Repairing the Giro

Posted on Tue Sep 9th, 2025 @ 6:53pm by Lieutenant JG Elen Rell

789 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Pilot - "The Gate"
Location: USS Guinevere
Timeline: MD001, during the battle

The air tasted scorched to Elen, burned wiring and ionised coolant. She skidded the last metre into the corridor, braid half-loose, a looped strap of her field kit bouncing off her shoulder. She ducked instinctively as a power relay sparked above her. “Okay! I'm here! Sorry...Jefferies Tube 9-G decided to try aggressive diplomacy.”

The corridor was tilted slightly off true. Gravity felt just a fraction off-centre, like the ship was breathing sideways. Not great.

Ahead, a bulkhead had buckled from the blast. Inside the exposed junction housing, the gyro-sensor access node looked like it had lost an argument with a disruptor beam. Plasma scoring arced across the floor grilles. Conduits hissed faintly where EPS links had blown.

Three of the Damage Control crew were already on scene, crouched behind the partial shielding of a control hatch. One of them, Petty Officer Unni looked up as she dropped beside them. “Rell. Thought you were in Main Engineering.”

“Was,” Elen said, already unpacking tools. “Then the ship went interpretive dance and I figured you might want a backup dancer with good knees.”

She dropped into a crouch beside the sensor housing. The gyro-sensor array wasn’t the heart of the inertial dampening system, but it was damn close...a critical orientation nexus tied into both the flight vector calculations and the ship’s artificial gravity stabilisation. If it stayed out of sync, helm couldn’t hold position, and the inertial dampers would go from graceful ballet to warp-speed pratfall.

“Right. Status?” Elen looked over at Unni, her face serious but her eyes gentle. He looked shaken. Steady, but shaken. She couldn't blame him. She hadn't let her mind focus on it. Like that line from the poem her mother used to whisper... Steady hands, though the sky is burning; fear is only weather.

“Sensor readings are lagging by 2.6 seconds,” Unni replied. “And the primary dampener feedback loop isn’t responding to recalibration.”

“Lovely.” Elen pried open the lower maintenance panel, frowning as she ducked inside. “Oh, that’s extra crispy. Looks like when I try to bake.”

She reached for her tricorder, thumbed it to high-resolution diagnostic, and scanned the exposed isolinear relays and signal integrators. “Alright. EPS transfer conduit’s fused at the junction node. Probably when the deflector routing got hit...look, you can see the arc marks here.”

No response, so she added a little quieter: “Also someone bypassed the surge regulators manually, which is very brave and very illegal, but also clever, and I would like to buy them a fruit basket.”

There was a pause behind her. One of the crew coughed. “Do we reroute nav input to the backup array?”

“Not unless you want helm flying blind with only tertiary compensation. No lateral drift correction, no automatic yaw control. Think 'space canoe in a typhoon'. Which...is bad,” Elen reached for a micro-resonator tool and started delicately unspooling the damaged field coil junction, her motions quick but precise. She spoke as she worked, mostly to herself:

“‘When your compass fails, measure by your own breath.
When your path shakes, steady your bones against the stars.’”

Martian poetry. A little melodramatic, maybe, but apt.

“Okay. Replacing the SIF-integrated gyro relay with a bypass from the auxiliary alignment module...don’t worry, it’s rated for inertial load-bearing.” Her voice was calm now, rhythmic, as if she were tuning a harp string instead of repairing a critical starship system mid-firefight. “Give me fifteen seconds and a quiet prayer to Guinevere herself”

The ship lurched again. Elen caught herself on the panel’s inner frame and didn’t stop.

“Ten… nine…” She flicked a bypass tap, rerouted EPS flow through a secondary coupler. “Three-ish.”

The light inside the housing flickered. Then stabilised.

Behind her, the red alert lighting dimmed slightly, and the slight tilt in the floor eased, orientation beginning to correct. The inertial dampers pulsed as the system re-synced. Elen sat back on her heels, a wide grin smudged with soot across one cheek. “There we go. Like a leaf in the current...still battered, but at least we’re back in the stream.” She crawled out, putting her tools back. She glanced at Unni. “Stabilise the feedback regulator and run a full Level 3 systems check. If it even thinks about redlining, I want to know before the ship does another cartwheel.”

“And if it does?”

“I will personally crawl back in here and sing it lullabies until it behaves," Elen said sweetly before she shrugged and then tapped her combadge. "Rell to Jalay, got the Giro working again, for now. It'll need a more loving touch later."

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Lieutenant JG Elen Rell
Acting Chief Engineer
USS Guinevere

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