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Pending Receipt 05 Justified
Lev took advantage of the magnetic bases and set the thermos cups down. “Mar, calm down. Just…” He drifted closer, intent on comforting her.
“No.” she croaked. “I won’t calm down. This is not a time for calm!” She winces, her voice hurting, crossing her arms over her chest.
Lev caught himself on the frame of her bunk, so they didn’t collide. She glared at him through her lashes, their noses scant centimeters apart. He was trying to be comforting, but the stony rage on her face left no room for him to be nice.
“C’mon Mar, don’t be like this, it’s just…”
“No.” She croaked again. “I will be like this.” She nudged him, pushing him out into the middle of the compartment. “Things aren’t right. It’s dangerous.”
“We’re in space, everything is dangerous.” She stared daggers at him.
“Please don’t be angry with me, Marina. I’m trying to take care of you. I’m here to help, I care abut you.” He trailed off, his voice getting quieter as he drifted across the room, reaching out to catch himself on another bunk.
“It hurts too much to talk.” Her wounded voice squeaked like a pubescent boy. She turned around, pulling a portable computer from its magnetic dock next to her bunk. She powered it up, opening the text app, typing on the screen with her fingertips.
The repairs made in that panel don’t qualify as repairs. It may be functional, but it’s not right. Did you do them?
She held it out to Lev, who glanced at it. “Look, if you’re still too hurt to talk, I’ll just let you rest. I know when I’m not wanted.”
Deflated, Lev made to leave. “No, stay.” She barked as he shoved off the bunk toward the compartment’s hatch. She typed hurriedly.
I know things probably got a little excited in there, but that’s no excuse for bad work. We don’t have any room for error.
Lev squinted at her screen from across the room before stiffening, his shoulders hardening. “I know it wasn’t the right way to fix it, but it was fast and simple. It’ working and it lets us bypass a lot of damaged components inside that panel.” She started typing a reply while Lev kept taking. “It was hard to work in all the smoke, and after seeing what happened to you…” Marina held up the tablet for him to read.
There’s a lot of other people besides me to worry about on Stalingrad, even more on the cylinder.
The mixed expressions shuffling across Lev’s face as he read her message gave Marina pause. He’s not upset or insulted, not the least bit defensive. Normally his ego is delicate enough that I would have goaded a reaction out of him.
“Look, I’m fully aware it’s not right. But it’s online now, and to make any changes we’d have to de-energize the whole system. Again.” Lev left, a little more haughty than before. Perhaps I am getting to him. She let him go. Perhaps if he stews in his own thoughts long enough, he’ll come to his senses.
***
After three more ship days of bed rest, Maria went back to the reactor control room. She wasn’t normal yet, her throat still hurt, and she still sounded funny when she talked, but she was improving. Not working, not helping Stalingrad was driving her mad. The mental anguish and frustration outweighing her diminishing physical pain.
She shouldered the hatch open, grinning as she let the momentum pull her into the control room. CaptainMironovawas there arguing with chief engineer Konstantin, and the mood in the room slapped the smile off her face.
“I don’t care. We’re nearing the transfer point, and we have a window to make. The lights are green, we’re going to jump. Regardless of how your gut feels about it.”
“Captain, just because systems are working under our current load doesn’t mean they will under the spike load of a dimensional jump.”
“Ships make dimensional jumps all the time chief, it’s routine at this point.”
“Those are military ships, captain, and no one would be surprised if one of them came up missing after a failed jump.”
“Exactly, this isn’t a military ship. We weren’t built by the lowest builder. This is a civilian operation. We can buy whatever cutting edge technology we like, and not be held beholden to the Federation’s misguided budget.”
“Misplaced perhaps, but I would never go so far as to say the Federation’s budgeting is misguided.” The chief engineer’s mood shifted at the captain’s political statement.
She waved a hand at him dismissively. “Come now, captain, this is a civilian operation, not the military one you came from, and we’re going to some far off system to start a new colony. Who cares what those tired old men back on Earth think. Feel free to speak your mind, chief.”
He scowled at her. “Captain, I think we need to power off the ship wide illumination systems, unload the reactor and fix relay panel thirty seven, properly before we make the jump and strain the electrical systems even further.”
CaptainMironova crossed her arms. “Not possible. We’re sixteen hours from our jump point, and with all the other things we’ve got t do before then, we can’t take any systems offline. We’ll need every watt of power we can get for the jump.”
“I don’t think it’s safe, Captain.”
“Light says green.” she repeated.
“I can make it so the light isn’t green.” Konstantin said firmly.
The captain turned back sharply, an extra edge in her voice. “And I can have you removed and locked in the brig too.” She nodded in greeting to Marina as she passed through the hatch. Marina watched Captain Marinova go, stunned by the exchange she wasn’t supposed to have seen.
Once the captain was out of earshot, the chief engineer said, “That’s what you get for coming back early.” Dryly.
Marina shut the hatch and hung there in the entryway, her mind racing with the implications. Her now habitual silence forced her to choose her words carefully. Before she could decide on which words to use, Konstantin broke the cold silence. “You weren’t supposed to see that. Don’t you worry about me. You’re the subordinate, it’s my job to worry about you.”
“Not worried about you. Much. Worried about our ship more.”
“That is something worth worrying about.” He agreed solemnly.
“So you are worried about the hasty repairs?”
“Hasty indeed.” He turned back to his console. “Of course I am worried about the repairs. But I have a lot on my plate, Mar, this whole colony for starters. I wasn’t worried about the repair then, because it worked for what we needed when we needed it to work. But this is now. And I don’t think it will work when we need it to. The jump is going to take every spare watt this ship can muster. We can’t let a weak link like that break our chain.”
“Is there really no margin?”
“Modern jump systems have gotten much more efficient. That’s how we’re able to do it with only a single reactor, and not a whole reactor bank. But that also means we’re going to rely really heavily on our capacitor banks, and they’re going to have a huge instantaneous discharge. That patch job might be fine under our sustained load, but who knows what will happen during a power spike like a jump.”
“Relay panel thirty seven, is just compartment lighting, right?”
The chief engineer winced. “Marina, I know you’ve been resting and stuff, but you sound really awful. I know you want to help, and I appreciate your concern, your dedication, but are you really sure you should be back here and not recovering still? Did the nurses give you clearance to come back to work?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m here now. Don’t trust anyone else, someone else might get it wrong.”
Konstantin grimaced knowingly. “Fine, but don’t strain yourself. No breathing hard. I’m officially restricting you to light duty.”
“Don’t worry, talking is enough work as it is. No heavy breathing for me.” She drew an X on her chest, making the universal hand gesture for a promise.
The engineer’s face said he wasn’t satisfied, but he kept talking. “Yes, relay panel thirty-seven controls compartment lighting for almost all the machinery and workspaces on board Stalingrad. In theory, if the extra squeeze from the jump put too much juice in those cables and they failed, we would lose lighting, but that should be it. But in systems as complex and interconnected as space ships we know it’s never that simple. Who knows what else could happen if that patch job fails.”
Marina drifted to the nearest console, logging in. “And captain doesn’t want to delay so we can do proper repairs.”
“Right. She’s so concerned about the precision of the jump window, speed, time etc, aiming for the exact spot in space pinpointed on the charts. I understand the desire for mathematical precision and schedules, but this is interstellar navigation, and not just from one star to a neighbor, but crossings more than a thousand light-years. A couple extra hours cruising before the jump isn’t going to make that big of a difference. Nothing we can’t compensate for on the back end.”
“Better safe than sorry.” Marina recited the old adage.
“Exactly. But captain says no. And we can’t do the fix without powering down all the lighting in all the service spaces. It’s not something we can do on the fly, not without warning, not without preparation and proper shutdown.”
“Lock out tag out. Makes fore more damage, more injuries later.” The terminal she had logged into finally finished booting up.
“Exactly!” exclaimed the older engineer. His pro-union tendencies emerging.
“What can we do without being able to power off, though?” She was racked with a coughing fit, her eyes watering as she struggled to navigate the computer system and cling to the terminal as her diaphragm made her body convulse involuntarily. She pulled up the schematics for relay panel number thirty-seven.
Engineer Konstantin drifts over, looking at the schematic over her shoulder as she saved a local copy to the terminal, and draws new lines on the schematic showing the cables bypassing the entire system, leaving the service lights always on.
They studied the display in silence together until an idea struck her. “Already is powered off. Only these cables are powered. We can repair everything else before reconnecting it all at once.”
The chief raised an eyebrow at her. “Could use a battery pack and a meter to troubleshoot the individual relays, isolate and replace the bad parts, fix the wiring. Make the whole panel good as new before reconnecting the power lines.”
Marina nodded in agreement as Konstantin continued. “With the relays replaced, we could power down, hook up the power lines and power it back up. The system would only be off five minutes at most. That’s a brilliant idea, Marina. I’ll get Toya to get all the parts and tools together.”
***
Toya received a message from Chief Engineer Konstantin. She opened it quickly, glad to be her boss’s first choice when he needed something. Can you pull all these parts from spares? Her eyes went wide as she saw how long the parts list was. Wires and relays, mostly. But so many. She didn’t even know there were that many kinds of relays.
She set off for the storage lockers to find the spares. Who designed this system anyway? Why did they need fifteen, fifteen and a half, seventeen and twenty amp relays? Couldn’t they just do with fifteen and twenty amp units? This is way too many part numbers. It’s ridiculous.
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