Author's Note:
This story has been retitled from 'In Space Everyone Hears You Scream' to 'In Space Everyone Screams. I'm very sorry for the long wait on Chapter 2. I told myself I would never be one of those writers who leaves their readers hanging and yet here we are, a year later. 2021 has been the most ridiculous year for me and I am finally getting back into writing on a regular schedule. Those of you who decide to pick this story back up and continue to read, I thank you. Chapter 3 is halfway written and by the time this posts, it will likely be in editing phase.
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Chapter 2
Anna levered her arm into a tight space spanned by coolant hoses, bundled wires, copper tubing, and steel brackets. The metal parts were dull; they had lost their luster ages ago. Her flashlight floated in the air at an angle so that its light shone into the narrow opening. The bluish white light gave the machinery a pallid tinge. As she loosened the last bolt and pulled the part free, she gave thanks for the lack of artificial gravity. Without it she was able to do things like change out parts that would weigh well over a hundred pounds under Earth's gravity. And she could do it by hand with minimal tools in the middle of the reactor by herself.
The ship's reactor was massive. Somewhat spheroidal, the inner chamber towered two stories tall and was as large as a small city block in diameter. The actual core itself encompassed a complex network of steel, aluminum, and titanium. It was sealed to the outside except for a series of vents that ran laterally down its sides like the seams of a massive pumpkin.
She pulled the old part free and held it under the light to inspect it.
It was charred. Burnt. Half of it blackened and discolored blue and dull gray. One side of the piping looked like half melted popsicle. She let it drift "downwards" at a sluggish pace (She'd grab it on her way out) and went to work pushing the new part into place. It looked like an F with a curved section at the end and a bracket in the middle that made it difficult to position. She spent a minute shifting in place to get it into the right position before bolting it into place.
Most of her days went the same way. She'd read through the reactor's system errors, scour the shelves in engineering storage to find the correct part, and replace said part. Rinse and repeat. This was the twenty-seventh part. She looked over her shoulder for what felt like the tenth time that day. And shook her head afterwards. The space was empty. The pressure of being alone was starting to get to her. That or she had watched too many horror movies as a teenager.
Inside the flood chamber, the only source of light came from her work light. The rest of the chamber was dark, with only a red glow haloed around the entry shaft. The reactor manual had been a dense piece of reading but she'd skimmed it over. This chamber was designed to be a buffer between the reactor's core and the rest of the ship. If the core's coolant system malfunctioned, the core could be flash cooled by venting the chamber to space.
With her flashlight in her mouth, Anna grabbed hold of a pipe and spun herself in the air so that her head was facing "down." She pushed off. Waiting for her at the "bottom" of the chamber was a suitcase sized block covered in hard plastic and metal plating. The sides were covered in yellow vinyl letters that read "100kWh." A battery pack.
She had hooked up the battery to the core's sensor array and her tablet floated in the air, tethered by a cable to the pack. Anna tapped the screen and watched as the backlight came on and a cool light lit the darkness. She pulled up the app designed to handle core diagnostics and read through the notifications.
A list of maintenance items in red colored text appeared. There was also a small but growing section of green. Items that the system had registered as completed. She wiped her brow. Her tablet told her that it was about 9 degrees celsius inside the ship. Cold but not deathly cold. Moving about and retrieving parts had warmed her body up but after spending the last twenty or so minutes in one place, she was feeling cold again. She took a moment to untie the sleeves around her waist and pull her tracksuit back up. She still wore her cryosuit underneath. It was a functional outfit. And she had been too busy trying to get the ship up and running to go looking for more appropriate clothing. Staying alive was her highest priority. Besides, there was no one else on the ship aside from her. Social customs were moot. If the ship had been warm enough, she would have likely floated through the halls naked. Still, having pockets was always useful.
Turning back to stare at the tablet floating in the air, she tried to focus on the lines of text on the screen. The first order of business had been attempting to diagnose what went wrong with the reactor. It had been a tedious game of cross referencing error codes with the manual to see what was actually wrong. She had tried at several points to look at the raw code that the system spat out but it was coded in a newer language that she wasn't very familiar with. In the end, she had chosen to focus on the maintenance items that the app described as being the most critical.
When she had dug through the reactor's event log, she had found the cause of the shutdown. Shortly after the crew came out of cryo they had enacted an emergency reactor purge. That had been weird. From what she had read in the manual, a reactor purge was only to be done if the reactor was overheating. It was a last ditch effort to cool the core down and avoid a meltdown. It told the core to pour all its excess heat into the flood chamber which would then be vented into space. When they had done that, they had damaged parts of the core and the entire reactor had shut down as a precaution.
"But why vent it in the first place? There were no documented overheat warnings before the event," she murmured. She scrolled back to stare at that old line of text. "Doesn't make
any
sense."
She realized she was still holding the flashlight in her mouth. So she let the thing go and it drifted downward.
She pulled down one of the command menus and ran a system diagnostic. Probably the dozenth time she had done so in the last week. It came back with a few lines about parts that the system had detected would need to be replaced or maintained eventually but weren't critical.
It was time to insert material and see if she could start up the reactor. If she could, she could breathe a sigh of relief for a while.
At least until I have to worry about food,
she thought. But one problem at a time. She reached out for the flashlight and swung it around to shine it at the opposite wall. The light revealed a bundle of supplies floating in the air. It was a mixture of plastic boxes filled with parts along with larger pieces that had been wrapped in foam for transport. There was a bundle of steel pipes, and a box full of tools as well. She'd basically pulled everything she thought she might need from maintenance storage.
The reactor used deuterium-tritium to start the reaction. The isotopes were contained inside a metal canister that was almost as long as she was tall. Anna wrapped an arm around the canister and pushed herself back toward the core.
On the other side of the core, exactly halfway up the side of the thing, there was a receptacle hidden underneath a stainless steel door. Exactly where the manual said it would be. Grabbing the handle, she pulled it open and shone her light inside. A circular chamber with a sort of sled sat inside. She pulled the sled out, rotating it with some effort until it slid open. She pulled the old canister out and sent it floating away behind her. In went the new canister, which fit perfectly. This done, she pushed the sled back in and locked the door shut.
It took her a few minutes but she was finally getting close to getting the reactor back online. Or so she thought. Every previous attempt at restarting the thing had failed. It was always one thing or another. A loose coupling here. A faulty valve here. A coolant hose that needed replacing here. It had been a never ending laundry list of repairs. But she was finally close.
Drifting back towards where she left her tablet, she plucked it out of the air and tapped through menus until she found the correct one.
Her finger hovered in place over the button labeled "Begin Reactor Sequence."
She pressed the button.
Silence. The entire room shuddered. A near imperceptible hum droned through the air as the systems started up. Air circulated through ducts. Various fins and valves began shifting, going through their pre-programmed checklists.
Anna held her breath. It had taken her a long time to reach this point. Too long. She had cursed all her life choices up until this point. Choosing software engineering instead of mechanical. Agreeing to go on an ice cream date with the feisty, red-head in a worn leather jacket covered in colorful pins. Agreeing to come on this god forsaken colony mission.
The core seemed to halt like a giant beast taking great pains to pause before changing direction. It wound down, the electric hum in the air subsided, dying out.
Below, on the tablet screen, a notification appeared:
Error 54-10: Start Sequence Aborted.
She snarled and swiped downwards to reveal the rest of the error message.
Duct 31-A non-operational. High risk of extreme temperature during emergency venting. Please repair duct venting before commencing reactor start sequence.
She threw her head back and hissed out a frustrated breath.
It was always something.
For a few seconds she floated there, her toes just touching the "ground" and her eyes closed.
Come on, Anna. Pull it together. Let's go see about this stupid duct,
she thought.
Fifteen minutes later, after checking the schematic, she found the problematic duct. It was critical to operation. In the event of a projected core meltdown, the ship's flood chamber was connected directly to the vacuum of space. These ducts opened, venting excess heat into space. The flood chamber could also be filled with coolant to rapidly cool everything down.
Anna had pulled one of the space suits from a maintenance closet. Now, dressed in the stark white and gray of the suit, she pried open the hatch. Lifting the door out of the way, she pulled herself inside.
The space was narrow, comparable to the dimensions of on-board air ducts. If the gravity had been active, she would've had to crawl on her hands and knees through the vent. Instead, she gripped the edges with her hands and launched herself through. With her head tilted up, it felt as if she was floating "upward." She eyed the distance, making sure to keep her light on in case there was debris blocking the way.
Soon she reached a bend where she caught the round and stuck an arm out to stop her travel before shifting in place and launching herself "upwards" again. Thankfully, this particular vent wasn't overly long or twisted. There was just one more bend before she neared the first shut-off gate.
The diagnostic program had listed this gate as being operational and without fault. She pulled the device off of the velcro strip at her hip and tapped the screen. She found the menu for reactor controls. Another two seconds and the gate came to life as a low hum nearly imperceptible to the ear whistled through the air and the surface slid smoothly away.
The temperature dropped almost immediately. Her suit insulated her from the harsh temperatures of outer space but even underneath it all she could tell that there was a breach somewhere.
