Compartment - Part 6

Someone screamed. It was Mother’s voice, from above. From the gauge deck. Then a second scream. Not a second scream from Mother, but a second voice screaming as if she was injured or trapped. Was misses Jenco screaming too?

Start from the beginning: Enter the Compartment

Missed the last part: Follow the air

Arin used the cramped space of the air manifold to turn around. She wedged her head and shoulders into the duct and began the painful squirm back to the Pose Control Compartment. A few slivers of the brilliant light from the other side of the vent cover streamed through the gap between her shoulders and the wall, illuminating the narrow passage in front of her. When she squeezed her hips into the vent, the light from that enormous and secret space was fully eclipsed. She turned on her headlamp and continued moving home.

She squirmed through the first eight-meter segment of duct and found a way to twist her body to make the first turn. In a few more meters, she estimated, she would be back inside the Pose Control Compartment, squeezing through the segment of outvent duct installed just above the electrical feeds.

As Arin twisted and pushed her way closer to home, her thoughts shifted from wonderings about the compartment of the brown and the blue, to the magnitude and focus of Father’s inevitable wrath. Even if her attempt fool the sensor alarms worked, and the unack light on the Maintable had stayed dark, there were plenty of clues to her unauthorized journey that Father would notice. Her bloody arm injury would raise one of his eyebrows. He might not immediately guess the source of the dusty stains that accumulated on her shiftwear from her slither through the outvent, but he would extract the truth from her somehow. Maybe he had run a tool check while she was gone and noticed the twist drive she took with her was not in the locker with the rest of the set. Maybe he had shouted for her during his work on the maneuver mesh, and searched for her when she did not respond.

She reached the end of the outvent and grimly disconnected the shunt she placed on the flow sensor when she removed the vent cover. She was now certain that she had made a mistake and put the outvent into an alarm state, yet not sure what that mistake might have been. The arms of the trochanter actuator slashed through the space outside the vent cover in the same pattern and rate as when she began her secret excursion. That was a good sign. If Father and Mister 5-8 Jenco had completed their work on the mesh, the actuator would likely be in a test cycle, with a much different pattern of movement.

Safely exiting the vent was a problem she hadn’t thought of when she entered. Her entry was a mostly graceful, headfirst dive into the vent, timed to avoid the thrashing arms of the actuator. She couldn’t climb out slowly and safely like she would during a planned maintenance event. To make it to the standplate intact and alive, she would have to quickly move through the trochanter swing space in the few seconds between cycles. The interior of the vent was too small for her to bunch up her knees for a forceful and quick outward thrust.

The trochanter arms slashed through the space again and again. In her mind, Father and Mister 5-8 Jenco were finishing maintenance on the maneuver mesh and would soon be at the Maintable, wondering where she was. The limited time she had left to exit the outvent system was being sliced away with each rotation of the actuator.

She elongated herself in the vent, stretching her knees and ankles into the duct. She grabbed the sharp, corrugated edge of the vent frame, and counted off the beats until the arm swung past.

She pulled against the vent cover so hard that she cut her fingers on the metal edge. She had managed to pull with enough force to slide halfway out of the vent. The trochanter arm swung first away from her, then overhead, then began its journey back to the space now occupied by her upper body.

Arin flopped towards the deck, letting the weight of her torso pull her legs from the vent. She landed on her back with a loud and painful smack. She instantly went flat – knees down, arms down, head turned sideways. The actuator swung past, brushing delicately against her ear. She violently rolled sideways onto the standplate and caught her breath. “Pythagoras,” she whispered to herself.

Three breaths. She couldn’t hear anything but her own heartbeat pounding in her ear. Three more breaths, the drum-like sound turned into a mechanical pumping thump in her chest.

Three more breaths. Her heart quieted and she started shaking.

She sat up and hugged herself to try to quell the shakes.

Someone screamed. It was Mother’s voice, from above. From the gauge deck.

Then a second scream. Not a second scream from Mother, but a second voice screaming as if she was injured or trapped. Was misses Jenco screaming too?

Arin’s heart surged back to full-power. Ignoring the walkways and ladders, she climbed straight off the standplate, through the maze of electrical feed conduit, to the top of the expansion tanks. She leapt across the tops of the tanks, slid onto the bonding table crawlway, then flung herself up three ladders to the gauge deck.

A sixth person stood by the Maintable. A previously unknown sixth person, somehow now inside the Compartment, stood at the table screaming. A woman. Her face was a horror of grotesquely mis-sized and misplaced facial features, stuck to a head that was the wrong size and shape, affixed to a disgustingly disproportioned body.

Arin briefly joined the screaming, then fell to her knees and vomited onto the gauge deck floorplate.