16

It isn’t comforting that the ship’s power will only turn on for a few minutes at a time, here and there. Unless we’re fully going to build a shelter outside the ship with a fireplace and a chimney, we can’t build a fire inside this ship. We run the possibility that we’ll freeze to death inside here.

Every morning when we wake up, there is frost coating the windows in the sleeping quarters. My nose is frozen, and it’s torture having to get out from beneath the covers and each other’s warm bodies.

So I go back into the mechanical room. I slip into the mind of a mechanic and engineer.

The electrical board is complicated, the most advanced I’ve ever seen. I have to go through it, one wire at a time, tracing where it goes, what it does. One by one, I check them, fixing the damage I find; replacing what was fried in our punch through space.

I find core connections that were melted in our jump. And if I were anyone else in the galaxy, we would be in trouble. There aren’t spares on the ship