Humanity in the Deep

Part 3, Chapter 8

Roger did not know how long he had been out. All he knew was that when he woke up, he felt worse than after his week at five G's.

He was dazed for a few seconds before remembering what happened; they must have been hit with a missile.

That would also explain why they are spinning rapidly.

With much difficulty, he stretched his hand out to where the jet controls were. With his hand feeling like it weighed a hundred kilo's, he tried to stop the spin.

His first attempt only made things worse. Half of the jets were down, their buttons blinking at him. Some looked to be have been cut off by the safeties, the others the computer showed as dead.

He was able to slowly stop most of the spinning. The jets had to be used cold, wasting most of the gas.

He looked around and saw that Dianna and Thomas were still limp in their seats. That was when he noticed that there was no atmosphere in the cabin. Explaining why his helmet had locked.

Roger checked all three suits; they had no tears and were working properly. He shook them both while yelling into the radio.

Roger only had readings from about half the boat, and some of what he did have was sporadic, blinking in and out.

Thomas took a while to snap back. Dianna took one glance at the board and snapped awake.

After mumbling to herself for a while she said, "At least one missile must have hit just above the drive then blown a hole clean through the outer hull."

"How are we alive?" Roger asked.

Dianna turned to look at him and said, "I don't know. Maybe the armor we added did better than we thought it would."

Roger heard a groan behind him, as Thomas said, "The strands must have caught the heat and dispersed it.

"They're fraying now, of course, dumping the heat directly into the data lines and plumbing. We're going to be dead in space before too long if we aren't already."

Roger looked at what few temperature sensors were still reporting, and they were all showing that Thomas was right; the temperature was increasing, spreading around.

Roger asked, "How long to get the Alice moving again? We have a fight to get back to."

Thomas laughed.

He stopped laughing when he saw Roger was serious.

"We don't have to fix everything. Just get moving. We can keep our helmets down and not worry about life support." Roger said.

Dianna counted on her fingers, "We have three major problems. One: we can't dump heat. Two: the data connections got melted or broken if they were near the strands, and most were. Even the backup radio links were there and are probably lumps of useless metal right now. Three: we're down to near critical levels of reaction mass for the jets."

With resolve, Roger said, "I can make do with what jets and reaction mass we have. Even cold, we have enough to go after the bastards."

He hoped that was not a lie.

"For the sake of argument, we could lay down more cable, or just rig everything with radio's, but we still have the heat problem," Thomas added.

He was sadly right. Modern ships created a lot of heat, most of which was turned into electricity or radiated out. But that took the strands working. It took very little heat to cause serious damage to ship and crew.

Thomas looked up from his status board then at Roger, and sighed, saying, "I can deal with the heat problem. We might have a couple hours if we stay in the suits. That's if we fire the drive in short bursts only.