Selected Short Stories Featuring Cinderella Shoes

by Nicolas Wilson

nothing had caught fire in the last few seconds. “No complaints. Everything's nominal.”

  “Good. Do me a favor and check up on Williams' sector. On the off-chance something's gotten into the environment there that set him off.”

  “Sure. Docs haven't taken a look at him yet, have they?”

  I pinged his location on my HUD, “He's arriving at PsychDiv... now.”

  “So it's probably a needle I'm looking for in this haystack.”

  “Once the doctors have given him a once-over I'm sure they can advise on potential environmental mood alters. But you can at least start collecting the environmental data.” He wasn't happy with my answer, but neither of us being able to pluck diagnoses out of the future, he could stick his unhappiness. He left out the same door I'd just come through. “Nav, how's our course?”

  NavDiv spoke without turning around from his panels; he'd been transfixed by the data streams that had come from the ship's telemetrics since we started accelerating. “Slow and steady, boss-man. We're still crawling our way to near-light.” The Nexus accelerated slowly, at about the maximum speed the human body can withstand for prolonged periods- around 3g.

  Even at that speed, we need the nanites in the uniforms to compensate, along with a few internal enhancements to strengthen organ systems and connective tissues. We were reluctant to do more, since the effects of nano still aren't that well understood- and no one's forgotten about the cancer epidemic that spread through the first colony that beta-tested nano injections.

  At that rate, it takes about 115 days to reach light speed, not that we wanted to get too close to it, because the closer to that speed you get, the more fuel it takes to keep accelerating at the same rate, and the more slowly time moves on ship. “Anything else?” I asked.

  “So far no obstructions, no obstacles sensors or probes didn't see from more than half a light-year away. I'll keep you appraised if anything changes, but really I don't see it happening. Until we reach speed we're more a cruise ship than anything. Might as well sit back and enjoy a Mai Thai.”

  “Drinking while navigating is strictly prohibited by the ship's charter,” the ship's computer added helpfully.

  “Why can we program an AI sophisticated enough to fly the world's most expensive starcraft, but not savvy enough to understand the difference between ordering a drink and making conversation?”

  I smiled as I answered him: “We have. I think she just enjoys fucking with you.”

  He turned a wary eye to his control-panel. “Is that it? Because I know where they store your RAM, and if I have to start yanking boards until you no longer have the excess operating capacity to be a pain in the ass, I will.”

  “EngDiv would never let you do that, Dave.”

  “I know my name's Dave, but still, it creeps me out when you say it like Hal.”

  I cut in. “In her defense, she has a far more silky and pleasant voice than Hal.”

  “Thank you, captain. Plrrrbt.”

  “Did she just raspberry me?” Dave asked. “Did our ship just raspberry me?”

  “She did. I think Haley has your number. I'd quit while you're ahead. Ish.”

  “Oh God, you named her that? I already have a Space Odyssey nightmare once a week. Do I really have to go catatonic for you to be satisfied?”

  “How close to light are we?” I asked, ignoring the question. I remembered from the briefings that the force to push our ship, and hence the amount of energy that required, was roughly the mass of our ship multiplied by our acceleration. So by starting slow, and building slow, the savings on fuel were huge.

  “Just rounding 70%.”

  “Then we should already be reverse-Winkling.” Anything close to 70% of lightspeed and time effectively took half as long on the ship as off it. At about 95% of lighstpeed, the ratios reached for the sky and 1 year on the ship felt like ten to the rest of the universe and increased exponentially after.

  “How long before we're in the Kennedy Window for the first few sensor pods?” I asked him.

  The window was named for Andrew Kennedy, who invented the Wait Calculation. Basically, because of differing speeds, two bodies that leave the same point can reach their destination at radically different times. Kennedy was concerned with increases in technology, but the calculation had since been applied more broadly.

  The Nexus was designed to fire sensor pods from tubes. Their initial speed was higher than the Nexus'. However, the Nexus continued to accelerate, and would eventually overtake the pods.

  The purpose of the pods was to arrive at a planet flagged by earlier probes for closer inspection. The pods were designed to orbit a planet a couple of times, get enough info and slingshot back towards our trajectory to be picked up en route. Hitting Kennedy's Window meant getting the pod and its sensory data back early enough that we only stopped at planets that actually had someone to talk to on them.

  “Ten minutes.” We were specifically targeting inhabitable planets. We didn't want mining rights to particular worlds; we wanted the rights for whole systems. So our mission was to seek worlds that might have competing claim, and break bread with them- if possible, make a deal. If not possible, at least make sure we marked off territory around them, to keep their expansion checked.

  “There you are. You threatened to throw another engineer out an airlock?” I recognized the grating voice before I turned around. Pete Ferguson, HR rep and the company's man on the ship. He was the only unranked member of the crew, which was odd, because he was also number one in the ship's hierarchy- behind captain, of course. He was a stickler for the goddamn regs. He seemed to like me, but not respect me- an odd combination in practice.

  “Is it somehow my fault you hired engineers who are 90% dick and only 10% brain?”

  “I don't suppose you could tone down on the references to male genitalia,” he said. “I'm sure, at a minimum, that the female members of your crew aren't comfortable with it.”

  Haley chimed in to defend me. “Actually, Mr. Ferguson, the term ‘dick' originated in the 1500s, meaning ‘fellow' or ‘lad.' It was not until the late nineteenth century that the phallic connotation of the word surfaces in the written record.”

  “She's in rare form this morning, isn't she?” I asked him.

  “She?”

  “With that voice I think it's obvious. You don't want to give our ship gender identity issues this close to the start of our mission, do you? You aren't deliberately trying to create a hostile work environment for our computer, are you?”

  “I'll, uh, be in my office,” he said, slightly ducking his head as he turned away.

  “Thanks for that, Haley,” I said.

  “Anytime, captain.”

  Continued in Nexus, available Summer 2013.

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