This would be my key. I quickly ripped out the main circuit board. Repairing the whole system would mean replacing at least twenty boards and would take at least that many minutes. But replacing the main board could be done in about ten seconds. Once this was free, I grabbed a replacement from the storage locker across the room and slid it into place. Now, I only had to hope that the reactor was still hot enough to restart. I restarted power to the computer system and typed the commands. The engine came roaring to life. Sucess was mine.

But with only the main control board working and all the others fused shut, I would have to work manually with the commands the pilot sent to the engines and they would probably only last about five minutes like this. I hit the comm system.

"Bridge, power is restored."

The captain responded first. "Great. That was fast. We'll start restoring orbit."

"No, that won't work," I said. "You only have about five minutes and all controls from Anna have to be recycled through me anyway. It's on manual. You'll have to land the ship or we'll just lose power again and crash."

"Blast. Okay, we're on it. Be watching for commands from Anna. Bridge out."

It was only a few seconds later that the first commands from the bridge came to me. I quickly relayed them into the grid for the engine reactor. It was not the most pleasant ride I'd ever had and I thought about seeing the doctor for something to settle my stomach if I'd had the luxury of time. In the middle of the desent there was a very sudden explosion from above me, outside the hull, and a scraping and tearing of metal as the ship lurched from some kind of sudden impact. Obviously not a good sound, but there were not warning sirens of a hull breach, so it could probably have been worse.

Finally, though, we were touching down. I would rather have been cycled through a bad washer machine twenty times over than repeat that landing, but we were alive, and that counted for a lot. It was just in time too, for not four seconds after landing, the circuit I had just reinstalled overloaded again and fused itself into the mainframe. There was no hope of replacing this. We'd need to reassemble the entire reactor, computer and all.

My place would be on the bridge as our tiny crew of six decided what needed to be done next, so I left the engine room and began travelling the corridor again. On the way I met up with Kisandra Ivanova, our weapons specialist. She was a Russian and she did love her weapons. Once Gustav insinutated that she liked guns....well, because of the phallic references the late Dr. Sigmund Frued had put forth many years ago. But she vehemently denounced this theory saying that she liked large guns because it allowed her to kill people faster. She took a quick dislike to the navigator after that, and no one dared breech the subject again.

She didn't seem very talkative and I had little to say, so we finished the short walk in silence. We were the last two to appear on the bridge. Anna and Gustav were still at their posts, but they had turned their chairs around to face us. Captain Jonathan Howard was standing off to one side of them waiting for everyone to arrive. Dr. Françoise Pierre Dumas, our French physician, was standing to Gustav's right peering out the window at the white, desolate landscape. At our approach, Jonathan came to life calling everyone's attention to him.