frankmask

The engineer had heard about this sort of thing. It happens when an incoming kinetic projectile actually performs the way it's supposed to and punches a neat two inch wide hole through a space vehicles exterior armor, interior bulkheads, core systems, and whatever else it happens to hit before it's intertia decays. It didn't happen very often. You could go throught an entire semester of combat situations manual engineer/repair and only get maybe a half a days lecture on what to do when a two inch tungsten slug actually manages to penetrate your shields at a significant fraction of the speed of light. In this case, the slug had pinched an oxygen producer, which had in turn ignited, and produced the blossoming, organic zero gravity fireball that was rushing towards the engineer. He stood there frozen, perfectly aware of what would happen when that fireball reached him, how it would enter his lungs, cling to him like liquid. But he couldn't will himself to move, even to grab the robotic fast transport handle that ghosted after him wherever he went in the ship. He could feel the turbulence around him as the ships atmosphere controllers wrestled with the process of the fire. He could smell smoke. And he could watch the fire rolling forward through the passage. But he couldn't move. But a modern military spaceship is very nearly a living thing in and of itself. The atmosphere processors had begun combatting the waste gas buildup as soon as the oxygen producer had relayed the nature and extent of it's damage to the central engineering hub. The firecontrol systems were already online and working at peak efficiency, as evinced by the nearly invisible semi-organic membrane that snapped silently shut a few meters in front of the horrified engineer. He watched the fireball flicker and die as the firecontrol computers shunted the oxygen out of the corridor and flooded it with inert gas. After a handful of seconds the only evidence of the fire was the smears of waste particles it had left on the bulkheads. The membrance retracted silently, and the ships engineering AI spoke in the engineer's head. "Mr. Johanson, I'd like you to make a manual observation of Oxygen producer A122F42. I have it offlined and drones are moving in to conduct repairs, but the incoming projectile or the fire damaged a few of the sensors in the area, and I would like you to confirm my perceptions."