Chapter Eight – In The Dark
Hiiiissssss
Pete came to in a panic. He had no idea how long he’d been out. All he knew was that the hissing sound that he was hearing was the worst sound any space-farer could ever hear. It usually meant only one thing – air was escaping their ship. And as far as he was concerned, the pitch black only made everything a thousand times worse.
“Nick! Alex!” Pete called shrilly.
“I’m here, Pete. You all right?” Alexander answered groggily.
“Hmm, what’s going on?” asked Nick, sleepily.
“We’re losing oxygen! Get your masks on!” Pete ordered, ignoring his brothers’ questions.
Pete fumbled behind him, waving his arm around where the facemask should be hanging. He started to panic as his hand touched only empty air.
The gravity. There’s no gravity, Pete desperately remembered.
He reached further around, found the tank and worked his hands up the side, feeling for the connection. At last, he had it. Pete let his fingers run along the tube floating above his head.
“Can you get that leak stopped?” Alexander’s voice was slightly muffled from inside his facemask.
“If I can find it, I can,” Pete answered him. “I need light, though. I’ve lost my torch.”
Nick’s watch lit up and came floating towards him. “Here, will this help?”
Pete reached out and grabbed the watch as it floated into reach. He quickly unstrapped himself and started to float upwards.
“How long can we last without proper spacesuits?” Nick asked.
“Depends how long it takes for the air to leak out,” Alexander answered out of the dark. “It doesn’t sound like a big leak. Maybe an hour. Tops.”
Pete closed his eyes, mentally picturing the layout of the pod. To his right were his brothers in the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats. Behind him was the second engineering board, which thankfully still had its seat folded away into the floor of the cabin. To his left was the main hatch and beyond that was the door into the storage bay. At the rear of the cabin was the small one-person airlock chamber, behind which, were the storage compartments.
He pushed himself off, angling towards the compartments and hopefully, the emergency lanterns. Pete pressed the button on Nick’s watch again as he floated. In the small, eerie half-light, it was hard to see exactly where he was, but his trajectory looked right. The wall loomed up. Pete let go of the watch and grabbed at the handles of the storage compartments.
The light vanished. Pete reached out with one hand and snagged the watch again before the afterglow had vanished from behind his eyelids. He pressed the button and waved the watch around and down, quickly spying the compartment that he wanted. Carefully, he pulled himself down the handles, before letting go and floating in front of it. He opened the door, reached in and grabbed one of the lanterns.
The burst of light hurt his eyes as the cabin lit up.
“Good work, Pete,” Alexander called.
“Thanks, but that was the easy bit,” Pete grinned.
Now that he could see again, Pete was feeling somewhat better. He opened a second compartment and pulled out a bottle. Pete checked the label and used the handles to turn himself around. By listening intently, he was sure that the unnerving hissing sound was coming from somewhere near the second engineering console. He pulled himself slowly in that direction.
Pete brought himself to a stop just behind Alex’s chair. Letting himself hang in mid-air, he sprayed red dye towards the hissing sound. The red patch hung in the air, before slowly beginning to move towards the right side of the console. Pete carefully watched the dye, letting his hands search out the sealant patch kit in his pouch. It was a temporary measure at best, but Pete knew that it’d hold until they could get back to the station.
“Is that it then? Is it fixed? Have you stopped the leak?” Nick asked anxiously ten minutes later, as he watched Pete putting away his tools.
Pete nodded. “That should hold it for now. It’ll need to have a proper job done on it later.”
“Any chance of getting the computers back up and running again soon?” Alexander asked, floating just behind him.
Pete pushed off and let himself float back to the console he’d been working at earlier. He kicked his feet into the armrests, touched off from the ceiling and settled into the seat rather gracefully, he thought. Hooking his feet around the base of the chair to keep from floating away, Pete stabbed at the restart buttons. The computer remained dead.
“It’s not working,” Pete told his brothers in frustration as he pushed the buttons for a second, third and fourth time.
“What’s wrong?” Alexander asked as he floated over.
“No idea. The backup battery must be dead,” he told them.
“Can you fix it?” asked Nick, from the pilot’s chair.
“Luckily for us, yes. I should be able to use one of the generators that A.B. and I replaced this morning to give us some juice,” Pete replied, relieved that he actually had that option. If he’d already unloaded those generators before O’Lochlan’d locked them in, then there would have been no way that he could have gotten any power.
“Do you need a hand?” Alexander asked.
“Yeah, thanks,” Pete grinned lopsidedly.
They pushed off towards the rear storage bay. He popped off the cover and yanked on the manual release. The door opened obediently. Alexander followed him in with a lantern and they set to work. Pete used his hand scanner to check the generators. He knew that he’d only fixed two of them that morning. The first one checked out as the one that still needed work.
“Let’s get this one hooked up to the auxiliary battery,” Pete told his brother, pointing at the closer of the remaining two.
In the null-gravity, the generator weighed nothing, it was just its size that made it awkward to handle. Pete had Alexander going backwards and forwards from the storage compartments for the leads and tools that he wanted. He found it somewhat strange that he was the one ordering his older brother around, especially when just that morning he’d been the assistant.
It was just under half an hour’s work for Pete to be finally satisfied that the generator was hooked up correctly and that he was ready to try the computers again.
“Alright, let’s try this again,” said Pete, once more seated at the engineering console.
Alexander floated gently behind him, arms crossed. Nick had swung his chair around, watching intently.
He paused, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and pressed the buttons that should restart the computers. He cracked his eyes open and peered at the screen. For what seemed the longest time, nothing happened.
Then, a small blinking cursor brought a massive grin to Pete’s face.
“We’re up and running!” Pete announced triumphantly.
“Yes!” Nick punched his fist into the air, making his longish hair float up ludicrously above him.
Pete’s fingers danced over the console as he brought up the system’s monitor onto his screen. Two clicks and the main lights were restored.
“I’ll be restoring gravity next,” said Pete, blinking the bright light out of his eyes. “Better brace yourselves.”
Alexander lightly tapped the ceiling above him. Pete watched him, timing the return of the gravity with his brother’s landing on the floor.
“Nicely done, bro,” Alexander grinned.
Pete grinned back.
“Life support is on-line,” Pete announced a minute later, breathing a sigh of relief.
He worked steadily, bringing the remaining systems back on-line in reverse order that he had shut them down. Structural integrity. Engineering sub-systems. Navigation. Communications. Thrusters. And finally the engines.
Nick’s eyes lit up as his board came alive. His fingers were a blur as he began his own set of diagnostics.
“Pod is fully operationa
l,” Pete announced.
---
“I have helm control and everything check’s out,” Ace crowed.
“I’m bringing up the sensors now,” said Alexander as the overhead screen sprang into life.
Alexander’s eyes were glued to his screen. Pete saw him frown as he looked down to check his figures.
“Ah, guys, I’m getting some strange readings here,” he said sounding worried. “I’m not reading the station at all.”
Pete peered across to double-check his figures. Nick, meanwhile, had punched in the command to open the blast windows, drumming his fingers with impatience as they slowly rolled up. His short, sharp intake of breath brought Pete’s eyes off of his screen.
“Alex, Pete, who parked all these weird ships out here?”
Star Runner Page 8
