Vigdis wasn’t all that useful in the first two hours immediately after the crash. Thirty minutes after the ship came to a halt, she found that she couldn’t really put any weight on her left foot. It wasn’t anything new, just the adrenaline of the attack and crash wearing off and her old injury waking up with a vengeance, but it would subside in a few hours. Although the crash was a violent one, fortunately she’d padded and strapped down Fritjof’s carrier enough for him to make it through all of that without any harm done, although he wasn’t happy about being put on house arrest since the crash due to hull breaches he could escape through into the inhospitable air outside. 23,6%. [i]Just[/i] above the safe limit. It also told them something else: They weren’t anywhere in Sol anymore. Yay, drive works, I guess?

When the captain called a meeting once the chaos of the first day died off and opened the floor, Vigdis raised her hand. “How’s Varen and when are the coffee rations opening up?” She started with questions before moving on to comments. She could already see a lot of overtime in their future, “About the hull breaches, that might be worse than it seems. Any breach in a compartment on the dorsal half we can find easily enough due to the air composition differences, but any hole in the ventral hull will be sealed by the soil. We’ll have to use the smaller drones to go over it centimeter by centimeter from the inside. I also don’t need eyes on the heat shield to tell you that it’s gone. In the ‘educated guess’ department, the other outboard engines might be a bigger issue. Nevermind being filled with soil, we’re worried about the gimbal mechanisms, both structurally and functionally. Without a crane or a heavy lift VTOL, we might be stranded here. We’ll have details tomorrow.” Vigdis started with the bad news part of what the engineers already knew, which would likely only get worse once they actually had a look. Maybe they’d be able to rebuild one long range antenna, and the resource situation would also depend on how much of the torn off engine they could salvage.

“On the bright side, I had time to look over the structural members. There’s about thirty cracked or snapped ribs on the ventral and starboard side, most of which are repairable. Main girders running the length of the ship are okay, or will be with some reinforcement, except the ventral ones, both of which are snapped in two. They [i]could[/i] be patched together, but it will be sketchy at best, but the Jo was built with redundancy in mind, so [i]structurally[/i], a week or two of work, she’ll be fit to launch, fly and land. If we have to, maybe even reach orbit, but the only way we deorbit safely is if we repair the heat shield. That’s a problem of accessibility and materials.” Fortunately, they wouldn’t need to deorbit or even communicate, they just needed to get to Sol. Someone would come investigate the silent ship and pick them up from there. Just as long as it wasn’t her old crew who came for them, she’d never live that down. All in all, it could’ve been a lot worse. Fuck it, they’ve built it once, they’ll build it again. The Jo would fly again one day, even if hunchback, limping and only once. The last part was up to whether the company execs and billing would decide to go with repairs or salvage.