by K. B. Wagers
“Can do, Commander.” Moments later the clatter of her boots echoed from behind them. “What’s up?” Jenks asked, skidding to a halt.
“You know anything about rewiring power couplings?”
“From scratch?”
“Possibly,” Rosa replied, and Jenks made a face.
“Here,” Max said, sliding the schematics across the display. They’d settled into an almost friendly rhythm since Jenks had saved her butt in the bar, but Max still couldn’t get a read on the woman like she had with the rest of the team.
Jenks scratched at her head, disrupting the now purple strands of her hair as she studied it. “Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem, depending on what I have to work with, but we can get it done. We going that direction?”
Rosa nodded. Jenks gave a sloppy salute in reply and headed for the back of the ship, shouting for Tamago.
“She’ll get the gear together,” Rosa said. “We’ve got a decent complement of spare parts. Never know when you’ll have to make a repair on the fly.”
“Every other week,” Ma muttered, shooting a grin at Rosa over his shoulder.
Max listened to the banter with half an ear as she studied the specs for the research station. The power core was in the center spike, slightly below the ring. She expanded the view, zooming in on the interior.
“Know anything about power couplings, Carmichael?” Rosa asked over her shoulder.
“I don’t,” she admitted. “But I figured it was better to take a look and at least know where the core is than show up there and be totally lost.”
“Fair enough.” It could have been approval in Rosa’s voice, but Max wasn’t sure. “Go with Jenks when we get on board. You’ll learn something.”
“Yes, Commander.”
For the next ten minutes, Rosa walked her through the schematics, patiently explaining the basics. “The CHN mandated that all major components going into space had to be interchangeable no matter the original producer. So a power coupling from the Hudson Company will still work within a system designed by Voyager.”
“It’s smart,” Max replied with a nod. “That way you don’t have someone dying out here just because of a brand war.”
“We had enough of that in the Collapse.”
Max watched in silence as Rosa reached up for the medallion at her throat. The Collapse was so far in humanity’s past and yet had affected everything moving forward. It seemed sometimes that it had been only yesterday that the world fell into chaos and ruin thanks to the indifference and greed of humanity.
“Hey, Max, have you seen Saturn up close?” Ma asked, looking over his shoulder with a smile.
“No.” Max’s eyes were locked on the view rapidly filling the main window and the word came out in a breathless gasp.
Saturn loomed ahead, a yellow-brown oblate sphere ringed with innumerable particles. This close they no longer looked like rings, but a kilometer-thick carpet of ice and debris stretching between the ship and the planet.
“She’s beautiful.” Max couldn’t take her eyes off it.
The rings moved, undulating in waves at spots and shifting like the ebb and flow of a river.
“It’s Ma’s favorite planet. Jenks’s is Pluto.” Sapphi grinned from her spot on the bridge opposite Max. “Despite the fact that it’s not a planet.”
“I can hear you! It is a damned planet, Saph, reinstated and everything in 2240,” Jenks hollered as she clattered back up the stairs.
“Only because they felt sorry for it.” Sapphi winked at Max.
“It’s because Jenks feels a kinship with small things that don’t fit in the solar system.”
“I heard that, too, Ma!”
Laughter echoed through the ship.
“It’s got a heart on it, for crying out loud,” Jenks muttered a moment later from Max’s side. “How can you not love it?”
“For what it’s worth,” Max whispered with a smile, “I like the heart, too.”
Jenks eyed her for a moment, then a slow smile curved one side of her mouth and she bumped her shoulder into Max’s arm.
They flew around the planet. And then, the bright white orb of Enceladus came into view, stunning against the black backdrop of space, hovering above the rings. And orbiting it, the research station.
It was shaped like a spindle with a rotating ring two-thirds of the way down the narrow, spiked center.
“Enceladus Research Station Control, this is Interceptor boat Zz5, Zuma’s Ghost,” Sapphi said.
“Roger that, Zuma’s Ghost. This is Enceladus Control.” A dry voice echoed back over the com.
“Commander Rosa Martín here, Enceladus. Heard you needed the power back on. We thought we’d swing by and see what we could do.”
“We’ve got sweaters aplenty, but it would get hard to breathe after a while. We appreciate the assistance.”
“Are we okay to dock? We can use the ship to power the sequence.”
“You are cleared to dock, Zuma’s Ghost, and thanks for the offer. Less of a chance of something going wrong if you use your power grid instead of ours.”
“Sounds like a plan, Control,” Sapphi replied after exchanging a nod with Ma. “Docking procedures initiated.”
Max grabbed for the nearby bar as the ship angled in for the docking port and slipped easily into position.
“Docked and locked, Commander,” Sapphi announced.
“Good job, Ensign. You and Ma hold the fort here. Lieutenant, you’re with me.”
Max followed Rosa down the stairs to the door, where Jenks and Tamago waited, gear slung over their shoulders. They piled into the airlock and Max rested a hand on her sword.
The other door slid open, revealing three people just inside the station’s airlock, and a message from Jenks scrolled across Max’s vision.
Verified station staff. Visual matches files.
“Commander Martín Rivas of the NeoG,” Rosa said. “This is Lieutenant Carmichael and Petty Officers Khan and Uchida.”
The man in the front lifted his hand with a smile. “I’m Dr. Julien Apostas, head of Enceladus Research. This is Dr. Via Hugh, she’s in charge of our biology department, and Svetlana Krupin, my assistant and our head repairwoman.”
“He’s being kind,” Svetlana said. “Our repair tech went home a week ago because their wife is having a baby any day now. I got stuck with the duty. At which, I’m afraid, I haven’t done all that well.”
“Well enough, Svetlana,” Julien replied, rubbing a hand over his short beard. “Now that we’re all sure we are who we say we are, should we take this out of the airlock, Commander?”
Rosa’s lips twitched. “Sounds like a plan, Doctor.”
“Call me Julien.” He stuck his hand out. “Thanks for coming to our rescue.”
“Why didn’t you just head for Jupiter until the techs could get here?” Rosa asked, shaking his hand.
“Rules for something like that are we all go or we all stay.” Julien smiled. “And since we’ve got a few timed experiments, we weren’t willing to leave.” He shrugged. “Here we are. It wasn’t much of an emergency as they go, and Jupiter Control said you could be right over.”
“Jenks has a talent for putting things back in working order. She and Lieutenant Carmichael can go with Svetlana.” Rosa pointed in their direction. “See what they can do to get you up and running again, at least until the company techs arrive. In the meantime, I suspect Petty Officer Uchida would love a tour. They’ve got a background in biology.”
“University of Utopia.” Tamago smiled. “I did my studies on the underground ice floes there.”
“Excellent!” Dr. Hugh clapped her hands. “You’ll find this fascinating, then, Petty Officer. We’ve been studying the development of microbes on Enceladus.” She pointed off to the left. “If you want to follow me, I’ll show you what we’re working on right now.”
Max took the bag Tamago was carrying and nodded once to Rosa in acknowledgment of the order scrolling across her vision.
Check in ev
ery half hour.
“So, you had couplings in storage, didn’t you?” Jenks asked Svetlana as they followed the petite redhead down the corridor in the opposite direction.
“The couplings in storage were bad. Or at least I think they are? Nothing changed when I plugged them in. I know enough to put them in and hit the switch, but not enough to rewire from scratch.” Svetlana lifted her hands helplessly.
Jenks grinned. “If you’re up for a lesson, I’ll teach you how. I’m going to teach our new lieutenant here anyway.”
“Awesome! I left the couplings down in the core room. It’s this way.”
Max followed along behind as Jenks peppered Svetlana with questions about the power core and about the particulars of the power problems the station was having. It seemed random, but Max spotted the pattern and the way Jenks was able to coax information out of Svetlana without assuming the scientist knew the answer to the problem because of her own experience with the power core.
The stationary nature of the core meant it had different requirements from a ship’s, but the core itself wasn’t all that dissimilar from that of a ship a class or two larger than Zuma’s Ghost. Thankfully, what was bad was the couplings that fed power out from the core and not the core itself. They found themselves in front of three cylindrical nodes set into a nearby wall about half a meter off the floor.
Jenks tossed her bag down and dropped into a crouch by the pile of parts in the corner. “Hey, Lieutenant? Hand me the power tester in the outside pocket of the bag you’re carrying.”
Max set down her bag, fished around until she found what she was reasonably sure looked like a tester, and handed it over.
“Thanks.” Jenks took it, turned it on, and slammed it against the deck a few times until it actually cooperated and powered up. “I swear to God, if I don’t get that equipment requisition in soon I’m dumping this entire bag of junk onto Hoboins’s desk and quitting.”
“Jenks said you were new to the team?” Svetlana asked Max as Jenks continued to curse under her breath.
“Yes. I just transferred in a few weeks ago.”
“I’ve been here for almost two Sol years. Two more months and I’ll get my LifeEx bonus.” She smiled brightly.
“Bonus?”
“If you do two years out past the belt on any of their research or mining facilities, Hamatachi Corp pays for the initial treatment and the re-ups for as long as you’re with the company. It’s incentive to get folks to be out here away from Earth for so long.”
Max frowned. “They’re required to provide the treatment if you’re working out here, aren’t they?”
“Oh sure, CHN regs for space work and all that. But if you flake on your contract you have to pay them back for every day you’re short. After two years you can quit whenever and just lose the re-ups.” Svetlana smiled. “If I stay with the company for a full twenty I’m set for life.”
“The lieutenant wouldn’t know about that, Svetlana,” Jenks called. “She’s minted.”
Max sighed and shook her head. “I am not.”
“Oh,” Svetlana breathed, her blue eyes suddenly round in her heart-shaped face. “Carmichael—I didn’t even think.”
“It’s fine.” Max wondered what kind of scene it would make to kick Jenks, who’d dived back into her work, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter. “We have to earn our LifeEx same as anyone else.”
“You could just buy it, though.” Svetlana winced. “Ooh, I’m sorry. That was rude.”
“I couldn’t. Not really.” Max smiled. “Our great-grandfather wrote several provisions into his will that are mandatory for all future generations. I do get an annual payment from my inheritance, but if I were to leave the military, that would stop unless I took a job with the company or with the Coalition government.”
“That’s all super-fascinating stuff, but this is really interesting. Come here you two,” Jenks said, waving a hand over her head. “So, Svetlana, every single power coupling on this station is utterly fried. All three of the ones in use and all three of the ones in storage. The odds of that are really impressive. Again with the impressive failure ratios,” Jenks muttered the last bit to herself. “Did you have a power surge or something recently?”
“Nothing I can think of.” Svetlana frowned.
“Well.” Jenks clapped her hands. “The good news is, all three are bad.”
“How is that good?” Max asked, sharing a look with Svetlana.
“Teaching moment. They’re bad, but fixable. I’m going to rewire this one. Watch close, and follow along.” Jenks pointed on either side of her.
“What?”
“Time to get dirty, Lieutenant. You and Svetlana will do the others while I’m working here.” She took hold of her coupling and twisted until the cap came loose in her hand, trailing a mass of wires along with it.
Max swallowed and grabbed for her coupling.
An hour later the three of them were greasy with the slippery green biolubricant that was used to help keep the conduits cool, and all three grinned in delight at the humming sound that now emanated from the power core of the station.
“Flip the emergency power off, Commander; let’s see if she’ll take the load,” Jenks said over the coms.
“Emergency backup going off in three, two, one,” Rosa replied.
There was barely a shimmy as the power swapped back over. Svetlana whistled her approval while Max stared at the whole thing with a kind of dazed amazement that broke only when Jenks punched her in the shoulder.
“Good job, Lieutenant.”
Max seemed ridiculously stunned. It hadn’t been a hard rewire job, but the look on her face made Jenks wonder if anyone had ever taken the time to show her how to do something so mundane. “I did it right?”
“Probably. We’ll know in five minutes if the whole thing blows.”
Max’s eyes snapped wide.
“Kidding, I’m kidding.” Jenks slung her arm over Svetlana’s shoulders, pleased when the pretty research tech leaned into her. “I think this calls for a shower and a drink.”
“I just might have something stashed away, and you’re more than welcome to shower with me.” Svetlana glanced in Max’s direction. “I’m sure Dr. Apostas won’t mind if we drop you off at his quarters, Lieutenant. He’s got a private shower you can use. I’ll message him and get permission.”
Jenks tried not to chuckle at the look of relief on Max’s face.
Letters
Jenks—
Settled in. Finally.
Mission requires us to be on the ground here as much as up in the black. Right now they have me on the dirt on Trappist-1e as a point of contact for the planetside dockyard. It feels weird being on solid ground, no lie. (And shut up, I know you’re making some joke about how I finally found the perfect solution to my space problem.) The new team is great. They’re not you all, but, well, you know what I mean.
There’s so much traffic. I didn’t realize how big the habitats had gotten. The news makes it sound like they’re still super small. Spoiler alert: they are not.
I miss you. No, that’s a lie. I really miss Doge, give him a hug for me.
—Nika
Nika—
You’re going to turn into one of those Army dudes staying dirtside all the time. I think you should come home.
I’m being nice to the lieutenant. Taught her how to rewire a power conduit on a run out to Enceladus the other day. You’d have thought I taught her brain surgery, as impressed as she was.
Most of the time she moves like she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but we put her in the ring and it’s like watching a ghost fight. I had her spar D’Arcy yesterday and he couldn’t put a hand on her. I can’t figure out if she’s letting me punch her or if I’m immune to her creepy powers. Ma’s talked Rosa into putting her in the navigator seat, too, and the first simulation they did was a thing of beauty.
She’s all right, I guess. I’m going to keep punching her in the face until s
he learns how to keep her damn hands up, though.
Doge misses you, but I don’t.
—J
T-minus Ten Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games
“Hey, Jenks, you got a minute?”
Jenks hit send on the email to her brother and then looked up at Max. “Do now, Lieutenant. Whatcha need?”
“Rosa just passed on a report from Admiral Hoboins. Those five people you picked up with that system jumper out in the belt before I arrived are dead,” Max said, sitting down at the table across from her.
“Dead?”
Max nodded at Jenks’s incredulous look. “There was a malfunction in the fire suppression system in the brig of the naval transport. Four sailors had to be treated for oxygen deprivation and eight prisoners were beyond revival—our five were among them.”
“Should I be the one to say that’s extremely convenient?” Jenks asked.
“You can,” Max replied. “You wouldn’t be the only one thinking it, though.”
“Why are we only hearing about this now?”
“Navy just sent the word to Hoboins.” Max shrugged. “I guess they didn’t think it was all that important.”
“Figures. It was odd enough with the ratio thing and that all those people were on the trial list for the new version of LifeEx.” Jenks rubbed a hand over the back of her neck. It still surprised her a little that Max had shared that information with her so easily, and that Rosa apparently was encouraging them both to look into this weirdness more than a month out from the mission.
“The problem is this means the case is officially closed,” Max said. “Off-Earth has their property back, the criminals are dead. There’s nothing for NeoG, or anyone else for that matter, to do.”
“Did we get a report on that fire and anything on the autopsies of those criminals?” Jenks asked.
“I’ve got it. Also have a list of the passengers who were on the ship,” Max replied, and the notification blinked to life in the corner of Jenks’s vision at the same time. “For all the good it’ll do. Short in the wiring, no sign of foul play. Open and shut.”