Maintenance

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Maintenance
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Usually, when Technician Tara Harper looked at the slipspace drive she was tasked with maintaining and servicing, she felt a sense of pride. ‘Magnificence’ and ‘Splendor’ were two words that came to mind when she stared at the towering structure.
Those two words eluded her now, as the Drive in front of her was anything but magnificent, or splendorous. It was, well, wrong. Flashes and streaks of blue lightning lanced from the circular carapace at the front. Its containment cage seemed to buckle, sway, contort, then go back to normal immediately afterwards. Two times she counted the core set inside that cage rupture then reform, but the whole thing was… grainy? Like someone was rewinding an ancient Earth VHS player with a shoddy remote.
Tara turned to one of the junior trainee Technicians next to her, and grabbed him by the lapels of his blue uniform. 
“What happened to my Drive?” She asked, her eyes wide and manic, before shaking him when he didn’t answer the exact second she asked her question. “What. Did you do. To my drive?!” She shook him with every other word.
“We didn’t do anything!” The trainee grabbed her wrists and shook her off. “It just started…” he looked at the piece of machinery and waved his hands in desperate fashion. “I dunno! Doing that!”
“What the hell is even going on?” The second trainee Technician spoke up from her other side.
Tara licked her rose lips and smacked them in an exaggerated way. “That right there is a Cascade Failure.” She crossed her arms, motioning with a finger to the way reality itself began buckling and cracking under the strain of so much pure cannot be, leaking from the Slipspace Drive like the clearest cerulean water. 
“In about thirty seconds,” she said, “the drive is gonna go boom. Slipspace Splinters are gonna rip this ship into about twenty different pieces. We’re all gonna collapse into micro black holes, popping up all over the ship, ripping us into atoms, and scattering us to whatever dimensions are out there.” She smiled at the two trainees, and clapped them on their shoulders.
“Now would be a good time to pick a god and pray!” She laughed and watched the lightshow, the gears in her brain turning about how she would go about fixing this.
They exchanged horrified glances. “Well you’re the Head Technician! Do something!” the man on her left said, shaking himself out from under her arm and breathing short, panicked breaths. 
Tara sighed, rolling her eyes at their petty desires to continue existing overriding their appreciation for her gallows humour. “Alright, alright.” Twenty seconds. She massaged away the briefest hints of a migraine pulsing behind her forehead, before snapping her fingers. “Hand me a maintenance jack.”
“The hell is a jack gonna do?” one of the Trainees asked.
Tara slumped her shoulders, and turned to face him. “Just hand me a goddamn jack and shut up!” she commanded, before holding out her hands.
The first Trainee unslung a long half-hammer half-wrench from his belt and extended it, locking the metal in place before giving it to Tara. She studied it, checked its weight, then held it in front of her with one eye shut, powering down its length, as though inspecting the edge of a sword.
She gave it a few test tosses. Ten seconds. 
Drawing her hand back, she held it like a javelin, brought her other free hand up to aim it, turned to one side, and threw it towards the Drive. It sailed through the air, passing by the Splintering of reality, and impacting the circular front of the Drive with a colossal clang.
The Drive hummed in protest, then all at once the lightning stopped, the splinters receded, and the ship lurched, tossing the two unprepared trainees on their asses. Tara managed to stay standing, folding her arms and watching as the drive spun down, belching out one last gout of lightning before going silent. 
The trainees looked up at her, mouths agape, eyes wide and uncomprehending. They were entirely aghast with the situation.
Tara dusted off her hands and caught their eye, flicking between them. “What?” she shrugged. “I’m not going over there while it’s on.” Her brows furrowed like it was the most obvious thing in the world. 
The trainees shared a glance, before one of them looked at the Drive with cautious eyes, pacing around it like one would expect a stray cat to do a stranger. “Did you break it?”
“No.” Tara stepped up towards it and ran her hands over the smooth metal surface. “It’s hard to break a Slipspace Drive using just a maintenance jack.” She hummed. “Well, unless you got inside it.”
Her countenance changed as she inspected the Drive. The surface was smooth, absent any damage despite the roiling metal she had seen not ten seconds prior. 
“Then how the heck did you turn it off? Did you hit the manual shutdown?” the second trainee walked to where the jack had hit, picking it up and checking for a button or switch Tara had hit when she threw it. 
She spun around to face him, her face contorting so much that it was a wonder she didn’t develop creases then and there. “Manual—this is a slipspace drive!” She yelled. “It’s powered by star energy and creates black holes for fun!” She hopped over one of the pipes connecting the Drive to the fusion reactor and pushing a finger into the trainee’s chest. “It’s a glorified particle accelerator hooked up to screw-you machines that rip apart spacetime! It doesn’t have a manual shutdown.”
“Then how the hell did a wrench hitting it work!” the trainee countered, batting her hand away. 
Tara looked at the drive and put a hand on it, running her fingers over the metal. She ducked under the circular housing, and crawled beneath the machine. “Most likely, the kinetic force deharmonised the particle accelerators, robbed the cascade reaction of the energy needed to continue being self-sustaining, forced the slipspace splinters to recede, and dropped us out of slipspace by collapsing the harmonic fields.”
She looked up at the two Trainees and held out a hand. “Jack,” she commanded.
One of the trainees, after he stopped his eyes from rolling around in his skull, handed her the reclaimed maintenance jack. She slid back under the drive and got to work removing the maintenance panels.
The other trainee leaned in close and crossed his arms. “Did you get any of that?”
“Nope,” the other man shook his head. 
“Good,” the first said, sighing with relief. 
Tara popped the maintenance hatch off of the bottom of the drive, placing the bolts and panel next to her. “I was speaking gibberish,” she said to the two trainees, unhooking a flashlight from her belt and shining it up into the innards of the Drive. “Sometimes, you just have to accept that what works, works.”
“Bridge to Engineering,” the Comms crackled and Tara winced as her ear was assaulted with the voice of the Captain. “What the hell is going on down there?”
“Sorry, sir,” Tara said. “Slipspace Drive was going haywire. Had to turn it off.”
There was silence on the other end for a few seconds, before a sigh and an exasperated tone followed. “You threw a maintenance jack at it again, didn’t you?”
Tara could almost see him in her mind’s eye rubbing the bridge of his nose. “In my defence,” she said, “it worked.”
“Yeah?” the Captain said. “Do you ever stop to think that maybe it’s because you throw so many maintenance jacks at it that it goes haywire so often?”
Tara paused in her work with her maintenance jack wrapped around a bolt on the particle accelerator. “Well, I’m not exactly gonna get close to a slipspace drive while it’s on. Not even to turn it off. You remember what happened to Roberts?”
The Captain groaned. “Who the hell is Roberts?”
“Exactly!” Tara shot at him. “You don’t remember Roberts, because he got too close to a Slipspace Drive!”
“Just…” the Captain took a breath. “Will you please take care not to damage the equipment. The heavily volatile, multi hundred million Credit equipment?”
“I make no promises,” Tara said, tightening the bolt and moving on to check the rest of the machine for damage. “I’ll get her working again, and when we pull into dry dock, I want some time to myself with it, so I can make sure she never has another temper tantrum.”
“I’ll requisition some shore leave.” the Captain said. 
Clicking her tongue, Tara smiled. “Appreciate it, sir.”
“Of course, that’s all dependent on you getting the Drive working again. If not, well, we’re in for a long journey home.” the Captain said. 
Laughing, Tara slammed the maintenance hatch back onto the slipspace drive and stood up once more. “That’s what emergency cryo is for, sir.”
“What, you’d rather be asleep than watch the stars go by?” the Captain jabbed. 
“Hell, considering our destination, I’d rather be asleep when we get there, sir,” Tara said with a smirk. She looked at a part of the machine’s readouts on top, and widened her eyes. “Ah! Got it.”
The Captain hummed. “What was the problem?”
Tara looked at the readouts again and shook her head, manually adjusting them back to normal levels. “Some jagoff decided to overclock the particle accelerators. Manually. Hoping to boost her speed.”
The Captain spluttered. “Who?”
“Sir, with respect,” Tara cleared her throat. “If he was here during the Cascade, then he isn’t onboard anymore. That’s all that matters.”
The Captain cleared his throat. “Button the Drive up, we’re jumping in five.”
Tara switched her comms off and snapped her fingers to one of the trainees, who were watching her with mixed expressions.
“Hey,” she said. “Hand me the duct tape.”
“Duct—are you serious?” one of the trainees widened his eyes at her. 
“Yes!” Tara said. “What else is there?”
“Fixing it!” the trainee said.
Tara blinked at him. “You want me to spot weld a particle accelerator when you’re in the same solar system as it?” she blew a raspberry at him. “No. Duct tape, or we leave it open and you get a nice look into how a Drive works.” 
She stepped up to him and let her eyes turn glassy, like she was staring through him, rather than at him. “You know, some of my Tech buddies say that you can see infinitely. Imagine that. Infinite nothingness. Not even darkness,” she turned her eyes to the side. “It’s alluring, too. Like the prettiest pair of eyes you ever did see. Makes you wanna get real close, lose control, lose yourself fall into it. Forever.”
The trainee leaned back away from her, eyes wide and face white.
The other trainee turned away. “Duct tape,” he said, scampering away and taking his buddy with him.
Tara smiled to herself, steall leaning over in the same position she was when they were in front of her, She turned her head and called after them. “Thank you!”
Category:SilverLastname
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories
Category:The Weekly Winners