The Birth of The Unity (sequel to Chronicle of Nautilus)

Chapter 5: Engineering Issues

It was 20:00 ship time of a twenty hour forty-two minute long day, a time period identical to the one of a day in the target colony. It was a time when all the people in important positions ended their work day and were allowed to get ten hours twenty-one minutes of well-deserved rest.

The captain was doing the routine of ending the shift. He manually scrolled through all the ship systems, looking for minor alarms or system failures. As always, he checked the oxygen level on the ship and rushed through all available cameras to double check for probable fires, water leaks or any other possible faults. He paused in between views for about three seconds. Upon seeing anything suspicious, he would call for the person in charge of the area to check things out.

It was a time of a weekly engines check, so Adam ran the engine activation procedure without injecting the fuel. As expected, everything went well. He recalled it was ninety-seventh day without any ship threatening incidents or system failures. Last being sparking of a computer lock of a rarely used door. Upon seeing that, he had informed the engineer of the floor to pay attention to the failure before it caught fire.

Those engineers, he now remembered, not a trustworthy bunch at all.

Adam shook hands only with one person each time he passed by and it was the second captain, Ermac sixteen. The handshake marked their switch of the shifts. Ermac monitored the systems with two of his assistants and if anything major happened he would call in Adam and Adam would bring in his team if he felt a need to. Together they had gone through a couple of maneuvers and same as Adam, Ermac had all the knowledge of the ship. If the need should arise, the old captain knew, the combination of Ermac and Jane could easily substitute him for many years.

Ermac was currently a man in his mid-forties, a bit taller stature than Adam. He had creepy dark eye bags and blue piercing eyes. His pitch black hair was neat as always and stroked to the side. He emitted a natural imposing prescience. Perhaps it was the uniform that fit him perfectly well and gave an image of an unbreakable bureaucrat or that seriousness in the face, that had yet to show a smile. There was a small secret Adam knew about his colleague but never told it to anyone. In a small locked greenhouse, the ship's botanist was growing tobacco plants for Ermac. After his shift was over, Ermac would go to a little-known room with a window to the stars and have a cigarette or two while enjoying the view.

Ermac and Adam were both clones of two men bread for interstellar travel.They both had computer rivaling intelligence and nerves of steel.Adam excelled in intuition and was great at managing the situations when they went out of standard borders. Ermac excelled when it came to obeying and acting by the rules. For this specific journey, Adam was chosen as the main captain, due to the scores in specific tests and the fact that this was only the second ship of such kind and creators though that there might be many unpredictable situations, instructions for which could not be prepared beforehand for Ermac to follow.

Adam shook hands with the fellow captain and strode out of the room with a pace uncanny for a man of such age. As he passed the scanning tile on the corridor, Jane's voice said, "Have a good rest, Adam 15." The goodbye was set on automatic and did not carry any vocal emotions.

Today after work, he had arranged a meeting with the chief engineer. It was a while since they had met in person and there were many things to talk about, including the little incident repeating over the hundreds of years. They both were old men about to lose their steam. The chief engineer was the person whose life cycles coincided with Adam's the most. In a difference of maximum two-year, they would go rest and be reborn. Those who learned of the coincidence found it freaky.