Conflagration

"We're Gonna Die."

On board the disabled hardpointer, Erin and Lyssa had no idea what was going on out in space.

The first thing Lyssa noticed as she floated into the dark engine room was how silent it was getting. By this point, even momentum was beginning to fail and the three engines' main cores were winding themselves down. They would continue to spin for the next several minutes, but by the time Lyssa could get fuel and ignition restored, the engine cores would have lost too much speed. Restarting the engines was going to require a burst of energy from the APU, but getting the Auxiliary Power Unit back online meant getting it's control computer and the plane's battery bus back online first. Lyssa had her work cut out for her and she had limited time. Here's where we separate the women from the boys.

The second thing that Lyssa noticed was that every one of the hundred-or-so circuit breakers on the main panel was popped out. She had never seen them all popped at once. Nothing she tried was going to work as long as those breakers were popped, so she made that her first priority.

"Check your breaker panel up there!" she shouted to make herself heard way up in the cockpit. "Push in any breakers that's popped!"

"Okay!" Erin shouted back. A few seconds later: "They're all popped!"

"So push 'em in!"

The next minute was taken up by frantically pushing in all those breakers. Click-click-click-click-click. She clicked circuit breakers into place as fast as she could. By the time she clicked the last one home, her thumbs felt like they were on fire. She barely noticed. Her mind was already racing ahead to the next task. The only breaker left to click back into place was the big master breaker, but she held off on that one.

"All your breakers in?!" she shouted to Erin.

"Almost! My fingers are killing me!" Erin shouted back.

"Pussy!" Lyssa shouted. "Once those are all in, pull the control card out of the flight computer and let me know when that's done!"

"Roger that!"

The next thing Lyssa needed to do was get power to the Battery Control Unit, the small computer that controlled the plane's main batteries. There was probably still power in the plane's batteries, but without the BCU, she couldn't use that stored power. In other words, she needed power to get power. And she had a good idea where she could get some. She stepped over to the other side of the engine room and began rifling through the tool box and supply drawers, only peripherally aware that she was no longer floating. As the plane began to encounter the atmosphere and bounce back into space, its changing direction was pulling her to the floor, simulating a sort of microgravity. Time was short. She had to hurry.

"Control card's out! We're starting to bounce! Hurry up!" Erin shouted back from the cockpit.

"Don't put that card back in until I tell you to!"

"Roger that!"

Roger that? Pilots love their jargon. Lyssa rolled her eyes as she rummaged through the drawers. Finally, she found what she was looking for: a coil of small-gauge wire about three meters long. It wasn't rated for the 40 amps she needed it to carry. Normally, she wouldn't use wire this small, but it was all she had. She'd either get the BCU running or she'd set the engine room on fire.

Under normal circumstances, it would be impossible to boot up the BCU without a command input from the plane's main computer, but the main computer wouldn't run without power. That's normally fine when the main computer can draw its power from the engines, the APU, or when it's plugged in to station power. It's not so good when the batteries are the only source of power available. Lyssa decided that if she ever met the engineer that designed this system, she'd punch him in the butthole.