An angry hissing filled the hallway as the goose started to digest itself. Seabourne ran back to the sealed escape pod door to check on Scotty. If the pod launched successfully without smashing into a comet, he could use PuddleJumper to make the pickup. Dorado-class shuttles were designed as tenders between ships, but SAR was their secondary function in the likely scenario that one Orbital ship would be making pick up on one in distress.
A flash came through the narrow window built into the door just as Seabourne was approaching it. Fearing an explosion, he looked through the porthole and breathed a sigh of relief when he didn't see a debris field. He then quickly sucked it back in when he realized he didn't see a pod, either. His lungs continued to do a complicated ballet when he realized the ship was no longer moving.
There are only a handful of organizations that have the ability to remotely stop an Orbital Liner mid-flight. The list was slightly longer without a crew on the bridge who could contest control of the ship. None of them were people that Seabourne particularly wanted to deal with at the moment. With any luck, it would be someone that would get Orlando back to Curacao. If it was the Lane Hackers, well, that's why Orbital paid Interspace Commerce so much for the "Seabourne Clause."
The bird made a SCHLURP like noise as its chest ripped open. Various organs whose function Seabourne could have only vaguely guessed in the best of times insinuated their way onto the floor while Seabourne did some mental math. A lifepod built to sustain 10 people for 3 days could sustain one person for 30 days. That gave him a solid two weeks to figure out what the hell happened to Scotty before he had to ask for help, provided he didn't run into the NX-01 before then. Looking through the binder, however, the task was going to be tricksy at best. The pod was heavily modified to evade detection for this 'ultimate hide and seek' game. He'd have to find the damn thing with the mk I eyeball, assuming Scotty didn't figure out a way to send out some kind of signal. In any event, step one was getting back to PuddleJumper and swap the old shuttle back for the Widdershins.
He stepped over the remains of the bird and made his way back to the shuttle. He swung by Auxiliary Damage Control to undo the docking clamps on PuddleJumper since it was less out of the way than going back to the bridge. Entering the shuttle, he heard a faint whistling of escaping air and noticed the cracks radiating from a projectile impact in the middle of the screen. He sighed and backtracked past PuddleJumper's empty emergency equipment lockers into the Orlando for a patch kit. The vacuum would suck any resin clear through the crack, so he needed a full patch: flexible yet strong airtight canvas with a valve in the middle and a ring of epoxy along the edge. He found one in an emergency locker near the airlock, exposed the epoxy, set the patch around the cracks, let the adhesive set, and then closed the valve in the middle of the patch. The whistling stopped.
On a whim, he took the party horn out of his pocket, ripped off the rolled up papery part, and jammed it into the valve so the mouthpiece was facing inwards.
"All right, Scotty. Olly olly oxen free."
He opened the valve in two bursts, one short, one long.
