The Brave One

“If we still have our minds and our hearts and each other, whatever comes next, we’ll be fine.”

Morgon was the stable star, the second stop on their tour of the Vance Nebula. Iberico, the stellar photographer was calibrating his inner rig. Behind him, gazing out the window at the arching flares, magnified in the nano-glass’s telescopic display, were the power couple from Kalergol; Kekoa kept forgetting their names because Sashka had done the booking for this run. She was in the nook fixing drinks for the tourists from Ivar, who were floating upside down, hovering above Iberico, and trying to find the best angle to observe Morgon’s roiling cauldron of nuclear energy. They were the ones who spotted it first.

“Is that normal, Captain?” the female tourist said, Dreya, he thought her name was.

She spoke with such diffidence that Kekoa ignored the question entirely.

“I don’t think that’s normal,” she stated with a little more urgency.

It was enough to get him to turn his head from Iberico’s equipment conundrum up toward the Ivarians.

“Is what normal?” Kekoa asked, smiling as they were, at the novelty of a weightless upside-down conversation, hovering above a raging star.

“God no,” Iberico gasped, the tone in his voice unmistakable.

Dreya’s question had caught the astronomer’s attention long enough to look out the window, and better than any of them, Iberico knew what he was looking at.

Kekoa locked eyes with the stellar photographer. There was no need for explanation. That was when the alarm began to sound.

A siren blared three times, followed by the instruction that began to run on a loop: “Warning. Retreat to the radiation room immediately. Stellar flare imminent. Warning.”

“Sash, get a head count!” Kekoa shouted to his niece—the first mate tending bar.

“Is this another drill?” one of the tourists shouted from the sitting area. Sashka had just served them lunch.

“It’s not a drill!” Kekoa shouted. “Get to the inner bunker. You all know the way. Quickly and calmly. Go. Do it now.”

Iberico was floating at the window, doing math apparently. “We have fifty seconds maybe.”

“Sash!” Kekoa shouted to his niece. “Get the bots to the door and have Windsor pull off Nayla’s head.”

“Uncle K, what?” she shouted back down the hallway. In the confusion of the moment, she couldn’t hear him on coms.

“Her head. I want her head in the bunker before the flare hits.”

Iberico looked at Kekoa. “I’d be disappointed that I didn’t have time to finish setting up, but this will fry all my equipment anyhow.”

“Go,” Kekoa said. “Forty seconds now.”

“This will kill us,” Iberico said. “If not instantly, certainly in the dead ship we’ll be floating in. I’d rather watch.”

“And I’d rather have your expertise after we get hit, so I’m ordering you to the bunker for the good of the group.”

“Are you coming, Captain? Thirty seconds now probably.”

“Wait, hold at the archway,” Kekoa said. “Sash, the head count?”

“They’re all here except Iberico. And you.”

“Okay, standby at the door with Windsor,” Kekoa said. The Captain was flying toward his B-kit, for whatever that might be worth. “And get yourself inside, Sash. Now. Don’t wait.”

Kekoa pulled out the crate, shouting for the astronomer to look back toward him. Then he hurled the crate across the open viewing deck toward the archway.

“Inside,” Kekoa shouted to Iberico. “Get it to Windsor.”

“Fifteen seconds, max!” the astronomer shouted back as he guided the large crate into the interior corridor. “Hurry, Captain!”

Kekoa pushed off the wall with a full long leap and prepared himself to rebound off the frame of the archway to the inner corridor. As he hit the frame, bouncing toward the inner bunker, there seemed a crowd in front of him, but there wasn’t time to take a pause. As he flew, certain he was destined to crash into a pile of humanity on the bunker’s threshold, dooming them all to be irradiated, Kekoa winced and braced himself, preparing to try and pull as much of that pile inside with him. Windsor, though, had the situation surprisingly in hand. The crate went in by the bot’s left arm, followed by Iberico, who yelped as Windsor tossed him inward. By the time Kekoa arrived, Windsor had pushed Sashka back inside and was turning to direct the Captain’s flight.

Kekoa landed on the Carhall couple, and by the time he’d turned, Windsor had already latched the rad-room from the outside, closing everyone in.

“We got everyone in, Uncle K,” Sashka said.

There was a second of silence as everyone seemed to take a simultaneous breath.

“Are we going to die?” the young man from Ivar said.

Iberico, wincing and rubbing his shoulder, was floating there in that crammed bunker, upside-down to the rest of them. “Welp,” he said. “We are about to find out.”

The ship suddenly lurched backward, surprisingly non-violently, more like a large boat riding a single wave and gently settling in the trough on the other side of the crest. For a few moments, Kekoa’s ship, The Brave One, seemed to creek and groan as it absorbed the force of the stellar flare’s cosmic wind.

The hard lights flickered and went off, and a second later, a set of dimmer emergency lights illuminated the cramped room.

“Still here,” Kekoa said, looking up at Iberico and at the others crowded inside the inner bunker.

“For the time being,” Iberico said, skeptically. “We’ll see what the radiation does to the ship.”

“She’s hardened,” Kekoa said. “Made for this.”

“Nothing was made for this, respectfully, Captain,” Iberico replied. “But the fact we aren’t dead already means there’s hope.”

“There’s always hope,” the young lady from Carhall stated.

“Until there isn’t,” the male executive in the power couple stated.

“Okay,” Kekoa said. “Everyone just take a breath. I know that was a hectic few moments, but we’re all going to have to keep calm and keep our heads about us in order to survive this. It’s going to be a little while until Sash and I can get an assessment on the ship. First, we’re going to need to figure out the situation in here, so I’d ask you to do your best to cooperate, and for right now that means not panicking, staying calm, and allowing us to do our jobs. If you think you have skills that could help us at any point, please let myself or Sashka know.”

Kekoa gestured for Iberico to join him toward the rear of the bunker where Sashka had settled.

“Windsor took my head off,” Nayla, Kekoa’s embodied AI stated, “at your urging, Captain. I quite object to that.”

The way her head chirped out the protest brought an involuntary, if nervous, round of laughter from the humans in the rad-room.

“Sorry, old girl, there wasn’t room for your body,” Kekoa said. “And I suspect we’ll need your mind if we’re going to get out of this.”

“I am disoriented. Where is Windsor, Miss Sashka?” Nayla asked, her eyes directed at the young first-mate.

“He didn’t make it in,” Sashka stated.

“Oh,” Nayla replied. “That is sad news. Windsor was my best friend.”

Whatever humor the humans had found in the conversation dissipated. Everyone seemed to take another deep breath.

There were a total of eleven people in the hardened inner room of The Brave One—one person less than the touring vessel’s official capacity. She was a renovated stellar research ship whose inner rad room was the feature that had sold Kekoa on the ship in the first place. The bunker was cramped, but he had evaluated the gear—the scrubber and purifier, water recycling and hardware—everything was old but sturdy. The dealer had called the room “a hawg—stout, the genuine article,” and he’d finished the pitch by stating, “odds are a billion to one you’ll ever need to use her in the Vance, but the city inspectors will love it.”

And love it they did. Otherwise, they’d never have issued Kekoa the only multi-day permit for the inner nebula out of the Carhall spaceport.

“Are we all really going to be able to breathe in here?” Dreya asked. “It seems tight.”

“The Captain said as much in the safety briefing,” Glen, the Kalergi executive in the power couple stated. “And I know you were paying attention, because you made it in here with us.”

It was his best attempt at being diplomatic.

“Yeah, but …” Dreya shrugged, leaving the thought incomplete, as though her doubts should have been self-explanatory.

“The hardware for the life support is inside the bunker,” Kekoa reassured them. “We’ve got water, a decent stash of food for everyone, and our scrubber in here is industrial class.”

Kekoa opened up the rear panel—a hardened display that was hardwired into several instruments whose electrical components were housed in the interior of the rad room. He had readings on only a handful of the stations: internal radiation levels for the ship’s interior; ambient temperature inside the ship; and a critical reading of sorts in itself—zeros across the board on the ship’s instrumentation.

Iberico laughed when he saw the radiation level. “We might as well be in the corona if that’s correct.”

“It’s correct,” Kekoa said. “The one on the right is the one we should be focused on.”

“What’s that one?” Merritt, one of the tourists from Carhall asked, her tone betraying her terror as much as her eyes. “It looks green.”

“I’m glad you asked,” Kekoa said, smiling. “That’s the radiation level in this room—like a sunny day on the beach in Carhall. No danger.”

“Yes, it’s good,” Iberico said, turning toward the group. “It’s okay.”

“Sash, can you get out your mom’s box for everyone?” Kekoa said.

Kekoa’s teenage niece, to that point, had either been successfully putting on a brave face or had been too shocked by the suddenness of the moment to feel the reality of their peril. The mention of her mother, Kekoa’s older sister Karla, cracked the young woman’s emotional façade to pieces. She froze, floating for a few seconds in silence with wide, watery eyes. Then, when she could no longer suppress the flood of emotion, she began to weep audibly.

The intensity of her sobbing caught the attention of everyone else in the cramped room, who went silent. The couples clenched each others’ hands tight, and the two friends from the Dern cylinders celebrating their mid-year holidays together held each other about the shoulders and softly began to cry.

Sashka continued to weep and kept repeating that she was never going to see her mother again. Even Iberico’s eyes began to water.

“That’s not true,” Kekoa reassured her each time. “Hey, all of you,” he said, turning to the group. “I will tell you exactly where we stand. We are alive. We are together, and we are going to get home.”

“More data is needed,” Nayla’s voice piped up in the ensuing silence, “to make a meaningful calculation.”

“Thanks, Nayla’s head,” Kekoa said, shaking his own head at the AI’s frank input. “but I’ll ask for your assessment if and when we need it.”

It wasn’t irrational or unexpected for an emotional release like that to follow in the shock of the solar storm’s suddenness. In truth, Kekoa himself hadn’t had time to think about his actions. He’d just reacted. He’d followed regulations and run the safety drill at the start of the tour, and without exception, with their lives on the line, they’d all performed admirably.

“You did great, everyone,” Kekoa said. “Every single one of you is worthy of this ship’s name.”

He looked at his niece and smiled.

“The chocolates?” she said.

Kekoa nodded. “Karla, my sister, Sashka’s mom, she bought me this box of chocolates at ship’s christening as a kind of joke. They’re all vacuum sealed—designed to last decades, for a long space flight, I guess—and she joked that I should keep them in the bunker to remind us how sweet life can be if something happened. So Sash is going to pass one out now and one when we get off. I can’t tell you when that will be yet or how, but we all remember the stories of the founders. They may seem like myths they were so long ago, and maybe some parts were mythical, sure, but they’re also true. We’re going to be calm, be brave, and get through this one step at a time. We were made for hardship.”

No one spoke for a while as Sashka continued to pass out the chocolates.

“Good speech,” Misty said.

Kekoa couldn’t tell how sincere she was being, but he detected something there in the body language between her and Glen, her husband, the businessman. She was a politician of some kind on Kalergol, Kekoa remembered vaguely. They were holding back.

Kekoa waited until everyone had been served, somewhat hesitant to say more, as he felt like he’d said everything that needed to be said in the moment.

“I am very grateful, if a bit surprised to be enjoying this,” Iberico stated as he bit into the chocolate. “This is an older vessel, but much sturdier than I would have believed.”

“The hull is hardened,” Kekoa stated. “I got her from the city university on Kappa-Nira. They ran her through their stellar weather program there. I guess they have a decent cluster nearby.”

“The Six,” Iberico answered, nodding. “It’s a good school, supposedly. So they’d used her for field work?”

Kekoa nodded. “I think they were expanding, needed a bigger vessel, and I was looking for something that would pass Carhall’s regulations for the Vance.”

“Pardon,” Glen said. “That’s nice and all, Captain. I’m just … I don’t mean to be rude and interrupt, but it’s not exactly obvious to the rest of us where we stand, exactly.”

“Yeah,” one of the two friends from Dern agreed, Maize, he thought, but he wasn’t positive on both girls’ names yet. “What happened?”

“A solar flare, right?” Dreya, the Ivarian said. “I saw it come right at us.”

“It can’t have hit us flush,” Iberico stated. “Not if we are talking to each other and eating chocolate, but close enough.”

“But it was a flare from the star?” Maize repeated.

“Yes,” Iberico answered. “A coronal mass ejection—an enormous one.”

“So it turns out The Brave One was more The Stupid One flying into the nebula, just like they said back at Carhall,” Dreya’s husband Ayo said.

Kekoa looked over at him, obviously offended, but he didn’t say anything. He was about to respond but Iberico beat him to it.

“That’s not fair. Statistically, I mean … that event on Morgon, of that class? That was not a once-in-a-lifetime event to strike us that far out. That may be a one-in-a-thousand-lifetimes event. And to get hit by it as well?”

Iberico started shaking his head, as though he was just considering it for the first time.

“If it had happened at any other point on the star’s surface, we’d have witnessed the most magnificent show in thousands of years of stellar observation of the Vance.”

“We were well within the regulated distance from Morgon,” Kekoa said. “just extraordinarily unlucky.”

“Again,” Glen said, “all well and good, but the ship? Where do we stand?”

“Ah,” Kekoa said. “Sorry. The short answer is we won’t really know where we stand for a little while, except that we’re safe in here for the time being.”

“What’s the issue?” Misty, the politician asked. “And when will we know?”

Iberico looked at her like she had three heads. “Beyond the solar flare? That’s pretty much the one issue.”

“Well, obviously,” she spat back, “but the Captain said we won’t know for a while where we stand. Why not? What’s happening? We’re not all stellar cartographers or whatever you are.”

“I do remote sensing of all kinds on stellar bodies. It’s a totally different thing from cartography. Not even close to the same thing.”

“Take a breath,” Kekoa said. “It’s uhm … the issue is both electromagnetic and the radiation. The hull is hardened, similar to the rad-room here, but obviously not quite as perfectly. The main problems we’re going to have to deal with will be figuring out what systems may have been fried by the flare, and because of the current radiation levels, we can’t risk trying to bring anything out in the ship back online. Not until the storm passes, but we don’t know when that will happen.”

“What are we talking, though? Days?” Glen asked.

“The professor here probably knows best,” Kekoa said.

“Not days,” Iberico said. “A day, maybe. We won’t know until the radiation levels begin to go down. If they go down.”

“What do you mean if?” Dreya said.

Iberico shrugged. “Again, the hull could have been damaged. Then the ambient radiation from the star could be a problem.”

“Wait, what? Like in the ship?” the other girl from Dern said.

Kekoa shook his head. “I don’t think—” He put up his hands to calm everyone down. “It’s unlikely.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The uncertainty only caused the group to erupt into a cacophony of voices, all speaking at once.

“Nayla!” Kekoa shouted, “It’s unlikely, right?”

“Affirmative. Highly unlikely.”

“Why do you say so?” Iberico asked the AI’s head.

“Had the hull been breached by the stellar flare, the ambient temperature inside the rad-room would likely already be fatal. I can give an approximate range in degrees kelvin if you like, Captain Kekoa?”

“Negative, Nayla.”

“So what’s next, Captain?” Glen asked. “What should we expect?”

“Well, we wait for the radiation levels to go down, and then we’ll start assessing the ship’s systems once it’s safe to do so.”

“How long will that take?”

“The storm is still happening,” Iberico said. “This is a big one. Could be, maybe eight, ten, twelve hours, maybe more. It needs to pass us by. When the radiation levels inside the ship begin to drop it is probably over.”

“As I said,” Kekoa continued, “it’s going to be a little while. So, please, everyone remain calm, do your best to settle in, and we’ll get through this.”

“Thanks for the chocolate,” Dreya’s husband Stoll said from his quiet corner of the rad-room. “When we get back, Sashka, please tell your mother it was delicious and lifted our spirits.”

Sashka had recovered her emotions by then. She even smiled when he mentioned her mother, graciously thanking him and promising she’d relay his message when she got home.

Over the following hours, things settled down in the rad-room. Kekoa quickly found out, that in addition to the necessities he’d packed to pass inspection—like rations, medical supplies, and water—the university had left quite a few useful items he hadn’t stowed in the bunker. There were magnetic sets of chess, Sabaca sticks, and a deck of playing cards, and, he learned, the chest top in the middle of the room was a dully magnetic table.

While Kekoa himself, Sashka, and Iberico took inventory of the systems and discussed probable timelines and eventualities for the solar storm, the other guests casually listened while getting to know one another better.

At nearly four hours from the eruption, with the radiation levels still holding steady near peak, Nayla plotted the first timelines based on power consumption and rations. They had six days before batteries within the rad-room were exhausted. Glen, whose work involved managing financial resources and assets, was able to extend that timeline to nearly seven days by asking Nayla to factor in behavioral variables. Limiting conversation proved to be a surprisingly effective way to ration the power the old industrial air scrubbers gobbled. Nayla, on the other hand, bodyless, sucked up almost nothing, and because there was hardly any work that could be done requiring her calculations, she entertained the guests playing games on the center table by reading a selection of shorter works from the Charran literary canon, both well-known and obscure.

The mood in the room was quietly resolute, calm.

Privately, Kekoa marveled at the comfort of the cramped room, elegantly engineered as it was to conserve the body heat of their small crowd. Surprisingly, it wasn’t particularly stuffy in there either, even after four hours.

Kekoa credited that relative comfort and the nearly weeklong timeline for putting the group at ease enough that no one was asking him the real questions—the probabilities he was quietly turning over in his mind.

Morgon was well on the far side of Helicon from Carhall, and the lesser star would largely be obscured from the view of the touring vessels running day-tours anyway, but more to the point, he knew, it would be months before the light from the flare even exited the Vance. Even if some remote sensing instruments happened to be nearby in the nebula and happened to have the ship in frame at the time of the flare, there would be no chance that anyone would see The Brave One and recognize that they were in danger before they were long dead.

Nor would coms be able to penetrate all that EM interference, even if by some miracle the flare hadn’t fried his ship’s less hardened systems.

They weren’t expected back for another five days, so the earliest he could imagine the clock starting on a possible rescue only left about forty-eight hours for any mission to get from Carhall, through the Vance to the vicinity of Morgon, leaving them at best thirty hours to find a dead ship, with no communications, floating aimlessly in an area with countless other points of light interference. The odds were as long as Iberico had made the flare seem to be. Rescue, if it happened, Kekoa knew, would depend on whether he could light a bright lamp for searchers to see, and that depended on the other question none of the passengers had begun to ask yet: how broken was The Brave One­?

The fusion reactor at the heart of the ship was a sturdy model. With the hull protecting it, as well as the engine compartment’s thick magnetic plating, Kekoa doubted the flare could have put it out of commission entirely. Similarly, though with less certainty, he believed the sublight plasma rockets could be functional on a restart. Every other system on the ship, though, given the intensity of the solar storm, was likely to have been severely damaged, if not destroyed beyond any hope of repair. That was why he’d had Windsor grab Nayla’s head for them. She had the ship’s specs in memory in perfect detail. Nayla had been invaluable in refitting the old vessel. Kekoa also had a number of old processors, relays, transceivers, and other components floating around in his B-kit, including a pair of old ball-drones that functioned fairly reliably in zero-G.

As the hours ticked by and the radiation levels in the ship’s interior still remained stubbornly high, Kekoa pondered, considering these variables he wasn’t yet ready to voice to the other ten people stranded in that crowded room.

In the meantime, they turned down the lights so the guests could get some rest. Kekoa let Sashka join them while he and Iberico continued to watch the radiation level hover, quite consistently, well into the red.

They hardly spoke over the next ten hours or so while the passengers who could sleep did.

Finally, when it seemed like everyone was asleep, Kekoa gestured for Iberico to come close, then he whispered the question he’d been waiting to ask. Could their plight have been detected by some stellar observation gear somewhere in the Vance.

“Unlikely, but not impossible,” Iberico whispered back to him. “I have been thinking too, even if they came looking, when they get no response from us, they wouldn’t necessarily assume we are in trouble. It would be normal for coms to be down, given the circumstances. No one will think to look for us until we don’t return on schedule. Can we fly out somehow if the reactor is operable, Captain?”

Kekoa sighed. “Out? No. The jump lanes are narrow in the nebula to begin with. Without reliable arrays to collect accurate positional data, even if we somehow cobbled together the processing power and the electromagnets in the FX-T weren’t damaged beyond use? An FTL jump is a dice roll of the absolute last resort.”

Misty, the politician, Kekoa could see, had stirred and had her eyes fixed their way. There was no way she could hear them, but she would be asking soon, he knew.

“So the sublight, what? Several months travel time to the Vance’s boundaries?” Iberico whispered.

“Best speed from a functioning ship? Maybe a few months, maybe longer.”

“What’s our timeline for survival aboard the ship if we can get the sublight working again, Captain?”

Kekoa shook his head. “The same, I think. The only functioning life support is in this rad-bunker. Unless we find a way to magically move the power from that reactor to here, if the wires are fried, and they surely are, then the timeline’s the timeline.”

“So, we must be seen in time, or we don’t survive?”

“That appears to be the score.”

“I thought before we were surely dead, yet here we are,” Iberico said. “So maybe we’ll find a way.”

“We’ll certainly try,” Kekoa responded.

The politician, Misty, who had been trying to maintain a posture of subtlety to her interest, now looked directly at the Captain, wide-eyed. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, turning her head and rolling slightly. Then she shut her eyes again as she turned away.

By the time everyone was awake a few hours later, the radiation levels had dropped from the red, through the orange, down into the yellow. It was an excellent sign. Kekoa was ready to get some sleep himself finally, but there was something about the way Misty was looking at him that reminded him of that first mistake—forgetting to inform the group where they stood. He wasn’t going to sleep until he made sure they all knew.

“Okay, listen up everyone. The radiation levels are dropping. This is a good sign,” he began. “That doesn’t mean we’re out of this situation. A lot depends on how many systems in the ship have been damaged by the radiation. Iberico and I spoke last night, and we think our best chance for survival is to get the sublight engines burning. Odds are that we won’t be seen by any rescuers otherwise. But, we will be missed when we don’t return on schedule. The harbormaster in Carhall will definitely send a ship out looking for us. If we’re very lucky and the sublight is unscathed, we’ll execute a long steady burn navigating as best we can by eye along our original flight plan. In a few more hours if the radiation levels continue to fall, we’ll start to troubleshoot. If the sublights are down, we’ll spend the week trying to fix them however we can. We will take every last shot that we have and then laugh about it over that second chocolate back on Carhall. That’s the plan for now.”

The details were where their fate would lie, Kekoa knew, and he tried to answer as many of the group’s questions about those details as he could. They spoke for nearly two hours before Kekoa finally turned in.

He did sleep, and, when he woke, he was conscious of having dreamt of trying to escape the center of a labyrinth.

The radiation levels were still a little high for his liking, but Kekoa decided they couldn’t spare the time anymore. Inaction was eating into what he suspected was going to be a long repair timeline. The risk was that the radiation still ambient in the ship would play havoc on their communication with the drone. He had two such ball-drones in his B-kit, so there was a backup if they lost contact with the first, but it was a valuable asset to lose if it went down.

They hadn’t gotten any feedback from the ship’s systems, even with Nayla’s direction. All signs were pointing to a dead ship, or at least dead instrumentation. The drone would need to determine what it could.

As they were preparing to drop the drone out the drop port, Vee, one of the two friends from Dern approached Kekoa. “Captain, you said to let you know if we had skills that could help. I’m a competitive racer. If you think you need someone to fly that little popper in a tricky situation, I’m your best bet.”

He looked at her skeptically. She didn’t seem to have the sharp eye of a keen racer, and she was very young. “Recreational, like in local leagues?”

“No, Captain, collegiate Bet League.”

“She’s legit,” her friend Maize said. “I play real sports. She races anything that flies.”

“Show me,” Kekoa said, handing Vee the eyepiece and taking off the glove. “Put that popper in the drop chute in one go.”

Vee smiled. She put on the gear and moved the little ball around in several directions, getting a feel for its responsiveness in zero-G. Then she took it around the bunker to the far wall and shot across it in a straight line to the far wall, stopping the drone dead in the drop port without even touching the sides.

“Better than me on my best day, young Ms. Vee,” Kekoa said. “Shall we have a look around?”

They surveyed for hours, looking for any sign of electrical current in any of the ship’s systems. The interference was strong enough to confirm the readings from the rad-room. It was still dangerous for people out there, and there wasn’t so much as a pin light to delineate the floors from the walls.

Vee did, with some very careful flying and direction, get far enough back into the stern holding area to take decent thermal imaging of the engine compartment on the other side of the bulkhead. The reactor was still warm.

Kekoa asked Nayla to confirm his suspicions—that warm was good.

“Yes, Captain. Starcraft-style reactors drop into standby when the control arm ceases communication with the unit. It is probable the reactor is still operating and the control arm is the part compromised.”

“That’s good news, right?” Dreya asked.

Kekoa smiled. “There’d be residual heat if the reactor was compromised, but not at that level. Heat means she’s still generating power, which means she can fire the plasma rockets. We’ll just need to figure out how to get her firing.”

Nayla couldn’t detect a signal from the control arm, which meant it was likely dead, or at least the parts of it that communicated with drive controls were. That was the hurdle.

“We have five days,” Kekoa told the group. “That’s the big challenge. If we can figure out a way to talk to the engine and the rocketry is still functional, which it should be, I think we can fire this engine and make a big showing of it. But we’ve got quite a few obstacles to clear in those five days.

“I’ll keep everyone informed.”

Kekoa spent the day discussing the problem with Nayla. The younger passengers, like the previous day, mostly tried to pass the time playing games on the table, while Dreya and Stoll, Glen and Misty, and Iberico listened to the back and forth between Nayla and Kekoa, doing their best to understand the problems he was attempting to get a handle on.

Access was one. For maintenance, those engines were designed to be pulled out in their entirety from the assembly in port. One didn’t tinker with their engine in the middle of a spaceflight. The control arm itself could only be accessed by small repair bots through access terminals from the interior of the ship. Kekoa had two such bots, both of which were undoubtedly fried. So something else was going to have to get in there somehow, because it surely wasn’t accessible to a person.

Then, loosening or removing the control arm enough that they could access the reactor was going to be a problem. Somehow, something was going to have to talk to that reactor. And if the control arm was truly dead, they’d need to access the reactor head under it.

“Nayla, would you be able to run a basic control algorithm from outside the reactor somehow?” Kekoa asked the AI’s head.

“Unlikely,” she responded. “The level of precision in adjusting the reactor output requires dynamic feedback in real time.”

“Can’t you just tell it to burn? Make it binary—burn, no burn?”

“We could blow up the reactor if the plasma flow was not consistent throughout the system. The control arm has a very important job.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Kekoa said. “There’s going to be some risk involved here.”

Kekoa went through his B-kit from top to bottom. It wasn’t that he was a packrat, but he kept certain things. He never threw away a tool if it worked or could work, and he liked to keep random hardware that he thought had the potential to be useful someday. And, in refitting The Brave One to be a touring vessel rather than a research ship, some of those random pieces had proven invaluable in the renovation process.

Mostly, the guests ignored him as he fumbled through each compartment, setting a few things aside for Sashka to hold. She’d rebounded, splitting her time between serving the guests water and rations on a schedule and assisting the Captain in whatever way she could.

The bottom compartment of Kekoa’s crate had components from a decommissioned Andrew. “There’s a processing core here,” Kekoa said, raising an eyebrow.

He handed the rectangular object to his niece. Then, after moving several random pieces of the dead bot’s body around, he pulled out its right arm, which had been folded over double inside the bottom bin of the crate.

“Nayla, would you like a new arm?”

“That appears to be an old arm, Captain.”

“Could you operate it remotely?”

“If it were on a reliable network, but I’m not sure I see the point.”

“Why not?”

“An android’s arm is only useful when it has a sufficient anchor point. It needs to be attached to a body.”

“Or some other solid object.”

“Correct,” the AI concurred.

“We’ll figure that out,” Kekoa said.

It was clear by then to everyone in the rad-room. Kekoa had something in mind. Those spare parts were adding up to something.

When he explained his plan to Nayla, she responded, “A bold plan,” without making any assessment. Sashka remained at his side while Kekoa fumbled through various other parts in his crate. Iberico, too, added both his hands and his input as Kekoa began to turn a discarded arm into their chief hope of survival.

Toward the end of the evening, when the guests were growing equal parts tired and restless, Misty approached Kekoa, whose singular focus had turned to affixing the Andrew upper-arm to a flat metal plate he intended to magnetize using a battery pack from one of his drills.

“Will it disturb you if I keep you company, Captain?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “I’ll let you know if you do. I hope you won’t take offense.”

“My offense is hardly the top priority at the moment,” Misty replied. “I’m kind of in awe really.”

“In awe?” Kekoa said, his eyes focused on the spare hull plating he was drilling and tapping. “Of what? This?”

He gestured down to the floating hand.

“The whole thing. The Brave One—I thought it was just a marketing gimmick to sell tours. The Brave One goes into the Vance! Like your ads.”

Sashka, who was beside her uncle holding his tools, looked over at Misty. “It is a marketing gimmick. It’s Uncle K’s name. You know that, right?”

“That’s Captain to you, squirt. At least on this vessel while we’re underway. Uncle K?” He was smiling as he shook his head jokingly.

“Yes, sir!” she said, laughing and offering a mock salute.

“That’s what your name means?” Misty asked.

“Yeah, the brave one. Goes all the way back to Earth. I don’t know how my mom came across it in the archives, but she liked how it sounded, and I suppose she thought naming me that might somehow manifest it into being.”

“It seemed to work.”

“I don’t know about that,” Kekoa said, his eyes still fixed on the plate. “Hold this.”

He handed Misty a drill bit without even looking at her.

“Well it appears that way, Captain. You’re just going for it, you know. No hesitation. No fear, seemingly. Just diving in.”

“Yeah,” he said, drilling a small dimple into the metal plating, “The Brave One goes in.”

“Yes,” Misty said.

“You want to know the truth? Really?”

She nodded. “Please.”

He looked up from the work and met eyes with her. “I ran a second-rate charter out of Carhall for almost ten years before I could afford my own ship, and within three years I was dangerously close to foreclosure five or six times. Between the berth, the registration, the insurance, the competition, the advertising? I was just turning the wheel and falling farther behind with each revolution. I mortgaged that first ship, my house, and took out a loan just to get my hands on this ship, and when I did, I had to sell my twice mortgaged house and come live on the ship in order to renovate her so I could get permitted to run cruises out of her. So yeah, quite frankly, it is a marketing gimmick. I need all the help I can get. I had to train my teenage niece as a mate because I couldn’t afford an experienced hand—or even a bartender for that matter. Running a seven-day cruise out of Carhall when absolutely nobody else would even attempt it? That’s brave, all those choices. This?” Kekoa said, holding up the floating hand. “This is me being too damn stubborn to die out here in a fluke sunstorm after all that. I’d cut off my own hand right now if it made a damn bit of difference.”

Misty didn’t quite know how to react. She couldn’t tell whether Kekoa was angry, frustrated, proud, or perhaps just exasperated. But he still had a wry smile on his face.

“The Brave One?” he huffed. “Hell, I’m terrified my sister will haunt me for the rest of eternity if I don’t get Sash home to her in one piece. She’d bring me back from the dead again just so she could kill me herself if anything happened to Sashka.”

The young mate started laughing. “She would.”

“Well,” Misty said. “I guess I’m just trying to say I admire your perseverance.”

Kekoa looked up again.

“If we still have our minds and our hearts and each other, whatever comes next, we’ll be fine.”

Misty and the rest of the guests kept their distance after that, watching intently as Kekoa, Sashka, and sometimes Iberico worked to turn that arm into a functioning robot Nayla could control remotely. They fixed the shoulder to the plate using loose hardware from Kekoa’s crate and the arm’s own tension cables. Then they magnetized the plate using the battery from a welding torch and spare wiring from other parts of the dead Andrew. Next, they powered the arm itself by modifying the drill’s battery. And finally, Nayla wrote an app for Kekoa’s swatch to communicate control commands directly from her mind, through the swatch, to the appendage’s nerve center.

By the time it was finished, they had three days before they needed to burn.

Kekoa was exhausted enough after putting the robot arm together that he decided to take a nap. Before doing so, though, he put Nayla in charge of directing the preparations for moving the arm. Glen, Iberico, Vee, and Sashka were tasked with packing an appropriate toolkit for the hand that would make it through the access portal without snagging the arm. Their solution also couldn’t allow the tools to float out of the reach of the hand once inside the engine compartment. It was imperative that the knot they tied the tools together with completely unfolded with a single pull from the hand. The group took nearly four hours to prep the arm and test the ingenious knotting system that Nayla devised from her base programming. It was part mathematical problem, part caregiving protocols, as historically, even back on Charris, some children still wore shoes with laces.

By the time Kekoa awoke, Vee had been working for nearly twenty hours, but they needed to move the arm regardless, exhaustion or no. The group had devised a system using the two drones, basic magnets, and strips of industrial tape to pull the arm down the narrow access tube, where the hand would need to open the panel and pull itself inside. The drones would light the room and feed visual cues back to Nayla, who, for her part, would feel like she had an arm again, albeit one halfway across the ship.

As Kekoa was preparing to step outside the rad-room for the first time in days, Merritt’s husband, Ayo, who hadn’t said more than two words the whole time they’d been stuck in there, turned to Kekoa and stated. “Only something this farcical could possibly succeed.”

They had a little over two full days remaining by then.

Deployment did not go smoothly. Kekoa found it was difficult to get the package to sit still inside the outer access panel. The arm kept drifting toward the walls. Vee and Iberico couldn’t coordinate between the two drones, because there was still electromagnetic interference between the rad-room and the drones’ receivers. Iberico had anticipated the possibility and had a contingency planned. He collected every piece of tech on the tourists’ bodies that could be networked and had Nayla daisy-chain them into a string network. Then he had Kekoa tape each component, one by one, along the ship’s hallway walls at regular intervals. In total there were six swatches, a necklace, two eyepieces, and Glen’s old-school rectangle. It made for a strong network clear into the engine compartment.

Once they had a good signal and the drones were flying true, Kekoa retreated to the bunker.

As soon as Nayla had anchored the robot arm above the reactor’s control arm unit, she stated to the eager group, “This will take many hours. I will report on my progress at intervals.”

Vee finally got her rest while Sashka and Iberico flew the drones, lighting the work area for Nayla. Kekoa, meanwhile, got right back to work trying to awaken the spare processor from the Andrew, conferring occasionally with Nayla on how he should proceed in opening the unit and accessing contact points. Once again, it was Misty who stepped into the Captain’s workspace to offer assistance.

“I like to work with my hands,” she told him. “I think in past days I might have been a painter. Or maybe a neurosurgeon.”

“Either or,” Kekoa said, looking up with a smile. “In past days, I’d have been a bus driver.”

It wasn’t long before Glen, Stoll, Dreya, and Ayo had joined in, each with a different job—pulling wire from the Andrew’s remaining components, stripping and cannibalizing other small parts, prepping soldering contacts, the entire group working through the process like a puzzle.

“How are the batteries in that arm?” Iberico turned to ask Kekoa nearly six hours into Nayla’s work on the engine’s control arm.

“They’re perfect,” he responded.

“Yeah?” Iberico said, flashing the Captain a skeptical look. “She’s doing a lot of work in there.”

“Yes,” Kekoa repeated. “Perfect.”

Nobody asked the question—could they charge them again somehow if they died? It seemed they all knew the answer.

Nayla’s work was delicate. In addition to dictating power levels and calculating feedback within the reactor, the control arm also routed power from the reactor to all the ship’s other systems. Thus, it wasn’t as simple as turning a few levers and loosening a few bolts. It was like disconnecting the ship’s brain stem from the spinal column using a toy crane as the primary surgical instrument. Nayla, though, needed no rest, and never got frustrated. She was genuinely the perfect ship surgeon.

Eighteen hours into her work, Nayla announced, “The work is progressing. However, I will need to shut the lights in the rad-room to conserve life support. You may begin to feel lightheaded and nauseated as I ration the use of the air scrubber.”

“How long do we have, Nayla?” Kekoa asked.

“Whatever you are asking, whether it be time to burn or time to critical on life support, the answer is the same. It is unknown and unknowable. Everyone remain calm and quiet, and I will update you as new information presents itself.”

As the lights dimmed, Kekoa caught a final glimpse of the whole group, all ten of the others—those brave ones, who in nearly a week of monotonous, high-pitched peril magnified by boredom, silence, and the frustration of a crowd of strangers in tight confines—here were ten people who never once despaired of their plight, never once gave up, never once turned on him, never once turned on each other.

He took his young niece by the arm, his back to the wall where the circulator still hummed slightly, and he waited for the lights to go out. As Nayla slowly brought them down to dim and then to perfect darkness inside that lightless room, Kekoa stated, “Just think how beautiful that second chocolate is going to taste. I can’t wait to share it with you all.”

---

Eight days following the Morgon Superburst, the Lathebroke Folly, a hardened cargo carrier out of Carhall, was the first to mark the missing touring vessel The Brave One flying on a straight vector at low sublight between the stars Morgan and Helicon within the Vance Nebula. They observed no lights nor transponder signal, and she wouldn’t answer hails. The Trasp defense frigate Enoch responded, deploying two teams of lunar defense specialists to make entry to determine the status of the crew and passengers.

Upon gaining entry to the vessel, moon rangers located eight passengers and two crew at various locations throughout the ship. All ten were severely dehydrated and hypercapnic, but somehow, they’d each been carefully tucked into a cold bag and were all, miraculously, still breathing. One passenger, though, Maize Roche, a young tourist from the Dern cylinder group, was found deceased within the radiation room wearing a space suit that had exhausted its oxygen supply many hours prior. The senior investigating officer surmised that Ms. Roche had moved the others to evenly disperse the concentration of carbon dioxide in the ambient air when the air scrubber in the radiation room went offline. He further concluded that she became hypoxic and disoriented before she was able to remove her helmet and breathe the ambient air in the ship.

The ten survivors, upon being revived, remembered nothing past the moment the lights went off in the radiation room. The Captain, Kekoa Ridley, informed the investigating officer that the Nayla model’s head found floating inside the radiation room had been functional throughout the ordeal, likely only going offline after the rad-room battery powering it was completely exhausted.

Indeed, once powered, the Nayla revealed the sequence of events in detail.

Following the AI’s removal of the ship’s broken reactor control arm, Ms. Roche, being a young, healthy athlete, was the only remaining conscious member of the party. She flew their remaining functional drone as the Nayla AI installed the group’s jerry-rigged reactor control arm. That makeshift engine component allowed The Brave One to fire her sublight engines at a constant flow rate for nearly twenty hours. The searchers on the Lathebroke Folly sighted The Brave One’s glowing plasma tail mere minutes before the ship’s engine ultimately died.

Immediately upon establishing a consistent sublight burn, the Nayla, realizing the radiation room battery was almost fully depleted, directed Ms. Roche to don a spacesuit, fully oxygenate herself, and dress and relocate the other party members to disparate areas of the ship. The AI reported becoming inactive shortly thereafter but surmised that Ms. Roche, being a novice to space flight, must have become hypoxic when her suit’s oxygen ran low and either didn’t know to or was too weak and confused to remove the suit’s helmet when it became imperative for her to do so.

The ship’s Captain, Kekoa Ridley of Carhall, expressed tremendous regret over the loss of Ms. Roche and stated that he was determined to salvage his ship so he could re-christen her Maize Roche—The Brave one. He also credited Ms. Roche as being responsible for an odd curiosity the investigating officer couldn’t explain at the time of the rescue—namely, how the unconscious Captain of the vessel had come to be found with a half-empty box of chocolates zipped tight within the upper of his insulated flight suit.