Emwan

by Dain White

  He looked over at me for a moment, a smirk on his face.

  “Conn, weapons. We are good to go for firing solution on Master 1.” Jane’s voice was businesslike and brisk.

  I raised an eyebrow and re-checked my screens. I had Master 1 plotted pretty well, but this was going to be a pretty long shot.

  “Captain, I need to adjust course!” Emwan called out suddenly. I pulled the new course onscreen and compared it to our previous track, looking for targets.

  “Em, this new course is nothing like the solution we filed.”

  “That’s affirmative, Yak. This intercept will soon be invalid.”

  I stammered a bit. “It will?”

  “In twelve seconds, Yak. Please file the new course track with Vega Orbital Control.”

  “Filing, aye,” I replied automatically, and started working through the log screens.

  “All hands, stand by for maneuvers in 15 seconds,” Emwan called out.

  Pauli and I gave our crash bars an extra cinch, as per usual, and I got back to work filing the new track. “Track filed and confirmed,” I called out the moment the ack came onscreen, and glued an eyeball on Master 1. It sure looked well plotted for our original track, but sure enough, as close to twelve seconds as I could count, it did the wink out of existence trick.

  “Captain, please note slight correction to intercept,” Emwan called out sweetly.

  “Very well, Em, we are secured for maneuvers.”

  “Maneuvering in 3, 2, 1…” a sudden shove kicked us hard and we fell away from Talus as smoothly as a leaf falling from an oak into the soft grass of deep space.

  08242614@11:02 Gene Mitchell

  The first thing I heard was that damned oscillating tremor in the thrumming of the reac drives That pump isn’t going to last much longer.

  My upper chest burned with every breath, and a weak, watery cough bubbled up and rattled out, shocking my eyes open. It took me a minute to see anything other than a general red blur.

  “Easy there, Gene,” Captain Smith said softly as a cool breeze of some sort tickled my nose.

  “What is—” I started, reaching for my face through a red haze.

  “Settle down, mister, that is an order. It’s an oxy tube, and leave it where it is or I am going to restrain you with my belt.”

  “A what?” I croaked.

  “You’re in sick bay, Gene.”

  I blinked around a bit more, but couldn’t see anything but red. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”

  “Beats me. Maybe you got old or something? I am worried about your heart, currently.”

  “Worried? Impossible.” I replied smartly and tried to laugh, but another retching rattle of fluid hacked up out of my lungs and my chest ached. This wasn’t a time for laughter, apparently.

  “Nothing is impossible, Gene. You don’t remember what happened?”

  “Well…” I trailed off for a moment, trying to think. I was in the top tunnel, bleeding off a helium line… I had my tools, and… “Oh.”

  “Yeah… You know, you should probably take a little more time for naps Gene. You need to rest a bit more frequently I think.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I smiled, blinking a bit more until the red shapes started to come into focus. The horribly ugly red blob moved closer, and I realized it was the captain. All of the other red stuff finally focused into what looked suspiciously like the sick bay, and... “Are we at Zebra, Dak?”

  “Indeed we are, mister, and burning pretty hot from the feel of it.”

  “Well, who’s at my station?”

  “Oh, I have Yak back there. I told him if anything looked green on your screens, to make it orange – and if anything was orange, we wanted it red.”

  I blinked a bit more to make sure this wasn’t some sort of terrible nightmare. One never knows, at my age. Stranger things have sure happened.

  “Well, are you going to die again?” he said after a few longish moments.

  “Maybe… if you’re serious, I might as well. It’d be a lot less work.”

  “Nah, I wouldn’t do that to you, Gene. Janis has an assembler back there, and one upstairs finding all the tools you scattered around.”

  I breathed a ragged, bubbly sigh of relief. “Well, that’s much less terrifying. So if you’re back here, who’s calling the shots on the bridge?”

  “Oh, Pauli’s up there, so we’ll be okay. Yak is navigating for him, so…”

  I shook my head slowly. “You want me to die right here and now, Dak?”

  “Never happen, mister, I have experience with the chest zappers now, so you’re stuck with me for a while.”

  08242614@11:06 Steven Pauline

  I was having a tough time getting focused. My screens looked more like gibberish than code. I tried to settle down and stay on task, but my brain wandered far afield, to places I didn’t really want to go.

  Across the aisle from me, Yak was working through a mess of targets, and the side screen in front of me showed the endlessly grinding task list Janis and Emwan were generating on the Admiral’s behalf. I felt like a semi-useless lump.

  Try as I might to fill my head with something else, all I could think about was Gene, rattling around in the dark access tunnel, lifeless and cold.

  As cranky and grouchy as the old codger might be, I honestly couldn’t imagine life on the Archaea without him. The mere thought of losing him was enough to flood my eyes with hot salty tears, which I surreptitiously palmed away before Yak noticed.

  “He’ll be fine, Pauli,” he offered quietly, not looking up from his screens. “We just need to stay on track here, man. Nothing we can about it, you know?”

  I sighed heavily. “Yeah, I know Yak,” I replied. “It’s mighty hard to focus with the thought of what might have happened back there.”

  Yak shrugged. “We all punch out sooner or later, Pauli. No one gets out alive, as the old saying goes.”

  I laughed, weakly. “Good point. I just hope we have enough time to make our peace with it, you know?”

  “Nah, it doesn’t work that way Pauli. You’re here, and then, you’re gone. Fast or slow, it doesn’t matter. Once the switch is flipped, away you go. My only hope is I get at least one more pint of beer before it happens.”

  “What happens if you do get another?”

  “Well, I just hope for another one then. After enough pints, it doesn’t much matter.”

  The thought of Yak blathering incoherently made me smile, despite the maudlin topic. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Yup… I know it, too. It’ll be okay man. The old guy needs a little bit of rest and some relaxation, he’ll be back to his grouchy self in no time.”

  “I imagine so…”

  “Steven, if I may interrupt…”

  “Absolutely, Janis,” I replied.

  “I need you to please verify responses from a specific chain of orders we’ve sent.”

  I allowed myself one more ponderous sigh, and then got back to work. A lengthy list of acknowledgments scrolled into view as I swiped the tab over, and I tabbed out to a console so I could script a sorter. Janis could have built it for me before I could ask, but the fact she hadn’t built it yet confirmed for me that that I wasn’t going to ask for help.

  I needed to keep my fingers limber anyway.

  If you don’t use it, you lose it – and that’s triple-guaranteed when it comes to logicspace. Nothing rots faster than an unused skill.

  Scripting something like a sorter was pretty trivial, all I really wanted to do was evaluate the start dates and compare with distance and proximity to make sure there weren’t any sequential faults in the data set. Nothing about this sort of work was terribly hard, just a quick little loop through a bubble sort, with a modified pointer to hold any faults. I didn’t expect to find any, but you just never know.

  There was a pile of data here.

  I couldn’t really take the time to evaluate the contents of each packet; my eyes started glazing over after looking at a few. Jan
is and Emwan were routing ships through Procyon, Tauran, and even along the Magelleanic Belt, though so far their orders looked routine.

  I suppose it should be that way, really. They were a only few moves into a grand chess game, one that spanned the known galaxy, the end of which only they knew.

  I hoped they knew, at any rate.

  So far the data looked good and the timestamps checked out. The service was definitely operating at a new level of efficiency. The only anomaly I could see was a concentration of movement orders into the Sol system.

  I guess that shouldn’t really have surprised me, given the recent attack on Oort Station; a heightened presence in the area would be expected. Even so, there was definitely more movement inward than I’d expect.

  “Janis, do you think there might be too many deployments in Sol system?”

  “I do not, Steven. As a point of fact, we anticipate a significant increase in deployment throughout this entire sector, timed to coordinate with a major fleet exercise. I am not sure if it will be enough, however.”

  The way she said it was immediately troubling, ominous. I knew better than to hesitate.

  I opened comms. “Captain, ears?”

  “Ears, aye,” he replied immediately.

  “Captain, we’re deploying a significant force in Sol system, but Janis just stated she doesn’t feel there will be an adequate amount—“

  “Adequate for what?” he interrupted, sinking his teeth directly into the meat of the matter.

  “Sir, I don’t know yet, I wanted to let you know immediately.”

  “Very well, son. Keep me posted. Yak, what is the duration of our current evolution?”

  “Uh, it looks like 28 minutes sir, give or take,” Yak replied, pulling tangents across his screens to help calculate the vectors.

  “Impossible son, nothing takes that long… Em?”

  Her reply was immediate. “Captain, that is an accurate estimate, given our current course and heading.”

  “Is that the best we can do?”

  “It is, Captain, given the current situation.”

  “I see.” He paused for a moment, clearly mulling over options. “Very well, carry on my dear. I’ll be here if you need me.”

  “Aye Captain,” she replied.

  08242614@11:14 Jane Short

  I made my way through the gun deck, and up into the weapons compartment, wincing as I moved. My side ached and tingled and burned and at the same time, felt glassy and brilliantly painful. It was a wretched, obnoxious pain that coursed through my ribs and hip with every breath. I’ll be damned if I was going to let it stop me though. I could tell when the meds were wearing off, as the rampaging thunderous gallop of pain roared back into my poor torn muscles and bruised ribs.

  Poor me, I know… I am a soft, sensitive girl at heart, despite having a thick, bulletproof exterior, a carbon-tempered flint steel personality, inside I am that tiny little girl that used to scream when I saw my own blood, every little bonk and scrape felt like the end of the world.

  The thought of my childhood brought a smile to my face, despite the searing agony of my ribs. I was a terror, eight year old Jane Short, pigtails and freckles, dirty and dusty, meaner and tougher than anyone alive. No one could outrun me, and no one dared try.

  I might be exaggerating a little bit. I was also pretty interested in puppies, kittens, rainbows, and secretly, deep down… not that I would ever admit it… but I really liked pink and purple.

  I was a typical little girl, though maybe a little more precocious than the rest of my kind. I was unafraid of wrestling some bully to the ground and making him eat dirt and beg me to stop. I was Jane the Champion, Jane the Great. I stood up for the littler kids, and ran as fast as the bigger kids, and never let anyone tell me otherwise.

  I chuckled again, thinking. My hands were on automatic, working through my screens, pulling up levels, checking through all systems. My head may have been, ah, possibly 20 years in the past, but my eyes and hands were here and now.

  So were my damned ribs.

  We were hauling along pretty good through a transfer orbit, shifting from a low apoapsis to a much higher track, with what looked to me like a fairly conservative amount of delta towards a more polar orbit. I didn’t really understand it much, flying these things was monstrously complicated. Not my area of speciality, to be sure. Luckily, Captain Smith did appear to know what he was doing, or at least he was good at faking it. Either way, it worked for me.

  That reminded me, though… Captain Smith has been mighty quiet for quite a while. Normally he’s quite chatty, but I hadn’t heard anything from him for a while.

  “Conn, Weapons,” I called up on comms.

  “Conn, aye,” Emwan replied smartly.

  “Oh hi, Em,” I stammered a bit, not really expecting her. “Uh… why are you on conn?”

  “Captain Smith is currently in the medical bay with Gene.”

  “Oh.” I replied lamely, suddenly realizing what Yak was trying to tell me earlier. I started to get a bad feeling, watching the target track cycle through a pile of orbitals. “Thanks, Em… I will stand by.”

  “Very well, Jane. Please be advised we will need a firing solution for Master 3 in sixteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds mark.”

  “Mark,” I replied automatically, my fingers swiping over a clock while my mind ranged even farther afield. What is going on?

  “Jane, please do not be alarmed,” Emwan said softly. As always, she was characteristically speaking her mind when it was most needed, and least expected. “Gene had a rather urgent and significant cardiac event, but his prognosis is good. Captain Smith and Steven were able to intercede medically and he is currently stable.”

  My screens blurred momentarily as the reality of what she had said started to sink in. I felt a momentary burn in the back of my throat, a pit in the base of my stomach, and for a brief moment, I felt a new kind of pain, a new agony. “He’s okay?” I tried to ask, but the words stuck in my throat and came out halfway between a sob and a croak.

  “Please do not be alarmed, Jane. He is stable, and recovering well. We are watching his condition carefully, and Captain Smith is at hand if needed.” She paused momentarily, then added softly, “I know he’ll be fine, Jane.”

  I wanted to leap up and dash to ring three, I wanted to race around and take charge and make sure everything was right, and everyone was okay. An overwhelming maternal instinct, long dormant, bloomed like a white-hot ball of light inside me. I needed to take care of things. I needed to make things right.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I blurted out brusquely, in a choking sob.

  “Yes, there is,” she replied in a soft, soothing voice. “But first, you need to stay calm, my dear.”

  I took a deep breath and centered myself. “Calm, aye,” I replied after a moment.

  “Very good. I understand you have a significant amount of experience with field theory?”

  “I do, though mostly with regards to armament applications…” I trailed off, waiting.

  “That’s good. Janis is maintaining watch in Engineering, but we both think it important to have a qualified opinion. Could you assist us with a review of the plasma containment field levels?”

  “Well, I can sure try, but it’s really not my area of expertise…”

  “I understand. Our main concern is one of being able to correctly intuit a potential fault before it occurs, something both you and Gene do a much better job of than Janis and I.

  Janis is sure nothing bad will happen, and I don’t really have a bad feeling, but we both feel that it would be beneficial to have you helping us.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I replied, and a new set of tabs showed up on my starboard screen. I swiped them over and crossed my eyes a bit at the strange, cryptic readings. Obvious indicators of power levels were less obvious on Gene’s view, rather than a bar indicator with danger levels, he had a three dimensional cloud graph with danger zones marked with outliers.

 
“How does he quantify safe levels, Em?”

  “Mathematically, Jane, though we could certainly assist with that if needed.”

  I whistled. I knew old Gene was pretty handy with numbers, but three dimensional tensor calculi seemed a little hot, even for him. “He does this in real time? He just… figures this out?”

  “He does, it’s quite impressive.”

  “Yeah,” I replied with a small voice. I knew the basic mechanics of what he was doing; the fields looked a lot like a toroid, with data points indicating field strength throughout the ring shape. He must be constantly solving for safe levels as he watched the values change, balancing the strength of the fields at points where needed. “Can you color code this for me, to make it a little easier? I can’t balance this like Gene can.”

  “We are already doing this, Jane. If a value shifts from green to yellow, the calculation point is quickly indicated. Our calculations indicate the proper shift to balance and green-shift the field to stasis, but if you could keep an eye on the trouble spots and suggest changes, we’d really appreciate it.”

  I clicked my tongue. I had already moved past the flighty panic of maternal instincts, and had already begun to lose myself into the equations required to help.

  Deep down, I knew what she was asking of me, and surprisingly, I appreciated it.

  08242614@11:23 Gene Mitchell

  The voices murmuring through the cotton of my head sounded familiar, but I couldn’t tell why, and I found it really hard to care. My body ached horribly, my arms were numb and I felt like my chest had been seared with lightning.

  “Ahem,” a familiar voice drifted down through the fog.

  “Dak?” I croaked, surprised at the sheer depth of gravel in my throat.

  “That’s right, mister,” he replied with a soft kindness in his voice that I didn’t recognize. “Looks like you took a little bit of a nap on us there. How are you feeling?”

  “Ugh, you were just here,” I gasped and stared at the soft redness of my eyelids for a moment. “Did I pass out? I feel like garbage, not to be too vulgar about it, sir.”

  “Janis, can you give him anything more the pain?”