Hot Fix
Posted on Wed Oct 25th, 2017 @ 10:05pm by Lieutenant Alana Tovan
Mission:
A Day in the Life
Location: Deck 1367, Junction 1367-G5
Another late night, and another late night repair. Frankly, Alana didn’t really mind the late night repair jobs. During the station’s “day” time the corridors were full of civilians and Starfleet personnel going about their business. On a starship, at least, this traffic was usually limited to Starfleet, and they generally stayed out of the way. Civilians, on the other hand, were inconsistent at best. Some had enough sense to not get in her way, while others saw a working engineer or technician and thought that it was the perfect time to start up a conversation. And more dangerous maintenance activities were a whole other ordeal. Some people didn’t appreciate the safety precautions station operations personnel put in place to protect them. The fact that a safety forcefield required them to walk fifty meters to another junction was just too much for them to handle.
No, Alana preferred the quiet. No one wandering around to get in her way. No one to ask questions that she didn’t have time to answer. It was just her and her equipment, just as it should be. Tonight was one of those lucky days where she could have some time to herself to focus on the task at hand. It was one of those days that seemed more rare since she started working on visiting ships more than on just the station. But tonight she managed to pull an easy, relaxing job.
Deep down on Deck 1367 there was a faulty power relay. Maintenance reports showed that it had been repaired several months before, but there were still reports of power fluctuations on the lower decks. Usually they were trivial momentary power interruptions, but to a Starfleet engineer, no power interruption was trivial. If it wasn’t working right, then they weren’t doing their jobs. The logs stated that this relay had been replaced twice before, and both times too recently to be reasonably back on the maintenance list. Most of the time a job like this would have been delegated to one of the many, many technicians on the station’s operations staff, but Alana wouldn’t have it. Something was up with this relay, or there wouldn’t be any complaints. So she grabbed her tool kit and set out to work.
Reaching relay junction 1367-G5, Alana took the typical precautions. She erected force fields on either side of the relay junction, and removed the panel hiding the relay from the bulkhead. With tricorder in hand, she examines the suspect equipment. There were signs of excessive wear and tear on the device, but nothing out of the ordinary to suggest that it should be failing. Alana put the tricorder away and pulled out one of her tools, a circuit tester. With this, she could monitor the functions of the relay as it routed power through the grid. Operation of the relay seemed fine, though the current was reading a little high upstream of the connection.
If Alana had truly been a Vulcan, like she sometimes claimed, she would have raised an eyebrow. Instead, she managed a puzzled glare. Something had been causing the relay to momentarily break its connection, but what? All signs pointed to the power feed itself. Too little power, and it might switch off. But she was reading too much power, which could cause the relay to burn up. That might have explained the excessive wear. She closed her eyes for a moment as she thought, but they opened again as an idea popped into her head. She looked to the left, upstream of the relay in the power grid. What she was looking for was behind the next panel in line.
Moving along the floor and dragging her tool kit with her, Alana opened up the next panel. Just as she suspected, the upstream power coupling was damaged, and appeared to be for some time. Alana rolled her eyes and signed audibly. The last few repairs had replaced the failed relays, but hadn’t addressed the root cause of the problem. This coupling needed to be replaced, and soon. She was convinced it wouldn’t last much longer, but fortunately she had a spare in her kit just in case. Alana grabbed a spanner from her kit and closed off the power flow going into the coupling. Normally this would have rendered the circuit safe. But Alana hadn’t counted on one thing; the damaged relay. The excessive flow was still triggering momentary interruptions, and it chose this exact moment to cause another fluctuation. Just as Alana removed the failing coupling, the relay backfired, resulting in a spark and a quick burst of plasma. Luckily Alana was not sitting directly in front of the coupling, but her hand was still there, taking the full brunt of the burst.
The pain in her hand was sudden, but excruciating. The fire was there and gone in an instant, leaving her hand badly charred and blistered. It was best that the corridor was empty as Alana was unable to refrain from yelling an expletive as the pain coursed up her arm. The hand was badly burned up to the wrist, but she was fortunate that she didn’t receive the full blast. Her hand could be easily saved by late 24th century medicine, but at the moment that was little consolation. She was simultaneous upset, worried, and angry at herself for failing to take the bad relay into consideration, and was already contemplating having Commander Prescott put a reprimand in her record. But she shook the thought aside. She still had a job to finish.
Stupidly pushing through the pain, she used her good left hand to reach across her body and grab the replacement coupling. It was slow going, but she managed to manipulate the piece into place with the one hand, the burned hand cradled against her body. She triple checked the connections to ensure that she hadn’t made a mistake before opening up the power flow once more. She let out a quiet sigh of relief that the circuit was holding, and reinstalled the bulkhead panelling with her good hand and knee. Satisfied that everything was in working order, she packed up her toolkit, took down the forcefields, and hurried to the nearest infirmary.
Lieutenant Alana Tovan [P:Von]
Acting Assistant Chief of Operations
Starbase 332
