Chapter 5 – Forgotten people and broken systems.
Thelya walked down the corridor, the floor was warm from the soft hum that the ships engines pushed through the ship. She had gotten used to walking in her spare time exploring the, her city. She knew the top few decks were off limits so instead she went down. She'd already visited many of the empty rooms between her quarters and here. When she first arrived she was hardly ever let out of the dorm room, she could hardly remember her old home anymore, every now and then, if she tried really hard, she could just barely remember sitting on the porch swing that last summer, or following Tav around.
She knew she should probably spend the time in her room going over the meditations the cryptic instructor gave them every evening on the eighth day of the week. But she never could sit still long enough and her mind never calmed with those breathing exercises, instead she found running through the corridors usually cleared her mind much easier. Right now though she wasn't running she was walking she'd taken a left turn a few corridors back then a right or was it left she wasn't sure.
The part that started to annoy her was that she wasn't recognizing some of the corridors now and not all the lights were on. The familiar letters on the bulkheads telling what deck and section she was in were missing as well. She vaguely remembered being told to watch where she went while they didn't mind her wandering the populated areas of the city ship; the unpopulated areas were not finished, and not always fully lit. When the ship shuddered protesting at something, before the familiar jolt of dropping out of FTL was felt. She felt her pulse start to rise but she quickly suppressed the anxiety, she would get back to her quarters she told herself.
"Get me details people," Captain Fenri barked entering the bridge, "I want to know why we aren't moving, and if there is any damage"
"Seems we hit a bump in the road sir, sensors indicate that a slight fluctuation formed in our FTL field sir."
"I suppose it doesn't help that we are flying an overly large fat bird or that it is unfinished." One of the engineers muttered.
The captain settled into his command chair. He pulled up the crew reports on his tablet. "We're missing one of the civilians, see if internal sensors can find her, she didn't report from her quarters when the alert sounded. Send out some search parties as well."
"I'm detecting a coolant leak in one of the lower levels. I'm having trouble pinpointing the location though because sensors in that area are down or haven't been installed yet. A maintenance crew has been dispatched."
"Sir you aren't going to like this." One of the bridge officers pulled up an internal sensor log forwarding it to his tablet.
"Your right Jim I don't." the sensor log showed a life sign flickering as it went between sensors before eventually disappearing beyond the range of detection on the same deck as the coolant leak. He hoped the girl had the sense to avoid the stuff. It had a tendency to irritate the skin and could have damaging effects if breathed.
They had over three hundred thousand rooms on this boat at least he could rule out the ones where the sensors were working.
Someone else was making use of all the distractions; humming to himself he went and pulled a small tube out of a stasis chamber by the time the high council discovered his work it would be far too late to stop. He'd been waiting for a distraction like this for the past 4 years. Ianas checked the backup power supply he'd spent so long charging. This had better work. He bent down next to the device shoved the vial in then took a crystal out of his pocket and placed it into a slot on the device. The process would take a few hours but it would be before the coolant leak was fixed.
He was sure it would work this time. Having used a different kind of cell than the ones they had tried to use previously. Those few attempts he'd been allowed failed as the body built in the machine didn't event take a breath. The sensors could just barely detect a difference between these and the previous ones, these reacted more like normal living tissue than in the other trials there was a faint energy reading in one of the upper spectrums.
He examined the face forming beneath the clear, hard polycarbonate viewing port. Yes this was going nicely.
Thelya looked down the hall seeing the coolant spreading slowly like a low misty cloud on the deck plate. Cursing her luck, out of the five hundred decks on this ship she had to pick this one. She turned and ran hoping to get to the stairs or one of the maintenance hatches so she could climb up a floor but then she saw the gaseous mist coming from the other direction. She looked around saw another corridor just a little bit in front of the mist in the other direction. Running she barely made it to the corridor opening, she angled turning to run down that corridor she could see the coolant mist at the other end but there was a door near the middle of the corridor she ran to it.
Pushing the button to open it she ran inside closing the door. She would have a short amount of time in the room it was sealed off from the coolant but she could tell that the air wasn't circulating. She calmed herself and looked around the room for anything that could help her.
At the other end of the room was a computer terminal it hadn't been tied into the system yet and was dark. There was a box next to it that was open it showed various cables color coded and in specific shapes which would help her connect the terminal to the connectors in the floor. Another box on its side showed the pedestal the computer usually sat on. It would be too time consuming and difficult for her to thread the wires through the pedestal into the floor, and far too heavy to lift the terminal and pedestal upright and set it into the usual position. Instead she would try to connect it on the floor where it lay. She walked over quickly inventorying the pieces. She was a little dismayed to discover that one of the data ports in the floor was missing its connector. She would have to splice the wires which would be difficult unless there where some tools in another one of the boxes.
"What do you mean we won't be back in FTL for a day?" Fenri glared at the sensor technician.
"The FTL drive apparently doesn't like unexpected or sudden changes in gravitational fields It'll take us a day to clear this region at maximum sublight at which point we can reinitialize the FTL. We could adjust the field to work around these fluctuations however that would also take a day and would only result in the FTL drive destabilizing again once the fluctuations dissipate and the space-time lattice returns to normal." At one time their scientist would have referred to it as a rips or ripples in the fabric of space time but fabric was such a two dimensional term for something that was better represented using three dimensions.
"Have we found the girl yet?" Fenri asked the bridge for the tenth time that hour.
"Search is still ongoing, she's still alive we just can't tell where exactly the sensors are picking up a faint reading from the middle of the cloud of coolant." One of the officers replied. "We've cleared the areas we can without environmental suits because of that coolant leak. The vents should start to filter it out of the corridors soon as we seal the leak."
Well thought the captain. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Soon as the next resource shipment arrived through the gate from the mining operation he'd ask the council if they could drop out of FTL for a day or two to work on installing systems that should have been in place before leaving.
Just a short time more and the clone would be finished. He was almost surprised at how well this was working. The clone was breathing and there was a heartbeat. The program was supposed to have gradually uploaded the stored brain pattern to the clone hopefully the calmly blinking eyes indicated this had gone well. The last time the clone seemed to have been panicking before being removed from the chamber and dying before taking a breath on its own.
Ianas settled down to look at the readings, before he could really get into them though the councilor for research and development walked in distracting him. He would have to stall, prevent her from looking to closely at the chamber.
"Shame this didn't work, we had such high hopes for the project." She started conversationally.
A bit nervous he tried to casually move in-between her and the cloning bed. "Yes, shame. I invested a lot of time into this."
"I might be able to get them to reconsider in time." She eased up onto one of the diagnostic beds.
"It would take a very long time, Tyrien made it quite clear that as long as he was the deciding factor of the council he would veto this line of research." He sighed.
"Giving those minds another chance to contribute when they were ended so suddenly in the evacuation effort is not something we should dismiss lightly Ianus. I will do what I can just promise you'll wait until I can clear the restriction again."
"It may be too late for that" Ianus muttered as the pod behind him slid silently open.
Thelya found something that would work to strip the wires and there were a few wire caps down in the box below. It seemed a rule of construction that no matter what wire caps would always end up lying around everywhere. She braced herself and stripped the appropriate wires on in the floor then the ones from the connectors. She proceeded to twist the cap onto the wires then connected everything else coming out of the floor to one of the longer cables that would lead to the terminal.
Struggling to move the heavy terminal around the deck plating she repositioned it so the access port on the back was closer to the wires she was messing with, and began connecting everything in the order the teacher had told them. Finally everything connected properly. She hit the power button and waited before quickly hitting it again cursing seeing the sparks dropping from the splice. She'd connected the power cables backwards she carefully undid the power connecter then swapped the wires, resetting the connection before plugging it back in and turning the terminal back on.
Arwen blinked. He remembered dying; no it was a second hand memory that's odd. He saw himself getting shot in the back no less. Then standing back up and holding his hand out in front of himself and the energy weapons just glancing off to the sides. Odd He didn't remember doing that He didn't even remember leaving for the mission. Last thing he truly remembered himself doing was getting the brain scan. That must mean. He sat up and He looked around.
He sat there for what felt like ten minutes checking everything over. Then opened his mouth and tried to say something and all that come out was a hoarse croak.
"Arwen!" he heard a gasp. Then an angry voice, "Ianas, we shall talk later about this. For now get him some clothes would you." Her face was quite red at the last line.
Arwen looked down again noticing he didn't have any clothes on well everything was fine and dandy downstairs yes-sir, he finally managed to say three words. "Ianus, clothes now."
"Sir, I'm getting a terminal login from compartment four-thirty-seven on the deck that's currently flooded with coolant."
"Well! See if you can get me a comlink to that compartment or terminal!" Fenri practically shouted happily.
"Should be able to; let me send her instructions on what to do to enable the audio pickup."
Fenri waited impatiently for what felt like hours but was only five minutes before he heard the young girls voice over the intercom shakily say, "Hello?"
"Thelya? This is captain fenri, we should have the coolant clear in," he looked down at the report on his tablet, "in two hours ok? Just stay put and we'll have a group outside to guide you back to your quarters. Everything's ok now." His rich voice soothed and comforted her. Well if he had to be a captain of a ship full of kids it helped to have a voice like General Hammond's
Notes: Cityship information: 8km diameter, 2km height, 1 m hull thickness, giving 4 meters for each deck there are 500 decks, each deck holds somewhere between 400 and 800 compartments, some compartments span 2 or more decks depending on what the space was designed for. There is no central computer core; computing power is distributed throughout the ship. The ship database is ingeniously stored on crystals that as a side effect glow with a nice warm white light these line every corridor of the ship and are always on in some capacity.
Theyla was rescued from that planet at age 3, Tav was 8, respectively this makes their current ages 12 and 17