Ships of My Fathers (13 page)

Chapter 10

“Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty, boy. The best results are covered in grime.” — Malcolm Fletcher

M
ICHAEL WAS SURE TO ARRIVE
more than thirty minutes early to his first shift with Charlie. He had swept through the breakfast line, learning Gary, Susan, and Maggie along the way, and tucked a couple of extra biscuits in his pockets for later. He had also mapped it out on the console the night before, so he did not get lost in the turns of deck five this time. Charlie was already there talking to Karen, but no one else from first shift had arrived.

“…vibration on tank four,” she was saying. “I wasn’t sure at first, so I got out the scope and gave it a listen.”

“Was it the whole night?”

She looked up and saw him come in. “Morning, Michael.” She covered up her name patch.

“Karen Larkin, environmental, third watch,” he said.

“Good boy,” she replied with a smile.

Charlie nodded to Michael but turned back to Karen.

“My question?”

“Oh, sorry,” she answered, sitting up a little straighter. “No, it started around oh five thirty and has been going off and on since.”

“Morning showers,” he suggested. “Did it correlate to the new pump?”

“No, it was more intermittent than that, more like every few minutes. It would start with a louder thump and then rattle around for a while. I can’t seem to narrow it down to any of the fittings down here.”

Charlie shook his head. “It’s probably one of the air gaps.”

Karen’s face lit up. “Ah, so that would be the back shock from one of the spring valves. Gotcha.”

Charlie turned to Michael. “Did you ever do much plumbing work?”

“A little, mostly scraping out the sludge tanks and the likes.”

“Never did much with fittings?”

He smiled. “Not much. I had a toilet lock that kept breaking loose, but that was about it.”

“Well, I think we’re going to take you on a leak hunt today.”

“A leak hunt? Not again!” cried out a new voice.

They all turned to see two crewmen walking in. Michael grinned as they approached. He had planned ahead the night before. “I believe that’s Alfred Kessler and Edward Tennyson,” he said, long before they got close enough to read their name patches.

The one on the right laughed and covered both his own and the other’s name patch. “New guy’s been studying, but which is which?”

Michael put on his best consternation face. “I believe you would be Edward, while your friend here is my second cousin, Alfred Kessler.”

Alfred brushed Edward’s hand away and extended his own to Michael. “Pretty good, cousin, but can you tell me the names of the relatives in between us?”

Michael froze as he took the offered hand. “I, um…”

Alfred busted out laughing. “Don’t sweat it, Michael. I can’t either. I know it’s on my mom’s side, but beyond that I have no idea.”

A round of laughter and handshakes ensued, but eventually Charlie brought it back to the job. “Ok, so a leak hunt up on deck two. Anything else, Karen?”

“Air scrubber six is down to fifty-eight percent, and yes, that’s a six percent drop since shift-change.”

“Yeah, I figured it was due. Eddie and Al, looks like you two are reskinning the scrubber today.”

They chatted a little longer, mostly Eddie saying how he glad he was to be spared from the leak hunt, but then Karen pointed to the bulge in Michael’s pocket. “Is that a biscuit?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I thought I might get hungry later.”

“Oh god,” she said, “could I please have it? They’re always out by the time I get to the galley, and I get stuck with toast. I hate toast.”

He handed it over and then fished out the second one for her as well. “Oh, thank you, Michael. I was starving.”

“You could have sent for some,” Eddie chided.

Michael was surprised. “You get delivery?”

“Sure,” Charlie replied. “If you’re ever stuck on a station and can’t get away, call in to the galley. They’ll send something out to you.”

“Yeah, but they’ll take their sweet time about it,” Karen said, devouring the rest of the first biscuit. “It’s never as warm as this, so thank you.”

“No problem,” Michael replied.

She turned back to Charlie. “Mr. Feldman, do you have the watch?”

Charlie nodded stiffly. “Yes, Ms. Larkin, I have the watch. You are relieved.”

She held up the second biscuit. “Thanks again,” she said and skipped away down the corridor.

Charlie and the rest of his crew went through the diagnostic screens again and confirmed everything was as Karen had told them, but from the time they had first come down, scrubber six had dropped another percentage point. “At fifty, it signals an alarm on the screens. At thirty-five we get the klaxons. Trust me, you don’t want to let it get to thirty-five.”

“Well, what do you do when you’re reskinning it?”

Al was already back at one of the controls working on something. “We reroute the ducts around the scrubbers. Number six can go to number four or number eight.”

Eddie was at the main station monitor. “Go to four. It’s still reading in the nineties.”

“Switching to four.”

Charlie tugged at Michael’s sleeve. “Let’s get you a kit and get started.”

The kit was little more than a zero-g tool belt. It still had pockets for the tools, but they were also all held in with straps. This one was stocked with mostly wrenches, screwdrivers, and a few tubes of something gooey. He noticed that Charlie’s also had a small torch and goggles. They both suited up and headed up to deck two, officer country.

Michael worried about running into his uncle. They had not crossed paths since the disastrous dinner, and he was in no hurry to see him again. As it was, deck two was almost deserted. He saw one man duck through a cross corridor. It was not anyone he knew yet, but he spotted the purple swirl of the tach engineering patch.

They came to a narrow floor-to-ceiling wall panel, no more than half a meter across. The only thing that marked it as being different was a small collection of letters and numbers along the bottom. “W/P/A 2-1 & 2-3”. Charlie pulled out a power screwdriver and started detaching the panel from the wall.

“Here’s how we’re going to do this. We open all the panels, one at a time, and you go in and look for the leak while I go into the officer’s baths and test the fixtures.”

The panel came away to reveal a narrow gap between two walls, wide enough for Michael to slide into but also filled with pipes, cables, and ducts. “In there?”

“Yeah, your first warning,” Charlie replied while sucking in his belly, “watch your weight when you work systems. You never know where you’re going to need to crawl.”

“Okay,” he replied, squeezing in. “What am I looking for anyway?”

“First of all, look up, towards the back. Do you see a flex pipe going up to a T-junction in each of the two walls?”

He looked. Flex pipes were everywhere in different sizes and colors, some thick and blue, some thinner and clear, and a few near the floor that were thick and brown. This was in addition to a jungle of bundled cables and several air ducts. He had to maneuver around a couple of ducts before he could get far enough back to see. There they were, right up at the height of a typical shower nozzle. “Yeah, I see them.”

“Do you see the pipe going up from that junction, should be hard pipe, not flex pipe.”

He looked again. There it was, about twenty centimeters tall going up towards the solid ceiling. It was topped by a fat cap, screwed down onto threads. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Ok, that pipe holds an air gap, and we want to make sure it’s not leaking.”

Michael looked back towards Charlie in confusion. “Why do you want air in your pipes?”

“Only in that one pipe. That’s why it’s sticking up. The water beneath it keeps it from going anywhere else.”

“Ok, but why do you even want it there?” he asked.

“It acts as a shock absorber,” he answered. “All the user valves on the plumbing are spring loaded. You noticed that, right?”

He had, in fact.
Sophie
’s were like that, too. One of the luxuries in port, especially ground ports, was turning on a shower and leaving the water running to steam up the bathroom. On ship, he was used to holding down the water chain to rinse off. Letting go cut the water automatically. “Don’t all ships have that? Go easy on the water system and all that?”

“Yep, and when that valve snaps shut, it sends a pressure wave back through the water in the pipes. If you’re not careful, it’ll rattle through every pipe in the system. The air gap in that top pipe absorbs the shock, letting the water slam up before dropping back down. From the rattling Karen was hearing this morning, my guess is that one of those pipes has leaked most of its air out.”

Michael nodded. “No air, no shock absorber. Okay, so how do I tell if it has a leak? Am I looking for a puddle in here?”

“No, you’re feeling for the vibration. I’m going to go play with the fixtures in two-one. There should be three air-gaps on that wall. Find them, and put your hands on them one at a time. When the valve closes, you should feel a slight thump, but only a slight one. If it’s a big thump, start looking for any water near the pipe, even a single drop.”

He scanned around and found the other two vertical gap pipes on the first wall. He figured they corresponded to the shower, the sink faucet, and the toilet. He heard movement on the other side of the wall, grabbed the one for the sink and called out, “Ready on the sink!”

He felt a slight ping, heard water moving through the pipes briefly, and then felt a firmer thump, but it was not much. “Negative, I think,” he called through the wall. “Ready on the shower.”

They progressed through the six fixtures accessible from that crawl space, but none of them felt particularly bad. Michael wiggled his way back out and helped Charlie reattach the panel. “So what now?”

Charlie smiled and turned across the hall. Another narrow panel was labeled “W/P/A 2-2 & 2-4”. Michael’s shoulders sagged. “How many of these are there?”

“Now do you see why Eddie and Al were so happy not to go on the leak hunt?”

Michael chuckled. He had pulled worse duties. When he was nine he had flushed the navigator’s passport down the toilet. Guess who got to disassemble the sludge tank looking for it?

They opened the panel, and Michael crawled inside. Once he heard Charlie on the other side, he called out, “Ready on the sink!”

And so it went. They hit pay dirt on sink 2-7. Michael felt it jump in his hand, and he could hear it almost grunt, like Malcolm trying to hold in a sneeze in his environment suit. From the other side of the wall, Charlie said, “That sounded promising.”

“Yeah,” Michael replied. “Hit it again.” He let go of it this time and watched. He could actually see the shock, almost like someone had hit it with a hammer, and then he saw what he was looking for. A single drop of water trickled down the side of the pipe. He followed its trail all the way back up to the threaded cap at the top. “I think we found our leak.”

Charlie reappeared out in the corridor. “Okay, now we have to turn the water off. Look for a blue-handled valve near the floor on that side.”

Michael had been expecting Charlie to come in and do the actual work, but no, he insisted that Michael learn it. He talked him through draining the water out of the pipes, unscrewing the cap, cleaning the threads, coating them with fresh sealant, and tightening it up again. The tightening was the hardest part in such a cramped space, but he got it done. Afterwards, they turned the water back on and tested it. The visible hammering had dropped down to a mild thump that he could only feel, not hear.

Michael climbed back out and helped Charlie seal up the panel. “Great, now what?”

Charlie tilted his head down the hall. “We’ve still got eight more panels to check.”

“But we found our leak.”

Charlie shook his head. “No, we found a leak. We still have to check the others to make sure it’s the only leak.”

Michael sagged back against the wall. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“But first, let’s go get some lunch before the crowd shows up.”

“Good idea.”

They were the first to report for lunch, but not by much. By the time they were sitting, three more were in the line. Lunch was a spicy sausage and rice combination with a side of black beans. Over time, various crew stopped by to do the name-patch dance. He met two more cargo handlers, another drive engineer, and the pilot, Jake Norris.

“First shift,” he said. “Actually the only shift, since I only get to do my thing during docking maneuvers.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?”

“I have passable knowledge of most of the bridge systems, so I do a lot of shift covering. As soon as I’m done here, I’m heading back up to let Gabrielle get lunch.”

They chatted a little longer since Michael was curious what it was like piloting such a behemoth, and Jake was more than happy to brag about his skill, but all too soon he had to go.

Charlie nudged Michael, “Time for us as well. Let’s head down and cover for Eddie and Al, then back to our leak hunt.”

Down on deck five, scrubber six was back up and running, and Al and Eddie were playing a word game the rules of which escaped Michael. He and Charlie took their places at the station and watched the various indicators update. Mostly though, they did not update, holding steady in their green state.

“Is it always this boring?” Michael asked.

“When you’re lucky,” Charlie replied.

Forty minutes later, they headed back up to deck two to resume their leak hunt, and when he was getting ready to test stateroom 2-11, his worst fears were realized. He heard his uncle’s voice in the hallway. “Who is that back there?”

He panicked for a moment, but before he could respond, he heard Charlie’s voice. “Good afternoon, Captain.”

“Afternoon, Mr. Feldman. What’s up here?”

“We’re on a leak hunt, sir. Now that we finally have tank four up to full pressure, we’re getting some vibration in the system, so we’re checking all the air gaps.”

“Found anything yet?”

“Yes, sir, in Mr. Brookstone’s quarters, but we’re checking the rest to be safe.”