Stress vomiting! Feel the excitement!
The medics told me that I ended up saving four of them. I’m not going to lie; I was grateful one of them was Rubicon. Any life saved is worth it, but him dying? That could have been bad.
The burn itself wasn’t so bad — it was just a jarring, full-body bruise that the medical staff could handle, once they had time — but getting power was the easy part. Getting control meant aching wrists and ankles as I shoved the hauler into something resembling stability. Amalgamation tech is very good, very intuitive, but whoever designed never thought about conditions like this. The two internal computers were worse than useless, and for five horrible seconds I thought they were going to override my manual controls and blast the hauler straight into the ground.
But their own confusion (or possibly, agonized internal screaming) meant that the failsafes wouldn’t let them take control just yet, and the fuzz I could now hear with almost painful clarity in the empty cockpit gave me enough clues to the space around me that I could align myself in a relatively straight path and and reasonably correct angle. And once the computers had ten seconds of decent data to work with… everything was fine. The hauler evened out, the emergency lights went off, and the creak of metal was conspicuous with its sudden absence. We were on a clear and smooth glidepath to home, and there wasn’t a thing I had to do besides throw up again. And let me tell you: this time it was from stress.
One thing every engineer should consider is “how will this be used in an emergency?” For most emergencies putting in a conspicuous big, red button to just shut everything down is perfect. For some of them, however, you need to be able to override the idiot shut-offs because, while computers are much safer than human brains, humans can tell you what to do much easier than they can tell you how they know.