Jacob stared at the large open rent in the corridor that spanned twice the length of his drone. The rent was a concern, but he was more worried about what he could see through it. The massive tear exposed at least five decks below, and space. He watched in horrified fascination as stars slowly drifted past the opening as the ship rotated slowly.
That was a problem. He had finally located an unblocked path, and this was it.
He mentally cursed and tried contacting Melody again, but the AI was just as absent as the previous times that he attempted to communicate with it. He couldn’t be sure, but he would bet it had been days since they last spoke. He was starting to get worried.
There was no trust between him and the scatterbrained and damaged AI, but he did not doubt that the AI was key to his survival. If it was dead for good, he needed to figure out a solution to his problem on his own.
Jacob used the drone’s sensors to look around. He spotted a chunk of metal a little larger than a head and picked it up. Then he used the drone to throw the piece of scrap across the gaping hole in the ship, which was awkward since the maintenance drones weren’t designed to chuck material around.
Instead of falling, the chunk sailed across the gap and continued to go farther than it should have before it finally clinked to the ground and rolled into a nearby wall on the far side.
That little experiment answered a question he had been considering since he first took control of the drones. The ship did indeed have something that generated gravity. Without power, he had no idea what that might be, but it didn’t matter; he now knew how to get across the gap. It wasn’t going to be pretty, though.
It took a little over a day to design a pair of ramps and attach the first to the edge of the gap.
The second, he held onto, because it would go on the far side, so he could cross back over if he found the way blocked.
The makeshift devices weren’t very tall, just tall enough to give him a bit of lift, so when he soared over the section without gravity, he wouldn’t just slam into the broken edge of the flooring at the far end.
Once it was ready, he backed up as far as he could and accelerated toward the jump before he could second-guess his decision. He doubted the designers had ever envisioned these drones doing jumps, but he hoped their stout construction was enough to absorb the impact.
As the drone accelerated, Jacob realized he could have walked faster than the lumbering machine could move in its current condition, but that was fine. He only needed a little speed. Too much, and he was likely to overshoot the far side, damaging the drone when he came crashing down. Too little, and he wasn’t sure what might happen. Falling into the tear was possible, but unlikely with his direction of travel and the lack of gravity. Still, he would prefer to cross the area as quickly as possible so he didn’t have to think about what-ifs.
Jacob hit the ramp, and at first everything was fine, then his point of view started to pitch sideways. He flailed the drone’s arms to try to correct his orientation, but it only made the rotation worse. He had been so occupied with trying to correct the jump that he hadn’t even noticed when he reached the other side until gravity reasserted itself. He crashed to the floor with a screech of tearing metal.
The impact dislodged the ramp he had been holding onto, sending it careening into the void, but more worryingly, it snapped off one arm and broke one of the wheels holding a track in place.
He silently cursed himself as he spent the next hour trying in vain to right the drone. When that failed to produce any results, he shifted his treads so the fronts were facing the floor. With that, and his one good arm, he was able to pull himself along. He imagined he looked like a man dying of thirst while he crawled along on all fours in a desert.
The image made him chuckle and helped him pull his thoughts away from his predicament.
Jacob did his best to filter out the damage warning that kept piling up as he dragged his body across the floor, but it was a constant reminder of his stupid decision. He should have just spent however long it would have taken to clear one of the other blocked paths to the fabrication center.
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Now he was down a drone, even if he could get it upright again. He wasn’t about to attempt crossing back over. It may still serve some purpose on this side of the ship, but he didn’t know that for sure.
As he made his way toward the fabrication center, he found a partially broken bulkhead that stuck up at a shallow angle. It wasn’t enough to block his passage, but it did allow him to slide up it enough to tip himself back on his treads.
Luck seemed to be on his side for once. Maybe fate felt sorry for him?
His next obstacle proved that wasn’t the case.
A large door stood in his way, above it, the words ‘Fabrication Center’ were written in eiraxin or whatever the eiraxins called their language.
The problem wasn’t the door, but the lack of power to the controls. His maintenance knowledge told him there was a sensor that should have opened the door at his approach, but that hadn’t happened.
When he searched his new knowledge for workarounds, he discovered there was a manual release, but it was within a panel that led to a small maintenance tunnel designed for the crew to access. Apparently, nobody ever thought that the large maintenance drones would need to use a manual door release.
That left providing power to the door as his only option.
Jacob sighed in frustration and retrieved his broken arm. When he returned to the door, he moved over to a service panel. The panel came off without issue, leaving him staring at a mess of wires and electronics that wouldn’t have been out of place back on Earth.
Once again, he was struck by just how normal most of the stuff was aboard the ship.
It didn’t take Jacob long to find the power connection. He popped one end free and let it dangle while he placed the remains of his arm on his chassis and dismantled it. It took longer to find a power wire in his arm that was still connected to the socket than it did to dig through the door wiring.
Once he had it extracted from the metal shell of the arm, he connected it to the wire of the door and plugged the socket back into its spot on his chassis.
His vision dimmed, and most of his sensors went offline as the power draw hit him, but the door gave a groan and began to open.
The process was laboriously slow; his little power core simply didn’t have the juice to make it go any faster.
By the time the door finally opened wide enough to admit him, his sensors were flickering fitfully, and he was once again on the verge of power depletion.
Jacob wasted no time and yanked the connection free. His vision stabilized, but the effort had drained his battery. He knew he was going to have to find a new power core soon, or this drone was going to join the other dead hulks on this failing ship, leaving him with the one stuck at the debris blockage as his only hope.
He trundled into the fabrication center, eager to see what all the fuss was about. The place was huge, larger than even the massive hangar he found. Once again, he was forced to adjust his estimates on how large the vessel must be to contain such a thing.
The large arched beams overhead made the room look like a dome, but Jacob could tell it was stretched farther in one direction.
While the room was massive, it was not empty. It was filled with all sorts of machines, none of which Jacob knew anything about. Some were made from the same shiny metal as the rest of the interior, while others appeared to be bronze. He even saw what looked like smokestacks, but he doubted that was their purpose. He couldn’t imagine that pumping manufacturing byproducts into the open air aboard a ship would be a good idea.
It would take time and effort to search his memories for the specifics of each device, but they were helpfully labeled.
As he trundled along on his damaged tread, he looked for anything to do with power cell manufacturing. He wasn’t even sure if that was a thing, but as he was passing one machine, he slowed to a halt and stared at a sign that read “Charging Station.”
Three power cores were sitting in the alcove, with a green ring slowly circling them. There was even a convenient docking spot for maintenance drones.
Curious to see if it was still functional, Jacob made his way into the alcove.
Once he was in place, a small metal stop rose from the floor, and an arm on a triangular scaffold came down. It stopped in front of his power cell port, then a red light flashed. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it kept flashing, seeming to grow more insistent with each passing moment until another scaffold lowered from the ceiling along with a small display.
The screen was displaying a rule. Jacob felt really dumb when he read it, quickly backing out of the drone. Apparently, it was against protocol for operators to be in control of a drone during battery swapping operations.
Melody probably would have mentioned that if it were around. Jacob watched the swap take place from his virtual space. He wondered to himself why the fabrication center had power when the door and the rest of the ship didn’t.
That wasn’t entirely true, he realized. Melody must be drawing power from somewhere; maybe the fabrication center was connected to that same power source.
Jacob wondered if bringing the fabrication center back online would cut into his power reserves, but he didn’t see much of a choice. He needed to make repairs if he wanted to get out of the situation he was in.
The battery swap was completed, and the drone hologram blinked green to let him know it was okay to reconnect.
When Jacob reconnected, he saw that the depleted power core was now in the charger, showing a swirling red light. At least one thing worked properly on the ship. He would need to collect as many power cores as he could to fill up the charging bank, but for now, he needed to take stock of the entire room and find out what needed to be fixed to bring the fabrication center back online.
