It was time to start getting everyone loaded for evacuation. Alqadi
and Sayah both made an attempt at talking to the fortune teller, but
ultimately it was Lila taking her away for a quiet chat that changed her
mind. Changed it a lot. Unsettlingly so, in fact, but the job was
done.
Sayah told Suleiman to prepare for having his data cores
moved. Sabetha asked again about her cargo, but was rebuffed by an
increasingly stressed Sayah, and went to make alternative arrangements.
Tahir began herding people down to the dock, while Alqadi went to
contact the Nekatra. With some assistance from Gurgeh he was able to
convince them to get into three of the escape pods and prepare to
launch. Gurgeh also had a look at the remaining escape pods, and
managed to identify a fifth pod in usable condition.
Back at the
Aliya, Sayah unlocked the doors and began preflight checks, soon finding
out that the navigation systems had been affected by the proximity of
the nearby star. She set it to recalibrate, but it would be a slow
process.
It was perhaps not a complete surprise when we realised that the other ship had disengaged from the Ghazali.
They weren't complete monsters. They had loaded the twenty-five people
that the Fatima's Bounty could hold along with Sabetha's cargo, and had
taken the ship round to the cargo bay to pick up one of the containers
of stasis pods. But now we had an extra twenty-five people that we
needed to find space for.
Sayah opened the lock on the door to
the main cargo dock, and there was a brief shootout between Alqadi,
Tahir and the captain of the Fatima's Bounty. The captain was shot and
incapacitated, but it was too late to stop the ship from launching.
And then all our plans (neatly drawn on the Aliya's whiteboard by
Tahir) were thrown into further disarray when Suleiman's voice came over
the tannoy to tell us that the reactor core was melting down and
instead of six hours to escape, we had one.
We had an extra
escape pod, and while they were built for four, we reckoned we could
squeeze one extra person in there. Alqadi tried to convince the Nekatra
to fit themselves into two pods instead of three, but they refused.
Lila and Sayah began stripping the Aliya, throwing out literally
anything non-essential to create extra space, shedding perhaps a brief
tear at the loss of all the soft furnishings. It was around this time
that Sayah came up with an excellent plan, albeit one that required
having been thought of a couple of hours earlier to actually be
successful: agree to take the cargo, then once the other ship had
launched, knock out Sabetha, ditch as much cargo as necessary to fit the
remaining people on the ship. But it was obviously far too late for
that.
There was a drop ship in the cargo bay, too damaged to fly,
but part of it was still air tight. It was hardly an ideal solution,
but if they could get it launched, a few more people could be kept alive
inside it until the Aliya could come back to tow it to safety.
Sayah disconnected Suleiman's memory cores, and Shahim used a loader
from the cargo bay to transfer him into one of the escape pods. Alqadi
got in the pod with Suleiman and Shahim, while Sayah got into the other
with the four other survivors that we'd planned to send in the pods.
The rest of the crew got the second container and the drop ship ejected
and got into the Aliya. Tahir's piloting skills, plus some fervent
prayers to the Traveler, got them clear of the ship and picked up the
container. With Sayah unavailable in an escape pod, Gurgeh took over
the data djinn's chair, and was able to guide the ship to pick up the
drop ship. Finally they returned for the escape pods.
Sayah's
pod was the first one they found, possibly thanks to her efforts to
boost the transponder signal. Then two of the Nekatra pods. Two pods
still to find. A tense few minutes. And then a fourth pod was found -
the one containing Alqadi, Shahim and Suleiman.
We never found the fifth pod.
No comments:
Post a Comment