Chapter 40 Day 17 The Engine Room
Seventeen days out of Sanre-tay, still under power. It was hot in the engine room. Hotter than I've ever known it to be. I was leaning against the railing of the control platform staring down into its depths and soaking in the dry heat. The roaring heart of the Lost Star smelled of working machines and ozone. I found comfort in being close to it. Part of it.
As a general rule, sightseers are not welcomed in the engine room, especially under power, but hanging out in the engine room without a reason is one of the captain's privileges. Not one to be abused, mind you, but if I paused and lingered awhile on my nightly rounds, as I was now, they'd not kick about it. I lingered to soak in the warmth and the life contained in the muted fury of the nine rocket engines driving the ship ever faster.
The control platform sits directly above the main reactor and rocket engine, which together, make a ten-meter diameter column of nearly fifty meters in length. Around this central feature is an intricate, organic-like web of struts, grated catwalks and platforms mounting banks of fuel and cooling pumps, generators and transformers linked to the main and eight smaller rocket engines by twisting cables and pipes.
The control panels on the engine room platform are duplicated on the bridge, but on the bridge you're remote, unable to keep as close a watch on your charges as you can working amongst them. By day seventeen, at mark 7.1 acceleration, every element in the complex machinery that delivered fuel and controlled the output of the nine rocket engines was being tested as it hadn't been in fifty years. So the watch engineer on the platform monitored the console readouts while a second and perhaps third engineer scurrying about in the cavernous depths of the room, looking after this pump and that generator, making sure everything was running smoothly. Of course each piece of equipment had its sensor and status light on the platform, but lights on a control panel are just lights. You needed to see and touch each piece if you're an engineer and want to really know what was going on with your machines.
Lilm had the watch and was slumped on a tall stool keeping an eye on the panel, listening and smelling the hot air for the slightest trace of something running too hot or shorting out. Tenry was somewhere in the maze below, inspecting the machines, putting his hand on them to make sure they were running silky smooth and cool, noting any questionable reading.
'Everything running smoothly, Chief?' I yelled to Lilm, just to be polite.
She didn't bother to yell a reply; a curt nod was her only reply.
Lilm and her partner Riv had a mutually agreeable tempestuous partnership. As Riv said, she was a high spirited woman. And so, while Riv was the Chief Engineer on our books, in reality, that title changed with the watch. Lilm was every bit the chief engineer, as tough and as stubborn as Riv, if not more so. Who was actually calling the shots in that partnership, and in the engine room, at any given time was an open question. In practice we called both of them Chief, and when they were both present, we usually asked a general question, “Say, Chief, what’s the status...” and waited to see who'd answer so we'd know who was in charge at the moment. However, with Lilm on the platform and Riv grabbing a nap, there was no doubt who was Chief at the moment. Fortunately, she was in a relatively mellow mood and wasn't glaring daggers at me to get lost, so I rested on the railing and brooded in peace.
I wasn't brooding all that darkly. I was, in fact, remarkably content for a captain on notice. Not that Min and I were any closer than we'd been from day one, but that was actually working out smoothly. She seemed to have settled seamlessly into the routine of the ship and the society of her shipmates, and I was quite content for things to go on that way a while longer. We'd a long voyage ahead of us, plenty of time to sort things out between us.
Mostly, I was just enjoying the heat and noise. The composite D-matter hull which protects us from the full spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation the nebula and our passage kicked up also keeps the heat generated within the hull by its crew and all the machinery inside as well, so it must be either converted into electricity by our thermoelectric converters or moved outside to the heat exchangers on the hull. After seventeen days under power, both heat exchange systems were running just about flat out.
The Lost Star was designed to be primarily an interplanetary freight liner which needed no more than two to ten day burns to jump from planet to planet. An interstellar jump like this, which required a twenty-day burn to reach interstellar velocity fell outside the ship's optimal range. Not dangerously so, but still, it was noticeably warmer aboard the ship, and I, for one, wasn't complaining. I'm certain we'd let the temps fall back to Port Prime standard once we were done with the engine, but like ol'Sunny Day I was coming to rather appreciate the ship's more tropical climate.
Well, I'd best get on with my nightly inspection, I thought, so I pushed myself off the railing and started for the catwalk to the main access well. Having seventeen days of pseudo gravity was another novelty. I was getting quite accustomed to it. Not only did it made cooking and eating easier but it kept the cats and dogs attached to the deck.
I gave Lilm a wave as I turned and climbed the stairs that circled the well to the next deck up, the engineering deck. The engineering workshop lay on my left as I stepped out into the broad passage way of the deck, and the environmental office and control room lay on my right. I looked in on both, but both were empty, the bank of status lights in the environmental office a solid green. I walked ahead, checking the locks on the supply lockers and our food freezer before climbing a steep side access ladder to the bridge deck.
Min and Kie had the bridge watch and I gave them a break and headed up through the silent and dim lit crew and passenger decks and on to the awning deck. Rafe and Myes were playing Black Star on the Bistro table, and Illy was reading in the dimness of the awning deck commons. I watched the game for a while and headed up to no. 4 hold.
The sound of the engines was muffled by the four decks below, so the hold seemed strangely silent, and the large space was lit only by several dim cargo lights. Deep shadows hung about its far corners and from the mezzanine with its jumbled surface of shadows and deeper shadows, I could sense more than see the cats watching me. Even after exploring the mezzanine in our search for the drone, I'm still not completely comfortable in no. 4 hold, alone, in the dim light. As I may have mentioned, I'm no more superstitious than the next spaceer, but there seemed too many memories about the place to be completely comfortable. People have lived and died aboard this tiny little world for more than a thousand years, and each of them has left something etched in the atmosphere, the ether, of the ship behind them, and those memories seemed to be strongest in no. 4 hold. I stood for a few moments in the middle of the hold searching the shadows for something that wasn't there, and checking the locks on the two strong rooms, and headed down. And another day reached its home port.