The main viewscreen shifted, tapping into the external cameras of our satellite network. Anchor station hung in the dark pocket of space at the L5 Lagrange point.
"I do not understand," Judy whispered, stepping up to the holotable and staring at the sensor readouts. "When we saw it through the external array, it looked fine. But this..."
She was right. The sheer scale of the station had doubled since we left. Attached to the primary habitation ring was a massive secondary ring, covered in scaffolding and partially finished plating. It was a massive expansion, a testament to what Rey and Sarah had accomplished with the two automated Mules we had left behind.
But Anchor station looked like a graveyard.
The exterior floodlights were completely shut off. The only illumination came from a few scattered, dim amber emergency lights that pulsed weakly along the primary spine.
"Archi," I said, a cold knot of dread forming in my stomach. "Are you getting life signs?"
"Scanning," Archi replied. "I am detecting one hundred and twelve human biosignatures. The vast majority are clustered in the primary command module and the central residential block. However, the overall power grid is operating at critically low levels. Thermal output is down by forty percent."
"They are freezing in there," Mereel said, his hands tightening on the flight controls.
"Open a channel," I ordered. "Standard internal encryption on our primary frequency."
Static hissed through the bridge speakers for a few seconds before a voice broke through. It was not Rey or Sarah. It was C.O.R.E.
"Incoming vessel," the station management system spoke. Her voice, usually crisp and flawlessly modulated, carried a strange, clipped digital stutter. "Identify yourself."
"C.O.R.E., it is Surgrim," I said, leaning over the comms console. "We are home. What is going on over there?"
There was a long pause. For a moment, I thought the comms had dropped.
"Surgrim. Voice pattern recognized. Welcome back," C.O.R.E. finally responded, her voice flat and utterly utilitarian. "It has been two years, one month, and four days since your departure. I am unable to open the main hangar. The atmospheric containment fields have been powered down."
"Powered down?" Mereel repeated. "Why?"
"To conserve critical energy reserves," C.O.R.E. replied, taking nearly three seconds to process the answer. "Station power is currently at twelve percent capacity. If you intend to dock, you must use the exterior emergency physical airlock."
"She is stuttering," Judy noted softly, analyzing the audio feed. "They must have shut down her secondary and tertiary processing nodes to save power. She is running on the absolute bare minimum hardware just to keep the life support grid balanced."
"Good thing we actually installed that emergency manual docking port," I muttered, looking at the tiny, unlit target on the station's hull. "Mereel, can you thread the needle without the guidance beams?"
Mereel did not even dignify that with a verbal response. He just killed the automated approach systems and took manual control of the maneuvering thrusters. The massive ship drifted toward the darkened station. Without the guidance beams or the magnetic clamps to pull us in, everything had to be perfectly aligned by eye and raw spatial awareness.
With a deep, resonant clang that vibrated through the deck plating, the primary docking collar locked perfectly into the station's emergency airlock.
"Hard seal confirmed," Archi announced. "Atmospheric pressure is equalizing."
"Let us go," I said, already moving toward the elevator. "Judy, grab a couple of emergency thermal blankets from medical. Mabel, you are on power duty. Archi, guide him through routing the heavy umbilicals from our reactor to the station's primary docking junction. We need to feed them power."
"Already on it," Mabel grunted, tapping his console as the schematics lit up his screen.
Judy and I hurried down to the primary airlock on the lower deck. The heavy metal doors hissed open, revealing the umbilical corridor that connected the ship to the station.
The moment we stepped across the threshold, the temperature plummeted.
I shivered, my breath instantly pluming in the air as a cloud of white vapor. It was freezing. The corridor was bathed in a sickly, dim amber light, the emergency bulbs struggling to cast shadows against the bulkheads.
The gravity also felt slightly off.
"Gravity plating is running at zero point eight Gs," Archi informed us through our comm badges. "C.O.R.E. has initiated power saving protocols to reduce the load on the rotational generators."
What used to be a bustling, brightly lit hub of scientific progress now felt like a haunted submarine running on empty. The steady, comforting thrum of the fusion reactor had been replaced by a labored, rattling sound.
We reached the inner airlock door. Before I could punch the manual override, the heavy doors ground open with a metallic screech.
Standing on the other side were Rey and Sarah.
They looked exhausted. Both of them were bundled up in thick, heavy winter coats, gloves, and woolen hats. Rey's face was pale, dark circles bruising the skin under his eyes, and Sarah looked like she had not slept a full night in months.
For a second, nobody moved. We just stared at each other across the freezing threshold.
"You are actually real," Rey whispered, his voice cracking. "We thought you were gone."
"We are here, Rey," I said, stepping forward and pulling my old friend into a tight embrace. Despite the thick coat, he felt thinner. Sarah joined in, wrapping her arms around both of us.
"Two years," Sarah mumbled into my jacket. "Two damn years, Surgrim."
"I know," I said softly, pulling back and looking at them. Judy handed them the thermal blankets, which they accepted gratefully, wrapping them over their coats. "Time dilation hit us hard on the first jump. But we are back now. Mabel is hooking up the reactor to the station grid right now. We will have you fully powered in ten minutes."
Rey let out a long, shuddering sigh of relief, leaning against the bulkhead. "Thank god. We have been running on extreme rationing for six months."
"What happened?" Judy asked, looking down the dim, freezing corridor.
"We overextended," Rey said grimly, pulling his blanket tighter. "Come on. Let us get to the command center. It is the only room on the station we still have fully heated where the rest of the research team is huddled."
We followed them down the dim, amber lit corridors. As we walked, we passed the primary hydroponics bay. The massive glass windows were frosted over with condensation, and inside, only a third of the grow lights were active, bathing a small patch of struggling crops in a weak purple glow.
"When you guys left, we had a lot of raw materials and the two Mules," Sarah explained, her breath visible in the freezing air. "We did not know how long you would be gone. We wanted to expand the labs and upgrade the zero gravity hangar for when you got back."
"The structural build went perfectly," Rey sighed. "But we drastically underestimated the power requirements to maintain life support and gravity for double the mass. The fusion reactor just could not keep up. The primary grid strained itself trying to compensate, and we blew three primary superconducting coils. We have been bleeding power ever since."
We reached the command center, a small, heavily insulated room at the core of the primary hub. It was noticeably warmer here. Dozens of researchers were sitting on the floor in heavy coats, drinking hot water from thermoses. Several monitors were dead, and the ones that were active flickered constantly.
"C.O.R.E., give me a status update on the power transfer," Rey called out as we entered.
"Physical umbilical is connected," the voice stuttered from the ceiling speaker. "Syncing network frequencies. Routing external fusion power to primary grid in three minutes."
Before the countdown could even register, the lights in the command center flickered violently. A sharp, piercing alarm began to chirp from the central console, cutting through the heavy silence of the room.
"Warning," the system crackled. "Primary grid decoupler has seized. Cannot isolate station reactor from incoming external power load."
Sarah rushed to the console, her fingers flying over the physical keyboard since the holographic interface was dead. "The mechanical decoupler just locked up! The reactor has been throttled to the absolute minimum for months because of the damaged grid. If the raw fusion power hits the system while our core is still physically connected, the feedback loop will overload and cause a catastrophic meltdown."
"Can you quench the plasma and drop the magnetic containment?" Judy asked, stepping up behind her.
"Even if we vent the core, the physical superconducting busbars remain fused closed," I argued. "We have to manually release the decoupler in the engineering bay before the power transfer hits critical mass in fourteen minutes, or the backfeed will shatter the station's magnetic coils!"
The alarm continued to chirp, a relentless, terrifying countdown.
We had been home for less than ten minutes. The grand reunion, the stories of our travels, the explanations of where we had been, all of it vanished in an instant. We did not even have time to unpack.
I tapped my comm badge.
"Mereel, Mabel, get down to the station's engineering deck," I barked, my voice cutting through the panic in the room. "The primary decoupler seized. We have fourteen minutes to manually unjam it or we cannot transfer power."
"On my way," Mereel's voice came back instantly. "Mabel, follow me. Grab the heavy hydraulic rescue tools from the emergency locker on the way down. If something is jammed, we'll force it."
I grabbed a heavy flashlight from the wall, tossing another to Rey. "You're with me. If the grid behaves unpredictably, I need someone who knows the new bypasses you installed."
"We can't take the main route," Rey noted, catching the flashlight. "The turbolifts are dead."
I paused mid-stride, looking back at him. "Turbolifts? Since when do we have turbolifts?"
"Since the researchers got tired of walking three kilometers a day between the new labs and the residential ring," Rey explained breathlessly as we hurried out the door.
"Nice upgrade," I admitted, breaking into a jog down the amber-lit corridor. "But isn't that a massive continuous strain on the reactor grid?"
"Yeah," Rey panted, struggling to keep up with my pace. "Which is why they were the first things C.O.R.E. shut down when the coils blew. But because we retrofitted the primary access corridors for the lift tracks, a lot of the old pedestrian routes are blocked off. We have to take the secondary maintenance shafts."
I stopped and gestured for him to pass me. "Your design, your maze. Lead the way."
Rey nodded, taking the lead.
Running through the freezing, dark maintenance shafts felt like sprinting through the belly of a dead leviathan. The air was thin and smelled of ozone and stale, recycled sweat. My breath plumed in the beam of the flashlight.
We reached the heavy blast doors of the primary engineering bay. They were sealed shut.
"Manual override is fried," Rey panted, pulling at the heavy release lever. It did not budge.
Mabel stepped up, grabbed a heavy steel crowbar from the wall mounted emergency breaker box, and wedged it into the manual release track. With a massive grunt, he threw his entire body weight against the lever. The metal groaned, and the heavy doors popped open just enough for us to squeeze through.
The engineering bay was a cavernous nightmare with multiple levels. In the center, the primary fusion reactor was barely glowing. The massive superconducting coils that usually pulsed with blinding blue light were dull, angry orange, and one of them was visibly ruptured, leaking a cloud of crystallized coolant into the freezing air.
"Where is the decoupler?" I asked, my eyes scanning the maze of pipes and conduits.
"Up there," Mereel said, already sprinting up the metal gantry toward the ceiling, where the massive umbilical junction connected the station to the docking ring. "Judy, how much time?"
"Six minutes," Judy's voice crackled over the comms, tense and clipped. "The reactor is pushing against the dead grid. The magnetic back pressure is building. If I do not open the floodgates in six minutes, the safety protocols will trip, sever the connection, and we will be stuck in the dark."
We reached the decoupler. It was a massive, brutalist piece of engineering. A physical tungsten carbide guillotine designed to drop and physically separate the internal wiring from the external docking clamps.
It was stuck halfway.
Mereel grabbed the massive manual release wheel and pulled with all his strength. His boots slipped on the grated floor. "It is completely seized! The thermal expansion from the blown coil must have warped the housing. The tungsten teeth are fused together!"
"Archi," I said, tapping my comm badge. "Analyze the decoupler housing. Can we force it?"
"Negative, Surgrim," the calm voice replied in my ear. "The tungsten carbide teeth have undergone microscopic cold welding due to the extreme thermal shock. Applying brute force will simply shear the manual release wheel off the main axle. You need to sever the physical connection."
"Mabel!" I yelled. "Grab the heavy hydraulic spreader from the emergency cage and snap the teeth!"
Mabel was already dragging the massive yellow hydraulic tool from the wall locker. "I am on it. But Surgrim, this thing is carrying the ambient voltage of the entire station's residual charge. If I snap it while it is under load, the arc flash will vaporize us, and the feedback will still fry the reactor."
"Judy," I said, my IT brain suddenly shifting into overdrive. The hardware was broken, so we had to patch it with software. "The decoupler is jammed, but the circuit is still technically closed, right?"
"Yes," Judy replied. "The physical gap has not been made. The power is currently bottlenecking against the dead reactor."
"Then do not send a continuous stream of power," I ordered. "Pulse it. Drop the voltage to absolute zero, let Mabel pump the hydraulics, and then snap the power back on before the safety sensors trip."
There was a brief pause on the line. "I cannot just 'pulse' a multi-gigawatt fusion feed," Judy said, her tone completely flat and analytical. "The thermal shock on the magnetic injectors will be severe. The absolute maximum I can drop the line without the automated safeties permanently severing the connection is three seconds. And I will need twenty seconds of live feed between drops to stabilize the reactor's back-pressure."
"Three seconds dead, twenty seconds live. The math holds," I said. "Mabel, when the line dies, you pump like hell. But the second you hear the warning beep, you freeze. If you snap it while the power is on, we're ash."
"Copy that," Mabel grunted, shifting his grip on the heavy tool.
"Dropping the grid in three, two, one," Judy counted down.
*BEEP.*
The deafening hum of the power grid vanished. The silence was absolute.
"Go!" I yelled.
Mabel squeezed the handles of the hydraulic spreader, pumping furiously. The heavy steel jaws bit into the tungsten teeth of the decoupler. The metal shrieked in protest.
"Power returning!" Judy shouted.
*BEEP.*
The ambient hum of the power grid slammed back into existence, vibrating through the deck plates. Mabel froze instantly, holding the pressure steady but not pushing further.
We waited in tense silence, watching the heavy jaws bite into the metal. The heat radiating from the friction was intense, fighting against the sub-zero chill of the room.
"Twenty seconds," Judy reported. "Destabilizing again... now!"
*BEEP.*
Silence.
Mabel pumped the handle again, his massive arms straining. The hydraulic pressure spiked. The tungsten groaned, micro-fractures beginning to spiderweb across the frozen metal.
"Power returning!"
*BEEP.*
The hum returned, angrier this time. The overhead lights flickered violently.
"I can only do this one more time!" Judy warned, her voice tight with panic. "The magnetic containment is starting to buckle. The core is going into thermal runaway. I cannot hold this loop!"
"Almost through!" Mereel shouted, leaning in with a heavy breaker bar, ready to pull the release lever the second the teeth snapped.
"Last cycle... dropping... now!"
*BEEP.*
The hum died for the final time.
"Now!" I screamed.
Mabel threw his entire weight onto the pump handle.
With a sickening, deafening crack that echoed through the massive bay, the warped tungsten finally gave way and shattered. The heavy guillotine blade dropped with a massive thud, physically severing the internal grid from the docking ring.
"Physical separation confirmed!" Mereel panted, dropping the breaker bar and stumbling back, wiping sweat and soot from his forehead.
"Judy, kill the pulse! Open the floodgates!" I yelled into the comms.
"Grid is isolated. Dumping power now," Judy replied.
For three seconds, nothing happened. The engineering bay remained dark, cold, and silent.
Then, a deep, resonant thump vibrated through the floorboards. It started low, a physical thump that I felt in my chest, before rising into the smooth, powerful, beautiful hum of a fully fed fusion reactor.
Above us, the massive overhead floodlights flickered once, twice, and then blazed to life, bathing the engineering bay in brilliant, crisp white light. The ventilation fans roared into overdrive, immediately pushing warm, freshly scrubbed air into the freezing room.
"Gravity plating is renormalizing," Archi announced smoothly over the comms. "Transitioning from zero point eight to standard one G. Please hold onto something."
My stomach did a brief flip as the artificial gravity settled firmly back into its proper parameters.
"C.O.R.E.?" I asked, looking up at the nearest ceiling speaker.
There was a burst of static, followed by a sharp, digital chime.
"System reboot complete," the voice echoed through the bay. The stutter was gone. Her tone was crisp, modulated, and perfectly calm. "Diagnostics indicate a massive influx of external power. Fusion core stabilized. Life support is optimal. Surgrim, it is good to hear your voice. I appear to have been in a low power hibernation state. My apologies for the lack of a proper greeting."
I let out a breath I felt like I had been holding since we dropped out of warp. I leaned against the railing, my legs suddenly feeling very weak.
"Do not worry about it," I chuckled, wiping a smear of soot off my cheek. "Just keep the lights on."
Mabel powered down the hydraulic spreader and hung it back on the rack, looking incredibly pleased with himself. "Told you I would handle the heavy lifting."
Mereel laughed, clapping the big guy on the shoulder. "Good work, Mabel. You just saved the station from becoming a very expensive, frozen tomb."
Rey, who had been watching the entire ordeal with wide, terrified eyes, finally let out a shaky breath and slumped against a console. "You guys just casually rewrite the power delivery protocols of a fusion reactor while snapping tungsten with a hydraulic jack. I spent the last two years doing botanical research, and I still feel like I am losing my mind."
"Welcome to the crew, Rey," I smiled, walking over and clapping him on the back. "Now, let us get back to the command center. You have two years of gossip to catch us up on, and I want to know why my station looks like a half eaten sandwich."
An hour later, the command center was unrecognizable from the freezing refuge we had entered. The ambient temperature was a comfortable twenty-one degrees Celsius. The holographic displays were back online, projecting warm blue and green data streams into the air. The research team had dispersed to their quarters to finally take hot showers and sleep in beds that were not radiating cold.
Only the core group remained around the central holotable. Judy had brought over a fresh pot of real coffee from the mess hall, and the rich aroma was doing more for morale than the fusion reactor.
"So," I said, wrapping my hands around the warm mug and looking at Rey and Sarah. "The secondary ring. It is massive. But it nearly killed you. Why expand the zero-gravity hangar if you did not have the power grid to support it?"
Sarah sighed, tracing the rim of her cup. "We did not build it for us, Surgrim. We built it for you."
She tapped the console, and the holotable projected a 3D schematic of the station. The new ring expanded the primary hangar, lining the zero-gravity space with massive internal repair gantries, heavy manufacturing arms, and automated replating docks, all enclosed within the expanded atmospheric containment field.
"When you left, we didn't know what you were going to find out there, or what kind of shape the ship would be in when you got back," Sarah explained. "We figured if things went wrong, you'd need a fully equipped orbital shipyard to do heavy repairs or forge new hull plating. We just wanted to be prepared for the future."
Rey nodded grimly. "The structural build went perfectly. But we drastically underestimated the continuous power draw of the expanded atmospheric containment fields and the heavy manufacturing arms. The fusion reactor just could not keep up. The primary grid strained itself trying to compensate, and we blew three primary superconducting coils. We have been bleeding power ever since."
"We just got too ambitious," Sarah admitted, looking down. "We wanted to have this grand surprise ready for you. Instead, we ended up trapping a hundred people in a freezing tin can, rationing synthetic protein paste and praying the life support did not fail."
"Hey," I said softly, reaching across the table to cover her hand with mine. "You built an entire orbital shipyard with limited resources. That is not a failure. That is a miracle. The power grid issue is just a bug. And we have the best patch deployer in the solar system sitting right here." I pointed at the primary interface node on the table.
"I have already begun rerouting the power distribution algorithms," Archi chimed in smoothly. "By integrating the secondary reactor into the station's grid via a permanent hardline, we can bypass the damaged superconducting coils entirely. Furthermore, I am deploying a swarm of repair nanites to reconstruct the tungsten teeth of the decoupler assembly. The station will be operating at one hundred and twenty percent capacity within six hours."
Mereel leaned back, a massive grin on his face. "And with the new tungsten-rhenium alloy we brought back from Alpha Centauri, I can reinforce those heavy manufacturing arms you built. They'll be strong enough to handle anything we throw at them."
I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like home. It tasted like victory.