by Darrell Bain
Sandy closed the last panel and backed out of the cramped portside missile space, glad that she could release her long brown tresses from the band she'd confined them in while working. She shook out her hair, locked up behind herself and headed back to the work station. Lawrence Tanner was waiting there to relieve her. He was a light brown color and not too bad looking but so far, he hadn't shown any interest in her.
“Hi, Sandy,” he said. “Exciting day?”
“Yep. I broke a fingernail on that sticky number four latch on the port cannon. I thought I'd fixed the damn thing but it bit me anyway.”
“I'll look at it. Uh...”
“Something else?” She waited expectantly.
“No, guess not.”
She thought he had intended to ask her something personal. She stood for a moment longer but he said nothing further. She shrugged. “Lots of luck with the cannon latch. I think a little gremlin is hiding behind it.” She tapped her time into the station clipboard, punched in her code and handed it over to him.
Tanner glanced perfunctorily at it. She knew he knew it was good.
“There wasn't anything wrong, as usual. I'm going to grab a shower and hit the chow line.”
“You'll be sorry,” he said with a grin.
“Aren't we always?” It was a standard jibe but truth to tell, the food wasn't that bad. If the cooks would learn a little more about seasoning, she'd have no complaint. Of course in that case, someone else would be sure to complain about over-seasoned food. With close to a thousand persons aboard, she figured they probably tried for a happy medium.
After eating she left the main dining room and headed for her tiny stateroom. That was one good thing about the COESS Merchant Marines Service. A body could have a little privacy, unlike in the military transport ships the twins told her about where only officers and NCOs had staterooms. The army company being transported this run were assigned rooms though, albeit no bigger than closets and the lower ranking soldiers like the twins had to double up.
As she shucked her coveralls and undergarments, Sandy began wondering if either of the twins were off duty. They were fun even if they were ten years younger than her. Both were mature beyond their years, and appeared to have at least a few things on their minds other than sex. Not that she had anything against sex but the twins already had definite goals for their future, intending to use the bonus money and savings from their army hitches to go to school. They wanted to become xenoscientists of some kind, although the particular specialty was still rather fuzzy. Tom thought he'd like to study comparative genetics while Jerry favored the gross aspects of xenofauna when it could be defined as such. Either of them would do for the evening if they were free. Or possibly both. She thought idly of that scenario and wondered what their reaction might be if she brought it up. Maybe a little liquor would help move it along. She smiled to herself at the fantasy and stepped into the shower. It wouldn't do to get serious with either of them but anything to alleviate the boredom of the eternal weapons routine. Too bad Lance didn't seem interested but since he wasn't, the twins were and they were definitely eager to please.
* * * *
An engineering tech spoke to his girlfriend in the hydroponics section. An electron chaser was told nothing much was wrong but knew his boss was worried. The captain was seen running hurriedly from his cabin toward the control room when he should have been walking. A ship is akin to a living organism in many ways. When something goes awry in one department, it often affects another and even when not, its officers and crew tend to talk. By the time Captain Gordon arrived in the control room and was apprised of the situation, word was already spreading that the ship was off course. Rumors began building and became exaggerated in the telling and retelling but that was only the beginning.
* * * *
“What in hell happened here?” Captain Gordon demanded to know. His normally controlled voice was suffused with barely suppressed fear that manifested itself in an expression of anger.
“Apparently a whole bank of computer boards failed and threw us off course, sir,” Travis told him, noting as he did that Gordon must be afraid. A tic he had never seen before was working beside his right eye. His mouth was shut in a thin tight line and his jaw muscles were knotted as if he were gritting his teeth.
He prepared himself for an explosion from the captain but even his wildest thoughts hadn't prepared him for what followed.
“Who's responsible for it?! Who caused the failure?! By God, I'll have him in irons all the way back to earth!”
“Sir, there's no time for that now. We have to try to find out where we are and see if we can even get back to earth,” Sissy said. Her voice was level but Travis saw that she was both angry and almost as afraid as the captain. Unlike him, she was doing her best not to let it show. Only knowing her as well as he did allowed him to see how upset she was. Not that he blamed her. He was afraid, too.
Gordon turned his rage and fear on her. “Did you do it?! Were you responsible?!” His voice was loud but not loud enough to hide the frightened tremor that marred his outrage.
“No, sir, I was not. As I said—”
“I don't care! I want to know who did this!”
A dead silence greeted his statement. Travis saw him scanning the control room and looking for a culprit while the ship continued its headlong flight, unpowered but still moving at its last velocity before going inconstant. He felt sick at the way Gordon was handling the crisis, looking for blame rather than taking action.
“Well?” His voice was loud and threatening.
Travis tried to answer honestly. “Sir, when the computer went down it caused the inconstant factors to spin way beyond where they should have been. The alarm didn't sound so we had no way of knowing until the scheduled check. We've shut down the computer and impellers until Mister Effers can rig up something we can depend on,”
The captain glared at him. His mouth trembled with unvoiced fury.
“Sir, may I suggest we try to determine where we are while that's going on, if we can?”
“Good God!” Gordon yelled and turned his wrath on Sissy again. “Coffeehouse, do you mean to tell me you don't even know where the ship is right now?!”
“That's right, Captain. I'm trying to figure it out, but with the main computer down, I'm having to rely on the control room backups and I'm not even certain they're accurate. They should have kicked in when the main computer went down and sounded an alarm. They didn't, and the inconstants kept spinning with nothing to control them. Nothing ... at ... all.” The slow rendition of her last statement told everyone how horrified she was.
“You mean we have no reliable computer?!” Gordon practically screamed the words.
“I don't know yet, Captain,” she answered in a steady tone of voice, a decided contrast from Gordon's screech. “I'm proceeding on the basis that the backups up here are okay and somehow they simply failed to come online when they should have. Mister Effers booted them up manually for us to work with while he's trying to route around the failed boards. That's the last word we had from him. But, Captain, we're...” She nodded toward the screen. “I don't see any landmarks. I don't recognize the part of the galaxy we're in and that's if we're even in our own galaxy!” She didn't say it, but most of the control room crew knew they might not even be in the same universe.
“Goddamn it, you blond-haired bitch! You're going to pay for this! You and the whole control room crew! You're all responsible!”
Travis and Sissy exchanged glances. Neither had ever seen Gordon lose his composure, but then nothing material had ever gone wrong as long as they had been aboard. They were in new territory and it was appalling.
“What do you have so far, Sissy?” Travis asked quietly, hoping the question would bring their captain back to his senses.
She looked at him helplessly then stared at what data she had and back up at him. She ignored Gordon's glare.
“We are so far off course that I don't know where we are, XO. I d
on't really even know where to begin looking, but I've got one of the backups tied into the main spectrum scope searching for landmarks and the other running calculations based on the data we had before the main ‘puter blew up. So far I've found nothing recognizable, although I believe we're still in our own galaxy. It was the course settings that the bad boards affected initially, not the quantum inconstants. However, after we noticed something was wrong, the uncalculated course change had altered the inconstants so perceptibly that they were way beyond anything I've ever seen before. By the time we shut down, all kinds of indeterminate settings had been factored into our course. We came out somewhere way off our path. I mean way, way off. We're lost.”
“How in hell could that happen so quickly?” Gordon asked belligerently. He took a step toward her. His mouth twisted into a snarl. “What's the time between sightings checks? Two hours? We couldn't be lost!”
Again Sissy and Travis exchanged glances. He should know how the drive works, surely, Travis thought. But he was acting as if he'd never heard of an indeterminate setting, the one thing every space-faring person feared. It could only happen if the main computer and both backups went down as theirs apparently had done.
Terrell, seeing that he could do nothing from the control room had gone to the engine room in order to be present once Effers got a reliable computer online. The three control room technicians were trying not to stare and making a bad job of it.
“Sir, nothing like this has happened since we first began interstellar travel,” Travis said, trying again for calm. “Or nothing we know of, that is. Perhaps a few of the early ships that were lost had computer problems but none have gone missing in years and years. I think we should consider ourselves lucky we didn't wind up in a whole other universe.”
Gordon stared at him then Sissy for long moments with his mouth half open. It was obvious that the quandary of a lost ship was finally beginning to sink in. He closed his mouth slowly and felt for the captain's chair. His groping hands touched its armrests and he collapsed into it like a rag doll.
“How soon will you know where we are?” He glanced from Travis to Sissy and back again. He spoke as if all the previous conversation had not taken place.
Sissy shrugged. She was becoming fed up with his manner. “Captain, we may never know. In fact, I doubt that we will. And even if we did, we're so far beyond where we should be I wouldn't dare try to get us back. We have no surveys for this area and there's no way to reverse the indeterminate settings with any kind of accuracy. It's that bad. I believe we should begin looking for a habitable planet as soon as we're satisfied we have computers we can trust.”
“A habitable planet. You're saying we may never go home?” Again his voice rose.
She nodded. “If we don't know where we are it's the only option open. We could search forever and not find our way back to earth.”
“Keep looking for earth,” he ordered in an unsteady voice, as though it were just around the corner and would be found any moment. He stood up and his body wavered for a moment. “I'll be in my cabin.” As he left, his hands touched each part of the control room in reach as if satisfying himself it was still there.
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* * *
Chapter Two
No one had told Jimmy Hollister he couldn't talk. He knew he shouldn't but rumors were already flying. They couldn't help but be, what with all the control room techs listening as Captain Gordon shouted and raved at his officers and listening when he ordered them to search for earth. By now even the lowliest tech in the control room knew that was an impossible task.
At dinner he ate with Staff Sergeant Maria Mirando of the weapons platoon from the army company they were transporting. They had just begun seeing each other. She was a few years older but it didn't bother him. Maria was dark-haired and pretty even if she was older and there was nothing at all wrong with her figure or her mind, either. She was the first person in the military he had known at all well. He had been surprised and pleased, if somewhat disconcerted at the depth of her knowledge beyond her military specialty. It didn't fit the impression he had carried of the military all his adult life, that of narrow-minded persons who thought force was the answer to most problems.
“The captain's not taking it very good,” he told her after relating how the ship had gone so far off course. “Don't spread that around, though. It's bad enough that we're lost without our passengers knowing the captain's gone bonkers besides.”
“How so?” Maria was already party to the rumors but she wanted to hear it from a source close to the control room.
“Oh, he's trying to find someone to blame instead of seeing whether the problem can be fixed or not. And he ordered the control room crew to keep searching for earth. Crap. We could look forever and not even come close to finding it.”
“You mean the problem can't be fixed?”
Jimmy shook his head. “I strongly doubt it, not the way Sissy Coffeehouse was talking. She's the chief astrogator, you know. She said we're probably in the same galaxy but God knows where in it.” Talking to Maria was helping to settle the fact of being lost in his own mind, even though he was beginning to realize he'd probably said more than he should have. No help for it now, though.
“Hmm. It sounds ominous.”
“You bet. Like we won't be going home any time soon, if at all.” There! He'd said it.
She paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Never?”
“She told Captain Gordon we should start looking for a habitable planet. What does that tell you?”
She smiled slowly then finished the bite of food. “It tells me I'm not gonna get my wish, looks like.”
“Wish?”
“Uh huh. I joined the army for adventure and to do something different. So far all I've seen is occupation duty on McCallister's World and that rock is worthless if you ask me. I was hoping for duty on Bonnport and then damned if our company didn't get orders to go there. It would have been different and probably lots of fun if all I've read about that planet is true. We were going to be stationed there for four years. I was looking forward to it. Now it sounds like that's down the tube.”
“Well, you can still get your wish. Probably more than you asked for.”
“What makes you say that?”
“A new planet is always interesting and usually dangerous until it's been explored. And new planets are sure as hell different.” He shrugged and grinned. “Ever look at the casualty figures for first contact teams?”
“Um. Yeah. Not good.”
“Then there's other problems. You know we have a contingent of hardcore prisoners on board?”
“Yeah. What's that ... oh, I see. What do we do with them?”
“Right. And then there's the ship's crew and the army and the government types being sent out as replacements for ones going back to earth. Put them all together and what's the ratio of male to female?”
“Um. Not good again.”
“Right. And last but not least, the Carlsbad wasn't designed for colonizing. We'll be short of everything. Primitive. Hell, I don't even know if we've got any seeds aboard other than what hydroponics uses. And what happens when the recycling and fabrication equipment breaks down? Think of all the supplies we'll be short of or not have at all.” Christ, he thought, now I really am scared! How in hell are we going to survive? Or will we?
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah?”
“Suddenly I'm not hungry. Not for food anyway.” She looked across the table into his warm brown eyes and took in his young, earnest face and short brown hair. Decision time. “But I've got a bottle of rum I snuck aboard and I've been waiting on a special occasion to use it.”
“And?” Jimmy held his breath. He had been hoping for this even if not under the present conditions.
“Let's go pick it up then go to your stateroom.”
* * * *
Crag Morehill growled low in his throat, a sound that fit his appearance. He was a big ugly man
but behind the wiry, unruly hair and scarred face lived a sharp, if uneducated mind. The noises he made were another effort to irritate the guard, more for something to break the routine than the idea it might be effective. When the guard didn't react, he sounded off.
“What the fuck is this? More of the same shit you've been feeding us every day?”
The guard paused in his daily routine of sliding trays through slots in the prisoners’ cells. He grinned at the big con. “Better eat it while you can, Morehill. Rations are likely to get short before long.”
“Yeah? How come, little man?”
“You haven't heard, ugly? The cap'n made a wrong turn. We're lost as a goose.”
“You're pissing in the wind, screw.”
“You wish, you ugly fuck. But you oughta be glad. You won't be dumped on Brongstill and spend your life draining swamps and being eaten by monsters.” He laughed into the sudden silence behind the food slot and moved on.
In the cell, Morehill began spooning the food into his mouth mechanically. His mind was occupied with what the guard had told him. He wondered if it was true and after a moment of two of thought, decided it probably was. All the guards had suddenly become nervous and talkative, like they were scared of something. If the ship was lost that would explain it. And if it was true, now he had to figure out what it meant to him and the other cons. If they couldn't be sent to Brongstill to labor in the swamps, then what would be done with them? And how could they influence the powers that controlled the ship for some kind of deal? Or could they deal? Maybe they would simply be spaced when the food ran short but he rather doubted that. Lost or not, they were safe for now. Civilized restraints would hold for a long while yet. In the meantime though, it wouldn't hurt to find out all he could and be ready for whatever happened. Shit, it might turn out to be a break instead of having to do the time, twenty years of back-breaking labor in return for freedom, but only if he lived through it. He'd heard that few did. He set his empty plate aside and rubbed at the scar that began below his mouth, cut through the edge of his lips and ended in the shaggy hair at his temple. Not being able to get a haircut irritated him as much as anything else about being imprisoned in the ship. He thought for a while about the situation then began mapping out a campaign in his mind to bring all the cons together under one leader. He didn't really care who it was. It could be him or someone else so long as they were smart enough to know what they were doing. Smart enough to rely on intelligence instead of force as long as they could. But force and violence had to be on the agenda somewhere along the line. That was all the cons really had to work with in the long run. But in the meantime ... something else might work.