Relics - Michael Jan Friedman [7]
“Well?” asked the captain.
Sachs shook his head. “No response, sir. The warp engines are down.” He called up another screen and cursed beneath his breath.
“What now?” prompted Armstrong. “Don’t tell me the impulse engines are dead too.”
“Not quite,” said Scott, who’d been tracking the status of the propulsion systems along with the chief engineer. “But they’ve suffered collateral damage from the coil explosion. There’s nae enough power there to keep us in orbit.”
The captain glared at him. “What are you saying?”
“The Jenolen is losing altitude,” Scott explained as calmly as he could. “We’re caught in th’ bloody sphere’s gravity well and we cannae get out.”
“That can’t be,” insisted Armstrong. “Surely the engines can be fixed.”
Sachs shook his head. “I’m afraid not. There’s too much damage-and not enough time.” He looked to Scott for confirmation-and got it in the form of bleak silence.
Montgomery Scott had pulled his share of rabbits ou t of his hat. But for once, even he was at a loss. There were lots of ways he could think of to pull the Jenolen’s engines together. But any of them would have taken many more hours than they had left.
The captain licked his lips. “You mean there’s nothing we can do? We’re just going to crash?”
It went against the older man’s grain to admit it, but as he’d told Jim Kirk time and again, there was no changing the laws of physics. “Aye,” he conceded. “That’s about the size of it.”
Armstrong’s brow creased as he wrestled with the enormity of Scott’s statement. “How long before impact?”
His chief engineer supplied the answer “Seventeen minutes, thirty-five seconds, sir.”
Ben Sachs was a man with modest ambitions, the product of a long line of men with modest ambitions. Sure, he’d wanted to get into space, to tinker with a warp drive and feel the joy of having it respond to his tinkerings. But unlike his peers, he’d never aspired to serving on a Constitution-class vessel.
So when the assignment came down to replace the chief engineer of the transport ship Jenolen, Sachs had been happy to accept it. More than happy, in fact.
Let the other fellows work under unrelenting pressure, he’d told himself at the time. Let them walk their daily treadmills, eat their meals in a blinding hurry, lie awake at night wondering if there was some gauge they might have misread. Let them strain their brains trying to remember what attracted them to this life in the first place.
I’ll be content swimming in a smaller pond, where I can take time to enjoy the view without feeling guilty about it. I’ll be just fine on the good ship Jenolen.
Up until now, Sachs’s prediction had been right on the money. He had been fine. He’d found the perfect, uneventful niche for himself.
And more than that, he’d found love-the perfect love only an engineer can feel for his ship. Ben Sachs had fallen head over heels for a transport vessel that no one else would have given a second look.
But in a flash, that had all changed. Now he was riding the Jenolen down to the dark and featureless Dyson Sphere below. And the odds of his idyllic life going on in its idyllic way-hell, going on at all-seemed more and more remote with each passing second.
Strangely, that didn’t inspire fear in him-not really. It didn’t even inspire regret. Sachs had never married, had never had children, and his parents were long gone. He wasn’t leaving anyone behind.
He was going to die alongside his one true love. The romance of it appealed to him, so much so that it overshadowed the grisly fate awaiting him at the bottom of the gravity well.
“Mr. Sachs!”
The chief engineer shook his head and sought out the source of the shout. He found himself gaping at a narrow-eyed Montgomery Scott.
“Are ye with me or nae, lad?” asked Scott.
Sachs swallowed. “With you on what?”
The older man cursed beneath his breath. “Have ye nae been listening