Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  The ship was happy enough to stay here in the system he'd so grandiosely named Origin, but he wasn't. There were no planets here capable of supporting life. He needed to find a habitable world; preferably one with a breathable atmosphere because the Nightingale had lost a lot of her reserves in their last jump, and there were only so many times air could be recirculated. They also needed water and food, both of which the ship was running low on.

  The only good thing about the situation was that there was one man on his own aboard the ship so that shouldn’t be a burden. If it came to it, he could cut down on his bathing and limit himself to eating from the hydroponics bay. He had a year give or take he figured and the ship could manage a lot of jumps in that time. They'd find something. If they could actually jump. If they didn't simply disintegrate in the attempt.

  “Sub atomic polarization field fully extended and coordinates locked in,” the ship informed him, meaning they were ready. The ship had finally determined their coordinates to thirty decimal places, so when they jumped it would know exactly where that place was in relation to their present one.

  “You're sure that we can do this?”

  “Everything's green by green. Or do you need to see the medbot and have your eyes checked?” the ship scolded Carm. It had been in a bad mood ever since they’d left Aquaria, and it wasn't going to suffer foolish questions.

  “Fine. Then let's do it.” Carm decided to be bold and get it over and done with, though his voice sounded a little squeaky and his palms were sweating as he gripped on to the armrests of the chair. If this jump went horribly wrong it was only his life on the line, as the ship didn't have a life. It didn't seem like such a comfort to him just then.

  “Yes Carmichael.” The ship accepted his order and a moment later engaged the translation drive. What followed felt like both an instant or an eternity, and then they were somewhere else.

  Carm knew a very brief moment of nausea, and a sensation of moving in a direction he couldn't understand, and it was over. There was no banging, no power fluctuations, no sparks, and no sirens. Nothing other than what should be.

  It was done! In fact it had felt like one of the smoothest jumps they'd ever made. Sitting in the chair, sweating a little and with the sound of his heart beating too loudly in his chest, Carm almost dared to believe it had been perfectly executed. No lights flashed, no alarms sounded. The procedure had felt as smooth as it always did. He took in a quick deep breath of relief and then thought about giving in to hysterical laughter.

  His relief came prematurely though as a yellow light started blinking on the consoles in front of him.

  “Radiation alert!”

  Carm needed to check for himself, so with trembling fingers he punched every holographic control, wondering if he was about to die.

  Fortunately the problem wasn't critical. The radiation was neither internal radiation nor a leak from the ship's drives or the reactor. It was excess solar radiation. The ship had arrived in a system a little closer to the sun than was ideal. The hull was reacting. It was in essence one giant photovoltaic cell and it liked light. However, too much of it and the extra energy could burn out the plates.

  “Rotate the ship so that the bottom hull faces the star,” Carm gave the standard order for the situation and hoped it would be enough. The base of the Nightingale had been designed for taking the brunt of atmospheric re-entry, so it had thicker shielding.

  “Already doing it. But good suggestion Carmichael. Stellar in fact.” The ship was quick to damn him with faint praise – which was probably a good sign.

  “Thanks. Make a note of that in your logs. Ship approved of Captain's plan!” Carm had had enough of the ship's acid tongue.

  The rotation quickly fixed the problem, as the yellow light went out and soon they were within tolerances and Carm knew a sense of relief.

  It had been unlucky arriving too close to a star, but that was just one of the occupational hazards of jumping blind. They could have arrived far too close to the star and burn up, but the odds were massively against that. They were a million times more likely to arrive in empty space light years from the nearest star. There was simply so much more empty space than stellar matter.

  In short order the ship was recharging, they were establishing coordinates, nothing else was flashing yellow, and Carm felt like his old self. In a matter of only a few hours they'd have their second set of coordinates locked in, and their new universal map would have two locations on it and a direction between them. With the new data they had the start of a brand new map.

  “Ship, are we ready to begin astrometric analysis?” Carm enquired after ten minutes of waiting for something to go wrong.

  “Yes Carmichael.”

  “Then begin.”

  “You know a please might be in order,” the ship whined.

  “So might a personality transplant!”

  The ship made a sound that Carm assumed was its mechanical equivalent of displeasure, before starting to unpack the suite of astrometric survey equipment it carried. If wherever they’d arrived was anywhere near known space, it would locate them in time. The odds against that were astronomical however. Just then though he was being shown images of the new system.

  His first thought was that it wasn't a good one. The sun was a white medium star that was running a little hotter than he would have expected. It had four planets judging from the gravitational analyses. Two giants and two dwarf planets. None of them were any good.

  The giants were far too large to land on, with twelve and sixteen standard gravities respectively. And they certainly had nothing of the air, food and water he needed. The dwarf planets were barren – one boiling hot from sitting too close to the sun, while other was a distant frozen waste. Save for some titanium deposits detected close to its surface, it had no value either.

  In the old days when he’d had a job, he might have surveyed the planet. Titanium was worth something, but here there was no point. He could have used the metals, but there were easier worlds from which they could be mined.

  “All right ship, let’s do a complete system plot. Find me every planet and asteroid and track them. Search for any signs of civilisation. Then start the long range interstellar charts. See if you can find me a galaxy that looks even vaguely familiar. And at the same time analyse and lock in the translation coordinates and begin a ship-wide full diagnostic.”

  He didn’t expect to find any signs of civilisation. Alien societies had been found, but as well as being vast the universe was also ancient, and what they'd found had always been archaic. The most recent had been a million years old or so, while some had disappeared billions of years in the past and had become dust.

  “Search parameters?”

  “Best matches. Two days.” That should be long enough for the astrogation computers to find and plot the nearest galaxies, and assess if any of them were known. After two days they would jump back to their original point to make another blind jump. And little by little they would start drawing a new map.

  “We’ll call this system Secondus,” he announced after quickly scanning the databases to see whether it had already been used. A name was important. More pertinently he had two systems on the map: Origin and Secondus.

  It was only two jump points but it was a start. Statistically, he needed fifteen thousand jumps if he was to have any chance of plotting a course home.

  Fifteen thousand jumps. There were going to be some obvious problems with that.

  For a start in the last eight or nine centuries the Commonwealth had only mapped a shade over eight thousand jump points and had matched only one point to a spatial position. The other problem was that it took a day or two for an astrogation unit to find and assess all the nearest galaxies, see if it recognised any of them and then determine its coordinates. That meant thirty thousand days spent doing nothing but jumping, or eighty standard years. Life expectancy was good these days, but he certainly couldn’t spend eighty years ju
mping.

  The biggest problem though was that no translation drive had ever jumped fifteen thousand times, least of all blind ones. He doubted many had done fifteen hundred. And that was in a properly maintained ship. Sooner or later the drive would fail. She had been a well maintained ship, and he could pilot her conservatively, but there was a limit.

  At some point his journey would end and then, to survive, he'd have to do the unthinkable for a deep spacer – he’d have to go dirt side. He'd become a grounder.

  Even worse for a deep spacer than being spaced was being permanently grounded. They'd rather be spaced. There was a reason the Spacer's Guild worried about the deep spacers. That they insisted they have android companions and AI's with defective personalities..

  If only they could see me now, Carm thought. With his android companion locked away in a glass coffin having tried to murder him and his AI at war with him even if it was only a verbally. Maybe the Guild would rethink their policies.

  Still that was for another time. He wanted to go home to see his family again. So even though it was practically impossible, he would do everything he could to achieve that goal. He was going home no matter what. He would go back to his favourite bars, and when he did, he was going to do his best to give himself alcohol poisoning. He would have a story to tell and then he would dance again.

  In two days they would jump back to Origin and after running a full diagnostic and letting the drive cool sufficiently, make their next blind jump to add another point to the map.

  It was an annoyingly slow way to work, because it required twice as many jumps as it would otherwise. But if they jumped from one world to the next, to get back they'd have to reverse every one of those jumps. Having a hub avoided that problem, because it meant that they could go from any world to any other they'd visited in only two jumps.

  It would be different if they were able to combine courses and make them into one single course between two known points, but after a thousand years, no one had worked out how to do that. For the moment though they were here and he had a lot of work to do.

  “Alright ship, give me my next work assignment,” Carm said, sighing wistfully.

  “Back to engineering then. There's some field coils giving fluctuating readings, and we don't have spares. We may need you and your gift with the fabricator to take them and make new ones.”

  “Great…” Carm ignored the ship's sarcasm, and headed off to engineering. Fabricating field coils – grunt work he had to do because the ship's servicebots lacked the manual dexterity to operate the machinery.

  Chapter Eight

  Life for Annalisse after the attack had changed dramatically, as it had for everyone at central station, the detectives in particular. It wasn't just that many were injured and all were grieving. It was that here in their own station they'd been attacked. Some part of the bedrock of the world had shifted underneath their feet without warning and now they were reeling.

  The counsellors had said it that was normal, and that it would right itself in time. Sometimes Annalisse wondered if they were just saying that, because there were days when it felt that the world would never return to how it had been.

  The biggest change though was that the investigation was no longer a law enforcement matter. The Aquarian Navy had been brought in, because someone higher up in the ALEB had made the decision that they’d been compromised too greatly, that their officers couldn’t be completely trusted. Since they didn’t know who was dirty and who was clean, an external agency had to be involved.

  So they'd called in the Navy.

  That had been a body blow and there had been no warning. She’d returned from the hospital to find Navy officers in their neat black uniforms, setting up home. That had been difficult to accept.

  But she'd dealt with it, because she had a mission to keep her going. She had to find the bastard who’d done this. The Navy had a mission too, but theirs it seemed was to stop Annalisse from completing hers.

  The Navy, Annalisse had decided, were no more pleasant to work with than your average pride of rabid Centauri hyenas. A week after the attack they weren't working with the Navy –they were working for them. They’d taken over the investigation totally and any notion of cooperation was a sham.

  The first sign of that had been when the work stations had been taken away – simply removed overnight without any discussion. The Navy had brought in their own stations and chairs. Now everywhere she looked she was surrounded by Naval officers, all of them in their neatly pressed uniforms, all sitting at their cruise liner quality work stations complete with all the latest gear.

  The toys didn't stop there. Their expensive black uniforms, made of the best blend synthetic wool fibre, picked up lint. So they had a bot on the floor whose sole task was to brush them down when they came in from outside. It didn't brush her down she'd noticed. Another bot wandered around the floor constantly serving them with drinks as they worked. Somehow she couldn't imagine the ALEB ever spending the credits for one of those. They wouldn't even spend the credits for the expensive blends of coffee and tea it served. And they certainly wouldn't waste money on an android masseuse which wandered around the floor rubbing people's shoulders and necks.

  But by far the biggest expense the Navy had gone to was bringing in an entire research vessel filled with technicians and fancy equipment. The ALEB had had to scramble for every technician they had, reassigning them from other cases just to put them on this one. Tests were slow, and many of them had to be sent off-world to be done. The Navy had no such issues. To add insult to injury, as this was only the Aquarian detachment of the Navy, if they required more resources they'd put in a request to Naval Command in Sol, and they'd get what they needed within a day.

  How could they spend so much on such wasteful items? Where did they get the credits from? That was what she couldn’t understand. In the ALEB every credit someone wanted to spend was audited five times before it was approved. Overtime was almost never approved. In the Navy the officers had their own credit authorities. Big ones.

  It wasn't right. Annalisse assumed that her colleagues felt the same way. This might be a police station but they’d simply been swept aside. And not just that, but replaced by more highly valued officers. Unfortunately there was nothing she could do about it other than to do her duty and even that was highly restricted.

  Her role was to sit at her new station, write a few reports and occasionally be interrogated. She wasn't allowed to investigate anything. She wasn't even supposed to know how it was going. A lot of the time she ended up playing games quietly while waiting to be assigned a job. That didn't happen often, and when it did it was usually only the most menial of tasks.

  The only good thing was that she wasn't alone. A dozen other detectives were in the same boat and she suspected they too were sitting playing games, and wondering what had become of their lives. Those who hadn't been involved in the investigation had been transferred to other stations to carry out routine policing duties from them. They were the lucky ones.

  But the ALEB had been completely compromised and there was no point in pretending otherwise. They’d been humiliated and taught an embarrassingly painful lesson. Three of their own, including the Captain, were dead., and although she’d never really liked him it still sat very badly. Five more were in hospital, not all of whom would survive and those who did might never return to active duty. The New Andreas central station was in pieces. The XC policebots were all under suspicion and offline, meaning that half the detectives no longer had partners.

  Thirteen was in a technician's workshop having its data drive examined byte by byte, despite having saved officers' lives, she doubted it would be coming back. Even if it was found not to be compromised, it was still vulnerable. She suspected it was going to be scrapped.

  It wasn't the only one. At least a thousand other bots were suffering exactly the same fate as Navy technicians hunted for evidence of tampering. The ALEB technicians had also b
een replaced, most of them were on indefinite leave, and would only come in to be interrogated. Some of those examinations had been brutal so she'd heard. But it was what had to be expected. They were all under suspicion.

  So the technicians came in periodically, were met at the door and escorted by officers making sure they saw nothing of importance. Above all else they weren't allowed to go near the bots. They couldn't be trusted, not even with being in the building.

  If the bomber's intention had been to completely disable the ALEB he’d done a brilliant job. And what he hadn't completed the Commonwealth Navy would finish.

  But Annalisse couldn't say that out loud. She was already sailing on stormy seas. To the ALEB she was the officer who continually brought them bad news and could be the leak. To the Navy she was the one who always discovered things just a fraction too late. That the doctor was innocent after he'd jumped. Stopping a rogue policebot, after people were already dead. And they were also secretly annoyed that she was wearing her body armour all the time, as if she didn't trust them to protect her. They were right of course – she didn't.

  “Detective Samara!”

  Annalisse started as she heard her name bellowed by the Major. She looked up, saw him standing in the doorway to what had been the Captain's office, beckoning her, and immediately stood up and went to him. It annoyed her to be yelled at like that but she knew better than to disobey Major Standish, even if he wasn't her Captain. Others had tried to resist the Major – it hadn't gone well.

  “Major,” she greeted him politely and resisted as always the urge to tell him that his huge downwards-bending moustache made him look like a caricature from a holodrama.

  “Inside!” The Major wasn't nearly so polite, but that too was normal. He was military police and as far as he was concerned the regular police were too lax and overly concerned with nonsense like people's rights. This was terrorism. People had no rights. They did what they were told and so did police officers.