Chapter 5

After an hour I felt I had enough knowledge to not make a complete ass of myself and they seemed confident in their plan of attack. Three hours after docking, we were suited up and ready to enter the docking port. It would take ten to fifteen minutes to get to engineering, so I asked Tali to send an audio warning when we reached two hours, signalling our need to return to the ship. Tali had the mass-fabrication unit provide us with pistols, should there be hostile surprises waiting for us, but I hoped that there wouldn’t be any conflict. Due to the beam and burst settings, they would also help us to cut through debris that could impede our work should there be any.

I tapped on my communications toggle, “Tali, what is the status of the reactors? You predicted that they would be up to sixty-five or seventy percent capacity.”

“That is correct, Captain,” Tali replied. “The two active reactors are generating the predicted increased output. One is at sixty-two percent, while the other is running at the predicted seventy percent. There are minor repairs needed to get the first reactor to seventy, but that can wait until we get the other reactors and AI unit up and running. My scans show that everything should be working correctly, but you will need to check the connections before we activate the unit. Vish’ala has all the information you need in her Personal Information Unit, or PIU, as well as the command crystal she suggested. As long as no immediate repairs are needed, you should be able to get the unit out of stasis before you run out of oxygen.”

I nodded and turned to Vish’ala, “Are you ready to go? I know that there will most likely be many dead bodies between us and the engineering room, are you sure you are up to this?”

“I will be okay, Captain,” Vish’ala answered. “We have been trained to deal with situations like this, so I will just try to rely on that. I promise that if I do have some difficulty, I will tell you immediately.”

With that, we headed to the airlock and readied ourselves for what would be on the other side of the door. With a hiss of air, the door opened to darkness the lack of power to this section had even the emergency lights deactivated. We turned on our helmet lights illuminating the short airlock corridor. The white and silver of the walls reflected the light and illuminated the path before us. After I took my first step, I had to adjust myself as I felt the pull of the ship’s artificial gravity disappear. Vish’ala moved effortlessly, but she had been trained for this, where I had never once felt the sensation of no gravity. She laughed at my predicament and grabbed my hand, helping me reorient myself before we continued onward. With Vish’ala’s assistance, I made it across the corridor, and she attempted to activate the manual override for the door. We heard a negative chime from the controls, telling us that access to the panel was denied, but that also told us power was still being fed to the doors to prevent unauthorized access.

A keypad above the hatch for the manual override became illuminated, so Vish’ala tapped a sequence of inputs that caused another chime and the doorway opened. From our positions, we could only see the far wall of the corridor a few feet in front of us, with the hallway running left and right of the doorway. There was no light coming from the hallways, save for the illumination coming from our helmets. We both drew our pistols and nodded to one another before we moved to look through the opened doorway. I gestured a count of three and then leaned out, looking down the left side of the corridor, while Vish’ala leaned out and looked down the right. From what I could see, there was a little bit of debris floating from the lack of gravity, but nothing we couldn’t maneuver through. I turned to look the other way, where Vish’ala had been looking and saw that it was completely collapsed, blocking that path.

I glanced at my companion and said, “Vish’ala, do we need to figure out a different route or is the unobstructed corridor the way we need to go?”

She tapped the glassy surface of her PIU and brought up a three-dimensional diagram of the section of the outpost we were currently in. She tapped a few commands into the small keypad at the bottom and a yellow dot showed where we were and began to trace its way through the corridors to our intended destination. It reminded me of a GPS trying to find the optimal route. A few seconds later it flashed, and the path no longer changed, staying on the current path.

“It looks like this is the best route to the engineering core,” she said, gesturing to the display. “It will take twenty minutes to traverse this path instead of the predicted ten minutes, but there are no expected obstacles in our path.”

I nodded and she led the way, with me clumsily following behind her. Though we moved effortlessly, we were still looking around for signs of trouble or danger as we went. There were one or two things that slowed us down, such as bodies blocking pathways or debris, but we were able to deal with them rather quickly. They were by no means as obstructing as that blocked corridor had been when we entered the outpost, but they were manageable. By the time we reached our intended destination, thirty minutes had passed, but we hoped the return trip would go faster with all the obstacles dealt with. To be careful, I told Tali to adjust the time frame of our departure to one hour and thirty minutes just in case we had an issue reactivating the unit. With our possible exit window out of the way, Vish’ala brought up the diagram of the connections that needed to be checked to ensure we could activate the unit and computer core. We checked to see if power was running to the door for the engineering core and were happy to find that it was still active. We made sure to stand on either side of the door and we were happy to see the pad respond, so Vish’ala entered the same override code as before. The door opened and we glanced in, to see the room was huge as well as in a bit of a mess.

While the hallways within the outpost were roughly three meters, this one had to be at least four or five meters, ten meters wide and maybe fifteen meters long. We entered slowly, looking for possible threats, though I was taking in the unique design of the room. There was a holo-display table in the center of the room, but it looked to be twice as large as the one in the ship. It had sixteen chairs around it, none of which were in their stasis pod mode. Except for the wall opposite the door, we came through, the rest were covered in various consoles and displays that currently were dormant. They took up a third of the wall while the rest of it was various conduits and cables that ran along it towards the far side. The other side of the room had a two-meter-tall piece of equipment, with at least twenty-five or more lines of thick cable running from it, with a third of them running up the wall into the ceiling. Part of the roof had collapsed, while some of the consoles looked as if they had exploded and there were floating bodies still in the room.

Vish’ala headed towards the far side of the room, and I followed close behind her. I couldn’t help looking around for threats and getting a feel for what was in the room as we travelled across it. When we arrived at the two-meter-tall console, she pulled an item from a pouch on her left leg and began using it on the damaged cables. Feeling useless for the moment, I began moving around the room and carefully started collecting the bodies. Once I had them, I slowly and carefully placed them on the floor as best I could, so that they would not get damaged further when gravity was restored. After nearly an hour, I had all the bodies moved to one side of the room and ready for when power was fully restored. I gave my PIU a glance and saw that we were getting close to our cut off point, so I made my way back to Vish’ala and found her still checking the various cables.

“How are we doing?” I asked when I arrived next to her. “Have any of them scanned as damaged and in need of further repairs?”

She shook her head and answered, “No, sir. I have run full diagnostics on seventeen of the thirty-five and they look to be functioning with no disruptions.”

I nodded and replied, “We have roughly a half hour before we need to make our way back to the ship, will you have them all checked by then?”

“I don’t think so, sir,” she replied. “I wouldn’t risk rushing it either, so I will do as much as I can before we head back. It will take thirty minutes to refill the tanks on the ship, so we should be able to get a meal in before we can return. There is no telling when we will be back to the ship once we get the AI unit back up and running, so I think that would be the best course of action.”

I nodded in agreement with her assessment and told her to continue her work while I started moving pieces of debris to an unoccupied corner of the room. I had gotten some of the debris moved when my PIU chimed, signalling that it was time for us to leave. Vish’ala put the scanner away and followed me out of the room. Moving the bodies and debris had gotten me more used to moving in the zero-g environment, so we were able to make it back to the airlock with little issue. When we took off our helmets in our pressurized airlock, we had twenty-two minutes of air left and we were proud of our progress. We returned the suits to medical to have the tanks refilled, while we had a quick meal. Tali appeared as we were eating to give us an update on the tasks she had begun.

“I have begun to harvest more materials for the reactors from the smaller craft floating around the outpost. I estimate that we will be able to get all the reactors to eighty percent output within the next two days.”

I stopped eating a moment to ask, “Why would it take two days to get the four reactors to eighty percent?”

“It is due mostly to the damage that needs to be repaired in the various reactors to ensure that output. It will be at least a week before the AI for the outpost would be able to manufacture enough bots to begin harvesting the needed materials to restock their stock as well as our own, not to mention then getting started on the various repairs the station needs. Out of thirty-two mass-fabrication units at the AI’s disposal, only four work and three of them are providing the necessities needed by the surviving populace, leaving only one for the AI unit to use.

“Very well,” I responded with a sigh. “Continue at your discretion, but make sure to check in with me before adding anything else to your tasks.”

She smiled and said, “Of course, Captain. I will ensure that you are kept apprised of everything I am doing.”

I thanked her and returned to my meal, as she vanished to return to what she had been doing prior to our return. With our meal concluded, I retired to my quarters to go to the bathroom before we returned to the outpost.

Thirty minutes later, we were once again in the engineering core and while Vish’ala finished scanning the rest of the connections, I continued moving debris. It was almost another half hour before she told me she was done and was ready to initialize the AI, saying that the connections were good. I gave her the order to proceed, and she placed the command crystal into a receptacle before tapping on an input pad found near the controls of the massive unit. The pad came to life, and she began entering commands, causing the device to begin to hum with life.

Vish’ala glanced back at me, “We now have re-established power to the unit, sir, and the crystal has also been confirmed as scanned, but the AI has not come out of hibernation. I would suggest giving your command code and ordering the AI to emerge, sir.”

Agreeing with Vish’ala, I called out, “Security command authorization code, Alpha-Bravo-One-One-Zulu-Seven. Command override, activate Trak’alta AI unit.”

We heard a chime confirming the system acknowledging the code, as more lights and noise began to come from the machine confirming the system was attempting to carry out my orders.