“Not at the moment, Captain,” Mr. Kelley said, “but I’ll know as much as we can find out in a couple of tics. Mr. Wang? Can you pull up the maintenance records for the period beginning at this point and going forward until you find anybody doing anything in the boat deck?”
I popped another list up on my starboard screen. It took a tick or two but I found the record identifying the replaced sensor. “Sensor broken. Heat damage. Scorching on casing.” It was initialed AX.
“Hardly conclusive,” Mr. Kelley was muttering, “but that’s as solid an explanation as we’ve had in weeks.”
“When you get a chance, Mr. Kelley,” the captain said, “would you ask Mr. Xia about that sensor head?”
Mr. Kelley was still gazing at the display and nodding slowly to himself. “Aye, aye, Captain. And I think I’m going to go take another look at the boat deck myself. All this time I’ve thought the EMP caused these failures.”
“We all were, Fred,” Mr. Maxwell said. “Mind if I tag along?”
“Nope,” Mr. Kelley shook himself from his contemplation of the display. “Let’s go see what we can find.”
The captain clapped me on the shoulder. “Nicely done, Mr. Wang,” she said, and the officers, except Mr. von Ickles headed off the bridge.
Mr. von Ickles smiled at me from his console. “You said it had to be something obvious. I almost laughed out loud when Mr. Kelley said that,” he told me.
“Well, you see what you expect to see, sar,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve certainly done my share of that lately.”
“Still, what made you think of the gravity?” he asked.
“When it came back on it, I dropped hard. It made something of an impression, sar.”
“Was the deck damaged?”
“No, sar. I checked.”
We sat there grinning at each other for a tick and he said, “Nice work, Mr. Wang.”
“Thank you, sar.”
We both secured our stations then and I headed for the mess deck. Cookie had spiced beefalo on the menu and I was hungry enough to eat one raw. It felt good to be underway.
While I ate lunch, Mr. Kelley and Mr. Maxwell came onto the mess deck. Mr. Kelly had a portable fire extinguisher with him and brought it over to me. It was metal, heavy, and about half a meter long. It also had a scorch-mark along the base.
“Let me guess, sar,” I said to him. “It hangs above the burned out sensor?”
“Yup,” Mr. Kelley said. “I thought you might like to see it.”
Mr. Maxwell continued, “This seems to support your hypothesis, Mr. Wang. The boat deck uses magnetic latches.”
“The cleanup crews found these down all over the ship, but nobody thought to do more than just pick them up and re-rack them,” Mr. Kelley said. “We’ll want to take that little item up with the designers.”
“But, sar, why don’t they fall off the bulkhead every time there’s a power fluctuation,” I asked.
“I don’t know, Mr. Wang, but we might have taken enough of a yaw when the sail generator went down that they just slipped off the latch in zero-g.”
Mr. Maxwell added, “We seem to have excellent evidence that the ship worked exactly as designed, but we do need to look into adjusting the continuity breakers. If those had been on, this wouldn’t have been able to do so much damage. Thank you for your work, Mr. Wang. Well done.”
Three days out of Niol, I began to get worried.
We had just taken over the evening watch and I finished my routine maintenance and systems scans. There was nothing left to do. For weeks I had had the data and systems problems stemming from the near catastrophe in Betrus. Now, the statement Mr. von Ickles had made about needing to find a way to make the position permanent came back to me. What possible value could I add on a regular basis to make it worth keeping my slot open?
Mr. von Ickles must have seen me sitting and staring at my console because he came over and asked, “Are you all right, Mr. Wang?”
“Troubled, sar. What am I going to do to contribute now that we’ve got the EMP problem solved?”
“Ah, you’re worried they’re going to take the slot away?”
“No, sar. Well, yes, sar, a little.” I had to correct myself. “But the bigger problem is why am I here?”
“Well, that’s a question men have been asking themselves as long as we’ve been capable of asking,” he said with a grin.
I had to chuckle. “I meant what am I contributing to the trip, sar.”
He smiled an odd, almost gentle smile. “So did I, Mr. Wang. Isn’t that really the question we all ask ourselves? What am I contributing to the trip?”
It clicked into place then. All of it. The whole swirling mass of angst and uncertainty snapped into focus. I took a deep breath and let it out. Not a sigh, but something like it.
“When you put it like that, sar,” I said with a smile, “it’s so obvious.”
“So, what do we need to be more effective as a ship?” he asked.
“Well, sar, the mechanics of the ships operations seem pretty well optimized.”
“You might be surprised about that,” he said, “but go on.”
“Well, sar, Pip and Cookie built some software to help with market analysis and trading. Would it be appropriate for me to work on that? Maybe take some of what I’ve learned in building these displays to help them visualize trades maybe?”
“Perfect, Mr. Wang. Why don’t you look that over and see what we can to help out? You might also check with Sandy Belterson on her astrogation updates.”
“Really, sar?”
“The ship is designed by people who know how to build ships, but they don’t necessarily know what it takes to make their living flying them. What makes sense for them is sometimes less than intuitive for those of us out here in the Deep Dark.”
“You think I could help, sar? I don’t know the first thing about this stuff, really.”
“I think that gives you a leg up on the people who designed it, Mr. Wang,” he said with a grin.
“How’s that, sar?”
“Well, they thought they knew what we needed done. You’re laboring under no such false belief.”
I spent the rest of that mid-watch running through the cargo simulations that Pip had built. I got a feel for what it was doing, very loosely, but I was going to need to talk with him about what he needed before I could mess with it. I thought I saw some things I could do with the way he plotted price trends against cargo and port. While I was at it, I took a look at the cargo manifest reporting. Compared to the systems display we had for communications status, cargo manifests seemed rather—for lack of a better word—primitive. Of course, if that was all they needed, then perhaps I was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
Still, it was something to do and by the time the watch was over I had lined up about eight different projects. I didn’t know if any of them had merit, but until I looked into them, I wouldn’t know. The next day was my twenty-four off so I took a run and a long sauna before heading to my bunk. As I settled down to sleep, I thought about Bev, the flying living room, and the academy. I wondered where Brill might work in there, or even Pip.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Umber System
2352-October-05
We were two days out of Umber and Pip was ecstatic. All the way from Niol we worked to improve his cargo trading software. We spent the first few weeks just bringing me up to speed on what it did and how it did it. I developed some new code for him that let him siphon off more of the beacon data on cargo pricing. In addition, I had discovered that we could get access to Confederation economic indexes as we passed the jump beacons so we were able to begin adjusting our trade expectations based on baseline economic data. I did not understand it myself, but I was happy to set up the data handling and visualization routines.
“This is fantastic,” Pip gushed as we pulled in the orbital beacon data. We were sitting on the mess deck at mid-morning as he studied the new displays of the current commodities data
.
“But is this going to help you make more profitable trades?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? I’ll be able to find cargo opportunities that I never would have seen before. With this level of detail two or three days out…wow.”
“It just doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Are you sure?”
“Look, Ish, in trading you need two things: information and time. You need the information to know what’s possible, and the time to decide what to do with it. With these new displays—and the extra economic data—we’re going to start making better trades right away. Look,” he said, pointing out one of the new pricing trend lines. “That line is dropping like a rock. If we wait two days to sell those igniter plugs when we get to port, and if that trend continues, we’ll have lost three percent on the value of the trade. If we can lock in the price now, that’s money we’ll be making that we didn’t even know about before.”
I saw his point. “But why isn’t everybody doing this?”
“They’re probably trying to. We’re succeeding because you’ve given me a set of economic tools that are custom-built for exactly what we’re doing. We really need to show this to Mr. Cotton. He’ll be impressed.”
“Okay, what do we need to do next with this?”
“I really think we need to get Mr. Cotton and Mr. Maxwell in on the brainstorming.”
“Sounds reasonable. Mr. Maxwell’s on watch now. Why don’t you talk to him this afternoon, maybe get Mr. Cotton, too? I’ve got the afternoon watch, and maybe we can sit down after cleanup tonight and go over it?”
Pip agreed and I headed to the gym for a pre-watch run and sauna. I had about a stan before I had to report to the bridge. After thirteen months of running almost every day, I could now run for most of that time without any problems. I had been working on picking up my pace, since I was doing reasonably well with endurance. It felt good.
When I got to the bridge I marveled over the big blue ball that was Umber. I never found out why they named a blue planet for a shade of brown, but there were stranger things than that. The system we’d just left, for example, Niol, was actually an acronym for “Not In Our Lifetimes.” The story was that the original settlers had thought about the prospect of making the planet profitable. They had been wrong, of course, but the name had already stuck.
Dick Graves was on the bridge, working with Sandy Belterson to start the astrogation updates. It was a lengthy process that often ran from two to three days depending on the volume of pending updates. It required gathering data before docking, through the port-visit, and a day or more past departure. I watched awhile as they laboriously took data from one screen and pasted it bit by bit into another screen.
“There isn’t a process for loading those records?” I asked.
Sandy gave me one of her you-really-don’t-understand-this looks and said, “Yes, Ishmael, there is. You’re looking at it.”
I grinned at her. “I was thinking of a more automated process. Like a command that would grab all the updates and put them in the database, but I see your point.”
Both of them shook their heads, and Dick said, “Nope. This is just one of the banes of the astrogator’s existence. The problem is that we have to find the ones that apply. We can’t just take all of them so we have to do it manually.”
“Why can’t you take them all? And how do you know if you missed one?”
Sandy pointed out the contents of an update. “Some of these are for areas of the galaxy we’ll never go, like this one is for the Harnden quadrant. There’s no sense to grab that, it just wastes time. And we don’t know for sure if we missed one. That’s why there’s two of us doing it.”
“So, you’re culling the updates because it would just take too long to do them all?”
Dick grinned at me and said, “Exactly. This stuff takes forever.”
“If we got the system to do it, so we could grab them all in a tick or ten, is there any reason why that would be a problem?”
“If you could figure out how to do that, you’d be a hero to astrogators across the galaxy,” Sandy said.
Dick shot me a squint-eyed look. “Why? Do you think you can?”
“I’m still trying to figure out why it hasn’t been done already. It looks like it would be pathetically easy to do, so what I can’t see is why hasn’t somebody else done it by now?”
“I don’t understand,” Sandy said. “How could it be pathetically easy? We have to grab the updates of the beacons and manually go through them.”
“True, but this information comes from the same source that Pip’s cargo data is coming from—the jump and orbital beacons—right?”
“Well, I don’t know about Pip’s cargo data,” Dick said, “but yeah, these are coming from there. We get a few from the jump beacons, but most of it comes from the orbital loads.”
I took them over to my station and showed them the cargo and price loads that we captured for Pip and what we did with the data to match it against our flight plans and projected alternatives. It didn’t take long to give them the tour and when I was done they both stared into my screen like—well, I don’t know like what. Their expressions were something between disbelief and lust.
“Sandy,” Dick said, “would you mind carrying on with those updates, while I have a long chat with our savior here?”
Sandy shook herself away from peering into the screen. “Well, the shorter that long chat, the better,” she said with a little grin. “But if you could move it along, I’d be grateful.” She headed back to her station. Mr. von Ickles smiled at me from the other side of the bridge.
The rest of the watch went by in nothing flat and by the time it was over, Dick had given me a little tour of the astrogation system. The basic structure was not that much different from the cargo data. The actual content was different, but they had very similar underlying principals. When first section came to relieve us, Dick and Sandy had their heads together, talking excitedly as they headed down the ladder.
Mr. von Ickles followed me off the bridge. At the foot of the ladder he said, “You seem to have gotten over your concern about being a burden on Lois.”
“Yes, sar, in a way. I still want to feel like I’m contributing but between Pip’s cargo stuff and this new project in astrogation, I think I can.”
“I think so, too, Mr. Wang. Mr. Maxwell was just telling me that the cargo work is excellent and I think you can expect a few little tasks from him on our next leg. He and Mr. Cotton both would like some enhancements to the manifest system to get a better representation of the load we’re carrying.”
“Well, sar, I’ll stop worrying about job security so long as I’m doing some good.”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re helping Lois. You may not feel like it, but think of this like working on the mess deck. We all work better and more effectively because we don’t have to worry about fixing a meal every time we’re hungry. You’re finding rough places in the systems that have fallen through the cracks. Systems officers like me know about them, but we’re tied up with routine office work. System specs, who might be able to address them, typically need to be justified eighteen ways to Sunday before a slot is opened up. Your position is unique because we got it approved based on a threat to the ship, not on a demonstrated work load.”
My stomach growled loudly enough for him to hear it.
“I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned the mess deck,” he said with a laugh.
“Well, perhaps we could head down there, sar? I think Cookie’s got lamb chops for dinner.” My stomach growled in agreement and Mr. von Ickles led the way.
During the approach and docking at Umber, my mind started wandering back along the voyage. The cargo systems were shaping up and I looked forward to working with Dick Graves on the long in-port watches. We had a prototype astrogation update system in place but Dick wanted to get Ms. Avril’s input on it. We would have time to sit down and really go through it while in port. I thought it felt good to have things finally ge
tting under control.
Thinking that was one of those fate tempting thoughts and I regretted as soon as it flashed across my mind. Something of that regret must have shown on my face because Mr. von Ickles leaned over and asked, “Are you all right, Mr. Wang?”
“Yes, sar. Just had an uneasy thought for a second.”
“Looked like you’d been stabbed!” he commented with a quiet chuckle.
I smiled back at him, but I just knew I was going to live to regret my previous thought, so I tried to counteract it by thinking about all the miserable things I could. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I hoped for some damage control.
We were soon docked and first section relieved us. It was the first time we had docked before breakfast so everybody was a little thrown off. It made little difference to me. Third section had had the mid-watch so it was just a little livelier for us. It worked out well for first section. It did not matter all that much in the long haul, I realized. It all evened out in the end.
I stood up, stretched, and looked out on either side to see who we were near. There was another container ship docked to starboard with the double F’s of Federated Freight emblazoned on the side of the bow section. The configuration didn’t look quite like the Lois. I thought she had more cargo sections and looked longer. It was hard to tell looking back in the dark like that. On the port side was a bulk hauler in blue and gray. It had a C superimposed on an L all in a eight pointed star. I knew the logo, but could not dredge up who it belonged to. It would come to me.
I leaned down to secure my console. We had been relieved and the captain and Mr. Maxwell were negotiating liberty. I was not in any hurry to leave the ship, myself. Mid-watch was still mid-watch and I would need a little nap before I did anything. The co-op would be spending the day on preliminaries in preparation for a movement in force. Mr. von Ickles had let me reserve their booth. I got a kick out of handing the communications traffic for them.
As I headed for the ladder, Mr. Maxwell and the captain finished with their negotiations and Bev made the liberty announcement. I smiled at her on the way by, but stepped aside to let the captain have the right of way on the ladder.
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