Emerald Flight: “Human Factors” (continued)

Part of him wanted to rest, to escape into sleep. Another part of his mind buzzed with half-formed, half-glimpsed thoughts. He thought they might be hallucinations, but none of them remained in his consciousness long enough for him to tell for certain. All of these inner voices, though, felt distant and disconnected, although they spoke for someone else, not him. They told him that he was not safe, that they would come for him.

Who?

He did not know. Nor did he understand why he hid.

Why?

Carefully, slowly, he lowered himself so that the flat surface of the pillar behind him supported his back. That helped, and some of the weariness went away. He remained that way for a long time, listening into the darkness, waiting for the sounds that he knew would inevitably come at the cave door.

- 2 -

Devereux strode back into the bridge, feeling even less certain of herself than she had before she had left it. Elizabeth looked up from her tablet as Devereux entered, but clearly felt it prudent to say nothing. Devereux could not decide whether that irritated her more or that it was from Elizabeth’s lack of provocation that might have permitted her to vent some of her frustration and anger.

She spoke to no one as she moved with long, purposeful strides toward the command deck. A few of the officers, chiefly the more junior ones with less experience under her command, glanced up from their stations as she passed them. Almost all of them looked away again immediately, trying to look thoroughly engaged in their duties.

Rusty did not look away from where he lay on his back staring up into the innards of the command console as she approached. For some reason, Devereux found that reassuring. He murmured a string of syllables to himself as he worked. She could not tell for certain whether it was profanity, prayers, or a recitation of quantum electronic principles.

“Any progress?” she asked.

The Chief Engineer grunted a response and then leaned back from the console, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, and looked up at her.

“Of a sort,” he admitted without enthusiasm.

Devereux down at him, annoyed, and waited for a more complete explanation.

“I mean,” Rusty said, holding up what appeared to be a twin of the control board that he had remove earlier. “That whatever’s gone ‘poof’ in the ‘Ol—Lieutenant’s head, he’s remembered enough to override the command codes at the central core level.”

He leaned up onto one elbow.

“It doesn’t matter which console you try to use,” he went on, gesturing around the bridge with the thin translucent panel, “you won’t be able get in. We’d have to overwrite the core.”

Devereux wanted desperately to swear, but somehow managed to summon enough self-control to prevent it. What the Chief Engineer suggested was possible, but she was not certain that they had the equipment and protocols to do it themselves.

“As far as I know,” she said, sensing that Elizabeth had moved up closer, probably to overhear the conversation better. “That’s only ever done at a major repair base. If something goes wrong . . .”

“We could be stuck out here for a very, very long time,” Rusty finished for her. “. . . or a very short one.”

If the slipstream cores and main drive reactors were offline at the time . . .

. . . as they should be, according to the protocols, she remembered.

Then it was extremely unlikely that either one of them could be set to overload, thereby destroying the ship.

The less immediately dangerous, not no less fatal in the long term, results of the effort could be the disruption of, or complete shutdown of, their life support systems. Without a source of internal heat, the interior of ship, along with its inhabitants, would freeze solid within a few hours. Even if they managed to sustain a livable temperature, it would only delay the inevitable when they ran out of breathable air. Not for those rather extreme reasons alone—although those were certainly enough—Devereux was reluctant to exercise a core reset as their only option without exploring some of the alternatives first—if not all of them—before settling on that one.

“I hope you have some other suggestions,” she prompted Rusty. Elizabeth had formally joined them now.

“A few,” the Chief Engineer offered. “But only a few.”

He sat up know, brushing at his pant legs.

“The best thing would be to get the . . . Lieutenant to tell you what the hell he did.” Rusty looked up at the console and shook his head slowly, letting out a soft whistle. “He did a nice job of though,” he said admiringly. “Whatever it was.”

Devereux frowned. It was the obvious answer—and one that she had already known.

“Okay,” she told Rusty. “Keep at it.”

She glanced at Elizabeth, ready to issue an order, and then changed her mind.

“Have Security send two officers down to the cargo bay,” she instructed Elizabeth. “I’ll meet them there.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak, but Devereux cut her off.

“You have the bridge.”

Not waiting for any debate or objection, she turned and headed for the main hatchway.