Chapter 3: Disaster Strikes

Catastrophic news came through from the corporate ship Io. There had been one hell of an accident. The entire docking section of their ship was blown out into space all the way from the core outward. The ship was crippled. Their cryogenic gas dewars had been damaged. They were getting low on air and they were calling for rescue. Earth had nothing of the scale required or that could make it to the outer belt in time. Every great mining ship in the system immediately set course for their last known position. It was a frantic race to dig down to the habitable space from the nose of the ship, install temporary airlocks and ferry people into pressurized bays before the damaged ship's environment totally collapsed. Under such extreme pressure their un-tuned environmental controls DID go into oscillation and their engineers couldn't get a handle on it. They'd managed to get a few air domains surrounding their aquaculture tanks under control by severing the automated control circuits and hand-tuning the air handlers, but they didn't have enough staff to put a big dent in the problem to break the cycle ship-wide. Still, it gave the people onboard a buffer that kept them alive. Their command staff had made a policy not to invest in pressure suits for crew members that didn't regularly work in vacuum. That little money-saving decision turned around to bite them on the ass.

We had to evacuate the forward domains of the ship to keep our crew from being poisoned by radiation. We had been traveling so fast that micrometeorite collisions were inevitable and they caused X-ray bursts. The ship was designed for some amelioration of this effect, but we exceeded our design parameters with the rescue flight. We were lucky that the decontamination wasn't very destructive. The three forward-most discs of floors were later deemed unsalvageable due to persistent radiation issues and were filled with concrete

Anyway, we arrived in time to offload over a thousand crew members including men, women and children. All her ship's boats were left aboard as when the corporation had raised enough funds, her propulsion grid would be patched up and she'd be flown back to L4 to be rebuilt. So many tens of billions go into each great ship that abandoning one was out of the question.

There was a lot of scurrying to bring several of the mothballed air domains on-line. The ship's food resources had to be re-balanced and the plastics factories went into overdrive to furnish the suites for our refugees. Another creche was opened for the kids. The water recycling systems and waste-handling wetlands for a full quadrant of domains were brought online. It was a paperwork nightmare getting everyone's certificates verified through the computers on the stricken Io. We had a few attempted identity thefts but they proved fruitless. Everybody aboard each ship got an identity chip glued to their hip bone while undergoing their flight physicals and the kids got theirs on leaving the creche. It's just not advertised. It makes shipboard security one hell of a lot easier. The troublemakers were dropped off at the factories at L5.

An after-disaster review was held. We took apart the critical decisions and policies that both helped and hindered the cause of the disaster and its amelioration. We made plans to make our ship safer from our analysis. Emergency pressure suits and inflatable pods were staged throughout the ship. Air-retaining litters were designed and built. Plans were made to shed our radioactive bow and build an emergency docking facility there. We had too many eggs in one basket when we were restricted to one docking bay for the entire ship. Emergency air storage facilities were built in decentralized areas and pipes were laid to keep them filled that had periodic check valves installed. If an event caused the pipes to be crushed or severed the tanks would not empty uselessly or make the atmosphere in critical domains unbreathable. All this was done over a decade. When you're dealing with a nearly 400 Km diameter ship, these things take time. They weren't called great ships for nothing.