Fixit — Erik Schubach

This short story follows Fixit, a worker on the surface of Tau Ceti Prime. She is an ace mechanic who keeps the automated harvesting machines in good running order. She has never missed a quota in her efforts help to feed all the people “topside” in the giant floating cities in the sky. She has to make her first trip to the technologically advanced cities for the first time in her life to make an emergency shipment to New Terra City because Betweeners had hijacked the prior shipment. With the help of her pinger friends, the maintenance drones who are there to aide her, she gets an old airship repaired to make the flight. But things go bad when she is intercepted by those same pirates. Can she hold out until the Sky Guard can arrive?