Tiger: Dark Space (Tiger Tales Book 2) by Smith David

Author:Smith, David [Smith, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

After three days of edging forward, Dave gave up, stopped the ship and called the senior officers to the Officer’s Mess.

“Ok. We’re lost. We’re blind. And we can’t find anyone we can ask for directions. We’ve been edging forward looking for a gap, or …… anything, but it seems we’re in the thickest, gloopiest dust cloud ever discovered. I’ve stopped the ship as we have no idea if we’re getting closer to an edge or just blundering deeper and deeper in. Actually, we have so little visibility I don’t even know if we have stopped the ship. We can’t see anything at all to judge whether we’re still moving or not. Any ideas? Anyone?”

There was an uncomfortable silence around the table.

O’Mara spoke first.

“I wanted to send some probes out, but the buggers have gone on strike again” she sighed.

Dave banged his forehead on the table. He’d thought they were done with all that.

Trying to pretend she hadn’t seen or heard Dave’s moment of self-abuse she continued. “Other than that, Ensign David is tweaking a few of the sensors and conducting a couple of experiments we’re hopeful of, but it’s nothing that’ll help us right now.”

ASBeau had an alternative of sorts. “I could launch torpedoes set for maximum yield and maximum range, just to see if the shockwave will have any effect on the cloud, but I reckon it’s too big” he said disconsolately.

Dave was shocked and dismayed by this statement from the Ship’s Tactical Officer. His usual solution was to shoot everything, just for the sheer hell of it, if nothing else.

Crash added “If we can’t launch probes, Stavros or I could take the Faraday out. The downside is that navigation will be near impossible: We’ll have to fly on inertial systems only, so the further away we get, the greater the margin of error for the return flight. Unless we can work out some other way of navigating, the simulations I’ve run show that if we get twenty light-years out we’ll only have about a fifty-fifty chance of locating the ship when we come back. By the time you get to a hundred light-years, your chances of finding the ship again are near enough to zero to make it a suicide mission.”

Dave rubbed his tired eyes. “That’s not an option then. And even if we do fix our position, we still have to find a way to travel. Olga, how are the engines looking?”

The little Ukrainian engineer looked deadly tired. “The engines are looking shot sir. We’ve lost three drive coils from each side, and we can’t fix them. Big chunks of the coils were completely vapourised by the energy induced by the collapse of the field. There is simply nothing left to repair. Without them I don’t believe we can generate a large enough warp-field to drive the ship through.”

There were groans all around the table at this revelation. Without a warp-field, the ship was restricted to sub-light velocities. It would take a lifetime (or more) to get home.

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