now?”
“Yup, Engineman Wang reporting for duty. I think.”
She pointed to the coffee. “Is that for me?”
“You can have it if you want, but I already drank some. It has Ish-cooties on it.”
“Mercy, I haven’t heard that since grade school.”
“I don’t think I’ve said it since back then. You want a coffee? I’ll go grab you one if you like.”
She swung her legs down and stood up from the chair. “I do, but I’ll go get it. You sit and I’ll give you your first lesson in environmental watch standing.”
I took the chair which was still warm from her body, and she showed me the various displays on the station. They were basically real-time representations of the air and water systems. The center monitor showed a diagram of the ship similar to the schematic I was familiar with from my tablet. “Air is in green and water is in blue,” Bev pointed out. “You can use the stylus on the screen to isolate one or another system, rotate, zoom, and so on. Just like on your tablet. Try it.”
It did indeed work just like she said, but with the larger screen it was pretty dramatic.
Bev pointed out the displays to the left and right of the center. “Over there are the air readouts and over here is water. They are updated every few seconds and show you the pressures, chemical compositions, and system status. If any of them get out of whack, they change color and the location of the sensor that’s giving the reading will blink on the schematic.”
“That seems simple enough,” I told her.
“It is. Now, you sit there and watch for a bit. I’m going to run up for coffee. I’ll be right back.”
“What do I do if something changes?”
“Bip my tablet and I’ll come running,” she said seriously. “But it’s not terribly likely. We almost never get any problems here because we stay on top of system maintenance. Lemme go get my coffee and I’ll explain more when I get back.”
“Okay, sure,” I told her, although I was a bit nervous about being left alone with so little introduction.
“Good man,” she said and headed for the hatch. “Back in a flash.”
I sat there watching intently, my eyes flicking from screen to screen. I tried to figure out what the various graphs, charts, and tables were telling me. The air system had a tick-by-tick graph showing the incoming and outgoing air compositions. There were colored regions indicating oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and trace. It took me a tick or so to realize they were actually moving because they looked like just straight bars on the screen, but then I saw the time ticks scrolling across the bottom axis and realized the graph was being refreshed but the values were constant.
Just then, a small box opened up on the ship schematic display with the words: Automated System Integrity Check. Below that blinked the word: Running. It flashed for less than a tick before changing to: Air Systems Nominal and under that Water Systems Nominal—both in green text. A little acknowledge button flashed below it. I wondered what to do and just then Brill came back with her coffee and a plate of Cookie’s pastries. Seeing the display she said, “Oh, just acknowledge. Those happen randomly every stan.”
I used my stylus to press the acknowledge button and the little box disappeared.
“They get logged along with the length of time it takes for the watch stander to respond. Anything up to five ticks is fine. After that, it starts blinking. At fifteen ticks it will beep. At half a stan it automatically notifies the section supervisor and puts up a warning on the ship’s status display on the bridge. If it goes a full stan, it throws an alarm on the bridge and supervisor’s tablet.”
I considered that. “Got it. Moral of the story is, help won’t come for at least half a stan.”
“Exactly! Of course, the reality of the automated system checks is that they stave off the very real danger of falling asleep from the stultifying boredom of routine watch. Anything that might really be a problem with air or water supply will trigger a different set of warnings and alarms.”
“You make this sound a little scary.”
“Scary is good. It means you treat the system seriously. Remember that danger to you isn’t really the issue, but rather you’re the first line of defense against a failure that would leave the crew suffocating where they stand.”
“Okay, is it too late to go back to galley duty?” I asked and tried to add a little chuckle but there was some very real trepidation in my voice.
She smiled warmly back. “Yeah, sorry. We didn’t tell you this before because we needed to get you into our evil clutches first.” She made a comical
“So, why does it say nominal? Doesn’t that mean really small?”
She gave a little shrug. “Yeah, in common use it does, but what that’s really saying is that the discrepancy between what the reading should be and what actually came in is too small to matter. If something was out of range, the message would have been more detailed.”
“Out of range?”
“Sure. If the air mixture was off, or the water pressure too low, or anything like that, the ASIC would show you what subsystem threw the error and what the actual reading was. This is just the short version that says the ninety-eleven things we checked aren’t really different from what they should be.” Brill gestured with a toss of her head and I got up from the chair so she could settle in with her coffee and a pastry. “Help yourself.” She pointed to the plate with her mug. “I brought extra.”
For the next half stan, she explained the watch stander’s console and answered questions about of my job. She showed me how to slave my tablet to the various displays so I could monitor the screens even when I was not sitting in the hot seat. “That’s handy when you have to make your rounds, or go change a filter or something.” She must have seen the concern on my face, because she grinned sympathetically. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you standing watch with somebody else for the first couple of weeks. You’ll get used to it pretty quickly.”
We hit a lull then and I sipped my now-cold coffee and nibbled a pastry.
“So, how’s the greenie?” Brill asked.
“I have no idea. When she came aboard yesterday, she was a real mess. Very timid—like a whipped dog. This morning, I found her teaching Cookie and Pip how to make biscuits properly.”
Brill almost choked on her coffee. “She was trying to teach Cookie?”
“I don’t know if he was just going along, or if he was actually getting pointers. I’ve helped Cookie make biscuits plenty of times before. She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard from him.” I shrugged. “Pip was learning, though, so maybe Cookie was just playing along for Pip’s benefit.”
“What’s with the bruises?”
“I don’t know. Might have been in a flitter crash. She’s dinged up enough.”
Brill gave me a glare. “You don’t believe that, though, do you?”
I shook my head. “No. Yesterday she kept her hair down and was trying to hide the bruising. Today, it’s like it doesn’t matter.”
“What happened overnight?”
“I have no idea. She had some kind of crisis when she bumped into Bev in her ship-tee and boxers down in the berthing area—”
“Well, that’s pretty scary, right there,” Brill teased.
I chuckled. “True. Between the tattoos and the piercings she can be pretty intimidating. But Sarah seemed more concerned that she found Bev undressed.”
“Ah, the walking around in her underwear thing?”
“Yeah, something like that, I guess. Bev kicked Pip and me out of berthing and by the time we got back, Sarah was wrapped in her blankets and asleep.”
Brill swung her feet up onto the desk and cupped her coffee close to her face, inhaling the warm smell for a few heartbeats, obviously pondering. Eventually, she shrugged. “Never underestimate the value of a good night’s sleep, I guess.”
“Maybe.”
“How’s the co-op going?” she asked, her eyes flickering across the displays.
“It went really well the first day and then I kinda lost track. It seemed to be going good the other day when we were up there. Francis said they’d sold a ton. Pip came back last night and I got some sketchy information, but
