Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part One

For more than a month after the incident, the people funding the Ghail project plagued the station, poring over reports and interviewing Spencer and everyone else. The Pathways officers were in and out fast; this type of paperwork and investigation was ongoing and routine for them since their main jurisdiction was off-world transportation. Spencer endured the scrutiny for about a week, but then Graeber stepped in on his behalf.
“I don’t care how long you boys want to go over and over this with me or my staff, but the crew are now off limits; they have jobs to do, and this company comes to a complete halt when you waste their time like this. You have depositions, video-, audio-, and testimonial records; you also have the ship itself to study. Call us when you find something.”
The next day, Spencer had a new assignment. Things went back to normal. For a while.

He was sketching something on a tablet again, tuning out the other men—who, in turn, seemed to be talking about him as though he wasn’t there.
“Anything good?”
“He’s drawing some ship I never seen before.”
“Is it any good?”
“Look, it’s a ship; what do you want?”
“Well, I can’t draw.”
“You can’t bluff either. Call.”
“I wanna raise—”
“No, you don’t. Look at these.”
“Shit.”
The intercom came to life, cutting off the game and the conversation.
“Ray? You down there?”
One of the guys thumbed the wall unit. “Ray’s in the can. What do you want?”
“You guys should get up here. I think Corsi’s gonna eat it.”
There was a moment’s silence, then someone barked, “What’s goin’ on?”
“He’s on a collision course with the station and he can’t steer.”
Ray appeared from the toilet, yanking his coveralls over his shoulder. “Say that again!” he shouted, struggling to get dressed.
The voice in the wall complied.
Ray snapped the portable unit out of its clip in the wall, and the voice came through in stereo for a moment until Ray got out the door, several of the men behind him.
Spencer listened to the technical details spilling from the wall unit, and heard Ray—moving at high speed through the corridors—confirming parts of it.
Corsi had been setting a course back to the station when his ship’s entire navigation system seized up. The computer was basically worthless now, and he could not gain access to the actual engine from the cockpit. Just as he’d been about to call for a rescue, the main engines had fired, sending him hurtling toward the station at high speed. Now he had about ten minutes until the ship smashed into the station unless they found some way of diverting it—but diverting it almost certainly meant sending him streaking toward Earth with no brakes.
When he’d heard enough, Spencer launched himself from the hammock and headed for the bullpen himself. He wasn’t morbid, but he could not sit in the bunkhouse and hear about this over the intercom.

Premonitions are tricky things. Before Spencer arrived at the flight deck, he had realized that the crew would not be allowed in; the deck would most likely be depressurized in anticipation of an emergency landing—surely someone could think of a way to stall the ship. The crew would, however, be crowded into the bullpen waiting to rush in and help if Corsi somehow managed to dock in one piece.
Spencer had a clear plan in his mind, but he was doing his best to ignore it. In his mind, he saw himself bypassing the bullpen and entering the flight deck via one of the service crawlspaces; he could not imagine why he would want to do this, since he did not know what use he could be. He rejected the plan for several other reasons, chief of which was his certainty that the deck would be a vacuum already when he arrived.
He rounded a corner and ducked through the low, metal door into the bullpen. All the doors leading into the flight deck—from the observation deck, from the control room, from the bullpen—and any door leading into one of those three sections was oval-shaped and equipped with a magnetic seal in case of emergencies such as hull breach or decompression. The doors were supposed to be closed at all times, and a pilot would “knock” (a slang term for checking instruments and calling an all-clear) before opening any of them; it was merely a courtesy ninety-five percent of the time, but the other five percent of the time it was a life-or-death requirement. Spencer didn’t notice as he ducked through the door to the bullpen that it had been left open, but when he saw the next door open, he looked back and thought, ‘There’s something really wrong here. Why haven’t they decompressed the flight deck?’
Pushing past the few men in the bullpen, he stepped through the next door and found the men standing on-deck, listening to the conversation between Corsi and Hawking.
“I don’t think you can afford to crack your console; if it doesn’t work, you’ll have no way of correcting your course.”
“I’m reasonably sure I can make the change—and if I can’t then I’m stuck on this course anyway.”
“Not true. If you can drain a tank and get the deceleration protocols to kick in, you’ll spiral—it’ll give us time to get someone out to you before you get too close to the atmosphere.”
“You hope it will. I think I’m better off trying to short one of the engines; it’ll make me peel off course more slowly, but it’s a more reliable option.”
“Yes, and then you go shooting into the upper atmosphere at high speed—besides guaranteeing no one ever finds a piece of you, it will leave us with no autopsy. It’s bad company policy, Corsi,” Hawking joked.
Considering the situation, it was about the closest to emotional Hawking was likely to get—at least on the intercom—and the men on deck were deadly silent.
“How long?” Spencer whispered to the guy next to him.
The pilot turned an ugly eye on Spencer, and a wave of disgust washed over Spencer. This was not the time for politics.
“How long!” he demanded loudly.
“Six minutes until impact with the station,” the pilot hissed, then shoved past Spencer and into the hall.
“How long does he have left to change course?” Spencer asked the rest of the crowd in general.
“About four,” someone murmured.
The image of the crawlspace had been intruding on his thoughts the whole time, but now another image went off in his head like a camera flash. Spencer blinked hard and mumbled, “Stay put?” His head ached all of a sudden, and he pressed his palms to his forehead. What was going on?
He tried to reconcile the two impressions that he was getting, but his headache was getting worse. He smelled something familiar, and with a sharp stab of fear realized it was oranges.
He was having a seizure.