The next two days passed in a monotonous haze of disassembly and invention. Angers clearly had far more technological understanding than Carrick, but Carrick did his absolute best to absorb the information he could and familiarize himself with the patterns of when Angers would call for a specific tool or require them to move their contraption in or out of the sunlight that filtered down through the craft's vapor plume during the day.

Carrick remembered being told that, if a prisoner died in the facility, their truck could be recalled. On the first day of their work, he removed all the tools from the truck bay and asked Angers whether he thought they should likewise take any of the power cells or other components from the truck.

Angers looked over at all, but finally said he didn't think it was worth it. “They might be more likely to send people after this truck if it doesn't come back at all,” he said.

Carrick nodded. He looked at the truck's console, which rapidly flashed a warning that commanded Carrick to return to the surface. After some searching, he had found and removed a GPS beacon inside the truck's central computer, preventing it from broadcasting his location to the prison HQ. He didn't know whether the GPS tracked his progress actively from day to day, or only at the moment the HQ sent the signal for the truck to return.

Regardless, on the second day, despite its GPS module having been removed, the truck activated of its own accord, reversed its path, and traveled back along the tunnel which Carrick had excavated.

“Not much longer,” muttered Angers.

Angers had used his craft's computer to analyze the components which Carrick had brought, to weed out the ones that were broken beyond usefulness—more than half of them—and to determine the best way to combine the others into something usable.

The contraption they built looked like the dissected innards of a mechanical beast. Cables and circuit boards spread across an anti-static tarp which Angers had retrieved from his craft, an umbilical cable drifting from one end of the machine into the Blue Shrike’s cockpit.

A handful of processors were connected in parallel, feeding all of their outputs back into the Blue Shrike itself, each processor also governing a small machine haphazardly assembled from individual components that had never been intended to be combined.

It all fed back into the Blue Shrike’s laser projector, a weapon which Angers had ripped apart and rebuilt using crystals brought from the Green group’s warehouse. He said the weapon would now be useless against other ships, but just what they needed to reactivate the terraformer.

Once they had the energy to power it, of course.

So much time passed that Carrick lost track of the days. He didn't bother asking Angers. He simply did what he was told, painstakingly ripping apart metal panels and separating them by size and shape so they could be carefully soldered back together by his partner.

It was longer and harder work than he had endured in the prison itself. It was delicate work, a set of tasks which could not be botched without creating hours more of recovery. Carrick had to learn how to use almost a dozen tools no one had ever shown him, and though he practiced as best as he could on the scrap components which Angers said were useless, he still messed up several times within their first day of work.

Angers became jittery and frantic as time went on. He was clearly used to far more food than was available. Though Carrick had adjusted by this time to the few rations he was allowed in the prison, Angers seemed constantly light-headed and to have trouble focusing on the task at hand. This was certainly not helped by the intense concentration which he was forced to exert over the days of their work.

Eventually their work fell to raising the solar charging balloon and then bringing it down over and over so they could drain its small charge into the Blue Shrike’s capacitors.

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They did not have enough components to create multiple balloons, and in fact only had two of the wafers they used as the solar panel itself. Eventually the first disintegrated, and they were down to their last wafer.

At this point, Angers began talking to himself in a way in which his helmet did not translate properly to Carrick. His half-words came garbled like an occult language to Carrick’s ears. It became more and more obvious to Carrick that, for all Angers might claim they were both fully human, the lieutenant belonged to a world wholly disconnected to Carrick’s own. Angers was inescapably, truly alien.

There eventually came a point when Angers stood and stared up at the sky. “The convoy,” he said. “It's close.” He dashed to the Blue Shrike's cockpit and hurled himself half into it, staring at the computer readout.

Carrick approached, stretching very sore fingers whose joints were swollen and red. “They finally started out from the city?” he asked. He hadn't realized that the three days had passed already. His heart pounded. He felt light-headed with a chilly mix of fear and excitement. It braced him like jumping in an icy lake.

Angers whipped around. “No!” he shouted, his voice a shriek that clipped through the speakers of his helmet. “I missed the first notification! They're only half an hour away!”

Carrick glanced at their handiwork. It didn't look remotely like a finished machine, but more like the exploded remnant of a computer dropped from an airplane. “Are we almost ready?” he asked.

Angers punched several keys on his console. He did it frantically, carelessly. “We don't have any choice,” he said. “We’ll have to make it. Otherwise we'll both be lucky if they just shoot us and be done with it.”

Carrick approached and slapped a hand firmly on increase his shoulder. He stayed silent until the alien turned to him, then spoke slowly and calmly. “Stay focused,” he said. “We're not going to solve anything by panicking. Look, I'm sure both of us have been in situations worse than this before. I know I've been shot at while trying to get a safe open in far less time than half an hour. I'm still alive. You're still alive now after whatever you've been through. We can do this, got it? Now you need to tell me what to do.”

Angers was clearly attempting to listen. He took ten deep breaths, the airflow rendered as static through his helmet speakers. Finally, he nodded and returned a brief clap on Carrick’s shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “You're right. I need you to get over there with the priming device. When I give you the signal, press the buttons on each processor, the ones that start up the coolers. I’ll list them off from left to right.”

Carrick grinned, turned, and ran into the machine. He squatted down.

“One.”

Carrick pressed it.

“Two. Three.” A whine came from the Blue Shrike’s cockpit.

Carrick as he was commanded. Lights glowed on the active processors, and their related components emitted tiny plumes of gas.

“Four, five! Oh, we don't have enough power for this. It's going to be too close.”

Carrick ignored the worrying. He did as he was told and then stepped back as a pulse of static electricity stood up every short hair on his close-sheared head. He felt a crackling as his jumpsuit trembled over his skin, and stared in awe at the sweeping ray of light which dug into the single perfect crystal Angers had selected from Carrick’s haul, visible through a transparent plate in the Blue Shrike’s nose. Whatever the exact functions of the primer, whatever it enabled the Blue Shrike to do that its own computer could not, it seemed to work.

Angers was shouting something that his helmet did not translate. He engaged a heavy switch which looked like a shifting knob in the cockpit, and a turbine whirred somewhere nearby.

A bulbous projector on the Blue Shrike’s nose swiveled toward the terraformer hanging in the air, and then a visible, blue-white ray of light lanced from it and struck the terraformer directly in the center of its closest face.

***

Back at the above-ground headquarters of the Wasteland prison, a young male computer technician and his older female commanding officer stared intensely at the data spike their sensor array had just detected.

“What on Dirt is that?” The man breathed. He tried to run diagnostics on the data, but was informed he needed a higher level of security clearance. “It's got to be some mistake,” he said. “Never seen that before. I—”

The women shoved him out of the way and swiped her security key. “Neither have I,” she said, but the machine let her continue the scan.

She reared back as the computer let out a ping of task completion. “I don't believe it,” she said. “That doesn't make any sense.”

The young man gawked at the display, a three-dimensional render of the data set.

It looked exactly like the nervous system of a human being standing up with its arms stretched to the sides. Every person who specialized in information technology knew that bizarre signature. It appeared in every textbook published within the last fifty years.

It was the same energy signature which had appeared in the Accident's wake.