Martinez asked, “Wendy, why can’t we shut down Exchanger 1 and run all the waste heat from Power System 1 through Exchanger 2? That would be a quicker fix.”
Greenberg looked worried. “That’s a really asymmetric situation. Especially since we’d be running Exchanger 2 at full load. We’re talking about nearly five gigawatts of heat. It’s not just a matter of opening a couple of valves. Plus, we’ve never fully simulated that scenario, let alone tested it in the field. You’ve seen how unstable the system can be. I can’t say it won’t work, but I think we’re more likely to break something badly trying.”
“All right, then let’s table that idea,” Fang-Castro said. “But we’ll hold it in reserve. Dr. Greenberg, if I’m not convinced you can bring the system back online in less than a week, I’m likely to change my mind. Getting the engines back online is our first priority. Anything your people need, and any extra personnel you need, they’re yours. All of the ship’s resources are at your call. Coordinate with Mr. Francisco on this.”
She looked around the table: “Anything else? No? Then let’s do it. Mr. Darlington, you can shut down the recording. Mr. Crow, if you could linger a moment.”
When they were all gone, other than Crow, she asked, “Sabotage?”
He shook his head. “This time, I don’t think so. It was too uncontrolled, and if things had gone differently, could have killed the ship. I don’t think there’s a reasonable… mmm… process that a saboteur could have followed to create that result. I’ve been looking at it very carefully, talking to my people back on Earth, and we’re agreed on that. Our best guess is a fabrication flaw: at the end of fabrication, back on Earth, we were simply moving too quickly. Another month, we might have caught the flaw.”
“Good.” She smiled briefly and said, “You’re not nearly as paranoid as everybody thinks.”
He ventured a smile himself: “Too paranoid is as bad as not paranoid enough. We stand on a rather narrow ledge: that keeps it interesting.”
When he was gone, Fang-Castro, still in her chair, tapped her slate. A document had been winking at her all morning, and now she opened and scanned it, though she already knew most of it.
“…the impact of the molten metal slug on Dr. Johansson’s service egg quickly disabled it. The ship had high-bandwidth communication for 0.8 seconds before that channel went down. Consequently, we have full telemetry as well as the vid feed from the internal safety camera for that brief period. Dr. Johansson’s egg was facing the nozzle assembly when it blew out. The slug of metal hitting the egg was comparable to a front-end automobile collision at highway speed. As the egg was flung back at high velocity, Dr. Johansson’s body slammed into the forward console. Her forehead made full contact with the upper display. Her body rebounded backward, but there were no indications of voluntary motion in the fraction of a second before we lost vid.
“The impact possibly broke her neck, very probably gave her a fatal concussion, and at an absolute minimum knocked her out. There is no possibility she retained any consciousness.
“Low-grade status-sensor telemetry continued for another 3.1 seconds before cascading and catastrophic system failures disabled all communications from the egg. During that time, life-support monitors reported falling pressure in the cabin as well as rapidly increasing contamination of the air. We can’t tell from the incomplete data if this was smoke from onboard fires or ruptures of chemical lines or scrubbers that allowed toxins to enter the air system. Within seconds, at most, the air inside the cabin became fatally unbreathable and/or vented into space. If the impact did not kill Dr. Johansson outright, she died very quickly from asphyxiation or toxin inhalation.”
Ah well, Fang-Castro thought, as she filed the report.
Becca.
37.
Greenberg tilted back and closed her eyes, just for a second—though she didn’t know exactly how long the “second” lasted. The night before, she’d had the granddaddy of all cliché anxiety dreams: all the reactor tests were going wrong, every Level 2 tech had called in sick, she had totally forgotten Fang-Castro was showing up to inspect their progress, she really needed to pee, and on top of all that she’d somehow neglected to get dressed so she was floating next to the primary coolant control panel, naked, when Fang-Castro and Francisco entered the compartment.
None of that resembled the actual case.
The whole crew was running on illegal amounts of stims, but things were getting done. Short of any unexpected problems, they’d be moving again five days after the accident; maybe less.
Desperation was the mother of, well… something… and she desperately wanted to avoid cross-coupling asymmetric heat flows or any of the other dubious suggestions she’d heard. Previous discussions between Fang-Castro and the late chief engineer notwithstanding, Greenberg was going to run the power plant by the book.
What she was actually doing, she thought, was scheduling, rather than engineering. She’d read somewhere that the most successful generals were not the combat heroes, but those who could best manage traffic, and get fuel and food and ammunition to those who needed it.
Greenberg worked out ways to cut corners, to schedule work in parallel, even to schedule jobs by temperature. As much as possible, work that could be done on a hot heat exchanger was scheduled for the very beginning and very end of the repair queues. She’d been able to get some repair teams on the job within hours of the status meeting the morning after the accident, instead of having to wait a full day for the radiator metal reservoirs to come down to safe temps.
Conversely, as soon as all the fixes that demanded low-temp conditions were completed, she’d ordered the heaters turned on to bring the melt reservoir back up to operating temperature. She had given that word the night before, and currently was waiting on the inspection of the last of the high-temp work.
Becca might have been a tiny bit better as an engineer, Greenberg thought, but I’m a better manager. She was currently avoiding doing the one thing that Becca wouldn’t have avoided: she refused to get in the hair of people who already knew what they were doing and were doing it as fast as they could. Becca would have been on them with a whip, and that would have slowed things down.
She was still sitting with her eyes closed—only for a second—when her wrist-wrap tapped her, and she checked her slate: and she got the sign-off by the inspection team. Time to start making radiator ribbons.
She had a few new moves here, as well. Previously, they were in no hurry to fire up the engines—back then, a few hours one way or another hadn’t mattered. Now they did. Her magneto-dynamicists had burned up the models and figured out that radiator ribbons separated by more than ten meters didn’t really interact with each other. When it came to radiator sail stability, it didn’t matter whether Engineering extruded the ribbons one at a time or started up one in every dozen ribbons simultaneously. It required more people to monitor status boards when fifteen new ribbons got extruded at once, but that was all. She had the people…
She touched her comm controls, straight through to Fang-Castro: “Captain, we’re ready to start generating real power again. Should be about two hours from start until we have you at one hundred percent. Awaiting your command.”
“Thank you, Dr. Greenberg. Great job. You’re instructed to bring Reactor 1 up to full power.”
Greenberg: And now we’ll find out if I’m as good a power engineer as Becca thought I was when she made me her second.