Dangerous.
“So!” Tavia bounces on her toes. “Papa said we’re doing atmospheric checks this morning, and I asked if you could come help because you spotted that pressure differential yesterday and that was really smart, and he said yes, and Pickles said he wants to observe station operations, and—”
“Tavia,” Cetus says gently. “Breathe.”
She takes an exaggerated breath. “Can you please come help with atmospheric checks? Please?”
I should say no. Should claim I need to work on my ship, file reports, anything that doesn’t involve spending more time with them.
“Captain, I recommend accepting,” Pickles says. “The small person has been very excited about your participation. Also, I am interested in observing the station’s monitoring systems. For purely academic reasons.”
“You’re an AI. Everything you do is academic.”
“I neither confirm nor deny experiencing what might be termed ‘curiosity’ about the Terraforming Specialist’s operations. However, I note that refusing would disappoint the small person, and I have calculated that disappointing small persons is suboptimal for general morale.”
Tavia’s looking at me with those huge yellow eyes, markings bright with hope.
“Sure. I can help with atmospheric checks.”
Her smile makes something twist in my chest.
The monitoring station is impressive—banks of displays showing atmospheric composition, pressure differentials, electromagnetic activity, and about forty other metrics I’d need an advanced degree to fully understand.
Cetus moves through the space with practiced efficiency, pulling up data streams and correlating readings with the kind of systematic precision that shouldn’t be attractive but absolutely is.
I’m in trouble.
“The primary concern is maintaining atmospheric stability during storm activity,” he explains. I’m definitely not staring at his hands as they move across the controls. “Electromagnetic pulses can disrupt monitoring equipment, creating false readings that—”
An alarm shrieks.
Tavia jumps. Cetus’s markings flare bright as he pulls up the relevant display.
“Sensor array seven is offline.” His voice stays calm, but I can see tension in his shoulders. “That’s the tertiary backup. If we lose the secondary array, we’ll be flying blind through the worst of the storm.”
“Can you reroute?” I lean over his shoulder to see the display, very aware of his heat radiating through the small space between us.
“Standard protocols suggest—” He pauses, studying the data. “No. Standard protocols require physical repair, which is impossible during active storm conditions.”
“What about non-standard protocols?”
His eyes meet mine. Electric. “I’m listening.”
I pull up my own scanner, running diagnostics on the failed array. “Okay, so the sensor isn’t dead—it’s being overwhelmed by electromagnetic interference, right? It’s screaming so loud it can’t hear anything else.”
“An imprecise but essentially accurate analogy.”
“So what if we don’t fix the sensor? What if we teach it to listen differently?” I’m already pulling up the station’s communication arrays. “You’ve got redundant comm systems—long-range, short-range, emergency broadcast. What if we repurpose one of the short-range receivers to act as a secondary ear? Feed that data through a filtering algorithm to strip out the electromagnetic noise, cross-reference with the functional sensors…”
“That violates six standard safety protocols.” But he’s already pulling up the systems I’m describing, his movements quick and precise. “The signal degradation alone would—”
“Would be less than total sensor failure. And you can compensate for degradation if you know its parameters. Build a correction algorithm based on the differential between the filtered signal and the clean sensors.”
“You want to create a makeshift sensor array using equipment designed for completely different purposes.”
“I want to solve the problem in front of me with the tools I have available. Isn’t that terraforming in a nutshell?”
His markings blaze so bright they cast shadows across his workstation. When he looks at me, there’s something fierce and approving in his gaze that makes my pulse spike.
