2950-10-11 – Tales from the Service: Pests among Scars
This week we continue the account of Ruby Nichols, a hazardous environment tech working on one of the Navy space docks here in the Maribel system.
As I mentioned in last week’s posting, I have verified what I can about this account, which did come with a few limited images. A particularly good shot of the critter she describes here can be found on our datasphere hub. Though there are several creatures in the catalog which resemble it closely, none of them are known starship pests, and all of them breathe either air or water. Apparently, Ruby’s find needed neither.
As Ruby Nichols played her lights and sensors over the ruins of a maintenance crawlspace, the most contaminated bits of metal were glaringly obvious to both her eyes and sensors. The coruscating oil-slick sheen of phased-particle contaminated metal seemed to be everywhere, as if the escaping stream of reactor-fuel had forked a dozen ways just prior to slicing through the space, with each path meandering off in a different direction as it dissipated.
Ruby had long since given up trying to understand the reasons why phased particles chose the paths they did; in three weeks of carving out damaged metal from the belly of Marseille, her team had long since stopped trying to understand the ways of the strange matter which fueled starship reactors. Normally, such a job was fairly straightforward, with one or perhaps two nearly straight escape paths chosen by the particles as they escaped the magnetic containment. Only Marseille in any of their experience had suffered a much more complicated entanglement with its unmanaged phased matter.
As she got to work carving an oval section out of the crawl-space's bulkhead, Ruby heard Chief Logan swear on the open comms line. Rather than turn her head, she swiveled a suit camera to fix on him. The Chief had carved a section out of a bracing girder, and was struggling to pry the excised area free.
“It should just shatter if you hit it.” Ruby returned her attention to her own work. Phased-matter corruption tended to render metal as brittle as glass, a fact which often made their job immeasurably easier.
“Oh, I know.” Logan grunted. “I just hate chasing after the damned pieces.”
The sound of the section slipping free didn’t carry well in the thin argon atmosphere pumped into the work area, but Ruby saw the Chief stagger back under its weight, even with the assistance of the hazardous-environment suit’s servo-powered joints. Carefully, he lowered it down to the deck at his feet. No doubt his rad-meter was clicking alarmingly as he stepped down a level to haul the component to the drone cart at the middle of the work area.
Ruby finished cutting, then extended her suit’s pneumatic hammer and delivered a sharp strike to the middle of the cut-out piece. The panel shattered, and a dozen angular shards fell at her feet, some still attached to each other by stringy remnants of less-contaminated metal.
As she collected the shards into a bag and listened to the steady tone of her rad-meter, Ruby thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Again, rather than stop her work, she spun one of her suit cameras in that direction, expecting to find that a reflective surface had brought her an indirect look at the Chief’s movement. There was nothing reflective in that direction, however; the camera inset pointed down the length of the splayed-open crawlspace tunnel as far as the pressure-dam at the end of the contaminated area, twenty meters distant.
Frowning, Ruby kept the inset in view as she collected the last few pieces of compromised paneling and cinched her carry-bag shut. Behind the panel, a pair of spring-frames used to give the interior of the ship some degree of flexibility under strong gee-forces also appeared compromised. One of them was already cracked. Once again, she set to cutting the damaged pieces free.
This time, when something moved in the crawlspace, Ruby was watching. Something yellowish and shiny darted along the wall, vanishing into the shadows.
“Well I’ll be damned. Chief, Yuan might not be a total idiot after all.” Ruby switched off her cutting torch and turned two suit lights down the crawlspace, but saw nothing more. “Movement at about ten meters.”
“Sparticks?”
“Not unless they decided to learn to breathe pure argon at one percent standard atmo.” Ruby had seen plenty of sparticks, and knew that in addition to being air-breathing organisms, that they were usually a dull grey or black in color. “Something else. Fifteen centimeters long at the most.”
“Get good vids. We can have someone upstairs tell us what it is.” Chief Logan picked his way across the work area to Ruby’s side, gun already drawn.
Ruby turned her lights off, but kept her cameras trained on the place she’d spotted the offending critter. The moment she saw movement in the gloom, she switched them back on. This time, she got a good look at it – a many-segmented body that looked like an unholy cross between a beetle and a starfish sat pinned in the center of her for several seconds, its three faceted eyes glittering. After a moment of dazed motionlessness, the critter scurried up the wall to vanish into a hole.
“That’s no spartick.” Ruby sent a still shot to Logan, in case he’d missed it himself.
“Nothing I’ve seen before.” Logan agreed. “Give it a wide berth for now. I’ll send the image upstairs and ask if anyone knows what it is.”
Shuddering in her suit, Ruby stepped around Logan and headed up to the area he’d been working. “No argument there, Chief. Ugly little thing, whatever it is.”
