by Randy Moffat
Another tiny domino prominent in my annoyance array and darkening my thoughts a shade further was catching the reflection of myself from the neck down in the port glass. Currently I was wearing nothing but a reasonably clean pair of tidy-whities and a cool looking tool belt. Being half naked in the wilderness of space did not mean I was living some adolescent fantasy though, juvenilely comparing the size of my lever with the universe’ to see whose was bigger. It wasn’t the knickers. Wearing underpants was actually rather normal aboard ship these days. The annoyance factor there came about because the relative comfort of my Y-fronts reminded me by contrast of my last planet fall from which I had just returned three days ago. On Earth I had been uncomfortably wearing the politically symbolic, terribly correct and striking looking black uniform of an Admiral of the extraterritorial Terran Exploratory Space Service full time. Flaunting the formal gold rank and status bling, I had lost some of my humanity and become a mere symbol of the service instead. Being such a symbol had seemed to entail an endless cycle of stumping about posing sexily for endless pictures and shaking hundreds of sweaty palms. I was constantly pressing pudgy flesh because I was trying to make friends with several fairly dopey heads of state all of whom had their own agendas for TESS—and all of those ranged from merely bad to utterly execrable. Asses!
Then there was the added annoyance of another niggling thorn written by the marvels of the fourth estate that poked sharply up into the alimentary canal of my dissatisfaction. I got it. My service was called TESS for short. That was fair enough. No one called us by our full name of Terran Exploratory Space Service unless they were making a long speech in the hot sun to a full crowd. The service’s actual name had largely been relegated to the long term storage of the racial memory. Most people now routinely called our service just ‘TESS.’ In my current mood though I resented the use of ‘TESS’ alone. Right now the use of the acronym became symptomatic of the shortened attention span of the second information age imposing its need for clipped sound bites rather than full explanations on the ever retarding speech patterns and attention spans of the evolving world languages. In my mind the overuse of “TESS” had assumed a sort of sinister aspect as a symbol from a clandestine movement whose goal was worldwide mediocrity instead of excellence; actively encouraged by the tattered remnants of the press for whom a hash-tag was now a form of speech. If I’d had my way these last few weeks every press report would have had to spell out my agency’s name in full to remind the sillier world leaders I had been dancing with that the word ‘Terran’ in the name of my service implied that we represented the entire planet. I could have used that sense of globalism with my recent host of Presidents and Prime ministers to help counter their provincial and parochial concerns which represented every narrow aspect of humanity’s wide diversity… and stupidity. Still, that lack of support might have gone unnoticed if the same press corps had not worsened my already subducting opinion of them when they had taken to referring to me as “TESS’ Fleet High Admiral McMoran” unbidden. It was neither my official title nor my desire but the “news” people had their own needs, wants and desires which usually pivoted around getting at least one butt cheek onto a stool at a nearby tavern by 1500 hours sharp daily and calling it work. The bit that really hurt was that somehow, through the Brownian motion of linguistics, the bogus title had started to creep off the radio, net, vids and what was left of the paper press corps and out into the fleet. I had overheard it whispered this last month or so by my own TESS personnel which was a total pile of steaming cow flop… they, of all people, should know better. Idiots! All of them idiots.
The word ‘fleet’ in this new “fleet high admiral” fad had run sandpaper over my nerves too. The poor old broken down Gaia was my entire ‘fleet’ at the moment which only deepened my depression. She was the flagship of the fleet because she was the only bloody ship in the fleet. She bore my flag and her title essentially because I had no place else to go. That palled of course, but when I thought of it the notion reminded me of worse. Worse was the worst. Gaia was the first of her kind—but forces far outside my control had threatened far too many times already to make her the last of her kind. When you step out of the box as TESS had done, people are threatened. You make yourself a target. People trying to blow us up was yet another dram splashed into my full stirrup cup of vexation. The efforts of these lunatics had already cost me several people. Good people. Far too many people of merit were now dead while serving in the name of TESS. My TESS. These insane visits by Thanatos weighed heavily on me, when I dared think about them at all. I was starting to resent the whole irritating hydra of ridiculous and stupid self interests who were coalescing like inertia onto Higgs Bosons—trying to slow down and drag TESS to a full halt rather than pushing us forward as the future of humankind. Bastards!
Tied to their awful actions was at least a partial explanation for the current poor condition of my single ship. The primary effect was the obvious scars the ship bore. Scars inflicted by attacks on it… or the welded band-aids of repairs. The secondary effect though had been the loss of freedom to call on all of humanity to fix her after those attacks. Each attack required tightened security. Then tightened it again. Each need for security shrank the number of people that could safely be brought close to her hull to work on her and had slowed her recovery. She needed repairs and after so many attacks on the service only a few were on the short list to fix her. The lack of people trusted now to work directly on the Gaia was the genesis of today’s emotional block that got yanked out from under my personal Jenga tower of happiness. It was the single pivotal event that had begun this cascade fall from my sunny side into full blown irritation in the first place. In short, this morning’s trigger mechanism for my current funk. It had come just after lunch. Ordinarily Gaia would have been spinning around her central axis like a dreidel at Hanukah—using the centripetal motion to simulate something like .008 earth gravity for the crew. We had been trying it lately as an experiment to partially compensate for physiological changes creeping in from long periods away from Earth’s gravity well. We had stopped this standard rotation for a few minutes to launch two weeks of garbage using the pressurized trash chute modified for space operations that had always existed beneath the mess facility; the location for this waste management task was a historical remnant of her time as a submarine. The submariners had launched their trash out in the same place using similar technology. The crew of the Gaia had learned early on to stop the ship’s spin during this task or find themselves gyrating through a barrel ride full of wilted green stuff, food wrappers, tin cans and much less mentionable detritus. In this case the trash was dumped out into an unstable low orbit where it could fall into the atmosphere and burn up… fiery meteorites of rotted cauliflower and arugula.
It wasn’t strictly the waste management tasks that got me started on my downward spiral so much as the fact that I had happened to be half watching in the dining hall as they dumped bags of dross into the chute and I caught a glimpse of six expended tubes of “Goop” in one of the bags as it was pushed down into the launch tube under the genteel urging of Cookie’s size ten boot. ‘Goop” was a brand name for a nearly ubiquitous plasticized adhesive that TESS bought in bulk from Sears since we had discovered all too empirically that it could be used with a blast of heat from a blow torch to quickly seal small air leaks in our hull. My initial dose of ennui had descended with a crash on me then. At that very moment. I admit it. It was just depressing that after nearly eleven months of continuous use and repair to discover that I owned a ship that still had enough air leaks to be policed up by the crew at a rate of three tubes every week! My niggling suspicion at that moment was that my whole damn ship must be held together with the stuff. If duct tape would have worked up here I am sure the flagship would have looked like a silver mummy instead. It was acutely embarrassing to be the High Admiral of a service on the cutting edge of human technology in an essentially broken ship—a kind of cosmic accident waiting to h
appen. A ship whose crew was always one tube of adhesive away from breathing vacuum. TESS was engaged in a poker game with the universe. Looking to use the Petrovski Effect to lever the load of humanity off the fulcrum of our tiny planet and out to travel through the rest of the rooms in the mansion of the cosmos. Turns out the universe had stacked the deck. She had all the trump cards and was actively trying to kill us… too. The bitch!
So there it was. Bastards, Morons, Idiots and assorted Bitches was my lot in this life, I grumped. I knew this moroseness was an indulgence, but I also knew I would come out of this funk once the day’s workload got going fully so I had a little more time to swim around in my pool of bad feelings. In the end I should have known better—optimism is always punished if you wait around a while.
At that moment the ship gave a sudden and dramatic lurch to starboard and began to rotate again.
“Mother ffff… !” I expounded intellectually and grabbed a stanchion by the viewport instinctively as the view out the port rotated against the backdrop of stars. This was wrong. A klaxon was supposed to sound before rotational motion came on. I clung to my anchor and watched the rotation slowly pick up speed. In the background I heard the sounds of startled noises from the bridge crew behind and below me that informed me this was decidedly not a planned maneuver.
A tinny voice broke squelch over a distant radio and the sound reached me up here in the lounge.
“Great gods of Crap! Sorry! Sorry! My bad!” It shouted.
I recognized that voice. It was Chief Warrant Officer Gaston, one of my original Q-Kink team mates. He had been working outside, repairing a pinprick hole on the water tanks with a torch. I twisted myself around and glanced out the aft window of 11 Forward. Sure enough the slightly portly shape of Gaston in his space suit was flailing about at the end of the taut tether of a safety line clipped to one of the H20 tanks on the outer hull. He had obviously lost his grip on the hull when spin came on unexpectedly. Beside him a trail of frozen ice crystals twinkled in a neat spiral that pointed to a rupture in the side of one of the tanks that was not a pinhole any more. It was ejecting a jet of liquid kept under moderate pressure and warmed inside the three layers of heating blankets on the tank’s outside. The spray was acting as a spigot and imparting a whirl of momentum to the ship. Gaston had gotten a hand on the umbilical line and had begun pulling himself hand over hand frantically back along the line to the ship, clearly trying to reach the tank where his still burning welding torch could be seen jerking about on its gas line beside the spot he had been working before the water tank was punctured and the ship had spun him off. As I watched the flame of the torch stroked across its own insulated and heated gas lines, slicing them neatly in two and sending the torch head spinning off into space just as its dying flame struck the flammable gas from the now open hoses and ignited that. It turned the torch’s hoses into a slapping serpent jetting an explosion of fire like a flamethrower on Iwo Jima and lashing about in a totally random manner that was visibly melting the insulated hoses down and back towards the tanks strapped to the hull. I realized in a flash that the ship was spinning in a ragged circle that was cracking the whip with Gaston, keeping him out in a wider circle that would prevent him reaching the hull for a minute… perhaps too long for him to reach the hoses before they burned all the way to the hull and ignited the tanks strapped there.
I blinked—frozen for a nanosecond, but the mental image of those tanks of gas exploding against the hull got the old R-complex at the top of my brain stem doing its job of fighting or flying and a Pavlovian jolt of adrenaline sent me almost automatically diving with only faint overtones of a frantic whimper to the rail along the edge of eleven forward to yell below at the bridge crew.
“Counteract the spin with the maneuvering thrusters!” I roared at the startled TESS academy trainee midshipman on the thruster controls station whose eyes were big and whose mouth was doing a hooked fish imitation. “Stop all ship rotation motion! Maximum power! Do it NOW!” I bellowed, inhaled and somersaulted into a floating dive over the rail right over his head as the newbie hesitated a fraction of a second and then obeyed, slapping controls forcefully and blasting maneuvering jets arranged in rings fore and aft of the external water tanks hard. The jets thrust opposite the pressure of the water leak escaping outside began to slow us. I reached the radio station just in time to hear Gaston’s voice providing his coolly measured analysis of the situation.
“Holy shitzenmach! It’s gonna… . hey… hey in there! Bridge… !”
“Chief!” I shouted into the mike to override him. “Your welding tanks are going to blow if that flame reaches them. Guide us into the water crystals from the water tank rupture. You are in position to see it perfectly I need you to talk us in! Say again! Reroute the ship so the water leak points itself toward the flame, Try and bury it in the ice! Smother the fire! Start talking!”
Gaston was an old, steady and practiced hand on whom my ‘high admiral’ command voice seemed to work… bringing him back from the point of openly soiling himself so that he grasped my intent quickly. He replied almost without much hesitation and in a calmer tone.
“Roger. Uh… . Roger! Boss. You are coming up to flat line on Z axis spin! Almost there. Get ready… .” Gaston spoke clearly from practice and his superior viewing site outside at the end of his tether. “Give me two degrees forward on X axis and one degree clockwise on the Y!” The crew of the bridge held its breath as the now sweating rookie’s hands flashed across multiple trackballs, flipped switches on and off frantically giving nudging squirts of maneuvering jets and peered at his slider gauges feverishly to shift the ship through these gyrations as precisely as possible. By long standing tradition that began at no definable point, for the Gaia the X axis was forevermore an imaginary straight line poking vertically up the middle of the sail on the top of the hull and out the bottom of the ship below it. The Y axis was perpendicular to that, a line port to starboard through the hull as though along a centerline that lay across the submarine’s un-removed diving planes which still hung like limp wings at the bow. By process of elimination the Z axis then ran straight along the center of the hull and poked out at the bow and the stern. A moment passed. Then another.
“Close… close!” Gaston’s voice was dropping in concentration. “Damn! Easy… Hold up! Cease movement! Really close there… the ice trail almost drowned it, but that hose is whipping around all over the place and broke the line!”
“How long is the remaining hose?” I asked trying and failing to sound supremely casual. I was proud of myself though. I think there was only a bit of a squeak at the end of my question.
“I figure we got a good thirty seconds left before they reach those tanks and blow a hole in the side.” Gaston said almost happily—presumably he thought thirty seconds a long time in the compressed space-time continuum of one of our constant TESS emergencies. “Halt Y axis starboard rotation fully… Slow… . slow… . Slow! Good! Good! Now when I say… give it full up X axis! All you got!”
I glanced at our nervous trainee. There was a visible bead of sweat catching the light across his forehead and there was an equally visible shake in his hands as they hovered over the ship’s maneuvering thruster controls. Excellent training exercise. If he failed this test he might not live long enough to regret his choice and resign from TESS.
“Up X… . NOW!” Gaston said. The recruit slapped the jets—driving the ship straight ‘up’ the X axis. The ship rose and rose relative to the ship’s straight ‘upward’ along the imaginary line X through the ship’s sail while we held our collective breath.
“Bingo!” Gaston shouted gleefully from his observation position on the ultimate hilltop. “That’s done it. Ran the flame right into a sheet of ice and crystals… separated the oxygen feed from the gas… just enough to douse her. No fire to restart it…” He breathed on his mike. “Good job in there. I’ll have the gas shut off in a couple seconds. Nice work shipmates! We
cheated death that time! Ha Ha Ha…” He laughed raggedly. “Five inches… all the hose in the world.” He ended under his breath as he got to work shutting things off. He got chatty sometimes when he was nervous.
I grunted and keyed my mike.
“Remind me to have the cables for our welding torches armored to prevent anything like that happening again.” Entries in TESS’ rule book were strictly empirical; carefully reasoned out immediately after each near death experience and sadly the tome was already about as thick as an old Chicago phone book and getting denser daily. “While you are at it… slap yourself around for doing something so idiotic in the first place.”
“WILCO.” Was all Gaston replied, a vague hint of embarrassment in his tone at troubling everyone with eminent death was about all I could expect at this point. It only added to my nuisance ration that at one time or another virtually everyone else aboard the Gaia had troubled the crew in the same way. Some of the more active and inept had done so two or three times.
I ignored him and patted the rookie on the shoulder instead, using my admiral-like ‘ignore the bad and reinforce the good’ rule.
“Nice job… Mister… uhhh?” I chastised myself for not remembering all our new comers names. I’d had a few things on my mind.
“Baskarian, Sir.” The younger man looked up at me wonderingly… savoring the sweet taste of the life he might have lost. He had only been aboard three days—a senior at the academy who might soon join the ‘fleet’ if he passed his apprenticeship out here. Three days was only three potential disasters by TESS standards—not long enough for him to take near catastrophe as a matter of course yet.
“. . . Mister Baskarian. You kept your head. Well done! I would like to tell you this is atypical… but that would be a lie.” I said absently and heard a resigned chuckle behind me from my old ship mates who had survived endless dangers ever since the Gaia had been launched. And before.