Alex slept better than he had in some time that night, despite the fact that there was nothing working in his cabin. The computer core he had re-purposed to crunch a waveride had run all the systems in it, from lights to the life support module. Everything could be bypassed to operate, but that was work and all he was doing in there was sleeping. So, he left the door open and slept just fine in the gentle red glow of the corridor. Each individual cabin and the corridor produced enough fresh air for two people even if nothing else was running, so there was no concern there. It was even planned for, fans pointing everywhere to keep the atmosphere stirred up during zero-g operations, which was what they were doing for the time being. Carbon had seemed a little unsure about the safety of this arrangement, but had relented before Alex got the ship’s manual out.

Feeling surprisingly well rested, he glided down the hall to the head, towel and clean clothes crammed under his arm. The door controls on the head said that it was unoccupied. He knocked anyway. It was a superstition in the Civil Pilot Program, going back to the first scoutship - the Kon-Tiki - which had lost the door controls on the head three days into a year-long trip. They decided to simply knock instead of return to base, and every crew since had knocked to keep the head working properly since. He got no response and set about his morning routine. Shower and shave, vacuum himself mostly dry, finish with the towel, dress. The standard issue clothing for him included two pairs of navy cargo shorts which he'd never taken out of the drawer before today. He had opted for a pair of those knowing that he was going to be doing manual labor on a cold engine - that is to say, one that was fully powered down and discharged. It would probably be actually cold as well.

He pulled a gray CPP t-shirt on over that and what were effectively running shoes, and crammed his pockets full of the station gear he was supposed to always have on hand while off planet. There was work to be done and he was going to be doing it like he’d been trained. The right pocket got the emergency decompression gear, left was a medkit that was mostly just multishot nanite injector, but there were wound dressings in there too. Electronics might fail, but compression would always stop a bleed.

He'd never seen Carbon wearing anything other than her encounter suit or jumpsuit, but she apparently hadn't been issued the same vacuum-packed brick of clothing designed for humans that he had. That made sense. Their upper body was basically the same, but they had those weird, thin digitigrade legs.

She was already in the mess. She stuck a spoon loaded with pink-orange breakfast mash into her mouth, glanced up at him and choked on it, eyes wide with surprise as her antenna whipped up over the top of her head, ears unfolded to their unexpectedly large full size. It did a good job at making her appear taller, if only for a moment before she got that under control and they returned to their normal, relaxed position.

“Are you alright?” Alex paused there in the doorway, heart racing and actually startled at her reaction. Everyone’s instincts were in working order this morning.

“Yes.” She coughed, face squeezed tight as she cleared her throat a few times, trying to get food that she’d inhaled out.

“Okay. That’s good.” He gave her a little extra space as he moved to the dispenser and dialed in his usual morning oatmeal.

“I have determined-” Carbon’s voice tightened as she spoke before cutting herself off to cough again and sneeze. Her eyes rolled and she got an exasperated look about her before she continued, “I have determined the task I need you to work on first.”

The dispenser dinged, he retrieved his oatmeal and sat, bowl clicking down against the table. “Sounds good, what do I do?”

“Do you know what a plasma lock is?”

Alex paused before starting to eat, “locks up the plasma, right?”

“That is... you do not know, correct?” She gestured at him with her spoon, “it is a joke?”

“Yes, correct. I don’t actually know.”

“It is an assembly of control valves for shaping plasma flow to the converters.” She paused and fought another sneeze. “It is designed to operate at high temperatures and pressures, so the connections are extremely tight. Your height should give you better leverage on it.”

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He shrugged and nodded, almost done with his oatmeal. It was as bland as always, mildly sweetened and fibrous. They were both done in a few minutes, Carbon leading the way to the engine they were scavenging for parts, up near the top where she had been working the previous day.

“This part, with the tubes?” She leaned into the engine and tapped a very solid looking box about the size of a pillow with a dozen stout tubes leading out of it. There were ten of the boxes in a neat row running down the mounting plate. “It is a plasma lock. I need you to pry the c-clips off the fittings and unhook the tubing, which will allow me to take the service lid off. I will need access to all of them.”

“Sounds easy enough. Anything else I need to know?”

“They require some force, you will need this. The power tool designed for it was destroyed, so we are back to the most basic tools.” She pulled a pry bar about as long as she was tall out of the mess of engine parts and pressed it into his hands. With that, she pushed up and disappeared over the top of the engine. It was easy enough to get the pry bar into place, the c-clips were notched to take it, and they did require a large amount of force. Alex found quickly that if you let off the pressure at all, the clip would slip back down and any work would be gone in an instant.

The first one came off after almost half an hour of pushing, re-setting the bar to better angles and generally flailing around. It came off with some force, ejected from the engine and ricocheting off the wall and back into the engine. Alex lost where it went, but it didn’t matter. The next clip only took a couple of minutes now that he had a grasp on what to do. The one after that was about as fast, the work quickly became mindless though physically difficult as he had to rotate the bar more than 90 degrees,

He had plenty of time to think and found his mind wandering to the memory Carbon had shown him. Part of it was that her father seemed unimaginably tall, which did not mesh with his knowledge that Tsla’o were fairly short. It did make sense considering she had been a child at the time. It still threw him off. The bigger part was the little details, things he was starting to notice now that he wasn’t experiencing the memory for the first time. They - Carbon and her father - had the same coloration, the deep blue-black with pale blue striping at the shoulders. Alex had inadvertently seen Carbon's coloration and patterns when he had regained consciousness after the Eohm attack. The stripes continued down her back and sides, over her hips and legs. Alex assumed it to be a leftover from their evolution, when camouflage would have been useful.

The thing that had bothered him the most had been the vehicles parked on the rise behind them. A glossy black sedan, the wheels stretched out in front of and behind the cabin in a configuration that was common enough on human vehicles that it looked familiar. The sides bulged out, the creases in the body work glowed. He knew that sort of pattern, ships and ground vehicles alike shared that design when they were armored and shielded. The second one was more of the same, just larger. There was a dome atop it, and a slender barrel mounted behind that tracked the sky slowly in the few seconds she had looked at it. Anti-air laser, he was sure of that. Whoever her father was, he was probably a lot more important than just the mineral commodity trader she had claimed.

By the time he was down to the last few clips they were popping off after just a few minutes of work, Alex had developed a knack for it, now able to finesse them a bit to get the bar into a better position. The final clip was almost easy, despite having to jam the pry bar to his shoulder and push off the wall, effectively standing up from a deep squat and then pushing it further from there. He wasn’t even sure Carbon would have been able to get this much extension without something else to stand on. His shoulders hurt from the bar, and his legs ached like he had been skipping leg day.

He had, he supposed, not actually done any exercising since his legs had been regenerated. At least he was finished with this now. Alex was about to go looking for Carbon before he realized she was already there. Sort of. She was down at the forward end of the engine by the floor, partially hidden and watching him work. The look in her eyes surprised him as they made contact, hungry in a way that made him uncomfortable before they flickered over to something more composed. “It’s done, just need to get the tubes off.”

“So it is.” Carbon pushed off the floor towards him, stopping herself with a hand on his shoulder before reaching into the engine and wriggling the tubing free of their fittings on the last lock. She produced a screw driver from one of the many pockets on her jumpsuit, quickly popping the lid off the plasma lock, flipping it over and unscrewing a tiny panel on the back and extracting a glittery chip no bigger than his thumbnail from it. She held it up in the light and smiled, “perfect.”

Alex's brow furrowed. All that, for a sliver of material. "So what is it?"

"High temperature resistant programmable control chip. My reserve of these was destroyed and they are too complex to print." She said it like he should have know.

"Of course. What next?"

She looked at him with a faint touch of mischief in her eye as she tilted her head at the good engine. "I will collect the rest of these and set them with updated programming. You will find there are four locks in there that have been marked, I need them opened so the chips can be replaced.”

He sighed. “All right. Let’s get to it.”