SoV wrote:Something slammed into the interposed belly of Bernike’s impeller wedge and vanished with the instantaneous ferocity of a several hundred thousand-kilometers per second gravity gradient. But something else missed the wedge. It came sizzling through the tanker’s wide-open throat on a reciprocal course with a closing velocity of over 60,000 KPS, crossed the wedge’s interior at a sharp angle in approximately five-thousandths of a second, missed her enormous hull by no more than sixty or seventy kilometers, and went racing out the wedge’s kilt.
Then it was gone. The collision alert continued to sound, and Mandrapilias felt echoes of terror that hadn’t had nearly long enough to register at the time whiplash up and down his nervous system. His head jerked around to Zinaida.
“What the fuck was that?!” he demanded.
He didn’t know—then—that he would never, ever forgive himself for not reporting the incident instantly to ACT. Not that three and a half minutes of warning would have done any good.
I don't know if that three minute lead time would have made any difference if ACT had been alerted, but it seems that it may have been enough time to alert Hephaestus to abandon ship. Three minutes could have gotten
some people off Hepahestus.
Of course, it would have been ballsy of a freighter captain to have contacted Hepahestus and recommended that they evacuate immediately. At any rate, taking time to go thru ACT would have wasted precious time.
And even if everything would have gone like clockwork after the three minute countdown and many people successfully abandoned, being out in space amidst the maelstrom of BC sized chunks of debris being hurtled about could have become the instrument of a worse demise.
I wonder if Hepahestus carries emergency pods for everyone? Probably not since they would normally have the important element of time.