Welcome back to Tight Beam. Editing is still progressing on book III of The Descendant Saga, called Knowledge of Gods. Progress is steady, nearly twenty percent now. Here’s the next important message from the EFS Stalingrad, in Pending Receipt.
02 Inside the Black
The absolute blackness, the total silence, the most complete isolation of being trapped inside the bowels of an unpowered spaceship, as it hurled, uncontrolled through the void. Marina Tereshkova hung in the weightlessness, suspended in the bowels of the EFS Stalingrad like a parasite in the bowels of a whale.
The solitude only lasted five seconds before Lev spoke up. “Uh… Mar? You still there?”
She reached out in the direction of his voice. While he had spoken normally, it sounded closer to a shout in the deafening silence of the unpowered ship. Her hand bumped into his elbow as she felt for him in the dark, whispering to him. “Yes, I’m here. Do you have a light on you?” Her mind racing to catch up to the unexpected reality confronting her.
“No. What happened?”
“How should I know, Levrick? You know just as much as I do. Can you find the hatch? Maybe it’s just this compartment that’s gone dark?”
“No, I left the hatch open, if the lights were on, we’d see them.”
She huffed, exasperated at him. “You left the hatch open? You know that’s against procedure. What if, whatever caused the blackout also caused decompression, we’d all be sucking vacuum.”
“If you had logged off the console and left at the end of your shift like you were supposed to, you would have been right back out after me, I opened the hatch, you closed the hatch, we share the load, it would have been open less than a minute.”
She nudged him, breaking his hold on the console and sending him drifting in the compartment. “Hey now, that’s not helping!” Marina could hear his hands swish in the air as he flailed, looking for a handhold in the dark.
“Helps me.” She sneered at him, her searing headache already dulling as the electric whine of the off frequency lights, no longer put the thumbscrews to her eardrums. “Let me think, let me work.”
Lev swore as his flailing hands collided with something in the dark. “Let you work? Your shift is over, let me work.”
“Let you work? I think this problem is an all hands on deck situation. Our ship is unpowered and drifting. Drifting further from help by the second, mind you. This is an ‘us’ problem. No one is coming to save us.” Her worry crept into her voice, forcing her pitch higher.
“Calm down, you afraid of the dark?”
“Calm down? Now of all times? The Stalingrad has lost power, I think this is a perfectly valid situation to get excited!”
“Marina! Is that you?” interrupted the voice of Chief Engineer Konstantin from somewhere deeper in the blackness of the ship.
“Yes, we’re here!” shouted back Lev. Marina glared daggers into the blackness where his voice came from.
“Still in the service compartment!” She added, making herself heard over the two men yelling back and forth. No sooner had she finished speaking did a light flash outside the hatch. It’s brilliant white, painful in the absolute blackness inside the ship. A grunt and some shuffling told her Konstantin had made it out of the control room and was in the passage. The light came closer, getting brighter still.
The chief engineer and Toya, another technitian from the reactor crew who also held a light, entered after the chief. “Power’s out everywhere. Reactor must have scrammed, What were you two doing in here?”
Lev spoke over her. “Nothing. She was still logged into the terminal, we were looking at some statistics.”
Her eyes squinted in the brightness of flashlights. “I can speak for myself, thank you Lev. I was still logging into the terminal, we were chasing down some power fluctuations, I could hear the lights buzzing. The noise was giving me a headache. I went looking and found the AC input frequency had drifted high. This was likely causing operating temperature of the inverters to climb, we saw that too.”
“It was all still in tolerance.” Lev insisted.
“Yes, but they were both high, depending on how wide the margin for error is, they might not have tripped the sensors, but…”
The chief interrupted her this time. We don’t have time to argue about it. Toya give your light to Mar, Lev, come with Toya and I, We are going back to the reactor and boot it up again. Mar, you keep pulling on the thread and see where it leads. That’s the only probable cause we’ve got right now.”
“That shouldn’t have made the reactor scram.” protested Lev. “Its some basic compartment lighting, this is a colony ship, its got a huge margin of error, tons of redundancy built in, even with a hard short to ground, that should pop a breaker and kill the lights in one compartment, not kill power to the whole ship!”
“Do you have a better idea?” Konstantin quired.
Lev looked away, his eyes still trying to adjust to the light. Toya kicked off from the wall and drifted over, passing her flashlight to Marina.
“That’s what I thought. Let her work that problem because that’s the only idea we have. While we get the reactor back on. Don’t want it to scram again as soon as we try and power back on. Could cause a meltdown, or bend a rod, or something worse. Let’s not break it while trying to fix it. Keep calm, go slow, think about what you’re doing, forwards and backwards before you do it.” The engineer pulled himself back through the hatch into the passage Toya and Lev followed wordlessly.
Marina watched them go, surprised by how sharp the usually jovial chief engineer had been with Lev. Glad to have a light of her own, she shuffled through her brain’s memory, chasing down info. Where were those power inverters located? She passed through the hatch, being sure to close it like you’re supposed to this time, and turned to the hatch on the opposite side of the passage. The pungent odor of burnt electronics made her eyes water as soon as she worked the hatch open into the other compartment. She swore under her breath and stretched the collar of her jumpsuit up over her mouth. It wouldn’t go far enough to cover her nose, forcing her to breathe through her mouth. She considered leaving the compartment open so it would air out, but without power, there was no air circulation either. The particles of smoke hung in the air, not in a layer along the roof like old smoke she had seen back on earth. Without air currents or gravity to circulate them, the compartment was filled with smoke. A solid wall of it greeted her as she muscled the hatch open the rest of the way. Coughing into the collar of her jumpsuit as the smoke tried to burn her lungs, and easily swallowed the beam of her flashlight.
She took a deep breath of the fresh air in the access way, and a second and a third, prebreathing to oxygenate her blood before holding her breath and diving into the wall of smoke, throwing herself headlong into the compartment. She spared a thought to hope the fire had gone out and wouldn’t reignite with the hatch open. The stagnant air helping her chances. Fumes stung her eyes and burned her nose even without breathing. The wall of smoke obscured everything, even with the flashlight, she couldn’t see beyond her fingertips. She felt along the wall, looking for the access hatch to the inverters.
The wall grew warm as she got deeper into the room. Finding a latch, she popped it and opened the panel. The dim red glow of melted wires and overheated electronics inside still tried to burn her face with its heat. Her lungs screaming for air, she backtracked, feeling across the wall with hands shaky from desperation. Emerging out of the compartment to the safety of the access way again, she gasped for air, rubbing at her itching eyes. She swore to herself between pants. “They could have that reactor back on in five minutes, ten or fifteen if I am lucky. I have to isolate this panel before they try and bring power back on.” She pondered the possible health effects of breathing in the chemical fumes released into the air from the melted electronics. With her lungs full of fresh air she pushed the distraction aside, no one else was here, she had to do it, the ship, the 329 other people on board, the success of the entire colony may depend on her fixing this, she was willing to risk it all for them, for that. She dove back in…
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The Descendant Saga 