Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “Yeah. So, we give it back to the yard, eh?” he said with a laugh, full of pride for his eldest daughter.

  “With interest!” Willow echoed his laughter, the two of them sharing something so cosmic there never would be words for it. Running the Rim wasn’t easy; even though most kids adapted and did well. But some... some were better than good. Like a musician given a Stradivarius for the first time and who played genius music. Willow was a genius tech when it came to electronics in general and lasers in particular.

  His gaze dwelled on Willow for an extra moment. She was busy doing this and that, more so than she should have been. He was curious. “What are you working?”

  She shrugged. Willow was much too serious for her years; she had had been that way since she was born.

  “There’s a rock about 45,000 clicks down left forward. I’m not getting a survey transponder off it.”

  “There’s a reason why contracts go to the lowest bidder, even if no one has ever figured it out!” he said with a trace of acid in his voice. His daughter grinned at the hoary joke.

  “Yes, sir. Except I’ve been hitting it with the lidar, testing out the new magnetron. I don’t see any paint splashes either. And the computer says that it’s on a mildly eccentric parabolic orbit -- it’s coming in from the deep cold.”

  “The orbit isn’t a cometary?”

  “No, the orbit is parabolic, even though it’s not very eccentric,” his daughter said. Then she added, “The real deep cold and a real rock. There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, in the line of volatiles. I’m firming up a mass estimate now. The computer says a density above six.” She grinned. “I was about to tell you in any case.”

  Joachim Wolf sat up in his command seat. The rock had a density above six? “Give me the numbers; I want to plot an intercept.”

  “Already done, Dad.”

  Willow was, he thought again, as good as they get on the Rim or any damn place else. He looked at the numbers, and after a second, punched the button to fire a paint buoy ahead of them, towards the rock. Six point seven average density! Oh my!

  “Alma, can you and Dee Dee come up to the command deck? Willow has found something interesting.” That was on the intercom, he double checked that the ship to ship frequency was off.

  For the next several hours they maneuvered to dock with the rock, followed by a dozen more hours running survey.

  Afterwards, everyone gathered on the command deck and Joachim picked up the microphone to call it in. “Grand Point, this is Wolfs’ Daughters. Please respond.”

  Grand Point was nearly a light minute away, but with quantum latch frame communications, that was the same as right next door. “Grand Point here, Daughters. Howdy, ‘chim. You keeping your ladies happy?” The man on the other end spoke with a sweet Georgia peach accent.

  “Yes, except Willow. She’s been busy trying to strike it rich. I have a discovery to report.”

  “Proceed, Daughters.”

  Joachim dumped the orbital data Willow had acquired, then the other data from the chemical and spectroscopic probes; even if Daughters’ computers were nowhere near completely finished with all of it.

  The other immediately came back. “Six dot seven! Well, now! There’s a find! You want me to register this for you?”

  “Please,” Joachim told him, “if you would.”

  A moment later the other grinned. “Good job, Joachim! A very good job! Are you sitting down?”

  “Eh, what Grand Point? Say again.”

  The other didn’t bother to wait for the answer, but continued. “I filed the discovery report, and the computer came right back with a match from the Request for Finds database. Our good Federation has finally gotten off the dime, Joachim. They’re going to put in a Class III base here, and since Agincourt doesn’t have a moon, they want, and I quote here, ‘a suitable small body, preferably consolidated nickel-iron, 3 to 5 kilometers in the longest dimension, 1 to 2 kilometers in smallest; the major axis 1.5-35 AUs and an eccentricity less than dot one.’ You are nearly dead bang on for everything but the parabolic orbit and they can fix that.

  “Fleet offers standard terms: a lease for 99 years; your choice of group: either volatiles, lights or metals. You own one of those, the Federation gets the rest. And the bid close is in less than a week; a squeaker, but you’ll make the cut for sure.”

  “Metals would appear to be a good choice for a group,” Willow said, not really interrupting.

  “Probably,” Joachim laughed. “Did you see the assay, Grand Point?”

  “Yes, I imagine metals would be a good choice indeed! I did read the assay! I dunno where that rock came from, but I’d sure like to have been the one to find it.” The other turned his head to look at something else, and then swiveled back to them. “Wait one.” He was gone again; a moment later the screen went black.

  “Grand Point wouldn’t be thinking of trying to claim it themselves?” Alma Wolf asked her husband, a little nervous. “This is more than a little money.”

  Her husband shook his head. “Well, yes and no. A lot for us, but even for Grand Point it’s not much. A base lease for 99 years; according to the computer for a Class III base that’s a quarter million a year. They’ll be extracting ore for the construction of the base and ships. That’s a very fine rock, let me tell you. The computer says, a dollar a ton for iron ore as a royalty; that stuff’s forty-eight percent iron; cheap at the price. Twenty-two percent nickel and related metals. Bunches of copper and silicon. It runs about four percent titanium, aluminum is another percent, and there’s a half point of uranium and miscellaneous this and that. That won’t be worth as much as the iron. Except, of course, for the heavy stuff. Eight parts per thousand an amalgam of gold, silver, platinum, and iridium. That’s worth a half buck a ton just by itself. Best guess, according to the computer, is that it’ll go about a dollar and seventy-five cents per ton for metals. And they’re going to use a lot of it building the base.”

  II

  Terry Morrison hit the cancel button on his comp, shutting down the study program. He wiped his hand across his eyes, amazed that even after more than four years of it, how tired he could get sitting still, doing absolutely nothing except skull work. He glanced at the clock on the menu bar of his comp. It was time to get ready to go on watch. He stood and gathered his things, went into the bathroom, took a shower, shaved -- all of those chores that people do. He walked back through the compartment and down the corridor, without a word to the others.

  Behind him, he once again missed Candace turning to Rosa. “Where does he go?”

  Rosa snorted. “Coming from you, that’s rich! You’re gone almost as much as Mouse. At least he has a certified excuse.”

  Candace glared at her cabin mate. “What I do off duty is no business of yours!”

  Rosa glanced at the other bed; Larry was sound asleep, a wiring diagram up on his comp. “Honey, you can think that; you can think you can do whatever you want. But I’ll tell you true: if you sleep around like this on a Fleet ship on deployment -- they’ll put you off on the closest bit of terra firma. No one minds if you find someone you like; no one cares at all. But honey, you are going through men like there is no tomorrow. The rest of us don’t much like it at all.”

  “Like I care what the rest of you think?” Candy’s voice was derisory.

  “You should. You should care about a lot of things. Like what Mouse does with his free time. If I’d have known it was possible, I’d have been at the head of the line. Instead, I got shuffled to the back. It irritates me; it gives me gas. More important to you: it gives me a seriously bad attitude right now. Mess with me, honey and I’ll turn you into Swiss cheese.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” Candace huffed.

  Tokyo Rose laughed nastily. “You better figure it out fast, honey. Or kiss the Fleet goodbye.”

  The other woman was silent for a long moment, finally broke the other’s gaze. “At least tell me where Mouse is.”

  Rosa
looked at Candace coldly. “There’s a comp command that tells you where anyone on the ship is, if you’re authorized. You are authorized your cabin mates’ schedule. You should check it out, because one of the Fleet officers, a full commander, changed your security. You’re real-life available to anyone male; she made your schedule available, comp-wise to everyone, period. Cool!

  “The program reports where you are or where you have been to the rest of us. There aren’t many happy campers out there, Candy. Maybe you should have paid better attention in the class on personal conduct.”

  Candace pulled her comp to her and keyed in the first thing that came to mind -- herself. Her face set in a rigid clamp; it was all there. Everyone. Her teeth grated, her face was in a frozen rictus of anger. Without really thinking, she punched the keys for Mouse. That was even stranger than hers. He was on watch? He wasn’t part of the ship’s crew!

  Rosa laughed at her, simply laughed. “Yeah, I wondered how he did it, too! One of the engineers told me: he did it the old fashioned way. He walked up to the CE and asked. When was the last time a CE had enough watch standers? He snapped Mouse up. Surprise, surprise! Mouse has his engineering watch standing certificates!” Rosa sighed, shook her head. “I tried to get a bridge slot; they didn’t even twitch.”

  There was a chime and a voice on the PA announced, “New Texas System. Return to normal space in sixty minutes. Crew to flight quarters. Passengers to their staterooms.”

  Candace was beside herself with anger, practically frothing. The only good thing was that at New Texas they were only eight days from Gandalf.

  • • •

  For Terry, the watch was only marginally more exciting than most watches. His duty slot was monitoring the primary fusion reactor. His console was in the main engineering bay and because of its size it was off to one side. The Engineer of the Watch sat on a raised platform in the middle of the engineering space, surrounded by consoles; it looked like a miniature of the captain’s position on the bridge. Half a dozen other watch standers were on duty in the compartment, either sitting at consoles or available at need.

  Coming off fans was a piece of cake, the only difficult task was cutting the power to the fans right on the tick. If you were off by even a nanosecond the navigator would be all over your case and the engineer on watch got the blame when the ship emerged off target.

  The fans dumped right on the tick and everything looked fine. Humans felt low level nausea running on High Fan -- rather like seasickness, so Terry had been told. The relief was pleasant enough and Terry sighed. His board was green; everything was nominal -- for the first seventy-eight seconds.

  Terry heard it -- the sound was quite distinct. It sounded as though someone had just broken a thick piece of wood -- a hard, flat crack that echoed through the compartment.

  He barely had time to start to look up when there was another sound. This time it sounded like a million babies screaming at the top of their lungs, all at once. Out of the corner of his eye, Terry saw what looked like a silvery curtain shimmer across the compartment behind him.

  Instinctively, he leaned forward and down, letting his seat shield him from what has happening behind him. Bits and pieces were smashing into his console, some of them quite hard. By instinct alone, Terry got his hands up over his head, even as he sank lower, sliding into the space where his legs should have gone.

  The noise was deafening, beyond anything he could endure. Then abruptly, like a switch had turned it off, there was nothing, just silence.

  Computers aren’t human and they aren’t distracted. The computers in engineering and around the ship had noted the out of nominal events in the engineering compartment and now alarm hooters were blaring. Normally those were very loud.

  Shaking his head, Terry realized he could barely hear them. He took himself firmly in hand, trying to push himself up -- and promptly cut his hand on a twisted piece of very sharp, very hot, metal.

  He moved more carefully, finally settling into his chair. The air in the compartment was filled with dust and haze, and Terry thought, some smoke.

  The first thing Terry did was reach into the drawer at his station that had an emergency bubble and slipped it over his head. Shipsuits were vacuum proof; which was well and good if you happened to have a bubble and gloves. Terry looked at the gloves, in the same drawer as the bubble had been. He considered that there didn’t appear to be any pressure loss in the compartment. Then he stared at his bleeding hand for a second, before he decided that it would be difficult trying to do anything with gloves on.

  He looked around, trying to take stock. Lieutenant Anvari had been at the command console. It was hard to tell exactly where his console had been located. There was a snow bank of metal bits and pieces that covered something about where Terry thought the main console had been.

  Terry looked at his own board and was appalled at what he saw.

  The board had taken a severe pounding. For the first time Terry realized how close he’d come to being killed himself. Never, ever had he been on watch during a real accident. Simulations -- oh, yeah, simulations! Hundreds and hundreds of simulations! But none of those came close to matching this!

  The smoke was getting thicker, but he could see what he had to do and so he started trying to gain some measure of control over his thermonuclear genie sixty meters away. If it let go, Guam would never have any problems ever again -- the resulting explosion would turn the ship into nuclear debris.

  He’d been working the problem steadily when he realized someone was nattering at him over the bubble comm link. Terry broke concentration for a moment to listen.

  “Engineering! This is Chief Sullivan! Report! Engineering! This is Sullivan! Report! Report Engineering!”

  “Morrison, sir.”

  There was a pause. “Morrison, report!”

  “We lost a fan, sir.”

  Terry closed his eyes; the numbers came to him, unbidden. One of Guam’s turbine fans weighed twelve tons; it had been running at about 120,000 rpm. Fans ran in a solid titanium containment cage, supposedly impervious to a fan failure. Empirically, however, that did not appear to be always true.

  “Sir, fan containment failed and the debris came into the engineering space.”

  Terry saw something on his board and for a minute worked on it; while he was at it, the nattering returned.

  When he could, he went on. “Sir, I don’t think there’s anyone else. Sir, I have to work Primary Power. Sir, we could lose it.” His replies were dogged, the minimum to explain what little he had to say.

  There was a momentary silence. “Help is on the way, Morrison, hang on, Ensign.”

  Terry had returned to pushing buttons, only half aware.

  “There’s a lot of fire and smoke, sir,” Terry’s voice was muted. He felt tired, very tired. Thick gray smoke made it difficult to see his board, much less anything else in the compartment. He was really tired.

  Most reluctantly, Terry said the words. “Better hurry, sir.”

  He kept working his board, getting more and more dogged as the minutes passed. His brain grew fuzzy; instinct kept him going long past when he should have stopped.

  Finally it was too much. His face had to be just centimeters away from the console in order to see the displays, and then he would have to hold his head just centimeters away from the keys so that he could be sure he was hitting the right ones.

  One time he found he couldn’t lift his head. He felt a momentary sadness that he couldn’t do any more; he knew there was more he should do. But nothing worked; he felt so tired. He strained again anyway, but he couldn’t move. He was so tired. The world faded away into gray dimness.

  III

  Bob Shannon looked at the message on his comp and closed his eyes with frustration. It was simple, succinct -- and not at all unexpected. Unwanted, but not unexpected. With a sigh he glanced at the clock on the menu bar. Well, nothing like getting it over with, he thought. What would be the point in putting it off?

 
The message had simply stated, “Please see General Manager Wolf at your earliest convenience.”

  How many people every day on Peach Habitat got a message like that? One or two? More, most likely. For some, it would be routine.

  Sure!

  But for some of them, they were gone the day after. Bob was pretty sure where he was going to be after today.

  He was eighteen years old and like most Rim Runners, tall and thin. He had pale red hair, almost blonde, and he kept it tied neatly in a pony-tail. Normally he thought of himself as competent and he was not normally given to prolonged agonies over his decisions. Today was different -- and it wasn’t the decision he was second-guessing, but the results.

  Bob stood and headed for the door. If he had it to do over again, he’d do it again this afternoon. And the same tomorrow, just like he’d done yesterday. As far as he was concerned, the bottom line was results. The docs told him that the woman had another twenty minutes to live when he’d brought her in -- so yes, he’d brought her in hot and fast on a vector that came very, very close to the habitat. But the vector hadn’t intersected and as fast as he’d come; he’d arrived with scarcely a bump, not so much as a tiny ding on the shuttle.

  He stopped at the secretary’s desk in the Habitat General Manager’s office and the pleasant young man there nodded at him. “Robert Shannon?” Bob agreed, and the other gestured at the inner door. “Go right on in. Thanks for being prompt.”

  Bob tried to think that was a good sign; probably though, the admin assistant was just being polite and pleasant. On the other hand, a habitat general manager did not sit idly waiting for a hot pilot to appear. What was going on?

  Inside, a dark-skinned older man in his late forties sat behind a largish desk, the top of which was edge-to-edge displays. He was tall, even for a Rim Runner, and his skin was the color of old shoe leather and his hair a white fringe around his scalp.

  Bob smiled inwardly. He’d always wanted a desk like the general manager’s. Now, maybe not.