Aleesha Shray sighed and wiped her brow, leaving a smear of engine grease across her forehead. It was unseasonably hot, and the sun beating down overhead was scorching on the bare skin of her arms. "The rainy season cannot come soon enough," she grumbled.
"Yeah, and as soon as it gets here you'll be whining about how much you miss the sun," her brother Ben teased, nudging her with his foot. "How's it looking in there?"
"I can't find anything wrong with it," Aleesha grumbled. "Can you take a look?"
"Sure," Ben grinned. Aleesha scooted over on the grating of the scaffold platform, allowing Ben to settle down in her place in front of the access hatch in the side of the ship she'd been poking around in. After a few minutes, he pulled his hands out of the hatch, just as covered in grease as his sister. "I got nothing. Maybe it's in a different section?"
"The diagnostic readout said it was here," Aleesha grumbled.
"Oh, come on, Leesh," Ben teased, "you should know better than to trust a diagnostic readout completely."
Aleesha snorted. "I guess you're right," she said. She pulled a datapad out of her pocket and passed it to Ben. He plugged it into the diagnostics port inside the panel and squinted at the results that scrolled across the screen.
"According to this, there's nothing wrong," he sighed, disconnecting the pad and passing it back to Aleesha.
"You've got to be kidding me," she grumbled.
"Back to the overview it is," Ben laughed. He crawled to the edge of the scaffolding and shimmied down the side, Aleesha following once he was on the ground. They headed into the ship, arguing over the datapad.
Inside the ship, they found Bruck Celchu, a thin, wiry human boy with icy blue hair, matching eyes, and fair skin, hunched over the navicomputer in the cockpit.
"How's it going?" Aleesha asked, patting Bruck on the shoulder as she and Ben slipped past him, leaving a greasy handprint on his white shirt.
"Almost done," Bruck replied. "The navicomputer had to be completely reconfigured, not to mention updating both hardware and software. But it's in pretty good shape now. Should be pretty much optimized. I might have to do some fiddling to get it really perfect, but…"
"Good to hear," Aleesha grinned. "Ben, what does that readout say?"
"No errors," Ben sighed.
"Seriously?" Aleesha demanded, leaning over his shoulder to look at the readout on the datapad screen. "Kriffing… Fine. Whatever. I'll check it again later; maybe it'll decide to cooperate then."
Ben laughed, disconnected the datapad, and passed it to his sister. "Got anything else for me while I'm here?"
"Nothing ship-wise, but I'm sure you know there are lots of other things that could use your attention right now," Aleesha led the way back out of the ship and into the beating sun. "The hydroponics systems both in the city and on the Breath of the Wild have had rolling malfunctions. Orrill is doing his best with the ones on the ship, but he said he could use another set of hands, and no-one currently on duty up there has mechanical skills. Besides that, the environmental controls in apartment block four have also been malfunctioning. It's getting too cold in there at night for the Aleena."
Ben nodded. "Where do you want me to start?"
Aleesha sighed. "I guess with the environmental controls. The temp dropped so low in there last night that Jola and Tabrin had a few Aleena come in with early-stage hypothermia. They're cold-blooded, so it really doesn't take much."
"Will do," said Ben.
"I think I have time to check on the city hydroponic system," Aleesha continued. "If not, another day shouldn't kill it. And Orrill can handle the ship's system until you can get up there. If there's an emergency, he'll call."
"Aleesha!" the call came from the other side of the flight deck. Aleesha groaned inwardly, but turned to find the source of the shout. She waved at the figure jogging towards her.
"I'll catch you later," Ben grinned. "Good luck."
Aleesha let out a wordless grumble as Ben left and the new figure joined her. "What is it, Myckela?" she sighed.
"You got a minute?" Myckela asked, falling in step beside Aleesha as the smaller woman resumed her journey towards the city's hydroponics labs. While much of the food the occupants of the city needed to survive was grown in the converted freighter in geosynchronous orbit over the settlement, the Breath of the Wild, medicinal herbs and similar plants were grown in a more easily-accessible garden in a converted medical lab in the city itself.
Haven, while viewed as something of a utopia by its inhabitants, was a scavenged city. It was inhabited entirely by refugees and former members of the Galactic Resistance that had become disillusioned with their fellow rebels, and had taken over an abandoned polis on a dead world, decimated by a plague over a decade earlier, which had wiped out almost all of the native peoples. What had originally begun as a small band of former brothers-in-arms, trying to make a better life for themselves, and anyone else who wanted it without the bureaucracy of the Resistance, had boomed into an entire civilization that was rapidly running out of space in the city it occupied and was preparing to expand to a second. Because everything they had was recycled, however, that meant that malfunctions were common, and jerry-rigging to repair them was just as frequent.
"Can you walk and talk?" Aleesha asked. As one of the colony's founders, her attention tended to be in high demand. Today was an easy day. So far, at least.
"Sure," Myckela said.
"Then what do you need?"
"I've been measuring the water level on the city's supports regularly, as you know," Myckela explained. "Trying to get better at predicting when the rainy season will start and how bad the storms will be."
"And?"
"As you know, the planet is mostly ocean, with the exception of some fairly small landmasses over the poles. That's why all of the original cities were built with supports going down into the ocean floor at relatively shallow points in the seabed. That means that by checking the water level here, I can get a decent idea of where it's at across the planet."
"Right."
"Well, my recent measurements of the water level on our supports is… concerning, to say the least?"
"Myckela…"
"Sorry, right," the scientist laughed sheepishly. "Basically, we know that the planet's water cycle generally pulls evaporating water from the ocean to storm systems that form over the poles for about half of the year. When they grow to a certain point, they begin to break out and spread across the rest of the planet, leading to the six-month rainy season we've come to know and love—or maybe hate. The more water the storm systems suck up, the heavier the rains, the worse the storms, and so on."
"So the fact that we're currently at what is, at least to our knowledge, an unprecedented low in planetary water level means that we'll also likely be facing storms of unprecedented power," Aleesha finished.
"As far as I can tell," Myckela sighed. "If I could get weather data recorded by the city's original occupants, my predictions could be way more on point, but it was too corrupted by the damage done to the computer systems by scavengers before we got here. I've reached out to the members of the restoration team on Sanctum, asking them to keep an eye out for anything about meteorological trends, but they're coming up empty, too, for now."
Aleesha nodded. "Draft some plans on what we need to do to get through the storms. There's a council meeting next week. I want you to at least have something to present by then."
"Will do," Myckela nodded. "See you 'round, Captain."
"See ya."
Aleesha only made it a few feet further on the walkway before red lights began to flash and a siren sounded. "Now what?" she groaned, tapping her earpiece. "What's going on?"
Captain, we have an incoming ship.
"Who is it?" Aleesha asked, turning on her heel and heading back towards the main flight deck, this time at a dead run.
The ship is signalling itself as the Banner. No records in our systems.
"Get them on hailing frequencies. Patch them through to me if you do."
Coming through now, ma'am.
Aleesha came to a stop a few feet from the starfighter she had been heading towards. "This is Captain Aleesha Shray of Haven. State your name and business here or you will be shot down."
The radio fizzled for a moment, then a tinny voice sounded in her ear. Aleesha Shray? I thought you were going by Allie Raysh now.
Aleesha let out a short laugh and shook her head. She tapped the earpiece to switch frequencies. "Haven Defense Fleet, stand down. They're friendlies." Her voice echoed through the loudspeakers around the flight deck. In a few moments, the ships were powered down, the alarm had been turned off, and people were trickling back to their duties around the city. Aleesha switched back to the hailing frequency. "Conlon. Good to hear from you. What brings you to Haven?"
I need some information. I'm hoping you'll have it.
"Well, I'll do what I can," Aleesha replied. "Flight control will direct you to an open landing platform."
No need. We can make a water landing.
Aleesha arched her eyebrows. "Whatever you say, Conlon. See you soon."
.*.*.*.*.*.
Ben joined Aleesha at the railing of the walkway that ran around Haven's exterior. "I hear we have visitors."
"Yep. Did you get the Aleena's weather controls fixed?"
"Yeah, it was a short in the temperature control mechanism. I repaired the wiring. I'll monitor it for a few days to make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm also going to try and rig a diagnostic relay straight to my datapad, to keep an eye out for future malfunctions before they can blow up into something big and get people hurt."
"Good plan," Aleesha nodded.
"So, who's incoming?"
"You remember Spot Conlon?"
"Wasn't he in officer training with you and Obi?"
"That's the one. We worked together in intelligence for a while, too. He was under my command."
"Okay, what about him?"
"I guess we'll find out soon," Aleesha pointed at the silhouette descending from the sky above them.
Ben's jaw dropped in utter amazement. "Wait… That's a sky-sailer."
"A what?"
"Pretty much the ultimate pleasure cruiser on today's market. Designed after ancient sea-sailing vessels. Entirely self-sufficient—they draw all of their power from solar sails. They don't even need fuel. They're protected by a retractable bubble of reinforced transparisteel and some pretty heavy-duty shields."
"Fancy," Aleesha whistled.
"They can also serve as sea-sailers. In fact, something like that would come in pretty handy around here, especially with the second colony under construction."
"Ben," Aleesha sighed. "If they're top-of-the-line pleasure cruisers, we can't exactly afford them."
"No, no—I don't mean buy one, I mean build one!" Ben said excitedly. "I could totally rig something up. I wouldn't trust it to leave atmosphere, but to get between here and Sanctum? No problem. I bet I could even rig up some low-grade hoverfield emitters and engines so it doesn't have to sail across the water when it's really turbulent, and ways to draw power from wind and tidal energy for when the sun isn't strong enough to charge the sails."
"Sounds like a tall order," Aleesha said.
"Oh please," Ben grinned. "If anyone can do it, I can."
Aleesha arched an eyebrow as she pulled away from the railing. "We'll talk about it later. For now, let's go meet our guests."
Down on one of the lowest piers of Haven, Aleesha and Ben waited as the Banner touched down in the water and floated slowly into her berth. A mechanical gangplank extended up from the ship's deck, anchoring itself on the edge of the pier. A few minutes later, a head appeared over the lip of the walkway. Aleesha grinned and leaned down to offer her hand to the person climbing up the stairs. "Spot Conlon. Welcome to Haven."