Six hours earlier, Winter stood amongst the engines, those behemoths, with his hand tentatively reaching out toward a glowing panel on the wall.  The ship shook momentarily and the momentum drove his palm directly onto the panel.

“Damn!”  He pulled his hand back quickly from the hot metal.  “Turn it off!” he shouted, over the churn of the engines.  The whine slowly died down, while Patrick Winter examined his hand.

“What happened?”  The voice came from around the corner, followed shortly by the face of Jason Kapers, partially concerned, partially amused.  “I’ll assume it didn’t work?”

“No, it’s still overheating.  And I may have burned my hand.”  Winter held up his hand for Jason to see.  Jason winced silently.

“Why don’t you take a break,” said Winter, “and go grab us something to eat.  I’ll bandage my hand and take another look at the panel.”

Winter cursed to himself as Jason ran off, closing the hatch the engine room behind him with a clang.  This was all wrong.  The ship was brand new, top of the line stuff.  It self-diagnosed problems and could fix them automatically, while the entire crew slept.  So it was unlikely enough that anything would require maintenance.

But of course, if the diagnostic systems themselves fail, they’d need manual repairs.  In a perfect storm of coincidence, the Starcruiser’s diagnostic system just happened to break when the majority of engineering team had been on a research mission on the planet’s surface.  So Winter, the only officer and “engineer” on board, had been tasked with repairing the system.

Winter had tried to argue, in vain, that he was an electronics engineer and that this problem was almost certainly mechanical, but Argon would have none of it.  An engineer was an engineer to him, with all other adjectives preceding the title as superfluous bits added on by unnecessary academy classes.

So, Winter was here in the engine room, trying to trace power lines, burning his hand, missing meatloaf day.  Winter only hoped that Jason would bring him some meatloaf instead of the distressingly hardened evaporated sandwiches they had in the vending machines around the ship.

“Damn!” Winter shouted, as he hit the malfunctioning panel with his good hand.  The cover flopped open, mockingly, as a few lights lit up inside.

Well, now, thought Winter.  That’s interesting.  That’s a lot of power being drawn into the starboard shields.