Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer)

by Hechtl, Chris

  Seven thousand people of various species all on the station. It was quite a change for ship and station alike. A change all were slowly adapting too.

  The ship still had a couple of hundred people on board, all essential crew and their families. From what he had heard through the grapevine it was very different for them. It was quiet, for some too quiet. They were even talking about ripping out some of the habitats and returning the ship to a full bulk freighter again. Go figure.

  Of course the habitat areas in Kiev would come in handy to run people from the planet to the station right about now. Four or five grand a pop? Riff thought with silent amusement. It'd take a week one way but it would add a nice healthy addition to their growing population.

  He snorted at the thought. Their population. Apparently he was already setting down roots here. Gwen looked over her shoulder to him as she squeezed his fingers. “What?” she asked.

  “Just thinking about the future and things,” he said.

  “Oh?” she asked turning slightly to look at him.

  He shrugged. “Never mind. We've got reactor two up. Regua's after me to get the EPS conduits to some of the other fabricators and replicators online. Has the admiral gotten anywhere with the shields?”

  Gwen frowned. “I think he's been looking them over. I'm not sure.”

  “Check please. I've got a feeling we'll want them up sometime soon.” She looked at him. He shrugged. “I mean when we start moving the station.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said and then pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I'll um, I'll ask,” she said. “If I forget ask him at the next meeting,” she suggested.

  “Will do,” he said removing his hand. “I've got to get to work.”

  “Behave,” she admonished.

  “Don't I always?” he asked with a grin. She snorted. “Okay, sometimes?” he said again this time with a roguish twinkle. She snorted again and shook her head. His chest rumbled in a deep chuckle. “That's what I thought,” he said as he left.

  Sparks and Freeze worked on the recyclers the first day Freeze was out of the infirmary. They didn't so much work on the actual recyclers as they did on the compartments that they were housed in. They had heard that Kiev had reached orbit of the planet the day before and people were lining up to get to the station. That meant they needed more livable space for everyone when they got here, hence their current occupation.

  Sparks hated recyclers for good reason. So did Freeze, the damn things stank and the stench tended to cling to their clothes for ages. They nodded to some folks they know in passing but no one lingered for long, they all turn up their noses and beat a hasty retreat when they get a whiff. They knew a few people in the tribes but they were still in an us versus them mindset. The apprentices were helping some but they were also a pain in the ass to train. They did some really stupid things too sometimes.

  When Admiral Irons came by they had a brief talk. Sparks and Freeze shook his hand and thanked him for the training as well as the opportunity to be on the station. Sprite apparently let him know about the accident while they were talking because he asked if they were okay. Both men nodded.

  They each have two apprentices from the tribes. They don't like it, so they have the kids do the fetching and carrying to keep them busy. They also have bots to help do that now. The constantly have to think of something to get the kids out of their hair. Irons is amused but told them to be patient. “Maybe get the kids to help with minor things.”

  “Oh we do. But they are green.” Sparks replied. He tried hard not to roll his eyes.

  “Everyone's green at the beginning. Remember that. Remember what you were like when you first started the job. How your boss had to handle your mistakes. Don't hold it against them much. Try to be patient. They'll get better in time if you encourage them,” the admiral replied and then clapped Sparks on the shoulder. Freeze grunted.

  “We are. But oh boy do they try my patience!” Sparks replied, this time rolling his eyes. Irons smiled politely.

  “Spades tournament coming up?” he asked suddenly. Freeze looked up and blinked. The admiral snorted. “Good luck gents.”

  “Thanks admiral.”

  “I'll let you get back to work then, I don't want to slow you up and ruin your pace,” he said retreating. They waved as he left. An otter tech nearby complained about the constant relentless work. Sparks doesn't know the guy but his constant mustache twisting is getting on his nerves. The guy has a monocle and has a stiff upper lip attitude. “Ollie knock it off,” Freeze said tiredly as a rant went on for too long.

  The otter shut up when both old hands grumble about fur in the equipment. The Terrans exchange amused looked as the grumpy otter went somewhere else down the corridor out of earshot.

  Barry was finally happy; he managed to take the yellow school bus shuttle down to the planet to make regular runs to bring people back up. They were moving quickly to transfer goods and people to and from the ship. The shuttles were getting overhauls in transit from orbit to the station that way they would be ready when they arrived... hopefully.

  The captain wanted to be out of orbit and back to the station in under a week. He was pulling up about a hundred and twenty people on each run, three times a day weather permitting. He was fairly sure they weren't going to meet their deadline.

  He had sent a crew down to Eternia to service the shuttle there. Low and behold it was fine; Marlena had been a bit sheepish about all the hoopla. He'd taken it gracefully but hadn't offered her the pilot's seat to take it back up. She'd been a bit wistful about that but then Randor had called her over with a problem. Barry had turned and took the shuttle back up loaded with people eager for a new life.

  The day Kiev left orbit there was a third fire, this time Howi is the luckless idiot who started it. He had been patching a bulkhead and had accidentally ignited a pile of trash nearby with sparks. The trash smoldered at first and then burned, setting off a chain reaction. Since the oxygen is high and the nitrogen is low in the area there is a flash over. Some of the people were hurt. Howi is a bit singed but he had been wearing protective clothing so he was treated for heat exposure and smoke inhalation and then released.

  A quick investigation of the fire after it is put out pointed out the problem. A safety brief is held the next day. From now on work crews would clear trash before welders came in. They would also pump more nitrogen or other buffer gases into the compartment and lower the oxygen level to try to prevent another flash over. Crew chiefs do daily mandatory safety checks from now on.

  The Kiev returned a week and a half later loaded with 4,000 passengers from the planet. For the first time the ship docks with the station. It's a tense moment for all concerned, one wrong move and it could be bad, very bad for station and ship alike. Fortunately a pair of automated tugs were on hand to help ease the ship into its docking port.

  When they docked people streamed out in rapid order, eager to see the new station. Guides, both people and electronic, were there on hand to meet and greet them and guide them on their way. It was a chaotic situation that fortunately the AI and cybers had in hand after the first half hour. Sid and Emily may be a little rusty but they had experienced this situation many times before.

  Kiev spent a few hours taking on stores and was ready to undock in less than a shift. Cora delayed the action by making a couple of visits to her friends on the station and sight seeing. Eventually the captain dragged her back to the ship. She admitted to O'Mallory later that she had been tired and footsore.

  They made regular runs between the station and the planet, shorter each time. Each run added 4,000 people to the station's population and allowed them to pick up a load of material and equipment for the ship to install.

  Irons looked up as a green light on his HUD lit. “Yes?” he asked, not pausing as he finished his shower. Two months since the station had come online and Kiev should have left some time ago for her next destination but hadn't. The captain had delayed to make more inner system runs and to get as muc
h as he could out of the situation. Irons couldn't blame him.

  “Admiral, I thought you'd want to know we've got a transponder echo. DB 1701E formerly the Golden Dew Drop. She's at the edge of tug nine's range,” Sprite informed him, diplomatically not placing her avatar on his HUD.

  “Incoming?” he asked, shutting off the shower and reaching for his Towel. He scowled at the rattle in the pipes. Something was obviously loose. Either it had worked itself loose from the straps or someone had been lax when they had done the plumbing. It only took a moment to strap a pipe down to keep it from rattling. Unfortunately some people were too lazy to go through with that step. And of course some inspectors overlooked it. He'd heard scuttlebutt that some of the crews had run into similar issues.

  “Derelict admiral,” Sprite responded. “She's out on the edge of the heliopause about nine AU east from us.”

  Irons paused as he dried off. “We have a tug out that far?”

  “No, tug nine is only two AU out. She just barely caught the transponder. It's intermittent so the tug unfortunately didn't get a second fix to triangulate a location properly.”

  “Great,” Irons said. To hell with it, he thought, activating his shields. Water beaded and shed off him as the force field spun up. He felt like shaking like a dog anyway.

  “Feel better?” Sprite asked amused.

  “A little,” he admitted as he toweled his hair. His shields spun back down on their own. “Why the E? The Echo part I mean.”

  “Apparently there have been a great deal of ships with the 1701 designation. Echo is the fifth in the line.”

  “For a dispatch boat it has a lot of pretensions,” he muttered.

  Sprite chuckled. “It's a former yacht turned courier, of course it has pretensions. After all why name her the Golden Dew Drop?”

  “True,” Irons said, getting dressed. He had heard of the Honey Dew Drop, ships named after people places and things, even events. The name really didn't matter to him. “Do we have anything out that way?”

  “No, unfortunately not. I already checked. We've got another tug en route to the sector though,” she said.

  “Automated or piloted?” Irons asked. Tugs were out in force now. He'd spent a lot of the past couple of weeks making them and training their crews. Now they were out on their maiden flights.

  “Manned but she's pushing three unmanned tugs. The plan was to deploy them and have the pilot telepresence through the other tugs. I take it you want to detour?”

  Irons puckered his lips, thinking. Eventually he blew out a raspberry. “Not unless we get another signal and they get a location. Send supplementary orders to the pilot. If they get a signal from DB 1701E they are to deploy a minimum of one tug to it. Stick a rider bot in the supplementary orders just in case.”

  “Understood admiral. Anything else?”

  “No, that's about it. Unless you have something?” he asked.

  “The usual report so far. Myers wanted to do more digging in the science wing; Fu wants more processors for the cybers...”

  “In other words situation normal, everyone's being a pain in the ass,” he said dryly.

  “Pretty much,” Sprite responded amused.

  “Thought so,” Irons said going over to the food replicator just as she finished sending a signal to it to start his morning coffee. “Thanks,” he said, taking the cup out as the replicator finished with it. “What's on the agenda for today?”

  “Well, if we're going to follow through with your plan we need to overhaul the shields. But I did some digging in the specs of the station and I didn't like what I found...”

  Sprite had done a thorough look at the station's specs. She had discovered and passed on to admiral Irons that the station has no defenses beyond a low rated energy shield. That explained why the station had been battered when the shields failed he realized immediately. Energy shields were energy intensive, something most engineers knew. They looked pretty but the massive energy draw and the equipment needed to keep them functional was a logistics nightmare. Equipment constantly wore down, overheated, or went out of synch for various reasons. When that happened or if the power was interrupted then poof! No shield. Which meant no defense.

  Throw in a large surface area and the equipment and power draw went up exponentially. When you threw a lot of resources into something, making it horribly complex you made it easy for it to break down and hard to diagnose and repair easily.

  Oh sure you could build redundancy into a system. Back up after back up. That was normal for any engineer. You didn't design a system without some level of back up, and preferably more than one tier! But there was a point where you got diminished returns on investment so to speak. Too many subsystems tended to trip things up and slow them down or cause their own failures.

  Take for instance large shields. The station's shield was one example. It wasn't quite as large as a Bernal Spheroid’s shield, or a battle moon, but it was pretty close.

  He'd been on the board to design shields for planets and even one of the Dyson spheres. Great in theory, pretty for the public image to soak up during the first days of the Xeno war, but he had tried to squash the idea every chance he got. They were wasteful in the extreme.

  Sometimes the best things were the simplest in nature. Fewer chances for something to go wrong. Obviously the designers of this station had been thinking pretty and not practical.

  “Well! That's got to change,” he said looking around. He'd just laid out what he found to Gwen and the others. The cybers didn't look happy when he met with them an hour later.

  “We can do without your weapons thank you,” Fu said coldly. He had bluffed the pirates centuries ago and was certain he could do it again. All he had to do was threaten to blow up the station if they attempted to board. It had worked then and it would work now he was certain of it.

  Irons raised an inquiring eyebrow. He didn't want a fight but he'd give as good as he got if he needed to do so. “Oh? You can do without defensive weapons?”

  “Since when is a weapon a defense?”

  “You obviously haven't practiced martial arts much. Since someone used a rail gun to deflect an incoming projectile from damaging a station or ship,” Irons riposted, turning and glaring. “Kung fu of a different variety someone said. It doesn't have to be built exclusively to shoot enemy ships out of the sky you know, though that is a thought as well.”

  “The shield will be fine. There is no need for this,” Fu said dismissively.

  “Sometimes the threat of a weapon is more of a deterrent than ever using it,” Sid murmured. Irons nodded.

  “There is that. It would make a casual pirate or thief think twice and be on their best behavior right?” the admiral asked.

  Fu turned away feigning disinterest. “The shield is all we need.”

  “You do realize the work involved in rebuilding the thing right? In not only rebuilding it but powering it and maintaining it? I did see all that plate welded over the inner shield right?” Gwen asked. She and the bears were on hand. Fu hadn't been happy about adding Gwen to the council but she'd made it clear if things didn't change she and a lot of like minded individuals would leave.

  The Stewards were now paying more attention after they had found out about Fu's little stunt with the dome. One or the other or both now attended meetings and whichever one was not present handed their proxy to their partner.

  Sid and some of the others winced or shifted uncomfortably as the Tauren glared at them. She looked around to each of them. Finally the bears looked at each other and then Rachael turned to Fu.

  “The shield? You mean the one that did such a good job holding off the pirates the last time they were here?” Rachael Steward demanded. She wasn't about ready to forgive him for the dome Fu realized. She turned to address Irons and the others. “I agree with you admiral. Do what needs to be done.”

  “The burnt hand teaches best,” Irons said with a nod. “And they are just tools. Doctor Myers I'll show you a trick I learned when
I was a shave tail. You can calibrate an energy weapon as either a lidar mount or a primitive spectrometer. It's cool,” he said.

  “And energy intensive?” Myers said. Irons grinned. Myers smiled suddenly. “I like it,” he said.

  “A weapon is just a tool. It's the intent of the user that matters,” Irons said. “And yes, you can use it to bore into a rock and use a separate camera system to view the ejecta and scan it for material concentrations and type,” he explained.

  “Cool,” Myers said with a nod. Fu saw that the argument was lost so wisely withheld any more objections.

  ñChapter 27

  After several weeks had passed the station was firming up nicely. The planetary mayors had sent representatives to inspect the station and others to join the station council. Some of the new representatives were invalids recently injured or in the last stages of a disease. A few were elderly patrons of one or more influential people who for their own reasons gave them one last chance at life.

  Doctor's Trask and Kraft had their work cut out for them augmenting the people. Fortunately the medics had laid the groundwork with their training and repaired equipment. The facilities were there but they were concerned about the people, they still lacked the necessary fine skills to perform such invasive procedures.

  Each of the patients had to pass a rigorous exam. Two were rejected; they had terminal illnesses that would kill them anyway. One other was cured of her illness. She gratefully returned to her family on the planet.

  The doctors talked the situation over as their staffs worked on building their skills through various simulations and by working with the various injuries common in repairing the station.

  Of course they also began second stage implant procedures which helped raise their proficiency. There were thousands of volunteers. Many of the volunteers had level one implants so they started with those in critical positions.

  The downtime each experienced was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that they needed the downtime, many had been working flat out for weeks, working from the moment they got up until the moment they crashed from sheer exhaustion.