Turn of the Pipes (A Redpoint One Romance) (2 page)

Tish took the belt with one hand while her
attention followed Arthur as he headed for the cafeteria and the
coffee waiting on the counter inside. A soft sigh escaped her lips.
"Thank you."

Tish wandered away, the three bots who looked
to her following in her wake. Rachel shook herself when she
realized she was scowling after her. The two were adults, heads of
their separate departments. They could have a romance if they chose
to.

Rachel dropped one more valve into her cart
and pulled it towards the central raised platform. She left it
beside her bot as she stepped up on it and checked one of the
consoles. As had been typical lately, several reports of plumbing
failures awaited her.

Her mind classified each one from the most
important to those she could put off. One of them her new
apprentice could take on by himself.

She straightened up to find Damien sitting in
one of the nearby chairs, his feet crossed and propped up on the
corner of a console. He stared at her while nursing a steaming cup
of coffee.

"Problem?" He asked.

"We always have problems. I might need to
rebuild a juncture. Not my favorite activity," Rachel
said.

"No, I mean with that." Damien gestured to the
side with his coffee cup.

Rachel's eyes followed the motion only to find
another tender moment being shared in the doorway of the cafeteria
between Tish and Arthur. Only quiet words, but the body language
said it all. The leaning in towards each other, the smiles and
glances.

"Your point?" Rachel checked the front two
pouches of her belt to make sure she'd remembered to fill
them.

"A little jealous of a new love affair right
under your nose?"

Rachel leveled on him a dark glare. "That was
inappropriate."

Damien shrugged his wide muscled shoulders.
"Yet, the truth. As it’s grown so has your temper." He took another
sip of coffee before adding, "Have you dated since
whats-his-name?"

"Yes I have, and it has nothing to do with my
temper," Rachel said. "My temper is because of a station falling
apart around our ears and not enough people to handle
it."

"Umhmm," Damien responded, indicating he
didn't believe her a bit.

Which infuriated her even more. It didn't
matter if he might be a little too close to the matter. He still
didn't have to say it out loud. It made her feel too much like a
sulky child.

Before Rachel could formulate any kind of a
response to remove the all-knowing expression from Damien's face,
Arthur reappeared and stepped up on the center platform. Rachel
crossed her arms and leaned a hip against a bit of the railing
encircling the center raised platform while he read through the
system faults.

Damien's eyes silently laughed at her,
darkening her mood even more. Just to prove him wrong on her
feelings towards her friends, Rachel forced herself to flash a
smile at Tish as the shorter woman joined them. Tish was still her
friend, no matter the dearth of male attention in Rachel's
life.

A good day of working to set the systems of
Redpoint One right would help. Time away. She promised herself time
to talk Tish into joining her for the next Naughty Knitters Club
meeting. Maybe it would distract the ladies from whatever they were
plotting and planning.

"We have a number of high-importance repairs
to make today," Arthur said in a voice loud enough to carry into
the rooms surrounding the central room, bringing out other
maintenance engineers. Damien dropped his feet from the console and
swiveled around to give his undivided attention. "Tish, I see
several for you, as well."

"Already have it lined out," Tish said. "I
called in a few extra bots to help me out. We'll be
fine."

Calling out extra bots before even starting
the repairs? Rachel wished she knew how to do that as it would help
the big repairs to go so much faster. She'd tried before, with
limited success. Problem was, the bots and the space station
couldn't communicate with them in any normal way, being the
construct of long-gone and possibly extinct alien species. Yet,
somehow, Tish could.

Arthur started giving out assignments to the
people surrounding the platform. One by one and in pairs they
hurried off to begin the day's work. Damien drained the last of his
coffee to join a new apprentice Rachel had never seen before,
heading out to repair a life-support system.

"Rachel, the blockage in block CFI-21 appears
to be defying the repair bot attempts at a self-repair," Arthur
said. "I know you have other high-priority repairs, but I would
like to see you solve this one today."

Rachel nodded as she glanced around the room
at the few people remaining. "I'm a little mystified as to why the
systems can't figure it out, too. Have you seen Wu?"

Arthur rubbed the back of his neck in a way
that immediately put Rachel on warning. "Allegra had a problem last
night."

"What kind of problem?" Rachel asked,
straightening up.

Allegra managed the secondary maintenance
platform on the other side of the space station. True, she was
understaffed just like the main platform, but what did it have to
do with her apprentice? Her bot beeped a question from behind her,
picking up on her wariness.

"Kumar slipped on a wet floor and hit his
head. He's out for a couple weeks," Arthur said. He gave her a wane
smile. "The only other plumber we have available is Wu. Except you,
but I need you here."

In a way, it pleased her to be needed at the
main platform to such a degree. On the other hand, this meant she
had no one to help her with the day's repairs.

"Wu is only an apprentice, and two weeks old
at that. He doesn't have the training to go on his own," she
pointed out. "I believe he'll get there, he seems to have the
instincts, but this is too soon."

"As you said, he has the instincts. We don't
have a choice at this time. Allegra can't be left without a
plumber."

Rachel couldn't argue with the logic, although
she wanted to. Why should anyone be pleased to have a good
apprentice for only two weeks? A few years, maybe, but not two
weeks.

"I'll find you another apprentice," Arthur
said, as if reading her mind. "In the meantime, be prepared for any
repairs outside of Wu's abilities."

But, they both knew the odds of finding
someone who would stick around. One that the alien intelligence of
Redpoint One would accept, and through it, the repair bots would
accept. The station might not be able to communicate with them in a
common language, but it had no trouble letting anyone it didn't
like know they were not welcome.

In response her bot chirped at her, obviously
anxious to get going. Rachel was too, especially if she expected to
accomplish all the main repairs for her department by
herself.

"Right. I'm off, alone, to block CFI-21and
then to the rest of the repairs," Rachel said, wishing she'd gone
for a third cup of coffee. "Anything else?"

"Uh, yes. Are you doing okay?" Arthur
asked.

Trust him to notice her mood the past few days
even while being head-over-heels in love. She shook her head.
"Doing fine, only overworked."

Like Damien earlier, the expression on
Arthur's face said he didn't believe her. An alarm going off from
the center round table on the platform stopped him from pursuing
the matter.

A holographic image of Redpoint One complete
with all seven of its rotating rings appeared over the table. A red
pulsing light throbbed from one point on one of the rings. The
image zoomed in to show corridors and an alien symbol hovering next
to the red light. The symbol she'd come to know belonged to her
department.

"Just what I need. A plumbing emergency,"
Rachel said with a sharp shake of her head. Of course, she would
have one while all alone in her department with not a single
apprentice or helper on the horizon.

"Duty calls," Rachel said, stepping off the
raised central platform. Her bot took hold of the arm of the cart
full of plumbing sides.

"Call if you need help," Arthur called after
her as she left the maintenance platform.

Rachel wouldn't call unless absolutely forced
to. He would be busy with his own repairs. To be honest, she needed
to be alone. Time with her bot, time on the job, time to find a way
to get a handle on her bad attitude.

Her bot hummed and clicked all the way to the
transit tube in a way Rachel liked to call Redpoint One Repair Bot
Singing. She knew why it was doing it, too. The bots might not
react as expected to language, but they did to emotion, and today
Rachel was just a bundle of unhappiness.

One of the larger maintenance cars waited for
her at the transit platform. Slipping inside, she secured the
supply cart to the rear and settled in for the short ride out to
the ring. The bot continued to sing, occasionally chirping out
questions to her that she had no way of understanding.

It didn't matter. The chirps still made her
smile, just as they did when she'd first encountered the
bots.

Her bot left the cart to come settle next to
her feet, turning its eyestalks to gaze up to her, giving another
questioning chirp. She let a hand drop down to the white and yellow
curved main shell of its body. "I get it. Get happier."

Her bot made a smug beep that had her rolling
her eyes.

The car came to a stop at the travel platform
closest to the problem area. Unfortunately for her it happened to
be a public travel platform, and one where the inhabitants knew
her.

Her fears proved founded when Ms. Witherstone
spotted her from the crowd waiting for a travel car on the other
side of the platform. "Rachel, dear. How wonderful you are down
here! Our apartment block needs looking at."

"Sorry, I have an emergency to attend to.
Please file a service request." Rachel urged her bot forward faster
before Ms. Witherstone could extricate herself from the crowd and
come after her. The old lady might be sweet, but sometimes she
didn't know the word 'no.'

Then came two people she knew from the garden
club. Then the kids from the local school who'd noticed their
playing field getting a little swampy. Another who was convinced
the water in her apartment tasted different from anyone
else's.

A lot of it stuff she could have set a good
solid apprentice on to learn the job and the community. She tried
to reason with herself, telling herself that she'd had a good
apprentice in Wu for two weeks. She should be glad for the time. It
gave her faith other good apprentices might be out there
somewhere.

Who was she kidding? She needed someone for
more than two weeks, someone who would stick around and become a
full-time plumbing engineer at the main platform. Someone to stay
in her department that none of the other departments could steal
out from under her.

"Know of anyone searching for a job?" Rachel
asked her bot as they moved into the proper maintenance corridors
of the area, one of the larger ones, she noted.

Her bot chirped back at her as it led the way
to the repair before it started singing its unique song all over
again.

Finding many other repair bots waiting for her
didn't bode well. Finding a steady stream of water trickling out
from among a cluster of pipes added to the concern.

The big pipes towards the back of the wall
serviced most of the sector with both fresh water and waste
removal. Trying a few of the valves, turning them on and off in
sequence and the first good news of the day appeared. The problem
turned out not to be in any of the waste removal pipes, but one of
the fresh water pipes. Much cleaner to work on and she didn't need
to worry about haz-mat level cleanup afterwards.

The bots swarmed around her as she worked to
get down to the exact problem segment. Once she narrowed down the
location, she discovered a small leak around one of the main
overflow valves. Multiple hands came and went with the tools she
asked for and parts from the cart.

The repair didn't take very long. What
bothered her was that the maintenance alarm in the area didn't go
away. Instead, Arthur reported a new alarm going off in her
location. She found the new problem spot only to have a new alarm
go off.

Rachel scowled at the maintenance corridors
around her. "It's as if something is playing with the
pressure."

Her bot chirped a question, but instead of
leading her to a new problem area, it stayed at her feet. She knew
what that meant. Her bot was waiting for her to decide what to do
about the mess next.

"This isn't a treasure hunt. We go to the next
alarm," Rachel told her bot.

This time she led the way to the problem area,
using all her senses to help her judge the status of the new
problem. The line of bots trailed along behind her, quiet for once
as she concentrated.

A pressure. Definitely a pressure coming from
the area. No smells to speak of, which meant no waste-water
problems. Come to think of it, all the problems had been in the
fresh water.