The Lost Star's Sea Read online

  01

  The gig's emergency equipment locker survived intact, as designed, so we had a micro-reactor generator to power the boat, plus plasma cutters, welders, and power tools to make repairs. Things do go wrong in space and provisions are made to deal with the things that do. Half the wrecks in & Kin's flats arrived under their own power.

  Connecting the micro-reactor to an auxiliary power input port brought the control compartment to life with a galaxy of red, yellow, and even a few green status lights. The med-unit's status lights were one of those glowing green ones, so within minutes my head was being treated and the pain gradually erased, allowing me to find enough optimism to motivate me to tackle the synth-galley. That, and with the pain gone, I found I was hungry as well.

  Unlike the med-unit, the synth-galley was ablaze in red status lights. I downloaded the gig's manual to my com link and ran a diagnostic on it to identify what was wrong and how to fix it. Its problems were mostly confined to its below deck plumbing, so I set about pulling its lower panels and surrounding deck panels to get at its discrete, but necessary, connection to the gig's sanitary system which supplied the raw material for synth food. I found a floating jumble of uncoupled tubes, pumps, tanks, power lines and sensor connections in a pool of leaking sludge. Clearly, the underside of the gig hit something hard enough to displace the plumbing.

  Looking at the mess, I lost a bit of my appetite.

  Starting with the sanitation unit, I pumped the sludge back into its tank, and then, set about restoring the rest of the mechanical units and tanks to their proper places, more or less. I then reconnected the power cables, sensors, pipes and tubes using the gig's manual on my com link as a guide. Fortunately, the tangle of tubes was flexible enough to conform to the slightly realigned units.

  Sometime during the process, Cin and Siss showed up.

  'Ah, being useful. Good. Need a hand?' he/she asked, crouching down beside me as I lay, belly to the deck, silently cursing while blindly groping for an awkwardly-placed nub to attach a tube to.

  'Thanks, but I don't think an extra hand will speed things along. Tight quarters. Still, I should have it up and running within an hour.'

  'Good work, Litang. Feeling better, I trust?'

  'Much.'

  'Right. Then I'll rest until you've got it operational.'

  'There should be hammocks in the locker,' I said, pointing to the other side of the passageway.

  He/she nodded, stood up, snagged a hammock from the locker and disappeared into the control compartment. Siss stuck around for a few minutes, but seeing that I wasn't going to preen her, swam off with a flick of her broad, feathered tail and went outside again, hopefully to guard us from the riff-raff of the island.