No Time for Idle Hands

Securely strapped into the operator's couch, Enzo felt a jolt as the cold cable end at the back of his breathing hood made contact with the jack port of his cranial implant. Behind him, he knew and soon felt, a similar cable was reaching up to meet the junction at the back of the hood, binding him to the local network. The word 'CONNECTION READY' glowed in green capitals along the bottom of his visual field as the LimbOS firmware of his implant acknowledged a solid connection. Then he willed himself into the sensoriate of the drones in the docking bay beyond, and was pleased to see that at least the antenna on the roof of the drone booth was still functioning normally as his mind filled with the combined synthetic vision of four drones. It wasn't as comfortably personalized as his connection to the drones aboard the good ol' Sable, he thought with a detatchment wrought on heavy duty pharmaceutical chemicals, but it would have to do for now.
As soon as Enzo's implants registered connection with the drones, he immediately took appropropriate measures to make sure that it couldn't be easily severed again. First, he ordered the drones to cut off all exterior connections except to one another and to the transmitter atop the control booth in which he was currently situated. This was a precaution against a software glitch or, Patrons forbid, the lingering effect of a cyberattack being the cause of the communications issues within the ship; if a worm were responsible, he reasoned, then perhaps it had not already propagated to the drones or, if as as as the Aniki Labs Cyber Division were known to be capable of, would at least be rendered discontinuous and unable to coordinate an ongoing attack. Next, he instructed the drones to use line-of-sight laser links to communicate between one another in a relay system. As the drones worked their way around the sphere section to the damaged pressure hull segments, this would help maintain his connection even in the absence of microwave or hardline communications, even with the still-intact portions of the hull blocking a direct line to the booth and even with the dense field-proofing built into the inner hull layer.
With these steps out of the way, Enzo ordered the drones to go through a special hatch in the upper back wall of the docking bay to gain access to the crawlspace between inner and outher hulls, then start working their ways towards where Lanae though the impact damage was, a portion of the inner layer just radial of the forward sun windows. Soon, the drones were stringing themselves out along the hull, the first one pausing where the causeway met the sphere section to provide laser coverage around the corner. As it turned out, this was less far away than Enzo had expected, though the relief time saved in locating the damage was offset by the terrible realization of the damage's full extent.
Revelation's inner and outer hulls were comprised of modular, triangular segments formed from sandwiches of carbon composite armor, self-healing resin, hydrocarbon gel for absorbing particle radiation, and metal foil for absorbing electromagnetic radiation, then the same layers in reverse order on the other side. The gap between the hulls was wide to provide room for utility conduits conveying power, data, and especially water. The water was for municipal use, but it also served an important ship-wide purpose; by pumping it around from reservoir, wobbles in the ship's rotation caused by people and cargo shifting, as well as the launch of drones or subsidiary vessels like the Sable, could be greatly reduced through counterbalancing. The tangled maze of pipes reqired Enzo's drones to move slowly and deliberately to avoid causing further damage - or, it would have, had the impact not blasted them apart to create a cloud of slushy water streams interspersed with debris.
"Oh my..." Enso mouthed, considering the time it would take to put all that infrastructure damage to right. He swore again when he realized that this would be real problem for getting the patches on the drones' backs to where they needed to go. He felt his stomach do flip-flops as the ship started to slow its rotation, likely a result of an order issued by the CIC crew to help reduce the demands on the fluid counterbalancing systems, but that only made things worse - chunks of debris were beginning to break off and float free from the icy stalactites forming in the hard vaccuum, creating a visual clutter that -
"There," Enzo pointed from his seat, though no one was there to see his gesture. "Oh no, that is not good, Lanae." And it wasn't. A stream of sickly blue light flowed from what looked like a fist-sized hole in the outer hull towards what he discerned to be a man-sized, jagged crack in the inner hull where a stream of interstellar gas particles collided with venting atmosphere - Cherenkov radiation. The ship's magnetic field was having a hard time warding off the impact, and it would continue to do so unless something could be done to plug the hole in the armor. At the Revelation's cruising velocity, even a tiny grain of debris encountered along the way would have punched through, then blossomed into a cloud of plasma and shrapnel with bunker-busting energy. It was lucky, then, that at those speeds, such projectiles were usually so highly-penetrating that they would pass right though solid matter while imparting comparatively little energy into the surrounding matter. Usually.
Enzo examined the hole in the outer hull, then the gash in the inner. "Well shit, Lanae," he said more flippantly than was entirely appropriate. "What are we gonna to to do about this, eh?"