She opened the medkit and pulled out some heavy-duty bandaging spray.
“You don’t need to—”
“Hell I don’t. Even if you don’t feel that, I know that wasn’t designed to be exposed to the air.” She grabbed his right wrist, near the hand where it was still wrapped in fur and something that felt like skin. He allowed her to pull it forward. She sprayed the can onto the faux wound that was Nickolai’s arm. The spray dried white and flexible, giving his arm the character of a well-defined corpse.
She let his arm go, and he bent it, flexing his hand again. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, right.” She took handfuls of hardened sealant tape still attached to ragged clumps of almost-flesh, and shoved them into a cabinet so the debris wouldn’t bounce around the cabin and kill them during reentry.
The computer voice spoke. “Two hours until atmospheric insertion.”
“Now that you’re free,” Kugara told him, “Help me rig an acceleration couch that will fit your oversized body.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Good Samaritans
Surviving the worst will always complicate the matter.
Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.
Everything had been going as smoothly as could be expected, the bridge crew making periodic announcements over the PA system while Parvi sat at her station obsessively nursing as much efficiency as she could out of the damaged damping coil. Things were going better than she had a right to expect, the engines were already down to 50 percent ahead of her projection.
Then every meter on the console before her redlined. The power spike was sudden, and she lost all readout from the damping coil at the same time the emergency klaxons announced a hull breach.
She slammed her hand on the PA broadcast and shouted, “Everyone to the nearest lifeboat/cabin now! We’ve had a critical overload.”
Before she finished her sentence, the drives blew. She could see the displays go critical in the split second before the explosions. Everything lurched out from underneath her as every display went dead, plunging the bridge into darkness.
More explosions, and Parvi could feel her ass drifting out of the seat in the darkness.
She grabbed the dead console blindly, trying to keep from drifting away.
After a moment, emergency lights flickered on around the bridge, bathing them in a red glow. “What the fuck just happened?” Wahid called from the far side of the bridge. Now that there was some light, he kicked off the wall, back toward the console.
“The drives overloaded,” Parvi said, not quite believing it herself.
“Did the damping coil cause it?” Mosasa asked.
Parvi shook her head. “The spike happened before it failed.”
“Someone tached in,” Tsoravitch whispered.
“That’s bullshit,” Wahid said, pulling back into his seat. “They’d have to be right on top of us. You heard Bill.”
Parvi looked down at the pilot’s station, and even under emergency power, all the displays were dead. She tried
