RE: [Situation Vacant] Reactor Chief Engineer
12-30-2019, 10:36 PM (This post was last modified: 12-31-2019, 11:16 AM by Dartz.)
12-30-2019, 10:36 PM (This post was last modified: 12-31-2019, 11:16 AM by Dartz.)
Part 4: A Step Back in Time
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Every alarm light lit up at once - a thousand indicators flashing, yellow, orange and red, each one out of sequence of the others. A dozen alarm tones sounded, mingling into one solid cacophony of sound. A circular representation of the reactor torus flickered red, warning of a hundred sensors giving incorrect readings. Indicator dials showing injector and diverter positions flashed warnings that control signals had been lost. A diagram of the reactor hydraulic circuit flashed in time with a dozen dead sensors. The turbine continued to coast to a stop. Main generators showed no power.
It took less than a heartbeat for Jet to comprehend it all. “What the hell?” she managed to say.
The reactor operator sat back in his seat. Keisuke Morita took a moment to clear his glasses and take a few, quick breaths. His hands tried a few switches on the console in front of him, getting nothing but red lights in response.
He read from a growing list of red lines on the monitors in front of him.
“No signal on 48 volt control circuit. Reactor vault pressure increase. Neutron growth rate increase. Neutron growth rate over limit. Power growth rate over limit. Sector Power over limit. Global power over limit. Reactor vault pressure exceeding limit. Neutron rate zero. Field pinch warning…..”
“I’ve no flow…” Tasha, the hydraulic operator, interrupted from the second console. “High water, both steam generators. Low water, both. High pressure. No pressure. No signal. Pump failure - what the hell?”
Another alarm kept her from continuing - this one loud, shrill and distinctive. Four sharp tones repeating in sequence.
Jet silenced it with a single switch.
“Fire alarm. Reactor. Turbine. Turbine interconnect,” said Keisuke. “It’s on fire.”
The words barely made it out of his mouth.
“Emergency Batteries!” ordered Jet. Her voice rattled off the wall.
“Nothing. No response.” Kurt Meier answered from the power control console. The man looked at her for another option, then at the two operators sat beside him. Sweat had already begun to stain his white suit shirt. “That’s not possible. None of this is possible.This has to be instrumentation.”
His blues eyes begged for an answer from anyone. Something more than the one possibility nobody dared voice.
“Instrumentation,” Jet repeated. In that moment, everything made sense. Only one thing could knock out every single sensor at once. “Field collapse must’ve caused an EMP and blew out the power circuits. Start the generators for reactor three - I’ll use the controls for three to switch the bus to four’s pump service line.”
“That’s not an approved procedure!” Meier objected. A flash of terror shone in his wide eyes.
As if things could possibly be made worse.
“Do it!” Jet snapped back. “We need water in that core or we’re looking at a disaster.”
The reactor either needed water, or was in such a condition that it didn’t. Better to have it and not need it, then need it but not have it.
“I’ve make-up water from the reserves,” said Tasha. Her eyes focused on the few indicators in front of her that still worked. She took a moment to brush a few strands of dark hair from her face with a gloved hand. “Tank level’s going down but I can't see any in the reactor.”
Meir slumped in the generator operator’s seat. “If the relief valves are open, boiloff and gravity flow will cool the shutdown reactor.”
“Did it shut down?” Tasha asked.
“....Probably.” answered Keisuke “The field was getting unstable.”
He didn’t sound convinced.
A comm phone on the wall chimed, begging for attention. Jet, by virtue of being closest, grabbed it with one hand.
“It’s Jet. I’m in Four.”
“What’re you guys doing down there?” Anikas’ voice carried a flurry pf panic. “I got a call from Lun - there’s been a loud bang in the landing bay. I’ve a fire alarm in the reactor.”
“The test failed. We blew the magnets on the reactor. The backblast started a fire.”
Jet sounded more annoyed, than frightened.
“I’ll get fire brigade on the way.” .
A dreadful sensation crawled under Jets armour - a thousand legs prickling across what’d once been her skin.
Something more complex had happened, but she couldn’t put words to it.
“Tell them to wait. Send an exocomp first. Scout it out”
“Right. OK. Exocomp despatched.”
“The magnets didn’t blow“ A voice pulled her out of the call
“What?” Jet blinked.
“Last data shows them intact.” Keisuku pointed at the figures on the monitor in front of him.
“The sensors mustn’t’ve registered it before they were destroyed.” Kurt said.
“The trigger signal?”
“The detonators were still charging.” Keisuke clarified.
A moment passed in the room. Everyone understood what it meant. Nobody wanted to voice it - not out loud.
“Something else. Hydrogen…..” said Tasha, looking between the other three for someone to confirm her best hopes, someone to offer another simple explanation. “We did everything right. The reactor was coming under control. Something strange has happened. ”
She looked to her screen for an explanation - in case something had changed from the previous moment. Nobody said a word. The control panel continued to alarm.
“I’ll go to three,” said Jet, after a few moments. “Flood the core. Keep trying to figure this thing out. Use the last few seconds of data - frame by frame if you have to - figure out what failed first - where it started.”
Keep them working. Keep everyone from panicking.
Jet left the room with that, letting the armoured security door seal shut behind her. A few moments peace allowed her to gather her thoughts and try and ignore a muse insisting on feeding details of a forty year old disaster.
At least it gave her ideas.
Running footsteps interrupted her.
Kim Thsombe, from reactor one. She wore the traditional sammy outfit - the same white leotard, blue thigh-length skirt and red thigh boots that’d become fashionable because they could be made so cheap and comfortable.
Only a single band on her upper arm marked her as a reactor operator.
She stopped, doubled over, bracing herself against her knees, gasping for breath.
“What the fuck….” she gasped. “... are you doing in there?”
“We had the blow the magnets,” Jet said, quickly. “We’ve a fire.”
Kim looked up, still struggling for breath.“....if there’s a fire in four….”
“Ignore the manual. Disable the automatic shutdown if you have to. Do what you have to do to keep power up.”
“Is it bad?”
“The reactor’s scrap and we’ll be getting 3.6 Roentgen jokes for the next six months from every clever idiot orbiting the sun.” In the back of her mind, Jet already sensed otherwise. “Keep the lights on,” she added.
Kim nodded. “We’ll do that.”
Kim didn’t run back - she walked. Jet took a moment to wonder if she shouldn’t have been a bit more serious. It didn’t matter - so long as the other reactor didn’t shut itself off and leave them high and dry with no power to solve the problem, it’d be ok.
Beside the door to the control room three hung a warning sign. Restricted to Authorised Employees. Unauthorised entrance is grounds for immediate termination.
It was never clear whether that was in a corporate sense, or a Schwarzenneger sense. American libertarians could be weird like that.
Jet took a few breaths then opened the door to reactor three’s control room. Compared to the living chaos in four, three seemed eerily dead.
Nobody waited inside. Every screen sat dark. The entire system had been shut down and left waiting. The starter lockout key had long been lost - Jet instead lifted control panel cover, reached in through the circuitry and turned the contactor by hand.
Relays thumped into place. Computers and control circuits chirped as they ran through their startup sequence. Jet took the time to raise Lun using her own onboard comms.
“Alekseeva…” she answered after a half second.
“Jet here. What happened.”
“We felt a large shock. Lights from the roof collapsed to the floor below.”A pause. Lun didn’t sound concerned, but then when it came to serious matters, she could slip into that Soviet deadpan where it could be difficult to tell if the world could be ending, or if it might just be raining outside. “The gantry crane has been knocked off its tracks. No casualties.”
A dreadful thought came to Jet’s mind.
“The crane’s off its tracks?”
“Yes,” Lun confirmed.
The crane ran on a track built on top of a retaining wall. The retaining wall separated the turbine for reactor four from the landing bay.
If that wall had moved? Jet felt her mouth go dry at the possibility.
“Do you’ve a dosimeter aboard?” she asked. “A radiation dosimeter.”
“Yes,” Lun answered, still absolutely unfazed. The slightest mention of radiation would have anyone else running for the nearest airlock.
Jet waited.
Around her the control systems for Unit three came to life. Glass-screen monitors showed the entire system in a cold and stable shutdown. Fire alarms stood silent. Radiation detectors showed only the usual levels for an idle core.
She remembered them being higher when they first bought the station. At least the bulkhead wall between the reactors had held up.
Lun pinged her internal comm. Jet pounced on it.
“210 microroentgen per second,” Lun reported.
“210,” Jet repeated, momentarily relieved. “That’s not good, but it’s not a disaster.”
Not great, not terrible, her mind teased. Still, she couldn’t escape what it meant. This thing had just gotten so much worse. She felt her breath quicken.
She had to know how much worse.
“I need someone to check that wall for damage,” she said. “Have them wear a spacesuit. Bring a dosimeter.”
“Is this….” Lun began.
Chernobyl. The word went unsaid.
“....I don’t know yet. It might just be a steam leak.”
The relief valves had been opened. Jet already suspected otherwise. But no use admitting it until it’d been confirmed.
“I’ll do it myself,” said Lun. “We will make ready to sail. The ship will be ready to depart within the hour.”
“Thanks.”
The line cut, leaving Jet alone with the control system.
Jet took a moment to orient herself, tracing through the diagrams printed on the panels to find the correct switches. Beside them a single indicator lamp warned of an active fire somewhere in Reactor four.
An electromechanical lock blocked her from switching power to the dead circuits.
She made a note to permanently disable the permissives and interlocks in the remaining reactors if she ever got the chance. Some self-righteous engineer had made it impossible to do what needed to be done to save the system.
Jet lifted the panel and broke the lock, throwing the metal contactor to the linoleum floor.
For a half second, the indicator lights showed green - long enough for Jet to believe that maybe it had been an electrical issue
A single alarm belled as the circuit breakers tripped on a dead short.
Jet tried a second time.
She received the exact same answer.
Jet growled inside her throat. Of course it wouldn’t cooperate.
She tried a third time.
One of the breakers tripped for a third time. The other malfunctioned and refused to close, giving an overheat warning.
“Fuck it!”
Jet couldn’t escape the truth. Whatever’d happened - she’d never hear the fucking end of it. Fucking self-righteous morons.
She sat on the console, drumming over a thousand possibilities in her mind, her worst fears already making a nest in the back of her head.
A Boskone attack would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
She took a breath.
Fuck it anyway
It couldn’t be escaped. Putting her head in the sand would just get everyone killed.
Resigned to her fate, she left the control room of reactor three - accidentally taking the reinforced handle of the door with her. She tossed it to the floor with an annoyed grunt.
The important thing was to act. It might still be simple.
It took her a few moments to walk back to the door to four. The door opened to voices struggling with a system that complained at every action they took. The main alarms had been silenced. The panicked lightshow from the control panels continued.
Keisuke stood beside Tasha, both of them focused on the console in front of them. Kurt still sat at turbine control, a ring binder on his lap unfolded with printed hydraulic diagrams.
“Number two dry run trip,” said Keisuke. “Transfer pumps offline.”
Tasha looked at him, then down at her screen. “Reserve water tanks empty. Kims crew are bitching at me for taking all theirs.”
“That’s everything,” said Kurt, with the finality of a pronounced death sentence
“Still nothing in the reactor,” said Tasha. “Nothing anywhere.”
Jet glanced at the main screens. Nothing critical had changed. A few more sensors had dropped offline. The fire had to be spreading.
The door closed behind her. Everyone looked to her. She looked at each in turn, at the fear moulded into their faces.She felt it rise inside her once again.
Only one thing could save them.
“What happened to the turbine?”
Kurt blinked owlishly, taken aback for a heartbeat. Her glanced at the consoles beside him. “It completed rundown normally”
“Oil? Coolant?” Jet demanded.
“Oil level nominal. Hydrogen pressure nominal. Steam pressure, zero. Condensers - loss of vacuum.”
As normal as possible, considering the circumstances. It didn’t matter to him. She could see him wondering why it mattered to her.
Her stomach dropped. Everyone in the room mirrored the change in her expression.
“There’s radiation in the hangar,” she said, looking at the still-alarming panel, rather than at them . “One of the walls has shifted. I think something’s happened to the reactor.”
“Happened?” Keisuke blinked.
“Happened? You mean, you think it exploded?” Tasha’s gaze pierced.
Jet hadn’t wanted to be the one to say it.
“That is not possible!” Kurt snapped, offended at the idea. Already he’d rose to his feet, daring her to match him. “An explosion like this is not possible with a fusion reactor.”
Jet felt the sudden urge to shut him up permanently.
“It doesn’t matter what’s possible,” said Jet, focusing on keeping her voice even, despite the adrenaline buzzing in her body. She looked at each of them in turn. “Just what’s happened. There’s been a large explosion, a fire, and we’ve a radiation leak.”
“How much?” Kurt demanded. “How much radiation? That’ll tell what’s happened”
“It’s not clear yet,” Jet said.
Not quite the three point six answer. It really could be minimal still.
“A rupture in a steam line, or on the discharge header.” Kurt pronounced. His fingers flicked through the binder, searching for the right image. He smirked , flipping the the binder upright to show the diagram. “This here.” he placed his finger on it. “If the pressure dropped too quickly it would flash-boil the water in the steam generators. That would cause a water hammer, and blow the generator apart. That could do something like this.”
Tasha nodded. “Those generators were overflowing right before we lost our controls.” She looked to Keisuke, then to Jet for any hint of disagreement.“They were full of water.”
Anything that wasn’t the reactor could be dealt with.far easier than the reactor itself.
Jet glanced at the reactor monitors. No signal from any steam generator. No signal from any discharge header. No signal from the core.
Like nothing was there at all.
It felt like wishful thinking. It’d sounded like desperate thinking.
Lun pinged her comm. For a moment, she considered keeping it private - not to completely extinguish the one spark of hope that’d glimmered in the room - before forwarding it through to the reactor comm system.
Whatever the answer, they needed to hear it.
“Jet here.”
“I’m at the wall.” Luns voice emerged from the speaker, tinny and thin, chased by the rush of air through a space suit ventilator. “There is a crack in the wall where two panels meet. One of the panels has moved forwards by seven centimetres. Smoke is rising from the crack as a steady stream.”
“Steam?” Kurt seized on it.
“Smoke.” Lun corrected, her voice firm. “Dark. Under pressure.”
All four in the room drew in a breath at once.
“Radiation reading is…” Lun paused. The sound of a finger tapping on piece of plastic carried through the speaker. “....off scale.”
“How high is the scale?” Kurt demanded.
“One thousand microroentgen per second,” Lun answered. The first shiver of unease entered her voice. “I can taste metal. I can’t stay here.”
“That’s...” Tasha breathed
The same model of old Soviet dosimeter, giving the exact same off-scale reading it’d done forty years before. Three point Six Roentgen per hour.
“Don’t stay,” said Jet. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
“We’ll keep getting the ship ready. If it gets worse, we’ll abandon the ship”
“Alright. Use your judgement.”
The line went dead.
All three sat, staring at Jet, looking for the answer - looking for the diamond bullet to make the problem go away.
Of course Jet would know. Jet was the BNF. The one in charge. The one running the room.
Jet felt the panic rising in the room, the gnawing sensation that they sat on the edge of a disaster, a Pompeii, a Crystal Osaka - another fucking Chernobyl - and only one person could solve it.
With no idea what to do, and knowing something had to be done, she turned her attention to the problem that could be solved, something to keep everyone’s attention focused on.
Jet felt her own finger tap on the comm panel for a moment, filling the air with a sharp rapping sound.
The idea came a moment later. She keyed in the code for the station’s main control room
“Anika,” Anika answered after three rings, her voice coming sharp, pulled tight by a new panic. An alarm could be heard in the background, begging for attention. “I just got a smoke alarm in the main landing bay!”
Already thick enough to set off the fire detectors.
No point in sugar coating it.
“The containment wall in the landing bay has been damaged. Smoke is leaking through it from the fire in the reactor compartment. The smoke is radioactive.”
There was a pause. The alarm continued to sound.
“...this is… “ Anika began.
The most important thing was to seem confident - that she knew what she was doing - even if she didn’t.
“If that wall comes down it will be a disaster.” Jet said. She took a breath. “I need a team to shore it up. Have them get high-range dosimeters and breathing apparatus from the reactor section.” She paused, remembering that she had no idea just how radioactive that smoke was. It might be the worst kind of death sentence. “Volunteers only. Tell them about the radiation. Tell them the smoke is potentially lethal if they inhale it. Tell them if that wall comes down we’re looking at a Chernobyl. Let them make their own decision on whether to go.”
Anika breathed.
“I… understand.”
Jet considered the fact that she might’ve just condemned a dozen people to a brutal death - or a lingering sickness. It sat on her shoulders, heavy, even when weighed against the chance of the wall coming down and condemning dozens more.
She wasn’t even sure if she’d thought about it in those terms. It just seemed like the right thing to do in the moment.
“What do we do?”
A simple question.
In the moment, Jet had no idea. Nobody in Fenspace had ever faced anything like it. Few human beings alive had ever faced anything like it.
The big options swam for a half second. Evacuate the station. Fight the fire. Let it burn out.
She had the idea that A.C. would’ve been half way through whipping up some form of handwaved expanding foam - something to contain the radiation, smother the fire and support the whole structure from the inside.
Probably not possible, not with the materials Frigga had. Not worth wasting time on. It’d only get fucked up anyway.
Ben would’ve been halfway towards getting everyone off - loading every available shuttle and starship. Frigga had Lun, and some private shuttles - not enough for over five hundred. And God only knew how long a rescue would take to get organised.
Especially with the landing bay flooded by radiation.
Noah Scott would’ve actually been able to pay for the upgrades the reactor needed without having to prove the were needed, so no fucking accident at all there.
Jet had only herself, and Frigga. And a problem in the moment that seemed far too large to be considered by either.
The answer in the moment sat idle on the master display. Solve the problems they could tackle - step by step.
Use them as a ladder.
The turbine still registered normal. Full of flammable oil. Full of flammable hydrogen coolant. The turbine hall wall had already been damaged. What to do seemed obvious, considering what she’d thought to check a few moments before.
“Drain the turbine oil.” she instructed. “Dump the coolant. If either of them explode, they might take out that damaged wall.”
Tell them what must be done. More importantly, tell them why - what would be achieved, what would being prevented. It was a lesson she'd been taught years before. It worked in wartime.
All three settled - with at least something to focus on. Sitting at the turbine operators’ console Kurt had the controls to his hand. He worked through the switches, cancelling the alarms and overriding the permissives.
“If the remote doesn’t work,” he said. “It’ll have to be done manually. In the turbine hall.”
Full of radiation. Potentially a death sentence.
Tasha took a breath, settling back into her chair. “I know where they are.”
Jet considered that she might’ve been able to do it faster than both. She herself did have some level of radiation resistance - enough to tolerate spaceflight. How high did that go?
For obvious reasons, it’d never been tested.
There were other options. Relay teams. Expending exocomps. It depended on how bad things were in that room. Humans could survive high radiation fields better than most electronics. For a few minutes, at least.
Jet stared at the valves on the panel display, showing normal readings. Her mouth went dry. Her heart crawled up her throat. She preferred not to find out. They had power. Each valve reported its position. She couldn’t conceive of a reason beyond sheer spite why they wouldn’t.
Each light turned green in sequence as each valve motor began to turn.
“Danke Gott,” Kurt breathed. “It’s draining”
Jet felt relief cool through her body, chased by the smallest flash of triumph.
Keisuke smirked. “What else can go right?” Three pairs of eyes locked onto him. He shrunk in place “Worth a try,”
Jet felt herself smile momentarily. One little problem solved. The next one had to wait.
“There’s an exocomp on its way to the reactor. We’ll know what to do next, once we see exactly what’s happened”
All three in the room seemed to agree with that. So long as they thought she knew what she was doing.
That bought her time to figure it out. Time to get the station council together and bring them up to speed. Time not to rush in and get someone - or everyone - killed.
In truth, in the moment with time and space to actually think, all she could think about, is what people would say when they found out.
-----
---
Every alarm light lit up at once - a thousand indicators flashing, yellow, orange and red, each one out of sequence of the others. A dozen alarm tones sounded, mingling into one solid cacophony of sound. A circular representation of the reactor torus flickered red, warning of a hundred sensors giving incorrect readings. Indicator dials showing injector and diverter positions flashed warnings that control signals had been lost. A diagram of the reactor hydraulic circuit flashed in time with a dozen dead sensors. The turbine continued to coast to a stop. Main generators showed no power.
It took less than a heartbeat for Jet to comprehend it all. “What the hell?” she managed to say.
The reactor operator sat back in his seat. Keisuke Morita took a moment to clear his glasses and take a few, quick breaths. His hands tried a few switches on the console in front of him, getting nothing but red lights in response.
He read from a growing list of red lines on the monitors in front of him.
“No signal on 48 volt control circuit. Reactor vault pressure increase. Neutron growth rate increase. Neutron growth rate over limit. Power growth rate over limit. Sector Power over limit. Global power over limit. Reactor vault pressure exceeding limit. Neutron rate zero. Field pinch warning…..”
“I’ve no flow…” Tasha, the hydraulic operator, interrupted from the second console. “High water, both steam generators. Low water, both. High pressure. No pressure. No signal. Pump failure - what the hell?”
Another alarm kept her from continuing - this one loud, shrill and distinctive. Four sharp tones repeating in sequence.
Jet silenced it with a single switch.
“Fire alarm. Reactor. Turbine. Turbine interconnect,” said Keisuke. “It’s on fire.”
The words barely made it out of his mouth.
“Emergency Batteries!” ordered Jet. Her voice rattled off the wall.
“Nothing. No response.” Kurt Meier answered from the power control console. The man looked at her for another option, then at the two operators sat beside him. Sweat had already begun to stain his white suit shirt. “That’s not possible. None of this is possible.This has to be instrumentation.”
His blues eyes begged for an answer from anyone. Something more than the one possibility nobody dared voice.
“Instrumentation,” Jet repeated. In that moment, everything made sense. Only one thing could knock out every single sensor at once. “Field collapse must’ve caused an EMP and blew out the power circuits. Start the generators for reactor three - I’ll use the controls for three to switch the bus to four’s pump service line.”
“That’s not an approved procedure!” Meier objected. A flash of terror shone in his wide eyes.
As if things could possibly be made worse.
“Do it!” Jet snapped back. “We need water in that core or we’re looking at a disaster.”
The reactor either needed water, or was in such a condition that it didn’t. Better to have it and not need it, then need it but not have it.
“I’ve make-up water from the reserves,” said Tasha. Her eyes focused on the few indicators in front of her that still worked. She took a moment to brush a few strands of dark hair from her face with a gloved hand. “Tank level’s going down but I can't see any in the reactor.”
Meir slumped in the generator operator’s seat. “If the relief valves are open, boiloff and gravity flow will cool the shutdown reactor.”
“Did it shut down?” Tasha asked.
“....Probably.” answered Keisuke “The field was getting unstable.”
He didn’t sound convinced.
A comm phone on the wall chimed, begging for attention. Jet, by virtue of being closest, grabbed it with one hand.
“It’s Jet. I’m in Four.”
“What’re you guys doing down there?” Anikas’ voice carried a flurry pf panic. “I got a call from Lun - there’s been a loud bang in the landing bay. I’ve a fire alarm in the reactor.”
“The test failed. We blew the magnets on the reactor. The backblast started a fire.”
Jet sounded more annoyed, than frightened.
“I’ll get fire brigade on the way.” .
A dreadful sensation crawled under Jets armour - a thousand legs prickling across what’d once been her skin.
Something more complex had happened, but she couldn’t put words to it.
“Tell them to wait. Send an exocomp first. Scout it out”
“Right. OK. Exocomp despatched.”
“The magnets didn’t blow“ A voice pulled her out of the call
“What?” Jet blinked.
“Last data shows them intact.” Keisuku pointed at the figures on the monitor in front of him.
“The sensors mustn’t’ve registered it before they were destroyed.” Kurt said.
“The trigger signal?”
“The detonators were still charging.” Keisuke clarified.
A moment passed in the room. Everyone understood what it meant. Nobody wanted to voice it - not out loud.
“Something else. Hydrogen…..” said Tasha, looking between the other three for someone to confirm her best hopes, someone to offer another simple explanation. “We did everything right. The reactor was coming under control. Something strange has happened. ”
She looked to her screen for an explanation - in case something had changed from the previous moment. Nobody said a word. The control panel continued to alarm.
“I’ll go to three,” said Jet, after a few moments. “Flood the core. Keep trying to figure this thing out. Use the last few seconds of data - frame by frame if you have to - figure out what failed first - where it started.”
Keep them working. Keep everyone from panicking.
Jet left the room with that, letting the armoured security door seal shut behind her. A few moments peace allowed her to gather her thoughts and try and ignore a muse insisting on feeding details of a forty year old disaster.
At least it gave her ideas.
Running footsteps interrupted her.
Kim Thsombe, from reactor one. She wore the traditional sammy outfit - the same white leotard, blue thigh-length skirt and red thigh boots that’d become fashionable because they could be made so cheap and comfortable.
Only a single band on her upper arm marked her as a reactor operator.
She stopped, doubled over, bracing herself against her knees, gasping for breath.
“What the fuck….” she gasped. “... are you doing in there?”
“We had the blow the magnets,” Jet said, quickly. “We’ve a fire.”
Kim looked up, still struggling for breath.“....if there’s a fire in four….”
“Ignore the manual. Disable the automatic shutdown if you have to. Do what you have to do to keep power up.”
“Is it bad?”
“The reactor’s scrap and we’ll be getting 3.6 Roentgen jokes for the next six months from every clever idiot orbiting the sun.” In the back of her mind, Jet already sensed otherwise. “Keep the lights on,” she added.
Kim nodded. “We’ll do that.”
Kim didn’t run back - she walked. Jet took a moment to wonder if she shouldn’t have been a bit more serious. It didn’t matter - so long as the other reactor didn’t shut itself off and leave them high and dry with no power to solve the problem, it’d be ok.
Beside the door to the control room three hung a warning sign. Restricted to Authorised Employees. Unauthorised entrance is grounds for immediate termination.
It was never clear whether that was in a corporate sense, or a Schwarzenneger sense. American libertarians could be weird like that.
Jet took a few breaths then opened the door to reactor three’s control room. Compared to the living chaos in four, three seemed eerily dead.
Nobody waited inside. Every screen sat dark. The entire system had been shut down and left waiting. The starter lockout key had long been lost - Jet instead lifted control panel cover, reached in through the circuitry and turned the contactor by hand.
Relays thumped into place. Computers and control circuits chirped as they ran through their startup sequence. Jet took the time to raise Lun using her own onboard comms.
“Alekseeva…” she answered after a half second.
“Jet here. What happened.”
“We felt a large shock. Lights from the roof collapsed to the floor below.”A pause. Lun didn’t sound concerned, but then when it came to serious matters, she could slip into that Soviet deadpan where it could be difficult to tell if the world could be ending, or if it might just be raining outside. “The gantry crane has been knocked off its tracks. No casualties.”
A dreadful thought came to Jet’s mind.
“The crane’s off its tracks?”
“Yes,” Lun confirmed.
The crane ran on a track built on top of a retaining wall. The retaining wall separated the turbine for reactor four from the landing bay.
If that wall had moved? Jet felt her mouth go dry at the possibility.
“Do you’ve a dosimeter aboard?” she asked. “A radiation dosimeter.”
“Yes,” Lun answered, still absolutely unfazed. The slightest mention of radiation would have anyone else running for the nearest airlock.
Jet waited.
Around her the control systems for Unit three came to life. Glass-screen monitors showed the entire system in a cold and stable shutdown. Fire alarms stood silent. Radiation detectors showed only the usual levels for an idle core.
She remembered them being higher when they first bought the station. At least the bulkhead wall between the reactors had held up.
Lun pinged her internal comm. Jet pounced on it.
“210 microroentgen per second,” Lun reported.
“210,” Jet repeated, momentarily relieved. “That’s not good, but it’s not a disaster.”
Not great, not terrible, her mind teased. Still, she couldn’t escape what it meant. This thing had just gotten so much worse. She felt her breath quicken.
She had to know how much worse.
“I need someone to check that wall for damage,” she said. “Have them wear a spacesuit. Bring a dosimeter.”
“Is this….” Lun began.
Chernobyl. The word went unsaid.
“....I don’t know yet. It might just be a steam leak.”
The relief valves had been opened. Jet already suspected otherwise. But no use admitting it until it’d been confirmed.
“I’ll do it myself,” said Lun. “We will make ready to sail. The ship will be ready to depart within the hour.”
“Thanks.”
The line cut, leaving Jet alone with the control system.
Jet took a moment to orient herself, tracing through the diagrams printed on the panels to find the correct switches. Beside them a single indicator lamp warned of an active fire somewhere in Reactor four.
An electromechanical lock blocked her from switching power to the dead circuits.
She made a note to permanently disable the permissives and interlocks in the remaining reactors if she ever got the chance. Some self-righteous engineer had made it impossible to do what needed to be done to save the system.
Jet lifted the panel and broke the lock, throwing the metal contactor to the linoleum floor.
For a half second, the indicator lights showed green - long enough for Jet to believe that maybe it had been an electrical issue
A single alarm belled as the circuit breakers tripped on a dead short.
Jet tried a second time.
She received the exact same answer.
Jet growled inside her throat. Of course it wouldn’t cooperate.
She tried a third time.
One of the breakers tripped for a third time. The other malfunctioned and refused to close, giving an overheat warning.
“Fuck it!”
Jet couldn’t escape the truth. Whatever’d happened - she’d never hear the fucking end of it. Fucking self-righteous morons.
She sat on the console, drumming over a thousand possibilities in her mind, her worst fears already making a nest in the back of her head.
A Boskone attack would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
She took a breath.
Fuck it anyway
It couldn’t be escaped. Putting her head in the sand would just get everyone killed.
Resigned to her fate, she left the control room of reactor three - accidentally taking the reinforced handle of the door with her. She tossed it to the floor with an annoyed grunt.
The important thing was to act. It might still be simple.
It took her a few moments to walk back to the door to four. The door opened to voices struggling with a system that complained at every action they took. The main alarms had been silenced. The panicked lightshow from the control panels continued.
Keisuke stood beside Tasha, both of them focused on the console in front of them. Kurt still sat at turbine control, a ring binder on his lap unfolded with printed hydraulic diagrams.
“Number two dry run trip,” said Keisuke. “Transfer pumps offline.”
Tasha looked at him, then down at her screen. “Reserve water tanks empty. Kims crew are bitching at me for taking all theirs.”
“That’s everything,” said Kurt, with the finality of a pronounced death sentence
“Still nothing in the reactor,” said Tasha. “Nothing anywhere.”
Jet glanced at the main screens. Nothing critical had changed. A few more sensors had dropped offline. The fire had to be spreading.
The door closed behind her. Everyone looked to her. She looked at each in turn, at the fear moulded into their faces.She felt it rise inside her once again.
Only one thing could save them.
“What happened to the turbine?”
Kurt blinked owlishly, taken aback for a heartbeat. Her glanced at the consoles beside him. “It completed rundown normally”
“Oil? Coolant?” Jet demanded.
“Oil level nominal. Hydrogen pressure nominal. Steam pressure, zero. Condensers - loss of vacuum.”
As normal as possible, considering the circumstances. It didn’t matter to him. She could see him wondering why it mattered to her.
Her stomach dropped. Everyone in the room mirrored the change in her expression.
“There’s radiation in the hangar,” she said, looking at the still-alarming panel, rather than at them . “One of the walls has shifted. I think something’s happened to the reactor.”
“Happened?” Keisuke blinked.
“Happened? You mean, you think it exploded?” Tasha’s gaze pierced.
Jet hadn’t wanted to be the one to say it.
“That is not possible!” Kurt snapped, offended at the idea. Already he’d rose to his feet, daring her to match him. “An explosion like this is not possible with a fusion reactor.”
Jet felt the sudden urge to shut him up permanently.
“It doesn’t matter what’s possible,” said Jet, focusing on keeping her voice even, despite the adrenaline buzzing in her body. She looked at each of them in turn. “Just what’s happened. There’s been a large explosion, a fire, and we’ve a radiation leak.”
“How much?” Kurt demanded. “How much radiation? That’ll tell what’s happened”
“It’s not clear yet,” Jet said.
Not quite the three point six answer. It really could be minimal still.
“A rupture in a steam line, or on the discharge header.” Kurt pronounced. His fingers flicked through the binder, searching for the right image. He smirked , flipping the the binder upright to show the diagram. “This here.” he placed his finger on it. “If the pressure dropped too quickly it would flash-boil the water in the steam generators. That would cause a water hammer, and blow the generator apart. That could do something like this.”
Tasha nodded. “Those generators were overflowing right before we lost our controls.” She looked to Keisuke, then to Jet for any hint of disagreement.“They were full of water.”
Anything that wasn’t the reactor could be dealt with.far easier than the reactor itself.
Jet glanced at the reactor monitors. No signal from any steam generator. No signal from any discharge header. No signal from the core.
Like nothing was there at all.
It felt like wishful thinking. It’d sounded like desperate thinking.
Lun pinged her comm. For a moment, she considered keeping it private - not to completely extinguish the one spark of hope that’d glimmered in the room - before forwarding it through to the reactor comm system.
Whatever the answer, they needed to hear it.
“Jet here.”
“I’m at the wall.” Luns voice emerged from the speaker, tinny and thin, chased by the rush of air through a space suit ventilator. “There is a crack in the wall where two panels meet. One of the panels has moved forwards by seven centimetres. Smoke is rising from the crack as a steady stream.”
“Steam?” Kurt seized on it.
“Smoke.” Lun corrected, her voice firm. “Dark. Under pressure.”
All four in the room drew in a breath at once.
“Radiation reading is…” Lun paused. The sound of a finger tapping on piece of plastic carried through the speaker. “....off scale.”
“How high is the scale?” Kurt demanded.
“One thousand microroentgen per second,” Lun answered. The first shiver of unease entered her voice. “I can taste metal. I can’t stay here.”
“That’s...” Tasha breathed
The same model of old Soviet dosimeter, giving the exact same off-scale reading it’d done forty years before. Three point Six Roentgen per hour.
“Don’t stay,” said Jet. “There’s nothing more you can do.”
“We’ll keep getting the ship ready. If it gets worse, we’ll abandon the ship”
“Alright. Use your judgement.”
The line went dead.
All three sat, staring at Jet, looking for the answer - looking for the diamond bullet to make the problem go away.
Of course Jet would know. Jet was the BNF. The one in charge. The one running the room.
Jet felt the panic rising in the room, the gnawing sensation that they sat on the edge of a disaster, a Pompeii, a Crystal Osaka - another fucking Chernobyl - and only one person could solve it.
With no idea what to do, and knowing something had to be done, she turned her attention to the problem that could be solved, something to keep everyone’s attention focused on.
Jet felt her own finger tap on the comm panel for a moment, filling the air with a sharp rapping sound.
The idea came a moment later. She keyed in the code for the station’s main control room
“Anika,” Anika answered after three rings, her voice coming sharp, pulled tight by a new panic. An alarm could be heard in the background, begging for attention. “I just got a smoke alarm in the main landing bay!”
Already thick enough to set off the fire detectors.
No point in sugar coating it.
“The containment wall in the landing bay has been damaged. Smoke is leaking through it from the fire in the reactor compartment. The smoke is radioactive.”
There was a pause. The alarm continued to sound.
“...this is… “ Anika began.
The most important thing was to seem confident - that she knew what she was doing - even if she didn’t.
“If that wall comes down it will be a disaster.” Jet said. She took a breath. “I need a team to shore it up. Have them get high-range dosimeters and breathing apparatus from the reactor section.” She paused, remembering that she had no idea just how radioactive that smoke was. It might be the worst kind of death sentence. “Volunteers only. Tell them about the radiation. Tell them the smoke is potentially lethal if they inhale it. Tell them if that wall comes down we’re looking at a Chernobyl. Let them make their own decision on whether to go.”
Anika breathed.
“I… understand.”
Jet considered the fact that she might’ve just condemned a dozen people to a brutal death - or a lingering sickness. It sat on her shoulders, heavy, even when weighed against the chance of the wall coming down and condemning dozens more.
She wasn’t even sure if she’d thought about it in those terms. It just seemed like the right thing to do in the moment.
“What do we do?”
A simple question.
In the moment, Jet had no idea. Nobody in Fenspace had ever faced anything like it. Few human beings alive had ever faced anything like it.
The big options swam for a half second. Evacuate the station. Fight the fire. Let it burn out.
She had the idea that A.C. would’ve been half way through whipping up some form of handwaved expanding foam - something to contain the radiation, smother the fire and support the whole structure from the inside.
Probably not possible, not with the materials Frigga had. Not worth wasting time on. It’d only get fucked up anyway.
Ben would’ve been halfway towards getting everyone off - loading every available shuttle and starship. Frigga had Lun, and some private shuttles - not enough for over five hundred. And God only knew how long a rescue would take to get organised.
Especially with the landing bay flooded by radiation.
Noah Scott would’ve actually been able to pay for the upgrades the reactor needed without having to prove the were needed, so no fucking accident at all there.
Jet had only herself, and Frigga. And a problem in the moment that seemed far too large to be considered by either.
The answer in the moment sat idle on the master display. Solve the problems they could tackle - step by step.
Use them as a ladder.
The turbine still registered normal. Full of flammable oil. Full of flammable hydrogen coolant. The turbine hall wall had already been damaged. What to do seemed obvious, considering what she’d thought to check a few moments before.
“Drain the turbine oil.” she instructed. “Dump the coolant. If either of them explode, they might take out that damaged wall.”
Tell them what must be done. More importantly, tell them why - what would be achieved, what would being prevented. It was a lesson she'd been taught years before. It worked in wartime.
All three settled - with at least something to focus on. Sitting at the turbine operators’ console Kurt had the controls to his hand. He worked through the switches, cancelling the alarms and overriding the permissives.
“If the remote doesn’t work,” he said. “It’ll have to be done manually. In the turbine hall.”
Full of radiation. Potentially a death sentence.
Tasha took a breath, settling back into her chair. “I know where they are.”
Jet considered that she might’ve been able to do it faster than both. She herself did have some level of radiation resistance - enough to tolerate spaceflight. How high did that go?
For obvious reasons, it’d never been tested.
There were other options. Relay teams. Expending exocomps. It depended on how bad things were in that room. Humans could survive high radiation fields better than most electronics. For a few minutes, at least.
Jet stared at the valves on the panel display, showing normal readings. Her mouth went dry. Her heart crawled up her throat. She preferred not to find out. They had power. Each valve reported its position. She couldn’t conceive of a reason beyond sheer spite why they wouldn’t.
Each light turned green in sequence as each valve motor began to turn.
“Danke Gott,” Kurt breathed. “It’s draining”
Jet felt relief cool through her body, chased by the smallest flash of triumph.
Keisuke smirked. “What else can go right?” Three pairs of eyes locked onto him. He shrunk in place “Worth a try,”
Jet felt herself smile momentarily. One little problem solved. The next one had to wait.
“There’s an exocomp on its way to the reactor. We’ll know what to do next, once we see exactly what’s happened”
All three in the room seemed to agree with that. So long as they thought she knew what she was doing.
That bought her time to figure it out. Time to get the station council together and bring them up to speed. Time not to rush in and get someone - or everyone - killed.
In truth, in the moment with time and space to actually think, all she could think about, is what people would say when they found out.
-----
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.