Compartment - Part 4

Metal responds to prybars and spanners, but people’s brains respond to shouting and shame

Start from the beginning: Enter the Compartment

Missed the last installement? Follow the air

Arin leapt into the narrow tube an instant after the trochanter actuator’s front arm sliced through the space in front of the vent frame. Her jump was only energetic enough to propel her torso into the duct. Her legs were left dangling in the space that would be swept by the rear arm of the enormous part in a few short heartbeats. She thrashed and squirmed deeper into the duct. The trochanter thrashed outside the vent frame and lightly brushed against the sole of her boot.

Too close, she thought. Father would be furious if he witnessed her reckless game with the moving machinery. She took four deep breaths. Pain. Her arm. The skin between her left elbow and wrist was marred with a deep abrasion. Already, dots of blood had leaked through the deepest parts of the wound.

Her first thought on seeing the wound was that the size of the injury made it impossible to hide. All five people wore shirts whose sleeves ended just below the elbow. This design reduced the chance that their clothing would catch in moving parts. It also made her long bloody scrape as obvious as the ack-light on the maintable.

What is Father going to do when he sees this? She forgot about the pain, and started imagining different lies that would prevent Father’s discovery of her journey into the outvents.

“I fell,” she imaged herself lying to Father. “On the maintable catwalk.”

No, that wouldn’t work. How could she fall so the top of her arm suffered such a unique injury? Father wouldn’t believe it.

“I tried to cut my hair, but dropped the wire-tool. Then I accidentally scraped against the toolrack when I tried to catch it.” She always complained about the way Father cut her hair. He might believe she tried to be sneaky about the wire-tool.

The blood continued to ooze through the damaged skin of her forearm, forming a pattern of lines that was a bloody mirror of the corrugation on the metal edge of the vent frame.

When Arin was younger, perhaps five hundred shifts ago, Father found a tiny dot of drive fluid on the catwalk railing. He spent ten shifts – ten! – tracing it back to a sporadic micro-leak in a conduit run thirty meters above.

Father never raged at the machinery. Even the most sensitive and finicky parts enjoyed his endless patience. Equipment installed just beyond arms-length from the personnel-spaces yet rated for hand-disconnect was an amusing problem, or maybe an excuse to painfully improve his overall flexibility. A cross-threaded bolt, oily and nestled into a tight overhead crevice would be talked out of its hole with soothing voice as Father gently and systematically tried all the tricks for dealing with obstinate fasteners. The person who cross-threaded that bolt, however, was not given similar treatment. “metal responds to prybars and spanners, but people’s brains respond to shouting and shame,” Father had said to her. Many. Times.

She looked at the obvious pattern of her injury. Father will figure out what I did. She knew he would tirelessly and methodically examine every piece of metal in the entire compartment until he found the piece whose shape matched her injury.

Unless…

Arin smiled at the deviousness of her idea. She squirmed until her head was near the vent opening she had leapt into. The trochanter arms continued their unstoppable thrashing a few centimeters outside of the vent. The she carefully extended her injured left arm into the path of the thrashing machinery.

The arm swung past the vent, and she felt the wind from its motion on her injured arm. She pushed her arm a millimeter closer, and felt the machinery gently swish along her skin. She pushed her arm out one more millimeter.

Instead of grazing her, the huge metal part scraped along her arm. She stifled a scream and yanked her arm back into the vent. It was still attached. The huge trochanter actuator had created a new abrasion on top of the one caused by the vent frame. Blood started to ooze out of the injury immediately. It looked like condensation forming on the gas-level-line in the relief tanks. Well, except that the blood was bright red and the condensation was only clear water.

The injury was larger, bloodier, and hurt a lot more. But the pattern from the vent cover corrugation was no long visible. Now, that looks something that would happen if I fell.

She squirmed around again, and wriggled deeper into the duct.