A leap and a Joke
![[Image: Makarov_2.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/566957680435134474/568728573276454941/Makarov_2.png)
Makarov let out a sigh as he stared down into the the bottom part of the room Val was in, clicking off his magnetized boots and jumping off the railing, there was still enough gravity left to make his suit crash to the ground before he pulled himself back up and click on his magnets again, his face completely obscured as he turned his head to look at Val, scanning over the room with his expansive green retical, lighting everything up in it's path as he scanned the damage.
"Well this place is just all sort of messed up, ja?"
He attempted to activate the built in fuser but it did nothing, taking his hammer and slamming it down into his gauntlet before it bursted out flames in a very odd, cloud like way before immediately being snuffed out by the lack of oxygen to burn. Makarov turned his attention back to Val now.
"I assume you needed me for heavy lifting then? No wait, you wanted me for the butcher suit. I see how it is."
He laughed at his joke before laying his suit's arm on the hammer and leaned on it.
"How long do you think it'll take to replace that plating? I got about an hour left on my oxygen."
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Riehl's response was strangled away by the final seconds of the intranet deciding that now was the perfect time to fail on her. Bandwith was full, It chimed at her. Spacetraffic Control was eating away at the station's beleaguered commnets spectra to corral the bedlam of massively explosive improvised mines plastering the local space into a formation where they wouldn't latch themselves to the outer hull and blow the whole prison away. The Corsair techs were good, almost too good, but most of the bombs they dropped off lacked adequate guidance for how to operate the mines. Some of the technology differences were so separate that they'd just garble away to one another in broken Cretian Spanish and German about what a wrench is and why you'd need one. It wasn't a miracle that nobody had died, it was expending the slow odds. Eventually some poor sap was going to get themselves magnetised to an explosive spike the length of a Libertonian Football court.
Clothes.
There were an array of service lockers throughout the prison - everything the guards, maintenance teams, jailers and torturers-in-suits could require to keep near sixty thousand of Rheinland's most original thinkers in a state of slow suffering. Near every wall and floor contained storage hatches with unlocked sensor panels on the sides with no two-way switches. Nowhere to hide, if you were sneaky enough to stash yourself away, you'd be shut in there until the guards wanted you out. They were barely smaller than the cells.
The insides had been instrumented with sensors and antitap systems, most of which had blown up in the fusillade of gunfire, breaching drones and general massacre that'd sent all the flawless security systems designed to keep the roughest and hardest unarmed convicts in, screaming to destruction as their warranties promptly lost the value of the terminals they were coded on struggling to keep well-armed Coalition marines outside of each and every bulkhead. Lawful sabotage had been real proper - they'd busted and burned enough storage containers to make most of the fittings difficult to source, but they'd had to do it manually, and had mostly focused on staying, well, not dead.
She thumbed aside a broken lock, blasted open by a Unioner who'd lost patience with a las-cutter and resorted to explosives. A Unioner had stashed another set of overalls - pants were still off the menu - here, along with a power haz-suit that had a sizeable oxygen bottle and few leaks that looked like they'd widen through compression cycles. It wasn't rated for EVA, but for tunnel slicing, it'd do the job. It looked fresh, barely peeled out of the plastic.
Nothing more beautiful than collective property.
Riehl grimaced, lumbering out of the service elevator. The servos are stiff and new in the powersuit, calibrated for someone stronger, or twitchier, than herself. The radiation beeper ticked up on her hud to enough to fry a small chicken - exposure to the particulates blasted out from the fuel cores and antimatter detonations that still washed their residue through Vierlande's orbital slot. Emergency lights - sickness green. Stellar background radiation levels in an environment without any obvious hullbreaches. Hm.
"It's toasty in here. Not the core, either. Combat radiation, but no leaks. Somebody patched the place without sponging it down." She gesticulated a weary three-fingered chest salute to Val. "No pants."
She unholstered her multitool - pragmatically, it was half nanocaster, half materials penetrating sensor miniturised down and strapped to a bloated handcannon grip, then all bound together in a glossed aluminium case that did nothing to keep the mass down. A fine piece of Unioner ingenuity, as incongrous as it looked.
"Which unit's cracked up? Coulda' been a coreblower we wern't looking for."
Sabotage. It was all they were covering for. Vierlande had a decentralised power grid, with no less than three fusion reactors distributed through the hull backing up the six old fission units that had been running since the station's construction. That is, until the long arm of the law realised it was foreshortening and yanked the control rods out of all of the cores before shutting down containment.
Only one reactor didn't respond to the command. Reactor starboard Blue. In part, because it'd been shot to hell. It had become the defacto power source for the entire station over the interrim. Overstressed, and probably filled with blast burns. Main power had been dead for weeks.
Riehl attempted to rub her face only to bonk herself in the visor. "Marakov, you're gonna' have to do the heavy lifting. I can't move for shit in this can."
Waiting on You Darling
Makarov stood back up from leaning on his hammer, picking it up and turning his visor to Riehl to look at her, listening as she spoke. He sighed and glanced around at the room.
"Here's to hoping the place doesn't fall apart on us, just tell me what you need me to rip off, crush, smash, or haul from point A to B."
He turned his entire body to her now, hammer over his shoulder as he held the base, waiting for instructions, he wasn't exactly Station Generator smart, he could fix ships and panels, but not this.
Valentina looks at the two, then nods pulling out a few schematics she patches straight into Makarov's suit communications speaking in her currently tremulous voice "Okey, Makarov listen carefully. There's a level on the side of Blue, pull that down 3 times then pull it out. That will give you access to the control rods and the pressure vessel. At that point you'll have to describe the damage you see, oh and also" she takes a sharp breath and says the next one with fear and seriousness "Do not let the control rods touch the pressure vessel at all" satisfied that her warning was enough she checks over the other reactors whilst talking with Riehl, privately "You realise fixing a nuclear fusion reactor isn't going to be easy right? I can't promise anything, oh and take a few steps back Gunny when he opens up the reactor" she states.
Valentina checks over the radiation levels then herself takes a few steps back, this will be interesting either it works or the whole station goes up in a nice fiery nuclear reaction. Valentina starts to sweat, the stress getting to her again.
At The Edge Of Hell
Makarov let out a sigh and checked the radiation levels as he approached the panel, putting his hammer down and propping it up against the railing as he approached the lever, realising how small it was going to be in there, he let out a concerned, "Sh*t." He lifted his right arm high above his head as he pulled a lever and the massive forearm fell off, hitting the ground with a thud. then doing the same with the other. He Pulled down on the lever 3 times as instructed as the panel plating fell open, He switched his retical back to green as he lowered his head to look inside, the Control rods were in tact barely, the compartment was heavily electrified from something damaged. He was gonna get hurt if he tried something there. Suddenly the arching electricity spat out at him and shocked his suit, the retical shutting off as his suit trembled and the hydraulics went nuts, falling to one knee hard as he waited for the surge to pass. When he gained control of his suit he tapped the side of his helm as the retical spurred before turning back on.
"Uh.. well, the entire compartment is electrified and arching. The control rods are still raised, Val are you trying to kill me? I get i'm an ex hessian and all but i'd rather you just slit my throat while I sleep. Aside from that something in here is definitely busted up. And i'm NOT sticking my head in that thing to see it. I like my brains inside my head and not melting out my ears thanks."
After his monologue he got a lot closer to the open panel.
"Seems everything else is fine aside from whatever's flinging electricity everywhere."
Valentina watches Makarov closely and nervously as he approaches the reactor, she winces at the electrical damage muttering to herself "Th-that's not good..." she looks down at her pad going through a few things nodding and muttering along to herself. She takes a deep breath then concentrates, meaning business "Okay, Makarov I need you to listen carefully there should a few buttons on the side of the opening, I want you to press this sequence." she takes another pause "Sequence start, Deactivate electromagnets, then flush neutron overflow, activate electromagnets. Make sure the Control rods don't move too much whilst doing this. It sounds like the electromagnets overcharged" she presses some more buttons on her pad, starting to sweat more "If they are disabled completely, we'll have to do a full reactor shutdown Gunny." she says towards Gunda. This was going to be interesting and dangerous.
Stop Shocking Me!
Makarov tilted his head to the side and pressed the buttons in the desired sequence Val had said to him, being silent as he did so as the arching electricity within the panel ceased. The tips of his fingers burning from how electrified the buttons were as well. He was genuinely terrified of getting electrocuted again. The arching electricity within the panel has ceased.
"Alright what now, Val. I'd rather not bite my own tongue off."
The beauty of electromagnetism was that it was simple. Anything that impacted everything became a fact of life, from neutral particles to charged. Ninety percent of electrical engineering problems could be summarised by the bloody current was wonking up the wrong conductor. Flesh; water-rich and ferrous, didn't so much offer resistance as it cooked under ampage. Moreso if current found a cut, sweat, any chink in the armour that evolution had given between you and the universe.
Gunda grabbed Marakov's arm. "Hold it before you lose it. You see that?"
She pointed the scanner down the seam of the fusion torus, the laser pointer diffracting against the stained display, burning out pixels. "Yeah. Here's the working theory - there's three centimetres of insulation torn out of the stellarator wall and just bonking around in the torus."
Riehl licked the sweat from where it was stinging into her cracked mouth. "The reactor's a reactor. It's tough, but it's not structural. Force and pressure is real simple. The chamber's isolated from the station structure by hardfields, right? Power switches off, snap - It's losing the suspension on your bike then running over a rut. That doesn't matter so much on a space station. Push one way, you move. 'Cept we had warheads popping off all around the station and the station was hard enough to take it, or we wouldn't be here. So what do you get? You get shocks propogating through the station and canceling each other out. But they're not simultaneous, no. Bend a piece of metal one way, and it'll flex. Waggle it back and forth? It's going to get brittle. Polymer's brittle already.".
"Insulation's going to be screwed in there. See, if a crack sliced through there, you're going to get current in the walls. Add in a few radiation sources flashing the steel brittle outside of the hull, you've baked yourself a recipe for a cooked hull panel. Not enough to fry the room, might be enough to fry a hand on the controls."
Riehl let her words hang away from her. Marakov had felt the jolt under several layers of layered exposure suit. If it had been a bare hand she'd be smelling hogroast.
Valentina knows all too well the issues that Gunda is descrbing, nodding along to every word. She speaks up after Gunda has done explaining "Don't touch anything, do not activate the electromagnets. What ever is loose will probably attract to it and damage it more. You need to do a full reactor shutdown then take away the arm piece by piece until you find it. I hope you brought your screwdriver." she says walking to the railing, she speaks with some authority "Okay, Makarov press and hold the red button until a display comes up, when that happens type in the code 5-9-1-1, it will bring up a confirmation message. Confirm that you want to deactivate that arm, then I'll come down and begin to take it apart." Valentina looks at her suit and checks her O2 levels briefly "Oh and, be careful, please" she pleads with him
Hope this cargo hold full of Oxy...
Physically drained after the shocks and running out of air with only 30 minutes left (roughly) Makarov was becoming slow to respond. It took him a few seconds to bring his arm up to press the button as the screen appeared he typed in the code Val had given him.
"5-9-1-1"
He spoke each number before hitting the button to make sure his brain made the connection with his movements. He pressed the confirm button before slowly leaning down on his knees and putting his hands to the floor, flipping his gravity boots off to allow himself to free float and rest. Pulling his armored gauntlets back on he would glance at his oxygen meter.
"28... something minutes left on my oxygen, should probably make a run to my ship for more. Bring a whole cart back for you two as well."
After hearing the locking mechanism click on both his gauntlets, Makarov re-enabled his grav-boots as he thud to the floor again. Hoisting his hammer over his shoulder as stood. Glancing at the two of them as his retical flickered back to life from the previous shock.
"Need me to move anything before I head back to my ship?"
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