Page 19 of Last of Her Name

The Prism is still glowing, but only faintly. And instead of spinning in midair inside its dome, it’s lying on the bottom. Like a dying bird.

No spin, no power.

Thinking back to my lessons on Prism mechanics, I remember that the crystal has to spin inside a specific gravitational field, much stronger than anything a human can stand. My instructor pointed out that this is the weak point of any interstellar ship. Take out the generator that controls the Prism’s gravity field, and you cripple the ship. Most vessels carry a spare generator or two for this reason, but the caravel is so small, there’s barely room for the original parts, much less backups.

That’s the downside of relying on a single crystal to power your ship. You don’t need any fuel, but unless you have backup Prisms, you’re screwed.

“Now would be a really good time to wake up, Pol,” I mutter.

I glance back to see him still anchored to the bunk. He’s not bleeding anymore, thanks to a patch I slapped onto his forehead, and I can only hope there isn’t any internal damage. He got knocked around pretty hard. The best thing I can do for Pol is to fix our ship.

I unclip the harness and go back into the cabin, where I find a hatch in the floor that takes me down to the cramped engine room. Clinging to a pipe, squinting in the pale red emergency lights, I study the apparatus jammed into the small chamber, trying to make sense of it all.

The gravity generator is set between the air recycler and a heat converter. Squeezing into the small space, I take off my multicuff and pry open the tiny flashlight, shining it on the generator.

What I see makes my stomach coil.

The generator iscrushed.

The parts around it are perfectly intact, but the machine that controls the ship’s gravity looks like a crumpled piece of paper. The metal is hopelessly mangled. Even if I were the best mechanic in the galaxy, I couldn’t fix this mess. The only thing to do is replace the whole unit.

“What in the stars happened to you?” I mutter, cautiously touching the warped metal.

I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this. Generators don’t just spontaneously twist up like that.Nothingdoes. The more I stare at it, the less sense it makes.

“Stacia?”

Hearing Pol’s moan, I push off the floor and float back up into the cabin. He’s rousing, a hand pressed to his forehead.

“Pull it together,” I say ruthlessly. “We’re in trouble.”

While he struggles to take stock of things, I swoop back into the cockpit and into the pilot’s chair. A red light is flashing at the corner of the screen, but I ignore it; everything’s in emergency mode right now. I pull up a list of measurements—the distance between us and Sapphine, the planet’s gravitational pull, orbital charts. Thank the stars that much of the ship’s systems are still up. I start running simulations, hoping I’m not about to get us killed.

Then I laugh darkly, realizing that either way, we die. If we stay up here like this much longer, we’ll run out of emergency power. The controls will go out first, then the temperature will drop. But we’ll suffocate long before we freeze to death.

“What are you doing?” Pol asks in the doorway.

I raise a finger to quiet him, waiting until I’ve input all the parameters for the simulation. Then I sit back and say, “Either I’m about to save our skins, or …”

He sighs and takes the seat to my right. “Or you’re about to fry them.”

I give him a weak smile.

“Okay, Captain.” He winces and presses his fingers to the patch on his temple. “What’s the plan?”

“I’m a mechanic, not a pilot.” I draw a deep breath, watching the simulations run at hyperspeed. “But Ithink, if we put on the space suits, then vent our remaining breathable air through the stabilizing thrusters, we might make it.”

Pol stares. “Wait. You want to shoot all our oxygeninto space?”

“At our current speed, it would takedaysto reach the atmosphere, even factoring in the gravitational pull of Sapphine. We’ll run out of air long before then, anyway.” I tap a schematic of the ship’s O2system. “We need accelerant, and this is the only accelerant we have.”

He lets out a long breath. “Okay. But even if your insane plan works, we have a bigger problem.”

He taps the blinking red light that I’d been ignoring, and a message expands on the comm screen. I realize it’s a hail from a Sapphino patrol ship.

Pol grimaces. “They’re asking for our clearance credentials, which we don’t have, of course.”

“What do we do?”