by Britt Ringel
The man on the screen nodded. “Got it and thanks!” He raised a mug of ale on the screen. “Skål!”
“Safe voyage, Mr. Huseman,” Brooke replied. “I have to contact the other students now.”
“Wait!” Huseman blurted loudly. “Two of them are sitting right here.” He spun his datapad and Brooke’s perspective grew dizzying as the scene twirled in a half circle. Another young man and woman sat opposite of Huseman in his booth. Both waved and smiled, careful not to spill their drinks.
The datapad twisted again and Huseman reappeared. “We’re having a get-to-know-you nightcap,” he explained sloppily before rattling off the names of his companions.
Brooke quickly consulted Ambridge’s files. Huseman was a student engineer. His newfound friends were aspiring deck officers but both were focusing on navigation. The corner of Brooke’s mouth twisted. They would have to do. “Just make sure the three of you don’t oversleep, Mr. Huseman,” she warned. “If you miss your boarding time, you’ll still pay for the class.” She terminated the connection and freed her hair from its band. Rising from her chair, she retrieved her pistol from the desktop and holstered it. Afterwards, she smoothed the fabric of her dress, tugging lightly at the hem, before exiting the office. The ruined door would not secure fully but would appear closed if given only a cursory inspection. As she walked back to the lobby, she could hear Ambridge and Lochlain in pitched conversation.
“Well maybe you’re not the woman I thought you were!” Lochlain denounced, his voice echoing down the main hall.
Ambridge’s snort carried easily across the grand lobby. “Ha! That’s a laugh! I’ve hidden nothing from you and tonight I find out you’ve been married… TWICE?”
“You don’t really believe that psychotic woman, do you?” Lochlain asked incredulously. “She’s just saying that to drive a wedge between us! She’s bitter because you have something she never will again.”
Brooke mimed shooting herself in the head as she approached Ambridge from behind. “Oh my,” she said to gain the pair’s attention. “Are we having a lovers’ spat?”
Ambridge spun in place and pointed an angry finger at Brooke. “Just who do you think you are, coming here and telling these vicious lies about Reece? He said you were crazy but I never truly believed him.”
Brooke poured empathy into her voice. “You’re so right, dear. At first I was worried that Davy’s father was jumping on a sinking ship but now I realize that you two really deserve each other.” She brushed past Ambridge’s jutting finger and toward the front doors. “Forget I said anything, dear.” She casually beckoned Lochlain. “Come now, Reece, if you want to retrieve that silly certificate.”
“She didn’t bring it?” Ambridge erupted with renewed fury, channeling her energy into pacing back and forth.
Lochlain snatched the livid woman’s hand and ushered her out of the building while placating her, “I’m so sorry, honey. I’ll follow her back to her apartment and then flash you.”
“H-how could you not make her bring it?” Ambridge stammered. “And now you’re going to leave with her?” She tried to slam the front doors of the building closed but the embedded pressure sensors thwarted her. Instead, she furiously mashed her datapad over the door controls to lock them before whirling toward Lochlain. “Don’t bother calling me tonight! And if you want my help finding a job, you better start thinking up ways to prove you haven’t lied to me!” She pushed past Lochlain, intentionally brushing against Brooke’s shoulder before stomping down the stairs.
Lochlain opened his mouth but Brooke quickly pressed a finger over his lips. “Let her go away angry, Reece,” she said quietly. “It’ll help her in the long run.”
He watched the woman march toward her aircar. “We’re really burning our bridges in Svea,” he noted sullenly.
“No, we’re fusion-bombing them,” Brooke corrected. “I used a CBP cracking program on her computer in there. That’ll be logged in their cyberwarfare database. Within a week my field supervisor will be wanting to know why I used high-level hacking tools during my vacation.”
Lochlain looked pointedly at Brooke with a deep scowl. “You were supposed to distract Melissa while I made those calls.”
She shrugged off the reproach. “I saw an opening.”
“How’d you get into her office?”
“Personal magnetism and great sacrifice,” she quipped.
“What if Melissa had caught you?”
Brooke smiled dangerously and reached down to the hem of her dress. She slowly, daringly lifted the bottom of her skirt, revealing more and more of her firm thighs.
Lochlain gawked in confusion at her brazenness but soon let loose a short burst of laughter when Brooke’s pistol became exposed. “You were going to shoot her?” he asked cynically.
She let her hem drop. “No, but I’m still CBP. I can detain almost anyone for seventy-two hours.”
Lochlain’s eyes still lingered over her legs. “You were going to kidnap her?”
“Detain,” Brooke quibbled. “It’s called ‘detained and isolated’ when CBP does it.” She screwed an eyebrow at him and offered a cynical look. “You know, for railing so hard about corporate feudalism, you sure seem surprised at just how truly corrupt the system can be.”
* * *
They were back on Zanshin less than an hour later. The shuttle, simply dubbed “One-One-Tango,” was safely harbored inside the freighter’s cramped hangar. During the flight to the ship, Lochlain had secured permission to moor Zanshin at Docking Bay Sixteen on Svea’s primary commercial orbital. He had texted that information to each of the three students and set his datapad to wake him at 06:00. As Brooke and Lochlain climbed down the narrow ladder to the catwalk overlooking Engineering, he released a gigantic yawn. It was nearing three in the morning.
He crossed the metal grating suspended above Engineering to stand at the portal that opened to the corridor running the length of the ship. Dropping both of Brooke’s oversized bags to the catwalk with a metallic clang, he looked back. Brooke had paused at the life support controls.
“You coming, Mercer?” Lochlain asked while lightly punching the portal’s control panel. Only the berth doors were set to automatic lock. The portal hissed open to reveal a dark, narrow hallway stretching into blackness. “We need to get some sleep. We have to get up at six this morning to give us plenty of time to get Zanshin up and running and move her over to the orbital.” He shook himself. “It’s going to be risky doing it with just the two of us.”
“I’ll be right behind you,” she answered while fiddling with the life support controls. “I want to make sure we’re not going to suffocate tonight. Besides, it’s freezing in here.” Her hands ran expertly over the touchscreen.
Lochlain waited for her by the door. He looked down at Brooke’s bags and sighed. “I should have stopped by the tenement before I went to see Larsson. I don’t dare go back there now.” He picked up a bag again with a heavy grunt. “I can’t believe everything you own fits in two bags.”
Brooke brought the power core off standby and set it to minimal output. She transferred Zanshin’s energy draw from its batteries to the core. “I’ve lived a transient life the last decade. In fact, I really haven’t had a home since I left for engineering school.”
“That’s kind of sad,” he commented wistfully. After a beat, he added, “I guess I always thought of the ship I was on as my home.” He looked around the darkened compartment and listened to their voices still echoing within. The only lighting came from Brooke’s panel and from near the power core, one story below them. “I think I’m going to like it here,” he prophesied optimistically.
Satisfied with the readings on the panel, Brooke turned to him. “Me too.” She smiled but it faltered. “I just wish we were going about it differently. Don’t get me wrong, I kind of like the idea of screwing over CBP but I feel guilty about the people, even Melissa.”
Lochlain appraised her. “Would it help if I told you she was seeing an
other man behind my back?”
“She was?”
“No, but would it help?” The corners of Lochlain’s mouth curled upward. “Come on, Mercer. Let’s go spend the first night in our new home in our new rooms.” He began the long walk toward the ship’s center.
Brooke pushed off from the control panel, snatched her second bag and chased after him. The fingers of her left hand closed around his. “You know I’m sleeping in the captain’s quarters, right?”
Chapter 8
Both spent the night in the captain’s quarters although neither got much sleep. Just a couple hours later, Lochlain groaned when his datapad chimed loudly from the nightstand.
“Uhhnn, why is it so loud?” Brooke whined from under the covers next to him. “Why does your datapad hate you so much?”
Lochlain slowly sat up and placed his feet on the deck. It was like ice. “Holy crap!” he yelped while lifting his feet off the frigid floor. A wispy haze dissipated in front of his face. He blew out again and condensed breath floated in front of him. “Mercer, something’s wrong.”
“I know,” she mumbled from underneath her pillow. “You’re not letting me sleep.”
He slipped a hand underneath the covers and gripped her shoulder to shake her gently. “I can see my breath and the deck is barely above freezing.” He moved his hand up and pulled the pillow off her head.
A disheveled Brooke groaned but rose to her elbows. She looked at him with heavy eyes. “It’s still warm under the blankets.”
Lochlain lifted himself off the bed and spun in place. He grabbed the top of the covers and slowly began to pull them off Brooke. “Mercer, fix my ship.”
Brooke moaned as the sheets slipped away. “It’s so cold!” she bawled. A beat later, she added, “Reece, I think there’s something wrong with the life support.”
Lochlain was already across the room, dressing. “Really? You think? Maybe you should go check that out while I wake up the bridge. I want to be docked to the orbital by 08:00.” He trudged across the small room and into the adjoining bathroom.
Ten minutes later, Lochlain walked up to the top deck from the central stairwell. He passed through the cramped chartroom and entered the bridge. Dim light from the ceiling cast soft shadows around the compartment. He stepped to the captain’s chair and sat.
The first commands brought light and life to the bridge. While waiting for all three workstations to initialize, he called down to Engineering using Zanshin’s Main Channel. “Mercer, you there yet?” His voice echoed through the entire ship.
He received a response a few moments later. “It’s the ship’s internal clock. Somehow, Zanshin thinks eleven months passed during the night and she went into hibernation mode to conserve power.”
“How’d that happen?”
“I have no idea but it obviously has something to do with the chronometer,” Brooke answered. “I’ve reset her clock and taken us out of hibernation mode.” She paused. “The good news is that even though Zanshin shut down our life support, the air filtration system came back up when it detected high CO2 concentrations in our room. So at least we know that works. I’ll reboot the software for the chronometer and see if the problem comes back.”
Lochlain returned his attention to the bridge. All three control stations had booted and run through their start-up diagnostics. He saw green across the board. “Deck systems are up and running. Tell me when I have power to the drives and thrusters. I’m going to run through all the pre-flight checklists before we break her orbit.”
“You know, the second you move her we’re in violation of maritime laws for sailing without the minimum crew,” Brooke observed.
Lochlain grunted an acknowledgment. He focused on the sensors portion of his captain’s console. The Tuoma-class freighters came standard with a forward-looking fixed optical array and an antiquated 360-degree Encountrix-60 optics platform. He energized each system and activated the main wall screen at the front of the bridge.
The dormant screen flared into life. It had last been set to window mode, a mode designed to give the impression that the high-resolution screen was actually a viewport. Lochlain could see the top half of the forward hundred meters of Zanshin’s hull. Beyond the sprawling freighter, Svea gleamed in shades of blue, black and green. A blanket of clouds shrouded the planet’s main continent.
Lochlain switched modes and the sterile view of the system plot appeared. The capital system of Appiation Unlimited was a flurry of activity with commercial starships dominating the traffic. Hundreds of ships sailed in the black, traveling between Svea proper and her two tunnel points. One tunnel point led to Svea’s sister system, Imdali, and sporadic traffic flowed toward it from the planet below. In the opposite direction, a more defined line of ships sailed to the other tunnel point, seeking access to the Solarian Federation’s district system of Ancera. The multitude of vessels inside the Svea star system was not confined to the major sailing lanes. Dozens of other ships sailed between the capital planet and a nearby asteroid field. More still were plying toward the system’s solitary gas giant further away.
Mixed within the seemingly disorganized collection of commercial vessels were Appiation’s system defense ships. These police and military vessels represented the law in Svea. Lochlain counted ten active SDSes. Six snows glided among the civilian ship traffic. Four of the six were attending to the tunnel points while the other two made way inside the sailing lanes. Another pair held vigil near Svea herself and Lochlain considered them a mild threat. More distressing, he saw that both of Appiation’s larger brigs were policing the orbital. Finally, the iron fists of the corporation’s might, its two ships of the line and single razee, were even closer to Zanshin, gliding in their own graveyard orbits. He was unconcerned about these three, fearsome ships though. They were obviously mothballed, resting in deep torpor until the next corporate war.
“Four system defense ships nearby,” Lochlain announced to Brooke over the 1-MC. He compared that number to the sixty-seven nearby commercial vessels loitering around Svea. “I still like our odds.”
“You have power now, Reece.” Brooke’s voice sounded from his console’s speakers. “Be careful with those aft port thrusters. We need to baby them until they’re overhauled.”
Lochlain moved to the navigator’s console. He could perform the upcoming tests from the captain’s chair but it would be easier from the dedicated station. “Roger that.” He noticed that he could no longer see his breath.
A test-filled hour later, Zanshin was ready to rise from her grave. Her engineering and deck systems were fully active and the ship’s monitoring systems settled into a standard cycle. Lochlain had completed nearly every test available on the bridge and realized he was out of ways to procrastinate. With a final review of his ready board, he sent a comm request to the space traffic controllers on the nearby orbital. “Svea Approach, this is CSV Zanshin in graveyard orbit requesting vectors to the orbital.” He depressed the IDENT command that would briefly cause Zanshin’s navigation beacon to send a stronger than normal signal. The IDENT would cause Zanshin’s blip on the orbital controller’s screen to flare brightly for a moment.
“Roger, Zanshin,” a controller’s voice responded several seconds later. “Contact in supersynchronous orbit zero-nine-two mark nine at one hundred fifty-five kilometers. You have permission to exit your orbit and proceed at two-seven-two mark one. Expect vectors for the standard approach to Svea orbital.”
Lochlain echoed, “Two-seven-two mark one, thank you, Approach.” Using the captain’s duplicate controls, he eased Zanshin from her position and began to rotate her narrow bow to the correct heading. “We are now in violation of Commercial Sailing Code,” he murmured to himself. As was the case in his earlier tests, he noted Zanshin’s ailing aft, portside thrusters were giving less than sixty percent normal thrust. The ship also had powerful lateral and vertical thrusters at the bow of the ship, making the impairment minimal, but maneuvering the stern of the ship while trying to ke
ep her bow in place would be problematic.
With the freighter’s course set to the prescribed heading, Lochlain engaged the vessel’s four Toland drives and the ship pushed herself away from the planet. The wall screen displayed a system plot zoomed in to a radius of 1lm (light-minute) around the ship. Lochlain had tagged each of the four, active system defense ships for easy tracking. None of them seemed interested in Zanshin at the moment.
He monitored the limited information his panel conveyed on the drives. Although the port drives’ output was disappointing, all of Zanshin’s propulsion was inside the expected performance envelope. He knew that Brooke would be continuously monitoring their operation down in Engineering. He sailed in peace for several minutes. It felt odd to be cruising close to an orbital yet be the only person on the bridge. He had stood lonesome watches before in the deep, dark of space with nothing to do but monitor gauges but this was very different.
“Zanshin,” the controller broke the quiet, “thrust to port heading two-two-five mark five and intercept standard approach Alpha localizer. You are cleared for the approach. Contact Svea Tower at VEALS.”
“Two-two-five mark five and cleared for the Alpha approach. Contact tower at VEALS,” Lochlain confirmed. On the wall screen, he brought up the Svea Alpha Approach page from the navigation system. An overlay of the approach appeared with Zanshin’s marker position off to a side but edging toward the navigation milestone named VEALS. The ship would reach VEALS in twelve minutes, where Lochlain would rotate Zanshin to a new course directed at Svea’s large, commercial orbital. As the ship approached the orbital, she would pass through two additional milestones called the middle and inner markers, respectively. If Zanshin’s approach was fouled or if she had not received clearance to dock by the time she reached the inner marker, he would execute the published missed approach sequence and hold in a designated area of space, named LODGE, near the orbital until the space traffic controllers gave him further instructions. Lochlain was rarely forced to abandon his approaches, especially when space traffic was as sparse as it was near the orbital.