Chapter 13 - Impact Wrench

"To see something marvelous with your own eyes - that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that's worth more than one plus one."

—Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

The bridge had a hum now. Not the dead-air hum of an empty room with the lights on, but the real kind, the kind that meant something was actually running under the deck plates, with chairs bolted down and consoles lit. The Triumph of Darron's brain was finally awake, and about damn time.

Zoe was already at her station when Luca walked in, one foot kicked up on the console base while she typed in short, aggressive bursts that made the whole keyboard sound personally offended. A few dreadlocks had escaped whatever she'd done to tie them back and were hanging across her cheek, which she kept blowing out of her face without breaking stride.

"I swear," she said, "if this AI doesn't boot properly in the next ten minutes, I'm throwing it out the goddamn airlock."

"Which one?" Emily asked without looking up from a diagnostics panel. "The core or the entire nav console?"

"Both. One's useless without the other."

Luca let the door hiss shut behind him. "Planning a mutiny already?"

Zoe turned and grinned. "Captain on deck." She said it like she was announcing a clown at a birthday party. "We were just deciding which system to sacrifice to the stars."

Emily finally looked up at him. Her hair was pulled back, a pen tucked behind one ear that she'd definitely forget about later. "We're mid-diagnostics. Trying to calibrate life support and heat regulation while keeping internal pressure from dropping. Which is very fun, by the way. You should try it."

Zoe choked on a laugh as her chair swung forward. "No, please. We got this."

Luca smiled. "And here I thought the bridge crew had it easy."

Emily's lips quirked. Just a little, just enough. "We did. Before you got here."

He walked toward the captain's chair, which was still a weird thing to think, and sat down. The bridge barely looked like the same room. Yesterday it had been exposed cabling and jury-rigged mounts and the general vibe of a building that wasn't done being a building yet. Now it looked real. Like a place where actual decisions got made by people who knew what they were doing.

He did not know what he was doing. But the chair was comfortable. That counted for something.

Emily sat to his right at the XO station. She had her whole world organized across three screens, reports queued, diagnostics running, some kind of checklist she'd built that was almost certainly color-coded. Four years of combat together and she still found time to color-code things. She'd dragged a wounded man twice her size out of a collapsing portal and then probably filed the incident report in alphabetical order.

He looked at her and then looked away.

It was the timing thing, the stupid, permanent, unbeatable timing thing. When she'd been single, he'd been with someone. When he was free, she was with Mason or Pierre or whoever else the universe decided to throw in the way. And now she was with Pierre, so it was still wrong. It was always wrong.

He looked at her one more time anyway, because apparently he was incapable of not doing that, and then forced his attention back to the consoles.

"Hey, Luca," Zoe said, pulling him out of it. Thank God. "You wanna try initializing the AI core from the command override? I've already done two hard reboots, and it's still lagging."

"Sure." He moved to her side and pulled up the system overlay. "What's the hang-up?"

"It loads fine but won't respond to commands."

He keyed in the override. The console lit up. Sometimes the fix really was just typing the right thing into the right box. It felt like cheating. "Don't you have my code?"

"I do," Emily said from behind him.

"Then--"

"AI Core initialized," the ship's voice chimed in, flat and polite and completely unbothered by the four hours of suffering it had caused.

Zoe slumped back in her chair so hard it rolled an inch. "Finally. That only took four years off my life."

Luca stepped back and crossed his arms. One less thing trying to kill them today.

Emily was watching them both, chin propped on her hand. "You make a good team," she said.

He looked at her and tried to figure out why she hadn't just used his override code in the first place. She had it. She knew how. She'd let him come in and do it instead.

"Don't let it go to his head," Zoe said, already typing again.

The comms panel beeped, cutting through whatever Luca's brain was trying to do with that information.

"Genesis Platform, priority channel," Emily read aloud. "Not your dad."

That was a relief. He leaned forward. "Let's see it."

The screen lit up with a woman in the Genesis coverall uniform, headset on, dark hair in a bun. Her nametag said Isabel Torin, Systems Calibration Division. She looked about as excited to be doing this as Luca was to be sitting through it.

"Triumph of Darron, this is Genesis Control. We have a scheduled window for the calibration of your fusion drive and reactor load distribution. Please confirm you're ready to proceed."

Emily switched to her professional voice, the one that sounded like she'd been doing this her whole life. "Genesis Control, we are online and ready. Confirming core initialization and command integrity."

"Copy that," Isabel said. "Beginning remote handshake now."

Zoe moved between sensor readouts, muttering. "I hate handshakes. Half the time it just means something's about to crash."

Emily leaned toward him, close enough that he could smell whatever she used in her hair. Something clean. He noticed that every single time and hated himself for it every single time. "You want to stay, or should we call you when something explodes?"

Luca leaned back in the captain's chair and looked out the viewport at stars that were still and bright and absolutely ridiculous in every direction. Alpha Centauri was out there somewhere, just a glimmer, just a tiny point of light that they were eventually supposed to fly to in this thing they'd barely finished bolting together.

"Nah," he said, folding his hands behind his head. "This is the part where I pretend I'm supervising while you two do all the real work."

Emily shook her head, but the grin stayed. "Classic leadership."

Zoe raised a hand without looking up. "Delegating like a champ."

The comm crackled. Isabel again, slightly distorted. "Bridge crew, we're going to need Engineering to validate the load-sync patterns before we push the primary array. Can you patch them in?"

Emily was already reaching for her headset. "Copy that. Stand by."

"I'll do it," Luca said, tapping the internal comms panel on his chair. Might as well contribute something today. "Engineering, come in. Ryan, Chris, you guys awake down there?"

A loud clank echoed through the line, followed by Ryan's voice, breathless. "Yup. You rang?"

Chris came on next, already too cheerful. "If you're calling to compliment the fuel line reroute I just finished, the answer is yes, we're very awake."

A forced cough sounded in the background. "He means the one I installed?" Ryan added.

Luca let that one go. He didn't have the energy for whatever pissing contest was happening in engineering today. "Genesis is ready for calibration. They need you to handle reactor sync. We're patching them through."

Ryan groaned. "We're busy."

"Tell them yourself." Luca nodded at Emily. "Patching you in now."

She hit a few keys. "You're live, bridge out." One more tap and the connection cut from their side.

The screen went dark. The comms panel quieted.

"Let them deal with it," Emily said, brushing imaginary dust off her console. "We've got our own mess to manage."

Zoe turned her chair toward him with the energy of someone who'd been waiting for the adults to stop talking. "So. Captain. What's next?"

---

He didn't have an answer right away. That was happening more often than he liked. He sat there while the ship hummed and the monitors cast their glow and Emily dove back into her reports and Zoe went back to mapping the route to the Oort Cloud passage. Both of them had their shit together. He could probably just sit here and they'd run the whole ship without him.

Which was either comforting or deeply depressing. He hadn't decided yet.

"Alright," he said, pushing up from his chair. "You two have the bridge. Engineering's tied up with reactor sync. There's still a mountain of work to do if we want this thing to feel less like a construction site and more like a flagship. Duty calls."

Emily looked up. "Trying to make yourself useful, Captain?"

"If anyone needs me, I'll be bolting panels to the wall. Or something equally heroic."

The command deck corridor proved his point. Beautiful new deck plating on the floor, gorgeous stuff, and then you looked up and it was exposed conduits and coolant lines and wiring that looked like someone's garage project. The wall paneling was supposed to cover all of it. The wall paneling was sitting in crates twenty feet away, so there was really no excuse.

He started at the forward end and worked aft. The impact wrench felt good in his hands, heavy and loud and productive in a way that captaining rarely was, and after a while the work settled into a simple pattern: bracket, panel, bolt. There was something satisfying about a job where you could see the result immediately. Nobody was going to second-guess how he mounted a wall panel.

Twenty minutes in, he was on a stool, on his toes, holding a panel with one hand and the impact wrench with the other, trying not to drop either while he reached for a bolt that was about two inches too far away. This was fine. Totally and completely fine, assuming he didn't eat shit in the next five seconds.

"Looking good, Captain," Zoe said from behind him.

He almost fell off the stool.

She was eyeing the panels, nodding, and then her gaze drifted lower and a smirk spread across her face. The uniform was riding up in places uniforms should never ride up, and Zoe had noticed immediately.

"Starting to look like a real ship now. And, uh, other things are looking... quite defined."

Luca kept his eyes on the bolt he was torquing. His face was already warm. "Eyes up, Woods. Some of us are performing vital structural enhancements."

Emily was right behind her, looking up at him on the stool with an expression that made his stomach do something stupid. "He's right, Zoe. Such dedication. Such... reach."

Before he could say anything to either of them, Emily reached out and poked him in the ribs as she passed.

"Hey!" He jerked sideways. The bolt slipped from his fingers and clanged off the deck plating. The stool rocked. He caught himself on the wall, barely, and the impact wrench swung in his other hand like a weapon.

Zoe was already laughing. "Smooth, Captain. Real smooth."

Emily had that smile on. The one that looked innocent and absolutely was not. "Making sure you're still alert, Captain. All that focused effort, you might get a cramp."

His ribs were still tingling where she'd touched him. He bent his knees and picked up the bolt, taking way longer than necessary because his face was on fire and he needed a second. "Hilarious. Both of you. Don't you have an AI to traumatize or some life support to actually support?"

"Admiring your handiwork," Emily said. She leaned in like she was inspecting the panel, close enough that he could see the pen still tucked behind her ear. "Hmm, yes. Very secure. Top-notch bolting, Luca." She patted his shoulder as she straightened up, and the pat lasted about half a second longer than it needed to.

He was going to think about that for the rest of the day. He already knew it.

"We'll leave you to your structural integrity," Zoe said, pulling Emily along. "Don't strain anything important."

Luca watched them go. Emily's laugh carried down the corridor, bright and easy, and he stood there like an idiot holding a bolt and an impact wrench. "Enjoy your fun. Payback's a bitch."

"Looking forward to it, Captain," Emily called back without turning around.

He went back to work. The panels weren't going to install themselves, and he needed something to do with his hands that wasn't standing in a corridor replaying the exact pressure of Emily's finger against his ribs.

The ship transformed as the hours passed. He could hear everyone else working through the walls and decks. Drills, hammers, the distant sound of Ryan swearing at something mechanical. Progress on every side.

---

He was deep in the Habitation Deck now. The impact wrench was loud in the quiet section, and he kept looking over his shoulder every time he heard footsteps because he was not giving Zoe and Emily another free shot at his dignity.

By evening, his hands were killing him and the last panel was going in. He stepped back and looked at the corridor. The exposed pipes and tangled wiring were gone. Clean composite panels ran from one end to the other, solid, permanent, like they'd always been there. The lighting hit them differently, warmer somehow, and the whole space finally looked like the inside of a starship instead of a maintenance closet.

Not bad for a guy whose primary qualification was "happened to be in the room when they needed a captain."

The hiss of the lift door down the hall made him pause. Then came the grunting.

"A little more to your left, Danny! Your left! No, your other left!" That was Ryan, and he sounded like he was dying.

"I'm trying, Ryan! This thing weighs a metric ton, and it's not exactly aerodynamic!" Danny shot back, just as strained.

Luca leaned out from the cabin doorway. Ryan and Danny were wrestling a massive leather couch down the narrow corridor, both red-faced and soaked with sweat. The couch was winning. A few paces behind them, Emily walked with a tablet, completely composed, directing the entire operation like she was managing air traffic.

"Angle it, boys, angle it!" she called out. "Ryan, lift your end higher! Danny, pivot on your back foot! We're going to take out that light fixture if you're not careful! Honestly, it's like you've never moved a ridiculously oversized piece of luxury furniture through a confined starship corridor before."

She was enjoying this. She was enjoying this so much.

Ryan shot a look over his shoulder that could have melted hull plating. Emily ignored it completely. "Easy for you to say, slave driver! You're not the one about to throw out your back for the sake of a comfy movie night!"

"It's for crew morale, Ryan," Emily said, sweet as poison. "And my morale will be significantly improved when this couch is in the lounge and not scraping against my freshly installed wall panels. Careful with that corner, Danny! Sharp turn, sharp turn!"

Danny groaned as they tried to make the turn from the lift into the main corridor. The couch tilted at an angle that suggested gravity was about to make some decisions for them.

Luca crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe. This was better than anything on TV. "Having fun, boys?"

Ryan spotted him and managed a strained grin through what looked like actual physical pain. "Oh, ha ha, Captain. Feel free to jump in any time. My arms are about to secede from the union."

"That's what you get for skipping arm day!" Chris's voice floated up from the gym below. The bastard had been hiding down there all afternoon.

Emily shot a look toward the gym that could have curdled milk. "Someone has to do this. If it were up to you boys, this couch would still be down in storage." She turned back to Ryan and Danny. "Alright, almost there! Gentle now, gentle! And... down! Perfect."

With one final heave, the couch disappeared through the lounge doorway, and the sound of two bodies collapsing onto leather followed immediately.

Emily walked over to Luca, and there it was again, that small, satisfied smile that did things to his brain he was not going to examine right now. "See? Teamwork. And expert supervision, obviously."

"Expert supervision or enjoying the power trip?" he asked.

"Why can't it be both?" She tilted her head toward the cabins. "How's the paneling coming along? Still managing to keep all your bolts in place this time?"

His ribs tingled at the memory. "Very funny. And yes, progress is being made. Almost done."

"Good," she said. She wiped her perfectly clean hands on her spotless bodysuit, which was ridiculous, and he noticed every part of it. The way she did it. Like she'd been hauling equipment all day when she hadn't lifted a finger. "It'll be nice to have a space that feels settled." She looked toward the lounge, where the sounds of Ryan and Danny groaning into couch cushions drifted through the doorway. "Maybe we can even find those movies later."

"Maybe we can," he said.

She smiled at him, the real one, not the teasing one, and walked toward the lounge to check on her work crew.

Luca stood in the corridor and looked at the panels he'd spent the whole day installing. His hands hurt. His back hurt. The Triumph of Darron looked like a real ship now.

And Emily wanted to watch movies later, which was nothing and meant nothing and which he was absolutely going to think about for the next six hours.

He picked up the impact wrench and went to put it away.