The Salty Nut made it off the ground.
Barely.
The rear stabilizer was gone, the left engine was running at forty percent, and the hull had three stress fractures Pip had sealed with emergency foam that wouldn't hold past one atmosphere of pressure. Mei flew it anyway, pushing every working system to its limit.
"Eleven weeks," Mei said, her eyes fixed on the navigation screen. "The Ice Portal is fourteen hours from here at full speed. We're running at sixty percent. That's twenty hours minimum."
"Then we lose six hours," Xin said. "What can we fix in flight?"
"The stabilizer needs a full replacement," Pip said, already moving toward the engine bay. "I can't replace it but I can redistribute the thrust load across the secondary fins. Buys us maybe fifteen percent speed back."
"Do it."
