The Things We Repair
Copyright© 2026 by Flubu
Chapter 1: Silence
The first thing Neris Vael understood was that Takuhai was silent.
A courier ship was never truly silent. Even in deep transit there were guidance tones beneath hearing, the faint pulse of circulation through the deck, and ER’s reports arriving before a pilot knew she needed them. Takuhai had carried Neris across familiar routes for years. She knew the ship’s smallest habits: the almost imperceptible change in vibration before dimensional insertion, the soft confirmation tone when a cargo seal passed inspection, the way ER reduced cabin lighting when he calculated that she had been awake too long.
Silence meant a system had failed, or a pilot had.
Neris opened her eyes to emergency red.
Her restraints held her hard against the couch. The cabin had rolled eleven degrees to starboard. A cabinet hung open above her, its contents scattered across the forward bulkhead. Somewhere aft, metal contracted with a series of tired clicks.
“ER.”
“Present,” Takuhai’s intelligence answered. His voice emerged from the damaged cabin speakers with a thin distortion. “Pilot consciousness restored. I recommend postponing celebration until I complete structural assessment.”
Her ears lifted despite the pain behind them. “Status.”
“We are no longer in dimensional transit.”
“I had inferred that.”
“Your inferential capacity is reassuring.”
She released the restraints and immediately regretted it. Her balance shifted beneath her in ways the deck did not explain. Takuhai had come to rest at an angle, half supported by soil and half by something harder beneath the hull. Gravity was close to Xianglume standard, but not exact.
Forty-seven minutes earlier, the assignment had been entirely ordinary: a routine diplomatic courier run between Xianglume and an outlying colony world along an approved route. No experimental equipment. No hazardous cargo. No military escort. Nothing that should have placed her beyond the beacon network or driven a mature dimensional system into catastrophic overload.
Neris placed both paws on the console. Most of the display remained dark. What survived showed fragments: atmospheric readings, local gravitation, damage reports, and an empty navigation field where the familiar network of Xianglume beacons should have been.
“Where are we?”
“Unknown.”
The word seemed larger than the cabin.
Couriers crossed distance by passing through controlled folds in dimensional structure. The process was difficult, expensive, and so reliable that generations of pilots had come to regard it as routine. Navigation beacons framed every approved route. Rescue protocols assumed at least three independent points of contact.
The display showed none.
“Transit record.”
A damaged graph appeared. The expected phase curve rose cleanly, then broke into a knot of impossible harmonics. Three separate background fluctuations had intersected during the transition: a gravitic shear, a vacuum-energy discontinuity, and a phase inversion that did not originate from Takuhai’s drive.
ER highlighted a repeating twelve-part echo embedded in the corrupted data.
“Mechanical failure?” Neris asked.
“Insufficient evidence. The initiating disturbance appears external and natural. Its combined probability is below the threshold normally used for meaningful prediction.”
“Meaning?”
“It should not have happened.”
Neris stared at the twelvefold phase echo.
“But it did.”
“A concise summary.”
She tried the emergency band. Takuhai sent a compressed identity burst containing her name, vessel registry, species, medical status, and the courier priority code recognized by every cooperative civilization in Xianglume space.
Nothing answered.
She widened the scan.
Nothing.
“Repeat at maximum safe power.”
“Already attempted.”
“Repeat it.”
ER obeyed. The transmission left Takuhai, crossed the local sky, and vanished into a universe that appeared not to know what it was.
Neris reached for the dimensional navigation restart.
“Pilot,” ER said, “the phase lattice is unstable.”
“A diagnostic pulse only.”
“The distinction will not comfort us if the damaged lattice collapses.”
“Pulse at minimum amplitude.”
Takuhai’s deck vibrated once. The navigation field flashed into existence for less than a second, showing no beacons, no mapped coordinates, and the same twelvefold echo coiling through the background noise.
Then the aft systems shut themselves down.
A maintenance manipulator unfolded from the ceiling above her, shuddered, and stopped halfway through its reach. ER withdrew it, rerouted power, and extended a second arm from the opposite wall. Its three-fingered tool head passed Neris the medical scanner before folding back into Takuhai’s structure.
“Manipulator one has sustained joint damage,” ER said.
“Add it to the list.”
“The list has acquired subcategories.”
The cabin went darker.
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