Frick looked about for a rating with free hands.
"You," he called.
"Sir?"
Frick held up his bare hands. "Get me some gloves."
In 370 seconds or so, the Rix might turn them all to jelly, but damned if Watson Frick was going to be crushed by some piece of dumb metal in the meantime.
Executive Officer
Katherie Hobbes had never heard the battle bridge so silent.
With the synesthesia field absent, most of the control surfaces had turned featureless gray. She seldom appreciated how few of the screens and controls she used every day were physical. It looked as if the frigate's bridge had been wrapped in gray, grabby carpeting, like some featureless prototype. The few hard icons that remained--the fat, dumb buttons that were independent of second sight--glowed dully in the red battle lights. The big airscreen that normally dominated the bridge was replaced by its emergency backup, a flatscreen that showed only one level of vision at a time, and fuzzily at that.
Trapped in the dim world of primary sight, the bridge crew moved 85 in a daze, as if synesthesia were a shared dream they'd all just awoken from.
Not that their confusion mattered. There wasn't much they could accomplish with the Lynx running in its near-total darkmode. The frigate's pilot staff were handling the coldjets, nudging the ship through a very slow arc--ninety degrees in eight minutes--to keep the bow directly lined up on the Rix battlecruiser. The Lynx was like a duelist turned sideways, keeping the smallest possible area oriented toward her opponent. The pilots spoke animatedly among themselves, out of Hobbes's hearing. The executive officer instinctively made the control gesture that should have fed their voices to her, but of course second hearing was gone as well. Hobbes knew why they were frustrated, however; for their calculations, the pilots were using a shielded darkmode computer hidden behind the sickbay armor. The machine had about as much processor power as a robotic pet.
At this range the Rix sensors were very sensitive. Only the most primitive electronics could be used.
Hobbes turned her mind to Frick's engineering team. They should have the impromptu armor plating in position by now. She rotated an unwieldy select dial at her station, trying to find the team. The usual wash of sound from below decks had been reduced to a smattering of voices; the only dialogue that reached Hobbes came through the hardwired compoints at key control points on the ship. The low-wattage handheld communicators they'd broken out were to be used only on the captain's orders. At this range, Rix sensors could detect the emissions of a self-microwaving food pack boiling noodles. Even medical endoframes had to be shut down. Captain Zai's prosthetics were frozen; he couldn't budge from the shipmaster's chair. Only one of his arms was moving; the other was locked in a position that seemed painfully posed.
"How are they doing, Hobbes?" the captain asked. His voice seemed so soft, so human now, absent the usual amplification of the captain's direct channel.
"I . . ." Hobbes continued to scroll through the various compoints on the ship. The primitive interface was maddening. Ten awful seconds later, she was forced to admit, "I don't know.
sir." Hobbes wondered if she had ever said those words to her captain before.
"Don't worry, Hobbes," he said, smiling at her. "They're probably between compoints. Just let me know when they call."
"Yes, sir."
Despite losing his legs and one arm, the captain seemed hardly bothered by the blindness of darkmode. Zai was actually working with a stylus--on paper, Hobbes realized.
He noticed her gaze upon the ancient apparatus.
"We may need to use runners before this is over, Hobbes," he explained. "Just thought I'd practice my penmanship." "I'm not sure I know that last word, sir," she admitted.
He smiled again.
"On Vada, you couldn't graduate from upper school without good handwriting, Hobbes. The ancient arts always come back eventually."
She nodded, recognizing the ancient root-word. Pen-man-ship. It made sense now. As always, the Vadan emphasis was on the male gender.
"But perhaps old ways aren't a priority on Utopian worlds, eh, Hobbes?"
"I suppose not, sir," she said, feeling a bit odd that the captain was conversing with her only moments before the Lynx would come under fire. In darkmode, of course, there was not much they could do other than chat.
"But in lower school I did learn how to use a sextant."
"An excellent skill!" the captain said. He wasn't kidding.
"Though it was hardly a requirement for graduation, sir."
"I just hope you remember how, Hobbes. If the Rix hit our processor core again, we may need you at the hard viewports."
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that, sir."
"Twenty seconds," announced a young ensign, raising her voice to be heard across the bridge. Her eyes were fixed on a mechanical chronometer someone had dug up from stores. Captain Zai had also produced an ancient Vadan wristwatch from among his family heirlooms. He had examined the two timepieces, determined that they ran on springs--making them undetectable to the Rix--and synchronized one to the other with a twist of a minuscule knob.
As the ensign counted down to the point when the Rix could begin firing, Captain Zai handed Hobbes the writing instrument and paper.
"Care to have a go?"
She held the stylus like a knife, but that didn't seem right. She tried it like a pointer.
"Turn it around, and slip the business end between your index and middle fingers," the captain said quietly.
"Ah, like a fork almost," Hobbes replied. "Five," said the ensign. "Four. . ."
Hobbes made a few marks. There was a certain pleasure in the pen's incision of the paper. Unlike air drawing, the friction of pen against paper had a reassuring physicality. She sketched a diagram of the bridge.
Not bad. But writing? She crossed two parallel lines to make a crude H. Then formed a circle for the O.
"Zero," said the ensign. "We are in range of the enemy prime's capital weapons."
Hobbes tried the other letters of her name, but they dissolved into scribbles.
The chief sensor officer, leaned over a headsdown display, spoke in a loud, clear voice, as if addressing an audience from a theatrical stage.
"She's firing. Standard photon cannon. Looks to be targeting along our last known vector."