“So? I hate to break it to you Michael, but whether or not I want to live with that risk is my choice, not yours,” she replied. “Whether or not we’re sleeping together isn’t going to stop me worrying about you flying out there in a tinderbox with a gun strapped to it!”
Michael had to admit she had a point. He also had to admit, at least in the privacy of his own mind, that he’d been more scared for himself than anything else.
Kelly read his mind far more clearly than he wanted:
“What are you afraid of, Michael?” she asked. She slid onto the bench next to him and took his hands, unresistingly, into her own. “You weren’t at all what I expected,” she admitted, “and I was starting to think we really had something.”
“So did I,” he admitted aloud. “That’s what I’m scared of. The last time I really fell for someone…” he shrugged. “Let’s just say she got the posting we were competing for, and I got left in her dust. The only time since then I even came close,” he smiled with bittersweet memory, “I wasn’t doing so well at making my mind up between them, and, well, we all got ourselves in trouble. Hence, Avalon.”
“Let me get this straight,” Kelly said slowly. “You’re worried I’m either going to use you for professional advancement; or steal a space shuttle with you to get you exiled again?”
He couldn’t help himself. Her summary made him sound ridiculous, and he laughed aloud.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and suddenly she was right next to him. Their hands were clasped, and she was inches away from him.
When they came up for air a minute later, he shook his head slowly.
“Okay, I can see when I’m out-maneuvered, out-logicked, and beat,” he told her. “I concede.”
“Oh good,” she replied with a wicked grin. “Because it looks like we’re both off-shift, and I think the bunk in my quarters is getting cold.”
#
Once through the tiny door cut in the armor to allow access to the observatory, access to the remainder of the ship was by one of the long corridors that crossed each deck at regular intervals throughout the ship’s length.
The observatory was on the same level, Deck Eight, as Kelly’s quarters, and Michael found himself following the woman down the hall with far less hesitance than before. She was right, he knew. They were no less ‘emotionally compromised’ if they were together than if they’d separated, so they as may well get the benefit of the situation as well.
They were about fifteen meters in when the lights went out, followed a fraction of a second later by the artificial gravity.
Driven by the same mass manipulators that prevented the starship’s acceleration from smashing the crew into mush and that drove her through space at faster than light speeds, the gravity should never fail.
Michael had his implant linked into the ship’s emergency network before his feet had even left the ground. With a fighter pilots implants and bandwidth, he knew what was going on as soon as he was linked, the entire status report dumped into his brain in fractions of a second.
The Stetson stabilizers were failing. Failsafes had re-directed all power aboard the ship to maintaining the fields that stopped their warp bubble’s radiation from killing everyone aboard Avalon, but the ship’s computer calmly informed Michael that even with the extra power, the field would fail in four seconds.
With his implant at full speed, there was a lot Michael would think in four seconds – but not a lot he could do.
They were five meters from an emergency airlock door. With power re-directed, the doors wouldn’t close in time to save them even if they made it through.
Avalon helpfully informed him that he was floating right next to the manual override lever. It would take two point five seconds to cycle the lock, and the radiation would not reach lethal levels for just under a second after the stabilizers failed.
All of this passed through his mind and implants in a quarter of a second, and it took even less time for him to make a decision.
Kelly had a Navy officer’s implants and bandwidth – above average, but not the literally inhuman speed of a fighter pilot. Her eyes were starting to widen in horror at the status report as Michael issued an override command to his internal medical nanites.
He wasn’t even supposed to know that command existed, but there were advantages to his misspent adulthood. Every muscle in his body was suddenly hit with the equivalent of a direct injection of adrenaline, and the pilot moved.
Michael grabbed Kelly, faster than she could react to without any warning, secured himself to the wall, and threw her. With no gravity to slow her or bring her to the ground, she cut a straight line towards the airlock door.
He spent the time. A quarter of a second. Half a second. It took a full second, but she passed the airlock and he yanked on the lever the ship’s computer had directed him to. It resisted, but clicked into place as he threw every gram of his adrenaline-fueled body into the motion.
Emergency capacitors fired, and the airlock began to slide closed as he launched himself off. Time ticked off in fractions of a second as he hurtled through the air towards the lock. The door was moving quickly – but was it fast enough to save them?
The Stetson stabilizers failed as he passed through the airlock, entire sections of the ship flashing red as deadly radiation flooded the hull – but he was in the door! He was safe!
Then time crashed back to normal in a crescendo of pain as the airlock doors slammed just above his knees.
Deep Space
00:03 September 16, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Executive Officer’s Quarters
The alarm ringing inside Kyle’s skull clawed him awake in the middle of the night. His surprised motion launched him into the air, drifting away from his bunk along with the blankets in a complete lack of gravity.
That woke him the rest of the way up, and he finally requested a status update from the ship.
There was no response.
Blinking, concerned for his implant again, Kyle ran a quick self-test on the hardware. Everything inside his head checked out, and the internal log informed him that Avalon had transmitted an emergency alarm to all department heads and above for five point two seconds, after which it had terminated.
He pinged the emergency network, and inhaled sharply at the repeated lack of response. The momentum from that flung him into the wall.
Grabbing a hold of the frame of his bunk, Kyle considered the situation while he stabilized himself. If even the emergency network was down, Avalon had no power. At all.
He made his way, slowly and carefully, across his quarters to the emergency locker. Inputting a command code, he reviewed its contents, then removed two items – a pair of magnetic boots, and a standard seven millimeter Navy sidearm.
Once he had the mag-boots on, he could make at least an approximation of standing. Belting the pistol on carefully, he opened his implant up and sent out a general pulse on the officers’ channel.
“Anyone on this channel, please respond.”
It wouldn’t go far – there was enough metal in even Avalon’s internal hull to seriously mess with transmission if the optical network was down – but it should reach someone.
“This is Wong,” the Chief Engineer replied. “Thank God you’re up, Kyle.”
“What the hell is happening?” Kyle demanded.
“I’ll let you know as soon as I do,” Wong told him. “All I know is that we’re out of FTL and we have no power. I can’t raise the bridge, I can’t raise the Captain… you’re the first senior officer on the channel.”
“Can you get power back?”
“I’m on my way to Engineering now,” the other man replied. “Unless Engineering is gone, I should be able to boot the secondary antimatter plants from the positron capacitors.”
“Right now, we need power before anything else,” Kyle admitted aloud. “How can I help?”
“I need someone on either the bridge or Sec
ondary Control to provide override confirmations on the safeties I’m going to have to bypass if we want power fast,” Wong told him. “I can just rip them out, but overrides are faster.”
“I’m only a minute from Secondary Control,” the XO answered. “Probably longer in mag-boots. I’ll raise you again when I’m there.”
“I’ll be in Engineering by then,” Wong promised. “Let’s be about it, boss.”
With a firm nod, entirely to reassure himself as Wong couldn’t see him, Kyle carefully tested his balance on the mag-boots and then took off down the corridor.
Chapter 31
Deep Space
00:07 September 16, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Secondary Control
Avalon needed better emergency lighting.
Kyle had always been intellectually aware that the carrier had been a prototype, the first of her kind and never really intended to see action until all hell had broken loose on the frontier. That had never sunk in quite as clearly as it did while he made his way through the corridor to Secondary Control, dodging between the dim pools of light shed by the battery-powered emergency lighting.
Secondary Control, despite the emergency lighting, was a shadow filled nightmare house. Thankfully, it wasn’t an unoccupied nightmare house, through the Ensign and two Petty Officers who’d been holding down the night shift looked utterly terrified.
“Thank God you’re here, sir!” the Ensign exclaimed. She was a young, a dark-skinned woman, whose name was Alison Li according to the service file Kyle’s implant pulled.
“Ensign Li,” he greeted her, glancing around the room. “Status report, please.”
“I’m not… entirely sure, sir,” she admitted.
“Ensign, all I know is that I was woken up by an emergency alert, we’re out of FTL, and we have no power,” Kyle told her dryly. “Anything you can tell me is helpful.”
She took a deep breath and nodded, clearly trying to find some modicum of calm.
“We got an alert that the Stetson stabilizers were going into failsafe mode,” she finally said. “Then they went into emergency failsafe mode and re-directed all power to try and sustain the stabilizer fields.”
“It… didn’t work,” Li concluded, gesturing around. “Everything should have gone back to normal once we dropped out of FTL, but instead the entire network crashed. It’s almost…”
“It’s almost…?” Kyle repeated questioningly, and the Ensign – who couldn’t have been more than twenty-one – blushed.
“Sorry, sir, thinking out loud.”
“Finish the thought, Ensign,” Kyle told her gently.
“I majored in computer systems, sir,” Li told him. “It’s almost like the main computer core took a direct EMP hit and then failed to reset. But the core is shielded – and it’s right beneath the bridge.”
A chill ran through Kyle’s chest and he shivered.
“There are secondary emergency fiber optic links to the bridge and main engineering,” he said slowly. “Have you heard anything from the bridge?”
“Last thing the Captain said was ‘hold on,’ right after the first failsafe warning came on. Nothing since,” she said quietly.
A light and a buzzer on the main command console interrupted the conversation. It was the communications link to Engineering, and Kyle took a deep breath.
“I relieve you, Ensign Li,” he said formally. “Don’t go anywhere,” he added, “I get the feeling I’m going to need every set of hands I can find.”
He slipped into the central chair and activated the link.
“Roberts,” he said simply.
“Roberts, it’s Wong,” the Chief Engineer told him. “Please tell me you’ve got power, an implant, and an override code.”
“We’re on battery power,” Kyle replied. “Last I checked, this room is rated for forty-eight hours.”
“Yeah, well, so’s the bridge and I can’t raise them,” Wong said flatly. “I can’t find or raise half my goddamn night shift, either.”
That hung in the air for a long moment. If the stabilizers had failed before the Alcubierre drive had shut down, large parts of the ship would have been swept with devastating levels of radiation. The exact outer layers, in fact, where Wong’s people would have been doing midnight maintenance work.
“What do we need to get power back up?” Kyle finally asked.
“Well, from the fact we’re all still alive, I can confirm the positron capacitor failsafes are holding,” Wong said calmly. “I’m going to manually feed Secondary Antimatter Three with hydrogen and positrons, but I’m going to need a bridge override to open the positron feed.”
“I’ve been reading up,” Kyle told him, as cheerfully as he could manage sitting in the shadows, “but somehow I didn’t think I’d need to be overriding the safeties on our antimatter stores. You’re going to have to walk me through that.”
“Hold one,” Wong told him. “Kellers, Anderson – are those feeds hooked up?” he shouted away from the microphone for the com link. Kyle couldn’t hear the response, but the engineer ‘hrmed’ satisfiedly.
Kyle found himself waiting as he heard Wong walk away from the communicator. Every second that passed his fingers clenched harder on the arm of the chair. There was nothing he could do but trust the engineer, and every second they waited was one second less of air the carrier had.
Finally, Wong came back on the line.
“Okay, everything is hooked up,” the engineer told him. “I’m flipping the override request to the main command console there. My code is in.”
The single active screen on the console flickered slowly to full life, a flashing red ‘emergency override request’ occupying it. Slowly, carefully, Kyle typed in the nineteen-digit alphanumeric sequence of his bridge officer override code.
“Done,” he told Wong.
“Hold on,” the Chief Engineer replied. “But don’t worry – if we’ve fucked this up, you’ll never know.”
Kyle found himself literally holding his breath for a long moment, until he heard Wong exhale heavily in relief.
“There she goes,” he said aloud. “Secondary Three is online, XO. I’ll hook it up to life support first, but we’ll be able to start bringing the zero point cells online in ten minutes or so.”
“How long to gravity?” Kyle asked.
“Thirty minutes, maybe more, maybe less,” Wong admitted. “Without knowing what crashed everything, we have to double check as we go. Everything will take longer.”
“Ensign Li said it looked like a hard computer crash, due to an EMP in the main core,” Kyle told the Engineer.
Silence answered him for a moment.
“Yeah, combined with an emergency A-S shutdown, that could do it,” Wong admitted. “It should have auto-reset, but then, the Stetson stabilizers shouldn’t have failed.”
“The manual reset is in the core, Commander,” he continued. “If you can get there and confirm that’s what happened, I can direct enough power there for you to boot her. That won’t speed up gravity, but it’ll give us a fighting chance to get the rest of the ship online.”
“Understood,” Kyle said grimly. “I’ll check it out.”
Standing, carefully to allow the mag-boots to lock on, Kyle turned to face his pitiful staff of three.
“There are mag-boots in the emergency locker,” he told the floating Ensign. “Petty Officers Jackson, Sandel, you’re our relay. Keep in touch with Commander Wong and anyone else who wakes up and gets in contact.”
“Ensign Li,” he continued. “You’re with me. If you’re right, we have a space carrier to reboot.”
Deep Space
00:22 September 16, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Main Computer Core
Without his old implant bandwidth, Kyle had to pull out his datapad to find the access hatch for the vertical emergency access column leading up to the bridge. Ensign Li seemed impressed enough that he even knew they
existed.
“Why don’t they cover these in the Academy?” she asked as he slid the manual release to pop the door.
“The locations vary from ship to ship, even in the same class,” he explained as he carefully maneuvered his mag-booted feet into the vertical tunnel. “Even a small re-arrangement of, say, a heavy positron lance, can require moving one of these five, ten meters. The location should have been covered in ship’s orientation, but it’s often forgotten.” He shrugged. “In an age of zero point cells and antimatter reactors, who expects a starship not to have enough power to run an elevator?”
The young Ensign nodded slowly as she followed him into the spartan tube. There was a tiny ledge, barely large enough for one of them to stand on, next to a ladder that stretched from Deck One to Deck Ten along the center of the ship.
Kyle considered the ladder for about a second, and then turn off his mag-boots and used a ladder rung as a fulcrum to rotate himself and land on the wall. With his boots active, the wall was now the floor for his careful balancing act.
With his height and bulk, the access column was just wide enough to pull this off. Li managed it with significantly more space to spare, and he found himself silently envying her lack of centimeters.
Ducking slightly to dodge the ladder, he led the way up the ship. Unlike Li, apparently, as a Space Force Ensign his ship’s crew had engaged in the ‘sport’ of column climbing. Walking along the tunnel like it was a hallway was much faster.
He popped the Deck Three hatch open onto another empty corridor, and felt a shiver run down his spine. It was the middle of the night. Most of the ship would be asleep, and only department heads would have gotten the alert he did.
Space Carrier Avalon Page 25
