Starfarers!

Chapter 4 - pt 3

"What caused it?" asked Liz. She sat in the crooked hallway, leaning back against the wall beside the scorch marks. The alarms had been shut off, and everything was quiet, all except for a few fans that ran on a small backup generator to vent out the smoke. Liz's fire extinguisher lay next to her, nearly empty. "We've taken hard hits before, but that was rough."

"Hard hits, yeah, but not a whole ship, no matter how small," said Jim, sitting right beside her. "I guess now we know what that feels like."

"Did that thing self-destruct?"

"It couldn't have. If it did, there would've been a noticeable fire on our way down. And probably a hole in the hull." Jim had been unconscious after the crash too, just like Liz. Fortunately for them both, the flames in the cockpit brought him back to his senses in time to put them out. "Thank God the shields took some of the blow."

You two need to be more careful with who you fucking piss off for now on, thought Watson. The cat came out of hiding once the fires had been put to rest, but he was still a bit on edge. The tilt of the ship forced him to stay on his feet in front of the two Starfarers, always pacing with a flicking tail. Whoever comes after your two necks indirectly comes for mine. I bet you don't think about that do you? No, I bet you don't. Always tied up with your own stupid fucking preoccupations...

As Watson meowed to himself, Liz picked up the red canister, wishing it were a silver one, seeping with green, pink, and yellow mist. "Do we know where we are?"

"I assume you mean something more specific than 'Ifeen.'" Jim rose to his feet and stumbled through the cockpit doorway. "Nothing that relies on the main power works right now. We're gonna have to do some tinkering to get it back on. I doubt there's any Berlalarian lightning around to resurrect us this time."

"We've been crashing too often lately..." said Liz, turning her head toward the doorway.

What the fuck gave that away? thought Watson.

"...The ship just dies on us and we're forced to fall. You think it has something to do with the cerulean matter?"

Jim reemerged from the door and leaned on the frame. "They usually just charge the grav-engines. Right now the whole ship is out."

"Yeah, but they can get a bit ornery when they age. Maybe that's affecting everything else. When was the last time we put some new ones in?"

"Won't know that until the power comes back on. The records are in my terminal. But I do know that it's been awhile."

Liz set the canister aside. "We have extras, don't we?"

"Enough to change them both out just once. I suppose it could help."

"Let's start there, then. Hopefully it works. If that doesn't do it, it's your turn to devise some other fixer-upper plan."

Jim made his way down to the lower level while Liz went to the engine room. The blue glow coming from the windows in the engines was weak. That was definitely a sign that the cerulean matter needed to be changed. It wasn't a job that needed to be done often, but whenever it did, Liz hated it. It wasn't a dirty job, it wasn't a boring job. It was simply a you-could-die-if-you-do-this-wrong job. Jim hated it too, but he kept his opinions of it better hidden.

Just like the broken door to the conference room, Liz pulled on a small handle in the wall to manually initiate the changing of the matter. A panel popped open. After sliding that away, Liz was met with two large vertical levers. One vented out the left engine, the other vented the right. Liz grabbed ahold of the first and pulled as hard as she could. When the lever finally moved down about three inches, the ship sighed a deep, heavy sigh. The gush of energy could be heard, escaping through a series of outlets until it fled through the top of the hull. Liz held the lever steady, less concerned about opening it further and more concerned about just keeping it open until everything was released. The effort made her arms tremble after about only ten seconds and her face feel hot after about twenty, but by then the deep sigh had fizzled into nothing. When it became absolutely quiet from above, she released the lever. It snapped back into place and Liz set her hands on the second lever, repeating the process.