Taking Space 2

- Unexpected Return -

Stephanie sat staring at a plethora of holograms indicating all of Alf's normally automated systems while the AI himself ran the calculations they needed to make their acquired Alcubierre drive work. She had readily volunteered for the job not realizing how tedious and boring it would be.

She glanced up from the holograms and let her eyes trail around the room.

Daniel sat with his eyes closed, a control hat on his head and a giant smile on his face as he flew the Sun harvester through the inner atmosphere of a star Steven had chosen to retrieve the sun material they needed.

Michael in stark contrast had a giant scowl on his face as he manipulated hundreds of one of the millenarian arms through a dimensional door on the inside of Zion's Dynovamator making sure the gathered sun material formed a perfect sphere, without damaging or melting down any of the delicate components.

On the other side of the room, Steven endlessly prattled on as he and Catherine overseen the installation of the recently acquired Drive. The carefully schooled expression on Catherine's face told Stephanie that Cat was not enjoying her time either.

Catherine had never told anyone other than Daniel who of course had told her that Steven greatly annoyed her. While Cat was probably the only one who could understand everything, Steven said she had told Daniel on multiple occasions that the way Steven talked in run-on sentences and the extra worthless words he used made her want to strangle him.

Truth be told Stephanie felt the same way sometimes. Not with just Steven though with all of her brothers, and after the very little sleep she had gotten in the last few days and even though what she was currently doing was boring she was quite happy that she hadn't been paired with any of them at the moment.

Overseeing construction droids was just not something she wanted to do right now especially now that they were running on their own limited AI systems. Zion's S class AI had crashed half an hour ago thanks to the Empire's virus, and Steven had turned her completely off to make sure no permanent damage was done to her hardware. He then morosely stated that he probably have to give it a complete wipe before he booted her up again.

Suddenly a small whiff of something burning caught her nostrils. "Oh, no the food!" She exclaimed. They hadn't exactly had time to eat, and Alf had been set to watch over it, but all of his systems were busy doing calculations.

She jumped out of her seat and ran over to the closest dimensional door, but it didn't automatically open when she waved her hand at it. Instead, a large holographic list appeared beside it.

"Ah, blasted Alf," she spat because the occupied AI hadn't automatically selected the locations she had desired like he normally did for all of them.

She expanded the hologram until it could display close to a thousand separate locations they currently had dimensional doors set up at. We really needed to categorize these; she thought to herself as she scanned through them and finally found the one to the mess hall's kitchen.

She tapped on it, and the dimensional door sprung to life, dashing through the folded space, she ran over to a large pot spewing out black smoke. She ripped it off the stove and opened the lid.

Black chard mush stared back up at her as she looked down into the pot.

She clasped her hand over her eyes, and she unceremoniously dropped the pot into the sink.

"Stephanie," Daniel called through the dimensional door. "Your control console is beeping!"

She rolled her eyes it was one thing right after another, wasn't it. She turned around and dashed back through the dimensional door and over to her control station. She tapped on the offending pop up and froze as a new hologram appeared displaying the telltale blur of the probes that attacked them earlier as they sped down the star way becoming ever faster.