Starward

The Lonely Starship lurched aggressively just as Ryan was about to take the first sip of his fresh, boiling hot coffee. "AH! Dammit" he grimaced through the pain soaking through his shirt and tapped his com-link "Doc, what's happened now?" The reply came in an instant.

"East Drive Pod. Half of it just up and died, and I don't think the other half is enjoying the experience." Ryan had started running down the corridor to the engine service hatch before she'd finished. The bulkheads between all the vital systems had been left locked open to save time getting from one disaster to the next, and this was a trip he'd made countless times over the last week.

The open hatch was a cascade of sparks when he arrived. "Oh Fuck me, that's not good. Where's Ace?" he asked through the com-link.

"I'm here, I'm here" the young pilot panted as he came to the door. "Oh Fuck me, that's not good"

"Right. Gloves" Ryan pointed to the scarred but sturdy rubber gloves by the fuse box. "Pull three and five when I point to you, then back on when I say Go."

"Got it, three and five." Ace put the gloves on and carefully opened the fuse cover panel. He spotted the two fuses he needed and got himself into position. "Okay, ready" Ryan nodded, he had the small gauge laser pen ready to bypass the offending component in as little time as possible.

"Right. Doc, we need to drop the power level in the drive system again, to just about nothing, you ready?"

"You'll have to work fast, they might quit on us if we don't keep them fed, and I don't know we can start them up again if they do."

"Doc!" a fresh burst of sparks flashed out at Ryan "Just do it!"

"Right. On three. One. Two. THREE!"

The constant drone of the ships engines whirred down to almost nothing, when he figured it was just right, Ryan pointed at Ace. Ace pulled down the fuse levers and the sparking died away, as they did Ryan dived in the hatch and slid the weighty the control unit out of its snug housing. He moved like a rat, his eyes darting around the complicated mechanism looking for the problem. All the while a little clock was ticking away behind his eyes, he'd never been aware of the passing of time so much as now. "Ryan?" it was Ace calling out, nervously.

"I know!" where was the damn thing, it had to be in there. He soon spied it, tucked in behind layers of what he knew to be vitally important components, was the busted regulator. After years of fixing these rigs, he knew immediately there was no fixing it with a quick patch, not quick enough anyway. He stood back, leaving the little command box awkwardly protruding, and tore open another service panel. This one was much simpler, one big red handle. "Why can’t they all be this simple" he thought as he turned it to the off position. "Go Ace" he called back toward the fuses, and on the Com-link "Bring em back up Doc, not all the way, just till we're moving. Ace and I are coming to join you to see how much worse off that's left us."

As they walked back into the halls, Ryan was trying to dry his coffee sodden shirt by flapping it a bit with pinched fingers, he was sure it wouldn't help, but felt better than having the damp fabric clinging to his body. "So, why are we going to command? Its fixed right?" Ace was nervous at the best of times, but uncertainty really got him jittery. "Because if there's a problem, you know, I think you should tell me, like, now."

Ryan stopped and took in a deep breath, eyes closed, remembering to hold back from yelling at Ace. "Kid, of course there's a problem. There is always a problem. This entire mildly airtight heap seems to have been built almost exclusively out of lots of little problems. And I'll tell you all about our most recent step towards an unfortunate and untimely death when we meet up with Doc Matabele, in just a few moments. Why am I not telling you everything right away? Because I don't really want to have to do it twice. Okay?" He looked steadily into Aces' eyes for a good long moment just to make sure he was getting through to him.

"Um, okay." came a sheepish reply.

"Great, lets go then" And they walked silently up to the command deck.

When they arrived at command Dr. Matabele was darting between the various computer stations, her attention focused on running the data the ship was giving her. "Nice work on the buttons, Doc" Ryan announced as they strolled in.

"Thank you, all the years spent onboard these things is finally paying off, though I take it things didn't quite go as planned?" The tall slender woman standing at the centre console didn't turn to face them, she was busy checking screens of data from the ship. Prior to attempting to settle on the barren world, Doctor Matabele had been Chief Medical Officer onboard some of the largest ships in the fleet, and become very familiar with their systems.

"Not quite, I could've used your skilled digits down there to be honest, might've been able to get to it in time."

"Ah yes, but where a surgeon can perform the most delicate of procedures, I doubt I could have reached it in the time you did, and much less known how to deal with it."

"Well, I'll say this for all the running around, if we do die out here, at least I'll leave a good-looking corpse" he patted his belly "I'm in the best shape of my life." He laughed a little.

"That may say more about you than you intended" The doctor smiled wryly, peering over her glasses and making a deliberate glance at Ryans gut.

Ace cleared his throat, like he'd seen men do in the movies, but it was less convincing coming from a scrawny looking pile of nervous tension, "I'm sorry, this is all a lovely moment and all, but could someone explain how dead we are?"

"Yes. Right. Well. Long story short, I couldn't fix the command unit in time, so I had to bypass the entire engine. Basically I turned it off so it wouldn't explode. And we can't turn it on again, because, even if I could fix it, restarting the engine requires the rest of them at lower levels than we can maintain. And, as you know, the priming system is completely gone, so letting any more engines stall out isn't in our best interest. Now, as for why I've called you all here" (He'd had always wanted to say that, like he'd read so often in the trashy murder mystery novels that littered his workshop) "Doctor, could you bring up our navigation chart with all your projections. I'm guessing that's what you were doing as we got here?"

"You guess very well. Oh, but Ryan, I was already here, you didn't call me. Sorry"

"Damn, yes you were..." Ryan felt a bit deflated, that little moment he'd enjoyed swiftly taken away from him. Matabele pushed a few buttons and brought up a simple navigation chart. On the screen were just two icons; the Ship they were on, and the Warp Gate in orbit around the next nearest star.

They'd been heading for the Warp Gate for the better part of a month. After the dust bowl world they'd been scratching a life out on was officially designated 'Barren' by the Council of Worlds, every soul on the planet started making quick plans to get skyward as fast as possible. Decent ships were hard to come by, a handful of cargo carriers had dumped their goods and taken a fair chunk of the population, while anyone with a private ship had taken as many as possible. Ryan had let families go ahead of him on the haulers, sure he would find another way later, Dr. Matabele had done similar staying behind with the infirm letting the staff on the medical transport use her spot for an extra patient.

The ship they were on had been the last one even almost space-worthy that Ryan had parked in the back of his Junkyard, they'd spent the next week and a bit getting it flyable, with Ryan doing all the mechanical work while Matabele got into the computers and dealt with any injuries Ryan sustained working in the cramped confines of the ships' innards. The hardest part had been re-routing the controls from the Bridge down to the command deck several levels below. A dirty great hole that had been punched through the front section of the protruding bridge had rendered it useless for running the ship. After a couple of days and a great deal of swearing and electrical burns, they were off the ground and very gently pushing out towards the Gate.

"Here's us, here's the gate" Matabele punched in a couple of data entries. "This" a yellow line marked the path between them "Is how far we have to go. And this:" a small orange dot appeared on the line, just short of the Gate, “is where we run out of fuel. Does anyone see the problem? Without that last engine, we're too inefficient"

"Man, that's just not fair" Ryan let a breath out at the floor, then brought it back in, resolved to find a solution. "What can we turn off?"

"Nothing" The doc replied "What's on we need to live, the rest is just dead weight" Her shoulders slumped heavily towards the console. They were all staring at the little orange dot that was telling them when they were going to die.

"Hang on, how much weight?" Ace suddenly piped up. " If it's all computers and shit we aren't using, couldn't we ditch 'em?" He looked back and forth between to the others.

"It'd have to be a lot. Like a lot of a lot." said Ryan, passing the question with raised eyebrows to the Doctor.

"The backup..." Matabele got up and turned to another console. "There's a backup built into the ship in case of some catastrophe in the main computer, or to relatively quickly change what the ships purpose is. The idea is you drop a pre-loaded backup into the empty slot and the ship gets a new brain copied over while it's still in the sky. Only our slot," a ship schematic came up on the main screen, "is not empty." Lit up on the display was a huge square lump highlighted red, it was roughly the size of a bus. "Forget your healthy eating and exercise, boys, that's how we're gonna lose some weight fast. You two get down there with a standard issue tool kit, I can guide you from here over the P.A. system, I think I'll need a minute to make sure we won't blow the lights when we unplug it." She was already getting to work, looking back at the guys she said "faster the better, yeah?" And the two of them headed out swiftly, as instructed.

Two decks up and through a maze of dimly lit technicians rooms, they reached the backup. It was in its own special room, sitting like a prize sarcophagus in a museum exhibition. There was scaffold walkways crisscrossing the broad side of it, leading to many and various conduits that connected its various data outputs to the different systems of the ship. It wasn't just A back up, it was THE back up, everything you needed to run a ship from one side of the galaxy to the other, in one handy room sized unit.

The P.A. cracked to life "I've got you on the security cameras, I turned on the ones in this section to help speed things along. You two get to removing the outgoing connections, do not touch the power cable, that has got to be last. Repeat, do not touch the power cable. While you guys do that, I'm going to try figure a way to eject the thing and not fly into it. Seems it wasn't designed to be let go into empty space, least of all while still in flight. I'll check back in a couple minutes. Doc Out." Crackle-fizz went the P.A.

"And once again, not being able to stop is the thing that might stop us moving forward. I hate this fucking ship." Ryan turned to Ace, "Better get to it, Should be three bolts to remove on each one, then turn the handle to disconnect. You can start high, because my legs are killing me."

"Sure thing old man, meet you in the middle" he gave a mock salute with a wrench and got to climbing. Ryan smiled and started on the nearest conduit.

He'd only known Ace for a couple of weeks, early in to their journey they'd picked up a weak distress call from a scout ship that had left before them. His ship had suffered a power surge in the wake of the electromagnetic radiation left behind by so many bigger ships leaving the planet at the same time. Leaving him in a metal coffin floating in the void, with a damaged radio system he'd managed to get going just well enough to let it whimper for help. Ryan wasn't sure if no-one else heard him or no-one else cared, but he wound’t stand for leaving the cry for help unanswered. After getting him aboard and into the remainder of the ship infirmary, it took the doctor a few days before she'd let him up out of bed. But once he was let out, the Kid had been a very willing and not entirely incapable assistant.

It took a little over an hour to get the backup completely disconnected, Ryan and Ace were both spent by the time they were done, none of the bolts had come willingly, and a handful of the release handles needed both of them to get them free. "Doc? Doc we're done" Ryan called into his Com as they both sat wrecked on the floor next to the now inert power cable.

"Guys, I don't know how to tell you this, but I don't think I can get it out safely, I'm sorry." There was genuine despair in the Doctors voice, and Ryan just slumped down further, his head almost between his legs.

"Um, Actually, I've been thinking about that" said Ace, who sounded surprisingly upbeat. "I've had to do a similar thing in my patrol ship, well, I was ejecting myself and the ships a lot smaller, but the ideas’ the same."

"Kid, don't make me start to like you just before we die." Ace ignored the remark.

"We roll. Turn off any artificial gravity in this section and spin the ship so that we build up a little inertia in the backup, open the doors and put the roll in reverse. The speed it inherits from the ship along with the spin should spit it out away from us enough to dodge it as we fly past."

Ryan and Matabele sat quietly for a minute, playing the simulation of what Ace was suggesting in their heads. "Well kid, its better than the nothing I've got. Ryan?"

"I might puke with the spinning, but it could work. Can you do it Doc?"

"I'm no pilot, Ryan. Ace, get up here and take the reins, I'll start getting the gravity off and the roof open. Ryan you stay put, you'll be on the manual release of the backup."

A few minuted later they were all in position. Ace had full manual control of the Ships manoeuvring jets through the command console, Matabele was on the main thrusters and monitoring everything, and Ryan was up in the room overlooking the backup unit, poised to release the clamps holding it to the bottom of the rails that ran from floor to ceiling, strapped down to the chair ready for the gravity to be shut off.

"Retracting the roof and shutting down the gravity in three...two...one...now" Ryan felt himself become weightless as the Doctor shut off the gravity from command. In the massive room before him, the vastness of space began to be exposed to him through the sliding roof. "Alright Ace, you're on" Matabele instructed. The young pilot eased the power to the jets, pushing under one side of the ship and down onto the other, while the Doctor increased the main thrust just a little to get the backup moving faster than they would be.

Over in his little room, feeling every spin, Ryan was, for the first time glad that they'd been rationing food so tightly. "Are we there yet?" he called while his insides tumbled in free fall.

"Almost, still needs a bit more, but we have to do it gradually, or we'll end up throwing ourselves all over. The less correcting we have to do after the better for fuel."

"Right, yeah, just before I paint this little room in breakfast would be great." The stars above were just streaks to Ryan now, and the backup was beginning to fade into the black mist that was beginning to draw in closer and closer. "D...Doc..."

"Ryan?! Ryan, stay with us, you can pull it now. Can you hear me? Pull it now!" Ryan fought for focus; the thing, gotta pull the thing, to make the big thing go WOOSH up the hole. Bye-bye big thing! Through his delirium, Ryan saw the big red lever he had to pull.

"Keep it together old man! I'm ready to flip it around, but I need that box loose!" Ace was panicking there was only so much in the jets at one time, and he had pushed them pretty hard to get into a corkscrew.

Ryan wrapped his big hands around the handle, Why can't they all be this simple? He wondered, Big red lever, easy peasy! Hold up, haven't I done this before?

"RYAN!!" the shout from both his shipmates snapped his attention back to reality just enough to focus, he braced his feet against the desk and pulled the lever.

"It's good! Do it!" He squeezed fingers tight around his chair, knuckles white. Ace didn't waste any time, and switched the jets into reverse at full strength. The ship protested noisily, groaning under the unexpected change in direction, Like a whale being stung in the face by a harpoon, the deafening noise resonated throughout the ship.

In his glass walled chamber, Ryan saw an amazing sight. The enormous brick that lay on the floor of the next room suddenly jumped right up off the ground and out through the hole in the roof. For a moment he couldn't believe what he'd seen. One minute it was there, heavy as a dozen trucks, and then next it was flying straight up in the air like it weighed less than a feather. "Um, its gone..." Ryan felt like he should say something, even though he knew it was being monitored.

Back in command, Matabele was indeed monitoring everything, as the backup flung itself into the void, she was backing off the main engines down to their safer slow levels allowing the backup to drift further away from them. She closed the roof and brought the artificial gravity back online.

With the ship back on a straight course and no longer spinning like a top, the crew came together to see if they'd finally done enough. Doctor Matabele brought up the familiar map. The previous projections were still there, taunting them with its little orange dot of mortality. Matabele was running a new calculation through the computer, and the updates projections were drawing themselves on the screen. A new line, starting from their new position just a little closer, drew itself painstakingly slow toward the gate. They all watched it intently, not making a sound. It kept going, little by little, as it passed the orange dot of the last line, Ryan felt his chest tighten. The line kept inching forward, closer and closer, he swore it was getting slower and slower.

And then it stopped, not in the middle of space, but at the coordinates of the warp gate.

They were going to make it, in just a few days time.

All of them cheered, Ryan let out the breath he'd been unconsciously gathering as the line had been drawing. He shook Matabele by the hand and then took Ace in a headlock of affection, "Nice work Kiddo! You've saved our collective bacon!"

"Well, only seemed fair, I guess" he was looking shy at the attention, but Ryan was genuinely proud of him.

"But before we get carried away, I just have one thing I want to say" Ryan put on his serious face, "For the next three days, please: Nobody. Break. Anything".