Francis formally passed the watch to Diane temporarily.
“Somebody always has to be on duty,” he explained. “And that means available to respond more or less immediately. We get a lot of leeway because we can slave the tablets to the station and do most routine things even if we’re not sitting right there, but if I’m going to be in the shower somebody else has to be minding the shop.”
“I can see where having more people to share that load would be good.”
“Yeah, we have enough for three sections, and if all we had to do was watch, it would be dead simple. It’s the extra stuff that takes two or more people that disrupts us, but we keep the ship well maintained so little things like scrubber maintenance and sludge recovery don’t get in the way too much. You’ll see.”
We both ducked into the showers and within five ticks we were back in shipsuits and heading down to Foggy Bottom. When we got there, Francis relieved Diane formally and then stuck his head in Brill’s office. “We’re going on VSI now,” he told her. “I have my tablet and it’s slaved.”
“Okay,” she said. “Be back in time for lunch. Stay on the path. Write if you get work.”
As we headed out, I started asking questions, “VSI?”
“Visual Site Inspection. We’re supposed to do it once each watch. By tradition we do it somewhere in the middle, just to break up the monotony, but you can do it at any time.”
“What’s that mean? Visual Site Inspection?”
He pulled up his ship schematic and changed the view to place a sensor overlay on it. “All the readings we see on the monitor back in the section come from these sensors,” he explained. “The readings are only as good as the sensors, so we visit each one several times a day. It takes twenty to thirty ticks to make the circuit, depending. It makes for a nice stroll.”
“Be back in time for lunch?”
“She’ll hang out there in the office until we get back, just in case we need something. But she wants to go to lunch on time.”
“Stay on the path?”
“If something goes wrong, they know what route we’re taking through the ship and can find us quickly.”
“Is that likely?”
“It has never happened yet. But it’s a good practice.”
“Write if you get work?”
“Bip her if there’s anything that needs attention. The whole thing is kind of a ritual.”
We arrived at the first sensor package and Francis showed me the test port. He stuck the end of his stylus into the small hole and the sensor icon on our tablets blinked red, then green again. “Okay, next!” There were a lot of sensor packages to test, many only a few steps from the previous one. He had me use my stylus on some of them and check the display. There was not a lot to this part of the job.
“Doesn’t this get boring?” I asked after about the fiftieth package.
Francis snickered. “You have no idea—yet. But the alternative is sheer terror. You only have to live through one nasty environmental crisis to appreciate boredom,” he said with a smile. “Of course, if it’s really nasty, you don’t get to live through it so the boredom becomes moot.”
“What’re the odds?” I asked him, trying not to sound too alarmed.
“We’re good,” he said. “You have a higher probability of being murdered than of dying from lack of oxygen, for example. The key is keeping on top of things even through the boredom. As long as we keep checking, keep up with filter replacement, and stay on top of our air and water chemistry, you’re safer here than planet-side. Ships that are sloppy because it’s boring—or expensive—are the ones you want to be wary of. The
He took me down the length of the spine—the three meter diameter tube that connected the bow and stern sections of the ship—and we clicked off more sensor packages in there. It was five hundred and twenty-eight meters long and had eight airtight hatches along the way.
“It seems small for being the backbone of the ship,” I said, looking at the hexagonal spaces that we walked through.
“Yeah,” Francis agreed, “but remember that each cargo container is locked to the ones around it on the outside shell of the ship. The connections to the spine are really only needed for alignment. The real structural integrity—the reinforcements that keep the backbone from breaking—are on the outer edges of the containers.”
We finished out the tour by visiting the boat deck and engine compartments in the aft. It was the first time I had been down the spine, so I had never even visited this part of the ship in all the time since coming aboard. I was shocked by how large the ship’s boat was. Probably because it was the first time I had stood beside a shuttle craft and seen it resting on its landing struts. This one was basically an undersized planetary shuttle.
Francis saw me gawking at it and said, “They take it out for a spin a couple times a year. It doesn’t get much use because it’s expensive to run. It seats twelve but you don’t really want to ride in it with that many people. It’s a bit crowded.”
The Dynamars Auxiliaries were monsters. For months when I heard people talking about the
“How do you know if you checked all the sensor packages?” I asked Francis.
“We did them in sequence. If we’d gone out of order, the test would have gone red and then changed to a blinking green instead of a solid green. The missed sensor would have blinked yellow so you know where to go back to. That’s assuming the sensor passed. If it failed, it would go red and a blinking red would indicate a failed package test, but the missed packages would still blink yellow.”
We finished the tour at the aft engineering office and started back for environmental. We even made it back in time for lunch.
Chapter 10
ST. CLOUD ORBITAL
2352-FEBRUARY-21
The mess deck was crowded with all hands back aboard. The captain scheduled pullout for 14:00 and I knew that Cookie, Pip, and Sarah would have their hands full with people hanging around until 13:30. Francis and I stood together in line and he kept his tablet where he could see it. I glanced at mine periodically, but nothing showed up. I kept waiting for the automated systems check to pop up but it had the decency to wait until we were seated.
“Shouldn’t we go back down?” I asked as Francis settled in at a table beside Brill and Diane.
Brill said, “You can if you like, but as long as your tablet is displaying properly,” she nodded toward mine and continued, “and yours is, then you can see anything from here that you could see from there. Alerts and alarms will pop up on your tablet. We have it a bit easier than the bridge and engine room crew because of that.”
Diane asked, “Well, Ish? How’s your first morning as part of the Foggy Bottom gang?”
“Well, let’s see—it started out slogging and freeze drying sludge, then a marathon hike down the length of the ship and back up, but we’re all still breathing so I guess all in all not too bad so far.”
Francis patted me on the back. “You’re doing great.” He cupped a hand around his mouth, leaned over to Brill, but spoke loudly enough for me to hear, “I didn’t have to use the cattle prod once!”
