Into the Frying Pan Pt.III
Astarte was standing over the shoulder of a bridge tech starring at a very confusing breakdown of their onboard electrical grid. It broke down the power demands of all the ship’s systems, and for the life of her she couldn’t see anything out of place. But that couldn’t be right, gravity and life support don’t just cut out for no reason. Something had to have been damaged during the brief battle with the Kruhur, that was the only explanation she could think of.
The hatch to the bridge slid open and Astarte turned to see a purple faced and breathless Alwen standing at the door “Bones, what are you doing here?” Astarte asked.
Alwen gathered her wits, stood ramrod straight and performed a perfect salute “Doctor Alwen Djani, permission to enter?”
“Granted, what’s going on?” Aster asked. If it had been any other crewmen she would have denied the request during such a tense situation, but she had grown to trust and respect the young doctor, and knew that she wouldn’t be pestering her unless it was really important.
“It’s the new reactor, some one came aboard and tampered with it.” she said with hesitation.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said firmly “I saw a strange looking contractor leaving the ship after the reactor had been installed. He was acting suspiciously, and looked very unwell.”
Part of Astarte wanted to disregard her suspicion based on the lack of evidence, but then she thought about the strange readings they had gotten from it just before the ambush, and the lack of inertial dampening. All systems drew from a unified power grid except for a few key systems that were wired directly to the reactors, and the inertial dampeners were tied to reactor three. But if there really was something wrong with reactor three then the ship’s automated diagnostics should have alerted them. Unless? “Get me Chief Heizer, now!” she ordered.
Her men were momentarily stunned by her change in attitude, but only for a moment as their training reasserted it. Seconds after she had given the order Heizer had picked up his radio “Heizer here.”
“Chief, I need you to manually check the power draw on reactor three, ignore what the computers say, we think someone sabotaged it.”
There was a moment of silence before the radio crackled, “on it.”
They all waited with stunted breathes as the minutes ticked by. Astarte had never felt so nervous in her life as the tensest five minutes of her life ticked by, she felt like the whole universe had slowed down to a snails pace. Like a single second could last an entire lifetime, and then when she heard the radio crackle once more it felt like the whole thing had passed by in a matter of seconds.
“I don’t know how to say this Captain, but your right, someone did mess with it, and now it’s going to blow.”
“What do you mean?” she asked as her heart dropped.
“Someone plugged a virus and a transmitter into it, that power fluctuation earlier was the reactor as it began to pump all the power its producing back into its core. We’re only still alive because we’re currently at warp, but that wont last forever. Its slowly creeping towards a meltdown.”
Astarte bit her lip and tried to think of a solution, “Can we eject the core?”
“Maybe, but the moment we get it disconnected it’s going to start a meltdown, we’ll have to drop out of warp and discharge it immediately. And even then we might still be within its blast radius, it might knock us out with an EMP.”
“Aren’t our systems hardened against that?”
“Not at point blank range, our best bet would be to shut everything down and manually get everything back online. Critical systems like life support and gravity will likely be the first to come back on.”
Karega stepped forward, “If we do that then we’ll be flying blind for who knows how long. And I don’t doubt that the Kruhur are on our tails.”
Aster felt her panic begin to rise as she realized who hopeless their situation was, even if they somehow ejected the core and got all their systems back online, they would still be down one reactor meaning they would be moving a whole lot slower and would have lost their head start. An idea struck her, she wasn’t very well versed in nuclear physics, or how an EMP really worked, but if they found something big enough it might just shield them from the worst effects. If they time things right they might be able to stick a big rock in between them and any explosion. “Open all prior navigation data and try to find me a system with an asteroid field within range, Heizer how long do you think it will take to disconnect the reactor?”
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“five, maybe ten minutes.” He responded over the radio,
“Alright, that’s our time frame men. We need to find a big rock by the time Heizer gets the reactor disconnected.” She turned to the bridge technicians, “we need to shut down every system in this ship before that reactor goes nuclear, that includes small electronics, life support, and anything else we’re going to need. I need all hands-on deck.” She turned to Alwen and Gato “Go to the med-bay and shut down everything, we’ll be vulnerable after it blows and that might mean an enemy attack.”
Alwen nodded before turning to rush back to her station, Gato followed at her heels.
Minutes passed and the navigation team identified a system that was likely to have and asteroid field of some sort, it was hard to say for sure since their interstellar sensors were offline, but the system had a high metallicity which would mean gas giants with potential asteroid belts. It was their best hope, and it was just barely within reach. She had ordered the crew over the intercom to disconnect and turn off all electrical devices, and outside the bridge it was likely complete chaos as crewmen rushed to disconnect every electrical device they could find.
A spare radio was brought to Astarte so that she could attempt to communicate with Heizer after everything went down.
Aster watched the screen intensely as the distance between her ship and the empty system quickly grew shorter. As they approached some of their remaining sensors picked out a Jupiter like gas giant with a lot of mixed signals that indicated there was a large asteroid belt around the world. The ship entered the system and their close-range sensors picked out the largest rock they could find with the worlds belt and her navigators began to plot a course that would bring them in front of the Australia sized asteroid, drop them out of warp, toss the overloading reactor one way, and the ship another. Once they discharged the reactor there was no saying how much time they would have before it went off, they just had to hope that it would be far enough around the other side of the asteroid to protect the ship.
The ship very suddenly dropped out of warp and out of seemingly nowhere an orange red gas giant appeared outside the starboard window, completely filling the window. Directly in front of the ship a mishappen rock filled their entire view, the ship turned a little as the flew dangerously close the asteroid.
“Now!” Aster roared into her radio as the Astaroth hurtled towards the massive rock.
She didn’t hear any response from Heizer, but knew he had heard when a small blip appeared on the ships radar moving away from the ship at the same speed. EM thrusters pushed the Astaroth away from the discharged reactor while their Ion engine pushed them forward. They couldn’t just warp away since the warp emitters were directly tied to all the reactors, and without the third reactor they would have to manually redistribute the power draw, which would take time they just didn’t have right now.
Astarte gritted her teeth and crossed her fingers as all the ship’s systems shut down as soon as they had accelerated to an acceptable speed and course. The bridge was dark with exception of a blinking light on her radio, and then with little fanfare that little light went out. Astarte counted to ten in her head before pulling out the spare radio, she flicked the little switch on the side and waited with bated breath until a little green light blinked to life.
There was a collective cheer around the bridge as Heizer’s voice came through, the rancor was so loud she couldn’t hear what her chief engineer said, “I need you to repeat that Chief,” she said into the little radio.
She heard tearful and crackly laughter over the radio “I was asking if you could hear me, that answers that, give me a second and I get us some light.” He said over the radio.
Some seconds ticked by, and without much warning emergency lights clicked on and Astarte could see that some of her bridge crew had tears running down their faces. A second later Heizer radioed in “Bad news, little stuff like lights and life support are back, but the big stuff is not switching over. That means shield, thrusters, and sensors. I’ll get my boys to look over it manually, but its going to take some time. Until then we’re dead in the water.” He said gravely.
As if prompted by his words something hit the ship. The sound of shredding metal screeched throughout the ship and Astarte began to realize that this was all apart of Ah’ared’s plan. He overloaded the ships reactor so that they would be forced to eject it and get hit by the EMP, leaving them vulnerable and undefended.
There was a second ripping sound and Astarte experimentally tapped the intercom button on her chair, the ships loudspeakers crackled to life, and she let out a sigh of relief. “All hands, prepare to repel boarders. I repeat, all hands prepare to repel boarders.”
~~~*~~~
They had done everything Ah’ared had hoped they would do, and now the Astaroth was completely vulnerable and ripe for the taking. Ah’ared didn’t become the pirate he was today by being stupid, in fact it was his brilliant ambush tactics that had earned him a place at Kazlum’s side. The sneak attack on Femeri had been merely a miscalculation, he failed to anticipate how hardy and vengeful the Terrans were. All his prior experience with them was when he was preying on lone cargo ships, and it gave him the impression that the Hellworlders would be easy to handle. That was obviously not the case, and it was a good thing he had rigged the Coiled Strike to self-destruct, though he had hoped not to need that option.
He had thought he would be safe at Kazlum’s side, that he had more than proven his worth, but that hadn’t been the case either. Not only did Astarte chase him all the way to the capitol, but she arrived with a mighty fleet. And Kazlum, the powerful master he had sold his allegiance to, not only attempted to sell Ah’ared to Astarte, but failed to kill her or destroy her fleet.
But now Ah’ared would finally put an end to the beastly Hellworlder captain and reclaim his place as one of the most powerful pirates in the galaxy. Once he had her ship the only thing that could stop him would be the other Hellworlder ships, but his Kruhur ‘allies’ would deal with that threat for him.
The Venom saddled up next to the Astaroth side and its custom-made boarding fangs bit into the Hellworlder ship. The plasma cutters burst to life and began to slowly cut their way through the stupidly thick armor of the Terran ship. He had learned the hard way that his own men were no match at all for the fearsome deathworlders, so this time he had recruited a pod of Kruhur raiders. Trained for the specific task of boarding and seizing an enemy vessel.
Sk’tharc softly approached him and watched the feed from one of the boarding fang cameras as the Kruhur soldiers readied their weapons. “This is it.” she trilled ominously.
“Yeg, our hunt ig at an end.” Ah’ared agreed.
She watched the video feed for a moment longer “If this is the end, then why am I still alive?” she asked coldly.
Ah’ared gurgled a short laugh “becauthe I have dethided not to have you killed.”
“Why?”
“Becauthe you are a very thmart and regorful bird, killing you becaethe you wounded my pride in the patht would be a wathte.” He turned to face her directly “we could make the galathy bleed you and I.”
“Are you proposing we work together?”
“Yeg. I’ll make you my thecond, and we will kill and plunder ag we withk.”
She looked back to the screen in contemplation “And with that marvelous ship we would be unstoppable.” She looked back to Ah’ared “Fine, we shall be partners.”
“There ig one condthon”
Her head jerked to the side inquisitively “What condition.”
“You need to learn Aghl’aga, thith lithp ig maddening.”
She trilled mirthfully “That can be arranged.”
Good, with that out of the way all they needed to do was wait for the Kruhur to claim their prize for them.