Sweating inside of his radiation suit, the nuclear workman used tongs to heft the result of an hour's work. The rectangular prism was just over five inches long, while its bulk was a precisely crafted 5.0800 cm by 7.5000 cm. Each surface had, with painstaking effort, been polished to the perfection required of Johansson blocks. This would permit it to be joined to the core of a reactor designed to cover lightyears at a stroke with enough energy left over for far more than survival.
He reflected back. Compressing and shaping the nuclear remnants of the last meltdown seemed a logical step. No other release of the energy would be anything less than fatally catastrophic to the mile-wide ship; still, even this would be highly risky. He got up from his workbench and started walking to the core airlock and waldo controls.
Nobody had realized that shoelaces were a terrible idea on a radiation suit.They had been made that way for decades.
The poor engineer hadn't realized one of those shoelaces was snickering, having quietly freed itself from its bondage in the last hour.
He also hadn't realized that another engineer had neglected his duty and had left open the shielded container containing a number of dangerous fragments from the same event.
So, when he lifted one foot, it tried to move the other. One moment to recall his thoughts to the current scenario, one moment to he was holding a chunk of nuclear material fit for a bomb, and one extra moment to panic. Gravity did the rest.
As he tripped, the tongs slipped and the small, silver shard of devastation started on its ballistic journey. It might have been guided on its journey by some unseen hand to its clean, forceful landing in the open pig.
He curled up into a ball as a blue flash illuminated the room and he knew for sure he was a dead man. It was enough material to go critical and annihilate the entire engine chamber along with anything attached to it, and his imagination could see the atomic terror rending the atoms of the fuel and unleashing an unfathomable quantity of energy into the surrounding world.
Opening his eyes, he blinked.
The engine room certainly wasn't any afterlife he'd heard of, so he knew he wasn't dead.
Adrenaline was still pumping through him as he slowly uncurled, got up and looked around. The active dosimeter he was wearing didn't register much, so he slowly walked over to where he'd seen the slug of polished material land.
The pig was a little melted on the inside, and a few shards of material had fused to the inside. Aside from that, there was nothing.
Cleanup had done itself. After months of tending wreckage and carefully gleaning the dangerous bits, it was almost all gone.
Of its own accord.
He blinked, hoping it wasn't a dream, and then walked to the comm to relate to the captain what had happened.
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