Peter Flynn
rubbed at his eyes as he stared at the pressure readout on the gauge in front
of him. The numbers kept slowly climbing to the red zone. Flynn turned the
valve, causing a great woosh in the nearby pipes. He waited until the numbers
fell down through the yellow and into the low end of the green before restoring
the valve to its original position.
Normally
this job was done by the ship’s automated systems, but a fight with some
pirates over their cargo had sent a tiny piece of shrapnel bouncing through the
zero gravity hall to destroy the valve’s automated controller. And Calypso didn’t have a secondary
automated control.
So every
three and a half minutes Flynn had to relieve the pressure on the system or the
ship would explode while the ship limped to the nearest port for repairs. Stars above do I miss double and triple
redundancies on a ship. This never would happen on an Alliance ship.
That wasn’t true. Problems of this
nature still occurred on Alliance ship, but that was a problem for engineers
and enlisted sailors. Never would an officer, much less the captain, get stuck
on regulator duty.
But here was Flynn, Captain of the
freighter Calypso, on regulator duty.
He was the only one left to do the job as the rest of the crew tended other
systems in similar states.
Woosh.