“That’s good, right?”
His jaw flexed as he tilted his head. “Yes.”
“Yet you seem disappointed.”
“Honestly, boss…” Jackin leaned in, lowering his voice. “I was hoping it’d show something off with the thrusters—or at least a few faulty sensors. Something to account for that drift we had yesterday.” He glowered at his screen for another few moments, then added, “I think we should run it again.”
“Why?”
“I can write up a debugger quick and put it through at the same time. Maybe the diagnostic suite’s finally giving out on this rust bucket.”
Adequin blew out a heavy breath and glanced at the time on her nexus. “All right, if you think we need to. Go ahead.” Not like she had anything better to do.
Jackin tapped the screen to reset the scan.
She paced up the steps and sunk back into the captain’s chair, scratching her nose to mask a yawn. She returned to staring at the empty black viewscreen and tried to convince herself not to nod off. A few dull minutes later, her nexus chimed with a comm notification, snapping alertness back into her. She tapped her nexus to open the link. “Go for Rake.”
“Sir, Bach here,” Griffith’s rumbling voice crackled through, staticky and startlingly loud in the quiet of the bridge. She thumbed the volume down. “Sir, I’m running preflight checks on the Tempus’s torus chamber, but I’m getting a spike in the SGL readings.”
Blinking down at her wrist, it took her a second to process his words. SGL … she hadn’t heard that call in years. At least since the Resurgence War ended.
Jackin glanced over his shoulder, quirking an eyebrow at her. The rest of the bridge crew did a phenomenal job of pretending they weren’t listening in.
Adequin cleared her throat. “Say again?”
“The SGL readings on the Tempus, sir,” Griffith repeated. “I’ll need to run diagnostics to troubleshoot, but I need your biometric clearance.”
Jackin looked back, amusement tugging at the corner of his lips. “I got this, boss, go ahead.”
“Protocol—”
He held up a hand. “Void, not with the protocolling, please.”
“I’ll come right back.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” Jackin mumbled as he refocused on his screen, then his look shot up again. “Hey—on your way there, we’ve still got a half dozen in the brig from that hydro debacle.”
“Shit,” she sighed. Last night, she’d thrown the entire third-shift hydroponics staff in there to cool off.
After Cavalon’s little scuffle in the mess yesterday, the unrest had circulated, as it always did. This time, it’d ended up sparking a particularly destructive fight in the hydroponics lab. Half the nutrient tanks had been ruptured before Bray and the rest of the security team broke it up. She understood getting a little stir-crazy, but didn’t know why that had to make them stupid and violent too.
“Thanks, Jack. I’ll swing by and clear them for release.”
She started for the exit, where Cavalon still intently mopped the same innocent square-meter area he’d been targeting a half hour ago.
“Oculus, you’re going to swab a hole in the damn floor,” she said. “With me.”
She marched into the hall.
Jackin grumbled, “That means follow,” then after a moment, hurried bootsteps trailed after her.
Cavalon exhaled a few curses as the squeaking wheels caught between panels of decking and the water sloshed over the sides. After a few seconds, he had enough sense to pick up the stupid bucket and carry it.