RECOVERIES
In the darkened bridge of her destroyer, Calliope crouched on the floor, and ripped open an electrical panel with a prybar. The ship was dark, falling fast, and repairs would be extensive. The panel cracked, she ripped it back, and checked the floorplans on the tablet on the floor. Her helmet hung off the back of her vac-suit and sweat dripped into her eyes as she flicked through the plans. The junction box was farther down, and she leaned back to kick the aluminum panel from an awkward stance. She stood, pulled with her legs, and ripped it to expose the wiring. Her angled face lit by the screen below, she brushed her hair back, and blew upward to move the strays.
As she crawled under the bent panel to follow the wiring, she smelled burnt ozone with a tinge of fried copper. Finding the local cable box to plug in her battery pack, the auxiliary lights kicked on and she stood, chagrined at the effort to get the first step completed. She powered on the monitors in the captain’s station, and sat, routing her work onto the screen.
Dozens of camera feeds flickered across the monitor in front of her. Each feed was from a team of builder bots flying in the void of space, surveying the exposed framework of the hull. She leaned in, shocked at the severity of the damage. She tagged the worst sections for priority repair and pulled a second screen up to assign her builder bot teams.
A redline call came in and she checked her headset and transferred it to the screen on the bridge.
Jared’s familiar face appeared. He was the captain of her flagship, her most experienced pilot, and her lover. She missed his high cheekbones and piercing eyes, his shock of thick dark hair, but not his disapproving look. His background was not the bridge of her flagship and looked like the inside of a shuttle.
Jared masked his annoyance as best he could. “Why aren’t you showing video? Are you back on that destroyer?”
Calliope needed a good lie. “Of course not. Its falling into the Martian atmosphere.”
Jared’s eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t be risking your life to resurrect that hulk. I’m coming to get you.”
“I said I’m not there.” She struggled. “I’m on a different ship!”
Jared said, “I’m landing in the hangar now.”
“Don’t! I’m not there.” Her eyes flicked to an inset screen. Jared’s ship glided into the darkened hangar, landing next to hers. With the destroyer dead, there was no way to stop him. She hung her head. “Ok, there’s no chance you’ve brought me two hundred builder bots, is there? I can’t fix the electrical.”
Jared switched to his helmet cam as he navigated the lack of gravity and traversed the darkness of the dead hangar. “You’re in charge now! You can’t take these sorts of risks!”
She flicked on her own video. “I can’t afford to lose this destroyer, you mean.” She checked the other monitors where builder bots continued testing the electrical lines. “When the Larvaltics come back for another fight, you’ll be glad for this destroyer.”
Jared’s scowl was replaced with a grin. “I could only fit a hundred bots in the cargo hold.”
Calliope stifled a scream. “Open their command channels!”
Jared flipped his wrist to open the cargo bay on his ship and sent the command codes. She was already franticly typing. “Good to see you’re glad I came.”
His tone was familiar, and she had agreed to do better. “I can’t lose the reactor. It’s already back online. Do you know the amount of chromium in the framework alone—”
Jared’s mouth twisted to a thin angry line, and he cut the connection.
Calliope grabbed more flat screens from her cart and plugged them into her portable battery. Surrounded by monitors, she scrolled Arn’s engineering specs for the engines and compared them to the video feeds. The jetpack bots successfully resurrected the reactor, or she’d never have come. The bots needed completed plans of the power lines to the engines, but she’d hurried to build the prototype, and her plans were spotty at best. She had them peeling back the wiring to check for voltage but couldn’t find all the breaks.
Jared pushed a cart of batteries, monitors, and parts into the bridge and flicked on a bank of lights to assess Calliope’s situation.
Calliope flinched at the light and raised an arm to block it as she stood. She limped to sit in front of another console, rubbing her cramped legs as they threatened to topple her.
Jared squeezed Calliope’s shoulder and she angrily swatted him away before putting her face back in her monitors.
Jared checked his handheld tablet. “Flagship says we’ve got six hours before this destroyer falls into the Martian atmosphere.”
Calliope tried to confirm locally and failed. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “Every time I check I get a different estimate.”
Jared pulled his helmet back and grinned. “That’s because there isn’t a working antenna on this ship.” He shook his head. “Why do I smell propane?”
Calliope cut her eyes away from her handheld welding tools. “I’ve got six hours to fix this? If the engines light, I can fly to Deimos and put the ship into drydock.”
Jared raised an eyebrow. “There are holes clear through this ship. You might be better off running all new wiring.” She didn’t look up. “Since you refuse to leave, I’m going to set up in the coms room. If our orbit degrades—”
Calliope softened. “The reactor and the fuel rods are stable. If I can’t get the engines running in six hours, we’ll tow it. I’m not losing this prototype. It has invaluable data on where and how the aliens attacked it. I can armor up their primary targets.” She flicked her hair back, wiping her face with her wrist to avoid the flux on her hands.
“When you brought this destroyer out, it saved Parker’s life.”
Calliope’s four capital ships had left to pursue the retreating Larvaltics. Once they were gone, Theorannus, the Larvaltic king, attacked with twelve stealth cruisers hidden within the system. He’d meant to clear the Martian orbit and take prisoner any survivors. Calliope rushed from Deimos shipyards in the only ship she had left, the prototype shell of her destroyer. With no armor or interior, it had a full-sized reactor hooked into dozens of laser turrets. She grabbed a few hundred builder bots, loaded all missile launchers and available mines, and rushed to intervene.
Jared smirked. “Did you know the ship would fly?”
“The engines were prototypes, but they’d tested well.” Pulling a sour face, she scoffed. “Arn’s reactor ran, so I had no reason to think it wouldn’t.”
Jared grinned. “If you hadn’t delayed their main attack, Parker and everyone on his station would be—”
Calliope shot him a look over her shoulder. “I meant to kill the aliens myself.”
Jared’s smirk turned to shock.
Calliope shrugged. “I wasn’t delaying for you and Eylana to come back.” She saw Jared’s look. “I didn’t know how many ships there were—”
Laughing, Jared shook his head. “You though you could take them?”
Calliope wiped a tear, watching the jetpack bots marking areas to fix. “I didn’t think my ship would be trashed afterward. I ran through my ammunition and lost my engines, now the whole thing might burn in the atmosphere—”
Jared tipped his head. “Are you crying? It’s just a drifting hulk at this point—”
Calliope wanted something to smash with her fists. “I need to recover the reactor at least! We’re so far behind! The Larvaltics have so many ships. If they realize how weak we are—If they attack with a real force—”
She stood on wobbly legs and steadied herself on the console. “I can’t let this go or we’ll never catch up.”
Jared frowned. “This isn’t all on you.”
She didn’t look up. “Do you see anyone else up here? Earth is still fighting over scraps.”
Jared said nothing.
Calliope looked from the plans on her laptop to the helm. Without turning, she said, “The power is failing before it hits the engines, and I can’t get there to see. I can’t find where it’s out without testing every junction.”
Jared fidgeted. “I came here to see if you’d leave and do the repairs remotely.”
Calliope shot him another look, walked to the helm’s station, and sat.
Jared’s teeth snapped together. “Fine.” He watched her ignoring him. “I’ll be here to pull you out if you can’t get the ship running.”
Calliope didn’t look up. “I can fly away myself!”
“You wouldn’t.”
Calliope mimicked his words. Of course she wouldn’t.
He looked over her shoulder, in awe of the complexity of the plans. “This destroyer handled hundreds of fighters. Get it back online.”
Calliope felt relieved and turned to him. “Finally, you’re on my side.” She turned back. “It kicked ass, but she’s too slow and has a fat ass. I need her faster and sharper.” She took a quick glance up and brushed her hair behind an ear. “She’s a war hero— She deserves better than to get written off as scrap.”
Jared nodded. “You’ve convinced me. I saw you sneaking builder bots off Deimos station, and I knew.” He paused. “Can’t the bots fix this?”
Calliope rolled her eyes. “Arn’s reactor never got integrated into my plans—”
Jared nodded. “You were in the middle of it. I guess you didn’t finish writing up the documentation.”
“The bots can’t fix what they don’t know.”
He looked around. “Why’d you pressurize the bridge?”
“I needed some time out of the helmet. You know I get claustrophobic.”
Jared nodded. “You spent weeks in a suit.”
“Almost a month.” She plopped backward. “And now I can’t stand it—”
Jared frowned. “Just have the bots run new cables, drop the old stuff.”
Calliope said, “Smart, but there’s a lot more than wiring destroyed down there. Also, I still have to finish adding Arn’s reactor plans into the code for the bots.” She leaned back in the helm station and rubbed her bloodshot eyes with the heels of her hands. “Parker owes me for saving his station. He better remember.”
Jared’s hand lingered on her shoulder, but she leaned forward, already lost in work. She traced circuit routes through the destroyer and Jared’s smile fell. “We’re on a timeline. I’ll leave you to it.”
Jared sniffed at the stale air and took two builder bots with him. “I’ll fix the coms antenna. I’ve got to do some recruiting.”
He walked out, but Calliope failed to notice.
One of the main inverters was gone. A chunk burnt from the frame was the only clue an electrical control station had been there.
“So that’s why there’s no current.” She had a builder bot check the lines before and after the missing conduit box. Annoyed, she scrolled through Arn’s reactor plans. Calliope could follow most of it. She dug deeper for the missing parts and swore under her breath. Why had Arn made a critical part without redundancy? She found there were eight of these power boxes, all missing, precisely excised. She raised an eyebrow. The aliens were better gunners than she’d thought. She’d armored the lines, armored the engines, so how did they know to hit these junctions to kill the engines? Could they see the current?
Calliope chewed her lower lip. The aliens understood more of their technology than she’d guessed. While she waited for the bots to report, she checked the oxygen levels. With no pumps, the stale air grew thin. She’d have to get the circulators working.
She turned to talk to Jared, but he’d gone.
She logged into the builder bot’s work list and pushed her integration of Arn’s plans into their codebase. They recalibrated, querying back resource requirements. Calliope sourced the parts and materials from what she’d brought in the hangar. Teams of builder bots recycled debris, fed it into 3D printers, and spun cabling according to Arn’s specs. Minutes passed as she found more critical parts expertly targeted around the engines.
Arn Lasserman, as head of nuclear engineering, had scaled up the reactor for her destroyer. The header of this section of Arn’s plans read Current stabilization, transfer, and flow. Tired of reading, she flipped to a diagram, and traced the intricacies of the reactor’s power flow.
Calliope understood the reactor’s broad strokes, enough to integrate it, but she quickly found herself lost in the complexities. To repair it, she wanted Arn’s help, but he was racing to fix Parker’s station before it crashed as well.
***
Arn blinked sweat out of his eyes, as he grappled hand over hand in the conduit tunnels, following the hundreds of meters of wiring. His helmet light was strong enough to guide him. The conduits were reinforced steel, intended to never fail. In the light gravity he flew down the length of them looking for damage. When the combined Larvaltic fleet assaulted the station, they knocked out all power, along with the ability to stabilize the rotation. The torus wheel spun around a central axis to provide gravity and without a perfect balance of mass, any wobble might escalate catastrophically, flinging the station either out into space or down into the Martian atmosphere.
Arn had a small window of time, and already, slight wobbles were noticeable. Arn worked fast, flying down the tunnels, sending bots down others. They could attach a ship and push from the outside, but Arn didn’t want to invite catastrophe.
At well over two meters tall, Arn’s powerful frame didn’t fit well in the tunnels. Where the cabling routed through the spokes of the wheel, the tubes shrunk, and he no longer fit. He pulled and squeezed until he was under the hangar bay. The central axis housed the reactor, and to resolve this, Arn had brought eight of the smaller builder bots to roll down the piping to inspect the lines. The first bot jabbed a multimeter tool into the conduits, searching for live wires. He’d managed to repressurize parts of the station and patch most holes to hard vacuum. He checked the pressure in the hangar, saw it was good, and popped his helmet back to suck in fresh air. He’d gotten the air circulators working off electricity from the solar panels.
With a grunt, Arn tasted the air and grinned. At least he had that. Now he just needed to connect power from the reactor to the main engines. He used his tipped gloves and checked his handheld tablet, but engine status was still negative.
If he failed to find the source of the outage soon, he could try to wire the engines directly to the solar panels. It might give him short burns on the engines.
Parker, the head of the station, it’s chief architect and designer, called Arn over his helmet coms. “Our spin is gaining eccentricity.”
Arn growled, frustrated. After over a day of welding, diagnosing, and welding again, he was in no mood. He’d been commanding sets of builder bots and relied on them to complete more tasks than ever before. He’d never set the bots to a task and walked away. It was a measure of trust he didn’t accept, the type of engineering Calliope pioneered and preferred.
He straightened the headset and jammed the earpiece firmly in his ear. “The outage is between the reactor and the engines, somewhere along the spokes. I’ve got bots crawling the tube.”
Parker squinted. “The correct spoke?”
Arn snarled, “Any connection will do! We don’t need full power, just enough.”
Arn kept his eye on the bot’s live feed as it worked. Parker said something but Arn missed it as his screen went blank. Arn switched to an external cam in time to see the bot bounce out a hole in the line and fly into space.
Arn saw stars on his screen. Knowing he had to be quick, he muscled out from the conduit under the hangar flooring, and stood. Excited to be out, he jumped to his feet, and scrabbled awkwardly on stiff legs to the edge of the hangar. He looked out the window and saw the bot flying freely in the vacuum of space.
Parker said, “A bot just got spaced!”
Arn laughed. “I found the hole.”
Parker scoffed in his earpiece, “Why didn’t you have jetpack bots fly outside the tubes!”
Arn half-squatted, forcing blood to his legs. “I did. Do you see all the holes? There are eight spokes in the wheel, and a long circumference. I worked back from the engines myself.”
He ran awkwardly on stiff limbs up staircases to the external airlock, massaging the pins-and-needles sensation from his legs. Limping, he reached inside the airlock, activated two jetback bots, pulled back outside, and sealed the door.
He straightened his external mic. “Pushing jetpack bots out now. One to save the roller-bot, and a bigger one with welding gear. Let’s see how bad that line is and if we can’t seal it with plate steel once the connection is repaired.”
Parker said, “We can’t leave that powerline running through there. The aliens targeted it. Switch it to an armored section.”
Arn watched the light go green and slapped the external airlock controls. He pressed his forehead to the window and chuffed. “There’s no markings for the power conduit—nothing.”
“Nothing?” Parker sounded incredulous. “It couldn’t be a lucky shot.”
Arn frowned, pulled his gloves off, and ran his hands first through his auburn mess of curls. He stared at the blank steel plate and scratched his grizzled beard. He could taste salt around his lips. He grunted. “There are other burns from shots along the course of this conduit. This should tell us something.”
Parker hissed. “The aliens can see electrical lines? Sounds impossible.”
Arn looked at the flat steel with the scorched line of holes following his conduit. He compared it to the plans on his tablet. “There’s a pattern of enemy fire. I’d say they can see our electrical lines, without a doubt. I’ll start moving it now—”
Parker’s voice pitched higher. “Move the line later! We need the rotation back on center!”
Arn balled a fist in anger so quickly he dropped his tablet back to its safety line. Quick reflexes caught it against his thigh. He held back his instinct to curse and checked the video feed on his tablet. “Fine! The wiring is going to have to take a junction box covering the weld. I’ll seal it with some plate-steel.”
Parker’s tone changed. “I’m getting power into the positioning engines! Firing them now.”
Arn said, “Give it a second! You’ll fry the bot! He’s still welding!” Arn watched the bot back away just in time to see an arc flare past it. He snarled in anger while the second bot positioned the cover.
“Twelve junctions—this might be the final one.” Arn realized Parker had cut the line.
Arn dropped the tablet as the engines kicked on and the station rocked. He fought to stay on his feet and grabbed the railing.
After a pause, Parker’s voice went up over the station’s speakers. “Engines have positive adjustment. We’re back on axis!”
Parker called Arn back. “How is the support structure between the torus and the axis?”
Arn said, “I’ve got builder bot teams welding where it was weakened. The crew will be working,” he checked status, “for five hours.”
Parker said, “Will it hold?”
Arn chuffed. “Damn right it’ll hold!” He looked for a place to sit and saw none. “I’m bushed. You fixed the spin, but how’s our orbit around Mars?”
“Improving—”
“Good. I’m done. I’ve been on repairs since the attack, and my eyes aren’t focusing. I’m coming up, getting a shower, a drink, and standing down.”
Parker said, “Fine. If you feel you’ve earned it.”
Arn raised an eyebrow and considered murdering Parker with his bare hands. Instead, he smirked into the camera and saw Parker’s grin. Arn’s smirk deepened into a laugh. The laugh grew into a guffaw and escalated to a deep rolling echo around the hangar.
