“The Incuuri dude is dead.” Damon spoke to the bound mercenaries, his back was drenched with sweat, his breath was short and his glare intense. Idina was currently rushing through the place picking up everything they could carry that was of importance or need. “So this is what’s going to happen. I’m going to leave soon. I can either leave you guys here chained up to starve to death because no one will find you. Or you can answer my questions and I will leave you the key to the cuffs of one of your lot so you can free one another.”
Tsanaki and the others looked at him awestruck, eyes wide, even if quietly.
“I need to know who built the Incurri’s house.”
They looked at one another, hesitant. “Their… house?”
Damon nodded gravely, organizing his backpack with everything Han had left behind. Which was basically some spare gear and items. The stuff that could be of use he’d take with him, the rest he’d hide or hopefully drop off at his house if Sybil wasn’t around. “I need to know who built the place. Someone put something that made everyone inside bleed out of their eyes and ears.”
Tsanaki hesitated, shaking his head. “As far as anyone knows, the house was built by the Incuuri themselves when they sent Heliot to set up a branch in Sky Bridge… but we have never heard of such a thing ever happening before, not at the scale you describe.”
“Awesome.” He growled, pulling aside the pouches. “Where is the Incurri family at?”
“Their main household is in Three Spire City.”
“Pretend I don’t know how to get there while avoiding the knights.”
“If the scion of Incuuri is dead, lockdown will be in place. The lifts would be blocked. You could attempt to jump off of the city, the monsters in the valley might be dangerous, but… so are you.”
Damon grimaced, quite aware that Idina would insist on coming with him, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could refuse her either. He’d need a guide who could talk to the locals without freaking them out. “Alternatives?”
“Smuggling. It would be expensive, you are a wanted man.” Tsanaki declared.
“Fair enough, got any suggestions?” Damon leaned down to uncuff one of Tsanaki’s wrists, placing the key on the floor within reach if he moved, but not immediately so.
The man looked at his freed hand for a moment, then at the key, at his companions, and then at Damon. There seemed to be a moment of hesitation and then a heavy nod.
“Look for Stebos. The man is trustworthy in this field and owes us some favors. Tell him ‘the red eyes always watch’.”
He slung the backpack over his shoulder. “Appreciated.”
With a shake of the head, he bowed. “You spared our lives. We will never forget this.”
That was as far as the explanations went, it seemed. Damon left with little fanfare, taking Idina with him, and slipping into the night. Without the armor, it was much easier for him to avoid drawing attention, almost any shadow would do so long as he could fit.
“Stebos…” Damon’s lips pursed slightly at the word. “Haven’t I heard that name before?”
> ***
>
> ***
In the vast emptiness of space, no one can judge you for attempting to do advanced space mechanic work by trawling through tutorials, novellas, and downloaded forum based content. There was a surprising amount of very passionate people willing to spend no shortage of words in explaining why some technical detail was wrong.
It was hours of work, work that Emilie felt could’ve been better spent moving things, cutting things, or just flat out doing things. But she had exactly one shot at removing the spare reactor and exactly one shot at emptying the wiring from potential nanobots.
“And I’m stalling because I might fuck it up.” She spoke to herself, a bit more often than usual. Then again, everyone was allowed to go a bit touched in the thinkingbox when in such a scenario.
She checked her data-pad. The search results for “Reactor” had another four hundred thousand entries she’d yet to check. Sure, she’d prioritized results, but that was still a lot of text that had not been read yet.
To be fair, she could spend just about every minute of her remaining life-expectancy reading and not be done. It sort of was standard protocol to pack up one’s datapad with everything and anything when going out on exploration trips. Better to have amusement to spare than run out and become a cabin crazy.
“Like when you talk to yourself even though you know not even the system’s AI can hear you. Though maybe that’s just a positive more than anything.”
Emilie checked the schematics, and double checked, and triple checked. They were crude, drawn up from a combination of what she could see of the spare reactor and the instruction manual. And the tutorials. And the forum technical arguments that her pad had downloaded just because there happened to be the spare space for it.
And she checked again.
Just to be sure.
“Here goes nothing…” She turned on her visor’s light-protection function and activated her laser cutter. It was not meant to cut through things that were too thick, but she’d hijacked her battery for some extra burn.
It meant it would run out too soon, too fast, but so long as the spare reactor could run safely, then the water recycling system would be back online and she would be back on track.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
With a flick of the switch, and a sizzling hot flash of light, the helmet’s light dimming function kicked in and she could avoid blinding herself as she started work. Bit by bit she separated the spare reactor from everything that kept it safely in place. Then came the wires and pipes. The fist of the two did not show signs of having been chewed up.
For once in her life, Emilie thanked the profit-sniffing garbage chutes that ran the company she worked for. A normal ship would have the backup reactor running right away the moment the first went down, to at the very least keep life-support systems operational.
But for her ship, it had been deemed that if there were no immediately detectable signs of life, then they might as well not bother. And the nanites had chewed through many of the internal sensors and systems, including the one in charge of determining if there was someone alive on board or not.
Carefully, Emilie marked each pipe, each tube, and each cable, comparing to her notes. Some of the locations didn’t match up, but the functions did. A simple fusion reactor with a simple and cheap layout. Nothing out of the ordinary.
What did pose a bit of a headache was getting the thing to the blown-out hangar bay. With no gravity, the main issue was inertia. She could get it moving with effort, and she’d have to get the thing to stop moving with effort. Rushing would only make breaking or taking a curve harder. The hours trickled by. Emilie hummed away a tune, pushing the bulky piece of metal and groaning her way through, maneuvering it around the other heavy objects strewn around the place, like the spare grav plates and the other boxes she’d salvaged.
She’d have to tidy up and check inventory later. Maybe there was something that could be of use, like the security boxes. For now, getting the back-up reactor to the improvised depressurization chamber was the next item on the list.
Three more cycles went by after that, with Emilie needing to dismount half of the foam structure she’d made, put the reactor in there, and then build the wall back up. She also had to put together everything else she’d need to do in her space-walk.
Five more cycles, the spare reactor was outside, and she’d successfully pried a handful of gravitational and photon sensors from the ship’s composite hull. The spare reactor had been cleaned, sucked, blown, and checked. It had been systematically gruelling work.
Now the second phase began: Plugging everything in and turning it on.
To Emilie it was a laundry list of things to do. One she had been checking, triple checking, and pouring over throughout the past several days. Plug in some deuterium-tritium fuel containers. Weld the reactor to the ship’s hull. Connect breakers to avoid accidentally frying something. And so on.
Her food supply had reached the half-way point by the time she was ready to flick the switch.
Which was a little better timing than she’d expected.
“Here goes nothing.”
With her datapad connected to the reactor’s control panel, she pushed the ignition button, watching intently at the readings.
Nothing.
She checked readings, couplings, and pushed the ignition.
Again, nothing.
Emilie’s chitin itched as she tightened bolts, tubes, and screws, unplugged and replugged, confirmed damage or signs of nanomachines. And pushed the button.
Again, nothing.
She switched to diagnostics, seeing no readings at all. Then began going through the interface menu screens. Her datapad bleeped a soft green light indicating she had just received a message.
Startled, Emilie opened her inbox and noticed the sender was… the spare reactor?
“We have detected that you are attempting to use one of our products in a way that goes against our terms of use. Further attempts will result in all functionality being shut off until a certified technician can reactivate it.”
She read it one more time.
And then another.
And once more.
She looked at the door, at the entrance that led back inside and into the room with air and a water recycling system that was no longer running because she exhausted her battery by cutting things and welding them in place.
The spare reactor had to run.
Opening the official instruction manual, she sought out the list of “acceptable” uses the reactor had within the vacuum of space and zero gravity circumstances. She found none. There was no detailed situation that mentioned either scenario. Then how…
“No.” She frowned.
She was looking at the problem the wrong way. The issue was that the system was detecting the parameters and deeming them bad. All she had to do was convince the system it was working as intended.
“Step one, find out where its eyes are and gouge them out. Then make it think it’s still looking pretty.”
Brandishing a micron-blade, she started to unpack the casing of the reactor. Then sought out the electronic components. Emilie might not have known much about fusion reactors, but she knew space-junk when she saw it. This was just another component that had been built with the cheapest available pieces on the market. Finding each and every sensor took her an hour, distinguishing which of them were blocking her way took another.
“Just unplug the sensor, plug it to the datapad, register the information it receives, figure out how to fake the information…” Simpler said than done, but not impossible. She’d hijacked convoy trucks and those needed a biometric scan of the driver. This was easy compared to that.
A fourth hour, everything was plugged again, put back together, foamed up to ensure nothing went flying off.
She pressed the button.
And the light went on. The reactor moved through the test run in safety mode. Each module lit up, some with warning signs, but most confirming operational capacity.
“YES!”
It was with supreme self-restraint that she allowed the full diagnostic to run through, floating next to it and keeping herself waiting with baited breath. Once she’d run the program thrice she had the reactor turn on at full capacity.
Nothing blew up, nothing began blaring warnings. Emilie proceeded to verify the water purifier was working, and then proceeded to plug in the sensors that had been salvaged from the hull. Her datapad was immediately swamped with a stream of raw data, a lot of it.
Emilie grimaced, having expected something like this to happen. Her datapad did not have any way to interpret the information as anything other than signal noise. There were several options available to her right now, but she just made sure to gather eight hours worth before returning back inside.
It would take her three days to figure out a way to make a small program that would parse the stored information so that it would be organized in a way that would make sense. Another two for another one to interpret the important parts. It was rudimentary, and ugly, and relied too much on raw number crunching and very little on visualization. She had to trust that the numbers that popped out of the thing meant the things she thought they meant.
Because there was no way for her to make a program that would let her actually see a representation of the system. And after running several dozen samples of the raw data through the program, the results came in.
She was roughly eighty three point four light minutes away from the star at the center of the system. It was the length of her ship multiplied several billion times. If she had to walk the distance, it would take her tens of thousands of lifetimes to get there.
The system had four objects large enough to be considered planets, and exactly one of them showed signs of technology. It was roughly 94% of the way to the central star, and thus, thoroughly out of reach. There were other potential heavy objects that had their own gravity wells, but the math were finicky enough Emilie did not dare even hope it might be something approaching a space station or some mining base.
That meant she now had to figure out how to get this massive inert piece of scrap all the way from the edge of the heliosphere to the planet near its center.
And hopefully not trigger any other defense systems along the way.