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Oh Dark, he hated these tiny tunnels.

Tred carefully navigated the drone through the maintenance shaft.  It was a sort too small for any grown human to fit through; even the Beetle-Slugs found them tight if they had to go in there, but the sheer quantity of equipment that potentially needed accessing meant that they had no choice but to use very narrow tunnels.

His eye implants were feeding him the view from the drone he was remotely piloting, even while he sat outside in the maintenance room.

His view was fully that of the drones, and it moved as fluidly and easily as any person – it felt nearly like he himself was shrunk down and inside the maintenance tube.

Which made him feel so claustrophobic.

Sweat was running down his face, forcing him to blink often.

The scanners on the drones were checking each and every circuit in the systems.

No one ever thought about how inconvenient a battle was for maintenance personnel.  These ships were not just aluminum skinned tubes strapped to rockets like in ancient times!  Every single component was a computer or part of a computer, and the horrible blasting of a fight meant anything and everything could be disturbed.

The scan on this section completed, and his own visual checks – as poor as they were compared to the drone’s scanners – found everything to be in order.

He moved the drone towards the next section when he got an alert; something was moving towards him!

Well, towards the drone, at least.

He still felt a rush of adrenaline, but he didn’t actually have to do anything.

It was a Beetle-Slug, which activated the drone’s movement circuit.  His view dimmed momentarily to avoid giving him vertigo as it moved into an alcove.

He overrode the controls anyway, morbidly curious.  He looked down as the Bicet passed.

It moved swiftly, its many small legs a blur of motion.  Its leathery carapace with small plates of chitin indicating it was of a different caste than Cutter.

It stopped, and he jerked back as it rotated to look directly at the camera of the drone.  Tred had not physically moved the drone to peer at the creature, but – did it somehow know he was looking at it?

More sweat ran down his brow.

“Your drone requires maintenance,” the Bicet said.  “Micro-tearing of wire coating on arm C.  Send in for repairs after shift.”

Then it crawled away, and Tred felt stupid that he’d panicked so much.

“Ah, thanks,” he called out through its speaker, though he doubted the Bicet was even anywhere near his drone at that point.

Making a note to get the wire checked, he crawled on, finding a few molecules out of place in a crystal board matrix.  The whole section would have to be removed later for the adjustment, but right now it was . . . acceptable.  Its efficiency would be lowered by a very small margin, not enough to worry most, even if it bothered him.  And it did bother him; the molecules should be in their proper places, not . . . just flung out there wildly.

He made a note to go back for it.  Then, as he started to move on, he stopped.

No, no, he would take care of it now.

Detaching the crystal matrix case, he had the drone carry it out to a repair depot.  Other drones had dropped off other matrices, which were all in quite worse shape than his.

He’d probably get another annoyed message from the repair crew later telling him this matrix was fine and it didn’t need to be dragged out for repair . . .

Ignoring that, he crawled back into the tunnel.

Did he really want to keep doing this?

Not just the tunnel, but . . . the Craton.

He had been born here and he’d always thought that he’d die here.

But they’d been in a battle recently.  A battle!  And it wasn’t the first time lately that the ship had been in such a dangerous situation.

During all of that he’d just been so nervous that he’d felt faint.  He hadn’t even had to do anything, just hid in a bunker like the civilians.

But he’d felt the impacts, the hard ship movements.  He’d known what various subtle signs meant, even when no one else around him did.

He was, by sheer skills, qualified to be a bridge officer.  Yet the concept terrified him; that much pressure upon him.  He’d mess up and people would be killed.  Or even the whole ship.

His home ship.

Maybe he should leave.  With his skill set there would be thousands of job openings even in a nice and cushy system like Ran or Tau Ceti or Luyten.  Or even someplace exotic like Van Maanen or Cygni!

Even the thought of Cygni and its flares made him nervous, though.  And Van Maanen was a White Dwarf, sure, but – who wanted to live around a dead star?

Ran was beautiful, but he wasn’t the type to go sunbathing on the beaches of that pleasant world, and its dominant culture in space was almost . . . hedonistic by his standards.  Tau Ceti, he’d known a very rude man from there once, and Luyten . . .

One by one he ruled out the obvious choices.

He knew that there were literally thousands of other options, but that he would find something that made them inadequate for him.

He honestly did not even know where he wanted to live.

A call came in.

He blinked, fumbling for a moment before calling out, a little too loudly; “Cut drone feed!  Switch to call.”

He hadn’t even seen who it was, but it was probably too soon to be the repair crew – unless one had been operating a drone right there and checked the matrix!

No visual came up, just audio.

“Tred?” a cool female voice said.  It was nervous, hesitant, and his heart skipped a beat.

“Oh, madam Ambassador!” he cried.

“Oh!  Tred, is that you?”

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