Rosalyn blinked three times in rapid succession, twisted into a pretzel in the engine compartment. On a whim she had used Edison’s captain’s code to access this part of the ship and gained a much-needed second wind when it actually worked. Onboard ship engineering wasn’t exactly her area of expertise, but a few generalized undergrad courses and the ship’s schematic would have to be enough. All MSC vessels ran on the same tech, and that backstabber Griz had broken his usual silence once to drone on about the refinements and upgrades the entire fleet had received recently. That kind of thing was exciting to him, apparently.

Solar panels did the bulk of the work, Griz explained, giddy by his standards, and now Rosalyn was glad she had half listened. Even far from any suns, the panels could soak up traces of light particles. But once those stores were depleted or the ship voyaged too far from any light source, the engines defaulted to the radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Both methods were incredibly safe, but the newer RTGs had to be handled “like babies” according to Griz.

She could hear the pilot’s monotone voice as she unsealed the maintenance panel in engineering: Those puppies kick in too fast and you’ve got more than a fire, you’ve got one inferno of a shit storm.

Scrubbing at the grime on her visor, Rosalyn leaned in closer to the panel, coming face-to-face with the lighted screen reporting on the technical health of the ship. All of it could have been more comfortably accessed from the cockpit, but Rosalyn wasn’t chancing the trip. JAX and the others would be lurking in the halls, and she had been lucky to make it to engineering in secret. There was no telling how long she had, but sooner or later one of the crew would check on her in cold storage and find that it was empty.

It felt wrong, her fingers hovering over the life support and fuel readouts. The Brigantine was in decent shape, and would easily survive the trip to headquarters. Once the thrusters had cycled, they had begun gently carrying them back toward HQ, reinstating the code blue. The solar coating and RTGs had plenty of juice, but without a way to actually direct the thrusters, she would never make it back to the Salvager 6. It was floating out there somewhere, abandoned, but the code blue kept her from redirecting their trajectory. Maybe she could risk trying to override the code, but if she failed or was incapacitated, that would give the crew the ability to fly anywhere. That was a different plan for a different reality, she thought. It was too risky. If even one spore escaped decontamination on her suit, she could spread the nightmare to an entire corporate campus.