- Admiral T. Weisskopf, Fleet Commander, Navy of the Free Peoples of Bane.
Time to Destination: Three Zion Weeks
PERSPECTIVE COULD really affect how people see things. Yes, it was still insanely hot, in fact the temperature had been climbing again for a couple weeks, and yes, most of the crew was a bundle of barely restrained frustration inches from each other’s throats, but Morgan was actually feeling pretty good about everything.
While it wasn’t exactly typical duties, watching over a ship effectively drifting along in the black, running black with almost everything shut down, she had settled into an understanding of what her position required of her. Her willingness to assist where she could with repairs and maintenance had, as best she could tell, endeared her to the crew. This was especially true, given how she was able to help with certain tricky jobs because of her background in old tech, and others with her tiny hands and experience working by feel rather than sight.
She didn’t know what to make of the lessons Gertrude and Bill were giving her on religious matters, but they were taking it slow, and they were… nice.
Her training sessions with Max, on the other hand, were more than nice. They were fantastic. She was learning a lot, and being able to toss him around, and yes, get tossed around in turn, was a great way to relieve stress and tension.
She’d have liked to get more gym time at Hillman-level gravity on top of the training, but until they got the ship up to normal running parameters, that simply wasn’t an option. Not only was it not an option, she’d not been able to turn up the gravity in her sleeping alcove in a month, and they’d reduced the gravity in the inhabited parts of the ship to half that of Zion to further reduce the demands on the reactor.
“Black,” a gravelly voice called out from behind Morgan as she walked along the corridor.
Turning, she saw it was Lieutenant Brown – Jacob in this case – and he looked a bit gruffer than usual.
“Shouldn’t you be on the bridge?” she asked him, unable to even guess at why he was down here, evidently looking for her.
“Captain decided. Meeting in his office before he tells crew.”
“Now? He isn’t asleep? This couldn’t have waited till morning?”
“Yes, no, and no.” Jacob said, jerking his head over his shoulder in the direction he’d come, the direction the offices lay.
“All right, of course I’m coming,” Morgan said, shrugging.
“Gym?” he asked, gesturing toward her, or more specifically her outfit, as they walked.
Morgan glanced down at her sports bra and tight shorts, shrugging again.
“Yes, in this case, but heat’s getting bad enough I wear this other times too. Cooler that way.”
Jacob just grunted. Each of the crew had coped with the heat in different ways, and with different clothes, based on their own comfort level. Jacob himself was wearing a pair of coveralls that had been cut down to be sleeveless and with legs ending just above the knee.
“Oh, I’d better let Max know,” Morgan said, slowing her pace a bit as she pulled up her uplink. “Record for Max Eck, ‘A meeting came up, I’ll let you know when I’m free.’”
The uplink beeped at her once it had complied.
“Send.” That done, she turned her attention back to Jacob. “What is the meeting about?”
“Captain will explain.”
“Yeah, he will. Can’t you tell me anything?”
Jacob just grunted again.
“All right, I’ll try to contain myself. How has your watch been the last couple weeks? Any more fights?”
Jacob shook his head.
“Too hot and tired to fight.”
“That’s good, I guess. It has to be more difficult for you, having so many of the newest crew on your team.”
A grunt of a slightly differing tone, one Morgan had come to interpret as dismissive.
“I’m grateful you were willing to take over the graveyard shift so I could get my feet under me on this trip.”
This time Jacob answered with a snort, before adding a few words.
“This trip asked a lot of all of us. Rush job, always something.”
“True. At least we’re doing better than my last run. We’re a bit short-staffed, and have a lot of loaner crew, but nothing compared to trying to run the Dawn with only about half the crew able to help.”
“Nasty business, that. Makes one superstitious.”
“Oh?” Morgan had been at this long enough to have learned that a lot of spacers were, in fact, deeply superstitious, though how it manifested varied.
She didn’t quite understand it, for the same reason she had a hard time wrapping her head around Gertrude’s religious teaching. The universe was vast, and there was more mankind didn’t know than it did, but seeing omens in events or interpreting luck good or bad as fate was as foreign to her core upbringing as expecting the ‘Comrade Managers’ back home to show up and work the mines directly.
“Once coincidence. Twice happenstance. Three enemy action.”
“And you think we’re to enemy action?”
Jacob gave her a quick, curt nod.
“Fate of Dawn, Herald, now STEVE. Less than one year.”
“One of those was caused by people, by pirates. One was a simple accident. The third was because of leaving early. They don’t seem connected, at least to me.”
Jacob shrugged again, letting out a deep ‘hmm.’ “Forty years,” he continued after a moment, “Nothing major. No losses, no attacks, no disabled ships. Something big is coming, I can feel it.”
Morgan was going to ask him where he felt it – how he felt it – but they’d reached the captain’s office. Lieutenant Bill was already outside seated on the bench, talking quietly with the Chief Engineer. Farther down was the ship’s head doctor, looking like he was dozing with his head resting against a strut between two of the benches. Morgan hadn’t interacted with him at all really, beyond in passing at that one fateful meeting when all the officers had been present. Beyond her preference to see a female doctor, he was on call when she was typically sleeping or getting ready for her own shift.
If those two are here, this must be serious. But what could it be about? There isn’t anything I can see we could do to further cut back demand on the reactor, and we’re only a few weeks out anyway.
The lift arrived behind them, and Morgan turned in time to see the captain stride onto the deck. As with the last time she’d seen him, the impression she got was that of a man hardly sleeping and plagued by stress. Fair enough, she supposed; there was a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, but he seemed to be taking things harder than she felt was really necessary, since his plan had been working.
“Let’s head down to the conference room,” he said, looking over the lot of them. “Too many warm bodies for my small office.”
The captain strode forward, moving so quickly that he was past all of them before anyone else could get moving.
Of everyone present, he was the most formally dressed, in a white button-down shirt and thin black slacks. Cooler than his uniform, assuredly, but the thin fabric would only offset his arms being covered to the wrists and his legs to the ankle.
As they followed along behind the captain, Morgan was struck for a moment that she was the only woman present, but it was only a passing thought, a consequence of who was needed for whatever the captain had in mind. Of the four main engineering officers, Matthews was the only male, as Morgan had already been thinking about the fact the other doctor was a woman, and for that matter all six nurses were women.
Why did I think of it at all, though? Is it because I feel like the odd man out, not because of my sex, but because of everything else? The next most junior officer here has been with Takiyama for at least ten years, and all of them are old enough to be my father, or grandfather in the case of Jacob and the captain.
Blast it, I thought I was past feeling like I didn’t belong. Yes, I’m young, but I don’t have anything to prove to
them and they aren’t looking for me to do so anyway.
Maybe I’m just frustrated that this is important and it looks like he talked about it with Jacob, and probably Bill, but not me?
If the captain’s office was too cozy to hold them all, the conference room was practically cavernous. It was designed to hold all the officers and several others besides, and with only five men and Morgan, they wouldn’t even fill one end of the table.
Not that they tried, each person consciously or unconsciously sitting with an empty chair to either side of them.
Morgan did the same, all too aware of how strongly of sweat she must smell, given that she’d been holding off on a shower until after her exercise. The days she didn’t meet up with Max, she’d have headed straight back to her quarters after relinquishing the con for a not-so relaxing hot shower that at least did clean her off somewhat.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to enjoy a hot shower or the sauna again? she wondered. Right now, I’d be very tempted to swear off both forever for a single cold shower or cold cup of water.
“Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice, especially those of you who were sleeping. Doc Maki, Engineer Matthews, you probably suspect what I’m about to say, but I’ll start at the beginning for the Browns and Black, who don’t.
“As you are all only too painfully aware, we’re slowly losing the battle to keep the ship livable. We’ve done everything we can to reduce waste heat buildup, and all but shut down the reactor. For a while, that worked. It even looked like it might carry us through. That hope was, sadly, rather too optimistic. Matthews?”
The chief engineer nodded.
“All things being equal, we would have been able to reach our destination with a bit of wiggle room. All things are not, however, equal, and as always, there were unforeseen consequences. Some were minor, like added strain on certain systems because of the extra heat. Some were more dire, such as the various small breakdowns because we didn’t dare continue with our routine maintenance schedule. There was one problem I didn’t anticipate, fixated as I was on the mechanical issues.”
Matthew nodded towards Doc Maki, who nodded back and took up the narrative.
“This problem is all but catastrophic, and it is something we didn’t anticipate. I didn’t anticipate it, and I should have.”
“Joriz, you’re a doctor, not a botanist,” Matthews interjected, reaching over to pat his colleague’s shoulder. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. I should have thought of it too.”
“Thank you, Harold, but the wellbeing of all organics on the ship are my responsibility, not just the people.” He turned back to the rest of the room. “Like any ship with enough room to fit one, we have hydroponics bays, both for oxygen production and food supply. It is simply too economical to pass up the benefits, and nothing mechanical we’ve come up with is as efficient as plants in any case. The problem is that while most of the crops in there are weathering the heat just fine, or fine enough for our purposes, some of the strains we have in there primarily for oxygen production haven’t. Several of the sections have died outright, and those that haven’t are sickly, and that means less oxygen production.”
“And that means more work for the scrubbers in the environmental plant,” Morgan couldn’t help herself from saying.
“Exactly. That added work means more demands from the reactor, which means more waste heat, which means more demands on the environmental plant, around and around in a vicious circle.”
“What do we do?” Jacob growled.
“I’ve been debating that for the last three days,” Rain quietly replied.
“Three days? And you didn’t think to include any of us?” Bill said, sounding closer to angry than Morgan had ever heard him. “We’re supposed to be here to support you, help you think through things. We can’t do that if you don’t include us.”
“You’re right, but not in this case. There really was only one thing to do, I just didn’t want to admit it. In this case I also didn’t want you taking the blame for the decision along with me.”
“What can be so terrible that it will matter?” Morgan asked. “We already have them suffering through 45 degrees or more Celsius with almost no escape from it, and little to distract them either.”
“We’ve already turned off gravity to most of the ship, reduced our ‘footprint’ within the ship to just the fraction we live in, the bridge, hydroponics, and engineering. What else can we do?” Bill asked.
“We’re going to reroute controls to engineering, shut off access to the bridge, shut off environmental to engineering, and have a skeleton crew in engineering, skinsuited their whole shifts.”
“That’ll help some,” Jacob said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“There is more. We’re also going to seal off the living spaces.”
Everyone looked around at everyone else, and even as new as Morgan was to their acquaintance, it was as plain as day to her that they were all checking to see if they’d heard right, or if they’d gone crazy.
“Uh, captain, we can’t. Where would the crew go?”
“Hydroponics. I ran the numbers. If we limit environmental to hydroponics and sickbay – which is the next compartment over anyway – we should be able to get the temperature locally down to twenty-five or so.”
Matthews had pulled off his uplink and was frantically typing calculations into a holographic keyboard he’d pulled up.
“Did you account for the body heat of the crew themselves?” he asked, still typing. “That many people in a single space, even one that big…”
The captain didn’t answer, instead leaning back in his chair, perhaps waiting for Matthews to finish.
“We’d be lucky to get down to twenty-eight,” Matthews said with a sigh, shutting down the holo. “And that assumes we can pull it off. Where will people sleep? Where will they eat? Hell, what about bathroom facilities and showers?”
“Ventilation,” Morgan said quietly, her mind racing as she considered how this would work. “Just getting the air recycled is going to be a major issue.”
“How so?” the doctor asked. “It’s the same number of people breathing the same amount of air, isn’t it?”
Matthews was shaking his head already.
“No, she’s right. Don’t forget, STEVE is a military design. That means everything that can be distributed is. No single point of failure due to damage for anything vital. That also means the environmental plant isn’t a single plant, but is scattered about the ship. That includes the air scrubbers, for CO2 and everything else. The main portion of the plant is near hydroponics, which I’m sure the captain took into consideration when thinking this up and through, but the whole point is to limit how much of the ship we’re piping air to, and that means cutting ourselves off from large chunks of that capability.”
“Won’t be any privacy,” Jacob said. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by this, but he looked at Morgan as he said it. “Two hydroponics. One men. One women. Hammocks, maybe? Can’t move plants, tight fit.”
“We’d all be just sleeping out in the open…” Morgan muttered. She tried imagining that, and unnoticed by her, her hands started trembling. The bare idea of sleeping with no walls around her, not even a canopy to close, everyone able to see her, to approach her while she slept.
Her head was swimming, her body slumping in her chair before she had time to register the fact, to react. Dimly she recognized she was panicking, but it was a disconnected sort of feeling, and she felt disconnected from her body, completely out of control.
Everything turned grey for a moment, and then she found herself lying on the table, looking up at some very worried faces and one grim one.
The grim one was the doctor, who had pulled a tool of some kind from somewhere. It was beeping, and then he reached down and pulled her eyelids up, shining a light in them.
“Wha…” she managed to murmur.
“Just be still for a bit,” Bill said, and for some reason she found it ex
tremely funny that his shirt had changed color.
Wasn’t it red before? That’s a white shirt.
She turned her head, and noticed that there was something red under her head, a crude pillow.
“Okay, back up, everyone,” Doc Maki said, straightening up himself. “Bit of a panic attack, I think. Do you not like crowds much, Lieutenant?”
“Not really, but…” Morgan shook her head, regretting it instantly. “Ow.”
“Let things settle before you try and move,” the doctor ordered. “If it doesn’t pass soon, I can go get something that will help.”
“We’d all have to sleep. In the same room?” Morgan said slowly, thinking over how that would work again. Getting into her skinsuit. Bathing. Everything. She shuddered again, and the doctor reached over and grasped both of her shoulders.
“Maybe don’t think about that for a bit.”
“Take a moment, Black,” the captain said, standing up as he did. “There is a lot to discuss, and we’ll be at this for a while yet. Maybe a walk would help? Get some fresh air, or fresher anyway?”
Rain glanced at Maki, who nodded.
Morgan was feeling a bit better, and tried to rise up. Maki held out a hand, and for once she took it, awkwardly sliding off the table. She could stand, and was just feeling a little light-headed.
“A walk. Yes.”
“And some water as well,” the doctor added.
“I’ll be back in a bit. I’m sorry for, well…” Morgan trailed off. She wasn’t quite feeling herself yet, but intellectually she realized she would be quite embarrassed once she was. Appearing weak in front of the most important people on the ship, hardly flattering for her image, self and otherwise.
She could see Bill and Jacob share a glance as she left, but was still too out of it to even guess at what it meant.
Once in the corridor she allowed herself to slump against the bulkhead, sighing and wishing the metal was other than almost burn-her-skin hot.
Running Black Page 15