Bridgebuilder

The next morning arrived and Alex was a little less tired than usual. His apology to Zenshen had been met with good natured ribbing, which was what he had expected.

Dominic Crenshaw had also been amicable to getting an apology. Alex had come clean about how his reaction had been more about his past bad choices than what Crenshaw had said, and they had talked for a while afterwards. About Alex's experiences with the Tsla'o, mostly. He had spent the most time around them, immersed in their culture. It was all stuff he had sent along in his reports to Section 7. The reports that had not made it to the Primer. He would probably be annoyed by that forever.

Crenshaw was less hesitant about trusting the Tsla'o than the first time they had met on McFadden station. Actually working with them had settled that.

It eased some tension that Alex had been hoarding all for himself.

Breakfast went as usual. He loitered after eating today, though. The Corvin was still inoperable, with its instrumentation still largely disassembled. There would be no further flight prep until that was resolved. Carbon had set the printers to work on the replacement parts overnight. Apparently the nose ribs were finished, but the length of the wiring harness Alex had removed and cut yesterday was taking its sweet time due to greater complexity.

That was fine. He still had something to do, there was a little timing involved. He sat in one of the booths in the mess by himself as people started to filter out. Scrolled on his tablet, drank his coffee, ate his donuts, and generally acted dejected because he was back to not doing anything but minding the Groundskeeper drone.

There were a couple of people left in the mess when Alex finished his donuts. He bundled up, grabbed a fresh coffee, said a quick goodbye, and cycled out the airlock.

Then opened his comm up and set himself to patrolling. This was his life right now. He patrolled.

This was less a functional military patrol, and more like a security guard making sure nobody was trying to steal the dispenser out of the lunch room. It was, for all intents and purposes, doing laps around the base. Checking up on the Groundskeeper. Pretending he had some function here, because the drones they were supposed to have did this way better than he could, from a kilometer in the air.

It looked better than not logging in any sort of task while everyone else worked.

Alex set his coffee down in a snow bank and slipped on a pair of sunglasses, the false-sun of the Artifact aggressively bright this morning. Regular military issue ones, no fancy stuff built in except for impact resistance.

He tromped down the hill, the airlock to the mess cycling behind him. Abbot, Crenshaw, De Luca, Valena, and Zenshen were all heading over to the Command building.

It was the little things that made them immediately stand out from each other. Abbot in his anorak. De Luca had a macho streak so she wore no parka over a thick base layer. Crenshaw flew the Mars flag on his shoulder, pale blue over rust red. Valena was the only other Tsla'o in the mess, her hood down and silver-gray fur sparkling in the sun. Zenshen had taken to wearing a flag on her shoulder as well. Purple, red, and gold. That was not a standard thing the Tsla'o military did.

He didn't know where she had gotten that flag, or how it was attached.

They all packed into the Command building's airlock, and that was that. Alex turned his attention back to the patrol. Lake: still frozen. Pathways: still frozen. Mind: preoccupied.

Carbon had scanned the thing he found on the wiring plug after dinner last night. Worked on it in their bunk until bedtime, poring over what she had found for several hours.

Her analysis of the extra circuitry on the wiring harness determined that it was a remote bypass. It had a tiny antenna so the range was limited - it would have to be accessed from inside the cabin, or just outside the cockpit. Once active, it would have control over everything the flight deck did, including comms so it could receive commands through the Corvin itself.

She had noted that the autonomous logic boards they had received 'on accident' were powerful enough to run an advanced drone once loaded with the right software, it would need an antenna to access the bypass - something that they had on hand in every wireless electronic device on the base.

The units were currently lacking any programming, so it wasn't an issue. Carbon had also taken the liberty of filling all the ports on those boards with quickweld, rendering them impossible to use.

Alex sneezed and spilled coffee on his parka. His crisp white parka. "Fuck." He brushed it off, mostly making it worse. His gloves had coffee on them now too, and there were drips on the previously pristine walkway.

Well, that sucked but it was easily remedied. The depot was right there at the bottom of the hill and it had a bathroom. It would only take a minute to get this cleaned up with an actual towel.

He scuffed some snow over the spill on the path and headed down.

Alex let himself in the pedestrian door, and remembered to clean his boots this time. Carbon had briefly complained about someone tracking boot prints all over her shop, and Alex was pretty sure that it had been him. Under different circumstances he would have kept that to himself and just minded that in the future. But they were dealing with people with nefarious intent here, so he had copped to it probably being his visit. Not someone else skulking around in there. That time, at least.

Carbon and Zheng were the only people there. Carbon was working on another pallet of supplies that had come through yesterday, wearing her armor. Zheng sitting at the workbench, tapping away at a keyboard. The printers were humming away at projects unknown, the matter compiler still building the wiring harness.

"Morning!" He announced, as no one had really looked up from what they were doing when he walked in.

Zheng waved over her shoulder.

"Hello." Carbon hefted a crate about half the size of her body off the pallet and carefully walked it into the secure cage, glancing over him quickly. "What did you do to yourself?"

"Coffee attacked me." He finished the cup and tossed it into the recycler by the door. "Don't worry, I won."

The cage door closed behind her. "So I see."

"Just stopping by to clean up, really. So, you know." He headed back to the bathroom, a very compact affair crammed into the corner of the building.

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"Do not let me stop you."

"I won't." Just normal coworker banter. Probably. His last batch of 'coworkers' that he hadn't ended up in love with had been other Scoutship pilots. Which were not a normal group by any means. Had Carbon ever had coworkers at all before now? By his understanding, the command staff on the ship she was deployed to as a Lan were the closest thing to such, which, again. Not a normal group.

They were going to screw up so bad if they ever faced any sort of scrutiny to keep this charade afloat.

Flip side of that, of course, was that if someone was preparing to make weapons here, there was a reasonable chance they knew about that relationship. Maybe not the full details of it, but the Civilian Pilot Program had seen the black box data from the Kshlav'o as well as the ONI. The Navy knew. The thought had crossed his mind that they would make great collateral for use against Eleya. Well, Carbon would. He'd only be there to keep Carbon in line, but given Carbon's reaction to Eleya being shitty, that would not work out in new and exciting ways for their plant.

But there was a silver lining here. A little water and a paper towel was all it took to get his clothes clean again. It was the closest he could get to a silver lining right now. Alex had never really considered himself particularly fastidious when it came to his clothing. Scuffs and such just added a worn-in patina. But that blotch running down the crisp white front of his jacket had annoyed him.

Alex really had to try out the other color settings on his parka. He paid for the color change feature, he should use it.

Carbon was waiting for him when he stepped out of the bathroom. "Could I ask you a favor, Pilot?"

"Yeah, of course. What's up?"

She smiled and gestured over to a stack of plastic containers on the workbench. "The nose ribs for the Corvin finished fabricating this morning, do you suppose you could take them up to the hangar for me?"

"Sure, I'm headed up past it anyway." He grabbed them up and stuffed them into one of the big cargo pockets on his parka, surprised at how compact they were. The Corvin's wings weren't particularly thick, though. "All clear of microfractures, I presume?"

"Yes, both Zheng and I checked independently." Carbon nodded, watching him cram dozens of hours of work into his pocket like a handful of snacks. She looked up to meet his gaze and she continued, in a slightly sweeter tone, "if it is not too much to ask, could you also take some of my tools with you?"

"I don't see why not." He knew she was going to ask that.

All of this had been planned to get him in here to take that tool box up in a manner that appeared organic. The moody hanging around the mess, the 'patrolling', spilling the coffee... It was assumed that their plant, or plants, would have access to the security cameras and drone feeds. Some of them could be avoided, some of them couldn't.

When they went looking for these parts, the locations should be unknowable. No matter how much searching they did.

Which is why, when Carbon led him over to the secure cage and grabbed a big toolbox for him to take, it had already been loaded with a bunch of stuff they wanted to make disappear. Off camera.

"Here you go." She held the black polymer toolbox out like it was weightless, thanks to the strength boost from her armor.

He lifted it from her grasp and nearly dropped it. He had expected it to be heavy, sure, but not that heavy. "Wow. Suppose you will be taking a spaceship apart." Alex laughed, wincing internally at how nervous that sounded.

"I will be, yes." Carbon said, pleasantly.

"Well, I should get back to it. I'll see you guys at lunch?" He pulled his hood up and shuffled awkwardly to the door, adapting to the weight of the toolbox as he went. "Don't have too much fun."

Zheng didn't look up from her work, waving over her shoulder. "See you later."

Carbon waved. He caught the heavy weight of sadness collapsing into her eyes just before he stepped outside.

Alex assumed this entire thing was more difficult for her. They had gotten used to each other and fell into a comfortable groove over the last few months. Now they got to play pretend at being friends, at best. They were doing all right at that in public and very bad at that in private.

He didn't like it, but he had experience with having romantic relationships come and go before. Not that Alex had been very good at them, but it gave him a foundation of that sort of loss to build from, to be comfortable with. Carbon didn't have that. She didn't even have friends that hadn't been given to her.

That was what burned through his mind as he trudged up the hill to the hangar. She was a grown woman, more than capable of taking care of herself. He shouldn't feel so defensive of her... But he did. Alex knew how defensive of him she was. He had been there when it boiled over.

Soon he was back in the Hokule'a, filling the seats with more parts and a big box of tools. He closed the door - the hangar was cold. While the shuttle's main power couldn't be turned on, the life support was on its own redundant link and keeping the temperature inside at a much more survivable 23 degrees. Practically balmy after months on Tsla'o ships.

The top trays of the toolbox actually contained tools. Shiny, new, about half of what Carbon would need to open up the wing. Conveniently, these were more than enough for him to open interior body panels the onboard tool kit couldn't. There were only three people that should have access to these once they were back in the cage, as well, minimizing the number of avenues

Beneath that, where one would normally expect to find larger tools, were the more concerning goodies that got sent over. He picked up what looked like a dark gray IV bag, swollen with what they were considering contraband. Beryllium colloid, one liter. Two more remained in the box. All five of the quickweld sealed logic boards were in there as well, and a can of spray foam to keep things from rattling around.

The meeting with Admiral Serrat was still on for this afternoon. Carbon and Williams had been triangulating on how they were going to approach these findings over dinner last night, dining in the Command building under the guise of planning the expedition's first visit to the holographic map in the grove. Feel out Serrat's responses to determine if he was aware of what was going on, and if it seemed appropriate to do so based on his reactions, request that all of this stuff get sent back through for a thorough investigation. Or at least safe disposal.

No one was supposed to be using the portal without express permission, and that included hurling suspicious items through it.

So this may have been for nothing. Alex might find himself back up here after dinner tonight taking the overhead bin apart again to get at the nook that he was about to seal those logic boards into.

Time would tell.