The Command

When she got back, the Red Devils were roaring. The supply ventilators were on in Aux 1 and they were blowing the last of the smoke out of the escape scuttle. “Okay, let’s get in there and see what we got,” Helm announced. “Take it easy and watch where you walk. It’s still isolated, but don’t fucking touch anything looks like it might be hot. You stay with me, Sugar Mama.”

“Don’t fucking call me Sugar Mama, jackoff.” The guys from the repair party sniggered, and she snapped her flashlight on and stalked past them into the dark.

* * *

The IR flat looked OK, but the boiler level was a mess. Stuff was tracked all over. Helm told them to get rubber gloves and foxtails and get it cleaned up, then they’d see what to do next. He and the captain and the exec and the chief engineer, “the whole fucking food chain,” as Ricochet put it, were gathered around number-one GTG.

The first bad thing Cobie saw was the number-one switchboard. Still smoking, with a big hole down at shin level where the lower breaker panel had blown out. Bubbling chunks of brown plastic, blown-out wires. The disconnect bars, copper contacts big around as her thumb, were melted into shapeless globs of red metal. They were still sizzling as they burned their way into the deck matting. They picked everything up that was too big to sweep and carried it out in buckets. She tried to pull what was left of the breaker carrier out. It didn’t move. Akhmeed couldn’t get it out either. He said they’d have to get one of the hull techs to cut it out with a torch. She went down to tell Helm but, when she got to the gaggle around the generator, stopped to listen.

Lieutenant Porter, the chief engineer, was explaining to Captain Lenson that the labyrinth seal had blown on the generator. Not the turbine, but the part that made electricity. It had mineral oil in it to lubricate the bearings. When the seal blew, it sprayed the oil on the rotor. “That sent a high voltage, high amperage charge, just like a bolt of lightning, up the bus to the switchboard. That’d blow the 1SG breaker, the switchboard generator breaker. So that’s what happened up there.”

“Why’d the seal blow?” the skipper wanted to know.

“No reason I can tell you now, Captain. Could have been a manufacturing defect. Unfortunately, they’re not a replaceable item.”

“How about the LP compressor? What happened there?”

“Downstream effect. The breaker blew out of the switchboard and right through the 1SA section. It sheared the bus tiebreakers out of the board and shorted out all the power and tripped all the generators off the line.”

Cobie thought, And we were just lucky none of us was standing in front of the switchboard. But Porter was saying that since the rotor was connected to the generator shaft it had made the shaft jump, and one of the blades inside the turbine had brushed the inside of the casing. Since it was going at thirteen thousand RPM, as soon as metal hit metal the blades came off.

Porter rounded suddenly on Cobie. “You were in the space when it went, right? Kasson?”

“Yessir. I mean, yes, ma’am.”

“What’d it sound like?”

“A bang, superloud. Then a kind of rowfing sound… then a whirring, like everything was dying.”

Mr. Osmani said, “That growl was the turbine eating itself. After the lightning bolt blew the generators off the line. Without power to the electronics the engines power down. They’ve got five minutes of fuel on the gravity tanks, but they shut down without the auto run signal.”

Cobie kept looking at Porter. She sounded like she knew exactly what had happened and what to do. She didn’t seem to be in awe of the captain or the exec. The captain wanted to know if they could fix the turbine. Porter said they weren’t allowed to and they didn’t have parts kits. They’d have to remove and replace. Captain Lenson said to report the casualty, then, and asked how long would it take to put a new one in once they got it. She said maybe a day. Then he asked about the air compressor, if they could fix it. The chief engineer said they’d try, but they could run the plant, the pneumatic valves, and the rest of the system with the remaining compressor. If that failed, they could bleed air down to operating pressure from the high pressure system, or run the plant in manual if they had to, although they’d have to go to two watch sections to do it. The skipper nodded. He told Helm to tell the watch section they’d done the right things. He was glad they’d all got out safe. Then he told Porter to get on the repairs and ducked out the escape scuttle.

* * *