Stars Like Cold Fire by Brent Nichols

Author:Brent Nichols [Nichols, Brent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781927881248
Publisher: Bundoran Press Publishing House
Published: 2016-08-09T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

We limped through N-Space, trailing smoke and losing air.

The crew worked on the ship, and I stayed out of their way. Lal put on firefighting equipment and headed into Section Three. He emerged half an hour later and announced that the leak was plugged and the fire was out. The smoke slowly cleared, and most of an hour later the force fields turned themselves off. The remaining smoke wafted through the ship, not very much of it, and I wrinkled my nose as it reached me. Higgins coughed once, weakly, and moaned.

Harcourt crawled under the med table and went to work on the bridge stations. I pulled my feet up on my seat to get them out of his way and watched him plug wires into jacks and peer into a hand scanner. When he got down on hands and knees and stuck his head deep under the console I called out changes on the screens. Finally the screen across from me came to life.

Harcourt rose to a squatting position. “It’s not everything, Captain. You still can’t control the engines at all from here, or anything that uses the ship’s computer.” He rubbed his eyes, looking haggard. “You’ve got a few things, though.” He jerked a thumb at the second station. “I’m going to leave that side for now, if that’s all right?”

“That’s fine, Harcourt. Thank you.”

He nodded, crawled under the med table, and headed aft.

I put the bridge controls through their paces. They were a mess. Something like ninety percent of the usual bridge functions were gone, and the screen would periodically flicker, turn white, then recover.

Radar was down. I had optical sensors, but I couldn’t tell the ship’s position. At the Academy we had learned to navigate by the stars, a lesson that had seemed utterly useless to me. Now I was grateful for it, and wished I had paid more attention. Distant constellations were effectively fixed points of reference, looking the same from anywhere in the cluster. That gave me a quick sense of direction, and told me we were well off course. We wanted to go almost directly spinward from the minefield to reach Amethyst Station. Our current vector was a good thirty degrees toward the core and roughly ten degrees toward Galactic North.

I groaned as I realized I would have to figure out the course correction by hand.

With the ship’s computer down, faster than light communication was utterly impossible. The subtle pulsing of a Rasmussen engine wasn’t something you could do by hand. We wouldn’t be calling for help. We would have to find our own way home.

I got busy figuring out our new heading, and quickly got lost in the math. Finally I decided to make the best adjustment I could and at least get us moving in something closer to the correct direction. I tried to bring up the controls for the manoeuvring thrusters.

They simply weren’t there on the on-screen menu.

“Great.” I threw my hands up.

“What is it, Captain?”

I looked up. Johnson stood on the other side of the med table.

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