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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn!\u201d He pulled his hand back quickly from the hot metal. \u201cTurn it off!\u201d he shouted, over the churn of the engines. The whine slowly died down, while Patrick Winter examined his hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened?\u201d The voice came from around the corner, followed shortly by the face of Jason Kapers, partially concerned, partially amused. \u201cI\u2019ll assume it didn\u2019t work?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, it\u2019s still overheating. And I may have burned my hand.\u201d Winter held up his hand for Jason to see. Jason winced silently.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy don\u2019t you take a break,\u201d said Winter, \u201cand go grab us something to eat. I\u2019ll bandage my hand and take another look at the panel.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But of course, if the diagnostic systems themselves fail, they\u2019d need manual repairs. In a perfect storm of coincidence, the Starcruiser\u2019s diagnostic system just happened to break when the majority of engineering team had been on a research mission on the planet\u2019s surface. So Winter, the only officer and \u201cengineer\u201d on board, had been tasked with repairing the system.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn!\u201d Winter shouted, as he hit the malfunctioning panel with his good hand. The cover flopped open, mockingly, as a few lights lit up inside.<\/p>\n
Well, now, <\/em>thought Winter. That\u2019s interesting. That\u2019s a lot of power being drawn into the starboard shields.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. \u201cDamn!\u201d He pulled his hand back quickly from the hot metal. \u201cTurn it off!\u201d he shouted, over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-fiction","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}