Crescent by Phil Rossi Page B

hand.
    “I don’t know. That’s not what I meant to come out.” She looked away. “I’m not…   I never…Sorry.”
    “It’s okay. About that day in the cafeteria…   ” Gerald said. “I wanted to ask you about it in Heathen’s, but…   ”
    “What day in the cafeteria?” She looked confused.
    “You seemed very upset about something? Gave me a stern talking-to.”
    “I don’t ever remember being in the cafeteria,” she said, and sounded perfectly sincere. Gerald nodded and shrugged.
    “Maybe I dreamed it. Look, I’ll be on the bridge. Come out when you’re ready.”
    “Thank you,” she said again.
    “And that’s enough of that. No more apologizing or thanking— don’t make me lock you in here.”
    Her lips quirked in a ghost of a grin and he left her there to get dressed.
     
    (•••)
     
    The mystery ships were gone by the time Gerald returned to the bridge. He sat in the control couch and watched the empty camera feed for several seconds, tapping his chin as he contemplated the next move. He waved away the camera overlay, replacing it with the radar. The field was clear, which meant nothing, Gerald knew. It could fill with a dozen red blips at any second. He reinitialized the ship systems one by one and Bean began to hum to life around him.
    “Bean,” Gerald said.
    “Take us to the coordinates?” the computer replied.
    “You got it.”
    Ina returned to the bridge as the engines fired. The change in inertia caused her to stumble. Gerald grabbed her by the waist and she placed her hands on his. He settled her into the couch beside him. He didn’t look at her. It was time to focus now. It didn’t matter if Bean was in control of the ship or not.
     
    (•••)
     
    The comm crackled.
    “Captain,” Bean’s voice sounded tinny in the small helmet speakers. “The lifeboat’s reactor core is still hot.” Gerald stopped his descent and gripped the hauling tether with more force. Starlight glittered on the tiny, interlocking plates of the cable. It looked like the hide of some chrome-scaled, interstellar snake.
    “You’re kidding me,” Gerald said.
    “Older model ships relied on heavy fusion cores for propulsion. The lifeboat’s core would still be hot three hundred years from now. You are going to have to jettison it.”
    “At the risk of sounding repetitive here—you’re kidding me.”
    Bean was right, of course. When they dislodged the vessel from the crater wall, the lifeboat would be under more stress than it had been in hundreds of years. The stress just might be enough to agitate the reactor and blow the whole ship into pieces, taking Bean, Gerald, and Ina along with it.
    Gerald ran his hand over the edge of one of the lifeboat’s tail fins. Dust came away in a milky cloud that hung suspended in the cold starlight. He looked to the gaping opening in the lifeboat’s side. The metal was twisted and sharp. He hoped that…  
    “You’ll have to go in through the opening in the starboard side of the lifeboat.”
    “I can manually pop one of the belly hatches,” Gerald said.
    “Captain. I’m sure the mechanisms that allow for manual hatch release are sealed from exposure to hundreds of years of space dust.”
    “I could tear my suit if I go through that hole.” Gerald let go of the tether and fired one of the suit’s small air jets, propelling himself to the lifeboat’s hull. He landed silently and the magnets in his boots automatically adjusted to simulate 9.8 gravities. Measured steps carried him along the curving hull to the underside of the vessel, his booted feet kicking up small, cream-colored clouds of dust with each silent step. The helmet lamp grew brighter as it adapted to the darkness. Gerald crouched and began wiping the hull-plates clean until he found one belly hatch. After several attempts at turning the manual release, Gerald realized that trying to open the thing by hand was futile. For a moment, he considered letting a drone try to open it,