Save Solaris

Unofficial Literary Challenge 6, Prompt 2
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The ship rocked to one side and Anslow Dorvin was thrown against a wall of the Jefferies Tube. He didn’t have far to go from his previous crawling position, but the pain in his shoulder felt like he fell down the entire saucer turbolift shaft of Solaris. He rubbed his shoulder then wiped sweat from his brow. Looking around he found his repair kit. Anslow cursed under his breath and began crawling again toward his destination: deck four, section eight-alpha, plating four-seven-five-bravo, conduit seven, panel one. As a maintenance engineer, that made sense to him.

His combadge chirped. Anslow tapped it as he crawled. "Dorvin here." The gruff and stern voice of the Chief Engineer responded. "Dorvin, we need those circuits rerouted. How much further?"

Anslow sighed as his hand slipped from another jolt from the ship. "At this rate, another two minutes. Any chance to keep the ship from moving?"

"No."

Raising his eyebrows at the simple response to his joke, Anslow nodded and kept crawling.

Three turns and he was under the panel. Feeling the warmth of a fire nearby, he wiped his hands on his uniform to dry them. He pulled the kit open and began unscrewing the plate to access the conduit from below. Once the circuitry was revealed he whistled at the complexity. He tapped his badge.

"This is Dorvin, I'm at the conduit. What now?"

"Standby."

Anslow chuckled. He had spent the previous ten minutes burrowing his way through the guts of the ship because none of the Engineering Team could be spared. Now he was faced with rerouting the ship's nervous system and the doctor just told him to wait. "Damn it, I'm a maintenance engineer, not a -"

The combadge chirped again. "Dorvin here."

The ship rocked again and his head bumped against the frame of the hallway flooring. He held his head as if to keep his brains from oozing out and grimaced from the pain.

"- did you get that?"

Anslow was surprised by the female voice. "I'm sorry, I was interrupted by pain."

"Not funny crewman."

The engineer frowned as he looked up at the multi-colored entrails of technology. The female continued, "Remove the second gel-pack from the right and splice the blue cable to the red cable. Got that?"

Anslow saw what the officer was suggesting and started getting out more tools from the kit. "Confirmed. I'll need thirty seconds." There was no reply. He shrugged and dropped the spanner to free one hand. Using the fuser, the two cables melted together.

Extinguishers activated above him and the heat diminished perceptibly.

"Well done, crewman. Brace yourself."

"What?"

Anslow was thrown against a wall of the Jefferies Tube as Solaris launched into Transwarp and his world went dark.

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Cast:
Anslow Dorvin - Owen Wilson
Heard but not seen: Thel Ythysi - Kevin Sorbo
Heard but not seen or named: Female voice - Jennifer Aniston