The Flaming Arrow by Kathy Oltion & Jerry Oltion

Author:Kathy Oltion & Jerry Oltion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2000-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

THE SHUTTLE had been badly damaged. Deloric and Terwolan floated in their spacesuits beside it, making a visual inspection to see just how bad it was. All around them the stars were tiny points of silvery light, but in their soft glow the shuttle showed what too much light could do. Every surface that had been exposed to the laser’s fury had either melted or charred. Access hatches had welded themselves to the hull; thruster ports were clogged, and most of the sensors were unrecognizable lumps.

Deloric and Terwolan weren’t in much better shape themselves. They had both been burned on their faces and arms so badly that the skin was blistering. Their hair was coming off in crisp chunks. They could see again, but every time he blinked, Deloric could still see the laser beam slicing across his field of vision. It had been torture putting on his spacesuit, but they needed to know how badly the shuttle had been damaged.

Their blind jump had taken them a few light-hours away. They were still on the edge of the same star system they had been in, but they had gone far enough to be outside the Blind. Deloric was glad of that. The Blind was theoretically not dangerous to a properly protected person, but he had taken about all the radiation damage he was willing to endure for a while.

“You know anything about warp engines?” Terwolan asked him, pointing at the partially melted bulge on the shuttle’s underside.

“No,” he said, “but I know it’s working or we wouldn’t be here.”

“The control panel doesn’t even acknowledge its existence,” she pointed out.

“It’s got to be just a sensor glitch. We know it’s getting commands.”

“It’s going to be mighty hard piloting this thing without feedback.”

“Yeah.” He looked at the reaction engines at the back. The bell-shaped nozzles were okay—after all, they were designed to withstand far more heat than they had received today—but the fuel lines leading to them were partially melted. “It’s going to be hard doing it without normal-space engines, too, but I think we’d better try. If those fuel lines rupture, we’re dead.”

Terwolan pulled herself around back for a closer look. “It’s just the left engine. The right side is okay.”

“So we can go in spirals. That’s good news.”

“We can shift the center of gravity to the right as much as possible by moving things around inside. And the forward steering jets are still good, so I can compensate with those, too. It’ll be enough to get us into port somewhere.”

So long as they didn’t try to land on a planet, but that went without saying.

“We’re not going to get much in trade for it when we get wherever we’re going,” he said.

“Trade?” She looked over at him, her head tilted to the side inside her helmet.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly rich at the moment, and we’re not going to be able to access our payroll unless we want to trip every security alert in the sector.

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.