I looked again at the massive hole in the side of my ship, like looking away and back would somehow magically make it not so bad, it didn’t, it was no wonder these parts had been locked out honestly, it looked like some kind of explosive had detonated internally, ripping out a huge chunk of ship, and all the recent damage had done was rip off the band-aid.

Jenel barely suppressed a groan at the scale of the damage. She had started off as a patcher, so she had seen this sort of mess before. “Emergency repair drones probably burned themselves out with the aim of her limping home for a repair in a proper naval dock.”

“And she never made it, so now we got to pick up the tab. Oh! Goodie.”

“On the positive side there’s less to rip out when we do a full remodel, right?” As per usual, Nara looked for the positive in everything, one of these days she’d do it round the wrong crew, and it’d get her airlocked. For now, she was still one of mine though, and a good kid, so I couldn’t bring myself to piss in her cheerios.

“Well it’s definitely that, the size of this hole we could actually use it as a docking bay after a complete patch job, now if only we had the couple of million creds that will cost, then we could get out of debt and be able to start not affording to fix this mess instead.” I chuckled, not because this was a laughing matter, but because if I started crying over comms, everybody would get all touchy-feely when I got back. Even Jenel, and that would be weird for all of us.

I crept in closer to check if I could get access this way, maybe it wasn’t all bad, (damn, Nara was infecting me with optimism, I needed to keep an eye on that, unchecked optimism leads to overconfidence, and you don’t want to be overconfident on a spacewalk, or on a ship, or maybe at all.) Now I could slip right on in, maybe bypass some of those lockouts, just had to squeeze past the damage, careful not to tear the suit, the consequences of a wardrobe malfunction out here were a little worse than an embarrassing picture in the tabloids tomorrow, and I was in. There was a door right in front, about two cabins worth of missing ship away.

I could totally do this, I ran my palm over the entrance panel, and it was locked out, but of course it was, and I didn’t have long before I had to head back. This suit had air recyclers, of course, but given that I wasn’t the species they were engineered for, I’d much prefer to avoid that. Delonians hailed from a much more acidic world than earth, so breathing through one of their recyclers would definitely make your eyes water.

It was like breathing in a room full of people slicing onions, while a vid screen played old yeller, and grave of the fireflies in the background. So if I wanted to get in there, it was now or never. “Jenel, there’s only one way to get in, I’m using THAT.”

“Don’t you dare, did you get a virus from all those old vids and scramble what passes for your brains? You don’t even know if it works, it could pack in midphase, and I aint climbing out there to cut what’s left of you out of a door because you couldn’t just leave well enough be.”

“Hey, I know what I’m doing.”

“No, no you don’t, you have basic scraprat training, that thing is definitely not basic, we don’t even know if it works on our species.”

“Then it’s about time I find out.” I replied, pulling out the Geistsphere from my tool belt. In case you were wondering a Geistsphere was a small orb shaped thing (no duh) capable of allowing passage through a barrier, but it had problems, like never being built for human use, and being found in a scrapyard, and been repaired by me (a problem all by itself.) But the alternative was go back and forth for the next six months or so, trying to bypass the locks, which were undoubtedly Military grade lockout. Time we couldn’t afford, or dry-dock her while we try to get access, which of course would be faster, but dry-docks cost about 4k creds a day, and we DEFINITELY couldn’t afford that, so I could do this, risk my life, for potentially enough creds to clear our debt. Or we could try one of the expensive ways, and they’d take Reliance as pay, probably fudge the figures and claim she was worthless, and leave us with debt, and without a ship. This really was a no-brainer, and luckily I am distinctly short in that department, and apparently the plain old instinct to survive department too.

I pondered for a moment, like I hadn’t already made up my mind anyway, then started the activation sequence.

The question was, had it worked, it was definitely doing something, it felt like my entire body was coated in a wetsuit, that had been dipped in jello. Yes, that included the inorganic bits that usually only offer feedback from their sensors in text form, and lemme tell ya, that was freaky. Well given that we didn’t even know how long these things lasted, this was certainly not the time to be stalling. Right, access potentially life, and ship saving tech first, angst over the ephemeral nature of cybernetic organisms later, there was plenty of time for an existential crisis when I was off the clock. So I squared my shoulders, extremely glad it had recognized my suit as a component to phase with me........ maayyybbeee I should have thought of that sooner, like before activation.

“Well that’s one small step for cyborg” I muttered to myself, well aware this was a terrible, terrible, idea, “One giant leap for idiot kind.” I shifted forward, and closed my eyes, really hoping that I wasn’t about to slam into a locked door.