The Soup Must Flow

by Admiral Biscuit

Rating: teen
Tags: Slice of Life, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 3985

Running across Equestria, a vast network of pipes transfers soup from the mines out West to hungry ponies on the East Coast. Few ponies sitting down to a bowl of fresh cazuela ever think about the soup pipeline.

Running across Equestria, a vast network of pipes transfers soup from the mines out West to hungry ponies on the East Coast. Few ponies sitting down to a bowl of fresh cazuela ever think about the soup pipeline.

For Langy, it’s her job. It’s her life.

The soup must flow.

Now with an audio reading by Wonder Gala (on Soundcloud)

Published 2020-02-04 12:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2020-02-04 12:10:01 UTC

The Soup Must Flow

The Soup Must Flow
Admiral Biscuit

Located at the base of the Canterhorn, Canterlot Substation Six is an ornate building of solid stone with red clay tiles on the roof.

It’s not near any settlement, although it’s within easy trotting distance of a water stop.

Sometimes small villages pop up around an out-of-the-way industry; sometimes ponies don’t want to commute and so they build houses and when they’ve built houses the earth ponies want to have gardens. Gardens and houses require a hardware and seed store, and not too long after those are built—and sometimes before—a public house is erected, offering food for before and during shift, and beer for after.

Next comes a market and a post office and presently a whole town is born.

In this case, there was nothing but rolling foothills and occasional shards of bedrock poking through the lousy soil. All the trains stopped for water before ascending or descending the Canterhorn and so it wasn’t inconvenient for ponies to commute. Ponies had gotten as far as erecting a small public house with a few rooms, and that was it.

Langoustine Bisque—Langy to her friends—paused in the entryway long enough to grab her hard hat and clipboard and then walked to the main production floor, her eyes and ears filling her in even before the night shift manager could. Two of the pumping engines were running, their giant walking beams rising and falling nearly in time. The third was stationary, either broken or waiting for an order.

Since there wasn’t a cluster of panicky mechanics crawling over it, Langy figured that it was waiting for a shipment.

As she crossed the pumping floor on her way to the central office, she returned a couple friendly waves.

Whenever she said that she worked as a supervisor, ponies invariably pictured desks piled with paperwork, and while it was true that her office had that, an array of repeater gauges was a far more prominent feature, displaying steam pressure and pump revolutions and flow rates and innumerable other important things. A dedicated telegraph ticker printed out a thin tape of system messages, and in a small cubicle in the corner, they had their own telegraph operator to send and receive station-specific messages.

The operations crew and the managers didn’t switch shifts at the same time. Once upon a time, they had, but that had led to all sorts of chaos on shift change; after a snert disaster, word had come down from on high to change procedures. The working crew would keep performing their tasks as she got up to speed, and by the time they were ready to go home, she’d have a plan in her head.

“Morning, Langy.”

“Morning, Vichy.” The night supervisor was a slender Prench unicorn with a faint Mareseille accent which became more pronounced as either her stress level or the gravy pressure gauge rose. “Calm night?”

“No equipment malfunctions on our end,” she said proudly. “Pump two is idle, so I sent a few extra hooves to go over it, lube everything, and check all the flanges and fittings for leaks. It’s been working hard the last couple of weeks, you know.”

Langy nodded. Pump two was their most reliable, often filling in when one of the others was down for repairs. They really needed a fourth pump, but that would necessitate all sorts of new valves and pipes, not to mention stacks of paperwork high enough to rival the Canterhorn.

But Canterlot was growing, and the station was working ever harder to move the rich soup mined from deposits out west to the hungry ponies who lived up the mountain.

“Do we have any incoming flow?”

The telegraph pony, Dots, popped his head up. “Ticker shows a transfer of cazuela coming in. Reported at the Los Pegasus Understation at midnight, Unicorn Range One at five, and Unicorn Range Two at eight.”

“That’s slow.”

“Cazuela’s chunky, doesn’t flow fast.”

“So we’ll probably have two hours or more after it gets to Galloping Gorge Junction.”

“You’ll want to get steam up for it,” Langy said. “Might even have to drop pressure on lines one and three.”

“What have we got in those right now?” The gauges told their story, but it was better to hear it from the mare in charge than to make dumb assumptions.

“Split pea in line one, and fufu in three.”

Langy winced. “What were they thinking? Could have sent a broth through, that’d have kept flowrates up.”

“We should finish the pea transfer in a couple of hours, and word is that they’ve hit a rasam seam near Vanhoofer which should lower the line load when it comes into the system.”

“Is that confirmed?”

Vichy rolled her eyes. “Course not. Just gossip down the line, but it’s as reliable as orders from on high.” She glanced guiltily in the direction of the palace and then back to Langy. “Well, may you have a quiet shift, and I’ll see you tonight. The soup must flow.”

“The soup must flow.” Langy reached out and gave her a hoofbump, then settled into the seat for a quick scan of shift reports.

•••

“Bit of a problem with pump two, boss.” Stone Vapor fluffed his wings nervously. “Well, with the steam supply. We got a sticking valve in the inlet line.”

“Sticking valve?” Langy dropped the paperwork she’d been reviewing back on her desk. “How bad?”

“Dunno. Smart play is to pull it apart and see what’s in it. If it’s just some calcium, when we open the supply valve on the boiler, that ought to push it open.”

“And if not?”

“We tear it down, but we gotta wait until it cools.”

“Can you run the pump on a single supply line?” Langy wasn’t an expert at the pumping engines, but she knew her way around them.

“Yes, but we’ll lose almost half the output.”

“Give me a moment.” She turned her head back. “Dots!”

“Yes?” The telegraph operator poked his head through the door between Langy’s office and the telegraph room.

“How much time have we got before the next transfer comes in?”

“The cazuela? It’s running slow, they haven’t even got it at Galloping Gorge Junction yet.”

Progress reports had been coming in, and while she hadn’t run the numbers yet, her gut told her that the pea transfer was nearing its end.

“Okay. Stone, have your crew to get that valve apart and fix it, whatever it takes. Can you isolate that line on both ends so the pump can still be operated?”

“If we put blanking plates in after we pull the valve, yeah.”

“Do that. Dots, send a telegram up the line to let them know we’ve got issues with pump two, informative only at this point.”

“Informative?”

“That way I don’t gotta fill out paperwork saying we’re refusing a transfer. Then send a telegram to the public house, see if anypony’s still hanging around from last shift and wants to earn some bonus pay by cleaning and balancing tanks.”

•••

The soup must flow, and woe betide the mare who prevented the orderly transfer of soup.

In an ideal world, the pipelines and pumping stations were perfect machines, performing their work with clockwork precision. Soup went in, soup came out, everything in balance.

But in the real world, machines broke, ponies got sick, valves stuck, pipes leaked. Trains failed to deliver enough coal to fire the boilers or arrive in time to take a load of soup—the pipeline was prone to any number of unforeseen malfunctions.

The ponies who had built the system had recognized this, so each station had a number of storage tanks to not only hold batches for local distribution, but also to handle brief flow problems.

As the infrastructure stretched thinner and thinner, they were more often pressed into the latter service, although to do so necessitated filling out forms and if used too often, an explanation to a supervisor. Langy was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but she was hedging her bets.

All the ponies running the transfer stations hated filling out paperwork, and while it was technically against the rules to delay soup shipments except in an emergency, steam pressures could be lowered, flow rates adjusted. An advisory telegram down the line would serve that purpose, would build just a touch of delay into each prior pumping station’s output as the word spread. Those on the line would remember the times they’d gotten informal help from a supervisor in an upstream station, or a clerk in a downstream station holding a string of tank cars for a second inspection prior to unloading. They’d remember when some convenient delay held back the paperwork for a few precious minutes, or when Horseshoe Bay No. 4 requested a two bar increase in steam pressure down the line for a transfer, claiming clogged filters at their end.

•••

There was only so much she could do in the office. Paperwork was a necessary evil, forms and logs and charts and updated policies and procedures. While most of it was necessary to keep the soup flowing, Langy belonged out on the floor with her ponies, deep in the heart of the action.

As she crossed the threshold, it was like a weight lifted off her back. In there, it was everything reduced to numbers on a page, but on the floor it was the hiss of steam and the throb of walking beams, the shouts to and fro from the maintenance crew as they unbolted the faulty valve. The clatter of hooves on the floor and the whisper of wings in the air, the gentle tinkle of magic and the musical clang of a dropped wrench. That was what she loved, what she refused to lose sight of.

It was true that to do her job properly, she needed to step back, to see the bigger picture in a way that the ponies on the floor couldn’t. The repair crew had eyes only for the valve, for the bolts that secured the flange and the best way to lower it to the floor for cleaning and inspection. Surely some of them were internally griping at the lack of a spare, grumbling that there wasn’t another they could bolt up in its stead. None of them had sat through a maintenance meeting, discussing spare parts inventory with the head fitter and the district’s accountant; none of them had waded through countless pages of reliability reports. That wasn’t their job.

Tempting though it was, she wouldn’t try to encourage them to hurry, to take a shortcut. They knew what they were doing, and she was wise enough to not undercut Stone Vapor’s leadership. Shouting at them to do their jobs faster wouldn’t help.

Instead, she moved over to pump one, currently running the pea transfer. “Hey, how’s it looking?”

Only an ear turned in her direction; Annubar’s eyes were focused on the control board. “Hour, tops. Probably less.” A hoof waved over at a log. “That’s not what the log says, in case you’re wondering, but I can tell by the gauges. Viscosity’s dropped by four centipoise in the last hour, and flow’s kicking up. They usually cut pea thin at the end, and there’s always some mixing with the buffer towards the tail. Last sample was trending to broth, and I can hear the pumpjack’s picking up speed.”

“Good work.” There wasn’t much more to say—her operators kept their ears on the ebb and flow of the line better than she could from her office. “How long could you run cazuela?”

“If I had to, maybe a couple hours, tops. Then we’d start to slow ‘cause of with the head up the mountain, with both the weight on the pipe and the temperature drop. The book says we could run two dozen bar but the pump doesn’t like that, and we’d start dropping volume. This pea is pushing it already.”

“I know.” Split pea was going to be the death of her. Why ponies even liked the stuff she didn’t understand. “You’re the fastest on local transfers, right?”

“The farm?” The colloquial term for the storage tanks at any pumping station. “Damn right I am.” Annubar turned for a moment, blushing. “Begging your pardon.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Leadership training hadn’t instructed her to explain herself; the foremare knew best, and hooves on the ground couldn’t see the big picture, that was what the book said, but she knew better. “We got pump two down at the moment, and we got a slow cazuela coming up the pipeline. I can buy time if I got an empty tank, but I don’t, not right now. The biggest is four, and it’s half full of hot and sour. If we shift the kusksu to three, we can split the hot and sour to one and five, and that gives me an hour buffer.”

“Two, really. Lower Canterlot’s got too many bends on the inlet side, and cazuela isn’t gonna flow fast.” She glanced down at the board. “How close do you want me to cut it?”

“Close as you can.”

“You got it, boss.”

•••

While the pump room was the heart of the operation, the valve room was the brains. Isolated from the activities on the main floor, banks of control valves, level repeaters, and pressure gauges took up two entire walls. A third was covered with a complete diagram of the plant and tank farm, as well as a simplified drawing of the upstream and downstream sections of the pipelines.

The fourth wall was mostly covered with stallion pinups.

Two mares worked every shift, and they were invariably similar enough to be sisters. Whether that was a job requirement or job consequence, nopony knew.

Technically, Clapper was the senior mare and Flapper the junior, but in principle they were interchangeable, as Langy well knew.

As much as her maintenance crew and informative telegram down the line, the two of them could save her from countless hours of paperwork. They knew every trick there was to get product moving through the pumping station—or not, as the situation demanded. Both of them were utterly convinced that they were the true masters of the line, and they weren’t entirely wrong in that opinion.

Langy’d heard horror stories from other operators about disgruntled valve operators and the havoc they could wreak with only a few carefully-calculated settings, and she’d long since determined that her best course of action with her crew was open honesty. Rather than try and pretend a situation was under control, or that she’d figured out the solution on her own, better to present it to her well-trained, experienced crew. Let them take ownership of the problem, too, and they’d be as invested in a solution as she was.

“Pump two’s out for maintenance, and we’ve got a batch of cazuela coming on the tail of our pea soup. I’ve put a call in for anypony still hanging out at the pub and dorm to help with tank transfers and clean storage tanks.”

Flapper nodded. “You gonna move hot and sour?”

“That’s the idea.”

The valve mare glanced over at the flow board, and then back at Langy. “We’ll need a big pump available if you want to move it quick. Gravity feed won’t cut it, nor the little piston pumps at the tanks.”

“Number one should be free soon. Pump operator says that the pea transfer is close to done. I’ve told the boiler room to build extra steam, and with a line off pump two, we’ll have a surplus on the front end.”

“What have we got for buffer?”

“Tank six, five hundred gallons of mostly-pure water.” Clapper continued her slow examination of the glossy stallions plastered across the wall. “A bit of salmorejo contamination in it, but if we run it through the tomato filter bank, it’ll be clear enough for hot and sour, and we can push the kusksu with the same valves.”

“Ooh, a Blackburne shilling.”

“With a smothered mate, since we’ll be crossing storage tanks.”

“If the cazuela comes through when pump two’s back online at full capacity, we’ll be shipping it direct.”

“Can’t trust the misfitters to get the job done in time,” Clapper remarked.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Flapper waved a hoof. “You just let us know what pumps are working and where you want the soup, okay? We got the valves under control.”

•••

Waiting sucked.

She’d done all she could do to inspire her crew. She’d planned and made a backup plan and now there was nothing to do but shuffle papers around on her desk and wait. The soup would come, and they would deal with it.

Some days, she felt like a general inspiring her troops, and other days she was still a scared little filly, wanting nothing more than to gallop away to freedom.

Every tick of the clock was one more second to freedom or failure, and she didn’t know which.

Another trip around the pumping station would give away her nervousness, would cause her team to wonder if she trusted them to carry out her duties. She knew not to do that, even if she wanted to.

Langy slid papers around on her desk with her hoof, not really seeing them. She pictured Stone Vapor working his crew; surely they were re-installing the valve by now. Annubar, eyes glued to her gauges, now transferring the hot and sour into backup tanks. Flapper and Clapper in their own control room, shifting the product through a maze of pipes to where it needed to be. Dots, his ear to the entire system, making his own judgements as the messages flew up and down the line.

Waiting was hard; waiting gave her grey hairs in her mane and tail.

Maybe now was the time to walk the floor again, get her own eyes on the station.

She glanced at the clock. It had only been five minutes since the last time she’d been tempted.

“Not before three,” she reminded herself. “They know what they’re doing.”

•••

“All the bolts are tight, chief.”

“Good job.” Stone Vapor clapped the fitter on the back. “Stand by for low pressure soap check.”

•••

“Tank four’s empty,” Clapper said. “Switch the inlet to raw steam, let’s get it cleaned out.”

“I’m on it.” Flapper spun a control wheel. “Half open, don’t let me forget to dump the condensate.”

“Hey, Flap? Don’t forget to dump the condensate.”

The elder mare stuck her tongue out. “Thanks.”

•••

Line pressure rising. The gauge flickers, the needle briefly bumping off its stop then falling before it pushes up again. Incoming flow, waiting to be routed. Seconds count before the line goes solid.

•••

“Unicorn Range Five reports tail of cazuela clear,” Dots reported. “Water buffer following, then a light zuppa pavese.”

Langy’s ears perked. “Light?”

“That’s what they say. Broth only.”

•••

All eyes watched the flanges intently, until Swage finished her inspection of the work. “No bubbles—no leaks.”

Stone Vapor nodded. “Very good, team. Full pressure on both lines, let’s get pump two back in action.”

•••

“Inbound cazuela, tank outlets shut, both inlets open wide.”

Clapper glanced at the board before returning her attention to the stallion pinups. “Keep an eye on the depth gauge; if the pipe bashers can’t get pump two online, start cutting inflow at a hundred kilderkins.”

•••

“We’re bogging,” the pump operator said, mostly to herself. The machine was the brawn and she was the brains. “Come on, you big bitch, get a bite of that soup and push.” She twirled a valve, kicking open the steam nozzle, balancing her pressure to match line flow.

•••

A roar of steam caught her attention, followed by a distinct throb in the floor.

A moment later, Stone Vapor stuck his head back in the office. “Pump two’s back online. Leak check passed, we’re getting steam up in it now.”

“How long before it’s ready to go?”

“Five minutes to get the beam up to speed, blow out the rest of the dirty air, and it’ll be yours to command.”

“I’ll let the crew know.” She turned briefly to the telegram office. “Dots, advisory message, pump two back online, we’re at full capacity.”

“Got it.”

She shoved her chair back and trotted to the valve room. For once, both pairs of eyes in the room were intently focused on the wall of gauges rather than the pinups.

“Pump two’s back online,” she announced.

“About time,” Clapper muttered, but Langy saw the tension leave her back. “Flap, you’re on the inlet valves, match my pace on crossflow, stop at ninety percent outflow capacity. Once pump two’s pushing hard, I’ll switch pump one to dump the storage tank into the outlet side until we’ve got that tank sucked dry.”

“On it.”

Langy departed the room as the two mares set to the valves, crossing back to the pumping room floor. Her destination, pump one, was already speeding up as its load dropped.

She didn’t tell Annubar that pump two was back in action; she didn’t need to. Anypony with eyes could see the great walking beam as it moved in steady, reliable strokes.

“Stand by for tank transfer, then idle in preparation for light zuppa pavese.”

“Light?”

“Yeah, that’s what Dots says.”

“Good girl.” The operator patted the console as the gauges started to drop from the yellow zone. “I knew you could keep up.”

•••

Canterlot Substation Six is located at the base of the Canterhorn, an ornate building of solid stone with red clay tiles on the roof.

It’s not particularly near any settlement, although it’s within easy trotting distance of a water stop.

Vichyssoise—Vichy to her friends—paused in the entryway long enough to grab her hard hat and clipboard and then walked to the main production floor, her eyes and ears filling her in even before the day shift manager could. All three of the pumping engines were running, their giant walking beams rising and falling nearly in time.

Everything was normal.

She returned a couple friendly waves, and then walked down to the central office and greeted her daytime counterpart.

“I see you got pump two back online.”

“Thanks to Stone Vapor’s crew.” A good leader praised her workers, they both knew that. “They had to clean out a sticking valve on one of the steam lines.” Details were in the report, but it never hurt to give a briefing so the incoming supervisor would know what to expect.

“Any delays?”

“We advised the other stations, and there were no delays on our end.” Code that both mares understood full well. Favors were owed downstream and would be repaid. “Cazuela ran later than anticipated; after the pea transfer we had a brief hold in the farm, then pushed all product through. Tank four took the overflow until we could empty it. Ought to be cleaned by hoof if you’ve got anypony free—you know how cazuela sticks. Pump one’s running light zuppa pavese and three’s idling in preparation for miyeok guk. Steam plant’s been dropping pressure as we transfer out, and I’ve got the crew switching in the seaweed baffles. We got an advisory order for maccu to the farm for transfer by rail, but none coming through the line that I know of. Might wind up being a back-transfer during the night shift; Dots said there was a shipment up the Neigh Horseleans route, you might get that.”

“Fifty percent probability?”

Langy shrugged. “Twenty at best. Dots says Manehattan’s clamoring for gazpacho, and you know they always get first priority.”

“Alright.” The shift exchange handled, the two mares bumped hooves. “The soup must flow.”

“The soup must flow.” Langy bumped Vichy’s hoof and headed out the door.

Author's Note

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