Are you hurt?"Abel asked softly. Jessica's eyes stared blankly out into space. "They're all dead. Th-they're all—" she stammered. Wrapping her arms around herself, she collapsed to the floor.
They'd managed to run far away from the flight deck, but she couldn't help looking around nervously. That monster was still with her, his taint still on her.
Abel could almost see her thoughts etched on her forehead. He tried to calm her down and get her to focus on the task at hand. "He won't follow us. Even a vampire will take time to heal from those wounds. What did he do to the ship's controls?"
"He said that he'd crash this ship into Rome." She sobbed. "And Mr. Dickins tried to stop him, but . . . and the captain . . ." Her words hung in the air.
Abel wanted to comfort her. He wanted to hold her close and promise her that everything would be fine. But he couldn't do that. Too much was at stake for him to waste time taking care of her.
"Calm down, Jessica," he quietly commanded.
She vomited. Abel put his arm around her heaving shoulders. He pulled her hair back and held it gently in his hands. Looking up to the ceiling as if asking God for guidance, he sighed. What a nightmare. The computer was compromised, a vampire terrorist was on the loose, and the bridge was in disarray. There would be full-scale panic if the passengers found out.
"What should we do, Father?" Jessica asked.
"We need to stop him."
But how? Jessica wondered. The duke had already attacked the ship's main weakness: the computer. They didn't stand a chance of saving the ship. No one knows how a computer works. Secrets to the old technology were lost qes ago.
"I've seen the blueprints of this ship. It has a sub-bridge, right? It's in the hangar with a messenger plane. We can control it from there."
"That's impossible," she said, wondering where he got his hands on blueprints in the first place. "The Tristan is on autopilot now. The manual override is extremely complicated, and there are layers of protection. We'd need to unlock those. It's all controlled by the computer."
The computer was the most mysterious of all the relics left behind from before the Armageddon. Only specialists called "programmers" could decipher the large volume of coded ones and zeroes into logic. She didn't know what the vampire had done to the system, but it would take an amateur years to figure it out.
Abel nodded. "I have an idea. We can disconnect the computer controls and pilot the ship from the sub-bridge."
She hesitated. "Technically, we could . . . but we don't have a helmsman."
Abel smiled. "You can fly this thing."