Page 232 of Every Almost

It came down from the burst overhead lines in glowing sheets. It pooled across the deck, ankle-deep and rising, lit from within as if the entire room had been dropped into that bioluminescent sea. Where it touched an exposed conduit, it arced, bright and vicious, and the arcing was the part that could kill somebody. If Charlie wasn't careful, it could put an arc through her heart if she touched the wrong conduit.

Maren was at the primary console, her shimmer blazing, processing data faster than the display could render it. Two junior technicians worked the secondary junctions by hand. Alarms came from every panel at once.

"Talk to me," Charlie said, wading over to Maren, Tavi following behind.

"Three junction failures, cascading." Maren's voice held steady even as her hands shook. "The primary manifold pressure is climbing. Every bypass I open, the pressure finds a new path to overtake. If it reaches the quaternary line, we lose environmental in the forward habitats."

"The Niblets?" Tavi asked, the worry in his voice evident.

"The Niblets," Maren confirmed.

“Okay,” Charlie said. “Okay, okay. Seal the three that blew,” she stated, wading in beside Maren. “Take them out of the loop completely and starve the cascade.”

“Sealing,” Maren said.

They all waited.

For four seconds, it actually worked. The primary pressure dipped, and Charlie let herself breathe.

Then it started to climb again, faster than before, and a fourth junction let go somewhere above the ceiling with a sound like a struck bell.

“Four failures,” Maren lamented. “Pressure’s higher than when we started.”

Charlie stared at the readout. She had taken three paths away when it needed a path, so it’d gone looking. And what did it find? A smaller line, and forced it wide open.

She hadn’t stopped the cascade.

She’d fed it.

“Reverse the flow through the secondary,” Tavi said. “Push it back the way it came.”

“That doubles the load on the tertiary,” Charlie said, already shaking her head. “And the tertiary is what’s feeding the habitats. We’d cook the Niblets in about a minute.”

“Quaternary’s at sixty percent,” Maren said.

The whole system laid itself out in her mind. She followed the pressure, moving through the manifold like water looking for the sea. Water didn't want to be stopped. It wanted somewhere to move.

Then she saw the one move nobody wanted to make.

"We stop feeding it new paths," she said. "Instead, we go and give it every path at once."

Maren stared at her. "That floods the entire lower deck."

“Storage and maintenance,” Tavi said. “Nobody’s down there.”

"For about ninety seconds, yeah," Charlie said, looking over at Maren. "But then the pressure equalizes across the entire system and the cascade stops, simply because there's nowhere left for it to cascade." She was already moving. "We'll be pulling coolant out of the deck plating for a good while, and we'll lose whatever isn't sealed down there. But we keep the habitats."

Charlie looked back at the console and began reading the manifold's overhead run and the component up in the ceiling void where the primary feed married the distribution lines. "But I can't run the release from down here. Somebody has to physically stage the tertiary manifold, up top, by hand, while somebody else runs the console sequence in time with it." Charlie looked back at Maren. "Two people. Same rhythm. No lag."

She looked at the access shaft in the corner. It was narrow, a console filling one end, a ladder bolted to the other, thirty inches of standing room and a maintenance void overhead where the wounded component sat gushing into the bay.

"Maren, you hold the primary. Tavi, get on the tertiary console and call me the readings. I'm going up."

“But you said you needed a second. Especially in the shaft, someone is going to have to man the console,” Tavi said, gripping Charlie’s forearm to stop her from moving. “Maren can’t leave the primary, and with me on the tertiary line?—”

That was when Reyna rushed into the room, hitting the water as soon as she was through the threshold.

“I’m here,” Reyna said breathlessly. “How can I help?”