“ Earth?” He croaked.
“ Captain, please! Get some rest!”
He glared at her, getting his message across without words. Kira shook her head and sat down. “Fine, but the longer you fight recovery, the longer Tarn’s going to try to figure out a way to run this ship.”
Her ploy worked, making Sharp’s gaze jump over to Tarn. Tarn jerked as well, then sent a scowl Kira’s eye. “Captain! I never once-“
“ Sir, there’s nothing in this system large enough to slingshot us back towards the Core worlds,” Kira interrupted. “Our speed is too great. Given our remaining pusher’s status and our fuel level, we won’t be able to slow down nearly enough. We need a gas giant. The star is nearly identical to Earth’s, only younger. If we had more fuel we could establish an orbit around it and head back, but with what we have we’d have to veer in too close to it and the Mule’s not built for that level of heat and radiation. We still might make it, but the odds are bad and a single solar flare would end it.”
Sharp grunted, then motioned for Tarn to help him stand. He gained his feet, sweat breaking out on his brow as he did so. Kira felt herself aching for him, knowing the agony he had to be enduring and the incredible willpower it must have taken for him to function that way. “Get some rest Captain, I’ll figure something out for you by the time you’re ready.”
He stared at her a long moment. Kira steeled herself, knowing that she had to show him she was confident. She was confident, at least in the area of knowing that she had an idea. It was dangerous, but not as dangerous as trying to use the star’s gravity well. It was also probably a permanent solution, but one that she felt she could live with.
Kira stayed on the bridge, rerunning her calculations and rechecking her sensor readings. The planet was still eight days away, plenty of time for the rest of the crew to be back to feeling like human beings again.
Chapter 15
“ You want to what!”
Kira had braced herself, but the volume and intensity coming from Sharp’s outraged question caused his voice to crack. She forced the wince off her face as she met his angry gaze. “Sir, we’ve been broadcasting for nine years now. We’ve got three days until we need to make a decision, and that would still put us at six days until we reach our destination because we’d be slowing down. Nine days to broadcast a new message, indicating where we are, what we’ve found, and…well, whatever else we’ve got left.”
“ Why bother, there’ll be nothing left of us!”
“ Captain, I’ve run every possible scenario I can come up with and a few suggested by others. This is the only one that has any chance of success.”
“ We could bypass the system entirely and stay on the ship.”
“ Aye, we could, but at our speed we’d almost certainly stay ahead of any rescuers that attempted to come after us. Sir, with all due respect, I don’t want to die marooned on the Rented Mule.”
Sharp’s eyes narrowed. He waited until Kira realized he was expecting her to go on. “So we rotate the ship and use the pusher to slow us down. Using the last of our reserves we can get to. 29C. That leaves us with only our thrusters, which will produce a lot more immediate thrust but will run out quicker. My simulations show those are best saved for once we enter the atmosphere to help us maneuver and slow us down. The planet has a lot of water so if we can use the atmosphere and our thrusters for breaking we can land in the water and have a reasonable chance of surviving.”
“ Land? You mean crash,” Tarn muttered.
“ Crash land,” Kira corrected. “The engines will be on line and the inertial suppressor as well. An impact like that will override it, but by diverting all of our power to it at the last second it shows a decent chance of not being smeared against the floor. That much power will require the overrides be thrown though, and the inertial suppressor will be destroyed by the overload.”
“ What kind of chances?”
Kira felt her heart leap in her chest. By asking that question she knew he was considering it. “Better than one in three, Sir. If the timing is right on everything.”
“ Then what? The Mule’s not that kind of boat. This ship is rated at forty thousand tons, and we’re carrying another eight thousand in cargo. If we survive a splash-down then we’ll sit on the bottom and watch the water come pouring in.”
“ Sir, the course I’ve plotted maximizes our thrusters to put us at an angle. We’ll definitely hit and hit hard, but we should come to a rest near a shore. Hopefully not too deep so we can get out. Maybe even try to modify one of the mining surveyors to help us get out of here and to shore.”
“ You’re crazy,” Sharp growled.
“ Yes, Sir,” Kira admitted with a nod. “Crazy and not ready to die, Sir.”
“ You got anything better?” Sharp turned, addressing the others that were gathered on the bridge. Nobody spoke, though Tarn was fidgeting. The Captain swore then shook his head. “I’ll think about it. Until then, come up with something better!”
Sharp left the bridge. Eric sent Jeff off to check on the engines. Tarn hunched over his station, ignoring the rest of them. Kira looked on until Eric let out a pent up breath and turned to her. “You really think this is going to work?”
She reached out from where she sat and took his hand in hers. “It’s this or we drift through space forever. The odds of us coming close to another system are long, and even worse that it happens before we run out of time.”
“ We could go into a cold sleep again,” Eric said with a shudder.
Kira shook her head. “We could, but we’d need a few weeks of getting ourselves to full health or we probably wouldn’t survive it. Our food will only last so long.”
“ The ship’s got recycling systems.”
Kira knew her sour expression conveyed her thoughts of eating anything recycled. Eric nodded in agreement. “Yeah, as if the powders aren’t bad enough some days. Okay, so what are our odds?”
“ Depends on how the ship can handle the stress and how good our engineer is,” she smiled at him. “I think we’ve got the best engineer to be found outside of the Core worlds, so I’m feeling pretty good about it.”
Eric frowned. “Best engineer outside of the Rim worlds, maybe, but that’s because I may be one of the only ones dumb or unlucky enough to be out here.”
Kira squeezed his hand. “Stop that. I’m learning a lot about myself these days and it turns out I’m a lot tougher and a lot more capable than I ever thought I was. I know you are too.”
Eric chuckled. “You’re a special case.”
She shrugged it off. “The computer gives us about a one in ten chance of survival.”
“ Ten percent!” Eric hissed. They both turned to Tarn but he seemed to engrossed in whatever he was doing at his station to notice them. “You told the Captain-“
“ One in ten is if the computer handles everything and we just enjoy the ride,” Kira said. “Autopilot on the way in and everything. With me flying and you controlling the power our odds are better.”
“ From one in ten to one in three?” His expression showed his skepticism.
“ Yes, the computer can’t override safety limits.”
Eric snorted. “For good reasons!”
“ The Mule’s never going to fly again,” Kira said in an even lower voice. She glanced around, feeling as though she was talking about the ship behind its back. “We just need the hull to remain sealed, the thrusters to be operational until we’re out of fuel, and the inertial suppressor to work for one last kick. We can overload them when we need them to increase our odds. If it breaks them, oh well, we won’t be needing them anymore.”
Eric winced but said nothing in response. Finally he nodded, then glanced at Tarn again. “So we’ll be stranded on an undiscovered planet that your sensors indicate supports life. Is there any life already on it?”
Kira’s hopeful smile faded. “Some. I mean there’s oxygen, water, nitrogen, carbon, and other elements that result from living creatures. I can’t pick up any evidence of electronic emissions or man-made elements.”