I woke my station and checked the damage reports. There were uncontrolled fires raging down on D deck, and evidence of shrapnel damage to the portside engine assembly as well as various…

“Carto?”
“Yeah?”
“We’ve lost the portside signal transcoder. Engineers say there’s no way of repairing it before twenty-oh-oh.”
A string of expletives left my mouth.
“Vec, we can’t do a course change without it. Can they rig something? Anything?”
“Our little monkey is still wreaking havoc onboard and the security teams can’t find whoever it is.”
“Well, get something capable of signal delivery out there. I don’t care how, but I can’t do anything without a port transceiver. And tell Engineering to stop playing hell with my engines, they’re stressed enough as it is.”
“That’s your job, carto. Sweet-talk them, work your magic or something. We need everything we can get out of them.”
“I would, but our saboteur took out the port primary heatsink and they’re getting stressy. All I can do is stop them boiling out.”