B22 Plumbing Problems (Patreon)

Commissioner Troykintrassa has come aboard in this next episode of Executioner's Gambit, and Tori is worried about whether or not he'll consider her request.

This is actually a two-parter, so I'll queue up the second part to auto-post tomorrow.

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Tori paced nervously before the airlock, and Captain Gutassi glanced up from his seat. He’d pulled two office chairs into the corridor from the adjacent conference room, but Tori’s was still vacant beside him. “You’re making me jumpy, Investigator,” he said. “Could you settle down?”

“No, I don’t think I can,” she admitted, body trembling. “I’ve tried, but it’s just not happening.”

He laid the strand he’d been studying in his lap. “Worried the commissioner won’t approve your surgery?”

“That too,” said Tori, “but also what we discussed after I first met Daskatoma.”

The captain’s ears splayed, and he said nothing for a moment. “I have a lot of discussions with a lot of geroo every single day. I don’t recall—”

“We were trying to figure out why Daskatoma was upset that I’d transferred here,” she reminded him. “The only reason we could come up with was a secret quarantine to contain the rebellion fomenting aboard the Sailor’s Gambit I.”

With a side-eyed stare, he said, “The rebellion fomenting here?” Gutassi yarped. “I’ll grant you that the crew’s been energized by that Boots video and the Executioner’s murders, but I think you’re badly overstating just how angry everyone is. The commissioner would only consider purging one of his ships if he believed he was likely going to lose it otherwise. Or do you think that’s the case?”

“Well, uh…” said Tori, her ruined ears wilting. “How should I know?”

“Well, I do know,” he said, gesturing for her to sit in the open chair. When she did, he explained, “Imagine the absolute worst thing that could happen—the crew is so fed up that they rise up and revolt. They take over, and the masses lynch all their terrible bosses and co-workers.”

Her ruined ears fell as she imagined it. “That would be … horrible.”

“Yes, it would,” agreed the captain, “and I say that as everyone’s boss. I’m sure plenty of crewmen out there hate my guts too, but then what would happen after they strung us up?”

She stared into his fatherly face for a long moment, waiting for clues before venturing, “The company would punish us by—”

“The company doesn’t care,” laughed Captain Gutassi. “Someone could stab me in the friggin’ back while I was in mid-conversation with the commissioner, and he’d be annoyed that he’d have to repeat himself to whomever replaced me. All the company cares about is that the ship’s operating as intended and that someone is captain so they know who to yell at when we under-perform.”

She thought she might throw up, and she laid both palms across her queasy stomach. She muttered, “No one has ever reassured me in such an un-reassuring way before.”

Gutassi laughed, and the indicator above the airlock lit, so he excused himself, returning several long minutes later and looking a little more frazzled and unkempt than when he’d gone in.

When he said nothing, she asked, “Go okay?”

The captain sat in silence for many long moments, staring at the airlock he’d just come through. Eventually, he turned and gave her a weak excuse for a smile before turning back away. “Yeah, well, as good as can be expected, I suppose,” he said in hushed tones. “He’s got a punch list a kilometer long of how I’ve disappointed him.”

“Oh, no, Captain,” said Tori, putting a paw on his arm. “I’m sorry. Will it be okay?”

He stared a moment longer in contemplation before nodding, but he didn’t look her way. “Yes, I suspect so. Amongst everything else, he’s mostly pissed about the reactor being overdue for a refit. But with Subcommander Kimoa being murdered and all, he’s cutting me one last measure of slack.”

Gutassi closed his eyes and let his head roll back until it rested atop the chair’s cushion. He let out a whistling breath and ran a palm down his face like a prisoner who’d just dodged a death sentence. “Needless to say though, I’ve drawn my last tile from Commissioner Troykintrassa’s boneyard. Any more bad news from the Sailor’s Gambit I before we get things turned around here, and he’ll be feeding me into the recycler—paws first!”

“Yikes!” Tori quietly hissed. Back on her previous ship, the administrators had nearly done that to her. It was a horror she’d love to forget. “Daskatoma wouldn’t—”

“No, Daskatoma wouldn’t,” he agreed. “And I guess I’ve grown overly comfortable with that, but his uncle has made it abundantly clear that he isn’t afraid to step in and take over.”

He pulled out his strand and began tapping at the face. “He’s given me to the end of the day to replace Subcommander Kimoa, but I think it’d be prudent to check that one off before he even leaves the ship.”

“Yeah, probably,” said Tori. She didn’t know what went into rearranging officer responsibilities, but it didn’t sound too tough of a task. Whether they liked it or not, officers had to perform in whatever roles he assigned to them. With a touch of worry, she asked, “Did you ask him to speak with me?”

Captain Gutassi bit his lip and stared blankly at his communicator for a moment. “Yes … and no.”

“No?” whimpered Tori, her hope for getting the commissioner’s approval suddenly withering.

The captain turned back to her, finally. “I told him that you wanted to speak to him, but I didn’t say what about… In fact, I pretended that I didn’t know,” said the captain. “My apologies for that, but considering the circumstances, I’d appreciate anything you could do to distance your request from me. If it pisses him off, then I’d prefer if Commissioner Troykintrassa won’t end up dumping this on my tab as well. I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes, sir,” she sighed with downcast eyes. “I won’t tell him that you approved it. I won’t mention that the doctor even wanted your approval.” Her stomach roiled with apprehension, but this wasn’t a lost cause … at least, not yet.

“Thank you, Tori. He said he’d try to leave you a little time before he left.” Gutassi looked up and waved to an older gal who was marching toward them. “Chief Onaha! Is the commissioner’s shuttle okay?”

Despite her grey fur and a lean build that bordered on frail, the engineering chief moved with intensity, and she had a glare in her dark eyes that looked like it belonged on some sort of industrial machine. “Okay? Okay?” she shouted. “If one of my engineers neglected that much maintenance, he’d be out an airlock with my pawprint on his tailhole. The self-diagnostic returned so many warning messages that I’d be there all day if I tried reading them all.”

Gutassi’s light-brown ears frowned. “Ah, I see,” he sighed. “Is there anything we can do before he gets to a mechanic?”

“We don’t have a shuttle, so we don’t stock any shuttle parts,” the chief reminded him. “If he needs any replacement parts, we’d have to manufacture them, but we probably don’t have any of the alloys they use on Krakuntec, so we’d have to—”

“You can just say, ‘No,’ Onaha,” he reminded her.

“Feh,” she grunted. “If I told you, ‘No,’ then you’d think I meant, ‘Maybe,’ and then—”

The captain’s strand shrieked with a shrill series of alarm beeps, and he groaned before answering it. “The commissioner’s here,” he said, “that’s why my strand is on do-not-disturb.”

“I-I know sir—” said a nervous-sounding female on the other end of the line.

“Is the ship on fire?” asked Gutassi.

“No sir, but—”

“Are we being attacked by pirates?”

“No, but there’s big trouble in the plumbing, sir!” she got out this time.

“The plumbing?” laughed the captain. “We have lots of plumbers. Call them. Call all of them if you must—”

“I’ve got radiation counters in the wastewater pipes going crazy,” said the gal.

Engineering Chief Onaha’s ears lifted while Gutassi’s fell. Tori hadn’t noticed the captain getting up from his seat, but now the two officers huddled close. Tori stood too. Her heart began to race, and sweat formed beneath her fur.

The others shared a look of concern. Onaha whispered, “What in blazes spilled down the drain?”

“Evacuate recycling to the adjoining corridor,” instructed the captain with a surprisingly calm voice. “The wastewater is going to drain down there if it hasn’t already. Get a crew with dosimeters into hazmat suits, and get them down there on the double. If the crew’s been exposed, get them to med-bay. Contact plumbing and make sure they’re not working on wastewater.”

“Yes, Captain,” said the gal. She sounded a little less rattled now that the captain was taking charge. “Shut down the recycler?”

“No! No! No!” shouted both the captain and engineering chief in unison.

The older gal leaned in over his shoulder, explaining, “If there’s something in the wastewater, we need to get it recycled ASAP. That will get the isotopes extracted and back to where they should be stored. The recycler is made to handle that.”

“Plus, the commissioner is here!” hissed Gutassi, as if the krakun could hear him through a pair of airlocks. “If you shut down the recycler, you take down the trinity. If the trinity goes down, then the commissioner is stuck here until we can get it back up, and that’s a minimum of seventeen hours for a full discharge!”

Onaha nodded. “It’s imperative that we keep the trinity online until we can get him safely back through the gate. Suit up a minimal recycling crew if you must, but keep them working.” Her fingers were already flying over her own strand, checking logs, looking for raw data.

“Get more guys in suits and trace it back deck by deck. Wake people up if you need to, Lieutenant, get them back to work if they’re off-shift,” said Gutassi. “Give them emergency access so they can go through whatever doors they need to. Find out who’s been exposed before they wander off. And figure out how in the hells whatever it was got into the wastewater in the first place.”

“When you find the drain,” Onaha added, “open a tap and let it run. Flush it with fresh water until all the radiation counters drop down to background.”

“On it,” she said before disconnecting the call.

Tori nervously wrung her paws. A radiation leak sounded bad. Admittedly, she didn’t know how often such things happened aboard a gateship, but she hoped it was a rare occurrence. Was she in danger? The three of them were up on Deck 10, and since wastewater drained down to the lower decks, she figured it was unlikely to be an issue all the way up here. But what about Druka? He worked on nineteen…

“Reactor cross-contamination?” Gutassi asked his chief engineer. “A coolant leak?”

“Unlikely. The reactor’s still running sluggish, but it has been for weeks. No change there. And look here—” Onaha turned her strand to face the captain. “We have radiation monitors in alarm above the reactor on Deck 15. So, unless someone lugged a bucket full of coolant up five decks before dumping it down the drain…”

Her words trailed off and the three shared a worried look and an awkward silence. Five decks up from Deck 15? That would be Deck 10 … where they were … where the commissioner was…

The three turned to stare at the airlock sealed behind them.

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IV0ce21-aoq5eo5SZ6EoOIhiZ5I6VnCWXQYYEZMvvbQ/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?