Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer)

by Hechtl, Chris

  He shook his head. “I couldn't get a class two. Sorry. Didn't have the material. Besides, if I'd made it you'd of had a heck of a time getting it through the ship to where ever you want it. This one's going to be a pain in the ass as it is,” he said waving to the replicator.

  “Can we really make anything with it?” Regua asked, true hands reverently touching the lid.

  “Not quite,” Irons said. “You're still restricted to the basics. But this does have one additional feature. It has a scanning feature. So you can scan objects and replicate them. As long as they aren't on the restricted list of course.”

  “Cool,” Jen said. She'd read about that. Only a few replicator classes had that feature. Something about proprietary IP rights or something. She wasn't sure.

  “So we can have it replicate anything it scans? I mean if it's simple?” Tinker Bell asked, hopping up onto the lid of the replicator and looking down into its clear window.

  The admiral shook his head. “Not quite. Simple yes. But if it's on the restricted list it will balk at replicating it. If you try to do an end run around that or try to force it then the replicator will lock down or self destruct.”

  “Ouch,” Regua said wincing. Her upper arms showed uncertainty in a given situation. “Can they not be disabled?”

  The admiral frowned and then shook his head grimly. “Sorry, no. Programmed into the design. Any attempt to disable the security features and you are left with a lump of useless scrap.”

  “Oh.”

  “I had a kid try to replicate a stunner on the Destiny. I had just finished replacing their replicators...” he waved the explanation away. “Suffice to say he screwed it up so bad I had to rebuild it.” He held up his index finger in warning, voice firm. “So do not under any circumstances try to replicate something on the restricted list. Or try to get around the locks. Bad things happen.” The girls all nodded.

  “You said we need keys for some of the more important parts?” Fara asked. She too was looking at the replicator in awe. She'd been too busy going around the ship rebuilding food replicators to really pay attention to what the admiral had been up to the past week. Now she knew.

  Irons had been with her of course, he'd run her ragged... as usual. He had each of them trained on how to repair or rebuild a replicator now. What he couldn't give them was the security keys or the initialization key sequence. They were hard wired into him.

  “With this you can make basic parts for the ship. I've uploaded a list to you and to the chief. Check it out. Also with this and the food replicators you can make basic things for trade with others. I mean with other ships or planets.”

  “Cool.”

  “Fortunately we're only moving this monster through that wall, so we're lucky,” Irons said, pointing to the wall nearby. They looked at it and then back to him. He smiled. “The chief is running power lines and plumbing now. You'll have to fab up tanks for raw material of course. I'll help you there and help you plumb them if I'm not too busy. The blueprints are in the net so if I do get swamped with another project you can hopefully handle it on your own.”

  “If we can't we can call in the chief or you admiral,” Martha said with a nod.

  The admiral nodded. “Correct. I suggest you get a team in to do the grunt work. And have a couple of welders handle the finished welding. Kiev has a good team of welders now and they can inspect their welds when they are done.”

  “Cool.”

  “That's it then. Any questions ladies?”

  Martha looked at the others. Tinker Bell looked interested. “Can we test the scanning feature?” she asked. She sounded eager. He smiled. He would have been disappointed if she hadn't been eager.

  “Sure,” he said. He went over to his shuttle and came back with a coffee mug. “Let's do something simple.”

  He pressed the open button as the elf hopped off. She got an extra spring board lift and managed a back flip before landing. She looked over her shoulder to the replicator as a little gas escaped from it.

  “Now, you place the object into the center of the chamber like so,” he said, setting the cup down inside. “It can only scan things that it can replicate in its chamber.”

  “Okay, what about bigger things?”

  “You are limited on size. Anything bigger and you need to break it down somehow. Take it apart into sub assemblies.”

  “Okay,” Martha nodded, crossing her arms.

  “Now. You close the lid and the computer will run a series of scans.” The lid closed and there was a flash of red light.

  “What did it do?” Tinker Bell asked looking up at the chamber.

  “It used a series of sensors to get an external scan of the object. It has visual sensors and a laser scanner. The laser bounces off the object forming a three dimensional model. It used spectrographic analysis to study the object as well. Now it's going to stage four.”

  “Which is?”

  Irons smiled as the group huddled closer to the window to see. The elf jumped back up onto the lid to get a better look.

  “Which is inserting nanites into the object and tasting its structural composition.”

  Fara hid a shiver. That part she didn't like. She watched the chamber glow blue and then after a moment the light winked out and the green lights came on.

  “And we're done. The computer has taken the various sensor readings and overlaid them into a meta file. You just need to select the name for the object and place it in a folder in the database.”

  “But it's already labeled,” Regua said, looking at the control screen. The others looked at it. Indeed the screen had the image of the cup in wireframe form slowly rotating and the label coffee mug under it. They looked at Irons.

  “The database recognized the object,” Irons said nodding. “I told you, if it is in the database it will recognize it. Now if that had been a cup with ornate features on it or of some other design it would have said the same thing but then had an alpha numeric designation with it. Or the date.”

  “Oh.”

  “So...” He looked at the elf. “Excuse me here,” he said, holding out his arm. She looked at it and then up to him. He used his right arm to touch his shoulder. She nodded and swarmed up his arm to his shoulder. She held onto his ear as he opened the lid. “You'll get a better view from up here I believe,” Irons murmured.

  “And I'll be out of the way?” she asked.

  “Not at all. I just didn't want to wear you out hopping up and down so much,” he replied as he took the cup out and then closed the lid.

  “Now, I've got some plastic and ceramic in the small hopper here,” he pointed his foot to a small barrel connected to the replicator by a pair of hoses. “The ceramic is a slurry. Now I select the object, enter the number of copies I want...” he tapped at the controls for a moment. “Now If I want to manually set up the tray I can. But in this case it did it for me. Then I hit enter and print.”

  The replicator started to glow blue again. They looked down inside to see the cups growing out of seemingly nothing. It was a little foggy in the chamber. They knew that was the nanite matrix passing the raw material to the builders. In less than ten seconds the fabrication was done. The replicator dinged success.

  “Cool,” Fara said with a nod as the light changed to green. “It can break stuff down again?” she asked. “We really don't need more cups,” she said.

  “Oh sorry,” Irons said. He tapped at the controls and hit enter. The chamber glowed red this time and the cups dissolved.

  “Gone,” he said when the light changed back to green.

  “Very cool,” the Veraxin chittered.

  “True,” Tinker Bell said. “I did think that a replicator scavenging for its own building material was inefficient though,” she said thoughtfully.

  Irons pursed his lips as he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “You are correct. Most industrial centers use dedicated systems for that. Scavengers or molecular furnaces are what they are called in the business. They use robot
s and industrial machinery to break an object down into small enough parts for nanites to then take over.”

  “Um... no offense but what does size have to do with nanites?” Jen asked. Irons tapped the chamber meaningfully. Her eyes were drawn to it. Finally she got it and her eyes widened. “Oh! Duh. Sorry, slow today. I forgot. Nanites are supposed to be in a controlled environment at all times,” she said with a nod of understanding.

  “Right. Any other questions?”

  “When do we get it for real?” Martha asked.

  “When we're finished with the compartment it's going to be housed in. Ask the chief. I don't know,” he said with a shrug. “I was busy doing other things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have fun ladies,” he said, smiling as Tinker Bell hopped back down onto the lid and then looked up at him. She bowed. He bowed back. He nodded to the others as he left. He snorted as he turned; they all had eyes only for the replicator. Typical. If they hadn't been coveting the thing then he would have been disappointed.

  Numiria's first sleeper case went well at first. However the patient's vitals take a nose dive as they begin flushing out the radioactive toxins. They attempted to return her to her stasis pod only to discover it was irradiated as well. When the patient flat lined and didn't recover despite their best efforts they gave up in hopeless frustration.

  She called the time of death and then reported to a nervous Cora. Cora is obviously disappointed. She patted the depressed doctor's arm. “You tried your best. A clean death... I don't think we could ask for more,” she murmured, more supportive than ever.

  The doctor mulled over the situation in her quarters later that night. She realized she was in a funk. The next day she sensed the same from her staff. They were leery about trying again. She couldn't have that. What was the expression? Get back onto the horse. They needed to try again, not freeze themselves with doubt and uncertainty. That killed a patient as often as misguided efforts did. Finally she called them in for a meeting.

  Light Touch sat on the edge of her desk, kicking her feet back and forth. Chilly huddled in a corner, arms wrapped around himself. Ezri looked down, not meeting anyone's eyes. Numiria sighed. “Look. I know we're afraid. I know...” She sighed and her ears went down. “No one wanted that to work out better than I did. We all tried our best. But fighting the gods of death isn't easy. You all know this. We're going to try again,” she said firmly. They looked up at that. “We are not going to let this stop us from trying again. Not now, not ever,” she said vehemently.

  Reluctantly the staff looked at each other. Light Touch turned to look at her fellow student and then to the staff. “Doctor Numiria is correct. No matter what we will endeavor, we must continue. We must learn from this and then move on. We owe that to our lost friend.”

  “Exactly right,” Chilly said, arms opening up. The Veraxin signaled first degree agreement and determination. “We must continue the path we started. We must learn and move on.”

  Numiria's ears rose slowly. She looked from one student to the other and tasted their determination. Finally she nodded, her tail rising. “We will, starting now. Those of you on duty check your charges. I'm going to pull up the records from yesterday and we're going to go through them, event by event. We'll see exactly what went wrong. No blame, but we will damn well learn from this.”

  “Let's go people, you heard the lady,” the head nurse said with a nod. She turned to her staff. “Those not on duty but on this project report to the classroom... I mean lounge. The rest of us have work to do. Get on it,” she said firmly.

  “Thank you,” Numiria said to her students and the head nurse as the rest of the staff moved out.

  “We were only stating the obvious truth,” Chilly said. The elf nodded. Ezri nodded.

  “I know. I'm glad you have come far enough along to realize it. And to remind me and the others of it. Thank you again.” She turned to the nurse. “Helga...”

  The silver haired Terran smiled sympathetically. “I've already cleaned up the mess. Well, I had the orderlies do some of it and called in an engineering crew to take care of that blasted pod. I'm betting that was the problem. The pod.”

  “You think it messed her up?” The Veraxin asked, looking at the nurse. “In what way?”

  “I'm betting, and this is only a hunch mind you,” the nurse said holding up a restraining hand. “I'm betting something got missed when they stuffed her into that thing. I think something was irradiated and it kept giving off radiation even after she was in stasis. The radiation chewed her up.”

  Light Touch looked at Numiria in concern. “We based our assumptions on the records of the patient.”

  “We won't do that again,” Numiria growled. She looked at Helga. “Get someone to go over that compartment with a Geiger counter. I should have done that but I didn't think of it when we were doing it before. There was no need since they were in stasis after all. Apparently I was wrong about that. Find out if anyone else has the same problem.” Helga nodded. Numiria turned to look at the Veraxin. “We'll need detailed records of our next patient. Current records, not something we pulled up from the files. We'll compare the two.”

  “Got it. The next patient isn't a radiation exposure though,” the Veraxin said. “I believe it is a burn and severe trauma patient.”

  Light Touch looked at Numiria. “Shall we skip it?”

  “Her. She's pregnant too,” the Veraxin said waving his tablet.

  “I'm surprised she didn't miscarriage,” the head nurse murmured, eyes sad.

  “She will if we don't handle her case delicately. Skip to someone a little less complicated. We'll come back to her,” Numiria ordered.

  “I'll look at the list,” the Veraxin said. “There are many to choose from.”

  “We will get back to her. That I promise,” Numiria said firmly. The others nodded.

  The captain tapped his manicured fingernail on the new table, wondering if he should put in for a new desk for his office. He was listening to the replicator chief's report. He shot the Telerite nearby a look. Blur looked insufferably pleased with himself. He could see why.

  “So, we've got all the food replicators repaired and running. Recycling has been repaired and upgraded. I understand it is now designed to handle our passenger load.”

  “Which it was never designed to do in the first place. Good job,” Warner said, nodding to the chief engineer.

  Quinna O'Mallory leaned forward and shrugged. “Wasn't really me. I was working on the replicator compartment. It was Lobo and the Admiral,” she said spreading her hands.

  “Still a good job. On both projects,” the captain said with a nod. “Your people are doing wonders. Please pass on all our thanks,” he said.

  O'Mallory nodded. She gave Martha a look. The young woman sat down. “With an industrial replicator of our own we really don't need the admiral any more do we?” Blur said.

  O'Mallory sighed, rolling her eyes. Here we go, she thought annoyed. “That isn't exactly true,” she said, frowning.

  “But he's not a necessity,” Blur said doggedly.

  “True in some ways but not all. But if we want to continue operating at this level then we need to implement the asteroid plan. To do that we need the admiral's participation,” O'Mallory replied.

  “Why?” Hir'ruk asked.

  “Because the admiral holds the keys to the restricted list,” Martha blurted out.

  “Correct,” O'Mallory said as the council turned on the interloper. She smiled encouragingly to the young woman who was busy hunching her shoulders and looking down at her hands. O'Mallory glared at the other occupants of the compartment. “Unfortunately having an industrial replicator doesn't do you a whole lot of good for some repair projects. Like oh say reactor parts. Or hyperdrive parts. Or a dozen or so other things we still need.”

  “But we don't need them right now do we?” The captain asked.

  “Some no, not yet,” she said tartly. “We will however eventually. I for one would l
ike to have spares,” she said.

  Cora put a restraining hand on her husband's. He looked down at it and pursed his lips but didn't say anything.

  There was a long simmering moment before the chief grunted. “I think that with the new schedule my people will be able to implement all the repair plans we have made. If it works out then we should be able to hit Beta band when we leave Antigua,” she said, glancing at Blackhawk.

  The Native American hated meetings. He looked up from where he had been carving a stick and then shrugged. “I've simmed it a few times. I think we need more practice. Full bridge sims,” he admitted.

  “A good idea,” Warner said. He looked at Esmay. “Are you up for the challenge?” he asked.

  “We're adjusting our heading. Um... yeah,” Esmay said.

  “Adjusting the heading? Why?” The captain asked tartly. He hadn't heard this before now and was incensed to have found out in this way.

  Esmay squirmed a little in discomfort under his intent gaze. She looked at Blackhawk who spread his hands apart. Finally she grimaced. “I... we didn't take into account the speed when we planned the course. That... set off our markers.”

  “Are we off course?” Hir'ruk asked in sudden distress.

  Esmay shook her head firmly. “No. I don't think so. The problem is I'm not sure where on the course we are. Normally we can tell by what we run into on the course itself. But the compression ratio is different so it's harder to make adjustments. I'm pretty sure we're going to come out near Antigua, but I'm not sure how far out.”

  “Please tell me we're not going to overshoot,” the captain sighed rubbing his brow.

  “No, I don't think it will come to that. We'll hit the hyper wall before we do.”

  “Lovely,” the captain sighed. “And you're just telling us now?” he asked icily.

  “Um, well...”

  “The admiral asked. We hadn't thought of it until now. Actually his AI Sprite put us onto the problem. We just confirmed it not even fifteen minutes before this meeting,” Blackhawk interjected.