“PO,” he said to the lead petty officer of the section. “How long has that been down?”
“Four days, COB,” the PO said with a note of exasperation. “It started spewing water all over the compartment. I’ve had a report into the machinists ever since that shift. They say it’s a low priority.”
“And there’s plenty of high priority stuff,” COB said, nodding. The ship required constant maintenance, which was why they had so many machinist mates onboard. But there were never enough. In a way, could never be enough. Each machinist mate required logistical support, which would require maintenance… The only way to keep everything going all the time was to entirely stock the ship with machinists, which would have sort of defeated the purpose. It was one of the reasons that ships had to have a regular down cycle in port. And theirs had been cut short.
Even with a full maintenance cycle, quite often boats came back from deployment looking like an ad for duct tape and baling wire.
“Miss Moon?” the COB asked dubiously. “Would you like to take a look at it? And promise to get it put back together properly?”
“Do I get tools?” Miriam asked excitedly.
“That would seem to be necessary, yes,” the COB said.
“If I’ve got a repair manual I can do it for sure,” Miriam said. “If I don’t, I’ll promise to do my best. At the very least, it won’t be more broke than when I started. In fact, I can probably get it so it cleans clothes in a quarter of the time!”
“Will they be intact?” the COB asked.
“Well…”
“Let’s just get it working to specs, then,” the COB said. “Time to go find some tools.”
“Here,” Miriam said, reaching back over her shoulder with a pump in her hand.
“Are you going to remember how to put this back together?” PO Johnson asked. The junior petty officer, laundry, had been assigned to “assist” the linguist in her quest for repair of Clothes Washing Device, Water, Recycling, Number Three.
But Johnson had to admit that he wasn’t quite sure about it all. The “maintenance person” was, after all, on the books as a linguist. And while the view was… nice, he wasn’t sure that even one of the machinist mates would be able to figure out where everything went back if they were hanging upside down over the back of the washing machine with only their legs protruding on the top.
“Oh, yeah,” Miriam replied, holding a hose over her shoulder. Actually, more like her butt. “The guy who designed this knew what he was doing. Very elegant flow. But it’s so compact that the only way to get to the problem is to take it pretty much entirely apart.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Johnson asked. “All I know is all of a sudden the floor was covered in suds.”
“The inlet to the recycler broke off,” Miriam replied, holding out another hose. “See that part on the end?”
“Yeah,” Johnson said. There was a pressure coupling on one end of the hose with a piece of metal tubing, obviously cracked at the end, dangling from it.
“That’s the inlet,” Miriam said. “I’ve still got to disconnect the outlet and the recycler. Then I’ll have to see if they’ve got a spare recycler. If not, I can weld it back on. It’s point fourteen steel, probably Ingraham’s. They have a real problem with too much mercury in their steel, so even though it tests as point fourteen, it’s really too brittle. I never let any of my clients spec Ingraham for high pressure points. Besides, fourteen is a specialty steel and twelve works better for stuff like this. I don’t know why people keep speccing it. Anyway, whenever that hose comes under pressure, it’s going to flex, you see?” There was a clatter and a grunt. “And when it flexes, it puts pressure on the inlet. Since Ingraham’s so brittle…” Another grunt. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to pull this out. It’s too heavy.”
“Let me help,” Johnson said, scrambling up next to her. Sticking his head over the back of the washer, he could see what she was trying to pull out. It was a big thing that looked vaguely like a pump. He got ahold of it and pulled it out of the washer but couldn’t lift it with the angle he was at.
“Can you hold onto that while I shift back?”
“Sure.”
“No, we don’t have any spare recyclers,” Machinist Mate Ian “Red” Morris said, sadly. “Sorry, ma’am. If you set it over on the bench, as soon as one of us can get to it we’ll weld it back on. Thanks for finding the problem, though.”
Red was the only guy in the cramped facility. Somebody had to stay back and take problem calls and while it was usually the LPO, the latter was supervising work on a broken controller in engineering leaving Red to hold down the fort.
He wasn’t idle, either. He was rebuilding a hydraulic motor that drove one of the torpedo loaders. Until it got rebuilt, Tube Four was down. The machinist mate was missing his right arm from the elbow down, a legacy of the previous mission’s sole space battle. However, he had several good prosthetics ranging from one that looked and felt very real to the one he was currently using, which had multiple tool attachments. At the moment, a small, electric Phillips screwdriver was removing all the screws from the casing of the motor. He called it his Number Two Arm.
“I can weld it,” Miriam said. “It needs reinforcement, anyway. Mind if I look over your fittings?”
“Uh…” Red said, trying to ignore the double entendre. Married, married, married… he thought. “Go ahead. If you need any help…”
“I’ve got it,” Miriam replied. “Although if you could lift it onto the welding bench, I’d appreciate it.”
“What in the gra… Who… ?”
Lead Petty Officer Jonathan Macelhenie was tired, angry and sore. The controller for the secondary power system of the main engine was an experimental aero-mechanical system that was buggy as hell. Getting to the failed pump had eventually required three machinist mates and himself, all stuffed into cramped quarters and often with elbows in each other’s faces. They had a list of repairs a light-year long still to do and he’d resented that it took that much time and manpower.
So getting back to the shop, where he intended to take a small break, thank you very much, to find that the ship’s linguist was bent over a laundry recycler, welding something onto it, was not what he’d had in mind. Especially since he’d already encountered one of her endless monologues.
“Excuse me,” he finally managed to drag out. “Exactly what is Miss Moon… ?”
“The COB put her to work on that broken washing machine,” Red said quickly. He could tell the LPO was about to explode. “The recycler’s inlet broke off. She’s welding it back on. Then she’s going to reinstall it. Somebody might need to help her carry it down, but she can do the rest.”
“And get it into place,” Miriam said. “But I can put it back together. Do these things break a lot?”
“All The Time,” Red, Sub Dude and the LPO all chorused.
“Is there a way to tell somebody why?” Miriam asked, cutting off the arc welder and flipping up her face shield. “And how to fix it? This one won’t break again, by the way.”
She picked up a hand-held grinder and started grinding down the weld in a shower of sparks.
The LPO walked over and looked at the recycler. The inlets and outlets, especially the inlets, had a tendency to break off like nobody’s business. In the case of this inlet, the area around it had been routed out, a metal pipe installed and a circular metal reinforcing ring welded into place. Assuming the thing held water under pressure, it sure looked as if it wasn’t going to break any time soon. But thinking about the interior of the washer, which had about enough room for an ant to squeeze through… If it had been on a diet…