Chapter 46

They dressed in the environment suit room on the lower deck, neither of them looking at the other, pretending to be focused on the suits they yanked from the lockers. Connor shivered, feeling vulnerable in such proximity, even if Drew was a scrawny wisp of a woman.
His mind always returned to the previous problems: the broken coolant pipe, the ruptured fuel line.
And now they had a short somewhere.
A tool belt hung off the engineer’s narrow hips, dragged down on the right side by a heavy hatchet.
It was an emergency tool, something to break through inoperable panels.
And the tool would be perfect for all the sabotage they’d found.
Or it could cave in the skull of someone who wasn’t paying attention.
Did she know he had the empty Dustoff packet in his pants pocket?
The engineer glanced up from securing her boot coverings. “Is everything okay?” Her voice was almost lost in the clang of the lockers and clump of the gear hitting the deck.
Connor nodded at the belt. “Your personal tools?”
“Oh.” She glanced down and locked onto the hatchet. “Yeah. The last thing I had.”
Because you fired me, Connor finished for her. “This short…?”
“What about it?”
“It would probably be a wire with insulation scraped away?”
“You mean like the ruptures? Maybe. I was thinking something might have been pinched—y’know, sheared through—when we crashed in the hangar bay.”
How obvious! Why hadn’t he thought of that?
Connor blushed and look away. “So we could start there.”
“Let’s see what the reactor diagnostics say. It might save us time.”
“Right.”
The rush to judge Drew had Connor off balance. That wasn’t who he was, but at that moment, with everything coming undone and the team’s safety—their lives—in the balance, he was a mess.
He followed Drew out into the main engineering section, then into the reactor control room. With the lights dimmed to conserve power, they took extra care. Most of the engineering section was open space, but there were the occasional panels with sharp edges and other bad design decisions.
At the control panel, Drew hunched down and tapped a series of commands in. “It’s going to be a little slower than normal. Unless you want me to tell it to favor speed over conservation?”
“Martienne’s on a respirator. I think time’s critical right now.”
“Okay.”
Drew tapped another sequence of buttons, and the display brightened. Options lit the screen; she chose Diagnostics.
A few swipes into the interface, she waved Connor forward. “See this?”
Where she pointed, two windows showed power consumption. One was labeled Average Over Time, the other was labeled Last Hour.
Connor spotted the problem immediately. “Hangar bay use spiked a thousand percent.”
She nodded. “Part of that’s expected. We opened and closed the bay door and recycled atmosphere. But a thousand percent?”
“Can we cut power to it?”
“Physically. I could go down and disconnect the conduit at the junction box. I have to power that deck down now anyway, if I want to fix the short.”
“Let’s do that.”
“But…” She glanced up at him, her lip white from biting it.
“What?” His leg itched where the Dustoff packet rested in the pocket.
“The shuttle’s a mess. It’s barely worth salvaging.”
“Right.”
“And if we take Lucky down, we can’t risk having the shuttle in the hangar bay. Not like it is now.”
She was right. They’d need to eject it. If they wanted to reclaim it later, they could.
He shrugged. “Then we ditch it now.”
Drew tapped through the interface, and a frown twisted her face. “It’s still registering that short. I can’t do much without a reboot.”
“Will that affect the batteries?”
“No.”
“Do it. I’ll meet you down in the hangar bay.”
Connor hurried out and down the passageway to the ramp down to the cargo bay. He paused to make sure the strange chill he’d felt before wasn’t still a threat. It was silly superstition, but the memory gnawed at him.
At the hangar bay hatch, he hesitated. Everything came down to rescuing the team, and what they were doing was necessary, but it felt wrong leaving Martienne alone for so long. Without the pilot, they couldn’t get down to the planet.
He punched the button to open the hatch, then slid inside.
Everything went dark.
The reboot. Apparently, it did affect the batteries. Or maybe that was just the result of the short.
He powered on the suit’s lights and made his way along the bulkhead until he was at one of the huge pry bars that would be necessary to separate the shuttle from the warped bulkhead. He grabbed a second bar and dragged them over to the undamaged right wing, set the tools on that, then climbed up and dragged them to the crumpled nose.
It took a bit to get the tools between the surfaces, but once he did, he connected the tools and let them do the rest of the work.
Metal groaned as the tools extruded arms and claws to pry the vehicle free.
The shuttle drifted back, then settled.
Where the nose had driven into the starboard bulkhead, a panel fell away, exposing a cable bundle that had lost most of its thick shielding.
That was the short, exactly as Drew had suggested.
And he’d been ready to blame her drug problem.
Did an empty packet even prove she was still using?
He would have to ask her, point blank.
After he dealt with Martienne.
Lights flickered in the bay. He hopped down and hurried out, still feeling ashamed.
By the time he reached the infirmary, power seemed to be back to full.
Connor stripped off his environment suit and set his computer down on the empty bed and checked on Martienne. She looked pale and weak, but she was still breathing.
“Call Lem.”
The computer chimed back in response while Connor washed up.
He had his gloves on by the time the camera and the surgical tools robotic arms started moving again.
Lem’s face appeared on the computer display. “You have returned.”
“A power outage. The shuttle caused a big short that shut everything off.”
“That is a problem. Remote surgery for something as delicate as this requires reliable power.”
Connor tapped the drill-like tool with a gloved finger. “Is this the tool?”
“Yes.”
“Can you walk me through it?”
“I—” Lem’s lips pressed together. “Yes.”
Connor took the tool from the robotic arm, tapped the button that made the drill spin, then swallowed. “We go through the skull, right?”
A red laser dot from the camera appeared on the pilot’s scalp. Lem smiled. “Right here. Once you have drilled through, the rest is cleanup.”
“Great.”
“You are about to become a brain surgeon.”
The Golem’s words came across light and humorous, or at least it seemed that way.
Connor leaned in close, pressed the drill against the pilot’s skull.
Then he pressed the button and focused on the whine of the drill so that he didn’t notice the smell of powdered bone.