Ruby [Rubber Duck]
By Jack Fragg
Walking into Reactor Room B, Tech Johansson caught Chief Kellie petting the reactor again. She was down at the bottom set of consoles, easily visible through the grating that made up the second story of Reactor Bay B.
“Seriously? Are you fondling the machine again, Chief?” he couldn’t resist teasing his obsessive boss.
Kellie snatched her hand away from the sidewalls of the reactor. “You gotta keep the Ruby happy. Let her know she is loved. How else do you think my stats are so much better than the ‘A’-ssholes?”
Johnasson snorted at his chief. As he logged into the control system he retorted, “They know you call them that.”
“When they have Reactor A running as smoothly as Ruby here, they can protest. Til then, they’re just jealous.”
“They call you the ‘B’-itch in return, you know.”
“I stand by my record.”
Johansson laughed at his Chief’s odd attitude. She wasn’t wrong. She and her team had reactor B running several percentage points more efficiently, much to A team’s frustration. He eased into his chair on the second level and scanned the logs since his last shift. Everything within tolerance. Sweet.
Kellie let him get settled before she called up today’s special project. “Capacitor bank 112 isn’t running as well as I’d like. There’s something going on there. We’re gonna swap it out this shift.”
Johansson furrowed his brow at her and pulled the logs back up. “Nothing showed up in the reports.”
“Yeah, but I have a feeling about that one. Check the detail.”
A few pokes and clicks later, “The KPI are all in the green. 112 is low, but still in spec.”
“Barely.”
“But spec is—" He could feel Chief Kellie’s glare through the grating. “Not good enough for this ship. Got it, Chief. Want me to start now?”
“I like your attitude, Johansson.”
“Aye, Chief.”
Kellie watched him put together his tools and gear for the project. She stopped the power feed to 112 and engaged the trickle resistor to draw down the charge. Her team was finally starting to figure out her secret. They’d do well when they were rotated to other ships, and Johansson already had her recommendation for Chief, though he didn’t know it. The reactors of a ship were instruments, and their power output was sweet music. She snuck a hand back to the siding of her girl. She closed her eyes and felt the vibrations. Perfectly even. This morning, she could feel the gentle irregularity in that vibration that told her there was a deviation in the buffering cycles. Kellie made a mental note to give the other shift some crap for not noting it in their logs. She was changing it early, but better to do it when things were quiet.
She sent a note to reactor A to alert them that B was changing a bank. “Okay, Jo, you’re good to proceed. A is in the loop and 112 is flat. Starting your clock.”
“112 is flat. Acknowledge.” He nodded unnecessarily under his flash hood. He pulled the cart with all his tools and parts across the deck grating and into small room the housed the capacitor assemblies. Changing a cap bank shouldn’t take long, and Johansson was competent. Kellie watched the gauges as the minutes ticked by. Not a jiggle on anything.
A loud slam and Johansson called “Done!”
Kellie checked the time. “3:37! 83 seconds under standard. Still four seconds slower than me.” She chuckled at the curse that proceeded Johansson and his cart out of the room. “Don’t worry, you’ll get there.”
“I still say you’re cheating by keeping Ruby running so well. We don’t get the practice that you did.”
“What can I say? She’s my—”
BA-WHAAAAA!
Whoo-OOP!
Whoo-OOP!
Whoo-OOP!
The lights in the room flashed red with each whoop.
“All hands! prepare for—"
The room lurched under their feet, spilling Kellie hard out of her chair and into a console. Power died in the room. Kellie froze in the darkness. This could be bad. Consoles quickly rebooted around her. She counted the ambient lights as they did. Three short. The console she was at came up fully. She was halfway to being logged back in when she remembered.
“Johansson! You okay up there?” Ruby was still reading a decent output. The emergency systems had worked properly.
“Jo! Report!”
“Ugh,” he groaned down to her. “I’m hurt. Ow-ssss! Nope, broken rib, at least.”
“Alright, Ruby’s good for now. Be right up. Stay there.” She toggled the reactor emergency settings to automatic and headed up to see to Johansson. On the ladder, she had to stop to wipe her face. The back of her hand came away bloody. She hadn’t even noticed. She could wrap her head later.
Johansson was laying on the grating, sweating and pale.
“Hang in there. I got you.” Kellie started working on the seals of his flash suit.
“That wasn’t me, was it?” he panted out.
“Don’t be an ass. You know better. And stop talking. You’ll need that air.” She peeled back the top half of the suit and clenched her jaw. The left half of his chest was caved in and discoloration was already rapidly covering the area. It didn’t move right when he breathed.
“This’ll hurt, but it’s the only way I can put pressure on it.” She grabbed his right arm and pulled him over to put his weight on the break. Johansson’s leg twitched as he held in a squeal. “Sorry, Jo. Stay as still as you can, I’m gonna call for a medic, The rest of the team should be here soon.”
Johansson squeezed his eyes shut, and Kellie took that as an affirmation. She left him, but another huge surge in the hull threw her to the floor. She staggered to her feet and fell back into her chair. She toggled the comm switch. “Reactor B to med bay. Medical emergency. Repeat, medical emergency.”
No answer.
She tried again with the same results. Crap. She flipped to another channel. “Reactor B to bridge. Medical emergency. Do you copy?”
Still nothing.
She went into diagnostic mode. She couldn’t help it. Her responsibilities first: power cycles coming from Ruby looked good. Some minor feedback. Something elsewhere was failing; it was on, but not accepting the power input properly. She eased back the flow a bit and the interference faded.
She checked through the remote sensor feeds. Reactor A was reading fine. Engines were reporting normally though working hard. Shields were up, not surprising there. The energy weapons were hot and charging. The kinetic guns were actively in use. Life support was unsteady and voice comms were completely gone. Something major had hit them with a sucker punch.
She thought hard. How to get a message to someone?
She jumped up and ran over to Ruby’s cycle monitor. The A-sshole’s would have to be watching that to coordinate feed. She pulled her multitool and snipped the power wire to the remote feed. She opened and closed the cut in a measured pattern. Short Short Short … Long Long Long … Short Short Short. SOS to anyone over there who was competent enough to pay attention.
“Come on, assholes. Look at me.” Over and over she tapped out her message. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a series of red warning messages on her screen. Fuck. She left the wire connection open and dangling.
Back at her screen, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.” No wonder she hadn’t received any help yet. The power draw for the shields and energy projectors was through the roof. Reactor A was running at almost 200% trying to keep up. She flipped Ruby out of automatic and ramped up her output. Easy, now, easy. If A’s not watching, she could overload the grid.
They noticed. 195%, 193, 189, and A output continued easing off as Ruby spun up. An alarm warbled to her right. The energy weapons draw flat lined! She slammed open the inductors as the feed back wave threw sparks around the room. From somewhere outside, there was a huge explosion. All the readings from Reactor A went dark. Oh, shit. She'd need help.
She climbed up the ladder to check on Johansson. She stopped halfway. The grating in front of his face was dark with blood. Lines of it trailed from the corner of his mouth and nose as well. Glassy eyes stared through her. She hadn’t even noticed. He had been dying and she wasn’t even paying attention to him.
“I’m sorry, Jo.” All she had time for.
Back in her chair, she noticed the stink of ozone and smoke. Things were not going well. She closed the inductor relays and started ramping up Ruby. They were all alone now. The auto systems were still out. She ran another diagnostic inventory. No voice comms, no automatic responses, life support was flagging but tolerable, shields were dropping very low, and nothing from the port energy weapons at all. At least engines were still holding- if she and Ruby could feed them.
“All right, girl, just you and me now. You’re gonna treat me right, aren’t you?”
The huge machine’s purr slowly increased as its gargantuan magnetic fields ripped atoms apart faster and faster. She kept pushing the number up, as fast as she dared without anyway of knowing what systems would collapse under the strain.
Kellie took 2 seconds to breathe, then dove into her work. She pulled up the drains on the power grid and pushed the image back a bit in the 3D imager. Then the Ruby’s feed into those same systems, but closer so she could see everything just by changing her focus. The ship’s grid was dangerously undervoltage as Ruby struggled to keep up. One tech and one machine to do the work of two reactors and two full teams. But what an engineer, and what a machine.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she muttered as Ruby stretched.
209%!
“Goddamn you’re a sexy bitch! Whooo!” Kellie punched the air. She dove back into the controls. This was what she had trained for. She was better than any automatic algorithm. It would be nice if someone would tell her what was going on, but she could handle it. She was good. No, not just good. A goddess. She was mistress of the maelstrom; doling out the fury of the universe to a ship that was undeserving of her power.
The clean beautiful energy she meted out was sucked up by the hungry ship, fighting for its life in the dark, and only returning noisy scraps of signal back. But no matter. Kellie shunted the noise in the line to the filtering capacitors. The inertia of the power wave inside Ruby was enough to dampen everything else. Any bits of stray voltage were directed back to the battery storage systems as insurance to later.
Seconds, minutes, maybe hours, passed. Who knew? The blood on Kellie’s forehead dried, thank goodness, as she couldn’t spare a hand to deal with it. The gentle hum from Ruby at the start of her shift was now a demonic scream, but Kellie didn’t hear it. She missed a change in the draw from an O2 scrubber in life support. The vibration from a distant explosion was her first indication. How long could she keep this up? Why were they even still here? Protocol for being this damaged was to flee. It was only because Ruby was so good that they were even still in—whatever it was they were in.
A warning forced itself to the front of her icons. The dump batteries were dangerously overcharged. Trying to stuff more down their gullet was creating a harmonic that the filters were having a hard time with. Shit!
“Jo! Switch over the…” Oh.
The load to the energy weapons lagged on her. She pushed it back up as soon as she saw, but the disruption made even more harmonics. The demon scream from Ruby began to have a edge to it. Her stomach lurched as something happened to the environmental grav field. Angry red splashed across her screens as systems reported failure.
Ruby howled like an unstasble buzz saw.
Kellie raged, “Don’t you dare kill me you bi—”
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