Monitoring

Posted on 20 Jun 2024 @ 2:25pm by Lieutenant JG Kaelyth Solmarr

489 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: Enigma Variations
Location: Engineering
Timeline: Present

Kaelyth Solmarr was not a small man by build. Thus, it seemed incongruous for him to be stuffed into a crawlspace rerouting power relays. Yet here he was. He had been monitoring power flow between the many systems of the Cygnus when he noticed the beginnings of an overload in one of the Relay Junctions. So instead of wasting the time it would have taken for him to tell someone else to fix it and for them to get a kit and crawl into the space, he simply took the kit from beneath the main control board and crawled in himself. At 6 ft. 5 in. tall and muscular of build, this was no easy task. Thankfully, he was not claustrophobic or this would have been torture.

If you were claustrophobic, his mind reminded him pointedly, you shouldn't have gone into Engineering. Never had a truer statement been made, and he shook his head slightly, refocusing on the task at hand.

Three of the relays in the Junction had burned out, and he carefully removed them. Setting them aside, he replaced them with a temporary patch. It would hold long enough for him to crawl out, replicate the needed relays, and crawl back in. It would hold longer than that, but he did not think that he needed longer than that.

Unfortunately for him, he could not use the parts replicator because power had been routed from it to the cargo replicators in order to conduct Lieutenant Hartley's plan on the freighter. Therefore, he had to go to parts storage and retrieve three extra relays. That took him ten extra minutes -- it would have taken longer except that people tended to get out of the way for someone his size coming down a corridor at a good clip -- and he returned just in time.

Hissing slightly as he removed the slightly smoking patch, he replaced the new relays and then routed some of the power going through this Junction to the four nearest Junctions to better distribute the power demand. Then he crawled out once more and returned to the main Engineering console to monitor. That redistribution had helped, but he knew it would not last. The power requirements for that was being done on the freighter were just too high; the Cygnus was simply not designed for this. But he would help his Chief make it work.

Over and over, he routed power from one overloaded system to other less overloaded systems, trying to spread the load among many systems to ease the workload of any one system. So far, he had managed to keep the disruptions in service to secondary and non-essential systems. However, if they did not finish this soon, critical systems were going to start to feel the strain.


A Post By
Lieutenant JG Kaelyth Solmarr
Structural/Environmental Specialist
USS Cygnus

 

RSS Feed