by S. Walker
She opened her mouth, reconsidered, closed it. Then tried again: "I'm going to fucking space that Executive."
Janson lumbered slowly into the room, making a beeline for the bolted-down chair and the console perched in front of it. "She probably didn't know, or even check." He sounded tired, but carefully not accusing. "Did you ever look into worker conditions? Go down, walk around, see how they were?"
She followed him, trying hard not to imagine living at the smelter for any length of time. What did the sanitizer even look like? Jamet shuddered. "No. But if I'd have known, I would have... I'm not sure. Something, anyways."
"Ah believe you." He came to a stop looking down at the chair, then slowly examined the attached console. "Now that's an evil thing."
Jamet walked around to the other side, eyes going up and down the workstation. It just looked like an overstuffed chair, with wide armrests and a built-in console with a biochip reader. "That's... actually pretty comfortable looking? Some rips in the cushions, but not too terrible. Why is it evil?" She glanced at the back, expecting to see shockers, or maybe spikes. "What's wrong?"
He tapped the biochip reader built into the armrest, then pointed at the chair. "Think about sitting there, ma'am. Got your back and rear all comfy, arm out over the reader, watchin' the smelter systems on the display here." Janson tapped the blank screen. "Then maybe you get a little too comfy. Long day, not enough rest. Eyelids start getting heavier and heavier until without noticing it-- bam, asleep." He mimed something falling off the armrest. "An' your wrist chip moves away from the reader. No chip detected, system assumes nobody's watching for problems, safeties come on. Whole smelter grinds to a halt."
"Oh no. Shit." She remembered furious words scrawled over the outside of the hatch. "That's what they meant: Unavoidable downtime due to exhaustion. Sanctions, every time. So they would sit here as long as possible, trying to keep the smelter running until the whole load of ore got through. Sometimes it would be quick, I guess. But other times, especially if they hit a big bunch of copper nickel asteroids all at once..."
They both imagined it. Hours and hours of sitting in place as literal tons of ore processed through. Almost getting done, then despair setting in as another load arrived. Then another, then another. Endlessly.
Janson stared downward. "Dead man switch."
She didn't even need him to explain what it meant. "Can we work around it?"
He looked around, pointing at toolboxes and equipment haphazardly thrown everywhere on the deck. "It looks like someone already tried. If I had to guess how long they spent trying to figuring a way out ah'd probably say-"
Jamet said it out loud with the big engineer. "Sixteen months." Then, almost in tears: "Dead fucking stars."
"Yeah. Ah'll see what I can do."
He picked a console, got on the deck and slid underneath. She took a seat on the deck nearby to hand him tools, face set in hard lines of guilt and determination.
Chapter 37
Preplanned Courses
A circuit tester hit the deck with a crash, followed by an entire makeshift circuit board. "Who the hell designed this?" Janson flung a hand at the open maintenance hatch like he could slap an imaginary systems architect.
Jamet watched the board bounce twice and skitter underneath the dirty bed. "No luck getting around the dead man switch?" She stood to one side out of the line of fire, closed faceplate aimed down at Janson's work area and ready with an open toolbox. "Anything else we can try...?"
He took the only chair in an angry flop that made the frame creak alarmingly. "Ah can't get around everythin' all at once. If ah route the power relays through another circuit it works fine. Same for Environmental and recycler systems. But the moment ah try to bring the Krepsfield or the bottle over everything shuts down." Janson drove a finger against the chip reader a few times, face drawn downward into an angry frown. "At least ah got the safeties off the systems. Just need to start 'em, now."
She set tools on the deck with a rattling clink, then walked over to stand by the chair. "I'm probably going to sound stupid. But can we just hook the lifeboat generator up to this? That gets us direct power at least, without going through any lockouts." Jamet cross her arms, worried and trying not to touch anything. Maybe it was her imagination but everything in the room felt unclean. In both meanings of the word.
"That's... hmm." With his skinsuit helmet folded back the big man's beard was on full display, bushy and red. He tended to stroke it while thinking. "Not a bad idea, ma'am. It's big enough to power control systems at least, maybe the bottle generator too. But that Krepsfield is a beast, takes huge gulps of energy to get started and some special relays to handle the load." He huffed an angry sounding breath. "Poor lifeboat doesn't have the juice."
"Okay, so we run a cable or something in, power just the control systems, then use the smelter's main generator to- no, damn. Same problem as before." They both looked at the biochip reader. "It's really all run through here? No separate options...?"
He looked defeated. "Yes, ma'am. Ah think the systems are actually keyed directly to the reader; if I cut it out of the lineup even if ah start systems up manually they just stop again immediately. Might be able to figure it out," Janson motioned around the small room. "But it'll take weeks to know, maybe longer t' work around."
They both fell silent, thinking through the implications of working for weeks out of a cramped station control room. Janson in particular seemed to dislike the idea-- his big frame and broad movements didn't translate well to enclosed living on top of another person. It was a guarantee he'd be a mess of banged up elbows and small cuts.
Jamet had a different concern, but didn't know how to express it. She tried talking around the point. "I've seen these kinds of setups discussed before, at budget meetings and startup funding talks. Not this bad, though. This is awful." She looked around the room, noting how every single working surface wore ingrained dirt like a sleeve of filth. The seat and console got the worst of it-- a thick crust rimmed around the edges where sweat and food particles slowly accumulated during use. "It was pitched to us as a positive, though: Automatic safety systems. Prevents accidents if anyone happens to fall asleep or walk off at a bad time."
He slowly levered out of the overstuffed seat, one leg at a time. "That's pretty common, actually. Even useful-- could have helped me back in my time on that mining setup. But not like this." He followed Jamet's eyes, scowling at discarded food wrappers and drifts of handwritten notes. "This is takin' something that's supposed to be good and just... twisting it, like."
She walked around the chair and slowly lowered into it, feeling legs and back wallow naturally backward into heavily indented cushions. How long did someone have to sit in a chair before it started literally molding to them? How many hours with an arm awkwardly held out, wrist ID hovering over the reader while staring at the console screen? Jamet gave it a try, leaning out slightly and resting a forearm across the armrest. It was a stretch: The reader was placed slightly far enough out to be uncomfortable. Probably on purpose, designed that way. "Do you think they tried just... tying an arm to it?" The console lit up briefly, dim options offering to start main systems.
"Probably. Or propping up an arm, likely. Maybe with a blanket or some printouts." Janson gave her a worried glance, eyes flicking between her outstretched arm and the seat. "But it's too easy; a system like that would be simple to get around. I'm guessing some sort of heartbeat monitor, or maybe a random quiz or prompt you have to watch for and interact with." He leaned over and gently took her arm off the chair rest. "Ah don't like seeing you there, ma'am." The console slowly died again, conserving power.
She folded both gloves and looked down at them. So much for hinting at the problem, time to dive right in. Deep breath. "I signed off on it."
He paused in the act of helping her out of the chair. "Pardon?"
One hand waved slightly like she was casting blame on invisible masses. "It was a pitch meeting. New products, everyone looki
ng to get their name on something big that might land an instant promotion. This group came in, all excited, with a new way to reduce accidents. They called it Workplace Attention Management. Pronounced like 'Wham'."
Jamet scrubbed imaginary dirt off her skinsuit palms, one glove dry washing the other. "Lot of excited talk. Big presentation too, lots of facts and figures about how inattention led to damaged assets and bad profits." She laughed bitterly, eyes locked on the floor and Janson's big boots. "Funny. I can't remember a single mention about injured personnel. But the attention control thing-- that was mine. They wanted to put it in all the new startups, anywhere with 'high value assets at risk'. It seemed like a good idea. I signed." She brushed a tear back. "We all signed. Got bonuses that quarter, too."
A warm hand gently took her shoulder. "Couldn't have known, ma'am. Nobody blames you." Janson's voice was gentle, offering forgiveness.
She let him pull her out of the seat, feeling molded cushions reluctantly giving up their grip on her suit legs. "Maybe. But then we were here, on Pilster, talking about blowing everything up and getting out. But the moment the smelter came up as an option I suspected; this startup is only about six years old. They'd have the newest setups, guaranteed. Then we got close enough to see the schematics were changed and..." Jamet tapped the chair, then waved a finger in a slow, defeated circle around the room. "I knew. Not this bad, or this evil, but I knew the facility wouldn't..."
Finally she looked up, eyes haunted through her faceplate. Janson met her with a worried look. "Wouldn't what?"
"Wouldn't run. Not without someone here while it's on." Something bubbled up in her chest, hot and hard, settling somewhere on the back of her throat until both eyes burned in sympathy. "Wham."
Jamet watched him think it through, face going through a wide range of emotions. Sympathy slid into worry, then eyebrows drew down into a hurt look. She looked away before he started to get upset. "Why not say somethin' before we came all the way out? Told the captain, maybe. We coulda come up with something else to blow up. Lot of thinkin' power on board. Lot of options."
"Time limits, engineer." She held up both gloves, spider-walking them in the air. "One makes two, two makes four. You saw Paul and Emilia in the storage room; that was how many of the small ones could be made in, what? Fifteen or sixteen hours?" She frowned upwards like a system map was on the overheads.
"That's the small ones, though." He tried to sound reasonable. "Might not scale. The big ships are definitely slower at construction."
Jamet nodded. "Sure. Likely, even. But in seven months they're already going on nearly a hundred units. If we got here sooner, maybe a few weeks or a couple of months, there might have been more time. But how many new ship constructions can one hundred of them begin?" She glanced at where he stood in the gloom, silently resisting her points. "If we go back, start over, spend weeks here figuring out a solution that's time we give them to accelerate production. What if half a month from now we have to destroy three or four hundred? Bombs don't come that big, not even smelting facilities."
He nodded slowly, then crossed both arms. "So you said nothin' to us and came along to... what? Stay here an' blow yourself up? What would that prove?"
"Nothing." She changed her mind immediately. "Everything. That I can take back mistakes, undo at least a little damage. The captain got me thinking about it earlier-- he gave me a file of everyone I'd ever written off on. It was," Jamet closed both eyes, face screwing up in pain. "Very, very large. There's no way I could ever make up that much hurt, not even in a dozen lifetimes."
Janson was a mountain of suit, helmet thrown back and beard on full display. "Well, looks like you wasted your time, ma'am."
"What? How?"
"'Cause there's no way ah'm leaving you here for whatever crazy redemption plan that's got in your brain." He uncrossed both arms and levelled a finger like judgment. "And ah'm going to have a word with the captain for putting that idea on you to begin with."
Jamet reached out hesitantly, taking his finger in her glove. "That's-- well I would prefer you didn't get on him about that, actually. But come on now, be reasonable: If there was a better plan we'd be doing that right now. And I really was hoping you could route around the cutoff issue, maybe find a way to remote detonate. If that worked then great; trust me, I'd be on that boat with you!" She let his glove go, dropping both arms. "That didn't work. So now... I have to stay. It's alright: I thought it over. I'm not even scared." She hesitated, then admitted it: "Well, a little."
He thought about it for a long minute, leaving her slowly regretting how much she'd overshared the entire thing. As pitches go it was pretty lousy-- she'd never been good at just convincing people to do things, only threatening them or giving verbal beatings that felt like lopsided cage fights. Swaying peers wasn't a skill that came up a lot in her previous life. Mostly it came down to who had the most dirt on everyone else: Compliance was a foregone conclusion when someone had the right setup. That was how Management worked.
It was only looking back on it she wondered if that could be the only way. What if people really could come to an agreement? It sounded wild, but Kipper's crew seemed to be doing pretty damn well on that. Not a single blackmail file in sight but in less than a week they'd somehow evaded an alien threat that could take down Corporate warships, found the last survivors in system, juked a second attack, fought drone boarders, rescued dozens of people... it was a pretty incredible series of accomplishments. All with a group of people who gave each other shit non-stop, shared everything and didn't give a damn about getting ahead personally.
Now Jamet had a chance to add onto that, in a way only she could. The downside sucked for her personally... but that might be the payment she needed for a lifetime of putting a boot on someone else's face. At the very least it'd be a hell of a last word on Emilia: That bombastic little tech would never live down owing her life to a former Corporate hawk.
All she needed was Janson to agree.
He crushed her hopes. "Nah. Can't go along with it. Sorry ma'am. We're getting back on the boat-- you're going first, just in case-- and we'll get on the comms. Figure this out. Worst comes to worst we get back to the Kipper and just live off it for a while." Janson pointed broadly back toward the hatch, then gently took her elbow and made shooing motions. "Ah made up my mind."
She went for a cheap shot. "What about other ships coming in? They'll get destroyed while we're playing it safe. There's no way to warn anyone."
He hesitated briefly, then kept going. "Way ah see it, we can't do anything about that. Maybe that warship got the warning out-- you don't know. They coulda beat it all by themselves and rescue's coming for us tomorrow."
It had been worth a try. Jamet let herself be led to the exterior hatch, arguing the whole way. "So we're just going to hang around? While they make more and more ships all around us? That sounds like a front row seat to annihilation, engineer. I don't like being that passive."
He popped the hatch, keeping a careful eye on her the entire time. "Me neither, ma'am. Feels wrong to just stand by. But ah don't think getting you exploded would benefit the universe a great deal, even if you managed to take all of 'em with you."
"How does that make any sense? One person against a whole system isn't even a choice, it's an easy deal!" She stomped through the hatch, then engaged the lifeboat's airlock without being prompted. It swished open, letting her inside. "And I'm not even talking like an Exec right now: I'm even offering to trade myself."
He followed her in, then made a point of closing the airlock behind them and locking it. "Maybe ah think you're worth more than you believe. Doesn't matter anyways-- without knowing how to put those systems back together again this smelter isn't doing anything, ever again. And ah'm sure not going to walk you through fixing it, ma'am." He nodded to the pilot's chair. "Can you get us headed out? Back to the ship?"
Jamet facepalmed, then threw both hands in the air with a groan of defeat. "Yes! Yes I can. It's going to be a long trip, t
hough. Our fuel is nearly gone." She crossed the tiny cabin in a huff, plopping onto the forward couch. "The most I can do is give us a hard shove in the right direction, then coast for a few days." A quick wrist swipe brought the console display to life, already showing courses pulled up on individual callouts. "I preprogrammed it ahead of time."
He took a seat behind her, carefully buckling in. "So ah could go by myself, you were thinking?"