You could have all the power tools made by mankind at you disposal, but you'd still have to fix it yourself when you don't have the money, Cal mused.
Indeed, he was broke - he'd spent the last of his on-hand cash two days ago on some little gadget that looked interesting at first, but quickly got boring in less than a day. Now it lay on his workbench, disassembled, with half if its components stripped out and used to fortify his personal ship.
As he sat in the cockpit, trying to fit a piece of glowing something behind the control panel to make it look cooler, he felt something pull on his back.
"What the-"
And he was off, falling through a long, dark tunnel, his sense of direction messed up beyond recognition and the feeling of vertigo catching up to him like a torpedo. Then it stopped as sudden as it had come, and Cal found himself sitting in his cockpit still, with all his limbs intact. His ship was not, however, sitting in his hangar.
Outside the window, the world was on fire. Buildings burned like bonfires, bodies lay all over the ground... Cal's mind wandered back to the time of the rebellion. Was this how bad it was?
He punched in the start-up sequence into the ship.
"Reactor drained. Utilzing backup reactor. Estimated time to full system restoration: ten minutes." LISA told him.
Grumbling, he diverted half of the backup reactor's energy to cloaking the ship, and LISA informed him that the estimated time had grown to twenty minutes. He didn't care, he just have to-
A bright blue explosion not very far away startled him. Was he already discovered? He looked around and, miraculously, the ARC suit was standing a few feet away from him. It took him a minute, but he was able to power it on, and (to his joy) the reactor was stable and working at maximum efficiency.
He toggled cloaking and activated the Iris drones, sending the small spheres ahead for a look. He himself ran after them.
