Chapter 5: Strange Events

-- January - Week 2 --

The second week was turning out to be an even stranger week than the first.

While not anything, in particular, just lots of things in general. It seemed that they have gremlins in the systems. First, they had lost all the cameras on level nine’s right-side cargo deck. On the Monday, just after 02:00 hours, Lee got a call to go check out why.

Lee had been running some routine checks on level two’s air-conditioning control panel while the occupants slept. The occupants had been complaining about it not maintaining a constant temperature at night. Considering some of the noises she had heard, as she walked past the rooms at night, she wasn’t surprised that some of them felt hot and bothered.

Lee headed to the computer room on level seven. She noticed one of the input/output cards in the PLC (programmable logic controller) panel wasn’t lit, as it should have been. This PLC controlled the ships internal cameras, argon pumping system and the locking systems for the lowest three decks and the storage rooms.

Lee wiggled the card and pushed it back into place. It lit back up. Helm called her to tell her the cameras were coming back on, and the storage rooms were all green (locked). While she was there, she checked the other cards and made sure they were all screwed into place. Ship vibration was known to loosen the cards.

Lee found only that one card had been loose. ‘Very strange,’ she thought. She had installed this system, and she knew that the input-card shouldn’t have been unattached. Someone had to undo the screw that held the card in place. She wondered what activity that person was trying to hide.

The next night Lee was preoccupied trying to find a tool that wasn’t where it should be. A call came in from the helm to inform her that Professor Ram Dindi required her assistance in his lab. She gave up her search and made her way to the lab that he was assigned to.

While she walked, she thought about the piglet. She had rescued the same piglet for the fourth time just before her shift. She couldn’t work out how it had been getting out and why it was always sitting at her door, waiting to be let into her room.

‘It is kinda cute,’ she supposed. Her grandparents had always had a menagerie of pets on their cane farm outside of Sarina in Queensland. She had missed not having pets, but spaceships were not the best place to keep them.

Lee entered the lab, “Hi, Professor Dindi, how can I help?”

“Who are you?” he asked, obviously agitated, as he fiddled with a machine.

“Engineer Lee Gillian at your service, Professor,” she replied cheerfully.

“Ah! Right ... right ... hmm. I’m having trouble with this infernal machine. It was working before I went to dinner, but now it seems to be dead,” he replied distractedly as he fiddled with the machine some more.

“How come you’re working this late professor?” asked Lee. She removed the plug from the wall and then her multi-functional tester unit off her belt. She grabbed a Philips screwdriver to undo the cover screws on the side. She noticed that they had recently been removed and two screws were only loosely screwed in, and one was missing.

“Ah ... hmm ... One of the other professors needed it earlier. I decided to continue this project after he left,” he mumbled.

Ram’s strange office hours were well known. Lee looked at him, sidewise. She knew he shared this part of the lab with Professor Essco. She wasn’t surprised that Essco considered his work was more important or that Ram worked when he wasn’t there. “So, what are you working on Prof?”

Ram started to get excited, and he waved his arms around as he talked. “Debora and I are trying to fix a gene problem with the tomatoes that we have on board. We should be able to increase their yield and to get them to grow faster without them losing their flavour. I know which genes need tweaking and now the darn splicer isn’t working,” he looked at the machine in disgust.

By this time, Lee had the side off, and she was looking inside. “Well Prof, it would help if it had the cutter unit installed,” she said. She pointed to the empty space inside the machine.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed. “It was working when Essco left.”

“What time did you leave here, Prof?” she asked.

“Hmm ... I had a late dinner at around 20:00 hours. I came back and worked on the computer. Then left again around 23:00 hours to get some seeds from the storeroom,” he replied, nodding his head.

Lee touched her minder, “Helm, Lee here.”

“Hi Lee, how can I help you tonight?”

“Sung, can you check the log on Professor Dindi’s lab to see who else entered here, since 20:00 hours?”

“Hang on. Hmm ... One entry, it was at 23:15 hours. Rodger Bartlett’s ID shows up,” she said.

Lee frowned, ‘What was Rodger doing here and playing with this machine?’ To her knowledge, he wasn’t even qualified to fix it. “Helm, do you know where Rodger is located at present?”

“Lee, the computer says that he is in his cabin. Do you want me to call him?”

“No, it’s okay. Thanks, Sung. I’ll catch up with him tomorrow, Lee out.” Lee brought up the maintenance log on her minder, but there was no entry for the Gene Splicer being out of service. ‘Fuck! Rodger is a lazy bastard,’ she thought.

“No worries Prof, there is a spare unit in the hold, I’ll go get it for you. I should have this machine up and running in no time,” Lee told him and then left.

Lee headed down to the workshop. She checked to see if the original unit was there, but it wasn’t. It hadn’t even been left on a bench like Rodger usually did with things he pulled out. Peeved, she went to book out a spare unit from the storeroom on level five.

When she got to the storeroom, it was a mess. Equipment had been pulled out of boxes all over the place. Some of it was only half put back or had been tipped over and left where it fell. ‘Shit!’ she thought. ‘Jim was going to go off his nut.’

Lee hit her minder and called up Jim to tell him what she had found. As she had expected, he wasn’t a happy camper. Even less so when she asked him to see if he could work out what was missing and if it had been booked out correctly.

Lee finally found the new cutter unit and the old one. The new one had not been stored where the computer had said it should have been. Lee suspected that bloody Rodger had made the mess looking for it. He had dropped the old unit on one of the shelves, while he was seeking the spare.

Leaving poor Jim with the mess, she returned to the Professor’s lab. She installed the new cutter into the machine. Then she helped the professor recalibrate the laser and left him to his work once he was happy. Lee headed back to the storeroom to help Jim.

At the end of her shift, Lee stopped off in the workshop. To her surprise, the tool she had been looking for earlier was now sitting on the bench. However, none of her crew seemed to know who’d had it. It wasn’t the first time this had happened this week, and Lee wondered what foreigner someone was doing.

[A foreigner is a personal job done at work, without permission.]

Lee didn’t catch up with Rodger until later in the morning to ask about the Gene Splicer. Rodger informed her defensively that Professor Essco had called him to look at the Splicer just before he went off shift. He had removed the cutting unit and planned to replace it when he got up.

He didn’t mention looking for the new unit or making the mess. He tried to make it sound as if he’d not done anything wrong. Lee guessed that he probably wouldn’t even bother trying to finding the old unit to give it to her to fix.

When she queried why he hadn’t logged the job, he simply said that he’d been tired and had forgotten. Lee decided to log her report and let Ben sort it out. It hadn’t been the first time Rodger had forgotten to log his job reports, or that he had left a mess for others. She was sure it wasn’t going to be the last time either.

The man was a pain in her arse.

The next major thing that happened was the shutdown of the aft drive, RSD1.

This happened on the Wednesday day shift. Lee didn’t find out about it until she got up that afternoon. She learnt of it in the dining room, where it was the number one topic of discussion. The drive had been down for six hours by this time. They couldn’t find the problem.

The Doomsday Squad were going on about how they should turn back and get it fixed. Lee was surprised that Professor Essco was the leader of the squad. Considering he was the leader of the Science Team; he should have been pro going forward rather than pro going back.

They could arc around and drop speed and then micro-jump back part of the way. However, they would lose about three weeks to a month if they did. Lee decided to head down to engineering to offer her help. She couldn’t see any point in going back if she could help it.

Kyle was at the engine computer console going through the log. He was trying to work out the sequence of events that led up to the shutdown. “Hi Kyle, have they found the problem yet?”

Kyle looked at her, smiled and then back at the screen. “Nope, they called me in to see if I could find a glitch in the program. It’s a bit weird. The log indicated a leak in the coolant line. The pressure has been fluctuating, but we can’t find the leak and the coolant tank indicates it is still full.”

He pointed to the diagram of the system that he had on his screen, and Lee studied it for several minutes. She then scrambled around the machinery. She slid under the coolant piping to where the offending pressure sensor she believed faulty, was located. Shining her small torch onto the device, she checked it over.

“Hey, Kyle, can you bring me the liquid soap?” she yelled out. Lee felt a hard kick to her ankle. She peered back up through the piping to see a furious Rodger glaring down at her.

“Get the hell away from my drive, you stupid cow,” he screamed at her. “You have no authority to touch it. I’ll have you thrown in the brig for sabotage,” he shrieked. He then continued sprouting more crap in the same vein. Lee blocked out his tirade. She was flabbergasted with Rodger’s reaction.

‘Bloody hell! What was it with these people and the brig? The ship didn’t even have one!’ thought Lee. ‘This same bloke happily flaunted the rules when it suited him just so he could curry favour with others. Moreover, here he was bitching about whose jobs were whose.’

Kyle handed the container of liquid soap down through the pipes to Lee. Lee ignored Rodger and proceeded to wipe the soap around the pressure sensor. “Kyle, kick in the coolant pump,” she yelled out over Rodger’s ranting.

Lee heard the pump kick in and watched the sensor above her. As the pressure built, she saw the tiny bubbles appear in the soap, stop and then appear again. ‘Well that explained the pressure fluctuations but no actual leak in the coolant,’ she thought.