| [Visit 10: Survey Mission 1]
We dropped out of hyperspace with more than the usual excitement- Engineering (which occasionally tapped me as a maintenance tech) was unhappy with the balance of the jump system. I considered myself lucky- I wasn't likely to be called up for the maintenance and testing. We sent off one of our auxilliaries with reconsats in- system; I would precede us to the world we needed to run our analyses. We weren't going to be able to make short jumps to the inner system while the hyperdrive needed recalibration. We'd be proceeding through normal space- with all of the maneuvering implied. Even though we usually spent over a year in each of of the systems we've visited so far, it looked like we would be here for a while just trying to get in- system with the Feynman. I was wrong about one thing, though- I was called in to engineering after all; My normal work as one of the folks maintaining the ship's main computer systems was soon expanded to working with the engineering systems- a completely different network. I'd be supporting the calibration process since a Level 3 diagnostic (a term stolen from an old "Star Trek" series but still useful nonetheless) would require very close human supervision. It looked like I wasn't going to be in the thick of any analysis work. With me "trapped" on the ship, my wives couldn't go that far from me, so they were trapped to.
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