think the purge killed the rest?”
Captain Nash steadied himself against the bulkhead, grabbing overhead conduits to hold his position. “No way to know. No internal sensors while on battery power. It would have been nice if they had designed a porthole in that hatch, though. The only thing I do know is that everything forward of that hatch is unpressurized.”
“I doubt that will slow them down much.”
“Maybe,” the captain agreed, “but they’re not getting through that hatch unless they cut or blast their way in. That should buy us a few extra minutes.”
“Damn it!” Commander Eckert exclaimed.
“What is it?”
“I’m getting nothing but error codes from the port detonator’s control chip. Scalotti must have sent enough of a charge back through to fry it.”
“That’s not possible,” Captain Nash said. “It was an isolated system without enough power running through it to fry anything.”
“He must’ve rigged up an additional power source or something,” the commander reasoned. “Or maybe he wired in a relay some place where no one would find it, then triggered it remotely. You said he wasn’t stupid.” Commander Eckert looked around, desperately trying to think of something. “Maybe the starboard detonator is all right?”
“No, he would have killed them both,” Captain Nash insisted. “Just setting off one of them would likely cause enough damage to make it impossible for the Jung to reverse engineer the jump drive. Donny was always thorough.” Nash took a deep breath, looking around the cramped compartment for inspiration as he tried to think of a resolution. He looked at Eckert, his eyes squinting as an idea formed. “Was the jump drive down when we lost power?”
“Yes.”
“Was it damaged?”
“I’m not sure,” Eckert admitted. “The control system for the jump drive gets power from the system’s energy banks.”
“I thought our jump drives were fed energy directly from our reactors?”
“Not exactly,” the commander replied. “The Aurora’s original jump drive was designed to work from energy banks. When they came up with the mini jump drive, it was faster to just use a scaled-down version of the existing design rather than re-engineer both the hardware and software. Our system is just a slightly scaled-up version of the mini jump drives used by the Falcons and shuttles.”
“But we can keep jumping over and over again…”
“The Aurora has to take time to recharge her buffers because it takes a lot more energy to jump a ship her size. Her reactors weren’t designed for her jump drive, they were just adapted to power it. They aren’t powerful enough. We’re a lot smaller. Our reactors can replace energy in the buffers faster than we can possibly use it up, even jumping in rapid succession.”
“So there might still be power in those buffers?” the captain concluded.
“If they weren’t damaged, yes.”
“Can you tap into them with your data pad,” Nash wondered, “to see if the system is still functional?”
“Yeah, but why?”
“The only way we can detonate those drives is by accessing the detonators from the outside, and we can’t do that while there’s a Jung ship parked nearby.” Nash paused for a moment, waiting for Eckert to come to the same conclusion.
The commander’s eyes widened upon realization of Nash’s plan. “You want to try and jump the ship? From a fucking data pad? Are you insane…sir?”
“You got a better idea, Skeech?”
“Just because I don’t have a better idea doesn’t mean your idea is a good one. You know as well as anyone how precise the calculations for a jump have to be…”
“What about a standard emergency escape jump?” Captain Nash said, interrupting the commander. “Those are fixed distance, pre-calculated jumps. They’re already stored in each field generator’s database, right?”
Commander Eckert’s eyes lit up. “To protect against command latency between the port and starboard
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