“Well,” Nathan said, staring at the display on the Caretaker’s duty station, “we have a lot of work to do, but at least there’s an obvious starting point. And we’ll—huh? No, no, don’t be ridiculous. None of those is our starting point.”
The light purple outline around each of the Thrive, Breath, and Annihilation duty stations blinked one more time and then winked out. Instead of them, a small rotating question mark emerged over each of the things in Nathan’s field of view as he panned his sight around the room. One station after another was made the subject of the query, and almost reluctantly the same indicators were added to the doors leading out of the room.
But it was the one place where the indicator wasn’t which was the man’s intended point of entry into the problem of the station’s status.
“We’re going to be starting with the Caretaker’s station,” he declared calmly. “Now, I know you’re thinking, but Nathan! That’s ridiculous! We should start with something that allows us to actually do things! But no. We should start with whatever gives us the best overall system visibility and analysis. So what I want is everything that the Caretaker’s duty station can do, mirrored somehow into this HUD through your feed, Saucer. And I want that shit working; right now I am fairly confident that it’s not entirely broken, because it knew the difference between the Mind station and the other stations, but it’s also obviously kind of broken.”
The purple question marks dimmed, then disappeared. The Caretaker’s station glowed momentarily dark purple and then brightened into a yellow-green.
And then Nathan stood there while Saucer did inexplicable nanomachinery things and made the Caretaker’s station work again.
After the laserlike focus he’d had on understanding things, he found himself mentally exhausted and mentally wandering as he and his assistant—though in many ways, it was he who was the assistant, serving primarily as locomotion for his soulbound gear—got one terminal after another hooked into an ad hoc network. Each duty station spoke to the other and to the Caretaker’s processor node, and one by one queries started to flicker out into the rest of the station and come back with data.
One by one, the systems that didn’t exist on the station and perhaps had never existed on the station began to drop out of the bookkeeping. One by one, the status systems began to fix themselves as information transfer rerouted around cosmic ray and metaphysical deterioration damage, and as self-repairing networks cannibalized spare processors and redundant wiring in order to enable basic functionality across the system.
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Internal hatches irised open. A map populated. External hatches softly closed, sealing the station away from the vast expanse of vacuum out in the void—though it was still a vacuum inside, of course.
Bursts of power from the repurposing of high-energy materials and reclamation of long-forgotten batteries with trace amounts of charge took care of most of the power needs. For the rest…
“Down to eighty percent,” muttered Nathan. “Not sure how I feel about spending all of this just for diagnostics.”
But it was the path he had chosen, and he was determined not to regret it.
“Alright,” he said eventually, when his suit—which, as he was well aware, was everything to him and also was Saucer’s physical substrate—was down to seventy percent of its total charge capacity. “I think this is basically everything we were ever going to get.”
The situation was instructive. Leaving out everything that had simply no traces remaining, if they had ever been present, they had only a small number of things and those things were now displayed at the top right of the HUD on Nathan’s helmet. Some were powered down, others needed some kind of manual intervention—such as the haunted elevators and the fusion lance inexplicably failing to self-check. Others were working but useless: the cargo railgun needed target beacons which no longer existed and would have to be manufactured, the point defense reified plasma cannons needed sensors in order to target anything, and the internal trains had no track to run on and required more metals and plastics than were on hand in order to repair themselves.
There were reserves, small but theoretically usable amounts of reserves, in Central Storage. He would need to deal with the elevators in order to get there in any convenient way, but he knew that he could just climb, or go out and around.
And there were some systems that were operational… and one that he was determined to head towards before anything else, because it would provide him with at least some amount of information about what else might be on the station with him.
He wanted that. He wanted that rather badly.
Ultra-Short [1 LY] Psionic Sensors: Physical Blockage Of Equipment
And of course there was the Annihilation Sphere.
Nathan smiled to himself and whistled in his helmet as he swarm through microgravity towards the door behind the Seeker station, entirely content to compartmentalize the fact of the Annihilation Sphere’s existence and its continued operational status. He would, after all, survive its activation. In a manner of speaking.