The second beam grazed the stern.
“Ulga…” Gorgon quickly regained his composure. If the captain started screaming too, this ship was finished.
“Her starboard Optical Sensor is near the breach and in bad shape. Push that piece-of-junk engine on the far left to the limit and burn for three seconds. Blind her.” Gorgon gripped the navigation console as the ship shook violently, issuing his orders with a calm voice.
“Window?” Ulga inserted the mechanical key into the weapons station, bypassing every safety protocol in the engine control system. She pushed the parameters for the leftmost Ramjet Nozzle higher and higher: fuel flow, compression ratio, nozzle temperature. She dismissed every warning that exceeded the safety threshold, one by one, and the ship began to shake violently.
“Three seconds.” Gorgon looked at Selin.
“Three seconds… is… enough!” Selin’s fingers hovered over the jump control. Her eyes were fixed on the giant ship’s attitude data on the screen, and on the firing cycle of its port-side nozzle as she calculated the next opening.
“Do it!” Gorgon shouted.
Boom—
Ulga slammed the throttle all the way forward, and the leftmost Ramjet Nozzle let out a roar unlike anything it had ever made. A blinding blue-white beam of cold light burst out, spearing straight into the breach on the giant ship’s starboard side.
There was no sound in the vacuum, but everyone aboard felt it in that instant. It was as if someone had kicked the whole ship hard from behind, sending it lurching forward.
The beam stabbed into the breach. Its fragile, curled edges melted instantly, and metal vapor condensed into fine particles in the vacuum, forming a silver mist in the light of the star.
The Engineer Ship’s turrets stopped firing. All 37 had lost their target.
“Blindness confirmed!” Selin nearly screamed as she hit the jump control. “Jump—”
The star chart on the navigation console flickered for a moment, then went dark.
Power was brutally diverted from the reactor to the jump engine. The ship’s moving parts locked up inch by inch from deep within its frame, accompanied by the intermittent, teeth-grinding screech of metal.
Three seconds. They only needed three seconds.
Whoosh—
A thin, dark red beam shot from the Engineer Ship’s starboard side and struck the Peril Resolver’s stern.
Reacquiring a target took time. This was a counterattack. In the final second before the turret’s window of blindness closed, before its Optical Sensor burned through completely, it fired at the coordinates it had last locked onto.
The dark red beam was like a scalpel, entering from the Peril Resolver’s lower left stern and exiting at the upper right. In the few hundredths of a second it remained on the hull, it severed three main power lines, a fuel line, and the hydraulic system for the stern attitude-control nozzles. The Peril Resolver let out a muffled boom as white vapor gushed out. The ship abruptly veered at an angle.
“Attitude control is down!” Selin clutched the edge of the navigation console, desperately trying not to get thrown off. “The power’s been cut. We can’t charge the jump drive…!”
“Recharge it—!” Gorgon braced himself against his chair and growled through gritted teeth.
“I can’t. The main power’s been cut. I’m switching to backup power…!”
The Engineer Ship’s second turret began to turn. Its Optical Sensor still hadn’t recovered, and it couldn’t see anything. But it was using other means to pinpoint them. Maybe heat signatures, maybe electromagnetic radiation, or perhaps the leaking fuel vapor.
It was searching.
“Shut down all major systems.” Gorgon’s voice suddenly grew calm. “Now.”
Selin stared at him in disbelief, her body trembling slightly.
“Shut down all major systems!” Gorgon repeated. “Engines, radar, Active Scan, communications. Turn it all off. Leave only life support and passive sensors.”
“We’ll become a flying coffin…!”
“Right. No sensor will see a flying coffin as a threat.”
Selin gritted her teeth and quickly tapped across the Master Control Console. The engines’ roar slowly died away, and all the red emergency lights on the bridge went out. Only the light of the star filtered in through the windows.
The Peril Resolver glided silently through the vacuum, fuel vapor still spreading from its stern like a broken trail.
The Engineer Ship’s second turret stopped turning, followed by the third and fourth.
She had lost her target.
No one dared speak. The only sound on the bridge was the faint, intermittent creaking of the ship’s metal cooling.
“…Is she still searching?”
Selin crouched beneath the navigation console and turned to check the passive scan data.
“She’s using radar… but her radar’s damaged too. The echoes are all over the place…”
“Can she detect us?”
“I… I’m not sure. Radar needs echoes to form an image. We just shut down every transmitter, so to her, we should look no different from the rocks in the Debris Belt…”
“Fuel’s still leaking from the stern…”
“That’s a physical leak. Radar can’t detect that.”
Gorgon remained silent for a long while, then let out a deep sigh.
“Report the damage.”
Selin crawled out from under the navigation console on all fours, then knelt and checked the damage report on the Master Control Console.
“Attitude control is completely wrecked. One engine is dead, and we can’t control our heading at all. The main power line’s been severed. It’ll need to be bridged manually. The fuel line needs replacing too…”
“How long?”
“Huh?” Selin looked up in confusion.
“How long to fix it?”
Selin’s blue face had turned grayish. “Four and a half standard hours, at least. Assuming we have spare piping, a replacement main power bridge, and a complete set of attitude-control valves.”
“Do we?” Ulga’s voice came from the weapons station. Selin finally looked up at her but said nothing. Somehow, that said it all.
“Her Optical Sensor is recovering. Then we’ll be sitting ducks.” Ulga turned her chair around and crossed her arms, as if she were talking about something that had nothing to do with her.
Silence fell over the bridge again. Everyone knew they were hanging by a thread, but no one wanted to be the first to say, “We’re going to fall.” In the darkness, the star’s light filtered in intermittently, sometimes partly blocked by drifting debris.
“What if we only fix the power?” After a long pause, Gorgon suddenly spoke.
“If we have the parts, we can fix it right away, but we really…” Selin hadn’t finished when Gorgon simply waved a hand, signaling for her to stop.
The captain stood in front of the main console and dragged the optical image onto the main screen.
The ship was right behind them, floating amid the sparse, cold reflections of the Debris Belt.
She was simply too big. Seen from this close, she seemed to have lost something of what made her a “ship.” She looked more like a building with a gruesome wound, already beginning to rot.
But she was still alive. Her three remaining engines were still running, and her attitude control was still functioning.
Or rather, she was still meeting the bare minimum definition of “alive.”