The three girls walked into the engineering lab. They figured that it was the best candidate for an entrance to one of the station’s major facilities. The room was loaded with all kinds of tools, some of which could be identified, but many that held purpose that were beyond most of them. Two sounded nervous as she spoke “I kinda don’t like this place. It feels like everything’s scattered around. Like something happened here. Like something’s hiding.”
“It is a little bit weird, yeah. A lot of ripped out power cables. And these machines are all tumbled or flipped over. Like someone ran roughshod over this place and just tossed everything around.” Five commented, stopping at a particular device “You’d never be able to use an extruder for anything lying on its top like this, everything would come out bent.”
“What’s an extruder?” Seven asked, sitting down on one of the many metal block devices to watch the more able-bodied girls working the room over.
“Huh?” Five looked back to the other girl when realization hit her “… Ohh, I get it. Labor isn’t just dumb muscle, I know how to work this stuff!” she smirked and turned to Two, who was also looking around for loose panels in the wall. “Hey, you hear that? Bet you don’t know how to use a lathe.”
“Can’t say I do, muscles, glad you found your talent.” Two murmured as she looked around a particularly large machine for some kind of opening “This makes no sense, it should be right here. Or…” she turned her attention downward, then up to the ceiling and let out a groan as she motioned to the others and pointed up.
Both of the other girls let out annoyed sighs as they followed her gaze and saw a hatch on the ceiling “You’re kidding.” Five’s shoulders dropped, the girl becoming increasingly annoyed at the effort they had to put in for something that should have been easy. “Alright, we need a ladder then.” she said as she began scanning the room.
“Why would they design it like this though?” Two pondered, looking around the room herself for some kind of climbing tool.
“Maybe the room’s upside-down.” Seven mused in a whimsical tone, lost in her imagination.
Two raised an eyebrow at this. “Yeah… actually, what if it was.” It hadn’t dawned on her until that moment, but there were rails and uneven levels on the ceiling while the floor was flat, like one would expect the roof to be. “I… what? But then the hatch would be on the other…” she turned around to see another identical hatch on the opposite end of the ceiling “Uhh…” she just stood there perplexed as she tried to comprehend what happened to this room “That… would explain why this place is such a mess.” she mumbled.
Five was setting up a ladder she’d found and tested it to make sure it was steady, but Two grabbed hold of her arm before she started to climb “Wait, Five, there’s something really wrong with this room. That hatch probably isn’t even attached to anything. It might even be open space.”
“Thought you said there wouldn’t just be a door between us and space!” Five complained loudly.
Two nodded “Well… yeah, ideally. But if this room is so badly damaged that it’s twisted in place-”
“Then the room could be wrenched off the station entirely if we disturb it too much.” Five muttered, her eyes widening with fear. “Seven, why don’t you go see how Three is doing?” she asked, turning to the smaller girl in an attempt to try to get her to safety.
“Come on, I’m going to help.” Seven insisted, standing up from her seat “Just tell me what I can do.”
Two and Five looked at each other and shrugged, Five stepping up to her and nodding before she started to give her instruction. “Drag tools out of the room, just whatever you can carry that could be useful. We gotta seal this room off so it doesn’t depressurize the rest of the station.”
“Be sure to grab your lathe.” Two teased as she picked up a toolbox herself.
“You’ve got no idea what a lathe is, do you?” Five rolled her eyes, grabbing an acetylene torch and gas tank to roll it out into the hallway.
Seven hurried out carrying a light sealed box, hoping it might contain something useful, and then turned to go back in.
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“Hold on now.” Five held her shoulder “We don’t want to go in here too much. Let me think a a second. What can we carry that’ll be most useful.” she muttered to herself, trying to think of all the tools that would be useful in a situation like this.
“If it’s a weight problem, that makes me best.” Seven noted, and Five unfortunately had to agree with the sentiment, nodding to her “I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“Can we turn off the local gravity somehow, maybe?” Two asked.
Five briefly considered the idea. It might allow them to freely empty the room without disturbing the balance of it at all. But then she shook her head “For one, I don’t know exactly how the artificial gravity system works or if we even can mess with it. For another, Gravity might be what’s holding it in place. Our best bet is to get what we can quick and weld the door shut tight.”
“You’re the boss.” Two nodded, conceding that this was her specialty. She thought it best not to join Seven in returning to the room. “What do you want me to do?”
Five looked around and saw a maintenance hatch on the wall “Okay, we already know maintenance tunnels are pressurized…” she walked over and with some effort, pulled the hatch open “Get in there and maybe see if there’s a control box that might be looking at atmospherics or weight sensors or something, anything that might give us a more accurate read on what happened in there.” she turned to Seven and continued “Now, do you know what a pipe wrench looks like?”
Two nodded to her and scuttled once more into the cramped maintenance hall, but this time actually paying attention to the electronics running the lengt
Just like Five said, she found a control box attached below where the engineering room was. She had to shuffle around to pick up her slate again and connect to it, but thankfully, the handheld computer seemed to be made to hook into everything on board. “Atmospherics… they’re fine… somehow.” she muttered to herself “Gravity orientation… it’s reading normal. No controls here either, just readings.” she poked around a little more, trying to make sense of the readings “Oh I see… the rooms are in frames, that’s how it’s still powered, it must be a broken sensor then. It thinks nothing is wrong with the room, so it’s not firing any alarms. That’s bad. If it turns too much…”
Realizing that she was just musing her theories to herself in the tunnel, Two disconnected the slate and rushed back out to the hallway to find Five standing around a small assortment of hand tools “Alright, got some good news and some bad news.” she started “Good news is, I know what’s wrong. The room must be rotating freely for some reason, so it is something we can control.”
“By weight distribution, gotcha.” Five nodded, understanding the physics behind it “The bad news?”
“The sensor monitoring it is broken, so I have no idea how far it can rotate, or in which direction.” Two handed the slate to her, showing the logs she’d seen. “The station has no idea that anything’s wrong, so it’s not trying to correct itself.
Five sighed “So no idea if we’re close to breaking open a hole in the station if we turn it the wrong way, got you.” she handed the slate back “Like I thought, the only safe option is to seal it off. Any idea on the structural integrity of the station?”
“The only way I can make sense of it is if the rooms are held in frames, so they’re totally independent of one another. It’s modular. If we lose the room, the rest of the station should be okay.”
Five nodded “Seven, come on out, this should be enough to work with for now. I need to seal this thing.” she called into the room, then returned her attention to Two “What about waste management?”
“We’ll just have to hope physics has an entrance too, and it’s in better shape.” Two murmured “Grab her a welding mask on the way out!” she called in to Seven “Don’t want our engineer to go blind.”
“Jeez, how did I forget that…” Five muttered and then smiled a little “Engineer? I think I like that title better”
“Got it!” Seven came climbing through the door a moment later with a heavily tinted face covering in hand. She had some grease on her from carrying things around, but she seemed fine. Her injury didn’t seem to be bothering her as much as before, even if they couldn’t see it beneath her shirt now.
“Alright.” Five nodded and gave a long hard look into the room, hoping she wasn’t forgetting anything important “You two go back to the dorms for now, see how Three is. I can’t have you hanging around watching this thing light up.”
Two and Seven nodded to Five as she donned the mask and waved to them to move away. The pair walked back toward the dormitory, hearing the distant sound of the metal doors closing and the torch heating up.
“Are we going to be okay, Two?” Seven asked, sounding tired and worried “I’m starting to get real thirsty.”
“Yeah.” Two sounded just as concerned “I think we’re going to be okay. We need to get the water running, that’s it. Then we can rest, okay? We’ll get clean water, and then we can drink water, eat, sleep, and recover. We can take this at a slower pace after that, okay? And if you’re too tired to keep going now, you can lay down and rest with Three now.”
“No. I can keep going, I promise.” she stood up straight and kept walking, trying to make herself look tough despite the fact that she was sweating. “I’m not weak.”
Two smiled at Seven “I never said you were. You did a good job. I’m just worried about your injury is all.”
“Don’t worry, it feels lots better now.” she said, rubbing lightly at her chest “I’m not going to die from a scratch.”
Two smiled, happy to see that the girl had some resilience “Let’s leave that to the doc, okay?”
“Doc… haha, should I call her that?” Seven giggled, a bit of a mischievous look on her face.
Two laughed “Do it, Three’s too serious for her own good. She needs a nickname.”