A Stitch In Space

by Christopher Lansdown

  “Hello,” Fr. Xris said as Katie was looking at the radiation suit.

  “Hi!” Katie said, startled.

  “I’m sorry that you have to deal with me,” Fr. Xris said. “But just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it to the best of my ability.”

  “Thanks for the help,” Katie said. In a crisis, being gracious doesn’t sting as much as during ordinary times.

  Fr. Xris stood there patiently.

  “We’re going to have to fix the system generator manually,” Katie explained. “It’s a standard pebble bed thorium reactor, so the problem is most likely a ruptured heat pipe. We’re going to need radiation suits (that’s why I’m here) and we’ll need to put together a toolbox. Can you handle that?”

  “I think so,” he said, “but you’ll probably want to double-check me before we go in.”

  “OK,” Katie said. “The suits come in two sizes, I assume that you’re a large.”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Can you fit it on with your skirt?”

  She looked at his cassock and saw that it was torn.

  “What happened to your skirt?” she added.

  “Freia needed a bandage,” he said, simply.

  “Why didn’t you use the first aid kit in the emergency panel?”

  “I didn’t know about it,” he said. “The jamming noise that the attackers were putting out killed all of the signage. And now that I see where it is, it wouldn’t have mattered. By the time I found out how badly hurt Freia was, there were a lot of bullets separating me from that emergency panel.”

  “How is Freia doing?” Katie asked. “Belle wasn’t very specific.”

  “She was shot three times in the right leg. Two just passed through muscle, one nicked her femoral vein. She had lost a lot of blood by the time I got here. The pressure bandage I applied helped slow the bleeding, but she lost more on the way to the command room where Stan was. He sutured up the vein, sterilized the wound, and sewed up the holes, so she shouldn’t lose any more. I gave her some fluids to drink to keep her blood pressure up, but unfortunately there are no transfusion supplies on the ship.”

  “I suppose they weren’t thinking about pirates and figured that anything which could cause massive blood loss on a space ship probably meant you were part of a rapidly expanding ball of plasma—the hot kind, not the stuff in your blood.”

  Fr Xris laughed.

  “I suppose you’re right. Anyway, the next two days are going to be critical. If she doesn’t weaken, gets some food in her, and doesn’t develop an infection, she should be all right. Assuming that any of us will be all right, that is.”

  “Yeah,” Katie said, “let’s get to it.”

  Fr. Xris walked off to assemble the toolbox.

  “Hey,” Katie said, as he was leaving the room.

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for saving Freia’s life. She’s a friend, and I don’t have many.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  He had the toolbox assembled and ready for Katie’s inspection when Stan came up to her and said, “I’ve completed the extinguishing task, Ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Katie said. “Get on with fixing Spark now.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “I’ve got the toolbox ready.”

  “OK, coming.”

  Katie looked over the assortment of tools.

  “You’re not an optimist, are you? A fire extinguisher?”

  “We might be dealing with a puncture in a superheated fluid. It seems just possible that it could be handy to be able to cool things down quickly.”

  “This looks good,” she said. “Bring it and the radiation suits and follow me.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

  Katie looked at him sharply, but he just maintained a neutral expression, so she let go of reading anything into it.

  She led the way to the Jefferies tube into the thorium reactor.

  He handed her the small radiation suit, then started taking off his cassock.

  “You can wear these over your clothes,” she said.

  “You can,” Fr. Xris said, “but I don’t intend to bunch the cassock up at my hips. Don’t worry, I’m wearing underwear.”

  He was indeed wearing underwear, and it was quite modest—more modest, in fact, than several common styles of outerwear—but it was more form fitting than his cassock, and Katie was surprised at how muscular he was.

  She had her radiation suit on first, but he only took a moment more to finish putting his on, so she didn’t have time to become impatient.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “What?” he said, or at least that’s what it sounded like through two layers of radiation protection.

  Katie called him, and he picked up immediately.

  “It’s amazing how much these things muffle what you say,” she said.

  “It is,” he said. “How did people in the early ages of nuclear power get anything done in these before they had comm systems?”

  “I think I read that in the really early days of nuclear power, they didn’t understand the danger, and would handle the fissile material with bare hands, and even eat it, though I’m not sure why.”

  “Will you lead the way since you know where you’re going, or would you prefer me in front in case there’s something really dangerous?”

  Katie looked at him trying to figure out whether he was being sarcastic.

  “You actually meant that, didn’t you?” Katie said, a note of surprise in her voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “Right now, you’re more valuable than I am.”

  “All the same,” Katie said, “I’ll go first, since I know where I’m going. And I know what this ship looks like when it’s working, so I’ll be able to spot where it isn’t.”

  He nodded.

  Katie went into the Jefferies tube. The tube went in for a while, then took a turn straight up. It was a small, cramped tube that had a ladder built into its side wall. The vertical section had several side-tubes branching off, and Katie went in the third. This led into the main heat interchanger.

  Fr. Xris was right behind her, and when she turned to him to ask for the thermal imager, he was already holding it out in his hand. She took it and examined the pipes.

  “I’m not seeing any leaks,” she said. “Wait a minute, I’m an idiot. A double-idiot, too. First, the problem has to be close to where the shooting was, and we’re not. Second, I wasn’t getting error information because the pirates had been jamming communications. They’re not jamming anymore. I can run a diagnostic!”

  Accordingly, she ran a full diagnostic. This caused all of the computers which were embedded into the reactor system to report their values so that the computer could cross-check these values against nominal values and determine where the problem was.

  “The pressure is down in the secondary condensing coils,” she said. Which makes sense, they run over the room the pirates were in. Damn, did we do this to ourselves?”

  “If we did, I doubt it was avoidable. And you never know. Battle robots have some weird programming. It’s always possible that one of the pirates’ robots fired straight up for some reason.”

  “Well, let’s get to it,” Katie said.

  They crawled back to the main tube, then descended to the level with the condensing pipes. They were arranged in layers about one and a half person-widths tall, with the piping being immediately below the catwalk above it.

  “This is going to be fun,” Katie said sarcastically.

  She pointed at one section. “The recorded data indicated that the pressure dropped there first.”

  It was, not surprisingly, on the lowest level, and they had to lie on their bellies and army crawl out to it. This was made less comfortable by the ladder rungs embedded into the floor for access when the ship’s gravity was pointing 90 degrees from standard down.

  “There’s no point in complaining,” Katie said, “but this sucks.”

  “There isn’t and
it does,” Fr. Xris agreed.

  When they got to the area with the problem, they rolled over onto their backs.

  “Can you see it?” Katie asked.

  “Is that it?” Fr. Xris said.

  “No,” Katie said, “that’s just a fastener. But this is it.”

  She looked over and he was holding out an ultrasonic scanner.

  “Thanks,” she said as she took it.

  “The damage isn’t too terrible. Both sides of the pipe are torn through, but it slowed the bullet enough that it stuck in the catwalk above.”

  “Are you going to just cut the fins away and patch the holes?” Fr. Xris asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He handed her the mini angle grinder, then got the patching material and the mini MIG welder out.

  “It’s funny to think that with all my training, here I am doing a robot’s job,” she said.

  The job took about three minutes total.

  “I suppose we should check for other damage before trying to turn the condenser system back on,” she said. “If one bullet got through, more probably did too.”

  * * *

  Katie turned out to be correct. By the time they stopped searching for damage, they fixed five holes, four on the lowest level and one on the level above.

  As they were finishing up, Katie said, “it will be nice to stand up again. I’m getting tired of being so cramped. You know, my mother told me to go into engineering because this way I would never need to make my living on my back.”

  They both laughed

  “All right,” she said, “let’s try it out and hope it works. We don’t carry a lot of spare water since it’s a closed system.”

  “You can be assured of my fervent hope,” he said.

  “And your prayers?” she asked.

  “Those too, though I didn’t think you’d want me to mention it,” he said.

  “With things this bad, I’ll take your prayers,” she said. “You do realize that even if this works, we’re probably still going to die?”

  “I’m not familiar with the specifics of our situation,” he said, “but I did gather that it’s pretty dire. Still, there’s no point in borrowing tomorrow’s troubles when today has enough troubles of its own. Let’s get this generator working first.”

  “Sounds good,” Katie said.

  When they had gotten out of the Jefferies tube, they took off their radiation suits. When the cool air reached their skin, they realized how hot they were. They also realized that they had both been sweating a lot. The pressure of fixing the condensing tubes had been very distracting.

  “Oh this is attractive,” Katie said, “I feel like I’ve taken a shower.”

  “Not commenting on your physical appeal, I know what you mean about feeling like I took a shower. It’s a pity that they didn’t put any sort of air conditioning system into those suits. But I suppose they figured the things would never be used.”

  “I’ve got a feeling that a lot of things no one ever expected to be used are going to get used on this ship today,” Katie said. “It’s time to turn the engine on and see what happens.”

  Fr. Xris made the sign of the cross on himself, and said, “I’ll say those prayers now.”

  “Do,” Katie said.

  She walked over to the console and initiated the reactor startup procedure. Pebble bed reactors are very simple. The fissile material is embedded in ceramics which expand when they get hotter which in turn pushes the fissile material further apart, slowing the reaction down. The reactor can never melt down, but the reaction rate never hits zero, either. The startup procedure, therefore, is just to start the heat transfer pumps.

  The procedure was ten seconds long, and it was a very tense ten seconds. A missed hole in the condenser coils could cause the entire thing to shut down, and worse, it could waste enough of the second stage water that the reactor couldn’t run even if they patched it up.

  But the ten seconds elapsed with no warning messages. Instead of an emergency shutdown, the reactor started producing electricity.

  “Yes!” Katie shouted, and forgetting herself jumped on Fr. Xris and gave him a big hug. He was startled, but hugged her back, briefly.

  Katie let go, feeling embarrassed. After all the hostility she had shown him, hugging him was presumptuous, even if it had been impersonal.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t trying to do anything sexual. I’m just really happy that it worked.”

  “I know,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m very happy that it worked too.”

  Katie tried to think of what to say, but couldn’t come up with anything, so instead she placed a call to Captain West.

  “Belle, it worked! The system generator is online and on track to generating at nameplate capacity in two minutes. I’m shutting down the cruising engine now.”

  “Good work!” Belle said. “Was the priest helpful?”

  “Yes, very,” Katie said, self consciously. For some reason working with Fr. Xris had humanized him, and she was becoming embarrassed at how she’d treated him in the past. It wasn’t that she’d let go of her anger at Christianity, though even that had attenuated somewhat since the beginning of the trip, but she could now tell the difference between Christianity and Fr. Xris. It didn’t mean that she liked him now, but it made everything connected with him very awkward.

  She hung up and said to Fr. Xris, “At this point, I think that I should be in the command room. They’re going to be talking about how to get us back into the slipstream, and I think that we’re going to need something clever, which means that they’ll need me.”

  “I don’t mean that in an arrogant way,” she added, blushing slightly as she realized how that might sound. “It’s just that they don’t know what this hardware can do, I mean, at the limits, where it isn’t normally used.”

  “Katie,” he said, taking a step closer to her.

  He wasn’t especially close, but for some reason that movement still made her feel his presence, and her heart beat a little faster. Now that she was regarding him as human, she realized that Freia was right.

  “Yes?” she said cautiously.

  “I’m not sure why you’re treating me like a normal person now, but whatever the reason, and for however long it lasts, if I didn’t think badly of you when you were treating me like a cyborg, why do you think that I would start now? It’s not my habit to assume the worst where I can avoid it.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” she said. This was very awkward.

  “If you’re worrying about the past, don’t,” he said. “Forgiving people is my job.”

  He smiled, then added, “And if you’re worried that I’ve changed my mind about your previous offer, don’t. Not even in hell would I break my vow of celibacy.”

  “You believe you can go to hell?” she asked, surprised.

  “Of course,” he said, puzzled.

  “But I thought that hell was just for non-believers.”

  “No,” he said. “Who told you that?”

  “My Nana,” Katie said.

  “Where did she ever get such a crazy idea?” he asked, with more sincerity than politeness.

  “I don’t know,” Katie said. “I don’t know where she got most of her ideas.”

  “I wonder what else she got wrong,” she added.

  “Some time when we have time, feel free to tell me what she told you, and I’ll tell you what she got right and what she didn’t.”

  “Maybe I’ll take you up on that,” Katie said, though she didn’t know why since it wasn’t a very interesting subject. She really hoped that she wasn’t starting to like him, since he was clearly off the market. Unfortunately, pheromones, hormones, and instincts know nothing about vows of celibacy.

  “Do you want to come to the command room with me? I think you’ve earned a spot on the crew, and anyway, someone has to tell the other passengers what’s going on, and I bet that Belle would be happy for it to be you rather than her.”

  �
��Thanks,” he said, and gestured for her to lead the way. “Though now that you mention it, what is going on, anyway? We’re not in the slipstream any more?”

  Chapter 11

  Katie had filled Fr. Xris in on what had happened by the time they got to the bridge, and she had gotten the notification that the cruising engine had shut down on the way. She was thus able to make her entrance bearing good news, which is always a good way to walk into a room.

  “The cruising engine is shut down,” she said as she walked through the door. “The spill-off has cooled down enough to use, which we are for the excess energy from the system reactor, so we’re at exactly zero acceleration. You can maneuver us around any time you want.”

  “So you knew we’d have calculations for you to do?” Belle asked.

  “More or less,” she said. “How far away are we now?”

  “Forty five thousand kilometers,” Belle said.

  “Not to be rude,” Kari said, “but what’s he doing in the command room?”

  “If it weren’t for him, I’d still be fixing the system reactor,” Katie said. “I think he’s earned a place with the crew for now. And besides, someone has to tell the other passengers what’s going on.”

  “He can stay,” Belle said.

  “Thank you, Ma’am,” Fr. Xris said.

  “So before we can turn around,” Belle said, “I think that we should figure out what the error bounds are on how we turn around under thrusters, and it would be helpful if there was a way to precisely measure how much we actually turned.”

  “The gyroscopic compass isn’t accurate enough?” Jack asked.

  “It wasn’t designed to be accurate to a thousandth of a degree, which is (back-of-the-envelope) what we need. We never normally turn without external reference points.”

  “If what we need are external reference points,” Fr. Xris said, “what about the pirate ship? Is it far away?”

  “It’s like ten thousand kilometers away,” Jack said. “And drifting.”