The warning icon bounced, then unfolded to provide more detail. A pressure warning. Not terribly alarming. Valve safeties were triple-redundant. Her job would be to get a visual on the bypass valves on either side of the troublesome equipment to make sure they were reading accurately. To say it was dangerous work was putting it lightly. If the bypass valves weren’t closed all the way, the valve maintenance team could be cut clean in half by superheated steam when they went to pull out the malfunctioning unit. Naecia headed to the distant end of the western stretch and then made south for the bad valve. She called it in.

HyRope: I have a pressure warning on valve zero by zero.

Home: We aren’t showing.

HyRope: Calibrate then. I have valve zero by six thousand forty at ninety-one percent, valve zero by seven thousand forty at eighty-seven percent. Do you show same?

Home: We have those, HyRope. Nothing below three thousand longitude, nothing west of two thousand latitude. Seems the stratosat for that segment is offline.

HyRope: A flare?

Home: Negative. We’re moving another over, but it will take some time. Advise when you have visual.

HyRope: Yep.

Naecia flew along the eastern boundary toward the southern horizon, checking for new alerts, but saw none. Whatever the pressure issue was, the problematic valve wasn’t affecting down-line equipment. Yet.

Repairing a single bad unit was a straightforward problem and wouldn’t have any measurable impact on the overall power output from a grid with forty-nine million other valves. If it led to a failure cascade, then they’d be in trouble.

The rows blurred by, seven thousand of them in the space of ten or eleven cyclets.

Even before row zero was discernable on the horizon, Naecia saw the problem. A geyser of steam, blasting straight up. It wasn’t a pressure problem. It was a breach.

HyRope: The valve is completely blown!

Home: Shutting down lines zero by zero through zero by one.

HyRope: Thank you Home. I’m just five out.

Naecia accelerated the byceptor and checked her display. “Show me the pressure gradient,” she said, but the icon failed to respond. “Repeat, valve zero by zero.” The icon remained yellow. It should have changed to a breach warning. “Clear cache. Reconnect.” Her eyes flicked down to the status as the icons cycled through a soft reboot. Finally, three red bars appeared where the alert had been. No connection. Satellite issues. “Reconnect.”

She let the ‘ceptor coast to a halt ten rows shy of the blown valve. The geyser rose high over the field into the red light of Pangema, making it seem like magma rather than vapor. Home’s attempt to shut down the lines hadn’t taken.

HyRope: Home, retry line shutdown, zero by zero through zero by one, grid nine hundred.

Naecia sighed, then rounded on the valve from the upwind side in order to get closer. “Optical zoom, right side, times ten,” she said. She left-eyed the troublesome valve, then once she’d found it, swapped eyes to the magnified portion of her starshield.