She pulled up the schematics of the ship on the main screen and spun through them, looking for anything there might be she could pull out of some long-forgotten hold or behind a door.
“Commander,” she said.
Rainer re-appeared. Behind him chaos reigned, clouds of various vapors and people running around, lights cutting through the mist. A flick of one eye to acknowledge her. “Navigator, I’m a bit busy down here.”
“There are three maneuvering thrusters on the aft end of the ship, correct? If I blow out one of them, how much thrust is it going to give me?”
Fingers moving at impossible speed, he rattled off the number. She keyed it in, scanned through schematics, keyed in more numbers. “There are emergency solar sails, right?”
“They’ve never been used. No idea if they’re functional or not, or the condition of the membranes. They were designed for use no farther out than Mars orbit.”
The rattling in the ship got a little worse, a deep wobbling rumble as the stress on the front spars intensified. “I want to use the thrusters to push start the ship.”
“Keep talking. That uncharted puzzle solving mind of yours turns me on.”
“Pervert. Keep all your blood in your brain, not your cock.”
“We can’t have a disaster without a penis joke, Lachesis. It’s bad luck.”
“Is that what it is.”
“Besides your favorite toy.”
“You do flatter yourself, don’t you.”
“Ouch. I might have felt that one.”
“And I think the whole ship heard it, because I know the whole bridge just did.”
“Last time I checked, we were married, and we have certain conjugal duties to each other.”
“Duty. Your enthusiasm is just a result of your dedication to this ship?”
“Crèche will be so pleased to hear this conversation. Think it will count as passing Supervision?”
She continued to key in calculations. The ship began to pivot around its stern, slowly, adding to the stress loads on the spars. “I’m going to deploy the solar sails. You blow out a thruster. I’m already maneuvering the ship to catch maximum solar radiation pressure. I’ll pivot the ship again once the thruster fires, and if everyone leans to one side and you can get the engines to sixty-one within eighteen seconds, I can fire them without ripping us to shreds. Assuming that harmonic in the front port spar doesn’t get worse.”
“We’re assuming the sails will deploy.”
“And if they don’t we’re all going to die so it won’t matter much, will it?”
“Have you done the solar radiation pressure calculations?”
She sighed. “Why, yes, Commander, I did, because you gave me the data yourself, remember, so I wouldn’t be bored with nothing to do except count threads in the carpet? So I counted photons instead.”
Rainer actually stopped what he was doing and grinned. “You’ll need two thrusters. I’ll set Port Gamma and Port Delta to overload. It’ll also blow out the secondary bulkhead, and the decompression will give you a bit more. It’s going to cause a hell of a wobble, but we’ll repair the hull later. You’ll have to compensate on the fly.”
“Fine.” It wasn’t, but whatever.
“You will only have one thruster on that side.” Rainer warned her.
“Three minus two is one? You don’t say.” She was already keying in her course and acceleration calculations.
“Just checking your math.”
“Trust me, I can deal with little numbers.”
“The size of numbers is relative to the subject of measurement.”
“Or you could just say scale, but I guess you have to compensate somehow.”
“My anatomy is not a bell you need to keep ringing to drive away bad luck.”
Tsu cleared his throat. “Is that the only option, Commander? Tell me there’s a better one besides blowing pieces off this ship and damaging our hull.”
Rainer weighed it for about a second. “I suppose certain death remains an option.”
Lachesis snorted on laughter.
“We need alternatives.” Bennett finally left his station to interject into the conversation.
Rainer slowly turned around and gave the smoke-filled, rock-tumbler, chaos of humans and wolf form werewolves running around a deliberate look, then said, “Bit short on those.”
Bennett said, “We could try to ride it out here. Angle the ship into the blast to try to skim over it. Like a water wave.”
Lachesis and Graves both glared at him. Graves said, “We haven’t done any simulations of exploding ships. I don’t know if the wave would behave that way, how high it’d be, how deep, or anything about it.”
“We don’t know how spacetime is going to behave blowing up any of these ships.” Lachesis agreed. “And there’s the debris field. Anything that hits us is going to be irradiated to hell.”
Tsu took a breath and said, “Navigator, you have control. Commander Rainer, make whatever she wants happen. Commander Bennett, strap it all down, inform Keenan and Forrest we are Condition Black.”
Condition Black: not all the ship could be saved. Save as much as possible, sacrifice the rest.
Bennett straightened, a look of gut-sinking horror briefly flickering across his schooled face. It took him a second to reply. “Yes, sir. Condition Black.”
She and Rainer exchanged a look across the screens. And she said, “Solar sails, Commander.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He looked over his shoulder and bellowed, “Juan! Deploy the solar sails!” Then to her, he said, “Twenty-two seconds. If they’re going to deploy at all, that is.”
The flight computer really wasn’t going to like what she was about to do.
The ship groaned and wobbled as the belly thrusters fired, pivoting the solar sails towards the solar wind. The belly spars strained under the pressure of the thrusters and the punishment of the generator disc.
“Can you make it work with fifty-nine?” Rainer asked her.
“Sure.” She didn’t have a choice.
LURCH.
She grabbed her station to steady herself as a violent shudder made the entire ship clunk and groan.
“Solar sails deployed,” Juan shouted as he ran behind Rainer towards some other station.
The ship listed to port. Acceleration climbed faster than expected. A bit of hope flitted through her heart. “Still going to need to blow the thrusters out for the final push, Commander.”
Rainer, focused on his instruments, shouted, “Simone! Jess!”
They appeared next to him, sweating and harried.
Rainer stopped what he was doing and turned to face them. “We need more acceleration. We have to get it from somewhere, so we’re blowing Gamma and Delta thrusters out. You have four minutes to get down there, set them to blow, and secure the primary bulkhead.”
Lachesis paused in her calculations. “Wait, the thrusters can’t be blown remotely?”
“With this much vibration, it can’t be assured,” Rainer said to her, then he turned back to the two crew. “You know what I’m asking.”
Jess and Simone saluted as one. “Yes, sir.”
They ducked into the chaos without further hesitation.
Wait… no… what have I done?
“How are we looking, Navigator?” Tsu’s calm, cool voice cut through the rumbling chaos as the ship strained.
“As good as can be.” She choked through the grief of what her plan might cost.
LightBearer began to glow a horrific, eerie blue shade, like an unholy halo had swathed it in light.
“It’s about to go,” Graves reported, voice hollow.
Rainer focused on something else for a second, then said, “Simone and Jess in position.”
“Then blow the ports at your discretion, Navigator,” Captain Tsu said.
She was about to find out how much Gaia despised them. “Simone, Jess, Commander: six seconds on my mark. Commander: for twenty-seven seconds unload everything that�
��s in the engines. Mark.”
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
LURCH
A giant shiver flung itself through the structure. Alarms exploded everywhere, the lights flickered briefly, everything fritzed. The ship spun violently on its axis again, the stern rising above the neutral plane like an ancient ship on water, then plunged back down, suppressed by the solar radiation pummeling the sails.
“Sixteen seconds until main engines.” Rainer’s voice somehow sounded cold and calm in the undulating creaking of metal.
In her vision there was only math, curves, and LightBearer tearing itself into pieces on the screen, encased in that unholy blue glow.
NightPiercer howled.
LightBearer exploded.
Something she’d never be able to describe tore across the field of view. Maybe like a supernova, maybe like a sound wave.
It was nothing anyone should ever see.
Ever.
A thousand somethings pelted the hull, and NightPiercer screamed in metallic agony as the ship heaved one final time.
Condition Black
Throb… throb… throb…
Was that her heartbeat?
No, if her heart was beating that slow she’d be dead.
Did the ship have a heartbeat? Was the ship alive?
Now you’re talking like one of those people who believe the ships are haunted.
Lights flickered. The emergency track lighting around the edges of the bridge first, then the consoles illuminated one by one.
“System reboot,” Harkins reported.
Tsu picked himself up off the floor, straightened his shirt. “Take inventory of your stations. Life support and comms first, Harkins. Tell me the reboot is proceeding normally.”
“Can’t say yet, sir. I have no idea what just hit us.”
“The business end of a Core, I think,” Lachesis said, dragging herself back up into her seat. Her station was dim and dead.
Twenty-two seconds passed and still dead silence. Bennett said, “That hit probably fried half our network nodes and took out wires and cables.”
Her implant zapped her, but no cold in her arm—comms truly dead. She was on her own with her heart.
Tsu pressed again. “Harkins. What do we have?”
Harkins said, “Nothing, sir. The firmware in the bare metal is slowly bringing critical systems up, but the main core is offline. It will take time to re-compile the core to run on what chiplets are left.”
“If there’s enough left to reboot it,” Graves said.
“Where’s your positive thinking, Graves?” Lachesis pushed some hair out of her face. Her station flickered and produced a few lines of minimal, dimly illuminated information. Even two of the six analog gyroscopes had been damaged. No engine performance data. No Telemetry.
Graves patted his dead station. “In here, I think.”
She waited a minute to see if more came up on her station, but nothing.
Gaia only knew where the hell they were going or how fast they were getting there. “Harkins, tell me the emergency re-compile protocols put navigation control near the top of the list.”
The Tech officer turned in his chair towards her. “I—why?”
“Oh dear,” she said, clucking her tongue and sighing, while part of her acknowledged it was a very casual reaction to a very serious problem. Her shocked brain must not have rebooted completely. Or she’d been so close to her own demise so many times over the past few months it ceased to impress her.
Tsu jumped in his chair like a stuck animal. “Harkins, prioritize navigation.”
“But—”
“Ships don’t just slow down on their own in space, Lieutenant,” Tsu said tersely. “Navigator, how bad is it if we’re still accelerating?”
“I’d estimate seven hours until we won’t be having this conversation.” The engines had emergency failsafes that shut them down if the main computer core failed, or they were disconnected from both the automatic and manual navigation controls. She had no way to confirm if any of those systems had worked.
If the engines were still going, they were still accelerating. That acceleration would eventually stabilize, but the ship needed to be reconfigured for high-speed cruise or else it would slowly start to pull apart.
But shutting down the engines had its own problem. In a single, final bit of hilarious cosmic irony, she needed the engines to decelerate the ship.
Good times. Good, good times. Great, in fact. Amazing. Fabulous.
Tsu stood. “First Officer, you’re in command, Navigator, you’re acting XO until someone with higher rank shows up. I want all adult werewolves not already at an action station to report to the nearest section to be messengers and sniff out survivors who may be trapped.”
“Where are you going?” Bennett demanded.
“Engineering, Commander.”
“Send someone else. The lifts are out.”
“I’m Engineering, you’re Operations. We’re Condition Black. The ship needs me down in Engineering more than it needs me sitting on my ass shouting commands at a crew that can’t hear us.” Tsu moved towards the door. It didn’t open. He tore out the panel on the side, pulled a lever. The door released. He pried it open halfway and disappeared into the dark hallway.
Twenty Percent
It took forty-two minutes to re-establish primitive helm control.
It gave her forty-two minutes for the shocked numbness to wear off, and her brain to take in the scale of the disaster. Forty-two minutes to think about Rainer, Jess, Simone, Juan, and everyone else on the damn ship that wasn’t on the bridge and might be very dead.
If Rainer was dead, would she know?
Forty-two minutes to wonder if Ark had escaped the blast, or if her family was dead. Forty-two minutes to think about the letters she’d never sent.
The large primary screen finally flickered back to life, supplying them with a view of empty space and mountains of data. The engine failsafes had failed, but the engines had been shut down by physical manual override—the absolute last resort—three minutes and thirty-one seconds after everything had gone dark.
That was three minutes and four seconds of acceleration she hadn’t anticipated, and if they’d continued to spool how fast were they actually going? How far off course had the blastwave knocked them? She didn’t have a clue beyond the ship seemed stable.
Bennett stood up from the big chair. The stars were slightly different. “Where are we, Navigator?”
“Good question,” she said.
“Please do not tell me that Rainer’s new powerplants catapulted us to some distant point of our galaxy,” he said dryly. “I know he said they were theoretically capable of FTL, but this is not how I wanted to test the theory.”
“You wanted to test that theory at all?” she asked, just as dryly. “I never took you for an explorer.”
“Cut the shit, Lake. Where are we?”
She stared at the star field. It was different enough Bennett had spotted they weren’t the usual stars, and to her, it looked utterly alien at first glance. “I’m not sure.”
“Are you saying we’re lost?” Bennett asked.
No, of course they weren’t lost. She wasn’t about to get lost in her own bloody solar neighborhood. Where they were was the least of their problems right now. “No, I just need time to figure it out.”
She couldn’t see the Sun, but the screen—which was just given them the raw, forward view—only provided a relatively narrow field of view. She’d be able to orientate herself once she spotted a few celestial landmarks, but it wasn’t the most urgent problem facing them.
Bennett grated, “We don’t want to get lost in the murk between planets. We need to get back to Jovian space.”
She shook her head, then regretted it as her ears rang and the sore muscles of her neck and shoulder punished her. She rubbed her neck. “We leave the ship alone. It’s stable, and that mig
ht be the only good thing happening right now. The engines are cold and we don’t know how much damage the hull has taken. Even if I decelerate it, I don’t know if I can accelerate it again.”
Going for a random jaunt around the planets and grand tour of the solar system wasn’t the most terrifying thing. Losing Ark, LightBearer, Rainer… that they might be all that was left, and that they might not last much longer. What would be worse? NightPiercer dying slowly around them, and knowing that civilization had winked out, or flying back to Jovian space just to find the wreckage of the two other ships?
Bennett stared at her for about fifteen seconds. Then, grimly, he nodded. “Fine. Let’s get back to work.”
She got to work while more damage reports came in via werewolf wolf form messengers running like pages on an ancient battlefield. They reported having to scrabble over, under, or through debris, and some decks weren’t accessible. Bennett conducted the sick, sad orchestra of the dead, dying, injured, damaged, bleeding, venting, and smoldering. She helped Harkins and Graves try to figure out what systems to bring online and make sense of the gibberish readings from within and without the ship.
Deciding what debris to clear and what access to restore and what decks to prioritize—knowing full well there might be people trapped but alive—was the hardest thing. They decided together what to do, but took turns giving the orders to spread the agony of saying the words around.
She did not let herself think. She did not let herself dwell on any of it.
Harkins got her enough helm control that she was finally able to start calculating the ship’s relative speed and where they were and where they were headed. All she had was star charts, gyroscopes, and some very basic instruments. There was no guarantee she’d get anything else back anytime soon, and she couldn’t risk changing the ship’s course or speed. Interfering with one of the few things the ship was doing well was just borrowing trouble.
She swiveled her chair around to face Bennett, beyond exhausted and her heart like a charred lump under her breastbone. “Have you heard anything?”
Bennett, slumped down in the big chair, ran his hand over his face. “About what?”
Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2) Page 32