We stared, two dozen men and women, struck dumb and horrified by the sight. There was a sense of scale that emerged from the fluid movement of the lights; they seemed to be many fathoms beneath us, which would make them terribly large and impossibly fast. There were no solid shapes, and no disturbance of the water, just a deep field of liquid flowing light.
                          
We watched for what seemed like hours, entranced by the mesmerizing ballet of cold light, a mirror reflection of northern lights. When it ended, abruptly, there were three almost simultaneous events. First, the lights seemed to contract, each mote freezing in place and collapsing like the iris of an eye in bright sunlight. Secondly, there was a tremor in the air, that first raised the hair on the back of my neck. As the ghostly lights winked out of existence, it rose in intensity, until I thought my eyeballs might shake their way out of my head. Through the fog of sudden pain, I heard a noise rising above arctic wind, a humming vibration from the Mistral herself, that matched the electric shuddering in my skull.
                          
It was as if every lightbulb aboard the Mistral where suddenly flushed with power, flaring bright and buzzing noisily in their housings, and when the whine had reached a fever pitch, they began to pop and shatter among a shatter of sparks. From start to finish, it lasted less than two seconds, and we were left floating silently in the dark waters, beneath the starry sky, on a dead and crippled boat.
                          
The damage was invisible, without any obvious cause, and total. Nothing aboard the Mistral worked, each carefully crafted system of multiple redundancies had crumbled. Every light was shattered, and even the replacement bulbs, and the small flashlights we all carried held fused and useless filaments. Satellite phones, shortwave radios, all means of communication were useless bricks of plastic and wire. Every battery was dead, every stereo system was silent. We were adrift, without sail or engine, isolated from the world by a hundred miles of black and silent sea.
                          
The crew moved through the ship that first night like moles, fumbling through dark corridors with only a few pale green chemical lights to check each system. They relayed each disheartening message like a fire brigade through the darkness, to where the Captain and I stood on the deck, trying to make sense of the senseless. At last, when nothing else could be done, I fumbled my way back to my cabin, and tried to sleep, the darkness feeling like an oppressive many fingered hand, slowly gripping my chest.
                          
The next morning, I again took stock of our situation, hoping for some fragment of hope we had passed by in the night. The damage was total. We would have to find a way to send a distress call, and hope that we had not drifted too far from our last known coordinates. The men may not have known the full details, but it was clear from their haunted visages that they knew how dire the situation was.
                          
The first death was that afternoon. The sounds of screaming brought me above deck and into a thick heavy fog. High in the gloom, I could see bright burning specks of light, descending slowly. My stomach turned; it was two signal flares drifting uselessly through the haze. Some damn fool had fired the signal flares. I burned with an unfamiliar and foreign rage, and rushed through the fog to the foredeck with hatred in my blood and my fists clamped tight.
                          
The scene that emerged from the fog broke me from my stupor. The enlisted man, a flare gun still in his hand lay broken in a pool of blood. The Captain stood over him clutching the railing, driving the heel of his boot repeatedly into the broken mess of the boy's skull. I realized then that the screaming I heard, the high keening wail was coming from the Captain, his face in a rictus of animal rage. Around them was a small crowd, standing motionless and silent, watching like sentinels.
                          
The Captain turned to see me, and dropped into a crouch, his fingers wrapping around the flare gun and he raised it level with my eyes.
                          
We stared for a long moment at each other, our eyes locked as he panted heavily, his face lightly spattered with blood. The only sound was the wet gurgling exhale of the enlisted man's death rattle, a bubble of blood forming on his ruined face.