“Is this it?” Deacon said. She prodded the thick tangle of cables and components hanging from the ceiling with a gloved hand. “A whole ruined colony, and this junk is the only thing with power?” 

We’d come out of hypersleep two days earlier, after a hundred-year voyage, only to find the Gautama colony in ruins. The equipment ahead of us was the only thing we’d found still working; an insane tangle of spare parts assembled like nothing I’d ever seen. In false color, my visor overlaid it with a purple blush of heat and the fine lattice of a magnetic field.

“It’s got power all right,” I said. “Dormant, though. Magellan, are you getting this?”

The voice from the ship came with a fine spray of static. “Roger that. We’re patched through for data feed. Signal good.”

Deacon unspooled a cable from her suit backpack. “OK, Magellan, we’re going to try and connect,” she said. 

The flat line of the carrier signal bandwidth was scrolling across my visor. It spiked as Deacon plugged in. 

“Whoa!” Deacon shouted. “That’s some data density!”

The voice from the Magellan hesitated. “Ground party standby, we’re, ah, having some kind of system malfunction.”

My visor stuttered, then went dark. “Magellan, did you get that?” I said.

The line was quiet. 

“Magellan this is ground party, respond?”

Deacon and I looked at each other. I tapped my visor’s earpiece. 

Deacon tapped hers, and shook her head.

“Looks like we have a problem here,” I said.

-- By 30 Second sci-fi (http://30secsf.com)