“Nothing to worry about,” he assured her. “Please accompany me to the bridge, Yeoman.” He gestured chivalrously. “After you.”
She just looked more puzzled. “Er, the bridge is that way, sir.”
“Of course it is.” He smacked his forehead in mock dismay. “That rollover must have spun me around a bit. Maybe you’d better lead the way, just in case.”
He spoke lightly, trying to palm it off as a joke. Did Kirk josh around with his crew like this? Shaun hoped so.
“Aye, sir,” she said, a trifle uncomfortably. “This way.”
Pushing off from the ceiling, she led him down the busy hallway to a bright red door that opened to reveal some sort of elevator compartment. They floated into the elevator, which impressed Shaun with its size and convenience. Back on the Lewis & Clark, they had gotten by with just ladders and hatches. Then again, there had been a lot less territory to traverse on his old ship. For all he knew, it was quite a hike from here to the bridge.
The door closed behind them. Voss looked expectantly at him, and Shaun wondered what he was supposed to do. After an awkward moment, she took hold of a handle jutting from a rail at waist level. It chirped at her touch.
“Bridge,” she announced.
The elevator surged into motion. Voice-operated, he noted. I’ll have to remember that, assuming I stick around much longer.
The trip was short and smooth. Within minutes, the elevator came to a stop, and the door whooshed open. “Here we are, sir,” she said, unable to look him in the eye. Shaun hoped he wasn’t hurting the captain’s reputation among his crew too much.
Sorry about that, Kirk. Then again, who knows what you’re doing on my ship right now?
Two hundred fifty years ago, that is.
Before he could exit the elevator, the gravity came back without warning. He dropped deftly onto his feet, avoiding a clumsy fall. Voss stumbled slightly but managed to land on her feet, too. He grabbed her arm to steady her.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Anytime, Yeoman.” He flashed what he hoped was a winning smile. “Time to put our best foot forward.”
He strode onto the bridge.
Twenty-four
2020
“So, is this it?” Zoe asked. “Are we screwed?”
“Not on your life,” Kirk said. He had never believed in no-win scenarios, and he wasn’t about to start now. “We still have five hours to take back the ship.”
“Er, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re locked up in maximum security.”
“Hardly.” He glanced around the compartment. “This is an airlock, not a brig. It wasn’t built to keep people in.” He inspected the hatch leading back into the habitat module, while mentally reviewing the specs he had studied earlier. “In theory, there should be a manual override.”
She shook her head. “You disabled it, remember?”
Not really, Kirk thought. He assumed that Shaun had done so when the stowaway was first discovered. It made sense. Shaun and Fontana would have made sure that Zoe couldn’t open the airlock on her own. I would have done the same thing.
But he had more than two centuries of scientific expertise on these early astronauts. Perhaps there was some way to take advantage of that. His gaze fell on Zoe’s smart tablet, which she had been allowed to keep in her cell. “Give me that device of yours.”
She batted the tablet over to him. “Why? What are you up to?”
“Wait and see.”
A tool chest on one wall contained the equipment that the crew used on their extravehicular activities. Kirk used a zero-g screwdriver to pry loose the casing at the back of the tablet, exposing the crude silicon circuitry. Its wireless capacity had also been disabled, he noted, but he might be able to remedy that. The only question was whether he could do so in time with the primitive tools at his disposal, as well as making the necessary improvements to its programming.
Spock could do this blindfolded with chopsticks, he thought. Too bad he’s not here.
Zoe watched over his shoulder as he tinkered with circuits. Needing additional components, he cannibalized the headphones in a spare “Snoopy cap.” He was reluctant to pillage the EVA gear but didn’t see any other option. Everything depended on giving Zoe’s tablet a twenty-third-century upgrade.
“Wow!” she murmured. “Who knew you were MacGyver in disguise?”
He didn’t get the reference but assumed that it was a compliment.
“Hand me those magnifying lenses,” he requested.
“Yes, Doctor.” She passed him the lenses like a nurse in sickbay. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Improvising.”
Sweat beaded on his brow as he struggled with the archaic equipment. The lack of proper tools frustrated him. Time ticked by agonizingly, and he would have traded an entire ringful of dilithium crystals for one good laser solderer. His mind flashed back to that time in the Great Depression when Spock had managed to modify a tricorder using far more obsolete materials than these. He smiled tightly, encouraged by the memory. If Spock could put together a working mnemonic memory circuit out of nothing but “stone knives and bearskins,” then he should be able to hot-wire a twenty-first-century computer tablet using NASA hardware.
Or so he kept telling himself.
“Almost there,” he muttered.
A sudden impact shook the airlock. A metallic bang sounded as if it was coming from right outside the ship. The signal light above the inner hatchway went out.
Uh-oh, Kirk thought. That could be trouble.
“Yikes!” Zoe dropped a screwdriver, which drifted slowly toward the floor. “What was that?”
“The rings,” Kirk guessed. It was the only plausible explanation for the impact. “The ship must be passing through the rings. An iceberg slammed into the hull.”
Smaller impacts buffeted the hull, like hail pounding against a tin roof. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Klondike system, with its unstable rings, but Saturn’s rings had their own share of hazards if you were suicidal enough to brave them, which O’Herlihy clearly was. Praying that none of the collisions would breach the hull, Kirk listened tensely for an alarm. When no siren sounded, he assumed that the ship’s tough titanium skin had withstood the storm for now.
“Sounds like we’re okay,” he told Zoe. “That first bang must not have been big enough to sink us.”
“You sure about that? ’Cause it sounded damn big to me.”
“Yes,” he had to agree. “It did.”
The collision was an unwelcome reminder that they were running out of time. Even if they survived their periodic passages through the churning rings, Saturn’s ferocious atmosphere still waited to crush the fragile spaceship to a pulp. Hurricane winds would whip the shattered fragments around the planet at speeds exceeding a thousand kilometers per hour. And then, of course, there was the danger of burning up in reentry.
Granted, history had recorded no such disaster, but perhaps he had changed history already just by being there. There were too many unknown variables. He couldn’t count on the Lewis & Clark surviving as it had under Shaun Christopher’s command.
“Start getting into one of those spacesuits,” he ordered Zoe. “Just in case.”
She hurried over to where the suits hung on the wall. “How come?”
If they lost their atmosphere, he wanted her pre-pared. A spacesuit would buy her precious time.
“Just do it,” he said, “and hurry.”
She didn’t argue with him. “Hey, if you were into cosplay, you just needed to ask.”