The engine room seemed dimmer than before. The main lights had gone out, and the only source left was a dim red emergency light that a human would see easier in than she would.

That meant that Tred hadn't succeeded as she had hoped. No power, no hope for contacting the team. Maybe even no chance for the team to even escape this system.

Would their ship begin to ride the waves as this station was? Oscillate through reality until it became stuck in an endless loop . . .

Moving from cover to cover, she kept watch and moved towards the primary engineering room. It was a secure chamber just beyond the main room. Maybe Tred hadn't entirely failed. If he had succeeded in even just resetting the system, the generator might be simply awaiting a manual input to get everything back online.

She'd risked contacting him, but the ship's system informed her that the communication system was down. She'd been keeping silent, and couldn't know when that had happened, but it wasn't a good sign.

Moving towards the door, she suddenly heard a noise from beyond and cursed, sidling up to the wall next to the entry.

It was unlikely to be Tred. She'd given him orders, and the man was at least good at following those.

Readying herself, she slammed the door open button and took aim.

"Don't move!" she cried, her sights on the man.

The man froze. His back was to her, and she could not see his face, but both his hands were visible. And on a console nearby was his pistol.

"Don't even think of going for it," she said. "I won't miss."

He turned just enough to peer at her over his shoulder. "You've got the wrong idea. I'm not your enemy."

Pirra ignored that. "Step towards the main screen." Away from the gun. The room was big enough she could herd him away and get it.

"No," the man replied, his voice curiously blank.

"I will shoot," Pirra hissed.

"With what gun?" the man asked.

And Pirra realized that her hands were now empty.

"What the hell-" She moved to lunge for his gun.

"Don't try it!" the man said, grabbing the weapon and pointing it at her.

"It works in ways you don't understand, Lieutenant Pirra. Sometimes it even listens to me. Sometimes, I can reset the things I want, when I want," he said. "Except for the living . . . you I can't reset . . . at least not yet."

"How do you know my name?" she asked.

The man's eyes glittered like a maniac. "Do you really think this is the first time around for this? For any of this?"

She didn't have a response for that. "Where did you get the gun?"

"From Dr. Crube. She was wise, in a way, to sneak it on board. She's seen enough of the results of messing with Leviathans to know that sometimes a bullet is the best way out. Too bad she realized it too late."

Pirra kept her hands visible, trying to plan. If she dove back, she might be able to close the door on him, but he was in the main engineering room . . .

"To be honest," the man said. "I don't want to hurt you. Or anyone."

"You shot at me. You were chasing the other man," Pirra replied.

"I was scared. You were new, at one time," he replied. "It's been a long time and I saw someone new and I . . . panicked. I wanted you away from me. You have no idea how delicate it all is, how important it is that I don't die yet."

"You're not in any danger from us, and we're not trapped," she said, forcing her voice to be calm while her stomach went into knots. "We can still get out. If we can contact my ship, we can leave."

"You wouldn't know if you were trapped," the man said. "And you need to listen to me. The fusion reactor's been sabotaged. But I'm just a Nav officer. I don't know how to fix it."

"Sabotaged? How?" Pirra demanded.

"The magnetic fields have been unblanaced, and the system set to run an emergency drill that it believes is a test. So it'll go full power in ten minutes unless we stop it. And if it does . . ."

"Then the plasma will rip out the side of the reactor," she breathed.

"Yes," the man replied. "It will destroy the station and kill us all."

He looked back to the console. "I can't die. Not, yet. I've still got more to do." He brought up a screen.

"Look," he said. "You can see it's true."

She approached cautiously. The man still held the gun, but he was not pointing it at her.

The screen showed exactly what he had said. A test was warming up, noting the 'scenario', but on another window she could see that the magnetic rings had been tampered with, put out of alignment. Alerts were going off, but the system had been blinded to itself.

This scenario had been locked in . . . well, it said days ago. That seemed unlikely, but given how time was making no sense, it didn't mean much.

It also meant that she couldn't know who did it. The three men who had spaced themselves might have set it before committing group suicide. Or even Dr. Crube.

And them taking other ways out did make sense; a rupturing fusion reactor was not necessarily quick or painless, depending on just how it ripped the station apart.

"I don't know how to fix it," the man said again. "But I can't die yet. I can't."

Pirra glanced to him. "I don't know how to fix it either. It would take a highly skilled fusion engineer to do this . . . The other man with me can do it," she said. "We have to get him. If we can find him in time, he might be able to avert this-"

"Pirra!" she heard called from outside the room.

The man snapped his gun up to aim at the door, but Pirra held out her hands. "That's him!" she said. "Trust me!"

The man hesitated, his finger on the trigger. She saw the fear in his eyes as he watched her. It was more than fear of what would happen, she felt. It was a true fear of her.

"I promise you we won't hurt you. We want to live, too. This station needs to live."

The man hesitated. "I want to trust you, but I don't think I can."

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"I'm a Response officer," she told him. "I've taken an oath to serve the Sapient Union, like you did. But I also swore to protect and save who I can. Please . . . let me help you to live."

The man's hand slowly, hesitantly, lowered the gun. He said nothing, only watching her.

She took a careful, slow step forward. He didn't move.

"Let me take it, and I promise I won't hurt you," she said.

His shoulders slumped, shuddering as something seemed to loosen in him. Carefully, she took the gun from his hand.

Putting it on her belt, she called out.

"Tred!" she called. "We're in the Main Engineering Compartment!"

"We?" Tred came back.

"It's under control," she said.

The man was no longer looking at her, his eyes cast downward. He didn't even seem to be aware as Tred came into the doorway. "I had to come tell you about the sabotage," he said.

"I just found out, glad you could make it," she said. "Do you think you can fix it?"

Another man appeared beside him, the man who had appeared and run so many times.

"This is Nalen Kress, I met him coming down here and- oh god!" Tred realized the other man was there and visibly recoiled.

"It's okay-" Pirra began.

"Shoot him!" Kress screamed, pointing at the disarmed gunman. "Shoot him while you can!"

"No," Pirra said, trying to calm him. "He's not armed, and we-"

Kress came towards her. "You've got to protect me from him! He's the cause of all of this! He's the reason we're stuck!"

His panic was almost infectious, and she saw terror spreading to Tred's face. It encroached upon her almost like an animal, and she held up a hand to try and push him back. "Stay back-"

The room was too cramped, and as he moved towards her, she grabbed for the pistol on her belt.

But she couldn't shoot the man just for being panicked. He was raving, coming closer, and she prepared to give him a kick to the leg that might knock him back-

"Give it back!" the gunman cried, lunging for her. "I can't let him kill me!"

"Calm down!" she yelled, as authoritatively as she could. But both men were rushing her-

Kress got his hand on hers, struggling for the pistol. Then the gunman had as well. They fought, Pirra throwing her elbows and knees into the men to fend them off.

With her training and enhanced muscles she was a match for them, but it didn't mean it was easy. The grasping hands were threatening to accidentally-

The gun fired.

The once-gunman gasped, his eyes widening.

"No," he said, stumbling back.

Pirra threw a hard blow into Kress, sending him onto his back.

A bloody flower blossomed on the once-gunman's chest, and he slumped against the wall.

"Finally," Kress whispered fiercely. "Finally! You can't stop it this time!"

Pirra aimed the gun at him. "Stay on the ground!"

The whole room shook. The fusion engine had just reactivated.

She stumbled, the gun almost slipping from her grip.

She managed to hold onto it, but the newcomer threw himself out of the room, clawing his way back to his feet and sprinting off.

"The magnetic coils are unbalanced!" Tred yelled in horror.

"Get on it!" Pirra said. "Can you fix it?"

"I don't know! We've got one, maybe two minutes before it rips apart!" Tred replied, getting on the console and frantically beginning to work.

Pirra hurried to the shot man. He was staring upwards, his eyes open. Blood covered most of his front.

His pulse was thready, and even as she applied a closing bandage she knew it was too little too late.

She still didn't even know his name.

His mouth moved, and the barest of sounds came out.

She leaned in to hear his last words.

"I will be reborn," he whispered.

Then his pulse stopped.

Rising, Pirra looked out the door after the man who fled.

"He's the one who sabotaged us," Tred said. "He's an engineer - I think he's trying to end all this."

"What?" Pirra demanded.

"There was only one engineer stationed here. Only an engineer could have set the reactor into this death spiral," Tred replied, talking quickly. "It has to have been him! You need to get him, Lieutenant, if he gets away there's all kinds of other things he can do to destroy this place!"

Pirra took a deep breath. "Lock the door behind me," she said, and charged out after the man.

*******

As Pirra left, Tred stared at the screen readouts. The system thought it was running an unmanned test and wouldn't accept external inputs to tell it to shut off. Kress had disabled that option.

He could still manipulate the system that the man had thrown off, though. Normally a plasma coil alignment took hours and a team of six.

But that was procedure, and this was his specialty. He could not manually set the alignment, it was far too fine a work for a human to do.

He watched the stability rating of the generator. It was just starting, and while it was already beginning a dangerous oscillation, the magnetic fields were able to withstand it for now.

He knew some tricks that could help him speed this. He didn't need to perfectly align it all right now - well, he needed it nearly perfect, but there was some wiggle room. At least enough to make it not destroy itself . . .

Some of the magnetic fields were set right. He just needed to give the others the appropriately mirrored settings. It wasn't a procedure you should ever do, eyeball the numbers, flip them, and force the system to implement them. Normally you'd plot them all by calculations and then let the AI finagle the little details.

But the AI wasn't working right now. He had no other way.

His hands shook as he put in the numbers. He did the math in his head; it wasn't hard, but he'd never had to do it under pressure like this.

Even a glance told him that there were thirty-six of the magnetic field generators out of alignment.

And in some of them, Nalen Kress had anticipated his plan, he realized. Four of the most critical magnetic plates that mirrored each other were all out of alignment. He had no base numbers to work with to flip.

Quickly he finished the others. The oscillations in the system were still growing, and alarms were beginning to increase in number, but the more of the system he had functioning properly, the slower the problem would grow.

But those last four - he had no simple tricks to fix them. He was going to need to figure out a proper alignment to them that would function, with just a calculator.

Panic overtook him, and he froze. The instability readings increased, and he knew that soon it'd be too late. His problem would be solved by no longer mattering.

No one would ever even know he'd panicked. They'd just know he'd failed.

But he'd been trained well. He couldn't think, but he could still act.

His fingers flew and input numbers. He couldn't be sure where he was pulling them from - memory? He had looked at these numbers, and though the angles were absurdly precise, down to the twentieth decimal point, did he really remember them?

One more aligned. His mind felt like it was a blank again, and he was second-guessing his own numbers.

"Fusion reaction destabilizing," the computer said. "Reactor breach imminent."

"I know," he muttered.

If he was wrong on his first number, then it would kill them. But inaction was a guaranteed failure. He just had to run with it.

The stress on the system was beginning to set off even more warnings. He had so little time left . . .

"Reactor breach in ten seconds," the computer said.

"I know, I know!" he snapped.

Taking the number he'd just input, he adjusted the last three magnetic fields to match.

His eyes went to the readout. The oscillations wouldn't immediately stop, but if he'd done his job anywhere close to right they'd begin to . . .

"Fusion reaction stabilizing," the computer said.

"Oh thank god!" Tred burst out, his knees giving way.

Slumping against the console, he gave thanks to his teachers, both in mathematics and speed-typing, and whoever had made a keyboard that was proof against fat-fingered inputs.

"Simulation successfully completed," the computer continued.

It still believed that it had only been a test. For a moment, Tred was worried that maybe it had been, that he'd gotten this scared over nothing.

He looked through the readouts again.

But it had been a real threat. He'd averted disaster.

"Computer," he said, feeling exhausted. "Get communications back online."