She ran an integrity check on her starshield and customized helmet. Any pipefitters hailing from Scella, as she did, required modified headgear to make up for their slightly longer necks and respiratory requirements. A Scellan could breathe through their nose and mouth, but it was most efficiently, and comfortably, done through the small spiracles on either side of the neck just below the jawbone. Not wanting to trust anyone else with her life while out in the pipe fields, she’d done all her own mods, welding fresh metal-foam rings onto the neck opening and rerouting the inner vents so that they would be proximate to her preferred respiratory pathways. The icy surface of her home planet was a far cry from the crucible of Vask’s day side.
She double-checked the suit, put on the helmet, and stepped from the small shuttle enclosure. Her starshield darkened immediately, preventing the nearby red dwarf from burning the eyes out of her head.
A crosshatch of pipe, the source of Vask’s power generation capabilities, stretched to the horizon and beyond. Naecia went to the operator’s lectern and lifted the protective panel to reveal a screen. Swiping away a scrim of dust, she brought it online and scrolled through various readings on things like radiation capacity, energy absorption efficiency, pressures, etcetera. She concluded that they were nominal, then ran through them again out of caution. When problems did crop up, it was usually as a result of wind, sandstorms, or solar flares, but nothing outside tolerances had registered during Embo’s shift. She signed herself onto the grid and closed the panel. Data was one thing, but her job was to be the eyes – and hands, if it came to that – on the ground.
On the short side of the platform was the byceptor that Naecia and the other pipefitter-operators used to do their rounds. Ships or drones would be a quicker way to conduct field surveys, but hostile air conditions made airborne methods expensive and dangerous. Anyway, Naecia liked riding the ‘ceptor. It was a chance to go fast and forget about things. A voice command released it from the platform’s clamps and she muscled it forward to the narrow lane between the two giant grid pipes that marked the boundary between her section and the one just north.
She mounted up and bit lightly down on the inside of her cheeks, sending a chirp from her implanted com, which then paired with the ‘ceptor. The vehicle’s readings glowed into view on the lower third of her starshield’s display. Power, good. Both wheels, good. Motor, good. Map, present.
She lifted her legs and accelerated into the grid like she’d been shot out of a valve at eight-thousand pressures per square meb. The ground was largely smooth, except for bumps here and there where the wind had carved tiny sand dunes. She careened toward the horizon, a tiny black dot trailed by an arcing tail of dust.
The grid was a colossal network of steam pipes, grouped into bundles then running on racks just above the surface. Here and there, they were suspended higher up to allow ingress and egress for observation and maintenance. Naecia altered her route each cycle – it was the best way to keep from getting complacent and losing focus. The pipes she oversaw operated at immense temperatures and pressures, which meant that there was no such thing as a minor failure, only catastrophic ones. Today she decided on a spiral pattern, careful to cover ground only once.