Orphans - Kevin Killiany [28]
Even with their best efforts, however, it was unlikely the damaged giant could survive making the skew flip its designers had intended. Rather than reverse the vessel and restart its ion drive to slow it down, the Klingons intended to attach impulse engines to bring it under control.
But that was a job for years from now.
The immediate task was to repair native systems and attach structural integrity field generators at key points. Their goal was simply to make the ship stable and provide its inhabitants with a viable environment until a more permanent solution could be found.
Unfortunately, even though they’d located over two thousand unused connection ports for the network linking the external thrusters, the system was not set up to accept external commands. And, despite exhaustive searches and scans, they had found no entrance to whatever drive or control systems lay beneath the surface. If they were going to find a way to get the ship under power again, it was up to the away team on the inside.
She glanced at the chronometer mounted on the bulkhead. One hundred and six hours since Tev and the others had disappeared inside the ship; thirty-eight until any communication was expected.
She wondered what she would be doing thirty-nine hours from now.
CHAPTER
15
Suspended in the blackness, Pattie could not decide whether she was blind or the tunnel was completely dark. The question had vexed her off and on over the last several hours. Or perhaps days; she had been wandering alone for so long she was no longer sure.
Even though she knew the outcome, she repeated her ritual. She closed her eyes and waited a hundred heartbeats before opening them. The hundredth or three hundredth time she had tried that. Nothing. No difference. Either she was blind or there was no ambient light whatsoever.
She was going to have to proceed on touch. Which was what she had been doing. The last thing she had seen was that nimbus of blue flame rising from her lighter to the huge, spongy mass against the ceiling.
She’d had a long time, while feeling along walls and bumping into objects and taking chances on empty expanses of floor, to think about what had happened. The heavy mustiness she had smelled had been a cloud of spores from the lichen, or whatever it had been, filling the gaps and covering the ceiling. Just as centuries ago on Earth sparks igniting airborne flour dust had blasted mills to oblivion, the open flame of the lighter had triggered an explosive combustion of the spores.
Reflex had curled her into a ball before the biomass exploded; she never saw the fireball that singed her shell and melted most of her utility harness. The thermal shockwave had bounced her down the tunnel like a cork in a flood. If it had been a natural cave, she might well have been dashed to death against jagged rocks. As it was, the smooth walls of the corridor had scraped and beat her, perhaps—she was not sure—even knocking her unconscious.
From what she had been able to feel of the wreckage afterward, her internal bruises and contusions were a small price to pay for having been blasted out from under the collapsing ceiling. No doubt the rest of the away team, her friends, thought she was dead.
She had rested long enough.
Standing on the narrow rung, she steadied herself against the upright and flung the buckle end of her climbing rope—woven from what remained of her harness—above her head. The third time it hit the rung above and stayed. She eased the strap upward and cautiously waved another hand in the darkness until she caught the descending buckle.
If this buckle were metal, I could use it to strike a spark. Then I would at least know….
Forcing the thought from her mind, she focused on fastening the two ends together. Once buckled, her climbing rope formed a