Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script)

by David Collins-Rivera

  Since the engineer knew exactly what we needed, he had to go aboard. It would almost certainly be safer and better, though, if he was not alone. Should anything go wrong, he might need an ally: someone near enough to assist, but not so near as to be implicated in any security problems. That meant me.

  It took some careful thought, which is where most of the discussion came in. Since we had to have jobs, yet were also on a mission that might have to be carried out while performing those jobs, what, exactly, should those jobs be?

  Dieter, especially, required a position that allowed him to move around, since he would need the freedom to re-order, pick up, and deliver the jump array parts to Shady Lady. According to the personnel records we looked at, there was a low-level position in station Life Support opening up, that seemed to mostly be about changing and repairing air filters around Mylag Vernier. That sounded like a good fit for the engineer, under the circumstances. Even I could have handled such a job, but my Engineering certification was not an advanced one -- while even the lowly peons of this station were likely trained experts. The only really high-level certs I had were all in the field of civilian ship defense, and that did not bode well for my chances. So we talked and pondered.

  John didn't have a lot to offer, so he'd been killing time going through some old station backup files that included technical diagrams for specific systems. After a time, he interrupted our unproductive chatter to announce that he'd found a hull schematic for the area immediately surrounding our ship. Bringing it up on the Tri-D, he pointed out our exact location. Dieter studied it a bit then dove into the records, himself, for a few minutes before coming up with a table of obscure information.

  Shady Lady was parked in permi-shadow at the base of a large metal protrusion that housed machinery dedicated to emergency fire suppression. The ship sat upon a big square frame of sealed venting that was part of this same system. According to the tables of information, it rarely got visually inspected. The system had internal temp, vibration, and pressure sensors, all of which were deemed adequate for the job. If we had unlimited air, we could have hung out there indefinitely.

  That was reassuring, certainly, but his most arresting comment was that he thought he could circumvent all those automated sensors, clear out any gratings in the way, and manipulate the outer and inner coverings of the shaft. In other words, create an access hole.

  "Without causing a detectable pressure drop?" I asked, because it seemed pretty ludicrous, to be honest.

  "Yeah," he assured, zooming into the diagram. "We build our very own airlock."

  He proceeded to annotate the hull diagram with a crude hand-drawn version of Shady Lady sitting atop the fire vent. He gave it portholes and a life preserver, which got some chuckles. He pointed to the station's hull underneath it.

  "I can put a door right through here."

  Though I, myself, had never worked on an emergency fire venting system before, this one seemed pretty standard from what I understood about them.

  The idea of it was that, should a big-enough fire ever break out in the section of Mylag Vernier directly below us, air-tight gates in the companionways, normally retracted and unused, would roll down and seal off the trouble spot. Then, valves or coverings on the vent would flick open, and atmo in the affected area would rush out, carrying all the oxygen feeding the fire. This was considered the final and least desirable step in dealing with such a catastrophe, since it would also kill anyone in the vented area not wearing a pressure suit. Even so, it was a nearly universal safety standard, employed by stations and larger ships throughout space.

  "If our resident computer experts can track down the self-testing routine for the sensors in this particular vent," Dieter went on, "we can delete it from the automated cycle. That way, when we physically disconnect them, the sensors won't be able to trigger a failure warning. In fact, monitoring controls won't even know they're there. Understand, though, the venting system itself will be unaffected. It's entirely separate from the monitoring sensors, which are only installed to detect vent blockage or other malfunctions. If a fire ever gets out of hand down there, and the suppression system kicks on, this vent will still function as normal."

  "That wouldn't be too good for us up here, would it?" Mavis asked with understated irony.

  "Not especially," he conceded, "but messing with the sensors doesn't change that risk at all. In an absolute emergency -- which venting is considered to be -- we'd have trouble out here whether the sensors were active or not. What do they call that on space stations, again, Ejoq?"

  "Um...a vent event?"

  "Yeah, that's it. Vent events have the highest override clearance of any other process -- even surpassing human codes or security protocols. A fire in a can is a disastrous occurance, and it's treated as such. The hardware monitoring sensors we remove will not change that at all. Once we've done it, we can penetrate through the grating, down to what looks like a tiny service recess, or closet, right here."

  He touched the diagram overhead and set it to rotating, showing the spot from different angles.

  "Seems like a lot of work," John commented, though without discerable skepticism.

  "Well, what else do we have to do?" Chris posed, and no one had an answer.

  We studied the diagram floating over our heads. It spun slowly, silently.

  "Looks like we're going in," the captain stated.

  * * *

  "You're sure it's offline?" Dieter asked Stinna again, as he held the wiring for the door's magnetic switch in his left hand, and a cutter in his right.

  "Yes, I'm sure. You keep asking that." She didn't sound hurt, but she didn't sound pleased.

  "I'm just being thorough, don't worry."

  "I don't worry."

  "You really need to share that trick," I commented over radio, as I stood behind our engineer outside as he snipped a wire. I was there to lend a hand if he needed it, but he really didn't seem to.

  "Focus, boys," Mavis said, her voice sounding tinny through my jawbone.

  We didn't have the materials to build an airlock, of course, so we needed to scrounge for them elsewhere. Since we couldn't go inside, we could only search upon the upper hull. And whatever we took, it had to be something that no one would come looking for.

  That meant trash.

  Building a lock out of garbage proved to be a challenge -- not just for Dieter, but for all of us. Finding the stuff to begin with was less so, since there was always some kind of exterior work being performed by various departments, and any multi-day job entailed bringing out parts, tools, and assorted equipment that sat near the work site until it was needed. Much of this stuff came packaged up in very strong plastic crates -- some of them quite large.

  A job replacing a bunch of sensor relays sitting a full quarter turn, counter-clock, from us, was taking a lot of time. The project had been underway for at least two weeks already, without any end in sight. This, we learned from decrypted station messages. The repair boss in charge of the work apparently didn't trust anyone with the job except her firstshift crew, so it was slow going.

  One day, dead in the middle of midshift, while the work site stood empty, Dieter, Chris, and I went on a scavenger hunt.

  We found the new relays stacked in their crates near a whole X-band detector array that was wide open for surgery. Dieter thought two of these crates could be stacked together and sealed to make a one-person airlock. Carefully, we removed a couple of the repacement relays and set them off to one side. Then we tromped back with the empty containers, as well as some discarded plastic sheeting, thick and strong.

  Later on, we overheard the work crew wonder aloud, via the open channel, who had been at their worksite. They complained to their boss back on-station that things had been messed with out there, and that some packaging was missing -- probably, they speculated, because another exterior crew had raided their site for trash so they could meet their recycling quota. After being assured that all the relays were still present and in p
erfect shape, the boss promised her crew she'd look into it in a placating middle-manager tone that implied she'd do no such thing.

  Working both inside the ship, and outside on the surface, Dieter put together a small chamber that was pressure-capable (for short durations, anyway). He anchored it in place over the fire vent using all of his very limited supply of molecular cement. The so-called hatch for the thing was made from two pieces of that plastic sheeting, with a zip-slide opening in the middle.

  For pressurization, he ran a hose from this glued-down composite box up to Shady Lady's exterior atmosphere recharging port, just overhead. A remote switch and sensor device activated either a charge or discharge from the atmo-exchange system on the ship, thereby pressurizing or evacuating the box. A readout aboard ship fed information culled from our tapped data line into a program written by our computer experts. This, so as to carefully monitor and match the box's air pressure with whatever the station's pressure sensors down below were showing at that exact moment. (This number was usually quite stable, but it was good to be vigilant.)

  A quick touch of the plasma cutter, and a section of the grating was off. A slower, more careful cut with a vibrosaw (which might have been audible inside, so we had Stinna monitoring for any complaints about it the whole time) got the mechanism removed from the pressure-capable rollgate right inside. This represented the actual seal that would slide open during a vent event. Electromagnetic rails on either side snapped the rollgate open and closed, and that only happened in an emergency. With the locking mechanism now removed, it could actually be retracted and secured again by hand.

  Below this was a narrow shaft dropping straight down, like a well, through polynium hull plating, structural reinforcements, and several insulation layers.

  A thin but moderately-strong plastic cable was attached to a winch built from the pieces of a powerful little grinding tool that Dieter had been loathe to repurpose. This was our elevator. A safety clamp attached the tool to a person's pressure suit harness. Then they could switch it on or off to roll or unroll the cable, and thereby, go up or down.

  There were two sets of static guiding baffles inside the shaft meant to control air and combustion flow, but he uncoupled these, and handed them up easily. Once cleared, the fire shaft was eight meters deep, ending at an inner rollgate which was a copy of the one above. Directly below this was the maintenance closet.

  As soon as everything had been cleared, Dieter zip-closed the box and pressurized it. He opened the rollgate seal at his feet, and lowered himself down the dark shaft until he hit the inner rollgate.

  The shaft was air-filled now, so he listened closely for a long time. Up on the ship, we listened, too, through his suitcam. There were no sounds of movement beyond.

  After five full minutes of this, with him just hanging there, Dieter took out his vibrosaw. He cut through the gate's latching mechanism and rolled it back easily. Then he kicked out a grate cover at the very end of the shaft, which clattered onto a box below, and lowered himself down.

  "Okay, I'm inside," he announced over a scrambled channel that SS2 had set up. On the suitcam feed, he was moving around too much for me to see anything more than a cramped, narrow space filled with supplies. "Guess it all works. Coming back up."

  Which he did. He used the grinder winch to rise into the shaft again, reattached the outer grating, and then rolled the gate closed. After this he winched himself up to the gate above, and climbed back into the plastic airlock on the surface. He disconnected the cable, closed the gate, and activated the system on the ship. In a minute or so, the engineer opened the zip-slide in the plastic sheeting, and walked back out into our shadowy spot on the upper hull.

  Though it had been a group effort, Dieter had been the real star of this show, and we all praised his hard work and ingenuity when he came back aboard. He was rightously exhaused, and racked out immediately after a hot shower. This left the rest of us to ponder our next step.

  We had the vid from the engineer's feed replaying in the Common Room.

  "This does look like the sort of place that gets worker traffic," I put in, swiping the air to stop the image, zooming in on a blurry electrical panel of some kind on the wall. "We might drop right in on somebody, if we're unlucky."

  "We can install an old-style PIR in there," SS1 stated. "A passive infrared detector. We won't get any real details, but if there's movement, we'll know about it."

  "Do we have one of those aboard?" Chris asked, looking hopeful.

  "Not as such," John answered (rather smugly, I thought), "but I know how to make one from a Tri-D interface stylus. We have some in stowage."

  He pulled down a long list of ship's stores and checked a location, then went amidships, rumaging around in one of the many small spaces where supplies were wedged in. He returned with a pen-like device that he immediately broke in half. He pryed at it a bit, and produced a tiny item from inside, hardly bigger than a rice grain.

  "It just needs a radio transmitter."

  "Won't that be easy for Station Security to trace?" I asked.

  "Only if they're looking for it, and actually know what it means. All a security sweep would pick up is some very localized low-power static that was comes and goes, like EMR bleed-over from a cheap consumer device. The station must be full of that sort of thing. The PIR itself would only be keying off movement, not digital information, so the transmission shouldn't seem like anything but random noise."

  John declared the tiny device would transmit whenever its infrared sensor closed -- that is to say, whenever it detected a temperature change in a very specific location. In this case, such a change corresponded to motion, and motion meant people. Placed in the closet below, it would be able to tell us when it was safe to go in.

  It took a little back-and-forth nonsense for SS1 to build his PIR, because the tools he needed were in Engineering, and we didn't want to wake up Dieter, while Mavis didn't know what he was talking about at first. Eventually, he had tiny parts and tools spread out on the table, and he carefully mounted the rice grain to a plastic clip the size of his thumbnail. Stinna seemed very put-out by his commandeering of the table space, however temporarily, and retired to her bunk in a huff.

  All told, the device assembly actually went pretty quickly, and the radio receivers on the ship picked up the pulse just fine. John then found himself a little out-matched on the software side of things, when he tried to write a script to have the radio band detector activate an alarm up here, inside the ship, whenever movement in the closet was detected. He finally had to ask SS2 to return and help, which seemed to brighten her mood a bit (or not; it was hard to tell).

  She knocked out a usable program in just minutes, but spent another hour refining it. When the exact frequency and profile of the static pulse was detected amidst the myriad other radio signals that the ship's passive sensors were continually sifting through, it would get pushed to the very top of the notification priority list. From there, audible chimes were tied in, and a pop-up warning flag was set to slide into view over any holograms currently on display.

  Once assembled and tested, the PIR was only three centimeters long, and weighed almost nothing. A bit of glue tape would hold it to a wall quite easily -- and we had glue tape.

  Chris volunteered himself to install the device, and suited up.

  We all sat or stood around in the Common Room (Dieter was awake by now) and watched our ML's progress over his suitcam feed. The engineer talked him through the simple pressurization procedure for the plastic airlock, which went without a hitch. Repelling down the shaft in a pressure suit was also easy for him, as he apparently had had some covert ops training in the past. (Using a grinding tool for a winch was clearly new, though.)

  Inside the shaft, he confessed over comm to be making a heck of a racket as he descended. It worried him, but it turned out there was no one at the bottom to hear anything. Once he was in the closet, Chris didn't hesitate: he stood on a large canister of floor polish and stuck the PIR
directly over the door, right near the ceiling. He then walked around inside for a bit to see if it worked. That wasn't easy with what little room he had (especially wearing the suit), but John confirmed we were getting a signal, while a low bong sounded in the Common Room.

  Chris' return was easier than his descent had been, and he declared that it was just a matter of practice. Up top, in the makeshift airlock, he unclipped himself, closed the rollgate on that end until it sealed, and activated the atmo-exchange. Soon after, he was back aboard.

  Convoluted, and seat-of-the-pants engineering though it utilized, Chris had just proven that the process was repeatable and reliable enough to get the job done. We could now get inside Mylag Vernier when ever we wanted to.

  About an hour after Chris' adventure, the bong sounded, just like before. It went on for about two minutes, then stopped. It didn't happen again for almost a full day, and then, for only about the same length of time. It seemed likely these were Maintenance workers.

  When he'd been down there, Dieter hadn't inspected the door out to the wider station, so Chris had made a point of doing so.

  "It looks solid," he informed us, once we were on to the next problem. "It has closed slats from top to bottom. I assume if the air is vented, those open as a matter of course. I didn't see any sensors on the door itself to detect when it's open, but that doesn't mean there aren't any."

  "I did a search for that," Stinna put in without looking up from the code she was writing. "The lock is electronic, and logged."