Chapter 3 - Reboot

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

The klaxons kept screaming. Luca ran the situation through his head again, prioritizing threats. Burned electronics scraped his throat raw, and everyone's eyes were on him. He could work with that. They expected him to have a plan.

He had one, sort of. Just need to buy time and keep them working on the problem. Down below, the fusion reactor was finally humming stable and the generator held steady right behind it.

Ryan and Chris had gotten the new transformer installed without electrocuting themselves, which was honestly more surprising after their little pissing match. So what is the problem?

"Alright, listen up!" Luca said. "Fusion reactor's stable, generator's holding, and the new transformer is in place. We need to get the power flowing right... and fast."

"Power grid first, then life support. Ryan, grab me those electrical diagrams. The big ones."

Already elbow-deep in a storage bin, Ryan shot him an exasperated look. "I'm looking, man! Whoever packed these away has got them all out of order!"

"Hey, that was me!" called Chris as he headed out of the bridge to search for tools.

"Well, thank you very much for making this more difficult than it needed to be, bro!" Ryan yelled at Chris' retreating back. Luca watched Chris flip him the bird without even turning around.

"Quit bitching!" Luca snapped. They were running out of air, and these two were still trying to figure out the pecking order. "For the love of..."

With a triumphant grunt, Ryan yanked out a roll as thick as his arm. "Got 'em. These fuckers are huge."

"Those are the old ones," Luca said, looking at the label. "Where's the updated set?"

Ryan groaned. "You wanna go down there and do it yourself?"

"No, I want to keep the reactor from blowing up. Try the left bin."

Across the main table, they spread the diagrams like a battle plan. Luca stared down at what looked like the world's most complicated puzzle. Grid lines and load symbols filled every inch of it, none of them labeled in any way that meant anything. Ryan was already tracing pathways with his finger, muttering curses under his breath.

"Okay, the main bus is here," he said, jabbing at a thick line. "Transformer's feeding into it fine, but something downstream is causing the system to shit itself. Load balancing software wasn't calibrated for this half-finished grid. It's dumping power through the first available path."

"Zoe," Luca said, turning to where she stood at her console in flip-flops and shorts. "Think you can squeeze into the maintenance shaft and check the connections?"

Without looking up, she raised an eyebrow. "Why? Because I'm small?"

"Because you're the only one who won't get stuck," Luca replied without missing a beat. "So yeah, because you're small."

She grabbed a tool belt and a flashlight, then made her way to the access hatch. She looked back once. "You sending me in alone?"

"Danny." Luca pointed at his science officer. "Go with her."

"We'll need a multimeter," Danny said, shrugging out of his orange hoodie.

Ryan clutched his toolbox protectively. "Dammit. Fine. But I'd better get it back in the same condition!"

Luca took a deep breath and massaged his temples. "Joey, I want you on the radio. See if you can raise anyone. Genesis, other ships. Even static is better than this damned silence."

Moving to the comms station, Joey shook his head. "The asteroid field here is too dense, but I'll give it a shot."

---

Minutes later and from somewhere in the ship's guts, Zoe cut in over the radio. "Connections look solid, but this junction is glowing. Definitely not supposed to happen."

Back to tracing lines on the diagram, Ryan jabbed at a cluster of pathways. "There. Junction box twelve's getting hammered. It's trying to shove way too much power through a circuit that was never meant to handle this kind of load."

"Because the ship's not finished," Luca said, stating the obvious.

"Exactly." Ryan's finger traced the overloaded pathway. "Load balancing software is basically nonexistent. System doesn't know how to distribute power properly, so it's just shoving everything through the first path it finds."

"CO2 climbing fast," Joey cut in from his station. "We're running out of time."

Emily sounded like a woman who'd been dragged out of bed at two in the morning to babysit a ship full of idiots, and honestly, she wasn't wrong. "Luca, I can try bringing the life support scrubbers online, but they need massive, stable power. If I flip that switch now with the grid this fucked up, we either fry the entire environmental system permanently, or worse, create a feedback loop that destabilizes the reactor."

"Look, it's simple," Ryan said, stabbing the schematic with his grease-stained finger. "We shunt power directly around the bottleneck. Bypass all the fancy load balancers and feed raw juice straight from the generator into the secondary grid. Yeah, it'll surge like hell, but it'll force everything to stabilize. Two minutes, tops."

Chris stared as if Ryan had suggested setting the ship on fire. "Are you a complete idiot? A raw power shunt will blow every secondary fuse we have and toast that transformer we just installed! The only way that doesn't kill us is manual isolation. We cut Junction Twelve completely, reroute everything through auxiliary conduits. It's slower, but we don't explode."

"Slower?" Ryan shot back. "That would take at least an hour! We'll be suffocated by then!"

They were arguing blind, based on theory and guesswork. One plan would probably blow them up. The other would definitely let them suffocate. Either way, they were running out of air.

Great, that made three ways to die. Luca stared at the diagram as Ryan and Chris started gesturing wildly at different sections.

They need a commander, not another engineer. He looked at the three terrible options on the table. Right now he had guesses and panic and two guys one bad sentence away from trying to out-stupid each other, and that wasn't nearly enough.

Only one way to get what he needed. It was going to cost him, but so did suffocating.

"Stop." He didn't shout it, and somehow that worked better. Ryan and Chris both froze. "Both of you."

Luca closed his eyes.

This is going to suck.

His interface pulsed once.

[Ability Activated: Systems Analysis Burst]

The System layers command-grade diagnostic logic over your own thinking, accelerating subsystem analysis and failure-chain recognition.

Base Duration: 4 minutes

Adjusted Duration: 5 minutes, 34 seconds

Base Cooldown: 24 hours

Adjusted Cooldown: 19 hours, 50 minutes

The ability did exactly what it sounded like. The System crammed command-grade engineering logic into his head, the kind of pattern-recognition that let someone actually read a ship's subsystems instead of just staring at them. For four minutes, his brain would work like it belonged to someone who knew what they were doing. After that, nothing for twenty-four hours. One shot.

Great trade and totally worth it. He was going to feel like absolute garbage.

Pain drove a spike straight through his skull. He caught the edge of the table before his knees could do something embarrassing, and the schematic stopped looking like random bullshit. Power routes lit up across his vision and Junction Twelve flashed white-hot. Overflow paths spidered outward through half-finished conduits. Three more stress points blinked alive behind it, each one ready to go bad the second somebody shoved load through the wrong line.

Five and a half minutes, give or take. Then the ability was gone and the cooldown would sit on his interface until tomorrow night, mocking him.

"Luca?" Emily was already moving.

"I'm good," he lied, voice tight. "Give me a second."

Emily crossed the bridge before he'd finished the sentence. "Luca, you look like you're about to pass out."

"I'm fine, Em." His vision swam, but he forced himself to focus.

He focused on Ryan's plan to bypass the junction. The system in his mind flashed with a horrifying probability:

[Catastrophic Transformer Overload: 68–79% Probability]

Ryan's bypass route flared first. It ran too fast and too dirty. The new transformer would take the hit and die screaming.

He shifted his focus to Chris's more conservative plan. The data was just as grim:

[Main Bus Short Circuit Cascade: 60–71% Probability]

Chris's plan ran cleaner and safer, but way too slow. By the time they finished, the CO2 curve would already be in the kill zone.

Both plans were suicide with different timing.

Fighting the urge to vomit, he analyzed Emily's desperate gambit. More numbers flooded in.

[Reactor Destabilization Feedback: 11–19% Probability]
[Permanent Degradation to Life Support Grid: 85–93% Probability]
[Crew Asphyxiation: Averted]

Emily's ugly workaround lit up in a brutal green-red split. Raw pull from the primary conduit straight into life support. It would hammer the environmental grid hard enough to leave permanent damage, maybe wreck it completely, but the scrubbers would come back online before they all choked to death.

None of the numbers were clean. The system gave him bands, not certainties, and the bands were wide enough to mean anything could go wrong in any direction. Ryan's plan could blow at sixty-eight percent or seventy-nine. Emily's reactor risk could be eleven or nineteen. He didn't know. The ability didn't know. It just knew more than he did, which was the whole point.

Nineteen percent chance of killing the reactor versus a guaranteed slow suffocation. He could live with eleven percent. He'd been living with worse odds than that since they left New Hampshire.

So that was the answer. It wasn't great. It was just the least terrible option on the table.

It was his call.

"Forget the junction box." Each word came out clipped as the migraine kept building up pressure behind his eyes. "We're not fixing the grid. We're cutting off a limb and keeping the patient breathing."

"Emily." He turned toward her, vision blurring. "You're pulling power directly from the primary reactor conduit. Taking the raw, unregulated feed. It'll probably trash the environmental controls permanently, but it'll keep us breathing."

"Luca, that's a one-way street!" Her voice cracked. "We'll be locked into that configuration!"

She wasn't wrong. She also wasn't the one who'd just watched three probability readouts tell him every other option ended with them dead.

"Better than being dead!" The words came out way harsher than he meant them. "Ryan, Chris. The moment Emily pulls that power, the grid's going to go absolutely insane. You use that chaos to isolate Junction Twelve. Only shot we get."

For one ugly second, nobody moved; six people just stared at him like he'd asked them to jump out of an airlock, which, honestly, wasn't that far off from what he was actually asking.

Ryan broke it, his jaw tight. "On your mark, Captain."

The way he said it landed somewhere between respect and a dare. Luca filed that away for later, assuming there was a later.

"I've got your six, Ryan," Chris said.

He looked at Emily. She gave him a quick nod.

"Execute," Luca said, and his hands were shaking so he shoved them against the console where nobody could see.

The whole ship bucked. Every panel on the bridge lit up at once, warnings stacking on top of warnings, and the reactor's hum dropped low enough that Luca felt it in his teeth. That wasn't a good sound. That was the sound a machine made right before it decided to stop being a machine and start being shrapnel.

"Power's flowing!" Emily's voice cut through the chaos. "Life support coming online, but the grid's losing its shit!"

"Now, Ryan, Chris!" Luca shouted into his comm. "Sixty seconds. Go!"

The longest minute of his life. Sparks blew out of a junction two meters from his head and he flinched hard enough to bite his tongue. Another klaxon started up, because apparently one wasn't enough, this ship wanted to make sure he was absolutely certain things were going wrong. But through all of it, through the noise and the sparks and the blood in his mouth, he heard the air scrubbers wheeze back to life. It was the best sound he'd ever heard, better than anything else he could remember.

"Junction bypassed!" Chris's voice crackled through static. "It's holding!"

Warning lights flickered and died as the power grid found its new, completely fucked-up equilibrium, and for one shaky second the crisis was over.

The migraine hit a spike without warning. He went down hard, both hands clamped over his skull. Fuck, that hurt like hell.

"Life support is stable!" Emily called out, yanking off her oxygen mask. Then she paused, double-checking her readings. "Wait... that's weird. The environmental grid should be completely fried after that power surge, but everything's reading normal. We got incredibly lucky."

"You're welcome," Ryan grinned, still covered in soot and grease. "I invested all my attributes in Luck."

"Shut the fuck up, Ryan," Zoe said, climbing out of the maintenance shaft with a smile. "Luck's not a stat."

"Hey, explain this then!" Ryan gestured at the functioning life support display. "Ninety percent chance of permanent damage, and we walk away clean? That's pure Ryan Mitchell magic right there."

---

For the first time since they'd been dragged into this nightmare, the air tasted like air. It had that recycled tang to it, but he could breathe. Luca sat on the deck with his back against the console and let that fact sink into his bones.

Danny had collapsed against the bulkhead next to him, his face finally showing some color instead of that corpse-gray he'd been rocking for the last hour. Chris had given up any pretense of having his shit together and just sat there, covered in soot, looking every bit the exhausted twenty-two-year-old he actually was instead of the action figure he usually tried to be. Joey was making the rounds, checking pulses and hydration like a worried mom, and Emily's shoulders had finally come down from somewhere around her ears.

"Don't get too comfortable," Chris muttered, wiping soot from his face. "You still smell like burnt rubber."

"Better than smelling like sweat and Axe body spray," Zoe said.

Ryan threw something at her. "Hey!"

Static cut through the moment. Electronic whines froze everyone mid-sentence. Luca's pulse, which had just started to come down from the stratosphere, spiked right back up. Emily was already at the communication station, hands moving fast over the frequency controls, and the noise slowly sharpened into something that might have been a voice fighting its way through interference.

"...Triumph of Darron... this is Genesis Platform..."

Luca's whole body went rigid. He knew that voice. He was on his feet before he'd made the decision to stand, and his legs almost didn't cooperate.

"Dad," Luca said, and his voice cracked on the word. His hand found the console and gripped it hard enough to hurt. He was breathing again. He hadn't realized he'd stopped.

"...do you copy... repeat..."

Emily was working frantically to boost the signal, adjusting frequency and filtering out interference. The voice came through clearer. For half a second, the tightness in his chest loosened and he was just a kid hearing his father's voice. Then the words got clearer and his dad sounded scared. His dad never sounded scared.

"Luca, they've compromised our command center."

His hands went cold. Literally cold, like someone had dunked them in ice water. Genesis was compromised, but by who, and how? It had security, it had protocols, it had ... His brain was already spinning up scenarios and every single one of them was bad.

"Their shuttles launched five minutes ago. They're coming for you."

Five minutes was nothing. It meant those shuttles were already in the asteroid field, and it meant he had no time at all.

"Dad, our main thrusters are still offline," he said into the microphone. "We're sitting ducks here."

The transmission was getting worse, Athan's voice fading in and out through bursts of static. "...power core... avoid the asteroid field... don't trust..."

Don't trust who? Luca's jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt. Don't trust who, Dad? Finish the goddamn sentence.

"Dad? Dad, come in!" Luca shouted into the comm, his grip on the console tight enough to ache.

"...they... Karen..."

"Karen? What does she have to do with this?" Emily asked.

Then there was nothing. Static filled the channel, and with it the empty hiss of dead space. His dad had said Karen's name like a warning, and Luca's brain was already running with it, already building connections he didn't have enough pieces to finish.

"Dad!" Luca yelled, but the channel stayed dead. Emily kept working the controls, cycling through every frequency and emergency channel, but Genesis Platform had gone silent.

"They cut him off," Emily said quietly.