The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [81]
Trip’s eyes were drawn to a red warp-engine warning light that began flashing urgently as the demands of the hull-polarization relays began redlining the warp core. Realizing he had only seconds to act, he swiftly entered a command into his console.
“What the hell are you doing?” Phuong said, looking at him as though he’d just lost his mind.
“Taking us out of warp. Slowing to impulse until the warp core cools down.”
“Now?” Phuong was beside himself.
“It’s better than redlining the antimatter containment system and blowing ourselves to quarks,” Trip said in the calmest tones he could muster.
“It’s not all that much better, Commander. Look at the rate they’re gaining.”
“We can’t outrun them,” Trip said. “And we can only dodge them for another few seconds. So unless you’ve got some kind of new souped-up hull plating folded up in your back pocket, what the hell are we going to do?”
Phuong paused momentarily to study some readings, then tapped another control. An old-style aviation joystick rose up from a recessed panel at the helm in front of Trip.
“I hope you can steer manually,” Phuong said, a grim smile on his lips.
Probably not as well as Travis can, Trip thought. He grabbed the stick. “Where are we going?”
Phuong tapped on the controls, and a viewscreen located just below the forward windows magnified the section of space directly in front of the ship. “There,” Phuong said, pointing to a field of space debris that lay ahead, faintly illuminated by the glow of the nearby orange star around which the debris field orbited. “That’s where we’ll lose them.”
It never failed. It often seemed to Trip that hot pursuits through space involved a nearby debris field or nebula or other such sensor-obscuring cosmic feature far more frequently than dumb luck alone could account for. He wondered if the Romulan military staked such places out, watching and waiting the way the highway cops of previous centuries used to trap speeders, and the Branson had merely had the bad fortune- or her pilot and copilot had exhibited the poor judgment- to fly too close to such a place.
Keeping his eye on the image of the pursuing ship, Trip jammed the control stick hard to the right, then forward. The two blasts of energy the Romulans had fired at them shot off into space, missing them entirely.
“That’s something like four million kilometers away,” Trip said. “While we’re stuck at impulse, we aren’t going to get there in time to do us any good.”
Phuong got up from his seat and moved to some wall-mounted controls. “We will if we go back to warp.”
Trip’s eyes widened. “Not a good idea while the core’s still this hot. It could be an hour or more before I can verify that the containment field won’t collapse under the stress of a fully operational warp field.”
“So let’s go to warp without a fully operational warp field.”
Trip was beginning to see where Phuong was going, and he was a bit embarrassed that he hadn’t seen the solution first. “We’ll set up a warp burst, just enough to kick us forward a few million klicks, then drop back into normal space.”
“We can lose them in there,” Phuong said. “These engines are tough. They can take it.”
“As long as we don’t overshoot the mark,” Trip cautioned. “Or smash into any debris too big for the hull plating to handle.”
Phuong shrugged. “We don’t have time to be choosy, Commander. They’re powering up their weapons again. Hit it!”
Trip jammed the controls to the side again, spinning the ship away from another pair of energy blasts.
“You ready?” Phuong asked, returning to his chair.
“Do I have a choice?” Trip answered.
“They’re my engines, Commander, so maybe I ought to be the one to handle the warp burst. Get ready to do some fancy flying.”
“I’d rather you fly while I handle the engines, Tinh. But she’s your ship.”
Phuong didn’t respond to Trip’s comment, either because he was ignoring it or because he was intent on the data spooling onto the console at his left. “I’ll take us to warp for approximately zero point seven one seconds,” Phuong said. “And then you’ll get us lost among the rocks