Sol Strike (Battlegroup Z Book 3) by Daniel Gibbs (red novels .txt) 📗

at the readout, and mental alarm bells rang. Outflow was already at twenty-five hundred PSI and still rising. At three thousand, they risked pipe ruptures, among other problems. “Scram the reactor.”

“Sir?”

“I said scram the reactor now.” Tehrani’s going to have my head over this.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Hodges looked from screen to screen and realized even as the fusion reaction ceased, something was causing the pressure to continue to skyrocket. “What in the…”

“I don’t understand, sir. I show no fusion reaction in our plasma chamber yet.”

After he’d stared at the reaction control screen for close to ten seconds, it suddenly hit Hodges as to what the problem was. “Shit.” He whipped out his handcomm and keyed it for the bridge. “Colonel Tehrani, come in, please.”

“This is Tehrani. Go ahead, Major.”

“I need permission to vent our helium-3 stores into space, ma’am.”

“That’s the fuel—”

“Now, ma’am, or we lose the ship.”

“Do it, Major.”

Hodges cut off the commlink and turned back toward the rating. “Let me get in there, Corporal.” He didn’t trust the task to anyone but himself.

As the young woman stepped aside, he pulled up the emergency fuel-dump override and jettisoned the Greengold’s entire primary supply of helium-3.

From above them came a series of small popping sounds followed by ungodly screams.

Someone shouted, “We’ve got a pipe failure up here! Superheated liquid escape!” A few moments later, a wave of steam blew down.

This isn’t happening fast enough. Hodges switched screens to the pressure display. Incredibly, the hot-liquid system was up to three thousand two hundred PSI—and still climbing. He was stunned. What the visual showed was nearly impossible, yet there it sat. He took the one option left. With another button press followed by input of his security code and biometric confirmation of identity, the reserve helium-3 tanks vented into space.

More shouts and screams issued from the upper reaches of the engineering space as the deck plates clattered with enlisted personnel rushing toward the liquid spill. The ventilation system barely kept ahead of the steam release, pushing the temperature above thirty-five degrees Celsius quickly.

“Sir, shouldn’t we call for evacuation?” the young corporal next to him asked.

“Not yet,” Hodges replied. Plasma reaction inside the torus came to a stop, according to the display he stared at. A physical confirmation was the sudden loss of most electrical power. “Switch us to the emergency batteries.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The lights came back on, and the screen showed a continual drop in the hot-liquid loop pressure. Hodges let out a sigh of relief. “Okay. The first problem is solved.” He managed a smile.

“But, sir, there’s no fuel. How do we restart the reactor? Or get home?”

In the process of dealing with one emergency at a time, Hodges hadn’t even considered the possibilities of what lay next. He immediately sobered at the thought of being stuck a few jumps away from Earth, without helium-3 to power the heart of the ship, to say nothing of getting home. Hodges closed his eyes. “One problem at a time, Corporal. Begin emergency decontamination procedures and flush the torus with liquid nitrogen. I’m going to get my suit and perform an eyes-on inspection.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A few hours later, Tehrani sat at the head of the table in the deck one conference room as the senior officers trickled in. In the space of a few minutes, she’d gone from planning to launch an attack on Earth to wondering how exactly they would recover from the latest setback. Gloomy was a good description, but as always, she forced a neutral expression onto her face and projected confidence. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We had a full engineering workup.

Hodges was the last to arrive. He took a seat next to Wright, while the CAG was off by himself on the table’s right side. “I apologize, Colonel. It took me a few minutes more than I’d planned on to decontaminate my hazard suit.” The engineer’s tone was unusually pensive.

“I understand, Major.” An alarm bell rang in the back of Tehrani’s mind. “Wait, did we have a radiation release?”

“No, ma’am. I wanted to put eyes on the torus and the plasma-generation chamber.”

She nodded. “I see. Well, what happened?”

The engineer glanced between Tehrani and Wright. “Cascade failure of our reactor fuel injectors. They were rated to last fifty years. Well, we got about thirty-six years out of them. In a nutshell, helium-3 was inserted into the reactor torus too quickly, which overheated the injectors and jammed them in the open position.”

“Which is why you ejected our entire supply of fuel into space,” Wright interjected with annoyance. “Why not shut off the valves instead?”

“Because I didn’t know what was going on until I got inside the housing,” Hodges snapped. “We were making decisions on a second-by-second basis to keep the ship from exploding in a fusion fireball!”

“Gentlemen,” Tehrani said, adopting her best soothing tone. “What’s done is done. I’ve no doubt our chief engineer made the best decision with the available information at the time. The question now is how do we recover?”

“There’s a fuel reserve on the Salinan,” Wright offered. “Is the reactor repairable?”

Hodges tilted his head and furrowed his brow. “It is, but it’ll take some time. A couple of days, minimum.” He held up a hand. “Before anyone freaks out, yes, I know our emergency batteries are rated for forty-eight hours. I’ve already talked to my counterpart on the Salinan, and we can run a power umbilical over to keep life support and the basics running. No shields, engines, or weapons.”

“Well, that’s the beginnings of a recovery plan,” Wright replied.

“The Salinan doesn’t have enough fuel to get us home. By far. There’s enough for the stealth raiders to refuel once. No one considered the possibility of the Greengold’s reactor failing as it did.”

Tehrani felt his words settle around her throat like a vise. She swallowed. “Are you saying we’re stuck here, Major?

“Without additional fuel, yes.”

I’m not leaving my crew here. They’re not becoming prisoners of war. “Where do we get more fuel?”

Everyone turned and stared at her.

Wright said,