“Who the hell did they make these damn tubes for? Four year olds?” Theo grumbled under his breath as he folded himself into a pretzel. 

Arranging himself like some kind of freakish human spider in the middle of the tiniest jefferies tube he’d ever seen, he managed to brace one foot on the wall opposite and started to unscrew the panel cover above him. 

It was hot work. The base always ran hotter than he’d like to account for all the species aboard, but a fault in one of the environmental clusters had set it raging out of control. The base as a whole was running three degrees above normal, with other sections running hotter than that. 

Like the jefferies tubes… which were currently about the same temperature as a sauna. He’d stripped off down as far as he could, right down to his sleeveless undershirt, and even that was soaked through with sweat, the skin of his arms glistening as he worked on the last screw on the panel above his head. 

The screw gave and he caught it with the ease of long practice, slapping it against the magcuff wrapped around his wrist. Even if he hadn’t worked as an engineer for many years there were some things you never forgot. One of them was the sure and certain knowledge that any screw you allowed to hit the deck would immediately find either a hole in said deck, or something heavy and immoveable to disappear under. 

He grunted as he lowered the panel cover and set it aside, looking inside as the cluster was revealed. 

“Where are you?” he murmured, quickly scanning over the relays, counting them from left to right and taking note of the batch numbers. “Nine-five, nine-five, nine-five—“

He was looking for relays with a batch number ending nine-six. A manufacturing fault meant that they locked in the temperature settings at higher levels, and because they were all in series (a design fault if you asked him), one faulty relay meant it would affect the whole damn system. 

“Well, hello beautiful,” he smiled, then said. “Computer, take environmental cluster five-seven-alpha-four out of sequence please.” 

Reaching in, he plucked a nine-six out of the line. The cluster whined and went dark as he dropped the faulty relay into the toolbox by his head. A second later he was pushing a nine-five in place, waiting for the soft click more felt that heard that told him it was sited correctly. 

He waited, watching the cluster, but it didn’t light up again as it should. Sighing, he reached for his padd, cradling it against his chest as he snaked the wires from the top and plugged them into the control panel for the cluster. 

“TFXO and I’m doing diagnostics again,” he muttered as he ran through all the standard diagnostics quickly, but his words were without ire. The engineering department was busy with other issues and while he wasn’t the most qualified engineer onboard, he was the only qualified engineer who’d been available to deal with this. That and his office was one of the ones running hotter than Hades and he’d had to do something before he turned into a crispy critter. “I guess you can take a guy out of engineering, but you can never take engineering out the guy.”

“Yes!” he murmured in triumph as he found the setting that was at fault and the cluster lit up again. “Computer, run a level five diagnostic on environmental cluster five-seven-alpha-four.”

He watched the cluster for the next couple of seconds until the computer replied. “Level five diagnostic complete. No abnormalities found.”

“Excellent, bring the cluster back online and reintegrate it with the environmental systems. Run level five diagnostic on the entire system and report,” he ordered, already lifting the heavy panel cover and starting to screw it back into place.

He’d just finished on the second screw and started on the third when the computer replied. “Level five diagnostic complete. Environmental system  operating within normal parameters. Base ambient temperature dropping to normal levels.”

“Thank heavens for that. Inform main engineering the last of the faulty relays are now replaced,” Theo said, finishing up the panel and twisting to grab his tool box. It didn’t take him long, half crawling, until he reached an intersection with a hatch. 

Cracking it, he reached up and over, catching the edge of the hatch so he could unfold himself. Then he was out, in the blessed cool of the newly activated air-conditioning. 

“Captain Barrington?” The soft voice of his yeoman emanated from his commbadge. “Sorry to disturb you, but I wanted to remind you that you have a comm call scheduled in five minutes.”

He sighed, tipping his head back to murmur. “I’m too old for this s—“ Cutting himself off, he answered. “Of course, I’m on my way now.”

Reaching back into the tube, he picked up his toolbox, his uniform jacket stuffed in the top and closed the hatch up. Then he headed along the corridor to make his way back to his office.