by F P Adriani
“How’s it going?” I shouted to Steve as I rushed toward the beam-engine area.
“Good,” Steve shouted back. “I’ve been increasing the flow of the Evan; that way we can get into a bubble a bit faster than normal.”
I stopped quite far from the actual engine; it was usually very hot right around there, and I couldn’t deal with the extra heat right now. As it was, my hair felt matted to my head with sweat. I ran my right hand over my head, and sure enough, it came away wet. “I can’t believe this shit’s happened—and over a fucking stone! But, listen up: I need someone to get a small flight capsule from the storage closet. I’ve got an idea,” I said, my eyes on Gary as he came up beside me.
*
The next fifteen minutes in engineering were among the most nerve-wracking minutes I’d ever experienced on my ship. I kept thinking of what could happen, of how I and my crew could be killed if the other ship hit us so hard that the shields failed and then another shot pierced the Demeter’s hull; already Steve had found a slight drain on the exterior shields. The reactor had also not been running when all this shit started—and there was no time to get it up to peak-power now: more fuel rods needed to be reloaded into the shafts, yet every available person was rushing around getting the beam engine prepared, or taking care of my special capsule….
When it was almost ready, I had Karen set up a communications link from a computer terminal in engineering.
She, Gary, Shirley and I stood by that terminal while Steve worked at the main computer terminal for controlling the beam engine.
There were several series of red and brown mobile torso straps that hung from the ceiling around engineering, so when flying was too turbulent, the engineering crew could still work without excessive danger. Someone lowered the straps now, and all of us in the room quickly strapped into nearby ones and locked them into their floor junctions.
I told Karen to open the communications-line to the other ship, which immense green structure was visible on the tabletop viewscreen beside Karen’s keyboard.
“This is Captain Zarro,” I said over the line now. “The capsule’s ready. Are you?”
“Just send it over toward my port side,” the man on the other ship said in his smooth way. “This took far too long. I am beginning to lose patience.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want that to happen,” I said in a voice that matched his smoothness. “But won’t you even tell me your name, so I know who I’m doing business with?”
“I’m Claudius,” he said. “That’s all you need to know. The capsule?”
From behind the other computer terminal, Steve gave me a quick thumbs-up. And then Karen nodded at me once, her blue eyes finally locking onto mine.
“Do it,” I said, and her fingers immediately pushed the blue button on her keyboard.
On the tabletop viewscreen, the image was now split between the green ship and a camera view of the back of the Demeter, where a small, white, rectangular box suddenly appeared and then rushed through the black of space, toward the other ship. About halfway there, the box’s dimensions quickly expanded until the whole thing turned into a blast of light.
“Now, Steve!” I yelled. “Hang on, everyone!” I glanced at Shirley beside me, who was so pale she looked like she was on the verge of passing out.
I grabbed one of her hands and squeezed, just as the force of the extreme curon change in space-and-time shook the ship and we all swayed toward the sides of the Demeter; outside the ship, the silvery curon beams were rushing out the back nozzles then curling around to encase the Demeter in a protective shell.
We were finally in our own space, isolated from normal space, and we could travel at superhigh speeds now, in time with the Earth’s time; curon bubbles effectively mitigated time dilation.
Like with many ship designs today, the Demeter’s curon engine was used for both bubble-creating and propulsion. But the Demeter wasn’t always flying at high speeds; at moderate speeds, the beam engine was only on a low setting, so if we were inside a bubble then, we could easily get communications across the field-barrier and normal space would appear normal to us from inside the field.
However, right now, the curon engine was on the maximum bubble setting, and things on the viewscreen looked anything but normal: there were random pockets of kaleidoscopes of color and random pockets of empty black. Sometimes the various shapes were going very fast; other times they were going very slow. But they were always going. There was no “stand still with respect to local space” evident out there now; we were space, and it and we were always moving.
“How are we doing?” I asked loudly, staring at my strapped-in crew around the room.
Steve flashed me two thumbs-up signs; then I exhaled loudly and let go of Shirley’s hand. “You all right?” I asked her.
She nodded at me now, a little shakily. “But I—I don’t know what to say….”
“You don’t have to say anything. I can see on your face that this wasn’t the kind of exciting adventure you were expecting on here.”
She laughed gently, and I felt something loosen along my hips: Gary’s hands. He had held me the whole time I had held Shirley. At the thought of his caring behavior toward me, I felt a pinching feeling around my heart. And I also forgave him for what had happened on the bridge: I knew he was probably worried about me more than he had been thinking of anything else, and worrying about others sometimes makes you say and do stupid, unlike-you things.
I turned my head toward over my shoulder and flashed him a small smile as I undid my strap.
*
Though I remained in engineering for a little longer, I couldn’t remain that long; I felt completely exhausted.
Thankfully, Chen and Pete quickly confirmed with Steve and Karen that there were no signs of that warship in our curon bubble. I listened to the four of them talk all-things-Demeter over the intercom.
Then Shirley turned to me; she had a smile on her face. “What did you use before in the capsule—what happened with that ship?”
“I had a photon flare inserted in the capsule—spaceships use them if they’re dead in space. The flares have power packs inside, but I had a little something extra added to it so the flare would explode bigger and faster, and give off more light than normal—it was my magician’s poof! of smoke.”
“It was also a great idea!” Shirley said.
“Yeaaaahhh…” I replied, on a big yawn. I covered my mouth with one of my hands. Then I removed it to call to Steve: “Where will we come out and when?”
“In about three-and-a-half hours,” Steve said, “we should emerge in the far end of The Alexi Layer.”
“Crap,” I said, almost a growl. “That’s days away from Keron-3. Guess I was right earlier when I said we wouldn’t make it there on time.” I clicked one of the engineering intercoms for Chen and Pete on the bridge. “Whichever of you will be up for the rest of the night—and I only want one of you to, the other must get some sleep—make sure you send a message later to Keron-3 that we won’t make it on time. I’ll send them a new estimate when I reach a spot where I feel I can give a good one.”
“All right, Lydia,” Chen said, fatigue lacing his words.
“Get some sleep!” I told him before I clicked off with the bridge.
Steve called to Shirley to come closer to the beam-engine area, and my eyes searched the big room, for where Gary had disappeared to. My eyes found him over by his old office in the huge room.
I waved at him, trying to catch his eye. He walked toward me in his red pajama pants, and I really liked the way they looked on him; the bulges of his firm thigh muscles were clearly visible….
“You look really tired,” he said to me when he reached me.
“I am—no lies! I’m going to take a nap.”
“Lydia, I’m switching with Steve. I got some sleep tonight; he didn’t. Karen and I are gonna handle the bubble exit.”
I nodded. “I think that’s a good idea—I mean if you do, if you’re up t
o it.”
His mouth turned into a lightly laughing curve. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I wasn’t up to it.”
“I know you though, Gary: you’ll forget about yourself because you want to do the right thing; you want to make sure everyone’s happy and safe.”
His nod at me now was slow and soft. “We’re a lot alike,” he said.
Then I took one of his hands—and squeezed it tight in one of mine.
*
My feet dragged as they finally pulled my body up my ship toward my cabin. When I got there, I stripped off my clothes, jumped into my shower, soaped and rinsed myself, then sloppily dried myself. Then I crashed down onto my bed completely naked. Then I remembered that stone.
Before I went to bed earlier, I’d put the stone in my safe. But, after everything that had since happened because of it….
Moving with some difficulty, I got off my bed and shuffled my tired bare feet over to my safe. I removed the stone, located my belt, slipped the stone inside one of the pockets, then laid my belt onto the black nightstand beside my bed.
I finally plopped back onto my mattress and almost immediately fell asleep….
…I woke to Gary’s voice saying my name, from over the intercom. I wanted to groan about having been woken up, but I was too weary to groan.
For the second time that night, I moved over to the intercom and checked the time: at least I’d slept almost two hours.
“What’s up?” I asked Gary now.
His reply came fast: “I need you to come down to engineering.”
I sighed, loudly.
*
Dressed once again, I charged down toward engineering. The stairs and decks were empty. My heavy footfalls sounded like I was galloping and I probably was—in frustration.
But the halls and decks were noisy now for another reason: something was clearly wrong; I could hear and feel the Demeter shimmying too much. If Shirley was still awake, she must have been having a ball with this motion.
When I finally walked into engineering, Shirley was no longer there, but there were quite a number of my other crewmembers inside; most of them were at the back part of the long room, behind the reactor and the beam engine but in front of the partially-clear wall that housed the start of the pale-gray aft nozzles. Behind the wall, the white floor there gradually curved upward, till it locked the rest of the fixed part of the nozzles within a back air-locked compartment that was really part of the ship’s belly.
The nozzle area inside engineering was protected by a field that extended to encase the beam engine on the right; the shield-field was often set so that matter and energy could flow to the space around the engine, but high-speed curon and other particles, and high-energy wave-based radiation couldn’t get across the shield from the engine.
Nevertheless, my crew would often be going back and forth in that area, so the shield would have to be lowered then, which meant that excess heat would escape and usually make it quite hot near that more protected space.
I was sighing as I began walking down the room toward my crew, but I didn’t go all the way down. I stopped near the narrow, gray front of the beam engine, still remaining outside the shield boundary. I hated going too far back in engineering because it could also get quite noisy there.
From that back area of the room, Gary’s eyes caught mine, and I lifted my eyebrows in a questioning motion as he, Karen and Sam finally moved my way. When they reached me, they all looked at me in unison through long faces. …Okay, this was not promising….
Gary finally frowned more obviously. “Lydia, unfortunately, the rupture on Nozzle 2 has spread and now there’s a crack. The fracture rating on the material can’t handle a crack this big; soon it’ll be flirting with a loss of material. I was afraid an expansion would happen after the rupture. The forces of the entry into the bubble-state made the damage worsen. I’ve closed the flow to Nozzle 2 and retracted it, but the damage has been done.”
“Fucking great!” I said. “So what the hell should we do?” I looked from one to the other of my crew.
Then Karen spoke: “Well, the good news is: we can repair it. I’ve already started giving out tasks for that, and Sam’s going to oversee it. This isn’t the first time the ship’s had a nozzle rupture; tiny ones happen occasionally from normal operation. But, we can’t start the welding repair till we leave the bubble, kill the engines, and detach the engine-joints to Nozzle 2. A big problem with running as we are is: the more strain we put on Nozzle 1 with this imbalance, the more we risk that one developing some other problem. We can fly backwards, Captain, but there’s only the one nozzle in the front, and I think you know it’s not enough for maximum speeds, especially when the primary engine from that direction would be the zenite one.”
“Can this debacle get any worse?” I said now. “You have an estimate on the repair-time involved?”
Karen’s sharp blue eyes shifted toward Gary now, and he raised his brown eyes toward the ceiling, as if he were trying to remember something. “I think it’ll take us several hours to weld up the crack and temporarily patch the liner. Good thing we noticed the worsening crack before we continued on at maximum in the bubble—the crack probably would have gone even higher up the nozzle, and we wouldn’t be able to fix it from inside; we’d need to dock somewhere and extend the nozzle to the ship’s exterior for repair. Right now, the crack is short enough that it’s still outside where the nozzle parts slide together. You can’t risk welding one segment when another’s been retracted to against it. You might fuse both together then.” Gary sighed. “Luckily, we saw the problem in time. But Steve’s going to have a hell of a finicky, dirty job to wake up to.”
“Wow, this certainly is fucking great for everyone,” I said, unable to think of anything more than my need to vent. But at least my outburst helped wake me up.
I was breathing hard: I couldn’t believe how much bad luck and bullshit had happened in such a short period of time. Why did the universe always seem to compound problems from the seed of an initial problem? It would be great if you could just fix one thing before another thing breaks; at least then you’d feel like you were ahead sometimes.
But now I was behind in both the damage to my ship from that Claudius asshole and behind in the money I’d be out, thanks to the imminent repairs and the materials involved in making the repairs….
“I think,” Gary said to Karen, “you should pull us out of the bubble in fifteen minutes. We’re short of where Steve wanted us to be. But I think it’ll be all right—I mean I hope it will….” Gary sighed now.
“You know, I can’t believe this is happening all because of this fucking thing.” I pulled open my belt pocket and yanked out the firestone. The hot way it looked juxtaposed with the cool way it felt in my hand was still so intriguing. But, though I still found the stone beautiful, I also realized that it was a dangerous beauty. And for all I knew, considering I kept carrying it on me and touching it, the thing was such bad luck, maybe it would wind up being bad for my body too. Since no one understood it, maybe no one knew all of its effects.
“Suddenly,” I said in a loud quick voice, “I despise this fucking thing and everything it’s done.”
Without even giving it a first thought—forget about a second—I raised my arm and furiously flung the stone as hard as I could away from me. It quickly connected with the black, bottom casing of the beam engine, causing a shockingly bright-white flash there, right before the big room around me turned to a deep black.
*
Totally startled now, I stood in the dark with my mouth dangling open.
“What happened?” someone shouted—Shirley’s voice. She’d shown up in engineering while I was in my angry fit and I hadn’t even noticed her.
“Apparently,” I said toward where her voice seemed to have come from, “the power’s out.”
Some heavy distressed breathing around me—then another flash of light, this time from one of my crew with a large flashlight—Sam. The beam th
at extended from his arm moved around the room, apparently in search of a computer. Someone rushed to a terminal now—Gary—and my fingers fumbled with my belt and the communicator there.
“Pete,” I said, “can you hear me—is this working? What happened?”
“Was just about to contact you and ask you that,” Pete said fast in a shaky voice. “I’ve lost my panel here.”
“Everything in engineering is down—Gary, Karen?”
“Hang on,” Gary said. The screen in front of him was flashing to life; then, slowly, the electrical power came back on around the room. “There was a weird—I don’t know how to describe it other than as a weird electromagnetic quake. The sensors are showing it simultaneously affected every electrical machine on the ship.”
“Great. Yet another problem,” I grumbled.
“Actually, Lydia, it’s not the biggest problem.” Gary thrust one of his hands toward the viewscreen beside the computer. “Look at the view from the outside sensors and cameras.”
I moved over to him and did what he said—and saw that the screen was filled with pure black.
I groaned. “I should have expected that: now we’ve lost the cameras.”
Gary’s head shook fast, then turned toward me, his eyes locking onto mine, and I saw something blossom in them that I really didn’t expect to see: fear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked fast, moving even closer to him.
“What’s wrong is…I don’t know where we are. We’re not in space anymore.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about…” I finished, my voice fading away. I was looking at the screen again, on the sides where there were normally numbers listed about spectral data, mass data, thermal data, etc.—except, now, all the number sections were blank. I sighed hard. “So the computer must be fucked too.”