Busted

“What have you done?” Our First Officer, Shandra Smith, demanded.

“I thought we were about to miss our turn,” our Captain, Buzz Ryan, said. They were behind me, Ryan sitting in his command chair and Smith likely doing her best to loom over him. She sounded pissed, which was not a good thing.

“So you, what, wrenched the helm hard left while we were moving at Warp 4?”

“Yeah,” I piped in, “that’s basically what the helm log shows.”

“You know that the helm computer doesn’t ‘miss our turn,’ right?” she asked, tension rising in her voice.

“I mean, it can make mistakes,” Ryan said.

She rubbed the bridge of her nose. She got a lot of headaches. “Remember how we discussed not touching the helm until Don and I got back?” she said slowly, as if talking to a particularly slow child.

“I do know how to drive this ship,” Ryan said, like a particularly petulant slow child.

“You demonstrably do not,” she retorted, sitting down in the chair next to mine and scanning the console. “These nacelles can’t take that kind of abuse. They’re old, and even going in a straight line is a challenge. So,” she said, turning to me, “where’re we at?”

“Warp core is offline. I can’t tell more without going down to engineering. Inertial dampers are offline. Again, can’t tell more. Artificial gravity is fluctuating and is probably offline in the crew hull. I hope someone washed the dishes, because if not we probably need new dishes.”

“And you fired our engineer at the last station,” Ryan helpfully reminded Smith. I was pretty sure I could hear her molars grinding together.

“I’ll stay here,” she said to me, “can you go back to Engineering and see what you can find?”

“Yup. I’d actually like to shut off the gravity entirely. It’ll make this a little quicker, and that system might just need a reset anyway.”

“Done,” she said, tapping her console and placing the ship in zero gravity.

“Back in a sec,” I said, pushing off my console toward the hatch at the rear of the bridge. I pushed off again and sailed through the long access tube that led to Engineering, close to the aft end of the ship. I settled into the Engineering console and opened a channel to the bridge. “Okay, it looks like the warp core did a self-preservation shutdown, so we should be able to get it back online pretty easily. Impulse engines read five by five. Logs show the gravity systems probably do just need a reset, so they should be fine. I expect it was the sudden jolt that threw them off.”

“So we’re good to go?” Ryan’s voice came back.

“Yup, all except for the inertial dampers, which seem to be completely fried. So we’re good to go so long as you don’t mind getting smooshed as soon as we start moving at any appreciable speed.”

“Oh.”

“I’m lighting up the distress beacon,” Smith said, “nav says there’s a station not too far away, and I’m sending them a request for assistance.”

“How far?” I asked.

“Fraction of a light-year,” she said. “A small fraction, actually. It’d be an hour at full impulse, maybe, assuming we wouldn’t be killed at full impulse.”

“Couldn’t we just work up to full impulse really, really slowly, so the inertia wouldn’t kill us?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah, in theory,” I said, “but I was actually wrong about the impulse engines. They’re reading as fully operational, but as I glance around back here, I notice that the main power conduits are actually charred black with smoke coming out of them, so I’m a bit suspicious of the diagnostic system.”

“Wait, what?”

“No impulse engines,” I clarified. “Also, everything else is suspect. We’re going to need to overhaul the Engineering systems, and we’re going to need a decently equipped station for that.”

“I have an idea,” Smith said.

“You got a reply form the station?” I asked.

“I did not,” she said, “but I’d like to start moving in that direction anyway.”

“I may not have been crystal-clear on the state of the engines,” I started.

“No, I got it. No engines. But you do remember what we picked up at the last station, right?”

Icelandic Troll was nominally a salvage ship, with search-and-rescue being a kind of side hobby. But that meant the ship consisted primarily of a giant empty box, where we’d work on salvage as we took it to someplace to sell. This trip, we’d been hired as an ersatz cargo ship. I’d not actually looked at the manifest we’d been given, although I pulled it up on my PADD. “Organic compounds?”

“Yeah,” Smith said. “Meet me in the bay.”

We usually kept the bay fully pressurized in transit, and this trip was no exception. It only took me a few moments to clamber through the hatch in the floor and emerge into the aft end of the bay; Smith popped in a bit ahead of me, using the hatch just aft of the bridge. Our cargo was twelve large, identical, cylindrical metal tanks, held in place in the middle of the bay by its built-in array of tractor and pressor beams. Each tank was about thirty meters long and probably ten meters in diameter. We each pushed off the ceiling of the bay and arrived at the same tank. We edged over to a label that was riveted onto the side. It was covered in barcodes, but a section in small text read, “Keep chilled. Contains Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”

“Sack-a-what?” I asked.

“It’s beer,” Smith said. “We have twelve tanks of beer.”

I did some math in my head. “This is over two million liters of beer.”

“They’re pressurized, too.”

“Pressurized.” I said. The word wandered around in my mind.

“We have all those struts,” she added, pointing to where they were strapped down against the inner walls of the bay.

“We use those to support wrecks when we’re dismantling them,” I said, not understanding where this was going.

“Yeah,” she said, “but they’re hollow. They’re basically four-inch pipes.”

“Pipes,” I repeated. That word wandered around in my mind, too. It eventually brushed up against pressurized. “You want to make beer jets.”

“I do,” she said, grinning.

“He’s going to be pissed,” I said.

“I know,” she said, grinning bigger.

“It’ll take us a couple of days at a jet-powered crawl,” I said.

“I figure at some point the station will be able to send something to tow us, but worst case, yeah, a couple of days. We’ve plenty of provisions.”

“I’m getting the welding kit,” I said, kicking toward the back of the bay.

“I’ll turn the ship around,” she said, kicking back toward the hatch that led to the bridge.”

A couple of hours later, the rear of the Troll was pointed toward the station; we’d had enough oomph in the pressurized attitude thrusters to achieve that much. We’d depressurized the bay, and I’d donned a work suit to weld a pipe to one of the tanks. Smith had cracked the bay doors open, and I’d run the pipe out the opening. “I think we’re ready,” I said. “I’m on a safety tether and I’ve got a good hold on this pipe.”

“WE CANNOT DO THIS,” Ryan yelled over the intercom.

“We mourn for the brew,” Smith said. I opened the fuel line, and we rode to the station on a long wake of foam.

The station–which apparently was a fairly isolated facility that didn’t check their communicators all that often–finally got in touch. We were about an hour out, with two tanks to go, when they sent a ship over to give us a tow. Figuring that the cargo job was pretty much a write-off at this point anyway, we drank up some of the fuel, and were feeling no pain when we arrived at the station.

So pity us poor sailors, wherever we roam,
For there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever come home.
So cheer for us sailors, riding in on the foam!
We were drunker than lords by the time we got home!