31. Never Tear Us Apart
THIRTY-ONE
NEVER TEAR US APART
The alarm pulled Charlie out of a dead sleep. As if on autopilot herself, she went to the door of her quarters and out into the corridor.
Engineering alarms had a specific pitch.
They weren't smooth escalating tones like many of the other alarms on the ship.
This one was ugly. It immediately communicated that a system had started failing on its own schedule.
She'd learned it in her first month on the Emberkind and hoped never to hear it because, usually, it meant a catastrophic and dangerous failure.
Yet here it was, blasting over the ship like a siren.
Charlie ran to Engineering.
Tavi intercepted her at the corridor junction.
He wasn't grinning.
In all the months Charlie had known him, she had never once caught him without his signature grin. Its absence hit her harder than the alarm and told her everything she needed to know without words.
"Coolant manifold," he said quickly. "Cascade failure. It's bad, Spark Plug."
"Where's Cael?" she asked.
"Gone."
Charlie stopped in her tracks. "Gone? Gone where?"
"I mean, he's not there," Tavi said, stopping beside her.
"Maren already pulled the access log on the way down.
Apparently, he ran a solo diagnostic on the manifold.
Off-schedule. Off-protocol." Tavi's voice had lowered, and Charlie could hear his thoughts in the tone.
"He pushed it to full capacity, Charlie.
" Tavi's jaw worked. "But then the log just...
stops. He was there, and then he was gone.
" Tavi shook his head. "Maren caught him on the corridor feed.
He ran for the duty stations two decks up. "
Charlie's quarters were four doors down from the bay. Cael knew that. Everyone in Engineering knew that.
He had gone two decks up instead.
He would rather have run the length of the ship than knock on her door.
There was a version of Charlie that would have fired a retort first and asked about the manifold second. That Charlie would always get her shot in early because nobody else ever did it for her. Even now, she felt herself load the round, months of Cael's face packed into one clean sentence.
But she set it down.
She was surprised how easily it flitted away. A few months ago, it would have cost her something to hold that back. But now it just... didn't matter. Cael had done this to himself, everyone could see that without her input or addition.
And besides, Charlie had a manifold to save.
"Talk to me while we move," she said to Tavi instead, and they ran.
Engineering was completely flooded.
The coolant was a clear, temperature-reactive fluid that moved like water and carried a faint luminescent charge, and the whole flooded bay had lit up blue-green from the inside.
It looked like the bioluminescent tide Charlie had read about as a kid.
The tide that glowed where the waves broke and lit up around your ankles when you walked through it.
It came down from the burst overhead lines in glowing sheets.
It pooled across the deck, ankle-deep and rising, lit from within as if the entire room had been dropped into that bioluminescent sea.
Where it touched an exposed conduit, it arced, bright and vicious, and the arcing was the part that could kill somebody.
If Charlie wasn't careful, it could put an arc through her heart if she touched the wrong conduit.
Maren was at the primary console, her shimmer blazing, processing data faster than the display could render it. Two junior technicians worked the secondary junctions by hand. Alarms came from every panel at once.
"Talk to me," Charlie said, wading over to Maren, Tavi following behind.
"Three junction failures, cascading." Maren's voice held steady even as her hands shook. "The primary manifold pressure is climbing. Every bypass I open, the pressure finds a new path to overtake. If it reaches the quaternary line, we lose environmental in the forward habitats."
"The Niblets?" Tavi asked, the worry in his voice evident.
"The Niblets," Maren confirmed.
“Okay,” Charlie said. “Okay, okay. Seal the three that blew,” she stated, wading in beside Maren. “Take them out of the loop completely and starve the cascade.”
“Sealing,” Maren said.
They all waited.
For four seconds, it actually worked. The primary pressure dipped, and Charlie let herself breathe.
Then it started to climb again, faster than before, and a fourth junction let go somewhere above the ceiling with a sound like a struck bell.
“Four failures,” Maren lamented. “Pressure’s higher than when we started.”
Charlie stared at the readout. She had taken three paths away when it needed a path, so it’d gone looking. And what did it find? A smaller line, and forced it wide open.
She hadn’t stopped the cascade.
She’d fed it.
“Reverse the flow through the secondary,” Tavi said. “Push it back the way it came.”
“That doubles the load on the tertiary,” Charlie said, already shaking her head. “And the tertiary is what’s feeding the habitats. We’d cook the Niblets in about a minute.”
“Quaternary’s at sixty percent,” Maren said.
The whole system laid itself out in her mind. She followed the pressure, moving through the manifold like water looking for the sea. Water didn't want to be stopped. It wanted somewhere to move.
Then she saw the one move nobody wanted to make.
"We stop feeding it new paths," she said. "Instead, we go and give it every path at once."
Maren stared at her. "That floods the entire lower deck."
“Storage and maintenance,” Tavi said. “Nobody’s down there.”
"For about ninety seconds, yeah," Charlie said, looking over at Maren.
"But then the pressure equalizes across the entire system and the cascade stops, simply because there's nowhere left for it to cascade.
" She was already moving. "We'll be pulling coolant out of the deck plating for a good while, and we'll lose whatever isn't sealed down there. But we keep the habitats."
Charlie looked back at the console and began reading the manifold's overhead run and the component up in the ceiling void where the primary feed married the distribution lines.
"But I can't run the release from down here.
Somebody has to physically stage the tertiary manifold, up top, by hand, while somebody else runs the console sequence in time with it.
" Charlie looked back at Maren. "Two people. Same rhythm. No lag."
She looked at the access shaft in the corner. It was narrow, a console filling one end, a ladder bolted to the other, thirty inches of standing room and a maintenance void overhead where the wounded component sat gushing into the bay.
"Maren, you hold the primary. Tavi, get on the tertiary console and call me the readings. I'm going up."
“But you said you needed a second. Especially in the shaft, someone is going to have to man the console,” Tavi said, gripping Charlie’s forearm to stop her from moving. “Maren can’t leave the primary, and with me on the tertiary line—”
That was when Reyna rushed into the room, hitting the water as soon as she was through the threshold.
“I’m here,” Reyna said breathlessly. “How can I help?”
She was soaked to the knee already, and she wasn’t in uniform.
Dark tights, a tank, the soft off-duty clothes of someone who’d been in for the night.
Charlie had never seen her in anything that wasn’t the captain, and for half a second the sight of her stalled Charlie out completely.
Then Reyna’s eyes moved over the bay, fast, taking the whole disaster in at a glance, and Charlie watched the captain slide into place.
“Charlie needs a second,” Tavi said. “Someone needs to man the console in the shaft while Charlie handles the manifold.”
“Tell me where to stand,” Reyna said, not even a pause in consideration.
Charlie did not waste a breath being surprised. When Reyna Solas offered, Charlie’s whole body just said yes. There was no hesitation, no deference.
"Just as Tavi said. You run the console in the shaft while I run the manifold. When I call the sequence, you execute at the exact second I call it. If it's even a second too late, we flood a deck for nothing." She was already moving. "You good with that?"
"Yes."
"Then come on, Captain." Reyna nodded, following Charlie as she turned to the team.
"Tav, you good?"
"On it, Spark Plug," Tavi said as he moved out of the bay.
"Maren?"
"Ready and set, Charlie."
Charlie waded toward the shaft, turning to Reyna. "Stay with me."
The shaft was worse up close.
The overhead component had completely split along a seam, the coolant coming down through the void in a steady column.
So the moment Charlie started up the ladder, she was climbing straight into it.
Cold and glowing, it plastered her hair flat as her tank went dark and stuck to her.
Her cargo pants soaked through and hung off her, heavy, dragging.
None of it reached her. Up here there was the manifold, the rhythm, and the next coupling. Her hands already knew what they doing.
And under all of it, steady, thirty inches down, was Reyna's voice. Calling the console back to her; keeping the rhythm. There, the whole time, and Charlie never once had to check that she would be.
"Console's live," Reyna said. "I have the tertiary array. Walk me through it."
And then they were working, fast, the two of them together.
Charlie had worked with good people before.
Even on the Emberkind, she'd worked with Maren, who was brilliant, and Tavi, who knew systems better than anyone, and a dozen sharp techs across a dozen jobs.
Yet she had never in her life worked with anyone like this.