I’ve decided to flip from expansive to tight on this one. Three thousand words, six sections, trim all the fat. Let’s see how it goes.
…
The Thawing
We’re barely on schedule. Everything about this job is harder than it should be, and it shouldn’t be hard at all. This place was made by the Amalgamation! Hell, it was made for us. Everything should work perfectly, on the first try. Instead we’re fighting freezes, leaks, stalled filters — if it wasn’t an alientech site, I’d be recommending that we just give up like the original designers did, and let the Covered Ocean have the whole damned thing back.
Chumley doesn’t understand how weird it is that we’re having problems, either. I’d expected her to do the usual nogo thing, and go around screaming about the delays. Instead, she’s been staying out of the way, letting us work in peace. She’s not yelling about the cost, either. Every time my team logs an overtime charge, Chumley checks off on it without even arguing.
…There’s something really weird going on here.
But we are on schedule. We mapped out the entire site, gotten the breach in the side closed, and slapped sealant on anything that looks like it might be leaky. The first slushpipe is moving the seawater out, and now we’re wading through the half-drained halls and looking for more leaks. There aren’t that many, actually. The Amalgamation did good construction work. Shame they’re all dead. We’ll start running the other two slushpipes tomorrow.
