Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

  Charlie Nash was born in England and holds degrees in mechanical and space engineering, medicine, and writing. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Aurealis and Ditmar awards. She lives on the eastern seaboard of Australia, and is working on two new novels, and a third Ship’s Doctor installment.

  w: charlienash.net

  f: authorcharlienash

  Also by Charlie Nash:

  Short Story Collections

  Men and Machines II: punks and postapocalypticans

  All Your Dark Faces

  Men and Machines I:

  space operas and special ops

  Charlie Nash

  Published in 2019 by Flying Nun Publications, http://flyingnunpublications.com/

  “The Ship’s Doctor” first published 2010 in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #47

  “Dellinger” first published 2014 in Use Only As Directed, Peggy Bright Books

  “Tartarus” first published 2013 in Electric Spec, Volume 8, Issue 2

  “Deep Deck 9” first published 2012 in Luna Station Quarterly #10

  In all the above first publications, stories originally credited to Charlotte Nash.

  Copyright © 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014 Charlie Nash

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ISBN:

  978-1-925775-09-9 (paperback)

  978-1-925775-10-5 (eBook)

  Cover design by Richard Priestley

  Contents

  The Ship’s Doctor

  Dellinger

  Tartarus

  Deep Deck 9

  Your thoughts?

  More from Charlie Nash

  For all those who grew up watching Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor and Dana Scully, and who played with Lego and rockets, and who never wanted to stop

  The Ship’s Doctor

  Adventures of Coryn Astridottir #1

  This is the way it always ends.

  My cheek burns from his stubble and blood rushes to my head. Got up too fast, but we’re five minutes from port. I grope for my trousers under the covers. They’re crunched down below the bed end, inside-out, cast off in a rush. I turn them by feel, then go after my shirt. Be gone before he’s back.

  I hear him cleaning up through the thin bathroom walls. He was good, this one, with his reactor-ore-etched nails and whip scars on his back. From the prisons or military chain-gangs maybe. I didn’t ask his name. I never ask. Once my need is gone, it’s gone. Then, I can let the other desire take over.

  I can remember who I am.

  I put a hand to the pod wall, cold from the space-soak. Two engines push us towards port: one a DM-starrunner, the other a MaximII. Their vibration thrills me, sending shivers dancing in my skin, a smile on my lips.

  I interpret them while I pull on my trousers one-handed. The Maxim lags the DM, thrumming out of sync. Probably a coolant blockage. Nothing much fancy happens in the old gear. The pulse drive won’t get much further than the return leg but it’s not my concern. Some sap in the control room will see a red blinking light: this boat’s only a red-class star freighter. A fast shuttle. I’ll forget her before I’ve passed the airlock, just like the man in the bathroom. I never bothered to learn their names, because out there is the Freya. A blue-class mega station. Black shimmering crystal looming in the darkness.

  After that, there’s nothing else.

  “Doctor.”

  A curt nod in khakis greets me at the entry dock. Stars on his shoulder say he’s a second-captain, Gibbon stitched in white on his chest. Gibbon is a type of monkey, but I don’t make the comment. It wouldn’t help. Gibbon’s a man whose humor evaporated into space years ago.

  So I nod in return, take his hand firmly. “Captain.”

  He pauses just a bit too long. I know what he sees. Young woman. Too young. Too pink. Too pretty. But I forgive him that. He doesn’t know. He licks sweat from his upper lip. The Freya is a big deal when you don’t trust the physician. And he’s old enough to think it’s all bunk. Doctors for ships, new-verse crap.

  No sense in jerking around.

  “What is the nature of your problem, Captain?”

  Gibbon’s eyes flash left and right.

  “Not here,” he murmurs with a nervous glance to the crowds in the dock.

  He turns on his heel and we’re walking to Freya’s hub, waved through border control, on the long journey to the control deck. The Freya is the size of a planet-side city, like suburbs stacked one on another. She’s a parasite station, hanging above Artemis, whose blue oceans are the only reminder of home. The Artemis system’s the frontier of transformed worlds and Freya is the gateway. Space elevator. Captured asteroid miner. Terraformer. Bolt hole. My heels flash at the disgruntled crowds lining up with passports. I meld into the noise, following my monkey. They don’t even scan my case.

  The lift is a bullet in a tube, doors marked in red Authorized Only. Gibbon’s fingertip glows with a red LED beneath his skin as his touch grants access. My desire stirs then; I want to touch it, feel the machine in the man, just as I itch to touch the walls and feel Freya’s pulse. But Gibbon’s a tense sort and there’ll be time enough for astonishment. I am beginning to feel her anyway. Men like Gibbon barely appreciate what’s in these walls. A new kind of thing entirely.

  Two red bullets later, a blue-striped door declares Operations. Gibbon announces me, scuttles off. I’ve unsettled him and he doesn’t know why, never will. Good for him.

  The council of eight first-captains stands in a clutch. More khakis with loops of red at the shoulder. Ex-military men tending a sick giant. Giddy hens in a circle. The one with the extra gold bars steps forward.

  “Doctor,” he says with an inflection I don’t like. His name is Murphy. I want to make a joke about the irony, but I don’t. That part of my brain still works, but it’s under control these days. Murphy introduces the others. I slide my eyes past their faces, not remembering names.

  “What is the nature of your problem, Captains?” I press.

  Murphy shifts in his shoes.

  “First of all, I need to impress—”

  I want to hiss. He thinks of legality and his ass before the station. I glance at his pants. No, not even an ass worth saving. But it’s not him at stake. I give him a clinical smile, reassurance, no humor.

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality was extended in the last verse approved regs, Captain. Don’t worry, you’re covered.”

  He breathes out.

  “The core is fluctuating,” he volunteers. What the fuck do we know, you’re the doc…

  I put down my case and turn to the wall screens.

  “Bring me up the vitals, please.”

  A hovering tech engineer glides forward to man the controls. The old men don’t get themselves dirty on the keys. Likely never learned to type. I’d do it myself, but I think faster this way. And I have to go through the motions, not to scare them first, and to let my connection find its frequency.

  The tech’s fingers dance. Data readouts fill the main screen, another scrolls graphs tagged in multicolored Helvetica. Colors grow and shift. No one in the room can read it; proprietary design. Nothing trips my pattern recognition, so I start on The List. I pine for direct connection, but I’m not there
yet. My brain takes a while to scan the frequencies.

  “Primary line pressure?” I begin.

  I don’t like this part; makes it seem like she’s a machine, no respect for what she really is. I’m not a mechanic. But it does give the onlookers some comfort.

  “Twenty bar median, ranging eighteen to twenty-point-five,” answers the Tech.

  His voice is calm, deep. Not bored. I like that. Careful. I keep my eyes on the screen.

  “Normal then. Core field?” I continue.

  “Half Tesla.”

  “Holding steady?”

  “Blips two percent on a four-hour-cycle,” he offers, matter-of-fact, professional.

  I grunt. Unusual to get that sort of variation. I cast an eye at the techie’s pocket. Riley. Strong hands. My brain drags my eyes upwards. Strong jawline too. Please, not when I’m working.

  His eyes, an odd deep red, flicker to mine. He looks away quickly, with a small frown. Like he did something wrong. He avoids looking up again. His cheeks burn red like his eyes. He clears his throat.

  “We changed out five filters in the last planet-cycle,” he volunteers, staring at the wall.

  “And?”

  He licks his lips.

  “And what, ma’am?”

  “Why did you change them?”

  He flushes. “The red light went on.”

  I nearly double take. No one goes by instrument panel anymore. But then I remember where I am. The furthest flung blue-class in the known verse.

  “I need to see those filters,” I say.

  “Uh… they went to the recyclers.”

  I turn to stare at the first-captains.

  “Gentlemen. You cannot destroy specimens. And you cannot put unchecked parts into the recyclers. This isn’t a mechanical works, with parts that break and get replaced. She’s a grafted organism.”

  “It’s standard procedure—”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  It snaps out of me, curt. Murphy shuts his jaw, squashing his cheeks.

  “How long have these fluctuations been going on?”

  “Forty planet cycles, give or take,” says Riley.

  “How long is that here?”

  “About two Earth weeks.”

  “Two weeks?”

  I glare at them. Dammit. They’d let her go for two weeks. The information brings a memory I don’t want: of hot raw burn to my sinuses. I suck cooling air through my nose to forget.

  “It took half that time getting you here,” complains Murphy. “Anyway, I don’t see the problem. There’s a leak somewhere, a processor down, whatever. We haven’t lost critical systems and—”

  “Time is precisely the nature of your problem,” I snap, mind doing the math. Gods, two weeks! “This isn’t a leak, captain. A station this size can’t maintain critical systems for two weeks on a leak.”

  I’ve folded my arms. My toe taps. I picked that up from my registrar at the docks and I’ve never shaken it. He even spoke to the ships that way. Time to take control.

  “Riley, I’m going to need a sample.”

  “You going to explain what you’re doing?” Murphy tries to re-establish authority. The other first-caps nudge each other, all that powder gray precision suddenly not delivering.

  But I wasn’t, not yet. They’d have their answers. But sharing information now will slow me down. I don’t blame them; they’re fearful. They remember the Selenium. She died spiraling into a sun, when the DNA microsplice tech was new. We all remembered her, because her doc went down with her. There were rumors about why. But this wasn’t about that, not exactly. Riley and I have a date with Freya.

  Riley keeps quiet at first. He walks beside me, along cleated maintenance deck grateways, a system the passengers never see. His manners change. Back straighter. Jaw set. He’s not as green as I thought, just a show for the ops room. If someone had asked, he’d have said he was leading me to the core system hatches, but no one leads me anywhere on a ship. I could have followed her heart with my hand on the walls.

  “So, what do you need a sample of?”

  We stop at a bullet call point. Riley’s thigh is long and muscled under the blue fatigues, which run a smooth line from belt to knee. Not now. I look at his face instead. Unlined, earnest. Interested. Damn.

  “What do you know about the core?”

  “Blue-class StarLiner Evo model,” he says, like the fine print from the catalogue. His red eyes shine.

  I pause.

  “Not many people know that.”

  “Know what?” he asks. I wait as the bullet slides open and we step inside. The doors close.

  “That the station’s core defines its class, not its size,” I say.

  “Oh. My dad—”

  He catches himself as the bullet whizzes away. My stomach drops before the magnos kick against the acceleration. My grandmother knew the man who developed the magnos. That still gives me a rush.

  “What else do you know?” My eyes wander to his buttocks. They curve under the blue drill, muscled and hard as a synthetic melon. He catches me looking.

  “Its proprietary… some of the guys in tech wanted to take one apart, see what was in there, but it’s not supposed to be a good idea.”

  “That’s right. Know why?” The bullet accelerates again.

  “Because it’s a living machine,” he says softly.

  “That’s right.” I close my eyes, put a hand on the wall. A living machine.

  The exact details are secret, of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know. The Company spliced DNA programs with the micromachines in the core, programs that could copy themselves, evolve, be selected, multiply. Superior to anything they’d ever programmed in software. That made it possible to make a system for a blue-class that wouldn’t be obsolete as soon as it left the dock. The hitches were years in development, but they were mostly about getting the signal out. No one had built ports for something that was living matter on a scaffold.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. In a few generations, the DNA machines built their own scaffolding onto microwires, massive bandwidth, parallel processing. But then the techs couldn’t understand what went on inside. It didn’t look like what they’d programmed anymore. They couldn’t diagnose the problems.

  Then they found out they didn’t have to, not exactly. All they needed were us.

  The ships’ doctors.

  We leave the bullet at the core deck. Riley swipes a glowing LED finger over the reader. I’m having a hard time keeping my attention off him. The strength in his hands, the stamina of a youthful body. Only the core room lets me forget for a while.

  I put my case on the floor and pull it open. An old-style doctor’s case with pouches, slots and hidden places. It smells of leather and Listerine. I get my tools. Fifty mil syringe and sixteen gauge needle in plastic packets. Swab and graft plaster. Gloves, goggles. Mask. I hold one out to Riley, which he takes with a confused expression.

  “What do I need that for?”

  “Because you wouldn’t want to be sorry.”

  He shrugs and pulls it on. Obedient too. Probably looks good in leather. The urge is getting a long-nailed hold. I shake my head, trying to dislodge it.

  I go to the walls then: thousands of four-inch square panels with quarter-turn fasteners holding them over the central exchange. From here, Freya sends her nervous system all over the station, even grows satellite control centers where they’re needed. But this, right here, is the master.

  I listen through my fingertips and finally I feel her frequencies resolve under my touch. My heart skips to beat in time with her, and the connection rush squashes my other urge. Our minds, such as hers is, speak. Our direct connection is nearly complete. And I feel her system choking. I follow the stress to a high point, then point to the panel.

  “Here.”

  Riley gets his quarter-turn tool. I unwrap the syringe, tip it with the needle. He turns the four points with a practiced hand and the small window to Freya’s core stands open
.

  At first, it looks like a jumble. A gelatinous web, like jellyfish running with pale blue streams piled one on another: oxygen dissolved in inorganic medium. The look of it isn’t right, but it wasn’t what I was hoping for. On Selenium the microwires got an impurity and corroded. The sloughing debris poisoned the DNA and the whole system went down. Making calculations while sick and a-kilter, she ran into a sun, my colleague still trying to stabilize the poison. But if the wires were corroding, there should be rivers of red or black shot through the mix.

  This is something else. Distributed, cloudy. I tell myself it’s no big deal, but I still bite my lip, remembering. Because there was another station before the Selenium. One that never made it out of port.

  One that got infected.

  My breath steams my goggles as I plunge the needle tip into the cloudy goo. It’s only ten mil under the thin membrane. My thumb moves the plunger by muscle memory, and a thick spurt of pale blue sits in the barrel. I withdraw, swab the spot and stick on the graft plaster. Riley has the panel on before I’ve capped the needle.

  “Now what?” he asks.

  “Analysis.”

  “And you’re expecting what?”

  He leans over me as I pull the mobile micro-bio unit from my bag. I try to ignore him, running a loving finger along the keypad. It’s crude, limited range of species, but accurate. I load the sample cassette, click it home. The red light blinks, working.

  I look up at Riley then. His hair – the color of burnt umber –touches his skin like fronds of a willow hiding one strange eye. My hand moves to his leg.

  The unit’s light blinks green before I get there, and I turn the move into asking for a hand up. Riley obliges, grip firm and sure. My urge flutters uncomfortably, and I do what I never do. I hold his eye with mine.

  “What does it say?” he whispers, breath hot and close.

  “You have an infection.”

  The first-captains stare at me. One moves his mouth like a fish.