The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One

by James Wilks

  Jang did not reply, except to shout, “Go!”

  Five minutes and ten trips across the cargo bay later found Jang breathing a bit more than he had previously and Parsells and Quinn lying flat on their backs, gasping like stranded fish on a lakeshore. Their lungs burned, their legs hurt, and Quinn had a stitch in his side that he might have traded for stomach cancer had he been given the option.

  Jang let them rest for a minute before beginning on his next lecture. “There are advantages to working in a variable gravity environment; one of them is training. Few ships accelerate at greater than sixty or seventy percent of Earth gravity, though most are capable of more. It is comfortable for the crew, and the faster one thrusts, the greater the fuel consumption becomes. Most crews allow themselves to become soft, their muscles to atrophy. They do not understand the advantages that can come from training for high gravity environments, especially when operating in a low one.” He looked down at the two men. Parsells was working to get himself into a sitting position, but Quinn remained prone. The security chief removed his vest, letting it drop heavily to the floor, and indicated that the men might do the same. They did so gratefully, Quinn struggling up as he did so.

  “Observe,” Jang said, and then took off running towards the elevator shaft which bisected the back wall of the cargo bay currently serving as the floor. After a few meters, he leapt into the air and landed a seemingly impossible ten meters distant on the far side, having easily cleared the three meter tall elevator shaft. Quinn and Parsells looked at each other in disbelief. A few seconds later, Jang jumped up on top of the elevator shaft and into view again. He put his hands on his hips in a manner that Parsells was quickly beginning to hate.

  “The effects of light gravity make feats possible that would have been considered superhuman only a hundred years ago.” His deep voice echoed around the large chamber, bouncing off the UteVs and jump ships arrayed above them. Far above them, currently acting as their ceiling, the cargo bay doors stood closed and sealed. It made the two men nervous knowing that empty space and instant death were on the other side of those doors, but their new boss seemed to be quite comfortable with the setting.

  “What if someone bumps the wrong button on the bridge - the cockpit,” Parsells corrected himself, “and accidently opens those doors?” He pointed up as he spoke.

  “As I am sure was true when you were mining asteroids, there are a dozen safety protocols in place to prevent that from happening,” Jang replied as he lightly leapt down from the elevator shaft, making it look like no more than a one meter drop.

  Parsells snorted laughter. “Probably not as many ‘safety protocols’ in place as you think, but yeah, they were careful with us.”

  “Just so.” Jang walked up to them. “Next is weapons training.”

  Quinn smiled, and Parsells nodded. “Sounds a lot better than running sprints. Where do we do that?”

  Jang began walking over to a metal case that stood two meters tall with gripbars arrayed around it. The case was nestled on the floor against the wall next to the elevator. “In here.”

  “In here?” the usually quiet Quinn asked. The worried look had appeared on Parsells’ face as well.

  “With live ammo? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  Jang leaned over and typed a six-digit code into the keypad on the weapons locker. “It is, but only if we shoot each other.” He pulled open a locker and removed a projectile rifle. “The hull of this ship is twenty-five centimeters thick. It is designed to deflect small asteroids if necessary, provided we are not going too fast. You wouldn’t get through the hull with one of these in a hundred years.”

  “But there are weapons that cut through hulls,” Parsells said, bringing himself to his feet, his wet shirt clinging to his chest.

  “Yes. We have a few, and I want you to be familiar with them, but we do not train to attack other ships. We train to defend ours.”

  Day four.

  Clea Staples stood in the dorsal observation lounge, looking somewhat down towards her home planet. The viewing window stood at a forty-five degree angle, extending over a meter up to meet the wall in front of her. When the ship was horizontal, the window acted like the rear windscreen of a car. Now she stood at the base of it, looking backwards to the constantly shrinking red planet and the tiny blue world beyond. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there, somewhere beyond the sun. The stars blazed as always. She considered the facts that any burgeoning astronomer understood: that the light of the stars she was observing consisted of photons that had been born in the heart of a star and sent on their way thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before. The tiny particles had travelled for centuries to find their home, finally, in her retinas. It was old knowledge, but it still amazed her.

  The engines were not visible from the viewport, but the blue iridescence that they created obscured her view to a small degree. Here, in one of the aft-most rooms on the ship, their noise punctured the bulkheads and filled the chamber. A metal table and chair hung clamped to the wall behind her; no one had come through this room to reorient the furniture the last time they had been in zero G, and the effect was somewhat disconcerting. Rearranging the furniture did much to alleviate the feeling that the crew was standing on the walls when under thrust, but there was no need and no desire to change every room each time the ship entered and left atmosphere. Staples suspected that this observation lounge had last been used on Earth, perhaps for a game of cards or a private luncheon.

  There was a knock at the door. Staples frowned and waited. The knock came again, and she sighed and said loudly, “Enter!”

  The door, in the ceiling from her perspective, opened outwards and Yegor Durin’s head poked through. He was squatting on the bulkhead wall that held the door, and his mop of unsecured dark hair hung down around his face. From his perspective, the door was a trapdoor in the floor.

  “You don’t have to knock, Yegor. This isn’t my bedroom. The lounges are public places, unless they’ve been reserved.”

  “I… alright. Mind if I join you?” he asked a bit hesitantly.

  Staples shook her head broadly. “Come on in.”

  The panels in the floor had been left retracted from the captain’s climb down to where she stood. Yegor swung himself around and began clambering down the ladder. He wore a black tee shirt and well-worn jeans, an outfit she had seen him wear many times when off duty. His hair was wet as though he had just showered; the tips of it brushed against his shoulders.

  “The door,” Staples reminded him. It was important to keep the heavy doors secured when they were not in use. If the ship had to cease thrust or take evasive action, heavy doors swinging loose could be a serious danger.

  “Da, Kapitan.” He took a few steps back up, leaned over, grabbed the door, and swung it into place as he descended again, being sure to latch it closed securely. He then made his way down the rest of the ladder and walked over to stand next to his captain, gazing down through the window as he approached her. She turned back and regarded it with him silently. A minute or two passed.

  “Amazing, yes?” he asked finally.

  “Always,” she responded. Another moment of silence.

  “You know, I grew up in Vladivostok,” he said suddenly, apropos of seemingly nothing.

  “I think I remember that, yes,” she replied, still looking through the window but curious as to his intention.

  “I grew up in a generation of young men sold on the idea of spreading the city into the ocean. The water had risen to cover some of city at that point, and we knew it wouldn’t stop.” He puffed his chest out and threw his shoulders back some as if touting some glorious plan. “So the new plan was to expand into the ocean.” His shoulders dropped. “Everyone was looking down. I kept looking up. I wanted to go into space, but they kept saying, ‘no, Yegor, we need you to be part of bold new expansion of Russia!’” He chuckled lightly. “I didn’t even like swimming. When I was sixteen, my parents made me take underwater welding clas
ses. I was so angry, I ran away from home.” He was silent for a while, and they both looked down through the portal as if hypnotized.

  Finally, Staples, smiling a bit, prompted him. “Did you go join the space circus?”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Space… circus?”

  She shook her head and turned back to the window. “Never mind. It’s a thing, a common joke. Running away to join… never mind. You were saying?”

  He chuckled again. “I returned home two days later, mugged, beaten, and ready for class. Decided that space wasn’t for me. So I worked hard in school, studied communications. I went to college, got job in underwater communications strategies.”

  “Were your parents proud?”

  “Very proud. Then I started looking for other jobs. Figured I was going to work underwater for the rest of my life, but at least I could do it somewhere not Vladivostok. I found the job opening at GTS working in space. I applied, got the job.”

  “What did your parents say?” she asked, turning back to her coms officer.

  He pursed his lips together speculatively. “Don’t know. Never told them. They went to bed one night. When they woke up the next morning, I was gone.” He was silent for a few more moments, and then he looked at her. “Not their life to live.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been thinking lately. We all have these ideas about how people should live their lives. ‘This idea is terrible,’ or ‘that opportunity was wasted.’ I think the truth is that people have the right to spend their lives anyway they wish.”

  Yegor nodded in agreement. “I think so too.” He turned back to the window at their feet and regarded the stars.

  She continued to look at him. “Yegor, was there something that you wanted to talk to me about?” she inquired.

  “I don’t want to bother you while you’re off duty.”

  It was her turn to chuckle. “Well, I think you’ve blown that.”

  He turned to her, appearing suddenly apologetic.

  “Relax,” she soothed. “I’ve quite enjoyed our talk. Besides, I’m the captain. I’m never really off duty. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I wanted to ask you about the new coms suite we got from the satellite. If I tie it into the existing coms hardware, it will extend broadcast sorting, strength, and clarity.”

  “Would you have to take coms offline?” she asked.

  “Oh yes, for a few days I think.”

  She arched her eyebrows somewhat disapprovingly.

  The man shrugged and raised his hands apologetically. “It is what it is. I can get them back up in two days as long as everything goes well.”

  Staples mused for a minute. “Okay. I want the upgrade, no question, but I’m going to ask you to wait. I’m expecting to hear from a friend of mine on Mars about an inquiry I made. I was actually hoping to have received it by now. I’d like to wait until I get that message before we go coms dark. Once I do, I’ll give you the go-ahead. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good,” he replied, and headed for the ladder.

  Day five.

  “Your move,” Yegor said in Russian, a smile on his lips.

  Piotr looked at him in a way that clearly communicated that he was aware of the fact. His dark eyes surveyed the board for another minute in silence, and Yegor took another sip of his bourbon. Finally the bald cook moved the magnetic rook across the board and positioned it to threaten his opponent’s bishop.

  “You can’t rush greatness, my friend,” Piotr said, much more comfortable and fluent in his native tongue. “How goes your grand project?” He reached for his own metal cup of the Kentucky bourbon that he had smuggled onboard the ship back on Earth.

  “Slowly,” Yegor replied as he surveyed the chessboard’s new and more threatening configuration. Piotr’s move was not one he had failed to anticipate, but he did not expect such a bold move from his fellow countryman. “There are a dozen connection points that need to be tested, each with its own passkeys, and once that’s done-”

  “Mm hm,” Piotr interrupted, ably communicating his interest in chess over the complexities of integrating communications suites built by different manufacturers.

  Yegor looked at him. “That’s really why I invite you here, Piotr. You’re such a great listener.”

  “If only you talked as well as I listen,” he rejoined, and Yegor smiled and bent back to the game. Piotr looked around the coms officer’s quarters, spare as they were, his eyes eventually settling on the small bookshelf his friend maintained. The books were held in place by a piece of twine across their spines. There were the classics he expected from their shared country of birth of course, but he had found that Yegor had a curious love for American literature as well. Mark Twain was hiding between Anton Chekov and Leo Tolstoy, and William Faulkner had cozied right up to Fyodor Dostoyevsky. As far as he was concerned, the best thing to come out of the American south was currently warming his belly. He took another sip.

  Yegor slid a magnetic pawn into place to protect his bishop. “Then you talk and let me listen.” His face grew more serious. “How is your sister? The children?”

  Piotr shook his head. “The same. Poor. I’d like to find that bastard.”

  “Then you’d be in jail and she really would have no one to help her.” His face was sympathetic. “How’s the motherland?”

  Piotr snorted derisively. “You watch the news.” His bishop slid out from the back row to threaten the offending pawn. Pieces were quickly piling up on this one exchange, and the scent of blood was in the air.

  “I try not to, actually. Home isn’t home anymore.”

  Piotr nodded. He had known of his friend’s familial trouble for some time. “Then why ask me?”

  “So…” he reached out to touch a piece, then withdrew his hand as he reconsidered. “I can show you what a good listener I am.” He smiled absently as he focused on the board.

  “Well, the lines have been stable around Moscow for some time. The hardliners won’t give up the capital, and the rest of the country doesn’t want a bloody battle. The whole reason they began fighting against Moscow was their totalitarian rule, their intolerant views, and their bloody tactics. It doesn’t make much sense to kill them all for their beliefs, even if those beliefs are terrible. Anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-freedom… they’re like some relic of the 20th century, and they just can’t accept that the world has moved on.”

  Yegor was silent a moment longer, then brought a knight to bear, further increasing the potential casualties should a battle ensue. “Seems like there’s always someone digging in their heels and trying to hold back progress. I’m just embarrassed that it’s us... well, our country, anyway.”

  Piotr shrugged. “I say fight.” At first, Yegor didn’t know whether he was referring to the situation in Russia or the chessboard in front of them, but then he continued. “Some people you can reason with. Some people you can’t. It’s like the Nazis. You can’t talk them out of their idiocy.”

  Yegor sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Too bad.” He took another sip, reached for a piece, and girded himself for battle.

  Day seven.

  As she made her way to the mess hall, Staples heard two voices. John Park and Don Templeton, she thought, and wondered what they were doing up at this hour. It was nearly midnight ship time, and after an hour reading Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, she had just given up on sleep for the time being and decided to rummage a raspberry yogurt from the galley. The two men seemed to be arguing by the tones of their voices, but they stopped abruptly as she padded into the room in her slippers and robe. Park was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a ratty tee shirt, and Templeton was dressed in his usual flight jacket and slacks. Staples wondered idly whether he washed them frequently or simply had seven sets of the same outfit. They were both looking at her. Beyond them, at the other end of the table, Piotr sat quietly regarding them like a member of a crowd at a tennis match.

  She gave a lopsided grin and continued walking over to one of the refrigeration units
. “Don’t stop on my account.” She fished around inside, unclasped a yogurt from its plastic holder, and lifted a metal spoon out of the magnetic silverware tray. The men did not continue. Staples sat down at the table near Don, placed her spoon and plastic cup on the surface, and rubbed her eyes tiredly. When she had finished, she looked back and forth at the two of them. “No, really. What’s the subject of discussion?”

  Templeton regarded a spot on the table pointedly, but John said, “The AI research bill. They’re voting on it – again - in a few months. We’ve been having a little debate.”

  “I see.” She opened her midnight snack, spooned out a bit, and leaned forward eagerly as if about to watch two champion poker players begin a game.

  Templeton still seemed reluctant to discuss the matter in front of his captain, but Park had no such reservations.

  “My first mate here believes that we should stop progressing as a species.”

  The gross oversimplification did its job, and Templeton rose to the bait. “I didn’t say that at all, and you know it. I just said that in some areas, there should be limits. Look, take weapons. Let’s say some scientist says he can build a weapon that will blow up a planet. Do you fund that? What if he says that he’s going to spread the research all over netlink? Do you try and stop him? ‘Cause you know some kook out there is gonna use it.”

  “Fair point,” was Park’s tame rejoinder, “for weapons. But Artificial Intelligence isn’t a weapon.”

  “It could be.”

  “So can this ship. Do you know how much damage this ship could cause to a city? To a planet? If we ran at one G of thrust for six weeks, we’d be going twelve percent the speed of light. Can you imagine if we plowed into New York City going that fast?”

  “There’s safety protocols to stop that,” Templeton said weakly.

  “Anything that can be invented can be circumvented. There’s a counter for everything.”

  “Maybe. But ships ain’t what we were talking about either. You’re talkin’ about creating something just as smart as a human. We get smarter as we get older, learn more and more, ‘cept there’s a limit on that. We grow old and die. Machines don’t die. They just get older and smarter and pretty soon some AI is at three hundred IQ and what if it decides it don’t like humans so much?”