Joy looked at Schroeder in surprise. “The command section has its own attitude control thrusters? Why? And, yes, I know what an attitude control system is.”
“I," the captain raised and eyebrow in surprise, "yes. The original operational scheme for this ship, the original company plan, was for the Ace-class ships to travel from one planet to another, and once there, swap an entire cargo section, for a cargo section that had been pre-loaded for us.” The conversation was irrelevant to their situation, Schroeder spoke because it gave him time to think. “The forward command section, and the aft propulsion section, can detach from the main frame of the ship. The design was for the ship to get into orbit, detach the cargo section, and tugs would attach them to a pre-loaded cargo section. Starships are wasting money if they’re not moving, so the idea was to spend minimal time out of hyperspace. The attitude control system is merely to assist the tugs in keeping us stable during the transfer.”
Joy still looked puzzled. “So what happened?”
Schroeder held up his hands. “Like everything else, plans changed. It was cheaper for the ship to stay in orbit a few days than it was to build and maintain all that infrastructure at every planet on our route. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it makes economic sense to do it.”
“So, the command section is designed to be self-contained. Then why can’t-“
Schroeder cut her off. “I know what you’re saying, but remember, the command section was only supposed to be self-supporting during the few hours while the tugs were moving it around. This,” he gestured around the bridge with one hand, “isn’t actually a spaceship. The thrusters are only cold gas, nowhere near powerful enough to bring us back to the Ace. We do not have any environment suits, and even if we did, we don’t have a way to get from here to the ship.”
“Could the ship, or the propulsion section, come get us?”
“Unfortunately, no. The navigation system is here in the command section. Jen would have no way to run the reactor, the engines, or to navigate. The fusion reactor should have shut down when the connection to the main computer was lost, I suspect the ship’s auxiliary power units kicked in automatically, as they are supposed to when main power is lost.”
“Are there space suits aboard the ship? Could Jen reach us?” Joy suggested.
“Yes, there are space suits, and maneuvering units, what are called jet packs. If Jen had reacted immediately, she might have been able to reach us. We’re too far away now.”
“So that’s it? We just wait for rescue?” Joy asked, disappointed.
“Uh, not exactly.” Seth spoke up. “Captain, we’ve got another problem.”
Schroeder turned to his navigator. “What is it, Mr Putri?”
“The inertial navigation system is functioning again.” He hesitated a moment before delivering the bad news. “We’re going to fall out of orbit in six, maybe seven hours.”
“What?” Schroeder exclaimed.
“We were in a low orbit to start, and the explosion caused us to slow down, and knocked us toward the planet. The low point of each orbit will have us kissing the top of the atmosphere.” Seth shook his head. “ Eventually, the drag will pull us down.”
CHAPTER 8
They found Jen laying right in the doorway of her workshop. Kaylee screamed and ran when she saw Jen’s slumped form, Manny followed right behind her. When they got to the crew specialist, she was barely conscious, bleeding from a deep gash on her right temple, and she had blood on her right side, soaking through her blouse.
“Kaylee, what do we do?” Manny asked his big sister.
Kaylee stood locked in place for a moment, unable to move, her hand over her mouth. Then she dropped to her knees and touched Jen’s cheek hesitantly, with tears running down her face. “Jen? Jen, can you hear me?”
Jen groaned, whether in response to Kaylee or not, the teenager couldn’t tell.
“We need to get her to sickbay.” Manny declared. “I’m going to get one of those stretcher things.”
“Yes, yes. Good idea.” Kaylee nodded her head vigorously, and Manny ran off down the corridor. What should she do in the meantime? The gash on Jen’s forehead looked nasty, but had clotted up, and wasn’t bleeding much anymore. What looked worse was Jen’s right side. Moving gingerly, Kaylee got Jen’s lower blouse buttons unfastened, and peeled the material back from her skin.
It was ugly. The woman must have broken ribs, in addition to the head wound. There was a long cut running along one rib. Kaylee looked up into Jen’s workshop, the normally neat and tidy place was a bit of a shambles now. Ordinarily, Jen had a place for everything, every tool, every piece of equipment she was working on. There was a heavy-looking smashed something on the middle of the floor, a big cabinet, is what it looked like. Jen must have had it on her bench, and it fell on her during the accident, because the cabinet had blood in several places along one edge.
Now what to do? She didn’t know.
Stop the bleeding. Jen had a first-aid kit in one of the drawers, could Kaylee remember which one?
Yes. She scrambled to her feet, found the kit, and tore open a large bandage. The package said t was supposed to seal itself to a wound, stop the bleeding, and it contained a medical salve to prevent infections. The wound along Jen’s ribs was long enough that Kaylee needed to use two bandages, side by side. Kaylee used another bandage on Jen’s forehead, after gingerly pulling matted hair away from the cut. She was daubing away sticky blood when Manny came back.
He was pushing a stretcher, it hovered over the deck, suspended in the air by isolating itself from the ship’s artificial gravity field. Manny pushed it next to Jen as Kaylee instinctively pulled the woman’s blouse closed. “Can you lower it to the ground?” She asked her brother.
“I’m trying. I think this is it.” He said, and, with the press of a button, the stretcher sank slowly to the deck beside the injured woman. “Can she move? Kaylee, we have to roll her onto the stretcher.”
“I don’t think she can move by herself. Jen? Jen, can you hear me?” The woman didn’t respond. “Help me, we’ll move her feet onto the stretcher first.”
They got Jen’s feet and lower legs onto the stretcher, and strapped her feet in securely. Then, they knelt on the deck and, holding her under her shoulders, struggled to slide her gently sideways, until she was off the deck and supported by the stretcher. While she was being moved, Jen’s eyes briefly fluttered open, unfocused and unseeing. Then she passed out with an anguished grunt, her head slumped to the side.
Manny now was confident he knew how to control the stretcher, he set it to one meter above the deck, and it rose smoothly. Brother and sister pushed it along the corridor and around several corners, taking care not to bump it into any walls along the way to sickbay.
Manny had left the sickbay door open. Both children had been to sickbay on their tour of the ship in Earth orbit, and had not been back since. It was normally an over-eagerly cheery place, with brightly colored walls and soothing landscape pictures. Now, the picture screens were blank. There were two rooms off the main sickbay reception chamber, they pushed Jen into one of the rooms, and the stretcher slid right into place along rails jutting out from the wall, and became a bed.
“Doctor! Doctor, hello?” Kaylee waved her hand in front of the robot doctor, the only on aboard.
“It’s not working, Kaylee, the ship’s computer is down.” Manny stated disgustedly. “Remember, Jen told us all the robots are controlled by the ship’s AI.”
“Then what good is it?” Kaylee asked angrily, and kicked the inert robot with her foot.
“Is Jen going to be OK, Kaylee?” Manny seemed hesitant to get close to the unconscious woman.
Kaylee stood beside the bed, hands on her hips, in an imitation of her mother. “I think she has broken ribs, I put a bandage on that. And she got hit in the head. We could clean that up, and put a bandage on that, too. Yeah, we should do that.” She looked around the sickbay, at the myriad cabinets and dr
awers. All the computer screens were dead, useless. “Manny, look around and see what supplies are in here, don’t touch anything.”
“I won’t. What are we looking for?”
Kaylee looked at Jen. The woman’s mouth had drooped open, she was breathing evenly. If she had a concussion, which was likely, Kaylee knew not to do anything to make it worse. She had seen girls get knocks on the head while playing soccer, and the coaches always only kept the injured girls calm until the medics arrived. Head wounds were serious. First, do no harm. She had heard that somewhere. “I don’t know. Something. Anything.”
Gina shouted from her position, floating in the air above her communications console. “Radio jamming’s down again!”
The once again smooth voice of the pirate came over the speakers. “Time’s up, kapitan Schroeder. What is your answer?”
Schroeder knew what his answer had to be, he hadn’t needed the extra time. Safeguarding the lives of passengers and crew was a lot more important than cargo. While he didn’t trust the pirates to keep up their end of the bargain, he didn’t have any choice. “You can take whatever cargo you want, the crew won’t interfere.”
“Excellent!” The pirate laughed. “I knew you were a reasonable fellow, Hans, a business man, like me. If I allow you to talk to, well, to the other piece of your ship, you will order your crew there to not interfere?”
Schroeder gritted his teeth. “Yes, you damned pirate.”
“A pirate I am, now? Ha! I like that. Aaargh, shiver me timbers, avast yee scurvy dogs!” He laughed again, enjoying himself. “Good. You may speak to your crew.”
“Wait! This... part of the ship, the command section, is in an unstable orbit. I have a passenger and crew aboard-“
”One thing at a time!” The pirate interrupted. “You keep your end of this bargain, and I am willing to discuss a rescue later. I am going to open a channel for you to record a message, and you instruct your crew to keep out of our way. Be brief, and to the point. Is that understood?”
Schroeder found all of this very difficult to swallow. He forced himself to say a simple “Yes.”
“Channel is open for recording, now.” The pirate’s voice was taunting.
Schroeder cleared his throat, and tried to speak quickly, to keep his voice firm and calm. “This is Captain Schroeder, calling Atlas,” he caught himself, “calling the cargo section. Our shuttle has been destroyed by a missile, the crew is alive, and on the surface. The command section is in a decaying orbit, we have people injured here, but everyone is alive. Listen to me. These, these pirates, want to extract an item from our cargo. They are going to board the ship, take what they want, and leave. Do not interfere with them in any way. Repeat, do not interfere with them. Stay out of their way, and out of sight. That is an order.”
The pirate spoke again to cut him off. “That was a very moving speech, Hans, seriously, I got a tear in my eye.” He sniffed mockingly. “That is enough for now, we will relay your message to the, what did you call it, the cargo section? Pray that your crew there knows how to follow orders. Nightengale out.”
“Wait! What about-“ Schroeder started to protest, but Gina interjected.
“Jamming’s back on, they can’t hear you.”
“Bastards. They never had any intention of rescuing us.” Seth said in disgust.
“No.” Joy added, in a voice drained of emotion. “They expected us to be dead by now.”
“I don’t think so.” Schroeder responded, in a voice so low he might have been talking to himself. “If they wanted to kill us, they would have used a bigger warhead on that missile. As it is, they used just enough to separate us from the cargo section. No, they wanted us right where we are, in trouble. When the Navy shows up, they will have to rescue us first, and that will delay their pursuit of the pirate ship. Whoever these people are, they have thought about this very, very carefully. But they made one mistake so far; Nelson and the others survived the attack on the shuttle. I think they did mean to destroy our shuttle, that would be one less thing for the pirates to worry about.”
In Ace’s sickbay, Jen had awakened long enough to ask that Kaylee find a medical stabilizer unit and attach it to Jen's left arm. Kaylee had been skeptical that she could do anything to help the injured woman, but Jen had explained that the stabilizer was a first-aid device, for use when the sickbay's AI was offline. Kaylee found the bulky orange box, followed the instructions on the top, and clamped it around Jen's arm. The device inserted lines into the woman's blood vessels, and flooded her with artificial blood, drugs, and nano probes to prevent further damage from her head injury. Unfortunately, the stabilizer's tiny but powerful computer insisted that the best thing for its patient was sleep, and tried to inject her with sedatives. Jen kept having to press an override button every five minutes, to prevent the device from sending her into a dreamless slumber. At Jen's request, Manny had run back to her workshop and retrieved her remote control console, since Jen's bComm wasn't able to connect to the ship's computer. Her bComm was working fine, which meant the higher level functions of the ship's computer were down.
With her console, Jen had accessed the ship’s backup systems, and determined the cargo section of the ship was in no immediate danger. Their shuttle, she told the children, would be able to come back up, and rescue people from the command section. Except she couldn’t contact the shuttle's pilot Nelson, or anyone else, on the radio. And the radio was working fine. What was going on?
"Can you try a different frequency?" Manny suggested unhelpfully.
"The radio automatically cycles through the range of frequencies the shuttle's radio uses," Jen snapped, more harshly than she intended. She liked the children, but she was tired, and ached all over, and had a splitting headache. "Maybe the antenna isn't-"
The wall-mounted speakers of the ship’s intercom crackled, followed by captain Schroeder’s amplified voice “This is Captain Schroeder, calling Atlas, calling the cargo section. Our shuttle has been destroyed by a missile, the shuttle crew is alive, and on the surface. The command section is in a decaying orbit, we have people injured here, but everyone is alive, for now. Listen to me. These, these pirates, want to extract an item from our cargo. They are going to board the ship, take what they want, and leave. Do not interfere with them in any way. Repeat, do not interfere with them. Stay out of their way, and out of sight. That is an order.”
The message began to repeat, a shocked and groggy Jen used her console to cut it off. Jen wished the children had not heard the message. They shouted for their parents, until Jen told them their radio was only receiving, not transmitting.
Jen's head was spinning. She'd assumed whatever happened to the ship had been an accident. Nelson, Sam, and Rick Sanchez had been shot down by a missile? Schroeder had said the people in the command section were alive “for now”? What did that mean? Jen figured it meant until they ran out of oxygen. And the command section was going to fall out of orbit? When? Schroeder hadn’t had time to say.
At least she knew she didn't need to waste time trying to fix the radio. There was nothing wrong with the radio, it was being jammed. "Kids, kids, Kaylee, Manny, quiet, please. I need to think."
Nightengale briefly fired her engines, to match Ace’s altered orbit. The pirate ship then approached, quickly at first, then slowly, warily. As it got closer, the radar which constantly swept the area around the freighter began to burn through the electromagnetic jamming, and the radar receiver was able pick up a fuzzy, intermittent echo.
Jen kept trying to contact the command section on the radio, using frequency hopping, and boosting power to the antennas, but the jamming was too strong. Running checks of the ship’s systems revealed the damage wasn't as bad as she feared, until a collision alert popped up on her console. The pirate ship was approaching. “The, uh,” Jen blinked to clear her vision, “the pirate ship is getting close to us.”
“We have to do something!” Kaylee shouted through tears.
“I’m sorry, Kaylee,”
Jen said through teeth gritted from pain, “until your parents can get back here, I need to keep you out of trouble somewhere.” She twisted in the bed, trying to find a position that was comfortable for her ribs. She was still very groggy, experiencing double vision, and waves of feeling like she was on the verge of passing out again.
“They’re not coming back! They can’t! You said so!” Kaylee balled up her fists and hit the side of the bed in frustration. "The shuttle is destroyed."
Jen reminded herself once again that she was dealing with children. “They can’t get back right now, I didn’t say never. There is always hope, Kaylee. Don’t give up. Your Mom and Dad aren’t giving up, wherever they are, I’m sure of that. Your father can walk to the mining camp and wait there. The command section I know has plenty of air. The Navy will be here, we just need to wait until then.”
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