Page 5 of Life-Debt

All passed visual inspection.

How odd.

What could have shattered the gems without damaging the brackets?

I accessed the ship’s systems and scanned for the list of installed shiftgems. After a few frustrating minutes, I located the life support system, recorded the crystal size, and checked the box.

Luck remained with me, and I plucked out the appropriate stone, slid it into the bracket, and adjusted the mounting so the stone would be held in place even when the main engine thrummed to life.

Using the engine room’s console, I began a diagnostic scan on the life support system. While it churned through the test, I investigated the other downed systems. I determined the green stone shards had belonged to the water purification system, which could remain offline. The security system, including cameras, sound, and motion detection, were also down and would remain so until someone else fixed it. I set the brackets to the proper empty and locked position, cleaned out a few stray fragments, and moved onto the main problem of my day: the engine.

My first challenge would be finding a set of crystals the correct size. None of the blacks in the box fit, so I hauled them back to the cargo bay and began the tedious process of finding compatible stones. After an hour, I got lucky with a tri-color set in the right size for the engine. I’d have a quirky engine when I finished getting it operational, but quirky beat prone to catastrophic failure.

If it weren’t for the brackets being in pristine condition, I would have assumed the brown crystals had exploded, taking out the nearby machines. The lack of actual damage to the parts implied something gentler had happened—like someone taking a hammer to each of the stones and scattering the fragmented ruins across the engine room floor.

The stones might not have even been in the mounts when broken.

That left me with more questions. Who would break the engine and life support systems? Why?

Why lock one man in stasis as a last act of heroism? On most ships, the saboteur would have been given a quick death to spare dwindling resources, a last-ditch survival effort. The man on my ship had held value to the remaining crew.

Nothing added up.

After cleaning the mounts of shards and crystal dust, I tested the bracket, installed the tri-colored shiftgems, and returned to the console. To my delight, the life support system checked out, and a cheerful green button offered a restart of the system. I tapped it.

One by one, the red warning lights associated with the machine flicked to yellow. As the system churned through its various safety checks, those lights changed to green. Switching to the ship’s overview, I navigated to the monitoring systems to check the oxygen levels.

Sure enough, the system began to function again, and the levels of oxygen began to climb to survivable levels while the other toxic fumes decreased.

What the hell was going on? It had only taken plundering the cargo to restore the system. With no evidence of a repair attempt, I came to one conclusion: somebody had blocked access to the engine room while the crew perished, and the saboteur had unlocked the systems in his final moments.

My thoughts skirted into conspiracy-theory territory, but as it was the only idea I had that matched what I worked with, I decided to stick with it. A mass malfunction and mysterious restoration of the system made zero sense.

Someone had meddled, and their meddling had cost three men their lives. If I worked hard, did everything right, and took care with my unexpected guest, it still might cost him his life, too. I would do my best to save him, but I acknowledged my best might not be good enough.

Time, experience, and improved technology decreased the odds of death to one in ten thousand. As long as I reminded myself I had brought hundreds of people out of stasis without losing anybody, I could limit my worrying while waiting for my unexpected guest to resume breathing.

Perhaps he held the answers to my questions.

I began the tedious process of confirming the shiftgem installations before running a diagnostic scan on the engine. Unlike the life support system, the engine began throwing errors left and right, indicating I might have a big repair on my hands. After a few minutes and checking the manual, I determined the problem involved some loose nuts and bolts holding the gem coupling unit to the main drive. One trip to my ship for my toolbox later, I removed the screws to access the main drive core, did some tightening, and reduced the diagnostic errors to one, which involved the shiftgem mounts. Muttering curses, I raided the cargo bay for extra supplies, dug out an entire new mounting assembly, and unseated the gems, returning them to their case for safe keeping until I dismantled the entire engine, replaced the brackets, and put the whole thing together again.

Two hours and much cursing later, I had a functional engine for low thrust with jump drive capabilities.

Excellent.

In the time I’d spent playing mechanic, Pandora had explored, but to my astonishment, she found nothing we considered to be of interest beyond the cargo bays loaded with wealth, not even a single ounce of some recreational drug many space crews stashed in their bunks.

While I typically paid the fox in treats for the number of illicit goods she found, I promised her an extra treat for being patient. She bounced around my feet in her little suit, the metallic pads clinking against the ship’s floor.

For my final trick, I investigated the ship’s broken comm to discover yet another set of broken shiftgems. Another search through the cargo bays resulted in a set of yellow crystals, which would be suitable to open communication lines with the ship’s originating planet.

I expected a great deal of fun when I activated the system. Linking my suit to the ship’s comm, I pressed the activate button, scrolled through the menu of saved contacts, and picked the originating planet’s comm officer as the most likely one to get me to someone who could give me coordinates for where to take the derelict. Bracing for a scolding and accusations, I tapped the connect button.

The comm crystals hummed to life, and the machine buzzed. A dark panel on the screen glowed, and I sucked in a breath.

Most spaceships didn’t come equipped with voice and video communication systems. The crystals and base machine cost too much. Only species who relied on physical modes of communications tended to dish out for them. While the screen remained illuminated but black, a time-delay indication popped up, indicating we’d have a half second delay hampering us. In reality, we’d have to take turns doing full relays, although the lag wouldn’t bother most.

We might run into some trouble if we both attempted to talk at the same time.