Free The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley by Assorted Baen authors, Barflies Page A

two-hundred-meter-long hull were miniscule, and none of them came close.
    Except for one.
    The alien hull suddenly chimed to multiple impacts, blows so close together that they almost sounded as one: a high-speed machine gun. Alarms screamed out, and the bridge went black, the blackness just as abruptly relieved by red emergency lighting. “That doesn’t seem good,” Larry said.
    “It’s not,” Jackie said. Her voice had a hollow, shocked quality to it.
    “What happened?”
    Jackie didn’t answer for a moment. Then she chuckled, a laugh that carried an almost creepy overtone.
    “Jackie, no offense, but what the hell are you laughing about?” A.J. demanded. Madeline stared at the dark-haired engineer with rising concern.
    With apparent difficulty Jackie got herself under control. “Sorry. It shouldn’t be that funny. But it is. Remember where we get our main power from? Well, that’s the second time that goddamn E.U. ship has shot the same goddamn reactor!”
    Maddie felt her lips tighten along with her gut. “The reactor itself?”
    “I think so, this time. The safety seals tripped and all—I don’t think we’re looking at a radiation hazard—but it’s totally scrammed itself.” Jackie shook her head, looking grim now.
    “Can we fix it?”
    “I’ll have to find out what’s really wrong first. Give me a few minutes. A.J., Joe, help out here.”
    Helen and Larry nodded to Maddie. “We’ve got holes to patch.”
    “Understood,” Maddie said. “Stay away from the engineering area until we know what’s going on there, though.”
    “You got it.” The two scientists cycled the lock out of the bridge.
    A few minutes later Jackie sat slowly up and turned to face Madeline. Her expression gave the answer. “No.”
    “No chance at all?”
    “Not really,” Jackie said. “It didn’t actually punch the core, but the amount of work we’d have to do . . . At the least we’d need a big dock or a big, flat area to work on—one with enough gravity to keep things in place, or else someplace sealed off. And without the reactor, we can’t even sail around very long. We don’t have the fuel to set down anywhere, even if somehow I could get enough energy.”
    A.J. looked at her with a horrified expression. “You’re saying we’re going to drift through space until we just run out of power and die?”
    “I . . .” She looked momentarily defensive, then suddenly sighed. “Yeah. We are.”
    “I don’t suppose,” Maddie said, feeling unnaturally calm now that the worst news was delivered, “there’s any way we could get help.”
    “No,” A.J. said. “Not unless Odin can pull off a miracle.”
    “How long do we have?”
    “Well . . . that’ll take a little while to figure out. If we can get to the lander . . .” Jackie and Joe went into a combination live and electronic conference. Maddie glanced over at A.J.; the sensor expert was staring bleakly into space. “How are things on Odin ?” she asked quietly.
    A.J. shook himself and bent back over his controls. “I’ll find out. Can’t be any worse than it is here.”
    Maddie looked at the screen, which still showed the image of the huge E.U. vessel surrounded by debris. “I’m not so sure.”
    * * *
    It takes immense force to stop a thousand mobile tons, and with only Europa’s feeble gravity to provide the pressure, the Nebula Storm would not stop quickly. But stop it would, in the end, and already the five meters per second had become three and a half, three, cutting an interrupted gouge nearly a hundred meters wide across Europa in a stupendous fountain of crystalline white. Even as Horst began bringing Munin in for a landing, he could barely tear his eyes from the ponderous, deceptive grace of the Nebula Storm ’s slow-motion crash. He could hear someone praying in the background. “Stop, stop, God, please stop . . .”
    Two and a half meters per second now, dropping, just a brisk walk—but there was no more room.