Deep Space

  Chapter 2

  Effecting Repairs

  The landing succeeded, for the most part. Glenn stood up from his former seated position and calmed his trembling hands as best he could. The coursing adrenaline ran through his fingertips and a buzzing sensation covered them as the fight or flight syndrome pooled most of his blood into the center of his body. A stim pack would have been handy in a situation like this, but Glenn didn’t believe in that sort of thing. He worked through his mental dilemmas to a fault, and Kelly kept her distance from that particular quirk of his.

  “Damage report?” Glenn asked, pressing the communication switch.

  He surveyed his surroundings. The cockpit where he stood seemed decent enough, though the hasty landing discarded his books and wall décor to the floor in a mess of vintage antiques. His living space retained its overall shape, though this area of the Albatross hardly concerned him.

  “Ask me again in ten minutes,” Kelly said. “I’m not sure what’s broken right now.”

  “We’ll set up camp then, while you assess the damages.”

  “On an asteroid?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Glenn replied. “You shack up, and I’ll take a look outside.”

  He walked over to a footlocker on the starboard wall of the cockpit and punched in his PIN. A locking mechanism clicked and the metal door swung open, revealing an emergency spacesuit fitted with EV gear and a light beam gun. If he remembered correctly, the gun should fire about eight rounds before it ran out of ammunition, not ideal for a firefight, but decent for self-defense.

  EV gear was necessary in the depths of space, where lack of a nearby star could freeze a body in seconds. Glenn could have checked the area through his viewport, but he was feeling adventurous and the fresh air would help clear his mind. Was it air or space at this point? Hell, he needed both.

  He slapped on his gear and fitted the helmet over his collar, twisting the piece into place until it clicked.

  “Excellent,” he said.

  Glenn made his way through the primary hallway shaft of the Albatross and into the airlock chamber, a room that would normally connect its docking ramp to a causeway on a space station. However, in the case of an emergency landing, Kelly programmed the Albatross to lower the docking ramp to ground level using proximity sensors that ran along the hull of the ship. The gates closed behind him and the decontamination process began. Once the red contamination lights stopped cycling, the decontamination process ended, and the doors to the asteroid slid open.

  Glenn stepped down the ramp, and his EV suit adjusted to the climate. A warm buzz from his suit spread waves of comfort through his body. It was the best sensation, like walking around in a hot tub. He wasn’t even mad anymore about the …

  “The hell!”

  His baby, beaten with a blunt baseball bat by the looks of it. He couldn’t enter a respectable station without the scorn of mockery running rampant through crowds of captains who took care of their ships. Dents and pot marks from chunks of rock slashed and tore through his hull and left scars that would take months to fix and more credits than he’d make in a month!

  “I can hear you, you know,” Kelly said.

  Glenn hesitated.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Please tell me good news.”

  “I ran some diagnostics with OSI, and I do have some,” she said with a pause that made Glenn’s eyes twitch. “Do you want to hear the bad news first?”

  He heaved a sigh and swallowed a huge gulp of air that piled in the back of his throat.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “One of our rear thrusters is working at thirty percent capacity. I can divert power from other systems, so it won’t be much of a problem. We will move a little slower after takeoff, though.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad,” Glenn said.

  “Brace yourself,” Kelly said. “Those asteroids rattled up the FTL drive, and something came loose. I can’t pass a current through it completely.”

  Glenn shouted expletives inside his own mind. He crouched down and punched a piece of rock and the sensors lit up in his glove as the EV suit corrected the temperature. The surface of this rock … was it hot? No, that didn’t make sense.

  “But you can fix it, right?” he said.

  “It’ll take some troubleshooting, but sure. I’ll need an hour or so.”

  Glenn grabbed a patch of soil from the surface of the asteroid and held it in his gloved hands. He noted the sensors lighting up as the suit corrected the temperature. They changed so quickly in reaction to the flow of heat. Once might have been a fluke, but the soil must be at least three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Glenn looked out on the horizon past his ship, and a distant star shone just above the crags, too far off for this kind of heat.

  “Kelly, do me a solid,” Glenn said. “Give me a report on the thermal activity of this rock.”

  “I doubt I’ll find much,” Kelly said.

  Glenn smiled.

  “I think you’ll want to see this.”