“Kali! Level check!” Faith shouted, wincing against the whistling howl of plasma rushing through winding caverns of overhead ductwork. Sweat prickled her skin with the sudden spike in heat, and she watched as Panem swiped at his forehead, one hand on the wheel of a crank valve, his own eyes focused on something distant, squinting into the darkness.
“What’cha did just now did help, but y’gon-ta have to do more ‘fore the levels are gonna drop back into the negatives, ya?”
“What if we inject another payload of coded nanites into the redistribution assembly that interfaces directly with the S...” Lazar’s shout trailed off as he turned his eyes toward the Admiral’s, lines of his face creasing in frustration, thought. “The core matter, thing.”
“Anymore nanites in the coreward RDA and we risk slowing the whole process down.” Faith shook her head. “Besides, even that’s not much more than a band-aid at this point. The problem is in the quantum orientations of each individual phase pattern of the Super Dense Matter in the–”
“Right.” Lazar held up his hands, closed his eyes in painful resignation. “You’re right.” He turned to Panem, opened his eyes just enough to meet the young technician’s gaze. “You’ve got a brilliant idea though, don’t you?”
“Well, uh...” Came the nervous response, eyes shifting uncomfortably. “There’s a control assembly about sixteen more bulkheads in toward the core which we can use to purge the N-Dimensional static from the primary interface coils.” He glanced vaguely toward the ceiling, swiped at the sweat on his forehead again. “That should make re-alignment easier, but unless we can figure out where exactly the optics are fried between the controls topside and Core Control, it isn’t going to do much good.” He paused, swallowed, eyes dropping to his feet. “Sometimes purging the coil static is enough to shock the system into realignment, but I’ve never seen it done when there was more than a point one percent rise in values.”
“It’s still worth a try.” Faith nodded. “Get on it.” Panem nodded in response, turning away as she gave the Captain a quick gesture. “Lazar, go with him. Help him if he needs it. I’m going to stay here and see if I can’t realign the plasma networks to set up an electromagnetic field of enough yield and directional force to knock the SDM back into proper alignment again.”
“That there’s a long shot Admiral.” d’Arc’s voice lanced into Faith’s ear, thick with static. Lazar nodded firmly, followed Panem in a quick jog back up a nearby staircase and into the bowels of the ship’s deep reactor pit. Faith breathed a sigh, coughed against the edge of cruel air that had slithered its way past the filtration system in her mask.
“I have to do something, Kali.” The Admiral answered, turning back to the panel, her fingers hunting among the green lights of valve controls for the proper places to reroute flow and set plasma burning through different passages and stretches of heat-tortured ductwork. Dials read current settings for variable levels of resistance and shielding, some adjustable, most not. “We’re running out of options.”
There is a suit, Admiral.” Came the Reactor Chief’s quiet response. Faith’s eyes unfocused for a moment, lost on the words, lost in the first fragments, the impact, the meaning behind Kali’s words. “At the other end of the pit, she is, half down corridor 887-F.” There was a pause on the channel, a break long enough for the Chief to pull in a worried breath, swallow against some unseen knot that had formed in her throat. “Don’t know what kind of shape it’s in, ya? Just ‘cept Rosendo was the one wearin’ it when the rads spiked in that area and cooked the whole stretch good.” There was a pause– quiet, but laced with expectant static. “She’s still broadcastin’ a signal, kay?” Another pause, another swallow, the sound of a throat being cleared. Faith knew exactly where the reactor chief was going, knew exactly what she was going to suggest, the words that were a breath and a half from filling her ear with the bone resonance harmonics that might as well have been the bell-toll of an ancient death knell. The sound of lips parting echoed across the channel, the slick sounds of failed speech, hesitation.
“Panem, I want you to–”
“No.” Faith said, cutting the reactor chief off mid sentence. “I’ll go.” She swallowed against her own fears, her own anxieties and worries and turned her face to the ceiling. Anyone who knew the reactor knew that the course of action that was brewing in both Kali’s and Faith’s minds was suicide, was as close as you could come to flirting with death as anything else, as surely a knock on the door of fate as teasing a starving tiger with a piece of raw meat was. There were places near the core of the reactor where it was almost certain death to go when the core was out of alignment, places where even a suit couldn’t protect you from the cruel whims of a wild and uncontrolled matrix of Super Dense Matter. There were ships where the innermost core of the engineering section was almost jokingly referred to as “El Diablo’s lair,” ships where little ceramic statues of “El Tio” brought aboard by engineers with ancestors who had worked in the ancient Bolivian silver mines watched every doorway into that deepest hell with hungry eyes, their greedy laps full of corrupted offerings.
“I’ll go.” She said again, and the silence that followed was as thick as the air, deafening. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes. “Corridor 887-F, right?”
“Roger.” Came Kali’s flat, uncertain response. “You sure you want to be doin’ this, Admiral?”
“No one lives forever.” Faith tried a smile, shook her head and sniffed when the smile wouldn’t stick. “Anything I should watch out for on the way to the other end of the pit?”
“Corridor 512-Beta.” The Reactor Chief said simply. “That whole stretch of walk is hot right now, ya? Try to skirt around the outer edges of the pit until you get the 797, then cut back through and toward the core.” Another pause. “That should keep you safe for now.”
“Thanks, Kali.” Faith tried, but only the silence came back to answer her. Turning, she scooped up the backpack of tools and medical supplies then, casting one last glace back at the green-lit display of the master valve controls for the plasma duct network, she started up the stairs and into the hell warren maze of corridors that ringed the innermost core of the reactor like the corrupted white of some monstrous, developing egg.
