Titan's Plague: The Trial by Tom Briggs (story reading .txt) 📕

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“So, what’s wrong with your rebreather again?” Larry asked. When the bus driver brought her back to the shop, Larry was waiting and took the rebreather from her. He then instructed her to change out of her suit and meet him in the conference room.

Larry was an older American of Italian descent. He’d traveled to Titan two years ago and was one of the few males here she was taller than. His greasy black hair and Roman nose documented his ancestry as well as any DNA test could.

“I don’t know what went wrong,” she said. “I just know my CO2 levels were too high. And you had the numbers like I did. Plus, why would I have such a bad headache if I was dreaming up the problem?”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s good you had the headache and didn’t pass out. We would have had to come out and retrieve you before you died. Although, I wish I could say I was confident our emergency response was a perfect process.” He looked back at the rebreather on the table and shook his head. “I’m not arguing that your levels went up, Lynch. I just think you might have been doing something wrong out there that caused them to go up.”

“What could I have done wrong? I followed all the checks before I loaded the bus, and I did another check on the bus on the way out like I was supposed to.”

He bent over and shook two of the line connections. He then grabbed the scrubber and lifted the whole rebreather from that point. He looked into the hose-helmet openings.

Pati saw him licking his lips, running his tongue back and forth while staring at the rebreather. He stood back up and tightened his mouth. “Damn if I can tell what’s wrong with it,” he said. He looked back at Pati. “I can’t find a single thing wrong with this. The battery is charged, the scrubber was just recycled yesterday, no connections are loose, and as far as I can tell, there’s no blockage. Exceept, I can’t say for certain about the blockage.”

“So, blockage might be it,” Pati said.

“No, I don’t think that at all, because the oxygen you were bleeding into the lines was making it through. I’m only not sure about the blockage because I haven’t physically examined each line and determined their condition.” He put his hands on his hips. “My point is, I’m not ruling out operator error, Lynch.”

Pati had had enough. She’d done everything according to instructions. Now, this clown wants to blame her. “If it’s operator error,” she said, “then you must be smart enough to know what my error was. So why don’t you enlighten this poor little misguided minion who can’t even figure out what she’s breathing?”

The lighting was bright in the conference room, and white display walls ringed the area. It made seeing the blood rush to his face that much easier. “Lynch,” he said. “If you plan on having a job at the end of this day, I’d watch my choice of words.”

Little bastard, she thought. An ugly little runt with that smug look on his face trying to lord over her like he held the key to her existence. It was like if she didn’t comply with his wishes and desires, she’d be out on the street begging for food and shelter. She clenched her right fist, held it at her side, and tried to stare him down. She started to raise her fist and then stopped. She had to cool down.

There was a trial going on, and right now, she needed every bit of data possible that showed she was an upstanding citizen of the community. Another police record showing violence against a male might keep Jack Reagan from dropping the case.

And she might just get her ass kicked by this son-of-a-bitch.  He was only two years from Earth, and even if he’d never been to a gravity clinic, he’d still have the bone density and strength to hurt her bad with a single punch. Bruno and Richard might have been bigger than this jerk, but she probably couldn’t even slow him down with a punch twice as hard as what she’d used to kill them.

The conference room door slammed open. “Okay, I want to see this rebreather,” Dr. Smith said, as she burst in.

Larry looked at her. “Hey, Dr. Smith, we could probably use your help.”

Understatement was the first term that came to Pati’s mind.

Larry turned toward the rebreather and pointed. “It looks perfectly fine, except we did get higher than normal CO2 levels registered in the database when she was outside. You have any idea why that would happen?”

At least he didn’t have an attitude about it, Pati thought. She saw Dr. Smith lean over and grab the rebreather, much in the same way Larry had, and just like Pati did when she ran her checks on the bus. Dr. Smith ran the same checks, only in backward order. She turned the rebreather over and pulled the straps and frame away from the apparatus, apparently examining the equipment from the opposite side. Then she pulled the whole apparatus off the pack and sat each piece, still connected, on the table.

Dr. Smith stood back from the table and stared at the rebreather components. She rubbed her forehead with her left hand and then rubbed her chin with the same hand. She reached out and picked up the rebreather again, this time placing the parts as if looking through the frame that held it and again rubbed her forehead and chin. She looked at Larry and shrugged her shoulders. Then she took another look at the rebreather and pulled pieces apart.

It took her twenty minutes, at least. Finally, she held up the scrubber. “This is it,” she said.

“You think there’s something wrong with the scrubber?” Larry asked.

“Not exactly, Larry. We have a nearly perfect process for recycling the scrubbers. Even if this one got through and the material wasn’t recycled, it should still work better than the CO2 numbers you saw.” She paused. “As long as the airflow is in the right direction.”

“The arrow pointed in the right direction,” Pati said. “I checked it at least twice before I went outside, and I looked at it a hundred times after the rescue vehicle picked me up.”

She handed the scrubber to Larry. “Look closely at the arrow and then the fittings,” she told him.

He took the scrubber in his thick, hairy right hand. He squinted hard, and in less than a second, his eyes went wide in surprise. He unscrewed a connective piece from the inlet and then checked the inlet. “Oh, crap. Lynch, I probably owe you an apology,” he said, while he continued to examine the scrubber.

“What?” Pati said.

Dr. Smith took the scrubber from Larry’s hand. She held it up to Pati. “Look at the flares on the arrow, see how the color is slightly different?”

Pati noticed, and she looked at the other end of the arrow and saw the barely recognizable scratch marks that were where flares used to be. “What happened?” she asked.

Larry and Dr. Smith looked at each other, then Dr. Smith turned to her. “Somebody modified the arrow on the scrubber so it could be put in backward. There’s an extreme process used to quality control the recycling of these scrubbers, but it’s not proof against purposeful tampering.” She looked at Larry. “Is there any reason why this should wind up on her rebreather?”

Larry shook his head. “We just hand them out based on availability. I’ll get you the name of whoever handed it to her, just remember they were not the one who placed that scrubber on that particular rebreather.”

“I think we need to call a constable,” Dr. Smith added.

“Yes, we need to do that. If one of my workers did that, I want them rotting in a jail cell on the way back to Earth.”

“Wait,” Pati said. “You think someone tried to kill me.”

Neither Larry nor Dr. Smith seemed to want to answer that question.