Hundreds of miles of wires and thousands of chips came together in the heart of the satellite. Coolant systems ran constantly to combat the heat. There were so many systems that the heat would have fried the systems and the satellite in seconds if the coolant system to keep them below forty degrees Fahrenheit. The coolant systems actually kept the room at negative three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but the heat generated from the systems was so intense that the room averaged about sixty degrees. There were certain areas that stayed too cold for humans to enter without protective suits and those areas were protected by blast doors and lots of red paint.
Finley was cold when it was less than seventy degrees, so she had no intention of going anywhere hear those areas.
The main monitoring room was thankfully closer to sixty degrees, so Finley didn't immediately want to turn around and leave.
Two technicians were sitting at the monitoring station, but they barely paid any attention to Finley. Due to the security protocols and the inherent danger of anything going wrong, no one sane had ever successfully broken into the heart of a satellite so they had no reason to be worried.
Daniel was a couple inches shorter than Finley, with short brown hair that was usually sticking up in random directions because it was a nervous tick to run his hands through it. He had steel grey eyes that never sat still, and it had taken Finley a while to get used to talking to someone who could never sit still during a conversation.
He was half buried in cables and console he'd taken apart when she found him. Muttering to himself as he worked on two different tablets and re-wired the console at the same time.
Finley grinned. "Good to see your staying busy."
"It's about degrees, not absolutes." Whatever he was working on sent up a burst of sparks, but Daniel didn't so much as flinch.
"Hmm. Are you too busy to say hello?"
"Hello." The level of sarcasm he could fill one word with was always impressive.
Finley put every ounce of cheer and pep she could into: "Hello."
Daniel froze, like she'd known he would, and turned to her with a look of such derision that she burst into laughter. "Really?"
"Couldn't help it."
He scowled. "What are you doing here? I sent everything you requested to the docks already."
Finley groaned. "I was afraid of that."
Daniel looked confused.
"It blew up."
He stared at her. "What?"
"Yeah. Someone put a bomb in it. It blew up right after we docked."
"Who the hell-" He remembered to lower his voice halfway through. "-put a bomb in my equipment?"
Finley shrugged. "We don't know yet, but it was very effective. Pretty much none of the cargo survived."
"No one knew what it was. I-, there were precautions-" Daniel tended to spiral when he was thrown off by something unexpected.
"It's most likely that they were targeting the Loss. I'm expecting we'll find out it wasn't supposed to explode until after we'd launched again."
Daniel's face twisted in annoyance. "Seriously? That took weeks to build. Not to mention finding the materials."
"I hear your assignment here is almost finished?"
Daniel snorted and waved a hand at the wires surrounding him. "Just doing a final debugging."
"Right." Just looking at all those wires gave Finley a headache. Starships were so advanced that their wiring was critical, and each ship had so many miles of wires onboard that they could stretch from Earth to the Moon laid one after another. Wiring engineers were the only ones who could even read and actually understand the wiring diagrams for a ship. "Where are you going next?"
Daniel sighed and finally stopped working on the wiring and turned to her. "What do you want, Finley?"
"I want you to come aboard the Loss."
"Why?"
"Because we're headed beyond the light wall. On a five-year mission to re-establish contact and continue humankind's exploration of the universe." She knew the moment she had his full attention. He rarely gave it to anyone, but when he did there was a weight to it. She knew his mind was running through a thousand scenarios, possibilities that would never occur to most people been if they spent years thinking about a problem.
"I don't do well in dangerous situations." He admitted, sounding the closest she'd ever heard to ashamed. She had heard rumors about a blow up with another Federal Captain towards the end of the war. Someone else who'd tried to force him to pick a side. And she could admit that despite her fondness for the cranky genius, his people skills weren't something he worked at or worried about. She'd seen him get into plenty of screaming matches with people who disagreed with him, and he'd always ended up being right. He tended to get loud and louder and a lot less polite if arguments dragged on.
But she didn't think he was bad in dangerous situations. He was so smart and so aware of it that he rarely panicked because he had absolute faith in his ability to fix any issue.
Finley was willing to bet that him not doing well was related to his lack of people skills and not his actual ability to handle danger, but he'd never believe it just because she said it. "I'm sure that's something we can work on. You probably just need more experience."
Daniel shook his head. "It's not a good idea. I've never worked on a ship before."
"You've built them."
"You just want me to make the upgrades to the shield directly."
"Not just. Look, I'd delay here if that was all I wanted, but my offer is genuine. We worked well together before the war, I think we could work well on this mission."
"You have an entire department of engineers and scientists."
"Who are all soldiers. They follow orders before they do anything else. Besides, none of them are the man who invented the NOVA bomb."
~ tbc