Idle Hands and High-Voltage Playthings
24 Jan 2018Terra Sheer
There's a certain practical elegance to the Lakon Type 9. Brute-big, built out of clean lines and uncomplicated geometries, ready-made for a singular purpose. As straightforward a barge of a ship as ever there was. And yet she's a moving study in contrasts. For her size, her living spaces are surprisingly cramped. Her guts are an ad-hoc scramble of redundances and half-thought designs. Like most ladies her size, she looks considerably better when she's not stripped down naked.We throw the last of the wall cladding into the corridor adjoining the common room. Flimsy beige and gunmetal panels of prefab, every single damn one of them imprinted with the Lakon logo. Even the little ones. And what opens up before me is a roadmap to mayhem.
I trace the cables and ductwork along the length of the room, half-seeing past the blueprints of my own recollection. My great uncle flew a Lakon heavy freighter. I grew up in a ship like this. There are differences ... random bits and bobs here and there where an engineer ran into a problem he couldn't figure out how to competently solve ... but the tried-and-true fundamentals are the same. Lakon freighters are always built around the same spine, as though they start with a Type-6 and just keep making it fatter.
There are three redundant trunk lines, tying all of the ship's power systems to the core, running up and down the length of this room. Port, starboard and dorsal -- as wide-spread as they can get while still being bound within the outlines of an imaginary Type-6, grafted into the middle of the ship. Their thick shielding makes this room an ideal storm-shelter. I remember too many days spent cooped up in a room like this while my uncle sniffed out neutron stars and UV Cetis. On days like that, boredom begets discovery. Idle hands, they say, are the devil's plaything. And if this ship is anything like that one, those three redundant trunks should all tie together right about....
Here.
"Hand me that wrench." I reach back to grasp for it, keeping my sight pinned to that little junction of delightful possibilities.
He doesn't hand it to me. "What are you going to do?"
"Just give me the damn wrench!"
He's hesitating. I can't, for the life of me, understand why. Nothing I could do would leave us more screwed than we are already. As a former dock hand, he ought to know that.
"Look. You're right. If we go out there now, he'll tear us apart with the turrets. So we've got to shut down the turrets. The power distributor hooks into the reactor at this junction. If I can overload it here, the surge will put every system on the ship into standby, and he'll have to clear the short and reboot to get the main power back online."
"How are you going to do that?"
"Will you just give me the goddamn wrench?"
I don't need to look at him to see the look on his face. I've seen enough looks like that already. But after a second, he relents and hands me the wrench.
I don't hesitate. I wedge the head of the wrench around the big red supply cable in the middle of the power distributor delta. Conveniently non-insulated. God, Lakon engineers suck.
"H-hey." Tiny stutters. That's kinda cute. He stutters when he's alarmed. "H-hey! Wait! That wire's live!"
I crank the wrench over. Its handle hits the drain, and instantly fuses with a blue flash and a shower of sparks. I feel the crack before I hear it. The air curdles with the stink of ozone. The lights cut out. I hear the circulator fans power down; feel the life bleed out of the ship around me.
And then Tiny's shoulder hits me in the gut. I go tumbling, wheezing. It takes me a second to get my senses back about me, and another to claw myself an anchor on the doorframe.
"What the hell...." I can't get the rest of it out. My breath is gone ... but I hope the look I give him makes up for it.
"You were going to electrocute yourself!" he says.
"You idiot." Breathe. Ow. God. Broken ribs, maybe? Punctured spleen? Acute traumatic hypochondria? "We're floating weightless in a space ship. We're not grounded." Though, to be fair, now that I think about it ... given the quality of Lakon engineering, maybe we could have been.
The lights come back on, dim and flickering. The air circulators grind back to some listless pantomime of life, barely operating under emergency battery power. Tiny glances around, and very, very slowly, the corners of his mouth bend into a smile.
"Come on." I grope my way toward the corridor, trying not to seem too doubled-over. "It won't be long before he tries to reboot and figures out there's still something lodged in the distributor junction. It's probably better we're not here when he comes to investigate."
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