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"So, the reason I didn't just make a replacement entire space station is because I didn't know if the entanglement had to be established in advance with physical colocation, but I can actually just do that, if these things are things you can assembly-line."
A different voice takes over. "No, no, it does work that way it's just the- yes, it was ceramic spheres. Just the spheres that have to start colocated. They contain each end of the entanglement, and the rest of the station extends it into a sort of film. But this link is a three-centuries-old design and can't use modern gate systems seamlessly. New style entanglements are smaller and thus lighter and thus much much cheaper to send on fast interstellar trips."
"...Probably. You'd want to be very very careful. Don't spin them, don't subject them to any sharp acceleration. But that wouldn't solve the problem. We don't have the right systems on our end."
Lyl: "Not two?"
Engineer: "Not without a whole lot of overtime."
Lyl: "I see, four then."
"Does overtime look more appealing if I offer to bribe you with my magic powers?"
"Yes," Lyl says, "Proof, though. It seems like you can make things without knowing exactly what they are, correct?"
"Yes. Would you like me to conjure up your birth certificate and tell you when you were born or something?"
"If you can do that you've just opened quite a can of worms. I was thinking more along the lines of making something unobjectionable like an autodoc in view of one of the security cameras."
Quietly, she forwards the entire conversation thus far to the United Systems' Chancellor of Security.
"Yes, yes, I'm an enormous security risk, tell me something I don't know. Give me a model number and I'll put an autodoc in front of a security camera."
"Rolebi Medico type three autodoc, public service version."
"Right. I'm not the final decision maker here but if you agree to make some reasonable quantity of things especially in low infrastructure worlds - more along the lines of medicine and computers than weapons, of course - I think we'll be able to push a rush-through to reconnect this gate as quickly as possible."
"I'll give you an update some time tomorrow. Bye." She might be a bit testy, what with the fact that she's not going to get to go back to sleep. Security wants to have words.
Cam hangs out in the station. He patches the hole until the place is airtight, in case someone wants to walk through once the gate's established and feels uncomfortable with the presence of a hole. He has dinner. He works on design for little drones to deliver the good news to the Cloudbank people.
After a couple of hours Nick calls him, apparently having figured out the 'sending' part of a phone.
"I was wondering if the printer will safely accept different materials, mostly. Also wondering if you got a real person on the stargate's phone."
"I did get a real person! They have to do some engineering on their end for anything other than data to come through. Your printer can do other materials but not just anything you have lying around, the steel raw I gave you is not-quite-exactly-steel and it would similarly need not-quite-exactly whatever else."
"So I shouldn't just give it wood or floatstone. Good to know before I got curious enough to try it. Might have set my ship on fire."
"Horray for safety standards. D'you think I could see outer space at some point?"
"I don't see why not. Lemme see how far away you are right now..." Cam checks the location of the tracking device.