Burning plastic and smoke. Shit. A fire had started somewhere below deck.

  "Chris, Ryan, Danny, let's go!" Luca said, grabbing one of the hand-held radios. He led the way down the corridor and toward the stairs below the command bridge.

  The door hissed as it slid open, and a wall of black smoke rolled into the command deck. The smell was worse down below, quickly making his eyes water.

  "Holy shit," he muttered, pulling up his shirt to cover his nose. Didn't help worth a damn. "Grab a flashlight." The smoke was so thick he couldn't see the far wall, and whatever was burning was just getting started.

  Behind him came Ryan's hacking cough, his flashlight beam slicing through waves of gray that rolled up the corridor. From Danny, muttered prayers. Couldn't blame the guy.

  Through the smoke, Luca spotted the sparks; a live electric current buzzing blue and white. The switchgear panel was on fire!

  "That's our main HV breaker," Ryan wheezed, his engineering brain still working even while he was slowly suffocating. "It's the master switch between the reactor and all the auxiliary distribution breakers." The panel door was blown open, revealing the charred guts of the ship's electrical systems.

  His eyes were watering like crazy, and sweat was rolling down his back despite the smoke. The black shit was covering them now, soot getting into their hair and clothes. His hands were shaking, from adrenaline, he told himself. Captains don't get scared. They get focused.

  "Fire extinguishers," He said, pointing to the emergency station mounted on the wall nearby. "Danny, Chris, grab them."

  "Luca, here! Help me." Ryan called from down the corridor. He was struggling to open the heavy blast door with the sign that read 'Electrical Switchgear - High Voltage.' The door's electronic lock was flashing red. "The main breaker's in there, but the safety interlocks won't let us in while there's a fault!"

  "Hold on," Luca said, pulling up the radio. "Em! I need the emergency override code for the switchgear room!"

  "One sec, Luca, everything's a mess," she said. After a moment of silence, she added, "I think I found it, 4742-3031-2069."

  Luca punched in the code, and the heavy door hissed, unlocking. They had to slide the fucking thing open manually as power was too unstable for the automatic systems.

  The switchgear room was a maze of metal cabinets and thick cables snaking everywhere, warning signs plastered on every surface. The main high-voltage breaker cabinet was obvious as it was the one with its door blown open and scorch marks spreading across the wall behind it.

  Ryan ran to the manual isolation switches. "I need to lock out the main HV breaker before we can even think about touching it!" Heavy mechanical switches clicked into position as he threw each isolation lever. The dangerous sparking finally stopped, but now they were running on auxiliary distribution breakers only.

  Danny and Chris triggered the extinguishers at the same time, and dry powder hissed out. The blast of powder turned the black smoke into a thick, gray soup, making visibility even worse.

  "Keep it up!" Luca yelled. The chemical smell was getting worse, burning the inside of his nose and making his eyes sting.

  The flames died back to glowing embers, crushed under the relentless attack of the extinguishers. The orange light faded, leaving them in the darkness with just the beams of their flashlights and the emergency light strips.

  Chris rounded on Ryan. "What the fuck were you thinking with that power surge?"

  Ryan straightened up, his expression shifting from relief to anger in about half a second. "What are you talking about?"

  "The reactor startup!" Chris snapped, waving his hand toward the smoking breaker panel. "You didn't ramp it up gradually! No wonder the main breaker blew!"

  "Hey, asshole," Ryan smirked, shining his flashlight on Chris's face. "We needed power right fucking now, or those UER troopers would've been crawling up our asses!"

  "Perhaps," Danny offered, stepping in, "the surge happened because the breaker was already stressed. These older vacuum breakers can't handle the full reactor startup current if there's any kind of fault in the system."

  He looked at Chris, then at Ryan. "The startup procedure was fine. The breaker was probably damaged during construction and finally gave out under load. Any of us would've done the same thing." Great, now it's Dad's fault.

  Luca shoved in between them, raising his voice. "Enough."

  Chris froze mid-retort, and even Ryan straightened.

  "This shouldn't have happened. But arguing about it won't fix our power grid."

  He looked around at the smoke, the scorched panel, the blown breaker.

  "We've got a hundred more things like this waiting to bite us in the ass. So, unless anyone wants to fight every time something breaks, we focus, we fix it, and we move on."

  After a moment of silence, Chris muttered, "Still burned like hell."

  The radio hissed for a second, and then Zoe's voice broke through the static. "Luca, you copy?"

  "Yeah, the fire's contained," He croaked. "Status?"

  "We're drifting, but the real problem is we're running on auxiliary distribution breakers," Zoe reported. "The auxiliary breakers aren't rated for more than a fraction of the reactor's output. Push past thirty percent and they'll trip too."

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "We're on limited power," Zoe finished, "and if we try to run engines or weapons, we'll blow those auxiliary distribution breakers too."

  "Joey's heading to the hangar for protective gear," Luca said into the radio, his mind already racing. "Zoe, I need you and Emily to find a way to balance the load from the bridge. Keep us under the auxiliary limits."

  He turned to the soot-covered engineers. "The main HV breaker is fried. Danny, you said there's a spare in Storage Bay Two?"

  Danny nodded, his face gray. "Yeah. It's a vacuum breaker assembly. Big, heavy as hell, but manageable with the three of us."

  "Let's get going," Luca said. "Ryan, Chris, you two are with me. We're swapping it out."

  They found the spare in Storage Bay Two, a cramped compartment filled with sealed crates. Emergency lighting cast weird shadows, making it hard to read the labels.

  "There." Chris pointed to a crate marked 'HV Circuit Breaker Assembly - 25kV Vacuum Type.' "That's our replacement."

  The crate was a chest-high block of reinforced metal. Moving it without a lift was going to be a bitch.

  Ryan stared at the crate. "We're screwed." He was still breathing hard from the fire suppression, and Luca could see sweat stains spreading across his shirt despite the dropping temperature.

  "Joey, how's that protective gear coming?" Luca called over the radio.

  "Found the uniforms and the masks," Joey's voice came over the radio, slightly distorted. "Oxygen's good for maybe an hour in each tank."

  An hour of oxygen. That should be enough time, he thought… assuming they didn't run into any more disasters.

  The latches gave way with metallic clicks, and they pried open the top of the crate. Inside, nestled in protective foam, was the new breaker assembly—a block of gray metal and bright yellow warning labels. Their only spare. This was their spare, they didn't have anymore.

  "Careful with this," Ryan grunted as they hoisted it out. "These vacuum cans are supposed to be modular, but this bastard is dense as a fucking rock." He adjusted his grip, sweat already beading on his forehead. "Drop it and we're really screwed."

  "Where's your power armor now, big guy?" Luca grunted as his fingers tried to grab hold.

  "God knows," Danny replied, huffing and puffing. "It's back there somewhere."

  They managed to get the breaker assembly out of the crate and onto a dolly.

  "Easy, now," Ryan muttered as they maneuvered around a corner. "Don't let it tip."

  By the time they reached the burned-out switchgear room, Luca's lungs burned with every breath, and his vision was starting to blur. The smoke hadn't cleared, and the air recycling system was still struggling on auxiliary power.

  Joey appeared through the haze, carrying a bag full of emergency gear. A fucking welcome sight. He tossed oxygen masks to each of them. Luca had never been so grateful to breathe through a mask on his face.

  "Thank God," Ryan gasped, his voice muffled by the hiss as he turned on the oxygen.

  With oxygen flowing and better lighting, Chris and Ryan worked together, disconnecting the burned breaker to make way for the replacement.

  "Still nothing from the Genesis Platform," Emily reported over the radio. "No response."

  Ryan's voice came over the radio. "This is a nightmare, Captain. To install the new main HV breaker, we have to shut down the entire main bus."

  Luca's throat went dry.

  "The auxiliary distribution breakers are fed from that same main bus," Chris added. "If we shut it down to swap the main HV breaker, the whole ship goes dark. No power at all."

  They were trapped in a classic engineering deadlock. A two-front crisis. They couldn't fix the power without shutting it off, and they couldn't shut it off without losing life support.

  This was no longer a problem for engineers. This was a problem for a commander.

  Luca keyed his radio. "Emily, you hearing this?"

  "I am," she replied. "I can direct-wire the battery bank to the life-support regulators, bypass the main bus entirely. But it'll only handle life support and minimal lighting. Maybe twenty minutes before the batteries are drained."

  Twenty minutes. He looked at the complex breaker assembly and the two engineers staring at an impossible problem.

  "Okay," Luca said, a plan forming in his mind. "We're going to do this fast and dirty. Emily, bypass life support to the emergency batteries. Ryan, Chris, the moment she gives us the all-clear, you kill the main bus and swap that HV breaker. Twenty minutes, no margin for error."

  "Captain," Chris said, "if something goes wrong with the installation, if the new main HV breaker doesn't seat properly or there's a fault..."

  "Then we'll deal with it," Luca stated. "Emily, make the bypass."

  He was no engineer, but he was the only one who could make this call.

  "On your mark, Captain," Ryan said.

  "Emily," Luca said into the radio. "Do it."

  The main corridor lights died, replaced by dim emergency strips. The ship's deep hum vanished, leaving an ominous quiet broken only by the hiss of their oxygen masks. The deck plates beneath their boots felt suddenly cold.

  "The main bus is dead!" Ryan called. "Clock starts now!"

  The trip back up through the ship was a grueling climb through heat and haze. The smoke was finally starting to clear as the air recyclers struggled back to partial functionality. His legs felt like rubber from exhaustion and stress, and the oxygen mask was making his face sweat under the safety goggles.

  Emily looked up when he entered, her mask secure. "Luca! How's the situation below?"

  "The breaker's almost online," He said, pulling off his oxygen mask and immediately regretting it. The air up here was better, but it still tasted wrong. "Chris and Ryan are finishing the installation now."

  "Thank God," Zoe muttered, not looking up from her navigation console.

  "Any luck reaching Dad?" He asked.

  She shook her head. "Nothing. Either they're not monitoring, or they can't risk responding. I've tried everything."

  "He knows we're alive," Luca said, more to convince himself than her. "He's watching. He has to be."

  The bridge radio buzzed. "Twenty minutes are up, Captain," Ryan's voice said. "How's it look from your end?"

  Luca looked at Emily. She took a deep breath. "Bringing the main bus back online... now."

  The emergency lights flickered back on. On the main display, the power grid schematic, once a mess of red warnings, now showed a clean, stable green line flowing from the reactor, through the new breaker, and out to the rest of the ship.

  "Power's back online!" Ryan's voice came over the radio. "We've got full reactor output flowing through the new main HV breaker."

  The bridge lights flickered and then stabilized, shifting from the red emergency lighting to normal white illumination. Displays that had been dark suddenly sprang to life, showing cascades of data and system diagnostics.

  "Holy shit," Zoe breathed. "I've got full telemetry, gravitational mapping, and collision avoidance."

  His shoulders dropped. They'd actually pulled it off. Emily was smiling for the first time since they'd launched, and damn if she didn't look good doing it. Even covered in soot and exhaustion, coordinating a ship's power grid like a boss.

  "Alright, Zoe," Luca said, standing next to her. "Let's see if we can get some proper thrust and figure out where the hell we're going."

  Zoe nodded. "Routing power to main engines now. We should have maneuvering capability in about thirty seconds."

  The ship rumbled with new energy. Luca could feel the deck plates vibrating as the fusion reactor ramped up to meet the new demand. It was working. It was actually working.

  "Main thrusters responding," Zoe announced. "I've got attitude control and... wait."

  Something in her voice made Luca pause. The smile vanished from her face.

  "What is it?" Emily asked, already moving to her diagnostic panels.

  "Power surge in the life support grid," Zoe muttered. "The thruster activation is causing a feedback loop. That bypass Emily set up... it's not stable under this kind of load. The system's trying to compensate, but I can't..."

  The warning klaxons blared before she could finish her sentence. Red lights flashed across every console on the bridge, and the ship's automated voice began announcing:

  "Critical system failure. Life support systems are offline. Oxygen levels falling."

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