Allison closed her eyes and as much as she wasn’t usually one to do such a thing. She whispered a prayer to the Dark Mother, then to anyone else who would listen that this would work, and that the fusion core wouldn’t explode. She lifted up her Dark Mother pendent and kissed it, then looked at her AR HUD to find the playlist she needed. She started bobbing her head to the beats. She pounded the holographic full thrust button and blasted out of the hanger at ten times safe Star Port speeds. She mentally added that to her list of criminal violations. She weaved through ships lining up to leave the dome’s air lock. She was pretty sure all of the pilots were cursing her out. Dimi was holding onto his console for dear life his eyes wide with terror.
She was not used to the profile of the transport. She was likely cutting it a bit closer than she meant to as she weaved between outbound ships. The ship jolted in a weird direction at one point. She assumed she’d hit someone or something. She kept on target though. The slowly closing airlock doors.
Dimi was freaking out and yelling at her. This was probably because the collision warning alarms were screaming, along with the anti-theft system and numerous other indicators that she was doing things to this transport that should never be done. She couldn’t hear any of it because she had her translator on noise cancellation. All she could hear was the music. She’d turned off all AR HUD functions and pilot ship displays. All she could see were the controls and power levels. She had realized as soon as she had come up with this plan it was going to come down to piloting. No amount of read outs was going to get her through it.
She reached out and rammed the excess power, the overburn she’d had Miles trigger into the thrustor. She could feel the transport start to shake itself apart as she burst through the dome’s exterior doors. They were almost closed. She slid her hands back and sent the transport ballistic. The atmosphere was tearing at the transport, and she could see the hint of red on the edges of her view port. She burst out of the atmosphere of Titan. Fighters were very close on her tail. She spun the transport in a barrel roll and flew straight at the Corporate Security frigate that was moving to block her. She spun the transport again avoiding a barrage of railgun fire. She reached out and dumped thirty percent power capacity to the FTL drive as she flew past the thrustors of the frigate.
Dimi stopped his ranting suddenly when he saw the flashing green FTL button. This wasn’t just something he was asked to do at this point. It was the end to the madness he’d just been put through. He punched it with his fist. The transport shuddered and transitioned into FTL. Allison collapsed into her seat and blew her bangs out of her face. She looked over at Dimi. He was white. All the color had drained from his cheeks. He leaned forward and let his head hit the co-pilot’s console.
Allison reached over and punched Dimi. He lifted his head. She yelled. She held up all five fingers of her right hand.
“You’re not done yet. Get ready to hit it again. Five minutes!”
Allison pointed at a countdown timer on his display. Dimi nodded. Miles came up behind the pair and put his hands over his ears. Allison didn’t notice she still had her music blasting. The actual transit time at max speed was theoretically less than a second at standard starship speeds, but the ship had to accelerate to reach top speed then decelerate at the far end of the jump. You could skip the deceleration, but it could mean a very bad day if your relative velocity was even a fraction of light speed in real space and something was in your way. Normally the trip would have taken seven minutes with acceleration and deceleration. Allison had cut three and a half minutes off the trip by cutting out the deceleration phase. The FTL drive core would still need a minute and a half to recycle. That was the real danger.
Allison watched the timer count down second by second as they were about to drop out FTL she leaned forward and prepared for evasive maneuvers. With any luck the transport’s relative velocity would be fast enough the System’s Alliance interceptors wouldn’t be able to hit with anything. Very few ships on Sol patrol duty had energy weapons. The rail guns might be a problem. She was depending on the System’s Alliance ships to be expecting them to be at an all stop when they exited FTL.
The blue-white hyperspace vortex vanished. Allison spun the ship and blew past the System’s Alliance interceptors. She zigged and zagged, then rolled the transport again. Railgun rounds blew past them. The transport was out of range of the Alliance vessels in less than thirty seconds. She watched the FTL drive core power cycle monitor out of the corner of her eye. If everything worked as she’d planned it, they’d jump before the Alliance interceptors could accelerate enough to overtake them. She kept up her evasive maneuvers as the power recycle timer ticked down second by second.
Dimi had his hand hovering over the button. Sweat rolled down his forehead. His hand was shaking. Perhaps it was the stress, or perhaps he was desperate to avoid more of Allison’s fancy flying. Either way the button flashed green, and he hit as fast as he could. The transport shuddered and nothing happened. Dimi hit it three more times then there was a pop from the rear of the ship it shuddered and the FTL corridor appeared. Of course, none of the three in the cockpit could hear the bothersome noises. They were drowned out by the blaring alarms.
Allison stood up. She pulled out her scanner again and kneeled down by the theft interlock. She found the alarm trigger wire. She wouldn’t have been able to find it until she’d triggered it. It was the only one in the interlock that had power. She followed it along the ship deck and up a wall. Eventually it led to the cockpit’s power conduit and fuse box. She found it and pulled the fuse for the alarm system. She stopped her music and listened. She smiled and thought: Blessed silence. Dimi lifted his head and looked around. He put his head back down after giving Allison the evil eye.
Allison linked her actual holo-phone to the transport. Since she disabled the alarm and lights on the bridge, it would be the only way she’d get an alert. She pulled off the stolen holo-phone and tossed it in the cupholder after she picked up her water bottle. She took a long drink. Miles was speaking loudly.
“How did you fly with all that noise?”
Allison shrugged.
“I had my translator on noise cancellation and music playing. I didn’t hear any of it. Alarms are kind of pointless when you know you’re going to ignore them anyway, if you think about it.”
She pushed past Miles. He moved forward and patted Dimi on the back. Allison was heading for the engineering room. It turned out it was cramped and basically a glorified crawl space. She wrinkled her nose. She smelled burned electronics. Her eyes went wide when she saw a fire. She rushed out of the crawl space and all the way back to the cockpit. She grabbed the extinguisher that was attached to the back of the pilot’s seat and rushed back to the crawl space. She sprayed it on the burning conduits.
Zebra rushed in to engineering after her and started coughing. Allison’s helmet had formed as soon as she caught a whiff of the toxic chemical fire. She pushed Zebra towards the cockpit and grabbed the emergency oxygen supply and pressed it over Zebra’s nose and mouth. She looked around and realized she didn’t see Pinto. She sealed the bridge and rushed back to the bunk area. She found Pinto unconscious. She kneeled down and checked for a pulse. He had one. She picked him up and rushed to the cockpit. She put him down on the floor.
“Zebra, get him the oxygen. Keep this door sealed. I need to vent the rear section.”
Allison rushed through the door and sealed it again. She rushed towards the life support controls. Only the large cargo bay and the cockpit were showing breathable air at this point. She sighed and vented the midships. The air would be thinner than optimal, but it was better than people dying from toxic air.
She walked through the airless midships and crawled into the engineering space with her scanner to check the damage. She breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that the conduit was still transferring power to the FTL drive core. The wiring was just live. So long as everyone avoided the place and she didn’t do anything crazy with the FTL drive core, like initiating another jump...
Which she had to do because she’d set up three jumps to throw the System’s Alliance off their trail. She picked a route that would pass through several star systems. She’d set it to go for thirty minutes. She swore under her breath and pulled herself out. If she initiated another jump the cables would arc again and this time, there would be no insulation to protect the rest of the conduits. The ship would basically electrocute itself.
She shook her head and moved further into the engineering crawlspace, being careful not to touch the high voltage conduits that had more current going through them than a twentieth century power plant. Ripping a hole into another dimension and propelling a ship at fractions of light speed were very power intensive.
Allison found her initial objective which had been the fusion core control panel. She brought up the command interface. The integrity readouts were showing red across the board. She unlocked the safety settings and reversed the changes she’d had Miles make.
Fusion generators were pretty basic in their operation. Charged batteries would initiate the reaction. The initial reactant was hydrogen, easy to replenish even in space and relatively easy to fuse. That would start the reactor up from a cold start. The byproduct of that reaction was helium. That was when the fusion reactors really kicked into gear. Helium was harder to fuse but the power output was exponentially higher than hydrogen, and it was a longer reaction with the same amount of reactant. The fusion reaction was limited by the amount of reactant fed into the generation chamber. When Allison had had Miles input the code she’d removed the limitation on reactant injection. Normally a fusion reactor would use ten or twenty molecules of an element for days operation. Allison was feeding it grams of reactant. The reactor was never intended for that kind of power output, and obviously neither were the conduits. Nor was it meant to handle that much beryllium. The catastrophic overload Allison had referred to was actually the risk that the density of beryllium was high enough in the plasma chamber it could fuse and create oxygen. At that point the plasma field would be so large it would blow out of the reactor’s shielded core and instantly incinerate anything in the vicinity. This wouldn’t necessarily blow a ship up, but if say the antimatter containment for the FTL drive were nearby no one on the ship would get home.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Allison started scrolling through the reactor’s diagnostics. She winced when she saw she’d very nearly caused a catastrophic overload. The beryllium count was off the scale. With safeties engaged the reactor would kill the reaction long before it got out of hand. The reactant levels were still good enough to get them to Sauroid Prime. She vowed right then and there to never tell a soul how close she’d come to being obliterated in an unintended antimatter detonation of her own making. She wormed her way out of the crawl space.
Her next stop was one of the wall control panels. She started swiping through diagnostics for the ship as a whole. Hull integrity was at thirty six percent, the frame was twisted but airtight. Antigrav systems were compromised, in other words less than fifty percent of the antigrav plates on the bottom of the ship were functioning.
She mused that landing on a planet was going to be ‘fun’. Unlike multi-role starfighters, cargo transports were not meant to be aerodynamic. They did not generate lift. They also did not have landing gear in the conventional sense. They were meant to gently hover down. She frowned. She swept on.
Allison nodded when she saw the air quality report, the cargo bay was toxin free. The cockpit was showing poor air quality but that had more to do with four humans locked in an enclosed space than anything else.
The next screen was a report on thrustor integrity and efficiency. They were not in good shape. She’d passed too much power through them. Once this ship got into a gravity well it was never getting out. The strain would burn the thrustors out, not to mention probably break the frame.
She shook her head. Landing the ship on Sauroid Prime was going to be more of a controlled crash landing while praying it held together long enough to actually hit the dirt. She flipped back to the life support screen and opened the cargo hold vents. She pumped the atmosphere into the midsection and cockpit. She sealed all the vents in the cargo hold leaving it at a near vacuum. Her helmet detected clean air so it sunk back into her armor.
Allison walked to the cockpit and unsealed the door. Everyone was giving Dimi dirty looks. Zebra walked out shaking her head.
“Dimi, you are never getting those Chap’s Breakfast burrito’s ever again!”
Dimi walked out after her looking sheepish. Everyone went to the collapsible lunch table and sat down. Miles stopped by Allison and gave her a smile.
“I knew you could do it.”
“I knew I could too. I just wanted to make it look hard.”
Allison faced the group.
“We’re going to be late for our rendezvous. The ship needs a few minor repairs. I’ll make sure I’m quick. When we drop out of FTL we’ll show up on deep space scanners again. We probably have a max thirty minutes before they reach us.”
Pinto looked at Allison. He was still looking a bit green and was sucking back oxygen from the emergency supply every so often.
“What was on fire?”
Allison waved her hand dismissively and tried to seem nonchalant about it.
“Nothing important just some insulation. I got it. We just lost some atmosphere. Which is no problem at all, we had a cargo bay full of air no one needs to use. I sealed it off. Stick to the cockpit and here and you’ll be fine. You guys relax. I’m going to see what I can find to get these repairs done.”
She smiled and walked away from the group chanting Adapt and Overcome under her breath. She pulled out her scanner and started checking everything in the ship. Allison decided that there had to be something on the ship that could act as insulation to stop the FTL drive core conduits from short circuiting. She was going through the food stores when she said her mantra out loud unintentionally.
“Come on Allison, Adapt and Overcome.”
Miles came up behind her and leaned on the transport’s hull.
“What was that?”
Allison blushed and shook her head.
“Nothing, just something my CO keeps shouting at me.”
She plastered a fake smile on her face.
“So, what’s up? Need something to eat? So far it is all edible. In one case, it might give you a good buzz…”
Miles crossed his arms and shook his head.
“Just how bad is it, Allison?”
Allison looked up at him from where she was crouched scanning the compressor for the cooling unit.
“Stop, you know my name?”
Miles frowned.
“Don’t change the subject, how bad is it?”
Allison stood up and dusted her knees off. She smiled and shook her head.
“Its not bad at all. We’re doing great. So, ah I really need to find the parts for this repair. Because if the Alliance finds us, it will be really bad.”
Miles stood in front of Allison and grabbed her upper arms.
“Allison, stop. What is going on?”
Allison shook her head.
“Go sit down. I’m the one in command of the ship, it’s my responsibility.”
Miles kept holding her there.
“This is not all on you. Come on, let’s have a team meeting. Maybe someone will think of something you missed.”
Allison shook her head. She was trying to fight back tears.
“No, I did all of this, I can fix it.”
Miles sighed.
“Allison, you got us this far. Let’s get across the finish line together.”
Allison looked up when she felt the ship transition out of FTL. She sighed. Miles put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the ship’s break room area. Miles pulled himself up on a row of cabinets.
“Guys, Allison needs help. She’s going to tell us what needs to happen and we’re going to teamwork the hell out of this shit.”
Allison rubbed her face.
“I was entirely truthful before. The fire did burn up insulation. What I didn’t explain was that the insulation that burned up was covering the high voltage conduits to the FTL drive core. If we jump again without fixing that they’ll arc, short circuit and fry the fusion generator, the FTL core, and probably every other system in the ship. If we try to go to FTL the ship will kill itself.”
Pinto held up his hand. He went to talk but ended up coughing again. He took a hit of concentrated oxygen from the emergency canister.
“Is that why we dropped out of FTL?”
Allison shook her head.
“No, I plotted a diversionary course to pull the System’s Alliance fleet in this direction. My intention was to wait for the FTL core power recycle and jump again about three minutes after we ended up here. Obviously, we can’t now. We’re sitting ducks for the Alliance. We’re already on their long-range scanners. If we’re unlucky it’s a carrier group and they are launching Athena fighter wings with drone support as we speak. If we’re lucky it’s a cruiser and they have to come after us themselves. We have maybe twenty-five minutes before the first responders get here. Unless we’re lucky then we have an hour or two. I don’t think we’re that lucky.”
Dimi stood up and rubbed the top of his bald head.
“You know, what’s that stuff you used Zebra when you needed to crawl across those open conduits at Aztech Corp? You know… its white. Expands. You stick in in…”
He made cutting motions across his cybernetic forearm. Zebra looked at him like he was an idiot.
“You mean, Wound sealant foam.”
Dimi nodded.
“Yea! That’s it. We got any of that?”
Allison gave him a dubious look.
“Sorry, I don’t think that will work, we’re talking gigawatts of power.”
Zebra shook her head.
“No, no, it is completely nonconductive. Like it was initially developed for hull sealant for hydrogen rigs that went into Jupiter’s atmosphere. It was just later BMC realized you could use it as wound sealant. It’s still the exact same. They literally just buy it from the corp that makes the rig sealant, charge ten times what it costs them and slap a new label on it.”
“Really? What about the anesthetic?”
“Its one of the chemicals already in it, part of what makes it such a good sealant.”
Miles clapped his hands and hopped off the counter.
“Alright, it’s a plan. Zebra, Dimi, gather up all the sealing foam you can find. There should be a few first aid kits. We also have our canisters from our kit. Allison will spray it on, she’s the smallest and least likely to get roasted. What else we got Allison?”
Dimi and Zebra rushed off. Allison shrugged.
“I’m sorry, everything else is on the outside of the ship. Unless you have some helium or hydrogen in your back pocket.”
Miles asked.
“Why?”
Allison sighed.
“Because the fusion core only has one more FTL jump in it. Then we’ll be running on borrowed time and power.”
Pinto took another pull from the oxygen canister. He was not looking good. She motioned to Miles and pointed at Pinto who was leaning forward in his seat. His head hit the table. Allison waved her scanner over him, specifically near his chest.
“His lungs are burnt up. He needs serious medical attention.”
Miles rushed over and helped Allison move Pinto to one of the beds.
“How serious?”
Allison motioned to her AR HUD which Miles could not see.
“I don’t know his lungs are all red on my display and its saying seek emergency medical treatment! Do I look like a doctor?”
Miles put his hand on her shoulder.
“Breathe, Allison. Just calm down”
She had tears forming under her eyes.
“I can’t breathe. This is my fault, if I hadn’t overloaded the fusion core, the conduits wouldn’t have caught fire, and he would be fine.”
Miles put his hand on her other shoulder.
“Allison, if you hadn’t taken all the risks you did, we wouldn’t have made it this far. Send me your scans, and whatever your holo-phone has on his condition.”
Allison did as he asked. By this time Zebra and Dimi had gotten back. Zebra noticed the moistness on Allison’s face.
“What did you do Miles?”
Allison shook her head and bit back sobs. She took the handful of foam cannisters and walked back to the crawl space. She gulped down air as she wiggled herself towards the power cut off. She shunted power away from the FTL drive core conduits with a manual switch. She scanned them to make sure they were dead then started spraying foam all over the charred conduits one canister after another. She rubbed it over all of them, covering all of the metal in an even layer. It started to harden quickly. She flipped the manual valve over and wiggled back out.
She rushed to the crew area. Miles had fashioned a rudimentary oxygen tube to provide a steady supply of concentrated oxygen to Pinto’s lungs. Allison didn’t know much about medicine, but she assumed based on all the red, if he survived, he’d need replacements. Everyone looked at her when she arrived. She shrugged.
“Well, lets see if it works. I’m going to initiate the FTL jump. If the lights go out, we better hope the System’s Alliance finds us soon because we’ll have no life support. If you’re the praying sort, now is the time.”
She walked towards the cockpit and stopped and turned around.
“Zebra, we need that ID beacon back to its old self before we arrive at Trappist, you have six hours. Otherwise, we’ll be facing down a System’s Alliance defense force that can’t identify us, I can tell you this, the fleet is on high alert because of the Sal’nash, so they’ll probably fire first, and identify us later.”
Zebra patted Pinto’s shoulder and grabbed her computer. Allison entered the cockpit. She crossed her fingers behind her back. She reached over the co-pilot’s seat and hit the flashing green FTL button. She closed her eyes and held her breath.