“It isn’t the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”
Yili remembered the old joke, and while it was funny when you were sitting around a table in the officer’s mess, it wasn’t quite as reassuring when you were trying to get your breath back after falling nearly twenty feet.
The one thing Yili could be thankful for was the fact she apparently hadn’t done any further physical damage. If her feet or ankles were broken, she couldn’t feel them. She could move. She could use her hands and for whatever reason, it was a little easier to see while laying on the opposite bulkhead. Above, she could see the breach in the corvette hull. The boat had apparently hit the surface at about a seventy degree roll to port. The starboard hull was above ground. The rest of the ship was beneath the surface. The structure appeared to be intact, but Yili knew she couldn’t rely on assumptions.
The engineer knew something had to be done about her feet or she wasn’t going to survive. Crawling from bulkhead to bulkhead in near freezing temperatures wasn’t going to do anything except hasten her oxygen deficiency and fatigue.
Yili needed heat and air, and she needed to re-establish some kind of structural integrity for Copernicus One. From there, she could work towards a solution to the bigger problems, like the location of her crew.
Then it hit her.
If her commlink was simply drained of power, she had a solution. She drew one of her blasters and laid it on the lower bulkhead so it was within her field of view. She slid the baselock out from under the primary energy transfer unit and pulled the grip loose. After a few more switches, locks and frameworks were detached, her weapon’s energy pack clattered to the floor. Yili was once again thankful, as she had something to focus on that didn’t remind her how much her right side hurt. She picked up the energy pack and examined it. Sure enough, it had a universal conduit at its base. Yili detached her commlink from her uniform, turned it over and connected it to the weapon’s energy pack.
The commlink’s indicator lights cycled three times, signaling the unit was now drawing a new charge directly from the weapon’s pack. Yili did some quick calculations, recalling the capacity of the standard Skywatch commlink and her twin Mustang Mark Fifteen heavy blasters. It wasn’t likely to take more than ten minutes to restore enough power to the commlink to transmit and monitor local area communications channels. Subspace was going to take more work. Yili decided the best approach was to just take her time. To be fair, she didn’t have much else to do anyway.
The next priorities were heat and air. The engineer drew her other blaster and examined the nearby bulkhead, looking for the closest primary hull support. She knew the structure as well as anyone else aboard DSS Argent. The main supports were constructed out of an alloy dense enough to resist disruption from something as small as a hand-held weapon, but also constructed such that they would absorb most of the latent heat from blaster fire.
In other words, they would make fine heating elements if combined with an energy source like the one in the engineer’s hand.
Yili rolled back so the shoulder she was using to support herself could steady her firing hand. She aimed at the nearest bulkhead support, rested her knuckles against the wall and opened fire. Each yellow-white bolt of energy filled the relatively dark chamber with a flash of stark light. Impact points superheated the solid metal column only a few feet away. Sparks and unstable energy exploded from the painted surface again and again, each time leaving a larger and larger scorch mark. After a half-dozen shots, the underlying alloy began to glow dimly, first with a burnt orange hue, and then with a more intense orange-yellow glow. It took Yili sixteen shots, but finally the metal was energized enough to not only be emitting a soothing orange light in the aft chamber, but also to be radiating a comforting heat.
Chief Engineer Curtiss hadn’t realized how cold she was until the sustained heat from the bulkhead began to warm her extremities. She shivered involuntarily and tried to inch closer to the heated metal. It wasn’t exactly a campfire, but it was a lot better than gradually freezing in the darkness of the corvette’s aft chamber.
She reached back to find her energy pack and recharging commlink. According to the readout, she would be back on the air in less than four minutes.