How I Got Here: "Trip Wire"
16 Apr 2024Columbuss
Commander Justin Estok. Stardate 15-APR-3310."...I'd prefer not to die today..."
I frantically reach for the next rung on the ladder, pulling myself up to the next and the next, scrambling to climb as fast as I can. Looking back down, the lift tube is a void of deep black even the head lamps on my helmet can't penetrate. The strap over my shoulder begins to roll off from the added weight attached to it. Halting the climb for a moment, I grab the strap and roll it back up over the shoulder of my suit and wedge it under the shoulder plate.
It's amazing what fear and adrenaline can do to the human body. A person could have a life time of experience in doing anything but the second their life is on the line, suddenly, it's as if they're doing it for the first time. Climbing this ladder back toward the center of the station, it's as if the feet of my suit have suddenly grown too big to fit between the rungs. The same ladder I used to climb down, into the bowels of the station, suddenly, it feels like this is the first ladder I've ever seen in my lifetime.
"How does that heat look kid?!" I say into the helmet comm.
"I'd get a move on sir," Brandson shouts back. "That reactor core isn't going to hold much longer."
"How long do I have?!"
"No way to tell boss," he yells back. "The temperature in there is climbing fast."
"If I'm not outside in five minutes you get to the cockpit and punch it," I say. "Do you understand me?!"
"We're leaving together or not at all," Finn's voice chimes in. "That being said, I'd prefer not to die today so move it!"
The walls of the station bang and moan as the piping embedded into the rock begins to expand and contract. Right now, in the deepest parts of this station, the fission reactor powering this place, it's boiling over. It's starting to melt down and the station is reacting accordingly. Piping and pressure release valves are beginning to burst from the pressure of trying to cool it down. Long rusted and under maintained heat regulators are starting to smoke. These fission reactors, they're ancient technology. You only find them in places, or stations, that someone had to build on a budget. They're heavy, expensive and inefficient, particularly for use in space. Anyone with half of a credit to spend went with fusion. Always fusion.
Climbing another rung, I glance back down at the computer core attached to the strap over my shoulder dangling down by my waist. It bobs and rattles, bashing against the hard exterior of the suit as I climb. To think, I might melt into radioactive slag, all for this little box and it might not even make it back to the ship in one piece.
Rewind fifteen minutes. Before I was climbing the lift tube ladder. Before my impending death. Before I removed the station's computer core, setting off a trap that triggered a station wide nuclear disaster.
Fifteen minutes ago I was powering up the station. Fifteen minutes ago I was standing in front of the reactor core control room terminal watching the cursor blink at the end of a thought. Fifteen minutes ago I wasn't about to melt into radioactive waste.
"START UP PROTOCOL SEQUENCE INITIATED. STAND BY FOR STATION WIDE REBOOT..."
Standing in front of the terminal, the lights above my head flick on. The familiar hum of electricity flows through the long dormant cables and conduits of the station, breathing life into the walls, hallways, tunnels and floors. Somewhere, deep inside the vast, unseen guts of this derelict asteroid and behind the solid rock walls carved out a century ago to make this place, what sounds like the switches on a giant circuit breaker being flipped echo through the stations bones as lighting and various other station systems begin to activate.
The once black and empty hallways, the dark and narrow corridors I used to get down here, down to the reactor control room, they're now bright and illuminated. What were once seemingly empty rooms and tunnels are now filled with overturned crates, empty cabinets and documents strewn about from when, whomever, decided they weren't worth carrying anymore. As the station powers up, all of these once empty rooms told the story of what happened here the day it's last inhabitants packed up and left.
This place, that only moments ago looked like an abandoned, derelict asteroid station, now looks like an abandoned, derelict asteroid station with the lights on.
The presence of lighting and terminals that have suddenly blinked back to life does nothing to erase this station's final moments. Moments that were captured perfectly by the bullet holes in the walls and the clear pillaging that took place here when this stations final inhabitants learned that their "domina", Octavia Quinton, wasn't coming back.
Glancing around this newly illuminated space, the furthest wall of the reactor control room, it's all glass. Thick, triple layered glass. The kind of glass you could tap on and not hear an echo. Behind the glass, wall mounted lighting glowing a soft red when I entered the room, has slowly changed from red, to yellow and now glowed a vibrant green. Beyond the glass, what looked like an empty space has revealed what appears to be a control chamber with a sphere in the center. Thick wires run down the sides of the sphere, hugging it's frame before descending toward the deck. At the base of the reactor, these cables are bound together in bunches before running down through flooring and into conduits I couldn't see.
Pipes run along the floor making up the base of the sphere. In fission reactors, its the piping that does most of the work. Some pipes are designed to circulate water through the core to help regulate temperature. Other pipes, they move water from one of the four tanks in the room into the core itself, using the reactor's heat to convert the water to steam. That steam spins a turbine which creates electricity and powers this place. Somewhere, inside the guts of the station, that steam is captured, condensed and then converted back into water, starting the entire cycle over again.
That checker board design on the exterior of the reactor core, those are the control rods. In old fission reactors like this one, fission control rods made up of nonreactive materials, like boron, were used to regulate the reactivity of the nuclear fuel inside. When reactivity goes up too high, the control rods are inserted into the reactor core, a few at a time, to bring the reaction back down. Insert them all and the reaction stops dead in its tracks.
Looking back down at the terminal, the cursor has formulated another thought and sat blinking, waiting to form another.
"REACTOR START UP SEQUENCE COMPLETE. POWER RESTORATION SEQUENCE INITIATED. PRIORITY START UP LIST SEQUENCING. ATMOSPHERIC RESTORATION SLOTTED FOR PRIORITY ONE START UP. BEGINNING ATMOSPHERIC RESTORATION SEQUENCE PROTOCOL. DO NOT REMOVE PROTECTIVE GEAR. STAND BY FOR SYSTEM COMPLETE..."
"Probably best to keep your helmet on boss," Brandson's voice says over the helmet comm. "We should be long gone before the atmosphere is restored in there."
"Roger that," I reply, turning back toward the door and heading back out into the hallway. Long dead air trapped in every narrow space and tunnel here starts to move. Particles that hung motionless in the hallway when I first walked through are dancing between the walls now. That audible hissing sound, that's the atmosphere control units kicking on and converting CO2 to breathable oxygen. Suddenly, every vent and duct in the facility is spewing out air.
"Did you happen to see the control room on your way down there?" Finn asks.
"I think so," I reply. "Heading back there now."
"For fuck sake," Brandson says, reacting to the images of the pillaged station relaying back to him from the helmet cam. "What happened in there?"
"Octavia's crew happened," Finn says. "When they knew she wasn't coming back there was nothing keeping them here."
"Judging by the bullet holes in the walls it looks like there was some, disagreement, on how to split up the loot," I say.
"Where are the bodies then," Brandson asks. "Shouldn't there be bodies?"
"This place has been sitting here for almost ten years kid," I reply. "We're probably not the first people to comb through it."
Heading down another hallway, I turn a corner and then another before finding myself in what looked like some kind of mess hall. A single walkway circles around a large, round table at the center with built in booth seating. The table, its littered with debris. Shards of broken glass, paper and plastic refuse that were strewn about the table top in a cascade that found it's way onto the floor. All of this, punctuate by what looked like a spray of blood darting out in an angle from the tables edge. Looking straight out from where the blood starts to where it ends, above the table is another bullet sized hole in the bulkhead. Looking down at my feet, a pool of dried "redish" black fluid stains the steel grating in the floor.
"I think I found it," I say, rounding the corner of another hallway and into a well lit room filled with terminals that have suddenly come to life. A round console sits at the center of the room, showing what looks like the stars from the local systems in a holographic display illuminated above the flat surface at the top. Around the room, various other work stations sit idle as their terminals do their best to display pertinent information to the empty chairs in front of them.
"That should be it," Brandson says. "Center console."
Kneeling down, I open the Maverick suits built in tool belt, taking out an automatic screwdriver and removing the fasteners from the outside panel. Setting the panel down, I look inside at the various wires and control boards powering the console above.
"Which board is it?" I ask.
"See that one in the center there with the steel cover?" Brandson asks. "That's it. The memory boards for these old station cores were always shielded like that."
"Wait," Finn says. "Is there no other way to get the information off of that board? You're positive we can't download it?"
"You're just asking this now?" I ask.
"It's just, the nav beacon warns people to stay away from here saying its booby trapped. And if we're not the first people to break in here, how come no one else has taken it?"
"It's the only way Finn," Brandson says. "It's an obsolete model. I would need equipment I don't have here to remove data from it. Short of taking the entire core and hooking it into the Chelsie directly, there's no way to pull information off of that system."
"Am I removing this board or not?!" I ask.
"If you want the information on it, you're going to have to," Brandson says back.
Slipping the screw driver into the console, I remove the fasteners holding the board in place before sliding it out of its housing and unplugging the power chord from the back. In an instant, the station lighting turns red as an alarm begins to sound, followed by an automated voice over the loud speakers.
"WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE REMOVAL. MALFUNCTION. REPEAT. UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE REMOVAL. MALFUNCTION. REACTOR CORE OVERLOAD SEQUENCE INITIATED. ABANDON STATION AND PROCEED TO MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE."
"That's not good," I say.
"I TOLD YOU!" Finn yells into the headset mic.
"What's going on kid?!" I yell back to Brandson.
"Shit!" he yells. "It looks like an anti-tampering device. I'd get out of there boss. Now!"
Fast forward to me climbing out of the lift tube and into the central landing bay I came in at. Burst pipes bellow steam up from the floor as plumes of smoke shoot out from the vents in the walls. Sparks shoot up from the floor in front of me as a power conduit ruptures. The sparks shoot up so high, they're caught in the gravity of the spinning station and fall down to the floor on the opposite side of the station above my head.
Reaching yet another ladder, I swing the computer core over my shoulder again, wedging it under the shoulder plate and begin to climb, up toward the sealed off mail slot to the access panel I came in through. The emergency system in my suit displays an alert on the faceplate glass of a significant rise in temperature and radiation.
"You've got to get out of there boss," Brandson says. "The core has gone critical. If the heat in there doesn't kill you, the radiation will!"
"Almost out!" I yell, before reaching the hatch, grabbing the umbilical and jumping from the platform, out into the void.