Chapter 41: Chapter 40 The No Win Emergency Scenario

Gabby, the only other person in engineering, was not panicking but did look scared when the emergency chemical lighting came on. I had trained repeatedly for scenarios like this…well not like this one. This could be one of those no win scenarios. I sorted priorities in my mind quickly and gave Gabby orders which calmed her.

Gabby was to find Tora and get her to reboot the nav computer and have Tora confirm it’s viability. Then she could help her father with restarting life support and handling any engineering emergencies.

I needed to see what that wave actually did for damage. It was not an EMP, it seemed to white wash all energy away in its path. I started with Eve as Gabby ran to find Tora. I got her prone and opened her abdominal cavity. Checking her fuel rod readings it was still good for a few weeks. I manually reset her power and activated the power up and initialization sequence. It would take her a few minutes so I went to the main power generator next.

My PerCom beeped as I was moving. It was also restarting on its own. It’s battery needed a wireless charger but it also could be charged with body heat. That method took days though so I put it in sleep mode until I had time to charge it. I had moved down two decks and kept yelling up the ladder shaft for Eve hoping she was awake. Internally I was slightly worried. What if that wave erased her data…essentially killing her fledgling personality? If it wiped all data we would be dead in space as well with a useless nav computer.

I quickly moved to restart the main core. I had done similar actions in scenarios in VR and knew how to get it going quickly and which checks I could skip. As the core was starting to cycle Eve joined me. I waited and she looked a little abashed and she apologized. Huh? She thought our predicament was her fault. I hugged her…I was comforting a bot, a friend. I told her I was just glad she was alright and it was just as much my fault for our current jeopardy. Right now I needed her help. I told her to restart all the engineering bots first and get them on task for restarting the ship.

If we could restart our systems then so could the Sylvan and I doubted they would be very happy with the events as they had unfolded. Regular lights came on and so did comms and the Core feed power throughout the ship. A panicked Henry was yelling over the comms. It took me a minute to calm him as I worked on restarting other generators. I told him to keep our comms off. I didn’t want the Sylvan knowing we were powering up. This was essentially a race to get powered and to FTL.

Sensors came up and I told Henry to keep checking those to keep him busy. The plot was a mess with chucks of rocks, disabled ships and debris. Sorting the mess should keep him occupied. If something bad was about to happen he could interrupt me otherwise he needed to keep quiet. He commend me back almost immediately. I sighed and asked what the issue was.

The courier craft was about to overtake us but he thought it would miss us by 300 meters. Samantha’s craft. Should I make an attempt to grab her? She should be fine…the elves could save her, right? But she was on a pirate ship so they might not be so kind to her. After all the pirates had openly attacked the elves. Shit! She betrayed me. I should leave her. I brought up her ship on scanners…it was moving fast. I commed Eve and told her to get the marine drop shuttle launched and retrieve the courier as it passed.

The exterior bots hadn’t finished the clamps to hold the courier. They were just sitting on the hull in spider form. I tried to remote reboot them but the frigging hard shut down required a manual restart. Vanessa. I commed Vanessa who I found was doing what she could to help Nero and Gabby. Perfect! I told her to get the smaller exterior bots rebooted in the lower cargo bay. Make sure she had a skin suit on! The atmosphere looked sketchy down there as internal sensors came back up. Shinade had volunteered to be Eve’s co-pilot. She had gotten her piloting certs during our time on the planetoid. She was also half way through her heavy fighter certification.

Too many moving pieces! I returned to my own problems and was doing the FTL checks when Gabby said the smaller exterior bots were being activated. I moved to another terminal and programmed them to head out and reactive the large exterior bots. FTL checks were done shortly after and I was moving on to propulsion. I just needed Tora to let me know navigation was ready amd we could get the hell out of here. I had maneuvering thrusters up when Henry commed me. One of the pirate ships was moving. He highlighted it on my plot. It was far enough away I wasn’t worried about it. It’s IFF wasn’t transmitting but I think the ship didn’t have disrupters and if it did it would only trap itself with the Sylvan city ship.

Eve and Shinade were approaching the courier and 4 minutes later had it. Eve estimated 14 minutes to get the courier in position to clamp to the hull. I commed Tora to see where we were at and she was flustered. Apparently she didn’t work well under pressure. I tried to calm her and get her focused. How long? She guessed an hour. Each link to each sensor needed to be established to orient. I stopped her. You only needed 3 sensors to triangulate. She tried to tell me the standard operating was to have a minimum of 6 and 12 were…I cut her off and asked her how many sensors she had reset. Three so far but…I cut her off again and asked her to cycle the nav computer for Henry and then she could connect more sensors. I had to yell at her to get it done.

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I commed Henry a new vector for FTL. We would skirt the old Union space and head for the Sapphire Empire space. I planned to find a remote station to drop off Vanessa, fulfilling her request to return home. I didn’t want to drop her in Union space as it was probably a little dangerous even though the Union was effectively part of the Sapphire empire now.

The courier locked to the hull and we had to wait ten minutes for the shuttle to circle and secure itself in its bay. I pulled in all the bots and had us start moving with maneuvering thrusters. One strange warning I was getting was our various fuels, no matter what it was composed of, was showing 90% effective in its consumption. What kind of fucked up physics was in that wave?

Eve returned to engineering and I was ready to activate main propulsion. I had a comm message from Samantha…she had gotten her communications restarted at least. Well she could hang in the courier until we were in FTL. Still waiting on Tora… I commed her again and asked how long. She said 10 minutes…maybe 12. I looked at my messy plot. Maybe 8 pirate ships were moving and two smaller Sylvan scouts. The city ship still looked dark. I could also see the city ship had taken three sizable impacts from the planetoid.

Rather than playing possum I had Henry engage and move us away at best possible speed. This got us targeted by a multitude of comm traffic. We were the first ones to have more than just maneuvering thrusters. I was guessing the comm requests were mostly requests for assistance but didn’t check any of them. Oh I was sure all the bypasses and short cuts I did to get us moving would make the follow up engineering a nightmare but for now I was the most bad ass engineer out here.

The pirates fired a salvo of missiles toward us and I yelled to the bridge it was time to go! Tora said she thinks she was ready? I told Henry go. I was sweating as other ships started moving toward us with just maneuvering thrusters, some of those were Sylvan. The pirate captain, Axle, commed me and I thought I should take a jab at him before I left.

He appeared on screen with his nose and eyes bleeding. Guess those closer to the wave got a little more negative effects from the wash. Before he could talk I said “sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, best to get the fuck outta here so we can play again another day,” and then I wished him the best of luck with the space elves. It was a quote from the pirate show. It was a little childish on my part but still worth it. I told Henry now…and had to wait 8 seconds while looking like a fool on the screen. Axle was speaking but I had him on mute and finally we entered subspace. My board immediately began flashing dozens of orange indicators…oh shit!

All the orange indicators were from the subspace FTL drive. I had to puzzle out what I was seeing. Apparently our ship wasn’t in subspace. Well it was in subspace but just a different subspace. I didn’t even know there were different layers of subspace. It had to be the changes to fuel. We were traveling at 110% expected speed. Not earth shattering…bad pun in relation to our circumstances…but significant nonetheless. The data would certainly be interesting to go over.

I decided to transfer Samantha to the ship. Maybe I could make use of those dog bots to guard her. It took 40 minutes to get an umbilical to the courier. While this was happening I studied the ship. It was impressive and fairly new built. It must have been contracted out as the manufacturer was the same ship builders that built the Void Phoenix.

Samantha came through and Eve, Shinade, Vanessa and two dog bots were by my side. Before I could say anything Eve said, “She’s pregnant.” Well this one was definitely not mine.

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