“What is happen, question?”

“This screen came up with information.”

“What is wrong, question?”

“Let me read!”

Rocky can be a real pain in the butt when he’s worried. I read the status report.

EMERGENCY POWER: ONLINE

BATTERY: 100%

ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING: 04D, 16H, 17M

SABATIER LIFE SUPPORT: OFFLINE

CHEMICAL ABSORPTION LIFE SUPPORT: ONLINE. !!!LIMITED DURATION, NON-RENEWABLE!!!

TEMPERATURE CONTROL: OFFLINE

TEMPERATURE: 22 °C

PRESSURE: 40,071 PA

“The ship’s keeping me alive, but not doing anything else right now.”

“Give me generator. I fix.”

“First I need to find it,” I say.

Rocky slumps. “You not know where you ship parts are, question?!”

“The computer has all that information! I can’t remember all that!”

“Human brain useless!”

“Oh, shut up!”

I climb down the ladder to the lab. The emergency lighting is on in here too. Rocky follows along in his tunnel.

I reach down, grab my tool bag, and continue onward to the next ladder. He continues following me.

“Where you go, question?”

“The storage area. It’s the only place I haven’t completely searched. And it’s the very bottom of the crew compartment. If the generator is accessible to the crew, that’s where it’ll be.”

Once in the dormitory, I crawl into the storage space. My arm hurts. I climb around to inspect the bulkhead with the fuel bay. My arm hurts more.

At this point, my arm just always hurts, so I try to ignore it. But no more painkillers. They just make me too stupid. I lie back in the storage compartment and let the pain subside a bit. There must be access panels in here, right? I can’t remember the exact layout of the ship, but critical equipment is probably inside the pressurized area. For this very reason. Right?

How do I find it, though? I’d need x-ray vision to know where—oh, hey!

“Rocky! Are there any doors in here?”

He is silent for a moment. He taps on the wall a few times. “Six small doors.”

“Six?! Ugh. Tell me where the first one is.” I put my hand on the compartment ceiling.

“Move hand toward your feet and left…”

I follow his directions to the first door. Man, they’re hard to see. The emergency lighting in the dormitory is meager to start with, and the small amount getting into the compartment is dismal.

The panel is secured with a simple flat-head screw that controls a latch. I turn it with a stub screwdriver from my toolkit. The panel swings open to reveal a pipe with a valve on it. The label reads PRIMARY OXYGEN SHUTOFF. Definitely don’t want to mess with that. I close the cabinet.

“Next door.”

One by one, he leads me to each door and I check what’s behind it. I know he can sonar-sense the shapes behind the doors but that’s no good. I’d rather just look at what’s there than have him describe what he senses in our limited shared language.

Behind the fourth door, I find it.

It’s a lot smaller than I expect it to be. The whole cubby is about 1 cubic foot. The generator itself is in an irregularly shaped black casing and I only know it’s a generator because it’s labeled as such. I see two thick pipes with shutoff valves on them, as well as several fairly normal-looking electrical wires.