More Money than Brains

 

Cover image adapted from a photo by Usman Haider, via Unsplash

“Lew, can you keep an eye on the reactor temperature while I ramp the voltage on these capacitors?” I had my hand on the knob and was looking into a mess of conduits and tubes that were untidily jammed into a service tunnel. Down at the bottom, through the mess, I could just see the capacitors and their connections. We would need to get them charged and the heat damage inside the service tunnel had me worried that the insulation might be torched.

It was several seconds before I heard Lew say, “Okay, Aric.” He must have nodded, and then noticed I wasn’t looking at him.

“Here we go,” I said, and turned the knob slowly clockwise, a few degrees at a time.

“It should be fine,” came a gruff voice from behind me. I sighed—quietly. We should have left him in cryo. “You can go faster than that,” he barked.

“Mr. Waller—”

“Captain Waller.”

I hoped he couldn’t see me roll my eyes. In all my years as a salvager, he was the third person to insist on that title, and the way he acted, he hadn’t affected my prejudices any. Short version: He was an ass.

“Captain Waller, if we turn up the voltage on these capacitors too quickly, we risk dumping a bunch of energy into the nearby components. It could do more damage. We’re testing the insulation, that’s the whole point.”

“Bah,” he scoffed. “Just turn it back off if you see a spark.” He was apparently ignorant of the fact that electricity could move faster than human hands, or that a large, easily-visible spark might mean that significant damage had already been done.

I turned the knob a few more degrees. Still no signs of danger. I sniffed the air, paying attention for any hints of an ozone smell, and nothing yet. Still, I thought it would be wise to wait a few seconds in between every turn of the knob, and watch for any changes.

We had turned up to this little private yacht just a few hours ago. It was floating without propulsion a few light-years from the nearest inhabited system, though still within the main communications network, far from any Picker activity. The request had come to me from his own family. Apparently, when the propulsion systems failed, he had herded them into the lifeboat and sent them off on their own, with instructions to bring help, but not very good instructions on how to fly the lifeboat.

According to them, he figured he was in no serious danger, so he would stay with the ship and wait for rescue in one of the cryo pods. His family had appeared at my office one afternoon and convinced me this was probably going to be an easy job, but apparently I need to set up a personality quiz or something to weed out guys like this.

Anyway, a few dozen hours later, we arrived in the right area and picked up on his beacon. No sweat. We found the ship with its reactor at minimum output, its atmospheric support systems turned off, its computers on standby, and the owner—excuse me, captain—in one of the cryo pods. So, we docked our ship, the Kingfisher, and went inside. We started out by bringing the atmosphere processors back online and warming up the captain.

It wasn’t until a bit later that the scope of the problem became painfully clear.

Practically every system in the ship had been neglected. Almost every minor system was reading yellow, meaning past scheduled maintenance, or orange, meaning minor defects detected and decreased operational efficiency. I’ve flown with a few minor systems in yellow in a pinch before, but this was unlike anything I had ever seen, at least as far as neglect went. Seriously.

As Lew and I tried to understand what the hell had actually happened, we realized it was not just a propulsion failure, but a bunch of other minor failures that snowballed into a propulsion failure. Waste heat was building up in weird places, stressing components that aren’t supposed to be stressed that way. Ventilation and organization were both ridiculously poor, leading to several components failing in a chain, which in turn put more stress on other components, and caused even more failures.

In the end, the primary cooling duct was so full of gunk that the system shunted the extra heat to a secondary duct, which did two things: One, it knocked out the temperature balance of the main thrusters, disrupting the ionization of the propellant and shutting them down. Two, that secondary duct had a crack that faced the housing of one of the crystal rods that were very important for jumping into Shelf space, and the damn thing had split open. So, we would need to fix both, but other things needed attention first, or we’d just break them again.

We thought that waking up the ship’s owner would help us figure things out—at least, where to start—but unfortunately Captain Waller seemed to have brought more money than brains out into deep space. So far, all he had done was hinder us by loudly second-guessing practically everything we did.

I sighed again. The knob was up about two-thirds of the way, and still no obvious effects down at the capacitors, and no ozone. “Lew, how is the reactor temperature?” I called out.

“Uh... About 15% above normal, but still within the nominal range. You see anything yet?”

“No, not yet. There’s a lot of stuff in the way, but I can see them well enough down there.”

“In the way?” I heard Waller’s voice and steps as he got closer. “Let me help you with that.”

I barely got out “No, wait—” before he grabbed hold of some of the wires and tubes in the service tunnel with both hands, I guess to push them out of the way, and I saw the cracked insulation on some of the wires flake off.

Normally, a pressure suit has metallic threads woven through certain parts of the suit to provide some protection from electric currents. They’re designed to handle fairly large currents, actually, bringing them from likely contact areas (especially hands) to a grounding point on standard magnetic boots.

However, in this case, I turned my head and saw a pattern of dim, cherry-red lights flare up at his waist for a second, and realized that either the currents were so large that they had just burned through the suit’s safety threads, or maybe the currents weren’t too bad, but the suit had (big surprise) been as poorly maintained as the rest of the ship.

Waller had just become a conduit for a few hundred rich, chunky volts. He couldn’t let go, his muscles locked from the current. It was likely that his suit had just been poorly maintained, but I couldn’t take that chance with myself. If I touched him, I might get enough current to lock me up, too.

I fell back and Lew just sat there, his mouth gaping in disbelief, either from what was happening or from Waller’s amazing stupidity. Bill had been leaning against a wall a few meters away, and her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. I saw a carbon fiber rod secured to the wall near her for just this kind of situation, and pointed and yelled. “Bill! That carbon rod! Now!”

She shook her head and glanced both ways, finally seeing the rod. She took one step and wrenched it out of its socket and threw it to me.

I grabbed hold of it with two hands and passed it between Waller’s arms. With a twist and a push, levering against the nearby wall, I managed to shove him free of the wires.

“Cutting power to that section, now!” Lew shouted. Apparently he had regained his senses when I yelled at Bill, and was doing exactly the right thing, albeit a few seconds too late.

All the lights in engineering went dark.

I switched on my headlamp and grabbed the collar of Waller’s suit. He wasn’t conscious. I stripped the suit off of his upper body and looked at his hands. They weren’t too burnt. Maybe he was okay. However, when I put my ear to his mouth and nose, I got worried.

I couldn’t hear him breathing.

Bill and Lew had gotten their headlamps on by now, and were trying to figure out what to do next. “Bill, first aid kit and defib,” I shouted. “Lew, damage report.” They both nodded. Bill started to head to the door, when suddenly a klaxon went off. She halted, not sure what it meant.

“Lew! What’s that alarm?” I had to scream to be heard over the noise. At least the klaxons were working well.

“Fire on the bridge!” He answered, and I cussed. The extra current draw must have burned out something up there.

“I’ll take care of the bridge!” I yelled. “Bill, get the first aid kit and take care of Waller! Lew, get me that damage report and see if you can get anything running again!” I walked to the door and, once I reached it, I pushed off and floated down the hallway toward the bridge.

Fires are always trouble in an enclosed space, and even more so on a ship. Most obviously, they can spread and trap and burn crew members. Or, only slightly less bad, they can do catastrophic damage to other systems. But the real insidious danger is when they overwhelm the reactive getters that normally convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen, to the point that the automatic flush cycle doesn’t refresh them anymore. If that happens, the whole ship can suffocate even after the fire is out, because they might not even realize the getters aren’t working until it’s too late.

On the way to the bridge, I grabbed a handheld fire extinguisher from a little nook on the wall. Also, I grabbed my helmet off of my belt and locked it into place over my head. I wouldn’t want any of the extinguisher to get into my face, especially in zero-g—I might breathe it in. The door to the bridge had closed automatically, and I tapped a command into the keypad to slide it open just a little bit so I could look inside. I stood off to the side to avoid any rush of heat or air when the door slid open.

I was relieved to find that there was only a very small rush of heat and air, and it tapered off quickly. I glanced inside and saw that the fire looked fairly small, limited to the inside of one little service panel on the floor, but you never know. I pressed the emergency fire suppression button on the panel, but nothing happened. Bad maintenance again, I supposed. Resigned to fighting the fire myself, I opened the door the rest of the way and stepped inside carefully, making sure to walk slowly with my magnetic boots. Seconds were important, but I didn’t want to risk losing control of my movement in this situation, not even for an instant.

I pulled back the door to the service panel, which thankfully wasn’t locked, and just unloaded that extinguisher into the hole. The flames flickered and seemed to go out, but I walked back over to one of the consoles and cut the power to all non-essential bridge systems anyway. Then I went back over to the service panel and sprayed another big clump of fire suppressant into it. The extinguisher was more than half empty, now, so hopefully that was it.

I would have collapsed to the floor if I hadn’t been in zero-g. Instead, I let my muscles relax and kind of half-floated there, tethered loosely to the floor by my boots, as I caught my breath. I listened for the sounds of anything else burning in the room, but there was nothing but silence. I closed my eyes and took a few more deep breaths, and listened carefully. Nothing. Then, after a minute, I turned on my communicator.

“Bill, Lew,” I gasped, “the fire’s out. No major damage.” I stopped to breathe a few more times. “Report.”

Lew’s voice came back first. “Ship systems are stable, some minor additional damage, and we’ll have to splice those cables, but other than that, we’re okay.”

“Waller is breathing and his heart is beating regularly again,” Bill said.

“Get him to a bed or a stretcher or something, strap him down, and make sure he doesn’t get up until we’re done here.”

She choked back a sarcastic laugh. “Gotcha.”

“I’m going to double-check everything here on the bridge... make sure nothing else is smoldering. Then I’ll be back to engineering to help.”

I got back to work.

*        *        *

And so, twelve hours later, we managed to get that ship running again. Waller wasn’t happy when he came to and found himself effectively tied to a bed, but he didn’t have enough energy to complain much. He tried to say something about his authority as captain, but we just ignored him and left the room. Thank goodness those doors are thick.

As for the extra time and materials it took to fix the damage he did by deciding to do his best impression of a carbon-film resistor—believe me, he paid for it.

I remember asking Bill in the office, “How do I itemize ‘fixing stupid broken cables damaged by idiot captain?’”

She laughed, and reminded me how.

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Thanks for checking out my short story! I wanted to write this to give people a short, free introduction to my Derelict Project characters and world. This one is short and I tried to make it funny. If you want to see more of these characters in more serious situations, you might consider checking out Missed Contact or The Hyacinth Rescue. Thanks for reading!