I pulled myself back through the open grate in the armoury's floor and tossed my hardlight adjuster onto the work table, swearing as I did. The water I'd grabbed earlier was still sitting on the floor beside the central leg of the table, untouched.

Victoria had been sitting in the cockpit, but she got up as she heard me climb back out of the engine housing. There was only space for one of us down there, and even though she'd explained she knew a lot about ships, she wasn't exactly going to be able to repair a human one. "Still bad?"

"It's fucked. We're-" I sighed instead of swearing again.

"Do we?"

"I'll give it one more shot before we need to make new plans."

"So we can't get to Ovigaia then?"

"Don't write it off yet, but-" I trailed off instead of saying 'yeah.' The laser fire we'd taken had pierced the hull, and while the prognosis could have been worse, there wasn't far for it to go. The shot had damaged the right-side power cells of the ship. Even if I managed to fix them so they stopped losing power on every circuit run, we'd already bled enough storage that we had essentially half as much auxiliary power as I'd planned for the trip to Ovigaia.

Unless I could restore peak efficiency and was wrong about how much power we'd lost in the past hours, we would need to land somewhere else. Not to mention, we'd pierced the veil at the wrong angle after getting hit, meaning the journey already would have been overlong with a fully functional ship.

"Do you want me to take a look at some of the options we might have?"

"Hard to tell what's in range until I have a read on the power, but sure. Thanks," Victoria nodded as she stepped back to the cockpit, sliding into the co-pilot's seat and bringing up the console.

At least she was making herself useful, better than she'd been on Mythellion III when I'd first met her. Maybe she was warming up to me or maybe just warming up to the idea of someone who was keeping her alive.

Mom had always said that getting shot at was great for developing character.

I took a sip of the water and watched as she started working on the console, slow and methodical but making progress. She hadn't asked for help, but I imagined everything that seemed intuitive for humans was like a foreign language of UI for her. Most tech used agreed on universal standards if they wanted to reach the mass market; human military surplus was optimized for our neural networking.

She swore, and I almost spoke up, but every minute I spent jabbing her ego instead of working on the batteries could be light years off our expected distance.

I dropped back into the floor and was met with the telltale thrum of the perpetual engine funnelling power to the rest of the ship. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the hyper-blue light.

Across from me, at the end of the first maintenance way, I could see the shield of the ship making a translucent lattice between myself and the infinite void of the black. Interlocking hexagons shimmered in a pulsing rhythm over the wound in the Gunboat Diplomat's hull. Just to the right of the damage, the twisted, melted metal of the power storage battery hung loose and open, pouring purple light like a gash in reality.

My personal shield, the one that I'd been storing on the ship, sparked to life as I approached the exposed battery, absorbing heat and radiation spillage from the damaged part and using it as power. Once I was close enough to see the inside of the battery, I pulled out my PA, not expecting anything new.

It only took a breath to establish that, despite my wiring a spare shielding cell into the network of the battery, we were still losing power each cycle through the laser wound. Nanite temp-repair gel had been enough to slow the pour of energy, but it was a patch, and perpetual energy needed a perfect system to remain perpetual.

There was a chance that I could rewire the shields connection and it would be good enough. I reached down to grab the hardlight adjuster on my hip and ended up patting nothing. Shit. "Victoria. Can you throw down the tool? I need it." After waiting long enough, I called again, "Victoria?"

There were two taps behind me as Victoria gently lowered herself through the floor into the maintenance hallway, stooping to avoid knocking her head on any of the support struts. She walked over with awkwardly bent knees and pressed the adjuster into my hand.

"You shouldn't be down here without a-" Victoria showed me her other hand and revealed my old mk23 shield generator. "-Thanks."

"Any better?"

"Yes and no."

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"By-"

"We're losing less power, but we're still losing. I just wanna try decoupling the shield cell I hot-wired in there and seeing if I can't-" I cut myself off to focus as I reached into the hole in the battery's casing and started dematerializing the hardlight wiring I'd built before. "If I can't get it running better."

"No chance of perfect then?"

"Don't think so."

Breaking down hardlight was usually quick work, but when working around a damaged battery storing enough power to restart a miniature sun, everything took too much time. Unlike the previous rounds of repairs, Victoria stayed with me this time and kept trying to find new angles to see what I was working on.

After a while, she gave up and sat down on the floor. ; there wasn't enough room in the hallway to see past me and into the casing.

"You can go back up and-"

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"Diadona?"

"Yes."

"Is that a human last name too?"

"No." I stopped working momentarily, pulling the adjuster out and shaking the last motes of light free of it. How close were Fotuan and human languages that her translator could catch the differences in species' last names?

"But you're-"

"Yes, I'm human," I confirmed, "I was adopted by a mixed family."

"Pardon?"

"My biological parents were human. Mom was an Ovishir, and Dad was a human."

"But you just said that-"

"Mom and Dad raised me after adoption; my bio-parents provided the parts," I clarified.

"Sorry, I'm just confused by- You keep saying 'adoption,' and I don't think it translates."

"Really?"

"I don't know what it means."

"It means that the people who raised me didn't give birth to me."

"That's so strange. And one of them was an Ovishir?"

"My Mom."

"And by Mom, you mean-"

"She raised me but didn't give birth to me. Yes."

"That's so weird," Victoria added just as I had to get quiet again to focus on what my hands were doing. My PA overlaid a wiring setup on the AR glass as the optimal path for energy, but it was the same one I'd just been using. I added a small touch of hard light off the highlighted circuit, hoping the system would suggest something else, but it just told me to erase my work.

Shit.

I knew my way around electronics well enough to follow instructions, but I wasn't about to take apart and rewire the entire battery when it was powering my ship through the black. That was just asking to become a statistic.

I set myself on redrawing the wired connections that I'd just spent the last few minutes erasing. Victoria spoke up again.

"You were raised by an Ovishir, then?"

"Mostly, my D- male parent," I switched the wording to try and help the idea translate for her, "died when I was pretty young so-"

"And that male parent was-"

"Human."

"I didn't know that was a thing that happened."

"Hm?"

"Two different species raising a kid," she explained, "just seems… Wrong isn't the right word, but it's strange."

"How long have you been away from Fotul?"

"Pardon?"

"How long have you been outside of Meritocracy space? Mixed couples aren't common, but they aren't that rare."

"I-"

"I'm just surprised you haven't seen one. How long have you been away?"

I'd almost finished rewiring the system, but I pulled my hand out to let my shield cool down. It could use the energy from the battery but feeding it too much for too long was asking for it to overload, and, unlike some other species, I couldn't get exposed to that much radiation for very long at all.

"I'm going to go check on our flight path options," Victoria said as she stood up, "let me know how the repairs go once you're done." She walked away before she was fully finished speaking.

I sighed once she was out of earshot and got back to work.

Even though adding the shield cell to defend the tears in the circuit had given the best results of anything I'd tried, we were still light years away from perfect energy cycling, even with optimal hardlight wiring. There was a chance that I could have gotten us somewhere closer if I had physical wires to use, but I didn't have any heavy-duty spares on the ship.

If this had taught me anything, it had shown me that I had too many spare parts for guns and not enough for the ship itself.

At least I'd have time to look at the Basking once we'd chosen a new destination.

I held the PA up to the newly rewired system and let it calculate how much energy we were losing on each cycle, then sent that data to the nav console itself before packing and heading back up myself.

As I closed the access panel to the lower deck and re-affixed the radiation shielding, Victoria spoke up from the cockpit.

"Are you kidding me?"

"What's wrong?" I asked without turning my attention over to her yet.

"We're losing that much power? I thought that-"

"Mhm."

"Well-" Victoria growled in frustration, and I heard her shoot up from her seat, "none of the routes I was planning are going to work then."

"Not enough?"

"We wouldn't even make it halfway to Ovigaia according to your human piece of-" she trailed off. We'd already beaten around the bush once regarding her ship vs mine. The Gunboat Diplomacy had won because it wasn't currently scrap metal polluting Mythellion's orbit.

"What are our options then?" I asked as I finally stood up in our conversation. Victoria turned back to the cockpit and got into the co-pilot's seat.

"Two. Maybe three."

"I think we need a main population center for repairs."

"One then, maybe two."

"What planet's number one?"

"Not a planet," Victoria brought it up on the screens as I went to meet her, blocking out the infinite void that the front cameras had been showing for the past hours. The reading on the screen was an ancient mining station that had been retrofitted into a colony ship. "Station-"

"What's the other option?"

"Uh-" Victoria shot a questioning look but no questions with it, "Baris-Na, an Anteraxi forward colony."

"Baris-Na it is."

Victoria didn't hit anything that would mark the planet as the ship's target. Instead, she pointed to the bottom of the screen and the energy it would take to get there. "I said maybe for a reason."

If we cut everything but the engines, we'd need to drop out of superluminal speeds within a few hours and drift for three days.

"We should aim for Station 26; the other one's not really an option."

I bit my lip for a moment before speaking up. "You're right."

There wasn't a point in explaining why I'd cut her off before. Avoiding the obvious choice was just putting us in unnecessary danger.

Still, I'd told myself I'd never be back.