Current Book: Untitled Book

"Master, we cannot maintain orbit!" one of the crew members said; and indeed, he was right - the Tarhedia was falling through the atmosphere with considerable speed, the thrusters only preventing it from being burnt up without it's shields. "Try to get us to crash into the sea! It won't do us much good aside from preventing the immediate destruction of the ship, and it'll let us try to regain power!" Lanis said, remembering that about 90% of Petra's surface is a vast ocean interrupted by islands of various sizes upon which the Petrans evolved. Nonetheless, the impact disabled most of the thrusters, and somebody had turned some of the dorsal thrusters, propelling the ship even deeper into the sea. "The pressure from the surrounding water is straining the secondary containment field generators - we'll lose containment!" "If that happens, we're as good as dead...narrow the field as slowly as you can without losing the field, it'll buy us some time!" Lanis said, certain that it would work, and continued: "We'll need to condense ourselves and seal off any ventilation shafts in flooded zones. We also need to shut the dorsal thrusters off and repair the ventral ones so we can start climbing, and it would be a good idea to restore power to the main containment field generators. And remember we're on a limited timetable - if we can't stop the ship's descent, the pressure will eventually overwhelm the hull and crush us all like a can!" After Lanis said that, Hatos gave the order for all non-essential personnel to evacuate to the central complex, which left only the two of them at the command level and about half a dozen engineers trying to get everything operational at the engineering section. However, the engineering section was soon flooded and the engineers had to evacuate to the central complex. "Nobody can get there anymore, not even by diving - it's too far from any of the still-safe parts of the ship!" Hatos said, "Which means that we are doomed. We cannot even use the phaser to phase ourselves off the ship, with the phaser control chamber being completely flooded!" "Perhaps," Lanis answered, obviously with an idea, "We could create diving stops - man-sized bubbles along the route to the engineering section - and make sure they're connected to ventilation shafts. Then we could theoretically reach it, and do whatever we can do to repair the ship." Hatos replied: "Maybe, but those bubbles would also be subject to extreme pressure, and we would have to shrink them gradually until we could stop our descent," obviously not too convinced. But since they had no other options, Lanis soon found himself diving between the diving stops to the engineering level, still in his Tarhedian suit, which he had now realized to also be waterproof; and soon found a corpse floating around - it was the navigator! "I think I just found out what happened to our navigator...somebody killed him!" he said before continuing. A few minutes later, he was further suprised by the navigator suddenly swimming past him - from the opposite direction! - and shooting at him. He fired back from his laser pistol, killing the navigator, and finding that he had turned into some sort of organic mass upon being shot - he was a Xargan! With no time to spare to inform Hatos of this unusual development, he moved on and found that the bubbles were shrinking faster than he could afford - the last one, which he had now reached, was about to pop! He took a deep breath and tried desperately to restore the main containment field generators before he ran out of air, all the time being monitored by Hatos from what was still left of the command level. And as he ran out of air, the Xargan shoes suddenly released an unusual substance into his bloodstream - some sort of stimulant - giving him the boost he needed, and he restored the generator. But the field didn't come online. Now faced with certain doom, he realized that the generator needed a few seconds - seconds he did not have - to generate the field...