Service Call

I exhaled.

Can’t those morons get anything right?

Cap loomed over me. He’s a huge guy, and I’m a small girl. Some primal fear stirred within my being as he shook me awake, kind of poking me in the shoulder with his steel fingers. He lost his right hand in the war and had it replaced with a bionic one. I opened my eyes and saw his lantern-jaw and flinty gaze and almost screamed.

“Get up, gear up and go sort the shit out on Mars,” he said. His voice is so deep he could probably break rocks just by humming Amazing Grace. “I think the idiots up there opened the portal to hell again.”

Two minutes later I was suited up, prepared to go online and strolling towards the dunk portal. I yawned and sipped from my sweat-straw. I’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep. They worked you like a dog here on the moon colony’s base. No union here. Nothing but saving other people from their own stupidity.

I’m a total fraud, by the way. Other engineers know exactly what they’re doing. I got the job because I’m a woman, a relatively young woman in her early thirties, and they needed someone to meet the diversity quota. Nine times out of ten, I end up walking away from a job and someone else has to come in and finish it for me. I’m amazed I haven’t been outright fired yet. It’s been almost a year since I got hired and no one seems to have figured it out yet. Everyone mostly leaves me alone and I’m fine with it.

The dunk portal was a hole in the floor rimmed with fluorescent blue lights. It had its own bay at the end of the hall. I stepped into it and everything flipped upside down. I hate dunk portals but this is the only one the base keeps operational at this hour. Saving power for the rest of the flight portals and such. Don’t even get me started…

Everything righted itself again, kind of like when you do a somersault, and then I was in the Mars base’s dunk portal bay, and there was old Hardecker, the night shift supervisor, chewing his thumbnail. He betrayed a small glance of irritation upon seeing I was the one they’d sent, but he did his best to conceal it and greeted me with a curt nod.

“What’s the problem?” I asked. I yawned again, a big one.

“It’s portal 8,” he said. “The one to the lava planet. We can’t close it.”

“Cap said you opened the portal to hell,” I said. “I thought the portal to hell was the fire planet.”

“No, this is the lava planet,” said Hardecker. “Portal to hell’s working fine.”

We started walking down the hall towards the main bay where all the portals were kept.

“And you can’t close it?”

“Well, the guys — “

An alarm blared and both of us winced. I stuck in my hearing plugs. The alarm died off, echoing down the hall. Hardecker, a squat guy of forty-three with a terribly shaped goatee wearing an old ratty Megadeth t-shirt, started talking again. They made us suit up for these service calls, but the operators and management were so used to the atmosphere they never even bothered wearing their oxygen masks. Amazing what humans can adapt to.

“The guys were over there doing samples for the STUFROU tours,” he said. “You know, the ones with the terminal matrix? We’ve been using it all week, and now we can’t get the fucking thing closed and the heat’s making the outside of the portal melt.”

“Well, at least it’s not the portal to hell,” I said. The last time the portal to hell got stuck open it was a living nightmare. Cap himself had to teleport in here and he gave me a look that I’ll never forget when I told him I couldn’t figure it out. I really hoped that wouldn’t happen today.

“So can you take a look at it?”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“Steve was always able to just get it going,” said Hardecker.

“I’m not Steve,” I said, and I probably shouldn’t have said it but honestly at that point those assholes could’ve just fire me and I’d just go back to working for the park service on Earth. I’d been happier there anyway. Never take a job just for the money, kids. It’s never worth it.

We emerged from the dank hallway into the main portal bay, which was huge and noisy and metal from floor to ceiling. The portals — standing portals, all of them, rounded and the size of large doorways — birthed and swallowed operators as they went about their business. This was one of the busiest ports in the solar system. The first one ever commissioned off-earth, too.

I saw the lava portal at the far end. I could tell it was the one we’d be working on because the heat shimmers pouring out of it were visible from across the bay. A number of operators and maintenance crew were gathered around it, and I could see the two maintenance leads all huddled at the control box, scratching their heads and trying to look like they cared it wasn’t working.

I prayed I’d be able to get online with the portal’s ethernet without any problems, but as we approached there was an affirmative-sounding vocal burst from the group around the control box. I saw the portal slide shut, it’s digital doorways zapping themselves out like an old TV. A couple spectators clapped.

“Not gonna fuck with us now, are ya?” yelled Kordie triumphantly, shaking his fist at the closed portal.

“What happened?” Hardecker yelled at them. “We just got controls here.”

Kordie and another maintenance tech named Tonester jogged over to meet us.

“Lost connection with the safety,” explained Tonester. “Froze up, thought it was frozen shut instead of frozen open. We kept thinking it was the HMI, that the swipe went bad or something.”

He turned to me.

“You think you could have Central adjust that, though? The safety switch? That’s not something that should happen again. Almost melted the rim this time. And Javon burned his leg.”

“If the guys wouldn’t fuck with the settings right before stepping through it wouldn’t happen,” Hardecker said. “They gotta wait to break the light curtain. They can’t just hit ‘Go’ and step in.”

“I been tellin’ em that,” Tonester said defensively.

Hardecker turned to me. His tone of voice made him sound like he was addressing a particularly stupid child. I didn’t care.

“So you want to bring up that change to Cap? He can have Steve take care of it later. We need to keep running now.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, relief already flooding me. I’d dodged another call. “Definitely.”

“You know what needs to be done?” Kordie asked. He’s a nice guy, big roly-poly grey teddy bear of a fella. Everyone likes him.

Before I could answer he spat some stream of techie jargon at me. I nodded like I understood and deeply cared about what he was saying. I would tell Steve about it in the morning. Steve would figure it out. He always did.

“K,” said Hardecker. “Well, sorry for dragging you out here at this hour.”

“No worries,” I said. I was so happy I’d get to go back and sleep. If all went well, I’d be undressed and back between the covers within the next twenty minutes.

I bade them farewell and left them to confer.

I’d rather be lucky than smart, I thought to myself as I walked back to the dunk portal.