The party

The cocktail party was being held in Lounge XII and there were security guards on the door checking people off the guest-list.  Anna sighed when she saw them, but set her face to calmly neutral with a hint of a smile on her lips as she got close enough for them to notice her.  Captain Leverel wouldn’t have asked for the security, nor would he have approved it if it had been run past him.  It would undoubtedly be the work of his social secretary, Michal Anrasmus, who was a greasy little pole-climber in her opinion.  The guards wore standard issue uniform in olive-green with orange splash-patches; camouflage for an environment you never found on board the ship.  To mark their duties for this evening though, they were wearing silver armbands on the right-arm, and their weapons were concealed well enough that Anna couldn’t spot them or bulges where they may might be.

“Dr. Lesjes,” said the guard on the right as she drew close enough that he didn’t need to raise his voice.  “You’re right on time, ma’am.”

The guard on the left, a woman she realised, held out a tablet.  “If you would be so good…?” she said, leaving the sentence dangling.  Anna forced the smile onto her face properly and rested her palm on the tablet.  After a moment it beeped, and the first guard produced a copper bracelet from somewhere and held it out expectantly.  After another moment wondering if she really wanted to do this Anna offered her wrist, and the guard placed the bracelet around it.  It was slightly heavy and cold.

“What’s this for?” she asked.  She’d been to cocktail parties arranged by Anrasmus before where the ticket, as she assumed this bracelet was, was needed to access various areas in the party room.  She’d quickly removed the ticket, which had been a brooch that time, to a pocket so that she couldn’t accidentally walk into any of his little attractions.

“Identification,” said the female guard looking beyond her.  Anna glanced back over her shoulder and saw a couple of senior engineering officers approaching the party.  She was pleased to see that they looked as wary about it as she felt herself.  “If you need to leave the party for any reason the bracelet is the only way to regain entry.”

“Right,” said Anna, nodding.  “That sounds… like Michal.”  Presumably this meant that he could throw people out if they didn’t want to join in whatever he’d planned this time.  “Thank-you.”

“Please go in,” said the first guard, gesturing to the door.  He clearly wanted to start processing the guests now almost behind her.  She moved forwards without answering him, as both guards were now occupied with greeting the new arrivals.  She found she had to push the door to Lounge XII open by hand, which surprised her, and that her bracelet warmed slightly and tingled when she touched the door.  Then she walked through into Michal’s latest notion of a cocktail party.

Maintenance

The data taken from the biotank readouts consisted of eighteen different measurements, and Dan rapidly saw that it was going to be easiest to assemble them into a data-cube and then slice through it in various directions to assess what patterns there were, and what data wasn’t conforming.  He transferred the data from Dr. Lesjes’s tablet to his own, backing up a copy on the lab’s local computer as part of standard process.  He was just about to turn the lab computer off again when he noticed that a decision box had appeared and overlaid part of the screen.

“Copy data to cloud?” he read out loud.  Strange, he thought, surely backing all the data up to the cloud – the information dense computing structure that laced its way through the entire star-freighter – was also standard process?  He reached out and tapped the Enter key almost automatically, and then noticed that the highlighted option had been Cancel.  The decision box disappeared, leaving the backed-up data visible on the screen.  He cursed softly under his breath and studied the screen, looking for the menu that would allow him to upload the data to the cloud for safe-storage, but before he’d covered more than a quarter of the screen (did Dr. Lesjes store everything on the desktop?) the door to the lab chimed, telling him that someone was requesting entry.

Surprised again, he called out “Enter,” looking over at the doors.

“Voice control is not active,” said a greasily smooth voice, too polished and enunciated to be human.

“What?” Dan looked up and around him, as most people did when addressed by the disembodied voice of the ship systems, and then felt a little foolish.  There was no response, and the entry chime sounded again.  He walked over to the door to the lab and pressed the door release pad.  There was a responsiveness to it that made him wonder if it was actually a mechanical switch instead of a touch-pad.  The door opened, and three men in maintenance uniforms stepped through.

“Please identify yourself,” said the first man holding out a tablet.  He was taller than Dan, and taller than the other members of his team, with hair that was greying at the temples and eyes that looked as though they’d frosted over.  His uniform, midnight blue with the maintenance logo sewn on both shoulders and the midriff, across the bellybutton, was tight-fitting, and after a moment Dan realised that the elasticated cuffs meant it was a pressure-suit, intended to keep its wearer alive for minutes in the event of a sudden pressure leak.  There was no sign of the helmet that would complete the suit, and Dan wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.  He looked at the tablet, and laid his palm flat on it, inside the lines drawn on the screen.  The tablet chirped almost immediately, and as he lifted his hand off the man was already pulling the tablet back and reading the instructions on the screen.

“Sticking door in Lab-EST?” he said.  His voice rose slightly at the end of the sentence, but Dan wasn’t completely certain it was a question.

“Yes,” he said.  “Er, who are you?”

“Maintenance,” grunted one of the guys behind the grey-templed man.  “What more do you need to know?  We fix your door, fast as a supernova.”

“I can’t really call you maintenance,” said Dan feeling awkward now.  “That seems a bit impersonal.”

“You can call me Malik,” said the grey-templed man, turning his head slightly towards Dan.  His eyes seemed almost to be hiding behind the curtain of frost, but they didn’t look directly at him, or even indicate that they were focusing.  “Otherwise we’re just the maintenance team.  Where’s your door?”

“It’s on the tablet, boss,” said the third man, who’d not yet spoken.

“Nope,” said Malik.  “This is Lab-EST.  We make no assumptions, and we go nowhere without authorisation.  Not if you want to leave in one piece.  This man here,” he pointed at Dan, “will show us where the door is, and will show us out again.”

“Right,” said Dan, wonderingly.  “It’s this way, just over here in fact.”   He pointed himself, and then realised that he’d gestured so vaguely that he might have been pointing into the corner.  “Er, just follow me.”

The maintenance men, led by Malik, did exactly that, walking behind him in single file, stopping as soon as he did, and generally acting like they expected the whole room to explode at any second.

Calling Facilities

Left alone in the lab Dan looked at the tablet.  Dr. Lesjes – she’d invited him to call her Anna a couple of times, but he always slipped back to Dr. Lesjes, even in the privacy of his own thoughts – had filled in nearly all of the data fields.  He counted three left to do, starting with number 28.  He looked over the biotank he was in front of and finally spotted the number 27 stencilled on it in letters tens of centimetres high.

“How could I have missed that?” he said quietly to himself, and noticed how his voice echoed in the quiet lab.  He pressed his lips together, answering the question only in his mind: he’d been looking for a much smaller number less obviously located.  He walked on to what he hoped was the next biotank and found that it had the number 26 stencilled on the side, so he walked back the other way to number 28.  Then he fussed with it for a minute while he worked out where the data readouts were hidden and how to slide the panel out to see them.  After all that he was pleasantly surprised to find that the stylus worked first time on the tablet with no extra little puzzles or tricks to work through.  He tried peering into the tank, but the shadows in there were confusing and kept moving, so he decided to wait for Dr. Lesjes to explain what he was looking at and what he was looking for.

Now that he understood the task the other two biotanks were quick to finish off, and he left the lab quickly, his feet ringing the steel floor panels in his haste.  The door he’d struggled with to enter the lab was another struggle to leave again, and then on the other side he found that it wouldn’t close properly either.  With no way to gain enough leverage to force the smooth, polished metal of the doors together he was forced to leave a five centimetre gap there, something that would have worried him a lot less before he knew that they were growing Empirical Storm Troopers in the other lab.  That thought galvanized him back to his desk, where he put through a call to Facilities and Maintenance.  A bored-sounding voice answered after two rings: “Facilities.  Make it quick.”

“Uh, I contacted you about a sticking door in our lab,” said Dan, feeling as though he were interrupting something.  “Uh, a couple of times, I think.”

There was a pause and the rattle of a keyboard, and then, “Yes.  Priority 146.  Expect it done in about six weeks, unless anything else urgent comes up in that time.”

“Uh,” said Dan quickly.  He wished briefly that he sounded more elegant, more in control.  “Uh, actually it’s in Lab-EST?”  He tried not to make it sound like a question, but the words slipped out on an ascending tone anyway.

“Why the hell didn’t you say so before?”  The voice on the other end was suddenly waspish and angry.  There was another rattle of the keyboard.  “Priority level raised.  There will be an engineering team out to you within the half-hour, ship.  If they do not arrive in that time you are to contact me again; ask for Chris personally and I will find out what the delay is.”

“Thank-you,” said Dan, a little bewildered at the sudden and complete change of attitude.

“And next time,” said Chris, emphasizing the word next, “please state the nature of the fault clearly.  We’re not mind-readers, you know.”  The call cut-off, but the display showed a 30 minute countdown.

“Right,” said Dan, still bewildered.  “Why is Lab-EST so important?”  Well, he knew part of the reason: they were growing Empirical Storm Troopers in there, but that didn’t tell him why he could get Facilities and Maintenance to drop their pretence that they’d do anything about his problem and actually resolve it by dropping Lab-EST into the conversation.

“I hope you’re having fun, tonight, Dr. Lesjes,” he said under his breath.  “Because tomorrow I really need some answers about what we’re doing here.”

He looked down at his desk, wondering what to do next, and saw her tablet lying in front of him.  Right.  Analyse the data from the biotanks and write a preliminary report on it.