Stardock: Part 33

Jaclyn’s eyes flicked toward the fusion generator and then back to me. “You’re not going to ask me to smash it are you? Because that sounds like a bad idea.”

I shook my head. “No. I wasn’t thinking of doing that. We’d probably all die.”

Jaclyn eyed me. “You think? So how were you planning to trash their plant?”

“Well, there are emergency procedures in case you need to shut it off. This generator looks a lot like the jet’s. It should be easy.”

Jaclyn smiled. “Kind of like how Rook’s headquarters wasn’t supposed to contain nerve gas.”

I was about to say that there was no way we could have expected that, but Jaclyn spoke before I’d gotten my thoughts together.

Shaking her head, she said, “I’m not arguing, let’s go.”

We ran toward the fusion plant. Jaclyn arrived ahead of me, but not by much. We weren’t racing. We stood among the pipes and cables, looking up at the white box in front of us. A few screens glowed next to it, giving the plant’s vital statistics in a language or languages that I couldn’t read.

Izzy landed next to us. “Do you need help?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What happened to the Hrrnna?”

She let out a breath, slumping a little. “Dead,” she said, “or its armor is so damaged it can’t move.”

She turned around toward the body. I followed her gaze. The Hrrnna wasn’t moving.

Travis came up as we spoke, carrying the monkey person. Not that “monkey person” was quite right. It (he) had a tail and feet that appeared to be made for grabbing branches, but he wasn’t furry, and outside of the obvious differences, he was otherwise a normal human. The man wore a form fitting jumpsuit and what I assumed was a tool belt.

Travis said, “He doesn’t know a word of English, and doesn’t have a translator device either. I’m not sure why I bothered to grab him.”

He frowned, thinking, and said, “He started to run away, and I jumped him before I had time to think about it. Maybe we’ll get some use out of him.”

I doubted it, but didn’t say so. Turning to Jaclyn, I said, “It takes two people to kill the generator. If you stand by that wall, and I go around the corner, we can start.”

Jaclyn walked up to the box, stepping over a foot high cable. “Where do I stand?”

She wasn’t far from where she needed to be. “You see the glowing symbol with what look like handholds on both sides?”

“Grab the handholds?” She asked, stepping up to the wall.

“Yeah.” I walked around the corner, ducking under a pipe, and stepping over two cables to stand in front of the same symbol. Glowing red with two protrusions sticking out of a vaguely triangular shape, it made me think of a demon’s head, but I knew it was some kind of alien symbol.

“I’ll tell you what to do.”

Grandpa had made me memorize the order. It was one of those things that spaceship crews knew how to do.

It didn’t take long before Jaclyn and I each gave the handholds a final twist and push. Inside the box came a crashing noise, followed by a sizzling sound that reminded me I hadn’t eaten in a while.

I reminded myself that it meant that important pieces of the power plant were melting, and that we’d just destroyed something that Earth’s scientists had yet to build a native working version of.

It didn’t bother me much. I wished I could look inside and watch how it worked. Even professional spaceship crew members didn’t normally have any reason to do this.

The generator gave off heat that I couldn’t feel, but did register in my HUD.

“We probably ought to go. The gravitics should start failing soon if they haven’t already.”

All the same, I was noticing what hadn’t happened when we shut off the fusion generator. The lights didn’t flicker, and I didn’t feel the ship begin to sink.

When the inertial dampers started to hum, I had a very bad feeling. Inertial dampers protected against sudden changes of direction, so I shouldn’t feel anything, and I didn’t. The dampers were working normally—like they would with a working fusion plant behind them. If the ship were running on battery power, the dampers would be using up the batteries quickly.

Most of my experience in space combat came from simulations the jet had run me through, but simulations were accurate. Typically ships that had lost their generator barely used their inertial dampers at all.

Well, there was one more thing I could try. I could call outside the ship with the suit’s communicator. Shields took too much power to run for long on batteries.

I clicked on my palm, and tried to switch to the regular League channel, but got no connection.

Rachel faded in near us, empty air filling with a figure in a white costume. Her mask covered the upper half of her face, but left her hair uncovered.

She didn’t look happy.

“Bad news,” she said, “there’s another engine room. Oh, and they know we’re here now. There aren’t many of them left on the ship, but some of them are coming this way.”

Izzy’s face tightened. “More? I don’t want to kill anyone else—not today. Not ever.”

I knew the feeling, but more as a feeling than anything else. I remembered killing the Xiniti, and I knew I’d killed more aliens than that, but the fighting had mostly been a blur.

Part of me hoped it would stay that way.

Rachel looked over at Izzy. “I get that, but we’re not out of this yet. The ship turned around a second ago, and it looks like we’re going toward someplace more populated.”

11 thoughts on “Stardock: Part 33”

  1. Battle ship and big enough, so, why not redundancy?
    Remember the little detail that it is a BATLE ship and that it will be hit sooner or latter in one engine room.
    Makes sense to have two.
    But now it has half its power.

  2. Yes…puny humans…fear them! For the alien invaders with their intergalactic spaceships are smarter than you thought. They have…REDUNDANCY!

    Mwahahahahahahaha!

  3. Redundancy can be both practical and useful. Damn aliens and their smart spaceship designs! But then, I guess there was no chance it would go off without a hitch. And at least the shutdown procedure worked, which confirms that Nick knows as much about the design as he thinks he does.

  4. The secret of redundancy is to repeat yourself, after all. That way you can say the same thing multiple times.Of course, saying that redundancy is repetitive is kind of a tautology, I think

  5. Redundancy can be good. It can also be really expensive; I wonder what this ship had to give up in order to mount a second power room and all associated support equipment. It’s probably a maintenance hog compared to having a single larger generator as well.

    Turns out the decision was worth it, but an extra platoon of marines in power armor might have given better tactical options. Not the we want them to have better options…

  6. As Club says, Redundancy can be good….. Let me repeat the “can be” – as in it is often a necessary evil, but brings with it a whole hoard of additional complicated scenarios that can cause everything to go horribly wrong… even if you are the one who wanted the redundancy. Add a third dissimiliar system… just in case the two identical systems fail and you have all kinds of fun for the safety people.

  7. I don’t want to kill anyone, you know these guys currently attempting genocide against my planet. They must be pretty swell dudes, definitely not people who should be stopped from succeeding, instead lets just softly tickle them and ask nicely.

  8. To be fair to izzy she hasn’t been trained or preparing for this kinda life for as long as the League. Hell she only got her powers like a year or something ago and didn’t know that they came from her racist grandfather.
    Before that she was basically a normal girl who never would have even given any thought to the idea she would ever have to kill someone, much less kill alien invaders who do have some legitimate reasons for hating humans (modified/ supers especially), though there anger is being pointed in the wrong direction since the humans on earth had no idea until after the fact and were used as the gentic template/slave race for the abominators armys.
    Though I dont disagree with what yiur are saying that they don’t really have a choice but Izzy simply isn’t emotionally prepared for taking so many lives.

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