4021.13.08
55 problems today-
No, 56. This engine issue brought it up to 56.
56 problems today but most of them were easy to fix, so how many problems did she actually have? 5? 7?
Early in her career Helena had internalized a lesson from one of her engineering instructors: focus on quality rather than quantity, especially when it came to your to-do list. By which he meant you needed to learn how to compartmentalize the different glitches and problems you would be dealing with day to day. Because there were always problems, but they weren’t all the most dire or the most timely.
And now as chief engineer she had the ability to delegate the easiest and more trivial problems that cropped up. She had put in her time as a fresh-faced recruit running around all over a ship, racing from fore to aft or up and down a dozen decks, crawling through ducts and clinging to the outside of the ship; now it was time to let others run themselves ragged as they put out countless little fires.
Which, unfortunately, meant that the big fires fell on her shoulders. Such as problem 56 on the day’s itinerary: the random and inconsistent output of Warp Engine 3. On paper one of the three engines acting jittery, its output never going above 75% of what was asked of it and falling as low as 2% at the worst (and jumping around to all points in between sporadically, sometimes hitting 15 different rates in as little as two minutes), would have made people start mentally mapping the route to the nearest escape shuttles, but it really wasn’t as bad as civilians or newbie crewmembers might fear.
The ship didn’t have three engines because it needed that much power to carry out its routine missions. On an ordinary mission – say, escorting an ambassador or helping evacuate a space-station threatening to blow up – the three engines wouldn’t need to put out a quarter of their collective potential. When time became a factor and the ship had to travel a significant distance they might need to coax 50% of all three, and a couple times Helena saw it go up to 80% cumulative.
But ordinarily, such as right now, they didn’t even need three engines, other than for keeping the ship on a steady course. And for the moment the ship didn’t need to get anywhere in a hurry. Idling in the Kenzarin System between escort missions, Helena was hoping for a day or two more to fully work out Engine 3’s problem.
Step one was a routine diagnostic check. There were over 4,300 components to just one warp engine, along with 650-plus connections to other parts of the ship’s systems, but after more than a thousand years of interstellar travel the possible list of what could go wrong with an engine was pretty well detailed. A diagnostics run would isolate any red flags or just irregularities and then it was simply a matter of going through the checklist to fix them.
4021.13.12
“Vimes, engine status.”
Helena bit down on a curse, while also biting down on a mouthful of ikatanori (her second dish this… morning? Was it still morning, it was hard to keep track of the time when she got lost in her work). Quickly swallowing the squid-like meat soaked in a kind of sweet and sour jelly, she pressed the comms button and replied
“Diagnostics is still proceeding, Captain.” Then, silently to herself, she added ‘Don’t ask for an estimate, don’t ask for an estimate.’
“Do you have an estimate on when it will be fixed?”
Shit!
“If we keep eliminating the possible problems…” What was a reasonable amount of time that wouldn’t make it seem like she was inept or lazy? “Around si- seven hours?”
“Keep me posted.” And the comms died.
Helena had gotten a reprieve, but she wasn’t going to relax any time soon. Shoveling the rest of her bowl of stew down her throat, she then grabbed another roll of yatun bread and bit off half of it. When she got anxious she ate, and for two days now Helena had been increasingly anxious.
It had been okay at first. The diagnostics run had raised several red flags and a couple dozen irregularities; not optimal, naturally, but identifying so many problems made her feel hopeful that fixing them (or even just some of them) would bring the engine back to proper operations.
But as she and her crew worked down the list more irregularities popped up, addressing one red flag raised another (or another two), and the engine’s output remained inconsistent and sporadic.
For the rest of the first day and into the second that was fine. Given the significance of the engines Helena and her crew taking their time and being thorough would be received by others (namely the captain) better than if she had to report that there was an unpredictable disruption to the engine but oh hey, we toggled this switch and pulled out and plugged back in this one node and now it’s all fine.
But on the second day the ambassador and his entourage conducting trade negotiations reported back to the Bos that their work was finished and they now needed transport to the Abraiq system. Helena had assured Captain Howard they could make the trip in a matter of days even with Engine 3’s unreliability – they couldn’t accelerate constantly but it wasn’t a long journey and Helena was hoping to have the problem fixed soon anyway – and that was good enough.
At the time. Now they were two days and change into their trip, not yet halfway to Abraiq, and from what Helena had heard the ambassador was getting peevish about their slow travel speed. So he was probably coming down on the captain, and now the captain was going to come down on Helena.
“High and mighty fool doesn’t even need to get there for a few more days, the ambassador from Grusk is traveling from halfway across the galaxy,” she swore to herself, chomping down the rest of the bread and belching slightly. The meal hadn’t satisfied her, but she tore her attention away from food for the moment and checked the latest updates from her crew.
Because the engines were big and complicated she had several crewmembers spread throughout the engine itself and the adjoining area, plus two software analysts checking all the programs related to the engine’s operations in case this was a coding error. Helena, at the moment, was in her office, overseeing their reports as they came in (and, of course, directing the rest of her subordinates to take care of any other problems that came up, to monitor the ship’s various systems, and to do their normal routine).
There had been two updates while she had been talking to the captain, both negative. The repairs suggested were performed, the issues cleared from the list of problems, but the engine wasn’t fixed.
And oh look at that, another red flag just popped up.
Frustrated and hopeless and anxious and all sorts of other things, Helena ordered a third bowl of stew and bread, adding in some uaffen cake this time. Food helped bury most of her unwelcome emotions, usually.
4021.13.15
A new update from the crewmate in section 5-UT, deck 3:
‘Hard reboot conducted. System reset. No information lost. Reestablishing gyroscopic controls.’
Five minutes later, a new update from the same crewmate:
‘Gyroscopic controls restored, but now the connection to the HVAC systems in sector 8 is offline.’
Solve one problem, another takes its place.
They were almost at Abraiq, no thanks to Helena and her crew. The captain’s patience was worn thin, Helena and her immediate subordinates were well aware of that, but at least Captain Howard was understanding enough that the engineering crew was working as hard and fast as it could to get Engine 3 up to snuff.
It had been a few days since Helena had gotten a full night’s sleep. A nap here or there kept her alert throughout the long days, but what was keeping her mood stabilized was her old standby: food. The chief engineer was trying to restrict herself to only three meals a day, but she was intentionally not keeping track of all the snacks she was eating through morning, afternoon and evening. Nor was she admitting to herself how loose her definition of ‘snack’ was becoming; it strained the word to the breaking point to think a full huuba fish on a bed of rice with a side of kelp salad drowned in heavy dressing was a ‘snack.’
But in Helena’s mind it was all a blur. Her focus was on the engine, on the dozens of problems that had sprung up in the wake of her team solving the dozens of problems that had come before, and then dealing with the dozens of other problems that came up when they fixed those problems.
At least their arrival at Abraiq would mean another few days of orbiting in place. If they needed to shut the engines down entirely and reboot everything – every damn thing – they could. And all it would cost was the planetside R&R Helena was looking forward to…
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