“Okay team. I have the green light on a space walk with the tethered jetpack. Who wants it?” Six hands go up. “Pfft. How did I know. Okay, you two goons.” The backup fire-team members from our danger maneuver. “RPS and tell me who’s going first and who’s going on the survey. ET2, you’ll be on tether and jet watch for the child that gets to go. Full air packs and thermal management for both of you. New guy, this is an outboard space watch. You will be tethered and mag booted next to the winch on the outside of our space ship. Minimize fuckery, understand me?”
“Yes Petty Officer Mercer.” I get from two teams? Anyway. After system checks, the MM2 on the jetpack leaves comms open as he “WOOOO!” out the space ship under thrusters. He’s not smoking the winch so I’ll allow it.
“Full video survey with commentary MM2!” he copy pings me, ass.
I set the electricians from engineering forward to attack the magnets around my troubled piping so they could unbolt the full sections instead of cutting them out. They tag out the systems, and I co-opt a fire control programmer to put HUD limitations into the related systems. FC1 James is an effing pro.
/James, you free for tasking?/
/What’s in it for me Merc?/
/Lunch in grav for two days/
/Week/
/Four days/
/Week/
/NM, I’ll do it myself. Lates/
/FINE, 4 days, lunch in grav. And a strawberry strudel./
/The strudel? Really? Ass. Fine. I need you to program a customizable mission frame with video game level progress. Feel free to scam it to other departments./
/Done/
/Alright, here’s my projected maintenance for the next 8 weeks, the modules are identified per team compliment/
/BIIITCH/
/Shut it, send it to the shipyard for a mint you greedy fuck. I get my 5%/
/God what a mercenary. Fine. That 5% is the only thing that keeps me working with you/
/Pleasure doing business, Jessie James./
/I hate you./
/<3<3/
That kid is a riot. Saves me a day plus worth of tedium for the low cost of a strudel. My days in the chief’s mess have mellowed considerably after Petra asked Ivanka to back the fuck off. And the cessation of goat noises of course. I started trading mess time for favors and not a single chief has said anything. They do it too. Apparently us and the officer’s mess in the forward section of the ship are the only places beside the HAB you can get non-vacuum packed food. I got a thanks for not letting Sailors die gift of actual baked strudel and I have a store of them in my rack and a forever thank you to the Culinary Specialists. I have one or two scheduled for supervised space walks this week.
It took two days to get the piping out that I needed inspected. And two missions to get a full visual survey of all of my thrust cones. I asked the remaining members of my original team to walk the thrusters and inspect them for damage as well, but that was mostly a morale gambit.
“Eng, I’m looking at a need for Magnetite to complete my valve reconstruction.”
“Can you not scavenge or make it?” He asked dismissively.
“I can make it if in two weeks if I don’t care about quality, but it’d be more efficient to scavenge.”
“You’re about to ask me for more people to build a thing to fit the maintenance again aren’t you?”
“Obvi, sir. I also need the geologist to consult on the process.”
“Mercer, if this maintenance period weren’t literally about you, I would be yelling right now. I’ll ask the geologist to assist in your experiment design, but we need to test those valves by week four or we won’t hit our metrics. Good job on the work-flow interface by the way.”
I ping him a happy ping and go about my day. Which means I need to manufacture a field generator for a ferrite chamber that I can magnetize while pressurizing to at least 200 atm. Maybe heated. Fuck, I need that geologist.
A week in, I brief PhD Niederman in my apparatus, he recommends temps above 1000C and at my proposed pressure and now I have some engineering problems. He has never seen manufactured magnetite, but he his certain of the conditions under which it is formed, so I adjust my project. I simultaneously have engineering machinist work up the valve I need, a spring and air back-pressured gate valve with a magnetic opening mechanism. I just need to form the permanent magnet on the piston head for the field generators to pull on. I ask my electricians to wire this electro-magnet module to operate independently of the field if necessary and they get to work. I need two of them, so my team is fabricating full time at the moment.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I’m almost feeling good about our progress when my outboard survey results pop red. Are you kidding me? “Tether watch, send Rocket Man to the chief’s mess for a detailed report when they arrive.”
“Aye Propulsion”
I kind of like that my team calls me by my station name rather than my rating. I like feeling important. I’m eating an excellent empanada when I hear MM2 reporting to the chief’s mess.
“Enter!” The rest of the actual Chiefs look at me with annoyance, but know the drill by now: I’ve been ordered to meal and spend hours here.
“MM1, it’s bad news. Uh, should I sit?”
“Yeah, pull up a sando and sit.” I take a deep breath, “Ivanka! Petra! Engineering news!” I hear a fumbling in my old room and laugh—I wanted to tell them to stop fucking.
Less than a minute later Ivanka comes out of her berthing, “This better be good, little Merc.” Ivanka looks annoyed, Petra seems to be putting herself together still. They were totally banging. Again. Still? I motion for MM2 to report.
“The port and starboard thrust cones are cracked, Chief, Zeta cone appears nominal.” He unwraps his treasure and moans into his sandwich. Eating in grav is indeed a luxury for my team.
“Cracked or split? How large was the gap between material?” I ask.
“Less than a millimeter at cone end? I didn’t have calipers with me. Both cones were approximately . . . a pinky nail in gap at the end.”
“Thank the Universe for that. When you’re done here, MM2, put in an order for a dozen emergency personel tether magnets, and 20m of cable? Yeah, and six hand winches.”
“I get where you’re going MM1, we going friction or plasma welding?”
Oof. That is the question. I have one heavy composite welder certified in space and she’s on medical HAB leave. Plasma welding might fuck up my vent ports in the thrust cone skins though. Damnit. “Better go friction. Pull the gear and I’ll work on Hunsaker’s paperwork.” I turn to the chief’s I interrupted mid coitus.
“Chiefs, we’re about to do a risky space walk with welding on a ship’s main system. Do you want the full data?”
“Da, Mercer. We need to sign the medical exception. Also, you want to take more than half of the propulsion watch off-duty, we need to authorize activating HAB crew, or to operate under-staffed for a control period.”
Oh. Shit, Petra’s got the chief, personnel management down. “Sorry, Petra. I forget about the paperwork. I recommend under-staff with a Engineering forward roamer for logs.”
“I would concur with that Penny. We would also appreciate fabrication updates for our maintenance tracker.” Petra replies.
“Damnit. Sorry Chiefs, that’s supposed to be automated. Me and FC1 are building this “quest tracker” from the ground and it’s been a bit squirrely. “
Ivanka has her cold, resting authority face on, “Anything else you may need within, say four weeks?”
“Yes, in the tracker, there is a test that is requesting a full engineering control compliment for reactor power fluctuations and damage control. Standard reactor DC, but liquid air and fire DC for engineering aft.”
“We will prepare a spare DC team to rotate with your personnel.” Ivanka states plainly. I’m shocked at her concern, but I also feel that she might have gotten some heat for not having a relief for those that received heat injuries. I nod at her assertion in acceptance.
My sleep is better than before, despite my increased worries about propulsion so I’m feeling energized when the crazed geologist and the science team monitoring the atmospheric study of Titan comes to the machine shop.
“Hello fellow scientist!” a jolly short man waves vigorously. “I hear you have interest in visiting the surface of Titan!”
I can’t help but chuckle at the man’s enthusiasm. “Hey Neiderman.”
“As enthusiastic as I can be about new rocks, Titan doesn’t have much in the way of rock until miles beneath the surface. And speaking of miles. If you’d read the study profile, the atmosphere of Titan is extremely thick, more than 100 kilometers thick.”
“Holy . . . moly, that’s like Earth atmosphere thick.” And suddenly my hopes are dashed. This is simply the wrong moon for away mission shenanigans. That or I’d have to build myself a shuttle. An idea I like very much. I pull up the executive summary of the science mission in question and see that we’re doing a low skim of the atmosphere and dropping a 2km hose with a scoop and some cables attached. “Thick and cold would make a Penny popsicle.” I get a chuckle out of that, so at least my stupidity is worth something.
“This is more of a chemist mission, so is there anything else I can help with?”
“More of a hypothetical of you have the time.” So, I spent some time with Niederman asking about his take on capturing and asteroid and running parts of it through our reclimators. He mentioned that the field has seen moderate gains on the Moon and on Mars, but the machines have trouble with crystals harder than tungsten carbide. Well, that little tidbit makes a lot of sense. If it can’t be ground or melted, it would be hard to process.
Melissa is champing at the bit to go on a space walk, and it helps that she’s trained on the vibration welder that we have. I send her the video surveillance files and my rough plan on the materiel bill. She reminds me that titanium is that magnetic and we’d be better off gluing anchors and burning them off in a chem burn or cutting them off afterward.
The forward machinists attach what looks suspiciously like a turbine engine with fins to cables and ribbed composite hose. It looks expensive AF. I’m ferociously disappointed that they can engineer a flexible tube miles long that can take turbine-speed forces, but we can’t even get a re-usable moon shuttle to deploy daring science teams.
Co-opting the mechanics and electricians from all of engineering, we get the piping, valves and electro-magnets down for analysis and the mechanical gate valve is hosed. The gate had been improperly calibrated so a small portion of the sealing disc remained in the transfer piping, causing plasma to hit it, causing the extreme hotspot—it wouldn’t have sealed for another ignition sequence. One of Petra’s team members from the reactor side runs a stress cycling simulation on the piping and says that we’ll make it to the shipyard if my team has in fact fix the heating issue. I call the man a self-important jackanapes for doubting my team, and Petra just starts laughing at me.
Week five of maintenance sees us testing the valves we basically built from scratch to find that the valves don’t seat hard enough when power from the magnetic field is still applied. Wit a few adjusted setpoints, we’re good for in-line testing and pressure checks.
Week six saw us putting everything back together again and cleaning up our messes, which bled into our proposed testing week. Because there is a lot of thermal lagging to be put back on. We also spent part of the time re-filling our emergency liquid air rigs because the CO wanted to trust but verify our brand new valves. The Science team wrapped up their atmospheric collection experiment and are gearing up to use the maintenance and fab-lab to start separating gasses.
Weeks seven and eight saw successful chem thrust checks on thrust cones and favorable data on plasma transfer tests and that oh-so important green Propulsion report pending a final visual inspection of the thrust cones.