Bridgebuilder

Iced

There in the wreckage of main engineering aboard the Kshlav'o, Alex tried to comfort someone who he was pretty sure he considered a friend, arms cast around her shoulders in what was supposed to be a pleasant though very much platonic hug. This is how a human would have interpreted it, but he wasn't hugging a human right now, was he? The idea that the person who hadn't turned the shields of her encounter suit off in his presence for the first month she'd known him might not be OK with this sort of physical contact hadn't really occurred to him until the silence had gone on long enough to be considered awkward.

"I think it would be better if you worked in a different part of the ship today, Pilot." Carbon's voice was clipped, each word carefully chosen and precise, "you could see about getting a waveride set up."

With that she slipped hand up between them and shoved him away, eyes cold and lips pressed tight.

"Very well." He didn't argue, despite a strong urge to explain his actions, to get her to understand what he did was in earnest. Alex had been in enough situations where he'd tried something like that and knew it was a bad call when the situation was still hot. Fingers grazed the wall, propelling him back towards the airlock to the passageway. The doors closed behind him, and he floated there for a few moments before shrugging it off and heading for the shower.

Wedged between two walls in a hot mist he pondered turning the AI on to do a jump calculation. Even with most of its logic processors shut off or underclocked - or both - the cooling system would still come on for the control processors alone. Safety procedures. The matter forges they had onboard were top of the line, but they couldn't fabricate a primary AI core if they wrecked it, so it was programmed to run with cooling only.

All of this nicely structured thinking did not stop Carbon's rebuff from gnawing fervently on the edges of his mind.

He found himself sitting in the mess while idly stirring a bowl of oatmeal, staring into a tablet researching the systems that were tied into the cooling system. Mentally flipping between what he'd done wrong and how to keep the cooling system from starting up a bunch of other systems it considered important, like the main reactor. The plasma blow off from that would give them away in a heartbeat, and it was all hard wired. Technically they could physically cut the connections, but then they'd have to feed the appropriate signal and power back into the parts they wanted on to spoof it into believing that everything was running properly.

This also required an EVA maneuver and removing the main sensor array to access those cables. Could they do it? If they were in drydock, yes, absolutely.

Out here in the black, with two people? If there was no damage to the structure around the sensors, Alex considered that to be a very tentative maybe. At least there was another potential answer he hadn't yet explored.

The agency had stocked the ships with tertiary and even quaternary layers for many systems, and that did include an emergency plan for loss of the AI... This did count as an emergency. Maybe actually physically doing something would free his mind up for a while, as well. He tossed the uneaten bowl into the recycler and floated up to the forward airlock. He wasn't going outside, but he'd need the radiation protection the EVA suit afforded.

Alex grabbed the bar over the open back of the ceramic-white suit and eased himself into it, legs sliding down until his feet slipped into the boots, then ducked to fit his head in the helmet. The ship's code to activate it from inside was two taps of index finger to thumb, then one of the middle and ring fingers each, the action easy until you try to do it with an unpowered glove. The back panel closed and pressurized as the suit cinched itself down, fitting to the user. For the first time since he'd woken up in the medical bay, a machine accessed his mind. Built into the helmet, it was practically a toy compared to his Amp, but all it covered was a simple HUD and the suit's handful of onboard systems.