Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Luc could feel the agititation from the adrenalyne still persisting in his veins. Couldn’t focus properly.
He looked at Nila, the medibot attached to the remains of her arm and the packed bandages on her neck and face, thankful for the sedation drip entering her from the bots flanges. Pool was a different matter, but one that didn’t seem pressing. (Anthromorphs were common in the 23rd century, if a novelty here, and he never thought the man was normal.)
> INTERNAL -ESTIA SOMA 10%
He imagined the focus- and attention-enhancing pharmetics dripping from the tiny pack embedded in his thigh hitting him before they actually did, calming him.
He took a breath.
> INTERNAL -OPEN DB STREGA 4 OBSIDIAN MECHANICAL KIT
He had never actually looked at the spec of his car before and for a moment hadn’t remembered the model, but as the estia-soma took hold it came to him, like scrolling through a familiar book to a favorite passage, unconsciously.
Overlaid on his vision–no occupying a separate place than the scene at hand–Nila unconscious on the lounge table, lying atop the encraved map of Terra–somewhere else in his vision, was a three dimensional line drawing of his car.
The outline had false-color coded details describing the lay of the wiring and luminals, light-nodes, mapping computer modules. The drive system was a false red: batteries, power conduits which traced a faint filigree around the internal surface to the screens, nav controls and the Kardeshev nacelles (which weren’t even really nacelles, as they were internal, sitting like haunches or hips on the fore and aft sides where wheels would have been on a ground car.
These would have to come out, along with the battery and the nav controls.
As he stared at the vehicle canted at 45 degrees up and starboard in the cargohold, with the butt end hanging out the gaping hole in the floor like an emerging turd, a hand touched his shoulder.
“Mr Maron, sir, I would be pleased to help you with whatever you needed. The Hut won’t be going anywhere if we can’t get her off the strand, at the very least, and I’m curious to see if we can mate the engines from your flying car to the airship…,” said Beatrix before trailing off, thinking Luc wasn’t listening. “Sir?”
Luc looked past her over Nila to the cockpit, at the other end, beyond the lounge and the engine room/machine shop, imagining wires running up under the floor grates the length of the ship to the captain’s chair…which was likely still covered in Captain Gordon’s gorey residue.
He looked quickly down to her, his eyes wide and dialated from the stims. “Of course.” He smiled. ” We will need a cutting tool, like a rotary saw with a fine toothed blade–I thought I saw one in the shop. It was on the right side on the bench. Also, wire snips…some sort of…bonding…joining tape…”
His breather was hanging from his jacket still, and Beatrix would have her own for the sort of work they would be doing.
“Cutting torch?” She asked.
“No, my car has very little metal in it. The composites would smoulder and fill the entire ship with smoke before they gave in.”
Beatrix fetched the tools while Luc began removing the panels that he knew would come off. The upper door required a bit more work and a combinations of wrenches. The lower door would have to wait.
Once the battery maintenance panel was off, Beatrix seemed to grasp what needed to be done. Luc warned her about puncturing it, but even this seemed to be understood: even after hundreds of years batteries still packed a lot of energy into a small space.
He went to work on the fixed panels over the nacelles, careful not to go to deep. According to his schematics–which he had adjusted to match the exact position of the car–the important spindles where only millimeters below the skin.
He could hear Etelka talking to Pool in the distance, but not exactly what the were saying. It sure sounds like the dufus.
Ion Fyr 