A modern waverider drive was actually composed of three parts: the reactor, the engine and the drive array. This was usually lost on people who did not work with them, who were safely ensconced in the assumption that they were wildly complex pieces of technology that made ships go quite fast.

The reactor provided huge amounts of raw, high energy plasma. The engine took that plasma and tweaked it to the precise specifications required by each part of the drive array. The array was where the action really took place. The refined plasma was converted to energy on site, allowing the array to make gravity go all funny, propelling the ship at faster than light speeds.

Alex was ‘front of the ship’ pretty much exclusively, concerned more with driving the thing and sensor analysis. There was a focus on ‘overlap training’ in the Civilian Pilot Program, so the Pilot wouldn’t be completely stranded if something happened to the Engineer and vice versa. He understood the parts and general idea behind how all the stuff in engineering worked, and he could safely swap parts and effect minor repairs, but he couldn’t explain the physics of how it worked. He had been trained on Human drives, of course.

The waverider drives in the Kshalv’o were state of the art Tsla’o technology, probably a generation or two more advanced than their Human counterparts. Before the attack, the engine casings were monolithic slabs of oily blue alloy with a hand-hammered finish and extensive decorative engraving. Despite the enormous cost of fitting engines for a scoutship - around a billion dCred total for a set of Human waverider drives - they lacked the caring details applied to the Tsla’o drives.

Now they were shadows of their former selves, one burnt and gutted for repairs, the other in a thousand pieces waiting to be made whole again.

“This is simple. Open up the access port, reach into the fracture array and find these filament cartridges.” They floated next to the parts engine and Carbon handed him a powered impact wrench and a bright red composite brick. The filament cartridge was roughly fist-sized with slick sides, two opposing faces covered in a fine mesh. ”They should be solid red, no cracks of any size. Microfractures will show up as discoloration.”

Alex turned it over in his hands, “solid red, got it.” Bold Tsla text was printed across the sides and a stylized arrow showed flow direction.

“If it is intact, you vacuum the dust out of it and put it into the good pile.” She pointed out a small stack of unused cartridges tucked away in the fixable engine, a shop vac quickwelded to the floor next to them. “They are quite durable, you should not be able to damage them with your hands alone.”

He nodded along as she spoke. “That’s not bad. How many do we need?”

“We require seventy more of them. There are several hundred in the array, it should be quite easy.”

“Is that all? Better get to work then...”

“Yes. I suspect it will take some time, we should break in three hours.” She gave him a warm smile and disappeared around the other side of the good engine.

“Sounds good to me.” Alex peeked into the engine, glad that this part didn’t use those awful damn c-clips. The access panels were held down by things that were obviously bolts, and the impact wrench made short work of them even in the cramped environment. He crammed his hand into the array, fishing around in the dark hole for a cartridge to pull.

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Easy was, as it had a tendency to be, a relative term. Alex found one quickly enough, fingers unable to get any purchase on it. He dug his fingernails into the sliver of slippery composite that sat outside of the socket to try to pull them free to no avail. After he had burned maybe ten minutes and was just about to go looking for that enormous prybar, he scraped a knuckle open on the latch on top of one of the other sockets. Things moved much more quickly after that.

Alex learned two things that morning. One was that the fracture array produced the black dust that Carbon had told him wasn’t dangerous and it produced it in copious amounts. The second being that Carbon measured time using the Tsla’o system.

The Tsla’o used base ten for almost everything. Their day was twenty hours long, split into ten hours of night and day... though their home planet rotates once every twenty seven hours and sixteen minutes by Human measure.

Carbon’s three hours was closer to four hours to him. It made the prospect of the twelve hour work day she suggested much more daunting. Not that they had much choice right now. At least the filament cartridges were coming out at a reasonable pace and were mostly salvageable.

It was difficult work, for reasons he hadn’t expected. He was always at the wrong angle, arm craned around the wrong direction to get to a latch. His hand would get caught on something he couldn’t see and he would wrench his wrist, or just have bad leverage to wriggle a cartridge free. Little things piled up into a litany of injuries running up his arms, muscles sore from his fingers into his back.

Putting the cartridges back in was much harder though very systematic. Go to one access port, ensure every socket has a cartridge, double check the latches and then seal up the port. Carbon gave him a dead blow hammer to seat them and a weird torque wrench to get the ports closed. Each port sealed back up felt like progress.

Then that was done and they hadn’t even taken their first break. The list of things to finish was still several pages worth of scrolling. Carbon split it up into tasks only she had the background for, things she could explain quickly, and stuff Alex could do with just a tablet to reference. The last part was basically just plugging things in.

By the end of their 12 Tsla’o hour shift - about 16 Human hours - Alex was reasonably sure his arms would fall off sometime in the night and he was going to develop a disease from the dust. For the moment, that didn’t matter. They had finished it. The diagnostics suite was testing every aspect of the engine, though that was several hours away from completion. If it came back clear, all they had to do was bolt the access panels down and it would be ready to use.

Alex sprawled out over the couch as best he could in zero g, trying to decide if he wanted to eat or just go to sleep when Carbon came into the mess. She didn’t look nearly as tired as he felt as she planted herself next to him, ankle hooked under the couch. She produced an antibacterial wipe and started to clean the dust from his face.

He waved her off, the motion feeble. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I do not have to, but I would like to.” She smiled and her cerulean eyes met his with a touch of mischief as she wiped his neck clean.

Alex rolled his eyes with a grin as she started to clean his hands. “Alright, I won’t stop you. I don’t think I could right now, anyway.”

She made an affirmative noise and she had a little smirk on her muzzle that looked like she was getting away with something. Alex wasn’t sure if there was some cultural meaning here or if she was just being nice... and he wasn’t going to complain. After the long day, it felt good to be tended to. “You look tired, Alex. Do you want to go to bed?”

“After today? There is nothing I’d like more.”