‘Having a handy subject to learn on, particularly one who isn’t actually someone you supervise, will be useful. Besides, I’m only asking you to learn from him, not marry him,’ he had said. He’d been talking about learning to work with someone she didn’t like, but perhaps Eck could be useful in the same sort of way, but for flirting and dealing with men.
“He just chases ladies, you say, he doesn’t actually intend to catch them?” Morgan asked, saying it slowly, almost timidly.
“That’s right.”
“Let him be then. It’s one more thing I need to learn to deal with, right?”
“It is indeed. Someday you’ll find someone you want to catch you, after all, and being able to let them know without all the schoolyard awkwardness will be useful.”
“Did you ever find someone like that?”
Marigold’s next words were accompanied by a sigh.
“A few I thought might be the one, but no, not yet. I know I don’t look the type, but when I find the guy for me, I’m getting out of this racket, settling down. The pay might not be great as a mercenary, but our expenses aren’t much either, so as long as you avoid the ‘booze, bets, and broads’ as it is often crudely phrased, it isn’t hard at all to save.”
“You’d just stay at home?”
“Absolutely. There was a saying in my home, ‘the future belongs to those who show up.’ Sure, the men and women who owned the mines had a lot more money than us, but most of them worked longer hours than we did, to the point that they didn’t have time for a family or kids. When they’re gone, who is around to remember them? My parents didn’t have much, but their memory will be around as long as their descendants talk about them. Isn’t that a better legacy than a bunch of money left to a near stranger?”
“I guess that makes sense.”
This was met with a burst of laughter.
“Some deep thoughts for the sauna, I think. How about we focus on relaxing for a bit, instead?”
That Morgan could get behind, and she nodded, settling down and closing her eyes.
Chapter 06
History is littered with people who ignore, twist, or distort the real costs of warfare for their own ends. Some of them I wouldn’t consider evil, I suppose, not that such is any comfort for the people who die in conflicts, or otherwise suffer. The primary group dying is, of course, the soldiers themselves, but just because someone isn’t wearing a uniform doesn’t mean they can’t be killed by those who do.
- Prime Minister Neil Kern, Planet Idaho.
Mining Ship Rusty Scoop ‘Assistant Engineer’ Linda Tresol
LINDA GLARED at the beat-up, barely functional, and out-of-date wall-mounted computer she called ‘hers’ in the loosest sense of the word.
‘We’ll replace it next year, Honey,’ her pa had said… but he’d said that three years running now.
Schoolwork was easy enough, even with the time lag of getting messages back and forth between Albion and the asteroid belt, and since she didn’t have to sit through the classes, she could rush through the week’s lessons in a few hours each Monday morning, but handling any of the newer games or VR programs was well beyond it.
Not even like I’m whining and comparing myself to the teens on Albion. Most of the kids out here have better than we do too, and they’re just as poor as we are.
And, to be fair to Pa, I’d still rather be out here than trapped on a dust ball surrounded by billions of sweaty smelly strangers, but is it too much to ask to be able to play the same simulations the other kids talk about? Just so I can be included for once?
Sighing dramatically, she hopped off her bunk that doubled as the computer’s chair and dug around in the piles of clothing for something clean, or clean enough.
Might be able to coax it into running one of the newer romance stories later, she thought, at last finding a pair of overalls with only a small oil stain on the knee. Those don’t demand as much from the system. Before that, though, I’d better get that spaced docking clamp fixed. That’ll keep Ma from biting my head off if it shorts out the lights again or something.
She sighed again, somehow managing to make it even more dramatic as she raised the back of one hand to her head.
A year more of this and I’m off to apprentice on one of the larger mining stations. Real boys! Someone to talk to besides Ma, Pa, and the littles.
Linda was grounded enough to know she’d miss her family terribly, but that didn’t stop her from yearning to meet more people, try new things. She also knew that finding someone willing to come back to the Scoop with her when she inevitably took over running it from her parents was not going to be easy.
Still, easy or not, she was enough of a romantic to assume she’d find some handsome man willing to make the grand gesture, and off they’d go, free and away from all the stupid governments and their stupid rules.
Head full of daydreams of that sort, she skipped along in the light gravity of the ship – cheaper that way – and got to work on the frozen clamp holding the shuttle in place.
They shouldn’t need it for at least another six months, assuming they kept finding good veins of iridium, but it also served as the mining vessel’s escape pod.
Slightly airheaded? Maybe. Willing to mess around with emergency equipment when she lived in space? Absolutely not.
Sticking in a pair of small earbuds, she pulled up some of the new music from Zion she’d managed to pira… liberate from a broadcast the week previous, and she got to work.
The music cut out suddenly some time later, as she had her upper body shoved awkwardly into the housing, trying to pry loose a stubborn bolt. Irritating, but not uncommon on the ship. She’d just have to get it rebooted once she had her hands free.
In this case, however, it proved to be no simple malfunction, as it was immediately followed up with…
“Linda!” Ma yelled at her just as she was reaching into the mechanism to try a different trick on the stubborn bit of metal.
Banging her head on the cowling above as she jumped upright, Linda yelled back.
“What? Not fair, yelling at me when I’m doing what I ought.”
“What are you doing parading around in that outfit for?” her ma asked, tapping her foot slightly as she stood there with her hands on her hips.
For a moment, Linda had to fight off a fit of giggles. Replace the grease stain on her cheek with makeup, and the coveralls for a dress – ah, to be able to wear a gown – and Ma would be the spitting image of the upset Duchess of Jacoby as she lectured the heroine in the last sim Linda had gotten to work.
Hiding the fit by bringing her hand up to her face, Linda looked down.
“What? They’re clean, mostly. That bit of oil there is from this job,” she lied.
“Not that,” Ma said, rolling her eyes. “Your bum is hanging out for all the system to see.”
“What!” Linda said, the single word said with a far different tone than she’d used a moment earlier. “No, it isn’t…” she started to protest as she twisted around trying to get a look.
That didn’t work, so she turned and presented her rear to a particularly shiny bit of machinery. She could instantly feel her face heating up as she realized Ma was right. The pocket must have caught on something, and it had torn clean off.
Turning to face her ma, Linda tried to put on a brave face, knowing that her blush was only deepening as she tried it.
“It isn’t that bad,” she said. Squeaked, really, for her voice wasn’t quite cooperating. “Anyway, who is here to see? Pa and the littles and ya?” Her second sentence came out all in a rush, sounding so desperate even to her own ears that she knew she was only making things worse.
“Linda, that’s not…” Ma cut off as the ship’s alarm sounded, startling both of them.
“Is Pa testing the system?” Linda said, for once not caring that she’d totally failed to play it smooth as she heard the fear in her own voice.”
“Are ya almost done with the clamp?” Ma said, her
face draining of color.
“Just about!” Linda responded, all but diving back in to get at the offending bolt.
The intercom came on in the shuttle slip, sounding a bit distorted as it bounced around the narrow opening around her, but still painfully, terrifyingly clear.
“Ma, get the littles down to the shuttle,” Pa started with, the alarm cutting off. “Frigate coming in, straight for us. Not Albion or Zion.”
Linda tried to focus on her work, but she couldn’t help but listen as Ma walked over to the wall panel next to the hatch.
“They say anything?” she all but whispered, connecting up to the bridge.
“They’re already jamming communications.”
Ma swore then, the harsh word sounding utterly alien coming from her kind, pretty face.
“What are ya going to do?”
“They’re faster, but I think we’re more maneuverable. I can try to lose them in the belt, at least for a while. It isn’t far to that failed planet cluster.”
“That won’t work, and ya know it.”
“It will… for long enough. It has to.”
“They’ll see us launch.”
“Not if you just drift out.”
“Peter…”
“I will see you after.”
Something splashed onto the metal beneath Linda. Reaching out, she realized it was a tear.
Realizing it made everything hit her at once, and her whole body shuddered.
No. No, I don’t have time. Not now. I don’t finish this, no one is leaving.
Redoubling her efforts, Linda drove everything else out of her mind. She didn’t notice when Ma left, nor when she returned. The shuttle powering up she couldn’t miss, however.
“Linda!” Ma shouted.
“Got it!” she replied, launching herself out of the casing and slapping the manual release. It stuck for a moment, and her heart stopped, but then it jerked to life again and started moving.
For a few seconds. Then it lurched to a stop and actually closed up again.
Linda’s heart froze. She’d seen that problem before. There was only one thing that could cause it.
Hands trembling, she grasped the sides of the still open housing and looked in, confirming what she already knew.
“Baby, ya have to hurry!” Ma called from the shuttle ramp.
Linda didn’t dare look at Ma. She straightened up with deliberate slowness, and walked over to the wall where the emergency locker was. Pulling it open revealed the vacuum suits they had.
For the first time in her life, Linda was thankful there were just vac suits and not the more advanced skinsuits. They weren’t nearly as sturdy, but she could get it on quickly, and without stripping naked first.
Behind her Linda could hear Ma’s footfalls as she came down the ramp.
“Baby, what are ya doing?” Linda could hear the fear in Ma’s voice. She’d never heard fear there before. Not even the time Pa’s line had snapped when he’d been working outside on a hull tear.
Still Linda did not turn, did not look at Ma.
“The easy break wasn’t the only problem,” she said, staring at the floor, voice devoid of emotion. “I have to pry it open and hold it manually once ya open the outer doors.”
“No! Baby, I’ll do it.”
“You’re not strong enough,” Linda snapped, looking up at Ma at last, and seeing the tears on Ma’s face that she could feel on her own. “Yer not.”
Ma knew it too. Linda could see it on her face. Her bad arm had never quite healed right. Normally it wasn’t an issue, but…
The intercom crackled back to life.
“It has to be soon, Ma,” Pa said. “Ya have to go. Keep the kids safe.”
“Go,” Linda said, grabbing a prybar out of the same locker before closing it tight. I hope everything else in here is tied down good enough.
Ma rushed forward, grabbing Linda in a hug tight enough that it drove the air from her lungs, even with the bulky suit in between them.
“I love ya,” Linda and Ma said at the same time.
Ma rushed up the ramp onto the shuttle, the door starting to close almost immediately. The moment it was secure the vents started up, rapidly pulling all the air out of the slip. Once that was accomplished Linda could feel rather than hear the shuttle slip door grinding open.
Leveraging all her strength, Linda pried the clamp open, holding it so the shuttle was free.
Ma was at the pilot station, just barely visible in the cockpit window from Linda’s position. The intercom crackled again, and her voice called out.
Still docked, Linda couldn’t help but think. The moment they disconnect from the umbilical, we’ll lose the signal in the jamming.
“We’re gone in ten seconds,” Ma said.
“Good luck. I’ll be praying,” Pa said. Adding quietly, “I love y’all.”
“We love ya too,” Ma said, echoed by the littles, their cute voices free of any recognition about what was happening.
“I love ya, Ma,” Linda choked out right before the line cut out. Pa wouldn’t have heard it, she’d made sure her suit was tied in only to the shuttle and not the whole ship.
The shuttle was outside the ship a few moments later, and Linda watched them slowly drift away as the doors ground back closed and the slip refilled with air.
Scant seconds after the ship was sealed once more, she felt the Scoop accelerate beneath her, faster than Pa had dared since Linda was a little girl.
More than anything she wanted to go up to the bridge; to have her Pa hold her tight, tell her it would be okay.
Instead, she took off the suit, carefully replaced it in the locker, and headed for the room just aft of the bridge, where they did everything from hold meals, haggle over business, to watch holos together. It was close to Pa, and about as safe as any part of the ship was going to be.
Maybe ever again.
Chapter 07
Hurry up and wait. The refrain of the military since time immemorial, it has more recently – at least as one measures a saying old before mankind ever left Earth – come to represent quite a few other jobs, particularly those involving space travel. While the gates have moved interstellar travel from an impossibility to a commonplace reality, it still takes months to get across the far-flung systems humanity has settled. Most of that is spent in subspace, completely cut off from the normal universe. Beyond that, any travel to the asteroid belts, so rich in raw materials, takes months at least as well, mostly spent just cruising along, surrounded only by the void.
Hurry up and wait indeed.
- Captain Bill Ramis, Free Trader Grendel, Colonel, Beowulf Marine Corps, ret.
WHILE MORGAN was no longer a neophyte in the ways of space travel, this was still a momentous occasion. There are certain things spacers always remember – their first gate jump, their first trip EVA onto a ships’ hull while underway, and, as today, their first departure seen from the bridge of a ship.
This time Morgan was only there as an observer, but soon enough it would be her in the big chair.
Literally big chair, at that. Morgan had spared more than a few moments worried that she was going to look like a little girl playing at her daddy’s desk, sitting in that thing.
Even Captain Rain was somewhat swallowed up in the thing’s cushioned depths.
Shaking her head, Morgan turned her attention back to the events unfolding around her. The good news was that she wasn’t expected to be able to do every job being done by the dozen people hard at work at their stations, but she was expected to be able to lead them and know what it was they did. Engineering she was good at. She understood how the ship worked, more or less. All this? It was new to her. Morgan snorted, quietly. If you didn’t count her standing on the bridge amidst the wreckage and carnage of that last fight with the pirates on the Fate of Dawn, or when she’d been given a tour of STEVE, this was her first time being on the bridge at all.
The view out the massive screens that covered the front of the br
idge was spectacular, showing the stupendous hatch leading out from Takiyama Station slowly opening as they approached.
It was all driven by the forward sensors and cameras, of course. There were precious few windows anywhere on the ship, and the bridge itself was buried in the center forward portion of the ship, just aft of the armored head of the ship. Opposite it, just forward of the engine spaces, was the Combat Information Center, with a complete backup set of controls for the ship, plus additional information gathering and analyzing equipment.
In-between these two was the rest of the core of the ship, with hydroponics bays on either side of the infirmary, and the rest of the crew spaces arrayed out around them.
It was a very good design, from a military perspective, with redundancies everywhere and the most critical systems as deeply buried and protected as possible.
Not that they were needed, strictly speaking, for a civilian freighter, which prioritized economy and efficiency over everything else, but there also wasn’t any sense yanking out the redundancies they already had.
The one thing that struck Morgan as an odd choice was the placement of the fusion power plant – forward, in the center of all the armor. If something happened to it there was no way to eject it as was common in civilian designs, which usually placed their power plants very near the surface of the ship, with little more than armored plating between the core and the black of space.
Then again, given STEVE’s original purpose, ejecting a malfunctioning or damaged core was simply a slower way of killing a crew far, far beyond any hope of rescue or aid, so perhaps placing it where it was most protected was the best of several options, none of them good.
I’m letting my mind wander again, she realized. All well and good to memorize and familiarize myself with how the ship is laid out, but when I’m on the bridge is not the time to be going over it for the hundredth time.
Though honestly, there wasn’t that much for her to do, not even watching what the captain was doing. From the books and other forms of entertainment she’d seen involving ship crews, the captain was always busy barking out commands, but Captain Rain had pretty much gone with ‘take us out, nice and slow’ and then left everything up to the pilot and navigator to handle. The pair of them were talking back and forth up front at their adjacent stations, but beyond her logical assumption that they were talking about the maneuver, she had no idea what they were saying.
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