“I don’t know, something just blew up.” The air seemed to be hissing louder now, as if the leak had gotten bigger.
“Is everyone all right?” Ethan called. Anxious murmurs answered him, except for Angelyn, who said, “Ladhi fell, I think she’s hurt.”
“It’s just a little blood,” she said, her voice woozy.
Elzabeth exclaimed, “No, you’re gushing!”
My rushed breaths fogged the inside of my air mask. Had to calm down. Had to look after the shuttle. I couldn’t tell what the automatic systems were doing.
“Polly, please tell me you’re still there, what’s happening?” Ms. Andrews demanded.
“There’s been an explosion. We’ve lost rear thrusting engine, we’ve started rolling.” Momentum kept us moving forward, but it didn’t keep us stable. The horizon outside the view port was slowly tilting.
Charles put a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped. He caught my gaze and frowned. The twin telepathy worked just fine then because I knew exactly what he was thinking: Stanton hadn’t just drugged the pilots—she’d sabotaged the whole shuttle.
“How are we going to get out of this one?” I asked.
“One step at a time. What’s traffic control say?” He nodded at the headset.
Ms. Andrews was talking. “You know where the lateral-thruster control is?”
“Yeah.”
“Lean on that baby, stabilize the roll.”
The lateral-thruster control was a lever on a square patch of control panel, lined up with several other levers—all controlling various thrusters that could get the shuttle pointed in any direction. I shifted it opposite the roll, hoping it worked.
The horizon line outside matched up with what the sensor display was telling me: we were still rolling.
“Ma’am, I think the thrusters are out completely,” I said.
“Polly … everyone in the lifeboat … listen close…” Static had started creeping into the communication, drowning out her voice.
I held the headset close to my mouth as if that would help. “Control, can you repeat that? I think something’s gone wrong with our antenna, or the power, or something.”
“Roger that, Polly. You need … gain enough altitude … safely launch the lifeboat … under the instrument … open panel … bypass main fuel line…”
I had to figure out what she meant from half the instructions. I heard stuff going on in the passenger cabin, spared a glance at Charles, who was directing people—getting them into the lifeboat, helping them with the two unconscious pilots. I could feel air rushing out of the cabin now. My ears were popping, and my eyes felt dried-out and watery. Meanwhile, I listened as hard as I could, asked Ms. Andrews to repeat instructions, and I figured it out.
We weren’t going to make it to the base with the shuttle falling to pieces, so we had to abandon ship. We needed at least a kilometer in altitude for the lifeboat to launch safely. We’d been slowly descending on the approach to Tranquillity and were now too low, about seven hundred meters, and dropping. Not far to go. Unless your thrusters were giving out.
Under the instrument board was a panel, easy enough to unhook and remove. This provided access to the actual guts of the ship, a mass of cables and wires that let the flight crew communicate with the rest of the shuttle. So many cables and wires. I was supposed to learn all this in flight school, not now. But Andrews talked me through it. There was a switch under here, a mechanical rather than electronic switch in case power went out, that would physically bypass the damaged fuel system and bring a backup system online.
White smoke was curling up from under the panel, and sparks jumped. The static on the line was getting worse—our antenna was also losing power, I guessed, and couldn’t transmit the signal to my headset anymore.
“Ms. Andrews? Ma’am?”
“Pol … come in … are you … Po…”
Then nothing. But I had her instructions, I had the switch.
The slow roll had turned us on our side; I was braced against the copilot seat with my arms in the guts of the instrument panel. I didn’t know how everyone else was doing; I couldn’t take the time to look. But no one was screaming, so I assumed everything was okay. Okay as it could be, which meant people strapping into the lifeboat.
I turned the switch for the power bypass. The whole shuttle rattled as thrusters roared on. A short scream from the back as someone got knocked off balance. I jumped up to the maneuvering controls to get us pointed up, away from the surface. Outside the view port, the black of space spread out before us. Good.
Then we started spinning. Not a slow roll—a corkscrew. I fell, smashed up against the back of the cabin, then into the tops of the chairs. I grabbed hold of the pilot chair and worked against the centrifugal force to pull myself back to the instrument panel, got thrusters going in the opposite direction to counter the spin. Didn’t stop it completely, but slowed it, so it was time to cut the thrusters and let inertia carry us on. I had to find the switch by feel. It was sticky, as if something held it in place, but I managed to get it switched back. With the bypass off, the power cut out again, and the thrusters died. That was okay, because we were pointed up now. In a couple of seconds we’d be high enough to launch the lifeboat. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about it.
“What was that?” Ethan demanded.