#mothballs

They’d have to be, if the generator they’d brought in had recharged the ship’s emergency batteries that much.

She flicked her comlink on. “Hey, Flynn, what’s the status on the reactors?”

“We finished providing the reaction mass and hypergolic slug for reactor one twenty minutes ago!” Flynn answered. “Everything down here is closed up and ready, you’re the one who’s delaying us at this point!”

“Right, right, I get it,” Mira replied, rolling her eyes, then checked her datapad again. “Step forty-eight… okay, here we go.”

She flicked two more switches, activating self test, and the emergency lights flashed on and off once.

A holo of the ship appeared, and Mira and Tye both gave it a once-over.

“Looks all green to here, Tye,” she declared, and the astromech rocked back and forth slightly in confirmation. “Great. Step forty-nine.”

She triple-checked the numbers, then flicked a control. Another.

Some of the switches on the panel lit up, others went dim again, and Mira moved back and forth between three different duty stations as she followed the flowchart on her pad. Then, finally, everything converged on a single control, and she took a deep breath.

Then pressed it.

There was a kind of subliminal thump, the whole ship trembling slightly, then telltales and indicators lit up all across the board.

“Reactor one start,” she reported, into the comlink again. “Everything looks good from up here, Flynn!”

“We’re all good here, too,” Flynn replied. “Reactor one is running smoothly, we’re getting a good efficiency curve, within five percent of nominal. They mothballed this ship well.”

“Then let’s get on with activating the rest of the reactors,” Mira decided. “How long until I can begin the start procedure for Two and Three?”

“We’ll be good in… fifteen, twenty?” Flynn said. “That’s for Two, we’ve been doing some of the prep work while we were waiting. Make yourself useful and get some of the other systems unlocked and online.”

“Hey!” Mira protested, shaking her head, then tutted. “Well, whatever. I’ll bring up… shields, I guess? Does One have enough power for that?”

“It should, but let’s not chance it until Two is online,” Flynn said. “Sensors should be better.”

“Got it, sensors it is,” Mira agreed, signing off, and switched to another file on her pad. “Okay, step one is… of course it’s on the other side of the bridge…”

She picked up her toolkit with a huff, and began schlepping it across the bridge to the sensor control station.

Halfway there, she paused, and looked out the armoured window.

The ships in the Chommell Sector Reserve Fleet were far enough apart that she could only see even the capital ships as toylike shapes, lit by the distant sun, and the escorts were not much more than points of light. Much closer, though, was the Makepeace, the Nebulon-B all the reactivation teams were working off, and she smiled a not particularly charitable smile as she looked out at the engineering support frigate… and four of the five other Star Cruisers that they were here to reactivate.

Bringing the Reserve Fleet from mothballs to full active status would take months, of course. They were operating off canned air and only pressurizing certain rooms, and there were less than a dozen engineers per ship for a truly vast war vessel. But it was happening, and it was inexorable… and it was happening for hundreds of Reserve Fleets, all across the galaxy.

Star Cruisers, Star Destroyers, heavy frigates, cruiser squadrons… the Military Disarmament Act limited the strength of the New Republic Defence Force, the active military, but putting everyone serving the arms industry out of work straight away would have been an economic catastrophe in a galaxy that had sorely needed to avoid them.

And the result was… something the First Order could have no idea was coming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been foolish enough to pick a fight with the Republic.

TY-3 whistled, and Mira sighed.