East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Chapter Twenty-Six

Layne looked around the immense engine room in wonder, then over at the slight engineer he was accompanying.

“Do you have any idea what all this does?” he asked unsurely.

“Yeah,” Linda replied. “I even know how it all works.”

The engine room was the largest open area on the ship. The ceiling was nearly fifty meters high and thigh-thick power busses reached up both sides to the four ion cannons of the main drive. Midline were six large cylinders, the primary fusion reactors that drove both the lateral plasma thrusters and the primary ion drive. Near the port bulkhead was a smaller fusion generator for internal power.

On the forward bulkhead was a large breaker assembly. The breakers were vacuum-filled and remotely operated from a control panel aft of the breaker assembly. Running out from the assembly were the six primary power shunts, large room-temperature superconductor buss-bars that carried the main load to the primary power distributors.

“Six breakers,” Linda said as they approached the breaker assembly. The breaker controls were large buttons, hand-sized, covered by shields with red and green readouts over them. Currently, they were all showing green. “Those big bars,” she said, pointing to the six primary power busses, “carry the power from the breakers to the distributor system. I’ve got to shut down the power then remove each of those buss-link bars.”

Each of the bars was about two meters long and a quarter meter square, connected to the breaker assembly at one end and the distributor assembly at the other by a hinged assembly closed with large mag-bolts. There was about a meter’s separation between each of the bars. The entire assembly was surrounded by a yellow plastic mesh cage just about covered in warning signs. Layne looked at them and shook his head.

“I don’t think you can lift one of those, can you?”

“No,” Linda admitted. “So this is how we’re going to do it. You’re going to shut down the breakers, starting with six and working to one. I’ll pull the bolts. When you’ve got all six shut down, you start helping me lift out the buss bars. We’ve got five minutes, maybe a smidgeon more, to get it all done. After five minutes, they can turn the power back on. When it’s coming back on, there’s a siren. When the siren goes off, we have fifteen seconds to get clear. If you’re near one of those things when it goes hot, you won’t survive the experience. Clear?”

“Clear,” Layne said. “I’m going to take the chance on losing pressure and take off my helmet. I don’t want anything getting in the way.”

“Same here,” Linda said, undoing the buckles and unsealing the helmet. She set it on the deck and looked around. “There’s supposed to be a big mag wrench on the forward bulkhead. You get used to the controls while I go find the wrench.”

Each of the buttons had a label under it, a metal plate with worn writing. The numbers were really the only thing that was clear. It was the first sign of age Layne had noticed on the ship but it was apparent that nobody had bothered to fix the labels in some time, possibly centuries. He worked his fingers nervously until Linda came back with a large wrench over her shoulder and a box in her hand.

“These things weigh a ton,” the girl said bitterly. “I ought to get Herzer down here doing this.”

“He’s got other things on his mind,” Layne noted. “What’s the box?”

“High voltage hot-stick tester,” Linda said, hitting a control and extending a very long probe. “I’m not going near those things until I’m sure they’re dead cold.”

“So, you ready?” Layne asked, nervously.

“Yeah,” Linda said, setting the wrench down and opening up the door to the safety cage. “Hit number six.”

“Great One,” the goblin pilot Reefic said, waving his arms in excitement. “Power to the starboard thrusters lost has been!”

“How?” Reyes asked, sitting up in his station chair and looking at the incomprehensible readouts.

“The main breakers are bein’ reset,” Gomblick replied. The kobold engineer’s words were nearly incomprehensible since kobolds all had a thick accent. “There’s someone a muckin’ wit’ the engines, Great One.”

“Tur-uck,” Reyes said, spinning around in his chair. “Take a team of orcs and scorpions to the engine room. And a kobold. Get the engines back on line.”

“At your command, Great One,” Tur-uck replied, looking over the gathered Durgar.

“Main power to the ion drive has been shut off, Great One,” the goblin said, waving his hands in the air in dismay. “I don’t have any engines! Evil evil people. They have taken my engines away!”

“I’ll go,” the kobold manning the engineering station said, jumping down from his station chair and slapping a fist into his hand. “I’ll nay have anyone muckin’ wit’ me engines. Goblast will stay to try to reset the breakers. If they’ve taken down the main busses, though, we canna reset from here. I’ll have to muck about and put them back.”

“Just do it,” Reyes said. “Reefic, can you get us back on course?”

“If I have engines, Great One!” the goblin replied. “Easy to do! Fly it I will!”

“Get them back on line, Gomblick!” Reyes shouted as the group of Durgar, followed by four scorpions, hurried out of the control room. “Get my engines back!”

“Quickly but carefully,” Linda muttered, unbolting the number six buss link. Each end had six heavy bolts to remove and she worked as quickly as she could. Once the buss was free she lifted the latching bar and set it to the side. Then walked to the input end and repeated the procedure.

“They’re all shut off,” Layne said, walking into the safety cage.

“So you say,” Linda replied, lifting away the locking bar. “There really should be a way to lock-out the power. The way they’ve got this set up is a hell of a safety hazard.”

“Can I help?” Layne asked.

“Can you pick that big sumbitch up by yourself?” Linda asked, touching the next bar with the hot-stick.

“Yeah,” Layne guessed. He centered himself on the large bar and lifted up, carefully, but was surprised by the relatively light weight. “It’s not all that heavy.”

“Room temperature superconductor isn’t,” Linda noted, starting on bar five. “Just carry it out of the cage and set it down. We’ll figure out what to do with them later.”

“If they don’t go live on us,” Layne replied, turning the bar awkwardly to get it out of the door.

“O ye of little faith,” Linda said. “Quickly but carefully. That’s the ticket…”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven…” Nicole muttered. “Bingo, hatch twenty-eight.”

The crew quarters had a main corridor with compartments to either side. Down the midline of the corridor were access hatches to the numerous control nodes laid in along the spine of the support beams. The crew compartment, like the control room, Maintenance and the EVA shed, were essentially built into the large tubes that were the primary support of the vast ship.

Some of the control runs were in pressure, but the door controls were in microgravity and vacuum, so the hatch had several stern warnings about death pressure. Beyond here be the dragons of vacuum.

Nicole opened the control panel on the forward bulkhead and keyed open the hatch, waving Josten in first.

“It’s a triple lock,” she said, following the pilot down the ladder. She dogged the first hatch behind her and keyed the controls for the second. “The second and third are the actual airlock. That requires a double release.”

She squeezed in to the side of the pilot in the small compartment and closed the upper hatch, then keyed the sequence for the last hatch.

“Grab the red lever,” she said, putting her hand on the lever on the opposite wall. “It’s a stupid design; someone could pull both levers at the same time if they really had to. But they had to at least act like they’re redundant given that it’s right by the crew quarters and the outer hatch can’t be opened unless the upper hatch is closed.”

“Got it,” Josten said, putting his hand on the lever. “One, two…”

“Three,” Nicole said, pulling down on her own lever.

There was a faint noise as the air was sucked out of the chamber and then the lower hatch opened downward. Immediately, the gravity shut off and they were left hanging in microgravity.

“Time to swim,” Nicole said, thrusting herself downward lightly.

The hatch opened out to the vast space in the middle of the support rings. Forward and aft the massive bubbles of the fuel tanks cut off the light, leaving the area in absolute darkness.

Nicole turned on her helmet light and set a safety line, then grabbed the handhold by the hatch and used it to gently launch herself towards the forward fuel bladder. Fortunately, the way was not blocked. For internal stability, the rings had large guy wires running across the diameter of the inner ring but there wasn’t one between the airlock and the control node. Just aft of the bladder there was another handhold, which she managed to snag on first try, and a hatch on the underside of the ring.

“Temperature in here is damned near absolute zero,” Josten noted. “Our icepacks are going to have a chance to refreeze.”

“As long as the heater coils hold out we should be fine,” Nicole said. “We’ve got a couple of hours’ power and more air than that.”

She held onto the handhold with her left and used her right to undo the latches on the hatch, pulling it down and away carefully. The compartment beyond was about a meter and a half square and the door controls were inset about a meter above her.

She removed one of the magnets from her thigh and clamped it onto the inner wall of the compartment, then lifted herself up to where she could access the control panel. There were twenty-six primary blast doors on the ship and each had a separate switch, a button actually, to close them.

“Herzer,” Nicole said, looking at the panel. “Any closing sequence you want me to use?”

“Start from twenty-four,” Herzer said. “That’s aft on the starboard side. Since most of their shuttles landed there, if they’re heading for Engineering, they’re probably going to use that side.”

“Got it,” Nicole replied. “Closing twenty-four now…”

“No, no, no, NO!” Tur-uck shouted as the door ahead of him started to close. He broke into a run but the door closed quickly and smoothly, sealing when he was still ten meters away.

“NOOO!” he yelled, hammering at the blast door. “Gomblick! Get this thing open!”

“I canna from here,” Gomblick said, waving to either side of the door. “The controls are remote! Perhaps the Great One can open it.”

“I…” Tur-uck snarled and then shook his head. “Damn.” He paused for a moment and then keyed his communicator. “Great One, we have a problem…”

“You had better be able to open those doors,” Reyes growled, leaning over the kobold engineer.

“I’m tryin’, Your Great Oneness,” the engineer said, nervously. He was flicking through the menus on the system, hunting for the proper subsystem. “T’was set on main engineering. It’ll take me a bit to hunt up the door controls.”

“Just get them open,” Reyes snarled. He had only three of the kobold engineers so killing one was not the best use of his time. But if the stupid git didn’t get the doors open soon, he was going to be breathing vacuum. “Tur-uck, we’re working on the doors. Hold on a bit. If you have to, go on the outside of the ship. You have to get to Engineering quickly.”

“Herzer, this is Megan.”

“Go,” Herzer said, closing his eyes.

“The blast doors forward just shut, any reason?”

“Trying to keep the orcs out of the engine room,” Herzer said, steepling his fingers. Sitting on his ass didn’t come naturally to him, but he was trying to keep the status of five different teams in his head and it was easier when he was sitting and visualizing it.

“Okay. We’ve overridden shuttles nine through twelve and pilots are in place. What now?”

“Get back here,” Herzer said, nodding in thought. “We need to get concentrated; New Destiny is going to get tired of us screwing with them soon and react. I’d like to have all my fighters in one place when that happens. You’re going to have to EVA to get in. We’ll leave a light on.”

“I’m on my way,” Megan said. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Herzer replied, opening his eyes. “Just hurry.”

“Herzer.”

“Go, Nicole,” Herzer said, calmly. It was like trying to juggle in free-fall keeping up with everything that was going on, but indicating there was stress would be a bad thing.

“Herzer,” Nicole said, removing the last latch and pulling out the control panel. The runs were fiber optic and the light flooded the space as she pulled the panel down and to the side.

“Go, Nicole,” the mission commander replied, calmly.

“Got all the doors closed,” Nicole said, trying to sound just as calm. Of course Herzer was calm, he was in pressure, sitting in Maintenance, not dangling in microgravity in the middle of the damned ship. “You realize we won’t be able to open them ourselves once I pull this thing?”

“Yeah,” Herzer said. “Pull it anyway.”

“Gotcha,” Nicole replied. She planted both feet, got a good hold with her left hand and yanked down on the panel, tearing it away in a shower of fiber optic cable. She leaned over slowly in the microgravity and spun it out of the compartment into the vast open area in the middle of the support ring. Even if the orcs found it, hooking it back up would be well-nigh impossible; most of the fiber optic links had been shattered when she ripped it out. And the only spare was in Maintenance. “Door controls are now D-E-D dead. Every blast door in the ship is closed.”

“Okay,” Herzer replied. “Van Krief’s team is crossing on the bottom to shut down the portside ships. Make your way to them and link up. If you don’t make rendezvous, just work your way back to Maintenance on the surface. Try to go on the bottom; I think the orcs are less likely to use that.”

“Will do,” Nicole said. “Josten?”

“I’m on it,” the pilot replied.