A fusion core. It was the most common type of generator nowadays. In practice, it was the only type that could run for a mercenary’s whole career with minimal refueling. It was also easy enough to scale that large-class ships could be equipped with ones the size of houses.

This model was the size of an armchair, and shaped like a square pedestal holding up a shiny metal ball. After tapping it with an electronic thermometer, I placed my hand on it and gave it a rub, like I’d do for a dog or a cat.

“What’s up with you, huh, big boy?” I said with a smile, and then squinted my eyes as I realized I was probably going mad. I turned to my toolbox, floating gently behind me, and remembered my thoughts of drawing a silly little face on it.

“I don’t know if I’m crazy or just lonely.” I shook my head and put myself to work. I had removed the screwdrivers from the ceiling, and although the handles were a bit warped and the blades stained, they had no difficulty helping me unscrew the lid.

I took the generator’s frame apart and prepared to spend an hour of my precious oxygen looking for problems, but the flaw in front of me was so glaring it might as well have turned into a rabid dog and jumped out to bite me.

“What...? Why! Who’d do this?” I took out the charred fuse and blinked several times at the empty slots beside it. Fuses where important everywhere, but out in space, they were essentially extra lives. Running a generator with a single one was nothing more than asking to be struck down by a single shield-breaking missile.

Speaking of which, would that be what made the hole? I’d heard about Northstar making a smaller version of their anti-warship Mistletoe missiles. I could see that tiny new payload making a hole about that big in a ship with little to no plating like this one.

If that was the case, it’d also explain the burnt fuse. The meltdown of the fission core at the end of the missile would have produced an absurd voltage at the moment of impact, jamming the shield emitters and blowing a fuse. Since this was the last one, the ship became a sitting duck…

“Well, no matter.” I shrugged and took a deep breath. “I’ll just install the spares…” I reached for the obvious ‘SPARE FUSES’ drawer on the generator frame’s side.

And I found a yellow note that read “Don’t forget to buy more fuses!”

“FUCKING PIRATES!” I punched the ground so hard I felt it through the spacesuit and began floating toward the ceiling. I shook my head in frustration as I dragged myself back into position.

“Ugh… How am I going to fix this, then?” I looked at the charred fuse like it was the culprit of my situation… and it stared back at me with a sad “XwX” face and powered off cat-ear-shaped lights.

“Wait a minute…” I recognized this silly thing. I checked the brand. “Lusho Entertainment…”

My face lit up. “Oh, Lady in White! You must have such a great fate in store for me!” I screamed a prayer with my arms wide as I put my screwdriver to the slot under the fuse’s digital ink screen and took it apart.

Lusho Entertainment was the brand that made that plushie from earlier, and also the ones behind the trend of putting cute silly faces on inanimate things. They were supposed to be a toys and entertainment company, but the owner was nothing short of a mad scientist and had branched the company into so many other industries.

This Pelu-Fuse™ in front of me was an incredibly famous meme product. Everybody thought it was a joke when it launched: a fuse that makes a happy face when it’s plugged in and a sleepy one when it’s not? Who needs that? You don’t even see fuses that often, they’re under a lid most of the time.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

But Lusho’s CEO took his inventions seriously, and this thing came with a feature that set it apart from anything the actual starship part companies were selling — you could repair the charred fuse if you had a strong enough heat source with you.

Mercenaries had said it was literally lifesaving, and I was about to confirm that. I installed my toolbox’s vice onto the generator frame and held the fuse tight. The crucible assembly within it came into view, and I saw the liquid metal splattered in a circular slot inside.

The glass holding it inside was made of the same material as fusion cores’ focus matrices, and I could use that feature to aim my welding torch right through it. And so I did, watching the radiating components around the fuse turn white-hot as the metal reddened.

Within a few seconds, an exceptionally advanced mechanism was triggered by the heat and began stirring the molten metal, forcing it into the shape of a straight line and completing the fuse’s inner circuit. It cooled back to a steel gray within a minute, and when I slid the screen back into place, a happy “>w<” face thanked me.

Smiling like a dumbass, I realized I’d always wanted to try one of these out.

“Let’s see if you’re as great as they say you are, you silly little thing.” I placed the fuse back into the generator and pulled the internal break switch to the “restart” position. Immediately, I kicked myself away from the generator, hoping if it failed and violently exploded, the plasma fireball would be small enough for me to survive by rushing out of the maintenance room.

However, the Lady once more smiled at me, and the generator hummed to life, a powerful vibration running through the entire starship. Lights powered on in a quick sequence, and warnings appeared in the shield and gravity control panels.

I took the deepest breath I had ever taken with the brightest smile I had ever made, and absent-mindedly approached the gravity control panel. A couple of touches later, I felt the immense calm that came from stepping on solid ground.

My toolbox fell sideways onto the floor, which I thought was somewhat funny. Its cable tensed up, and I felt like it was judging me for letting that happen.

Ignoring that, I grabbed the life support canister I had put aside before and reinstalled it. The dining room was hopeless, and it seems the wiring for the cockpit had been in the area of the blast, so I could only pressurize the rooms from the hallway onwards. However, that was more than enough for me who just wanted to survive.

I took my helmet off at last and sat on the pirate’s bed. I also got that silly blue cat plushie. I was used to sleeping alone, but I felt like I’d need the company if I wanted to catch any shuteye here in the starless, eternal void.

But at least I could finally rest without worrying about not waking up ever again. I slid off the rest of the spacesuit and placed it in what was now my bedroom, just in case a second Mistletoe missile decompressed the hallway while I slept. Then I stepped into the included bathroom.

Thanks to gravity control, it was possible to have a conventional shower in a starship. This wasn’t a tanker ship, though, so most of the water would be recycled. I hadn’t checked the status of that function yet, but I could only hope it was working correctly and I wouldn’t be drinking my own sweat tomorrow morning.

My body felt like I had put it through several wars by the time I finished drying. The adrenaline coursing through me had completely left, and what was left was the body of a not-so-active engineering student who had been through a literally spartan workout — I did have to wield a spear and shield, after all.

Nevertheless, I was as tired as I was hungry, and I made my way to the storage room. I remembered seeing some packaged rations there, but I didn’t have a chance to check what exactly they were.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” My mouth was agape with surprise by the time I checked the fourteenth one and realized they were all SpaceCakes. Are SpaceCakes sponsoring pirates now or what? Did this guy take on a convoy of SpaceCakes storage ships?

“That being said, getting hit by a Mistletoe missile from a SpaceCakes hired mercenary sure sounds like the type of karmic justice you get after powering a generator with only one fuse.”

I sighed and took out a pack of five and took them back to the bedroom, eating them while being careful of not dropping any crumbs. SpaceCakes were a nostalgic food for me. They were a hybrid of donut and cookie, with some dry icing and a touch of a biscuit’s crunchy texture. Me and my middle school friends’ diets were at least 40% composed of these, spread across most of the available flavors... I remember nobody liked the cherry ones.

With my stomach at least half-full and a year of exhaustion weighing on my eyelids, I squished the Lusho Entertainment marketable plushie to my chest and fell asleep under the pirate’s bedsheets, feeling safe as — unlike him — I had put a password and set a breach alarm on the door.