The Bridge is not arranged to provide excellent views to camera crews, like many common visions of starship bridges. There's no open floor plan and sleek minimalist design. Handholds for zero-g maneuvering stud the walls every few feet, and relatively little attention is paid to gravity's call. Consoles and screens, ruggedized to Hell and back, litter every surface, including part of the floor (only part because it was intended to be used while under acceleration, just not as often), and the ceiling. Two long floor-to-ceiling columns break up the space into three narrow aisles while providing more space for readouts, controls, and emergency equipment.

There are screens and controls for every imaginable type of sensor. There are dozens of command consoles specialized for a particular aspect of ship operations. There is a giant viewscreen taking up precious real estate on one wall meant to show things the Captain thought important to have everyone be very aware of. There are backup manual controls and electronics panels for almost everything, with as many physical switches and dials as there are touch screens.

Many of them are dark and shattered, especially near corners and joints. But just as many are even still blinking faint green text and red error warnings, the triply redundant backup power systems still ticking along almost three weeks later.

"If I recall correctly, the flight data recorder will be... Here." 

She opens a panel to reveal the bright orange box. It looks intact...

"Hopefully, we should be able to download everything and start piecing together what the hell happened. Mary, will you do the honors?"

"The ship AI's servers will be behind that wall. That will have extensive logs of everything, and if Exa left us any messages they'll probably be there. And there are individual system computers as well. My station is here, and the navigational controls here..."

"We're going to be here for a while, but let's pick the low hanging fruit first. Flight data recorder, and the AI drive."

Five minutes later:

"Okay... Here we go. Flight telemetry, transferring to everyone's PDAs now."

"...There's gaps. The- Here, at mission day 1453. The time stamps are continuous but there's a sudden jump in every reading, temperature, acceleration, voltage on various systems, and the Brigman Cores... Everything changes slightly, all at once. And then proceeds normally except the astrogation data is now... Junk."

"It doesn't recognize the stars, so it starts making wild guesses about course and position... But look there, that's..."

He pulls up some more recent data for comparison.

"Yes, the system determined that it was approaching its destination here, and if you look at this constellation- The system came back online in the outer system of this planet's star."

"So... The flight data recorder went offline for however long and came back up when we were on approach? Possibly some sort of hack or sabotage?" 

She's trying to figure out how she would go about tracking down a hack or glitch... Cybersecurity is not her specialty, though, and the Exodus's systems were always fiendishly complex...

"We obviously were sabotaged- Or well, probably, but later. Here, explosion and fire in the starboard coolant loop, dropping pressure on oxygen tanks, fire alarms all over... Just two minutes before we hit the atmosphere. The last moments are really confusing. It looks like Exa put in some hard work to keep as many of us as it could alive. But... The flight data recorder never went offline. It has a radioisotope-based clock, even if electrical power was interrupted we'd be able to tell that more time had passed. So it really seems like... We were... Instantly transported from on course to Avalon, to approaching here."

"Faster than light travel is, of course, not permissible under any known theory of physics. And yet, that appears to be what has happened to us."

"Who the heck would sabotage Exodus? That's... Well, insane. It's like blowing up Aldrin Station, or a monument or something."

"People have been blowing up all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons for a long time. My first guess- And it's a guess- Would be a rival to the Exodus Corporation, trying to ruin their prestige project. There are a number of ways someone could sneak sabotage through, especially if there is - a sympathetic member of the crew. Not everyone liked James Ryder, he was quite a divisive figure, politically, so there's possible motive. But then, why did the bomb only detonate on approach to a planet...?"

Humans, she tries to remember, want to see the world through stories. If there's a satisfying story to be told here, that will serve their purposes well, though it might not be closely related to the truth...

She feels like she's falling, like the truth is a sinkhole that's about to open up under her feet.

"...Let's see what the AI core has to say for itself."

"That's gonna have to wait a few more minutes. It sure looks like something tried to scramble all the data here. Random areas are flagged as empty and partially overwritten... Honestly, I'm going to need to take the whole thing back and do a forensic recovery on it to get more information, but a few of the files are mostly intact. Looks like... Some news summaries and message packets from Earth, and one video file that was written in about a hundred different places by Exa during re-entry..."

"Let's start gathering and packaging the things we want to bring back to Nivis. Anything that could have data on it first, maybe computer equipment or sensors and instruments second... It's not like we're going to stick around and do a forensic crash site analysis, too much work to do."

A few minutes later, Nina has assembled a mostly-uncorrupted copy of a half dozen news clips, and Exa's last message. She plays them on the large screen at one end of the Bridge.

The picture that emerges is a grim one: A few months after UNSS Exodus was launched, James Ryder revealed to the world that he had invented a prototype FTL drive, and installed it on the groundbreaking colony ship. The news soon after was increasingly factional and slightly unhinged- Newscasters lambasting him for lying in a publicity stunt, scientists claiming it is impossible, organizations condemning endangering people with experimental technology, demanding he reveal the secret. James Ryder and Ryder Industries evidently refused, and - the news is gappy and missing a lot of context, but soon after that there is a war between the United States and Brazil (mostly naval), and another one between China and Russia (mostly static in remote mountain regions), and some unspecified Trouble In The Middle East. Ryder Industries retreats from several countries as James Ryder flatly refuses to share the FTL technology, claiming he spent trillions to develop it. The world enters a worldwide recession thanks to the economic disruption.

Eva's message is just a short summary of these events, an apology for not performing better, and a tentative conclusion that the bomb was probably planted by someone from Omni Corp, Ryder Industries' biggest competitor and the other possible-nascent-megacorp; Unrelated to the hypothetical FTL device.

"Well... Fuck."

"What the FUCK! James Ryder always was way too fucking full of himself in my opinion. God! He played with our lives."

"I seriously fucking hope there was a - a backup, or plans, or some sort of surviving equipment in the debris field, that we can use to figure this out- We're obviously not on Avalon, we were still supposed to go there, just instantly, so if we want to go home..."

At least it's- An answer. It's James Ryder's fault. Or Omni Corp's fault, possibly. And of course, the international situation deteriorated back home...

"At least it seemed to be mostly limited, conventional wars. No weapons of mass destruction flying around. It's much less terrible than unrestricted war."

"I'm not sure what this changes, if anything. But we're no longer wondering, perhaps... We can blame the idiots back on Earth and - try to move on, and build up here. It doesn't change that we need to be diligent and diplomatic, here."

"Huge coincidence that the FTL thing is off target... And takes us straight to aliens. Magic aliens, no less. We don't have an explanation for that part."

"Does it matter? We're here, they're here. Fuck Earth, fuck James Ryder, we're Exodus now. We can do better than that."

"...God. I need to get some sleep. To figure out what to announce, and then sleep."

If the Exodus's systems were that compromised... Who's to say that everyone in Nivis is who the crew manifest says they are? Hmm...