You throw yourself forward as the warning klaxons blare 'SECURE ALL BULKHEADS'. The massive engineering door begins sliding shut with hydraulic finality. Rolling through the narrowing gap, you barely clear the threshold before it seals with a thunderous boom behind you.

The engineering bay is chaos incarnate - a cathedral of machinery where panicked figures scramble between towering reactor cores. The air shimmers with heat distortion, carrying the acrid tang of overloaded circuits. Chief Oren, a barrel-chested man with cybernetic arms and a face like crumpled durasteel, spots you immediately amid the madness.

'About damn time, apprentice!' he roars over the din, grabbing your collar and hauling you toward a sparking control console. 'We've got a cascade failure in the port nacelle!' His mechanical fingers dance across flickering displays, pulling up schematics that show critical systems flashing red. 'Get to the secondary regulator array - manual override code is 477-Alpha!'

As you turn toward the indicated station, the deck plates beneath you groan ominously. Through the engineering viewports, the swirling blue of hyperspace is distorting into sickly green vortices. A junior technician nearby mutters what sounds like a prayer to the Machine God.

The console before you has three access panels hanging open, their wiring exposed. A thin trail of smoke rises from one overloaded relay. The manual override keypad glows faintly beneath layers of grime, waiting for your input.