Aboard the UNSS Green Earth

The Mechanisms Aboard the UNSS Green Earth

By S. A. Freeman

"Be careful," Tasha said, pulling her ponytail out of her white jumpsuit, "and don't forget to log everything. Your PDA isn't even on."

Lily turned around and frowned, saying, "Sorry, boss."

Tasha huffed and stepped forward, clicking Lily's PDA on, nearly knocking it off its small stand. The screen blinked to life, and they both appeared on the screen, Tasha's dark hazel eyes glaring down at the smaller Lily. "You Mooners get on my nerves. This is the third time this week I've had to tell you to follow protocol."

She was small, but Lily managed a feisty scowl that reeked of disdain. "Can you stop hovering?"

Turning, Tasha rolled her eyes, and headed back to her station across the large, open, whitewashed bay called Lab-03, saying as she went, "Just be careful with those chemicals. Goddamn."

"Go to hell," Lily muttered, turning back to her PDA. Facing it, she said, "Lily Schultz, Biochemist, R-5, located in Lab-03. Mixing Substrate-12 with potassium nitrate and magnesium in an attempt to create a resistant and long-lasting fertilizer for assistance on the AgriMartian project."

That out of the way, she turned to the vials before her. Substrate-12 sat in a black glass container, while the potassium nitrate and magnesium sat in large glass beakers. It was a simple thing, just to mix them, but she had to be careful. First, she leaned forward, closely inspecting the glasses that sat on the cold steel countertop, checking them over for foreign substances. Theoretically, they should've been clear, given the counter-contaminant measures and double airlock doors, but a once over always helped.

As she inspected them, Tasha, behind her, said, "I'm heading over to Lab-02. You're the only one in here, so be careful."

"Yeah," Lily said, not turning around. She could hear the first airlock open and shut with a hiss, and then was left in silence. The beaker with the magnesium was cold, but the air in the labs was always nearly intolerably cold without the warmth of the jumpsuits. She gripped it and poured it into a large flask, before doing the same with the potassium nitrate, and mixed the two with a glass stir rod. Then, carefully, she grabbed the neck of the vial with Substrate-12.

When she poured the gross, viscous black liquid out, it landed on the powder below with a couple of plops. It looked like a sort of tar, and crept like a slug from the vial, drip, dripping down in liquid chunks. Lily watched it, eyes glossing over in boredom as she waited for it all to seep from the glass, when a smell hit her nose. Something foul seemed to be in the air that made her face scrunch. She sniffed around for a moment, careful to hold the vial where it was, trying to locate the source of the smell. It seemed to be all around her workspace for a moment. Leaning in to the mixture, however, she had to jerk away quickly. The smell was so powerful it singed her nose, smelling like a chemical burn. Her body tensed, and her eyes shot wide. Icy adrenaline stabbed through her gut as she turned to the PDA, yanking Substrate-12 away from the mixture flask Quickly she punched a button on the side of the PDA, prompting a small dialpad to pop up. One-one-two, was all she had to press, just one-one-two.

She got to the third number when the flask burst into a white, thunderous explosion. By the time Tasha and her team arrived, frantic and panicked, the fire suppression system had already done its job, leaving the room blackened, smokey, and empty. Klaxons wailed and people hurried aside as the responder team pried their way into the airlocks. Tasha watched, lips pursed, eyes empty, fists clenched, and cheeks stained.

"Go, go, c'mon!"

"I'm going!"

"Go faster!" McKinzie said, ushering the man in front of her to the emergency lift. They hurried down a hexagonal hallway, the corner lights flashing red in sequence as a mechanical voice echoed through the hallways.

On again, it clamored: "Code-Orange in Lab-03. Fire Team 02, Medical Team 04, Engineering Team 01, respond immediately to Deck-02. Repeat. Repeat."

"Price goddamnit, you need to work out more!" she shouted.

He looked over his shoulder with a snarky glare. "Right now? Jokes right now?"

"Just go!"

Loudly they bolted down the hallway, their boots hammering on the grated floor hard enough to shake it. The emergency lift was down a hall, to the left, next to one of the fuel-regulation rooms. As they bolted toward the set of steel lift doors, someone stepped out of the regulation and watched them pass.

"Is everything alright?" they called.

McKinzie turned as they arrived at the lift, Price hammering away at one of the doors' buttons. She shrugged, panting, and said, "No clue."

"C'mon," Price said, the doors opening to a small, dark elevator playing the emergency broadcast inside. McKinzie jumped in, the doors slamming shut behind her as the lift jerked up.

Both of them were panting, leaning on the handholds on the wall. "What the fuck happened, you think?" Price asked, watching the number above the doors shift from five, to four, to three.

"I don't know." The cool air of the lift was a refreshing change from the heat of the engineering deck. McKinzie, taking a deep breath and wiping her forehead, said, "Science nuts probably got too excited and blew a gasket."

"I hope not."

She shrugged. "Yeah, well, code orange. Doubt it's something else."

Covered in bearing grease, Price, cursing under his breath, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his dark orange jumpsuit. "This shit's not flammable right?"

"Well, only a little," McKinzie said. "I'm sure you'll be fine."

Price groaned. In a moment, the lift locked into place, and slipped open. The pair sprung out and hurried down the cleaner, rounded hallways that wove through the different labs and storage rooms of the second deck. Following a bright green line on the walls, they made their way to the charred airlock doors, just in time to see the medical team leaving. McKinzie paused. It looked like the fire was already out, and the fire team was already inside the lab inspecting the damage and aiding the scientists in securing any other materials. From inside, through the blackened glass, she could see Jonathan, the medical director of the ship, discussing something with a woman who was clearly frazzled. McKinzie pushed her way through the small crowd of white jumpsuits at the doors, and through the security cordon, Price close behind.

The room smelled foul. It was burnt flesh, absolutely, McKinzie knew. She'd smelled it too many times before to mistake it, and yet it still made her gut churn. She scowled, clenching her jaw when her boot hit the ash on the floor. As she stepped in, she caught the last of the conversation being had between Jonathan and the woman - Tasha. She looked completely disheveled, her normal black ponytail frazzled and frayed, and her face a deep red and sweaty, and McKinzie could hear the stress in her voice as it cracked and wavered.

"So she'll be fine?" Tasha asked.

Jonathan shrugged. "Likely. Looks like pretty severe skin damage, but not too much below that. If the fire guys are right, then it must've been a quick boom."

Tasha doubled over, leaning on a powdery lab counter. "Thank god. Christ, I thought I'd lost a member of my team."

"Well, I don't think she'll be coming back to work anytime soon," Jonathan said. "We're gonna try and get her back to Earth when we can. Even if her organs look like they'll eventually be fine, the skin damage was pretty bad."

McKinzie could see Tasha's fingers curl on the counter, digging into the soot as if she were in pain. "We're already running behind."

"Sorry. There's no way she's coming back though."

"Dammit!" Tasha slammed a fist down on the counter, before standing up straight and taking a deep breath as she attempted to regain her composure. "Alright, just... take care of her, okay?"

"Planned on it," Jonathan said, before departing.

McKinzie, just barely catching Tasha's gaze, turned away and saw Price already working with the fire team near the blast site. She joined them, inspecting a burnt out hole in the wall, pieces of shattered glass and melted machinery, and a giant melted hole in the wall that had burnt through several wires and panels. McKinzie looked into the hole as Price and talked with the head of the fire team, and started to inspect the damage. It was no surprise they'd had to crack open the airlocks manually; several of the locking wires had been busted, not to mention a major hydraulics pipe that had no business being where it was. She cursed the shoddy construction of the ship and pulled out her PDA.

When she pulled up the map, she located the nearest tool compartment, and turned to Price, holding out the PDA. He gave it a glance, then looked at her and nodded, before heading off. McKinzie then turned to the fire team chief, trying to catch his empty stare.

"What happened?"

He shook his head and sighed, gesturing to the blackened room. "Some kind of chemical explosion. Melted the walls, the counter, spat dust everywhere, and don't even get me started on the girl."

McKinzie ran a gloved hand through her sweaty, matted short blond hair, rubbing streaks of the black dust through it. "Well, alright then. Is it safe to work?"

"Should be," he said. "We're trying to get the Admiral to shut off the alarm now. Best of luck to you."

He gave her a little mock salute as he walked away, slipping past Price as he stepped back into the room. When she turned to grab the tools from him, she caught Tasha's eyes once again. It seemed, if just for a moment, that the room fell silent as they watched each other for a moment. Tasha's face was tight, and it seemed like she wanted to look away, but couldn't. Her soft features seemed sharper, like McKinzie's own, but it could have just been the way Tasha was tensing. For a brief moment, McKinzie wondered what Tasha was seeing through her steel-gray eyes, before she came to again. The alarm had fallen silent, the fire teams left, the cordon outside dispersed the gathered crowd, and now it was just the three of them.

Price handed her a black case of tools, and said, "The fire team's not gonna clean this place up? Or is that for the service teams?"

"Service," McKinzie said, shaking herself a bit and taking the tools to the damaged wall. "And they won't get in here until we're done, so let's get to work."

She laid the case out on the counter, punched a code into its digital lock, and cracked it open. "Price, get the right side, with the wires. I'll handle the hydraulics."

"Roger," he said, leaning into the hole. It was wider than it was tall, about the length of a person, so he dug into it and began to work with the frayed electrical bits.

As McKinzie picked up a welder and black multi-purpose tape, hopping onto the cooled countertop and leaning into the hole, footsteps echoed behind her. Turning, she watched Tasha approach.

"Need something?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.

Tasha frowned. "I need a drink. I need another scientist. I need you to do your job."

"Tightass." She leaned into the hole, flipping on a small mask that came with the tools, and tested the welder. "You should be more careful up here."

"Us? Every other day some system or other fails on this ship. It'd be nice if that didn't happen." Tasha leaned on the counter and crossed her arms, looking down.

"We aren't the ones that keep blowing the electrical systems in the labs," McKinzie said, starting to weld a piece of the hydraulics pipe. "This ship is shit. They all are. You and your team need to remember that."

"Good maintenance would help."

McKinzie stopped welding for a moment and sighed. She turned back to Tasha and flipped her mask up, frowning at her. "Blame Earth for that. They're the ones who built these deathtraps."

"Money and time constraints," Tasha said. "The Lunar ones were better. In fact, we'd still have them, if not for the events of 2091, you know."

"Also not my fault. Blame Earth for that too," she said, putting her mask back on and leaning into the hole, cursing under her breath.

Tasha sneered. "Chief Engineer McKinzie. With a title like that, you'd think you could, well, let's say, engineer the ship to function better."

Again, McKinzie leaned out of the hole and glared at her through the metal mask. "Why don't you focus on not letting your scientists blow things up every other day, huh?"

Price leaned out of the hole and looked at them both, before shaking his head and going for another set of tools and quietly leaning back into the ship's wound. As far as McKinzie could tell, Tasha didn't even register that he was there.

Her white jumpsuit was starting to get blackened with the soot in the air. Tasha tried to wipe it off, but her hands, covered in it, only stained her more. She grimaced. "After the events of today, I don't think that's... necessary from you. And my team is under significant amounts of pressure to get this done. We're on a time crunch with implications you couldn't possibly understand."

"Yeah whatever," McKinzie said, patching up another hole in the hydraulics line. "You have no idea what goes on in the belly of this ship."

"You have no clue what we do in these labs." Tasha stood up and looked around the room. "The progress we have to make."

She walked up to the counter that McKinzie knelt on, leaning on it and looking up at a secure set of glass beakers and vials that'd managed to survive the blast in a metal cabinet on the wall. Reaching up, she grabbed a beaker, inspecting it closely for cracks, melted points, or fractures.

McKinzie rolled her eyes and pieced together the final patch on the pipe. It would do until a new pipe could be fitted for the system, which would take a day or two. Carefully, she reached over to a small red valve on the wall - the emergency shutoff - and flipped it on to test the system. As soon as she did, from a small gap in the pipe, a hiss of hot steam blasted her in the face, heating up her mask instantly. She yelped and shot out of the hole, bumping her head on the overhead cabinets and rattling everything inside.

The jolt was enough to make Tasha lock up, dropping the vial she'd been holding. McKinzie watched as Tasha, eyes wide like a panicked animal, tried to recover the glass before it ultimately shattered and scattered across the ground in tiny glimmering pieces.

Fingers curling, Tasha began to shake, her face turning red as she turned to McKinzie. "What is wrong with you?"

McKinzie shrugged. "A lot of things. Relax, it's just a glass."

"Relax? Relax? Do Mooners take anything seriously? This is a piece of equipment that is expensive. Expensive! To haul all the way from Earth to Mars. Blast my labs, almost kill my scientist, shatter my equipment, you Mooners!" Tasha slammed a fist on the counter, spilling ash into the air. "Why are you all on my ship?"

"It's not your ship--"

"Can you do anything to uphold the fragile systems we have in place? Do you even understand the importance of our mission here? Are you capable of that?" Tasha scowled at McKinzie, her fists going white and her face burning a deep shade of red. It almost looked, from behind McKinzie's fogged mask at least, like her eyes may have been watering too. "You should've stayed on the moon! Holy shit."

McKinzie, body tense and jaw locked, took a deep, shaky breath, and tried to ease her grip on the welder. "Twenty-two years does a lot on a person, huh?"

With that she turned away, shaking it off her shoulders, and carefully leaned in to shut off the pipe. Tasha, behind her, said, "Why, of all people, did you have to be on this ship?"

"I didn't do anything to you," McKinzie said, white hot sparks flying as she patched the small hole that the steam burst from. "Not a damn thing."

Tasha was quiet for a moment, before simply turning and walking away, out of the lab without another word. McKinzie finished patching up the pipe and tried the steam one more time, being sure to back far away from the lever. No steam. It looked like it would function well enough until the new pipe was fitted. She turned to face Price, who was finishing up with the wires.

He raised his eyebrows and looked at the airlock that Tasha had just left through. "Well," he said. "At least it looks like we're almost done here."

"Yeah," she said, following his eyes to the doors. "Doesn't look like there was that much structural damage done, at least."

They climbed off of the counter and repackaged their tools, sealing the case up and labeling it with a small orange sticker for the second shift engineers to review the contents. Price picked up the case, and McKinzie took a moment to stretch out.

"Alright," she said, shaking her arms out and pulling her PDA from her pocket, "I'll let the service forman know we're done."

Price nodded. "Are we gonna patch the hole?"

"No, we'll send up another team for reinspection after the room is cleaned up, and then we'll patch it when we fit a new pipe on the system. Nobody's going to be using this lab for a while anyways, that's for sure."

"Guess that's true." His boot scuffed at the floor, kicking at the shards of glass beneath him. "So what was that about?"

Fingers tapping at her PDA screen, McKinzie looked up briefly, then down at the glass, before going back to the screen. "You don't interact with these people much, huh?"

"I usually stick to the lower decks."

"That was Tasha. She's to the eggheads what I am to us grease monkeys."

Price scratched his neck awkwardly. "Okay, but it sounded like you two have beef."

"It's a long story."

He paused. "Wasn't twenty-two years ago 2091?"

Everything in McKinzie's body locked up for a moment, before she forced herself to breathe out a small sigh and relax. "Yeah. Now c'mon, I just sent the service guys the memo, let's get back down to deck five. I'm still worried about the fuel regulators."

"The coolant?"

"It's working for now, but I want at least half of them inspected by the end of the shift."

She started for the airlock, and Price tagged behind her. "You sure you're gonna be okay?"

"If I wasn't sure," she said, glancing over her shoulder, "I wouldn't have made it this far."

After the shift-bell rang, and McKinzie had retired to her small, cramped quarters, just before she could slip out of her jumpsuit, her PDA dinged. The room wasn't large at all; in fact, as she sat on her bed, tucked away in a wall-cubby beneath the room's electrical systems, she could lean over and reach her desk, attached to the other wall and grab the device. When she pulled it up, a small screen appeared showing her doorcam. Outside of her door was a visibly uncomfortable Tasha, arms crossed like a hug across her chest and eyes looking back and forth through the engineering living quarters.

McKinzie watched her for a moment. Tasha was still in her white jumpsuit, so she must've gone right from her shift to McKinzie's room. For a moment, McKinzie watched her as she squirmed in the hard, brutalistic belly of the ship, before sighing and clicking a small button at the bottom of the screen to open the door. It hissed quietly, and then yanked open as McKinzie stood, putting her and Tasha face to face.

There was a long moment of quiet as she and Tasha stared at each other, McKinzie steadily holding a flat gaze as Tasha glanced this way and that, face turning down. Eventually, McKinzie, laying back on her bed, said, "And to what do I owe this royal honor?"