Nori elbowed him. “Do you two want to be left alone?”

“Eh? What?” He snapped out of his reverie.

“Think you can fix it?” she asked.

“Hmmm, I’m not sure. Let me check.”

The large man reached his hands into the air above the pit. Several light console and holographic monitors flickered to life, displaying zoomed in images of the engine and rows of unfamiliar symbols.

Nori blinked in surprise. “You can do that? None of us could locate any sort of interface here.”

Bulco smirked. “Looks like being the Navigator only goes so far. As soon as I entered the room, I got a notification on my HUD asking if I want to run a diagnostic, that’s when everything turned up. Here, I think this is what we’re looking for.”

He swiped at one of the holographic screens, and the weird symbols rearranged themselves into plain English.

Ship hull: multiple fractures detected.

Power core: containment breach detected. Emergency shutdown enacted to prevent catastrophic failure.

Thrusters: offline.

Null Tunnel matrix: destroyed.

“Hmm, interesting,” Bulco said. “Looks like the main power’s busted - see that crack in the casing? Without it, the ship’s going nowhere—the emergency power cells can only operate the ship’s internal systems. The thrusters look alright, but the sudden loss of power caused the controls to go on the fritz. No idea how to fix that one. So, to answer your question, Nori, I might be able to do something about the hull fractures, but other than that, it looks like the ship’s busted badly. And that’s not even taking into consideration the Null Tunnel drive. There’s no fixing that one—it needs to be replaced.”

Lana frowned. “The what now drive?”

Bulco shrugged. “Hell if I know. I just read the name off my interface. The actual parts are beyond my Engineer score to identify.”

“It’s a subatomic tunneling device,” Nori said automatically.

Lana arched her brow. “Eh?”

Nori looked embarrassed. “I don’t know exactly how it works. It causes something called ‘subatomic particle disjunction’, which opens a corridor through space.”

“You mean like subspace?”

“I guess you can call it that.”

“It would be cool to be able to fly away to a different star system.” Lana sighed ruefully. “But I guess that’s just a pipe dream if we can’t even get the main power to work. Any chance we can fix that one?”

Bulco shook his head. “The broken casing can’t be fixed; it has to be replaced. Do you happen to have the number of an intergalactic spare parts shop that delivers?”

Lana looked at him, crestfallen.