Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [86]
From section five, Girvan called over the mechanical scream, “Not at seven thousand feet per second at this angle we can’t! “
“Okay, let’s come up with something else. How long before the beam pulls us into the mountain?”
“Calculating;’ Jeremy said. “Draw is increasing incrementally with our thrust ratios. They’re pouring the coals to it.”
“Let’s pour our own;’ Stiles said. “Let’s try impulse point zero five, helm.” “Point zero five?’ “Don’t shout.”
Stiles shrugged at the kid, a simple gesture that had a visible effect on the young terrified teenagers, who were all watching him to measure how many points they should go on the panic meter. Going into a battle situation, with rules to follow and procedures to rely on, had been something they could handle after Starfleet training. Having the ship tilt and scream under them as a planet sucked at it that was something nobody’d ever trained for. Of course, having it smash into a planet’s surface would be hard to come back from, too.
Stiles found orders popping from his lips and responses coming from the crew in a step-by-step manner that had saved thousands of spacefarers in the past, a protocol upon which he now relied.
“Let’s have all the rookies to support positions. Primary crew take your emergency stations. Alan, watch the gyro display and tell me personally if it starts jumping. Let’s have red alert.” “Red alert!” Travis echoed.
A dozen changes erupted with that order. The lighting all over the CST shifted to muted cherry. The hatches between sections slammed shut and pressure locked-sssschunk.
“Keep up the thrust.” Stiles knew they were doing that already. Just wanted to make sure nobody pushed the wrong button. The ship’s sublight engines whined valiantly. “Let’s see what we’ve got to fight with. Give me some numbers and colors.”
Immediately Travis called into the comm. “Engine thrust control, give us numbers and colors.”
Almost immediately section leaders’ voices from all over the ship started bubbling through the comm system to the bridge, because now all the hatches were closed. Travis, Zack Bolt, and Greg Blake relayed what he needed to know and left out what he didn’t. “Six GCG, sir.” “Red over yellow on the plasma injectors, Eric.” “Green on the pellet initiators.”
“We are nine points overbudget on the MHD. They’re trying to equalize.”
To his shipmates across the bridge Jeremy called, “Just compensate when it spikes!” “Hear that, Jason? Compensate the spike only! Jason?
The engine noise swelled to a howl, as if a hurricane were transferring itself from section to section right through the sealed hatches. Beneath the engine noise squealed the grind of real physical stress, as the ship twisted and cranked against the planetary force hauling on them. It was as if they were towing some great body that insisted upon moving in the opposite direction. And they were losing ….
“Thrust increasing!” Greg Blake called. “No effect, sir! We’re slipping down even faster!” “Put more power to it, then.” What else could they do?
Stiles glanced sideways at Leonard McCoy, glad the doctor was sitting down. He didn’t want to be responsible for the famous elderly physician being scratched, spindled, or mutilated from falling down in the Saskatoon. Spock, too, seemed stable enough, despite the ravaged tilt of the deck and the slow spin that tore at the artificial gravity.
Travis punched at the controls with one hand while holding himself in place with the other. “Maybe we can twist out sideways-use the lateral-“
“We’d gulp too much fuel,” Jeremy argued. “We’re already burning the deuterium at fail-safe rate! It’s all we can do to hold position. Ten more minutes and we won’t have anything left at all. We’ve got nothing to twist with:’
Pulling himself bodily upward to Jeremy’s side, Stiles tried to make sense of what he saw on the maps and visual analyses of the planet below. “What’s the source of this beam? Anybody reading the surface?”
Greg Blake was the one to answer. “Reading an energetic pulse station at the northern foot