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work during a real fight.
    I practiced my turns and flips until the moves were all second nature. I had also found a firing pattern for the coil guns that was effective against multiple craft at once. As I flipped hard and fired off three rounds in a simulation my screen was suddenly overwritten with odd shaped characters. Shepard then asked a question.
    She wanted to know what I thought I was seeing. It took a few moments to recognize the characters as being the same ones we had seen on the side of the alien structure. Shepard then asked if I understood them to which I gave her an irritated glance. My holo-screen soon showed another two lines of characters... but this time they were in English.
    Again Shepard asked if I understood what it said. As I read through the text with a scowl on my face I came to the sudden realization that she had done it! She had cracked the alien's language. I quickly asked how and she revealed that she had a linguistics algorithm that had been running in the background on the ship's computers, continuously analyzing the alien’s communications.
    The artificial intelligence module of the computer system had taken the symbols from the alien structure and run them through the linguistics algorithm. It was nothing that Shepard had done herself. But the result was one of immense importance.
    If we could decode their communications we could use it against them in battle or perhaps even find a method to disrupt their comm altogether. It was a huge discovery, but as we sped along at 2412 SOL we had no immediate way of sending the message home. We would have to wait until we dropped below light speed which would take another three days, and then only if we flipped and slowed immediately.
    I began to run the numbers for a flip when a warning light flashed on both of our holo-screens. Collision with an object just above our safety parameters was imminent. I looked directly at Shepard as the collision counter ticked down from ten seconds. At zero the impact was not much more than a shudder. But the affect was a critical strike to our BHD rings knocking out all but one.
    I did an immediate flip and punched in the numbers for how long it would take to slow to a dead stop. I was disheartened when the time counter came back with just over 182 days. From our current speed we would come to a stop more than 12 light years on the other side of Earth. I viewed it as an unacceptable outcome.
    I punched up our on-board supplies and found that we had four extra rings. I again ran the numbers with only five BHD rings and found that it would still take 36 days to stop, placing us just over two light years beyond our own planet. Shepard then suggested that we scavenge some of our side rings. It would inhibit our ability to turn but at this time turning was not our problem.
    We were soon busily running scenarios and simulations of doing a ring exchange at 2412 SOL. The tiniest spec of space dust could obliterate the ship if it was struck at that speed with no active skin. Our best simulation yielded an exchange time of 22 minutes. During that short time-span we would travel almost 400 million kilometers.
    I asked Shepard for her thoughts and she concurred that without a full exchange we risked missing any attempt at fighting the main fleet before it reached our space. We were unaware of any such plans, but those things always had a way of not coming to the forefront until zero hour approached.
    As I reached for my helmet Shepard put her hand on my arm. She was the engineer and it was her duty to bring the ship back to within its proper operating parameters. She was the one responsible and she would not be releasing that duty to me.
    I looked her in the eye and then took a firm grasp of her hand. After a nod of my head and a slap on her shoulder I turned towards the supply boxes as she slipped her helmet over her hair and spun it slightly to the left until it latched. I followed immediately after with the same