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On the way out of berthing, Francis headed down to relieve Brill while I ran up to get coffee for us. I could hear Cookie, Pip, and Sarah working in the galley and smelled cooking bacon. My stomach growled, but I settled for pouring two mugs and made a promise to come back for food soon.

By the time I got back down to Foggy Bottom, Francis was formally relieving a groggy looking Brill. She smiled when she saw me. “You holding up okay?” she asked.

“So far so good,” I told her. “Guess what, I found out what those little statues are called and found out some pretty interesting folklore about them.”

“You’ll have to fill me in later. Right now I want some breakfast and a little nap before I have to be back here for the afternoon watch.”

She waved and headed out. Francis and I settled down to our coffee, and I made sure my tablet was slaved to the station.

“Just to refresh my memory,” I started, “sometime in the middle of the morning we’ll run the VSI again?”

“Yup, and that’s the highlight of the festivities. Unless something breaks.”

“What if that happens?”

“Depends on what it is. We might get wet. We might get dirty. We might die.” He shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”

“Hmm. I think I’d just as soon avoid that last one,” I said with a grin. “When was the last time something broke?”

“On the
Lois?
Never has happened as long as I’ve been aboard. I don’t see that changing any time soon so long as we pay attention to business and keep our crap in the tanks.”

“How about we review the overnight logs before heading up to breakfast? It’s a good idea to see if anything unusual happened on the previous watch,” he told me. “That way you’re less likely to be surprised.”

“Makes sense.”

“Brill is good, and she’d have mentioned anything out of the ordinary, so I doubt we’ll find much of note. Still, it’s a good habit to get into.”

As expected there was not anything unusual in the logs, so we went up to the mess deck for a quick breakfast. While we were there, the automated systems check fired off, and Francis had me acknowledge it on my tablet. “You’ll be standing watch on your own in a couple weeks, or less,” he told me with a grin.

After we returned to environmental, Francis startled me by saying, “Stay on the path. Write if you get work.”

“What?”

“Stay on the path. Write if you get work.”

“You’re gonna make me try to find my way alone?”

“Yep. Bip me if you get lost,” he said, leaning back in the watch stander’s chair and putting his feet up on the desk. “I can follow your progress from here. You’ll be okay.”

“But I thought you said we’d do this in the middle of the watch. It’s barely 07:30.”

“Traditionally, I said, traditionally. I also pointed out that we could do it any time.”

I could not think of any reason not to go, so I keyed up the overlay and headed out. It took me almost forty-five ticks and I missed one package during the trip, which I had to go back for, but I did not get lost. When I finally got back, Francis gave me a big grin and a thumbs up.

“That was amazing,” he said.

“What? Missing one?”

“Making it back at all.”

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep breath and said, “You’ve just passed the environmental initiation. It took me three tries before I could make it to the other end of the ship and back without having to call for help. It was a month of watches before I could make the run with only three missed stations.”

“You’re kidding!”

He shook his head. “Diane was able to do it on her second try, but Gregor never made the run without missing a station somewhere in the whole stanyer and a half he was aboard.”

“And you sent me out there alone after only one practice?”

“You made it, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

He shrugged. “I was watching you the whole way on the display. That one package, which is right behind the hatch in the spine, is easy to miss, but you backtracked to it in nothing flat. When you ran the after compartments without a miss, I was cheering and yelling in here. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me up in engineering berthing.” He wore a wide grin like a jack-o-lantern.

I did not know what to make of it. “It seemed pretty logical as I was doing it. All the packages are marked on the schematic. I just followed the map.”

“Exactly! But do you know how long it takes most people to figure that out? Oh, Ish, you’re gonna be great!”

I felt pleased that I did well, but still harbored doubts about my ability and the responsibilities that I had signed up for. Sure, the easy routine things are a snap but all the talk about something going wrong and everyone dying cast a sobering pall.

The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. Francis had me sit at the watch stander station and showed me how to check for routine maintenance tasks that might be scheduled during a shift. There were none for the morning watch, but we would have one in our evening shift. Then he took Brill’s chair and left me to handle all the routine system checks and keep an eye on the graphs. Over time, I noticed that they did fluctuate ever so slightly up or down, but they never moved far and always cycled back.

Around 10:00 Francis took me on what he called “a walk about” and we did an informal inspection tour of the section. The area was not that large in total, but the paths twisted back on themselves and took strange turnings behind and between massive chunks of equipment. He pointed out things to look for along the way like valves, which might be developing leaks, or the smaller filters that needed periodic replacement. He pointed out the one that we had seen in our earlier examination of routine maintenance tasks.

Brill came to relieve us at 11:45 and Frances regaled her with the story of my solo perambulation of the ship. She gave me a big smile and a high five. I still did not see what the big deal was, but I tried to be suitably excited for them. Personally, though, I was eagerly awaiting lunch and a nap. We had to be back on duty at 18:00.

Francis and I became a good team and he did not make me do all the VSI’s by myself. He claimed it was because he needed the exercise, but personally, I think he was just grateful for the company. After a few days, I had made a good start on the spec three study materials, but there was a lot of stuff to cover. I was not overly comfortable with some of the math and science, which there was quite a bit of. At the end of my first week, Brill moved me to third-section to stand watch with Diane.

To be totally honest, I did not understand why I did not just stay on with Francis. We got along well and he certainly knew his stuff. Once I started working with Diane, though, I recognized that Brill was exposing me to different styles of watch standing. Francis had been—not loose, exactly—but he was laid back and willing to go with the flow. Diane, on the other hand, was a checklist maker. On every shift the first thing she did was make a list of everything that needed doing and then she scheduled everything. At this time, do the VSI. At that time, do the department walk through. Any scheduled maintenance goes here. She was very good at it and, somehow, it suited her.

Having me around worked out well for her, too. Diane was the Scrubber Queen, and one of her challenges had been finding enough people to do the sludge tanks and replace the algae matrices in the scrubbers. Being on duty with her, meant she did not have to cajole anyone into coming in on their off-time to help. We had one midwatch where she and I spent the night up to our armpits in slime. We did the VSI early that evening and she picked a shift where there was no other routine maintenance. I am not saying that Francis would not have been able to find a two-stan window to do the scrubber, but with Diane, I always knew exactly what we would be doing, and when.

Even with all the planning, we still had a lot of time on our hands to just sit and stare at the monitors. After all, it was watch standing duty. I had known Diane for a while by then. She had gone with me back on Margary to visit a mushroom farm, and I had helped her out with a few tasks even before I actually joined the department. I am not sure which factor contributed the most, or perhaps it was both, but we slipped quickly into a level of synchronization that I had not really developed with Francis during my week with him. It was not that Francis and I did not get along. He was a good guy, and I liked his dry wit very much. But working with Diane, the watches did not seem quite so long. I tried to convince myself that it was because of her checklists and not because she was smart, witty, and cute.

One odd thing about Diane was that she would never talk about her past. She was not that much older than me, but she had been working as a spacer for almost five stanyers. I knew she had been on at least one other ship before the
Lois
, but she would not talk about it. “A girl needs to have a bit of mystery,” she would tell me with a sultry smile when I asked a question that was too personal. Then she would mug it up, batting her eyelashes like something out of an old movie, before changing the subject.

Two weeks out of St. Cloud, I adjusted my schedule once more and joined Brill. Our first watch together was an afternoon shift and I felt like I had not seen her in weeks. We passed each other back and forth during watch change, of course, but it was good to spend time with her again.

Brill’s style of watch standing was something between Francis’s and Diane’s. She would start the shift by enumerating the tasks we needed to accomplish but did not actually write them down or set a schedule for doing them. That first afternoon, all we had on our plates was the VSI and the automated integrity checks. Diane and I had done scrubber maintenance the day before and we were good for another week on sludge duty. That left Brill and I plenty of time for a good gabfest. I think she did not want to intimidate me with a bunch of questions about how I liked environmental, so she broke the ice with some small talk.

“So, you never did tell me…what did you learn about the sculptures?” she asked after we had settled in.

While I filled her in on the story that Sarah had told, she pulled her whelkie out of her pocket to get a good look at it.

When she saw me do the same, I think she was a bit surprised. “You carry yours, too?” she asked.

“Yeah, I would feel kinda naked without it. I always have it in my pocket, and I catch myself playing with it from time to time when I’m studying or walking around on VSI.”

“Well, maybe they’re magic and maybe they’re not, but they are very nice. I treasure mine, so thank you again,” she said before changing the subject back to work. “So how comfortable are you on watch?”

“I think I know what to do—so long as nothing goes wrong, but I have no idea what to do if something breaks.”

“Such as?”

“Well, what if the scrubber turns green in the middle of the shift?”

“It won’t. It takes several stans for that to develop, and the air mixture graphs would pick it up long before it got that far.”

“What if I find one of the sensor packages failing the VSI check?”

“Call me.”

“What if one of the pipes starts leaking?”

“Call me.”

“What if one of the graphs starts changing?”

“Call me.”

“What if I want somebody to talk to in the middle of the night?”

“Call Bev. She can come down here and smack you harder than I can.”

I laughed. “Very true.”

“Look,” she said seriously, “basically the role of watch stander is to alert the chain of command in case of anomalous activity. Diane and Francis, as spec threes, have the knowledge and experience to handle some minor routine maintenance on their own, which helps keep us up and running nicely and breaks up the monotony of watch standing for them.”

“That makes sense. But you don’t expect me to do that?”

“Not really, but I’m not going to say you can’t either. If you see a filter needs changing on your shift and you know how to do it, go for it. If you don’t, or even if you’re uncertain, pass it off to the next person. Nobody’s going to fault you for it.”

“Okay, that makes me feel better.”

“You’re an engineman, Ish, not a specialist. We all know you’re good and we appreciate your help a lot. But we also know you’re not trained to do much more than keep your eyes open. My charge to you, as your section chief, is to call me whenever you see something that you don’t understand. I will never be upset if you call me over something that turns out to be nothing. We may not survive if you don’t call me on something that turns out to be serious, and we all know you don’t have enough training or experience to tell the difference yet. So don’t try to be a hero.”

“Okay, I can do that. I got good marks in
Not-Hero
in school.”

“Good! What do we need to do this watch then?”

“VSI and section walk through. We’ve already checked and there’s no routine maintenance. We just need to stay awake and keep clearing the automated integrity checks.”

“You forgot one.”

I thought back over the list, but I could not think of what I had missed.

“Study for spec three!” she said with a laugh.

I grinned back at her.

“Okay, Mr. Wang, you’re now officially the watch stander of record for first section. You will log me in as your assistant and we’ll see how it goes.” She got out of the console chair and waved me into it. I swapped the logs as she had instructed and that was it.

Halfway through that third week she stopped coming to work with me, and when I relieved Diane for my first solo shift, she said, “Welcome aboard, Ish.”

I felt like I was finally a real member of the Foggy Bottom gang.