2953-05-14 – Tales from the Service: A Compromised Recycler
Cermytes are not the only troublesome organism Reach spacers have discovered on the far side of the Sagittarius Gap. Indeed, I spoke to a researcher who is observing Cermyte activity in captivity, and he named several other species I had not heard of beforehand, all of which seem oddly adapted to infesting spacecraft.
The hypothesis of the researcher is that space travel has been in heavy use in Sagittarius far longer than it has been in the Orion arm, perhaps several thousand years. Obviously there is no direct proof of this – no xenoarchaeological work of any significance has been done in Sagittarius. The claims of the Grand Journey to be an ancient confederation, if true, certainly are given credence by this theory, but other factors shed some doubt on it.
The idea that Sagittarius is a region of ancient spacefaring cultures, older perhaps even than the Angels, Reachers, and extinct Xenarchs that predate human and Rattanai expansion, is certainly an evocative one. It certainly puts a romantic spin on the pests which inhabit the region; after all, these things might be the animal survivors of long-departed spacefaring empires.
This is of course little consolation to the spacers who have to clean up after them, such as Sylvia Elmer, a recycler technician aboard the mobile service platform Sierra Nevada. The first part of her account details the sorts of trouble that foreign organism infiltration can cause in a shipboard recycler system, though obviously she did not know this to be the root cause until some time later.
Normally, a field refit of a mere destroyer like Brychan Mazza would be a matter of a few days. Seventh Fleet had been running its fast units ragged of late, so most of that time would be in engine and reactor service, possibly extending as far as a full reactor replacement. This was normal duty for Sierra Nevada, a fleet service platform as big as a dreadnought, and for its crew of nearly two thousand of the Confederated Navy’s best technicians.
As a mere organics tech, Sylvia Elmer was used to being a relative side-show in the frenzied activity aboard Sierra Nevada. Being the reason a destroyer was late to being returned to duty was a new and terrifying experience.
Of course, it wasn’t really Sylvia’s fault, not exactly. Nobody had known how damaged Mazza’s recycler system was until she and her team had cracked open the compartment to have a look, and few outside her specialty could really understand the trouble repairing a hybrid biological-technological system could be. To most spacers, even most techs, the recycler was just something that worked; it was ancient technology like the A-grav axis or the self-sealing pressure hull that hadn’t changed too much in more than a hundred years and nobody touched outside of the drydock.
Unfortunately for Mazza, what the crew had reported as a few minor warning indicators and slow cycle performance had been the precursors to an imminent total biological breakdown in the vats, a condition which had taken nearly two days to simply stabilize. Some sort of toxic foreign material had gotten into the system and poisoned the bio-engineered microcultures on the screen-plates in all the vats except, oddly enough, for the first one. Several severe leaks in the plumbing had sprung up while the team had worked long hours to replace the dead screens with freshly seeded new ones and work up the carefully tuned biosphere necessary for the system to operate correctly, making the task both dirtier and more complicated. By the end of their second day’s work, the whole team had been in environment suits, when normally this sort of work needed only an air filtration mask.
Being in suits had slowed the work further, but still by the end of the second day’s work they had the new screen-plates responding well. Then, after the whole team had gone to get some rest, something had gone wrong with the circulation pumps and starved out the microbes at the bottom of two of the tanks. This would have been self-correcting once the pumps were fixed had the colonies been mature, but of course they weren’t quite. Now, at the beginning of the third day, it looked like most of the screens would have to be seeded all over again.
Sylvia reported the setback to her superiors as soon as she was aware of it, before anyone had even cracked open the pump housings to see what was the matter. They still hadn’t quite figured out what had poisoned the vats in the first place, and how it had bypassed the first one in the chain. Normally, when someone disposed of illict drugs by putting them down the sanitary head, that was the vat which bore the brunt of it.
Of course, someone way up the chain called down mere minutes after Sylvia’s report to ask whether there was any way to speed up the process. Sylvia had long ago learned not to explain these things; a simple no, even in the face of the dreaded “are you sure it wouldn’t be faster if you enriched the starter nutrient solution” that every junior officer always suggested, was all she would say over voice comms. This particular organizational genius – who never even gave his name – even asked whether the destroyer could be fielded safely with only one operational recycler tank out of four. Sylvia replied that she could call up Mazza’s skipper and ask if he would like to wait a few days or be one bad flush away from having no recycler for the rest of his cruise, and that seemed to be answer enough.
The anonymous superior officer exited the conversation muttering something about consequences if there were any more delays. Sylvia wondered if this was meant to refer to her, or to himself, and didn’t want to find out.
Once Sylvia’s team had the pumps working – there was some sort of foul slime built up in them which the analysis tools could only identify as “non-living organic matter” - they got to work on yet another set of screen plates. Sylvia herself, stuck in her isolation suit, sat down in one corner with a sample of that slime in a phial, staring at it thoughtfully. It clearly hadn’t been in the system the previous day, which meant something had created it or introduced it since then. It wasn’t the recycler’s cultures, nor were Mazza’s heads sending down any waste. Where else could it have come from?
