Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “My cousin bought a truck and a couple months later, he found panties under the passenger seat. Two pairs. One pair I can understand, but, damn, two? That guy must have gotten luck-” I caught Adams giving me a look. “Must have, uh, neglected to check under the seats before he sold that truck,” I finished, my face growing beet red.

  “That was a heartwarming and insightful story, Joe. Really super helpful.” Skippy mocked me. “My point was, when you get something pre-owned, sometimes you get more than you bargained for.”

  “Huh? Like what? We haven’t bought any-oh, crap. The junkyard? We brought something back from the Roach Motel?” I guessed.

  “Unfortunately, yes, Joe. It now appears the Guardians tagged wreckage in the junkyard with tracers, to monitor the status of ships they had broken up.”

  “Tracers? Like a GPS tag? Why didn’t you know about these tags? And how could something like that shut down-”

  “No, dumdum, not like a GPS tag. The devices, actually they are not ‘devices’ at all because they have no physical presence. They are, ugh,” he huffed with ultimate disgust. “How do I explain this to a monkey? To you? It’s uh, uh, it’s an energy virus. Like a virus, but it affects systems which generate and store energy, rather than affecting matter like a living cell.”

  “Ok,” I pondered that concept. “Is it anything like the nanovirus the Thuranin use to take control of Kristang ships?”

  “No, it’s nothing crude like that. The Thuranin technology, which they stole and barely understand by the way, is still based on manipulating matter. This virus is energy, Joe, pure energy.”

  “So, it’s like a computer virus?” I guessed.

  “Close enough. Except without a computer to infect, or any sort of software code. Joe, this virus feeds on and attacks patterns of energy.”

  “It changes their pattern?”

  “Again, close enough. Let me give you an example, um, Ok. The powercell in that spacesuit was fully charged, and all that energy did not get drained in an instant,” he declared with a snap of his avatar’s fingers. The finger-snapping made a sound, which I think was something new, I don’t remember Skippy doing that before. “The energy is still in that powercell, but it is now locked away in a pattern that can’t be accessed. It’s like the energy is tangled up in knots, and can’t flow out the power connections. Ugh,” he sighed in his best drama queen fashion, shrugging his shoulders and throwing up his hands. “Damn, I am getting dumber just trying to explain this to you.”

  “Uh huh. Can you untangle the knots, or whatever?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, dammit! Fine, uh, what do we have for a backup energy source?”

  “Well, Joe, I was going to switch from the reactors to the beryllium sphere, but it’s cracked,” his voice dripped with sarcasm. “Were you not listening to me at all? We can’t generate or store energy at all, dumdum.”

  “Give me some good news, Skippy. Come on, throw me a bone, will ya?”

  “The good news is, if I can purge the system of the energy virus, the powercells should recharge without any lasting effects. I think. I’ve never encountered an energy virus so all I have to go on is theory. Truthfully, I’m kind of making shit up as I go.”

  “OK,” I ran a hand through my hair and took a deep breath while I processed the latest disaster that had struck the Merry Band of Pirates. “You got any ideas how to purge this energy virus from the ship?”

  “Yup,” Skippy replied with bubbly good cheer. “And you’ll like this one, because it is easy-peasy.”

  “Would you care to enlighten me, Oh Great One?”

  “It’s simple, Joe, and there is only one way to do it. I need to reboot the ship. Turn the ship off, drain all power completely, then I’ll restart it using my own internal power. Hopefully. I’m not making any promises.”

  “Turn the ship off?” I could not imagine the entire length of the Flying Dutchman, even our much-rebuilt Frankenship, going dark. “Like, off? For how long?”

  “My best guess is eighty six hours. Could be a bit longer.”

  “Eighty six-Holy crap, Skippy. We’re supposed to live in spacesuits that whole time?”

  “What? No, dumdum, didn’t you listen?” He scoffed. “I said, turn off the ship. That means everything, anything that generates, uses or stores power. That includes spacesuits. And dropships, in case you were hoping to take shelter in those until it is safe to come back aboard the Dutchman.”

  “How the, how the hell are we going to survive for eighty six freakin-”

  “Could be longer,” he warned me.

  “Eighty six or more hours, in deep space, with zero power? No lights, no oxygen recycling, no heat?” I knew heat was not the worst problem, not even in the utter frozen wastes of interstellar space. The ship was surrounded by hard vacuum, basically a thermos, the best insulator. There wasn’t anything touching the ship’s hull to pull heat away, so the only way we would lose heat was through photons of infrared light slowly radiating away from the ship, and that would take a while. The crew could wear cold-weather gear, then spacesuits to retain body heat. So, cold was not an immediate problem.

  “Uh, Joe, the problem is a bit more complicated than that.”

  “Of course it is,” I threw up my hands. “Like, what complication?”

  “Once I have turned off all shipboard systems and drained all power, there will be one source aboard the ship still generating electrical power.”

  “Our zPhones?” I guessed. “Oh, hell, we can live without-”

  “Not phones, Joe. Humans. The human nervous system generates and uses electricity. If all other systems are drained of power, the energy virus will migrate into your bodies and attack the energy patterns there.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “Uh huh. Oh, crap, indeed. The crew needs to be away from the ship when I begin turning the power off, so the energy virus won’t have access to you, because that would be fatal.”

  “Away from the ship? In spacesuits that don’t have any power?” Because spacesuits had a lot of surface area compared to our thermal mass, heat would radiate away quicker than from the ship. I’m not bragging about knowing that fact, Dr. Friedlander told me. Heat wasn’t the most immediate problem, because without power, the suits could not circulate or recycle oxygen.

  “Unfortunately, I do not see any other way to purge the energy virus from the ship, without it using the crew as hosts, so you need to get away. And we’re running out of time, so we need to get started.”

  “Skippy, you certainly know people can’t survive eighty six hours, not even eighty six minutes, in an unpowered suit. Yet, your idea is to get us away from the ship, so you must have a plan? Please tell me you have a plan.”

  “Nope,” he said with way more cheerfulness than was appropriate. “Not a single clue. I know how to purge the energy virus from all of our systems. What I do not know is how the crew will survive without any source of power, long enough for me to absolutely drain all power and erase the virus.”

  “Crap. Explain the problem to me, in simple terms, please?”

  “I have already started draining power from every system we have, but it’s a race against time, because the virus is attempting to use the locked-up power to destroy the ship. That means we can’t delay implementing whatever plan you dream up. The crew will need to be away from energy-storage sources like the ship and dropships, long enough for me to purge the virus. That is eighty six hours for the Flying Dutchman, and about thirty two hours for dropships.”

  “All right,” my mind was already racing through ideas. “We leave the ship in spacesuits that have dead powercells, and how about we float away from the ship, to meet up with powercells we will send ahead of us.”

  “Not happening. Joe, you have to leave the ship, but you can’t take any sort of stored energy with you. That includes electrical, thermal and chemical energy.”

  “Shit! We can’t take anything with us? We are way too far from a star to use solar power pan
els.”

  “Correct.”

  “Then this is freakin’ impossible.”

  “Well, to me it is impossible, but I have learned from painful experience that for all my incredible awesomeness, I am not good at dreaming up creative solutions to impossible problems. Thus, I have outsourced that little task to you.”

  “Outsourced?”

  “Sure, Joe,” his avatar waved a hand dismissively toward me. “Make it happen. Oh, and hurry, please, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “All right, I’ll talk to Dr. Friedlander. I am not great at physics, but there is one thing I do know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Our horribly complicated and idiotic ‘plan’, and yes, I am using ironic quotes around the word ‘plan’, started by draining power from the dropships. All of our dropships, every single one. Then, when every system aboard those dropships was almost completely dead, Skippy overpressurized the docking bays with nitrogen, released the docking clamps, and blew the outer doors open one at a time. The inert dropships got sucked out into space, tumbling out of control away from the Flying Dutchman. Why, you might ask, were we not using the dropships as shelters while we had to be away from the ship? Because the powercells of the dropships took a long time to really, truly, completely drain, and by the time the powercells were totally dead and truly purged of the energy virus, any humans inside would have frozen solid before the energy virus was safely gone. Also, as the dropship powercells were draining, the energy virus would be looking for a new host, so it would be very bad for humans to be aboard a dropship at that time.

  Humans could not be aboard dropships, and we could not stay aboard the ship. For at least eighty six hours, we needed to be away from the ship, because the much larger powercells and capacitors of the ship took a very long time to drain completely. That left spacesuits for humans to survive in, while Skippy purged the energy virus from the ship and dropships. Easy, right? We get into spacesuits, float away from the Flying Dutchman, and Skippy recovers us after the ship is rebooted.

  Uh, no. Not so easy. First, the powercells of the spacesuits also had to be fully drained before we got into them. Drained, like completely superduper dead. The powercells of our Kristang powered armor suits were comparatively small, so Skippy was able to purge them within a couple hours before we got into the suits aboard the Dutchman, eliminating the risk of the dying energy virus trying to infect a person inside the suit. How were we supposed to survive in spacesuits that had no power at all? That is where our way-too-risky ‘plan’ started to get really complicated. After the dropships were a safe distance away from the ship, we all got into suits, wearing portable breathing masks hooked up to oxygen bottles attached to the suit backpack. The suit helmets weren’t designed for users to wear a mask, so it was a tight fit, and my mask kept scratching my chin and the bridge of my nose. Once we had our dead suits buttoned up and verified everyone had oxygen flowing into their masks properly, we tethered ourselves together in groups of ten people, floating above the floor of a docking bay. Skippy depressurized the bay, opened the outer doors, and I pressed a button on a zPhone to activate a preprogrammed maneuver, then tossed the zPhone away because its powercell was still active. A few seconds after I sent the command to the ship’s navigation system, the backup thrusters fired, moving the ship sideways. It seemed like we were moving, but with the entire crew floating tethered together, we stayed in one place while the ship slowly backed away from us. The backup thrusters used pressurized gas and were not powerful, which was good because we didn’t want any sudden movement in case something went wrong.

  Tethered to nine other people, I tried to relax and not move, to prevent us from bouncing off the door frame on our way out. With ten people loosely tied together, we inevitably jostled around and began drifting toward the ceiling of the docking bay, but we were still well clear when the ship slid out beneath us and we were floating freely in interstellar space. All I could hear was my own breathing, the hiss of oxygen flowing into my mask, and blood pulsing in my ears. With the suit completely drained of power, I couldn’t speak with anyone over the comm system. To communicate, we each had something like a small whiteboard strapped to one forearm, and three high-tech fluorescent magic markers that worked reasonably well in space. If we needed to, we could write messages on our whiteboards and hold them up for others to see through the transparent visors of our helmets. In the utter darkness of interstellar space, the only light was coming from a single point on the Dutchman, pointed toward us.

  Strapped to nine other people, I forced myself to remain calm to conserve oxygen, and watched the Dutchman slowly fading behind me. In interstellar space, the bulk of the ship was a dark void in the dark starfield, except for the one light that Skippy kept pointed in our direction. With that light, I could see other groups of people tied together, each group tumbling slowly out of sync with the other groups. There was no point trying to stabilize the tumbling because even if we could synchronize the actions of ten people using hand signals, as soon as a group got stable, little motions would get the group tumbling again.

  For forty long, silent, lonely and terrifying minutes, we drifted in empty space. After we had drifted half a kilometer from the ship, or technically after the ship had drifted half a kilometer from us, the preprogrammed instruction fired the ship’s backup thrusters hard, using up all the stored gas canisters. We needed to be safely far from the ship when Skippy began draining all power from every energy-storage system, and we couldn’t wait long, so the ship had to scoot away from us as fast as possible.

  The only way I knew how much time had passed was by Skippy blinking the spotlight after each five-minute period had passed. When the spotlight blinked six times, I knew we had been floating inside dead spacesuits for thirty minutes, and I was already getting distinctly chilly. Part of me being cold was psychological, the Kristang suits were good at retaining heat and the hard vacuum of interstellar space was an excellent insulator. Skippy had assured us we would not be in danger of hypothermia for nearly an hour, but at the thirty minute mark, I could feel my toes growing stiff and cold, and I could only move them a little inside the boots. Even three pairs of US Army cold-weather socks were not helping my toes be happy.

  Finally, the spotlight blinked eight times to signal forty minutes had passed, then shined solidly for ten seconds in case any of us were not paying attention. That was the signal we were now a safe distance from the Flying Dutchman, where the energy virus could not project itself across the gap. Probably could not project across the gap, according to Skippy, he was guessing and the best he could give me was a solid ‘shmaybe’ about it.. His level of confidence didn’t matter, because we couldn’t wait much longer. I was shivering inside the suit, and our oxygen supply was only going to stretch another thirty minutes. We needed to get started on the next phase of our science team’s complicated, impractical plan.

  How, you may ask, were we supposed to restore power to our suits, when we could not take any type of energy-storage device out into space with us? I asked Friedlander the same question, and when he explained how our suits were going to power up, I nearly choked. Using the few bots Skippy was able get working, the beer can had made a superduper high-tech device that blew my primitive caveman mind when I saw it: a spring. Yes, a tightly-wound coil of some flexible composite material, attached to an electric motor. Skippy’s little helper elfbots had wound the springs for us before the devices were attached to our suits. All we had to do was reach behind to the bottom of our packs, and put a gloved finger through a ring to pull out a locking pin. I got it on the first try, without the fumbling around that happened when I practiced the maneuver aboard the ship. With the locking pin spinning away into deep space, I pulled a lever and felt my backpack shake as the coiled spring unwound. The suit stopped shaking, but still there were no comforting status lights showing in my helmet visor. Skippy had warn
ed me the powercells needed to reach a minimum charge before the suit’s systems would restart.

  “Hey, Joe! Hey, can you hear me?” He made a booming sound like a finger tapping a microphone. “Is this thing on? Damn it. Stupid monkey probably broke the spring. Why did I trust-”

  “I’m here, Skippy,” I replied, speaking slowly because my teeth were chattering from the cold.

  “Joe! Man, it is good to hear your voice. Ok, Ok, getting a status message from your suit, looks like you have within one percent of the expected charge level. Pretty good, huh? I cobbled those springs together out of spare parts, wasn’t sure they would work. It is-”

  “You weren’t sure they would work? Yet you sent us out into the great beyond anyway?”

  “In my defense, I wasn’t sure all of them would work, I was confident most of them would. So far, it looked like only one spring has failed, and that still provided seventy percent of the output I expected.”

  “Are all the suits in my group powered up?” From my position on the tether, I could only see into one other person’s faceplate.

  “Yes, Joe. The person with the bad spring is in Major Desai’s group, she is helping that person get powered up manually. Speaking of which-”

  “Yeah, I’m on it.” While I reached into the sort of fanny pack on the front of my suit, I called out to the other nine people in my group, talking briefly with each of them to assure myself they had come through the ordeal without too much trauma. Or, that they had come through the first part of our ordeal, because the really traumatic part for me would come later. Next, I checked in with the other group leaders while carefully extracting the handle from my fanny pack and connecting it to the gear on my belt. My grandfather would have described the next part as a ‘cockamamie scheme’; he was fond of colorful old-fashioned expressions like that. The pre-wound spring only provided enough power to get the suits restarted and allow comms and oxygen recycling to be restored. To keep those basic systems running, and to get the heater units going, we needed more energy. We did not have extra coiled springs, but fortunately we did have a source of power: human muscles.