Radiate Panels
Posted on 11 Aug 2021 @ 7:20pm by Commander Thaddeus Zayne & Master Chief Petty Officer Saoirse Barmeadow
Mission:
M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Orbit of Obsidian III
Timeline: MD05 - 1355HRS
1331 words - 2.7 OF Standard Post Measure
Most people hated the EVA suits. They were clunky, made you move awkwardly and no matter how hard you tried, you always ended up smelling the stale leftovers of whatever you had for your previous meal. Starfleet could travel at the speed of light, and then some, but still couldn’t scrub garlic out of recycled air. One of the many random musings that popped in her head as she worked, plasma torch in hand - her last resort choice to get the panel off in front of her. The age old ‘it can’t resist if it’s now a liquid’. As the panel edges liquified under her torch to create the opening, slipped her other tool under the latch and popped it free, catching it deftly before it floated away into the void. She might have been latched down to the array by the mag seal on her boots but the panel would have been happy to turn itself into a fiery projectile on reentry.
“Hold that,” Master Chief Petty Petty Officer Saoirse Barmeadow said, offering the thin metal sheet across the opening she just created.
Petty Officer DeSanto took the offered piece with a nod of his EVA helmet. “Hope they’re not all this hard to crack,” he mused as they both looked into the innards of the device.
Barmeadow and DeSanto were on one of the RSA panels that orbited Obsidian III. This Radiation Shield Array was what protected the people on Obsidian from the nearly debilitating radiation of their sun. But, unfortunately for them, the RSA had been offline for some time now. It was their job to bring it back up to speed.
The RSA itself was a planet wide network of satellites that were interconnected to one another and together created a latent radiation shielding for those on the planet below. These satellites that ringed the planet were as small as the platform they were on now, barely seven feet by seven feet, and as large as the hub-stations which were about the size of a pair of standard workbee pods. Just large enough to land a small shuttle on and, if necessary, house one person to live/work on the array. They’d already visited three of those types of satellite stations and were now working on the smaller arrays to try and repair whatever malfunction had put the entire thing offline. It was turning out to be far more difficult than they’d first thought.
Naturally, this work should have been the focus of the Obsdian Command Engineering teams. When she’d been the Chief there she’d worked on these panels countless times - it was just an expected part of the job. But that had proven easier said than done. While the station was coming online and was well under its own power, there were still plenty of things to keep them occupied, and to keep their new Chief occupied. Fixing the RSA panels wasn’t top of the priority list, at least not anymore. Knowing that she couldn’t spare any more resources to it, Captain DeHavilland had asked the Admiral for his help and he’d answered by assigning the task to Saoirse. She didn’t particularly mind, she just had her own pile of poop to be wading through aboard the Alexander. She didn’t really have the time for this. But here she was.
“Stabilize that coil while I reconfigure this,” Barmeadow said, waving to the relevant part as she pulled a tricorder from her suits leg pouch. “If it deviates more than two microns, stop me,” she added.
“Got it,” he agreed.
She flipped open the tricorder and began to work on it, concentrated so fully on it that when her commbadge chirped she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“It better be good, Ensign,” Barmeadow growled in reply.
“Good morning to you too,” came the familiar voice of Thaddeus Zayne.
“...Thad. Kind of busy,” she replied, smirking up at DeSanto who didn’t bother looking up at her. She shrugged it off.
“That’s what I heard. I brought help,” Thad replied.
“You… what?” she asked, looking up. Well, in fact, she was looking down but considering the fact that DeSanto and her were on the underside of the panel they were working on, with their heads pointed at Obsidian III, up was a bit relative. In the near distance a quartet of workbees were approaching, docked against a Talon runabout. The runabout was far, far too large to land on the bigger platforms but they had a lot more storage space and better replicators. Having it nearby would be helpful. Plus, if those bee’s had some OC engineers on there, that’d be even more helpful. She’d only been able to spare five from Alexander.
“Maybe we’ll get home in time for happy hour,” Ensign Granderson chimed in from their work bee hovering on the other side of the panel.
Barmeadow couldn’t help but smile, “Well. I won’t say no to a few more hands.”
“Following your lead, Chief. Where do you need us?”
“Give me a minute to fix this one and we’ll come to you,” she replied then squatted back down to finish what they’d been working on. Once she had it settled and the panel powered back up, she left DeSanto to put the panel back on and made the awkward, vertigo inducing walk up and over the panel to the workbee Granderson was waiting in. “Beam me in?” she asked, gesturing to Zayne clearly at the helm of the runabout. In a moment the blue beam coalesced in her chest and deposited her on the pad in the runabout.
Saoirse unbuckled her helmet straight away and took a gulp of non-garlicky air and then smirked to her old friend. “Look at you. XO,” she said, stepping up and offering a hug to the man. There was a camaraderie and history there that was far more than just the words written in the after-action reports of OC. They’d been through thick and thin together during their time in the void. She couldn't count the number of nights that she went to sleep wondering if his was one of the last faces she’d ever see in her life.
“Where’s Quinn?” she asked as she let him go.
“Power distribution network issues. Something about feedback loops,” Zayne shook his head, “He’s occupied. I was able to pull this group before they had a chance to report in properly. Figure we got at least another twenty-four hours before he starts asking where the hell his new staff went.”
Saoirse grinned, “Sneaky, bastard!”
Thad just returned what passed for a smile on his face and waved to the back of the runabout, suggesting the big terminal in the aft section. “Where can we help?”
“Well,” Barmeadow replied as they walked, “So far, all the panels have had the same problem. Misaligned inverters. Normally a small alignment can be fixed with a sort of… controlled short… but they’re so far off alignment now that if you did that the radiate coils will fuse… or explode,” she shrugged. “So we have to follow the power failures as they occur.”
“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Thad shrugged suspiciously.
“It’s a game of whack a mole, and there’s only four of us. If we can spread out, we can realign multiple panels at once and either get the system back online, or isolate the bigger issue,” she sighed, running her hands through her hair as she approached the large MSD in the aft section and then engaged it to show the whole RSA grid. “It’s going to take a fecking eternity.”
Thad nodded, looking it over himself. He shrugged, “Right. I’ve got eleven, not including me,” he explained. “Point us where to go, Chief.”
