Even before I arrived on the bridge, I have made a plan to save the ship.
"Professor!"
"Sir?"
"How long can our life support last with no power?"
"The life support DOES require at least a bit of power at all times." he told me. "No power, no life support."
"Yes, I know..." I said. "But tell me, how long can we go for before people start dying?"
"Oh, you meant that..." he said. "Let me check the library."
We both walked over to one of the working general purpose computers on the bridge.
"If we can just see the habitat volume..." the professor started thinking out loudly while navigating in the ship's library filesystem. "Then if I can get the number of crew members per cubic meter... Oh, and also the water reserves..."
I left him in front of the computer as he ran calculations.
"Sir, in the best scenario, I think we would have about half an hour before people start suffocating in the fore habitation." he said.
"Could we make it longer by getting all people to rear and also re-routing all the air that way?" I asked.
"There are multiple critical errors with that idea." he said. "Firstly, you need power to re-route anything, and secondly, no; even if you could somehow do that without power, that would kill everyone within 10 minutes instead of 30."
"Okay..." I said. "How much battery power do we have left?"
"Battery number one is full, number two is almost full, number three nearly drained."
"For how long can we keep life support running on battery power?" I asked.
"I'm not sure... It depends a bit on battery efficiency, and that depends on operating temperature and wiring quality and inductive re-"
"Okay, just give me a rough number."
"I would say... 2 to 3 days." he said.
"Do we have emergency solar power panels on this ship?" I asked.
"No." said Mei, from the other end of the bridge. "I checked already."
"Wait." said the professor. "We have a shuttle, and the shuttle has solar power panels!"
"Yes, but that's for the shuttle." I said. "What is your point?"
"If we can get our engineers to use the shuttle's solar panels to recharge our batteries, we can get practically infinite life support!" he said. "I mean... until we run out of food, I suppose, since hydroponics won't run well on solar power."
"Alright." I said. "It is decided then. Shut down everything except life support and ship intercom."
"Passive sensors?" asked the professor.
"Basic navigation, star tracker etc.?" asked Mei.
"Everything." I repeated, and walked to the intercom. "All decks, use minimal lighting. All decks, use minimal lighting. Switch to energy conservation modes. Shut down all non-essential systems."
I waited for about a minute for all ship crew to comply, and sent the second order.
"Main engineering, switch ship to battery power. Shutdown all reactors."
Just when I was leaving the intercom, I got a reply from main engineering.
"Sir, we can't shut down the reactor safely." said George. "Not when it's in this situation."
"Doesn't this thing have like... a panic button or something?" I asked.
"If we shut the reactor down now, we will damage everything and we won't be able to start it back up." he said. "Ever."
"Just shut it down, I don't care!" I said.
"Sir, are you sure?" George asked. "Most safety systems are disengaged for maintenance purposes, and if we shut the reactor down now, we don't know what-"
"Shut. It. Down. Now!"
The ship quickly switched to battery power and the reactor was shutdown without any apparent problems.
"Very good, chief." I said. "Now turn all safety switches back on and secure the reactor area. Professor Yamamari will meet you there for your next assignment."
"Understood."
I left the intercom and turned to the professor.
"Prof, tell the chief of our idea and implement it as soon as possible." I said. "You have all permissions you need to use the shuttle."
"Yes, sir." he said and left the bridge. Now, what I had to do was sit, wait and hope for the best.
"Do you think it was really wise to shutdown all sensors and navigation?" asked Mei. "What if we come under attack again? We won't even notice the enemy until they start shooting at us, and when they do, we won't be able to do anything."
"We wouldn't be able to do anything even if we saw them." I said. "So... what's the point of wasting power on sensors?"
"Okay..." she said. "Fair enough. Next question."
"Are you interrogating me?" I asked.
"Yes." she replied with a straight face. "Once we have a reliable solar power source, how do you intend to move the ship back to port? The main propulsion runs on the power of the main fission reactor, which is many orders of magnitude more powerful than the solar power we are going to get. Well... Without that reactor, we could, in theory, still use the old-school combustion rocket engines, but that gives us only one tenth the efficiency, and therefore very little cruise speed, which means that before we can get to the port, we will run out of-"
"Are you done?" I interrupted her on purpose. "I'm not intending to move the ship; we will get our long range comms back on for a while and ask for a ride back home. Hopefully, our other ships in the Inner Solar System are doing better than us."
"Yes, of course! That's a great idea!" Mei was slowly switching to her sarcastic mode. "Let's broadcast our position and velocity to every single enemy ship nearby that can and will come here before our friends do and watch the fireworks! Not only will they destroy us, but they will wait here a bit longer and also destroy the ship that comes to rescue us!"
She had a very good point.
"Okay, I get it, you are right." I said. "So, any ideas of your own?"
"Well, I would have some ideas... ONLY IF YOU DIDN'T ALREADY SHUT DOWN THE REACTOR!"