LIGHTNOVELONLINE 67. Repairs
"Jenny, do you know how the boss would have handled a situation like this in the past?" Sarah asked.
After a brief pause the AI responded, "When Gabe was still alive, he would have placed her in my Re/Gen capsule immediately then begun patching up the ship himself. Rebecca has only needed my services twice since he's been gone, and on those occasions she prioritized the ship's safety and integrity over her own health."
"Remember your bodies heal faster than normal," she added. "If not for the hypoxia, she might have been able to push through her current injuries."
I looked to my girlfriend and asked, "What's involved in patching up the cockpit? Can you do that out here, or do we need to get the ship to a dry-dock or something?"
"It's hard to answer that without seeing the damage," Sarah replied. "If all we're talking about is a missing window, I can patch that in under two hours. I just need to suit up and get into the cockpit with a plate of metal to weld over the hole. Then ideally I'd do an EVA and weld another plate over the outside, to be sure."
"Thanks Sarah," I replied.
My attention returned to the captain, I checked her with my med-scanner again, and had a closer look at her internal injuries. There was a lot of damage, but the most serious was her right kidney was all but destroyed by the impact. Accellerated healing or not I wasn't convinced that'd heal on its own, and I didn't have the drugs or tools I needed to treat it.
"Jenny is there anything on the sensors?" I asked as I glanced at her Re/Gen capsule. "Long-range, short-range, anything at all?"
She replied immediately, "No Amanda. We appear to be quite alone at the moment."
"All right," I said as I made the decision. "Sarah help me get Rebecca into the healing pod. Then we'll start working on the cockpit, and once that's done we'll figure out our next steps."
My girlfriend nodded, "Yes ma'am."
With the ship's gravity still at ten percent it was easy enough to get the captain into Jenny's capsule without making her injuries any worse. Once she appeared to be laying comfortably in there I gently pulled her necklace up and over her head, since I knew she wouldn't want to lose Gabe's fancy ring. I also took a moment to remove her shoes. I left the shoes on the deck nearby but slipped the necklace over my own head so it wouldn't get lost.
And finally I moved to the end of the pod where the control panel was located. That was pretty straightforward, it was a small touch-sensitive screen with three options. Open, close, or a timer.
I assumed the timer was if you were using the thing by yourself, so you'd have a few seconds to get into it before it sealed up. I tapped the close button and the door rotated shut then sealed in place.
The small screen changed to read 'Initializing', then cycled through establishing the neural link and finally settled on 'Patient Briefing'. It stayed there for about five seconds before it switched to 'Processing', along with a count-down timer.
"Eight and a half hours," I told Sarah. "Let's see how much we can fix before the captain wakes up."
She smiled, "Good plan."
Her first stop was the workshop, to get tools and supplies. I quickly gathered up my med-kit then followed my girlfriend.
There were a couple pieces of scrap metal on a shelf in there, basically sheets of alloy kept on-hand specifically for patching up holes. She found one that looked big enough to cover a missing window, then we brought it up to the main deck on the lift.
"How are we going to do this?" I asked as we got to the mess.
Sarah explained, "If you're insisting on helping, then we both suit up. The cockpit antechamber acts like an airlock so we don't have to depressurize the upper deck. Once we're through you'll be my assistant again. Hand me tools, help out if I need you to hold something."
"Worst case scenario," she added, "The damage is worse than we thought and this isn't big enough to patch it, then I might send you back down to the workshop for another big plate like this. Hopefully we're just dealing with a missing window. If there's additional damage to the cockpit structure that'll be another hassle we'll have to address."
I grimaced, "Fingers crossed it's just a window."
We got our e-suits out of the locker in the starboard airlock, then the two of us got suited up. Once we were ready I carried the tools while she carried the metal plate, and we headed forward to the cockpit doors.
The little antechamber did its job, me and Sarah stood in there while we closed the aft door then my girlfriend operated the controls to safely depressurize the small compartment before opening the forward door.
She led the way, and once we were both in the small cockpit I closed the door again behind us while Sarah moved further forward to stand between the two front seats so she could get a better look at the damage. And once I had the cockpit door sealed I turned around and got my own first look at the situation.
"Crap," I sighed.
The missing window seemed like only the start of our problems. All the loose cables and stuff that the captain left laying around had been yanked or disturbed one way or another when the window failed. Half of them were now hanging down in the way, draped over the seats or just dangling loose in the middle of the cockpit. Some were obviously damaged, and I worried it was going to be a nightmare getting everything working again.
Sarah didn't seem as concerned, she was focused on the window. She set the metal plate on the pilot seat for now, then moved closer to the missing window so she could give it a proper look.
"I see how it happened," she commented after a half minute.
I gave her a funny look, not that she could see it with her back to me. "The window got hit, it cracked, then it failed. It's not that complicated. Is it?"
My girlfriend shook her head, "If it took a direct hit from a piece of the warhead it would have been breached or blown out immediately. There's some damage on the nose of the ship. It looks like a chunk was knocked off there and that's what hit the window."
She added with a sigh, "We'll have to do an exterior inspection when we're done here. I bet we're going to find all sorts of little holes and damage to the hull plates."
"Ok," I sighed as well. "One thing at a time though, how's the window look? Can you fix that?"
Sarah nodded, "Yeah I don't see any structural damage. There's some damage to the frame but that's the sort of thing Mel's shipyard will be able to fix or replace. For now we'll weld a plate overtop from in here, then another one on the outside."
She took some rough measurements then used a cutting tool to trim the plate to the right size and shape. Once that was done I held it in place while she used a welding tool to secure it to the frame around the missing window.
We didn't immediately repressurize the cockpit, not up to full anyways. We slowly brought it up to about five percent pressure, then Sarah monitored the engineering panel for any signs it was leaking. It looked good, but she didn't want to fully pressurize it till we had the exterior patches in place as well. And that was a lot more involved.
First we had to cut the ship's gravity completely, then we got some more of those metal plates from the workshop before finally doing an EVA.
We went through the starboard airlock into the shuttle, then hooked up to the tether in there. Just like when Rebecca and I were at the Hammersmith, I was tethered to the shuttle and Sarah was tethered to me. The shuttle stayed docked to the ship, but we depressurized it then opened the overhead loading door and climbed out that way.
Both Sarah and I had toolkits clipped to our belts, and I was carrying a recovery bag full of assorted metal patch plates. We carefully made our way forward along the top of the ship to the cockpit. Sarah had another look at the damage from that angle, and finally welded another plate over the missing window.
The two of us barely spoke, apart from the bare minimum to get the work done. When we finished at the window we moved forward to the damaged nose of the ship. I hadn't even noticed that when it happened, but it was obvious from out here. A corner of of the forward sensor assembly had been hit and a fist-sized chunk of the housing was missing. That's probably what hit the window.
There wasn't anything we could do about it, and Jenny didn't say anything about sensors being offline so I figured it was still working. Sarah welded a patch over the hole and we continued on down to the main cargo airlock and ramp.
The ramp was half-open, and as soon as I saw it I knew something was wrong. It wasn't quite straight, the starboard side was lower than the port side.
There was more than enough room for both me and Sarah to slip past the ramp into the airlock, and my girlfriend immediately began inspecting the damage. Though it seemed obvious to me, the starboard-side mechanism was broken and the strut was bent.
"I can't really repair this," Sarah sighed. "Not into a usable state anyways. Best I can do is a short-term patch, so we can close it up. Should be enough to get us to the shipyard anyways."
"Understood," I replied. "How can I help?"
She ended up cutting away the bent parts of the strut, then replaced them with a few thin strips of the patch plate, welded together to make them long enough to reach. I was positive the repair wouldn't take any weight or strain, it was clearly a very short-term solution.
Sarah confirmed that as she was working on it, "This will let us close the ramp in zero gravity, but if we try and use the ramp under any kind of gravity it'll just break again. So we can consider the main airlock out of commission pending actual repairs."
The last thing we did was weld patches over a few small holes in the ramp. There were matching holes in the main airlock doors, but we'd have to patch those from inside the hold. One thing that freaked me out a bit was recognizing one set of holes in the ramp and inner doors was the same size and shape as the hole in our captain.
After the welds were finished I followed Sarah back out the half-open ramp. She moved to the exterior controls and hit the switch to seal the ship. The ramp silently pulled itself shut, and lights on the panel suggested it was sealed. Or at least locked, which was probably the best we could hope for.
The two of us did a final tour around the front of the Demeter, and Sarah welded little patches over another dozen small holes she found in the streamlined outer hull plating. Finally the two of us made our way back to the shuttle and into the ship.
Our last task was the main hold, which was still depressurized. We stayed in our suits and used the starboard ladderway to get down there, then Sarah welded patches over the holes we'd seen in the airlock door. Finally we brought the hold up to five percent pressure to test the integrity, and it seemed like the patches were holding.
Sarah and I went back up the ladderway to the starboard airlock and finally emerged from our e-suits.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we stowed the suits and put the tools away, and asked "Is that everything now?"
"Not yet cutie," my girlfriend replied apologetically. "We still have to deal with the mess in the cockpit."
Before we could do that we needed to be absolutely sure the welds and patches were holding, so Sarah brought the cockpit up to full pressure while we were both in the safety of the engineering compartment. She also restored the ship's gravity to normal at the same time. Then she kept a close eye on the life-support console's pressure readings, but it seemed like both the cockpit and main hold were good.
We still kept the cockpit's doors closed and sealed just in case, but it seemed safe to work in there without e-suits which was nice.
And fortunately Jenny was right, most of the damage was isolated to the controls along the starboard side of the pilot's seat. Sarah pulled out the breakers and disabled just about everything on that side of the cockpit, then the two of us carefully put all the dangling cables and dislodged conduits back where they belonged. And my girlfriend took care of the ones that had come unplugged or were damaged.
It took us another two hours but when we were finished the engineering and copilot stations both powered up without any trouble, and the ship could be flown from the copilot's position.
I took my seat and checked the sensors first. We were still alone, there were no other ships or anything else in the area. I set up one of the automated proximity alerts like Piper showed me way back when, but decided to leave us on conventional drive for now. I figured we probably weren't going to continue on to Fuminja, so best to let the captain decide where we'd go from here.
"We should probably head back down to the secondary hold now," Sarah commented. "I think the boss will be just about done."
"Right," I nodded slowly. I gave the sensors and nav screens one last look, then got up out of my seat.
I turned to follow Sarah out when my eyes settled on that metal plate welded over the missing window on the starboard side of the cockpit. I hadn't really looked at it the whole time we were sorting out all the cables and things, but for some reason the sight of it froze me for a few moments.
The past eight hours or so I'd been running on adrenaline and focused on doing the repairs with Sarah. Now that the crisis was more or less over, the sight of that patch let all my bottled up thoughts and emotions out all at once.
My mind raced and I couldn't help thinking, if things had been just a little different the window could have gone sooner. Or it could have gone immediately. I could have been killed, blown out into the void. Or if we'd put off scanning the cargo another twenty minutes we all could have been killed. Or any of a dozen other scenarios could have seen some or all of my friends killed.
Sarah caught me as my knees suddenly gave out, she supported me as the two of us left the cockpit together.
"C'mon Amanda," she said as she led me into the mess. "Let's have a drink, then we'll go see Rebecca and Jenny."
