by Brian Smith
The only other watchstander was the duty quartermaster, Azuma Taro, formerly a petty officer in the Nihon Uchū Kaigun: the spacefaring Japanese Navy. Like many men and women hailing from spacefaring nations, Azuma had enlisted in his nation’s space service to learn a trade that would get him offworld and out seeing the sights the solar system had to offer. Like most veterans, he was Earth-born. He and Ashburn spent a lot of watches trading “sea stories” from their respective years of service and found each other good company.
Azuma had recently finished his Level-Three academic credentials and was saving every penny he could to pay for a Crandall Academy education. Barsoom Traders had a matching-funds scholarship program for ambitious employees like him, but making the cut for admission as a Crandall cadet was up to the individual. He didn’t have anything approaching the level of training or schooling that Ashburn had, but they still had fun when Ashburn “spotted him” extra computer assist and they raced each other on astrodynamics solutions. At other times they might just play Go or chess. Unlike on a navy ship, deck watches aboard a commercial vessel didn’t require more than a couple of bodies and were generally routine and relaxed.
Their astrogation contest was interrupted when Jerry Sommers, the ship’s purser, entered the bridge with an armful of drinking bulbs.
“Hey-ho, Dakota! Ho, Taro! Anyone interested in some green tea?”
Without waiting for a reply, Sommers slung one in a low-velocity arc toward the quartermaster.
Azuma caught it easily. He grinned as he brought it to his forehead in gratitude and said thank you in his native tongue—arigato.
The purser also tossed one up to Ashburn, who accepted it with thanks while silently wishing it were black coffee instead—old habits died hard.
Sommers glanced around guiltily before hopping up into the captain’s chair. That was extremely bad form, but Sommers wasn’t a stickler about such things. Ashburn had been more uptight about protocols like that in the past, but a new career in the civilian sector had put a little bend in his straight-arrow nature. Sommers and Ashburn were a study in opposites, but good friends nonetheless. Professional competence was something that warmed Ashburn up to just about anyone, and Sommers had that in spades. The purser wasn’t a deck or engineering officer, but a master logistician and their legal eagle when it came to navigating the shoal-filled waters of foreign laws and regulations. Sommers could work the best deals, find the cheapest margins on fuel, and cut through a custom official’s red tape like nobody else Ashburn had ever met. For several years now their purser had “worked the triangle” (the cyclical trade routes between Earth, Mars, and the outer system), and he was always improving his game. Thanks to Sommers, Dejah Thoris’s cost-profit ratio was the best in the entire Barsoom Traders fleet. If Boss Forester stuck to his plan and made Ashburn master of the Thuvia when she was launched, Ashburn planned on stealing Sommers and bringing him along.
Sommers asked him if he’d ever been to Titan before. Ashburn nodded. “Yeah, but only once. My whole squadron landed at Chusuk Station on an exercise—just an excuse to train in Titan’s thick atmo, really. We wandered around for a couple hours and then flew back to the ship. There’s not much there, but I hear the place is growing all the time.”
“Wonder if there’s any good-lookin’ women,” Sommers mused aloud. Among his other skillsets was that he was one of the biggest skirt chasers in the solar system. He avoided synth or virtual substitutes as a matter of personal principle, and accordingly he knew the location of every low-rent fleshpot in every port he frequented. Standards were known to suffer when he was desperate enough, much to the horrified amusement of his shipmates.
“The ladies down there have to be hungry for fresh faces—right?” he asked, looking desperately forlorn. “There are a couple of babes in the Tafuna Yaro crowd, but they won’t give me the time of day. It’s been two weeks!”
Ashburn shot him a faux-sorrowful look. “You do look like you’re hurtin’, tovarich.”
“There might be a few tourists down there,” Azuma added.
“Damn, I hope so. I need to get laid!”
“I doubt you’re going to have the chance on this trip,” a new voice announced. Ashburn mentally winced, cursing his own inattention as Captain Xiang Ming entered the bridge. “Get out of my chair, asshole,” she snapped at Sommers, unsmiling.
It was only partly an act; Xiang put up with a lot of Sommers’s antics because she knew his value as ship’s purser, but catching him in her bridge chair wasn’t going to win him any points. No points for Ashburn either, for letting him get away with the transgression in the first place. Sommers scrambled out of her chair a little faster than he normally liked to move, and parked himself a respectful distance away, looking sheepish.
Xiang and Ashburn were more alike than not: both were Earth-born, prior naval officers, and self-made graduates of the Crandall Academy. The main difference was that Xiang had come up in the CFSN (Chinese Federal Stellar Navy), rather than the USN or one of its TOA equivalents. Their similarities didn’t matter—for no reason he could figure out, they’d simply disliked each other from about the first moment they’d met. His treatment aboard Dejah Thoris might have been hellish except that Xiang was a fair boss who also warmed to professional competence. She also knew that Boss Forester, who lived by his personally iconic, stereotypical vision of being a “Texan,” had taken a strong shine to his American countryman. Xiang had obviously decided to “go along to get along.” As a result, captain and first mate carried on a professional working relationship, lived in neutral corners by unspoken agreement, and didn’t socialize either on—or offship.
“Anything interesting to report, Mr. Ashburn?” she asked sharply.
“No, captain. We’re on our projected schedule. Engineering reports ops-normal with the reactor, and our bell temps are good. No incoming or outgoing signals. Arrival maneuvers are plotted and logged.”
“Very well. I relieve you.”
Ashburn was momentarily taken aback. “Uh . . . yes, captain. I stand relieved. Quartermaster, Captain Xiang has the deck. Log it.” Is she that upset about Jerry being in her damn chair?
“Aye, aye, sir. Captain Xiang has the deck.”
Xiang let Ashburn hang for a long moment, and then her mouth pressed into a tight-lipped smile.
“You aren’t on my shit list, Mr. Ashburn. Trustee Campbell has requested to see you in his cabin. I’ll take the remainder of this watch. You,” she added pointedly, glaring at Sommers, “are on my shit list! How many times have I . . . ? Never mind; go away, Jerry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sommers replied, trying to sound contrite, but not coming off very convincingly. He ducked fast as Xiang flung his forgotten tea bulb after him, and he picked it up off the deck after being forced to dodge it like a missile. He hid his grin as he fled the bridge, feeling a little relieved—he knew she wouldn’t have thrown it at him if she had really been pissed.
***
Although Bill Campbell wasn’t his boss, Ashburn still checked himself over like a midshipman headed for inspection before appearing outside the trustee’s hatch. He wore the standard two-tone black-and-red spacing jumpsuit that served as the shipboard uniform for Barsoom Traders crews, along with standard black spacer’s magboots that could pressure-bond with the jumpsuit. Spacing jumpsuits were flexible and comfortable, but made from modern materials that were fireproof and pressure-sealable in an emergency. A spacing jumpsuit became an unarmored exosuit with the addition of a helmet and gloves, or a pressure-bonding emergency hood with built-in respirocyte injectors if a helmet and air cannisters weren’t readily at hand. Design innovations during the torchship era commonly resulted in function adapting to a desired form.
Ashburn’s jumpsuit sported epaulets with the three gold stripes of a company first officer, and a Barsoom Traders patch on the right shoulder. The latter was the grinning caricature of a green multilegged thoat loaded down with cargo cannisters and giving a big thumbs-up. Ashbur
n wasn’t sure if Edgar Rice Burroughs had ever addressed the issue of thumbs on his fictional thoats, but the logo was well known and popular. Ashburn’s surname was embossed over the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit, while over the right was a small, translucent ruby pin of an arrow-shaped torchship, superimposed at a forty-degree angle over an eight-pointed star in the center. The ruby stone of the pin was representative of Mars (just like the stone in a Crandall class ring), and the pins were worn solely by Crandall Academy graduates. They provided an easy way to identify torchship officers within the company, since Forester hired only Crandall alumni.
Ashburn signaled the hatch, and it rolled open a moment later to admit him. Campbell was present, along with a Tafuna Yaro agent holding a small scanner. “Come in, lad,” Campbell said, waving Ashburn forward. “Are you wearing ocular snoopers?”
Ashburn confirmed that he was, and the guard asked him to remove them, along with his eardots, and hand them over. He did so, intrigued, and the guard, after confirming that Ashburn didn’t possess any other data-capturing or recording devices, ran the scanner over him from head to toe. The guard checked the result, nodded curtly to Campbell, and left the cabin without saying a word.
Campbell was holding a glass of scotch and offered Ashburn a drink.
“No, thanks,” Ashburn replied neutrally, aware that whenever he stood in front of a member of the Crandall Foundation board, he might be influencing his own destiny for better or worse. “Technically speaking, I’m on watch right now,” he added, not wanting to refuse the offer without explanation.
“Fair enough,” Campbell replied. “I suppose you remember meeting me several months back at the annual meeting down at Daedalia Planum?”
“Of course.”
“Right. Well, here’s the deal, Mike. Captain Xiang informs me that you’re the ship’s spaceplane pilot, and we’re going to be making several round trips between the Deety and Titan’s surface—but not all to the same destination. One of the landing sites will be virgin territory with no established landing field or beacon—it’ll be tricky. Think you can handle that?”
“Absolutely.”
“I thought so. I usually use a corporate courier for these Titan runs, but she’s a lot smaller and you’ve already seen how much crap we’ve got stuffed in the hold. One of my Tafuna Yaro security team is endo/exo qualified for atmospheric trips, and there’ll be enough work that you’ll have to spell each other. However, the other pilot is a security type first, with the flying qualification as an add-on—I’d rather use someone like you for the unprepared site.”
Campbell paused, paced a few steps, and took a sip of his drink before turning back to face Ashburn. “Ty Forester thinks a lot of you,” he added.
Ashburn wasn’t sure how to reply to that, so he just gave a slight nod.
Campbell continued. “In a few years, we’re going to be looking for the first crew to go to Alpha Centauri. I’m not going to lie: the selection process is going to be ridiculous, and I can’t make any hard promises. However, nobody will even get a first look unless the board can put their complete trust in them. That means, among other things, discretion. Are you the type that can keep his mouth shut, Michael?”
“That depends,” Ashburn replied without a pause. “Anything aboveboard and I’m your man. If you expect me to turn a blind eye while you space your ex-wife or something—not so much.”
Campbell nodded as if that was the answer he expected. “Well, we won’t be doing anything the slightest bit illegal, if that soothes your conscience. What I’ll need for you to do is erase the coordinates of the secondary landing site from the landing boat’s navigation log after each trip and substitute the coordinates of Janus Station, as if you’d landed there instead. That has less to do with Janus Station and more with keeping the coordinates of the second site a secret, you see. To forestall your next question: the ship’s spaceplane won’t be tracked via radar, lidar, or transponder during those runs. Captain Xiang and I have already had a chat about that—our parking orbit and your surface hops will be coordinated to minimize any chance of external tracking. Of course, there’s no way to ensure absolute secrecy or prevent you from memorizing those landing coordinates. In fact, I’d even prefer that you commit them to long-term memory—no data records, mind you, just good old-fashioned brain cells—and then sort of forget everything else about the next few days, up to and including this conversation. During our Titan layover you may see some Tafuna Yaro dressed differently than they are aboard ship, and you may or may not spot a bearded gentleman in snoopers who looks somewhat like me but doesn’t answer to the name Campbell. What do you say, lad? Can you live with all that?”
“Captain Xiang is fully aware of all this?”
“Aye, she is—it wouldn’t work if she wasn’t. She alone will have the bridge during your surface transits, to make sure nobody is tracking you.”
“What about Ty Forester? Does he know?”
“He knows it’s important; that’s why he loaned me Dejah Thoris on short notice.” That wasn’t strictly true, but near enough that Campbell felt like it was only a “wee lie.”
It wasn’t a hard choice for Ashburn. The request struck him as some high-end Crandall Foundation or corporate project, with nothing that seemed ethically suspect. On the face of things, he didn’t see a need to refuse and thereby shoot himself in the foot regarding Daedalus. Campbell had danced around the topic, but he understood that those were the stakes. However, it stuck in Ashburn’s craw that Campbell was using his personal aspirations as a form of leverage. I can be trusted without having to be threatened first, he groused to himself. It revealed something about Campbell’s character that made him thankful he worked for Forester instead. Boss Forester didn’t have much of a filter, but at least he was a straight shooter.
Ashburn’s mental deliberations lasted only a moment. “That’s good enough for me,” he replied. “Count me in.”
***
On the mark and by the numbers, the watch officer throttled down the torch after the final correction burn, or “soft-burn,” and the torchship was finally in a free-fall orbit around Titan.
They had arrived.
Dejah Thoris was one of a well-designed class of freighters optimized for moving large payloads. She carried four “ship’s boats,” of which three were strictly spacecraft designed for transfers between other ships, space habitats, or destinations like the lunar surface with its low gravity and lack of atmosphere. Her fourth “boat” was an advanced, aerodynamic spaceplane designed for operations in both space and atmospheric environments, which included destinations like the surface of Earth or Titan. All of Dejah Thoris’s auxiliary craft were designed to ride the exterior hull, partially embedded into the molded contour of her hull like snuggling offspring. They were hard-docked to large cargo airlocks, allowing direct access between the boats and the ship’s hold, not just for cargo transfer but for passengers as well.
Shifting massive cargoes was easier in zero-g or microgravity than under thrust, so loading for the first run began as soon as the ship cut thrust and went into free fall.
Ashburn stood in the cargo bay, clad in a heavier exosuit, the livery identical to that of his usual spacing jumpsuit. His magboots were turned on, securing him firmly to the deck. The attendant sensations felt perfectly natural to him after all the years he’d been spacing, and he was vaguely aware of cargo containers floating past him to be sealed into Zitidar One, the ship’s spaceplane. Its name was another Burroughs reference, like most of their company monikers—apparently Forester had been a rabid fan of the John Carter stories as a child.
Anyone looking at the first officer as they walked or floated by would see the smear of light playing across his irises, and his expression was essentially blank. He was in virtual, monitoring the external preflight inspection of Zitidar One being conducted by a trio of small exobots designed for that job, obviating the need for him to go EVA and do it himself. Zitidar One’s diagnostic computer and avionic
s suite were already powered up and running as well, conducting their internal system checks and making status reports over the ship’s network. Her cold-fusion APU was supplying power independent of her mother ship. He nodded with satisfaction as the exobots completed their inspection, reported that all was well, and jetted back into their various storage cubbies located around the spaceplane’s hull. He shifted out of full virtual and back into standard AR mode. This left him looking at the interior of the ship’s hold again, helpfully tagged here and there with small informative labels and data bars.
One of those tags was attached to the Tafuna Yaro pilot who’d be assisting with the surface hops; she was standing right in front of him, wearing something of a shy smile. His oculars tagged her as one Takagi Healani. She was of mixed ethnicity—Japanese and Hawaiian, judging by her name and looks. Someone in her family, however, had passed her the genes for a pair of the most strikingly blue eyes he’d seen in a long time. She stood about 5’5”, and her physique marked her as Terran-born. Like most of the Tafuna Yaro, he’d seen her at random a few times during the trip and had had to listen to Jerry Sommers’s endless infatuated descriptions of her. Ashburn had warned the purser not to push it with her—he’d seen her working out with her teammates. As Campbell had pointed out, she was a security agent first and a pilot second; he didn’t doubt that Takagi could kick Sommers’s scrawny Martian butt right through the bulkhead if she wanted to.
After trading introductions, Takagi asked to ride along with Ashburn on the first two or three runs—she’d been running VR simulations to familiarize herself with Zitidar One and how the spaceplane handled, but, as every pilot knew, a sim just wasn’t the real thing. Ashburn told her she was more than welcome to ride along. Both pilots had been already been buddy-checked by others, so they immediately headed into Zitidar One. This meant switching off their magboots and floating in, where they had to reorient themselves to the spaceplane’s interior configuration and strap themselves into the cockpit seats. Torchship decks were arranged like the floors of a skyscraper, sitting perpendicular to the long axis (and thrust vector) of the ship. That was what gave those on board a form of comfortable artificial gravity when the torch was throttled up. Zitidar One was designed more like a conventional aircraft: sitting on an Earth tarmac, they would be oriented normally; under thrust in space, they would feel like they were lying on their backs.