toss of my head and the helmet slid into place and I locked it down on the first try.
They took turns showing me things like the radio, patch kit, and the instrument panel mounted on the sleeve.
Cookie pointed to the air supply timer. “This is for emergency use only as it has just one stan of air. Use it just to get to a soft-suit or a lifeboat. You cannot survive long in it so you must be sure you know what’s going on around you if you ever have to put it on.”
Pip patted me on the back. “Next time you won’t be the dead one.”
“How often do we have these drills?”
“At least once every ninety days. Sometimes more.”
I took off the suit, folded it in the approved manner, and put the used indicator across the top before hanging it with Pip and Cookie’s. Several more were in the locker.
I pointed to the hangers with red tags. “What happens to the used ones?”
Cookie answered, “Someone from engineering will collect and reset them for use. Never take a used emergency suit because you won’t know how much air is left in it. You can’t change out of them in a vacuum and it would cost your life if you needed forty-five ticks and only got thirty.”
It was a sobering thought and I took it to heart.
As I closed the panel, I reached for my tablet. The ship’s schematic had an overlay showing all the emergency suit lockers. I made a mental note of the one nearest my bunk.
Cookie in the meantime turned to Pip. “You will be doing evening clean up alone for the next week, Mr. Carstairs.”
Pip nodded. “Aye aye, Cookie.” He may have tried to look contrite but he still had a big grin on his face. So did I for that matter. It wasn’t something to joke about, but still, it struck me as funny. Personally, I think Cookie left the galley then so he could have a good laugh, too.
Funny as it was, I was getting a little tired of being in the dark so I went to Beverly after dinner clean up. I found her reading in her bunk.
“Bev? Can you help me?”
She looked at me over the top of her tablet. “Dunno. Whatcha need?”
“What’s the story with these drills? I’m getting tired of being caught off guard by them.”
She chuckled. “Well, they’re supposed to be a surprise, but if you’ve never been through them, I can see why you’d be frustrated.”
“It’s making me a bit crazy. I’m okay with fire and suit drills now, but are there others coming up that I should know about?”
“It’s in your tablet under ship emergency procedures but I think the only one you haven’t been through is lifeboat drill. Do you know what your boat assignment is?”
I shook my head.
“Look up your record. It’s down near the bottom.”
I pulled out my tablet and found the notation. “It says boat four.”
“Odd to port, even to starboard,” she said. “Four should be the second boat back from the bow. You know where the boat deck is, right?”
I nodded. “I’ve seen the hatches under the track, but I didn’t look too closely at them.”
“Next time you’re in the gym take a look. Make sure you know where boat four is.”
“That’s it?”
She thought for a moment before saying, “There are some specialized drills, damage control and battle stations and such, but we only do those once in forever. Fire, suit, and lifeboat are the big three and we’re required to do each of them once a quarter, so get used to ’em.”
“Thanks, Bev. I’ll remember.”
I climbed up into my bunk and, on a hunch, I went through
We were still a week out of Darbat Orbital when I arranged to visit environmental during the afternoon break. I’d been working through all the instructional materials on engineering, but I hadn’t been able to score a passing grade on the practice tests. There wasn’t any one thing I was missing, but rather a kind of diffuse inability to keep everything straight, particularly with the environmental stuff. All the scrubbers, filters, cleaners, and recyclers kept getting jumbled up in my head. I contacted the section chief on my tablet and made an appointment for a tour.
I knew the Environmental Section Chief, Spec One (Environmental) Brilliantine Smith, from seeing her in the mess line. She was easily the tallest person on the ship. I’d guess her height at something over two full meters. I’d also seen her in the gym and sauna. She didn’t carry an extra gram of fat on her frame. The best description I could think of was, willowy. She kept her chocolate-brown hair short like the rest of the crew and had a kind of generic galactic citizen, appearance, except that she had to duck to pass through most of the hatches on the ship. She walked with a kind of stoop, learned no doubt through hard experience.
Walking into environmental for the first time was like stepping into wet gauze. The smell was unmistakable, but I didn’t really find it objectionable. It was kinda funky and green smelling. Not quite fishy, but there was a hint of that, too.
Smith watched me enter and nodded approvingly. “You’re okay.”
“Excuse me, sar?”
She grinned. “No, sar, for me, Ish. I’m no more officer than Cookie.” She grinned even more. “Just taller. They call me Brill, among other less flattering appellations, I’m certain.”
“I-see,” I said, although I only got about half of what she was saying.
“You’re okay because you didn’t wrinkle your nose when you came in.”
“That’s good?”
She nodded with a wink. “Between the humidity and the smell, about half the people that come in here turn around and walk right back out. The humidity’s from the matrices and the smell is from the algae.”
“Okay, that much I understand. But there is still a lot I’m confused by.”
“How far have you gotten in the instructional material?”
“All of it, actually, but I can’t seem to pass the practice test. Things I get right on one, I miss on the next and around and around. I can’t seem to keep the scrubbers and the filters straight.”
“Filter the water and scrub the air down, mix water and algae to make it all brown.” She chanted it in sing- song with a smile.
“Wow, I actually understood that,” I said with surprise as it slowly penetrated my brain.
“First practical piece of advice we give people. Water gets filtered and air is scrubbed. Then they get mixed together. It starts with running the water through a collection of different media to filter out finer and finer impurities. Eventually, it goes into the scrubbers where it keeps the algae matrices wet. That’s probably where your brain gets confused because the scrubbers work on both air and water.”
“Okay, that makes sense so far. So, the air doesn’t get filtered?”
“Actually, it does, but we don’t have a separate filtering system for it. Not like the water. There’s a simple electrostatic field that the air is passed through when it first comes into the system. It snags all the dust and other particulates out of the air. Technically, that’s not a filter because a filter is a physical barrier, like when you make coffee. The weave in the paper has holes that allow the infused water to pass without permitting the grounds themselves. It’s the same idea with the water system although the chemical processing is a bit more complex.”
I nodded. “And because the air is passed through a field, and not a physical barrier, you call it scrubbing instead of filtering?”
“Exactly.” She nodded and smiled. “The scrubbers also grab any odd gases that make their way into the system. Those are usually byproducts from work on the ship like trace amounts of free esters, ozone, and so forth. The goal is to keep the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and trace gases consistent. The air coming into the system is high on carbon dioxide and low on oxygen so we feed it into the wet algae matrix where the algae absorb the carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Have you ever noticed that the berthing areas don’t smell like a locker room?”
