Slipspace

In a reversal of her first visit to D’reth Station, Echo now led me through the corridors and down a cargo lift to the main engineering space for the ship. Inside, what must have been a large portion of the crew were buried deep within the machinery, attempting to diagnose the core failure. Standing off to one side was Marcus, who was heatedly discussing the current ship status with a tall and lanky man in coveralls. 

I could only catch bits and pieces as we approached but what little I could hear was not fun. The apparent engineer was obviously unhappy and the captain was looking quite annoyed, not that I could hardly fault him. 

I followed Echo up to the pair and took note of the look on her face. It was serious and pure business, a stark difference to the very friendly and caring expression she had worn all morning. 

“Any word on what’s going on yet? I heard that the reactor core went down.”

Captain Erickson and the other gentleman turned to look at us when Echo spoke up. The tall man in the stereotypical engineer’s garb was the one to respond. “All of the sensor tests are coming back green, but the reactor still won’t fire. My engines are cold and I ain't got a damned clue why!” The man’s voice was slightly nasally and carried a heavy accent that I was not able to identify as anything other than not from the core worlds. 

Marcus shook his head in shared frustration. “Soren, welcome aboard. Apologies for the state of the ship. This is definitely not the first impression we like to give to guests. Please allow me to introduce my chief engineer, Gilbert Yeager.” The engineer just gave a sharp nod in my direction. “Gil, this is Soren, pilot, engineer, and friend of Callisto’s.”

Gilbert looked me up and down. “Yer an engineer? Hmmf, don’t look like much of one. I guess I ought to say welcome. This here is my domain, though, and don’t you forget it!”

Despite the man’s offputting mannerisms, I didn't really hold it against him. Career engineers could be reclusive and tended to be very protective of the equipment they were responsible for. “Thank you for allowing me to be here, both of you. I’ll do my best to stay out of the way.” 

I got a ‘hmph’ in return which was as positive as I could expect, given the situation. Gilbert then turned away and went back to his work, which apparently required sitting upside down on a chair to look at the underside of a console. 

“Captain,” my companion piped up. “I’m going to head to the bridge so that we are out of the way here, but I’m also going to pull up the operations logs from the mainframe. Maybe I can spot something that the others didn’t? More eyes on the problem and all that.”

Marcus picked up a tablet and began manipulating menus within the interface. “Alright, Callisto. Keep your friend close so he doesn’t get lost. And Soren?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I trust that you will respect this ship while you are aboard. As a pilot yourself, I’m sure you can understand the protectiveness.” I nodded, understanding completely. “Also, I still plan on keeping our meeting, despite current events. It may be somewhat delayed, however. I hope that is acceptable?”

I nodded. “Of course. Thank you, Captain.”

That got me a small, tired smile. “Let me know if either of you find anything.”

Both of us nodded at that and Echo pulled me away from the reactor and towards a bulkhead door nearby. Through another set of corridors and up a stairway, we ended up on the bridge, which was about a third of the ship’s length from the bow and straddling the top of the hull. 

Five stations took up almost all of the available space. Two of them looked to be pilot’s consoles. They were set on either side of the bridge and had wonderful views out the forward viewscreen. Another station in the almost dead centre of the bridge appeared to be solely a navigation console; a holographic projector was attached to the forward-facing side and was likely used for displaying astro-navigation charts. A fourth console, set just behind the port pilot’s seat, was quite obviously a communications station with some backup nav equipment.

The fifth and last console was where Echo brought me. Far larger than any of the other consoles, the engineering station took up nearly the entire aft wall. Screens and monitors showed continually updating status indicators for every part of the ship. Many of those indicators were dark or red for the time being, likely because of the reactor core being down. 

My guide motioned to the comms station. “Might as well sit down. No telling how long we will be here. I’m going to be digging through the logs. I understand if you want to head back to the station so you can do your own thing.”

“Nah,” I answered. “I’m far more interested in what's going on here. Reactor cores don't just randomly cut out during basic manoeuvres. I may not know this specific ship, but after so many years on the Forge, I know a thing or two about those systems. Shoot me the logs too, I’ll take a look as well. Like you said, more eyes on the problem.”

Her face showed a grateful smile. “Alright. I appreciate it. Hate to make you work on your day off, though.”

“Don’t worry about it, Echo. I’m glad to offer my help.” 

A moment later, the console in front of me lit up as Echo sent a few terabytes worth of logs from the last operational cycle of the reactor. I sighed. This was going to take a while.

Even with the logs being parsed down by the computer into more realistically readable chunk, we spent several hours poring through the logs and we still hadn’t made any progress. Echo and I both were fighting back yawns. What no one had been able to figure out was why the reactor had stopped. Every test, every indicator showed good, but the entire construct still cut out just as the impulse drive began pulling power for movement. 

It nagged at me as I looked over the system checks that were performed as the reactor had cycled on. Everything looked fine, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. In fact, everything looked entirely perfect. Almost… An idea began sneaking into my head. “Hey Echo, can I borrow that console for a moment?”

Said girl looked at me confused, but shrugged and stood up to make room. I slid into the bridge engineer’s seat and began tapping away at the keyboard. After a moment I flicked my wrist to pull up my personal display. “Vox, take a look at these readouts. What do you see?” Echo flashed another confused look at me, but I ignored it in favour of watching the logs feed through my implanted holopad.

The AI’s voice responded within my head. “I see nothing of negative note. All systems appear to be perfectly within operational parameters.” 

“Yeah…” I noted. “Almost too perfectly in spec… Echo, tell the chief and the captain that we are on our way. I think I have an idea of what is going on.”

“Really?” came her shocked reply. “Alright. Just a sec.” The young Erickson heiress called her father and told him we were on our way down. We made good on that and quickly made our way back to the engineering spaces where Gilbert and Marcus were both working on a console, both obviously frustrated. 

The engineer looked at me, annoyance in his voice. “Alright kid, what did you think of that I didn’t?”

I pushed my way around Echo to the console the two men had been working on. “I was looking at the logs just like you were. Now, if I hadn’t done it on so many other drive cores, I probably never would have even thought of it. The results from the diagnostics were perfect. Too perfect, I realised! Over the years I spent with Jay, we ran into a couple ships that had experienced failures in their computers that caused incorrect feedback from diagnostic monitoring devices. Failsafe protocols would shut the system down as they were intended to do.” 

The chief engineer watched with a raised eyebrow and a frown as I rambled and made a motion for me to get on with it. I quickly accessed the command prompt for the core and requested that it display computer operational mode. 

“But, if the crew finished their checks and power-cycled the system before the sensors were properly recalibrated….” 

I trailed off again while waiting for the computer. When it showed that my theory was correct, I leaned back and let out a relieved sigh. “The computer can potentially revert to a manufacturer diagnostics mode. It’s a mode that really only exists as dead coding from the quality assurance tests in the factory.”

Gilbert looked between me and the computer display with wide eyes. His expression was almost perfectly mirrored by just about every other crew member in the room. “All you have to do is command the computer to recalibrate and reintegrate external sensor input rather than the simulated ones from the test environment.”

With a couple last keystrokes, a gentle hum began emitting from the deck plates as the reactor core in the centre of the engineering bay lit up with operational status lights. I smiled broadly.

“Well, I’ll be damned. I never would’ve thought of that. Once the computer is installed, that simulation mode isn’t supposed to be accessible at all. Why in the void would it have come on now?!” Gilbert angrily pulled his cap off and kneaded it in a hand. 

I could only shrug in response. “I have no clue what triggered it here, but it's something we saw on a rare occasion when I was doing recovery work. I even forced computers into it a couple times in order to bypass some components to make a temporary patch so we could get ships to a station.”

The engineer stood flabbergasted. 

“I would recommend a full diagnostic again now that the computer is getting actual input. Might want to check command access logs, too, while you are at it. Maybe you’ll find a cause. For now though, this should get you up and running again.”

Yeager looked at me appraisingly. After careful evaluation, he gave me a sharp but respectful nod and turned back to his crew. “Well, you heard him! Get back to work! I want those logs and diagnostics on my desk within the hour!” 

All of the crew that had been occupied with checking wiring and who knows what else around the compartment suddenly jumped back to action, cleaning up the mess they had made and attending to their supervisor’s imperative. 

The captain simply looked at me carefully. “Mr. Matson… follow me please. I think it is high time we had our meeting. Callisto, get back to the bridge and do a sweep on all of the other systems. I want to know for absolute positive that there aren’t any more surprises.”

Echo agreed and gave me a look that communicated a message of ‘good luck’ before turning and walking away. For his part, Marcus motioned me to follow him down a different corridor. During the walk from one end of the ship to the other, I saw the viewing windows that looked down into the primary cargo bay I had been in before. It was interesting to see it from this angle, even if the bay was almost entirely empty. Only a few pieces of cargo handling equipment took up floor space. 

When we finally reached the bow end of the ship, Marcus opened a door into what looked to be his office. It was well appointed, but gave off a much more comfortable vibe than the sterilised and authoritarian look of Harvey Kruger’s. 

I was quickly waved towards a plush chair on the near side of the large desk that dominated the room. Even as I sat down though, Marcus instead stepped over towards a beautiful antique looking wood and glass liquor cabinet to withdraw a crystal decanter and a pair of tumblers. After closing the cabinet and setting the glasses down on the desk, the captain took his seat in the chair across from me. The door slid closed behind me and our meeting was set to begin.