by Erik Wecks
“I’ve already ordered the auto-doc to dispense a high-level combination of biologic and nanite defenses, and then I sent a discreet email to the patient stating that her … or his scans had found something, and that they should take the meds provided from the auto-doc for the next three days.”
Soren’s shoulders seemed to relax. “So nothing that we need to report to the transit authority?”
“No.”
Soren sat back and rubbed her hands on her thighs for a minute, thinking. “I’m trying to figure out how to say this delicately. This is a small boat with a tightly packed crew. Sex between crew almost always ends badly. Either one or both of them end up leaving the boat. I don’t outlaw it like some captains—that just seems to invite worse trouble, but it makes me nervous. I guess I just want to say, I appreciate how discreet you were in this situation. It’s not our place to get in the middle of what will undoubtedly be an uncomfortable conversation between two people on this boat.”
Jo tipped her head. “I understand. However, if I’m asked why I gave the medicine, I will answer truthfully that they tested positive.”
It would probably happen, and soon, since the person was her roommate, Alia.
Soren held her hands out in surrender and stood from the desk. “Fair enough.” She walked to the door. “Oh, one more thing, Katy, before you call it an evening, will you be so kind to write me a quick report for the ship’s logbook? We’re getting close to Fuji, and I want to make sure my books are in order. I would hate to get caught without it if we got a surprise audit. Stranger things have happened.”
Jo glanced at the clock on her tablet. It was already ten minutes after she was supposed to be off shift.
Soren must have noticed because she added, “Nothing too long, mind you. Just a couple of paragraphs on what you found and your course of treatment.”
Although she was more than little frustrated, Jo managed a smile. “Of course.”
Soren just gave her a curt nod of acknowledgement and then stepped out.
It took Jo another twenty minutes to craft a report that she felt gave Soren the necessary information without giving away Todd or Alia’s identity.
When she stepped out the door a half an hour after her shift was supposed to end, she was surprised to see Vi standing in the corridor outside. The short pilot was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Oh, good, I was afraid I’d missed you, and then I would have had to go looking for you.”
Jo looked at the sailor with a puzzled expression and an amused smile. “Did you want something?”
“No … well, yes. I wondered if you wanted to grab a bite to eat.”
Jo laughed. “Sure, I’m starving. I got distracted reading charts and trying to figure out the insane medical file system and ended up missing my lunch.”
Vi merely nodded, but her eyes were almost as big as comm dishes when they arrived at the mess.
Jo was just about to ask Vi what was going on when she stepped into the room and was greeted with a huge cry of “Happy Birthday, Katy!”
Jo actually jumped back a step. She took a second to let her heart stop pounding before peeking back through the hatch. Most of the crew were all crammed into the small space, and as soon as Jo stuck her head in again, cheers and laughter broke out.
Jo stepped in, confused. Speaking loudly, she said, “But it’s not my birthday!”
More laughter greeted her.
It was then that she realized that someone had gone to the effort of stringing together pieces of electronic paper to make a banner that scrolled like a marquee: “Happy Birthday, Katy!”
Violet grabbed her by the elbow and started to escort a very confused Jo toward the head of the table, where a modest stack of gifts waited for her, along with most of her fellow officers.
Jo looked to Vi. “What’s this about?”
Vi gave Jo a mischievous grin. “You’ll see.”
Jo felt her chest tighten in panic. “I’ll see what?”
When they reached the front, Soren and the rest of the ship’s officers were waiting there. Soren had an envelope in her hand. Jo was brought to stand in front of her.
Soren smiled. She spoke loudly enough so that all in the now quiet room could hear. “On the Clarion, we know just how hard it can be to give up a name. Your name is more than what people call you; it carries your identity, your heritage. Giving up Josephine is giving up part of yourself, and it would be appropriate to have a funeral or a wake of sorts, and that is partially what this is. Many of us know how hard it is to leave our past behind. Some of us have done it more than once.”
Todd spoke up loudly from the back of the room. “You just had to bring that up, didn’t you, Captain?”
Soren didn’t look at him, but a mischievous grin crossed her face, and a chuckle rumbled through the gathered crowd.
Soren continued. “However, getting a new name is also an opportunity, a chance to give up on who you were and to become who you will be—who you want to be—and that is how we on the Clarion like to think of this event. Yes, it’s a funeral, but mostly it’s a birthday. Happy Birthday!” Soren held out the packet in her hand.
Somewhat embarrassed by all the attention, Jo tipped the envelope. Inside she found an identification card that looked exactly like the real thing. She picked up the card and saw her new face on it. She looked at the name: Katrina Paige. She wasn’t sure what to make of it. It felt like she was being asked to put on an ill-fitting set of clothes that didn’t belong to her.
Jo continued to stare at the card, unsure of everything, overwhelmed by the attention, but at the same time suddenly excited at the opportunity for a fresh start. She decided that she would look at this as a birthday instead of a funeral. A smile started to cross her face.
Someone shouted, “Say your name! Introduce yourself.”
Others took up the call.
Soon most of the crew and even a few of the officers were chanting for Jo to say her new name. Still completely unsure what to make of all of this, Jo looked up from the card and laughed. “My name is Katrina Paige, but you can call me …” She paused, a tinge of regret crossing her mind. She took a breath. “You can call me Katy.”
Laughing, the crew started a boisterous and obscene version of “Happy Birthday” that had Jo blushing about three lines in.
For the next couple of hours, Josephine, now Katy, was the center of attention. Since this was her first birthday as Katy, she was expected to do several things. First, she opened her presents, several of which were appropriate for a baby, including a handmade wooden rattle from the captain. She was served no alcohol, and when cake came after dinner, she was expected to eat it with her hands. Todd gave her so much grief about not being messy enough for a one-year-old that she ended up throwing half her piece at him. The cook laughed so hard he could barely breathe, and Jo/Katy found herself joining in.
It was in the middle of laughing that she thought of Tanith. He used to like a good joke as well. Then she saw him again as he drew his weapon and fired it at her, his face cold and distant.
The party went on for a while longer, and Jo stayed, still smiling, but the things that had been funny just moments before no longer seemed that way to her. As things wound down, Jo found herself wondering how long it would be until she screwed it all up and ended up on her own again.
16
Mt. Fuji Erupts
Vi sat at the console on the bridge. “Captain, we’re now on a ballistic trajectory toward Sunto. Our closest approach to the Fujiyama Orbital estimated to be in about ninety minutes. We expect to start our final burn approximately seven minutes from now. We should be able to start offloading cargo in about twenty-three minutes.”
“Thank you, Helm.” Captain Soren stood next to her chair at the back of the bridge, watching the four stations in front of her. “Once we get done with that burn, I want you to redo the calculations for our trip to Outer Tripoli. It’s an extra jump gate to go through Oceanus, but it will save us time because getting in
queue at Huygens Station is going to cost us.”
Vi frowned. “The average queue time at Huygens is only twenty hours. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
Soren’s eye twinkled as she grinned at her navigator. “Oh, you don’t think it will be a problem, do you? Well, I know things that you don’t, sailor. I know that the spring meteor shower at Huygens Four peaked eight days ago, which means that we can expect much longer than usual queues at the gate. And that is why they were red stopped on continuous transit. So unless you want to trade our bonus payments for a three-day stopover at the godawful bar on Huygens, then I think you best recalculate everything for Oceanus.”
Small laughs rippled around the bridge at that captain’s mock scolding of her navigator.
Even Vi chuckled as she rolled her eyes and said. “Aye, sir.”
Jo, who stood out of the way next to the exit, smiled with everyone else. She took it as a sign that she was adjusting to life as a merchant marine, because she understood exactly what the captain was on about.
Travel around the galaxy used a series of round gates that measured anywhere between a kilometer to four kilometers in diameter. The vast majority of them had huge traffic control stations nearby to manage the ships wanting to use the gate. These stations also served to defend the gate should anyone try to attack it. A smaller number of gates in unpopulated systems, like the one where Soren rescued Jo from the Timcree, used automated beacons. There were even a few gates, like the one that hid the Ghost Fleet, that were unmarked on any charts.
The gates were powered by artificially created black holes. Each gate created a wormhole with a second gate located anywhere up to eighteen or nineteen light-years away. During the war, the Ghost Fleet had made a record jump of forty-two light-years, but that was a secret that only the spacers in the fleet knew.
The cost and danger of such gates meant that each system only had one or, at most, two gates. The most efficient use of these gates for ships was a method called “continuous transit,” in which a ship passed through a gate transiting into a new system and then immediately reversed thrust to pass right back through the second gate and transit immediately onward to a third gate.
In this way, a ship could theoretically make its way across a good portion of the galaxy in a matter of a few hours. Ships paid a high premium for the privilege of continuous transit. Laws of supply and demand being what they were, it was always a tricky calculation to determine whether or not the extra cost of continuous transit or a standard queue time would make the most sense for a freighter like the Clarion.
The captain took an almost smug pull from her mug of coffee and spoke to her engineer, who had made the kilometer-long trip to the bridge for their arrival. “Freddi, did you get the maintenance done on the forward number two engine?”
From her station, the tall and narrow woman with short blonde hair answered with a kind of parental calm. “No, Captain, but the temporary repairs should hold for a while yet. We’ll be fine. There should be parts on the dock here. As long as we exit the well using the aft engines, we’ll get to it on the way out.”
Soren grunted her grudging approval, although she didn’t sound wholly convinced.
In her few weeks aboard, Jo still felt at a loss at times. She hadn’t yet adjusted to calling herself Katy, although the crew was beginning to test her. To help her adjust, they were randomly calling her “Jo,” and if she responded, she would have her face marked with a permanent marker. Yesterday was the first day she had managed to keep her face clean. Jo wasn’t sure what to make of it all. Most of the time, she found it good fun, but there were days when it irritated her to no end, and those were the days the crew seemed to take the game most seriously, insisting that she laugh with them, and refusing to allow her to feel bad.
Surprisingly, she was enjoying her work on the Clarion more than she thought she would. Now that she had papers, she had access to intraspace, and she’d taken a few tentative steps to test out her identity. Her freedom of movement in the virtual world had done a lot to relieve her claustrophobia on the ship. She’d even gotten brave enough to use her credentials as a doctor to consult on a couple of cases in the hinterlands—things from backwoods worlds that most busy doctors didn’t have time to take. She’d earned a small pittance from her work, but Jo decided that it was her ability to do something truly useful that had made it rewarding for her.
Behind her on the bridge, the main corridor ran straight and true to the aft engine room, stretching more than a kilometer back. The artificial gravity ended somewhere shortly past the crew quarters clustered near the front of the ship.
This was the first time that Jo would get to observe the offloading of cargo from the Clarion, one of the more interesting and tricky parts of space travel.
For a few moments, the room slipped into silence as the officers on duty went about their tasks, and Jo took a moment to enjoy the black stars, the main sequence star of the Shizuoka System was off to starboard, out of sight. They were running perpendicular to the gravity well, approaching Sunto from up orbit. The planet appeared as a bluish pool of light no bigger than your thumb, just off-center of their course.
Without warning, a bright flash made the planet stand out against all the other stars.
Jo gasped along with several others on the bridge.
Part of the planet seemed to have become a distinct bubble of the brightest violet Jo had ever seen.
Soren stepped forward, putting her hands on her hips. “What the hell was that?”
It was the sensors officer, Susan, who spoke first. “Captain? I’m getting an increase in positrons. I’m a magnitude above the mapped background for this location and still rising.”
Captain Soren flipped down her heads-up. “I see it, Sensors. Keep an eye on it. Comms, do we have anything coming in on the net yet?”
Sitting to Susan’s right, Michel Nichols, who served as the communications officer, answered, “It’s just beginning to come in now.”
“Put it on the speaker.”
“Yes, sir.”
At first, all Jo could make out was a static-filled hum of overlapping voices and messages. The panic was clear but little else. Then the distinctive whoop of an emergency tone swept aside all other communications. “Mayday! Mayday! This is the Mt. Fuji Orbital! We have had a catastrophic explosion. Engineering is gone. The bridge is gone. We are tumbling and our orbit is decaying …”
While the message continued, Soren looked puzzled. “Were they attacked?” She pointed to her sensor officer. “Scan the system. Make sure we don’t have anyone hostile lurking out there waiting to hit again, and get me an image of the station.”
Susan nodded. One panel of the stars disappeared as the ship’s camera oriented itself to look at the station.
When the image appeared a short time later, several members of the crew cried out. What had once been a typical round orbital with a long spindle above and below now looked like a cookie with a bite removed from the side. Atmosphere was clearly venting into space.
Someone brushed into Jo in their rush to enter the bridge. Jo turned to see the small, broad-shouldered woman who was the ship’s chief mate. Neela Singh handled all of the loading and unloading of cargo by the longshoremen and also arranged the contracts the kept the ship paid. “Captain, all our comms just went to hell. There’s all sorts of chatter about some kind of explo— Baap re!” Neela’s eyes widened as she finally processed the image projected on the big board at the front of the bridge.
Jones, the first officer, wondered aloud, “How many aboard?”
It was Soren who answered without taking her eyes from the slowly tumbling station. “About fifty thousand. Sound general quarters.”
The first officer reached over to a nearby console, which started a siren wailing throughout the ship.
“Sensors, do we have any possible hostile contacts?”
Susan removed her heads-up to look at the captain with both eyes. “No, sir, I can’t find anything. The on
ly contacts we have are all registered commercial vessels, most of them inbound, and most of them now scrambling away.”
“Very well. Continue to scan, and let me know immediately if you find anything.” Standing wide, Soren remained silent for a moment. Then she took a noisy breath and said, “Helm, I want to come alongside on the upper part of the spindle. It seems to be the least damaged.”
“Captain,” said Vi, “I don’t see how we can get anywhere near that thing. The debris field is really thick.”
“I see it, Vi. I am aware of the problems. How long until we’re near the field?”
“It’s hard to say, sir. It’s still expanding. At most, sixty minutes, probably much less.”
Soren furrowed her brow. She turned quickly to her cargo officer. “What about a dump? How long to dump our cargo? Can we come back and get it later?”
Jo hadn’t spent a lot of time with Neela, but from the little Jo knew of her, she seemed to be someone who thrived on a significant amount of fluster, using it to keep her balance and momentum. She waved her hands at the captain. “Impossible. We can’t do it.”
Soren just glared at her. “Fifty thousand people, Neela.”
Neela shook her head. “There’s no way, Captain. Even an emergency dump would take at least forty min—”
Soren interrupted. “That leaves you twenty until we hit the debris field. Do it, Neela.”
Neela was about to argue when the look on Soren’s face finally hit home. She opened her mouth and then stopped. “Yes, sir.” Neela turned on her heels and nearly sprinted off the bridge, muttering in Hindi the whole time.
Soren turned back to face her deck crew, two of whom, including Vi, were openly crying. Jo herself was barely holding it together, and she was the doctor. “All right, people, if we’re going to help the survivors, we’re going to need to keep it together. Susan, I want you to have the computer tracking everything it can detect larger than a meter, and, Vi, find a way to put a kilometer-long needle through that haystack and get us alongside that station.”