| |
“So now what?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Should we ask Brother Anderson?’
“What’s he gonna do?”
“Maybe he can override it or something?”
“It’s got no power. Plus, it seems like it’s jammed mechanically. Like the twisting of the ship, and the vibrations and everything have pinched it together or whatever.”
“Well maybe he’d have some ideas?”
“Ugh.” Colin resisted the idea, but it was just the mental kick he needed to break him out of his torpor. Surely if there were ideas to be had, he should be the one to have them. If there’s one thing men will always beat robots at, it’s ideas. The mind was ultimately stronger than any hunk of metal. And that gave Colin an idea. If he used one of the thruster-tugs to get a solid grip on the airlock from the outside, maybe he could twist and bend it a little bit, just enough to free up the jam. Of course, if he was outside in a thruster-tug, someone else would have to be inside trying the wheel. It would be dangerous. Too dangerous to put Hannah in that position. Could Brother Anderson pull it off? He had the strength. His dexterity was actually very good too, perhaps better than human. Yes, he could certainly operate the manual override controls. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t need to. What if they ran a long power cable out, just for the airlock motor controls? They could disable the ship-side door so it stayed open - Sector B was already depressurized so it wouldn’t make a difference - then a cable could run straight through.
Colin turned on his suit-to-ship comms. “Brother Anderson?”
The comms crackled back in mocking reply.
“Brother Anderson, this is Colin, do you copy?”
Just more crackling.
“It’s no good. We’ll have to go back and talk to him.”
Hannah thought to herself, ‘Huh, he actually took my advice!’
The journey back to medbay was uneventful. Colin talked a bit about thruster-tugs, and power cables. It seemed like he had a few ideas after all.