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11
No News is Good News
Marina struggled to keep up with Lev, as they navigated by headlamp, diving headlong through the passages along Stalingrad’s spine toward the reactor control room. Lev stopped, listening to shouting voices from ahead. He clung to the corner of the access way, waiting for Marina to catch up.
He pointed around the corner, squinting his eyes against the beam of Marina’s light. Chief Konstantin’s voice echoed up the passage, his shouted words overlapping themselves. “Power is still out, if he’s shouting like that, it must be really bad.”
Marina nudged him, and the two of them rounded the corner into the reactor control room. Toya and the Chief, both with lights, struggled with an open panel. “Get that, disconnect it from the other one,” Konstantin was saying to Toya. They both turned as Lev and Mar came in, their lights dancing across the compartment.
“What’s going on? What happened?” Lev asked.
“The power is out.” Answered Toya.
“No shit, I figured I would just use this old flashlight for fun,” retorted Lev.
“Main reactor has quenched, and the consoles are down because power is out. Secondary reactor is running, but is devoted to the capacitor banks recharging for the return jump.”
“Okay, and? We just power the consoles back up from the secondary reactor and use it to jump start the primary. No big deal.” Lev looked confused.
Toya glanced at him over the top of the open side door on the inert console. The chief engineer stated matter-of-factly. “The consoles are off.”
Realization swept over Lev, his eyes going wide. “And without the consoles, we can’t command the secondary reactor to route power back to the main or the consoles.”
Konstantine nodded and opened the panel on the other side of the console from Toya, burying his head inside among the wires. “We’ve lost all power, the consoles are off, but the secondary reactor is still running, without control?” Marina mused aloud as she drifted over to the other console. Unsure of what she was going to do with it, but she had to try something. “How is that possible?” she asked of no one in particular.
Chief Konstantine emerged from behind the other console again, pointing through the dancing shadows cast by their headlights. “Lev, bring me the portable toolkit from the supply closet over there.” While he waited for Lev to retrieve the tools, he turned to Marina. “I’m not sure. The computer still has to be on. A Tokamak reactor doesn’t just sustain itself, so the main computer must still be on and communicating with the reactor somehow to sustain the operation, but we have no way to control or communicate with it.”
Marina peeked over the top of the other terminal. “How do we know the other reactor is still on then?”
“Well life support is still on, isn’t it? Something is powering it, and it sure as hell ain’t the main reactor.” He dipped his head again as he scrunched back down behind the other console, fumbling inside of it.
“Good point, chief,” replied Marina. “So if all the consoles are down, how do we give it commands?”
“How indeed, does anyone have any ideas?” asked the chief engineer. “It’s not like we can just yank the power cables from one thing and jack them into something else.”
Lev piped up. “Well, if the reactor is still running and keeping the air on, then the computer controlling it is still on, its just the display interface that’s off.”
“Yes. We tried cycling power already, but that didn’t buy us anything. The internal fuses look good too,” said Konstantin as he held up a little glass vial, peering at the wire inside through the beam of his headlight. “The problem has to be further upstream.”
“I was going to suggest that!” Toya barked, her head emerging from behind the console as she snapped the panel on the other side shut.
“You can go check them,” he waved a hand at her dismissively. She dove headlong for the door, headed to the next compartment down the hall where the relay panels and circuit breakers were. Her headlight casting wild shadows around the room, illuminating dust motes as she crossed the compartment. “Mar, get out of there, seal that terminal back up in case the power comes back on.” Chief engineer Konstantin waved at her with the other hand.
Lev glanced about, watching Toya dash off like Konstantin’s technical attack dog. “What if she doesn’t find anything? What if it doesn’t work, what do we do then, boss?” He asked, nervousness accelerating his speech.
The engineer threw up his hands. “Look man, I’m the guy in charge, but I am not God. I don’t know everything, nor can I see the future. If it doesn’t work, we’ll figure it out then.” he barked, the frustration raising his volume again.
Another flash of light came through the hatch, the chief turning angrily to face it. “Back already? There’s no way you could have made it down there, opened the hatches and made it back here already.” His pointer finger thrust out sharply, assigning blame.
It was not Toya who had returned, but Sofia and another of the third shift technicians, Ingrid. Sofia held up her hands defensively. Replying “whoa boss man,” after he finished.
He nodded quickly. “Yeah, sorry, lots going on. Nice of you two to show up. Break out the tools, I’m not sure what it is yet, but were going to have a lot of stuff to fix.” Lev held up the case with the tool kit over head, grinning and shaking it triumphantly, the tools rattling in the plastic case.
Marina rolled her eyes as Sofia and Ingrid left to fetch more tools. Before Marina could speak the terminals came on. Their pale blue screens casting weak shadows, the silence in the compartment filled with the buzz of electronics and the hum of fans. Lev whooped, tucking the case of tools under his arm, drifting across the room to the second terminal next to Marina. Chief Konstantin already typing furiously at the first closest to the hatch.
Toya returned, out of breath with excitement. “Chief it worked, but the lights are till out. I don’t know why. There’s something else wrong. A bunch of breakers had tripped, I reset them all, but the lights won’t come back. A bunch of ancillary systems are still down. I tried chief, I really did.”
“Hush,” he waved at her with one hand, still punching keys with the other. Marina had logged into the other terminal, working her way through the layers of the system.
“Chief, the secondary reactor is solid as a rock. Running at ninety percent, just like we left, no fluctuations at all. It’s so steady I had to refresh the instrument readouts just to make sure it wasn’t frozen.” Marina reported Lev shouldering in next to her to look at the screen.
Konstantin nodded along as she spoke, never looking over at her as he typed away at the other terminal. “Sensors on the primary all read normal, cold reactor. It’s not responding to commands. Marina, feed the secondary some more fuel, lets pump it up to about ninety-five percent, giver he some extra juice so we can jump start the cold one with it.”
Marina nodded, typing out her commands into the console. Lev spoke for her, firing over his shoulder. “Working on it boss.”
The chief swore, and Toya slapped the side of the console, the screen flickering. “It’s not responding. Sensors are working, readings are normal, but no inputs make any difference.” Sofia came in, the squat, more burley woman Ingrid drifting in after her, arms full of tools as her toes tentatively tap danced across the floors, steering her progress in the weightless ship.
“Ah, ladies, just in time. Toya, go with them, you three head down to the main reactor compartment. Get eyes on the hard way, because I’m not sure if we can trust these readings, and I don’t want to make something worse by trying to fire it up.”
Toya saluted crisply. “Yes chief, main reactor compartment inspection, got it.”
Sofia grunted, “I’ve been working the hatches, follow me.”
Toya kicked over quickly, taking some of the tools from Ingrid and the three women left, heading further aft towards the engines and the reactors. The chief turned to Marina and Lev shaking his head. “Peace and quiet, eh?”
Marina nodded weakly as he continued. “We’ll do what prep work we can before we light the big fire.”
“Shame about the lights, no fun working in the dark,” Lev commented.
“What is going on down here?” Barked the sharp voice of Captain Mironova. She and two other crewmen from the bridge carrying large hand head lights entered. The reactor control compartment was blasted with the brilliant white light of the massive LED’s. Marina shielded her eyes with her left hand, Lev and Sofia looked away, Konstantine and Toya squinting against the dazzling light, the chief engineer saluted the captain.
“I didn’t ask for formality, Konstantin, I asked, what the hell was going on with my ship?”
He let his shoulders deflate, looking down. “It appears whatever gremlins had bitten us before and caused the failures have not been sufficiently chased off. We had another failure, but the secondary reactor is still on. We’re working on figuring out if it’s safe to jumpstart the main reactor with secondary to get it back online.”
“So you didn’t fix it the first time?” Mironova demanded.
“We thought we had ma’am, but it seems we treated the symptom, not the sickness.” He wrung his hands. Lev glanced back and forth between them, surprised to see the chief engineer so nervous.
“So what is the sickness that afflicts us?” she said, taking one of the lights from the bridge crew who had come with her, and sweeping it around the room as if she’d be able to spot the squat dark green technical gremlin crouching in the corner of the reactor control room and order the men to strangle it.
“I’ve got three people with tools headed for the main reactor compartment right now, to figure that out.”
“Well, the secondary reactor is smaller, it doesn’t have the same wattage. It can’t handle the instantaneous load of a jump. If you don’t get the main reactor back online, we’re stuck here, in this alternate dimension, unable to get back to reality. Unable to get back not just to Earth, but unable to get back to even the same plane of existence as Earth.” The captain said, her voice thin and deadly serious.
“I am fully aware, Captain. I know the specs of this ship just as well as you do. We’re working on it. As I said, there’s people with tools on hand, and by now, they’re probably in the reactor compartment as we speak.” He said with his voice even and measured, answering the captain carefully.
She waved the light around again, looking over the chief engineer, Marina, the assistant engineer, and Lev, the second shift lead technician. Her eyes narrowed accusingly, and she pursed her thin lips before she handed the light back to the crewmen she had taken it from. She said, “Fix it,” simply, and the three of them left, taking their blinding lights with them.
Chief Konstantin looked to Lev and Marina gravely. “We’re stuck?” Asked Lev.
Konstantin nodded in reply, but before he spoke, a chirp on his wrist computer informed him he had received a message. He woke up the screen of the terminal that had gone dark and typed quickly. Looking up after slapping the enter key to send his reply. “The girls are getting to work down there, they haven’t found anything, but they’re looking.”
“Whatcan we do?” asked Lev urgently.
“There’s plenty of sensors to check, and the thing has been running with no oversight.” Konstantin pointed at Marina and the other terminal. “Pull the data log for the whole time we’ve been blind and go through it, see what the second reactor has been up to, maybe there’s a hick up or some sort of evidence that can tell us what caused this.”
Marina set to the task, navigating through the terminal’s file system to pull up the records from the smaller reactor’s sensors.
***
Sofiya returned looking downtrodden. A canvas bag bulging with the shiny chrome of tools tucked under one arm. “Chief, we couldn’t find anything.” She let go of the tool bag, letting it drift weightlessly in the compartment. “Ingrid and I checked everything. It all looks normal. We couldn’t find anything wrong.”
“Well, something had to have happened. Because things are obviously wrong. You must have missed something,” he said calmly.
Ingrid came in after her, with the other tool bag. “No sir. We cross verified each other, checked everything in the manual, and everything we could think of that wasn’t in the manual. It’s been three hours. I think we covered all the bases. There’s noting wrong outside the reactor.”
“Outside the reactor,” echoed Lev. Everyone exchanged glances. Chief Konstantine slowly rubbed his temples letting out the deep breath he had been holding. “I was afraid of that.”
“Of what?” Sofia asked.
“Someone will have to go inside and figure out what’s going on.” Konstantine looked from one face to another.
“Wait, like inside the reactor?” Sofia sounded incredulous. “What for? There’s a ton of hardware we can check from out here. Shouldn’t we go through all that first before we go cracking that egg open?”
“I’ll do it!” Toya volunteered immediately.
The chief engineer glanced between his staff. “No Toya, you go back to the bunks or the mess hall or wherever you need to and round up the rest of the technical staff. They should have been here by now.” He ignored her disappointed look, moving on. “Sofia and I will start looking over the computers and sensor readings to double check the systems. Everything booted up fine and passed the self test, so I don’t expect to find anything. It’s all working as advertised, so in theory it’s all good on our end. Marina will suit up and go into the reactor. Lev you can be her helper since you’re on hand.”
Marina and Lev exchanged a glance before he waved her back into the hall.
***
Marina opened the hatch slowly, being careful to swing it slowly as she extended her knees. With her head and shoulders through the opening, she looked into the heart of the reactor. Slowly scanning every centimeter of its curved inner walls. Lev’s voice echoed from inside her helmet. “What do you see, how bad is it?”
“I’ve only just got in here, I haven’t even broke the tools out yet, I don’t expect to be able to see any damage with the naked eye.” She whispered back to him through the chin mic, her breath fogging the inside of the service suit’s faceplate. Gingerly, moving as little as possible, hoping no microscopic debris would come loose from her suit inside the reactor.
She folded up, retracting herself back down through the hatch, grabbing a laser sensor mounted on a pole handed to her by Ingrid. She extended it upward through the open hatch. Jacking her personal computer through her suit into the small terminal mounted on the pole. She closed her eyes as she hit the button commanding the laser to turn on.
After three minutes of tense silence, the small computer gave her some fresh information. Her heart sank as she looked over the lines of numbers and measurements. “Lev, I’m going to send you a data packet. Relay this back to Konstantin.”
She could feel his hesitation through the radio as he scanned the results himself. His voice thick as he said, “Yes, Mar,” and forwarded the information to the chief engineer. “Is this a problem we can fix?” he asked her privately after he sent it.
She started breaking down the laser measuring device, handing the pieces down through the hatch into the Tokomak to Ingrid below her. “Yes, we can fix it. But it’s hyper precise, and very time consuming. It has to be done correctly because there is no margin for error. It’ll take days, weeks probably, since it’s such a small space, we can’t have multiple people in here.” She drifted down, shutting the hatch above her head. “Or risk contamination inside the reactor. Anything could cause instability in the plasma field.”
“Weeks? That’s not time we have, we’re supposed to make the jump back to real space in like fifty-two hours, aren’t we.” His voice came tense and tinny through the speakers in the helmet of her isolation suit.
“Yes,” Marina answered him.
Now that the primary message has been transcribed, we can relate you the updates. Progress continues on Book III Knowledge of Gods. The manuscript had been roughly 85% through the final developmental edit pass. Our line editor has begun work behind the developmental editor. By page count the line edit is about 15% complete. We also had a sit down with our cover artist to start work on another gorgeous watercolor painting. Planned release date for Knowledge of Gods does not have an official release date, but it will planned to be in early August 2026.
Please subscribe to this newsletter Tight Beam to continue to receive updates of Pending Receipt and release of the next book in The Descendant Saga. If you have not read the other titles in the series, Book I Altar of Scales and Book II Cave in the Sky are available on Amazon as E books and paperback and Audible in audio format. We highly recommend you read those now to catch up before something from Book III spoils it for you. Thank you for your attention in this matter.
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The Descendant Saga 