Tag: fiction (Page 1 of 2)

“Winter?  You still down there?”  Argon’s voice came crackling over the ship intercom.  His voice, as always, was smooth and confident, but there was a note of urgency in it that wasn’t often there.

“I’m here,” replied Winter.  “What’s going on?”

“I wanted to let you know that we’re leaving hibernation mode.  So, stay away from the engines.”  Winter sighed.  Great.  “Oh, and did you fix the diagnostic systems yet?”

“No, sir,” Winter replied.  “Not yet.  I narrowed it down to an overheating panel, though.”  There was a moment of silence before Winter plowed onward.  “With all due respect, Captain, bringing the ship’s power up will probably fry this panel.”

Another few seconds of silence, before Argon’s voice came back onto the intercom, slightly louder, slightly more aggressive than before.  “OK Winter.  Here’s the situation.  We’ve got incoming Invaders and our ship might as well be a cardboard box for all the good it does us in hibernation.  I’m sorry you’re stuck down there during this, but I can’t allow any marmots onto this ship.”

A mixed blessing, then, thought Winter.  With a marmot attack, he’d be able to get out of this sauna of an engine – only sure to get hotter once those engines were going full blast – and maybe even get a chance to nap while locked down in his room.

“Thanks for letting me know, Captain.  I’m going to head over to my room, then.  Let you military types do what you need to do.”  Winter stepped away from the panel and toward the door.  Behind him, the engines were starting to spin.

“No can do, officer.”  Argon sounded more and more apologetic with each sentence.  “We’re locking down all the doors now, and besides, we need someone in that engine room.  If that panel is overheating, we’ll need someone to contain any potential fires that break out.  Also, that engine room is one of the weak points on the ship.  We’re dispatching a team to meet you, but if an Invader latches on before they get there…”  Argon’s voice trailed off as he let his words sink in.  Winter looked over at his standard kit, which he had left hanging from the handle of now-locked door.

“You’ve got your kit, right?”

Winter clenched his jaw and closed his eyes for a few seconds.  He opened them again, confirming that this wasn’t just a bad dream, before striding over and grabbing his standard issue pistol from his kit.

“Yes, sir.  Of course I do.”

Six hours earlier, Winter stood amongst the engines, those behemoths, with his hand tentatively reaching out toward a glowing panel on the wall.  The ship shook momentarily and the momentum drove his palm directly onto the panel.

“Damn!”  He pulled his hand back quickly from the hot metal.  “Turn it off!” he shouted, over the churn of the engines.  The whine slowly died down, while Patrick Winter examined his hand.

“What happened?”  The voice came from around the corner, followed shortly by the face of Jason Kapers, partially concerned, partially amused.  “I’ll assume it didn’t work?”

“No, it’s still overheating.  And I may have burned my hand.”  Winter held up his hand for Jason to see.  Jason winced silently.

“Why don’t you take a break,” said Winter, “and go grab us something to eat.  I’ll bandage my hand and take another look at the panel.”

Winter cursed to himself as Jason ran off, closing the hatch the engine room behind him with a clang.  This was all wrong.  The ship was brand new, top of the line stuff.  It self-diagnosed problems and could fix them automatically, while the entire crew slept.  So it was unlikely enough that anything would require maintenance.

But of course, if the diagnostic systems themselves fail, they’d need manual repairs.  In a perfect storm of coincidence, the Starcruiser’s diagnostic system just happened to break when the majority of engineering team had been on a research mission on the planet’s surface.  So Winter, the only officer and “engineer” on board, had been tasked with repairing the system.

Winter had tried to argue, in vain, that he was an electronics engineer and that this problem was almost certainly mechanical, but Argon would have none of it.  An engineer was an engineer to him, with all other adjectives preceding the title as superfluous bits added on by unnecessary academy classes.

So, Winter was here in the engine room, trying to trace power lines, burning his hand, missing meatloaf day.  Winter only hoped that Jason would bring him some meatloaf instead of the distressingly hardened evaporated sandwiches they had in the vending machines around the ship.

“Damn!” Winter shouted, as he hit the malfunctioning panel with his good hand.  The cover flopped open, mockingly, as a few lights lit up inside.

Well, now, thought Winter.  That’s interesting.  That’s a lot of power being drawn into the starboard shields.

“I know what you’re thinking, but we can’t make exceptions for officers,” the bartender said as he picked up the empty tumbler, wiping the sweat from the outside and placing it bottoms-up among the other dirty cups in the sink.

“You mean I’m done, right?” Officer Winter looked up. His eyes were glazed, ever so slightly. He’d drowned his sorrows at the bar before, but he’d never stayed this late. He wasn’t sloshed; he’d gotten a late start, but it seemed that last call was, indeed, the last call.

“Not in so many words, sir, but yes. We have to clean up shop, and that means everyone needs to clear out.” Winter looked up, pleading with his eyes, his shoulders, whatever other parts of his body were still under his control. “You’ll just have to be sad somewhere else, sir.” The bartender was sympathetic, but firm. He had clearly been trained well. His eyes said I’m sorry, but the rest of him said Please just leave. I don’t want a scene.

Winter got up, tossed a few bills onto the bar to pay for his final few drinks and made his way to the door.

“When do you guys open again tomorrow?” he asked, over his shoulder, as he was almost out the door.

“1600, sir. Have a good night.”

Winter chuckled under his breath. A good night would be a miracle after the day he’d had.