Full Share by Nathan Lowell

out into the ship and then she asked one of us to see if anything was coming into the section. I stuck the nose of my sniffer into the intake manifold and it was clear, but since we didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the ship, I figured we better keep an eye on it. I couldn’t very well stand there with it, so I taped it down, cranked up the audio alarm and left it. Without other sensor capabilities, it was the best I could do.”
    “Very logical, Mr. Wang,” the captain said.
    “Thank you, Captain.”
    “Please continue, Mr. Wang,” she said again and I began to hope I was not going to miss lunch.
    We got to the part where I went onto the bridge with the portable and she made me pause to describe the machine with brand name and full specifications. I was afraid she was going to ask for the serial number, which I didn’t know, but she let me jump ahead to the part where Mr. von Ickles had me boot it up.
    “What did you do when he gave you the program cube,” she asked.
    “I mounted it and began looking at the code. There was a problem with the scripts that needed some adjustments so they would run on my machine and I fixed them. I missed one so the initial load failed, but I saw where it croaked and I got it on the second try.”
    “And are you a computer expert, Mr. Wang?”
    “No, Captain. I used to play around with them a lot back in school but I am particularly familiar with my mother’s machine, sar.”
    “Why is that, Mr. Wang?” she asked.
    “Whenever she would have trouble with it, I had to fix it for her. I also had performed a few upgrades. When she died I stripped her stuff off to backup cubes and reloaded it fresh.” I was proud of myself for not choking there.
    “Yet, in spite of not being an expert, you spotted a problem with the ShipNet code and fixed it in less than ten ticks?”
    “Yes, sar. But it took two tries, and there really wasn’t that much to fix.” I wanted to be honest.
    “Please go on, Mr. Wang.”
    We continued in this vein for some time. We would jump ahead and stop periodically for additional details. They were particularly interested that I thought environmental smelled bad and what the problem turned out to be. We finally got through the part of using the spine as a giant cartridge filter and using the brooms to break up the crust when the CO2 level started rising.
    “Why brooms, Mr. Wang?” she asked.
    “Because we had them, Captain. We needed something that was wide enough to punch a good hole without scattering the powder everywhere. The bristles on a broom worked really well, and we had plenty of them handy.”
    Then I had to go on about replacing the sensor packs and the scheduled maintenance and was just about up to the point where I had to wake up to pee before they finally ran out of questions. Frankly, I was getting a little annoyed because I knew Cookie was already serving lunch.
    Finally, Mr. Maxwell said, “Thank you, Mr. Wang.” He shut off the recorder.
    The captain said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Wang. Dismissed.”
    As I was leaving, Mr. von Ickles said, “Oh, Mr. Wang?”
    I stopped and hoped it wasn’t going to be another question. “Yes, sar?”
    “We lived,” he said, and then winked.
    I smiled. “Yes, sar, we did.”
    They let me leave then and as I was heading back to the mess deck I pulled up my personnel jacket on the tablet. Sure enough there I found a Specialist Two (Systems) rating dated 2352-June-04 and, oddly, it was endorsed by the captain, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Kelley, and Mr. von Ickles. That was the strangest addition to my ratings collection.
    Seeing my ratings made me think of finding a new berth, which in turn reminded me of what waited on Betrus. I sighed at the thought, but lunch called and I was going to answer before my stomach ate my backbone. I just reminded myself to trust Lois.
    Lunch was more than half over by the time I made it to the mess deck. The officers had kept me talking for over two stans.