Bask Harder
10 Feb 2016Terra Sheer
All right, you idiot. Time to stop thinking so much and ... think!I need a signal. And that means I need power. There's got to be some juice left in this bucket of bolts. I already shut down all the big systems ... and most of the little ones. Even unscrewed the overhead lights to keep them from vamping power with that godawful "standby red" thing they do.
I search the dashboard for something. Anything. It occurs to me, in an off-hand kind of way, that if I get out of this, I've really got to get my shit together. This cockpit was a mess before I made a mess of it trying to keep warm. Candy wrappers, peanut shells, an empty bottle of Lavian brandy. I wince at the vintage as I toss that aside. Gotta stop drinking all the profits. I wouldn't be in this situation if I could keep a decent cash flow.
There's a mess of reminder notes stuck to the hood of the scanner readout -- at least half a dozen of them mention the damn fuel scoop. Then there's the Arissa Duval bobblehead standing in the midst of them with the words "Bask Harder" etched into its base.
"To bad nobody's figured out how to convert glory into power yet, eh, Your Majesty?" I give her a flick between the eyes. She nods sympathetically. I gaze past her through the frosted canopy, out toward where the other ship's drive flare is rapidly becoming just another dwindling flicker in a sea of stars. "Not much glory out here to bask in, anyway. Nothing but emptiness and ice."
Glory. Basking. Ice.
Something tickles in the back of my mind. The idiot again, reminding me of something I ought to know.
But my mind had turned to slush. I realize I've stopped shivering. Not a good sign. There's some comforting irony in the fact that, when you properly get down to the real business of freezing to death, you stop feeling cold.
There's irony in all of this. It was ice that broke my fuel scoop in the first place. Water, being a polar molecule, is attracted to the scoop's ion collectors. If you don't keep the damn thing heated, the shutter hinges freeze shut, and the actuators aren't strong enough to force them back open. They burn out the second you try. To use the scoop in that state, then, you'd have to go EVA in the blistering heat of a close approach to pry the shutters open manually ... or run with them open all the time, and risk burning them out with even more ice on the collectors themselves.
I'd left the ship on standby to go hot-rodding on some godforsaken ice moon, and the scoop was frozen shut by the time I got back. Should have known better than to let that happen. Should have known better than to wait to get it fixed.
Bask in His Glory.
I glare at Arissa. "Would you kindly shut the hell up, Your Highness?"
Water. Ice. Basking in His Glory.
"I bet you never have this problem. You've probably got an army of Imperial Slaves to scrape the frost off your scoop with their bare hands."
You've been basking in His Glory all this time, you idiot. You just don't realize because your eyes can't see it. But you've been basking in it. And so has the that ice.
It hits me like a brick. There are two hundred metric tonnes of water-ice sitting on my hold. All I have to do is blow the hatch, and it'll sublimate under the ultraviolet bombardment from the sun. Too feeble at this distance to feel as heat, it's still energetic enough to break water, photon by photon, into hydrogen and oxygen. And from that soup of ions, floating just outside my ship, maybe I can coax a few ions into my scoop.
Maybe just enough to get some life out of this damn hulk. Had I not been such a damn idiot, this would be easy. But now....
Could there be enough? Barely a sip ... maybe just enough to get a jolt out of the fusion plant.
Maybe just enough to send a signal.
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