There in the wreckage of main engineering aboard the Kshlav'o, Alex tried to comfort someone who he was pretty sure he considered a friend, arms cast around her shoulders in what was supposed to be a pleasant though very much platonic hug. This is how a human would have interpreted it, but he wasn’t hugging a human right now, was he? The idea that the person who hadn’t turned the shields of her encounter suit off in his presence for the first month she’d known him might not be OK with this sort of physical contact hadn’t really occurred to him until the silence had gone on long enough to be considered awkward.
“I think it would be better if you worked in a different part of the ship today, Pilot.” Carbon’s voice was clipped, each word carefully chosen and precise, “you could see about getting a waveride set up.”
With that she slipped hand up between them and shoved him away, eyes cold and lips pressed tight.
“Very well.” He didn’t argue, despite a strong urge to explain his actions, to get her to understand what he did was in earnest. Alex had been in enough situations where he’d tried something like that and knew it was a bad call when the situation was still hot. Fingers grazed the wall, propelling him back towards the airlock to the passageway. The doors closed behind him, and he floated there for a few moments before shrugging it off and heading for the shower.
Wedged between two walls in a hot mist he pondered turning the AI on to do a jump calculation. Even with most of its logic processors shut off or underclocked - or both - the cooling system would still come on for the control processors alone. Safety procedures. The matter forges they had onboard were top of the line, but they couldn’t fabricate a primary AI core if they wrecked it, so it was programmed to run with cooling only.
All of this nicely structured thinking did not stop Carbon’s rebuff from gnawing fervently on the edges of his mind.
He found himself sitting in the mess while idly stirring a bowl of oatmeal, staring into a tablet researching the systems that were tied into the cooling system. Mentally flipping between what he’d done wrong and how to keep the cooling system from starting up a bunch of other systems it considered important, like the main reactor. The plasma blow off from that would give them away in a heartbeat, and it was all hard wired. Technically they could physically cut the connections, but then they’d have to feed the appropriate signal and power back into the parts they wanted on to spoof it into believing that everything was running properly.
This also required an EVA maneuver and removing the main sensor array to access those cables. Could they do it? If they were in drydock, yes, absolutely.
Out here in the black, with two people? If there was no damage to the structure around the sensors, Alex considered that to be a very tentative maybe. At least there was another potential answer he hadn’t yet explored.
The agency had stocked the ships with tertiary and even quaternary layers for many systems, and that did include an emergency plan for loss of the AI... This did count as an emergency. Maybe actually physically doing something would free his mind up for a while, as well. He tossed the uneaten bowl into the recycler and floated up to the forward airlock. He wasn’t going outside, but he’d need the radiation protection the EVA suit afforded.
Alex grabbed the bar over the open back of the ceramic-white suit and eased himself into it, legs sliding down until his feet slipped into the boots, then ducked to fit his head in the helmet. The ship’s code to activate it from inside was two taps of index finger to thumb, then one of the middle and ring fingers each, the action easy until you try to do it with an unpowered glove. The back panel closed and pressurized as the suit cinched itself down, fitting to the user. For the first time since he’d woken up in the medical bay, a machine accessed his mind. Built into the helmet, it was practically a toy compared to his Amp, but all it covered was a simple HUD and the suit’s handful of onboard systems.
All this just so he could go back to the bridge. The Eohm had been so kind as to use a radiological round, leaving the bridge covered in enriched radioactive materials. This kind of thing was usually used against larger ships, to deny areas to your enemy and step up casualties. It was doing a fair job of denying him access. Almost killed Carbon, too.
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The boots clicked to the floor, allowing him to walk up to the door to the bridge. Not having artificial gravity on was a side effect of running waverider drives - too close to the drive propulsion array and the two would fight, and the one meant to sling hundreds of tons of ship around faster than light would win. In front of the drives, this just meant the gravity plates would burn out and there’d probably be a fire. In every part of the heavily confined ship.
The cadence they’d run the Kshlav'o at meant they had spent very little time with the gravity on for the last six months, and Alex found being attached to the floor again to be strange. He’d spent his entire life walking around and only now was it unusual. The clack of the boots on the deck plate were loud, artificially enhanced so there would be no guessing if the magnets had caught or not, and he clomped his way to the entry to the bridge.
It was an airlock, just like the other end of the passageway, another layer of redundancy to keep crews alive and functioning in the most dire of situations. Radiation levels picked up as he stepped into the space between the two doors and spiked to dangerous levels as the inner door opened.
The lights beyond were out, a flicker of his mind turned the suit’s lights on. If the engine room had been a mess, this was a disaster. Every surface was blackened, all of the kinetic buffers were blown out. A large hole in the ceiling had filled with foam in the wake of the slug, the deck below it warped and torn up. The physical navigation console was shattered, the main display rent in two, all the electronics exposed clearly burnt. Another layer of redundancy stripped away.
The pit Alex had sat in, literally a divot in the floor surrounded by the electronics needed to feed his Amp at full capacity, was now a lump of burnt crash foam with a roughly Alex shaped hole where Carbon had torn him out of it. Most of him out, anyway. He peeked down into it, the bright light from his helmet illuminating it like the noonday sun. There were some bits left down in the bottom where his feet had been, little bones and burnt flesh peeking out at him as he made his way to the front of the bridge. Lots of dried blood, now that he was close to it. He wasn’t sure where it had all come from. There couldn’t have been that much blood in him.
The deck plate he was looking for was easy enough to find and mercifully undamaged save for now being radioactive. A gloved finger pushed into the recessed latch and popped it up, pulling the plate out and setting it aside. The little computer core beneath slid up out of its socket, tiny blue and green LED’s blinking in the glare of the suit lights. Not particularly powerful compared to the primary AI, but it had a sealed power supply and no cooling requirements.
Alex yanked it up, half the lights on the box winked out and the few systems in the bridge that still worked shut off. He clomped to the door, sealed the radiation back in and ditched the suit in the forward airlock.
He retrieved the same units from his cabin and the med bay, stacked them up on the little table in the mess and wired them together into a cluster. Some engineer had actually made this easy, the necessary cables tucked into a little slot in the back. More of the little lights came on as they found each other and linked to the data store via wireless.
Tucked away in the recesses of the data store, there was a tiny program that would divide the duties of calculating a safe waveride up between the computer cores. It wasn’t meant for long jumps, mostly to get you out of any gravity wells and send a distress call on the FTL comm. Light-seconds would be plenty if that was all you needed. But that wasn’t what he was about to ask of it.
Alex was feeling pretty good about getting things done and not thinking about Carbon, which made him think about Carbon. He sighed and rubbed his face, second guessing himself again before forcing his mind back to work. The program didn’t even have an icon, the default system gears and wrench spinning slowly on his tablet as it crunched a test run.
He watched the clock as it worked. Minutes ticked over, each one slower than the last eating up the better part of an hour as the display crept towards noon. It bipped, and a short waveride uploaded to the data stores. It was just a fraction of a light year, not nearly enough to get them out of the system and away from the Eohm, but he wanted proof it could do the job before he worked up an actual flight path to the Thackery’s Globule they intended to hide in and spent a ridiculous amount of time crunching that only to find out it didn’t actually work.
He could do his job. Plot a path to safety and call for help. What he had wanted to do for the last month. Getting to do his stuff was not supposed to have tasted so bitter.