by T. M. Catron
She pulled out her handset. “Anything yet, Harper?”
“Not yet, Captain.”
“Where are we?” James asked.
“Nowhere specific. Somewhere in the DEEP.”
The DEEP stood for Deep Exploration Extraction Point. Originally, colonization crews and explorers used it as a stopping point on their way to distant star systems. Because it lay in neutral territory, with no government claiming it, human or otherwise, the expanse of emptiness was perfect for scientists who wanted to study the stars in peace. However, due to increased pirate activity in recent years, the stations had been emptied, and colonization bases relocated.
Now, Rance liked to say DEEP stood for Deplorably Empty for the Expansion of Pirates.
“Find anything?” she asked nervously. She didn’t like to think of pirates just now when the Streaker was stranded without the possibility of help if they needed it.
“The emergency lights in engineering work. So, there’s that. Tally’s still running checks. Life support is going strong.”
Rance sighed in relief as she limped back to the ladder, sliding down it and landing on her good foot. On her way back downstairs, she stopped and grabbed her helmet from her room. The comm there would work. She put it on and lifted the visor. At least she wouldn’t have to carry it in her hand now.
In the engine room, James held a bright light while Tally dove between the hyperdrive core and secondary engines. As always, engineering was spotless. Barely a speck of grease was on the floor. The room smelled of it though.
Tally sat amongst the disassembled pieces of the hyperdrive coils’ casing, another tiny light between his teeth, shining onto intricate wiring. His eyes glowed green, but his dark body blended into his surroundings, leaving the strange illusion of disembodied eyes floating in the dark.
“Find anything?” Rance asked.
“So far, nothing,” he mumbled with the light. “I thought something here might have shorted during the outage and caused a chain reaction. But everything here looks in perfect order.” He moved away. “See where that line of wires connects to the main power feed?”
Rance looked, but most of it looked the same to her. Then, she saw where he pointed—a tiny bundle of wires snaking their way toward the casing.
“Yes.”
“If the drive had shorted out, you would see scorch marks on these wires, possibly even some broken ones. But they are intact. No burning smell, either. Of course, the Streaker has fail-safes to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I’ve seen it on other ships before. It’s not entirely unheard of, if the power surge is catastrophic enough.”
“Where’d you learn all this, Tally?” James asked.
Tally looked affronted. “You’ve known me for five years, James, and you’re just now asking?”
“I’ve wondered before, but you don’t like questions.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Tally snapped.
“Well, excuse me for caring.”
“You don’t care, James. You are simply curious. I am old enough to know the difference.”
Annoyed, Rance rolled her eyes. The two of them always found something to argue about. In truth, she didn’t know much about Tally’s past beyond the years he’d worked for her father. She didn’t even know how old he was. Graekens lived longer than humans, and she’d often wondered if he weren’t hundreds of years old.
The comm turned on with a click.
“Captain,” Harper said. “We found something.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the ship,” Harper said. “There’s something wrong with Deliverance.”
“How do you know?” Rance asked. She squeezed in beside Solaris, who was holding onto the ladder and looking up into the control room.
“The Caducean Drive she’s installed on is silent. I should be able to link to it from my handset even without main power, but the drive is dead.”
“Couldn’t it have been from the power surge?”
“I don’t think so. This is an expensive, extravagant piece of equipment, even if it doesn’t look like that from the outside. It has its own surge protectors built in. It won’t go dark from a simple power hiccup. I think it went dark and caused the hiccup. And something is preventing me from restarting all the systems.”
“You think Deliverance is stopping you.”
“Yes, and I can’t figure out why.”
“Maybe there’s some danger we don’t know about?”
Solaris shook his head. “It’s dangerous for us to drift about like this in deep space. We could starve to death, or freeze, or get picked up by pirates. Deliverance must think that rebooting the main power is more dangerous than any of those things.”
Rance shuddered. “None of those are good options. All of them are certain death. If we need to take a chance, I’d rather take it trying to fix the ship. Any chance of Deliverance fixing it herself?”
“Not if the drive is malfunctioning.”
“Then unplug it.”
Harper raised her eyebrows. “Captain? We’re not sure what will happen.”
A sinking feeling settled into Rance’s stomach. Apparently having an AI onboard the Streaker was not in her stars after all. She fumed at the amount of trouble it had caused. “We know what will happen if we don’t do anything. Pull it.”
Harper grabbed the drive, took one last look at Rance, and then pulled. It slid out of its slot with ease. Rance breathed a sigh of relief. She had half-expected it to be stuck in there.
They waited, expecting something bad to happen, anything, really.
“How long will it take to reboot, Harper?”
“A couple of hours. I’ll bring everything back online one system at a time, to check for anomalies.”
“Can we get lights first? I need to fix my toe.”
“Lights aren’t a problem.”
Harper pressed a few buttons, and a flashing cursor came up on the screen in front of her. It was reassuring to know they would be up and running soon. After a few more lines of command, lights came on throughout the ship.
Rance switched off her glow-light. “I want to check and double-check every system before we jump into hyperspace. Take as much time as you need, Harper.”
“Yes, Captain.”
The order was unnecessary. Harper wouldn’t let anything slip by her. She’d triple check everything, and then check it again, before allowing any attempt to restart the engines.
Solaris followed Rance back into the med bay. Since Harper was busy, she found a medical manual on her handset and looked up how to set her toe without putting it in the emergency pod. Then, she hopped up onto the other table.
“I think Harper has some injectable stuff stored in one of these refrigerators, to help with the swelling,” Rance said. “Get it, will you?”
Solaris obeyed, pulling supplies from the storage unit and spreading them out on the table next to Rance. An x-ray scanner revealed her toe was fractured in two places. He injected a local anesthetic into it, bringing her immediate relief. Rance held the portable scanner over it while Solaris set the bone back into place.
Then, more injections for swelling and infection.
“We have a healing compound in there,” Harper called down. “Inject her bone with that. It will burn like heck but the fractures will heal within a few hours.”
“How long will it take if I don’t?” Rance asked.
“Two weeks, maybe three before you’d notice a difference, and you’d have stay off of it.”
“That’s not going to work. I need to walk around. We’ll be on Prometheus in a few days.”
Rance hated the idea of using valuable medical supplies, but she needed the use of her feet. There wasn’t an option.
Solaris found the injectable, carefully packaged in a bubble-like bag. When he inserted the needle into her bone, it burned like he’d injected liquid fire into her body. Rance gritted her teeth and closed her eyes.
“On Triton,” he said, “they have nanobots t
hat will repair broken bones.”
“And that emergency pod over there is calibrated to use them if necessary. But we don’t keep them stocked. They are ridiculously expensive.”
“All done,” Solaris said, releasing her foot.
The pain had subsided. Rance hopped off the table, careful not to put weight on her foot.
“Where are you going?” Solaris asked.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, we have work to do.”
“We can’t do much until Harper gets the power back on. Why don’t you rest and reset yourself?”
“Why do you think I need resetting?”
Solaris sighed in frustration. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Thanks, but I’ll go up to the cockpit and wait.”
He shrugged. “Yes, Captain.”
Rance would have stormed out, but her numb toe prevented her from doing more than a hurried wobble out the door.
She didn’t know why she’d become angry with him. Solaris was inherently helpful, a part of his character she rather liked. But Rance didn’t like feeling helpless or showing real weakness in front of anybody.
Especially Solaris.
Why she felt that way, she couldn’t say exactly. She’d always been competitive. Maybe it had something do with the fact that she always had the sense he could beat her at just about anything, even when he wasn’t trying.
Rance climbed into the cockpit and sat in her customary chair. She leaned back, looking up at the stars that dotted the blackness around them. Gazing up at them reminded her of home on Xanthes. She always watched the stars as a child, falling asleep in the solarium as the wind and dust swirled around outside, blocking them out.
Soon, the lack of sleep and the pain medication took its toll, and she fell asleep without meaning to.
When James came up the ladder, Rance woke with a start. The cockpit was lit up like twinkle lights, with all the usual glowing buttons and screens.
“Sleeping on the job, Captain?” he asked.
Rance’s mouth was dry, the result of sleeping with her mouth wide open.
“What’s up, James?”
“We have power to the engines and auxiliary systems. The consoles are functional. Just need to do some double-checking, but I think we’re in the clear.”
“That’s it?” Rance refused to believe it was that simple.
“Harper tried to uninstall Deliverance, but the AI is bedded down on the hardware itself. However, since the Caducean Drive was removed, she seems to have deactivated.”
“What does that mean for continuing our journey?”
James sat down in the pilot’s chair and swiveled it around to look her. “Theoretically, we should be okay to jump into hyperspace.”
“What about realistically?”
James smiled. “That too.”
Rance smiled in relief. “Okay then. Don’t tell anyone I was sleeping up here.”
James smirked. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain.”
“I mean it.”
“You’re so paranoid, Cap.”
“I detest drifting about in deep space, where anybody could come along and make easy prey of us. And stop calling me Cap. That’s an order.”
“As you wish.”
“Argh! James!”
James laughed. “You must be tired if you let that get to you. Go on, get some real sleep. I’ll call you when we’re ready.”
“Nope. Not happening. Everyone else has been up, too. I’m not going to let a little injury get in the way of sharing the workload. Where’s Henry?”
“Sleeping in Abel’s spare boot.”
“Hmph.”
“Captain,” Harper called over the comm. “It’s taking less time than I thought to boot up. We should be ready to jump in ten minutes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Solaris chimed in over the comm. “Maybe you should go to sleep on the job more often, Captain. That way we can get some work done around here without you breathing over our shoulders. Although with that loud snoring—”
“I don’t breathe over your shoulders! Wait—”
James snorted and then burst out laughing.
“You told them.”
He held up his hand as if Rance had thrown something at him. She was contemplating it.
“You were snoring, Captain. I couldn’t let a good thing like that go to waste!”
“What did you do?”
“Hologrammed the whole thing,” Solaris said, the mirth in his voice unmistakable. “Sent it to all the screens and holos onboard, which were all working, by the way.”
James snickered again and stood. “Your mouth was wide open too.”
Rance reached over and punched his arm.
Just then, Solaris climbed into the cockpit and sat in his chair. The traces of his laughter were all over his face.
“Glad somebody’s in a better mood,” Rance grumbled.
“Why shouldn’t I be? We’re going to be back in hyperspace soon, heading to our original destination and possibly a good meal. I’m so hungry I could eat Henry. Although, I don’t want to pick hair from my teeth. And I’m not crazy about cinnamon.”
“Not funny,” Abel called over the comm. Then, “He didn’t mean it, Henry.”
“Just kidding, Abel,” Solaris said. “Just kidding.”
“He is just kidding, Abel,” Tally said over the comm. “Sit back down.”
While Tally convinced Abel not to go to the cockpit and beat Solaris to a pulp, Rance sat back in her chair and told everyone to harness in, as a precaution. “Get ready for the countdown to hyperspace jump. Coordinates loaded, Harper?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Solaris did his pre-flight checks and nodded to Rance.
“Alright, James. Whenever you’re ready.”
Rance always liked this part. No matter how many jumps to hyperspace, she never tired of seeing the blue wave wash over the ship, of feeling the slight electrifying current in the air, the tingle on her tongue. The anticipation was delicious. It meant freedom. Rance breathed easy. They’d only lost a few hours, after all.
She was disappointed about Deliverance though. They’d only had her a short time, and—
James pressed a button, flipped a switch, and grabbed the throttle. “Jumping to hyperspace in three, two, one.”
The ship spun up, the hum of the smooth drive more like a subconscious thought than a sound. A blue wave appeared around the window, blurring the stars.
And then it disappeared.
One by one, all systems shut down, lights turned off, the drive spun down, dead. The cockpit was in complete darkness. Once again, they were at the mercy of the void.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” James said.
“By all the Founders of Xanthes,” Rance said, fuming. “Can’t we get anything right today?”
“Are you implying we did something wrong, Captain?” James said. “Because everything checked out. It’s annoying that you blame us.”
“We still have some power,” Solaris said. “Look.”
A light flashed near his elbow. It came from a button labeled “Initiate” and was used to power up the ship on short notice.
“Tally, what’s the status below?”
“Checking now, Captain.”
Forgetting about her sore toe and her bare feet, Rance stood and stepped out into the aisle. She winced, but the pain was much better. It didn’t look so bruised, either, but the swelling wasn’t much better. It felt like she was wearing a giant’s toe. Even the toenail had turned black. Rance made a mental note to ask Harper about it later.
Before she could get down the ladder, Harper reported in. “It’s just a short, Captain. We’ve overloaded one of the main breakers. Probably when Deliverance kept trying to turn on before she was deactivated.”
“Please tell me it won’t take an expensive part we don’t have to fix it.”
“Okay. I won’t tell you.”
Ranc
e groaned.
“But I can rig something to get us moving again. We’ll need to make some replacements once we get to Prometheus.”
“Fine. I’ll come down and help you. Where’s the panel?”
“It’s one of the main dashboards for the hyperdrive coil. Outside the ship.”
“That seems like a hazardous place to put it,” Solaris said. “It’s a major security flaw in the ship’s design.”
Tally chimed in. “The Star Streaker is a luxury space cruiser, not a military vessel. We need every available bit of space inside. Security doesn’t trump comfort.”
Rance swelled with pride at how Tally defended the Star Streaker. Anyway, it was just as much his ship as hers. He’d been there when she bought it and had been with her ever since. If it weren’t for Tally, Rance wouldn’t have made it as far as she had.
“I guess that settles it,” she said. “Abel, suit up. You and I are going on a space walk.”
Abel whooped so loudly, he didn’t need the comm for her to hear. His excited voice carried all the way up from the hold.
But Rance had forgotten that her toe was the size of a vagrappe. When she returned to her quarters, it wouldn’t fit in her boot.
“Guess I’m going then, Captain,” Solaris said, watching her attempt to put on her magnetic boot from the corridor.
Rance sighed. “Okay, suit up.”
Within a few minutes, they were suited up and Abel was standing inside the tiny airlock. They all waited impatiently as the compartment slowly depressurized. The air hissed out like the ship had a leak, rather than intentional cycling out air. Since the airlock was so small, Solaris had to wait until Abel was outside the ship with the hatch locked. Then they would repeat the process.
“Tally,” Rance called. “Remind me to install a proper airlock on this ship someday. One that more than one person can use at the same time and doesn’t take ten minutes.”
“Noted, Captain, along with automatic gravity controls, a military-grade weapons system, larger lavatories, and an automatic peanut sheller.”
“You just added that last one.”
“No, Captain. Added two months, five days, and three hours ago.”