There had been silence on the Bridge for a long time. In the end, the captain spoke first.
“What’s the status of her sensors?”
“…” Selin pulled a set of passive scan data onto the main screen and watched it for a few seconds, biting her finger. “The port side is intact. On the starboard side, only the forwardmost two Micro-Optical Arrays are lit. She can’t see us right now, but in at most 2 standard hours, she’ll be able to start actively reconstructing her surroundings.”
“So what now, Captain?” Ulga looked over. “Keep playing dead? Or wait for her to take pity on us and let us go, maybe send a couple of drones to fix our ship?”
Gorgon didn’t answer right away. He simply raised a hand and turned off the main screen displaying the data. The Bridge dimmed again, leaving only the faint emergency lights along the navigation console and the outline of the massive ship beyond the viewport, slowly rotating against the star’s silhouette.
“Can we still use the braking nozzles?” He looked at Selin.
“We can. The braking nozzles are powered by the auxiliary reactor, but we don’t have any velocity right now. What good would they do?”
“…” Gorgon remained silent for a long time, then let out a deep sigh, as if he’d made up his mind.
“Other than the expensive engineering rescue ships, no other Engineer Association vessels provide rescue services, at least as far as I know. But either way, they’ll definitely have enough spare parts to keep themselves alive.”
“What are you doing?” Ulga stood up from the gunner’s station. “Going up there to get yourself killed?”
“I made dinner plans last night with girlfriends from three different ports.”
“I like that,” Ulga said with a laugh, showing a row of uneven teeth.
“I don’t!” Selin raised her voice. “That thing’s only blind, not dead. If even one of her sensor arrays comes back online, we won’t even make good coffins!”
“Selin,” Gorgon said calmly, cutting her off. “We’ll briefly fire the braking nozzles to give ourselves some inertia and get closer to her. What do we need to do?”
“You’re crazy.” Ke’er hurried in from outside the Bridge, wearing a new white coat. The edges of her feathers were a little ragged from the constant pressure. “If there’s still internal security aboard that ship…”
“There definitely is,” the gunner declared. “Even if every toilet on the ship exploded, the Engineer Association’s security wouldn’t fail.”
The captain nodded. “Then I’ll go.”
The entire Bridge fell silent for 2 seconds.
“I’ll go too.” Ulga patted the armor plate on her chest, producing a dull thud. “Your job is to not die.”
Gorgon didn’t hesitate. He nodded, then looked at Selin. “Selin, figure something out.”
Selin opened her mouth, wanting to curse, but couldn’t.
She looked down at the completely dark navigation console, then up at the massive ship outside the viewport. She had no active ranging, no fire-control overlays, nothing—just her eyes.
Selin turned and pulled a writing board and a pen from beneath the navigation console. It wasn’t that she liked retro technology. Once the navigation system had shut down, the system that usually provided relative vectors, closing rates, and attitude estimates automatically had become completely useless. All she could use now were images captured by the Optical Sensors and calculations she worked out by hand with paper and pen.
She marked three points on the board, connected the positions of the massive ship’s aft-starboard breach at three different times into an arc, then marked the Peril Resolver’s current drift vector. She checked the numbers repeatedly with the tip of her pen, then hesitated.
“……6.8 kilometers.” A hand tapped the arc.
Selin didn’t accept the figure at face value. She checked it 3 times first and confirmed it was correct.
“Thanks.”
She continued calculating and filled in 2 more numbers.
Then she finally realized what was wrong.
Selin stiffly turned her head. The unknown alien life-form who should have been locked in the medical bay was crouched beside her, chin resting in both hands as she watched the writing board.
Her expression seemed completely calm, as if the loud crash and chaos from earlier hadn’t affected her at all. The Magnetic Handcuffs still hung from her wrists. The girl had followed Ke’er to the Bridge like a ghost, without making a sound.
Ulga whipped around to look at Ke’er, but Ke’er was only gaping, staring at the girl crouched on the navigation console. Clearly, she hadn’t seen her either.
The girl stood and turned to watch Gorgon for a few seconds. But before the captain could start feeling uneasy under her gaze, she turned to look out the viewport at the massive ship.
“….Very dangerous.”
She spoke softly. The girl still hadn’t fully mastered the common tongue, and she pronounced each syllable with heavy emphasis.
Gorgon merely waved a hand. “Ke’er, get her down. Selin, keep going.”
Ke’er, who had just recovered her wits, hurried forward a few steps. She instinctively spread her wings around the girl and half-dragged, half-coaxed her down from the navigation console.
Selin stood with her mouth half open, looking first at Gorgon, then at Jasmine. Finally, she sighed and turned her attention back to the writing board.
“I’ve run the numbers. We can fire them. The first effective window is in 47 minutes, when the collapse zone will rotate into our path. There’s a logistics Emergency Docking Port there. We can fire the nozzles at most twice. The first burst will give us lateral inertia, letting us drift into the collapse zone’s trajectory just as it reaches us in 47 minutes. The second, if we’re still alive to fire it, will correct our final closing velocity.”
Gorgon no longer paid attention to Jasmine, who was nearby in Ke’er’s arms, on tiptoe and tracing the outline of the massive ship outside the viewport with her finger. He turned to Selin and stared at the board in her hands.
“How much thrust?”
Selin thought for a moment, biting the end of her pen. She wrote down a number on the board, then immediately crossed it out and replaced it with a smaller one.
“Acceleration can’t exceed 0.7 meters per second squared, and it can’t last longer than 1.2 seconds.”
“Any more than that and it’ll be too much. She may not have optical sensors right now, but she still has two functional Micro-Optical Arrays. If a clean thrust trail suddenly appears against the near-infrared background, she’ll pick us out of the debris for sure.”
Gorgon nodded and looked at Ke’er. “Get the External Operations Deck ready.”
“That’s not all!” Selin looked up at him. “The nozzles can’t be fired directly from the Bridge.”
Gorgon looked toward the front compartment of the ship beneath his feet and understood. The main controls were all shut down. The braking nozzles still worked because every attitude nozzle had its own auxiliary reactor. But their controls from the Bridge had also been cut off at the bus.
Using the braking nozzles meant someone had to go to the front compartment, manually pull the safety pin, and switch the propulsion valves to mechanical control.
There’d be no automatic balancing or inertial correction. If someone’s hand trembled even a little, the direction and timing would both be off. The entire ship would drift helplessly into the other ship’s line of sight, then turn into fireworks.
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