Chapter 2 - Fire Amidships

Burning plastic flooded Luca's nose, thick and chemical enough to make it feel like the ship was trying to poison them on purpose. Something was on fire below deck, because why wouldn't it be.

"Chris, Ryan, Danny, let's go!" Luca grabbed one of the hand-held radios and led the way down the corridor toward the stairs behind the command bridge.

The door hissed open and black smoke shoved through the gap, thick and blinding. His eyes started watering before he got two steps in, and the taste in his mouth was something between melted wiring and regret.

Luca pulled his shirt up over his nose. "Holy shit." It didn't help worth a damn. "Grab a flashlight!" The smoke was so thick he couldn't see the far wall, and whatever was burning was just getting started.

Behind him, Ryan hacked out a cough, his flashlight punching a pale tunnel through the haze. Danny muttered prayers under his breath. Luca couldn't blame the guy. He was two bad breaths away from joining him.

A deck below, a live current arced blue and white off the panel, spitting and popping like it wanted to take the whole corridor with it. The switchgear panel was on fire.

"That's our main HV breaker," Ryan wheezed. His engineering brain was still running even while the rest of him was slowly suffocating. "It's the master switch between the reactor and all the auxiliary distribution breakers." The panel door had blown clean off, revealing the charred guts of the ship's electrical systems. Great. Wonderful. Exactly what they needed six hours into owning a starship.

Luca's eyes were watering so bad he could barely keep them open, and sweat rolled down his back despite the smoke. Black soot was getting into everything, his clothes and his lungs. His hands wouldn't stay still. He clenched them, looked at the sparking panel, and made himself think.

"Fire extinguishers," he said, pointing to the emergency station on the wall. "Danny, Chris, grab them."

"Luca, here! Help me." Ryan was down the corridor, struggling to open a heavy blast door. The sign read:

[Electrical Switchgear - High Voltage.]

The door's electronic lock flashed red. "The main breaker's in there, but the safety interlocks won't let us in while there's a fault!"

Luca's ability, [Crisis Routing], lit up in the corner of his vision, the orange prompt pulsing like it had somewhere to be. Fire, live fault, life support already gasping. The ability wanted in. It always wanted in when things went sideways, and things had been sideways for about six hours straight now. Luca killed the prompt. The cooldown on that thing would leave him blind for the next emergency, and there would absolutely be a next emergency because this ship hated him. Ryan knew electrical systems better than Luca knew his own middle name. Chris could rebuild a breaker panel in his sleep. They didn't need the System holding their hands, and neither did he.

"Hold on," Luca said, pulling up the radio. "Em! I need the emergency override code for the switchgear room!"

"One sec, Luca, everything's a mess," she said. After a moment of silence, she added, "I think I found it, 4742-3031-2069."

Luca punched in the code, and the heavy door hissed, unlocking. They had to slide the fucking thing open manually because power was too unstable for the automatic systems. His arms burned by the time it gave way.

The switchgear room looked exactly the way it had the last time he'd been in here, which was to say it looked like a disaster. Metal cabinets crammed in every direction, thick cables running overhead and underfoot, warning signs plastered on every surface that basically amounted to DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING. The main HV breaker's door had blown off, and scorch marks spread up the wall behind it like something had tried to claw its way out.

Ryan ran to the manual isolation switches. "I need to lock out the main HV breaker before we can even think about touching it!" Heavy mechanical switches clicked into position as he threw each lever. The sparking stopped. But now they were running on auxiliary distribution breakers only, which was a fancy way of saying they were running on hope.

Danny and Chris triggered the extinguishers at the same time. Dry powder hissed out and turned the black haze into thick gray soup, which somehow made visibility even worse. His eyes burned. Everything burned.

"Keep it up!" he yelled through the haze.

The flames died back to glowing embers, buried under the powder. The orange light faded and left them standing in darkness with their flashlight beams and the emergency light strips. Luca's pulse was still hammering. His shirt was plastered to his back. But the fire was out. That was something.

Chris rounded on Ryan. "What the fuck were you thinking with that power surge?"

Ryan straightened up, jaw clenching. "What are you talking about?"

"The reactor startup!" Chris snapped, waving his hand toward the smoking breaker panel. "You didn't ramp it up gradually! No wonder the main breaker blew!"

"Hey, asshole." Ryan smirked and shined his flashlight right in Chris's face. "We needed power right fucking now, or those UER troopers would've been crawling up our asses!"

Luca watched them square up and had to stop himself from laughing, because they'd had this ship for all of six hours and it was already trying to tear the crew apart.

Danny stepped in. "Perhaps the surge happened because the breaker was already stressed. These older vacuum breakers can't handle the full reactor startup current if there's any kind of fault in the system."

He looked at Chris, then at Ryan. "The startup procedure was fine. The breaker was probably damaged during construction and finally gave out under load. Any of us would've done the same thing." Great, now it's Dad's fault.

Luca shoved in between them and raised his voice. "Enough."

Chris froze, mouth open. Ryan, for once, shut up. That was new. Luca wasn't sure he'd ever managed that before, and he filed it away before it stopped working.

"This shouldn't have happened. But arguing about it won't fix our power grid."

He looked around at the scorched panel and the blown breaker, smoke still hanging in the air. Every surface was blackened. The whole room looked like it had been through a war, which, technically, it had.

"We've got a hundred more things like this waiting to bite us in the ass. So, unless anyone wants to fight every time something breaks, we fix it and move on."

After a moment of silence, Chris muttered, "Still burned like hell."

Zoe cut through the static. "Luca, you copy?"

"Yeah, the fire's contained." The words came out scraped and raw, his throat wrecked from the smoke. "Status?"

"We're drifting, but the real problem is we're running on auxiliary distribution breakers," Zoe reported. "They aren't rated for more than a fraction of the reactor's output. Push past thirty percent, try to run engines or shields, and we'll blow those too."

They couldn't move. They couldn't fight. They could barely breathe. Luca's hand tightened on the radio.

"Joey's heading to the hangar for protective gear," he said, his mind already running through the ten things that needed to happen next and tripping over most of them. "Zoe, I need you and Emily to find a way to balance the load from the bridge. Keep us under the auxiliary limits."

He turned to the soot-covered engineers. Ryan had a black streak across his forehead. Chris looked like he'd been rolling around in a chimney. Danny looked tired.

"The main HV breaker is fried. Danny, you said there's a spare in Storage Bay Two?"

Danny nodded, his face gray under the soot. "Yeah. It's a vacuum breaker assembly. Big, heavy as hell, but manageable with the three of us."

"Let's get going," Luca said. "Ryan, Chris, you two are with me. We're swapping it out."

He said it like it was simple. It wasn't simple. He had no idea if it was even possible. But they were moving, and moving was better than standing in a burned-out room arguing about whose fault everything was.

They found the spare in Storage Bay Two, a cramped compartment filled with sealed crates. Emergency lighting threw everything sideways, making half the labels impossible to read. Luca squinted at crate after crate, his eyes still stinging.

"There." Chris pointed to a crate marked 'HV Circuit Breaker Assembly - 25kV Vacuum Type.' "That's our replacement."

The crate was chest-high, reinforced metal, and it looked like it weighed about as much as Luca's entire future riding on them not dropping it. Moving it without a lift was going to be a bitch.

Ryan stared at it, still breathing hard, sweat stains spreading across his shirt. "We're screwed."

"Joey, how's that protective gear coming?" Luca called over the radio. His voice cracked halfway through and he pretended it didn't.

"Found the uniforms and the gear," Joey said, his voice slightly distorted. "Oxygen's good for maybe an hour in each tank."

That should be enough, assuming nothing else caught fire or blew up, which meant it probably wasn't enough after all.

The latches gave way with metallic clicks, and they pried open the top of the crate. Inside, nestled in protective foam, sat the new breaker assembly, a block of gray metal studded with yellow warning labels and every bit of hope they had left. It was their only spare, and if this one didn't work, they were done, not in some dramatic, inspiring way, but in the quiet useless kind where the lights went out and nobody got a heroic last line.

"Careful with this," Ryan grunted as they hoisted it out. "These vacuum cans are supposed to be modular, but this bastard is dense as a fucking rock." He adjusted his grip, sweat already beading on his forehead. "Drop it and we're really screwed."

"Where's your power armor now, big guy?" Luca's fingers were slipping already. His forearms were shaking. Sixty-seven points in Dexterity gave him fast hands and a lean frame, not arms built to haul hundred-kilo breaker assemblies. Chris had the Strength build for this. Luca had the build for not getting hit. Very useful, just not here.

"God knows," Danny replied, huffing and puffing. "It's back there somewhere."

They got the breaker assembly out and onto a dolly. Luca's hands were cramping. He flexed them open and shut a few times and hoped nobody noticed.

"Easy, now," Ryan muttered as they maneuvered around a corner. "Don't let it tip."

By the time they reached the burned-out switchgear room, each breath scraped in raw, and Luca's vision was starting to blur at the edges. The smoke hadn't cleared, and the air recycling system was still struggling on auxiliary power.

Joey appeared through the haze, carrying a bag full of emergency gear. He was a fucking welcome sight. He tossed oxygen rigs to each of them, and Luca had never been so grateful for anything in his life. The first breath of clean air hit his lungs and his whole body almost buckled with relief.

Ryan yanked his rig on and sucked in a breath. "Thank God."

Chris and Ryan pulled the burned breaker free while the oxygen cleared their heads. Luca stood back and watched them work. His job now was to not get in their way, which was maybe the hardest part of being in charge.

"Still nothing from the Genesis Platform," Emily said over the radio. "No response."

Luca's stomach dropped. Dad was out there. He had to be.

"This is a nightmare, Luca." Ryan's voice came through muffled by the mask. "To install the new breaker, we have to shut down the entire main bus."

Luca's throat went dry. "Meaning?"

"The auxiliary breakers feed from that same bus," Chris added. "Kill it to swap the main HV unit, the whole ship goes dark. No power at all."

That meant no power on a ship drifting through space with no contact and no backup, crewed by twenty-year-olds who'd been awake for, what, eighteen hours? Twenty? Luca couldn't remember anymore. His brain was running on smoke and adrenaline fumes.

"Emily, you hearing this?"

"I am," she replied. "I can direct-wire the battery bank to the life-support regulators, bypass the main bus entirely. But it'll only handle life support and minimal lighting. Maybe twenty minutes before the batteries are drained."

They had maybe twenty minutes. He looked at the breaker assembly, heavy and ugly and their only shot, then back at Ryan and Chris. Ryan was already eyeballing the assembly, solving it in his head. Chris had that look too, the one where he stopped being annoying and started being the best engineer on the ship. Luca had to keep everyone alive long enough for them to do their jobs. No pressure, Luca.

"Listen up," Luca said. He didn't give himself time to hesitate. "Here's what we're doing. Fast and dirty. Emily, bypass life support to the emergency batteries. Ryan, Chris, the moment she gives us the all-clear, you kill the main bus and swap that HV breaker. Twenty minutes, no margin for error."

"Luca," Chris said, "if something goes wrong with the installation, if the new main HV breaker doesn't seat properly or there's a fault..."

"Then we'll deal with it," Luca said. He didn't know how. He'd figure that part out if it happened. That was basically his entire management style at this point.

"On your mark, Captain," Ryan said.

"Emily," Luca said into the radio. "Do it."

The main corridor lights died and the ship's deep hum cut out with them, leaving nothing but the hiss of oxygen masks and the cold deck plates under their boots. The silence was total. The kind that reminded him that outside these walls was nothing but vacuum, and the only thing between them and that was a crew of kids and a twenty-minute battery.

"The main bus is dead!" Ryan called. "Go, go, go!"

---

The climb back through the ship was a grind through heat and haze, smoke still hanging in the air despite the recyclers working overtime. Luca's legs had given up pretending they worked. Each step up the stairs was a negotiation between his knees and gravity, and gravity was winning. By the time he hit the command deck, his face was a sauna under the oxygen mask and his hands were shaking from exhaustion, not fear, or at least not mostly fear.

Emily looked up when he entered, her mask secure. "Luca! How's the situation below?"

"The breaker's almost online," he said, pulling off his oxygen rig and immediately regretting it. The air up here was better, but it still tasted wrong, metallic and stale. "Chris and Ryan are finishing up now."

"Thank God," Zoe muttered, not looking up from her navigation console.

"Any luck reaching Dad?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Nothing. Either they're not monitoring, or they can't risk responding. I've tried everything."

"He knows we're alive," Luca said. He didn't believe it. He needed to believe it. "He's watching. He has to be."

The bridge radio buzzed. "Twenty minutes are up, Captain," Ryan's voice said. "How's it look from your end?"

Luca looked at Emily. She exhaled through her teeth, fingers hovering over the console. "Bringing the main bus back online... now."

The emergency lights flickered. Luca held his breath. If the new breaker blew, if it didn't seat right, they were sitting in a metal coffin with about three minutes of breathable air left.

On the main display, the power grid schematic, once a mess of red warnings, shifted. One by one, the red lines turned green. A clean line flowed from the reactor through the new breaker and out through the ship's grid.

"Power's back online!" Ryan came through from below. "We've got full reactor output flowing through the new unit."

Luca's knees almost gave out. He locked them and stayed standing through sheer stubbornness.

The bridge lights flickered, then stabilized, shifting from red emergency lighting to normal white. Screens blinked on one by one, cascades of data and system diagnostics filling the dark panels.

Zoe looked up from her display. "Holy shit. I've got full telemetry and gravitational mapping."

His shoulders dropped. They'd actually pulled it off. Emily was smiling for the first time since they'd launched, soot-covered and running on fumes, and it was the best thing he'd seen all day. He looked at her, then turned back to the console.

"Alright, Zoe," Luca said, standing next to her. "Let's see if we can get some proper thrust and figure out where the hell we're going."

Zoe nodded. "Routing power to main engines now. We should have maneuvering capability in about thirty seconds."

The ship rumbled. The deck plates vibrated under his boots as the reactor ramped up, and Luca felt it in his chest, a low hum that said the ship was alive again. They were moving. They had power. For about fifteen seconds, everything was fine.

"Main thrusters responding," Zoe announced. "I've got attitude control and... wait."

The smile vanished from her face. Luca's stomach hit the floor.

"What is it?" Emily asked, already moving to her diagnostic panels.

"Power surge in the life support grid," Zoe muttered, her hands working the console. "The thruster activation is causing a feedback loop. That bypass Emily set up... it's not stable under this kind of load. The system's trying to compensate, but I can't..."

The warning klaxons blared before she could finish. Red lights flashed across every console on the bridge, and the ship's automated voice cut through:

[Critical system failure. Life support systems are offline. Oxygen levels falling.]

This was happening. Because apparently the universe still wasn't done with them.