The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One

by James Wilks

  “All right people, you’ve got one hour to get your rooms in shape and get back up here. This may have been a tough run, but let’s end it right.” Nearly everyone undid their belts and headed towards the exit, and after Bethany locked her controls, she joined them.

  As usual, Bethany brought them into docking seamlessly. Cronos Station offered a number of docking tubes that extended at various points from its curved outer surface. The ship, in turn, was equipped with docking ports in several places. The dorsal port was ideal for connecting with a cylindrical spinning station, as it allowed Gringolet to take advantage of the spin of the station to maintain Earth normal gravity during their visit. Matching up the ship with the spin of the station was a tricky maneuver. It first required steering the ship as though it were flying circles inside a very large drainpipe. Once that was achieved and the velocity of the ship matched the spin of the station, the docking tube and port had to be lined up. Bethany had only John’s information from the station’s coms and the data on her surface and console to guide her, but after ten minutes of micro adjustments, a number considered small by those in the profession, they were sealed tight.

  Once the docking procedure was completed, the crew stood under near Earth normal gravity for the first time in several weeks and walked or rode elevators up to the top deck. Staples wanted to take a small delegation with her when they disembarked, and she had chosen Charis, Dinah, Templeton, and Jabir to escort Evelyn off the ship. After they had made their introductions and Staples had explained the situation, she planned to allow everyone else a chance to take advantage of whatever shore leave Cronos had to offer, which she assumed was not much. The group assembled in the dorsal airlock, and once the security checks had been passed, they climbed up through the open shaft and into the station proper.

  There were four people waiting for them as they climbed through the hatch and stood on the inside of the cylinder. The first thing that struck Staples as she emerged was the smell. It was a scorched scent, one of heated metal, oil, and machinery. The temperature was the next factor to greet her; it was perhaps five to seven degrees cooler than she liked to keep her ship, though the lowered temperature made sense for an environment where men and women were constantly working. She had encountered the same thing in other high-energy environments, including many restaurants. It was a choice that made it clear that those in charge favored the comfort of their workers over that of their guests, and small wonder, as Cronos Station received few of the latter.

  As the first out of the hatch, Staples had climbed up into a receiving room. While the rest of her chosen crew lifted themselves up and into the chamber, she examined the people arrayed in front of her. A man, assumedly the one in charge, stood in front. He looked to be in his early sixties and was tall and slim. His hair was a smattering of white and grey, and his skin was lined and burnished. Hard green eyes looked out from his face, and they regarded Staples with cold detachment. Those eyes were set deep in a long, thin, unfriendly face. Staples assumed this was Gordon Laplace, the commander of the station.

  Next to and slightly behind Laplace stood a shorter portly man, also white, with brown hair that was graying at his temples. Unlike his commander, he greeted the emerging crew with a warm smile that touched his blue eyes. His face was round with heavy jowls, and his teeth were crooked. Standing behind these two were security personnel, one man and one woman. Though they were armed, their pistols remained holstered, and they stood at ease with their hands behind their backs. They were there, Staples assumed, not because her crew constituted a threat, but as a formality of greeting. Or, she thought, Laplace just liked to have an entourage. Staples and Templeton stood awkwardly facing this group until everyone had clambered up and to their feet. The captain could hear her first mate breathing heavily beside her. They stood in a room perhaps seven meters square. Chairs lined one side, and the plaster walls were painted a soothing but sterile beige.

  Once Jabir, the last out, had gained his feet, Staples stepped forward and extended her hand. “Are you the station commander?” she asked.

  “Gordon Laplace, yes.” He did not step forward to meet her hand, but received it where he stood. “You must be Clea Staples.” She nodded in return, and then made introductions all around.

  Laplace identified the man next to him as Davis Ducard, his second in command. He did not bother introducing the security officers. His handshakes were curt and quiet, but Ducard smiled and murmured “hellos” and “good to meet yous” as he made his way from person to person.

  “Where is Mr. Bauer?” Laplace asked.

  Staples had been hoping to put this off, but there really was no way around it. “I’m afraid he’s dead.” Laplace’s eyes widened, and Ducard’s jaw dropped. “We communicated to you that we had been attacked by a pirate vessel. For security reasons, both yours and ours, we did not communicate the full extent of our losses. We have reason to believe that another ship was following us, and we didn’t want to risk giving them any information that might provide them with a tactical advantage over us.”

  The commander seemed to think this over for a minute before nodding and answering. “That seems to make sense, though it is clearly a great loss.” His voice was rough but not unpleasant. “Did you suffer losses as well?”

  Staples unconsciously looked at the floor for a moment as she answered. “Yes. Our coms officer, Yegor Durin. He was killed fighting our attackers. Several other crew members were injured, one permanently.”

  “I see. I am sorry. I trust you have Mr. Bauer’s remains, as well as a report to submit?”

  “Of course.” The man’s steely demeanor unnerved her a bit. She produced a small surface from a clip on the side of her belt. Ducard stepped forward, his smile now tinged with sympathy, and produced his own surface. With a gesture, the file she had prepared was transferred, and she returned the surface to its place at her side.

  The report was one she had put together in the past few days over several cups of coffee and much internal debate. She had considered being fully forthcoming with the commander, but in the end she had decided to give them an edited account of their journey. This was aided by Evelyn’s insistence that she not report Parsells and Quinn’s attack on her; she said that it would reflect badly on Staples and the crew, and it was her determination that her new employers understand that the crew of Gringolet had done their very best to see her safely to Cronos. The final report omitted not only the attempted sexual assault, but the altercation with the Doris Day over the satellite, Jordan’s report, and Piotr’s betrayal. It was not stretching the truth to write that the replacement of the coms system had rendered the ship vulnerable to the pirate assault. Piotr, as far as Staples was concerned, was a matter of internal ship business, as was the suicide of Parsells. She had related that Quinn had been exposed to vacuum, which was true enough, but she had bent the truth in stating that it had happened as a result of the pirate attack. This painted him in a more heroic light than she would have liked, but in the end she decided it didn’t matter.

  Laplace nodded. “I’ll look that over as soon as I have a chance. I am eager to hear how an armed escort failed to safely conduct its passengers to this station.” Though the statement was made without emotion, Templeton bristled, ready to come to his captain’s defense, and Ducard looked with embarrassment at his Commander.

  Before anyone could speak, Evelyn stepped forward. “Commander Laplace, I am very excited to be here.” He turned his icy gaze to regard her. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work here with you, and I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot, but I have to object. Clea – Captain Staples and her crew did everything they could. They were attacked by professionals who were trying to kidnap Herc and me. If they hadn’t been so good at their job, I wouldn’t be standing here. Please, you have to believe me: none of this is their fault.”

  Laplace faced her and considered another moment, his eyes never leaving hers. She returned his gaze with the same intensity. “Very we
ll.” Without looking away from his new computer scientist, he addressed Staples. “Does your report contain some theory as to why these ‘professional pirates’ wanted to abduct my new employees?”

  “It doesn’t, I’m afraid, other than the probability that good computer scientists can be hard to find for pirates in Jovian Space,” Staples returned.

  Laplace grunted and continued to look at Evelyn. “Well, I’ll have to read over your report. I assume you’ll be here for a few days.” It wasn’t a question. “I’m sure I’ll have many more questions. In the meantime, Mr. Ducard here,” he finally turned his eyes to Staples and gestured to the man at his side, “will see to your needs. Payment, of course, is something that will also need to be discussed, but only once I contact my superiors.”

  “I assumed as much.” Staples tried to keep her face expressionless, but the conversation was turning out to be every bit as difficult as she had feared it would be. “We may be here longer than a few days. We need to refuel and resupply, that’s true, but we also need repairs. The destruction of the attacking ship damaged ours, including our engines.”

  Ducard stepped forward, smiling his crooked smile again. “Sure, sure, I can help with all of that. Get you fixed right up. Can even maybe spare some manpower if you can pay their wages.”

  Laplace stared daggers at his subordinate and cut in abruptly. “No one is to lose time from their shifts. If anyone wants to spend downtime working on their damaged ship for some extra cash, I would allow that, but it must not interfere with production.” The tone of his voice made his dim view of the other man clear.

  Ducard took a breath with an expression on his face that was as good to Staples as an eye roll, but said, “Sure, sure, no one will lose shift time.”

  Staples decided that the shorter man was by far the better conversationalist, and addressed her next query to him. “I have a crew that could really use some shore leave, such as it is. Do you have any local watering holes or other R and R facilities they could make use of?”

  “We sure do!” Ducard grinned widely.

  “I am glad to hear it.” She gestured to Templeton, who seemed to have calmed some since Laplace’s implied insult. “I’d like to send Mr. Templeton here with you to make arrangements for repairs, refueling, and relaxation.” She looked at Laplace. “I’ll see Evelyn to her new quarters.” She did her best to match the commander’s tone, one that did not brook discussion. “And I’ll make arrangements to have her effects and Herc’s body brought aboard.”

  Laplace looked them all over, his gaze lingering on Evelyn, then he nodded curtly and strode towards the door, followed by his entourage of security guards. Ducard gestured that way as well to Templeton, and he followed. As Staples turned around to speak to Dinah about making the arrangements, Evelyn leaned over to her and whispered, “he was sexy, don’t you think?”

  The captain looked at her in surprise, then smiled and shook her head.

  Once out of the receiving room, Templeton found himself in a miniature version of a city. There were small walkways that might have been streets crisscrossing back and forth; each ran by not a city block, but a large building. The structures were anywhere from one to three stories high, and were uniformly made out of metal. Some sported decorations. Four buildings down on the left, for example, a wooden sign swung over the door naming the building, a bar Templeton assumed, Saturn’s Satyr. As he watched, a man and a woman in dirty work overalls walked through the door, speaking animatedly. Other buildings around them seemed to be server rooms, administration buildings, and guest quarters. He thought that the bunkhouses must be located in another section of the cylinder. Looking up was somewhat dizzying to him; he expected to be able to see the far side of the cylinder with similar buildings and people walking among them on what for him seemed to be the ceiling, but there was another cylinder, smaller, within this one blocking part of that view. That cylinder ran the axis of the space station like a thick straw in the center of a thermos. Long sections of the smaller cylinder emitted light, and that seemed to provide the majority of the illumination in the metal shell.

  As he gazed up at the large steel housing, perhaps half a kilometer across, he stopped walking. Ducard stopped as well and looked up. “That’s the elevator system for harvesting liquid helium from the atmosphere,” he said by way of explanation. “See, the top half of that is cable,” he pointed towards the end of the station oriented away from the planet it orbited, “and the rest is the elevator itself. We lower it down into the upper atmosphere and siphon off the liquid helium. It comes up the hose attached to the cable and then we pipe it into a storage tank.”

  Looking at the way the far walls curved up and around the elevator housing was giving Templeton vertigo, so he dropped his head and refocused it on his tour guide. “Where do you get the storage tanks?”

  “We make them. We have several foundries on the inside of the station.” He pointed vaguely towards the far ends of the larger cylinder. “We use reshaped rock and some ore we mine from the local asteroid belt. That’s where we get our water too. When we fill one up, we slap a booster rocket on it and off it goes to Earth.” It was clear the large man was enjoying explaining the workings of the station to his guest, and for his part, Templeton was curious to hear about it. “Libom catches them and decelerates them, then puts them into orbit and presto: profit.” Ducard showed his broad grin again. “You know, my great granddad did something similar in his day; he worked on an oil rig a hundred years back. I guess it runs in my family.”

  As they resumed their walk, Ducard in the lead, Templeton asked, “Did he work for the same company?”

  “Yep, Libom’s been around a long time. For an oil company, I guess they adapted pretty well to a planet that ran out of oil.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Left up ahead,” he added more quietly. After they had gone past a few more buildings, the curve of the floor had become obvious, and it felt as though they were walking uphill. Templeton began to breathe harder, and Ducard was already sweating, but this did not stop him from speaking. “I guess you guys had a rough time out there. What was it like?”

  Templeton had expected this. The two men obviously shared more than their positions as seconds in command. The two of them were about the same age, and Templeton assumed that like Staples, Laplace had picked a more personable subordinate to handle social matters, an area that he was clearly lacking far more than the captain. Two dirty and smelly men in even dirtier and smellier clothes walked past them, and Templeton would have bet money that they were headed for Saturn’s Satyr. “Just like the captain said,” he replied succinctly, trying to convey a finality indicating that he did not intend to expand on the subject.

  Ducard may or may not have understood his charge’s guardedness, but either way, he did not press the matter. “We’ll head to the EVA office and see what they can tell us about getting your ship repaired. Refueling shouldn’t be a problem, we’ve got a fair bit of uranium, and though you’ll find better food at Titan Prime, we can probably fill your fridges just fine if you don’t want to make the stop.”

  Templeton decided to press his own line of questions since the moment seemed appropriate. “Speaking of EVA suits, what happened to your last computer scientist? I heard he died in some kind of an EVA accident?” He hoped it sounded nonchalant.

  “Matt Spicer,” Ducard said. They were clearing some uniform buildings and had just emerged into a long park. There was green grass stretching perhaps half a kilometer down the long axis of the station, and it was dotted with a few fountains and several benches. People strolled here and there, couples sat on benches, and a few people relaxed on the grass with surfaces or drinks and food. It was a more idyllic scene than Templeton had expected from a latter-day oil derrick. “This is Cronos Park. Not a very original name. Thought we’d walk through it on our way to the EVA office.”

  “Sounds nice,” Templeton replied. “I’m surprised that Libom paid to ship all this dirt out here.” He glanced down at the greener
y as they walked along a stone path towards a fountain. “It is real grass, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, sure, real grass.” Ducard looked down at it as well, and gesticulated as he explained. “Paying people to live far from home has always been a tricky business. You know, five hundred years ago, used to be people’d work a few towns over, maybe see their families a few times a year. Then later people would work in other countries, but they’d still fly home for the holidays, that sort of thing. But working all the way out here… it can really get to you. Men and women get lonely surrounded by all this space. They miss their kids, their parents, their friends. Turns out, it doesn’t matter how much you pay people; if they’re really miserable, they quit. So the company tries to keep them as happy as they can.”

  “By building parks,” Templeton stated. They turned right at the fountain, and he was relieved when the sensation of walking up a gigantic drainpipe disappeared.

  “Among other things. They fund the bars here, the gyms, movie theater, pool hall, that sort of thing. We’ve even got minor sports teams, a full library, bunch of restaurants, all to keep people willing to stay out here and provide fuel for everyone on the core planets. Even with all of that, people get three months off out of every eighteen. The company actually sprang for their own private transport ship to move people back and forth to the core planets. It can take fifty people.”

  Templeton was surprised; it was unusual for companies to keep their own ships of that size. Most interplanetary transportation was handled either by a few major companies, the natural outgrowth of the airline industry of the early twenty-first century, or by private charter ships like Gringolet. “Huh. Why not just have your ship bring Evelyn… Ms. Schilling out here? Why hire us?”

  “Because the ship isn’t due back here for another month, and we have been in rough shape since Matt died.”