Fiction
Science Fiction
Day 2
“Okay,” I say, running a hand across my grimy, stubbly chin, “why don’t we go through it again? Maybe we missed something.”
Nori tenses and rolls her bloodshot eyes like I’ve suggested we count the crew seats because someone might have stolen one, even though there’s only the two of us on the ship. Nonetheless, she keys in her command code without comment and then initiates a system level reset.
The console instantly goes blank, and I catch a glimpse of a haggard, wrinkle-lined face topped by short, gray hair. Dark bags underscore both eyes and large, lobeless ears that I’ve always hated jut out like miniature comm receivers. I’ve never really thought of myself as old, but age suddenly weighs heavy on my shoulders. A second later, the screen flicks back to life, sparing me a deeper inspection.
“Okay, it’s ready,” Nori snaps, her patience clearly at an end, “Why don’t you do it this time?”
As much as I’d like to push her aside and do exactly that, I shake my head. I have been an engineer longer than she has been alive, but five years in management has kept me chained to a desk. The control system is a completely new design. She’s been using it for months now. Anyone on my team could go toe-to-toe with her, but I have barely two days experience, something she knows full well.
“No,” I reply, “you’re faster.” It is something I am loath to admit, but this is no time for vanity.
Nori quickly goes to work. Both hands fly over the screen, darting like a conjurer’s. I jealously remember when my hands were that nimble, that quick. She activates and resizes individual ship controls, positions system status indicators, and brings up a myriad of displays faster than my eyes can follow. It is as natural to her as breathing. Once she has everything arranged where she wants it, she initiates a complete systems check.
Five minutes pass in the space of one long heartbeat.
“No change,” Nori grimly announces, tugging her sweat-stained coveralls away from her body. “External sensors, nav, and long range comm are dead. Two auxiliary fuel pods are ruptured and venting into space. Engines pass all checks, but they still won’t come online.” She taps the console a couple of times. The display fills with an electronic record of her every action.
She skips the preliminary diagnostics and goes directly to the startup sequence. She expands one section after another, detailing every mechanical and electrical system down to the sub-relay and nanoprocessor level. Shifting forward in her chair, she then begins carefully examining each of more than a dozen ignition attempts, to include a bare-bones cold start with every system off-line short of life support. I look over her shoulder, trying to will an answer from the jumble of text, cascading numbers, video, and graphics. I consider and eliminate possibilities as rapidly as they come to mind. Each sequence is unique in a million different ways, but they all end with the same result. When the replay terminates, I am still just as clueless as when we started. The churning in my stomach escalates into a full-fledged war, burning the back of my throat.
“So,” she asks, her tone rank with scorn, “do you have any more bright ideas?”
She is the ship’s pilot and captain. I clasp my hands behind my back to keep from reaching for her neck. We’ve been at this for more than thirty hours straight. We need a break from each other as much as we do from the situation. However, I’m just as stubborn as Nori. If she’s going to stick with it, so am I. The only problem is that I don’t know what to try next. Plowing though that asteroid field left the exterior of the ship in shreds. Nori initiated an emergency shutdown as soon as we were clear, precisely as procedures dictated. It had taken me less than an hour to determine that the engines had escaped any real damage, but I still can’t tell her why they refuse to start.
“Can you run it in parallel?” I ask, trying to keep the fatigue and desperation that are beginning to cloud my brain from leeching into my voice. Nori’s eyebrows bunch together, but she nods. A few seconds later, the bridge lights dim and a hologram fills the starboard side of the room. Nori manipulates the display, stacking one ignition sequence on top of the other so that each sub-process is lined up in exact columns, with empty gaps where she forced specific systems offline. She positions an engine schematic and a set of diagnostic displays off to the far right of each row and then, without a glance at me, starts the replay at point five real-time.
My eyes focus on the engine schematics, scanning up and down the column, trying to spot any differences or abnormalities. Every component of the engines is represented, enabling me to see the precise effect on the engines as the timeline slowly advances across the individual systems to the left.
The sequence is eighty percent complete. The engines have just finished internal diagnostics with flying colors and the ignition coils should be activating next. My eyes shift to the integrated systems flow schematic. It is one of the smaller and more basic diagnostic displays, but also one of the most important. Subsystem communication transmissions and acknowledgements, fuel flow, coolant temperatures, intake valve dilation, and a thousand additional components are all represented. It is a ship coming to life.
As the display advances, a sense of wrongness begins to nag at the dark recesses of my brain. I stare but I can’t spot anything definitive. “Back it up a little,” I tell Nori as I step closer to the room-sized hologram. “Make this bigger,” I add, jabbing a finger at the flow schematic. The hologram fluctuates for a second and then restarts.
The display is almost back to where Nori stopped it. The acid in my stomach is now eating a hole though the lining. Something’s just not right, but I just can’t pick it out. “Run it again and loop it at point two real-time,” I snap.
“This is a waste of time,” Nori mumbles under her breath. I pretend not to hear her.
The recording is halfway through its third cycle when I spot a thin purple line I’ve seen a dozen times now but did not notice before. I check the entire column, top to bottom. The animated line appears in every flow schematic. “Freeze it,” I practically yell. My head snaps left and right, finding every gap where Nori forced a system offline and then looking for corresponding flows in the schematic. There are none—except between engines and nav. I go through it twice just to be sure. That’s when it hit me. Some bonehead designer must have hard-coded an explicit confirmation check. With a toasted navigation system, we could try a million different sequences, but the engines were never going to come on line.
I stumble toward the closest chair, feeling like I’ve just been sucker punched. We’re totally and royally screwed.
Nori stares at me for a long time and then slowly walks over to the hologram. She didn’t get to be captain of this boat by being dense, so it won’t take her long to figure it out. I don’t have a clue as to what to say to her when she does.
Day 7
“Hand me the L-terminator,” I growl.
A long rattling of tools assaults my ear, trying what little patience I have left and bringing a curse to my lips that I somehow manage to swallow. “It looks like a fat, silver rod with a flat pincer on one end.” I try not to sound derisive, but fail. Nori may be the captain, but she’s only four years out of the Academy, three of them in flight training. While she was the top pilot out of her class, she couldn’t replace a burned-out bulkhead LED if her life depended on it. Typical rockethead—not a one of them would know one end of an ogrometer from the other.
“Here,” says Nori, slapping it into my outstretched hand hard enough to sting.
Ignoring her less-than-subtle rebuke, I snip the cable and twirl the terminator around. Gently inserting the blue-sheathed strand into a small hole, I push the button that precisely slices and polishes a thousand hair-like fibers. I then repeat the process with a second cable, this one orange.
When I pass the tool back, I lift my head off the steel deck and see Nori’s worried face peeping through the narrow opening down by my knees. Despite her mechanical ineptitude and somewhat standoffish demeanor, I can’t help feeling a certain amount of sympathy for her.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, “once we get the engines fired up, we’ll be just fine.”
Nori nods, but her eyes say she isn’t buying it. Still, for my sake, she tries to put on a brave face.
I let out a deep sigh. Nori obviously hasn’t shaken off the Academy’s “to be a captain, you have to always act like a captain” brainwashing. I’ve served with a host of pilots and captains over the years. Far too many of them were more concerned with playing the part than doing the job. Nori, at least, shows some promise. She’s too much a stickler for procedures and protocol for my taste, but she’s not so blinded by her own ego that she won’t listen to reason.
“Look,” I say, “these things aren’t supposed to happen, but they do. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
“I’m the captain,” she snaps, “everything that happens on this ship is my responsibility.”
“That’s the Academy in you talking,” I tell her, shaking my head. “The forward sensors failed. Neither of us noticed it. Every alarm on the ship should have gone off, but they didn’t. Then we hit that dust tail a lousy twenty-nine minutes before the next full systems check. A billion to one stroke of bad luck, but there you go. Look on the bright side though. By all rights, we should be dead. I still don’t know how you threaded the ship between those asteroids, but you got us out of there in one piece.”
If anything, Nori manages to look even more dejected. “Given our condition, I can’t say I agree,” she says. “We’re dead in space and a million miles off course. Everything that was attached to the outside skin was sheared off, and you couldn’t sell what’s left of the hull plating for scrap. I’d hardly call that one piece.”
“Okay,” I concede, pulling gently on the blue cable until I have about a yard of slack, “so we ended up missing a few parts, but you know what I mean. Hand me the splicer. It’s the thing that looks like—”
“Yeah,” Nori interrupts, “that looks like a splicer. I’m not a total moron, you know.”
I decide it was a rhetorical comment and clench my mouth shut as I fuse the blue and orange cables together. “Okay,” I say instead, pushing up on my elbows, “give it a shot.”
Nori’s face disappears and I hear her soft footsteps moving over to the aft auxiliary console. It is quiet. An eternity of silence. Then I hear a fist slam down.
My entire body deflates. The back of my head thuds into the metal deck. I’m too numb for it to hurt.
“It didn’t work,” Nori says unnecessarily.
I lie here with my eyes closed. I know she’s the captain, but I hope she isn’t expecting a reply.
Day 12
Nori rummages in one of the storage lockers. She pulls out an emergency ration and sets it in the center of the briefing table. I add two tumblers half-full of water and then toss out napkins, plates, and forks. She twists the tab on the lid, and the white container slowly turns green. Three vents open in the lid and, a minute later, the seals release. Nori waits for the steam to dissipate and then pops the top. She quickly divides the contents between us. I notice she gives me the larger portion. I guess she figures I’m a third bigger than her, and it’s her duty to make sure I don’t starve to death before she does. I start to say something but then think better of it. She’d just dig her heels in, and we’d end up in another pointless argument. Over the past two weeks, I’ve learned that she’ll listen to me about some things—others, I might as well be talking to a bulkhead.
We’ve been on half rations for a few days now, so she scrapes out every morsel. Then she tips the container upside down and bangs on the back. She glances inside and then whacks it a few more times—hard enough to bend the spoon.
I clench my teeth and say nothing. We should have been rescued over a week ago. We’re both stressed out.
Swiping up the last few drops with a finger, she pops it in her mouths and licks it clean. When she turns around to toss the container into the recycler, I scoop a large spoonful back on her plate as much out of spite as anything else.
We stare at our food, eating in silence. Neither of us wants to talk about our situation, even though it dominates our thoughts every waking moment of the day.
I’ve got enough years on me that quiet doesn’t bother me. After a while though, it’s apparently too much for Nori. “How long have you been married?” she asks out of the blue.
I raise my eyes just in time to see her glance up from my hand. It’s a somewhat sensitive subject for me, but I realize she’s just making conversation. Besides, it’s not like we’re going anywhere.
“Thirty-two years.” I answer with a thin smile.
“Long time,” she replies, looking somewhat surprised.
“Yeah, I’ve got a daughter almost your age. She’s been married three years and has a baby due in a few months.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow,” I respond, thinking about my family. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. It’s hard not to during a time like this.
“Up until about five years ago, I was doing shakedown cruises like this full time,” I tell Nori, surprising myself since I’m not usually much of a talker, particularly about anything personal. “Back then, that meant going out for months at a time so I was away as much as I was home. Engineering is the best job going, but it’s one that needs young blood. Guess the brass finally decided they couldn’t get rid of me,” I say with a false smile, “so they promoted me to Chief, assigned me dockside, and put me in charge of a unit. The whole thing’s been a bit like one of those total immersion alien attack rides where you’re getting bounced around in five different directions at once, but my wife stuck with me through it all. She’s something special,” I say, nodding.
The two separations, I keep to myself, as well as the long, cold silence that had preceded every away mission. Nor do I mention that I’d promised my wife that the dock job meant I’d be able to spend more time at home, something that had ultimately proven untrue. Even though I’m not on missions any more, I’m responsible for the crews and the ships that are, and there is always something going wrong that requires my attention, something that keeps me working late most nights and more than a few weekends. God knows, I still love my wife. I’m pretty sure she still loves me, but it’s not like it was at first—when we were the center of each other’s worlds. As for my daughter, she’s almost a stranger. I got home often enough to watch her grow up, but not to really participate in it. Of everything, I regret that the most.
“Lately, she’s been after me to retire,” I abruptly add, revealing something I’ve never told anyone else. “I promised her that I’d think about it.” In truth, I’d only said it to appease her. Up until now, my work has practically defined my life. As much as I sometimes complained about it, I really couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Now...
“How about you,” I ask, suddenly eager to divert the conversation, “is there a husband looming on your horizon?”
“No, not yet,” she answers, blushing. “I went through hell to get this job, and I’m having too much fun with it to have time for a serious relationship. I’m still tight with my family, though, even if they do tend to get a little overbearing at times. That’s one of the reasons I picked this career. I needed some space to find out who I really am.”
“It’s something everyone needs to do,” I reply. “Just be careful you don’t put too much distance between you and them. It’s hard to get it back.”
A slight grimace crosses Nori’s face, telling me that I am sounding far too much like a parent rather than a crewmate.
“So, if you’re a dock jock,” she asks, apparently wanting to change the subject as much as I had, “then how did you end up on this junket?”
“Oh, it’s the usual story,” I respond, looking down at my plate. “Wrong place at the wrong time. We’ve had a glut of new ships coming through the pipeline, as I’m sure you know. All the flight teams were out or on crew rest. The brass tapped my boss to cough up a warm body to crew for you, and I was the only one in the break lounge when she happened by.”
I shrug, chasing a couple of stray peas around my plate. “It was supposed to be a milk run—two and a half days out, a few turns around Jupiter, and then back. My boss said it would be good for me, give me a chance to get my hands dirty again,” I say, trapping the peas with a finger. “Truth is, I really did it as much as a favor to her as anything else. She’s been great to work for, so I couldn’t really tell her no—not that I had a real excuse anyway.”
Nori nods. I don’t bother asking why she’d taken the assignment. This ship is scheduled to be commissioned less than a week from today. Nori is slated to be the captain. Neither is ever going to happen.
I can’t help feeling bad for her. This is just a medium-weight cargo tug. Nothing special. We push twenty or so out the dock every year. But Nori was so proud of it when she welcomed me aboard—I could see it in her eyes. She practically gushed while she told me how the ship had aced its four primary shakedowns. She even sat me down at this very table and briefed me on the mission even though my team had designed the test, and I knew more about it than she did.
She had been so enthusiastic that I listened to her whole spiel: “The AC-1066 series carries a crew contingent of six. Specs require that two can operate it in any emergency situation, so we’ll be conducting over a thousand simulated systems failures during the next five days. Some people say this test is just a formality, but it’s our last chance to make sure she’s perfect, and we’re going to do it by the book. Your job...”
When she was done, I didn’t have the heart to remind her that the ship could fly the entire mission without either of us. The real purpose of the crew was to handle the cargo.
Looking down at her plate, Nori slowly pushes her food around with her fork.
I take the hint and drop the conversation. Stabbing a gravy-covered cube of meat, I put it in my mouth. I chew for a long time. It could be a chunk of shoe, and I wouldn’t taste the difference.
Nori divides her mashed potatoes into exact quarters and then into eighths. “Do you think they’re still looking for us?” she suddenly blurts.
I can’t keep from sighing. I realize it’s what she’s really been thinking about the entire time we’ve been sitting here. A red flush spreads across my face. I’ve been an idiot for not remembering what it was like to be her age. She may be wearing a captain’s insignia on her collar, but she’s still a kid. Although she’s successfully overcome a host of minor malfunctions during her previous missions, nothing she’s experienced could’ve possibly prepared her for a situation like this.
“I’m sure they are,” I reply, forcing the corners of my lips upward. “We’re way off course, and we lost both emergency transponders along with everything else. I hate to say it, but we probably didn’t help ourselves by dropping that distress beacon either. I’m sure they recovered it, but the telemetry data didn’t factor in the lateral thrust from our ruptured tanks, so it would’ve pointed them in the wrong direction. Finding us is going to be like looking for a grain of rice in the middle of a desert. I can guarantee you though that they’re not going to give up—they’ll keep looking!”
It is a lie by omission. In reality, there’s only a five percent chance that anyone is going to find us—ever—and even less that it’ll happen before we have long since run out of food and oxygen. Our only real hope is to get the engines going, pray we can point the ship toward home and that we have enough fuel to get from here to there.
Nori nods. She’s a little scared—I can see it in her eyes—but she’s not scared nearly enough. That’s okay, though, because I’ve been running on little but adrenalin and terror for the past two days. I’ve got fear enough for the both of us.
Day 14
My toolbox makes a muted clang when I set it down on the steel decking. It is heavy and bulky enough to require a small, integrated anti-grav unit. I remember Nori laughing when I lugged it on board and cracking a hackneyed joke about engineers and their tools. Now it may well be our salvation.
Opening the lower right compartment, I pull out my handheld drill. It is something of an antique, but it still works as well as the day it was made—which is more than I can say about most things I’ve bought in the past ten years.
I glance at Nori, who is standing with her arms crossed over her chest. A dark scowl mars an otherwise attractive face. “You’re sure about this?” she demands. Clearly she is not.
“I don’t see any other way,” I assure her. “The engine-navigation flow has over a thousand triple-redundant pathways. We’ve tried everything else to include kludging together a virtual nav system. It’s just too sophisticated for us to fool. The only option we have left is to bypass everything and hook helm directly into the engine’s electro-mechanical subsystem.”
Nori is barely listening. We’ve gone over this a dozen times already and I’m not telling her anything new. Instead she is staring at the bold ‘DANGER—NO CREW-SERVICABLE PARTS INSIDE—DO NOT REMOVE’ labels imprinted on the top and bottom of every panel in the compartment. Splicing a few wires feeding into an auxiliary console was one thing. This is an entirely different prospect. I know that’s the real reason she’s so against this. The greatest fear of any captain is that they will make a career-ending mistake, and I’m asking her to sanction an unauthorized procedure that has a high probability of completely frying an already crippled ship and also getting a crewmember killed. Decisions like this are never easy at any age. This one has to be tearing Nori apart, but she’s smart enough to realize that our chance of being rescued is decreasing exponentially with every passing day.
“We might as well go down fighting,” I tell her. “The ship’s already a wreck on the outside. A little damage on the inside isn’t going to make much difference one way or the other.”
Nori doesn’t smile, but she finally nods.
I turn my attention to the panel in front of me. Rapping it with a wrench, I guess that it’s standard quarter-inch plating. The eight fasteners around the edges are recessed and filled in with some sort of tamper-proof epoxy. Fortunately, my drill has a number of settings that have been banned for decades. One of them should work just fine.
Pressing the tip against the panel, I lower the safety shield and toggle the aiming laser. When the beam is centered, I squeeze the trigger. The shield instantly turns opaque, and I soon smell the pungent odor of burning metal.
Nori looks like she’s going to be sick.
Day 17
I am flat on my back, waist deep in the ignition assembly, with a tangle of wires dangling over my head, a small assortment of tools sitting on my chest, and four screws clenched between my lips. Our situation is dire, perhaps even hopeless, but I am smiling. This is the part of the job that I have always enjoyed the most, but haven’t actually done for years. Being able to actually put your hands on something, figure out why it’s broken, and then get it working again was what had attracted me to engineering in the first place.
All that is ancient history. The primary and auxiliary systems on every class of ship are now built robotically in an air- and gravity-free manufacturing plant, and installed and replaced in highly modularized components. Even the diagnostics to isolate a defective subsystem are automated. A trained chimp could do it. The fact that I know the actual purpose of anything inside this module makes me a relic. There isn’t a single engineer in my unit who would care.
My smile is already fading when the smell of ablating metal interrupts my thoughts. The cramped space is too tight to sit up, so I lift my head and look down toward where my waist occupies the better part of a two-foot-square opening. One of the fasteners on the adjacent panel glows red, and I think to close my eyes seconds before the laser cuts through. I keep them squeezed shut until the plate falls to the floor with a deafening clamor.
When I look down again, Nori is wiggling her lithe body through the small opening, a feat she accomplishes far more easily than I. She squirms up next to me. “Mind if I watch?” she asks. “Standing out there doing nothing is driving me insane.”
“Be my guest,” I mumble past the screws.
A half-hour later, I glance over at Nori. She is following my every action but clearly doesn’t have a clue as to what I am doing.
“Okay,” I say as I reach up and tap a large metal cylinder. “This is the ignition inductor. I isolated it from the bridge controls this morning. The next step is bridging a dozen feedback signals so the engines fire up when you tell them to. Once we’re done with that, we still have to tackle throttle and guidance.”
As I work, I find myself pointing out the various controls crammed inside the module and explaining their purpose. I am surprised when Nori neither nods off nor slinks away. Instead, she seems genuinely interested and queries me on specifics, quickly challenging the depth of my knowledge. I glance over at her. Although I never once made the time to do something like this with my daughter, if I ever got a chance, it would be just like this. My heart suddenly swells. I turn away as tears well in my eyes and rummage through the pile of tools by my side. Quickly composing myself, I hand Nori an extractor and stab a finger toward a relay. She sets to work without a moment’s hesitation. I clip a thin blue cable. I am smiling again.
Day 25
Tomorrow is the big day. Nori is asleep. I should be too. We both agreed to it, but I cheated and filled my hypospray with saline. Now, I am sitting at the main console, double-checking everything that we’ve checked already.
After three long weeks, I am finally making some sense of the control system, but it has been a struggle. Ship technology is changing so quickly these days that a completely new generation is already entering the pipeline before the last one is even out. There was a time when I couldn’t wait to board the latest model, to be the first on the test team to discover a new innovation—or, better yet, a potentially serious flaw. I don’t remember exactly when the fun had gone out of it, but somewhere, somehow, the whole thing had turned into more of something to get through rather than to enjoy. It is hard for me to admit that my slowness in learning the system has more to do with me than with its complexity.
I cast a slow gaze around. Everything has changed over the years. When I first started out, bridges had a pilot’s seat with an actual stick. Every primary system had its own dedicated station containing highly specialized instruments, readouts, and controls, every one of which I had known intimately. Their elimination had been insidious, but all of it had eventually been replaced by a single integrated command system that could be split between crew positions or consolidated in every imaginable way. I’ll grant that it’s more efficient, but it’s just not the same.
A deep frown sours my face. When I was Nori’s age, I had no patience or sympathy for the senior engineers who grumbled when a system changed, and they had to learn something new. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve become just like them, something I had sworn I would never let happen.
The console emits a soft beep. The check is complete. A long sigh escapes my lips. I could go through it again, but there is no point. Everything we can do is done. Either it will work or it won’t. Getting up, I knead my aching back and wonder when I got so old.
Picking up my toolbox, I walk toward my bunk, thinking about my wife—again. For the past few days I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind, or the promises I made but have failed to keep. Mostly though, I remember kissing her lightly and tiptoeing out the door so as not to wake her. If tomorrow turns out to be a bust, the “c u in a few days” note I left isn’t going to be much of a commemoration. I think of all the things I could have said—should have said. My chest feels like it is ripping apart as I remember the lifetime we have spent together and the love we have shared, which despite everything I have done to ruin it, I can still see every time I look in her eyes. How to convey all that in a few simple words? Then it comes to me: “you are my life.” The message I should have left.
I round the corner and pause in front of Nori’s cabin. I’ve only known her for a few weeks, but I can’t say I’ve ever served under a better captain. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but if we do manage to somehow pull off a miracle, she’s got a great career ahead of her.
I start to walk away but stop. If nothing else, our situation has forced me to reexamine a lot of things: her, my job, but most of all myself. I look at her door and then at my toolbox. I set it down against her bulkhead and walk away without a backward glance.
Day 26
This is it—do or die. Nori is at helm. I’m strapped in at the adjacent control. The modifications we made couldn’t be done halfway, so most of the major subsystems are on manual control. She’s going to have her hands full piloting, so I’m operating everything else.
Nori glances at me. I nod encouragingly. We’re almost out of food and water. This is our only chance. Neither of us has mentioned it, but we both know it.
“If this works,” I tell her, “you should be able to pilot the ship, but it’s going to be like steering a one-man shuttle bolted to a supercargo engine. Throttle isn’t going to be any better. We could end up burning most of our fuel just getting turned around.”
Nori doesn’t respond. Instead, she reaches in her coverall pocket and pulls out a small holodisplay. Clipping it to the front of her console, she toggles it on. A foot-square area fills with a black background. Tiny white dots of varying intensity begin to appear. Then, in the very center, a blue dot forms and begins to pulsate. Home. I can’t help but smile.
Nori’s hand hovers over the console, unmoving. I am beginning to wonder whether she’s having second thoughts when her fist slams down.
The lights in the cabin dim from an electrical surge. A console on the starboard wall emits a loud crackle and begins to smoke.
My gut tightens, but a second later, I am slammed back in my seat as the engine kicks on. It is a struggle just to turn my head. Helm control is marginal. Nori has a death grip on the top of the console. Her free hand is a blur of motion as she fights the ship with everything she’s got. The stars in the main viewport jump around like crazy and then slowly, slowly begin to settle down.
Nori is shaking from her effort, but she spares me a quick glance. I give her a thumbs-up and pretend not to see her tears trickling down her cheek. She pretends not to see mine.
We have no possibility of docking and will probably miss Earth by tens of thousands of miles. Our only hope is that someone will pick us up on sensors or that short-range comm will work once we’re closer. It’s a long shot, and a million things could go wrong between here and there. Right now, though, at least we have a promise of a future. It’s enough for me.
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Copyright 2009, James Johnson. All rights reserved. Jim is an information technology manager with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science. He has written numerous technical manuals and system documentation and is now pursuing a life-long goal of penning something far more interesting than budget justifications and strategic plans
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