[h3]Mark A. Lopez[/h3]

Mark didn’t get the relief everyone else seemed to be clinging to. Sure, the ship had peeled away from the station and the bulkheads weren’t vibrating with imminent collapse anymore, they had survived, at least for the time being. But then the word came down: movement in the vents.

Maybe it was only a handful of metacer, maybe it was “probably nothing.” Either way, if something small and hungry got into the wrong crawlspace and chewed through a line it shouldn’t then it wouldn’t be the bridge eating the blame, it would be engineering, or rather whoever was left in charge of it. So in others words it would be him, elbows-deep in singlehandedly trying to keep a barely-crewed colony ship from turning into a floating coffin.

So Mark made due with what he could. One of his maintenance drones sat on a work cradle under a harsh strip lights, its chassis scraped and dented from the mess back at the cargo ramp. He worked silently, replacing a scorched servo and reseating a cracked camera housing, reattaching a plate that had come loose and started to rattle like a bad tooth. It was all typical repair work he was used to but then he reached for the rifle at the side of the table.

“Yeah,” he muttered, “That’ll do.”

He wouldn't pretend this idea was elegant, it was a crude solution to a stupid problem, but the ship didn’t have the luxury of perfect.

He rigged the drone to carry it in a way that didn’t fight its balance, kept the barrel clear of its own frame and adjusted the setup into the drone’s existing control loop so he could make it work without needing a second set of hands. He didn’t need a sentry that looked good, just something that could go into a shaft and stop a bug before it became a nest, he was not about to go in there himself. He also refitted the flare launcher, light and heat still seemed to be effective ways to keep those things at bay. 

By the time he was done, the drone looked like an amalgamation of military equipment welded to a maintenance frame. Mark wiped his hands on a rag and stared at it for a second, he felt rather proud of his little contraption.

“Whole ship full of geniuses,” he said to nobody, “And I’m the one chasing bugs in the damn vents.”

He keyed the comm.

“Bridge, Lopez. I’m pushing a sweep through the service shafts now. I’ve got a drone running eyes hunting for anything with more than two legs. If you’ve got reports of movement, give me deck and section. Out.”

He then switched to Ginny’s channel.

“Sokolova. I’m doing your sweep. If you hear anything about vent movement or hot spots, send it fast. I can only drive one of these things directly at a time.”

He launched the drone into the maintenance corridor. Its camera feed popped into his display: narrow metal conduits illuminated by its set of LEDs. The drone crawled into a vent junction and Mark leaned closer to the screen, his thumb and fingers making tiny corrections like he was flying a shuttle through clutter.

Somewhere under the irritation, another thought kept gnawing at him, this was going to keep happening. Not just with bugs but with everything. There weren’t enough hands around, not enough skilled crew. Every task was going to be triage, patchwork, improvisation and he could already feel how thin the margin was.

Mark watched the drone’s feed slide deeper into the ship and felt his annoyance forming into a possible solution. When this was over he was going to start building something better. Something that could do the job without him babysitting every meter of hull.

Because if the ESS 3822-01 was going to stay alive, it couldn’t depend on one exhausted engineer manually driving a metal bug-catcher through a maze of vents forever. He exhaled through his nose, thumb steady on the control.

“Alright,” he murmured, “Let’s go find your friends...”