Chapter 10

The elevator opened on the engineering level and I looked out. Positioned on each side of a wide, long hallway were portable repulser units, ready to be moved to damaged areas of the ship. Even one unit would take up most of the space in the elevator. Each of these emergency response units would create artificial gravity in small sections of the ship, if ever needed. Artificial gravity was produced from repulser technology using an overlapping polarity modular-capacitor. I stopped staring at the expensive units and hopped out of the elevator just as the door began closing. "A typical clan ship had only two of these beauties," I thought, "and here are a dozen. I don't doubt there are more of these elsewhere on the ship. It's a lot of expensive gear."

I wasn't surprised to see a security station at the end of the hall. Just like the bridge, main engineering is a vital part of the ship. The guy looked pretty relaxed sitting at a console desk behind a liquidarmor wall. A set of monitors showed the area immediately outside the elevator I'd just exited, at the end of the corridor. He wore a Shark Tactical Vest and had a carbine and boarding sword in a rack next to him. The brand name gear was light armor used by most of the crew on the ship to fight raiders. It wasn't uncomfortable like typical marine armor and it wasn't as dependable. I had enjoyed using the black colored Shark gear in small unit exercises at the Academy.

I walked through a security arch that I knew would stun me if I wasn't authorized to enter the area. "Here goes," I thought. The red color arch clearly stated, "restricted area." We didn't have such devices on a clan family ship but they were standard in Fleet ships or reserve vessels. "I'd be pretty relaxed too if I was the guard, knowing I didn't have to trouble himself with identification and authorization. Miley did all the work," I thought.

He nodded at me with a grin. My name and rank flashed on a screen on the flat part of the desk, which I couldn't see until I had passed the arch and approached his desk. He must have seen me stiffen when I walked through the arch. His eyes had a knowing twinkle that it was my first time through. A white light flickered above the elevator monitor and he promptly forgot me to turn back to his job. "Boring," I thought.

The corridor emptied into a circular room, three stories high with catwalks surrounding the second and third level. Orange-vested techies moved about the catwalks above me, walking from one panel to another or standing in pairs discussing work. More senior engineers in full orange-jumpsuits worked the main floor. Pipes of various colors, organized in groups of six, ran among various machines and up and out the third level. I could see a couple of red fusion containment bottles peeking out of the far wall. The large bottles were mostly hidden behind the wall; they were an important part of the power plant. If the fusion plant went out then nothing other than energy capacitors and batteries would be left, leaving the ship on emergency power. If that happened there would be a race to get into survival gear.

I walked towards the center of main engineering, looking for the duty station office. The engineering crew's ability to keep out of each other's way was practiced. I hadn't learned their unseen dance, seeming to bump into one orange shirt after another. Their movements from instrument panels to consoles looked rather random to me, but they were like ants in a nest, each one focused and on a mission. I found a place by a cluster of control consoles and surveyed the scene for a moment. These older engines weren't as automated as I'd expected. The Solon clan ships were definitely more automated, using less crew for the same purposes. It wouldn't surprise me to find that fears of artificial intelligence were behind this ship's design.

I noticed a small sensor-monitor next to an open door and made my way to it. This solar system was represented with colorful planetary spheres and gray moons with projections reflecting their distances from our ship. The animated wormhole was a spinning symbol not that far from the ice planet. I now understood the captain's preference for orbiting the ice world a little better. It was an ideal place to wait for Kate's shuttle return. Luck had the ship orbiting what now is known to be a marginally habitable planet, a rare find that would add to the corporation's prestige and the ship's fame.

Seeing an open door labeled "Chief Engineer," I entered the compartment. It was empty of staff. I was about to step out when I heard footsteps behind me. An older engineer came into the office, nodding his head in a polite gesture to me. He was tall, medium build, with narrow shoulders, a stretched neck, an odd-shaped elongated head and hair trimmed to Fleet length. The name on the uniform was Commander M. Tarry. He immediately glanced at the engineering status board, which was a simple outline of the ship's shape with lights and numbers representing different areas of the power grid throughout the vessel. I wondered if his head had been injured sometime in the past. I wasn't sure but I suspected the back of his head had a conical covering.

I felt the presence of someone else and was surprised to see another narrow entrance into the office that was behind a large panel. The chief engineer nodded sagely, and then quarter-turned, giving a terse command to someone out of my line-of-sight. Tarry stared at the large gravity control panel, ignoring me. He seemed to absorb every detail of his engineering kingdom, like a doctor with his finger on his patient's pulse he had the measure of the ship's condition. The man's demeanor had an aura of peace about him that put me at ease. I watched his efficient application of a few command entries on the panel.

He knew I was here so I waited, looking around the office more. The small room was full of cabinets with specialty tools behind the glass doors. A large desk with multiple consoles was against the back wall. A row of engineering PDAs were in a long charger by the desk. Commander Tarry walked over to and picked-up one of the orange electronic devices. He unlocked it and typed on it for a few minutes.

"Ensign Solon, this is for you," the chief engineer said, walking over to me and handing me the PDA. "You're assigned to work with Rayz. He is a petty officer with years of experience evaluating crewman for me. Listen to him."

"Thank you, Commander Tarry," I replied, happy he got around to me.

"He will test you in a number of different ways," he said cryptically.

An engineer rating entered the office and handed Tarry a clamp and a standard repair satchel. The commander passed them to me and the tech disappeared without a word.

"Your new partner is running inspects for me, aft of main engineering. He called in for the clamp in your hand, go find him and deliver the part. Rayz is expecting you," Commander Tarry said. "Welcome to the engineering maintenance team."

His simple no-nonsense command was short but it didn't seem unfriendly. The chief engineer was a busy man and I was an interruption. I glanced at the PDA in my hand and saw he had activated an application that located my partner on a ship map. A white bubble with "inspection team" was flagged for me.

I gave my best salute. "Yes, sir. I'm on it."

"Dismissed," he mumbled and turned away.

I didn't mention my implant, which had pulled up the same app when he told me to find Rayz. It was immediately clear the ship's artificial intelligence had taken notice of me now that I was a crewman. Since I had the PDA application going I suppressed the implant's guide map. It was more a distraction than a help. I'd always preferred PDAs over implant overlays, which I planned to mention to Miley sometime in the future. "She is just doing her job, trying to maximize my effectiveness," I thought. "It's not like I am special to her."

The PDA application gave me two routes to my partner. I took the shortest timed route, taking a service tube full of pipes towards the closest corridor to him. The more conventional route wouldn't take that much longer, using just corridors, but since the chief said my partner was waiting for me, I wanted to make a good impression on Rayz and arrive in a more timely fashion.

An alcove off the corridor opened to a series of capacitor arrays, one of the battery-like facilities that stored power. If a localized power cable were damaged, upon command a capacitor would release reserve energy to critical systems through back-up conduits. If they lost power, consoles and control panels would perform a controlled shutdown or otherwise shift the tasks to an unaffected secondary monitoring system. This all assumed the interruption batteries that each deck possessed were not drained. These "floor batteries" were the ship's last thread of power if the engines stopped working and the capacitors were exhausted.

I squeezed through the area to enter a narrow hall full of pipes that led to the fusion-reactor control room, which is near the stern of the ship. My partner would be working in a compartment just before the control room area. I'd taken a route from main engineering through the machinery rather than working around the ship through a number of the normal corridors. The chief engineer had given me the impression it was important to get the part to my new partner quickly. After getting my bearings from the numeric section code on the wall and relating it to my map, I could see I was almost there.

Looking through a liquidarmor window at the end of the hall, I saw the fusion-reactor control area. The octagonal compartment had the control room in the center, which looked like a prison tower with a bubble on top. A jumble of pipes, panels and support machines filled the large room. The entrance to the tower was a narrow catwalk near the ceiling of the two-story room. Outside the tower was a guard in Shark armor, at a security check point with a scanning arch on the catwalk, discouraging any unauthorized personnel from approaching the vital control room. The catwalk was one of the few security check points in the ship.

Taking just another brief moment, I peered down to the bottom of the reactor control area through the thick window. The room had a metal-grated floor; the reactor was beneath reinforced hull-armor in a separate containment area under the grated floor. Pipes like feeding tubes disappeared under the grated floor into the protected heart of the ship. The heart was hidden in that containment cylinder, which was designed to eject the core in the event of a catastrophic failure. "You've enjoyed your ogling view, now get going," I thought to myself as I breezed into the next room full of machines.

When I slipped between the bulky equipment in the back of the room, I noticed a slim, bald, older man, perhaps forty years old, standing under a hydraulic cylinder. He was a petty officer, about six feet tall and wearing an orange engineering jumpsuit with a standard maintenance satchel. We were about the same height but he was thinner and less muscular. I stopped and he stared back.

"It's about time you arrived with the part," he snapped. "I don't like having a ship's secondary system off-line long."

The guy wasn't scoring any points for personality, but I'd learned at the Imperial Academy to just take it. He was technically my superior while I was in training, and I wasn't looking for trouble. I needed good reviews and access to things I would need to get off the ship. It wasn't that he was hostile towards me, but to talk me this way was rather abrupt for a first meeting.

I approached him and he nodded at me. It was as if he was pleased at my decision to ignore the reproach. I handed him the ring clamp and noticed a long scar on the side of his neck that went from his ear to under his shirt.

"Ugly?" He asked, offering his hand. "A gift from a boarding party when I was about your age. All the healing beds were full, so I got to keep the scar."

We shook hands.

"Rayz," he announced with a stoic face.

"Von," I responded.

"Okay, this guy is hard to figure out. Demanding one moment, friendly the next, and then seemingly unemotional," I thought.

My new partner took the part from me and turned it over in his hand. Rayz sighed and rubbed his forehead, inadvertently dragging grease to it. "I don't like it when logistics purchases parts that aren't made by the original manufacture."

"They're likely to wear out faster," I agreed.

He just nodded and pulled a wrench out of his satchel, immediately tightened the replacement hydraulic hose clamp around the tube. Replacing the wrench with a rag he wiped his hands, and then closed the satchel. Rayz pulled his PDA from his waist and played with the menus and read a few pages before making an entry.

"Right, our next task is to inspect emergency lockers in and around the hanger deck area. The chief's notes say to do a few and then explain the process with you. When I think you're proficient, I will follow you around the ship as you inspect the rest of the suits that are due for a maintenance review," he said matter-of-factly.

I wasn't so sure how his coaching was going to go, something about Rayz was off. He looked over the clamp again, I swear it was the third time he'd checked it. Without a word he walked out the exit, so I followed him. We ended up back in main engineering where he deposited the tool satchel and washed up his hands and face. We both used the refresher and found some water to drink before he led me down a tunnel that came out on a different part of the deck. We used a small elevator that took us out of the engineering area but it didn't go to all the decks, so we got off after a couple of levels. I tried to get him to talk about himself but his responses were pretty much one word answers. Everything changed when I asked about how to use our orange PDAs.

While we walked down the corridor he explained the different menu options that were only on engineering PDAs. It didn't surprise me that there were links to a data management system, a team tracking application that mapped out where each engineering team was within the ship, and an icon for damage control procedures. Rayz promised to show me the sub-menus at a later time. He was very businesslike in his conversation. It surprised me that he didn't try to sneak in questions about my adventures while marooned or about my youthful appearance after being gone over nine years. He was in the perfect position to pepper me with uncomfortable questions, being trapped in his company for the rest of the duty cycle.

He took me to an elevator and hit the "H" button for the hanger deck. Rayz looked off into space at the closed elevator door like I wasn't there. "Definitely an odd-duck," I thought.

I recognized the hanger corridor when we exited the elevator. Just across from the hall from the elevator was a red locker door marked "Emergency Gear." My partner walked over to it and opened the locker. He fished out a tool from his pocket.

"This is a system pressure gauge," he explained, talking to the instrument like it was a treasured tool. "I will check the first three suits and you will observe the process."

He used the pen shaped tool to test the oxygen meter on the suit. Once satisfied the suit's reading matched his gauge, he inspected the suit for imperfections. Checking the emergency suit's functionality and looking for punctures or tears was a standard clan practice too. I had years of experience completing a similar task. Nevertheless, I remained attentive to his methodology to assure him I understood the importance of his teaching.

After finishing all three suits in the closet we walked closer to the hanger bay's large bulkhead door. Near the open bulkhead door my partner opened another red locker with three suits inside.

"Now I will talk you through the steps we take to inspect a suit," he said.

My partner went to work on a suit and without further preliminary remarks, began to tell me the step-by-step procedure for inspecting the helmet and oxygen system. He spoke in a steady matter-of-fact way that was flat in tone, as if he'd repeated the process dozens of times to others. Rayz now and then would repeat a phrase, slightly rearranging sentences, as if each order of the sentences were life or death. His rote, emotionless instructions seemed odd, they lacked the normal social graces of an occasional smile or eye contact. I took no offense; he was in the zone, clinically explaining the important task. I'd seen this type of quirk once before, a ritualized behavior used to control anxiety.

His precisely ordered words were partly a memory tool, an attempt to double check things that he associated with harm or danger. My partner was a checker. He worried about doing harm by not being careful enough. My family had a loyal guard who was obsessed with checking doors to see if they were locked or not. On many occasions I'd observed him cross a room and return to a door to double check it so he could be assured no one could break in. It was like the guard believed that if he thought of a bad event it was more likely to happen. My father loved the guy's attention to detail. My mother's whispered wisdom on the subject was that the man was an obsessive-compulsive.

Rayz completed his inspection of the suits and made a notation on his orange PDA. I looked over his shoulder and saw it was an inventory management screen. He tapped a button, which updated the system to show this particular locker had been inspected. We didn't do that on a clan ship, but it seemed like a good idea. Perhaps our ingrained sense of duty, hammered into us to do a task correctly, was a point of honor that wasn't questioned by clan members. Of course, there was social outrage if you let your clan teammates down.

Rayz smiled without parting his lips. The first encouragement he had granted me. "You'll do fine if you keep up your attentiveness," he said.

"Thank you," I responded with a deliberately friendly tone.

Rayz immediately grumbled when a crewman inadvertently bumped him while walking out of the hanger with his hands full of bags. The man disappeared into an unmarked compartment next to us. "Rayz likes his personal space," I thought.

"Don't get all caught up in talking to the crew while we are working," he cautioned.

I nodded my head while wondering where that random comment came from.

My partner looked at his PDA nervously and then hooked it to his waist belt. He pointed at the medical door across the hallway, it was a double-width red door. He waved me to follow him. The door slid open when he activated it, and inside we were greeted by a big-boned, full-figured nurse sitting at a "U" shaped desk. I could see she had been entertaining herself with a game on her console.

She looked Rayz up and down and then looked straight at me. The golden-skinned woman's thick brows rose up in surprise. Her oval face produced a bright smile at our interruption and she unconsciously touched the side of her hair nervously. The nurse moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, seeing something she liked. I noticed her short black hair was unusually spiky, a woman's hairstyle that I had seen only once before while at the pre-Empire Day dance. Her hairstyle was so odd that I'd actually recognized it. "She was in the wheel dance," I thought.

"Rayz Harper, it's great to see you during work hours," the tall nurse stated. "Here for some maintenance? I didn't know we were on the schedule today."

"Unscheduled training per the chief engineer," Rayz answered, looking down at his feet. "This is Von Solon."

"It's just Dr. Corfahr and I, so go ahead. He is probably still at his console studying," she said stepping around the desk. "I don't see any tool kits, so is this just an inspection?"

Rayz shyly nodded his head in agreement. The nurse looped her arm through Rayz elbow, which surprised me. She was much bigger than my partner, not unattractive in any way, but genetically she was a large woman, a six-foot tall commanding presence. My skinny partner acted very deferential to her.

"We need to go out for another date. It's time you asked me," she insisted in a manner that wasn't pushy but wasn't going to be denied.