Fracture - Book One of the Glass Galaxy Trilogy

Chapter 15: Waypoint

April 24th

10:58 AM

We decided to take only Abaddon's and Reaper's ships. We needed to move fast and discreetly, and their ships' pirate design would be right at home among the pirate-state of the Scarlet Wolves. I was uncomfortable leaving Alizabeth behind, but this way she would be able to watch over the station in our stead.

I put down my hand-cutter in frustration, the suit of Teracon Armour - I was thinking of calling it Assault Armour - standing implacably over me. I had spent four days trying to cut, wrench, lever, and simply pull the blade out of the armor, but I had failed to move it a single millimeter.

"You're really not willing to use a laser cutter on it?" Abaddon asked from where he sat on the floor beside me. "We could get it out in minutes."

"And we would ruin the armor in doing so," I responded curtly. "I would like to actually be able to use it later."

"I'm just saying that at this rate you aren't going to be able to use it at all," replied Abaddon.

"Kalani," Aria interjected, "Why don't you go back to trying to switch its mode?"

I sighed, "I already spent two days trying to do that, what makes you think that it's going to work now?"

She shrugged, "I just don't think that Kaeya would have put it in there without there being a good way to get it out."

"Yes, well, it's too bad that she didn't exactly leave a manual," I replied frustratedly.

Abaddon stood up, stretching, and pulled out a tablet that he began plugging numbers into. "Don't you think that the armor is a little too big?" he asked us.

"Yes, Abaddon," I drawled, "the armour is big. I congratulate you on your astute observation."

He glared at me for a moment, "No, I mean that its not properly proportioned. There's way more armour over the back portion than there should be."

I lay down on the uncomfortable metallic floor, squeezing my eyes shut as I stretched out my back, "Where the reactor is, yes."

"And what would the dimensions of such a reactor be?" asked Abaddon.

"A small reactor for powering something like personal armour would only be about 10 by 10 by 15 centimeters," I answered. "It would definitely fit, Abaddon."

"That's awfully small for a space about 20 by 30 by 60," he replied smugly. "I doubt that there's 24 reactors in this armour."

I bolted upright, a eureka moment igniting my mind, "We've been thinking about it all wrong! You're right, Abaddon, there isn't two dozen reactors in there, there's just four." I stood up and went around to the back of the Assault Armor.

"Four? Why four?" he asked me as he joined me.

"Because Maestro AI cores take a lot of power," I said, grinning devilishly. I felt around the back of the armor and made out a faint outline in the shape of a rectangle: the imperfect gap left behind by the AI core slotted into the armor. "Give me a cable and connect the other end into a tablet," I ordered Abaddon.

He handed me one end of a cable, and I connected it into the nearly-invisible port on the back of the AI core. Almost immediately his tablet began screaming out warnings, the harsh noise painfully loud, and he rushed to mute it. Once he was done that he parsed through the information on the AI core, a variety of 'critical damage' and 'low fuel' warnings haunting the tablet as he did so.

"It wants an access code," he said. "I could try to hack it, but if this AI is anything like Alizabeth then it'll be impossible for me."

"It's only a class two AI, while Alizabeth is a class four. They're not even close to the same. But I don't think that we have to do that anyways." I thought for a moment, mulling over Kaeya's memories for an answer, and there was only a single code that I could remember. "Try Y-7-49," I told him.