Miracle Workers (SCE Books 5-8) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [64]
They don’t have food replicators—the food is all cooked with these chemical stoves that don’t work half the time. The food is stored in freezer units that also don’t work half the time, so a lot of it is spoiled. In fact, Zilder had picked up some fresh food when he went to get me at the starbase—it got a much better reception than I did.
Which leads me to the workers themselves. As expected, they’re a mix, but most of them are either Nalori or Osina. The Nalori are humanoid, with skin tones ranging from medium ash gray to almost charcoal. Their eyes, by contrast, are uniformly black, with no apparent pupils. They practice a form of ritual scarring of the forearms and face—according to the database, this marks rites of passage like adolescence, adulthood, marriage, birth of sons, veneration of elders, and so on, which Carol confirmed. Most of the men are bald, though I have no idea if that’s biology or fashion, with long braided chin-beards of pale, violet hair.
And they hate my guts.
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh, but when Zilder introduced me to the foreperson—a large man named Kejahna—I could feel the disdain oozing out of his pores.
The only one who wasn’t hostile was Razka. He showed me to my tent—my tent! —and said he’d be serving as liaison between me and the workers. He seems nice enough—at least he didn’t glare at me—so maybe this won’t be so bad. And, since I’m both in charge and the only woman, I get my own tent. Every other tent has four people in it. Lucky me.
I’m going to try to get some sleep, then see what I can do in the morning. But I already miss the da Vinci.
First officer’s log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53274.1
My first day on Sarindar was spent being given a tour of the SA site by Razka, after a breakfast of cold oatmeal because the main cooking unit broke down, and I didn’t think to bring my own stove.
The design flaws that I found in the specs for the SA are exacerbated by shoddy work and a backward method of implementation. The first thing I did was order the detail assigned to construct the tubing for the delivery system to stop that and help in the digging of the hole for the antimatter reactor. The warp pulse is going to require the most testing, and it needs to be in place long before the tubing has to be finished. Kejahna wasn’t happy about this, and the workers even less so—digging is much harder work, after all—but they agreed.
Another problem are the antigrav units, which are slow and go off-line regularly, which slows the work down. After pointing this out to me, Razka said, “Welcome to Sarindar. This is the worst place in the galaxy. Nothing works here.”
“That’s going to change,” I said, and proceeded to stop the tour, sit down, and look at one of the antigravs.
“It’s pointless, you know,” Razka said cheerfully. “We’ve poked and prodded that thing for days at a time. Everything’s in working order, it just doesn’t work. This planet is cursed, you see.”
“I don’t believe in curses. I do, however, believe in faulty diagnostic routines.”
Razka frowned at that. “What?”
“The diagnostic routine’s all messed up. It’s in test mode.” I put the diagnostic program into the right mode, and it started listing all the things that were wrong with the unit. “They’re probably all like this.”
I called the assistant foreperson, J’Roh, over. J’Roh was a member of the Osina, an insectoid race—nothing like the Nasats, though. They have large compound eyes, tentacles instead of the more arm-like extremities that P8 Blue has, and six rather than eight of those extremities. None of them have Pattie’s sparkling personality, either. The one trait they share with Nasats, though,