Jacob stared at the large open rent in the corridor, which spanned twice the length of his drone. Through the broken gap, he could see at least five decks, and beyond that, stars. He watched in horrified fascination as the points of light slowly drifted past the opening as the ship rotated.
That was going to be a problem. This was the only unblocked path to the fabrication center that he had been able to locate. It would require weeks or maybe even months of work to clear the other passages. He had been keeping track of his own power draw, so he knew that the few power cores he recovered would hold out that long. None of the ones he located was fully charged, either.
He was growing frustrated with his slow progress, and actually wished Melody would return to point him in the right direction, if only to take one choice off of his hands. Unfortunately, the AI was just as absent as in the previous times he attempted to communicate with it. He couldn’t be sure, but he would bet it had been days since they last spoke.
After realizing he was just stalling to avoid making a choice, Jacob sighed and used the drone’s sensors to look around. Relying on the AI to solve all his problems was a crutch he should get over sooner rather than later. There was a way forward; all he had to do was figure out how to proceed. He spotted a chunk of metal a little larger than a head and picked it up. Then he used the drone to throw the scrap across the gaping hole in the ship. Despite the awkward nature of the throw, the material still flew toward its destination.
Instead of falling in an arc, the chunk sailed straight across the gap and continued to go farther than it should have before it finally clinked to the ground and rolled into a nearby wall on the far side.
That little experiment answered a question he had since he first took control of the drones. The ship did indeed have some sort of artificial gravity. Something had to be powering it. Probably the same backup system powering him and the AI.
He looked at the gap, and after a minute of thought, an idea popped into his head on how he could cross. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but now he at least had a goal in mind.
It took a little over a day to design and build the pair of ramps. Jacob attached the first to the edge of the gap.
The second, he held onto so he could attach it on the far side. It would allow him to cross back over if he found the way blocked.
The ramps were crude. Barely more than welded scrap angled upward just enough to carry him over the gravity dead zone. If he missed the ramp, he’d slam into the far edge and drift off into space.
Once everything was in place, Jacob backed up to the far end of the corridor and decided to do a short test run to see how fast he could go.
“That’s less than ideal,” he muttered.
He could probably jog faster, but it would have to do. Clearing the gap was less about speed and more about angle anyway. He lined that up as carefully as possible, then he prayed that the designers made the drone tough enough to survive the impact. Before he could second-guess his decision, he accelerated forward.
As the ramp grew closer, Jacob got a second look at what awaited him if he failed. He was starting to veer off course, so he adjusted his direction slightly and hit the ramp perfectly.
For one glorious second, it worked. The drone lifted cleanly off the deck and sailed across the gap. Then things started to go sideways, literally.
“Shit!”
Jacob flailed the drone’s arms to try to counter the spin, but the movement only made things worse. Gravity reacquainted itself with the drone, and it crashed into the deck.
The impact dislodged the ramp he had been holding onto, sending it careening into the void. More worryingly, it snapped off one of his arms and broke one of the wheels that held a track in place. The phantom pain was excruciating.
One moment, he was in the drone, the next, curled up on the ground, clutching at his arm and leg until the sensation abated. “Who the hell designs robots to feel pain?”
Once the sensations of having his arm and leg ripped off his body went away, he got up and got back into the drone. The pain was still there, but much like the first time he entered the drone, it was dulled.
He cursed himself as he spent the next hour trying in vain to right the machine. When that failed to produce any results, he shifted his treads so the fronts were facing the floor. With that, and his one good arm, he was able to pull himself along. He imagined he looked rather pitiful and ridiculous, but it was working. He imagined he was lost in a desert, crawling along, but instead of a person looking for water, he was a robot looking for oil.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The mental image made him chuckle and helped him pull his thoughts away from his predicament.
Jacob could feel other damage accumulating as he dragged his body across the floor, but they were minor in comparison to the arm and leg, so he ignored it as best he could. When he couldn’t ignore it, it was a stark reminder not to be stupid. He should have just spent the time to clear one of the other blocked paths to the fabrication center. His haste had nearly doomed him.
Now he was down a drone, even if he could get it upright again. He wasn’t about to attempt crossing back over. It may still serve some purpose on this side of the ship, but he didn’t know that for sure.
As he made his way toward the fabrication center, he found a partially broken bulkhead that stuck up at a shallow angle from the floor. It wasn’t enough to block his passage, but it did allow him to slide up it enough to tip himself back on his treads.
Jacob sighed in relief when the drone was upright and mobile once again. Luck seemed to be on his side for once.
A large door stood in his way, above it, the words ‘Fabrication Center’ were written in eiraxin or whatever the eiraxins called their language.
The problem wasn’t the door, but the lack of power to the controls. His maintenance knowledge told him there was a sensor that should have opened the door at his approach.
When he searched his new knowledge for workarounds, he discovered a manual release, but it was located behind a panel that led to a small maintenance tunnel designed for the crew to access. There was no way the large maintenance drone would fit through there. Apparently, nobody ever thought that maintenance drones would need to use a manual door release.
That left providing power to the door as the only other option.
Jacob sighed in frustration and retrieved his broken arm. When he returned to the door, he moved over to a service panel. The panel came off without issue, leaving him staring at a mess of wires and electronics that wouldn’t have been out of place back on Earth.
Once again, he was struck by just how normal most of the technology was.
It didn’t take Jacob long to find the power connection. He popped one end free from the panel and let it dangle while he placed the remains of his arm on his chassis and dismantled it. It took longer to find a power wire in his arm that was still connected to the socket than it did to dig through the door wiring.
Once he had it extracted from the metal shell of the arm, he connected it to the door’s wire and plugged the socket back into its spot on his chassis.
His vision dimmed, and most of his sensors went offline as the power draw hit him, but the door gave a groan and began to open.
He could feel his power core draining away as the door crept open.
By the time the door finally opened wide enough to admit him, his sensors were flickering fitfully, and the exhaustion associated with power depletion was stronger than before he first merged with a drone.
Jacob wasted no time and yanked the connection free. His vision stabilized, but the effort had drained his battery to critical levels. He knew he was going to have to find a new power core in the next few minutes, or this drone was going to join the other dead hulks on this failing ship, leaving him with the one stuck at the debris blockage as his only hope.
How he was going to change it without bringing the other drone over the open rent in the ship was another problem he would need to address, but maybe the fabrication center would give him another option.
Without hesitation, he trundled into the fabrication center, eager to see what all the fuss was about. The place was huge, larger than even the massive hangar he found. Once again, he was forced to adjust his estimates on how large the vessel must be to contain such a large space.
The large arched beams overhead stretched into a dome, but Jacob could tell it was longer in one direction.
While the room was massive, it was not empty. Machines of all sorts filled the space, none of which Jacob knew anything about. Some were made from the same shiny metal as the rest of the interior, while others appeared to be bronze-colored material. He even saw what looked like smokestacks that rose nearly to the ceiling. He couldn’t imagine that the eiraxins were dumb enough to pump byproducts into a sealed room aboard a ship, so probably not actual smokestacks.
Jacob thought he would have to search his memories for the specifics of each device, but they were helpfully labeled.
As he trundled along on his damaged tread, he looked for anything to do with power cell manufacturing. He wasn’t even sure if that was a thing, but as he was passing one machine, he slowed to a halt and stared at a sign that read “Charging Station.”
Three power cores sat in the alcove, a green ring slowly circling them. There was even a convenient docking spot for maintenance drones.
Curious to see if it was still functional, Jacob made his way into the alcove.
Once he was in place, a small metal stop rose from the floor, and an arm on a triangular scaffold came down. It stopped in front of his power cell port, then a red light flashed. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it kept flashing, seeming to grow more insistent with each passing moment. Eventually, another scaffold lowered from the ceiling along with a small display.
Jacob felt really dumb when he read the alert on the screen, quickly backing out of the drone. Apparently, it was against protocol for operators to be in control of a drone during battery swapping operations. Considering the haptic feedback and pain simulation, removing a power core probably felt like having your heart ripped out.
Melody probably would have mentioned that if it were around. Jacob watched the swap take place from his virtual space. He wondered why the fabrication center was the only room that had power when the door and the rest of the ship didn’t. It had to be attached to the same power source as the artificial gravity systems and the AI. He assumed it was some sort of emergency power backup.
Jacob wondered if bringing the fabrication center back online would cut into those power reserves, but he didn’t have much of a choice. He needed to make repairs if he wanted to get out of the situation he was in.
The battery swap was completed, and the drone hologram blinked green to let him know it was okay to reconnect.
When Jacob reconnected, he saw that the depleted power core was now in the charger, showing a swirling red light. At least one thing worked properly on the ship. He would need to collect as many power cores as he could to fill up the charging bank, but for now, he needed to take stock of the entire room and find out what needed to be fixed to bring the fabrication center back online.