We were still a week out of Darbat Orbital when I arranged to visit environmental during the afternoon break. I’d been working through all the instructional materials on engineering, but I hadn’t been able to score a passing grade on the practice tests. There wasn’t any one thing I was missing, but rather a kind of diffuse inability to keep everything straight, particularly with the environmental stuff. All the scrubbers, filters, cleaners, and recyclers kept getting jumbled up in my head. I contacted the section chief on my tablet and made an appointment for a tour.
I knew the Environmental Section Chief, Spec One (Environmental) Brilliantine Smith, from seeing her in the mess line. She was easily the tallest person on the ship. I’d guess her height at something over two full meters. I’d also seen her in the gym and sauna. She didn’t carry an extra gram of fat on her frame. The best description I could think of was, willowy. She kept her chocolate-brown hair short like the rest of the crew and had a kind of generic galactic citizen, appearance, except that she had to duck to pass through most of the hatches on the ship. She walked with a kind of stoop, learned no doubt through hard experience.
Walking into environmental for the first time was like stepping into wet gauze. The smell was unmistakable, but I didn’t really find it objectionable. It was kinda funky and green smelling. Not quite fishy, but there was a hint of that, too.
Smith watched me enter and nodded approvingly. “You’re okay.”
“Excuse me, sar?”
She grinned. “No, sar, for me, Ish. I’m no more officer than Cookie.” She grinned even more. “Just taller. They call me Brill, among other less flattering appellations, I’m certain.”
“I-see,” I said, although I only got about half of what she was saying.
“You’re okay because you didn’t wrinkle your nose when you came in.”
“That’s good?”
She nodded with a wink. “Between the humidity and the smell, about half the people that come in here turn around and walk right back out. The humidity’s from the matrices and the smell is from the algae.”
“Okay, that much I understand. But there is still a lot I’m confused by.”
“How far have you gotten in the instructional material?”
“All of it, actually, but I can’t seem to pass the practice test. Things I get right on one, I miss on the next and around and around. I can’t seem to keep the scrubbers and the filters straight.”
“Filter the water and scrub the air down, mix water and algae to make it all brown.” She chanted it in sing-song with a smile.
“Wow, I actually understood that,” I said with surprise as it slowly penetrated my brain.
“First practical piece of advice we give people. Water gets filtered and air is scrubbed. Then they get mixed together. It starts with running the water through a collection of different media to filter out finer and finer impurities. Eventually, it goes into the scrubbers where it keeps the algae matrices wet. That’s probably where your brain gets confused because the scrubbers work on both air and water.”
“Okay, that makes sense so far. So, the air doesn’t get filtered?”
“Actually, it does, but we don’t have a separate filtering system for it. Not like the water. There’s a simple electrostatic field that the air is passed through when it first comes into the system. It snags all the dust and other particulates out of the air. Technically, that’s not a filter because a filter is a physical barrier, like when you make coffee. The weave in the paper has holes that allow the infused water to pass without permitting the grounds themselves. It’s the same idea with the water system although the chemical processing is a bit more complex.”
I nodded. “And because the air is passed through a field, and not a physical barrier, you call it scrubbing instead of filtering?”
“Exactly.” She nodded and smiled. “The scrubbers also grab any odd gases that make their way into the system. Those are usually byproducts from work on the ship like trace amounts of free esters, ozone, and so forth. The goal is to keep the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and trace gases consistent. The air coming into the system is high on carbon dioxide and low on oxygen so we feed it into the wet algae matrix where the algae absorb the carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Have you ever noticed that the berthing areas don’t smell like a locker room?”
I nodded.
“The algae loves the stuff that makes that smell. It would reek if not for that.”
“Right, thanks, that helps.”
“Come on.” She turned and beckoned me to follow with a wave of her hand. “I’ll give ya the half-cred tour.”
For the next stan, she showed me the inner workings that kept our air and water clean. I expected to be disgusted by some of the processing. Sewage isn’t exactly appealing, but I found myself fascinated by the way the air and water systems intertwined on the ship. There was a certain amount of unrecoverable waste, but almost ninety-eight percent of the air and water was recycled. At each port, we topped off the elements that got lost, used up, or destroyed. I even got a perverse bit of entertainment out of the notion that coffee was continually recycled through the crew’s kidneys, down to environmental, and back to the mess deck where it started the cycle anew.
When we got to the algae matrices, the-makes-it-all-brown part of the doggerel became apparent. According to The Handbook, the algae were a blue-green variety but when they were wet, exposed to light, and healthy, it wasn’t green at all, but a kind of reddish-brown. The matrix itself, was actually a synthetic film that held each little alga suspended to maximize its surface exposure. My preconceived notions about tanks of blue-green pond scum were blown away.
I laughed out loud and she turned a quizzical eye in my direction. “I don’t know why, but I had this idea that I’d find big vats with bubbling slime.”
She grinned. “That’s a common misconception. The bacterial recovery tanks are the closest thing we have to fit that impression, but they don’t bubble. We actually have to aerate them to keep the aerobic bacteria alive, not the other way around.” She looked pensive. “Now if we could just find a use for the sludge…”
“Sludge? What do you do with it now?”
“We press it into blocks, freeze dry it, and give it away to planets that need terraforming material. It’s not worth selling, and we’re prohibited from jettisoning it.”
That struck me so oddly that I laughed again. “Are they afraid the galaxy will fill up?”
She shook her head. “No, actually, back in the thirty’s it was okay to just drop ’em out the airlock. The problem was that one wound up splattered across the main viewing port of a passenger liner.” She did a good job of keeping a straight face, better than I could have. “Rumor is that several members of the CPJCT Steering Committee were aboard at the time and didn’t fancy having their view ruined by streaks of spacer sludge.”
“Thanks, Brill. This has helped a lot.”
My break was over and I needed to head back to the mess deck so we said our goodbyes and she gave me a friendly wave as I headed out.
For the rest of the day I kept chanting, “Filter the water and scrub the air down, mix water and algae to make it all brown,” over and over in my head. Two days later, I took another practice test and passed. Not perfect, but it was the first passing mark I received on the engineering materials. I felt jubilant.
Chapter 10
Darbat Orbital