[h3][b]Mark A. Lopez[/b][/h3]
[hr]

Mark's hands moved fast, trying to get the ship ready as fast as he could. He cut power to the tertiary rings and water heaters, pushed lighting down to emergency and essetials, and fed the spare into the maneuver busses and the local defense bus. The reactor curve bowed a little, then steadied. Green bars climbed where they needed to.

He finally managed to keyed into the weapons subnet, eyes narrowing as he scanned for ports. Point defense nodes came up on the schematic, little icons meant for asteroid scraps and stray debris. Not much in the way of teeth from what he could see but built to spit out metal and plasma at rock, not monsters. [i]It'll have to do.[/i]

Next he rolled the drone bay online. Mostly remote maintenance units that had been reconfigured on the fly months ago; they had good servos and were overbuilt for exploration work. He flashed the payload manifests; flare launchers, mounted for signalling and debris marking, checked out. Augmented grasp servos read 120 percent torque. Cameras warmed up to their individual fees, no offensive mounts, but a flare in a bug swarm draws attention. A shove from a powered claw could push a loader out of the way or maybe even tear through a metacer's shell.

"These should come in handy, still a bitch to remotely control..." 

He muttered to himself, if these things had been automated the whole job would take two minutes and a cup of coffee. But Eden hated the word AI, and automation had been gutted system-wide. So here he was, stuck manning bots that should have been able to think for themselves.

He flipped comms open and spoke fast.

“Bridge, Lopez in engineering. I’ve rerouted nonessentials to maneuver and defense. I’ve hotseated some of the point defenses to engineering. I can hold them here but I need someone on the bridge to call shots if we take heavy contact.”

“Ginny, I’m launching drones as sentries. They’re fitted with flareguns and reinforced claws, they aint weapons, but they should hold their own for a bit. I’ll pilot them from here, but I need a visual patch to your channel if you want to use them for reactor recon.”

“Cargo and boarding teams, keep volatile crates staged in the AL and keep people off the ramps. I’ll try to draw any swarm away from the loading lanes.”

He hit the launch sequence. The bay doors cracked, and one by one the drones blinked awake on his feeds. Cameras flared to life. Small, squat machines, paint scorched from past jobs, their flare barrels gleaming up.

Mark took a breath, he thumbed the manual control and felt the first response from the front drone as if it were an extension of his arm. It squealed as servos wound up, then rolled forward under his guide, the others were on a sequence program so they would follow Lopez's commands in unison. A dozen of them began to march out. 

Watching the drone lumber out toward the cargo lip, this was enough to buy time, perhaps save some more people. He didn't like trading time on hope, but alas.

"It is what it is..." he spoke to himself.