Seeklight

“Hey.” He rapped on the screen dividing the little room in half. “Hey, Rennie. Did you hear something?”

Muttered grumbling, then the sound of her turning heavily onto her other side. “For god’s sake,” she said disgustedly. “Go back to sleep. The engines shut off, is all.”

That was it. Daenek touched the wall behind him and realized that it was the sudden stopping of the vibration that he had become so used to, that had startled him from sleep. The engines’ constant noise permeated everything, became as much a part of one as the sound of one’s own breathing. And now that noise wasn’t there.

Wait a minute, thought Daenek. He scratched his chin, carefully nursing himself back into full consciousness. We’re still a week away from the mertzer village. So if the engines aren’t running right now, it’s because they can’t. Something must have gone wrong.

He rapped on the screen again. “Hey. Rennie. We’d better get down to the engine room.”

A groan answered him. “What for? We just finished our shift a couple of hours ago.”

“Come on.” The engines are stopped. It’s an emergency.”

“Let ’em fix it themselves.”

Daenek gave up and set about retrieving his scattered clothing on the floor. When he was dressed, he strode across the room and slammed the door after himself as loudly as he could.

On the caravan’s deck it was bright daylight. Daenek winced and shaded his eyes with one hand as he headed along the main walkway.

“Daenek,” a voice called from above. “Hey, what’s up?”

He looked overhead and saw one of the young cargo-handlers, named Mullon, perched on a strut of one of the cranes. The youth’s beard-stubbled face grinned down at him.

“Beats me,” Daenek called up to him. “I just woke up.”

“Well, at least it didn’t sound like anything exploded down there.”

“That’s good, I suppose.”

Mullon’s grin grew wider. “Maybe it’s just waiting ’til you get there.”

“Thanks.” Daenek resumed his way towards the stairwell that descended to the caravan’s bottom levels. The entire crew of mechanics was assembled in the engine room,- waiting while the head mechanic stood talking into the ’phone mounted on the wall. A couple of the men nodded at Daenek as he emerged into the crowded space from the forest of grease-covered machinery.

Benter hung up the ’phone and turned around to face the men. “I told the captain we could fix it ourselves,” he announced.

“He’s sending the other caravans on to the village, instead of having them wait for us.”

Daenek waited and listened as the head mechanic divided the men into groups of three and four, detailing what had to be done. In a few minutes, Daenek found himself following one of the groups into the dark recesses on the other side of the illuminated open space.

“Hey,” he said, “what happened, anyway?”

“One of the damn torque shafts ripped loose,” answered one of the men. “It’s got to be bolted into place, and then splined in with the rest.”

He didn’t bother asking for any further explanation. The nature of a torque shaft was no more mysterious to him than everything else with which the mechanics concerned themselves.

A metal ladder dangled precariously through a circular hatchway in the floor. It creaked with Daenek’s weight as he descended after the others, finally emerging onto a small metal grid that hung by struts from the bottom of the caravan.

Several meters away, towards the rear of the caravan, he could see daylight. The view to the sides was blocked by the innermost of the gigantic treads. Other groups of mechanics were visible, working from similar metal platforms that hung suspended from the caravan’s enormous metal belly.

That must be it, thought Daenek. A long shaft, thicker than a man’s height, dangled from one end into the dirt of the roadway below. Its loose end had dug a trench a couple of meters deep into the rocky soil before the caravan had come to a halt.

Another group of mechanics was busy fastening to the shaft a chain that lowered from a winch on a platform above them.

“Look here.” One of the mechanics on the platform with Daenek crooked a finger at him. “This here is one of the auxiliaries,” the mechanic said, tapping a much smaller shaft that ran alongside their heads. “It’s got to be loosened so that the main shaft can be re-splined. Think you can hold it up at this end while we work the other?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He started to ask how heavy it was, then stopped himself. Putting his hands in position underneath it, he waited until the other mechanics finished unbolting the shaft’s flanged end from its connections, then carefully eased its weight onto his shoulder.

“Got it?” Without waiting for an answer from him, the other mechanics headed single-file down a narrow suspended catwalk towards another platform further on beneath the caravan.