[Fenspace]A Frigga Syndrome

[Dartz]

-----------
From: Gregory Bearer
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup.

Hot off the presses from the Active Reactor Safety Commission, The Official Report on the Friggan Accident is out at last and it makes for the most amusing reading one can have in such a nuclear group as ours.
As I'm reading through it, I'm summarising:


The Background
The reactor cores on Frigga are old Lensherr-type Stellarators of the sort that were built everywhere in the belt before the WFC told everyone what they were doing wrong. These 'First-Generation' fusion reactors were popular among the mundane groups as most of the power systems and support hardware could be bought from mundane sources. The turbogenerators, pumps and everything beyond the 'black box' of the core could be standard hardtech of the sort keeping the lights on in mundania for a century.

These reactors, unlike every other fusion core since, run on deuterium-tritium fusion - which produces a spray of fast neutrons the turn everything they touch into white-hot radiation. The net result of this being, that after any sort of lengthy period of operation, the reactor structure becomes hideously radioactive. The core of a recently shut-down Stellarator has been described as the 'single most intense man-made radiation source known' in one publication.

1 Unit was built as a prototype in the Federal Republic of Germany.

10 units currently remain in use in Fenspace, of which 4 were installed on Frigga. After nearly fifteen years of service, it was decided to run life-extension tests on Frigga's power-plant, to verify its continued safety. This test series was supervised by Lensherr engineers, and was coming to a close when the accident happened.



The Core

The basic function of a Stellarator is to capture the sun, and put it in a bottle. The reactor must recreate the intense temperatures and pressures that occurr in the heart of a star in order to even ignite a fusion reaction, which then must be carefully regulated to keep it burning and stable. All of this energy must first be contained, then extracted in useful amounts.

The reactor consisted of a sealed steel torus vacuum chamber, designed to withstand the cryogenic temperatures of the field coil magnets on one side, and the stellar temperatures of the reactor on the other. Lineing the torus were thousands of steel channels filled with pressurised water, keeping the vessel cool. These were seperated amongst 4 cooling circuits, with the channels arranged such that any three were sufficient to keep the reactor safely cooled. On top of the cooling channels, were hundreds of cells filled with molten enriched lithium. This lithium, when struck by neutrons liberated by the fusion reaction would fission - releasing helium and tritium gas. This tritium can be captured and used as fuel in the reactor. Finally, shielding the metal structure of the reactor was a refractory blanket manufactured from graphite. This graphite blanket withstood the intense heat of the reaction, conducting it safely to the cooling system. This blanket also acted as a brake, slowing the high energy neutrons released by the fusion reaction, keeping them from tearing the metallic structure of the reactor apart.

Inside this lived an artificial sun, maintained by a complex array of fuel injectors, ash diverters and four 30 Megawatt neutral beam injectors to ignite, and stabilise the reaction as needed. All of this existed in a careful balance of fuel, ash, pressure and temperature such that the upset of any one of these resulting in the progressive collapse of the reaction.

It was thought this inherant instability made the reactors inherently safe. There is no possibility of an accelerating runaway reaction. The reactor is, instead, balanced on a knife-edge - always in danger of falling off and stalling.

Stellarators rely on a precisely shaped magnetic field to contain the fusion reaction to a narrow region within the centre of the core. They differ from the more common Tokamak and Sphermomak reactors in that the magnetic field is twisted by the shape of the field coils themselves rather than by inducing a current into the hot plasma. With advances in computer aided design, it was thought this more simple approach would produce a more reliable, controllable reactor.

As soon as the field is removed, the reaction collapses and the cooling system is ramped down. In Lensherr Stellarators this field was maintained by superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid helium.

In theory, removing the magnetic field was achieved by heating the magnets to the point that they lost their superconductivity and collapsed the field.

In practice, it takes time for the liquid Helium to actually boil off once the heater coils are turned on - up to 60 seconds in normal use. After years of operation, the heaters and their emergency batteries started to degrade to the point where the time taken to quench the magnetic fields in the vent of an emergency SCRAM became unacceptably high, potentially leading to 'operating limits' being exceeded under certain conditions.

The final test to be performed on Frigga Unit 04 was a full power test of the reactor's ability to safely SCRAM. The test called for a simulated loss of grid connection, and for a reactor SCRAM to be triggered. The emergency generators would come on-line and keep the main cooling pumps in operation. The auxiliary generators supplied enough power to operate the pumps to meet the shut-down decay heat demand of the reactor only.

They could not meet the full-power core demands. Given the inherent instability of the reactor, this was not thought necessary.

Five operating reactors had failed this test in the previous six months and had become subject to shut-down orders.



The Accident
Prior to the test, Unit 04 had been in full power operation for 4 weeks, exceeding the TPS' minimum required spec' by 2 weeks. The reactor was self sustaining, with neutral beam injectors offline. Core temperatures, neutron flux and radiation levels had all achieved a steady state, suitable for the test. The ash-burden within the core was at an optimal level. Fuelling levels were rich, but below the upper limit. The reactor normally contained enough fuel for five minutes full-power operation.

This is taken directly from the report:

At 14:00 station time, a grid switching fault was simulated which resulted in a loss of grid connection at the turbogenerator. The turbine began to overrev immediately.

At 14:00:03, the station's automatic control system triggered a SCRAM as per expected Turbine Trip procedures. Steam inlets to the turbine were closed. Divert valves to the condensers were switched to direct. Fuel injectors were closed leaving the core running on internal fuel. Diverters shut down to prevent ash removal. The emergency generator start sequence was begun. Cooling pumps began to slow. The field coil heaters were activated automatically.

It should have taken fifteen seconds for the coil heaters to reach operating temperature.

At 14:00:20 The emergency generator failed to correctly sequence and tripped. This was logged as an abnormality, but within the expected bounds of the test.

At 14:00:25 An operator switched reactor cooling pump power supply back to the coasting turbogenerator. Sufficient excitation voltage remained to operate the cooling pumps at a reduced capacity for another thirty seconds if needed. The reactor continued to operate at full power. Core temperature began to increase as coolant flow dropped.

At 14:00:40: The emergency generator was manually switched on-line. No appreciable heating had yet been achieved in the superconductors. Helium pressures showed no sign of boil-off.

At 14:00:45. With indication of magnet heating yet to be achieved, the TPS specified that the test be aborted at this point. Instead the test is continued. With cooling pumps operating at reduced capacity, core temperature increases rapidly.

At 14:00:58. An oxygen depletion alarm sounds in a vent shaft. This is understood by the operators to be an indication that boiloff is happening as expected,

At 14:01:03 Core water boils at an increasing rate. Steam pipe pressures increase within the core. A low water alert from the steam seperator system triggers a second automatic SCRAM from the Differential Shutdown System. The reactor control system now has two seperate SCRAM commands in effect.

At 14:01:15. Pressure sensors on the magnets begin to indicate expected values. Increasing temperatures and pressure in the core result in an increased thermal power output as the fusion reaction accelerates.

At 14:01:20. Core temperature exceeds limits. The test abort sequence is begun.

At 14:01:27. An attempt is made to switch steam flow back to the main turbogenerator and regain power as prescribed in the proceedure. This is rejected by the control system due to the still-active automatic SCRAM from the low-water alarm.

At 14:01:36. The safety valves on the top of the steam generators opens to relieve system pressure. Radiation alarms sound in the reactor hall.

At 14:01:44. Core temperature is now 20% above maximum permitted. Core pressure is maintained at maximum by the relief valves.

At 14:01:50. An operator is able to sequence full power to the cooling pumps from an external circuit using an unnaproved proceedure. Cooling pumps achieve full power. But SCRAM automatic control commands maximum revolutions from the pumps.

At 14:02.01 Reactor cooling pump 1 starts to over-rev followed by pumps 2, 3 and 4. A commanded trip is overriden by the an operator. Vibration alarms sound. It is thought that this is due to cavitation in the pump, caused by the high temperature of the feedwater. All coolant flow stops. Core temperature spikes. Water in the reactor rapidly tuns to steam.

At 14:02:09. Magnet temperatures have still not yet begun to rise. Based on current draw data it is estimated that only 50% of Helium coolant has boiled at this point.

At 14:02:11. The Power Distribution Control system detects instabilities in the reaction. An increasing quantity of ash and a decreasing quantiy of fuel begin to choke the reaction.

At 14:02:13, An attempt is made to manually reduce pump RPM and achieve flow. This is overridden by the DSS system commanding maximum pump RPM due to a zero-flow condition

At 14:02:15: Core temperature is now 50% above redline. Temperature sensors reach their limit. Temperatures above this point are not recorded. Core power begins to decrease. Water levels in the steam seperators begin to increase as liquid water is pushed from the reactor by expanding steam.

At 14:02:20, A second attempt is made to manually reduce pump RPM and achieve flow. The DSS system is overriden with a patch cable. An operator takes manual control of the cooling pumps and reduces power.

At 14:02:25, Coolant flow is restored, but only at low levels in three of four circuits. Some channels are blocked by steam bubbles. The fourth circuit remains locked.

At 14:02:30, Water levels in the steam seperators reaches the relief valves. Liquid cooling water begins to flow from the seperator circuit. Wetwell water levels begin to increase rapidly.

At 14:02:32. The emergency coil destruct button is pushed, triggering explosive charges on the field coil supports to destroy the magnetic field coils. It will take ten seconds for the detonators to charge.

At 14:02.33. Control system shows a increase in flow into the core on circuit four. This is taken as an indication that the pumps are working. A steam line inside the core has ruptured.

At 14:02.36. Alarm signals are generated within the master control program. "Power Rate Increase Warning. Power Surge Warning. Emergency Power Excess 204-APP-20, Emergency Power Excess 204-APP-1. 204-APP-20 out of order, 204-APP-1 out of order." The reactor has begun to self-destruct. Superheated steam is injected into one of the molten lithium breeder blankets in sector 204, igniting a flash fire which has begun to rapidly spread, overloading and destroying sensors.

At 14:02:37. Reactor Chamber pressure warning. Chamber pressure exceeds atmospheric. The reaction terminates as steam boils into the reactor core, flooding the active zone. The reactor vault, designed to keep pressure out rather than in, is immediately overstressed.

At 14:02:38. Explosion. Control system reports loss of signal from 275 of 292 functioning sensors in the reactor hohlraum.

At 14:02:41. Fire Alarm. Reactor 4 Turbine Hall. Reactor 4 Chamber.


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Yes, you read that right. The reactor core exploded. The core exploded and caught fire.

I'll leave you all to sink your teeth into that, for the time being.

##Next Time.... How they handled the reactor accident, some intriguing discrepancies, and some damning conclusions.

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[Dartz]

From: Gregory Bearer
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part II

@Pyrotechie. The DSS System is a secondary shutdown system – designed to operate independent of the main shutdown system – in case the main shutdown system was overridden it was supposed to prevent the operators from pushing the reactor into a dangerous configuration.

>>"What in Saint Barbara's name were they thinking?

Wait until you see what happens next.

--

To recap. A nuclear fusion reactor has just exploded. . In the control room however, there is no indicator panel saying 'Core Explosion'. Things aren't so convenient. The control room is over ten kilometres from the core - far away from any sound or shock.

All the operators know is that the coil destruct button has been pushed, the majority of their instruments have gone dead, and there's a fire alarm in the turbine hall. There is no video feed. There are no maintenance staff in the containment area.

"Our first thought was an electrical surge, caused by the coils being destroyed. It explained the fire alarms, and explained why we lost all our monitoring. An electrical fire could knock it all out. We knew the reactor was still there and we still had to handle the decay heat so we just pushed as much water into the core as we could in the hope some of it made it." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation

At 2:05:10 DCAMS maintenance logged a request for an Exocomp to be despatch to investigate the reactor chamber

It will take fifteen minutes for the Exocomp to reach the reactor chamber through a dedicated passage. The Frigga Volunteer Fire Brigade has been waiting onsite for ten minutes. They wait outside the reactor chamber airlock, on the safe side of the containment chamber.

"We knew about the guys at Chernobyl. That was in the back of our minds of course. We sort of knew how dangerous this thing could be, if the unthinkable happened and the core was burning. But if we needed to go in there, like, absolutely needed to - we agreed we would. To stop this thing in there getting out - if we thought we could do anything we decided we wouldn't hesitate. " -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

"Even still, we thought it might've been a broken steam pipe at worst. The reactor never entered anyone's mind. It just had to be intact. Fusion reactors can't explode" - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

At 2:21:19 the despatched Exocomp suffered a catastrophic failure. It lasted less than a minute after entering the reactor access passage.

At 2:21:48 DCAMS maintenance logged a second request for Exocomp despatch.

It takes another fifteen minutes for the Exocomp to reach the reactor chamber. The video feed from this Exocomp records its compatriot spinning on the ground on its side, out of control. It investigates. It moves on. The unit succumbs before reaching the reactor proper. The recorded video can be viewed here.

All that static?

That's hard radiation striking the exocomp's video sensor and overwhelming it.

At 2:40:33 DCAMS maintenance logged a third request for Exocomp despatch. The Exocomp hive rejected the request.

"That could happen if they knew they we're doing something dangerous because they were sot of emergent like that. They had a sort of sense we trusted. We sort of knew something bad had happened but we didn't know what." -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation.

"Somebody had to go in there and see what the hell was going on. We couldn't do anything until we knew. Jet ordered the fire department to investigate." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

The outer hatch to the airlock can be opened by hand. It takes five minutes for the Friggan Volunteer Fire Brigade to force open the inner hatch.

"The pressure in the turbine hall was so high, a hydraulic ram had to be set up to open the door." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, tatement to ARSC investigation.

"The hatch cracked and a blast of hot, smoky air rushed out. Khayone thought he could test metal. I could feel it prickling on my lips and on my tongue, even with the BA. After a moment, my dosimeter started to scream. I looked at the guys. A second dosimeter alarmed -then a third, a fourth, a fifth in the space of a heartbeat. Bambam screamed at us to run. I shouldered the ram off the door and it slammed shut - then I ran.

That door was open for less than thirty seconds. And I still got sick. I got a burn down the side of my body facing the door, and on my hand holding ram. If I'd stood in front of the door rather than the side, it might've killed me." - Kim Hyung-Jung, FVFB, tatement to ARSC investigation.

The firefighters who had tackled the fire at Chernobyl reported a metallic taste. With full positive pressure breathing apparatus, radaway and protective clothing the firefighters on Frigga reported the exact same effect. It was the taste of hard, lethal radiation. It was the taste of death itself.

Kim Hyung-Jung saved lives by shutting that door. He would recover from his radiation injuries, with an equivelant whole body dose of just over 1 Sievert. The firefighters report their radiation levels to the control room and withdraw.

"It was immediately clear that more than an electrical panel was burning," -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, tatement to ARSC investigation.

"The feeling was indescribable. I remember being angry at the local operators for suggesting the test continue past the abort point. I remember being angry at the equipment for not fully reporting the information we needed to make the decision. Most of all, I remember thinking, this was just the beginning," - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation.

"I didn't think a person could go that white." -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation.

Radiation alarms sound in the access tunnel, triggered by contaminated smoke.

Levels in the vicinity of the door are over 100 Sieverts per hour from dust. The monitor does not read higher.

Average levels in the tunnel, are just above 1 Sv/hr.

A fatal dose is 5Sv over 5 hours

Radiation alarms sound in the main hanger as the Fire Brigade withdraws and decontaminates. Radiation in the Hangar reaches 36mSv per hour. Not great by normal measures, but nowhere near as terrible as what is contained within the reactor.

"Standby. Standby. Standby. This is an Emergency Action Message issued by the New Birmingham City Board of Directors. All Employees to Evacuate to designated Shelter Decks in Accommodation Block and await further instruction. All Employees to Evacuate to designated Shelter Decks in Accommodation Block and await further instruction. Company Stores will remain closed. Employees who remain outside of Shelter Areas do so at their own risk and no claims will be entertained." - TITANIC Automated announcement, control room VDR

"It surprised the hell out of us. What we thought were blocked vents in the ceiling coughed out puffs of dust and then started warning us to stay inside." - Gabriel Ermine, Prop. 'The Rock and Hard Place', - statement to ARSC investigation.

"Parts of the system still date back to the original mine. There're still individual server blocks doing dedicated tasks and they're cross-connected in ways that don't seem related to what they really do. We don't always know what they do or why, but completely unrelated things stop working when we take them out." - Anika Daini. Online post Here

At 3:00:00 the fire has been burning for just under an hour. The Fire Brigade is again called up to ram the hatch open. A crude secondary airlock has been jury-rigged to keep them safe. This time, a heavy motoroid is brought up to protect the operator. The armour of the motoroid and the sealed cockpit are expected to keep out the worst of the radiation, but even still, it was far too dangerous for a human being to go in there

" I was scared. If the radiation knocked out the motoroid they'd have no choice but to leave me in there and I didn't really know what radiation would do to me but it seemed like the best idea because I had some radiation hardening built in and we needed to know what happened before we decided what to do," -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation

At 3:14:27 the hatch was opened for a second time. Compressors forced fresh air from the hangar and access shaft into the airlock to establish positive ventilation. Two firefighters exceeded their radiation limit and were withdrawn. Anika Daini stepped inside the turbine hall.

"The steam pipes from the reactor feeding the turbine had collapsed onto the top of the turbines. A glow - not like a fire but something more like a massive electric spark shone through. I remember wondering what it might've been - that maybe it was an electrical fire in one of the field coils and we'd get away with it. Then the pressure vents in the ceiling opened and dumped to space. A column of fire roared out - looking more like a firework throwing bright sparks splashing across the machinery. The viewscreens in front of me washed out with static - I could feel it flow through me. A human would have been dead." -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation

"That's a bloody metal fire!" - Mackie Jaguar - Nekomi student - on control room VDR.

"The reactor is destroyed. It's destroyed and burning" - Anika Daini - on control room VDR

You really need to listen to it to get the full effect.

"Nobody said a word. We just sat and stared." - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.

"Thinking we were preventing a disaster, We pumped our entire auxiliary water reserve into the reactor chamber. Onto a burning metal fire." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

"This was the worst of all possible situations. The reactor was destroyed and on fire. The fire was being fuelled by the water pooled in the suppression pools being drawn up by vacuum pressure each time the relief vents opened. If the chamber was opened to vacuum to extinguish the fire, all of the water would be drawn up to the remains of the core at once, resulting in an explosion which would likely destroy the reactor hall and kill everyone on the asteroid. If the fire was left to burn itself out, the remnants of the core would eventually melt through the concrete reactor floor, into the flooded suppression pools, with much the same effect." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation

"Fuck me sideways," - Jet Jaguar - on control room VDR

--

6 Months ago, the S.S.C.S Challenger was conducting a routine survey mission of the asteroid belt, when it encountered a pocket of intense radiation. A sample was taken - containing activated Iron, Scandium, Yttrium, Isotopes of Lithium, Chromium, Caesium, Iodine and a dozen other trace elements. It was immediately clear that the radiation was not natural in origin.

Isotopic decay indicated that whatever incident that had created the radiation trail, had occurred three months prior.

This was the first anyone in Fenspace knew of any incident on Frigga. Though they didn't know that at time.

 

[Dartz]

From: Gregory Bearer
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part 3

@Luminairian. All fair points I'm getting to that. In the end, when all is done I'll let everyone make their own judgements who or what's at fault.

Anyway, on with the show.


--

On Frigga, the question of what to do next is discussed. Beneath the reactor proper is a maze of feedwater pipes to supply coolant to the core. Surrounding the pipes is a suppression pool filled with water, designed to quench any steam leak from a burst pipe, before the pipe itself could be isolated. The reactor operators, not realising the core had been destroyed, attempted to pump fresh water into the core through these broken pipes. The effect, was to completely fill the suppression pools, which then overflowed to flood the drywell beneath the reactor core proper.

The remains of the core continue to burn. The heat and pressure generated by the fire is repeatedly opening emergency ventilation valves in the roof of the containment building, exhausting the plant to vacuum, and drawing more water up from the suppression pool and drywell to feed the fire with oxygen.

If nothing is done, the cycle will continue until the remnants of the core burn through the concrete containment, and drop into the pool, resulting in a massive explosion that would likely destroy the remaining three reactors, and kill every living thing on the asteroid.

The only alternative, is to vent the compartment to space to extinguish the fire. Drawing the water out of the suppression pools and onto the burning core - leading to a thermal explosion with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Disaster it seems is now inevitable. The reactor crew, disagreed.

"This Thing, terrifying as it was, was still contained. We'd had the worst possible accident - beyond anything anybody had thought was possible, but all of our safety equipment was still working. Nobody wanted to make the call too early, when the situation could still be saved." - Keisuke Morita, statement to ARSC investigation.

"We don't have a disaster yet. If we evacuate now, and that whole thing goes up while we're evacuating - then we just get a lot more people killed. We need a better plan." Jet Jaguar, Control room VDR

"We were told to rig charges on the main gate, and on any access shafts between the accommodation block and the hangar, and then open all gates to the mines, open chambers - anywhere with atmosphere that isn't inhabited," - Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.

"Keisuke and I had to get Units one and two shut down, depressurised, and running on the isolation condensers. Three was already cold, so we started pumping the core down. With the reactors stopped and the emergency generators running, we could start draining the suppression pools. I remember saying it was too bad we couldn't just open the drain gates for four - the first blast had knocked out the power - and the manual valves were underwater." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

"I stood on top of the radiation shield of a shut-down nuclear reactor, still hot under my feet even through my rad-boots, manually opening valves to the isolation condensers because the auto-sequence wouldn't let us do it. It sounds insane, but we knew what we were doing. " Marco Ricci, - Second-Shift Engineering Team, Statement to ARSC Investigation.

"We had this accident. We needed to accept that. We bore some responsibility for it. It didn't matter. Now, we needed to save lives. If that meant doing in hours what normally took days, so be it. We wrote new procedures minutes before we needed them. The operators knew their own system well. We knew the physics behind the reactor well. We would argue with the operating team about what the system could do, and they argued with us about how to do it, but we could always figure out ways to make old machinery do new things." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation

Their plan is to shut the remaining reactors down, drain as much water out of the system as possible, in the hope of minimising the damage caused by the fourth reactor's explosion. When the reactor explodes, charges will block the main tunnels, then blow the main gate, and hope the depressurisation would eject the majority of the debris into open space at escape velocity. The asteroid's residents would bunker down in the accommodation areas and wait for the station's natural orbit to carry them away from the radiation.

"It does sound crazy, but the logic was sound. The fastest way to evacuate Frigga would have been to use a Gagarin-class ship, boarding from the main landing bay - close to the reactor chambers. If the second explosion had occurred while the evacuation ship was in orbit, or boarding, everyone on the ship, and everyone on the station would be killed pretty much instantly. A long evacuation from the habitation blocks further from the core, would increase the time exposure to danger for all involved. Shutting the other reactors down would likely be of little benefit, but the distance between the habitation blocks and the reactors would be enough to protect the inhabitants from the initial blast, while Frigga's orbit would carry them away from debris. The eventual evacuation would then be slower, but could happen at leisure after the worst of the radiation had subsided. In Theory." James Floyd, ARSC lead investigator

In theory, it's impossible to blow up a nuclear fusion reactor, but here we are.

"About six hours after we got the shout, a call comes down from above and it's Jet, saying she needs to know what the levels are in the Suppression pool. I answered her half with a joke thinking she couldn't be serious, Bloody Lethal is what they are. And then, she asks me back How lethal? She says to me, I need to know if two people would live long enough to get down to the drain valves, and open them. And my body goes cold because she's fuckin' serious." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

It's a simple truth. No machine on Frigga could do it.

The equation is as simple as it is cold. After the accident, analysts suggested that, even sheltering in place, the inhabitants of Frigga would each have a 1 in 10 chance of death. That left a total of 47.2 dead by cold probability, assuming everything went as expected. Two people, sent to open the drain valves, would certainly die. But the explosion would be prevented, and therefore, the math said 45.2 would be saved.

But only if it is possible for two people to make it in the first place. So. A hole is drilled and sealed. A probe is inserted and the readings are taken.

"The first meter pegged, as far to the right as it could go. It stopped at a thousand. The second settled at Eight Thousand. Eight Thousand roentgens an hour. From just the reactor feedwater." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, tatement to ARSC investigation.

A thousand roentgen approximates 10 Sieverts per hour. 5 in 5 hours means certain death. 10, is beyond the ability of even Handwavium to save. 50 means almost immediate incapacitation.

"I told them up there what we were facing down here. and I remember her calmly asking me just how long it'd take me to get to the valves. I remembered how we'd taken the whole 'go to our deaths' resolution on the trip down and now there I was staring it in the face and - it scared me. Really, I didn't know. I didn't know what was under the reactor, in the dark. I guessed an hour or so - I couldn't tell you if that's an honest guess or a coward's. She told us not to try - we'd be toast before we made it." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

The Fire continued to burn, flaring off a new burst of radiation like hell's own geyser every five minutes. By now, the reactor on Frigga had been on fire for 24 hours. It had been burning its way through meters of solid concrete and metallic asteroid for an entire day.

"We needed to think outside the box. If we couldn't open the valves by hand, we'd have to use something a little more mechanical. It was time for the engineers to take over." - Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.



--

The first people outside of the asteroid of Frigga to realise something 'major' had happened, were the crew of the SCSS Challenger, six months ago. Three months after the accident happened.

"Naturally it raised eyebrows. Radiation fields like this just don't happen naturally away from planets. My first thought was that somebody had been testing something they shouldn't have been but that didn't really fit either. It wasn't until we analysed the radiation that we found out it was potentially something far more innocent, or far more deadly. The shuttle's hull protected us of course - and I didn't need to worry too much. My curiosity had been piqued, so we moved along to investigate.

We found evidence of multiple short releases of intense radiation. It did not take much to determine they followed an orbital path, and were released by a rotating object, such as an asteroid. It took five minutes for the navigator to pinpoint Frigga as the origin of the radiation. The time and orbit and rotational periods matched perfectly.

After an hour, we reached the largest and final radiation field. Inside, we found actual debris - hot fragments emitting lethal levels of radiation. Some where hot enough to be physically glowing. Others were more substantial - pieces of equipment, wreckage.

We found a single motoroid, so intensely radioactive we determined it must have been placed inside, or near, the core of a deuterium fusion reactor. Grappling it with the arm pegged the radiation monitors in the payload bay. We left it drift until someone more qualified could pick it up.

Finally we found four contaminated fire engines. Also, intensely radioactive - but not to near the same degree. The radiation seemed more to concentrate in the engine's pump units.

What sort of problem would involve pumping highly radioactive water, result in an irradiated motoroid, and leave such a debris trail? Something that damaged the reactor, and created a situation dire enough that required a motoroid to be used inside a nuclear reactor, which meant somebody had to pilot it in there. Which meant a situation dire enough for someone to take that risk and probably die in the process. A situation which continued for days.

A loss of coolant, or a pump failure? They must've had to use the trucks to pump the reactor coolant. If it'd failed, they might've used the motoroid to make a running repair. Which didn't explain the intensity of the debris. I thought maybe the cooling pumps had failed at first - or maybe a broken coolant line inside the reactor that had to be repaired. Serious, but nowhere near a Chernobyl.

But, given how serious that could've become, why wasn't there an alert put out? Or an evacuation request? None of the things you'd normally expect.

None of the pieces really fit right.

We sent a quick message, looking for an explanation since nothing was reported, and we get one back from one of the operators - Toptunov. "There has been an incident. One of our reactors was damaged. The situation was resolved."

The channel closed. I remember thinking, I love a good mystery." -Shizuka Hayama, Engineer, SCSS Challenger.



--



"Your bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island," - Charles Montgomery Burns, Springfield Nuclear Power Plant

To compare this to Chernobyl, is to compare a breeze to a hurricane. In truth, the stakes and scale are infinitesimally lower. Hundreds of lives are at stake, but not millions. Even in the absolute worst case scenario, with Frigga a poisoned tomb, there will be no great effect on civilisation. No vast tracts of land will be abandoned. No governments will fall. No consequences would linger for decades beneath the soil. The dust and debris from the reactor will dissipate to the void of space where it will harm no-one.

So far, the only injury has been to a single firefighter.

But that's not what's important here.

 

[Dartz]

From: Gregory Bearer
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: An anatomy of an atomic fuckup Part 4



Scraping through by their skin of the teeth. It's time to find out just how close we came to disaster...



---

The situation is explained to the residents of Frigga in the coldest of terms.

"The engineering committee has determined that the core will likely burn through to the water tanks within two days. .... Further evacuation is not possible in the time that is available to us. We cannot be reached in time by a suitable craft." - Announcement from Station Council on Frigga's internal bulletin system

Nobody panicked. When told the truth, the people accepted it. As much as they could accept such things.

"The Soviet Union is the only country to ever truly fight Godzilla. The failings of the system of the Soviet Union gave birth to it's Godzilla. The blood of the Soviet Citizen entombed him again. In the end, it may have brought about the death of the Soviet Union itself. But in the process, the Soviet Union saved the world. I saw the same courage again - not in thousands perhaps, but still.. We trusted the people. We told them the truth. We told them exactly how grave it was and allowed their bravery to shine" -Lun Alekseeva - Navigator, SC Lun. Speaking with Maico Tange.

"We might not have been saving the entire world. We were saving our own little one. That's what mattered." -Steinar Amundsen. Drill Team B Leader. Statement to ARSC investigation.

Some could draw on personal experience.

"I was worried, but I wasn't panicking. On Earth, they evacuated my home because of an accident. More people died because of the evacuation, than would've because of the accident." -Kotono Ito. Prop, Phitness Bee gym. Statement to ARSC investigation.

Others were more circumspect.

"We were told to close the bar. We kept it open. The Midoriyah stayed open too, along with half the shops on the Mezzanine. Sure the reactor might explode and kill everyone, but if it didn't, life needed to go on tomorrow. We couldn't do anything about it." - Gabriel Ermine, Prop. 'The Rock and Hard Place'. Speaking with Maico Tange.

"It was exciting! To have something to do. Something to challenge. Something to fight. Something to do. Life can get so monotonous out here sometimes, with the same schedule. It never really occurred to me that we might fail. We had a problem, we knew what the solution was, we just had to make it happen. We couldn't lose," -Nerima Tabby. Drill Team B operator.

There were a few dissenting voices, but they resigned themselves to their fate.

"I wanted to Evacuate. Some of us didn't have confidence in the whole 'shelter in place' thing. But we didn't have a choice, with the bay occupied, nobody could leave. Seemed like it defeated the purpose of sheltering in place if everybody was down there trying to stop the core exploding, when the core exploded." -Kim Deckman, resident. Online post.

There were those aware of the paradox of sending a hundred people into the teeth of danger to 'minimise the risk'.

"In hindsight, we knew it was bollocks. We just didn't want to sit around and wait." - Mirai Yashima -Drill Team B cutter. Statement to ARSC investigation.

A few were thrilled.

"Fuck it up and die. For us, this was Tuesday. Only now everyone else got to join in!" -Jake Applebee. Drill Team B operator. Statement to ARSC investigation.

The reality of the situation however, dawned. This was not a toy. It was not the big bad guy that existed just to be defeated. Inside that reactor lay the cruellest of deaths. And solving this problem meant making systems work in a way they were never meant to, on what was effectively a moment's notice.

"Nothing in reactor the system was made to do this. We had nothing capable of powering the sump-pumps. Which meant we needed to rig up something else. Which had to work. And keep working. Or else it would either have to be fixed by somebody who wouldn't survive the repair, or we'd have a radioactive disaster. We still only had an accident." - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.

This is a situation that leaves no margin for error. The price of any mistakes is obvious to those on the frontline.

"I had to cut the lines to the holding tank, blank them, then weld on the couplings which the brigade would hook their hoses up to. When I was told how much radiation would be flowing through that pipe, I decided I did not want to have to come back to fix that weld." Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation.

The fire continues to burn. The reactor core melts closer and closer to the water pool. At any moment it might break through. There is no way for anyone on Frigga to know how close they were coming to death.

"I tried not to think about it, in the end." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

"The plan was in motion. We had no choice but to see it through, to whatever end." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation.

"Looking up at bare concrete, I remember thinking, on the other side of this is death. If we hit water, we'd get a lethal dose in minutes. If we didn't drown or boil first. Or if the core blew. I touched it with my hand and it felt warm and I wondered if it was the radiation or just my imagination. Our counter chirped to itself, telling us we had an hour or more at least to get set up. We set the drills in minutes, bracing them on the channel walls, then set the target depth. Hopefully we got the depth right." -Steinar Amundsen. Drill Team B Leader, statement to ARSC investigation.

It takes nearly eight hours to properly drill the concrete. Some tasks, such as planting and laying require extreme care and precision - best left to the hands of experts with years of experience.

"People assume that planting explosives is just a matter of sticking it in and hoping for the best. Yeah, and if they thought about sex the same way, it's no wonder their partner goes home disappointed. Demolitions is an art form. There're explosive that push. Explosives that shatter. Explosives that cut. Fast explosives. Slow explosives. The wrong combination - a bad shape on a charge or just teency bit too much brisance and instead of bringing down the wall, you bring down the entire building. Or instead of dropping the roof, I'd collapse the entire reactor chamber," - Minnie May Hopkins, operator of 'The Purple Kitten', and explosives and blasting specialist, speaking with Maico Tange.

Naturally, not everyone is thrilled.

"Watching little miss ekrixiphilia wire the entire thing to blow was the most unnerving part of the whole thing. Nobody should be *that* into explosives." - Name witheld.

"With everything ready to go, we began the long ride back u the tunnel, behind the emergency blast line. If the reactor went, we'd have a chance to blow it before the cloud of death caught up." -Hans Krömeier - Fitter, Reactor Team A. Statement to ARSC investigation.

33 hours and 30 minutes after the accident had begun, the button was pushed. The explosives detonate.

"This was the moment when we could do nothing but pray. To whatever Gods we thought would listen. Whatever happened, we would have to go in." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

Nobody had anything left to do but wait.

"We heard nothing. We felt nothing. The blast triggered a shock-trip on the remaining reactors, but they had already been shut-down. Then we waited." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, statement to ARSC investigation

"The explosives triggered. And we waited for the big boom." -Anika Daini, computer systems operator, statement to ARSC investigation.

"The counters in the shaft went off-scale high. The water drained. We'd bought time. But, eventually the core would still reach the water." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

After half an hour, the hatches are opened.

"Jet told us to go. We went. I breathed a sigh of relief when my dosimeter didn't twitch." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

"We had at least five thousand cubes of water to pump. The Sabres could just about manage two and a half a minute, each in the best of conditions, giving us ten cubes a minute. I guessed it would take at least eight hours to drain it all - if nothing went wrong. " - Guy Montag, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

"We had four motors doing the pumping, leaving just one spare in case a regular ordinary fire started elsewhere. Those four, we filled the tanks with fresh water, then stacked some steel plates around the tanks and in the back of the cab to try and take the sting out the radiation. We could still only spend a minute at most, checking, or refuelling." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

The trucks, of course, would eventually run out of fuel. Running at full throttle drained the fuel tanks almost as fast as they could be filed

"Spend too long getting the diesel nozzle in the tank, and your arm'd rot off in a month's time. It encouraged you to be quick!" - Basil 'BamBam' Bambridge, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

"One of the motors overheated. We caught it before the head blew. The water was coming out so hot from its own radioactivity, it wasn't cooling the engine properly through the heat exchanger. We had to run them at a lower power, but that meant taking longer with that reactor still burning. The harder we pushed the motors, the more likely we'd lose one, or more of them. If we took it easy, we risked the core reaching the water." -Khayone van der Merwe, FVFB, statement to ARSC

A relay is set up, firefighters running in for a minute to check each engine, or start refuelling, then out before the dose gets too high. The hoses, the pump units, everything has begun to glow with hot radiation. The computer systems on the trucks begin to go haywire, generating false alarms, but the diesel engines keep running. The forty-year old engines are fully mechanical. The radiation doesn't affect them.

They run.

And run.

And run.

47 hours and 35 minutes after the core was breached the first of the engines stops pumping on dry run protection. Then the second. The third and fourth followed within a minute.

"That was it, no more water. We were done." - Guy Montag, FVFB, statement to ARSC investigation.

"We no water left to fuel the fire, all that had to be done, was to open the chamber to vacuum. The dregs boiled off and froze. The fire extinguished. The melt would remain hot and liquid. But it was contained - it had no way out. Everyone cheered. We had done it. We saved the station" - Keisuke Morita, statement to ARSC investigation.

"We Triumphed. And five hundred lives were saved." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

The report here is glowing, praising the collective effort of everyone on the station. Once the accident happened, it was dealt with 'exceptional skill, bravery and courage in the face of absolute danger.'

An accident occurred. But a disaster was prevented. That, on some level, must not be forgotten. Frigga came as close as it was possible to come to utter disaster. And Frigga saved itself.

The remnants of the reactor core would ultimately flood the galleries below. The molten steel, lithium, graphite and concrete mix would insinuate its way through broken steel pipes, bubbling and boiling off shallow pools of condensate, cooling as it diluted itself with more and more iron, steel, stone and concrete, before eventually coming to rest in a frozen glass waterfall, at the bottom of the blast-cut shaft.

The single most intensely radioactive object known to humankind came to its final resting place in its concrete tomb.

And that would've been that.

But for one small water leak from a storage tank.

---



NOTAN: 220472025
ORIG: XBNB-FRIGGA77
PRIORITY: RED
STATUS: CLOSED TO ALL NAVIGATION
SDATE: 0000
EDATE: 0000
REASON: REACTOR CORE ON FIRE

"We got the NOTAN just like every other ship in Fenspace. I actually checked the sequence to be sure it hadn't been missed. No date meant an immediate close. No end date meant an indefinite close. A priority rating of Emergency. And that reason, Reactor Core on Fire. I bet Lorca any amount of money that, whatever was happening on Frigga right now, wasn't a reactor Fire at all. The fire had happened months ago. It explained everything that we discovered - the radiation, the wreckage - all of it. Except for why they were only telling Fenspace about it now," -Shizuka Hayama, Engineer, SCSS Challenger.

Because, they had no choice.

A small leak in a storage tank containing the still radioactive coolant water had found its way into an access tunnel beneath unit 3, where it caused a radiation detector to read off-scale high.

An engineer went to repair the 'obviously faulty' detector. A nearby detector read zero. So he didn't bother bringing a geiger counter. He didn't pay any attention to the water pooled by his feet, until he replaced the defective detector with another one, which immediately read off-scale high. He checked the zero-reading one - to find it had long been replaced by a resistor to keep a fault alarm from sounding.

By the time he checked his dosimeter, he was already dying.

20 others would receive serious doses, stopping the leak.

 

[Dartz]

From: Gregory Bearer
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: Anatonomy of an atomic fuckup Part the Final

And now to the part you've all been waiting for.

---


The residents of Frigga knew they'd had a serious accident. Stellviacorp likely had an inkling that something had happened. At least as much as anyone living on the station knew. Fenspace as a whole still knew little - a mixture of embarrassment and shame prevented more than rumours making it out. Members of Frigga's Volunteer Fire Brigade were honoured in that year's honours list for 'confronting an extreme hazard'. Still, it seemed like those involved agreed it was best for everyone if the rumours of the accident remained exactly that.

The station's council was keenly aware of the effect a radiological panic would have on the station's economy. The culture of secrecy insinuated itself through the station. It became the thing that was never mentioned - like so many uncomfortable realities in fandom - it was consciously ignored.

"There is no truth in Fandom. Only stories - only the comfortable narrative. The same stories we always hear. You blow a reactor up and somebody has to be responsible, somebody has to be blamed. It's a comfortable story. Fen love that. You get your heroes and your villains. No matter the reality, we'd be the villains." Tatyana, 'Tasha' Toptunov - speaking with The Quibbler.

Therefore, outside of those directly involved, the only people who had any concept of how serious the accident had been were the crew of the Challenger. From there it went to the ARSC, who went to the Space Patrol - assuming something far more sinister had happened.

With the Jordan Waide incident in full swing on the other side of the system, only a few cool heads prevent a disastrous misunderstanding.

Now is time for investigation.

The ARSC despatches its best people. They request help, from leading experts from Earth to assist.

"The Institute was requested to take part, as it had no political links to any organisation involved. We could give our scientific verdict without outside influence. There were still politics of course but they were a different sort. The institute is also the one place in the universe which had prior experience with this type of thing. Today, I am deputy chief administrator of T-27 reactor project. However, my first assignment with the Kurchatov Institute was in Ukraine, in 1986, as a student under a radiochemist. " - Elena Zhakarov , deputy chief administrator, Kurchatov Institute. Interview with Russia Today.

The Kurchatov institute, with its own fusion research program, provides a neutral voice in exchange for a chance to learn lessons.

The majority of the physical evidence is either intensely lethal, or has been incinerated. Thirty seconds in the reactor chamber proper is a lethal dose for an unprotected human being. Radiation hardened machines instead are used scout out the wreckage. The robot travels through the concrete ruins, crawling over collapsed standpipes. An exocomp is found deceased in a side passage, followed by another. Rats litter the passage - dead from radiation, then sterilised beyond decay.

The reactor's turbomachinery has survived mostly intact, but it contains no clues. Inside the reactor hall, the remnants of the steel torus shell of the core - inches thick - lies buckled and bent, warped by the intense heat of the fire inside. The core has collapsed into itself, crushed by its own weight in the heat. Little of the reactor lithium, or graphite, is found. One of the steam separators has fallen, breaking the steam lines to the turbine. The pressuriser tank has breached. The main coolant pumps still stand clear of the wreckage, scorched but intact. Little else is identifiable.

Only when the robots make their way into the formerly flooded galleries is the reactor core found, still shimmering hot with decay. It looks like black, smooth glass - more like frozen oil. It flowed like water, insulated by vacuum, finding its way through the galleries and steamlines beneath the core finally, finally hardening in the access shaft dug by Frigga's mining team, leaving a black glass waterfall, frozen in place. The robot managed to send one grainy photograph before expiring.

The glass waterfall is the single most radioactive object in the universe - an entire reactor's worth of radiation, concentrated inside a concrete and stone tomb. It will remain detectively radioactive for millennia to come. When the earth, the sun and the moon are gone, it will remain as an eternal monument to humanity's ability to fuck up.

The investigation ultimately concludes that the most likely cause of explosion was the fracture of a water pipe within the reactor due to a combination of age, metal fatigue, neutron embrittlement, overpressure and thermal expansion. The straw which broke the atomic camel's back was likely a water hammer from the recovering circulating pumps fracturing a water channel. The fractured channel damaged the inner liner enough for reactor water to reach the lithium breeder blanket. A flash lithium fire fuelled by coolant water destroyed the core.

Simple.

But that's not why the accident happened.

This is where the report goes into fun territory. They have to start interviewing every single person involved in both accidents. And this, is where the recriminations and finger-pointing begin. Nobody wants to be left holding this hot potato. Nobody wants to be the person who blew up a nuclear reactor that was, supposedly, impossible to blow up.

"Those involved felt they would be held responsible for a disaster which, in their minds, they had actively prevented. The incident wasn't anybody's fault, but they'd be the ones to take the blame for it, and everyone would be punished in the court of misinformed public opinion." - ARSC report on the reactor core breach at Frigga 77.

Lensherr blames the operators.

"The operators had no real concept of the physics behind the reactor, or it's limitations, or why those limitations had to exist. Over the years they had simply figured out what worked and what didn't, regardless of whether to procedure had been approved or not. The core should have been shut down when it was clear that the magnet heating was not happening, but the operators overrode the company test procedure specification, based on their experience of the core. The failure was unexpected, but the test was continued long after it should have been stopped. It was the fault of the operators." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, Tagesschau, Das Erste.

The Operators Blame Lensherr's system or the core itself

"Nothing seemed strange. Everything looked normal. The pressure sensors on the coils always stuck if the reactor had been running for a long time. The sensors always froze with the cold. This had happened a dozen times without ever causing a problem. We had O2 sensors to give a depletion warning in the vent compartment - they triggered later but were more reliable" - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.

"It's the system's fault really. When we tried to take manual control that second SCRAM from DSS kept forcing us to override on each command. If we managed to get control of the pumps, even a few seconds earlier, our accident, would've just been an annoyance. The system didn't let us do what we needed to do to save the core." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.

Frigga, Blames the Parliament.

"We proposed it as a budget item last year, but the Parliament shot it down. We had to keep the lights on. We had to meet production for Bristol, or they'd just use that as more leverage against us. You can't have a mine without power to run the machines. You can't have a settlement without Power. So we had to keep the cores running. We didn't have a choice." -Jet Jaguar, speaking with Maico Tange.

Meanwhile, the Parliament blames Frigga.

"The cost of rebuilding the Power grid on Frigga - compared to the value generated by the settlement was just too high to consider. How am I supposed to explain to my constituents in Tokyo that their government is spending this much of their money on an asteroid settlement that, quite frankly, has openly opposed the government on numerous occasions? There were more important things we could do with it. The cost of delays due to possible breakdowns on Frigga seemed insignificant" - Yuko Arimura, MP for Minister for Social Justice, speaking on VBC's 'Prime Time'.

The situation is beyond toxic, and begging for something to happen, somewhere. Eventually, something had to catalyse it. The investigators focus on Frigga itself and the mindset behind the test.

One common theme on Frigga, however, quickly emerges. In every interview, one line emerges in some form or another.

"We've always done it that way, or, that's always happened, and it never caused a problem before."

This may sound familiar to a lot of people out there familiar with the history space exploration.

"Safety procedures did exist, but were routinely bypassed or outright ignored based on 'operating experience' or 'operating necessity'. Known risks would be taken once, in a situation where maybe the consequences of not taking the risk would've been potentially worse. But then it'd happen again - and again after that, until eventually the risk became routine and was taken as a matter of course while forgetting it was ever a risk in the first place. Each time nothing happened further proved this was safe method." - ARSC report on the reactor core breach at Frigga 77.

This right here, is normalisation of deviation. It is insidious, and it is cancerous. It's either a consequence of complacency, or something, somewhere is driving it to happen. It's built into the culture.



"They started a test which relied upon an indicator they knew to be faulty. This is foolish! The test has already failed before it has even been begun if the one indicator it depends upon is faulty. The failure to understand this one basic fact is the root cause of the accident. The second, is that they embarked upon this test to see what would fail - rather than as an exercise in proving a system believed to be in good order. They knew they had problems and they started anyway." - Elena Zhakarov , deputy chief administrator, Kurchatov Institute. Interview with Russia Today.

"That's just the way things are here. We're ten years behind everyone else. And we've two years to catch up. We're running on a fraction of the budget, while trying to expand to meet next year, and the year after that, fighting infrastructure so old, parts of it aren't even made anymore. It means you need to think on your feet and figure out what works, and what'll keep working to get you to the next milestone. We don't have time to think about things like that - if it works, do it. Otherwise we fall behind." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, speaking on VBC's 'Prime Time'.

"Find a Part. Find a Body. Make it Work." Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation

We have all the conditions for a fully developed case of Go Fever. Someone, somewhere has to put the brakes on it before disaster strikes.

Instead, we have Baron Frigga.

"Sometimes, when you're in real danger of being left behind, and everyone else is spending as much on one thruster assembly as you are on the entire bloody program, sometimes you need to fool nature to have a chance at being successful. The only people who complain are the ones who don't need to do it anymore." -Jet Jaguar. Baron Frigga.

This was Jet, speaking after being caught running a full oxygen atmosphere in the RF-47 at a race last year. The warbirds class the RF-47 competes in requires competitors to maintain standard atmospheric pressure in the cockpit. It didn't specify the composition - since they assumed nobody'd be reckless enough to run pure oxygen at atmospheric pressure. Until Jet and Asagiri gave it a go, to remove the Nitrogen circuit from the RF-47 and save a hundred kilos of weight.

It's the first time in the series' history that a mandatory technical change was introduced between races. She was very nearly asked to leave because of it.

In 2025:
Frigga exceeded its ore production targets by 25%. To the point where the surplus could be sold on the spot market, to feed back into the station's budget.
Frigga moved up Three full points on the Federation's Planetary Development Index - the largest single move since the index was established.
Frigga expanded from a population of 26 - including catgirls, to a population of over 500.
Frigga had the smallest budget overrun of any Millennium settlement - as a percentage of total budget allocation.

"Progress on 77 Frigga has been remarkably quick since accession to Crystal Millennium. If this continues, 77 Frigga and Eleanor City (Formerly New Birmingham) are on course to grow into a major waystation in the Main Belt within the next few years. The local economy is beginning to flourish. Active trade is reducing import costs, while major infrastructure projects such as the Starlight Express, or tourist attractions such as the artificial hotsprings, raise the quality of life, while drawing a steady stream of curious visitors. That this has been achieved on the meagerest of budget allocations is all the more worthy of praise." - Federation Travel Times.

Not said, is that in the same period, Frigga had more accidents resulting in injury than most similar sized settlements would have in five years. With hindsight it now seems likely that a lot of important corners were being cut in the process. The rust has been painted over, rather than repaired.

"She's the person flying along between lanes on a motorcycle at full speed when all other traffic has stopped on the motorway, trying to catch up to the front and hoping nobody tries to change lane before she makes it." - Comment on Maico Tange's article.

You very quickly end up with an organisation where running rough-shod over the normal basic considerations of safety and security becomes the normal. You get to the point where nobody realises they are taking a risk at all.

In the end, nobody realised they were taking the biggest risk of all. One basic assumption, shared by the designers, builders, operators and politicians, has just been proved false - that a handwaved fusion reactor cannot explode.

But if we live in a world where doing the impossible is routine, how are we surprised that the impossible happens?


--

The report concludes after this, that the accident was ultimately the consequence of:

A reliance too much on past experience, rather than on present examination to determine if a course of action is safe. (It's never caused a problem before...)
A culture that fed off of 'Go Fever' to get results and reach milestones, without considering the real risks being undertaken. (Otherwise we fall behind...)
A crew who had no full understanding of the physics of what they were operating, or formalised operating procedures. (They had simply figured out what worked...)
An assumption that incidents and accidents could be handled before the situation got out of control. (We've been doing this for years...)
A reactor design that left little margin for error in the first place, with monitoring systems prone to ambiguity and error. (The sensors always froze...)
A political situation that prevented the necessary funding for maintenance and upgrades being released.(There were more important things we could do with it....)
A management culture that openly favoured risk taking to achieve results (Sometimes you have to fool nature...)

Motions of censure for 'hazarding a settlement' and 'orchestrating a cover up' have already been proposed for many of those involved at next year's convention. It seems likely most will lose their voting privileges for a few years, along with the usual disqualification from Convention high office. The Frigga Volunteer Fire Brigade - and many of those involved in works to control the reactor, have been proposed for this year's honours list. Some names manage exist on both lists. Such is the way with heroes and villains.

Whatever else was done wrong, one thing was done absolutely right - and one thing only ever needs to be done right to prevent disaster.

"The approach to nuclear safety, which also, in my opinion, applies to any technologically complicated or potentially dangerous object, must be made up of three elements:
-The First; to make the object, for example a nuclear reactor, as maximally safe as possible.
-The Second, to make the operation of the object as maximally reliable as possible, but 'maximally' can never mean 100 percent reliability.
The philosophy of safety demands the introduction of a third element, which admits that just the same, an accident will take place. " - Valery Legasov - Chief of Chernobyl Accident Commission. Dictated Memoirs.

The impossible accident happened. The reactor containment survived the explosion and withstood the fire. Radiation was vented harmlessly to space. Radiation - in dangerous quantities - never intruded upon the inhabited spaces of Frigga. Whatever mistakes were made, this one critical thing was done correctly.

The accident was contained for long enough for it to be stopped. And it was stopped not with another handwave, but with careful, competent thought, measured risk and daring action.

There is no Frigga disaster. No tomb of ghouls. There will be no memorial wall to the dead. What happened remained an 'accident'. The nearest of near misses - of the sort that most people would normally take as a learning experience.

However, there is one conclusion that cannot be escaped; nothing that was happening on Frigga, would be unusual in Fenspace. Outside of the really big places that've attracted people who might actually know what they're doing - there're many still winging it with a wave and a prayer.

We live in a society that's grown used to the assumption that reality can be cheated with a handwave. The difficulties nature throws our way can just be vanished and dealt with at the consequence of an inconvenient quirk. We're used to dealing with black-box systems that are at times unfathomable, but whose compliant performance must be assumed because our lives depend on it. It breeds a sort of arrogance - an assumption of our own mastery of a world and powers we don't really understand but that we've just sort of figured out.

And when those powers stop insulating us from reality and the limits of our own capabilities - where that handwaved safety net tears wide open - there will be consequences.

"I'm alive. But they had to replace everything in the process. Everything. My body. Half my mind. Even my face is just a replica on a biomimetic substrate. In some ways, I'm a ghost - an android built from a dead man. I remember my life - but it doesn't really feel like I was the person to live it anymore." - Marco Steelwing - Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Formerly of Frigga Second Shift Engineering team.

-----------------------

 

[Dartz]

It does seem like a recent HBO miniseries borrowed a little bit from this - doesn't it? Or maybe it's just a common reference pool. Supposedly, that is a legitimate extract from Legasov's memoirs. I cannot verify that as I don't speak Russian and just nicked a translation I found.

One of the criticisms I remember reading of Fenspace has been that Handwavium lets you do things without really paying a price. You don't have to be competent. You don't even have to be good - it makes things happen. But it just sort of gives you the veneer of things happening without really doing anything. Meta-wise, it's great stuff when you need XYZ to happen for your story to work, but if the story's entirely handwavium it sort of falls flat on its face, because nothing really matters anymore

Handwavium doesn't solve the problem - it enables the problem the audience wants to read about. And a lot of hard lessons are easily forgotten. And a level of respect for technology and science is being lost. There will always be problems that can't be handwaved away.

The story borrows a fair bit from some actual accidents to at least try and give a sense of reality. One of the actions taken by the operators - switching coolant pump power to the coasting turbine is exactly what the operators at Chernobyl were testing the ability to do - while the ruined core melting into the coolant water is the big disaster the Chernobyl liquidators were trying to prevent. At the same time - some handwavium is involved. Almost like the reactor was designed to have just this kind of accident.

The only real concession to handwavium is that the radiation is vented to space rather than across most of Europe - and that it's a fusion reactor which is altogether more radioactive inside at first. Had this reactor been on Earth, large swatches of land would be massively irradiated while whole populations would be left as walking ghosts slowly rotting alive. On the other hand, the reactor was safely contained away from the station's population by the simple expedient of a containment wall.

The reactor is handwavium. It exists to have the problem.
The problem is rooted in reality - where politics, human factors, constrained budgets and bad practice colide.
The solution is rooted in the problem - actions taken by people under threat and showing courage and cleverness to tackle their problem - rather than magic anti-radiation dissolve-the-atoms handwavium.
And there're consequences. Ranging from a chance of cancer in 20 years, to radiation burns, to losing some reputation, to someone basically being turned to a 'ghost'

Having a problem I went to the trouble of setting up in another shared setting get sort of crushed by the application of a Mary-Sue, rather than some real thinking, turned me off the setting.

---

Click to shrink...

There's one other thing nobody's noticed - maybe because the science is inherently mushy - but caesium and iodine have no place in a fusion reactor. These are Fission products.

Which leads, of course, to one simple conclusion.

This story is a lie.

 

[Dartz]

Taking the obfuscating stupidity approach only works so long as people aren't worried you'll kill everyone.

Anyway, from the eventual documentary....
-----


Every alarm light lit up simultaneously, a thousand indicators flashing, yellow, orange and red, each one out of phase with the others, begging for attention. A dozen alarms sounded at once, mingling into one solid cacophony of sound. A circular representation of the reactor torus flickered red, warning of a hundred sensors giving incorrect reading. Indicator dials showing injector and diverter positions flashed warnings that control signals had been lost. A diagram of the hydraulic circuit flashed in time with a dozen dead sensors. The turbine continued to coast. Main generators showed no power.



It took less than a heartbeat for Jet to comprehend it all. "What just happened?" she managed to say.



The reactor operator sat back in his seat. Keisuke Morita took a moment to clear his glasses and take a few, quick breaths. His hands tried a few switches on the console in front of him, getting nothing but red lights in response.



He read from a growing list of red lines on the monitors in front of him



"No signal on 48V control circuit. Holhraum pressure increase. Neutron growth rate increase. Neutron growth rate over limit. Power growth rate over limit. Sector Power over limit. Global power over limit. Hohlraum pressure exceeding limit. Neutron rate zero. Field pinch warning….."



"I've no flow…" Tasha, the hydraulic operator, interrupted from the second console. "High water, both steam generators. Low water, both. High pressure. No pressure. No signal. Pump failure - what the hell?"



Another alarm kept her from continuing - this one loud, shrill and distinctive. Four sharp tones repeating in sequence.



Jet silenced it with a single switch.



"Fire alarm. Reactor. Turbine. Turbine interconnect," said Keisuke. "It's on fire."



The words barely made it out of his mouth.



"Emergency Batteries!" ordered Jet. Her voice rattled off the wall.



"Nothing. No response." Kurt Meier answered from the power control console. The man looked at her for another option, then at the two operators sat beside him. Sweat had already begun to stain his white suit shirt. "That's not possible. None of this is possible. This has to be instrumentation."



His blues eyes begged for an answer from anyone. Something more than the one possibility nobody dared voice.



Nobody dared admit everyone on the station had already died.



"Instrumentation," Jet repeated. In that moment, everything made sense. Only one thing could knock out every single sensor at once. "Field collapse must've caused an EMP and blew out the power circuits. Start the generators for reactor three - I'll use the controls for three to switch the bus to four's pump service line."



"That's not an approved procedure!" Meier objected. A flash of terror shone in his wide eyes.



As if things could possibly be made worse.



"Do it!" Jet snapped back. "We need water in that core or we're looking at a disaster."



The reactor either needed water, or was in such a condition that it didn't. Better to have it and not need it, then need it but not have it.



"I've make-up water from the reserves," said Tasha. Her eyes focused on the few indicators in front of her that still worked. She took a moment to brush a few strands of dark hair from her face with a gloved hand. "Tank level's going down but I can see any in the reactor."



Meir slumped in the generator operator's seat "If the relief valves are open, boiloff and gravity flow will cool the shutdown reactor."



"Did it shut down?" Tasha asked.



"....Probably." answered Keisuke "The field was getting unstable."



He didn't sound convinced.



A comm phone on the wall chimed, begging for attention. Jet, by virtue of being closest, grabbed it with one hand.



"It's Jet. I'm in Four."



"What're you guys doing down there?" Anikas' voice carried a flurry pf panic . "I got a call from Lun - there's been a loud bang in the landing bay. I've a fire alarm in the reactor. "



"The test failed. We blew the magnets on the reactor. The backblast started a fire."



Jet sounded more annoyed, than frightened.



"I'll get fire brigade on the way." .



A dreadful sensation crawled under Jet armour - a thousand legs prickling across what'd once been her skin.



Something more complex had happened, but she couldn't put words to it.



"Tell them to wait. Send an exocomp first. Scout it out"


"Right. OK. Exocomp despatched."



"The magnets didn't blow" A voice pulled her out of the call



"What?" Jet blinked.



"Last data shows them intact." Keisuku pointed at the figures on the monitor in front of him.



"The sensors mustn't've registered it before they were destroyed." Kurt said.



"The trigger signal?"



"The detonators were still charging." Keisuke clarified.



A moment passed in the room. Everyone understood what it meant. Nobody wanted to voice it - not out loud.



"Something else. Hydrogen….." said Tasha, looking between the other three for someone to confirm her best hopes, someone to offer another simple explanation. "We did everything right. The reactor was coming under control. Something strange has happened. "



She looked to her screen for an explanation - in case something had changed from the previous moment. Nobody said a word. The control panel continued to alarm.


A dreadful possibility entered Jet's mind.


"I'll go to three," she said, after a few moments. "Flood the core. Keep trying to figure this thing out. Use the last few seconds of data - frame by frame if you have to - figure out what failed first - where it started."



Keep them working. Keep everyone from panicking.



Jet left the room with that, letting the armoured security door seal shut behind her. A few moments peace allowed her to gather her thoughts and try and ignore a muse insisting on feeding details of a forty year old disaster.



At least it gave her ideas.



Running footsteps interrupted her.



Kim Thcombe, from reactor one. She wore the traditional sammy outfit - the same white leotard, blue thigh-length skirt and red thigh boots that'd become fashionable because they could be made so cheap and comfortable.



Only a single band on her upper arm marked her as a reactor operator.



She stopped, doubled over, bracing herself against her knees, gasping for breath.



"What the fuck…." she gasped. "... are you doing in there?"



"We had to blow the magnets," Jet said, quickly. "We've a fire."



Kim looked up, still struggling for breath."....if there's a fire in four…."



"Ignore the manual. Disable the automatic shutdown if you have to. Do what you have to do to keep power up."



"Is it bad?"



Jet forced a smile. "The reactor's scrap and we'll be getting 3.6 Roentgen jokes for the next six months from every clever idiot orbiting the sun." In the back of her mind, Jet already sensed otherwise. "Keep the lights on," she added.



Kim nodded. "We'll do that."



Kim didn't run back - she walked. Jet took a moment to wonder if she shouldn't have been a bit more serious. It didn't matter - so long as the other reactor didn't shut itself off and leave them high and dry with no power to solve the problem, it'd be ok.



Beside the door to the control room three hung a warning sign. Restricted to Authorised Employees. Unauthorised entrance is grounds for immediate termination.



It was never clear whether that was in a corporate sense, or a Schwarzenneger sense. American libertarians could be weird like that.



Jet took a few breaths then opened the door to reactor three's control room. Compared to the living chaos in four, three seemed eerily dead.



Nobody waited inside. Every screen sat dark. The entire system had been shut down. The starter lockout key had long been lost - Jet instead lifted control panel cover, reached in through the circuitry and turned the contactor by hand.



Relays thumped into place. Computers and control circuits chirped as they ran through their startup sequence. Jet took the time to raise Lun using her own onboard comms.



"Alekseeva…" she answered after a half second.



"Jet here. What happened."


"We felt a large shock. Lights from the roof collapsed to the floor below." A pause. Lun didn't sound concerned, but then when it came to serious matters, she could slip into that Soviet deadpan where it could be difficult to tell if the world could be ending, or if it might just be raining outside. "The gantry crane has been knocked off its tracks. No casualties."



A dreadful thought came to Jet's mind.



"The crane's off its tracks?"



"Yes," Lun confirmed.



The crane ran on a track built on top of a retaining wall. The retaining wall separated the turbine for reactor four from the landing bay.



If that wall had moved? Jet felt her mouth go dry at the possibility.



"Do you've a dosimeter aboard?" she asked. "A radiation dosimeter."



"Yes," Lun answered, still absolutely unfazed. The slightest mention of radiation would have anyone else running for the nearest airlock.



Jet waited.



Around her the control systems for Unit three came to life. Glass-screen monitors showed the entire system in a cold and stable shutdown. Fire alarms stood silent. Radiation detectors showed only the usual levels for an idle core.



She remembered them being higher when they first bought the station. At least the bulkhead wall between the reactors had held up.



Lun pinged her internal comm. Jet pounced on it.



"210 microroentgen per second," Lun reported.



"210," Jet repeated, momentarily relieved. "That's not good, but it's not a disaster."



Not great, not terrible, her mind teased. Still, she couldn't escape what it meant. This thing had just gotten so much worse. She felt her breath quicken.



She had to know how much worse.



"I need someone to check that wall for damage," she said. "Have them wear a spacesuit. Bring a dosimeter."



"Is this…. " Lun began.



Chernobyl. The word went unsaid.



"....I don't know yet. It might just be a steam leak."



The relief valves had been opened. Jet already suspected otherwise. But no use admitting it until it'd been confirmed.



"I'll do it myself, " said Lun. "We will make ready to sail. The ship will be ready to depart within the hour."



"Thanks."



The line cut, leaving Jet alone with the control system.



Jet took a moment to orient herself, tracing through the diagrams printed on the panels to find the correct switches. Beside them a single indicator lamp warned of an active fire somewhere in Reactor four.



An electromechanical lock blocked her from switching power to the dead circuits.



She made a note to permanently disable the permissives and interlocks in the remaining reactors if she ever got the chance. Some self-righteous engineer had made it impossible to do what needed to be done to save the system.



Jet lifted the panel and broke the lock, throwing the metal contactor to the linoleum floor.



For a half second, the indicator lights showed green - long enough for Jet to believe that maybe it had been an electrical issue



A single alarm belled as the circuit breakers tripped on a dead short.



Jet tried a second time.



She received the exact same answer.



Jet growled inside her throat. Of course it wouldn't cooperate.



She tried a third time.



One of the breakers tripped for a third time. The other malfunctioned and refused to close, giving an overheat warning.



"Fuck it!"



Jet couldn't escape the truth. Whatever'd happened - she'd never hear the fucking end of it. Fucking self-righteous morons.



She sat on the console, drumming over a thousand possibilities in her mind, her worst fears already making a nest in the back of her head.



A Boskone attack would be too easy, wouldn't it?



She took a breath.



Fuck it anyway



It couldn't be escaped. Putting her head in the sand would just get everyone killed.



Resigned to her fate, she left the control room of reactor three - accidentally taking the reinforced handle of the door with her.



The important thing was to act. It might still be simple.



It took her a few moments to walk back to the door to four. The door opened to voices struggling with a system that complained at every action they took. The main alarms had been silenced. The panicked lightshow from the control panels continued.



Keisuke stood beside Tasha, both of them focused on the console in front of them. Kurt still sat at turbine control, a ring binder on his lap with unfolded with printed hydraulic diagrams.



"Number two dry run trip," said Keisuke. "Transfer pumps offline."



Tasha looked at him, then down at her screen. "Reserve water tanks empty. Kims crew are bitching at me for taking all theirs."



"That's everything," said Kurt, with the finality of a pronounced death sentence



"Still nothing in the reactor," said Tasha. "Nothing anywhere."



Jet glanced at the main screens. Nothing critical had changed. A few more sensors had dropped offline. The fire had to be spreading.



The door closed behind her. Everyone looked to her. She looked at each in turn, at the fear moulded into their faces. She felt it rise inside her once again.



Only one thing could save them.



"What happened to the turbine?"



Kurt blinked owlishly, taken aback for a heartbeat. Her glanced at the consoles beside him. "It completed rundown normally"



"Oil? Coolant?" Jet demanded.



"Oil level nominal. Hydrogen pressure nominal. Steam pressure, zero. Condensers - loss of vacuum."



As normal as possible, considering the circumstances. It didn't matter to him. She could see him wondering why it mattered to her.



Her stomach dropped. Everyone in the room mirrored the change in her expression.



"There's radiation in the hangar," she said, looking at the still-alarming panel, rather than at them. "One of the walls has shifted. I think something's happened to the reactor."



"Happened?" Keisuke blinked.



"Happened? You mean, you think it exploded?" Tasha's gaze pierced.



Jet hadn't wanted to be the one to say it.



"That is not possible!" Kurt snapped, offended at the idea. Already he'd rose to his feet, daring her to match him. "An explosion like this is not possible with a fusion reactor."



Jet felt the sudden urge to shut him up permanently.



"It doesn't matter what's possible," said Jet, focusing on keeping her voice even, despite the adrenaline buzzing in her body. "Just what's happened. There's been a large explosion, a fire, and we've a radiation leak."



"How much?" Kurt demanded. "How much radiation? That'll tell what's happened"



"It's not clear yet," Jet said.



Not quite the three point six answer. It really could be minimal still.



"A rupture in a steam line, or on the discharge header from the pumps." Kurt pronounced. His fingers flicked through the binder, searching for the right image. He smirked , flipping the the binder upright to show the diagram. "This here." he placed his finger on it. "If the pressure dropped too quickly it would flash-boil the water in the steam generators. That would cause a water hammer, and blow the generator apart. That could do something like this."



Tasha nodded. "Those generators were overflowing right before we lost our controls." She looked to Keisuke, then to Jet for any hint of disagreement."They were full of water."



Anything that wasn't the reactor could be dealt with. Far easier than the reactor itself.



Jet glanced at the reactor monitors. No signal from any steam generator. No signal from any discharge header. No signal from the core.



Like nothing was there at all.



It felt like wishful thinking. It'd sounded like desperate thinking.



Lun pinged her comm. For a moment, she considered keeping it private - not to completely extinguish the one spark of hope that'd glimmered in the room - before forwarding it through to the reactor comm system.



Whatever the answer, they needed to hear it.



"Jet here."



"I'm at the wall." Lun's voice emerged from the speaker, tinny and thin, chased by the rush of air through a space suit ventilator. "There is a crack in the wall where two panels meet. One of the panels has moved forwards by seven centimetres. Smoke is rising from the crack as a steady stream."



"Steam?" Kurt seized on it.



"Smoke. " Lun corrected, her voice firm. "Dark. Under pressure."



All four in the room drew in a breath at once.


"Radiation reading is…" Lun paused. The sound of a finger tapping on piece of plastic carried through the speaker. "....off scale."



"How high is the scale?" Kurt demanded.



"One thousand microroentgen per second, " Lun answered. The first shiver of unease entered her voice. "I can taste metal. I won't stay here."



"That's..." Tasha breathed


"Don't stay," said Jet. "There's nothing more you can do."


"We'll keep getting the ship ready. If it gets worse, we'll abandon the ship "



"Alright. Use your judgement."



All three sat, staring at her, looking for the answer - looking for the diamond bullet to make the problem go away.



Of course Jet would know. Jet was the BNF. The one in charge. The one running the room.



Jet felt the panic rising in the room, the gnawing sensation that they sat on the edge of a disaster, a Pompeii, a Crystal Osaka - another fucking Chernobyl - and only one person could solve it.



With no idea what to do, and knowing something had to be done, she turned her attention to the problem that could be solved, something to keep everyone's attention focused on.



Jet felt her own finger tap on the comm panel for a moment, filling the air with a sharp rapping sound.



The idea came a moment later. She keyed in the code for the station's main control room



"Anika," Anika answered after three rings, her voice coming sharp, pulled tight by a new panic. An alarm could be heard in the background, begging for attention. "I just got a smoke alarm in the main landing bay!"



Already thick enough to set off the fire detectors.



No point in sugar coating it.



"The containment wall in the landing bay has been damaged. Smoke is leaking through it from the fire in the reactor compartment. The smoke is radioactive."



There was a pause. The alarm continued to sound.



"...this is… " Anika began.



The most important thing was to seem confident - that she knew what she was doing - even if she didn't.



"If that wall comes down it will be a disaster." Jet said. She took a breath. "I need a team to shore it up. Have them get high-range dosimeters and breathing apparatus from the reactor section." She paused, remembering that she had no idea just how radioactive that smoke was. It might be the worst kind of death sentence. "Volunteers only. Tell them about the radiation. Tell them the smoke is potentially lethal if they inhale it. Tell them if that wall comes down we're looking at a Chernobyl. Let them make their own decision on whether to go."



Anika breathed.



"I… understand."



Jet considered the fact that she might've just condemned a dozen people to a brutal death - or a lingering sickness. It sat on her shoulders, heavy, even when weighed against the chance of the wall coming down and condemning dozens more.



She wasn't even sure if she'd thought about it in those terms. It just seemed like the right thing to do in the moment.



"What do we do?"



A simple question.



In the moment, Jet had no idea. Nobody in Fenspace had ever faced anything like it. Few human beings alive had ever faced anything like it.



The big options swam for a half second. Evacuate the station. Fight the fire. Let it burn out.



She had the idea that A.C. would've been half way through whipping up some form of handwaved expanding foam - something to contain the radiation, smother the fire and support the whole structure from the inside.



Probably not possible, not with the materials Frigga had. Not worth wasting time on. It'd only get fucked up anyway.



Ben would've been halfway towards getting everyone off - loading every available shuttle and starship. Frigga had Lun, and some private shuttles - not enough for over five hundred. And God only knew how long a rescue would take to get organised.



Especially with the landing bay flooded by radiation.



Noah Scott would've actually been able to pay for the upgrades the reactor needed without having to prove the were needed, so no fucking accident at all there.



Jet had only herself, and Frigga. And a problem in the moment that seemed far too large to be considered by either.



The answer in the moment sat idle on the master display. Solve the problems they could tackle - step by step.



Use them as a ladder.



The turbine still registered normal. Full of flammable oil. Full of flammable hydrogen coolant. The turbine hall wall had already been damaged. What to do seemed obvious, considering what she'd thought to check a few moments before.



"Drain the turbine oil." she instructed. "Dump the coolant.If either of them explode, they might take out that damaged wall."



All three settled - with at least something to focus on. Sitting at the turbine operators' console Kurt had the controls to his hand. He worked through the switches, cancelling the alarms and overriding the permissives.



"If the remote doesn't work," he said. "It'll have to be done manually. In the turbine hall."



Full of radiation. Potentially a death sentence.



Tasha took a breath, settling back into her chair. "I know where they are."



Jet considered that she might've been able to do it faster than both. She herself did have some level of radiation resistance - enough to tolerate spaceflight. How high did that go?



For obvious reasons, it'd never been tested.



Jet stared at the valves on the panel display, showing normal readings. Her mouth went dry. Her heart crawled up her through. They had power. Each valve reported its position. She couldn't conceive of a reason beyond sheer spite why they wouldn't.



Each light turned green in sequence as each valve motor began to turn.



"Danke Gott," Kurt breathed. "It's draining"



Jet felt relief cool through her body, chased by the smallest flash of triumph.



Keisuke smirked. "What else can go right?" Three pairs of eyes locked onto him. He shrunk in place "Worth a try,"



Jet felt herself smile momentarily. One little problem solved. The next one had to wait.



"There's an exocomp on its way to the reactor. We'll know what to do next, once we see exactly what's happened"



All three in the room seemed to agree with that. So long as they thought she knew what she was doing.



That bought her time to figure it out. Time to get the station council together and bring them up to speed. Time not to rush in and get someone - or everyone - killed.



In truth, in the moment with time and space to actually think, all she could think about, is what people would say when they found out, and the dread sense that, when people found out the truth, the finger of blame would end up in one place alone.

 

[Dartz]

What is the Price of Truth?
by - Maico Tange
technical research by Shizuka Hayama
---A report on the Accident on Frigga 77. The trutht about what brough a settlement to the brink of disaster, and the coverup that followed.
---Part VII. One Final Question remains.


Our story, which began with a meeting with an engineer in a cafe, now comes to the final question.

Who is responsible for the accident on Frigga? Who is to blame?

Jet Jaguar is first under the glare of the inquiry - a cyber with a habit of going off half-cocked, of leaping before she looks and only figuring out how to land halfway down. As Baron Frigga, she first set the tone for the settlement - its character and its intrinsic nature. She fostered a culture of getting things done, almost in spite of the risks of doing them. It was her idea to use Uranium inside the reactor core, to improve its energy output.

The presence of which would have been near harmless, if not for a design flaw built in to the reactor itself. When subject to a thermal shock - such as that caused by an interruption and sudden resumption of coolant flow - the inner reactor liner is at risk of collapsing. A collapse of the liner would expose lithium breeder blankets inside the core to the full force of the reaction, triggering a miniature nuclear explosion which would wreck the core.

The presence of Uranium only increased the magnitude of this explosion and the resulting fallout. Three tons of TNT, became Thirty. An explosion that would have merely wrecked the reactor, instead threatened the entire containment structure and required rapid actions to prevent a far greater disaster and a release of radiation which would have led to hundreds of fatalities.

This collapse, might never have happened if the reactor operators had followed the procedure rather than improvising on the fly. Nobody in the room had any formal training in operating the reactor, but they did it anyway, thinking they understood what they were doing. What they did, was the exact same thing they had always done without fully understand why they were doing it. Continuing the test after it should have been shut down primed the accident to happen. Their well-meaning actions in the last moments - instead of saving the reactor - acted as the final detonator switch.

Lensherr heavy industries knew of at least one occasion, prior to the accident on Frigga, where liner damage had occurred inside an operating reactor core. The possibility of this occurring was never mentioned in the company literature. The reactor documentation detailed thermal limits and heat up and cool-down rates based on the possibility of a coolant channel fracture. In truth, the company was aware that this was not the case. At stake were millions of euro, and two unfinished reactors at Bielefeld.

Privately, computer modelling had shown that a rapid change in temperature inside the liner, could cause damage. The circumstances that would cause this were thought to be unlikely.

A reactor after a decade of operation, with cracks and weaknesses accumulating in the carbon-carbon liner, having its coolant supply interrupted while operating at high power, and then having it restored again without any cooldown time, creating a shock cooling event. These circumstances were replicated exactly on Frigga.

The safety test was prompted by an internal review inside Lensherr, which suggested that there was a possibility these circumstances could occur, due to a delayed shut-down. Ultimately, the safety test could fail in a manner which caused these exact circumstances to occur.

Once they did, the reactor simply did exactly what physics required of it

The test is only being run, because Frigga had begun to experience energy shortages, and requests for funding to upgrade the system had been denied by Her Majesty's Government. Feeling they had no alternative, the Station Council began a project to modify the reactors to produce more power by hybridising them, using the Fusion reaction to drive small scale fission reactions, extracting even more energy and pushing the reactors hotter again. The test program was begun to prove the integrity of the reactor, before the program advanced.

Data logs reported by Frigga to the Convention Active Reactor Safety Committee showed Reactor 2 and Reactor 4 regularly operating for long periods at an output at times at least twenty-five percent above their maximum rated operating level. This gave them an extra ten percent electrical output. This was not flagged as a deviation by the ARSC, and no investigation was begun. It was allowed to continue.

The accident requires all of the above to be in place to happen as it did. Each participant can rightfully claim that others forced their hand, or without the actions of others, the accident would not have happened.

No crime like this has ever been committed in Fenspace. In truth, nobody is even sure that what happened was a crime. The accident on Frigga is almost unprecedented in human history.

Whether the actions of the station council, and the reactor operators could be considered as grave an offense as endangering the collective security and safety of one of her Majesty's settlements remains to be decided.

It seems likely the Court will find those involved guilty of deceiving Her Majesty's Government by first covering up the accident, and doing so again after the reality of the accident was revealed - trying to downplay its consequences.

Even still, to the Courts of the Crystal Millenium, a person's actions are only part of the picture.

Of equal importance and specific interest to the Court is the content of their hearts at the moment of action.

In the agony of the moment, What were they feeling? Why did they make the decision they did? What did they expect was the outcome? What is the nature of the darkness that overcame them in that instant? What is the light that guides them? What in their nature drives them to act the way they do?

Not just a rational what and how, but a soulful why?

I put the question to Jet herself. After a few moments thought, the answer she gave me was a single sentence.

"Where once I feared the cost of lies, now I only ask, what is the price of the truth."

Exactly what she meant, by paraphrasing the closing line of HBO's Chernobyl miniseries, is known only to Jet herself.

As for the price of the truth, that remains to be decided. Within the Courts of the Crystal Millenium, and the Office of the Convention Authority, the wheels of inquiry have begun to turn. The collective Juries in the Courts of public opinion have already begun their vociferous debate.

One is left only with the impression that the price of truth that Jet Jaguar fears, is far higher than anything within the powers of the Convention.

-----
-------------------------------------------------

Spoiler

Although I'm sure the two people who're going to read this have already read it, maybe I can add a note or two of what I'm trying to do. I want to try and ask some questions about the 'well respected' people in fandom, and stuff that gets excused or brushed under the cover, because someone is popular, or because they 'always do that'.

It's just Jet acting out again - but a lot of people were nearly killed.

I tried it with another story - but people didn't really bite.

There's one interpretation is that, covering up the incident and the extend of it might be called an attack on people visiting Frigga. They unknowingly exposed themselves to radiation at levels that may well have caused them to reconsider visiting the station. Maybe that's a backdoor access to issues like consent and the like.

There's also the cliquesshness of it all - Jet is an outsider to the group she's been lumped with

 

[Dartz]

Let's try this. See what happens.... not that anyone reads these.

Relevent Prior Reading

Relevant image link

---------
The office had little, to no decoration - a bare testament to how little time its occupant actually spent there. A desk finished in cheap printed plastic veneer carried no papers or computer. An office chair had been used exactly once, causing the shock to collapse.

The crystalline carbon walls had been rendered a milky white opaque by careful acid etching, patterns waved through layers mimicking the grain of timber.

Only a pair of battered steel blades in a presentation case, and a greyscale sketch framed on the wall gave it any sort of personality. Jet couldn't help but stare at that smiling image of herself, soaring through the sky with a bright shining smile on her face.

Jet found it hard to remember a time when she'd been that happy.

Not recently anyway.

Her mind couldn't quite put words to how she felt, while the image grinned back at her with a mockery of how she should be feeling.

Her muse did it's best to be helpful, pinging off another dozen alerts that her name had appeared in another dozen blogs, a few forum posts, and even a Boskone darkweb site. The Chewy Gristle commentary hour had well and truly entered its second priapism.

Momo von Satan gleefully read out the possible consequences, while The Cock ejaculated over the deeper technical details of exactly what went wrong and the physics behind it.

She pushed it out of her mind. Of course, they'd all found the story they wanted.

She felt the ground shift under her feet - a momentary sense that the room had begun to turn around her, even as her own stabilisers insisted it wasn't. That, and a building headache in the back of her skull warned that her blood sugar might be getting low.

Jet opened a drawer in her fibre-board desk and grabbed a fresh 'Booster'' pack. It took a moment to unclip the empty one from her waist, then mount the fresh one in its place. A blip from a chip in the pack's own controller her told her it'd last for another twelve hours.

The booster-packs contained the majority of vitamins, minerals, sugars and proteins needed to keep her going, in a format that could be fed almost directly into her bloodstream.

They had been intended to keep Kunstler going on long missions in open vacuum where having an actual meal would be obviously impossible. Jet'd taken to using them just to keep going and save time on bothering to cook and clean up.

In the back of her mind, she noted it'd been weeks she'd she'd actually eaten anything, and almost as long since she'd felt hungry. Something about that idea warmed her inside, confirming her self-identity just that bit more.

A message from Frigga through her personal relay killed whatever small comfort that gave her.

Two more banal items that begged for her personal seal of approval. The interruption blistered her mind. A third had her snarling, wishing she had a phone she could launch through a window to escape from the stream of notifications.

She gave everyone the answers they could've found themselves if they'd bothered looking them up.

Baron Frigga had to be on call to make shit happen. Jet couldn't say No. Things would start to unwind without her. On Frigga, the War on Kipple marched on and it had an insatiable appetite for bureaucracy.

It was necessary, she thought.

A knock at the door

"Yeah, who is it?"

The door opened with a squawk from an oil-starved hinge. She heard the rustle of fabric, followed by the groan of irritation of someone dealing with it. A smile crawled across her lips

Jet always thought that Anika Hansen never particularly looked comfortable in glacier-white gown made from spun diamond fibres and silk. Privately, she never ceased being glad she'd been spared the requirement to wear a similar level of plumage.

"We need to talk, Jet," she said, before taking a seat on an unused couch.

Oh.

"I need you to tell me what happened." said Anika. "I need you to tell me why you didn't tell anyone. I need to know why this happened, Jet. I need the truth."

Jet knew in her heart, Anika would be the one to understand. Finally, someone who wouldn't just assume the fucking worst.

"There's no truth - not really," she said, looking right at Anika as if she'd understand from that. "Fenspace runs on the narrative, on the story. Some people want stories about heroes and not victims. Some want stories about victims and not heroes. But every good story needs a villain." Jet didn't break her gaze. "It doesn't matter what the reality is. Now they have their story. And we have to be the villains."

"That's cynical," said Anika, calmly.

Jet folded her arms. "The fact that we're both here tells me otherwise."

Anika took a breath. "We aren't here because of the explosion - we're standing here because of the coverup. Because for some reason you felt the need to keep quiet on what was almost another Crystal Osaka. Because everyone on Frigga was nearly killed."

She placed her hands on her lap, obviously trying her best to keep things even - to keep the manner people expected of someone they called 'Queen'.

"But they weren't. We stopped the accident. Why should we tell anyone? Why should we let ourselves be dragged over the coals as the morons who blew up a reactor? We'd look like idiots who can't do anything right. Who does that serve?"

The sense of betrayal stung in her heart and snapped from her tongue

"People could've helped." said Anika, sounding more saddened, than annoyed. "Everyone would've helped. If only they'd been asked. Putting out the fire. Cleaning up the wreckage. Cleaning up the radiation. Making the existing systems safer. Even evacuating Frigga rather than risking hundreds of lives on a gamble."

"You know damn well that they wouldn't…" Jet snapped back at her. "And even if they did, they'd only do it so they could gloat over us afterwards, as proof that we weren't capable of looking after ourselves."

"So instead of trying to work with everyone," Anika answered, softly "Instead you've convinced yourself, and every one Frigga, that everyone's working against them, and that you'll have to go it alone."

Jet felt herself compelled to look her in the eyes.

"It'd help if the parliament didn't start out treating us, like a rock full of children. No matter what happens, we can't fucking win. We try ask for more funding to fix basic things and it gets turned down because, obviously we're a fuckups if we can't maintain basic shit on our own. And when shit breaks down because we can't afford to fix it, and we miss our targets, we're fucking incompetent and don't deserve the money to fix the problem because obviously we'll just piss it away into space."

Why the hell couldn't she understand that. "I'm doing what needs to be done to keep Frigga working the way everyone wants it to."

"So you went somewhere else."

Jet felt herself blink owlishly "What?"

Why did that sound like such an accusation?

"Ben told me about the project. That they've been funding it undercover." Anika paused a moment, taking time to consider her words. " I don't know how I can let it continue after this. This has created an unholy mess"

"Like I said, I don't have a choice," said Jet. "We had to keep it secret."

She gave Jet a look that seemed more disappointed, than angry. "If that's what you'd told me earlier, I might've believed it."

Jet felt her words die in her throat. She wanted to scream at her. To beg her to try and understand

Ben leaked.

"What did Ben tell you?"

"That you're going to be making fuel for the next generation of Blackbirds. And this whole thing's about keeping the Boskone from finding out."

"Fuck's sake." she breathed. Jet buried her face in her hands, resisting the urge to scream. She probably could've crushed her own skull, if she tried. It might've been merciful.

Anika's gown rustled again as she pushed herself to her feet.

"We can't risk another Osaka. Not over something like Blackbird fuel." she said. "And if you can't understand that, maybe you need to find somewhere else to live."

"Frigga is my home."

The words came from her mouth before they even reached her mind.

"It's also home for over five hundred people now. Being first in the door, doesn't give you the right to stay if you're making it a dangerous place for everyone else. I'll leave you alone to think about that"

Jet stood there, spinlocked. The right thing to do, would've been to fill her in - to tell her the whole truth, or let her work it out on her own. Telling her, increased the risk of it all falling apart. One more datapoint that allowed one of the pattern-matchers out there to work it out.

The necessary thing, was to keep the secret and drive on, to close ranks just that little bit tighter - maybe to put things in motion in a way that couldn't be stopped.

She heard the door lock again, and realised she'd been left alone with her thoughts. Jet paced the room, her heels clicking on the tiled floor, looking for a spark of inspiration - something to guide her towards the right answer.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do?"

The picture didn't answer. It smiled back at her, mocking her on some level. That was the person she wanted to be. Unfortunately, it just wasn't who she became.

An idea entered her mind. Before she'd even recognised it, it'd carried her through the citie's airlock, and out into open space.

Venus receded into a point of light. She had a sense where it changed - she just needed to see where it happened.

------

Breaking into the asteroid proved far easier than she remembered. Where once there'd been monitored deadlocks and automated defence turrets - only a simple padlock and a pressure seal remained.

The blast-marks on the surface still seemed as fresh as the day she'd made them.

A few guards from Great Justice remained to patrol the ruin, keeping the Stalkers away. Otherwise, the rock had been empty for nearly a decade. It'd been stripped bare of anything that might've been valuable, or could've been of use in a court of law, on a test bench or to an intelligence analyst. Only the structure and framework remained,

The metal framework supporting the tunnels had already begun to split and fray like rotting timber. The hopes and dreams that'd built the place had long since gone, replaced first by a nightmare of violence, then by nothing at all.

The wave had a funny way about it. Things would last for years without maintenance or repair, so long as someone still lived there and gave it a spark of life. Once abandoned, things could unwind themselves in months, turning to kipple as the energy and intent that filled them evaporated and left them to come apart and become kipple. Once Kippleisation set in - almost nothing could stop it. People just stopped caring.

It happened to people too, Jet figured. The wave broke both ways like that. What people thought you could do mattered as much as what you thought you could do.

Jet moved on with that thought, carrying it with her.

Papers, cloth, toys, smashed fragments of peoples lives gathered in the corners to hide, or waited patiently for their owners to come back.

Some were in prison. Some had been released. A few lived out their lives in rehabilitation or long term care. Many died when the station fell. Most had been forgotten.

Only the darkness seemed to remember. It resisted a cyber's unnatural eyesight. It fooled the image intensifiers in her visor, throwing back shades of threats that'd long since passed. The sense of dread lingered in her heart,

Her mind mutated the static of her radios into the sounds of a distant war - shards of dead voices playing in the back of her mind, begging for rescue she couldn't give.

Alone in the dark Jet felt herself being stalked by some unseen predator, biding its time, waiting for a door to close and lock behind her. The sensation pulled her body tight, begging her to bolt and run for it - to get out.

She dared to use her torchlight, risking discovery by a passing patrol. Jet knew she could stay ahead of them

Alone in the depths she found herself wondering at whatever impulse had compelled her to come back. In the back of her mind she felt a thrill rise in her body as her navigation maps fixed her position.

She'd stood on that spot, years before.

A brief pause, while she'd gotten her bearings.

Rubble blocked her path back. Only the Gruppe had raced ahead, riding the shockwave. Dozens had been buried under tons of rock - the few survivors begging for help through their radios while an entire asteroid crushed in around them.

It took far too long for them to stop. Longer again to find what was left.

Jet kept moving. Forward was the only way to go

She could walk through the moments, as clear and vivid as if they'd happened the day before. Brass shell casings still littered the floor, mingling with fragments of grenades and the few shards of bone the cleanup missed.

Jet drew a long breath through her nose, flooding her nostrils with the same familiar scent - a mix of wet iron, dry concrete and burnt gunpowder. She felt that flash of panic. That thrill of survival - of being one step ahead and leaving death in her wake. Faster. Smarter. Stronger. Keeping one breath ahead.

She felt herself hunted again, the darkness chasing her forward. Of course, the security grid must've still been up. The guards must've spotted her.

Jet reached out with her sensors, finding only glimmers of distant energy. Nothing close. Nothing active.

She waited, holding her breath, expecting anybody. But nobody came.

Jet took a breath, moving deeper, past research labs that'd been stripped bare and bunkrooms whose occupants might've survived and found their way home, even if they never really left.

She passed the moments where she'd found her friends, dead on the ground. Jet stood, staring at blank stone where Alex had died.

Jet took a breath. Her heart ached to fly with Alex again, even after thirteen years. Her face still shone in Jet's memory.

She moved on before too much could be dredged up. Maybe if she'd been faster the first time around, they could've linked up and made it out together, but that didn't happen.

She scattered the Gruppe so they could each use their speed to their advantage and spread the enemy, rather than being tied together. It meant they'd died alone without help if they got pinned down.

Another collapsed tunnel marked the graves of some Chaos Marines. Jet found another way around this time - through a tunnel that'd been laser-cut by the teams following her through. Glassified walls threw back warped reflections of herself.

She thought she might've looked that bit too clean compared to how she felt.

Someone had taken a photograph of her on the way out. Bloodied, but not her own blood. Battered, but still standing. She'd looked like the Mad Max version of herself - armour strapped together, but with blades on her arms still shining clean.

Look at those eyes, as cold and hard the ice at the bottom of a glacier.

That was how a random voice online had put it. That was how they pigeonholed her. What people expected her to be good at, what they expected from her when she wasn't going off half-cocked or figuring out how to land when she'd already leapt.

They didn't understand. Doing nothing meant death. At least if you acted, you could fix your mistakes later.

What people thought you could do mattered as much as what you thought you could do, she recalled.

Jet took a breath.

It'd been founded under the name 'Olympus Heights'. Official records called it Boskone Four. Most who'd been there called it Jusenkyou. What began as an experiment in meritocracy with a libertarian bent, ended in nightmares and nemesis.

What began with the basic idea that success was earned, mutated into the assurance that failure was deserved, a might-makes-right Kratocracy where those with more money, strength or influence could do what they willed with those who had less, assuring themselves the entire time that if you weren't strong enough, wise enough, or wealthy enough to stop someone doing something to you - then it was your fault it happened.

Survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog, an unplanned experiment in Social Darwinism - a Randian Gulch turned into a grim authoritarian parody of itself. Even the true Randroids had been horrified by what happened.

She entered the main concourse, a rusting sign hanging from the ceiling, showing a tournament bracket,. still announcing 'Bitches' as the challenger for top dog. Jet mused that, since she killed the man in the centre circle, technically that made her the last lord and master of the rock. She passed the spot where she'd watched a catgirl exact revenge on her handler. The man didn't scream as he died - but it wasn't from lack of trying.

She'd killed anyone armed, in case they shot her in the back - no matter how panicked they seemed to be. It could've been an act. It had been for one of them. It was about neutralising the potential threat, removing their capability to act.

She'd put that in her report. In a cold office, the review board had rubber stamped it as justified.

Jet found herself standing at an open door labelled 'Station Director'. She could remember the sound it made as it hissed open, revealing the man at the centre of it all. In the darkness beyond she could almost see his ghost still standing in his own armour.

A flash from her torch exorcised the room. The little kick of adrenaline remained in her veins.

In a strange way, she'd still expected him to be there - but nobody came.

It'd taken her three hours to reach it. It'd take her two days and dozens of bodies to make it the first time. Like going back over an empty level in a videogame to find that last pickup secret. Nothing remained but dead desolation and echoes of what had been.

She entered the Director's office. The blast-mark on the wall that marked his passing still remained, two great gouges torn from the concrete floor and ceiling where the arms of her balisword had embedded themselves. Bits of the director himself probably still lived in the cracks of the floor.

Immortal maybe, but not indestructible.

His office had been stripped of anything valuable. Only bare walls and the empty skeletons of computer consoles remained. Power cables had been tied into hanging nooses to keep them from dangling.

Jet felt grateful she'd come unarmed this time.

She pondered on who Rosebottom had been. A person who'd come up with the same hopes, dreams and ideals as the rest, became their anthesis. Someone who'd gone from Sad Puppy to Mad Dog, desperate to test himself against the best so he could prove himself better.

She remembered finding some of his blog posts, from right after he'd come up. He'd seemed so damned happy and excited, the same as everyone else. Then it all began to rot. With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed almost Greek.

Ultimately, the universe concluded he'd become exactly what everyone expected him to be. They'd put him in a pigeonhole and he'd expanded to fill it.

She paced around, her heels tick-ticking on the concrete floor, looking for something, while still not being sure what it had been. Whatever epiphany Jet had expected by going there, eluded her.

In the end, it had just been an empty office.

Jet took a breath.

She'd traced her entire route through Jusenkyo and found nothing. Except for one last place.

She had to backtrack. A blown tunnel had blocked it off.

Jet found herself dreading it. But she couldn't avoid it. The closer she got, the more she felt certain it was the root of it all, where she'd find her answer

Excercise Control.

The room had been stripoped bare, leaving only a single steel desk that'd been bolted to the floor. Underneath it, a scratch on the floor marked the point where one of them had tried to hide - and failed.

Please, You don't have to do this.

She stood in echo of that moment from a decade ago, letting it wash over her. She remembered how she'd written it up at the time.

"Drone operators neutralised to prevent any repair or retasking of the station systems."

Whether they deserved to die or not, didn't matter. The review board called their deaths acceptable and justifiable. In the cold light of windowless office, a panel of three anonymous arbiters had agreed with her and given it the rubber stamp. Justified by circumstances.

Maybe if she'd described what actually happened,- maybe the bureaucrats might've had a different opinion. It might've even made the Kratmanites nope the fuck out.

It'd been the necessary thing. Enemy combatants didn't just carry a gun. It didn't feel right - but it had been. It must've attracted attention. A week later, she'd been offered her first warrant card.

She felt in her soul, that the ability to see past what felt 'right' and do what was necessary in the moment, had burned her in some undetectable way.

She did what was necessary. To keep the lights on on Frigga. To keep the Boskone from rising back up. To keep the world from falling apart. Jet was the one who knew where the line was - and could operate in those grey spaces where what 'felt' right, and what was right were two different things.

The sound of footsteps snapped her out of it, shuffling down the concrete. Loud, either incompetent, or doing their level best to announce their presence. They wanted her to know they were coming.

Either they were supremely confident. Or they didn't know who and what she was.

Jet readied herself.

"Great Justice. I'm not armed," a man's voice called out."I'm here to talk."

She prepared herself, incase they were lying. Her engines spooled, energy charging her body, waiting to be unleashed in a high-speed run for open space.

A man in a light tactical uniform stepped around the door, gloved hands raised above his head. Jet guessed from his face that he couldn't have been more than 20 years old, with deep, hazelnut eyes, and a dark, full beard

"I'm not armed," he said again. "I just want to talk."

Jet felt her body relax.

"I'm fine," she said, curtly.

"I know," he said. "But people like you come back here all the time. We just make sure they aren't going to hurt themselves."

Of course, he was insinuating she'd come there to kill herself.

"I'm fine," Jet answered again. "I just wanted to see something."

He looked up to her, then took a breath, looking in to the empty room

"They found seven bodies in here. Some station technicians who'd been running the drones. Basically unarmed IT people. They re-programmed the drones to turn on the Boskone and someone murdered 'em for it. Complete cold-blood slaughter - some of them were hiding under the table - they weren't even armed."

"I was here," she said, in a quiet voice.

"I'm sorry you had to find that," he said, trying to console her. His gaze settled on the desk. "Rosebottom was a psycho. Good thing A.C. put him down when she did,"

Jet's jaw hinged open, distraught. She wondered for a moment if she'd mis-remembered the entire thing

Reality didn't matter, not when faced with the narrative. In the end, history was nothing more than what people collectively agreed had happened. People preferred the narrative -- it was so much more comfortable than the real thing.

Heroes were heroes. Villains were villains. Once the narrative decided what path you were on, every decision it allowed you to make just reinforced it.

Like a shite game of Dungeons and Dragons.

"I'm on a train that's going somewhere," she said. "That I don't want it to go."

"I can't help you with that," the guard said. "There's a counselor at the outpost."

Jet felt a soft smile curl her lips. "I don't think they can help with this problem. It's something different."

It left her with the idea , that she needed to do something to get off the railroad -s something that ran across the story and into a new direction - something intelligent.

She needed to talk with someone - she just didn't know who.

She needed to know what the narrative expected her to do.

-------------------------------

 

[Dartz]

---I forgot to post this here---

----------

"Instrumentality Committee Meeting"

That was how it always appeared in her dayplanner. She preferred the reference to what it was actually called. It matched how she felt about it, even if it lacked the truly 'scure cachet the real name had.

The worst part of her job, Jet thought, were the group calls and conferences. At least the meetings on Frigga could be held in person - but calls to Mars, to other members of parliament, to the mundanes - all had to be done by remote. By hologram, by video, or by ominous sound-only monolith.

She hated how nobody ever managed to get their damned mic levels right. Someone was too loud. Someone was too quiet. Someone spoke in jitters and starts, fractions of a syllable being lost to cosmic rays and encoding errors. Someone lagged by long seconds, perpetually speaking out of sync and killing the flow of conversation.

Jet gave thanks that the camera on her monitor had long broken - it gave her the freedom to walk around a little. Moving helped her think. It sparked the mind. It earthed the restless energy in her bones.

Eddie had the characteristics of the still to be built reactors finalised. They existed in their complete form in his mind, running already for years. He had a roadmap for the life of the reactors, from first fuelling, through to their eventual decommissioning. He had the characteristics for the reactor's plutonium confirmed.

Jet kept her usual misgivings about his simulations to herself. She'd be the odd one out in the group - especially with A.C. having decided to join in. Jet suspected Eddie had begun to hate her.

Oh ye of little faith. Jet wondered where they got theirs, or where hers had gone.

Kohran had begun designing weapons, based on that characteristic.

"It'd be as powerful as a truck bomb" she said, "But a truck bomb with some stolen nuclear waste would be a lot easier to build, a lot easier to hide and wouldn't have to worry about it meltin' itself to destruction."

"Problem solved then" Jet's muse added her reply to the conversation, correctly guessing what she would've felt.

"There is still the benefit to producing such a weapon - the radiation pulse of fission," Eddie remarked. "It would be extremely radiotoxic."

"Well yeah. You can't make it impossible. So you just make it like doing a tooth extraction on an angry badger - from the wrong end." A few people smirked in response to that. "And it can't trigger a secondary."

"There are easier options, to do far more damage." A.C added.

"Best we can do I guess," Benjamin Rhodes added with an almost incongruous cheerfulness. "No more city-killers."

The buck passed to Jet, responsible for the practicalities of getting things done. Her mouth regurgitated the details of the funding plans.

"I've got deals with some former Belt Alliance mines." she said. "They've been hammered lately but since we're subsidised by Venus to supply Bristol, we can sell them ore well below their cost of production - they can compete with the Rockhounds and line their pockets with the difference."

If they had an attack of conscience, they had to worry about whatever evidence might've potentially been gathered on their own specific activities as part of the Belt Alliance protection racket.

A.C's expression flattened, her lips pursing as it sat a little ill with her.

"I know we're breaking the Parliament's agreement with RDA" Jet continued, feeling a little bit giddy inside at getting one over the powerful. " Some of it's going to the station fund to pay for everyone's pet projects and quality of life things here on Frigga, but I've had to cut a few MP's in so they've an interest in keeping quiet. The Project gets less than half of it."

"I might like to know who they are when this is done," A.C mused

"There;ll be hell to pay if this gets out. The Rockhounds have political influence," said Kohran. "They'll go to legal war."

"We can always buy a coupla shipments," said Ben. "Send a regular ship over that comes back empty. Take it into stock on paper and then lose it to production issues. It never actually exists. I think everyone can do that."

"That'll help." Jet said, with a quick smile. "We're doing some production efficiency things to increase output aswell, but there're limits. The more we sell, the more the cost of doing business goes up."

"You might approach the RDA under the table" A.C. suggested. "If the sale price is lower than their production costs, they may be interested, and that flips the scandal from Frigga breaking an agreement her Majesty's government made, to Frigga being forced to look elsewhere."

Jet felt her stomach drop, appalled at the idea for reasons she couldn't explain.

"It'd embarrass them, rather than give them more ammunition," A.C added.

Of course, the idea drew a few nods of agreement from the rest of those present. It made perfect sense. It sat wrong with Jet's soul in a way she couldn't place - as if it violated the basic tenant of her being - an anathema to her existence.

The faces on the call waited for an answer.

"Yeah, I can do that," she said, with all the enthusiasm of a child for their homework.

Jet had long learned the art of separating how she felt about doing a thing, from the necessity of actually doing it. These tasks were essential, no matter how wrong they felt.

Her mind still clutched at straws, looking for anything to justify her instincts.

"But the power dynamic changes," she said."The Rockhounds have no incentive for keeping the arrangement secret. I can't push them harder either."

The corrupt could be relied upon to do what was necessary to keep their face in the trough. The RDA had no such incentive - they could make demands. They could take control.

"I'll have to make the introduction, of course," said A.C., not seeming particularly enthused about it. "Marsden may need some convincing."

Of course, Jet thought. Her presence changed the dynamic. The orbit of the conspiracy shifted.
The sense of powerlessness simmered inside Jet - of having no choice, no matter what, of being swept along in the narrative, no matter how she thought things should be.

Dealing with Big Name Fans always came with a cost. But they all brought their own strengths to the table.

Ben contributed the bulk of the engine technology, the nuclear fuels and, on the surface, a lot of the overt funding. Kohran contributed the weapons knowledge with Eddie as a backstop. Eddie himself brought the biggest technical mind in Fenspace, even if it strained against the mundane limits of Frigga's own engineers.. A.C. had been the unwitting participant, not even knowing about her involvement, until it had to be explained to her. She now had enough influence to maybe keep things smooth - that tendency to shape the narrative and help it flow. Of all things, it made success more likely.

Jet contributed a space station with a lot of space and a history of successfully containing a reactor explosion, along with the willingness to go so far out on a limb, she couldn't even see the tree - and the ability to figure out how to land when the limb finally snapped.

Jet Jaguar could be seen to be that bit reckless. It fit how the narrative of Fenspace saw her.

It's how everybody believed she'd snapped when she chased down Asmodeus Grey. It's why nobody believed she'd been the lead on the mission - after one attempt to cover for her backfired.

Jet's eyes had fallen to her reflection in the monitor.

The woman who stared at the wall behind her, looked tired beyond belief, like an echo of who she'd been over a decade before, when a random photographer had caught a picture of what'd been left after Jusenkyou had been finished.

She looked like she felt - like the dregs of a drink sitting in last night's glass. Little left to give, and what was left had long gone stale. Little left to look forward to.

"There's another fly in the ointment," she said. "Anika knows what we're doing out here - Anika Springfield."

That moment's silence, invited her to speak more. Of course, she'd have to drop a friend in it.

"I told her," Ben announced, saving Jet the trouble of dropping him. "She asked me questions, and I couldn't lie to her, so I told her it was our project - " he smiled again "To hide the real truth."

The worst part of it being, he'd thought he'd been doing the right thing.

"Ben, talking to Anika will have consequences you know."

Consequences that could range from a calm chiding, to having to bring the chocolate cheesecake the next time the 'committee' met, to time, costs or influence as needs be. A.C. spoke in a tone that didn't

"I was trying to-"

"You DIDN'T. CONSULT. That's caused further issues to deal with. And it doesn't look good for you."

"Wha-?" Benjamin's avatar blinked on screen

"If that's what you do to a supposed friend, what else?"

"Anika's my friend too." Ben had his hackles up. "She asked me if I knew anything. I couldn't lie to her."

"Yeh still coulda sent me a bleedin' message before she knocked on me door,"

That moment of silence warned her that her frustration had bubbled up - the mask had slipped. Eddies little avatar seemed to inflate a little with barely contained smugness, as if to say 'See what I've been dealing with.

"This won't get us further," A.C. warned in a plain tone. "The next step is, of course, either to try and convince her that it's best if this remains a secret, or to try get ahead of it."

The discussion began - what, how and who. What did the narrative expect. They each offered the solutions expected of them.

Her mind drifted away. A few people on Frigga offered their problems, hoping Baron Frigga would solve them with the personal touch. Sign off on a project. Put a word in with the council. Ask a question of a minister. Figure out which node had gone corrupt. Simple things - stupid things - but solving them made people happy and say thanks. Local politics never changed - she may be a loon who'll kill us all, but sure she fixed the roads and got the jobs in, and didn't she get those two steam locomotives approved for the Sparks?

Even that didn't seem to matter. Part of her mind still lingered in that room on Jusenkyou, terrified at being discovered, and still hoping nobody ever learned of her side-trip.

The only way she could win, was get off the path the narrative expected of her.

What's the last thing you do in a conspiracy?

"We go public," Jet said. It wasn't a proposal. "Everything except the bomb. We go with Ben's explanation."

The silence that followed, politely requested an explanation. She figured out the reason why, after coming up with the action.

"When it all comes out, they'll all be happy that we got caught, and they'll be happy that they know and they're smarter than us and we didn't get away with it. And maybe they'll understand why we kept it all secret, without really knowing. " Jet felt a savage smirk draw across her face. "So long as they're happy with the story, they'll stop looking and nothing ever needs to be hidden again."

The ordinary fan could be glad about being smarter than the Big Names. They could be happy with the narrative - so long as it fit what was expected of the participants. The narrative would become truth. The reality would be forgotten.

Ben made a face like someone had stepped on his grave. "Yikes!"

A moment's silence followed. Kohran glanced at Eddie's Avatar.

"Marsden might not want to support a competitor, in the case," A.C. remarked. "But that might also be a matter of discussion,"

Of course, she'd also understand, on some level. They both worked as Troubleshooters. A good hang out could hide a great many things, especially when that hangout confirmed people's biases.

In the back of her mind, Jet's muse made notes on an angle that could be played. Play into Marsden's impression of Frigga, the Millenium and Government enterprise.

"Well, there're other things that can be done with a nuclear reactor, too," said Jet, "I'm sure we can find something of value we can do for the Rockhounds."

Kohran glanced offscreen momentarily. "Yeah, that'll be easy an' I know they use some isotopes for densimeters."

"We use them too," added Ben. "For deep penetration inspection and in the infirmary."

A.C's avatar paused a moment. "I've requested a meeting with Marsden."

Jets eyes glanced at all the window. "Speaking of meetings, I've to get to Venus in an hour."

"Good luck," Ben Chuckled.

She gave a shrug of her shoulders. "I can be late. It'll be nice to be fashionable for once." Jet took a breath. "By the next meeting, I think we'll have a press release ready, our engineers will have the construction plans done."

Another message pinged off inside her mind - one requesting Sylia attend an urgent meeting. Keeping that deception going be telepresence wouldn't last much longer, but it had to. Jet thought she could take it while flying.

"The Prototype bird with the new engines will be ready by then," and Ben seemed positively proud of that. "We're getting a little more kick out of the engines too"

"I might wanna try one of those," said Kohran.

"I'll get you one of the first batch," Ben promised, showing the first

"Just a test is fine."

"I will have the blast shields ready," said Eddie. And he would be so pleased to do it. "Along with the final stability calculations in a format which is human interpretable - and for public consumption."

Through it all, it seemed like they were still on track. She realised she'd stopped pacing around the room.

The participants logged off in turn, each with their own traditional goodbyes. Jet watched them go, one by one, until only A.C. herself remained, her green eyes not able to see Jet, but somehow still watching.

She sat back in her seat, and Jet found herself wondering what was left to discuss.

"Are you alright, Jet?"

She hadn't expected that. Her breath caught in her throat. She felt like a child who'd been caught with her hand in the biscuit tin.

"It's not hard to tell that you haven't had time to sleep for at least a month." A.C. gave a gentle smile, not threatening. "Which means you're probably neglecting your maintenance." The chiding was gentle - non-threatening. Just a warning that it'd been spotted. "No matter how much we want to think otherwise, we're only human,:

Jet could tell she was being deliberately careful, like she was offering a hand.

"I've too much to do right now."

Back of on any of it, and it all fell apart.

"Other people can carry the torch, if you let them."

Other people would probably fuck it up. Jet bit her lip a moment, getting the sense she was being led into a minefield.

"I've a meeting with an advocate about the reactor inquiry in an hour," she said, as a deflection. "I need to get to that. I'd rather a barrister in that room than me."

A.C. simple nodded again.

"I'm asking you as a friend," she said. "Before I have to step in as your Doctor. Please look after yourself."

The call cut, leaving Jet alone in the room, shaking inside her armour. She screamed at the blank screen, before launching it across the floor at an inhuman speed. It burst into a shower of electric sparks.

Rage. Betrayal. Fear, she couldn't explain what it was, even to herself. How the fuck was she supposed to take a break anyway?

Stingray begged for more attention from an owner who never existed, and who had kess to give. If that collapsed, she'd be the person who let an entire company and those who it employed collapse into the ground - for no good reason at all..

Frigga and the War on Kipple raged on. A flamewar needed to be headed off after someone accidentally modded themself into some artist's closed species. Something always broke, and it was always something she had to fix.

Followed by the duties expected of Baron Frigga to Her Majesty's parliament, which seemed to actively reject her presence but still demanded she attend to them.

Asagiri needed work to stay relevant and in people's minds. Someone wanted to buy a spacecraft and it needed to be tweaked for a test-flight. The last remaining racing team since Daryl pulled out pushed for more and more technical support to stay ahead. Let that fall, and the one thing that might've been interesting would wither and be forgotten as it fell out of the collective mindshare of enthusiasts everywhere.

And then, The Reactors, which ate hours between local planning and negotiations with suppliers and keeping an eye on the Boskone to make sure they hadn't figured it out. Leave it alone, and risk the end of the world.

The one thing A.C. didn't understand - a controlled shutdown of all four machines couldn't be possible. And trying to stop them would have her taking the blame as the person who ruined it for everyone who relied on it. Nobody would care.

Even if she succeeded, nobody would know and she'd have to put up with everyone thinking she was a loon.

Worse than that…

…given a few quiet moments she really wasn't sure what she could do to take a break. Nothing in life was fun anymore. Most were just a slow march towards an inevitable disappointment.

Jet worked in what had once been the Station Chief Engineer's office, surrounded by dozens of half-finished projects that'd been abandoned as whatever spark that'd momentarily inspired them guttered and died. Mackie's hacked-open skull still stared from a shelf where it'd been put.

She couldn't bring herself to do anything else with it.

Her meeting on Venus still insisted she attend.

Within minutes she was hurtling through open space aboard XR, pushing up against Magnificent Midnight's speed records. Of course, if she dared to try and beat them the response would be swift and crushing. She cut it close inside the orbit of Mercury - close enough for the paint to blister, panels to pop and the sunshades to start to fizzle.

She plunged the black, dagger-like aircraft towards the planet, crashing it into a high parking orbit, annoying some tool of a pilot who an alert from his TCAS and acted like it was the worst thing in the world

Rather than bother with spending a half hour in the swarm of traffic control to get down into the cities, Jet left he spacecraft in orbit on autopilot, set the transponder to broadcast the 'crew resting' signal, popped the canopy and snuck herself down through the traffic with her private transponder off.

XR remained in orbit, pilotlessly cruising through traffic.
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