Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls: A Diving Universe Novella by Rusch Kristine Kathryn

Author:Rusch, Kristine Kathryn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

9

No matter what they did, they couldn’t access the proper controls on the console. The bridge remained in darkness. At one point, Ryder managed to grab Calthorpe, and strap him into a chair. Ryder said Calthorpe was unconscious, but something in Ryder’s tone made Elissa think that maybe Ryder wasn’t telling the crew everything.

She decided not to ask. She couldn’t do anything about Calthorpe, even if he were badly hurt, so it was better to try to get the ship back under control.

If she could get the ship under control.

The flare had faded to nothing, but her eyes had adjusted to the dimness. She still couldn’t see clearly, but she could make out shapes. And some of those shapes were her crew, doing their very best.

They had two major problems: the ships that were closest to them, the fighters and the transports, hadn’t arrived. Which meant that they were probably disabled as well, although, she had to hope, not as disabled as her ship was.

That meant rescue might take a while. The commanders in her squadron would have to make the right decisions: how to protect the area, maintain the information shield, rescue the crew members in the fighters, and come get the Discovery. Theoretically, the Discovery should have been their first priority, but the commanders served with the officers on the transports and fighters. Sometimes personal loyalty trumped orders.

The second problem her crew had was more immediate: it was getting colder. The air might last hours, but if the temperature dropped significantly, the crew wouldn’t last hours.

Elissa had managed to snag her environmental suit helmet, and as she suspected, nothing about it worked. It just provided an extra layer of clothing. A super-strong layer, but a layer nonetheless.

Still, she had one and her crew didn’t.

They were her priority.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to do two things. Binek, I want you to check the nearest life pod. See if its systems got fried. If the systems are fine, we will finally have a solution.”

She doubted that the systems were fine, but she didn’t say anything. Stranger things had happened.

“Secondly,” she said, “we need to open the equipment locker and remove the environmental suits.”

The equipment locker was part of the bridge. She wouldn’t have to manually open that door to the corridor. And the word “locker” was a misnomer; it was actually a small room off the bridge. The locker had a door with a manual override. The door opened with a simple pull if the power to the ship went down.

Someone had been thinking on that design, at least.

“You think some of the suits will work?” Trombino asked. Again, he sounded a bit too eager, as if he were clutching onto anything.

“I am not in the guessing business, Officer,” she said, her tone flat. A man prone to great highs would also fall to a great low if things did not turn out as he expected. She didn’t want to raise his hopes. “We’re taking this one step at a time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.