2953-05-21 – Tales from the Service: An Infested Recycler
Sylvia Elmer turned the vial of gray-green slime over and over in her gloved hands. It hadn’t come through inflow – none of the sanitary facilities would work as long as the recycler compartment was in maintenance mode. It hadn’t come from the culture on the screens either; taken as a whole, the microbiome of even an unhealthy screen produced very little insoluble waste, and an excess would have set off caution indicators long before enough to clog a pump could accumulate. The slime being largely nonliving, aside from a smattering of the same microbes on the screens, ruled out the introduction of hostile microbes to the system. Where else could it have come from?
A small but searingly furious part of Sylvia’s brain didn’t care. If she wrote a report stating that the recycler of Brychan Mazza was unreliable due to unknown interactions – a fairly standard phrase technicians used when they meant “we couldn’t figure out why it broke in the first place” – Seventh Fleet headquarters would send down orders for the people with cutting torches to carve out the compartment and swap in one of the four identical units of Sierra Nevada. That would mean plenty of time to fix it, of course, but if the problem spread to the other three units before they did, one of the very few mobile service platforms in Sagittarius would be forced back to base for repairs itself. The fleet would demand a scalp for an incident of that scale – most likely Sylvia’s.
There was always the possibility that someone on Mazza’s crew had gotten wise to the monitoring system on the sewage inflow and snuck into the recycler compartment itself to dump contraband into the vats directly. That would explain why the first vat in the chain was unaffected, at least for now. The pumping system never flowed anything into the first vat from the other three during normal operation; this could be done, but only by manual command, which would be logged.
Of course, so would any command to open the vats. A quick scan of the logs revealed no legitimate access operations for the compartment or any of the vats between the last maintenance cycle and Mazza’s arrival alongside Sierra Nevada. This didn’t entirely rule out the theory, though. Only the newest recycler models were entirely tamper proof, and the fleet tended to use older, cheaper recycler fittings on smaller warships like destroyers.
Sylvia got up and circled the compartment, threading between pairs of technicians slaving over the second set of new screen plates in as many days, and checked the three access hatches that stood open. None of them showed any sign of forced entry, but all three had the oldest model of access panels, which could be disconnected from the outside by anyone with basic electrical tools and a schematic hologram.
Next she checked vat number two. It was open and its screen plates were out, of course. The lid’s electronic lock did have a manual override, but it looked like this would also trigger access logging. Unlike on the hatches, though, there was some odd superficial scratching around the hinges and latch, as if someone had been working at it with improperly configured tools. Sylvia winced, wondering why nobody had seen that yet. It looked like someone had disassembled the vat’s lid to covertly dispose of something without leaving an electronic trace. But what had it been?
The compartment was in total disorder; it had been the center of so much frenzied activity in the last few shifts that there was no way to know what was the result of the intruder’s visit and what the result of the maintenance crew’s efforts. Even without more evidence, though, there were only so many things that it could have been. Whoever had done this knew a little bit about recyclers, so it would be something they thought the system could digest without a fuss. That meant something organic – contraband narcotics, unauthorized foodstuffs, perhaps even the corpse of a pet kept secretly in a cabin that had died unexpectedly.
Anything even vaguely human-digestible wouldn’t give the system much trouble, and a dead cat or the equivalent would leave telltale bones after the flesh was digested. That left the usual suspect – drugs. Illicit substances could have any number of strange effects on the system, and the chemical sensors might not necessarily pick them up. They might even bond with polymer components, making it all but impossible to purge them.
Sylvia switched on her helmet comms and turned on the all-team channel as she peered into the murky liquid half-filling the vat. It was time to let everyone know what they were dealing with. “Someone pried this one open and dumped something.” She grabbed a sample vial from her belt, hooked it to the end of a multitool standing nearby, and lowered it into the muck. “We might have to swap out the entire vat.”
Several helmeted heads looked up from their work, but the only response on the comms came from Carlson, one of the most senior members of the team, “They always find new ways to break our toys.” He didn’t even seem to know his microphone was hot.
As Sylvia’s sample vial dipped into the liquid, odd ripples shimmered across the surface. She frowned; it almost looked like the ripples a school of tiny fish would make in the lakeside shallows at Trieste Vert, where she’d spent many holidays as a child. Partially digested sewage did have all sorts of odd properties, but she’d never seen that before. Even the idea that anything larger than a microbe could live in the vats sent a shiver down her spine, but of course that was ridiculous.
At least, it should have been ridiculous. When she withdrew the vial, the rippling motion appeared in reverse, as if a swarm of tiny somethings was returning to the spot it had departed. Of course, the contents of the vat were too murky to see anything below the surface.
“That’s something you don’t see every day.” Carlson had appeared at Sylvia’s shoulder. “What in the blazes lives in a recycler vat?”
“Hells if I know.” Sylvia shuddered. “Forget the sample vials. Someone get me a fine-mesh net.”
The many new xenobiomes encountered by spacers on the Sagittarius Frontier obviously pose many strange challenges to the smooth operation of space flight. Recycler runaways were not unknown previously – usually due to a prolonged excess of one nutrient over the others in the sewage – but no species from any world was ever known to colonize recyclers before Sylvia’s team discovered this one.
The actual anatomy and behavior of the organism has not yet been released, but Sylvia’s description suggests that it is very small, somewhat fishlike, and invertebrate. Perhaps the Navy wishes the details to remain little known until they can deploy a countermeasure, lest the Incarnation somehow discover how to weaponize this organism, though I find this quite unlikely.
[N.T.B. - I am less skeptical than Duncan. Someone’s exotic fishtank specimens sidelined a whole destroyer for many days. If these things have nearly microscopic eggs, and those eggs get introduced into the nutrient slurry supply chain by an Incarnation agent – a thing they seem quite capable of doing – it could restrict vast portions of Seventh Fleet to near-port operations for weeks. Better to keep the identity of this pest quiet for a while.]