The Meridian Dawn hung in space, its hull split open along the starboard maintenance bay. Keiani Fenn floated in the void beside the breach, her EV suit’s maneuvering jets giving occasional puffs of gas to keep her in position as she surveyed the damage.

"Well, sweetheart," she murmured to the ship, running a gloved hand along a severed power conduit, "someone really did a number on you, didn't they?"

Her helmet comm crackled. "Fenn, what's the assessment?" Captain Cooper' voice carried the weight of a man who'd already lost too much.

Keiani pushed off from the hull, drifting back to get a better view of the carnage. The Meridian Dawn was a mid-range mid-sized freighter, capable of landing in atmosphere with substantial cargo. Ships like this were the best way to get supplies to smaller colonies. More populated worlds typically had space stations in orbit, and for them it was far more efficient to use large freighters that were built in space and would never visit the surface of a planet.

Landing, and especially leaving planets, was far more energy intensive than simply moving cargo once you were in space. Ships like this were common just because most settlements were simply not big enough to warrant a full space station, so ships that could pick up cargo from major shipping hubs and haul them to a planet’s surface by themselves were in high demand.

Something about the damage to this one didn’t sit right though. Initially, it looked like stress fractures in the hull had created a weak spot, and a piece of space debris had the bad luck of hitting just that spot, severing a propellant line, and the xenon gas had been violently sucked out into space. But while Keiani had seen damage like this before, it just looked to clean, and overall, the freighter looked in too good of repair for some freak accident like this.

Keiani released a small camera drone and moved it into the breach, taking close scans and imagery, which fed to the HUD in her helmet. The patterning of the rips in the hull looked too uniform, and… there, an odd residue near the remnants of the propellant line. She had the drone do a spectral analysis while she moved to inspect the peeled back petals of the hull. Just when she was about to call for parts to begin the repairs, her HUD gave her a notification, the residue was from a small explosive device.

" This wasn't debris damage, Captain. Someone used a very small amount of targeted explosives, on the propellant line and on the hull. I almost didn’t catch it, but this was definitely sabotaged."

Silence stretched across the comm channel. Keiani knew what Cooper was thinking—the same thing she'd been thinking since his distress beacon had pulled her away from a lucrative engine rebuild on Kepler Station.

"Pirates?" Cooper finally asked, though they both knew better.

"Pirates steal cargo, not cut ships adrift to die slow," Keiani said, propelling herself toward the airlock. "I’ve found a few different ships lately, with some damage that just doesn’t make sense. All Nexus Dynamics cargo fleet ships like yours. But this is the first confirmed evidence of sabotage I’ve found in… a while.”

“Why would my employer sabotage my ship?” the Captain said over the comms as Keiani came aboard.

“Insurance payouts. I used to work for them…” Keiani said over the comms as she cycled the airlock and extended the artificial gravity into it, standing on the floor as the ship’s air rushed into the tiny room, before finally opening the interior door. The captain was there waiting for her, so she took off her helmet and continued in a low voice “I caught them sabotaging ships about a year ago, instead of selling the ships or laying off employees, they were staging accidents and collecting the insurance payout. I tried to blow the whistle, and it got me run out of the company. But I didn’t hear about this continuing until recently. I thought they’d gotten scared and stopped.”

Cooper leaned against the bulkhead, suddenly looking older than his fifty years. "Shit. We can't afford passage on another ship. The cargo's time-sensitive medical supplies for the Tau Cygni colony. Without it..."

"People die. Yeah, I got that part. At least you’re not dead. I don’t know what to tell you about your employer, I’d touch up your resume if I were you. I can patch you up and get you going though.

Cooper straightened. "What do you need?"

"About twelve hours, a case of that Centauri whiskey you're hauling, and everyone to stay out of my way." Keiani was already digging through the spare parts in the cargo bay, looking for what she could use to patch the line and patch the hole.

“Whoever sabotaged this, I think they messed up, I think it was intended to breach the inner hull too, but they didn’t know the specs of this particular freighter well enough. I think they intended for you to be dead… do you understand that?” Keiani said to the captain. Who only gulped, his face pale.

She set to work, hauling a crate of parts back out into space to work from the outside to patch the hull, then  coming inside, and crawling into a hatch in the inner hull to service the propellant line. All the while talking to the damaged machinery in the gentle, coaxing tone she reserved for broken things. "Alright, beautiful, let's see what we can do about this mess. You need a whole new line, but I’ll get your sexy engines running again for now with a patch-job."

Hours passed. Keiani lost herself in the familiar rhythm of repair work—the dance of problem and solution, the satisfaction of coaxing life back into dead systems. Her hands moved with practiced efficiency, callused fingers finding purchase on components slick with lubricant and her own sweat.

"You know," she said to the engine, now feeding the repaired propellant line back in, "I used to work for the bastards who did this. Nexus Dynamics. Thought I was keeping ships safe, turned out I was just another cog in their murder machine. I think your captain is still processing that…"

The plasma welder hissed as she sealed a joint.

"Took me three years to figure out the pattern. Ships failing in deep space, always the same component failures, always just far enough from help to guarantee casualties and too much expense to recover the ship. Laying people off is pretty shitty, but this is next level shitty.”  She paused, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. "I tried to do the right thing. Fat lot of good it did me. At least you and your crew are safe… for now."

A shadow fell across her workspace. Cooper stood in the doorway, holding two cups of coffee.

"Talking to yourself again, Fenn?"

"Talking to her," Keiani nodded at the engine assembly. "Machines are honest. They tell you exactly what's wrong and exactly what they need to fix it. People..." She accepted the coffee gratefully. "People lie."

"Not all people."

Keiani laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Captain, in my experience, the only difference between pirates and corporations is the quality of their lawyers."

Cooper was quiet for a moment, studying her face. "So why help us? If you're so sure everyone's crooked, why risk your neck jury-rigging our engine? Why rent a shuttle to come help?"

The question caught Keiani off-guard. She covered by taking a long sip of coffee, buying time to think. Why was she here?

"Because," she said finally, "someone's got to fix the things the bastards break."

Six hours later, the Meridian Dawn's engines hummed with renewed life—not the smooth purr of factory specifications, but the determined growl of a machine patched together by genius and stubbornness.