The Shining Legend was possibly the ugliest spaceship in SinoStar’s fleet. At the back end of its long spine was a heavily shielded antimatter drive. Forward of the reactor was a skirt of battered cargo buckets. Outbound, these had carried agro and manufactured goods destined for Rising Dragon station. Inbound, they contained unprocessed nickel-iron ore and dirty chunks of ice from SinoStar’s asteroid mines. Next to the buckets were storage mods. Further upspine, a hodgepodge of crew mods had accreted over the years: Command, Galley, Service, Health, Rec and Wardrooms A, B and C. Three crawlerbots, nicknamed Apple, Banana and Cherry wandered the various hulls of the ship checking for micrometeor damage. A watchbot named Eye flew alongside, held by a magnetic tether. Their asteroid bucket looked to Mariska like a pile of junk that had fallen out of a closet.
The ship ran on antimatter and water. Electrolytic cells dissociated hydrogen and oxygen from ice that had been treated back on Sweetspot. The hydrogen was used by the positron reactor for thrust, the oxygen refreshed the atmosphere in the crew’s quarters. Unlike the starship Gorshkov, the Shining Legend was not a closed system. Scrubbers removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and vented it to space. The cells replaced the oxygen lost in this process and therefore required a constant supply of water. When reserves ran low, the crew fetched blocks of the treated ice, stored on loading porches outside the storage mods.
Qualifying in cargo was the last step before a shadow could advance to senior crew; it was the one job where the computers needed human help. Both Richard and Glint were shadowing cargo on this run. Glint had failed cargo once already but she’d been doing better this time. They used the crawlerbots to load, store and offload material at either end of the run and bring in the ice while the ship was in transit. In the old days, cargo monkeys used to suit up and actually drive the bots, but now everything was handled remotely from Command.
Throughout the run, Richard, Glint and Beep would gather at the cargo rack in Command to divert the bots from their normal rounds. But having people look over her shoulder made Glint nervous, especially after she had failed cargo. Back at Rising Dragon station she had put several new dents in the buckets while loading ore. Her problem was that when she got flustered, she lost track of where the edges of her bots were. She was fine as long as she didn’t actually see anyone, so Richard and Beep had taken to monitoring her from a distance when she took her turn on the rack.
So Mariska was surprised when Richard flew into the Rec mod.
“Isn’t Glint on ice duty today?” She was working out on the treadmill.
“She is.” Richard maneuvered himself into the weight machine and buckled in.
“Aren’t you supposed to be watching her?”
“I am.”
“But you’re not.”
“No.” He smiled at no one in particular as he adjusted the arms of the machine. “I’d rather be here with you.” He set the resistance to four kilograms for curls.
“Richard.”
He laughed. “Beep told me to take a break. He’s watching her but she hasn’t messed up since Dragon. Ninety-seven days and counting. She’s so good now that she’s boring.”
Mariska had logged just three kilometers and had seven more to go. At least a half-hour before she finished her workout and could escape him. She pulled her towel from its clip and wiped her face. Sweat was another thing she hated about space. She missed swimming.
How was she supposed to act around Richard anyway? She couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind those wide brown eyes when he looked at her. Probably imagining new kinks. But with more than a hundred days left in the run, she couldn’t afford to confront him. Feuds in space tended to take up a lot of room. On a ship the size of the Shining Legend, that would be trouble. But she wasn’t about to pretend that she was comfortable being alone with him.
After he finished the curls, he did shoulder squats. The weight machine clanked and wheezed and its gyros hummed. The more reps he did, the more the veins stood out at his temples. Richard was proud of his foolish muscles and worked hard to keep them. Now he was grunting from the effort. It was kind of disgusting. He told her once when they were high on wizard that he’d be like some kind of superhero if he ever visited the Moon. She’d tried not to laugh at his ignorance. There was hardly any crime at Haworth. The Moon had no need of another Lord Danger.
“You haven’t been very nice to me lately.” He was smiling, his cheeks flushed from his workout. “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing.” She wasn’t going to think feathers and golden chains.
“Somehow you make nothing sound an awful lot like something.” He waited for her to answer; she let him wait. “Okay.” He reconfigured the weight machine for squat thrusts. “One. Two.” The count exploded out of him when he kicked his legs back. “Three. Four. Five.” He was so strong that he overpowered the gyro. When the apparatus banged against the wall, she could feel the entire mod shake. It was a point of pride with Richard that he could do this. “Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.” No one else aboard could. Sometimes she could feel him working out as far away as Galley.
Richard stopped at twenty, sucking air in huge gulps. Mariska felt a familiar tingle; since he was out of breath and couldn’t speak, he was offering her his feed.
“No thanks,” she said. She woke up the screen in front of them, picked a 3D channel at random. It was old sci-fi from the previous century: a space captain in a ridiculously tight uniform was sitting on a shiny chair on the bridge of some fairy-tale spaceship. The camera pulled back. Everyone on the screen was sitting on chairs.
There were no chairs on the Shining Legend.
“Artificial gravity.” Richard climbed on the stationary bike and started peddling. “I could use some of that just now.”
Mariska ignored him and pretended interest in the 3D.
Now the people on the bridge were staring at a viewscreen showing another silly spaceship. In an external shot, one ship veered sharply away from the other, narrowly avoiding a collision. Back on the bridge, the crew were all leaning to their left.
“Sorry,” said Richard, “but they’d all be puddles of jelly on the wall.” He shook his head. “People on Earth still watch this stuff.”
The counter on the treadmill clicked over to tenkilometers. “Really?” Mariska slowed her pace to a walk. Her legs felt pleasantly heavy.
“People on Earth are stupid. They don’t know anything about living about space. That’s why I left.”
“There are stupid people everywhere.” She unbungeed herself. “The trick is not to let them do anything stupid to you.”
Richard shot her a quizzical look. “Meaning?
“Meaning have a nice workout, Richard.” She said, and kicked out of Rec.
Mariska had never had a feed from her mother before. At first she wasn’t sure that she should accept it. Natalya Volochkova was a fossil like Beep. Her generation used feeds only for the most intimate sort of contact, which was the last thing Mariska wanted. But this feed had been the only message from her mother for several days now. Mariska was curious to know why she had stopped.
=Moya radost, you know this isn’t what I wanted for us.= Natalya Volochkova was seated in a plastic chair in a spare room that was clearly not at their home in Haworth. The focus was tight, the light harsh. Mariska tried to zoom out but the feed refused her command. There was a stale papery smell to the room that made Mariska think that she might be looking at a museum or a library. Some kind of storage area. =You think you are doing what is right. Maybe, but where you are now is not where you will be when you grow up.=
“I am grown up!” Of course, her mother couldn’t hear her.
=I know you have been suffering, but things will get better.= There was a weight to her voice that Mariska had never heard before. =I promise.=
“Just stop your interfering, bitch.”
=I’m on Mars just now, but I won’t be staying. I don’t know if you’ve heard but we’re commissioning a new st
arship, the Natividad.=
Mariska felt her throat tightening.
=It’s been more than a year since I’ve heard anything from you. I write, you are silent. At least I know that you are safe. I’m sorry if you’re unhappy.= She was shocked to see her mother’s eyes shine with tears. =I wish I knew what you’re thinking just now. But if you really want me out of your life, then I must accept that. I’ve been offered a place on the Natividad. I had hoped to bring you with me but….=
“Go then.” Mariska closed her mind. The bare room and her sad mother disappeared. “Leave.” She deleted the feed.
Mariska tried to relax into the delicate embrace of her closet’s sleep net but her thoughts kept tumbling over one another. Mariska wondered at how little she understood herself. After all, this was exactly what she wanted. Natalya Volochkova was finally leaving her alone.
So why did she feel betrayed?
Glint’s scream shook the walls of Galley fifteen meters away. Mariska choked on a mouthful of butterscotch pudding. When she poked her head out of the hatch Beep almost tore it off as he shot upspine toward Command. She followed at a distance. Ahead she saw Richard desperately trying to pull Glint downspine. Glint flailed at him like a drowning swimmer.
“What?” Beep shouted over her shrieking.
“Seda…tive,” said Richard. Glint spun in his grasp and they crashed against the deck of the spine. “Ooof. Glint, no.”
“What?” said Beep.
“Something about the ice.”
It was a measure of Glint’s panic that she gave musclebound Richard all he could handle. But when he finally yanked her arms behind her back,she slumped forward. Her screams melted into sobs.
“You.” Beep pushed Mariska at them. “Help.” He flew into Command.
They wrangled her downspine to Health and strapped her to an examining table. Richard tried to comfort her while Mariska tapped at the med rack and charged a face mask with somapal. When Richard pressed it to Glint’s nose and mouth, she groaned and went limp.
They stared at each other across the table. Richard was breathing hard enough for three people.
“What about the ice?” said Mariska.
“Don’t know.” He shook his head. “There wasn’t time.”
“Let’s find out.” He followed her out.
“Where?” Beep muttered to himself as his fingers danced over screens on the cargo rack. “Where, where, where?” He was barefoot and held himself still by curling his toes into the deck burrs. His hair was mussed. He looked like he had just woken up; she thought he might be twisted. “Damn it, where?” Mariska had never noticed how long Beep’s toes were. There was fine black hair on the joints.
He stabbed at the rack. The screens that had been showing crawlerbot Banana’s view switched to Eye flying next to the Shining Legend. He panned up and down the ship. Mariska gasped when Eye looked past the porch on Storage D, where their reserves of treated ice were supposed to be.
It was empty. Behind her, Richard made a strangled noise.
“Come on. Where?” Now Beep turned the eye away from the ship to scan the nearby space.
Mariska tore herself away from cargo to access the nav rack. “Time cluster,” she said.
It was 04:33:04 on 15 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and nineteenth standard day. The ship had completed its mid-course switchover from acceleration and was now seven days, two hours, and eleven minutes into deceleration toward home. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in one hundred and five days, eighteen hours, and twenty-one minutes.
“There.”
The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for just sixty-eight more days. The inventory of ice finished updating. It would be sufficient for forty-seven days of oxygen renewal. The screen began to flash red.
Eyes wide with terror, Mariska glanced across Command at Eye’s view. Two blue-white blocks the size of lunar rovers were tumbling sedately away from them toward the blaze of stars.
“The problem isn’t fuel,” said Mariska. “If they start a ship soon enough, it can match trajectories with us. Then we offload some replacement ice and finish our deceleration.”
“Except there won’t be any we.” Glint looked hollow. “We’ll suffocate by then.”
“Not necessarily.” Richard was trying to convince himself. “Not at all.”
“We’ve got tons of ice back in the buckets,” said Didit. “Asteroid ice. Tons.”
The four of them had gathered in Wardroom C while Beep was in Command talking to experts at Sweetspot station. No one wanted to be alone, but being together and seeing how scared they all were made waiting for Beep an agony. There were long silences, punctuated either by hopeful declarations or sniffles. They all cried some, Glint the most. Mariska was surprised at how little she cried. She was sure she was going to die.
“Such an idiot.” Glint rubbed the heels of her hands against her temples. “The stupidest damn stupidhead in all of space.”
Didit poked her listlessly. “Shut up, Glint.”
“It’s my fault too,” said Richard, not for the first time. “Should’ve been watching you. That’s what backup is for. More eyes, no surprise.”
Twenty hours before, while retrieving a block of treated ice, Glint had bumped the Cherry crawler against the side of the open airlock. The ship’s computers had interpreted this as a potential failure and had triggered lockdown protocol. Glint hadn’t wanted yet another screwup on her record, so she had gunned Cherry into the airlock just before the doors slid shut. Once it was safely inside, she had cancelled the lockdown. It was, after all, a false alarm. The shipbrain would still record the incident, but an anomaly without consequences wouldn’t get Glint in any trouble.
Only now the consequences were dire. Normally, Glint would have instructed Cherry just to drop the ice and leave the airlock. Then, after checking that the primary ice restraints on the storage porch had re-engaged, it would have resumed its automated search for micrometeorite damage. But the crawler was on the wrong side of the doors and its restraint routine had been interrupted by the lockdown. This wouldn’t have been a problem had not the secondary restraint, a sheet of nanofabric that covered the ice reserves, failed. The two remaining blocks had somehow nudged out from underneath and taken off. Simulations showed that some kind of vibration could have set the ice in motion. On a ship as old as the Shining Legend, shakes and rattles were to be expected.
Mariska guessed that the ice had come loose when Richard banged the weight machine against the wall of Rec. From the way he avoided her gaze, she guessed he thought so too. Was that why he kept apologizing for leaving Glint to fetch the ice?
What everyone was wondering, although no one dared say it aloud yet, was how Beep could have let Glint trash the safety protocols so totally. He’d told Richard that he’d watch her. Had he had his nose in a sniffer?
“Here it is,” said Mariska. “That data feed I was looking for.”
=Untreated water is a poor conductor of electricity, impeding the reaction in electrolytic cells so that the dissociation of hydrogen and oxygen occurs very slowly. Typically the addition of salt electrolytes will increase the conductivity of water as much as a millionfold. Using water treated for enhanced conductivity enables SinoStar’s advanced electrolytic cells to achieve efficiencies of between 50% and 70%=
“So salt.” Didit brightened. “We get ice from the buckets and just add salt.”
“We don’t have that kind of salt,” Glint said wearily. “And we sure as hell don’t have enough of it.”
“Hey, all the feed said was that the cells would be slow.” Didit wasn’t giving up. “Slow is better than nothing.” She looked to Mariska for confirmation.
“Plus raw asteroid ice is full of dust and crap. It’ll just clog the cells.” Glint’s chin quivered but she held the tears back. “Face it, we’re slagged.”
“Shut up, Glint.”
“There’s a way,” s
aid Richard. “There has got to be a way.”
Nobody bothered to agree or disagree. The silence stretched.
“Buck up, monkeys.” Beep appeared at the hatchway. “We haven’t fallen out of our tree yet. Everyone up to Command and I’ll tell you the plan.”
The word plan seemed to lift the four teenagers. Didit reached over and gave Glint’s hair a sisterly pull. “Told you.” As they followed him upspine, Mariska caught herself grinning with relief. The brains at Sweetspot must have seen something she hadn’t.
Beep waited until they had settled themselves around the cargo rack. One of the screens showed Banana crawler parked in front of Storage D. “So we use the crawlers to fetch raw ice from the buckets. We chip off chunks and boil all the impurities out.”
Mariska knew that couldn’t be right. “How do we do that?” said Mariska. “We have no way to capture….”
“Volochkova, did I ask you to speak?”
“No.”
“No, what?” His voice was cutting.
“No, sir.” She noticed that the skin of his face seemed stretched too tight.
“Leave your ignorance in your pockets. All of you.” He let rebuke hang in the air for a long moment. “Next we start collecting leftover salts from the electrolytic cells and stop dumping the stuff into space. We add it to the purified water we’re going to make. They’re telling me that using fresh water slows down the electrolytic cells. It’s like watching toenails grow.”
“We know that,” said Didit. “Mariska found a feed.”
“We’ve got enough treated ice…” He glanced over at the nav rack. “…for forty-seven days. Let’s see how much salt we can save by then. Okay, monkeys? Trouble is knocking but we’re not letting it in. I’ll suit up and ride Banana back to the buckets.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 28