It was 45 minutes later, and Joe was fully suited up and clunking down the hallways, further dwarfing private Fuentes now that he was covered in high temperature plastics a separate insulator suit. The plazmat suit consisted of 3 layers:the inner suit, where anything that couldn’t take thousand degree temperatures was kept. such as microchips and the occupant, with an inner visor that served as an interactive HUD for suit monitoring and control. This was kept cool behind the second layer, which created a quarter centimetre vacuum between the undersuit and the rest of the world, as well as being an insulating material itself.
The third layer was where things got complicated - an active cooling solution, covered in ceramic plates to gather heat, and using ferrofluids pumped around the torso and body to dump into a backpack heatsink. However it powered itself using the very heat it absorbed, and it was extremely stiff and hard to move inside room temperature environs. All of these were adjustable so the suit could be used by many people, but that meant it needed at least one other person to assist the user with suiting up, and extricating themselves later on.
Grunting and sweating as he tried to walk against the suit’s resistance, Joe regretted his decision not to just strip down in public and do it a bit closer to their destination. Private Fuentes had kept turned around until Joe had gotten himself pulled into the first layer suit, then assisted with the connections and adjustments for the next two layers. Verifying everything checked out on the HUD, Joe then went through an external visual check with the shy guard and verified there were no leaks and the coolant was - sluggishly - flowing, viscous and thick, a deep bronze sheen that glimmered in the tubes. The oxygen recycler and breather were working properly, and Joe told himself the faint burning meat scent was just his imagination. They stepped into a main thoroughfare - a wide passage intended for cargo conveyance and moving large components - and were soon staring at the wide yellow bulkhead that sealed the reactor section away from the rest of the station.
Joe saw multiple hazard signs pasted in bright red on the front - CAUTION PLASMA LEAK. Just in case someone hadn’t heard. Joe ignored the suspicious rust coloured stain on the floor next to the bulkhead, and gestured Fuentes to start the cycling process. A quick pressure check later and the slab of metal slid upwards, revealing a metal chamber several meters to a side and another bulkhead on the other end. Joe stepped inside and Fuentes cycled the outer airlock closed, then Joe waited a few seconds, took a deep breath, and cycled the inner airlock open.
The hydrogen plasma inside the reactor section was nearly invisible to the naked eye, emitting at most a slight blue glow in the air. However to the sensors in Joe’s suit, the charged gas billowed inwards in a yellow wave of heat, blue sparks flashing through the billowing clouds as electrical arcs discharged into metal railings and grounding rods. He felt the impact, a light buffeting against his chest that spread a warmth over his body. The thin engineer was sweating profusely, waiting for that first searing sign of a suit failure. But he remained merely warm, and able to move much more fluidly now that the suit was at operating temperatures. The bronze coloured coolant gel flowed freely and smoothly now, glowing a bright red as it pumped through the tubes.
Checking his readouts, Joe could see the external temp was sitting at a toasty 2200K. The suit could withstand this temperature for forty minutes, after which the backpack would melt and the heatsink would drop out. Death would soon follow for the suit occupant, so Joe had to hurry.
Stepping into the large, open bay of the reactor section he grimaced. Almost everything built into the reactor section was designed for high temperature operations, but post construction additions rarely were. Terminals, crates, tools... all had long since melted and burned into scorch marks on the floor and walls. The open floor plan of the lowest level gave Joe ample opportunity to circle around and determine that the fault wasn’t that easy to find. He dug into a suit pouch and pulled out a thin, hexagonal rod which was already glowing red from the heat. Locating the nearest plasma outflow pipe, he pressed the rod against the metal and waited. A second later, the device emitted a BEEP made audible through the suit sensors. Pressure was fine, no fluctuations that would indicate uneven flow from a breach. Onto the next.
Joe carried on in this vein for the next ten minutes, checking the condition of all the pipes from the reactor itself - the hydrogen flowing through the outpipes was generally the hottest and most heavily charged. If the issue wasn’t the outflow, then maybe damage to one of the plasma reprocessors that stored and cooled hydrogen for re-injection into the core, primarily as a temperature control method. If the core was running too hot, put some cooler plasma in to run it lower.
It looked like it wasn’t the main pipes. And time was running shorter - Joe had less than half an hour to go before he’d need to exit and do a full suit overhaul. Shutting down the reactor and dealing with the remaining hydrogen in circulation came now, fixing the cause later.
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Joe made his way near to the reactor and awkwardly bent to pry open a floor grate. Same relative spot as space station 9, thank goodness for corporate creative bankruptcy. Within, there was a series of purely mechanical controls which connected to highly insulated, very durable, but somewhat dumb computers inside the reactor. Pulling a tungsten lever with a grunt, he waited for the rest of the interface to clank out of it’s floor recess. Every dial, button and lever on the interface was plain, unadorned, and glowing red as heat was dumped into it. There were no displays. Joe swallowed an unnecessary lump of nerves and began the shutdown process.
It would take nearly 15 minutes, as it required Joe to follow a series of memorised steps he’d memorised en route to the reactor itself. Several times he had to stop and consider which button to push next, or dial to turn, as there was zero feedback - this was as much in the nature of a password as a process. But he had plenty of-
“Warning, heatsink temperature at CAUTION levels”
The soft, voice echoed in his ear, artificially female and tinny. Joe checked the HUD and blanched - 8 minutes to do this. Hot and cold sweats tried to break out on his forehead at once and he felt faint. The universal shutdown needed at least another 3 minutes.
Joe got a little frantic, and began to second guess himself. Was the third dial on the top left next, twisted to the 15th clockwise digit? Or was it the second lever protruding from the bottom of the console? He didn’t know. He didn’t have time. His hands started flying and Joe went into an instinctive mode, not really looking at what he was doing and wishing the shutdown confirmation would hurry up. His eyes flicked to his HUD - 4 minutes, 35 seconds. Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap. Come on. Lever 24 twisted once and pushed into an upright position. Button 31 long pressed twice and short pressed once. Shit what was the final step? Joe began to panic, frantically moving his eyes across the terminal even as his vision blurred with tears. Final step, final step. Then it jumped out at him, the single labeled switch in the entire panel, engraved into the metal with clear block letters.
Joe flipped SCE from MAIN to AUX and sighed in relief as he felt a CLUNK under his feet, the entire station shaking just slightly as masses of hot plasma got diverted towards the station’s external tanks, where it could be cooled and de-ionised at leisure. The thrumming Joe had felt since before entering the airlock ceased, cyclotrons and plasma inductors and the many, many components of fusion going quiet for the first time in years. Immediately, Joe could see the density of the plasma surrounding him begin to drop. Excellent.
Then a harsh buzz sounded in his ear and he realised he only had 120 seconds to get to the airlock before his heatsink failed. Joe screamed, his voice heard only inside the suit, and he began running frantically towards the airlock. Tripping, the visor smashed into the ground and he struggled to his feet again heedlessly. The HUD lit up with warnings as a microscopic crack started leaking in charged hydrogen, the high temperature rapidly causing the minor damage to worsen as the fracture began to spread. Joe felt his legs like leaden weights, dragging him down as he tried to run, the airlock a distant memory on the other side of the open reactor bay. Ninety seconds. The awkward gait of the suit, even improved with the freeflow of the coolant, hampered Joe and what he could normally have run in 20 seconds took him over a minute at a laboured jog. He had barely half a minute left on the heatsink integrity by the time he reached the bulkhead, yellow paint long since stripped by heat to reveal a surface warmed to a deep blood red.
Slamming frantically on the cycle button, Joe stumbled inside and towards the internal controls, slamming the red button to close the bulkhead and cycle the chamber. He could feel his face warming up as the plasma density inside the helm began to grow, the tiny crack allowing more and more in. The bulkhead didn’t close.
He slammed his hand against it again, noticing that the button didn’t move. Was it fused or jammed? Joe screamed and started punching the button repeatedly, to absolutely no effect. The HUD timer ticked down to under ten seconds and Joe redoubled his efforts, to no avail.
Then, salvation. The inner bulkhead closed with a slam, and Joe felt the temperature immediately drop as plasma was pumped out and replaced with cool, blessed air. The suit began to stiffen up but, without more energy being dumped in, was no longer in danger of overheating. Joe breathed a sigh of relief then started with a gasp as the external visor popped out of the suit, the crack causing it to break in two as it fell to the ground. The outer bulkhead opened to red emergency lights. Fuentes standing by the controls. Joe dropped into a seated position inside the airlock and began to laugh uncontrollably, shaking with guffaws heard only by himself.
Eventually, he regained control of himself and stood back up, noticing the suit had become significantly stiffer. He’d need at least another half an hour before anyone could touch him to assist with removal - even now the outer suit was causing a shimmer in the air, it’s surface “merely” in the high 3 digits. Once he was back in the chief engineer’s office, it should be cool enough to remove the outer layers. Motioning for Fuentes to lead the way, the pair walked through formerly well lit corridors, now only dull red emergency lights shone, granting the walls a ghastly cast as the pair made their way through the bowels of the near defunct station.