"Tau, you guys seem to be in charge now. What's the plan?" I asked.
"God... I don't know. For now, it works like this; we go in, we get as many people as possible, we get back out." said Ismael. "Then we wait for other ships to arrive. Do you have any better ideas?"
"No." I replied, but then had an idea. "But... I want to take a short flight towards that leaking gas jet and determine what Fort Unity is leaking."
"Exercise caution, Lodos. The jet might be powerful enough to cause damage to your vessel. Don't get too close - we have enough people to rescue already."
"Got it."
I left the side of the passenger liner Tau Rubycon and boosted the shuttle towards the jet coming out of the side of Fort Unity. The shuttle's spectrometer was extended in preparation to collect data.
"We are moving to the spaceport to evacuate the people there." said Ismael.
"Lodos IV copies. Good luck."
Tau Rubycon's pilots moved their ship to align with the spaceport entrance, and were soon obscured from my view by Fort Unity itself.
I continued towards the point of leak and skimmed the edge of the gas stream, also getting a nice view of the hole. Lots of light was coming out of the damaged structure, illuminating the gas stream, making it quite visible. The necessary data on the gas composition was collected quickly, and it turned out that Fort Unity was leaking out a mixture of gases similar to the usual atmosphere of Earth at sea level, except it had unusual levels of carbondioxide and carbonmonoxide. Those people were going to run out of air to breathe - the exact time was beyond my abilities to estimate, but the clock was ticking. Besides that, the amount of carbon in the air stream suggested that the fire going on inside was quite large.
After the quick evaluations, I turned the shuttle around to join Tau Rubycon on their evacuation efforts. Flying towards the Fort Unity spaceport entrance, I could reestablish communications with Ismael and Leonardo.
"Tau, this is Lodos. Fort Unity is leaking it's atmosphere. How is your status?"
"Lodos, Tau speaking here." said Leonardo. "We still didn't make it inside. The rotation axis of Fort Unity is messed up. The autopilot won't allow us to land in this situation. We are going to go in using full manual flight controls."
"I will queue up behind you for landing." I said, moving Lodos IV to a safe distance behind the passenger liner.
"Here we go." Ismael said, anxiously. "I will try to match rotation with Unity and boost through the door."
"A little to the right, Tau." I said. "You are too far left, you will hit the hangars."
Ismael made his corrections without replying.
"Little down, little more down..." said Leonardo. "Easy..."
"Wait, roll a bit clockwise..."
"Pitch down, pitch down!"
"Let go of the right thruster!"
"I'm trying!" said Ismael. "This is not easy."
"Stop yawing to the port side, what are you doing?"
Tau Rubycon suddenly engaged it's engines to go through the spaceport entrance of the celestial.
"We are off! Brake! Brake!" screamed Leonardo. Ismael had attempted to go through while Tau Rubycon was still off target.
After an instant, the aft thrusters of Tau Rubycon disengaged and the forward thrusters started firing to decelerate the ship. However, judging by their rate of deceleration, it was already too late to abort the approach. Leonardo's voice dominated the voice communications just before the impact.
"OH SH- BRACE! BRACE FOR IMPAC- ARGH!"
Tau Rubycon had hit the frame structure around the spaceport entrance and was sent partially into the port by its own inertia. The ship seemed to be stuck and the fuselage was blocking most of the entrance now.
"Tau, this is Lodos. How bad is it?"
The initial response was just a lot of static.
"Tau, this is Lodos. How do you read me?"
And this time, even the static didn't reply.
"Tau, this is Lodos... Tau Rubycon, short range direct comm check. Please respond."
"HELL!" Leonardo cried. "GAAAAH! MY LEG!"
"Leonardo, talk to me." I insisted.
"DEAD!" he said. "ISMAEL'S DEAD!"
It was apparent that Tau Rubycon had crashed bridge-first into the wall.
"Leonardo, can you move the ship? Do you still have control?"
Leonardo screamed a lot of curse words and phrases in return, none of which contained any answers to my question. It was clear that he was in extreme pain, and I could no longer get any help from Tau Rubycon.
"Oh no, Mei!" I suddenly cried out. I could only hope that she was in a good condition. And, if Tau Rubycon was indeed out of service, I also had to somehow get her out of there.
I looked around the spaceport entrance to try to figure out any details about the celestial that could help evacuate people. An airlock, a seal, some sort of hatch, an external docking port perhaps... My eyes were searching for them, but I could see nothing of those sorts.
"I will regret this." I said, and tried to align myself with the partially blocked spaceport entrance. Only a shuttle could get through the small gap that was left between the entrance frame and Tau Rubycon's hull.
Normally, going through a small gap was a very easy thing to accomplish in space if you had precise thrusters and computers, but the odd rotation of Fort Unity was making it extremely difficult.
"Okay, Kagan, take it easy..." I started speaking to myself. "Match roll rates, just a bit to the starboard, there you go... A little higher up now..."
I throttled up to engage the main engines of the shuttle and fly through the gap, but the flight computer disregarded my command.
"Proximity alert! Collision avoidance override!"
Those phrases were repeated a few times by the flight computer, and the shuttle remained in its place. The flight computer overlaid the shuttle's cross-section schematic onto the gap I was trying to fly through. Lodos IV was simply too big to fit into that space. I was not going to be able to get inside, not with the shuttle I was flying.
"Damn." I said. "Computer, how can I... uh... How can I get in?"
"Unable to interpret request. Please rephrase your question and try again."
"Computer, determine available access paths into the spaceport or habitation segments of Fort Unity."
Lodos IV's computer brought up a schematic of Fort Unity on one of the cockpit displays, illustrating the paths and explaining them by voice.
"The spaceport segment of Fort Unity can be accessed via the main entrance on the fore side of the structure, but please remember to communicate with space traffic control for clearance first! To get to the habitation sections from the spaceport, you can take either one of the six elevators on decks A, B, C and-"
"Computer, cancel current request. What are the alternative paths into the habitation section of Fort Unity if the spaceport is out of service?"
"No alternative paths could be found into the habitation section."