Garrick tried to ignore the infernal itch on his ear. It had started a day before, and knowing he couldn't scratch it for another few days made him antsy.

Six days had passed, and the engineers were still hard at work laying new, temporary cables from their only working reactor to the Sibilis' mainframe. Macdewil was working on the second reactor, though his original estimate had been extended from days to weeks as he kept coming across issues.

Garrick was about to go for his daily round when he saw the aforementioned Macdewil float towards him. His face was tight, and his eyes stormy. As their eyes locked, Garrick accepted the call.

"It's fucked."

Garrick blinked at Macdewil's snarl.

"The second reactor?" Garrick asked.

"The control system, which I thought I could fix, is fried. We did it ourselves, too, making me feel like a moron," Macdewil said, shaking his head angrily.

"How?"

"I should have disconnected it before starting reactor three," Macdewil said. "I was just too tired, wasn't thinking straight. The power went everywhere, of course, and with half or more of the power regulator system destroyed, there was a power feedback. We're lucky the stupid control system fried. If it hadn't, it might have tried to boot and caused more damage to reactor three."

Garrick took a deep breath, then nodded.

"Fine. So be it. How much work would be needed for reactor four?"

"Too much," Macdewil said. "We are going to need to drag one of the frigates here to salvage for spare parts."

Their connection was quiet as Garrick thought about the bad luck.

"Fine," he finally said. "What about Hiblert's idea?"

Macdewil clicked himself to a cable hanging beside Garrick's and let himself drift beside Garrick.

"We can do it," he said. "It's going to be dangerous, and it could be a potential one-way trip, but it's doable."

"Good," Garrick said. "That means we are going to need information on the state of the other ships. What about The Sibilis mainframe?"

"A day, maybe two, Macdewil said. Then he sighed. "Where do you want to go, Garrick? There's no planet here, just a few dozen moons around those useless gas giants!"

"Useles? Maybe," Garrick said as he pulled up the information on the system that they had managed to gather before coming into conflict with The Serotonin.

"Majriti is almost smack middle in the Goldilocks zone, and it has eighteen moons," he said, looking at his own notes. "Three of them are ice moons, and our readings showed they all might have liquid oceans below the surface. Should I remind you how much of a goldmine Europe ended up being? Just because we both had to live in the Frozen Belly doesn't mean it wasn't a great place to live for those more fortunate and rich."

"Yes, and should I remind you that it took hundreds of years to go from a simple base to even a remotely livable city?" Macdewil snorted.

"That was almost two hundred years ago," Garrick said, raising an eyebrow. "Do you suggest we use such archaic methods?"

"We might have a choice," Macdewil said as he closed his eyes. "From what I can tell from the last records, the chances of The Seretonin having survived in any whole form are very slim, and none of the frigates are in one piece. We are lucky The Sibilis had all those reinforcements."

Yes, we are, Garrick thought, wondering again why they had even been there.

"Well, we have multiple rocky planets," he said, knowing full well how unlikely those would be.

Without any atmosphere, they would still be relegated to living in shelters, likely below the surface. If there had to be a choice, the icy moons were a more likely candidate. No, what he needed to do was poke Macdwil until he started thinking. If he had just ordered it, his friend would have tried his best, which is true, but it wouldn't have been nearly as good as if he had started thinking again.

"Don't even joke about that," Macdewil snorted. "Mars still had issues. The only rocky worlds usable are those with an atmosphere."

They were quiet for a bit, but Garrick saw Macdewil's eyes sharpen on the wall, seemingly deep in thought.

"What we should do is create a space station and keep it between one of the moons and the gas giant," he said. "We have more raw material here than we could finish in a few hundred years, and it's all made to work in space. Getting it on a moon would likely destroy most of it, and we aren't going to be able to dig out anymore for a long time."

Garrick hummed, nodding as they thought about that.

"Then we should get that big ice moon that moves around Majriti," he said. "There's a thin band of rocky debris around it that we could use as a resource."

Macdewil nodded his head, then frowned.

"What?" Garrick asked after a few moments.

"Are we seriously going to keep those names?" Macdewil asked.

Garrick rolled his eyes before sighing. "What's wrong with Majriti?"

"You know how I think about gods and stuff," Macdewil snorted.

"Yes, you don't like it," Garrick said, getting close to telling his head engineer and friend to stuff as he wasn't interested in any theological debates right now. Those had caused enough wars in the last fifteen hundred years.

"Not necessarily… but I like the old ones. You know? The pagan ones?"

Garrick groaned. "We are not renaming them, but if it means this much to you, go and find a name you like and slap it on the moon. They weren't known till we came here, and it's unlikely that we will get back and have some bigshot name them for us."

"Good! Can I name all the moons?" Macdewil asked, leaning forward with glistening eyes.

"Definitely not," Garrick said. "Name the one we will build a base around, but make sure it's a nice one."

Macdewil snorted. "What, did you think I'd call it Hell or something?"

"Were you?" Garrick asked.

"Captain, you think too little of me," Macdewil said as he unhooked himself and began drifting for the exit. "I was thinking of Asgard," he said.

"No fantasy and fiction references," Garrick snapped just as Macdewil ended the call.

He watched his head engineer quickly drift away and shook his head.

"Well, atleast he's not as depressed anymore," he thought with a weary sigh.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Hours, then days, moved by.

Garrick spent most of his time trying to make plans for the future and scouring the remains of The Sibilis for anything useful. Yuri kept asking for power to the medbay so she could use the scanners, only for Macdewil to shoot the plans down due to energy constraints and potentially blow up the reactor.

Macdwil himself was splitting his time between fixing The Siblis Mainframe and creating a small rocket-like device that could blast someone towards the nearest frigate.

As Garrick returned to engineering, Yuri floated towards him, opening a connection.

"Yuri?"

"We can't stay like this much longer, Captain," Yuri said, looking worried.

"Like what?" Garrick asked.

"Weightless," Yuri said, waving her hands around. "If this keeps up a lot longer, we are going to start exhibiting issues when we get gravity back."

"Macdewil has explained this," Garrick said.

"I know, captain, and I understand," Yuri said wearily. "But you told me to act like the head medical, and I am. This is part of it. We can't continue like this much longer. There needs to be some plan thought up to get us gravity back."

Garrick sighed, adding the item to his growing list that already contained: getting as much food from all the ships as he could, figuring out a future plan to grow new food, finding out what was wrong with their implants, potentially finding a way to signal Sol that they were alive, gathering all crypods potentially now drifting around the system, and a few more.

"I'll come up with something," he said, trying to sound as sure of himself as he could.

"Thanks, captain," Yuri said before hesitating. "I'm sorry, Garrick. I wish I could help more than I am now, but I need the medbay for that."

"I know, Yuri. You are doing great," Garrick said.

A few hours later, he had a slight sense of Deja Vu as he hovered beside Macdewil, looking at The Sibilis's mainframe. Its initially clean and nice exterior was gone; everything was now covered in wires, cables, and extra devices.

"Same as with the reactor?" Garrick asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Almost," Macdewil muttered, looking at a few of the other engineers who were still working on a few systems that had been attached to the walls. "The reactor just needed to be repaired, and we had to cut a few of the cables that led to malfunctioning sections. The mainframe? We had to move things from parts of the ships here, add them where they don't normally belong, and redirect the cables from the other reactor to work with just reactor three."

"But you are just going to push a button?" Garrick asked, raising an eyebrow.

Macdewil burst out laughing, and when he finally calmed down, he was furiously blinking to get the tears from his eyes.

"Dammit, Garrick. Did you have to make me laugh? There's snot on my lip!"

Garrick just calmly stared at him, and after a few moments, Macdewil snorted.

"Yes. I'm going to push a button," he said before doing just that.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then the lights flickered all throughout the room.

"Shit, stabilize that output!" Macdewil shouted to one of the engineers who was already flying to a small panel. He did something, and a moment later, the lights stopped flickering. Another few seconds passed, then the mainframe lit up like a Christmas tree. Lights, mainly blue and green, but a few red ones, were flashing furiously and continued to do so for a minute before most began glowing stable.

"Status?" Garrick asked.

"Not sure," Macdewil muttered. "Sibilis, status?"

There was no response, and Macdewil began rapidly talking with the other engineers. Within moments, they had used more words that Garrick didn't understand than during his university days.

A sudden, soft voice interrupted them- cutting through their chatter like a knife through butter.

"Captain Dasbartin, I am operating at four percent capacity. Would you like a status report?"

A round of joyful shouting came, and Garrick quickly cut off the general chat.

"Yes, Sibilis. Start with the message you send me about the System-AI."

"The System-AI was locked away within the forward section of the ship, and from my limited readings, most of those systems were destroyed. Those still in the back are, however, operational. I detect no activity on the processing units there."

Garrick was quiet, happy to have another integral part of his ship back up and running, but worried if he was actually talking to The Sibilis. How would he even know if he wasn't talking to that System-AI? As he pondered that, an idea popped into his head. He thought about it for a few moments but couldn't come up with a reason not to try.

"Sibilis, how do I know you are not the System-AI impersonating Sibilis?"

"There is nothing I can do to prove my personae, Captain. However, Engineer Macdewil might be able to. There is a record in my databank that suggests there is a linguistic disparity pre-programmed into my LLM. He is listed as one of the personnel who has access to this, and if another LLM or AI has taken over, he would be able to verify my integrity."

Garrick frowned, then quickly called Macdewil, explaining what he'd heard.

"What is this about a linguistic disparity?" he asked.

Macdewil was quiet for a bit, then he snorted. "I didn't know they had actually done that! It was after a drinking session, back on Igniz, where we theorized about an AI attack by The Unity Pact and how we could potentially find out about this. I suggested adding a trigger in the data that trained the LLM, one that would be so deeply ingrained and specific for each LLM."

"Would this give us a guarantee?" Garrick asked.

"Not a guarantee, but it would be close," Macdewil said. "Sibils, I also want you to give me the complete checksum of your last internal software state."

"Yes, Engineer Macdewil, I will send it to you immediately."

Garrick waited, and after a while, Macdewil nodded.

"Sibils, salads are a man's best friend and should never act like…?"

"A brownie because those cannot be trusted," the Sibilis answered promptly.

Garrick blinked, then stared at Macdewil.

"What? I told you we were drunk?"

"Remind me again not to let drunk engineers touch billion credit infrastructures," Garrick said. Still, somehow, he felt a lot better now.

"Sibils, status update," he said.

"I am locked out from the entire front half of the ship, and I'm only getting responses from ten percent of the rest of the system. The external shields are down, and the hull plating that was directly impacted by the exploding Shipslinger is destroyed. The engines are disabled and unresponsive, so Inertial Gravity can not be achieved."

A list of the systems, one Garrick had seen many times, appeared in his H.U.D., and he had to do his best not to let his sadness show. Most systems were red or orange, with only a handful of yellow and none green.

"Alright," Garrick said. "Then let me sketch the situation for you. We are dead in the water, stranded in Upsison Andomedae, and there is zero chance of anyone coming to find us. Engineer Macdewil and I have drawn up initial plans to create a small space station between one of Majriti's moons and the gas giant. I want you to come up with a feasible plan and work it out with Macdewil. Any immediate suggestions?"

"I would suggest heading for the aft scanners and trying to get those operational," the calm, emotionless voice of the Sibilis said. "With those, I would be able to provide insight into the location of the debris around us. This would help us determine our plan."

Garrick looked at Macdewil, who nodded back.

"Alright, tell me what you need to get the aft scanners operational."

"Captain, I would require to know the state. It would be best if you head there and share the current physical state of the hardware."

Garrick opened his mouth, then closed it as he thought of something else.

"We are currently unable to talk outside of the engineering room. Something is interfering with the signal of our Implants. Can you detect what is causing the interference?"

This time, it was quiet for one entire second, something that almost shocked Garrick, as it meant an immense number of calculations had just happened.

"There seems to be some sort of radiation still coming from the direction of the Shipslinger," The Sibilis said. "My surviving sensors aren't enough to determine more than its existence, and only that due to interference I am perceiving. However, from what I can detect and read in the logs, the radiation is weakening at a rapid rate and should likely be negligent within sixteen hours and ten minutes."

"Send everything you can detect of this radiation to Nurse Yuri," Garrick said. "Also, see if you can detect any survivors on board."

"Yes, Captain. This might take a while."

Garrick frowned. He wasn't used to anything taking long with LLM's, especially not with The Sibilis, who was state-of-the-art.

"Explain," he said.

"I might be able to infer survivor activity by enabling parts of the ship's power grid and seeing if there's a specific draw of power. However, the single reactor currently online is insufficient to do this for large sections," The Sibils said.

"Very well. Do what you can, but make sure not to overextend the reactor," Garrick said. "Repairing the other three is likely impossible."

"Yes, Captain. I will contact you as soon as I know more."

The Sibils fell quiet, though Garrick knew that it was back. Somehow, as much as he worried, having the perpetually calm voice back made him feel a lot better, and suddenly, their survival didn't seem as farfetched.

"I'll come with you to the aft sensors," Macdewil said. "The others can take care of patching up any little things. The Sibils should be able to easily tell them what to do."

"Alright, let's head out," Garrick said.

He pushed himself out and slowly drifted back into the main engineering room.

I hope we can get these sensors up fast, he thought.