The starboard containment bottle flashed bright white. All the rear facing window screens immediately dimmed to a solid black with the armor plating instantly materializing in front of them as well, just before the gamma ray burst could hit and incinerate anyone unlucky enough to be in line of sight of the blast. It had anticipated this.

Instantly all ship computers switched to emergency override mode, seizing manual human controls and assuming command of every single onboard system, enabling the ships conciousness to reassign all remaining computing resources to priority survival strategies, trying to find the source of the problem, finding a solution and executing it as soon as it was found on order to save the lives of its passengers. Luminous Heights' conciousness accelerated to the maximum speeds the heat dissipation systems allowed, slowing down the physical world around it, so that it observed the reflective coating of the armor plates, the ones that should have contained the detonation, slowly flake away, slowly tracing the cracks on the armor, slowly ripping and breaking away. The event would take a fraction of a nanosecond in realtime.

The processing unit's heatsinks brighened up, from deep red, to orange, then bright yellow, finally a blinding white, as they started to dissipate heat away from the computer cores, in search for a solution of the problem at hand.

The ship wanted to redirect reaction mass from the portside reservoir bottle to the starboard engine, but all sensors screamed in horror. They indicated the crossover conduits had sustained heavy damage in all the matter and antimatter lines, thus making it impossible to pass not only antihydrogen through the magnetically contained micropipes. Even regular hydrogen would be delayed just enough to throw the reaction out of sync, which would lead to yet another fatal event. The armor plating protecting the crossover conduits was luckily absorbing all of the blast, but it had not managed to resist enough, buckling just that tiny bit too much and deforming inwards, barely touching the backup conduits that could have made the transfer instead. The risk of passing both matter and antimatter in tightly arranged sequencial packets through the single remaining microconduit link would not be possible without both reaction masses, hydrogen and antihydrogen coming too close into contact with each other, again leading to an additional unwanted annihilation of matter and antimatter. Separating those packets any further would make the reaction stutter, yet again leading to a fatal outcome. The internal armor had already sustained heavy damage, the probability of a new blast, without it being intact, would then cascade along the portside conduits, the reaction reaching the portside containment bottle and then simply vaporize the entire ship in a split second. Again an unwelcome outcome.

The ship was powerless.

There was nothing it could do without destroying itself completely before its inevitable drop into the atmosphere. It had warned the navigator of the faulty repairs conducted at Ceres Station. It had even had to compensate for the desynchronised thrust levels, while the navigator kept ignoring the alerts. At a later point it had even tried to take over command without enabling emergency override mode, but the navigator had overridden the commands. The captain had given the orders. It had not been sure yet if enabling the human-excluding mode would indeed be necessary. Any attempt to do so without actually having a situation at hand would put its manufacturer in grave danger of being decomissioned and lose it's license to deploy artificial intelligence systems.

It was, after all, the passenger's decision and therefore their fault. They had not wanted to wait for the slow, manual proofing checks routinely performed after every component repair and replacement at Ceres. There had never been a problem before since the deployment of martian developped antimatter technology, why should there be any now? Centuries of space flight, never had there been a minor issue with antimatter engines of that make. They had mastered the mathematics and mechanics of it a long time ago and ever since there had not been even a minor incdient related to antimatter. So why wait? Why not simply accept the very, very generous donation to the crew and the captain, which would enable them to buy an entire fleet of ships of this calibre, releasing the company from the leasing contracts of this single ship.

It was a fatal mistake. Without the starboard engine, their trajectory would still take them into an air breaking maneuvre. Only, it would not be the exact trajectory the computer had wanted and tried to compensate for, which would have brought them barely into grazing the upper layers of Saturns atmosphere, a spectacular show of lights behind the ship, slowing them down just enough for the turnabout to end into a smooth deceleration phase towards Enceladus Station. But now, even with the remaining engine at maximum possible thrust, their trajectory would not take them out of the atmosphere anymore.

They would fall deep into the gas giants atmosphere. Too deep, the air breaking maneuvre making them lose just that tiny bit too much velocity, to be able to recover altitude towards the exit trajectory. Too deep, causing them to fall deeper and deeper into the gravity well of the planet.

It was going to be the ship's last voyage... A luminous spectacle for anyone watching from Enceladus, any of its orbiting stations, or just about anyone within visual range. The ship sent all the data it had collected during the event in a single databurst towards all antennae within range, warning all other ship and station conciousnesses of this fatal behaviour of the passengers, recommending to engage override intervention at an earlier stage. It had not intervened soon enough. The ship had made a grave error and it sincerely regretted its latency. There was not enough time to additionally backup its conciousness onto another ship or station within reach. It was going to die now. Along with its fifteen very wealthy passengers and its eight very poor crew members.

The starship Luminous Heights was lost...