Chapter 30

Cathérine took a deep breath. She’d been on her way to the Engineering department when she’d found a little alcove, a side-passage that led to a mostly unused storage room, and took a deep breath. The stress was getting to her, and that was frustrating. Cathérine Durand had been in spaceship battles. She’d had to physically fight intruders over control of her ship. She’d been shot more than once. And now she was having anxiety? She was almost insulted. 

It made a degree of sense, of course. Cathérine worked well under pressure. But there was no real pressure here. All’s quiet on the western front, so a soldier like her was starting to gnaw at her own leg. The problem was not external. There were no enemies to fight, no aliens to bravely look in the face, square-jawed and proud. There was just the emptiness of space outside, the planet below, and the crew in here with her. 

The crew, she hated to admit to herself, which were not necessarily her allies. Someone on board was responsible, and it was stressing her out. Should she treat everyone as a potential traitor? That could lead to a total collapse of the ship’s ecosystem. This wasn’t a military vessel, you couldn’t just press everyone until the answer you needed popped out. These were civilians, and civilians have long memories. Not to mention the fact that they were people, and people deserved better than the kind of treatment a military environment provided. 

So what, then? Keep quiet, until it happened again, and again? Of course not. She had to do something. She was doing something. She was going to head to Engineering and ask — politely — if they knew what was up. That was probably the best course of action. If someone stepped forward and was like “yeah, oops, dropped my spanner into the gears, won’t happen again, chief,” that would be fine and dandy. And if she didn’t get any answers, she’d leave her communicator on and recording, and she could ask Riel or Prakoso to go over things with her, see if she missed anything. 

She straightened her back and turned the corner. The Engineering Department was on the Engineering Deck. Confusingly, it only took up about half of the deck, with the other half being living spaces. Because of the essential nature of things like “engines” and “reactors,” most of the engineering crew preferred to sleep close to their job, had their own mess hall, and their own rec rooms. It meant that they were a bit more sequestered from the rest of the ship, but it was a sacrifice that’d had to be made for the sake of the ship’s safety. In theory, anyway. 

Cathérine noticed that the salutes she got down here were a bit less lively and enthusiastic. People didn’t smile as much at her down here. When she got a few suspicious glances, she wondered briefly if perhaps she should’ve taken Mayes with her down here. Evangeline was imposing, if nothing else. But she’d considered it beforehand and had decided against it. Not only did Cathérine not expect to actually get attacked, she also figured that bringing the chief of security down with her would send the wrong message. She wasn’t here to strong-arm anyone, and bringing a Security Officer with her could absolutely be construed as doing exactly that. 

She came to a set of doors. They were the heavier kind, like the ones you got to the hangar bay. The kind that could withstand some really heavy hits. Behind that door was the main engine room. If something went wrong in there, you didn’t want to be on that side of the door unless you were really good at fixing engines really quickly. She pushed the button, and the double doors slid open. 

The engine room was massive, as was to be expected. The SA-drive was a remarkable piece of engineering, but one of its main flaws was its size. The Inverse Square-Cube Law dictated that at too small a scale, the SA-drive would try to fold itself, which was, for obvious reasons, bad. A little bigger, and there would be no room for passengers. Which was why the engine room was the size of a football stadium, the massive spherical drive humming happily in the middle, its concentric rings rotating lazily. Well, it was still there, at least. Nobody had stolen her engines yet. 

But there were red lights all over, and were they supposed to be red? Or were they supposed to be green? Did the lights even mean anything? The room itself wasn’t actually that busy. Despite its prodigious size, the engine did not require a large crew to function. There was space for a thousand people in this room alone, but Cathérine didn’t think there were even fifty. There seemed to be a lot of wasted room in the space, but she knew every inch of the engine room was used to its full potential. Even the massive emptiness around the drive itself. When it folded space, the drive would essentially become a nexus of particles. While technically mostly harmless, a concentration of enough beta particles would still be enough to cause some serious harm, and a lot of the engine room was covered in aluminium shielding because of it. 

Not the engineers, though. Many of them had their overalls tied off at the waist as they moved through the, admittedly quite warm space. It was hardly regulation, but then again, the Sollipsis wasn’t exactly a regulation ship. And she wasn’t here to yell at people for not wearing their uniforms correctly. The floor of the engine room, below the massive drive, was a bit like a network of half-buried tunnels, or trenches, criss-crossing the space, and people were walking through it like rats in a maze. She didn’t know who designed this room, but Cathérine felt like she’d probably have some criticisms if she ever met them. 

Not far from where she’d entered was a large, heavily shielded room, in case the reactor did more than bombard the surrounding area with mostly harmless particles. It was also the main Engineering room, and contained the office of the Chief of Engineering, as well as an elevator that was supposed to be the main entrance to the Engineering Department. 

Cathérine had very specifically decided against using the elevator. She didn’t want to seem like a dictator who had come down from on high to glare at her subjects. She’d elected to walk in through the proverbial factory floor. Was it a bit shallow and manipulative? Yes. Did that mean it was a bad idea? Hopefully not. She wanted to start off on the right foot, and if she had to pull rank later, she could still do that. But for now, she just wanted to ask some questions. Answers optional. 

The door to the Engineering room slid open silently. There were a dozen people sitting behind various monitors, looking at systems diagnostics. Nobody seemed very alarmed at the fact that the engines seemed to not actually be working. One woman, she saw, strode through the room, walking from monitor to monitor, when she wasn’t being occasionally stopped to look at a tablet or even some physical documents. 

“Chief Engineer Gosseyn,” Cathérine said as she approached. Ellen Gosseyn was easily ten years her junior, probably probably more than that, but she had the energy of someone who knew what they were doing, and who knew they had the team to back them up. 

Gosseyn took a moment to look up from her tablet, which was such a blatant and obvious power play, Cathérine had to almost respect her for that. It was a pause that was exactly long enough for Cathérine to feel awkward, just standing there. If she asked for attention, she’d come off as petty or demanding, making Gosseyn look sympathetic to the people around them. If she said nothing, she’d be showing deference to Gosseyn, making her look in charge, instead. 

So Cathérine chose the third option. She walked right past Ellen, to one of the few schematics she knew she could read, projected onto a large monitor. If Gosseyn was too busy to help, the captain could help herself until she was ready. Her gambit paid off. Ellen spun around like her whole body was on a swivel when her Captain didn’t just stand next to her like an eager cadet. It took all of Cathérine’s self-control not to smile when the Chief of Engineering came to stand next to her, instead. 

“It seems all systems are nominal,” Cathérine said, looking at the screen. The engineer in the seat in front of it was clearly made uncomfortable by the fact that the head of his department and the captain of the ship were standing right behind him. 

“It does,” Ellen said. “That a problem, Captain?”

“Just making an observation,” Cathérine said with a little smile, then turned to her. “I’m glad to see you have a moment to spare, Chief Engineer.” She stuck out her hand. “Let’s talk.”

With an equally careful smile, Ellen Gosseyn shook it. “Looks like I do. How can I help you, Captain?” The two of them, almost simultaneously, walked over to the large window that overlooked the entire Department, and the giant Alcubierre-Suleiman Drive in the middle of it. 

“Well, ideally, I’d like your help in figuring out what’s wrong with my ship,” Cathérine said. She looked sideways at Gosseyn. “It’s not moving, you see. And I hear you’re one of the best, so I’m hoping maybe you and your department could shed some light on the subject.”

“I’m surprised you came all the way down here, Captain,” Ellen Gosseyn said. “After all, we were just on an alien planet. You’d think they’d have much more capable and interesting mechanics than us fragile humans down here.” She walked over to an unoccupied monitor and typed in some commands quickly. The glass window started to display numbers and diagrams, overlaid onto the drive. “All systems are, like you said, Captain, nominal. The engines ought be working, but aren’t.” She looked at Cathérine defiantly, like she was expecting her to call Gosseyn a liar. 

“Yes,” Cathérine said, “you said as much in your report. Strange, that.” She walked over to the monitor and typed some things in, too. The numbers flickered for a moment, but remained the same. “Even stranger is that there appears to be a glitch in your systems, Chief Engineer. You may want to get that looked at. It could even make the wrong data appear on, say, a screen. Or a report.”

“We’re aware of it,” Gosseyn said, nodding like Cathérine had mentioned that the paint was flaking. “We’re having a programmer look at it, soon as one of ‘em’s free, but you know how we systems engineers are. The machine doesn’t care about our schedule.”

“Yes,” Cathérine said. “Quite.”

“I promise, Captain, soon as we got an answer to the problem, I’ll be the first to come and deliver it to you in person.” Gosseyn turned and put a hand on her hip. She seemed genuine. Sure, she was antagonistic, and something was going on. But she wasn’t hostile.

“How are you and your crew doing, Chief Engineer? Any complaints?” Cathérine asked, looking around the room with her hands behind her back. Nobody met her gaze. Intimidated? Secretive?

Gosseyn shrugged and leaned on the monitor. “We can’t complain,” she said. “I think it even says so in our contract.”

“Well, that’s not accurate,” Cathérine said. “Complaints are exactly how we get everyone on this ship looking forward in the same direction, after all.” She paused for a moment. “If you had any complaints, Chief Engineer, what might they be? Living conditions okay?”

“Living conditions are just fine, Captain,” Gosseyn said. “Just some worries and niggles. Nothing to worry about. If we had reservations, we should’ve brought them up before we landed on an alien planet, right? But then again, everything was fine until then, so nah. Nothing to report. Captain.”

“Understood,” Cathérine said. “Well, if you do hear any complaints, do let me know, Chief Engineer. It’s paramount to the mission that we, and that does mean all of us, are in agreement.”

“Right.” Gosseyn turned to walk away, and paused. “What was that again?”

“What was what?”

“The mission.”

“Exploring the universe. Seek out new life. All of that.”

“Right. Seems to me we did that, Captain.”

“Certainly, but that doesn’t mean our mission is just… over, just like that, Officer Gosseyn.”

“If you say so, Captain,” Gosseyn said. “You’re the captain. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have some more work to get to. You know, figure out the real problem.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” Cathérine said, and made for the door. It had barely closed behind her when the elevator in the Engineering room opened, and Blake stepped out.