2953-05-07 – Tales from the Service: A Trail of Cermytes 

Clara Liang had begun to hope they’d finish their sector sweep and report all clear when they found their first sign of Cermyte activity. If they weren’t looking for it, they might have dismissed the pockmarks as mere age weathering on a section of the polymer cladding of the high voltage weapon-power conduits. 

Janda Dunewhite, of course, was not a particularly old vessel, having commissioned into the fleet barely two T-years before the opening of hostilities. The insulation simply hadn’t had time to degrade like it sometimes did in vessels that were in and out of mothballs and lengthy refits for two or three decades.  

Clara’s previous posting had been to just such a ship, and she examined the pockmarks closely for nearly a minute while Ruslan Boyko scanned the area for more definite signs of the pests. It certainly looked like superficial age deterioration to her eye. Either some supplier had skimped out on the quality of the insulation for this section, or there were small cermytes in the area. The xeno-pests had compound jaws that worked on polymer something like a power sander. None of the briefings Clara had seen had explained what those jaws were intended to devour in the cermytes’ natural habitat; surely no universe created by a loving God would contain a creature specifically adapted to devouring high-tech materials. 

Shuddering, Clara pulled an electrical probe out of her tool-belt and ran it along the back side of the conduit. Nothing skittered out, but she could feel the unevenness of a surface even more chewed-on than what she could see. The thick cladding was still safely insulating the conduit, but if the infestation had gone a few more weeks unnoticed, the next combat alarm could have shorted the whole system. 

“They’ve gone elsewhere.” Clara turned toward Boyko. “But they’ve been here.” 

“Cermytes don’t move very far unless the food runs out.” Boyko shook his head. “Maybe we startled them.” 

Clara pulled a maintenance beacon-tag from her bag and stuck it to the bulkhead at the forward edge of the damaged area of the conduit, then put another at the aftward end. A quick tap set them to synchronize so the maintenance computer system would understand them to identify the diameter of an affected area, which would show up on Chief Belluomo’s status board. She set this as a “yellow” indicator, which was the agreed upon means of advising damage without visible cermytes. 

No doubt this was not the only such area being flagged at this point. It was up to the Chief to guess the location of the main body of cermytes from the various damage indicators deployed by his team throughout the ship. It was a job Clara didn’t envy; no doubt it would remain undone at the end of their shift, and the hotshot first shift crew chief would be tearing out his hair at the dithering of the two “lesser” shifts who had spent the previous sixteen hours gathering information on the problem, and would try to raise Belluomo’s “incompetence” to the skipper. 

Fortunately, that wasn’t Clara’s problem. While her chief was getting raked over the coals, she’d be in the mess compartment downing five more coffees and trying to stay alert long enough to catch up with her friend Kir Connely, a second-shift engine tech, before staggering back to her bunk for eight to ten more hours of staring into the darkness. If she was lucky, she’d doze off a few times and catch more two whole hours of sleep. 

Unfortunately, the end of the shift was still more than six hours away. Clara stood, scanned the conduit one more time, then gestured in the direction they’d been going. “Let’s finish the sweep. If there’s going to be more, I’ve got a hunch it’ll be where this line goes through the forward firewall.” 

A few dozen meters down the narrow maintenance passage, Clara was proven right. The thickened cladding where the conduit passed through the heavy bulkhead and the hull frame behind it was covered in a network of shallow dimples, most no bigger than a fingernail. This could not be simple weathering. 

“The ones at work here were bigger.” Boyko ran his wrist lights all around the visible pars of the conduit terminus. “Maybe three or four centimeters. Small adults.” 

Adults meant egg-laying, of course; cermytes bred at a prodigious rate. “There’s hard vacuum past this bulkhead.” Clara tapped the firewall. “No way they went forward.” 

“They didn’t go to port, and this is the last tunnel to starboard.” Boyko nodded. “That leaves two directions.” 

“I was afraid of that.” Clara shuddered as she scanned her lights along the wiring-netted overhead paneling. Less than half a meter above that was the floor paneling of habitation deck five. A similar distance below her feet was the overheads of habitation deck six. Those were both crew accommodations decks, in addition to housing duty compartments. “They’re sheltering in the hab areas.” 

Boyko sighed. “We’re going to have to vac-cleanse half the ship, aren’t we?” 

Clara pulled out another handful of beacon tags. “That’s not our department.” Maybe it wasn’t so bad to leave the decision to the first shift chief after all. She couldn’t imagine any good coming of rousting the crew out of their bunks and venting their cabins on the order of an enlisted chief while the skipper was sleeping. 

The problem with cermytes is not that they are devious, or particularly stealthy, it’s that once they get aboard a ship, they are almost impossible to fully exterminate in the field. A crew struggling to keep them in check will have its battle readiness degraded even if no systems are affected. 

Janda Dunewhite has since been pulled into the yards at Sagittarius Gate for a minor refit, and it can be assumed that if the vessel was still struggling to exterminate its cermytes at this point, that a full decontamination was completed before the refit began.