Commission for Jads!

There are a lot of reasons for REZQ's high staff turnover. Poor wages, poor benefits, unfair and uncomfortable working conditions. But if there is one overriding reason, it is that their employees just don't tend to live terribly long -- and it is the tools they are expected to use, rather than the hazards of space themselves, that often prove the most dangerous.

Amongst the many ironically potentially lethal things held onboard a REZQ recovery vessel, Polygraphene Hardening Obsequent Mass Expediator -- PHOME -- is perhaps the least pleasant. A pink foam that sprays in a variety of consitencies, sticks to almost anything and sets harder than most other known substances in seconds, PHOME is used to put out fires, seal up hull breaches, or stick together things that one wouldn't expect could be stuck together. In short, PHOME is the hyper-bonding, hyper-toxic, hyper-dangerous duct tape of the deep space recovery engineer. So it follows that the average REZQ recovery vessel, often in deep space for months, carries an enormous amount of both PHOME and its precursor chemicals.

Ted, here, has been awoken in the middle of a sleep cycle to attend to what he thinks is a mercifully-small crack in one of the ship's integral PHOME transit pipes (no doubt caused by cumulative damage from over-jumping the ship). Unfortunately for him, the leak that the computer had detected is rather larger than the one that he thinks he has fixed so easily.

Poor Ted.