“We’re not out of trouble yet,” Aliz said. “We’re extremely sparsely crewed. There is no one on board I’d trust unconditionally with the captain’s chair and obviously I’m going to have to sleep. No engineers. We’re likely to have a couple of high-care passengers. We’re not in a safe area yet. I don’t know if we have enough reserves to get to a safe area.”
“If the ship has a mid-space docking facility, I can get an engineer.” She told Aliz about Finn.
Her eyes widened. “Really, a Kaspari? From the Olympus Kaspari family?”
“The very one. He has some emotional baggage, but he used to be a core shield engineer on the SS Stavanger.”
“I can use him. We have an internal dock. It’s normally used for dragon fighters, but we lost most of those when we were captured. Evelle can figure out how to rearrange the shelving so it can accommodate your ship. We need to get that engineer on board.”
Tina then told Evelle about the things they had set up with Thor and Jens.
“I like the way you work,” Evelle said. “Lots of backup and redundancy. I’m sure we’ll be able to contact that ship.”
Aliz then sent Tina to locate and check on the other people on board, and report on the state they were in.
It was safe enough to move about the cabin, so Tina disconnected herself from the chair and floated through the cabin. As a front-line attack warship, the Manila didn’t waste energy with such fripperies as a revolving habitat, even if it also meant the crew spent a significant part of their time in the gym. Being in the gym was better than doing nothing, and revolving habitats were vulnerable to space rock strikes and radiation, not to mention enemy attack.
The ship was so underoccupied that it was hard to find the other crewmembers. Tina pulled herself through passages, listening for voices.
Many things had come loose during their departure from the station, and some of the mishaps had resulted in minor damage. A tool kit floated in one of the passages, having knocked a neatly hammer-shaped dent in the wall during one of the ship’s manoeuvres.
Some crew cabins had been left open and unsecured, and the bedding had migrated to block the air intake vent in the passage. Tina tried to pull it loose, but the blanket had been sucked into the fan and was hopelessly entangled.
With every passage she traversed, it became clearer that they needed more people to run the ship safely. A lot more people. Was there an option to quarantine part of the ship and run it like a much smaller vessel? There might be, but certainly Aliz would have activated that option already if it existed?
Tina finally found the rest of the ship’s occupants in one of the mess rooms, a small sorry huddle of people, several of them injured, lost in the huge space with many empty “food stations” set on a frame of bars that crossed the space at regular intervals. They were probably struts that added to the structural toughness of the ship. In these warships, nothing was ever purely there for comfort.
The small group had secured themselves against the wall. Tina was happy to see Margot with the group.
“We were wondering who ended up making it on board. I was hoping you were here.” The bright look on Margot’s face was the first happiness Tina saw.
With Margot were a handful of other women and three of the rescued men.
During their sudden departure, several people had been unsecured and had been thrown about. One of the men had an ugly bruise on his forehead. He held his arm in a strange position, even if he didn’t complain about pain, and remained eerily unresponsive to Tina’s question.
One of the women was extremely concerned about people who had been left behind. “We have to go back to get them,” she said.
Tina didn’t say that she didn’t think the ship was going anywhere in a hurry. She just hoped that Federacy reinforcements would get to the system before the pirates could recapture the ship. They were vulnerable.
The members of the group were cold, hungry and miserable. Tina said she’d see what she could do about food and turning up the temperature. She suspected they would close off parts of the ship and only occupy sections near the bridge.
These ships had rules about only essential crew being allowed on the bridge, and Tina didn’t want to break that rule without the pilot’s permission, so she went to report to Aliz.
“We have a total of sixteen people on board, including us. Two of the women from the prison cell got left behind. We still have three men on board, but although they can move and seem to listen, they haven’t communicated that they’re able to do their jobs.”
Even while Tina was speaking, Evelle shook her head.
Then Aliz confirmed that sentiment. “I’m not willing to take this ship across deep space with so few resources. I need at least another pilot and an engineer, a navigator and three capable people to monitor the ship’s vitals. At the very minimum. I would love to have a third pilot, especially one who is licensed for dragon fighters. We still have a couple.”
“We’ll have an engineer when Finn comes on board,” Tina said.
But Finn wasn’t responding and was probably keeping his head down in the wake of the disruptions.
Meanwhile, the Manila wasn’t going anywhere.
Aurora Station’s news channel was very vague about the happenings. Apparently, when the Manila ripped out the access tube, pressure had been lost in a section of the docks, and a number of pirates had been sucked into space.
It worried Tina that they had no news from Finn. Evelle scanned the cloud of merchant vessels waiting a short distance from the station, but couldn’t find the ship, although that could be because Aliz didn’t allow her to turn on the strongest transmitters.
“Let the station think we’re dead. Those friends of yours
