By John W. Otte
Katherine Smyth needed a miracle.
The anti-matter induction chamber was history. Instead of a silvery sphere nestled in the heart of the Fortunato’s engine, a metal flower blossomed, as if opening toward weak sunlight. Her toolkit slipped from numb fingers, thudding onto the deck. Without the chamber, the Fortunato had no engines. They had momentum, but they couldn’t maneuver. They wouldn’t be able to deliver those emergency medical supplies. People would die, and the blame would land on her.
She wanted to scream at the unfairness. The micrometeorite through-and-throughing the ship wasn’t her fault. The quartermaster shorting them replacement parts wasn’t either. And it wasn’t her fault the captain believed her family’s reputation.
Smyths had been engineers on TerraFed ships for four generations, and everyone whispered Smyths were miracle workers. How many stories had her family swapped at reunions about near impossible repairs done under the most harrowing conditions? Now that hype would end her career.
She snarled at her dropped toolkit, which had been Grandpa Smyth’s. He’d given it to her when she joined the guild, promising it had everything she’d ever need. How about a replacement induction chamber, Grandpa?
She kicked it, spilling the contents across the deck. Her shoulders slumped. Making a mess wouldn’t fix things.
Wait, what was that? Amid the scattered tools rested a small box with a large red button. Where had that come from? She picked it up, surprised at its weight. Was it made of plastic? If it was, that made it at least three hundred years old. As she turned it over, she spotted words scratched in Grandpa’s handwriting: Use this when you’re stuck. She sneered. Really?
But then, what could it hurt? Katherine held it out at arm’s length and tapped the button.
Nothing happened.
She sighed. Time to answer the captain and accept the blame.
“So, what needs fixing?”
Katherine whipped around. A middle-aged man stood before her, with a halo of long hair rimmed around a bald spot, wearing strange garb—jeans and a sleeveless white shirt, like what her ancestors wore in the images in Grandma Smyth’s holoscrapbook.
She stammered. A thousand questions percolated through her mind, and she finally settled on the most pressing: “What?”
“You activated the beacon. I’m assuming you need some help and stuff.” He stepped around her, whistling. “Never mind, I see the problem. That doo-hickey got destroyed and now, what, your ship can’t go?”
“No, we’ve got plenty of momentum. We can’t steer.”
The man nodded, and a strange mark flared to life on his right cheek, a red light blazing across his eyes. He stumbled, then sighed heavily, shaking out his head as if to clear it.
“Right, right. Anti-matter induction drive. You guys haven’t discovered masretic steering yet.” He examined the damage. “So, no swap? We gotta bypass the destroyed induction chamber and restore thrust to the engines, that it?”
Katherine blinked. Bypass the damage? How? And what was “masretic steering?” Had she gone insane from the stress? Or was this some sort of emergency hologram? She stepped forward and nudged his shoulder. Flesh and bone.
He smiled. “No, I’m real.”
Her hallucination knelt to sift through her tools. A wistful smile split his face. “Love this time period. So many clever tools. This won’t take long. Fixing a busted engine is a whole lot easier than trying to rebuild trebuchets in the middle of a siege.”
As he talked, he snared a resonance tuner and somehow used it to start reshaping the damaged chamber, forcing the jagged petals to close. Katherine gaped at him. How was he doing that?
“See, these induction chambers are ridiculously over-engineered.” He swapped out the tuner for an emergency hull patch kit. “All you need is a couple of tubes to shunt the energies correctly. You’ll need a replacement, but this’ll do the trick and stuff.”
Much to Katherine’s surprise, this person was able to turn the detritus into… well, she wasn’t sure what. A misshapen lump that somehow connected the different parts of the engine. He sprayed the hull sealant over the cracks, twirling the tub in his hands as he finished.
“You should be good. Trust me, I do stuff like this all the time. Like when I was summoned to fix a pauk-paravozik for the Prussian-Russo Combine…”
Tuning out his voice, she flicked her gaze to the chamber. Should she try it? It looked completely unsafe, and if it blew out, the engines would shut down automatically. She’d be just as fired, so what did she have to lose?
She returned her attention to main engineering. The man didn’t let up in his rambling narration at all, explaining how a family of mice had made a nest in the gunnery system of a weapon she had never heard of. After sucking in a deep breath, Katherine flipped the switch to restart the engines.
With a shudder that wormed through the decks and a sharp clank, the engines whined back to life. She risked a peek at the status board. The engine was fine, well within safety tolerances. She turned to the man, who nodded to himself.
“Don’t worry about the bill. Your great-grandpappy did me a solid not too long ago. Far as I’m concerned, we’re square.”
Katherine blinked. She suddenly recognized this strange man from Grandma’s holoscrapbook. Her grandfather, as a rookie engineer, with his arm around the shoulders of…
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“Name’s Joe Enza. The beacon needs to reset, so you can’t use it again for another five years. But don’t worry. You’re a Smyth, right? You’ve got this!”
A door of light appeared behind him. He smiled sadly, then stepped back into it. The portal closed with an ominous thunk.
Her comm chirped with a message from the captain. “Good work! We’re seeing nothing but green up here. You Smyths! Miracle workers, the lot of you!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Old and busted: Deus ex machina
New hotness: Joes ex buttona
Fun read. There’s an interesting story behind this story (i.e. Grandpa’s story).
Loved the line about rebuilding trebuchets in the middle of a siege! Great story!
Love it!! This is a great take on the character – I really like Joe – and Katherine.