Don't Be So Precious With It

For this week's story, I'm thinking about a few things. Red dirt and what it might feel like to work under low gravity and high trouble conditions. What sort of jobs might be accessible when robots and humans are a functional, customizable build team.

What it might feel like when you can't quite let go of a life's work. And what someone who can't let go might do when they realize that they've reached that point.

This week's story, dear reader, is a reminder that, even with the most important works of life, there's a point where we have to let go, and remind ourselves,

Don't Be So Precious With It by M. K. Dreysen

"Don't be so precious with it," the voice over the radio told me.

Don't be...

Precious? I don't often want to throw somebody off a hundred foot fucking drop. But this seemed to be one of those times. "Hey Chuck, listen. Where's your junior engineer?"

"She's around somewhere. Why?"

"I think I'm going to need her to take a look at this. In person."

"Well, are you sure?"

"Chuck, there's an I-beam right in the middle of where the valve is supposed to go. Yes, I'm sure."

Chuck grumbled about it, but he did get Channa headed my way. "Leina, she'll be there in about an hour. Other side of the plant."

"Right, I'll rig down for her." Tab up the commands, acknowledgement from Specs that they were bringing me down.

Then, "Hey, Specs, we've got a guest coming in, human, I'll need to bring her up to get a look at the problem."

"Right boss, two humans in the lift for visual inspection. Do you need Wally or Fitz with you?"

"Nah, we'll just need Lift and Tuck on the horn. We'll probably need to lift that valve into place, I can rig it."

"Boss..."

I sighed. I programmed Specs, I know why they're the way they are. "Are they idle?"

"Wally's inspecting the welds for tomorrow's lift, assuming we're on schedule. Fitz is on cleanup."

"Ok, send Fitz my way as soon as you see our guest."

The hour gave me time to work on my schedule. Wally and Fitz could go to work on the hundred and one other bits of the job, so the overall schedule hadn't come into a squeeze. Yet. That left me checking my programs and assignments.

Every job's custom, especially out here. I ignored the various itches and faint pains, the kind you can touch when you're not in armored pressure suits. Lots of practice. I've even gotten used to working through the clumsy gloves and head's up display that my helmet gives me.

And I do like how hard it is for someone to sneak up on you. My team and are the only ones allowed inside the work perimeter unsupervised, so we've got plenty of cameras rigged up for safety. "Hey Leina, you called for me?"

"I did. You're going to want to strangle whoever did the structure work." Story of my life there. I always bid the whole job. And then the client's Specs equivalent parses out the job the way they're programmed too, trust and cost mapping and here we are, one part of the whole.

And, showing the proud young design engineer that the structural contractor had put a fifteen centimeter piece of steel right in the middle of where her control valve was supposed to go.

Oh, and doing so from a swaying crane lift suspended a hundred feet in the air. Not so bad here as back home, gravity and its magic, but it's still a hell of a long way up. "Well damn," Channa muttered. And then started in on taking her pictures.

One of the three classic reactions. Cursing, or get on the phone and start the blame game. Or like Channa was doing, break out of it and get started on the rebuild. I kept quiet until she got to the only real question. "Can you fix it?"

"Yep. The boneyard's got the steel, we'll take a day and rework the structure. Just do me a favor and doublecheck my drawings before you go."

I'd asked for as-built drawings, knowing full well they'd appear about six weeks after I was on to the next job. Such is life sometimes. But I definitely needed to make sure whatever I built fit Channa's design.

I worked on the programming for Wally and Fitz, then sketched in Lift and Tuck's, while Channa verified our drawings. "You're good here, Leina. How much?"

"A day, no need for parts, and it's all mild steel? That's in the contingency schedule." Twelve days contingency on a sixty day job. High for a traditional schedule, but I'd learned a bit since we started Mars work. Usually what ate time was parts availability, especially anything with exotic metals. "But I have to warn you, when this kind of thing happens..."

She looked confused on the HUD; our helmet glass isn't really see through, so helmet cams do the visual overlay for us. "What do you... you think there will be more like this? But..."

I chuckled. "That's usually the way it goes. And it's not a comment on the structural crew, that's Jim Manning's team, they're pretty good." I meant that, too, Jim's good people.

But even good people can get waylaid by a glitch. Maybe Jim transposed something and it propagated through the rest of the job. Maybe data transfer flipped a corrupted bit. "All just part of the gig, Channa. Maybe we'll get lucky, but I've got a duty to warn you to be prepared. If it's not a one-off, we'll see this kind of thing show up often enough that you'll want to be prepared if we do hit schedule slip."

Prepared meaning ready to get on the horn to her bosses. I like it when the client gets their yelling and screaming out of the way quick, then we can all just get on with it.

That, and we get the approvals for my soon to be oversized invoices pushed through before accounting has a chance to scream at me.

****

Specs found it.

Not the mis-measured structure, I found that. Like I'd do in turn for Channa, Jim had filed his reports and data. I poured through the video until analysis popped up the discrepancy. Just a small angle difference here, and a little extra steel Jim's Metra had needed to patch and make length.

No, Specs found something else far worse. "Boss, can you check something for me?"

Specs is mostly a state of mind. But they do have a metric shit ton of remotes, to keep an eye on us and everything else. "Where?" I followed Spec's map to the structure Wally had torn down. "What am I looking for?"

"Cuts, on the three main structural legs."

The ones that connected to the actual vessel itself, and held the weight of the platform Wally, Lift, and Tucks had torn down. About halfway up the vessel, the platform was there for observation and to make for easy access to the valves on the main feed lines we should have finished today.

The legs had been cut almost all the way through, just above the main pads where they mated up with the vessel. "Son of a bitch."

First thing, before I called anybody, was Jim's final video walkthrough. Yeah, sure, right, Jim's Ullin is just as anal about these things as is Specs, and has just as many high definition cameras to do the job right. And every weld has to be shown and inspected on final.

Jim had walked away with a clean job on this platform, the video showed it.

Which left me scratching my head. Metaphorically, I wasn't about to take the helmet off.

I called Channa first this time. Mostly because, no matter how I could figure it, Channa sabotaging the build she was so proud of didn't add up.

****

I'd given Chuck shit for his promotion. "Off-site 'director', huh? Pretty fancy way of saying desk jockey."

"Yeah, Med told me to fuck off, I'm timed out for radiation. They stuck me underground until it's time to go home."

I'd have told you that Chuck would have gone straight home rather than take a desk job. Muddy-boots engineer and proud of it. Chuck had worked this particular plant from day one, a real lifer. But even with our armored suits, there's only so much surface time available. Not if you want to make it home to spend the hazard pay.

That's the way I'd have figured it. Only, I didn't know quite how attached Chuck was to the plant. How much it meant to him to have built the place from scratch. To have babied it up to first unit production, second unit expansion, now third unit expansion.

It was Chuck's plant, and the company had taken it away from him. Once the dust settled, I had pieces to put together. How Chuck hadn't quite been able to let go, how he'd started calling Channa at all hours of the night, whenever a hiccup showed on his screens.

How he'd ignored the messages from their boss, telling Chuck to back off and hand it over to Channa. He was supposed to be teaching, only he couldn't let go of the reins.

How, not knowing that Specs and Ullin exchanged remotes for data overlap, Chuck had taken a torch to the platform legs after Jim's final walkthrough. And those three cuts weren't the only ones.

****

"I never expected I'd be so grateful for going over schedule and budget," Channa told me on our final walkthrough.

A hundred days on a sixty day job. Not bad when we had to stop and rebuild all the structural elements. For the accidental mistakes and the purposeful sabotage. "Just glad we caught it."

Channa smiled. Grimly, I think, but she'd learn. "I made sure we've got the board approval on the overages."

"Appreciate it." I'd written a report, both for the inspection board and Channa's company, and made sure that both groups knew I was submitting the same files.

But I'd also made sure to talk to Channa and her boss before I did it. Not about hard feelings, but so that they had the chance to put Chuck on his way back to Earth, and the other things that went along with that kind of fall into disgrace ride.

I do kind of wonder if, maybe if I'd had a chance to talk with Chuck a little more, maybe I could have stopped him? But that's just the ghosts and the way they talk when we're between jobs.