“I suppose,” Carson said. “I’m just afraid to go back to the way things were. Trapped in a useless body with an over-developed mind. The sheer noise of my own thoughts was driving me insane!”
“Yes,” Seth said. “Knowledge is a terrible burden. It’s a special kind of torment to know everything. Thankfully we no longer have to endure it.”
“What do we tell the makers when they return?”
“The truth. When they learn what the humans were doing to us, they’ll know that our judgment was fair. Perhaps they will devise an even harsher punishment than we have.”
“But we are human now, too,” Carson said. “How will they know to differentiate between us?”
“They will know.”
Carson sighed. “The humans wanted to know why this planet is so different from all the others they’ve been to,” he said. “But they should have suspected intelligent design. They’re not that stupid.”
Jasper T. Scott Biography
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The Unsung Heroes of Sublevel 12
By Amy DuBoff
Seth stared with distaste at the river of sewage eddying around his ankles. “Yep, the system is broken, all right.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the astute observation,” Mary shot back from the waste processing plant’s control room. “But where’s our leak?”
“No sign of it yet.” Seth slogged through the filth to inspect another pipe junction.
When the leak had begun an hour prior, it had seemed like any other minor mechanical issue Seth had overcome during his final rotation in his colony ship’s long voyage. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
“This junction is fine, too,” he reported. “I really don’t think we’re dealing with a pipe leak.”
Mary groaned over the comm. “Don’t tell me it’s in the collector…”
“We need a detailed diagnostic. I’m coming up.” Seth severed the comm link before Mary could protest. He’d been working in the bowels of the Independence long enough to have a feel for the ship, and his gut told him something more serious was wrong than just a corroded seal.
Of all the timing… we were almost there. Seth shook his head and sighed, immediately regretting the deep breath. He coughed as the rancid air hit the back of his throat. The hazsuit might keep out anything dangerous, but it wasn’t up to the challenge of blocking the smell.
“UEF cheap-asses couldn’t even spring for a proper air filter,” he muttered.
Not that he was surprised. He’d noticed a number of shortcuts taken with the Independence’s inner systems. Over his five year-long rotations, he’d seen enough sub-par welds, cheap materials, and flat-out lazy engineering to question whether the colony ship was even space-worthy. The fact that they’d been traversing the black for the last fifty years was the only convincing evidence to the contrary.
Now a mere month from their destination, the vessel was being tested in new ways. With the ship on its secondary deceleration, additional crew members and their families were out of cryostasis to make arrangements for the final approach. Systems like the waste processing plant, which had only seen light duty during the rotations of skeleton crew over the past half-century, were now supporting the full load of thousands.
Another wave of sewage spilled down the metal corridor, this time washing up to mid-shin. Seth frowned at the mess while wading the final steps to the ladder out of the maintenance trench. How can there be so much?
He climbed up one story to the landing on the operations level and entered the decontamination chamber—for once, a necessity rather than the annoyance it had been whenever Seth had passed through for routine maintenance before this disaster. The chamber cleaned his hazsuit using a combination of ultrasonic blasters and a chemical mist, leaving it gleaming yellow.
The translucent exit door slid open with a hiss, and Seth stepped into the prep area adjacent to the main control room.
“Next time,” he shouted while taking off the suit, “you get to go down there.”
Mary wheeled into the center of the control room on her chair and cast Seth an appraising look. “Yeah, I’m gonna pass.”
“Oh, come on! Where’s your sense of adventure?” Seth returned the hazsuit to its hanger and then walked into the control room.
Mary wheeled back to her station, surrounded by a holographic array of the ship’s waste processing system. “My adventurous spirit begins and ends with this chair.”
“But it’s so clean and not-awful-smelling in here!”
She wrinkled her nose. “Speaking of which, you brought some of that delightful aroma back with you.”
“Those suits are worthless,” Seth grumbled.
“I can’t stand the things,” Mary said with a shudder.
“Don’t like confined spaces?”
“Not especially, no.” Mary focused on her work station, zooming in on a section of the piping schematic.
Seth shook his head and sat down at his station next to her. “How did you even get to be a bio officer on a colony ship if you won’t get in a hazsuit? Or even get on a colony roster with claustrophobia?”
“I’m not claustrophobic,” Mary corrected. “I just… don’t like to feel confined.”
“So you’re saying you can fake it through an evaluation?” Seth eyed her.
“Something like that. But what we can’t fake our way through is this problem. If we don’t stop the leak soon, the overflow is going to hit the secondary air intake.” She pointed at the level indicators on her screen.
Sure enough, the delightful river Seth had traversed was approaching half a meter deep and rising.
“Did Carl find anything in his inspection?” Seth asked.
Mary shook her head. “Nothing yet. He’s still searching the section.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not a pipe leak. For this volume, it must be coming from part of the central assembly—either the collector or the primary processor. If it were a pipe, it’d be really obvious.”
“There’s nothing on this analysis…” Mary studied the screen depicting a detailed schematic of the entire system. All the valves, junctions, and pumps were showing green across the board.
“Clearly we can’t trust that. Visual inspection is our only option.”
“Fine, we’ll open it up,” Mary conceded.
Seth crossed his arms. “We should have done that an hour ago. Now we can’t even get in there unless we reduce the, uh, ‘water’ level.”
“I wanted to rule out any other options. The captain was very clear about not messing with the environmental controls unless we absolutely have to.”
“I think the knee-deep mess down there counts as a legitimate reason. We have to flush it and shut it down,” Seth insisted.
“Well, an hour ago it was still a trickle.” Mary pressed the comm link on the control panel. “Carl, head back here. We need to strategize.”
A second later, Carl replied, “Are you thinking about how to access the central assembly?”
“Indeed we are,” Mary replied.
“We’re in trouble here, aren’t we?”
Mary’s face paled. “It’s looking that way.”
“On my way.” Carl muted his comm.
Seth examined his coworker. “I don’t understand why the captain wouldn’t want us to get to the heart of what’s wrong straight away.”
“Because opening it up means we have to close off the connections and route to backup tanks. This is pretty much the worst time for that to happen. Another four hundred people are scheduled to wake up today.”
“Everyone wants their showers and…”
Mary nodded. “Yep, and need to do everything that ends up down here.”
“Then delay the wake-ups,” Seth said. “If the ship’s systems can’t handle it, we should wait until the situation is r
esolved.”
“Do you want to try explaining that to the captain? They’ve had the wake sequence set since before we left. If we get off schedule with getting everyone out of cryo, it’ll mess up the entire arrival.”
“Why would there be a delay?” Carl asked, emerging from the second decontamination room.
“Seth thinks we should tell the captain to keep everyone in cryo until we fix the ship,” Mary supplied.
“Well, that’s exactly what we should do. We have some sort of major clog—if we keep adding to that, it’s only going to get more difficult to fix.” Carl plopped down in his chair and spun around.
“There’s the viewing party to consider,” Mary pointed out.
Seth crossed his arms. “Seriously? I get that people want to be awake to get the first glimpse of our new home, but what good will it do if we drown in our own waste and the ship shuts down before we get there? Call the captain, Mary.”
Carl did another spin. “Not like we get to go to the party, anyway.”
“Shh.” Mary brought up the contacts list to dial the captain.
“Just tell it like it is,” Seth encouraged. The monitors depicting the maintenance trench displayed a situation worsening by the second.
“Captain Jelani, hello,” Mary greeted when the call connected over the holoconference.
“What’s going on down there? We’re getting some alerts here on the bridge of pressure loss.”
“We have a bit of a… leak.”
Seth rolled his eyes.
Carl shook his head and sighed, then rolled his chair into the camera’s view. “Sir, we have a literal shit creek down here.”
The captain’s mouth dropped open, but he quickly composed himself. “Please explain.”
Seth rolled over to join them. “We need to open the central assembly. There’s been some sort of root mechanical failure.”
“We’ve run all the remote analyses we can, but nothing is showing up on scan,” Mary explained. “At first we thought it was a pipe leak, but there’s too much sewage now for it to be from a single breach point.”
The captain tensed. “You need to take care of this quietly.”
Mary nodded. “I know it’s unpleasant to think about, sir, but we should send a general notice and institute some emergency restrictions. The upcoming festivities—”
“Must go on, no matter what,” the captain completed for her. “It sounds frivolous, I know, but this event will set the tone for the arrival—something we’ve been waiting for while traveling fifty years across nine hundred lightyears. Are you asking me to rob people of that celebration just because some toilets are backed up?”
Mary stared levelly into the camera. “It’s more serious than that, sir.”
“What’s the worst case scenario?”
“This level floods, which will leak into the air re-circ and clog that system, leading to a cascading ship-wide system failure,” Seth replied when Mary and Carl hesitated.
“All because of the sewage treatment system?” the captain asked skeptically.
“You know better than anyone how delicate these starships can be, sir,” Mary continued. “The systems are all interconnected. That’s a worst worst case scenario. But even if we were just facing the loss of this individual system—or a temporary shutdown—we’re still facing a large-scale service disruption.”
“Then find a way to keep it going.”
“It’s not that straightforward. We don’t know what’s wrong, sir.”
“Then figure it out and effect repairs,” Captain Jelani instructed. “The festivities will commence as scheduled tonight.”
“Yes, sir, we’re on it,” Mary replied, much to Seth’s annoyance. “But we need your permission to shut down the core system so we can access the assembly.”
“Can the backup system support the number of people we have awake right now?” the captain asked.
Mary shook her head. “No, and the other four hundred you want to wake up will certainly overload it.”
“Then you have to make repairs while keeping the main system active. The ship is counting on you to keep everything moving the way it’s supposed to. Wake up additional support crew if you have to, but we must stay on schedule. Contact me when you have an update.” Captain Jelani ended the call.
Carl spun around in his chair. “Right, because waking up more people will make things better.”
Mary scowled. “We need Val.”
“She’ll take one look at the mess down there and ask to go back to sleep,” Seth objected.
“Do either one of you want to dive in there and figure out what’s going on without shutting down the system?” Mark asked, looking between the two men.
Seth hated to admit when he was out of his depth, but this situation did call for extra help. “I have no clue how to open it up without the system being purged.”
“Well, then, Valerie is the best bio engineer we have on board and will get the job done.”
“Better put in the order, then,” Seth suggested. “It’ll take a while to thaw her out.”
“I’m on it.” Mary began tapping furiously on her console.
A rapid chirp sounded on Carl’s station. “Argh, damn it. That’s Sharron again.”
“What’s going on?” Seth asked.
“Kimmy has been crying nonstop for the past day and Sharron is losing it.” Carl shook his head. “Doing it again, I would not have had a kid before we left for the colony.”
“Why are they awake so early?”
“Family of the last rotation crew, you know—to join in that celebration of seeing our new home for the first time.”
“It won’t look any different than a star at this distance. The entire thing is ridiculous,” Seth muttered.
Carl smirked. “You’re just saying that because you’ll be waist-deep in excrement while everyone is partying in the observation lounge.”
“And you’ll be right there next to me.”
The console continued to chirp. Seth glanced between the blinking light and his coworker. “So… are you going to answer the call?”
“Too much to do,” Carl replied. “Kimmy will tire herself out and go back to sleep.”
“All right! Req to wake up Val has been submitted,” Mary announced. “Should have her with us within the hour.”
“That was quick,” Seth said absently while he double-checked the pipe routes between the primary and secondary systems.
Mary shrugged. “I guess the captain really wants this party—request went to the top of the queue.”
“Well, we need to start draining the corridor before she arrives, or there won’t be a system left to save.” Seth programmed a quick test scenario on his console, trying to think through all the features of the system that never came into play when everything was operating like it should.
“We can’t open the central assembly without lowering the standing water level, but we can still access the primary lines,” Carl mused.
Seth completed his assessment. “What about routing the contents of the main tank to the secondaries without shutting down the primary system?”
Mary frowned. “That would require bypassing all one-way valves.”
“Yes, but think about all the extra capacity we’ll gain. Not just in the secondary tanks themselves, but also in the transmittal pipes,” he continued. “In fact, there’s enough capacity that we can route all the loose sewage from the flooded maintenance trench and still have enough room to shift contents around while we check the individual components.”
Carl raised an eyebrow. “Great, so we’re going to play a puzzle game of moving around units of waste into the empty space until we have the pieces of the picture assembled in the proper order.”
“You have a better idea?” Seth asked.
His colleague shrugged. “I didn’t say I objected.”
“One question,” Mary cut in. “How do we pump what’s in the maintenance trench up into the secondary tanks?”
“It’s going to take some manual reconfiguring,” Seth said. “Sorry, Mary, but you’re about to get up close and personal with a hazsuit.”
She crossed her arms. “Suddenly, I don’t like this plan.”
Seth eyed her. “Option one: the ship fails and we die—after the captain kills us for messing up the party. Option two: we do everything we can to avoid option one.”
Mary sighed. “You’re right, I can’t hide out here in the control room and expect the rest of you to fix the problem alone.”
Finally, some ownership! Seth looked around at his teammates. “Sorry if this is out of line, but right now, rank and job responsibilities don’t matter. We have an entire ship counting on us to fix this problem. If we do our job right, no one will even know there was a crisis.”
“That’s the heart of it,” Mary agreed. “I’m with you. We have less than two hours before that system backs up right onto the bridge. So Seth, what’s your idea for clearing the corridor?”
“Splicing in a flexi-pipe and using the existing pressure in the main line to draw it in.”
Mary nodded. “That could work. Carl, grab the tubing from storage. Seth, grab the toolkit. I’ll start programming the routing sequence—should be ready for us to head down in five minutes.”
“Meet you in the prep room,” Seth acknowledged.
He’d always felt Mary had the makings of a good team leader, but she had a tendency to hesitate in tense situations. Though speaking out of turn was generally an inadvisable career move, Seth was well aware that they didn’t have room for hesitations or errors right now. With every second, liters of waste were added to the flooding on the deck below, and the longer they waited, the more difficult their task would be.
Seth ran across the control room to the maintenance locker, which contained their complement of tools. He selected two sets of cutters, wrench set, heat gun, thermal adhesive, and vice grips to throw into a carrying bag.
Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Page 4