Coffee and Chaos
Posted on Sun Dec 22nd, 2024 @ 5:29pm by Lieutenant Alan Harrison & Lieutenant Commander Lylja Tigerlilly
673 words; about a 3 minute read
Mission:
Terrorpin
Location: Engineering and Ops
Timeline: MD 01: During the Earthquake
Alan enjoyed a good cup of coffee - one with strong flavor and a bit of milk. It didn't matter the time of day; you could often see him with a cup in his hand. His current cup had moved past the steaming phase and was in the still warm, but calm, stage. Hence Alan's surprise when he saw a few ripples in the surface of coffee while staring at it deep in thought. However, before he could get another thought in, he ripples extended beyond his coffee to the rest of the room, which caught Alan off guard. After bracing himself on the nearest console, he shouted, "Report!"
"It's an earthquake, sir!" came the reply of a crewman in the corner.
"Well, at least it's something normal this time!" Alan said with a surprising bit of relief, despite the room still shaking.
Once the shaking stopped, Alan declared, "We should check in with ops and see how the grid is holding up,"
He pressed his commbadge, "Harrison to Tigerlilly, Engineering is still online," he said after quickly glancing at the overview on his console, "How are things in ops?"
"On my way to find out, Harrison," said Lylja. "Though none of my automated alarms have gone off. I am expecting the grid to be amber. Good thing we had started improving the system redundancies. Wish this had waited until we installed the new generation capacity. Back in a moment." The comlink shut off.
"Thank you, Commander, I'll keep the line open," Alan replied, finally taking a sip of that coffee he'd been staring into only a moment before.
A minute and a half later. "In the office, everything working here. As expected the entire system is amber with a few red zones, but I should be able to get those stable in a few minutes. No complete losses of power anywhere, but some brownouts. Again should have that worked out shortly."
"Where do you need my engineering teams?" Alan inquired.
"Send a term to Junction Relay 7A, it is throwing weird error reports and may be compromised," said Lylja scanning the system. "The North 2 broadcast unit is reporting structural damage, I will take it offline until it can be inspected. Everything else is mid-priority, help the people and then we will get back to them. I will update as the situation changes."
"On it," Alan replied, relaying his orders to the group of engineers that had already started assembling near him. He continued to Lylja, "I'll have Chief Nilsson to do a structural analysis of the buildings around the colony. Could you have someone meet his team outside Ops? He'll likely need some extra hands who know their way around a hyperspanner."
Lylja pulled up a personnel list. "I should be able to shake someone free." She tapped and highlighted several possibilities. "Overall, things seem to be holding together so far, do we have any word on the cause? Or if we should expect more quakes?"
Alan glanced at his terminal, "Nothing so far. The computer seems to be having trouble pinpointing the origin of the quake, so it can't say anything about aftershocks yet," Alan remarked, "That was my first earthquake. I guess I never truly appreciated those seismic regulators on Earth until now."
"Leto Coloney had light seismic activity but nothing overly dangerous," said Lylja. "Certainly nothing like this. Could we use scans from a shuttle to help localize the source?"
"Did we have any shuttles in the air at the moment of the quake?" asked Alan, "If we had multiple, we might be able to triangulate it."
"I will drop a message to flight control and see what birds they have up," said Lylja.
"For the moment, things seem to be stabilizing," she continued. "Assuming no further disasters, talk again in ninety?"
"Sounds good," Alan replied, "Harrison out."
Turning to his team, Alan made an announcement to those gathered: "First things first. Chief Nilsson, take whomever and whatever you need and go make sure no buildings collapse on anyone."
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