Suicide Run

by Nathan Lowell

  “Tankage. Potable water mostly,” Downs said.

  “So there really are no bunks?” Zoya asked.

  “Only the pilot’s couch,” Downs said and led the way forward. “This is a one-person ship, so we got the best, most comfortable couch we could.”

  Natalya and Zoya stood at the back of the cockpit and stared at the couch.

  “Try it out,” Downs said. “I want one of these of my own.”

  Natalya waved a hand in an “after you” gesture to Zoya.

  Zoya stepped over to the couch and slid onto it, almost gingerly, before lying back.

  “Well?” Downs asked.

  “How do I adjust it?”

  “Adjust it?” Downs asked.

  “Yeah. The lumbar support needs to move up and the head rest is too tall. It’s only just catching the top of my head.” Zoya put her hands up and stuck them between the back of her head and the headrest.

  “Oh,” Downs said. “We’ll customize it for the pilot so it fits perfectly.”

  “You’re going to trade out the couches for each new pilot?” Natalya asked.

  Downs looked up at her blankly. “Each new pilot? How much turnover do you think we’ll have?”

  Zoya levered herself up off the couch. “Right hand, left hand,” she said.

  “How do you think they’re planning to use these?” Natalya asked.

  “The new pilots will each get a ship,” Downs said with a shrug. “How else can they do their runs?”

  “Dorion’s planning on trading pilots every four days,” Natalya said.

  Downs blinked. “I think you misunderstood. The ships will be out longer than four days.”

  Natalya nodded at Zoya. “Right hand, left hand.”

  Zoya asked, “Why not just get an adjustable couch? What if I want to change it while I’m out there?”

  Downs mouth moved like he might be working up a spit before he spoke. “That’s why we custom fit them for each pilot. So you don’t have to change it.” He spoke slowly, as if to a somewhat dim administrator.

  “Cost,” Natalya said. “This was cheaper.”

  Downs glared at her.

  “Am I wrong?”

  His jaw tightened before he ground out, “No. You’re not wrong.”

  Natalya and Zoya shared a glance and Zoya stepped up to Downs. “So, what’s with the galley?”

  “I told you. We had the space so we made it more livable.”

  “You took a perfectly viable galley for a one-person operation and added a dining room and four chairs,” Natalya said. “Who’s coming for dinner?”

  Downs shook his head and his lips pressed together in a tight line. “Look. You don’t wanna fly this ship. Fine. We’ll find somebody who will. There’s no need to get snippy with me, Missy.”

  Zoya stepped between Natalya and Downs before Natalya had a chance to process what Downs had said. “Tony. You’re right. We don’t want to fly this ship. We want to fly a safe and comfortable ship. This is neither. I get that it’s your baby, but you’ll have to pardon us for being critical of it. We’re the ones who’d have to risk our lives to fly it.”

  “We don’t need a couple of prima donnas coming in and tearing apart all our hard work—” A sharp ping-ping sound from the passageway cut into Downs’s warming tirade.

  Chapter 15

  Pulaski Yard

  2366, May 2

  FOOTSTEPS ECHOED IN the silence and a slender woman in a pristine station jumpsuit smiled as she entered the galley. “Hope I’m not interrupting,” she said.

  “Ms. Pittman,” Downs said. He gave the woman a short nod and backed up to the bulkhead. He looked like a kid just caught red-handed in the cookie jar.

  “Hello, Tony,” she said with a cold smile. Her brown eyes warmed considerably when she offered her hand to Natalya. “I’m Alison Pittman. You must be Natalya Regyri,” she said.

  Natalya shook the woman’s soft hand and nodded. “Ms. Pittman.” She nodded at Zoya. “My wingman, Zoya Usoko.”

  Pittman reached out to Zoya with another warm smile and an offered handshake. “Ms. Usoko.”

  Zoya took the offer firmly. “Ms. Pittman.”

  After a side-eyed glance at Downs, Pittman said, “We asked for you two because you’ve got more experience with small, jump-capable ships than anyone else in the system. Obviously, we’ve made some mistakes. How do we fix them?” She raised an eyebrow in Natalya’s direction.

  “First you have to accept that this ship isn’t viable as it sits,” Natalya said.

  Downs opened his mouth but shut it with a click after another glance from Pittman. “Can you explain for me?” Pittman asked. “I’m not an engineer.”

  Zoya said, “Before I’d risk my life in this ship, I’d insist on a second Burleson drive, as a minimum. Before I’d sign a contract to fly it for any period of time, I’d insist on an adjustable couch. The galley is the galley. It’s dumb, and it doesn’t make any sense to have a four-top table in a one-person ship.”

  Pittman looked at Natalya. “Ms. Regyri?”

  “We’re late to the game on this, Ms. Pittman,” she said.

  Pittman nodded. “I’d rather know the problems now—even as late as it is—than a stanyer from now when we’ve got a thousand of these things all built.”

  “I don’t know enough to really talk about anything beyond what Zoya’s said and which you’ve heard already.” She glanced up at the overhead and shrugged.

  “What do you need to know?” Pittman asked.

  “Why one-person crews?” Natalya asked.

  Pittman pursed her lips and nodded, folding her arms. “It seemed the most cost-effective approach. With a thousand of these ships, that’s a thousand pilots. Every additional pilot multiplies the operating expense.”

  Zoya said, “How much do the ships cost?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” Pittman said. “A lot.”

  “Fair enough,” Zoya said. “Losing one would be expensive, though?”

  Pittman’s lips flickered in a smile. “Yes.”

  “What’s the breakeven?” Zoya asked. “A couple of stanyers?”

  “More like ten,” Pittman said, tilting her head to one side. “Depreciation, operational overhead, and variable costs.”

  Zoya nodded. “What’s the cost of pilot turnover?”

  Pittman blinked. “We don’t have numbers for that.”

  “Because you’ve never had a fleet of your own ships?” Zoya asked.

  “Right. All our data is run on a contractual basis with existing operators.”

  “So you’re setting up a significant vertical integration of your operation. What’s the estimated cost saving on that integration?” Zoya asked.

  “We’re actually a new division of the organization. What they pay in contracts now is privileged information.”

  Zoya smiled. “So, your mission is to bring the costs in below what they’re paying. Preferably with higher reliability and better integrity of the process against a rapidly expanding demand. Right?”

  Pittman tilted her head to the side. “Yes, although reliability and integrity have never been problems for them.”

  “What’s the rate of growth on new demand?” Zoya asked. “Because reliability and integrity will suffer if it grows faster than you can expand service to cover it.”

  Pittman didn’t answer for several long moments. Some kind of thought process was running behind her eyes, but Natalya wasn’t sure whether it was “How much can I say?” or “Who the hell does she think she is?”

  Before Pittman could respond, Zoya said, “We don’t need to know. It’s just—from an outsider’s perspective—the organization appears to be incurring a massive expense to start up this in-house service. They’re adding layers of management, new personnel, expansions to the space-based facilities, and additional support services for those pilots. That’s a huge investment, and all of that investment depends on these ships and the people who’ll crew them.”

  Pittman
gave a slow nod. “Of course.”

  “Then—purely as an outsider—I think you’re being short-sighted in sacrificing ship safety and pilot satisfaction on the basis of a few percentage points of cost,” she said. “That twenty-stanyer failure rate gets multiplied across a thousand ships. With as many jumps as you’re planning to make a day, in two decades you’re going to lose a lot of ships, a lot of pilots, and a lot of data. You can replace the ships. You can hire new pilots. Losing data? That’s reputation on the line. Once you lose that?” Zoya shrugged.

  Pittman glanced at Downs and refolded her arms. “What do you suggest, Ms. Usoko?”

  “Stop,” Zoya said. “Whatever you’ve got on the ways now, stop construction until you can get a more reliable design.” She looked at Downs. “Sorry, Tony, but this ship isn’t safe.”

  Pittman looked at Natalya. “You?”

  “I’m with Zoya. This ship isn’t safe. I wouldn’t fly in it.”

  “Would you fly in my yacht?” Pittman asked. “It has only one drive.”

  “Sure. Why not? Yachts don’t fly that much. Twenty stanyers of reliability on a ship that needs a century to get twenty stanyers of use-hours? That’s a long time. If you’re willing to risk your life on it, I’ll go with you.”

  “What if I wasn’t going?” Pittman asked, her brow furrowed.

  “No deal,” Natalya said. “I’d want to see the maintenance records and check the parts lockers before I’d get underway on my own. Not just your ship. Any ship.”

  Zoya coughed into her hand and it sounded suspiciously like “Melbourne.”

  Natalya grinned at Pittman. “We’ve had some bad experiences lately and wouldn’t want to repeat them.”

  Pittman gave another slow nod. “That’s fair,” she said. She paused and frowned. “What’s with Dorion and four-day missions?”

  Natalya looked at the overhead and sighed. “You two really should talk more.”

  Pittman’s lips tightened. “We talked this morning. He didn’t mention anything about four-day missions.”

  Zoya’s head came up with a snap. She looked at Natalya. “He wouldn’t, would he?”

  “Yeah. He would,” Natalya said. With a glance at Pittman, she bit her tongue against saying what she really thought.

  “I still don’t see what your problem is,” Downs said.

  Natalya looked at him. “What kind of structural work have you done, Tony?”

  “Tony’s the primary architect for the yard,” Pittman said. “He designed the expansion that includes the new ways, the parts fabrication facilities, and housing for the workers.”

  “Before that?” Natalya asked.

  “Look, I’m not the one in question here,” Downs said, his back stiffening as he glared at Natalya. “My track record isn’t the issue.”

  Pittman raised one perfect eyebrow in Downs’s direction and he shut his mouth against anything else he might have been about to say. “Tony’s been with the company for a long time,” she said. “He’s done a lot of good work for us. You two seem to take exception with his efforts here.”

  “We’re not the first,” Zoya said. “We’re only here because your test pilot quit on you.”

  Pittman gave a dismissive toss of her head. “He’d been critical of the project since he came on board a month ago.”

  “Wasn’t that about the time you changed the design?” Natalya asked.

  Pittman looked at Downs. “Was it?”

  Downs shook his head. “He came on when we laid the keel for this boat.”

  “And he didn’t like what he saw then?” Natalya asked.

  “He didn’t like anything,” Downs said, his mouth twisted like he tasted something rotten. “Coffee, food, ship, his quarters even. Nothing was ever good enough for him.”

  “But he stayed for a month,” Zoya said.

  “We paid him for it,” Downs said.

  “He drew the line at taking your money for flying this ship?” Natalya asked, looking at Pittman.

  Pittman paused for a moment before answering. “Yes. Apparently.”

  “He liked our money well enough before then,” Downs said, his voice a low grumble.

  “You weren’t asking him to risk his life before,” Zoya said.

  “Why’d you change the design?” Natalya asked.

  Downs clamped his mouth shut and looked at Pittman.

  “What change?” she asked. “We change the design almost daily.”

  “The drives. Why did you take out the second drive? Cost?” Natalya asked.

  “Optimization,” Pittman said. “Explain it, Tony.”

  Downs stood a little straighter. “Without the extra drive, we didn’t need as much power generation capacity. The saving in mass gave the ship an extra two Burleson Units’ worth of leg. We wanted the ship to be able to get as far as possible as fast as possible.”

  “And it cost less,” Zoya said.

  “Yes,” Downs said, biting the word off. “Yes, it cost less. I still don’t buy the safety argument.”

  “There’s another factor to consider,” Zoya said, looking at Pittman. “Accuracy.”

  Natalya’s brain seemed to stutter as it adjusted to the realization. “Oh, of course.”

  Zoya smirked. “You’d have thought of it eventually.”

  Pittman frowned, the furrow between her eyebrows marring her serene visage for just a moment. “Accuracy?”

  “Jump error,” Zoya said. “Up to five percent plus or minus.”

  Pittman’s head made a slow shake. “I still don’t get it. What about jump error?”

  “Navigators jump into the edges of a system,” Zoya said. “Or try to. Sometimes they jump long, sometimes short.”

  Pittman’s expression hardened. “Yes. I’m aware of that.”

  “When you jump two or three Burleson Units, the error is negligible. Just part of doing business. Six or seven, it’s manageable,” Zoya said. “When you’re jumping fourteen? You need a big damn hole in space to shoot for or you run the risk of getting punched by a rock.”

  “Or punching into one,” Natalya said. “You don’t have to be too close to a gravity well to have a problem, even in a Scout.”

  “We had that problem with the Peregrine on this last run,” Zoya said. “Finding spots big enough to jump into when the errors are larger than some systems.”

  “Having legs that long isn’t really going to help that much if you can’t plot courses that don’t risk jumping long or short and into trouble,” Natalya said.

  Pittman’s frown returned again. “So those extra two BUs aren’t really useful?”

  “Depends,” Zoya said with a shrug. “There’s a power consumption curve to calculate.”

  “When you push a drive closer to maximum, it uses more power per distance,” Natalya said. “We can make a lot of shorter jumps for the same power consumption as one big one. Actually get farther but we lose time as we make the course adjustments between jumps. The Peregrine has more than enough power so we don’t worry about it.”

  Downs’s eyes grew wider. He looked back and forth between Zoya and Natalya. “What about the original Scouts? They looked seriously underpowered.”

  Natalya shrugged. “I don’t know. My parents rebuilt the Peregrine’s engine room from the drive mounts up.”

  Downs cast a glance at Pittman before leaning back against the bulkhead as if for strength.

  “Tony?” Pittman asked.

  Downs shook his head. “I need to run some numbers.”

  Pittman’s frown deepened. “So what you’re saying is that eighteen BUs would have been enough?”

  “Probably overkill,” Zoya said. “That’s a big jump and the error on bending that much space is at least a couple of light days, probably more. From a practical standpoint, the pilot will be making short hops out of the system, a long hop to get close to the next one, then another short one to minimize error on the far end where it matters most.”

  “Those short hops will take time and the
course corrections between jumps will take more,” Natalya said. “The capacitors can recharge while those corrections happen.”

  “Any competent navigator should be able to balance the power drains against the draw,” Zoya said. “We only ran into a couple of places where we needed the Peregrine’s legs on our circuit. We had to pay for that in charging time.”

  Pitmann looked at Downs again.

  He shook his head. “I need to run some numbers.”

  “Ballpark it, Tony,” Pittman said.

  Downs ran a hand over his mouth and shrugged. “Maybe. Yeah.” He paused, gaze focused in the middle distance. “It makes sense.” He focused on Pittman. “It wasn’t one of our design drivers.”

  Pittman’s frown didn’t let up but she nodded. “Run your numbers.” She looked at Natalya. “What do we need to fix, in priority order?”

  “Add a drive, replace the couch,” Natalya said. “I can’t tell about anything else until we fly it.”

  “What about the galley?” she asked.

  Natalya looked at Zoya who shrugged. “It’s dumb and it’s taking up volume that might be put to better use,” Zoya said.

  “Like what?” Downs asked, his chin thrust forward in challenge.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Stores? Maybe an extra freezer,” Zoya said. “The chairs don’t matter to the mission. It’s not like the drive. Thinking ahead to what the ship will be used for? Stock it right and you’d be able to trade pilots in a matter of a few minutes. Only replenish the ship once every ten missions or so.”

  “That’s an idea. Make it modular and you can have the replenishment waiting on the dock. Roll the empty out and roll the fresh one in. Give pilots a chance to load out their preferences,” Natalya said.

  Pittman’s frown eased a bit. “Tony?”

  “The drive is the problem,” he said. “We can pull the couch and replace it with an adjustable one easily enough.”

  “Who’s your supplier on these?” Zoya asked.

  “Local construction,” Tony said with a glance at Pittman.

  Pittman’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s making bank, Tony?”

  Downs shuffled his feet and found something interesting on the deck to look at. “Couple of the mechanics over in environmental got their hands on a Caldwell wide-bed printer. They’re buying the stock from us and selling the finished goods back.”