He Who Dares: Book Two (The Gray Chronicals 2) (29 page)

‘
Captain Michael Gray, commanding’

‘
Help u
s
’

‘
Ho
w
?’

‘
Drive gone wrong
’
 
that was helpful.

‘
How drive gone wrong’

‘
Runawa
y
’

“Oh damn!”  Janice muttered, holding the board steady as Mike quickly wiped it clean and wrote his responses.  For a moment, Mike was stunned.  How on Earth they expected anyone to help them was beyond him, but desperate people, no matter what race they were, took desperate chances to survive.

‘
Cannot shut down the drive
’

‘
Shut down the reacto
r
’ 
He wrote back.

‘
We try.  Reactor not shut down’

So they’d tried to shut down their reactor, that was something, and it told him a lot.  People who travelled in
n
th
had to have some sharp engineers to figure out how to do it in the first place.  It also meant they would install the usual safety systems for just such an emergency, so why hadn’t they worked.  He looked around at the shadowy bulkheads around him, seeing the Bridge crew half in Harmony space, half in his.  Pete Standish stood on the other side of a transparent bulkhead, looking blurred and indistinct.  Mike shook his head and began pacing back and forth, cudgeling his brain for some way to help them.  Looking down and rubbing the back of his neck in thought he walked through a Harmony bulkhead into a working space beyond without realizing it.  For a moment he stopped, his eyes shooting left and right as his brain tried to reorient itself.  He turned to walk back, and as he did, his head passed through a piece of equipment and for a split second, he had the impression of wiring and circuit boards.

“Of course!  He muttered, carefully negotiation his way across the space to his chair.  “Adam!  I’m on my way to you. We need to inspect the other ship’s engine.”  He snapped, hitting the internship replay to the engine room.

“You want to do what, Skipper?”

“Just stay where you are.  I’ll explain when I get there.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”  Mike scribbled on the board for a moment.

‘
We will try to find an answer’

“Skipper?”  Pete Standish asked.

“You have the Bridge, Number One. Janice, you are with me.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”  He answered, seeing Mike and Janice carefully walk across the Bridge, wondering what Mike had in mind.

Most starships that use
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th
space to travel across the universe use some form of fusion drive, or pebble bed reactor to generate the necessary power needed to enter
n
th.
But that wasn’t what Mike wanted Adam to look at.

“Are you nuts… I mean…  you want me to look into a running reactor?”  Adam spluttered as Mike broached the idea.

“Not exactly, and besides, the Harmony reactor is in another space you might say and can’t really hurt you.”  Adam looked at him as if he should be certified.

“So what do you want me to look at?”

“I need you to look inside their drive system and tell me why it’s a runaway.”

“Oh, is that all.  I thought for a moment you wanted me to do something difficult, like breathing vacuum.”

“Adam.  You are their only chance.  They can’t find out what the problem is from outside, and can’t shut the reactor down.  Their only chance is for you and me to look ‘inside’ their drive system and find out what’s wrong.

“Skipper, you know you are certifiable.”

“I know.  I’ve been told that before, but think of it.  You will actually be able to look inside a working drive system.  That’s so neat!”  He said, sounding like an overactive schoolboy on his way to a magic show.”  Adam looked over Mike’s shoulder at Janice for help, seeing her smile and shrug in answer to his unspoken plea.

  “Let’s start at the reactor and work our way back to the fuel system.”  Adam just shook his head in disbelief and followed Mike and Janice down the passageway.  Every so often he’d open a cabin door and poke his head inside.  A few times, he was greeted with a scream, or swearing as he caught the crew in their underwear.

“Sorry.”  He called, withdrawing quickly.  In one he dived inside over the protest of the people inside, one a female crewmember just coming out of the shower.

“I need to look under your bunk.” He said, dropping to his knees and burrowing under the lower bunk, tossing things out of the way as he did.  He found a shadowy conduit and poked his head ‘inside’.

“Coolant.”  He said, climbing to his feet.

“At least we are on the right track.”  Janice grinned, waving the protesting crewmembers to silence.

“We’ll have to go further back, Skipper.”

“Right.”

The effect of negotiating their way between the real and unreal bulkhead, doorway, down shafts and running into real bulkhead that happened to intersect with unreal ones was frustrating and had more to do with trying to remember the layout of the own ship and trying to ignore the what their eyes were telling them.

“It’s in here, Skipper!”

“What is?”  He shouted back, unable to see Adam or Janice through the intervening shadow walls.

“Their engine room, Skipper.  Come back about a hundred feet and turn left.”  He did, finding himself in crew mess, except it was now filled with part of a huge cylinder, pipe, conduits and what he took to be pumps and control panels.  From their limited point of view, the cylinder had to be fifty foot across from the angle of the outside curve.  Standing in the OR mess, they could only see about a quarter of it.

“Okay.  What do we do now, Adam?”

“Have a look inside, I guess, Skipper.”

“Well?”  He shot Adam a look.  He wasn’t intimidated by it.

“You first, Captain.  It was your idea.”  He grinned.

“Oh, thanks.”  Mike stood there for a few moments, breathing deeply.  He was just about to look into the beating heart of a miniature star, and he didn’t like it.

He remembered the old ship’s Captain sitting on the bar stool sucking down neat rum and muttering to himself.  He too had looked into a fusion reactor and it drove him mad.  The difference was, that the Captain had woken up from a sound sleep inside the fusion reactor as the two ships interspaced.  No one knew how long the interspace lasted, maybe second, maybe minutes.  However long it was, it was enough to cause the Captain to go mad.  He felt the sweat prickling his forehead, and taking one last long breathe, he quickly moved his head and shoulders into the shadowy cylinder wall and back out again.

“Humm…”

“What?”  Adam asked.

“Coolant, I think.”  His brow pulled into a frown as he waited for his brain to sort out what he had seen,  still not sure, he took another quick look, longer this time.  His mind finally made sense of what he was seeing when he turned his head back and forth,  a swirling mass of semi-transparent greenish yellow liquid.  Had this been ‘real’ he suspected he wouldn’t be able to see much of anything with no light and no depth perception.

“It looks as if they place their reactor inside a double cylinder with coolant filling the space between the two walls.”  He finally answered, seeing Adam nod.

“Makes sense.”  Adam muttered, and did his own quick look inside.  “The reactor is on the other side of the second wall probably.”  Mike inched forward before ducking his upper body into the shadowy cylinder again.  This time he passed through the swirling mass of coolant and through the second wall and the super conducting magnets that formed the fusion bottle ‘wall’.  As startling as it was, looking into the heart of a star wasn’t as terrifying as he thought.  Bright blue plasma surrounded him and from his point of view looked cool rather than blazing hot.  He knew it wasn’t, and only his mind perceived it that way.

“Skipper?”  He heard Janice call, and looked around.  He could just see her, standing beside him just beyond the outer wall of the reactor.

“Come on in, Janice, the water’s fine.”  He laughed.  Hesitantly, she and Adam moved up beside him and they stood there looking around in amazement.

“Hey, Skipper.  I can see the magnets.”  Adam pointed to the neck between the two reactor chambers.

“Right!  Almost the same configuration as ours, only much bigger.”

The fusion reactor was shaped like an enormous bar bell stood upright with a firing chamber at each end.  The inside wall never touched the plasma due to the intense magnetic containment field that formed the inner wall of the bottle.  As one chamber fired, the expanding plasma flowed through the neck, or magnetic channel between the two ends and into the other chamber.  The incredibly hot plasma pass through the superconducting magnets around the neck generate massive amounts of power through a magneto-hydrodynamic generator.

“The problem has to be in the fuel lines.”

“Right.  The reactor is running fine and has to get fuel from somewhere.”  Janice added.

“Yeah.  That means we have to search around and locate the fuel inlet.”

“What I don’t understand is why they just can shut the lasers down.  Without them firing, the whole systems should shut down.”  Adam said, peering around.

“So?  Don’t just stand there admiring the view, start searching.”  Mike ordered with a smile.

“Easy for you to say, sir.”  Janice grouched.  “I for one am not used to walking around inside a working reactor.”

“Oh, come on Janice.  When will you ever get another chance to do something like this.”

“Not in this lifetime, I hope.”  She sighed.

Even with the three of them looking, they still had problems finding the fuel inlet as they kept running into the real walls of their ship.  That meant pulling back out and running around their ship to another cabin or locker to find what they wanted.

“I have it, Skipper.  It under the recycling unit.”

“Of course it is.  Where else would the damn thing be.”  Mike muttered as he got down on his back and crawled under the recycling tank.  That wasn’t easy with all the pipe and conduits in the way, theirs as well as the alien ship. 

In the smelly gloom under the tank, it was hard to tell which was which.  At last he found Adam half sitting with his head inside an eight inch pipe.

“What do you have Adam?”  He asked, sitting up beside him.

“I can see the restrictor, or control valve for the fuel inlet, but I can’t see anything wrong with it.  The fuel is definitely shut off here.”  Mike took a look at both sides of the valve, agreeing with Adam’s assessment.

“So where is the damn thing getting fuel from?”

“Skipper?”  Pete Standish called down from the Bridge.

“What’s up, OX.”

“I hate to tell you this, Skipper, but we are on the clock here.”  Mike froze.

“How long?”  He asked.

“One hour, twenty-seven minutes and thirty-five second, according to the Nav clock.”

“Damn!”  That meant they were due to drop out of
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space when the Nav clock reached zero.  There was no way they could change it while in
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space, or they’d drop out too far from their target star.  Like several light years away.  If they tried to stay in
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th
space any longer, they could drop out inside the star.