The door to the main power facility rumbled open, shaking the entire floor. Jacob was sure something was broken inside the structure, but he wasn’t concerned about the mechanism behind the door, so long as it opened.
It did require power, similar to when he had to open the fabrication center door, but instead of recklessly jamming exposed wires from his drone into the door control, he came up with another solution. One he was quite proud of, if he did say so himself.
The little battery pack utilized one of the drone batteries, seated inside a charging cradle like the one from the fabrication center. Manufacturing a single charging cradle was a simple enough process; it was the rest that took him a bit of time. The unit sat in a roughly welded metal box with a handle, an on/off switch, and two power connectors extending from it. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
The unit sat on the floor near the door while Jacob waited nearby as it opened.
Unlike the fabrication center, which had working lights washing into the corridor when Jacob first opened them, the current room was dark. He was used to darkness by now. The entire ship was dark, and he was navigating through the drones’ onboard sensors.
Once the door was fully open, he trundled into the room, leaving the battery where it was. Unlike the fabrication center door, this one was self-closing. If it lost power before he figured out the reactor situation, he was going to have to bring another drone around with a fresh battery. Getting trapped wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would be annoying, so he hurried as quickly as he could.
As he trundled past the door, he idly noted it was as thick as a bank vault, making him even less enthusiastic about any repairs he would need to do to it.
Jacob had quickly learned that the maintenance drones had an upper limit on how much they could carry, and it wasn’t as much as he’d expected.
The room was dominated by six massive silo-like structures, which had to be the power generator or reactors, or whatever the eiraxins used to power their vessels.
He didn’t know what that was, because the information Melody had downloaded into his mind did not include anything about what he was looking at.
Jacob understood that people must have had very specific knowledge to work on the systems inside the room, but it still irked him that the AI had not provided him with that data. He suspected there were other systems aboard the ship that he hadn’t been given data about, but he wouldn’t know until he discovered them.
All he could do until Melody woke up again was poke around with the knowledge he had and hope for the best.
He didn’t actually poke around; that would have been dangerous. Instead, he took stock of the room, looking for damage or anything that might be a control panel.
There was no damage that he could determine, which was promising. He didn’t find any control panel, however, which was annoying. If there were a control panel, he could have found the connection address and pulled it into his virtual space to at least examine.
He was completing his second search when the absent AI finally spoke up once again.
“Captain, I see you’ve made progress on repairs.”
Jacob was so surprised by the words that he jumped out of the drone.
“No thanks to you!” he responded the moment he popped back into his virtual environment. “You’ve been gone for nearly eighty cycles, what the hell?”
“Apologies, Captain. The reserve power banks are not charging as fast as they should.”
“Whatever,” Jacob replied, waving off the AI’s excuse. If there was limited time, he didn’t want to sit there and argue with it. “Can you help me restart the main power?”
“I can, Captain, but not while the door is open. I am also almost out of reserve power once again. If I go into standby now, I can reactivate in eight of your cycles, if I have estimated them correctly based on the logs I’m looking at. If I stay online much longer, I’ll be down for over a hundred.”
“Then stop talking!” Jacob practically yelled.
The room went silent once more as the AI’s avatar vanished.
***
Jacob waited in his virtual space eight cycles later. He had removed his drone from the power plant room and shut the door once again. Thankfully, the damaged door mechanism hadn’t given out, and the door shut snugly behind him.
He witnessed the moment Melody flickered back into existence.
The AI wasted no time getting to work. “I am beginning the power reactivation sequence, Captain. I have just enough reserve power to kickstart the reactors. If they fail to come online, I may not be able to come out of standby for quite some time.”
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“Define quite some time?” Jacob asked.
“Thirty-two hundred of your cycles, give or take a hundred cycles.”
Jacob nearly choked at that. His cycles weren’t an exact unit of measurement, but he took one when his mental energy began to flag. Since one didn’t quite feel like a full day to him, he was estimating that two were closer to twenty-four hours. If his estimation was close, that meant Melody could be down for over four years. He was pretty sure he would lose his mind if he were left alone in this derelict for that long.
He cleared his throat and replied. “Let’s hope it works then.”
What else could he say?
The AI didn’t respond, but its avatar started to dim ominously. Jacob resisted the urge to tell it to stop, just so he could have someone to talk to.
Not wanting to leave the virtual space in case the AI needed him, he pulled up a video window from the drone. He figured out that little trick quite some time ago, but there was little point in using it unless he wanted to stare out into open space while he was tucked away in his virtual environment, which he had done on more than one occasion. It was almost like TV, and helped him unwind during his downtime sessions.
The first thing he noticed from the drone parked outside the thick door to the reactor room was a flickering of actual light.
That gave him hope, and soon the flickering became brighter and came more often.
He brought up the other three drone views, and similar things were happening where he had them parked.
With the four drones, he was able to determine that the flickering was actually a pulse of electricity, like a beating heart, growing stronger with time. It sped through the ancient ship, temporarily awakening systems, only for them to go dormant until the next pulse arrived.
Soon, the pulses were coming every few seconds, and the lights barely had time to go out before they flashed to life once again.
Jacob was so caught up in the moment that Melody’s voice started him.
“I have successfully restarted the reactors, Captain. They should stabilize in a few minutes.”
Melody’s projected stabilization came, but it took a lot longer than a few minutes. Jacob gave up counting the seconds after ten minutes rolled by while the lights continued to flicker fitfully.
“The power is now stable,” the AI declared as if it hadn’t taken far longer than estimated.
“Finally,” Jacob said, setting down his spoon and quickly swallowing the digital food he had made to pass the time. “What’s next on the agenda?”
The red list appeared, and Jacob swiped it away in annoyance.
“Is that not what you asked for?” Melody asked.
“I know what needs to be fixed,” he huffed. “I’ve been staring at that damn list for what seems like forever.”
“You have been onboard for eighty-seven days,” the AI corrected him.
It was less time than he thought, and while nice to know, it was not germane to the conversation.
“That’s all well and good, but it would still take me lifetimes to repair this vessel. Melody, this ship is far bigger than I first realized, and in far worse shape. Even if I could make all the repairs, I don’t think the fabrication center has enough material left to make any real progress. There is enough material left to fix one or two systems, depending on what’s required. We need another plan.” One that didn’t require him to slave away for the rest of his life until the ship ran out of material, and the repairs he made broke down once again.
“One moment, Captain, I am reevaluating our options now that I have additional power.”
Time ticked by as the AI was silent, but Jacob decided not to keep track, as it would only sour his mood even further.
“I have come up with a plan, Captain. Would you like to hear it?”
No, why would I want an actual plan that might get us out of here? Instead of saying that, he replied, “Yes,” doing his best to keep his tone from sounding annoyed.
“We have enough material to make repairs to the phase coil array. Once that is operational, I can transition the ship to an eiraxan shipyard for maintenance. The automated systems there should reduce the time until the ship is fully operational by a significant margin and allow us to carry out our directives much sooner.”
Jacob had a sinking feeling, but he didn’t want to voice his concern to the AI, who seemed singularly focused on its damn directives, whatever those were. He asked another question instead, not wanting to poke into that problem at the moment. “Melody, how long have you been here?”
“Are you referring to when the battle occurred, or my date of manufacture?” The AI asked quizzically.
“The battle,” Jacob sighed.
“The battle occurred eight hundred and fifty-seven years ago in your Earth years.”
Holy shit! That was a long time ago. Jacob didn’t know his history very well, but he did know the Dark Ages ended around 1000 AD. Only a few generations after that, the eiraxins were getting their asses handed to them outside the solar system.
“And when did you—” he had to think of a word, “—realize you needed a new crew?” He was going to use the word reactivate, but the AI had reactivated a few times since he arrived, and he didn’t need a breakdown of the AI’s entire history of unscheduled naps.
“Based on Earth’s calendar, it would have been in 1908. Why do you ask, Captain?”
“No reason,” Jacob replied. He kept his outward appearance calm, but internally, there was a pit in his gut.
Jacob had assumed that the AI and ship had been stuck out here for a few years at most. If nobody had come by to retrieve it in almost nine hundred years, he doubted there was anyone left who could, which didn’t bode well for the station. He didn’t bring up that concern with Melody because he was worried about how the AI might react. For all he knew, it had a self-destruct code built into it that would trigger the moment it realized its creators were dead and gone.
He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Tell me about this coil thingy. I don’t recall finding any information on it in the data you provided me.”
“The phase coils,” the AI replied with slight indignation, “are extremely complex and require a specialized engineer to work on them. The data packet I gave you was for a basic engineer.”
“Is that the same reason why I didn’t have any info on the reactors?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Melody, if I’m meant to fix all of this ship by myself, I need to know how every system functions, even the specialized ones.”
Melody was silent for a moment. “Are you certain, Captain? There are five specializations, and each is far more in-depth than the basic engineering package.”
Jacob paused at that. He still remembered the pain from having the language and engineering information shoved into his mind. He would prefer to get it all over with in one session, but if the pain was proportional to the data, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. “…Okay. Maybe not all of them. Let’s start with the phase coil training.”
