A cold mouthpiece presses past his lips and against his teeth. Reynard opens to remove the pressure. He bites the rubbery tip. Within two gulps, cleaner air pumps into his lungs. Amye’s frame basks in an angelic glow, as if she were a savior from the heavens. She gropes between Reynard’s legs, leaving him with a quick “this is not the time or place to rub my crotch” moment. His erotic thoughts are smashed as she yanks free an aerosol canister to spray fire suppression foam on the flames growing from a comm panel behind her. Within a half a minute the bridge returns to obscurity as valuable air molecules are sustained.
The fire gives him a brief moment of illumination, revealing a cooked mess. His crew appears no better. Amye is using the ocular lens of her headset as night-vision goggles. An act of brilliance in this crisis. The personal air breathers for thinner atmospheric planets—a stroke of genius on her part.
“They won’t help long. Shorten the breathable air supply. They suck out oxygen.” She explains, “A captain would want an assessment of resources, air and light being a priority.”
Reynard clips his eyepiece to his ear in time to witness Scott sprawled at the bridge doors. Conscious, he frees a panel at the base of the door frame.
“Formulate a plan.” About the most captain order Reynard gives. He is unsure of what to do to sustain his crew.
“Get outside before the breathable air inside the bridge stagnates.” The panel opens, and Scott jabs the durasteel bar into a cylinder. With labored breathing he pumps the bar.
How? The cargo ramp has to be underwater at best, and the side airlock will be too high to scale down without climbing gear. Reynard assesses the situation to himself. None of his training has prepared him for this. A starship’s captain should be more experienced. Not some kid—fresh from the farm—who possesses a cool starship. Flash Gordon was at least a Yale graduate, Buck Rogers was already an astronaut, and Luke Skywalker was a natural pilot, who could target wamprats in his T-16. All of them better prepared to deal with a starship crash.
“All exits are beyond the bridge doors. They need power to open,” Amye snaps. “Whatever hit us fried everything.”
“Shouldn’t we have insulation and fuses to prevent overloads?” Reynard hopes he asked a valid question.
“The blast overrode all fail-safes. Everything’s shut down and cooked. A ship with this damage should have exploded.” Scott, pumping the door release, slows as pressure builds inside the release mechanism.
“Are we all alive?” Good question for a captain to ask?
“Australia’s unconscious,” JC takes an emergency supply pack from under the first officer’s chair.
Amye pulls a second emergency pack from the seat across from hers. “How many emergency bulkheads are between us and the airlock?”
More electrical haze hangs before Reynard’s eyepiece. His lungs struggle as toxic air replaces cleaner.
Unbreathable air belches from the reclamation system.
“The bridge door and one more, plus getting the three airlock doors open.” Scott’s next pump cracks the door seals with a deafening—whoosh! The pipe drops to the deck with a clank as he digs his fingers in between the door’s seams. He flexes his pecs until he can drag the doors open along their tracks. Fresher air wafts over Scott. The small compartment meant to prevent catastrophe atmospheric decompression will only add a few minutes of breathable oxygen to the bridge.
“Commander, we don’t have enough breathable air. Not to get the next set of doors open,” Scott reports.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“Australia needs the medical bay. Without scanners I’m only guessing at her internal injuries,” JC declares.
Coughs emanate from the two cadets finding consciousness.
Amye tosses Doug a survival pack, pointing to the cadets. She crouches down next to the captain’s chair. “I noticed in the bay for the hidden shuttle there was a hatch in the ceiling, but there’s no corresponding hatch in the bridge floor. The way the shuttle was hidden I thought it was more like an escape pod than a ship-to-surface shuttle.”
“Extreme atmosphere condition cases require a shuttle over a transporter,” Reynard concurs. “If we find the hatch?”
“With the shuttle gone there is only the living skin between us and fresh air.”
Now would be the time to have more light. Reynard crawls around his command chair as does Amye. Like most of the ship, the floor panels are seamless. Preventing easy access to the Dragon’s hidden hatchways and compartments.
Amye touches the underside of the armrest. The chair designed to form-fit the person assuming command will move to fingertip position. This is a near-magical transformation to the untrained eye, but gears and levers instantaneously do the job. Under the armrest Amye fingers a button embedded in the smooth material. She slides it up and inside.
Several clicks from under the chair echo throughout the bridge.
“Help me.” Amye lifts on the chair arm.
Reynard does the same on the opposite side. The chair slides back on hidden tracks.
“I assume this would be automatic if the ship had power,” Amye pushes down on the floor under the chair’s station. It flops down.
Fresh air blasts her in the face before the electric haze drifts down the hole.
Amye snaps a glow stick from the emergency bag and drops it down the hole. It bounces on the Dragon’s swimming skin.
“If it doesn’t let us pass through to the ground, we can still reach the cargo bay—more air to work with.”
Reynard nods. He never figured to perform evacuation drills. Something else a more experienced captain would have instituted. A hand signal activates his sword brother. The four-armed warrior slips through the hole, landing with ease on the hull skin now acting as the floor for the shuttle bay.
The skin swims around Joe, never ceasing to be solid. The skin parts, forming a slide and allowing access to the outside clean air.
Joe leaps back to the hatch opening. He
