3
duct is supposed to be a standard internal cooling tube loaded with envireon refrigerant and absolutely human tissue toxic, maintained at a steady hypothermia inducing eight degrees centigrade. Which it was, right up until about an hour ago when they'd cut off the flow at the main valve and flushed the tube with neutralizing agents for the sole purpose of shoving him in through the nearest access vent.
The tube is supposed to be kept chilly because of the core, of course. Or rather that because without the induced chilliness, the vents that cooled the core would very shortly start to bake, then warp, then ultimately fail to provide safe and adequate heat exchange, which in turn tended to quickly result in things like radioactive contaminants spewing under extremely high pressures into other parts of the ship that don't seem upon initial inspection to be related to this duct in this place at this particular moment in time. The engineers have stressed all of this in the very recent past, over and over again. The engineers said that under normal operating circumstances the exhaust from the core is saturated by the microscopic envireon particles until it all evens out, until there's a nice equilibrium point established that keeps everyone happy and glow free. An elegant system, frightfully complex, not to be messed with except in cases of dire, dire emergency lest ducky circumstances suddenly and catastrophically unduck themselves.
From his perspective, things are far from ducky already, here where the HVAC tube lips over into a vertical shaft that plummets all the way down to the reactor core. (Though the air in the shaft itself has been by this time scrubbed and rescrubbed, thoroughly nanomesh strained, then scrubbed once more for good measure until all the nasty radioactive bits have been purged and it was perfectly safe for consumption. Or so they said. "They" being a fairly nebulous concatenation of People Who Knew Such Things and People Who Issued Assurances so normal folk wouldn't have to