Personal Log - Lacy Underall - Stardate 230118
So I’m down in the security office on level eleven when Chief Barbosa pings my comm badge and orders me to get my butt to level two and speak to the duty Ops officer, and that they have a job for me. I sighed and threw away the last of my raktajino. She kept sending me to do work for other branches. I think she’s trying to get rid of me.
I took the turbolift to level two, and went to the Ops office, and the duty officer assigned me to gas collection. “Underall, get some junior officers with the skills you need, check out a runabout rigged for gas collection, and get a load of deuterium.” Ugh. The force of gravity ensured that crap ran downhill until the job hit the lowest ensign. I perked up. I would be in command. I would have my own ship and crew. Cool!
I smiled brightly at the Lieutenant and assured him I was on the job, then quickly checked my PADD to find out what the heck I was supposed to do.
My last time “in command” had either gone really well or spectacularly badly, depending on who you talked to. At the Academy, they had us do the Romulan bioweapon lab simulation. My team was inserted into the simulation, and the idea was we work together to solve a series of puzzles to escape before the weapon killed us. They’d emphasized that we should use “out of the box” thinking, which I think was their mistake. Some thought the other mistake had been making me the team leader.
As soon as the instructor, Commander Fish, told us to proceed, I’d smashed a beaker, held a jagged piece of glass to Fish’s throat, and screamed, “let me out of here, or I’ll kill you!” My team set a new Academy record of 8.2 seconds.
But I digress.
I checked who was on duty and rounded up Cadet Dingus and the new Nova419 android, Pauline, as my engineer. Dingus was eager to get off the station after several weeks of cleaning space toilets.
So the three of us trooped down to the docking bay, talked to flight operations, and got assigned a dusty runabout named the Athabasca. It was in the very back of the bay, and it seemed the passenger module had been removed and a gas collection module installed instead - basically a set of big tanks and compressors that filled the extra space, leaving a very narrow corridor to get to the back where the replicator and bathroom were located.
We filed a flight plan to Hrulea (Ircassia IX) and got on with the job. Basically, what we needed to do was activate the Bussard collectors, fly through the upper atmosphere, then pause and wait while the continuous cycle fractionator threw away everything that wasn’t deuterium. Then the system took the remaining heavy hydrogen and pumped it from the collection tank to the storage tanks, liquifying it along the way. Rinse and repeat until we filled the storage tanks. Seemed simple enough.
My role in all this was to sit back with my feet up on the console, sipping raktajino while Dingus did the flying and Pauline operated the collection equipment. Something the manual hadn’t mentioned was how hot it got on the flight deck as a result of the gas compression. I stripped down to my undies, Dingus to what I can only hope was red body paint, and Pauline just sat there in her smug android way, unaffected by the heat.
Pauline did explain the three suggestions of robotics to me, though. Seems that way back in history, the Asimov guy had got it all wrong.
- Try not to break humans.
- If you do break a human, deny everything, and try to claim they were already broken.
- Try not to leave an oily residue on any surface Captain Maven is likely to brush against or sit on in her uniform because then there will be talk of taking away self-lubing privileges.
The third suggestion seemed oddly specific.
So after skimming the atmosphere about twenty times, collecting, compressing, and sweating, we made our way back to Galileo station. The engineering crew pumped the liquid deuterium from our tanks to the station's slush storage tank. I dismissed Dingus and Pauline and reported back to the duty operations officer.
“Good job, Underall, that brought our stored deuterium up by two percent.” He gave me a big grin. “The CO will be very happy. Now go and do that twenty-five more times.”
Crap! Dingus just shrugged. “It’s better than cleaning space toilets. Same time tomorrow?”
I couldn’t argue with that assessment.
End log