Eternity, Book 0 "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 7 Alone in the Dark

Cortez

He knew he was in trouble the instant the world went red then black. External windows died. It was pitch black in the Kodiak. "EDI? Anyone?" No response. Not even static. A very dim red LED above the main power buss fuse. Bloody hell. All right, let's get out of these restraints. Can't see a thing, but… Ah, got it now. Click. Right, so don't break anything. Oh shiny bright, where's the emergency door release?

Vega

"Oooof". Well now. It's kinda dark in here. Not everything down, though, the lamp over the bench is still shiny, the ring main must be intact. Now how do I get out of this stupid net… Stronger than it looks. Ah, here we are, hooo, that's better. Hey, what's that over there? Hm… qué lástima. Shouldn't happen to a dog. Damn, lift's a no-go. Fine. Maintenance shaft then.

"Madre de díos. Tali might get through here, but can I?" Are we stuck down here? No quiero pensar en eso, ni en pintura. "Where the hell is Cortez when you need him?" Probably running diagnostics. Where's everybody?

Allers

"This really isn't the way I wanted to go." In moments of fancy following the offhand offing of everyone she knew on Bekenstein, Allers had occasionally pictured herself piloting a skyvan into a Reaper as one last act of defiance, but underneath all the insouciance, she knew herself to be no Emily Wong. Shepard had actually cracked up a little, talking about her.

Her own ideal way to go would be in bed, surrounded by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and grandchildren. Well she was in bed all right… and unless someone else was alive, unlikely to ever get out of it. At that point a floor panel on the right tilted slowly open, fell with a muffled donk against the wall, and two snorting huffing alien monsters rose grinning over her bedside.

"Good morning, fine lady! And such a vision of helpless loveliness! Surely this is the maja I see before me!"

"Ignore him, he wouldn't know Goya from Velásquez, let alone la vestida from la desnuda. Can we perhaps assist?"

These juvenile delinquents were not quite the attending angels she had in mind, but once free, she kissed Cortez' cheek anyway. Prompting Vega:

"Hey, don't I get one?"

"Share mine."

"Ew!"

Adams

"Ow… EDI? Oh yeah."

The general quarters webbing was not just extremely uncomfortable, but hard to stow back in the wall. The idea was probably that there would be auto-retract mechanisms running; but right now, almost nothing at all was. Just the main Engineering Console, offline but functional. A few emergency lights in the floor, and the core itself. System reset on the console. POST, please. Adams grabbed a torch from Gabby's station.

Being in the core's shadow was probably responsible for the continued operation of the drive controls. The front would have hit from the rear; the Tantalus core seemed to have shielded the most critical components. Well bravo EDI, is that why you had the kids take the stasis projector upstairs? But it didn't do any good, did it. No way it would cover the whole AI facility.

Console one passed the POST. First order of business: ring power from aux to main. The core remained stable, courtesy of the Engineering Console. Board was red though, except for Consoles one and two (Donnelly's). Ring main passed continuity checks, good.

Nothing relying on semiconductor pico-scale integration was working. Fortunately the Normandy, as a military vessel, had backup resources of increasing robustness (but decreasing convenience) the further back in tech one went. It was Adams' guess that the primitive tech was hobbled by slow-blown circuit-breakers and fuses. A few seconds effort confirmed this; electroluminescent backup lamps lit as he reset local layer-one.

Attomech layer-two unencrypted control passed local checks. That would be enough to operate the ship, but not ideal, stay out of war situations, and it would take hours to switch out the electro-optical layer-3 which was on the fritz.

"I'm going to need parts." Main store was in the shuttle bay, but shielded lockers one and two were in the cargo bays. There was also a small cache he maintained (against policy) near Jack's old hidey-hole in the subwell. Next item: Adams enabled local control of elevator and partition doors. Time to explore. He grabbed the torch, moving into the access corridor where he had access to all floor distribution nodes. Resetting breakers brought doors back on-line.

Adams proceeded to Allers' converted cargo bay door, but didn't get two metres before the unmistakeable bulk of James Vega emerged, backing up, closely pressed by the reporter herself. "Out! The pair of you!" Cortez was flattened against the aft bulkhead, holding both hands out like he was pushing away a vengeful spirit… and actually Allers looked like sparks might fly from her disarranged hairdo.

Out of the corner of his mouth Adams whispered to Cortez, "What–?", as a small woman pushed the huge soldier down the hall by sheer force of personality. "Vega thought it would be a good idea to use the camera as a torch. Started pushing buttons."

"Uh… ma'am?

"What!"

"I need to get in there."

Allers looked baffled. "What in the name of God for?" Adams prickled. "So the ship can live, ma'am. And just possibly you too." Allers deflated, a little. "Oh. Okay. Be quick please, I think this buffoon has destroyed my camera."

"Uh, just let me see… no, ma'am, the basic camera is fine, but you've lost whatever was in working memory. Um, rapid store is corrupt, I could reboot the default VI and wipe it."

"I don't care, the last five days all went to head office anyway, can you make it go pleeeze?" So Adams spent forty precious seconds rebinding the outer kernel, at which point the camera came back on line and took up station at Allers' shoulder.

Just in time to catch a middle-aged engineer getting a hot smooch from a hotter reporter chick. Not fully appreciated just then. Initially, what Adams most remembered from the next few hours was how irritating it was to have a reporter eliciting a running commentary as he tried to bring a ship back to life. Later events modified this view:
– On the one hand, it would make him famous, which was far from obvious at the time.
– On the other hand, he would for years afterwards get interesting fan mail… the men were rather creepy.
– On the gripping hand, he had a go-fer which he desperately needed, especially in the first few minutes.

Moreau

The webbing did not auto-retract. Near-complete darkness; a few LED telltales, mostly red and orange. "EDI?" No response. Power offline. But they weren't vapor, so the eezo core hadn't destabilized. It took nearly thirty seconds of fiddling to find the manual control.

It was too stiff for his broken thumb. Jeff screamed in frustration.

Donnelly

"Uh, Tali?" No answer. Gabby worked it out first:

"Kenneth! Stasis will still be in effect."

Donnelly's ears reported a faint jingle and a fairly bright sodium-D light came from Daniels' omnitool. Tali sat on top of the stasis projector, within the field – invisible under the monochromatic glow – and next to the head of EDI's remote. Which looked very peaceful and very dead. Damn.

"Super. Thanks Mum. Easy to guess what's happened to the power."

"Yup. EM pulse. Must have been a fantastic gradient to get through superconductive Faraday shields."

"Nah. Alternating at the characteristic frequency, dear girl, the Cooper pairs see resistance, the super heats up and suddenly no EM shield. But that wouldn't follow us through FTL, and if it did by inverse square it would be essentially zero magnitude real fast. It must have been continuously recreated by whatever that red flash was."

"EDI mentioned a quantum soliton grid."

"And what the bejeesus is that?"

"Telling would take too long Kenneth. I wouldn't have thought it could be done at all. Anyway, let's get EDI back up."

"I don't think we can, dear girl. She asked me to tell everyone, goodbye."

Gabby looked shocked, for the first time Kenneth could remember since last hogmanay ("Kiss me now!" She'd threatened to knee him in the groin if he did that again. Better to stick to wooing by insult).

"We have to tell Tali!"

"It's got a few minutes to run, yet. Wait, the tell-tales are up. Adams has finally got busy." They began restoring local reticulation. EDI's hardware stubbornly refused to boot. Just as Ken was concluding, "Every pico-scale component outside the stasis field is bollixed," Tali fell off the stasis projector. "Whew. What did I miss?"

"Are there any problems with that suit of yours?"

"Yes, but everything's clamped, it's fixable. EDI saved my life. If my suit dies, I die."

"Well, it looks like EDI's not going to be around for a while. Even more damage than we thought."

"What about the DPU?" Donnelly was struck by the stress in Tali's voice.

"Fried, old girl. Look for yourself."

Adams

"Okay, kids. What have we got?"

"EDI's unbootable."

"Well, we sort of expected that." Allers: "We did?"

Chakwas poked her head around the door, while Allers muttered to a non-existent (yet) audience a brief description of the AI's importance.

"I've got most of the crew assembling in the commons, Greg. No serious injuries yet. Tali, how are you?"

"Fine, Doctor, EDI said to put the stasis projector here and I should sit on it. I thought we'd be putting the stasis projector over the DPU– "

Gabby interrupted, "She was protecting you, Tali. No suit, no Tali. For now, anyway. She told Kenneth to tell everyone, "Goodbye". Told me what it was that hit us. She was compressing information, I think. Telling everyone what they needed to know in a form they individually could assimilate fastest."

Adams frowned, sighed. "I suppose that means EDI's gone." But a bell was ringing somewhere. He shook his head. Sleep on it. "Look, I've got to enable the remaining floors. Tali, with me. Gabby, you and Kenneth see if you can liberate Garrus and get the main guns up."

He strode out the door. Tali ran to follow. "I suppose we get Liara?"

"No. You do, please. I've got to see to Joker."

"Joker? What about Ashley?"

Adams turned in surprise. "Hasn't Karin got her out of the lounge?"

"She's not in the lounge, Greg. I saw her catch the lift up."

"She must be with Joker. Catch you soon."

Moreau

After five minutes' futile cursing, Joker retrieved a stylus from a breast pocket and, very carefully, levered up the web release. Two minutes' rest brought the throbbing in his joints to halfway acceptable levels. Feeling better, he fumbled his way to the back of the cockpit. A few seconds of probing brought the shutter control under his fingertips.

No response. More fumbling. The shielded locker had a pistol with a laser sight. Amazingly, it still worked. With that Joker was able to find a torch. With that he found the ring main. Okay… local breakers… reset.

The crash field cleared. Adams stood in the oval, Allers behind him. "Joker! Good to see you're alive. You got free of the belt then?"

"Yeah, now I know how I'll feel when I'm old. Oh wait, who's at the core?"

"Me again, in a minute, getting crowded."

Joker began bringing up cockpit emergency systems. Many LEDs had turned green. Good. Now he could maneuver! "All hands, general quarters."

T'Soni walked up to the cockpit, with Tali and Glyph. "Jeff, Ashley isn't with you?"

"No! Kind of busy here! She's not in the lounge?"

Now try the shutters. They pulled back. "Awww, shit! CRASH STATIONS!"

– Next chapter will be #8, "Charity" –

Wednesday, July 15, 2015