Chapter 3 - Reboot
Chapter 3 - Reboot
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
The klaxons kept screaming while Luca sorted the disasters by which one would kill them first. 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. I just need to keep them moving and pretend that buys us time. Down below, the fusion reactor was finally stable, but the air-monitor warnings kept turning red.
Ryan and Chris had gotten the new breaker installed without electrocuting themselves, which was honestly more surprising after their little pissing match. So what the hell is still broken?
“Alright, listen up!” Luca said. “Fusion reactor’s stable, generator’s holding, and the new breaker 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!” Ryan yelled at Chris’s retreating back. Chris flipped 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. “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. Luca stared down at what looked like the world’s most complicated puzzle. Grid lines and load symbols filled every inch, none labeled in any way that meant anything to Luca. Ryan traced pathways with his finger, muttering curses under his breath.
“Okay, the main distribution bus is here,” he said, jabbing at a thick line. “Transformer’s feeding it fine, but the emergency cross-tie never opened when main power came back, so the thruster startup hammered a feeder that should’ve been dead and tripped the environmental controls. This ship is determined to keep me humble.”
“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 scan the cross-tie enclosure? Don’t open it or touch anything.”
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 pulled on an oxygen mask and shoved her feet into the work boots beside the hatch. She grabbed a thermal scanner, then looked back. “You sending me in alone?”
“Danny.” Luca pointed at his science officer. “Go with her and watch the isolation lights. Anything changes, both of you get the hell out.”
Danny shrugged out of his orange hoodie and reached for a second mask. “We’ll need insulated gloves.”
Ryan clutched his toolbox protectively. “Dammit. Fine. But I’d better get it back in the same condition!”
Luca massaged his temples. “Joey, get on the radio. Try Genesis, other ships, anybody. Hell, even static is better than this damned silence.”
Moving to the comms station, Joey shook his head. “The asteroid field’s too dense for a clean signal, but I’ll keep at it. Maybe somebody’s listening.”
Minutes later, Zoe cut in over the radio from somewhere in the ship’s guts. “The casing at Junction Twelve is hot enough to light up the scanner. The cross-tie indicator still says closed.”
Ryan jabbed at a cluster of pathways on the diagram. “There. Junction Twelve’s feeding the air system off the battery line and the main line at the same time, and that emergency line can only handle fans. Then the engines started pulling power and it got slammed.”
“Because the ship’s not finished,” Luca said.
“Exactly.” Ryan traced the overloaded line. “The handoff controls aren’t finished. Main power came back, but the battery feed never disconnected. Now both feeds are fighting each other.”
“Smoke filters are saturated,” Joey cut in from his station. “Keep your masks sealed. Carbon monoxide is climbing across the command deck, and it’s worse below.”
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, here’s the option. I hard-transfer the scrubbers and circulation fans onto the main feed. That bypasses their drive controls. If the cross-tie stays closed while I do it, we burn the new breaker, and the environmental drives go with it.”
“Look, it’s simple,” Ryan said, stabbing the schematic with his grease-stained finger. “We force the cross-tie open from here, then put the environmental bank on the main feed. Two minutes, tops, assuming the contactor listens this time.”
Chris stared at Ryan in open disbelief. “No, that’s how we fry the breaker we just installed. The remote contactor already ignored one command. If it stays closed during the transfer, both feeds hit the environmental bank and toast the breaker. We need to de-energize Junction Twelve, pull the disconnect by hand, and reroute through the auxiliary conduits. It’s slower, but we don’t explode.”
“Slower?” Ryan said. “That would take at least an hour! We’ll be unconscious before then!”
Most of the electrical shit might as well have been another language, but Luca understood the choices. One plan would probably blow them up. The other would leave them breathing poison for another hour.
Great, that made three ways to die. Luca stared at the diagram as Ryan and Chris started gesturing wildly at different sections.
Pretending to be an engineer wouldn’t help. He had to make the damn call. Right now he had two guys one bad sentence away from trying to out-stupid each other, and all their panicked guessing still wasn’t nearly enough.
There was only one way to get what he needed. It was going to cost him, but so did breathing smoke.
“Stop.” He kept his voice low, and that worked better than shouting. Ryan and Chris both froze. “Both of you.”
Luca closed his eyes.
This is going to suck.
His interface pulsed once.
[Ability Activated: System Pulse]
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 System snapped the mess into focus, and he only got 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. Junction Twelve flashed white-hot. The thruster surge had jammed the connection closed. Every time the ship tried to protect itself, the unfinished controls made the same bad connection again.
He had five and a half minutes. When the timer on his interface ran out, the ability was gone and the cooldown would sit on his interface until tomorrow, mocking him.
“Luca?” Emily was already moving.
“I’m good,” he said, his 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 made the diagram hold still.
He focused on Ryan’s plan to force the contactor remotely. The System flashed a horrifying probability through his mind:
[Catastrophic Breaker Overload: 68–79% Probability]
The contactor wasn’t going to open. Ryan’s transfer would put both power sources against each other again, and the new breaker would die screaming.
He shifted his focus to Chris’s slower manual reroute. The data was just as grim:
[Crew Incapacitation from Smoke Exposure: 60–71% Probability]
Chris’s plan kept the power system intact, but the air would put half of them on the deck before they finished.
Both plans were suicide with different timing.
Fighting the urge to vomit, he traced Emily’s hard transfer. More numbers flooded in.
[Main Breaker Trip: 11–19% Probability]
[Permanent Environmental Drive Damage: 85–93% Probability]
[Contaminated-Air Recirculation: Averted]
Emily’s ugly workaround lit up in a brutal green-red split. She could hard-transfer the fans and scrubbers to the main feed without their automatic drive controls.
With the fans and scrubbers running off the main feed, she’d trip the battery output breaker. Junction Twelve would go dead until the unfinished controller tried to reclose the battery feed. That would give Ryan and Chris less than a minute to pull the disconnect and lock it open. It would probably be long enough to burn out part of the environmental system too.
Of course the numbers were all garbage. The System gave him ranges instead of answers and left him to make the call.
There was a nineteen percent chance of tripping the new breaker versus breathing poison until they dropped. He’d been living with worse odds since they left New Hampshire.
The answer was lousy and still the least terrible option on the table.
“Forget the reroute.” Each word came out clipped as the migraine kept building pressure behind his eyes. “We’re cutting off a limb and keeping the patient breathing.”
“Emily.” He turned toward her, vision blurring. “Hard-transfer the environmental bank to the main feed, then trip the battery output. Bypass the automatic drives. It’ll probably burn some of them out, but it’ll clear the air.”
“Luca, that’s a one-way street. We lose automatic transfer. We lose the backup feed. Everything stays on manual until we rebuild the controls.”
She wasn’t wrong. He wanted to take the order back, but three probability readouts had already told him what every other option cost.
“Better than breathing this!” The words came out way harsher than he meant them. “Ryan, Chris. The moment Emily transfers the load, Junction Twelve should go dead for sixty seconds. Pull the disconnect and lock it open before the protection circuit tries again. That’s our only shot.”
For one ugly second, nobody moved. Four people stared at him like he’d asked them to jump out of an airlock.
Ryan broke it, his jaw tight. “On your mark, Captain.”
Luca couldn’t tell whether it was respect or a dare. He saved that for later, assuming there was a later.
“Right behind you, Ryan,” Chris said.
They grabbed the insulated tools and ran for the access hatch. Thirty seconds later, Ryan came over the radio, breathing hard. “We’re at Junction Twelve. Zoe and Danny are clear.”
He looked at Emily. The mask hid most of her face, not the fear in her eyes. She gave him a quick nod anyway.
“Do it,” 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 as the fans and scrubbers hit the main feed together. The reactor’s hum dropped low enough that Luca felt it in his teeth. 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. “Circulation is coming online. Main feed is holding, but the environmental drives are over limit!”
“Ryan, Chris, go now!” Luca shouted into his comm. “You have sixty seconds!”
It was the longest minute of his life. Sparks blew out of a panel two meters from his head, and he flinched and bit his tongue. Another klaxon started blaring over the first, because apparently one wasn’t enough. Through the noise and the blood in his mouth, the air scrubbers wheezed back to life. It was the best sound he’d ever heard.
“Junction isolated!” Chris’s voice crackled through static. “The cross-tie’s locked open!”
Warning lights flickered and died as the power grid reached its new, completely fucked-up equilibrium.
The migraine hit without warning. He went down, both hands clamped over his skull. Fuck, that hurt.
“Life support is stable!” Emily called out, keeping her oxygen mask sealed while she checked the readings again. “Two scrubber drives burned out, automatic transfer is dead, and we’re running the whole environmental bank from the main feed. Carbon monoxide is falling, but keep your masks on.”
Ryan grinned, still covered in soot and grease. “You’re welcome. 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.”
Ten minutes later, the air tasted like air again. It had that recycled tang to it, but he could breathe without the mask. Luca sat on the deck with his back against the console and drew one clean breath after another.
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, 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 each pulse and hydration reading twice, 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.”
“It’s better than smelling like sweat and Axe body spray,” Zoe said.
Ryan threw something at her. “Hey!”
Static broke into 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 broken by interference.
“...Triumph of Darron... this is Genesis Platform...”
He knew that voice. He was on his feet before he’d made the decision to stand.
“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 worked frantically to boost the signal. She adjusted the frequency and filtered out interference. The signal came through clearer. For half a second, the tightness in his chest loosened and he was just a kid hearing his father. As the static thinned and the words came through clean, he heard the fear in his dad’s voice. His dad never sounded scared.
“Luca, they’ve compromised our command center.”
His hands went numb with cold. Genesis was compromised, but by who, and how? It had security, it had protocols, it had ... His brain spun 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 in the asteroid field, and it meant he had no time at all.
“Dad, the surge knocked our main thrusters back 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.
“...they... Karen...”
“Karen? What does she have to do with this?” Emily asked.
The speakers crackled once, and after that there was nothing but static. 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.
Emily’s hands went still over the controls. “They cut him off.”