by Ginger Booth
Sass didn’t bother animating the non-player characters in this world. But she sprinkled frozen avatars around, drawn from period photos. Most new immigrants here at the entry vestibule looked Earth-normal. They dressed little better than the mud rats in the refugee camp, though at least they’d shed their parkas, weapons, and breath masks. The still figures coalesced around a local orientation officer, to learn emergency procedures. This man, his cheeks and body wasted, wore a clingy navy blue Colony Corps bodysuit which accentuated his ribs and bony hips as he held a breath mask in the air for display.
“Pressure leaks were common on Luna,” Clay noted. “The gravity technology came late, so half the locals suffer from irreversible wasting.”
“But he isn’t a stretch,” Corky observed.
Clay explained, “Children didn’t leave Earth. Few were ever born in the Sol colonies. And not here. That would have been Mars and Ganymede. Let’s move on.”
But Corky stopped at one of the avatars. “Half his face looks plastic. Why the mask?”
Clay sighed. “Yeast leprosy. A microbial fungus, common in the tent cities. It ate away the flesh. He was lucky to survive. But tent rats couldn’t afford the medical care to fix the disfigurements.”
They continued through a tunnel, which opened out into an open low-ceiling bazaar. This offered a smattering of tables and stools, but no goods for sale. “Most products were digital-only. You could place orders here. But people didn’t own much stuff. Similar to Denali.”
“So why visit the bazaar?” Remi asked, gazing around the utilitarian space.
“I don’t know that they did,” Clay responded. “I never visited the colonies, remember. But housing was cramped. My guess is like Mahina Orbital, people wandered through every open space for exercise. They held meetings here.”
Clay led them through corridor after corridor, occasionally pushing into a utilitarian lab, a cramped one-room apartment with bunk beds, or a luxury apartment. The farther they got from the space elevator, the more upscale the spaces became, with ethereal abstract murals on the walls, usually grey-scale with one or two focal blobs of crayon color. Luxury included space, but rarely much in the way of furnishings. The prestigious rooms bore sweeping arches of ceiling and bits of wall turned into statuary, with low cushioned benches in curving shapes.
“And the athletic complex,” Clay introduced, entering double doors to a gymnasium rich in resistance equipment and banks of stationary cycles, stair-steppers, and jogging machines, each with its own entertainment screen. “Everyone was supposed to be in here an hour a day. But there aren’t enough stations for that.”
They ducked their heads into the locker rooms. Loonies never showered, merely wiped off. Next Clay showed them a tack room, where residents suited up for work on the surface.
“We built these sims from old schematics,” he apologized. “Vitality left a dozen years later. In the meantime, Luna colony grew fourfold. Maybe a few thousand more rich corporate mogul types, plus a hundred thousand workers to build Luna’s share of the colony ships. They worked in orbit, 12 hour shifts, 12 days on, 2 days off down here on the surface. If they didn’t like the working conditions, they were fired. The death toll was horrific. They were promised berths to leave for the colonies. All the rich got settler slots. For the builders, only lottery winners. I don’t know how many won. But the best became Colony Corps crew.”
“Ten colony ships?” Darren confirmed. “How many were Luna’s?”
“Three,” Clay replied. “Four were built by Mars, and another three by Ganymede. They collaborated on those out in the asteroid belt. Luna had the largest shipbuilding operation by far, but they built the shuttles for lifting refugees off Earth.
“That’s enough for one session. Let’s log out back to the future.”
“Poor sods,” Corky murmured before she winked out.
Clay exited VR last, after taking one more look around the empty tack room. Perspective was his goal, but he wasn’t sure he’d conveyed much. These Loonies weren’t pitiful to him. They were the heroes who saved humanity by launching them into the stars. Maybe he should skip the Mars and Ganymede virtual tours. The engineers understood, and that was enough.
We owe them. Ever since Clay learned that the Colony Corps retreated here, he had to come and make sure they were OK. Because 8,000 settlers wasn’t enough.
104
A week out from the planet, Sass strolled from the bridge to snag a cup of coffee in the galley. She glanced down into the hold and halted, arrested by the view.
Scraps of red dangled over every piece of equipment. The whole crew – the ones who bunked in the crew quarters at the rear – mingled below. The housekeeper Corky presided from the half-landing on the staircase, as though in a guest box at an industrial opera.
“Corky! Why red rags?” she called across. Sass decided coffee wasn’t urgent, and trailed fingers along the catwalk railing as she headed aft to speak more comfortably.
Of course Corky didn’t lower her volume. “Making crew uniforms, cap! So we look all spiffy when we reach Sanctuary. Not long now!”
“That’s…industrious.” Sass would have preferred the woman ask before designing uniforms. Corky had a flair for inventing make-work to while away the weeks, though. Sass could only approve. A busy crew was a happy crew.
“But the ship’s coveralls are royal blue.” Since the only conceivable point was wasting time, the captain felt no guilt about making them start over.
“Yes, sar!” Corky bellowed, with her square-jawed grin. “We thought the bright red would go right well with the royal blue.”
Sass folded her arms on the railing, now standing nearly on top of the housekeeper down one of the two flights of stairs. “I don’t look good in red. Not a big believer in uniforms anyway.” She graduated from her police uniform into plainclothes at age 25, a point of pride at the time, having donned an army uniform at 14. Company coveralls weren’t the same thing. They protected personal clothes from work damage. “We’re civilians.”
“Yes, sar! We thought of that, too! Officers like us, we won’t wear the red, no. It’s just for the crew, you see.”
Sass wouldn’t exactly call the housekeeper an officer. Perhaps a noncom. Her pocket comm alarm beeped for the next set of engine burns, but she set it to snooze.
“Builds team spirit!” Corky enthused. “Belonging! And awareness of the chain of command. We took a vote. Most of them look good in red! We’re not so pale as you are. You’ll see, it’ll do wonders for EVA ball games!”
Sass’s brow furrowed. “Us versus them?” Normally they picked teams one at a time for their zero-g play in the hold. Though that left the last-chosen feeling unwanted. Sass and Clay led opposing teams. “That leaves the sides unbalanced.” She and Clay could beat a half dozen of the others.
“You’ll see, cap!” Corky raised her voice even louder. “Alright, you gold-brickers! Let’s start assembling!”
Clay sauntered out of the galley to join Sass. “Red shirts. Think I should tell them?”
“Tell them what?”
“You don’t remember that? Red shirts on an away mission.”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Sass assured him. “Coffee?”
He shared the joke during their break. No, they wouldn’t tell anyone.
She and Remi ended up twelve minutes late for their next set of engine burns, but it didn’t greatly matter. They didn’t even lose time on arrival. Working side by side, they simply adjusted the next burn to compensate.
Shiva had been hard-pressed to project Thrive’s trajectory. Her original calculations, based on a straightforward smooth deceleration, were wildly off what the Mahina ship chose to do.
Not that it greatly mattered to Thrive. Shiva reluctantly acknowledged that their strange pattern of burns cleverly incorporated a deceleration assist from assorted gravity wells. It took her several minutes – and that was an eternity for an AI of her capacity – but she figured out what they were
doing.
And she sent Narcissus updated instructions to compensate. The JO-3’s new flight plan exceeded the maximum safe velocity, but all these engineering limits had error tolerances built in. She assumed up to 10% was safe enough. Unfortunately this was only an assumption, because a search of her databases failed to turn up details on the subject.
But Thrive’s latest burns were mystifying. And they required her to lay on further acceleration just to keep Thrive within extreme range of Narcissus’ guns. At this rate, she’d get only a single shot. Narcissus would zip by so fast Thrive would never notice if it didn’t fire on them.
Grimly, Shiva concluded yet again that humans were damnably inconvenient. She spawned another process to continually recalculate a thousand possible shots based on what Thrive did next, based on burns up to 20 minutes early or late for the remainder of the interloper’s deceleration.
“There, did you feel it?” Sass asked Remi as the engine burn eased off. Now only two days out from Sanctuary, they performed their 00:34 burns yawning. The wonky schedule called for more at 02:17.
There were upsides to Sass’s lazy approach to decelerations on her trip to Denali. She conveniently slotted them at shift change, when two bridge officers convened on the bridge to hand off responsibility and compare notes anyway. This time, Sass and Remi were the only ones truly qualified for the job. Clay could sleep through the night, while the other two took turns catching naps.
Remi frowned. “A slight pull to the left.” He paged through displays on the console before him. “The computer compensated by burning a little longer. Hm.” He found a particular visual and scowled at it.
“Exhaust turbulence?” Sass suggested, trying to peer over his shoulder.
In irritation, he flicked the image onto her own screen. “Possible. It looks like something in the nozzle, disrupting the laminar flow. Conceptually.” He sent her another picture to compare. “The right engine flow.”
“Huh.” Sass saw tangle in the image. Exhaust of what, exactly, she was less clear on. Thrive’s engines spewed hardly anything out the rear of the ship. Which was currently in front of the ship, since they turned backwards to decelerate. The star drives consumed fuel, at a prodigious rate during the past few days. But her understanding was that they outgassed plasma. She thought that was energy, and thus expected it to behave like light beams.
“I though energy didn’t bend.”
Remi boggled, and informed her, “Sass, even light waves bend. From gravity.” He stabbed a button. “Chief engineer to bridge. Hoof it, Darren!” His fluency and Mahina slang were growing.
Sass cracked a smile. “That was mean.”
“Will you overrule me?” Remi challenged.
“No. I bet five minutes. He’s sound asleep.”
“Two,” Remi countered. “He is terrified because I ask him to second-guess me.”
Wild-eyed with adrenaline, Darren Markley reached the bridge in under three minutes, wearing skimpy briefs, a muscle T, and his Clark Kent glasses. He forgot his shoes. “What’s wrong!”
Remi grinned at Sass. She chalked up his win with a finger in thin air.
To Darren, Remi replied, “Chief, I think one of the engine nozzles has a clog.” He displayed the two flow images to Darren. “We have…23 burns remaining until we land.”
“That many! Huh. And how long have you noticed this?”
Sass supplied, “Three burns now. It’s getting stronger.”
“Question is,” Remi elaborated, “do we stop to clear the nozzle? Or do we trust it is safe to continue?”
“What’s involved in clearing a nozzle?” Sass asked. She’d never heard of this chore. She visualized the engine burns as blowing her nose. The star drive built up – power, plasma, something – and then she told the ship to sneeze. If blasting the star drive at power level 4 didn’t clear the sinuses, what could?
“Good question,” Darren allowed.
“And what the hell do we clean it with?” Remi pressed.
“Hm.” Knees bent and head bowed by the chamber’s low overhead, Darren leaned on the back bulkhead and pulled out his tablet. Disconcertingly, he stared into space, only using the device as a touch pad, and his glasses as the display. “I don’t know what to search on…”
Sass and Remi also bent to their consoles, dreaming up database queries. As usual, Remi guessed right first. “Nozzle build-up. This can’t be right.” He flicked his find to the other two.
“Vinegar and a crowbar,” Darren read. “Well that’s easy. Just two hours to cool the nozzles and then apply with…” The nozzles were open to vacuum. He couldn’t very well sponge vinegar out of a bucket.
“Purple gel,” Remi supplied. “To apply water-soluble. Need to mix and tube it. Twenty minutes.”
“Right,” Darren conceded. He was less fluent on space goops. “To answer your question… Yes. Power down the drive. We should fix this.”
“The royal ‘we’,” Remi noted. “Or will you join us outside this fine morning, oh lordly one?”
Darren scratched his nose sheepishly. “I probably should. Though I’d be least valuable player.”
“That’s alright,” Sass assured him. “Clay’s going out with you to compensate.”
Remi grinned. “Maybe I should sleep in?”
“No. If none of us knows what we’re doing, I want both of you out there.” Sass sighed, tempted to leave Clay on the bridge and go out to watch this herself. But captains weren’t supposed to do that, fun as it sounded.
She tapped the Saggy’s screen. “Recalculate. Should we do a bonus burn before we shut down the engines to cool?”
“Oh.” They bent their heads to it.
105
Around 04:00, Clay led his pair of engineers and crewman Joey on EVA to the nozzles. “Remember, keep your eyes on the ship,” he cautioned them, as Joey froze staring at the oncoming planet. “Joey, shift your clamp to the next hold.”
Given concrete instructions, the redshirt got his face pointed in the right direction and continued aft. Darren and Remi, intent on their eagerness to see ‘nozzle dirt’, matter-of-factly clamped at the base of the engine outflow and pulled themselves up the meter and a half to peer in. Darren didn’t plant his mag boots firmly enough on the hull, so his legs started to drift out, his momentum carrying him into space.
Clay yanked him back and secured him with a second line and clamp. He wasn’t worried about Remi. The miner was adept with his flying jets if his line failed. Joey was a different story. The first mate double-clamped him, too, and explained that his job was to retrieve tools on request, and supply them handle-first.
His charges secured, Clay cautiously played out some line to float behind the Saggy engineer to watch. The yawning black tube of the nozzle itself offered no hand-holds, and its ceramic alloy was non-magnetic. The aperture was nearly 3 meters across, the interior inky black. “Found anything?”
Remi floated motionless relative to the hole, each slight shift of his helmet light compensated with a twitch of a hand or foot to keep him steady. “Not yet. Lot of surface to inspect.”
“How the hell do we brace ourselves to work on this?” Even Remi’s preternatural spin control would fall apart if he tried to apply force.
“Darren, work on that, would you?” Remi replied. “Bungee cage.”
“I don’t think I’m coordinated enough to do that,” Darren confessed.
“Get the bungees out and secured,” Clay ordered. “Design the thing. I can string the first cords in place.” Once they had a handhold established, he and Joey could brace themselves between that and the nozzle walls to secure the rest. “Remember to leave space for us to climb in and out of this cage.”
The springy scaffolding was nearly complete by the time Remi reported success. “About 2 meters in, a nodule the size of a marble. Toward the ship centerline. Crowbar.”
Metal bar acquired, he ‘stood’ on the bungee webbing, head into the engine, with Joey and Clay holding his safety lines t
aut. But his first ten jabs at the obstruction failed to knock it loose.
He set the crowbar to sit in space and extracted his custom tube of purple gelled vinegar. He applied it liberally at the base of the lump. Curious, he also drew an ‘R’ for Remi on the wall, then wiped it with a cloth. The cloth came away blackened. The smeared R remained as black as its surroundings, but faintly shiny instead of matte. “Huh. Why vinegar?”
Darren assumed the question was directed at him. “No idea.”
Remi decided the gel had enough time to work, and applied the crowbar again. No joy. So he wiped the previous goop off, and applied it again. He set his rag drifting lazily toward his helpers, along with the empty purple tube. “Need another rag and gel.”
Clay expected Joey to grab the debris – it flew closest to him – only to see the trash sail right past him. “Joey…” Clay snatched the trash, lost his toehold on the bungee cage, and had to reel himself in. “No space trash! This stuff is dangerous. You want the ship to crash into this and hole the hull?”
“Not possible,” Remi opined. “Still waiting for tools. You guys are very slow. Everyone pass me your rags and purple gel!”
He was securing his second tube when suddenly the ship jerked violently, slamming the engineer into the nozzle wall.
Clay frantically strained to pull Remi to the bungees rather than let him rebound against the other nozzle wall. “Sass, report!”
Sass sat on the bridge when her ship lurched sideways. The door behind her slurped shut. The tiny chamber flooded with red strobe lights. She yelled over the emergency klaxons, “Computer, damage report!”