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T-3600
[ Recon ]
16-12-2175
12:45

According to my chief, the mission was easy: grab a prawn suit, inspect the jump drive and try to fix it before periapsis. The only difficulty: it needed to be done during aerobrake.

This job is going to kill me one day.

I followed the safety railing toward the drive in question. Setting my suit to sensitive controls to ensure I don't bump into anything. Manoeuvring carefully in between pipes and cables. The temperature decreased as I moved closer to the thrusters. Cooled by the vacuum of space through openings in the compartment. Handy to keep the drives from overheating, but not for quick maintenance. Luckily we got the prawn suits.

With a flick of the wrist, I turned the suit 45 degrees and started to inspect the exterior.
"Nothing obvious wrong here," I mumbled while steering the suit around the drive to give the other side a checkup. Nothing. I let the suit slowly drift towards the front as I reach for my comlink.

"TCR, this is EVA-TD-3556. You read me?"
"This is TCR, reading you loud and clear EVA-TD-3556. What is your message?" my speakers responded.
"Doing maintenance on jump drive 4, about to inspect the nozzles, requesting disable thruster commands. " I asked, releasing the button to hear the reply.
"Understood, Performing maintenance on jumpdrive 4, about to inspect the nozzles, requesting ignition in 30 seconds,"
I could hear the slight giggle in the tone of the operator.

"Hilarious, Cambridge. Hope you disabled the mission recorder for that," I said, half smiling.
A proper reply didn't come. What did come was a string of muffled off-mic cursing, which gave me enough info on the answer. "Understood. Thruster commands on jumpdrive 4 are disabled," Cambridge replied, her voice dripping in forced professionalism.

Now that the coast was clear, I swung the suit to the thrusters and gave them a closer look. Aside from the usual barbeque on the nozzles, there was nothing to see. Turning to the maintenance panel, I hooked a safety line on the railing with my claw and clasped open the cover panel. Inside was a web of pipes and valves. I grabbed a book from behind my seat, one made of paper that weighs the same as a brick. It still baffled me that of all the sectors, maintenance refused to digitise their books. Something about being able to fix stuff in case of a blackout, the chief had said when I complained about it once prior. He got a point, but that didn't make it any less of a pain to deal with.

After flipping through the pages for minutes, I found the paragraph I sought. I followed the valve logic and translated it over on the system, returning them to their default settings. I pressed the pressure test button and got a red blinking light. A pressure leak somewhere. I cycled through each valve, checking which one was the culprit.
After testing 10 of the 15 valves, I got it.

"Alice, how much longer till periapsis?" I asked while making preparations.
"Reaching periapsis in T-105 minutes," my PDA responded.