The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One

by James Wilks

  “Good,” she nodded. “Keep it up.” As she turned and climbed back out of the room, the engineer turned back to her work.

  Staples couldn’t remember a time since she had bought her ship where people had come knocking on her door with such frequency. This time it was her guest, Evelyn Schilling, and that made her smile.

  “Evelyn, please come in.” It was late evening, and they were due to arrive at Cronos station the following afternoon. The captain was still dressed in her work clothes, but a book rested open on her desk and a hot cup of tea wafted fragrant steam into the air.

  “Thank you. Chamomile?” she inquired.

  Staples nodded. “Would you like a cup?”

  The freckled computer scientist shook her head. She had changed to a pleated skirt and a tight fitting blue top that elegantly showed her curvaceous figure. Her hair was down and loose.

  “Is there an occasion?” the captain asked, referring to her clothing.

  Evelyn closed the door behind her. “Not really. I spent a few minutes digging this out. I guess I wanted to look nice and come thank you for getting me to Cronos Station.”

  Staples sat and gestured for her visitor to do the same. “Evelyn, we’ve been over this. This has got to be the worst charter flight in the history of charter flights.”

  She sat and countered, “Actually, I think that list is topped by flights that crashed.”

  “Fair point,” the captain conceded.

  “You and your crew have done everything you could to make me safe. I am so sorry about Yegor.” Her face was the picture of sympathy.

  Staples nodded gravely. “I am too. He was a good man. And I must say, again, how sorry I am about Herc. I’m sorry we couldn’t save him.”

  Evelyn looked at the wooden tabletop for several seconds, and her eyes welled with tears, but then she looked up and smiled, blinked them away, and forced cheer back into her voice. “Me too. I didn’t know him that well, but he seemed like a great guy. I know you did everything that you could.”

  “I’m not sure your employers will see it that way. A whole lot of people would call this a bad job.”

  “Well they weren’t here,” Evelyn said defensively. “They’ll have my statement, and if they read it, they’ll know you did everything you could to save us, to save me.”

  “Apart from one of my long-time crew members betraying me and our choice to hire two would-be rapists, I’m inclined to agree with you.” She sighed.

  “That’s not your fault. Look, no one blames the boss of Libom Pangalactic if one of the Senior VPs gets caught insider trading.” She saw Staples start to object, and hastily added, “Or turns out to be a serial killer.”

  “I suppose they don’t, at least not publicly. Anyway, you don’t have to thank me. It’s my job.” She took a sip of her tea and smiled.

  “Mind if I ask how you ended up with this job?” Evelyn ventured.

  “Oh, that’s a long and rather sordid story,” she said dismissively, waving her hand.

  The other woman leaned forward, resting her chin in her cupped hands, and smiled. “Those are my favorite kind. If I let you make me a cup of tea, will you tell it to me?”

  Staples laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.” She considered the woman for a moment. There was no way around it; she was stunning. It was a warm, expressive beauty that made her want to share secrets and dreams with her. It was a loveliness that said she could be understood; all she had to do was speak. Staples found herself, to her own amusement and surprise, genuinely attracted to another woman for the first time since a particularly drunken night in college. She looked into those big brown eyes and thought screw it, why not? “If you agree to keep it to yourself. Chamomile okay?”

  Evelyn sat back, evidently happy. “I promise, and chamomile sounds great.”

  Staples took another sip of her cooling tea, then stood up and walked to the electric teapot on a small counter at the back of the room. As she fished out a second mug and a bag of tea, she began to speak. “I used to work in benefits and compensation at a major metals and textiles company. I’d rather not say which one, or where. I started in the job not long after getting my Masters in Industrial Psychology.” The water began to boil, and she poured it into the teacup.

  Evelyn looked at the containers of books around the room. “I would have pegged you for an English major, not psychology.”

  “I was both, actually. They’re both really the study of the same thing.” She handed the mug to the other woman and sat down again. “Several years later, I found myself in my mid-thirties doing quite well. I was a senior Vice President, still handling executive compensation, bonuses, that sort of thing. Then things began to get complicated. I noticed, much like you did in going over the coms and radar data I suppose, some irregularities in the company’s budget. The kind of things you only notice when you work in the field for a decade or so: subtle stuff. I like to run a tight ship, so to speak, so I did some investigating. I had the idea that one of the other VPs was embezzling, so I kept it secret and conducted my own investigation. My plan was to go to the board once I got enough evidence.

  “It turns out there was some money missing, and it was going into someone’s private bank account, but it wasn’t anyone who worked for the company. Further searching turned up more money transfers, rather large cash outlays to other non-company employees.” She took another sip of her tea. “Well, I knew payoffs when I saw them. The disturbing thing was that there was no way these payoffs could have happened without several VPs and the President knowing, even if there was no evidence they had signed off on it. I probably should have dropped it, pretended I never saw anything, but I’m not very good at that, so I hired someone to look into it.

  “I had the names of the people who received the funds. They were all government officials in China, most of them centered in a particular province, one that contained a manufacturing plant run by my employer. Again, you’ll forgive me for keeping the details to myself. It didn’t take too long for my private investigator to ferret out some information. It turns out that manufacturing plant was polluting the local ecosystem. Elevated cancer and seizure rates, radiation, poisoned drinking water, all of those horror stories you hear about from the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. The payoffs were to keep the local officials quiet.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised, but I was. Of course what they were doing was illegal, and most of the abuses of that kind had ceased when we cleaned up our act around the mid-century, but it was more than that. The company I worked for had been very public about their aggressively environmentally safe manufacturing base. It was one of the reasons I chose to work for them. I had really believed in them, and the fact that they could do that, that my co-workers could do that to not only the planet, but their fellow human beings as well just disgusted me. I felt used, as if I had been helping this happen for years, albeit unawares. I had trouble hiding my feelings. I could barely walk down the hallway at work and smile at those people. Then my private investigator disappeared, and it went from disturbing to scary.

  “The company offered me a new position at a different branch. It was more pay for less responsibility, and the signing bonus was huge. I mean really obscene. About the same time, I received some pictures of my brother’s family. Just pictures emailed to me, nothing more, but the message was obvious. It was a payoff. I could shut up and take it, or walk and take my chances. They figured if I took the money and tried talking later, they could use the payoff to drag me down too. I suspected they’d use the same money and allocation strategies to cover my bonus as they did to pay off those government officials. I didn’t know what to do at first. I didn’t want to be complicit. Part of me wanted to walk away and never say a thing, to just leave the whole thing behind, but I didn’t think that they were offering an option C. So I took the money.”

  Evelyn, who had been rapt until this point, was aghast. “You didn’t!”

  Staples held up an index finge
r and smiled a bit. “Stick with me here. I took the bonus and the job, transferred to the new branch, and started working. I figured once a few months had passed, they’d stop watching me so closely, and that’s when I started moving. I didn’t feel safe going to the authorities. The government isn’t like Chicago in the 1920s, but it’s still vulnerable to corruption, and I figured my employer would anticipate that move. Instead, I contacted a rival manufacturing company.”

  “Nice,” the other woman said, finishing her tea.

  “Well, that didn’t go quite how I expected. Turns out, they really were a standup company, and they didn’t want to get their hands dirty. They told me they weren’t interested in corporate espionage, sabotage, or flinging mud. They told me to go to the police. That stymied me for a bit. When you get really disillusioned with the world, it can be rather baffling when someone takes the high road. But I guess they weren’t that squeaky clean, because about a week later, a woman contacted me and said that she could help me.”

  “Who did she work for?”

  Staples shook her head. “As far as I know, no one. We met, I gave her all of my evidence, and that was it. She didn’t want any money. Three weeks later, the facility in that prefecture in China burned to the ground. All of those VPs that were involved had bad things happen to them.”

  Evelyn looked shocked and somewhat appalled.

  “I don’t mean they were killed. They just suffered… terrible, life-altering setbacks. One invested all of his money in a company that went under. Another’s house burned down; no one was hurt. Another one’s spouse received photos of her infidelities, that sort of thing. I didn’t do a thing. After another month, I quit my job, and they didn’t put up a fight. Someone broke into my house not long after that and destroyed my computer files. All evidence that I had of what they had done is long gone now, which is fine. I tried to make it easy for them. I thought for a bit that they might come after me, but then I realized that there’s no point. The damage was done; there’s nothing I have or know that is actionable, and revenge isn’t something companies are often interested in. Revenge is expensive, so why bother? The woman, who said her name was Janae, helped me use a lot of my bonus money to relocate and help the families that had been affected by that factory. I used most of the rest to buy this ship.” She cast her eyes about the room as if she could see the entirety of the ship around her.

  Evelyn’s eyes were bigger than ever. “So this woman, she’s what, some kind of eco-terrorist, scale-balancer?”

  “You know, I’m not entirely sure what she is, besides a good reminder that we should all do the right thing because someone is watching. She’s also a good friend to have, though sometimes I do have to pay her.”

  Evelyn snapped her fingers and pointed at Staples. “Jordan, right?”

  The captain just smiled a little bit, shook her head, and put a finger to her lips.

  The evening was winding down, but there was still some conversation to be had, and both women seemed to be glad of it. It was approaching twenty-three, and Staples was thinking it was time to call an end to the visit when there was another knock at the door. As she stood up to answer it, she half-whispered conspiratorially to her guest, “I wonder if it will be good news or bad this time.”

  When she opened the door, Templeton stood in front of her, breathing hard despite the low gravity. “Parsells hanged himself.”

  “Both,” Staples muttered. Evelyn stood up behind her and looked at the first mate.

  “What?” he asked, confused by her response.

  “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Damn.”

  “Some problems take care of themselves?” Templeton ventured.

  “I suppose. I…” she turned and looked at Evelyn, then back at Templeton. “I’m fairly sure I hated the man, but I didn’t want this.”

  “Maybe he did.” the woman behind her said. She was standing very erect, and she spoke seriously in her deep voice. “Maybe he thought he could do something good.”

  “Maybe I guess.” Templeton shook his head. “To hang yourself in four-tenths Earth gravity. Can’t have been pleasant or easy.”

  Staples rubbed her face and her eyes with her hands for several seconds, and her skin was flushed when she took them away. “Well, I guess we had better go deal with this. Is Jabir there?”

  “Yeah, he’s there. I called him first. Wanted to come tell you in person.”

  “Thanks for that, Don.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I cannot wait to get to Cronos and for this whole job to be over.”

  Chapter 15

  As Gringolet approached the sixth planet from Sol, many of the crew set aside a few minutes to climb down to the rear observation decks at the stern of the ship. The brownish-yellow planet and its seemingly perfectly formed rings grew until they nearly filled the windows, and even those who had been on a Jovian run before found an excuse to take some time gazing at them. Saturn was nine times the size of earth, nearly one hundred times more massive, and its burnished surface was illuminated in part by the distant sun. In additions to the rings, dozens and dozens of moons orbited the planet, the most well known of which was Titan.

  Titan’s surface consisted mostly of ice and rock; that composition, along with its size, made it the ideal location for an outlying Jovian base. Titan Prime was a settlement that made use of rock to expand and build, water ice to provide sustenance, and the methane, ethane, and propane naturally occurring in the atmosphere to provide power. Over the past thirty years, it had become nearly self-sufficient. Though semi-regular shipments brought in people, luxuries, and supplies as needed, the continually expanding community had nearly obtained an ecological balance between their population, hydroponics, and small animal farms. What had started as a facility had burgeoned into a small town housing over five thousand residents. Titan Prime had a strong manufacturing base, and though it was largely financially independent at this point, it had begun as a joint venture funded by energy companies and several Earth governments. Now it provided workers to local mining stations such as Gringolet’s destination. It also functioned as a staging ground for further expansion in to the Jovian sector, a launch place for interstellar probes, and was the planned launch site of future interstellar missions to neighboring stars.

  In the cockpit, Staples sat in her seat with her crew around her. John Park had been pulling extra shifts for the past few days, mostly with Evelyn, to learn the coms systems well enough to operate them when she left the ship. She had offered to handle the coms during the approach, but John wanted the practice, and despite all they had been through, Staples wanted to make a show of finishing the job with her crew in place. John sat in what Staples still thought of as Yegor’s seat, corresponding with the station to plan their final approach. Charis had done her job well, and they were a scant five hundred kilometers out from the station when she cut thrust and left them adrift. In front of them, the now tiny star at the center of the system twinkled only marginally brighter than all of the other points of light in the unending darkness, and Staples could barely imagine the small blue dot where they had begun this job. It spun on nearly a billion kilometers away, and as happy as she was to be safely to their destination, she would be much happier when they were headed back home.

  “Captain, we’re ready to approach,” Charis said, looking over her shoulder, her hair floating up above her in the zero G environment.

  Her husband glanced over at her, and then back at his captain and nodded as well. “Cronos Station says they are ready to receive us.”

  Templeton leaned over a bit towards Staples. “I recommend we go in at about a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, nice and slow. That’ll give the crew plenty of time to rearrange their rooms and get strapped down again for final approach.”

  “That will get us docked in, what, three and a half, four hours?” John said.

  “‘Bout that,” Templeton replied.

  “I can’t wait to get off this ship,” Charis said with a sigh. Sh
e looked around again and added, “No offense, Captain.”

  “None taken,” Staples said, and she meant it. They had had a rough time of it, no question, and smaller things had made the larger difficulties of this journey even more stressful. It wasn’t just that they were grieving for a lost crew member, overcoming the trauma of a lost passenger, dealing with feelings of betrayal from a traitor, and fearful of a second attack from a ship that never came. They each had been forced to take on extra duties to cover those of crew members they had lost or incarcerated. People had had to cook their own meals, a practice most were unused to onboard, or else make do with snack food like granola bars or cheese and crackers. That extra time took away from their grieving and coping processes, and most found themselves busier just when they wanted more time to themselves. They could all use a break, and their captain intended to give them one. “Bethany, please turn us over.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Perhaps it was Staples’ imagination or the lack of sleep, but she thought that the pilot’s voice carried a bit more confidence than usual.

  As the ship pitched upwards from their perspective, Templeton picked a spot on the floor to root his eyes to, and Sol slid down and away from their view. A minute later, the enormity of Saturn loomed in front of them, dwarfing the tiny ship and filling nearly all of the windows arrayed around the cockpit. The rings floated above them, and Staples regarded them through the skylight on the ceiling. In front of them hung Cronos Station, owned and operated by Libom Pangalactic. Like most Jovian orbital mining stations, it was cylindrical in shape, and it spun along its axis to provide gravity for its workers.

  “Bethany, bring us in at one hundred and fifty KPH relative to the station,” Staples said. She felt the light pull of gravity pushing her into her seat for a moment as they accelerated up to speed, and then her safety harness was the only thing holding her in place again. She looked over at her first mate and nodded for him to take over.