Chapter Seven – Too Close For Comfort
Ace slumped in the pilot’s chair, his head on his fist as he stared out the viewport. The pod had continued on course away from the station for nearly two hours. And there had been nothing that he could do about it. He looked across at Pete sitting heavily in the seat beside him.
“Any change?” Pete asked hopefully.
“Nothing,” Nick replied glumly.
“At least I’ve had time to fix the door to the storage bay,” Pete commented.
They sat together, staring out into space. Without warning, the engines cut out, only to be replaced by the thrusters firing in a station-keeping pattern. Nick bolted upright in his chair, fingers picking at his board, hoping for a response.
“What happened? Why’d we stop?” Alexander asked, swivelling his seat towards them. He had spent the last couple of hours attempting to override the computer, with no success.
“No idea,” Ace told him. “It was nothing I did.” He slumped back in resignation. “I’m still locked out.”
“Communications are still out as well,” Pete confirmed from beside him.
“Where are we?” Alexander asked.
Pete flicked a few switches. A graphic of local space came up on the screen. An orange disk marked the space station, a blue chevron where they were.
“Zoom in here!” Alexander said urgently, leaping out of his seat to point at the screen.
The blue chevron leapt larger as Pete manipulated the readout. A pulsing red circle appeared beside them. The black hole.
“What’s the distance?” Alexander breathed.
Pete looked down at his console. “Thirty metres from the event horizon,” he gasped.
“Too close. Way, way too close,” Alexander breathed.
Both Nick and Pete stared at him. They’d heard more than enough of Alex’s lectures to know that anything less than seventy-five metres from the event horizon of a black hole was far too close for comfort.
“We need to get further away,” Alexander insisted. “And the sooner, the better.”
“We can’t,” Ace complained. “We’ve tried. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Nick’s right. I don’t know what O’Lochlan did, but we’re completely shut out. Short of doing a complete restart of all systems, we’ll never get helm control back until he gives it to us,” said Pete.
“Can we do that?” Alexander asked, seizing the slight hope that his brother had just offered.
“What?” asked Pete.
“Shut everything down, restart and get control of the pod back,” said Alexander.
“Probably Alex, but it wouldn’t be easy and we’d be sitting ducks for as long as it took. If anything bumped us, we wouldn’t even have the thrusters to stop us falling into the hole.”
“I say we give it a try,” Ace piped up.
“I agree. I’d rather get control back than spend it stuck here for who knows how long with O’Lochlan controlling everything,” said Alexander.
Pete chewed his lip. “Alright. Let’s do it.” He swivelled his seat, moving out of the co-pilot’s chair. “Alex, I’m going to need that console.”
Alexander moved out of the way, letting the engineer get to work. Pete brought up the systems’ monitor on his screen. It wasn’t used very often and could only be accessed by an engineer or a high ranking officer. He talked his way through the procedure, mostly just to make sure that he was getting all of the steps done in the right order.
“The first step is to shut down the engines. O’Lochlan’s already taken care of that one for us, at least. Now for the hard part. I need to shut down each system separately.” Pete’s fingers moved carefully over the console. “Communications. Navigation. Engineering Subsystems. Structural Integrity. Life-support.”
The blast windows lowered automatically as the structural integrity was taken off-line.
Pete looked up. “We’ve got a good couple of hour’s worth of air in here, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to have the emergency oxygen tanks out. They should be in Storage Compartment D.”
“Got ’em,” Nick called a minute later, handing one to each of his brothers.
Each tank was fitted into the specially designed slot at the back of their chairs.
“Better strap yourselves in. Gravity’s next,” Pete informed them.
He pulled the harness over his shoulders and clipped it into place, then waited, giving Nick time to get back to the pilot’s seat. He could see that Alex was already strapped into the co-pilot’s chair.
“Cutting gravity . . . now,” Pete announced, punching in the command.
A sudden feeling of weightlessness lifted him slightly from his chair before the straps caught and held him in place.
“Thrusters are shutdown. Just the lights and the computer to go.” Pete looked at his brothers. “It’ll need a good five minutes once the computers are cut to make sure that they’re purged before I can re-boot them.”
Nick gave him a thumbs up; Alex, a curt nod.
Pete swallowed. “Disengaging lights.”
The pod was plunged into near total blackness, the only light coming from the glow of the console in front of him. Pete carefully placed the fingers of his left hand on the restart buttons, before punching the computer shutdown code with his right. What little light remained immediately vanished.
“Computers are shut down,” Pete whispered into the darkness.
They sat in silence, waiting. Time itself seemed to stretch.
A sharp light came from the pilot’s seat. “Two minutes,” Nick announced.
Clunk.
A sharp metallic sound came from somewhere on the hull near the hatch.
“What was that?” Nick’s worried voice came out of the blackness.
“I don’t know,” said Pete slowly. “I think that something just struck our hull.”
Clunk, clunk, clunk.
“That does not sound good,” Alexander said grimly.
“Three and a half minutes gone,” said Nick, activating his watch again.
They waited in silence, listening intently, hoping that they wouldn’t hear anything.
“Four minutes, twenty,” reported Nick, “that’s close enough, isn’t it?”
Pete shook his head, forgetting that he couldn’t be seen in the dark. “We need the full five minutes.”
He waited, his palms and forehead growing damp with sweat, making his scar itch.
“Four fifty. . .fifty-five. . .five minutes!” Nick called triumphantly.
Pete stabbed down on the buttons. Nothing happened. He pressed again. Still nothing.
“Any time now, Pete,” said Alexander.
“I’m trying,” Pete told him. “My fingers must have slipped.”
Clunk. Clunk, clunk. CLUNK.
The pod itself shook this time under the onslaught. Pete shoved his hand into his pouch, rummaged and came up with his flashlight. He flicked it on, located the correct buttons and stabbed them again. A small green cursor appeared in the top left-hand corner of the screen.
“Computers are functioning!” Pete announced with a grin.
But just then, the pod seemed to shake itself more violently than before. It seemed to stretch, groaning at the pressure. A sharp shriek came from somewhere in the back.
“Wha. . .,” Pete started.
A small hiss. A crraaack. The vibrations increased, a piercing scream seeming to come from the very hull itself. It tumbled. Protested. Groaned. It struggled and hung together, barely.
The three boys inside clung to their chairs, straps, consoles in front of them. Pete tried hard not to throw up at the violent manoeuvres. The one tiny light from the screen winked out.
The pod gave one more tremendous buck, a heave and then lay completely still.
Star Runner Page 7
