by M. D. Cooper
Given that the load consisted of uranium-238 ore—mixed with the various other radioactive isotopes the fissionable material decayed into—Jacob had been given one of the older ships with which to move it. To his mind, one of the newer haulers with the graviton emitting manipulator arms would be better, since they wouldn’t actually have to touch the ore and get radioactive dust everywhere.
But Max had made the call, so the older ships were the ones moving the uraninite. As a result, the front of Jacob’s ship was half-covered in enough ore that it glowed faintly—though that was more from a slow nitrogen leak in the cooling system for his forward heat shield.
He was safe enough in the pilot’s pod, but the beta particles and gamma rays suffusing the area wreaked havoc on his positioning sensors, and he had to pay careful attention to what he was doing and what was going on around the ship.
Managing the rock was tricky as well. It was over fifty meters across, and highly irregular. Normally they’d use nets to help secure loads this large, and then the pincer arms would hold the net, but no one wanted to deal with repacking radioactive nets, and so they did their best with the pincers alone.
He double-checked his readings, making sure that the load was stable under thrust. Too much pressure, and the rock would split, perhaps into several pieces, each on their own trajectory. Too little force, and the rock would slip away.
Should that happen, it would create a navigational hazard, and Jacob would have to fly the sluggish ore handler to chase after them—something that could take hours.
The data on his console assured him that the rock was secure. If he carried on slowly and steadily as he was, then he shouldn’t have any problems.
Under his breath, Jacob began to hum along to the opera, which was one of his old favorites: a story of misplaced loyalty and unrequited love. As he listened, the singer’s voice rose to an almost inhuman pitch, while remaining delicate and light as a butterfly’s wing. A tear welled up in Jacob’s eye, burst over his lashes, and ran down his cheek before dripping from his muscled jaw.
He found himself wishing he instead reported directly to Pippa and Anwen, the twins who were the lead engineers on the project.
From the limited personal interactions he’d had with them, they seemed a bit fresh and inexperienced to be put in charge of the operation, but he didn’t think that mattered too much.
Mining the Cyprus asteroids was a straightforward job…. Or at least, it had been until they’d gotten down to the core of one of the thousand-kilometer rocks—affectionately named Irradia—and hit the uraninite there.
Other than letting Max make the call on using the older haulers, the twins had handled that development well enough, adjusting the schedule to gather a full load of the fissionable ore for processing at the Roma enrichment facility.
Max, however, had chafed at the delays the specialized load had created, and took it out on whoever was close…or handy on comms.
Jacob’s sensors picked up another ship nearby—later than they should have, due to the clouds of ionized uraninite dust—and he adjusted his vector, still gritting his teeth as he brooded over his less than pleasant supervisor, fighting the urge to spit in disgust, which wouldn’t be wise while under thrust.
Suddenly, an alarm flashed on his screen, and Jacob scanned the readouts. His maneuver had shifted his load, and one of the pincers had slipped. It was slowly dragging across the surface, and if it went much further, the rock would slip free.
He eased off the thrust while slowly adding pressure to the pincer, careful to avoid any sudden jolts that would put undue strain on the other arms.
The pincer kept sliding, and he knew that he’d either need to kill all thrust and re-grapple the chunk of ore, or use a net. If it were entirely up to him, he’d stop and get a new hold on the uraninite, but that would send Max up his ass in a heartbeat.
Without further consideration, he triggered a load-securing net to deploy from the sliding pincer. A web of carbon cables launched out from the pincer arm, pitons hitting the ore and driving into it, finally arresting the movement and holding the load secure.
The load safe, Jacob relaxed, noting that he was over halfway to the Euphemia now, and one of the most beautiful and tragic parts of the opera was coming up. The forsaken lover would soon finally comprehend what every other character and the audience knew: that she had been cruelly, heartlessly abandoned, and her three years of waiting had been entirely in vain.
Suddenly the music cut out as a message came in.
Max’s complaint scythed through Jacob’s calm.
Max was gone, and the opera continued from where it had been interrupted.
Jacob cursed aloud, his deep voice rumbling around the cockpit. He directed Max to take part in several unnatural and impossible acts with himself and various relations.
What does that dumbass expect me to do? he wondered. Fly from Irridia to the Euphemia at full thrust?
He ruminated that it wasn’t his fault he’d been assigned the final haul of the rotation. The job would take as long as it took; he would be stupid to rush it. All it would take would be a single mistake and everyone would be on their way back to Carthage a lot later, or maybe not at all.
Jacob turned up the music and double-checked his ETA. If he maintained his current velocity for five more minutes, and then began braking to match v, he would reach the ship in twenty-eight minutes. It was plenty fast enough. Max could go eat basalt.
Rolling his powerful shoulders, Jacob considered whether or not he cared to hear from Max again, cursed aloud, and switched off all but emergency comms.
He wouldn’t have to listen to Max again until he was face to face with him aboard the Euphemia. The boor was going to chew him out either way, so there was no point in getting it on comms as well.
If the asshole threatened to fire him in person, it would get back to the twins, and he was certain they’d have his back. He was a good worker, and they were too smart to let him go. If push came to shove, he was certain that Pippa and Anwen would overrule Max.
Jacob smiled at the thought of those two laying into his boss. He kinda wanted Max to try to get rid of him; he would love to see the look on the man’s face when they shut him down.
At the prescribed time, he killed the ship’s thrust and carefully repositioned the engines—which were held on long arms—to begin the braking burn. That was one thing he liked about this model of ship: no need to rotate the entire cargo load just to slow down…. And should the load slip, there was a much lower risk of it hitting the ship itself.
Once the burn had begun, and he was confident the ore wasn’t going to shift, Jacob settled in for the last twenty minutes of his journey, thinking about the shore leave he’d take on Carthage. Max’s allusion to his girlfriend’s anatomy had been rude, but it nevertheless sparked some pleasant memories and anticipation of renewing his acquaintance.
The opera was about to reach its climax. The weight of the heroine’s terrible betrayal was crushing all hope of happiness in her, and she was resolving to take her only remaining course of action. Jacob listened intently, his stubby fingertips deft as he made minute adjustments to his controls.
At the edge of the holodisplay, the silver orbs of the ore handlers on the next rotation edged slowly closer on their trip to the asteroid he’d just left, their articulated arms trailing behind. Beyond the cluster of ships, a thick rod hung at a thirty
-degree angle to his horizon, a motionless reference frame in the black: the Euphemia.
The soprano neared the final lines of the libretto, mourning the loss of her love, lamenting his unfaithfulness, and weeping for their innocent child. She was facing her inevitable end. Jacob’s lip trembled. This part always got to him, yet he loved it.
Many other pilots aspired to attain Max’s position, sitting in the air-conditioned comfort and roomy interior of vessels like the Euphemia, but not Jacob. He was more than happy alone in his cabin. Just him, the rocks, and his music.
His gaze drifted to Irradia’s lumpy surface, which still dominated the left side of his holodisplay, but his attention was on the music, not the half-mined asteroid.
Then a portion of the asteroid’s surface seemed to jump.
Jacob’s focus zoomed in on the image, watching as ejecta began to fly from Irridia’s surface as his equipment registered a massive surge of gamma radiation.
That doesn’t seem right, he thought, while pulling up the next rotation’s schedule. They shouldn’t be using anything that explosive to mine the seam.
There was a series of final blasts scheduled, so the presence of explosions wasn’t surprising, but a blast that large within a uranium-laden asteroid was beyond dangerous. As he considered the danger, his visual showed jagged lines begin to appear across the asteroid, outlining a hundred-kilometer section toward the end closest to him.
Then Irridia shuddered again, and Jacob’s equipment registered a burst of gamma waves, this time mixed with beta radiation.
Oh shit! Jacob knew what that meant. Some pocket of uranium-238 had either been hit with a neutron bombardment, or had heated up enough to go critical.
Unbelievably, almost comically, the chunk of Irridia that had been outlined by fractures broke free, surging into space as several tertiary detonations occurred.
A swathe of ore handlers lay in the hundred-kilometer rock’s path. They were already reversing course at top speed, but the runaway fragment scattered them like a bowling ball blasting through pins.
Jacob gaped. His fingers froze on the controls. The closing scene of the opera blasted through his headset unheeded.
What the hell?!
As he watched, the chunk of Irridia split again, one section tumbling away—on a direct course for Jacob’s ship. He forced his hands into action, shifting his engines to try to clear the incoming mass.
Alerts on his boards registered his load shifting, and he triggered the emergency releases, angling the engines to move clear of the hunk of uraninite before applying full thrust.
Suddenly he was jerked to the side, restraints straining to hold him in his seat.
His eyes locked on the console before him. The pincer that he’d deployed the stabilizing web from wasn’t releasing the net; it was stuck, holding his ship to the ore that was now an anchor, keeping him from getting to safety.
He triggered the pincer’s emergency decoupling systems, but the angle of force being applied from the engines had jammed them in place.
Frantically, he shifted his thrust in an attempt to ease the tension on the pincer’s articulated joints, but the action caused his ship to swing around too fast, and one of the engines slammed into the fifty-meter hunk of rock stuck to his ship. The impact was hard enough that it broke the fusion engine free from its articulated arm, sending it spinning slowly away.
Jacob’s throat constricted as he gaped at the display. A dozen alarms were flashing, and a ‘mass impact’ alert was blaring in his ears.
With a deft twist of the three other engines, he managed to relieve pressure on the pincer arm, and the decouplers kicked in, allowing the arm to come free. But now the ore he’d been hauling lay between him and freedom. He swung the engines around once more, ready to boost away on a new vector, when one of them died.
A fuel delivery warning lit up, and he realized that a line must have been severed when the other engine hit the ore.
He frantically cut off those lines, but he feared it was too late; there might not be enough time to get clear of the thirty-kilometer chunk of Irridia bearing down on him—though he’d burned his engines beyond their safety limits in the attempt.
In slow motion, Jacob’s nemesis approached.
It grew until the rock was close enough that he could make out individual surface features with alarming clarity. He clenched his teeth and braced his feet against the deck, pushing, as though he could somehow make his ship move faster.
Then, by some miracle, his half-ruined craft cleared the rock by just a few meters, coming out into clear space.
A cry of joy sprang from Jacob’s lips as he brought up a rear view, just in time to see three things perfectly aligned: the ore he’d been hauling, his fusion engine that had been broken off when it hit the load, and the inexorable chunk of Irridia.
“No…” he whispered, as the ore he’d been hauling hit the engine, and then crushed it against the hunk of asteroid.
Radiation alerts flared again, and then space was alive with debris flying toward him from the resulting nuclear blast. At the very edge of his perception, he was dimly aware of the opera playing on. It had reached its very end.
As a grey blur filled Jacob’s displays, the soprano drove her blade home, singing out her agony.
It was the last sound he heard.
SUPPER ON THE SAND
STELLAR DATE: 03.07.8937 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Marine Eco Station #14, Knossos Island
REGION: Carthage, New Canaan System
Erin relaxed in the gentle swell, letting it lift and then lower her body effortlessly as she floated not far from the shore.
She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever been so happy. The day at Martin’s beach house had been perfect. Now as the sky was easing toward twilight, the light of the Cradle was twinkling to life on the eastern horizon. The cliff that overhung the beach was already shadowy and gave no indication of the secret SATC facility housed inside it.
It had been the construction of the SATC that had originally brought her and Martin together. Erin smiled as she recalled her first encounter with the grumpy Doctor Ryland; he’d stood in the water a little ahead of where she was floating, and she’d been on the beach. She’d since discovered that Martin had a much more pleasant side to him, provided you weren’t threatening his precious sea creatures.
Erin sighed. She would have to leave the water soon. Martin was cooking a special dinner, and Isa had gone in to take a shower more than an hour ago.
Erin chuckled.
Her AI’s laughter echoed in Erin’s mind.
After a few more minutes of lazy floating, Erin said,
Erin heard Walter’s laughter for a second time.
Erin’s attention was drawn to the shore, where Isa had emerged from the beach house. She stood on the step barefoot, dressed in a bright sarong, her hair twisted up onto her head.
She called out, “Erin, what are you still doing in the water? You must be wrinkled as a prune. Come and take a shower, or you’ll be late for dinner. Martin says it’s nearly ready.”
“But it’s so beautiful out here,” Erin responded with a dramatic sweep of her arm above the water. “Do you think we can maybe eat outside?”
“I’ll ask him. But you better not take too long getting ready. He might just say you can’t have any.” Isa stepped back into the house.
Erin swam a few lazy strokes to the shallows and waded out of the water onto the beach. Martin wouldn’t carry out the threat Isa mentioned, of course, but Erin didn’t want to waste any more time. Martin could turn prickly if she made them both wait for her. He seemed to take most things in life seriously, and tonight he was cooking by hand, going to a lot of trouble to make the evening special.