Field Repairs

‘How’s it going down there?’

Sarah gave a distracted grunt, but otherwise ignored the question that came from her comm unit, focusing instead on the mess of circuitry and pipes in front of her. There was definitely some rewiring that needed to be done, but the positioning of the circuit board would make it awkward. This was because if an antimatter processing unit of this size broke down, you were supposed to replace it entirely. You certainly weren’t supposed to attempt field repairs with any part of the ship still powered up. The stickers on the unit didn’t warn you about voiding your warranty; they had a to-scale illustration detailing just how large an explosion you could cause.

‘Seriously, not trying to rush you, or anything, but we’ve got a problem; more of a problem, anyway.’

Deciding to have this conversation before she got entangled in really delicate work, Sarah put down her multi-tool, picked up the still squawking comm and pressed down the button.

‘Patrick, could you be more specific? I’ve got too much to do to play a game of ‘guess what?’

There was a pause, which Sarah had learned to dread coming from Patrick, before he responded,

‘You know the calculations we ran after the engines lost power?’

‘What about them?’ prompted Sarah, taking advantage of the pause in activity to crick her neck.

‘The results are off.’

Sarah’s first impulse was to insist that this couldn’t be true; they’d poured too much time, money and resources into buying and upgrading ‘The Tachyon’ for its central computer to bungle such essential calculations. The craft was the goddamn lynchpin of their courier service (‘anywhere in the local star cluster in 48 hours or less’). She was already fuming that their current client had hidden the dangerously unstable nature of the package they’d been carrying, resulting in their current lack of a functioning engine.

Still, she bit down on the instinctive denial because Patrick wasn’t one to make such an important statement without being absolutely certain.

‘By how much?’ she hesitantly asked. The engines had shorted out uncomfortably close to an asteroid belt and the calculations had been to determine how long they had before they drifted dangerously close to it. They’d already suffered a glancing hit from a small asteroid which, mercifully, had resulted in nothing more than a small, easy to repair hull-breach.

‘The results said we had two days before we hit the danger zone, based on how far we’ve travelled since the impact, we’re actually going to be there half an hour sooner. I’ve double checked the original calculations, there’s no error.’

Sarah took a moment to utter a word she’d learned when she was six from her grandfather. If the calculations themselves weren’t off, then the only explanation was that the variables used had changed. They were being pulled towards the asteroid belt by the gravity of the star it was orbiting. Which meant The Tachyon was now slightly heavier than it had been when they’d run the calculations. It wasn’t a large ship, so it wouldn’t take much. She’d helped Patrick seal the hull breach and they’d jettisoned all of the debris that had made it through the hull. This left one, extremely unpleasant, possibility.

‘Patrick, we’ve got a rock-hugger on board!’

‘Yeah, I’m armed and sweeping the ship now. You need to seal the engine room and get the engines working pronto.’ With this, Sarah’s comm crackled as Patrick released the switch on his own unit.

Digging hastily into her toolbox, Sarah reflected that Patrick apparently didn’t know that the engine room had sealed automatically the moment she’d opened the casing on the still connected antimatter processor. It was a hardwired safety feature on every official model of spacecraft; in the happy event that the meddler killed themselves by only partially destabilising the antimatter core, the explosion would be small enough to be contained.

Pulling down her welding mask and selecting the precision work mode on her fusion torch, Sarah leaned forward and began to work as quickly as she dared. While fumbling the repair of the antimatter processor was not something conducive to a long life, spending an extended period of time trapped on a partially disabled ship with a rock-hugger was much the same; except with a lot more blood and screaming.

Humanity had encountered a lot of unexpected things since they took to the stars in earnest, but none of them had come as wildly out of left field as rock-huggers. Officially, they were designated as ‘Non-Terrestrial Xeno-forms’. They had a lot of unofficial designations, but the only one that didn’t involve obscenities was ‘rock-huggers’. First discovered during the early days of mass-asteroid mining, the black armoured little savages hibernated inside chunks of rock that drifted through space. They provided a nasty surprise for miners when the heat of their new surroundings woke them up and they introduced themselves. They had vaguely triangular heads, long blade-like claws where they should have hands and were covered with deep blue armour-like exoskeletons. If they had a language or intelligence beyond hunting instincts, it wasn’t hugely discernible through the blur of claws and teeth they became when humans were present. For a leading cause of death amongst space-travellers (just behind cancer and stupidity), depressingly little was known about them.

Sarah was wrenched briefly from her thoughts by what sounded like a clunk. Her first thought was rock-hugger, only to realise that the clunk appeared to come from the antimatter processor. She froze for a moment, only to relax when no follow up noises occurred; meaning that she wasn’t hearing the first sounds of catastrophic system destabilisation. Still, it was a good reminder to keep her mind on the job at hand.

With the rewiring and the replacement of components done, she just needed to run system diagnostics to make sure that her work hadn’t interfered with the processor’s internal CPU’s ability to communicate with the rest of the device. Sealing the casing, she connected her analyser via an old-fashioned cable (because it’s generally a bad idea to make critical system parts wirelessly accessible) and was just setting the process running as her comm unit squawked into life again.

‘So, I’ve done another sweep and I still can’t find it.’ Patrick announced, sounding grim.

‘Well unless you missed it, then that’s good news; we were wrong about it being a rock-hugger throwing the calculations off.’

‘That’s just it,’ Patrick said, ‘I’ve found signs of it; claw scratches and a few chips off its exoskeleton,’

It took Sarah a second to understand what Patrick said over the humming from the antimatter processor as it began to run through its system checks. The slight heat from its exhaust vents felt weirdly out of place in such a tense conversation.

If there was a rock-hugger on board, it should have made its presence known by now. Unless…

‘The ship was barely powered when it got on board,’ Patrick said, giving voice to the horrible thoughts unfurling in Sarah’s head, ‘it wasn’t very warm.’

‘So, it woke up enough to stumble off to find somewhere warmer to wake itself up properly.’ Sarah finished, turning to look at the antimatter processor, now pumping out plenty of lovely heat as she heard another clunk.

Coming, she now realised, from above the processor.

All that saved her was half a glimpse of a deep blue, scythe-like claw, which caused her to jolt back in alarm. This meant that said claw hit the engine room floor without first passing through her, landing just before Patrick’s voice came from her comm. She didn’t hear what he said, she was too busy staring at the creature in front of her. She’d always expected them to be taller, it wasn’t quite her height, but the claws and blood-red eyes made up for any lost intimidation factor.

It launched itself forward with ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ speed, but you don’t become a star-ship engineer without learning to duck quickly. Sarah felt the claw pass over her head as she rolled to the side to put some distance between them. As she did, she reflexively threw the first thing that came to hand at it.

It was only after she heard Patrick’s voice coming from it that she realised that it had been her comm.

‘Sarah, can you hear me?! Unseal the door!’

As strategic choices went, this was an appealing one. Sadly, this wasn’t an immediate option. Until the processor’s system checks finished, the door wouldn’t allow itself to be unsealed. The good news was that there was probably less than a minute left before it was done. The bad news was that she had to last that amount of time in smallish room with a creature with swords for hands.

Realising that she had come to a halt next to her toolbox, Sarah snatched up her fusion torch before throwing the box at the creature for good measure. It shrugged off the heavy collision as it charged forward again, but it gave Sarah time to activate the torch’s heavy-duty mode. Before the creature could regain the momentum, it had lost, she swung the stream of white hot plasma at it.

The rock-hugger hesitated in the face of this and actually took a step back and left Sarah wondering if she should keep her distance or try and drive it back further. Unfortunately, the creature saw its opportunity and sliced at her again. The tip of its claw caught the handle of the torch, and sent it spinning up into the air, before managing to deal a thin cut to Sarah’s side.

Sarah staggered back as the rock-hugger charged in for the kill –

- Only to have the still active torch fall back down and deliver a ferociously nasty burn to the top of its head.

As the creature staggered back in pain, Sarah frantically checked the door only to find that the access light was still shining red for sealed. Then her eyes fell on the fire extinguisher next to the door.

They didn’t like the cold, did they?

Stumbling over to the door, she snatched up the extinguisher and advanced on the rock-hugger as she aimed and pressed the release button. Clouds of chemicals designed to lower temperatures and repel heat erupted out in a controlled spray, causing it to quickly back off. And then, after a few seconds, the sweet sound announcing the door unsealing itself could be heard over the wheezing sound of the extinguisher.

Without looking away from the shrieking creature, she slammed her left hand on the release button. The door had barely slid open when Patrick rushed in, pulse rifle at the ready. Spotting it, he fired three times.

As Sarah collapsed to the floor in relief, she quietly swore she was going to make the sound of a pulse rifle her new ring tone.

Four hours later saw Sarah sitting in her chair in the cockpit, sipping from a mug of hot chocolate and thanking whatever god cared to listen for pain meds.

‘Look at it this way,’ Patrick argued as he idly checked course readouts, ‘we might actually make money off this.’

‘What makes you think that? Sarah questioned, focusing most of her attention on the marshmallows floating at the top of her drink.

‘Well, thanks to you, we only need to pay to have the processor recertified, not replaced. Plus, we have a, not too badly damaged, rock-hugger corpse that a lot of natural history museums would pay big money for.’

Sarah was saved the effort of having to keep contributing to the conversation as a Theta-Sigma spaceport official came in over the ship’s comm.

‘Tachyon, we have your approach logged and authorised. Please extend your mag-clamp for docking procedure.’

‘Copy, control.’ Patrick responded, hitting the appropriate button, which caused nothing to happen.

‘Is there a problem Tachyon?’

‘Yeah, looks like our mag-clamp is non-responsive.’

‘Copy that, Tachyon, we’ll send a repair team out to- ‘

‘Don’t bother control,’ Sarah interrupted, getting out of her chair with a sigh, ‘I’ll take care of it.’