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So, I feel dumb. In post #5 of my thread 'For that Corporate Dime' two of the charcters abruptly change places - the Machinist is suddenly the Engineer, and vice-versa, and it is super noticeable because it is consistent throughout the post and at odds with the rest of the thread. If that post could be replaced with this, corrected post that would be fantastic:
The trip down the shaft was less fraught that Jewels had expected. She was accustomed to descending vertical rock-faces using pitons and cable, harness and anchor – but that was not how things were done on the Hub.
The cabin and cargo-bed of the maintenance-buggy were mounted on lockable hydraulic arms, allowing them to fold out at a right-angle from the vehicle’s frame. The suspension was mounted on a bed of variable gimbals that allowed a certain amount of latitude when it came to engaging with vertical surfaces, and the wheels could retract from their rims, which in that configuration were capable of full 360-degree rotation relative to the orientation of the vehicle and were equipped with magnetic clamps: a setup that allowed the buggy to latch onto and travel along grid-patterned rails built into the sides of elevator and maintenance shafts.
The grinding metal-on-metal hiss of the rims on the rails echoed as the three of them descended on their improvised elevator. The buggy’s headlamps lit the walls in stark shades of light and shadow, punctuated only by the glow of falling embers and small fires. Everything reeked of petrochemical lubricant, ozone and ash.
As the minutes and the floors ticked away they passed one broken pressure-door after another, all of them twisted and bent, blown outward as if by a sudden massive pressure inside the shaft; Those the intrepid little crew were not equipped to fix, but over the course of several hours Jewels and her two technicians stopped repeatedly to repair sparking conduits, extinguish small electrical fires or seal leaking ducts. After one particularly tricky such patch-job, requiring them to don respirators to avoid the clouds of leaking coolant and reposition the buggy several times, there was a sudden juddering rumble and the orange glow many hundreds of floors above them suddenly faded out.
“Huh, said the Machinist, frowning behind her mask. “I guess that was a reactor fire.” She poked at the Geiger-counter built into the dashboard, double checking the reading with her tricorder. Everything appeared within the margin of safety, but she pulled a box of rad-away stick-on patches from her tool belt and stuck one on the back of her neck anyway before passing them around to Jewels and the Engineer.
“You know these things cause cancer.” said the Engineer as he slapped one on his forehead.
“Everything causes cancer. Do they cause acute gamma-poisoning?” said the Machinist.
Jewels applied hers in silence, just behind her ear. She didn’t like how smoothly this was going –a familiar sensation that connected directly to the last thing she ever said to her boys, put her within the emotional bounds of a space she desperately didn’t want to be. She knew it wasn’t real, but suddenly the inside of her respirator smelled like an igneous cave, the tang of ancient water and batholithic granite. The surveyor could feel the drugs, like a bungee-cord wrapped around her soul, holding her back from something catastrophic.
Deliberately controlling her exhalations, she began to re-check her gear as the buggy’s drive-train re-engaged and they descended again into the depths of the station.
Eventually, they reached their destination. It wasn’t hard to spot – these doors, too, had been cut from their frame, presumably by a previous, better equipped maintenance crew. At Jewels’ insistence they circled the exit with the buggy, getting as thorough a view of what awaited them as they could before rolling up over the bottom lip and onto solid ground, the vehicle’s computer managing a smooth transformation between the vertical and horizontal modes such that all they felt was a slight bump.
The corridor before them was narrower than the one they started out in, not a concourse but a dedicated maintenance tunnel: bare steel gratings for flooring, removable gunmetal panels on every wall, and only about a meter’s clearance on either side of the buggy. There was no overhead lighting – only more removable panels, many of which were missing, revealing recently patched cables and abandoned tools.
Jewels poked at her tricorder, calling up her map once again.
“Okay,” she said. “The first bus is about two hundred meters in front of us. There should be a… what’s the word? Like a lobby but – ah, forget it. The tunnel should open up, and we should have a little more room to work.”
“I know,” said the Engineer, locking the buggies hydraulics so that the cabin and the cargo bed were once again secured to the frame. “Having room when you work on these big boys is important. Room-temperature supercon- fuck!”
They were all three blinded by the piercing glare of iodine lamps, caught in the headlights as another buggy came tearing silently down the narrow tunnel towards them, with only a few short meters between the maintenance crew and free-fall.
The cabin and cargo-bed of the maintenance-buggy were mounted on lockable hydraulic arms, allowing them to fold out at a right-angle from the vehicle’s frame. The suspension was mounted on a bed of variable gimbals that allowed a certain amount of latitude when it came to engaging with vertical surfaces, and the wheels could retract from their rims, which in that configuration were capable of full 360-degree rotation relative to the orientation of the vehicle and were equipped with magnetic clamps: a setup that allowed the buggy to latch onto and travel along grid-patterned rails built into the sides of elevator and maintenance shafts.
The grinding metal-on-metal hiss of the rims on the rails echoed as the three of them descended on their improvised elevator. The buggy’s headlamps lit the walls in stark shades of light and shadow, punctuated only by the glow of falling embers and small fires. Everything reeked of petrochemical lubricant, ozone and ash.
As the minutes and the floors ticked away they passed one broken pressure-door after another, all of them twisted and bent, blown outward as if by a sudden massive pressure inside the shaft; Those the intrepid little crew were not equipped to fix, but over the course of several hours Jewels and her two technicians stopped repeatedly to repair sparking conduits, extinguish small electrical fires or seal leaking ducts. After one particularly tricky such patch-job, requiring them to don respirators to avoid the clouds of leaking coolant and reposition the buggy several times, there was a sudden juddering rumble and the orange glow many hundreds of floors above them suddenly faded out.
“Huh, said the Machinist, frowning behind her mask. “I guess that was a reactor fire.” She poked at the Geiger-counter built into the dashboard, double checking the reading with her tricorder. Everything appeared within the margin of safety, but she pulled a box of rad-away stick-on patches from her tool belt and stuck one on the back of her neck anyway before passing them around to Jewels and the Engineer.
“You know these things cause cancer.” said the Engineer as he slapped one on his forehead.
“Everything causes cancer. Do they cause acute gamma-poisoning?” said the Machinist.
Jewels applied hers in silence, just behind her ear. She didn’t like how smoothly this was going –a familiar sensation that connected directly to the last thing she ever said to her boys, put her within the emotional bounds of a space she desperately didn’t want to be. She knew it wasn’t real, but suddenly the inside of her respirator smelled like an igneous cave, the tang of ancient water and batholithic granite. The surveyor could feel the drugs, like a bungee-cord wrapped around her soul, holding her back from something catastrophic.
Deliberately controlling her exhalations, she began to re-check her gear as the buggy’s drive-train re-engaged and they descended again into the depths of the station.
Eventually, they reached their destination. It wasn’t hard to spot – these doors, too, had been cut from their frame, presumably by a previous, better equipped maintenance crew. At Jewels’ insistence they circled the exit with the buggy, getting as thorough a view of what awaited them as they could before rolling up over the bottom lip and onto solid ground, the vehicle’s computer managing a smooth transformation between the vertical and horizontal modes such that all they felt was a slight bump.
The corridor before them was narrower than the one they started out in, not a concourse but a dedicated maintenance tunnel: bare steel gratings for flooring, removable gunmetal panels on every wall, and only about a meter’s clearance on either side of the buggy. There was no overhead lighting – only more removable panels, many of which were missing, revealing recently patched cables and abandoned tools.
Jewels poked at her tricorder, calling up her map once again.
“Okay,” she said. “The first bus is about two hundred meters in front of us. There should be a… what’s the word? Like a lobby but – ah, forget it. The tunnel should open up, and we should have a little more room to work.”
“I know,” said the Engineer, locking the buggies hydraulics so that the cabin and the cargo bed were once again secured to the frame. “Having room when you work on these big boys is important. Room-temperature supercon- fuck!”
They were all three blinded by the piercing glare of iodine lamps, caught in the headlights as another buggy came tearing silently down the narrow tunnel towards them, with only a few short meters between the maintenance crew and free-fall.
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