Story Electra - [Chronicles of the One-Eyed Man #5]

[Hippin_in_Hawaii 639]

 

 

Electra

Electra strained to reach just a few centimeters more. Her body was jammed tight into the twisted crawl-way; she tried not to think about the tons of cargo pressing down on the buckled floor she was squeezing underneath. If a structural support were to fail...squish! No more El!

Just a little bit more, and she could clamp the test lead onto the tertiary backup regulator’s ground feed. Exhaling, and ignoring the claustrophobic darkness, she strained forward, using her extended fingertips to guide herself. There!

“Got it,” she tried to yell, but lacked the lung capacity.

“Good. Hang on,” came Pan’s muffled voice from outside. At least Pan had good ears! “Right, that’s a negative. No continuity. And no surprise.”

“Get me out, please,” whispered El. That was all the volume she could muster, but she felt hands clamp around her ankles and start to pull. A few seconds later, she was lying on the ground, with Pan on one side and Art on the other.

“Gods, that was tight,” she whimpered, savoring the sun on her face and the feeling of unimpeded respiration. El wasn’t exactly claustrophobic, but that had been an alarmingly tight fit and a potentially dangerous situation. To say she was quite relieved to be outside was an understatement.

“So, that makes it perfect, yes?” asked Art rhetorically.

“Yes, sir, that makes it perfect. We have confirmed one hundred percent failure on the power distribution system. There is no way to get juice to any system on the ship.” El didn’t need to say it out loud; all three of them had known the likely result before they’d spent two days testing. Now it was official, though. No motors, no electrical system, and a severely compromised airframe. The quad was dead.

They took a minute to sit there in companionable misery.

“She was a good ship,” commented Pan.

“Yes, she was,” agreed Art.

“Do you think it was one of us?” asked El, voicing the thought she was sure everyone shared.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, which stretched on and on. El finally couldn’t take the quiet and answered her own question. “I can’t imagine one of us reckless enough to cripple all four motors while in full flight. If one of us wanted to kill everyone aboard, we’d have better options. Sabotaging the air system strikes me as pretty effective. If one of us wanted to force the plane down, if the plan were to force an emergency landing, there are easier ways as well, ways that don’t destroy the craft. Just lighting a small rubbish fire in the cargo bay would have triggered emergency protocols and we’d have landed; we all know that. We’re all aviators. Our lives are about keeping the ships safe. None of us wants to die tumbling to the ground. No, whoever did this, I think they didn’t know very much about flying. They were smart enough to unearth a flaw in a time-tested system, but not smart enough to realize the extent to which the craft would be damaged.”

The silence returned, but didn’t seem so oppressive now.

“I think I agree with you,” said Pan. “Plus, we’ve been together through so much, I don’t see one of us trying to hurt the others.”

“I see it the same,” said Art. “Which leaves us with a problem.”

“By my count,” interrupted Pan, “it leaves us with eight problems.”

“And by my count, it gives us one strong advantage,” said El. “We know we can trust each other.”

They sat there for a while, each lost in their own thoughts.

“Now what, Cap?” asked Pan.

“Let’s go talk to Apollo,” sighed Art.

Apollo looked like an Apollo. Tall, fit, handsome, blonde. A man born to command. He and Hep, his aide, were in the camp, tending to half-a-dozen small fires, each of which was (hopefully) burning a root cluster down to ground level. There was a real shortage of flat ground here, and the two nights they’d spend sleeping on it had not been restful.

“Ah, the air crew,” said Apollo, greeting them as they returned. “Coffee? The water should be boiling by now. The pot’s ready to go.” He gestured towards the official campfire, which differed from the root fires only in that it had a pot suspended above it, dangling from a tripod of metal legs.

Art squatted down to pour the boiling water into the coffee pot, then sat on a fireside log. Pan and El also took seats around the fire.

“Might as well have lunch while we’re all here,” said Apollo. “Who wants what?”

“I’ll take crap,” said EL.

“Spew,” chorused Pan and Art.

“Crap for me,” called out Hep, tossing a few more sticks on one of the fires before joining them.

“Two craps, two spews, and I think I’ll take the barf,” said Apollo, rummaging through a storage bin. “Right, here we go, gourmet meals all around!”

Everyone pulled the heating tabs on their meals and placed them on the ground to warm. Art wrapped a rag around the handle of the coffee pot and began to pour, filling each mug about half full before passing it to his right.

As they sat, blowing on the steaming hot coffee, waiting on the food packets to warm, Apollo spoke again.

“I suppose there’s nothing new to report?”

Art looked at El. “Tell him the good news, El.”

Apollo looked at her expectantly. El tried to take a sip of coffee, burned her lips, then set the mug carefully on the ground. “Well, sir, we have successfully completed the last test. We can now report with certainty that the power distribution grid is one hundred percent broken. Every fusable link burned; every breaker overloaded and destroyed. The numerous electrical fires that broke out when the surge hit destroyed much of the wiring and inline components within the crawl-ways and conduits.

“As we told you earlier, the motors are garbage. When the stator locks tried to engage, they were sheared off by the rotors. The shrapnel of those hardened-steel bolts, trapped inside a motor spinning at around 400 RPM, effectively shredded them to scrap."

“The airframe took a hell of a pounding as we tree-surfed our way to this final resting place. The frame is twisted in numerous directions, the outer skin is torn, and the paint job is completely ruined.”

There were chuckles from around the circle.

“The good news,” continued El, “if there is good news, is that the major components should all be intact. The fusion generator is still operating, the flight computer and network systems should be intact. Even the comm. system core should be fine, ignoring the fact that we scraped all the dishes off the hull as we slid in.

“What we have here, sir, is one heckuva spare parts store.”

Apollo nodded. “Which is what you promised me two days ago. And what we now know to be true. Well done, soldiers. And the cargo?”

“They’re tanks, sir. They’re designed to be abused. They did come loose and rattle around a bit, as you can see,” she waved at a tank-shaped bulge in the lower fuselage. “A quick visual inspection suggests they’re just fine, although also in need of being repainted.”

“And we still cannot access them?”

Art took this one. “Sir, they were code-locked after being loaded on the transport. Those codes are safely inside the operations computer. Without them, even if we were to physically access the tanks, we couldn’t get them operational. If there’s a work-around for that, the tankers would know it. We sure don’t.”

“Neither do I, Captain,” murmured Apollo. “So, unless and until members of the tank crews find us, this is as good as it gets?”

Everyone exchanged glances. “Sure look that way, sir,” said Art. “But all of the provisions and emergency survival gear survived. We could survive here for months, even without foraging.”

Apollo nodded. “Yes, we could. But those soldiers out there, they’re alone with the contents of their backpacks. What can we do help them? I want ideas, people!”

“Signal fire,” said Hep. “Giant bonfire, day and night, with lots of green material to generate smoke.”

“We’ve talked about that,” sighed Pan. “The jungle canopy is so thick, they’re not likely to be able to see it until they’re on top of it.”

“What we need,” said El thoughtfully, “is a directional radio pulse. Something they can track with their NetHands.”

“We’ve been doing that,” said Art, waving at the NetHand tied to a stick in the middle of camp. “But it’s got no range.”

“Electra?” prompted Apollo quietly.

“The radio transmitter in the quad should still be good. We lost the antenna, which means its range will be crippled. It also means that the unit will fry itself if we run it at full strength. But we could attach the antenna lead to the skin of the transport, use that as a dummy load. That should protect the electronics…”

She drifted off, murmuring to herself. Apollo was about to prompt her again, but Art raised a hand to stop him, then put a finger to his lips. Apollo nodded, settled back on his log, and blew on his coffee.

“...too much mass, nothing would radiate, but we could pull cables and run them over tree branches. Wouldn’t be efficient, but…

“...need a regulator. Could take one of the auxiliary feed from the genny, but still need a regulator…”

El’s eyes closed, and her breathing deepened. Pan and Art carefully stood up, taking their food and coffee with them. Pan nodded to the others; Apollo and Hep followed suit. Art led them to a root fire on the far edge of camp, sitting down on the ground.

“She does this,” Art explained. “I swear, that woman knows more about most systems than the people who designed them. She’ll drift off into this trance, and come back out of it with some profound insight or other.”

They slowly consumed their meals.

“Worst case scenario, how far away are the others?” asked Apollo.

Art chewed thoughtfully. “Worst case, a hundred clicks. My best guess is half that, though.”

“So fifty clicks, pathfinding through a jungle, with no GPS guidance, and no way of finding us,” mused Apollo.

Art nodded.

“Optimistically, figure ten clicks a day. If they knew where they were going, they would get here in three more days.” Apollo turned to Hep. “Take charge of prepping the signal fire. We’ll light that up the day after tomorrow, and commit to keeping it going for a week. There’s not much chance it will help, but that’s the same as saying there’s a small chance it will help. Let’s do everything we can.”

As everyone nodded in agreement, El came jogging up.

“Excellent idea, sir!” she chirped to Apollo. “If we don’t mind losing a little sleep, we can have it up and running by sunrise, I should think!”

“El, where’s your food?” asked Art.

“Oh, um, I…” she looked around, confused.

“Here, sit down, take this,” he said, handing her the last of his meal. “Now, remind us all, what was the major’s great idea?”

El shovelled a sporkful of food into her mouth. “Mpph rf thess grshs.”

Art chuckled and shook his head.

El swallowed. “We use the onboard radio transmitter to send a location pulse!”

Apollo looked puzzled. “I thought we couldn’t make use of any of the systems. Something about power distribution?”

El laughed. “Well, sure, not any of the real systems. But the radio is simple. All we need is twenty-four volts DC. We can tap one of the auxiliary outputs from the fusion plant, pull the power regulator from the water pump in the restroom, and use that to charge the radio’s backup battery. It’ll be slow, but we can probably emit two full-powered pulses a day.

“Of course, the power wasn’t the hard part. Without an antenna, the radio would just barbeque itself on the first pulse. But we can pull wiring out of the fuselage and drape it through the trees. The heavier gauge feeds would work best, but after the fires we had, we’ll have to work with what we can find. If we can get enough, all soldered together, and drape it through the trees, we’ll get a functional antenna. We won’t be able to call home, but we can generate a simple pulse that should reach a couple of hundred kilometers.

“We can call them home! Great idea, sir!”

Apollo nodded. “Thanks, El. Glad I could help.”

Pan, Art, and Hep all chuckled.

“Very well, Electra,” continued Apollo. “Finish your meal and then put us to work. Hep, hold off on that signal fire until we get this done. Everybody, eat up. We’ve got a job to do!”

 

Mahalo (thank you) for reading; I hope you enjoyed! This story is part of a series. Information on the series, and links to the other stories, can be found here.

[kaisdf 3,320]

Wow, love it!

[Person_Random 4,991]

Enjoyable story!  I really enjoyed the feeling of camaraderie you can get from the characters' interactions... makes me remember the good times of summer.

[P.4.R.K.O.U.R 329]

Epic story! You've got me hooked to this series, will have to come back later for the sequel. Looking forward to it!

 

On a side note, sorry for leaving the Anthology thing without informing. I decided not to hang on in there if I wasn't going to be active or write anything.