“Hey, Dougie, wake up!, Somebody’s called in sick and I need another able bodied mechanic for the…

Last Great Venture capsule repair job on the docket today. Yo! Wakey wakey, we’ve only got forty minutes until shift change. You in, right? This comes at triple time for you if I have my math right.” The half sized door to my bunk compartment is closing even as he continues to speak. Through the clamor behind my brother Daryl, I can see the other mechanics in the cramped company lounge getting ready for bed, or gearing up for another big day on the job. The dry dock is a massive hub of activity seventy miles off the dark side of the moon. A huge spinning torus with berths for all manner of vessels commissioned by The Company. A massive multi planetary conglomerate that footed a huge portion of the bill for manned space flight privately, and thus once it gained a foot hold in the business of exploration and mining, turned it into a choke hold that shows no sign of wavering in any capacity. Except for the ever increasing need for skilled labour and experienced flight crews, The Company looks to have a near endless trajectory towards growth and colonial expansion. The number of zeroes in their bank accounts boggles the mind. One reason why working for them is so lucrative, They put resources back into themselves, and make no bones about rebuilding, retro fitting, or recycling parts and designs that are proven to work, no matter how costly. They pay well, if you know what you are doing. They care for the flight crews and mechanics just the same. Mind you, we eat better, but have very challenging continental shifts. Three eight hour stints every twenty four hours. Keeping a schedule is paramount to success around here.

Stepping out of my tiny bunk, and zipping myself into my safety coveralls in one smooth motion, I give some serious thought to grabbing a long steam shower and forgoing food, but as I amble through the door I can see a monster of a hot breakfast spread, set out for the last night shift, and fix myself a plateful before the clock ticks down diving into the nearest open couch. The lounge is cramped, with low ceilings, and walls covered in video screens and view ports of the vast expanse of dry dock. It has emergency seating available for a full crew compliment of about thirty burly mechanics with no elbow room to spare. Should the base suddenly lurch to life there would be a mad scramble for everyone to find safe harbor in a crash couch, or their private travel pod that line the exterior walls making the lounge a sort of bull pen in the middle. The crash couches are beaten to hell and well worn, but each one has a crisp glowing green light to signify they are in prime working condition. The room, just like the whole base is colour coded. Mechanics rooms and work station areas are a dark rich red, food prep and entertainment levels are green, health care is blue and managerial posts are yellow. Our clothes match, except we all have separate load outs for pockets and our everyday carry. The horn to signify the shift change is going to blare any second now, I can see my brother Daryl through the thick yellowing glass of a view port, as he’s coming back to usher me into the dry dock space. Parked beside our living quarters are all of our tool chests, equipped with mag lev bases. Those are our livelihood, and we protect our tools with biometric locks and a swift hammer to the skull for those dumb enough to have proclivities towards theft. Poking his head in through the door to the crew lounge Daryl chimes in. “Dougie, The Last Great Venture is a mark eight, so we’ve got her parked down the far end by the exhaust vents. She’s not in too bad of shape internally, but we’ve got to check the entire hull for environmental damages. Boring, time consuming, but I need a trusted set of eyes leading up the team. You up for it?” He’s not as tall as me, but with the neck of a bull and a short temper he leads his team with gusto, and is imposing all the same. His red safety coveralls have been moded to suit his specific safety concerns and needs, namely a neck as thick as a child’s torso. Out in the dry dock there is slim margin to survive should you fuck something up. Hence the gruff attitude. In his position you watch a lot of good people grow cocky, inattentive, then die horrible, gruesome deaths. A needless waste, so he has become hyper alert, and it wears on him around the edges very quickly. I’m up out of my seat, dropping my garbage in the recyclers and incinerators, hopping to the door in a single bound due to our low gravity. Daryl turns on his heels and I follow him down the gangway, passed the laundry dispenser, collecting my tool bench as we head to the berth at the far end where The Last Great Venture is docked. Along the gangway several other tool chests are parked and in various states of disrepair, as additional teams are working all over the massive ship.

“Wheew…” I whistle. “Jesus, she’s beaten the fuck up. This is environmental damage? From where? the ice rings around Saturn mixed with a metric fuck tonne of shrapnel grenades, and a blown up parts depot?… my god, the whole hull is going to have to come off. Tell me you have extra crews crawling between the inner and outer hulls looking for micro punctures and penetration damage.” The ship is huge, mark eights are the largest capsules made by The Company. Compared to the original bad boy, the Non Sequitur, this thing is twenty times the size, and just as durable. Unless you drive it at mach five through a parts counter consisting of nothing but industrial sized nuts and bolts and titanium tipped shrapnel. “What sort of moron do you take me for Dougie? Have some faith little brother. I had three rotating crews put on it the second I laid eyes on her. What a shit show eh? Oh look, here comes Andy, our beloved, and beleaguered apprentice. Shall I have him search for the… what was it again, the capacitor or the capacitator?” It’s a tried and true make work prank we pull on all our apprentices, like searching for blinker fluid, or in our case finding a gasket for the flux capacitor. Hilarious, when done out of love. These behemoths have a parts count near nine million pieces, so the likelihood that a green mechanics apprentice will get the joke right off the bat are slim to none. Plus, apprentices are typically shit on in the ship yards until they earn their full level one certification. We don’t take on apprentices very often. Our non specific set of skills intimidates lots of people. Specificity is great, if you are a neurologist, but if you have the aptitude for it, a generalist mechanic is a very lucrative and exciting profession. Never a dull day when you’re certified to do a bit of everything on all classifications of vessel.

A short young man, of about twenty is racing along the gangway beside The Last Great Venture, pushing his equally spotless tool chest, his apprentice grade pink coveralls are sparklingly clean. His hands aren’t permanently stained grease black yet. He’s been our trusted side kick for nearly eighteen months by now. He’s beaming from ear to ear in the sight of the mark eight. She is a glorious piece of machinery. Her massive bulk dwarfing every other ship in our section of the dry dock. Would have been a real sight to witness the pilots maneuver this beast into its berth. Our section of dry dock repair bay is just one of about three hundred on the outer ring of the torus. A truly magnificent sight. The torus itself is ugly in its utilitarian design, but awesome in scale. Part of why we’re on the dark side of the moon, so as not to ruin the lunar view from the earth’s surface. Andrew is rocking back and forth, eager to hear what he’s going to work on today. Any other day and we’d fuck him over without even thinking about it, but this is a mark eight, and she needs millions of dollars worth of work done, and I don’t think we can push our deadlines any more than what The Company has allotted us. “Andy, you bring your mag boots and mag lev harness connectors with you today?” Looking over Andy’s shoulder at the hull of the ship before us. “If so, saddle up, we’re on ship in fifteen minutes. Be at the aft articulated vent shielding, ready to climb up. Bring visine, as this bitch will kill your eyes today.” I can see his grin growing larger than his face can bear. To actually go up and walk the length and breadth of a mark eight, and see the berth from all angles is a once in a year opportunity. Very rare for a green mechanics apprentice. Andrew is very lucky indeed. “Andy?…” turning from the ship to look directly at me. “Yeah Dougie?… erm,… Doug. Sorry.” I chuckle, as I glower at him. “Put on your knee pads, otherwise your pristine coveralls will be charcoal black by the time you’re done. Change out the inserts on your respirator too, that environmental shielding comes apart in your fingers and turns to super fine dust that will clog your lungs up real fuckin’ quick.” Packing up our gear, we head aft to climb aboard the hull of The Last Great Venture. The clock is ticking, credits are rolling and we’ve got several hundred thousand punctures to analyze and repair. The noise is cacophonous, and the air is tangy from sparks and spent ozone. Pneumatic drills and die grinders are throwing up clouds of orange microscopic dust. The light is dim and has an amber glow from all the spent environmental hull plating. Water vapor is hanging over the ship like a woolly sweater. In among the sparks a chill settles over us as we trace every millimeter of the mark eight’s external surface. Testing doors, vents and air locks. Checking welds, and rivets alike, all with an eye towards certain death if even the smallest wounds to the hull shielding aren’t found and mended. Hours crawl by, as we sweat, swear, bleed, bow and scrape over every facet of The Last Great Venture.

Shift change klaxons sound off, and we climb down, gingerly off the vessel exterior. Andy is so excited he practically jumps from the capsule to the gangway, a solid fourteen foot gap. Us worn and weary guys use the hand rails and antenna arrays as make shift ladders and work platforms. Pulling up beside our tool chests we unlatch the mag lev  locks and push our gear back to our crew quarter storage spaces. Up ahead, there is a commotion at the main junction between the dry dock berths and our section of crew quarters. People are jostling each other, and a scuffle is breaking out. Before it really registers, Daryl is off like a shot, ready to take control and make sure cooler heads prevail. “Daryl!” I shout over the din, trying to get in through the tightly packed bodies, close to the scrum. I desperately want to stop anyone who might try to swing a wrench at the back of my brothers head in a fit of rage, or as an act of retaliation. “Daryl!, what’s going on man?” I’m within arms reach of him, when the crowd around us starts to part. A slim, wiry fella is wrapped up in a full nelson, blood on his knuckles, his pink coveralls bunched up around his face. “Dougie!” Daryl says through gritted teeth. “Just the guy I was looking for… check his Id, I don’t recognize this guy from our section.” Daryl has the skinny, greasy man locked up tight in his grasp. “No id tags on him, what’s the deal here bro, you trying to get into a tool chest that’s not yours or somethin’?” The skinny man grins at me, a good selection of his teeth are missing, or have turned black. His lank hair is thinning and he smells like shit, and decay. “Yeah nah man, yeah nah. You’se know, just doin’ mah thang…” he’s twitching and jerking with each word. A junkie of some sort. Probably found a jumpsuit in the laundry and thought he’d steal and sell off someone’s hard earned tools. The gathered crowd wants to flush him out an air lock, but instead Daryl drags him over to a yellow cubicle stationed at the edge of the gangway, a good two hundred meters from any section of crew quarters. Standard hr protocol. We’ll live where we work, but management can’t get within one hundred meters of our recreational crew quarters. We have supervisors that are part of our crews for personnel matters outside of work hours. “No, we can’t wease him, we’re not murderers. He can go sit with HR, for a protocol rehabilitation session or ten to set him straight… ” pushing the greasy looking man into a chair, his slightly dusty pink apprentice uniform looking drastically out of place among all the men in filthy red coveralls after a full shift. “Dougie, you see Andy around, I want to discuss his progress on The Last Great Venture shielding before he retires to bed.” Daryl, is looking at me, concern etched across his face. The dirty guys coveralls are awful pristine to have come out of this side of the laundry facility. “Eh no, I haven’t seen him. He was so excited from work today he raced on ahead of me.” Andrew’s grinning face is no where to be seen in the crowd, or through the dirty view port that looks into our crew lounge.

“Sorry man” the HR flunkie says, “They just found his stripped body buried in among the tool chests. Looks like our greasy friend here came upon Andy unawares, while he was locking down his unit, hit him over the back of the head with a fire extinguisher. Direct hit to the base of the skull. It was quick. From the grin still on his face, he never felt a thing… ” the words fade out to nothingness. A slight buzz fills my head. Another dead kid. This one, now he had potential. He’s going to be difficult to replace. Somewhere external to us the shift change klaxon is going off. I have eight hours before I have to be back on. Daryl is going to be ornery for a while to come. Fucking junkie scum. Should have put him out on the float like the crowd wanted. I feel a stiff drink or ten are on my immediate horizon. Outside the bleak emptiness of space continues to float around us, undisturbed.

 

PART V