The Show Must Go On

The episode began, the well-known theme tune to "Honor Guard" played on your viewing device as a distant shot of the Nightstalker, recorded by an interrociter camera feeling reflected light from some three light years away on Sedgewick Station through a nanoscopic crack in hyperspace, zoomed in to show the stricken garden spade shaped vessel, and zoomed further to an airlock on the right side of the hull.

Thresher stepped out of the airlock and into deep space, extended his right arm, and fired a grabber on a trailing line from his bulky mechanical forearm. The spongy ball clung to the hull of the Nighstalker a few hundred meters ahead, where greebles sparked beneath a blackened and blasted section of grey hull plating.

He reeled in the line, pulling himself along the hull. In theory, Thresher could have used his thrusters to fly over to the damaged section, or simply walked along the hull. In practice, tethers looked cool and were marginally safer.

The cyborg approached the damaged section of hull. Neural impulses that, under more hospitable conditions, would have been speech were converted into data and sent back to the ship.

"Thresher here. I've got some serious arcing under this panel -- I don't think isolating the damaged conduit helped."

"Understood. I'll tell the Chief that the starboard control bus is flaky." It was Jolt's watch; she was on the bridge, coordinating repairs.

Thresher's metallic feet locked on to a section of undamaged hull and his mechanical left hand folded into his forearm and a chainsaw blade extended from the back of his hand. Working carefully, he used it to remove the brown and black mottled section of damaged hull, exposing a partially melted junction between two networks of conduits. Thresher surveyed the damage. "No way we're landing like this. These pretty sparks mean we're leaking gas."

"The only drydock in jump range is down Suburbia's gravity well. It's the East Pole or we spend the next weeks getting our sorry asses towed back to Sedgewick Station." The First Mate of the Nightstalker was a dashing young Fleet officer, one Benito Franco, fresh from the Executive Officers' Academy. His stentorian delivery of damage reports and gung-ho military attitude made him a significant supporting character.

He turned to Arsenal, who was sitting in a chair, reviewing his notes on a small handheld terminal. "Can you get us into the atmosphere with your force field?"

"Yes, sir, I can. The most conservative approach would be to provisionally patch the hull breaches and try to turn everything off in the damaged areas. I'll surround the Nightstalker with a screen and we'll do a simple powered descent in police airspace. That way, even if my screen should fail, we'd be able to make a controlled surface landing."

"Thresher says we have deep internal damage. Those pirates really kicked the crap out of the Nightstalker." Jolt was sitting in the command chair in the center of the bridge, which she turned to face Arsenal and the First Mate.

Jolt was a mutant -- the surface of her body produced vast amounts of static electricity. She wore a skintight matrix of actuators, sensors, and capacitors embedded in a suit that contained her electrical discharges and enhanced her strength and reflexes and powered an antigravity belt and thruster pack. She was a marvel of plastic surgery, an impossibly statuessque perennial pin-up, unapproachable and untouchable.

"I have another option. I believe I can patch the ship's state." Arsenal paged through his notes.

"What do you mean?" Jolt was impatient.

Arsenal continued. "Before Commander Cody commandeered the Nightstalker, I was practicing using my scanning powers on the ship. I discovered something interesting -- objects have a kind of suprisingly memorable being-song. If I can remember a little bit of the song, and play it back into the original matter, I can restore its previous thermodynamic state."

"Boo. Technobabble." Jolt shrugged.

Arsenal looked a little peeved. "I did my best to make it acessible. I originally wanted to call my object-memories a being equation I use to interpolate the state equation--"

"It doesn't help." Jolt drummed her gloved fingers on the armrest of the captain's chair.

Arsenal looked at his notes briefly, then looked up. "I can restore the ship to its state before it was commandeered."

"You're kidding!" Jolt looked surprised. "Well, why not? Let's give it a try!"

"There are risks. I've never patched state on anything as complex as the Nightstalker. I suggest we treat it as an emergency field repair, and have the ship thoroughly tested on the surface." Arsenal looked up from his notes.

"Sounds good. Do it now!" Jolt looked impatient.

"It might not work. The ship could be left in a state our technicians cannot repair." Arsenal flipped through his notes, desperately trying to summarize.

Jolt interrupted him, calling the Eye in engineering. "Hey, Eye! Are we gonna die in the next half-hour?"

The Eye appeared on the viewscreen. She was a lithe female with cream-colored fur. Her eye-sockets were covered with mirrored implants, and a large, oval amulet in the form of an eye was attached to her upper torso. "My sources say no."

Jolt turned to Arsenal. "Just do it."

"Very well." Arsenal fell into a trance.

The lights dimmed and then began to flicker madly. A strange, irregular vibration shook the starship. A few moments later, the lights went out.

Arsenal looked up from his chair, a somber look on his face. "Oh, crap."