Vagabond, page 4
part #1 of Guild Series
Extracting himself with fumbling fingers, Erik pivoted and sat up. After stretching his arms and legs for a moment, he moved across the small cabin to pull on some clothes and step into his boots. Stumbling into the corridor, he hurried to the reactor room. He was thankful to see the radiation levels in the green as he opened the hatch, and jogged past the nuclear reactor and into the engine room at the rear of the ship. The engineer was stuffed into an open wall panel, feet jerking rhythmically as he hastily worked on something unseen.
“Fynn, what’s going on?”
“The ion thrusters have gone crazy,” a muffled voice replied. “The damn things keep firing off with no…”
The voice was cut off with a yelp as the ship jumped forward under sudden thrust, throwing Erik against the bulkhead. White flashed before his eyes as his head made contact with the unyielding wall. The force of the acceleration held him tightly to the bulkhead as he struggled to breathe against what felt like bands of iron around his lungs. Suddenly, with as little warning as they flared up, the engines died down and the G forces were lifted from his body.
Ears ringing and a trickle of blood beginning to obscure the vision in one eye, Erik pulled himself along the bulkhead toward the open panel. He could hear the engineer moaning in pain as he got closer, and kneeled down to peer into the space so he could assess the situation.
“How are you doing in there, Fynn?”
Groaning and wriggling to try to extract himself from the tight space, Jesperson cursed the engines in disgust. “I think my wrist is broken, captain. That thrust was much stronger than the previous ones, and I wasn’t in a good position to handle it.”
Erik helped pull the engineer from the confines of the access panel, gingerly taking hold of the man’s right arm and looking at a wrist already turning an ominous purple shade. “Aurora, alert Dr. Murphy that she is needed in Engineering.”
“Belay that,” Fynn called out immediately, pulling his arm away and holding it tight against his chest as he sat on the floor near the panel. “Let the crew know we’re working on the issue and they should strap into a crash couch to be safe.” He took short breaths, visibly fighting the pain in his wrist. “We can’t let anyone else move around, captain, until we get the engines repaired. It’s just risking more injuries, and probably worse ones at that.”
“You’re right,” Erik conceded, turning to look over the engine room but not seeing anything out of the ordinary. “When did the malfunction begin?”
“That was the third instance, and they seem to be happening every ten to fifteen minutes so far. The first one was minimal, but I happened to be checking a few things in the reactor room when it happened. If I’d been in my bunk like the rest of you, we might not have known anything was amiss until this last incident. They are getting stronger, and I don’t know how much more we can take.”
While the engineer was talking, Erik had grabbed the first aid kit nearby and was working to put a makeshift splint on Jesperson’s wrist, then passed the man a few painkillers to help ease the discomfort. He also wiped the blood away from the cut on his own forehead and slapped a bandage over it to prevent more bleeding from hindering his vision. That task completed, he put the kit away and helped the engineer to his feet. “Let me be your hands, just tell me what I need to do.”
“I’ll keep checking the cables and connections here, since I was almost done with them.” He pointed to the other side of the large room, motioning toward the bulkhead farthest from the reactor room. “Go over to panel 3A71 and check in there. You’ve worked with me enough to know what you’re looking for.”
Erik rushed across the room, deftly unlocked the panel and set it aside. The uncovered opening was a few feet up from the deck and only eighteen inches tall, making it a tight fit as he bent and leaned into the portal. Conduits of varying sizes snaked through the space behind the bulkhead, dozens of them with very little clearance between them. Years of experience working on the ship helped him to quickly differentiate which conduits belonged to which system on the ship; blue conduits contained wiring for the computer systems, green denoted wiring that connected the command room to everything across the ship, and so on. The red conduits contained wiring and tubing for the engines and reactor room, so he sorted quickly through the jumble to find those and retracted sections to check integrity of the cabling within, making sure to snap the sections back together when he was done.
After verifying the wiring in the panel was good, he replaced the cover and moved a few feet along to the next one. He could feel the pressure of an invisible timer counting down in his head as he fumbled through the conduits to check them. Find the red conduit, retract cover, check the wires, close cover, move to next red conduit. He knew that he should be happy to see the contents of the myriad conduits so well maintained and undamaged, but his frustration grew each time he failed to find a problem that could be causing the engine malfunctions. He was checking wiring in the fourth panel, sweat dripping down his face and back, when Fynn called out to him.
“Captain, if the pattern holds the engines are going to fire at any moment. We need to get strapped in.”
Both men quickly closed the panels they were checking, and hurried across to the three crash couches around the central consoles, where an engineering crew could monitor ship functions. Fynn strapped in at his usual couch at the central console while Erik took the couch to his left. After they were both secure, the engineer reached out with his good hand and clumsily tapped at the console to bring up displays.
“I had Aurora start timing the malfunctions after the second instance. We’re coming up on the same mark where the thrusters kicked in the third time.”
“If the malfunction is happening on a regular cycle, does that help you narrow down what the problem could be?”
The engineer considered that while tapping through several screens, and finally shrugged. “I wish it did, but I can’t think of any particular system or program that would misfire so regularly. I do have several diagnostics running this time, though, so hopefully if the thrusters fire again we’ll get some data to help track down the root cause.”
Erik tapped the console in front of him to bring it to life, and keyed in commands to check the status of the crew. The others were safely ensconced in their crash couches, and it looked like John had gone to control in case he was needed. He was pulling up the hull integrity statistics when the ion engines flared up again, pushing him back against the gel padding without warning.
Alerts began to blare as the roar of the engines grew into a deafening cacophony around the two men. Erik saw a message pop up on the console in front of him, warning that the ship was surpassing the six G threshold that he and his father had always followed as a safe limit. The number continued to climb, as did the pressure on his body as the forces increased. When the acceleration surpassed ten G’s, he felt as if he could not draw in a breath and the force against his body was so strong he could barely move at all.
The alert noises grew louder and more insistent, rivaling the noise of the engines and the rattling of the ship as it experienced forces that it had not seen in more than a decade. Just as blackness was creeping into his vision and he felt on the verge of passing out, the engine thrust plummeted to normal cruising levels and he was almost thrown forward with the release of force.
Fynn coughed weakly next to him, wheezing breaths audible over the now humming engines. Erik quickly unstrapped himself and hurried over to the engineer’s crash couch. A trickle of blood was trailing from the corner of the man’s mouth, and his face was a mask of pain.
“I think a few ribs cracked, and might have punctured a lung,” Fynn croaked out, obviously struggling with each breath. He winced through a short chuckle. “It’s not turning out to be my day at all.”
“Aurora, let Dr. Murphy know I’m bringing Fynn to the med bay.” He unstrapped Fynn, and helped the man stand and begin a shuffling walk through the reactor room.
“The diagnostics picked up on something just before that last burn,” the engineer gasped out between steps. “It looks like the malfunction is consistent, too, so you should be able to anticipate the next one.”
“Don’t worry about any of that right now,” Erik told him as he saw Sally step into the corridor ahead of them. “I’ll get back to the engine room as soon as you’re being looked at, and dig into things again.” The doctor hurried to help him support the engineer as they entered the med bay. “Anyone else hurt during that last burn?”
“Thankfully, no,” Sally Murphy told him. “You have all of our thanks for upgrading the crash couches a few years ago. Those old models would have failed for sure at the extreme forces we just experienced, and I don’t want to think how bad things would have been then.”
Once Fynn was safely ensconced in a diagnostic chair that also functioned as a crash couch, the captain hurried from the room. “Take care of him, doc,” he called as he left. He paused in the reactor room long enough to turn on the ship’s intercom. “Everyone get into your high G suits immediately. If we can’t fix the problem before the next malfunction, it’s going to be a rough one. Tuya, John, meet me in the engine room as soon as you’re suited up.”
Erik released the comms button and pulled one of the high G suits from a locker. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but he didn’t want to waste time going back to his cabin for the custom-fitted suit there. As he reached the main console, he saw a timer counting down in the upper left corner. Undoubtedly, that was when the next expected malfunction would occur.
He spoke urgently, eyes looking up. “Aurora, do an audible count when that timer hits thirty seconds, and make sure everyone gets strapped in. In the meantime, go through the diagnostics Fynn has running and see what you can find. Nothing is jumping out at me here, but he saw something that might explain the problem.”
“I am working on it now, captain,” the gentle feminine voice reassured him.
Tuya arrived seconds later, with John not far behind her. Erik pulled up a schematic of the room and pointed out the access panels that had not been checked for faulty or loose wiring yet. The two crew members set to work on checking conduits while he started running a detailed program that would shoot a signal through each wire individually looking for any faults. Concurrently, the diagnostic would run a quality control check on the programs that told the engines what to do and when to do it. Erik was sure his engineer had already checked these things, but he had to be sure before moving down the list of troubleshooting.
The audible countdown began as they worked, and Erik ordered everyone to get strapped in. As soon as Aurora announced the last second, the engines burst into life once more. Even through the protective suits, he could feel the intense pressure of the burn as it reached fourteen G’s before fading back to cruising speed. The three of them jumped from the couches as quickly as possible to get back to trying to find the cause.
“Captain,” Sally called over the intercom, breaking his concentration. “I have Fynn sedated while the nanobots are knitting his bones back together, but before he went out he said I should tell you to look at point seven. I hope you know what he meant by that.”
Erik felt a vague memory at the words, and John roared in laughter from inside the panel he was checking. Extracting himself, the pilot smiled over at his captain with a hopeful expression.
“It’s probably been too long, captain, but don’t you remember your lessons when Fynn was teaching you how the ship worked?”
He grunted as the memories returned of the many weeks spent pouring over the engines and programs that controlled them when he was a teenager. “Oh yeah, he had that list of the most important things to remember when working on his delicate engines.”
“Fynn’s Twelve Points of Important Knowledge, he calls them,” John said, grinning at the memory. “And if my memory is good, point seven was…”
“Never forget the tertiary power coupling,” both men pronounced together as Tuya looked on with a raised eyebrow. Fynn had always been adamant that one layer of redundancy was not enough for safety, and insisted on putting in a second backup for all of his systems. It was an extra expense that very few ships took on, but it had saved the Vagabond from serious troubles a few times over the years.
They hurried over to the ceiling access panel where the power couplings connected to the main engine power input, Erik jumping up to release the panel while John pulled a small ladder from a nearby locker.
Erik climbed the ladder as Aurora started the next verbal countdown warning that another malfunction was expected within thirty seconds. “Get in the couches,” he ordered John and Tuya, wanting to know they were safe in case this was not the fix.
“You need to get strapped in yourself, Frost.” Tuya said urgently as she settled into the gel cushioning and started to connect the restraints.
Ignoring her, he reached up to push aside the thick cables of the main and secondary power lines, and began to smell the carbon from a burnt coupler. The tertiary coupling was singed and melted in some parts, with the cable to either side of it scored black. It was a small miracle that whatever had caused the damage had not spread to the tightly packed cabling around it or to the engine itself.
“Five,” the soft voice of the AI said.
He grabbed both sides of the metal coupling collar, and twisted with all his strength. At first, it seemed that the damage was too great to allow the parts to turn.
“Four.”
He felt his grip beginning to slip on the smooth metal.
“Three.”
With a jerk, the collar began to rotate.
“Two.”
The two cables, now separated, hung loosely with the damaged couple tapping against the bulkhead.
“One.”
Erik jumped down from the ladder and ran to the empty crash couch, connecting the restraints in a silence broken only by a soft hum of the ion thrusters working at normal capacity. Tense minutes followed as the three crewmates waited with bated breath for another wild thrust. As time ticked by without a malfunction, they began to relax and hope that the damaged power coupler truly was the cause of the problems.
Erik waited through another full countdown before breathing a deep sigh of relief and giving the all clear for everyone to leave the crash couches. He asked them to keep the high G suits on until they could be absolutely sure the issues would not return. He, John, and Tuya began a series of intensive diagnostic tests and continued checking all the wiring to rule out any problems there. Once all the diagnostics passed successfully, Tuya set to work replacing the tertiary power cables that had been damaged, while John dug through storage closets to find a replacement coupler.
Several hours after being woken from his short sleep, Erik surveyed the fixes to the damaged parts and nodded with satisfaction. “It looks like we got that fixed just in time.”
“Definitely,” Tuya said, motioning at the central console. “I looked over Fynn’s notes about the force of the thrusts, and if the engines fired another time on the same sliding scale we would have been looking at more than twenty three G’s of thrust, the maximum power for our engines.”
John winced at the thought of so much pressure on their fragile human bodies. “Any one of us could have stroked out with that much sustained force. I’ve experienced as much before in emergency situations, but that was always short bursts of a second or two.”
“I heard horror stories about long maneuvers with almost as much acceleration when I was on a frigate,” Erik told them, struggling to get out of the high gravity suit now that the danger was past. “When the Coalition and Syndicate were actively fighting each other a few decades back, it was apparently a common occurrence when two of their ships engaged in battle. The lieutenant I served under was a grizzled old veteran, and he’d been through a couple of firefights himself. He said the crew was forced to live in the compression suits, and still the injury lists after each engagement were filled with people who suffered broken bones or burst blood vessels in a hard burn.”
The three finished putting the engine room in order, and then went their separate ways. Tuya headed to the cargo bay to check the pod and containers, John retreated to his pilot’s station in the control room to run checks on how far the engine bursts might have pushed them off course, and Erik checked in on the engineer in the med bay. Learning from Sally that the nanobots were still at work making repairs to the broken bones and punctured lung, he finally returned to his cabin, wearily undressing and crawling back into his bunk. With the adrenaline wearing off, he felt as if he had just done twenty miles on the rec room spinner. Sleep claimed him almost as soon as he closed his eyes.
Four days after the excitement of the malfunctioning engines, Fynn woke from sedated slumber to find his young captain sitting at the bedside. The clunky nanobots had finally completed the repairs to his body earlier in the day as well as they could, and the doctor had extracted the small amount of black sludge that remained from the expended devices. The remnants were stored away to be sold at a future port for recycling purposes; the metals and plastics that the nanobots were created from could be melted down and reused to make more of the medical marvels. That small income helped offset by a small margin the purchase of an expensive replacement set of nanobots.
“Was it Seven?” the engineer asked in a croaking voice.
“Never forget the tertiary power couple,” Erik said with a smile. “You were right as always, old friend.”
The engineer gave a wan smile and licked dry lips. “I’m glad you remembered my lessons. I seem to recall a moody young man that spent more time moping and playing games on his tablet than paying attention to what I said.”
