The bridge crew were sweating bullets. Jerri didn’t know where the captain was. She didn’t see much of the captain these days. They were probably off doing important captain things, taking calls from other captains, mostly. Thinking captain thoughts. Not noticing that the Audacity was about to be pummeled into space dust if they weren’t very careful.
At the sight of her appearance, the pilot got the hell out of the way. Gunner was a solid pilot. Could land the Audacity anywhere. But he wasn’t a deep space navigator. He wasn’t rated for this kind of encounter, and judging by the dark spot on the front of his trousers, he didn’t have the nerve for it either.
Jerri slid into the helm seat, Slurpee in one hand. She had to keep the other empty for rapid tapping in coordinates. She was taking manual control of the ship, using the sensor array atop the beast to get a sense of where the bigger, more expansive asteroids were. That meant her burrito had to sit in her dressing gown pocket. That was fine. She didn’t mind. If things got really hairy, the Slurpee might have to go in the other pocket. That was why dressing gowns had two pockets.
“Alright, let’s survive this shit show, shall we?”
There was no reply. Everybody was terrified into silence as heavy asteroids rained fire around them. Most of the crew of the Audacity had something to live for, and these events threatened those plans.
“This is why I need time on the holobay, you knobs,” she muttered under her breath.
The secret to surviving an asteroid storm wasn’t to try to dodge asteroids, precisely. That was close to impossible, and it was the sort of job a computer could have done on its own. Surviving situations like these were more art and intuition than hard science. You had to anticipate things that simply weren’t there a moment or two ago. Flow state. That’s what it was about. Being able to take in all the information her brain usually filtered out and synthesize it into a recipe for survival.
“Give me manual control. Give me the stick,” she said, taking a quick drag from her Slurpee. The helmsmen and women used touch screens most of the time, but she needed something more tactile.
Someone in the back did as she asked. A thick stick rose from the floor along with two sets of pedals. She grasped the stick in both hands, and slid her feet onto the pedals.
“Hold on!” She shouted the words with a good amount of glee.
“All crew to secure themselves in the nearest restraints.” Commander Engbert, the head of security made the announcement while clinging to his station with white knuckles.
If the crew knew anything about anything they would already have been in their restraints the moment the call went out for Tessil to report to the bridge.
The shields were reverberating with asteroid strikes almost constantly now. She wasn’t surprised by that. They never called for her unless the only other option was dying in a fireball.
Her feet worked the pedals and her arms worked the stick with an easy agility that made the Audacity respond in exciting new ways. Usually the ship felt like a big heavy boat schlumpfing along through space. When Jerri took control of the Audacity, it felt like it had some real fucking audacity. The ship hit space like space owed it money, and it moved like a stripper on a pole. Hot. Sexy. More than a little dangerous.
When she flew she never paid attention to anybody or anything besides herself and the ship. This time she had a vague sense of Atlas’s presence, but it had to be erased, like every other distraction.
She jerked the ship hard left, banked around, and twisted it into a spatial slide, pushing the fiery universe past the windows. In the mental space she now occupied there was no place for fear. There was only the joy of flying. There was nothing else like this. This was life. This was everything.
“The ship is not rated to…” someone objected to the angle of entry as she whipped the nose around and sent the Audacity plunging through eddies of heat and turbulence. Her vision blurred momentarily as the Audacity vibrated aggressively in tune with the universe.
It was too late. She was pushing the craft along anyway, using the geo-gravimetric curve of space to slingshot around the blazing meteors.
“We’re experiencing microfractures in the hull!”
She ignored the various shouting about the things that were breaking. A lot was going to be broken by the time she was done with this. Repairs could be carried out afterward by someone else.
“Circuits are blowing on every deck!”
Including the bridge. Sparks were flying all over the place. It would have been distracting, but her time in the holobay playing bullet golf had inured her to chaos, pain, and the general madness of a situation such as this. Jerri ignored the screamed updates, the flashes of light and occasionally heat, as well as the scrambled efforts of the crew to hold their various stations together.