To Touch the Stars by Chris Hechtl

Author:Chris Hechtl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: self
Published: 2014-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

Berny and his crew did their best to isolate the ship's systems. He started with life support; after all, if the thing got in there it could just shut off the air and they'd eventually die. Or shut off the inertial dampeners and they would be squished when the ship moved. The problem with the other ship's systems was that they were all interconnected in a fine mesh. They were dependent on each other, so he had to be careful on how they went about bringing up the secondary systems.

Cleaning the secondaries out was a chore onto itself. They had to isolate each from the main system, reformat the software back to her basic system, then reinstall what information they had. He prayed the damn virus wasn't in the hard copy backups or they'd all be screwed.

When they were ready, Berny made an all-out attempt to kill the virus. The virus sensed it was under attack and went into a final mutual assured destruction rampage. It damaged the computer and systems, over writing files and sending the ship wildly off course.

The ship jolted as if they hit something in hyper that threw them sideways at even higher speed. The ship's inertial dampeners struggled to compensate. The crew was fearful they would fail but fortunately they held. Chief Shiku reported that the reactors were running at 120 percent to keep up with demand, and they were burning through a tremendous amount of fuel.

Eventually the ship faltered as it ran close to her exit time. She was low on power as well and off course, so the Captain ordered they drop out to find their location. When they translated out of hyper, the ship was pitched wildly about, spinning on all three axis as they exited hyper. The dampeners couldn't keep up fully; the crew was slammed about the interior of the ship.

Chri'nick'trill stabilized the ship with the maneuvering thrusters while the human crew went to work assessing the damage and treating the wounded. Doctor Asurabi was so overwhelmed with casualties he bit the bullet and called Kathy in to help. She didn't quibble, just rolled up her sleeves and dug in when the injured started to find their way to her clinic. Fortunately most of the human and dolphin casualties were just bumps, bruises, and sprains. She had to deal with a couple dislocated shoulders and triaged two head wounds, stabilizing them until Doctor Asurabi could take over their care.

The crew knew they were in trouble; they had dropped out of hyper far off course. That much was a given when the sensors reported no star in the area. Ibraham's people searched for Sol. It took days of anxious work to find the tiny G2V star. Many people volunteered to help but it was really up to the computers to find the star. They realized right off that they were so far out there were no radio transmissions, so that was a clue that they'd traveled farther than they had intended. Really far, for mankind had been transmitting for two centuries.

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.