Restitution (Space Colony One, #7) by J.J. Green

Author:J.J. Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J.J. Green
Published: 2022-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE FIRST SIGN THAT something was wrong was the water shutting off as Wilder was brushing her teeth. She pressed the faucet again to rinse her mouth but nothing came out. They’d run out of toothpaste years ago, so it was no big deal in that sense—she just spat into the washbasin regardless—but in every other sense the sputtering pipe was worrying.

She comm’d Dragan.

“Your water’s out too?” was the first thing he said.

“Uh huh. Has someone else contacted you about it?”

Was the problem localized or shipwide?

“Not yet. I wanted a drink, but, nothing.”

“Okay, can you tell Niall? I’ll see if I can find out what’s wrong.”

It was better to leave informing Niall to Dragan. Maybe Kes was right that his animosity came from a deep-seated affection for her, but it was animosity, nonetheless.

She quickly pulled on a shirt and pants and opened her cabin’s interface, from which she could access all the ship’s data. If they had a blockage or a leak, internal sensors should have picked it up and activated an alert.

Nothing showed up.

Ugh.

Something was wrong. There was no doubt about it. The fact that the ship wasn’t telling them the problem meant the relevant sensors were malfunctioning too. She, Dragan, Niall, and whoever else they could rope in would have to search for the leak or blockage manually, going over the plumbing system inch by inch.

She wrinkled her nose, hoping the issue was in the clean, not dirty, water pipes. People thought building starships was exciting and glamorous. But in fact, in many ways you were just constructing a giant house that happened to be flying through space. The passengers had the same bodily needs and functions as they had everywhere else. They pooped, peed, shed skin, and sweated just the same, and it was the engineers’ job to deal with it all.

Maintaining the Sirocco was becoming more and more challenging over the years. The ship was aging. Her structure and systems were wearing out. Every month, it seemed, they had to dip into the small stock of spare parts. One day, the stock would be used up, and then what would they do? There were no handy suppliers to contact for replenishment. Neither would there be any on Earth.

They had begun to resort to greater levels of ingenuity to fix things. Nothing was ever thrown away. Where they could repurpose materials they did, and they avoided replacing a worn-out or broken part whenever they could, choosing rather to mend it or rejig the system to function without it. In the beginning, she’d relished the challenge. It broke the endless days of monotony. Now, every time she was reminded that the Sirocco’s working life was playing out, it only added to her stress level.

The complaints about the lack of water began to come in. First, the cook comm’d her, saying breakfast wouldn’t arrive until the water in the galley did. Next came a flurry of personal messages, asking why the bathrooms weren’t working.

Her comm chirruped again. “I know, I know!” she exclaimed in answer.

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