by Bob Mauldin
As the visitors were anxious to see a working starship, they kept their questions to themselves for the present. Simon had three security officers on hand to make the tour groups a manageable five persons each. Simon took the first group out the door and onto the bridge. The other groups started out with different primary destinations in mind emptying the auditorium out almost instantly. After an hour of tramping around the ship answering questions, he was glad to get back to the mess hall. He fielded more questions until Gayle led her group in, turned his five over to her, and strode from the room. He slipped onto the bridge through his quarters, heaved a sigh of relief and sank into his chair.
Later, all three found him lost in thought, staring at a view of the Earth. “So this is where you’ve been hiding.” Kitty said. “We were beginning to worry. So, where the hell did that speech come from? Do you have any idea what kind of reaction you got from those kids? They’re so hyped up, they’re ready to leave orbit right now. We got them to calm down some though. They are all going back down to get friends to sign on. I think you may have just solved our personnel problem all by yourself.”
Stephen griped, “And you sent me to that convention? So, what exactly is our direction, Simon?”
Simon looked up, sat up straight, and spoke in a subdued voice. “I’ve been dreaming about that very thing since we first came aboard. The problem is that when a secret is shared by more than one, it isn’t a secret anymore. We’ve recruited some of Gayle’s friends, you, Stephen, about a dozen scientists, and almost three dozen who will come aboard as crew and recruiters. Plus any of their friends almost without any kind of guarantee of their loyalty. Our decision to keep the Galileo and crew her ourselves is going to cause a hell of a reaction when word gets to the right people. I’m sure there’s a lot of scampering around, trying to find out something concrete already. And trust me on this, those guys know their jobs, so it won’t be long.”
Simon sat quietly for so long that Gayle started to speak. Kitty held her hand out and shook her head. Finally, he spoke. “Once we take this step, it is a certainty that none of our lives will ever be the same. Not to mention a bunch of people we’re asking to follow us blindly. We’re going to have to achieve an equal-but-separate status and the technology on board this ship is all we’ve got. Our lack of numbers is a definite liability, but at the same time, we’re going to have to start being careful who we let in. I have some ideas on that for a later meeting.”
Once he got started, the rest just flowed out. “For the short-term, our direction is towards independence, although everybody concerned will know just how dependent we really are on the Earth, at least for now. We will outgrow that need rather quickly and become a separate, self-governing branch. A branch that will eventually absorb the parent as they get the technology we have aboard and join us or stay earthbound. It’s a dream I started having right after Kitty and I first came aboard. Now it looks like that dream will come true. If I have to give it a name, I’d call it The Terran Alliance.” Simon looked at his three commanders, one his wife, and two his friends. “I’m serious, guys. Tell me you don’t feel it, too, and I’ll walk away from this right now.”
Silence reigned on the bridge for a moment that was, to Simon, at least, an eternity. Gayle was the one to speak for the trio. “No, Simon, we feel it, too. We just didn’t have the words for it. You brought it to life. You’ve given it a face. I say let’s go start an empire!”
Stephen grinned and bowed. “Emperor Simon, the First! And his Empress, Kitty!”
Simon exploded. “No! Emperors rule by decree. And I don’t see our Alliance ruled that way. As soon as we have enough people, there will have to be elections. And I guarantee that my name will not be on the ballot! All I want is my own ship. And a chance to see things that no man has ever seen before. That’s another part of my dream, and no way is that going to happen if I am anything other than a ships’ captain. This boy’s happy with Captain Hawke. Period. End of discussion.”
Kitty addressed the silence that followed Simon’s ultimatum. “Whatever you say, Dear, I’ll go along with, but that is quite a ways in the future yet,” she said as if to a child. She laid a hand on his arm and smiled, taking the sting out of her tone. “Change of subject. I don’t think you have to worry about being too imposing to other people anymore. I overheard a couple of those kids actually brag that they got the Captain for a guide. We got twelve females in this bunch, by the way. Gayle and I won’t be alone anymore. Also, Stephen suggested an additional function for the wristbands. I checked with the computer, and it’s do-able. I did have some trouble getting it to respond to me at first, by the way. We now have a way to let people know we need them without being obvious. A mild electric shock. More like a tingle. That way, anyone down below can be told to report aboard before we leave orbit. It can also be used to call specific individuals or identify persons who are requesting a beam-up.” Simon considered what she had said. “Good ideas. And that’s to all of you. Looks like we’ve got a real good start here. Now all we need are about eight hundred more people.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Two weeks produced significant changes. The first batch of recruits talked to friends who talked to other friends and the first group of thirty-five turned into over seven hundred new faces living on, training on, and otherwise finding reason to be aboard the gigantic city/ship.
The first few days after the convention, Simon, Kitty, and Gayle conducted interviews with all those who accepted wristbands. Gayle’s second contribution to the crew, nearly a dozen large, intimidating friends of her brother, acted as more security and escorted each interviewee back and forth as they were called up from the lower levels.
A more professional solution was in the works though. Simon had contacted his old platoon and almost the entire unit, another thirty-three, joined outright. Six were either dead or off the grid as some called it. They would absorb Gayle’s original force and train them up to Simon’s standards.
Since none of the three were professional interviewers, they finally decided to just chat with each and see how it went. Simon specifically focused on education and home life when he sat down with an applicant. He laid out his ideas and listened to how each person reacted to what he had to say, then went into chat mode to draw out the inner thoughts of his prospect and let the answer to his final two questions count for as much as the whole conversation up to that point. “So, how do you feel,” he would ask casually while refilling a pair of coffee cups on the small table between them, “about leaving home for almost a year at this point in your life?”
The answer was invariably some form of, “Are you kidding? Look around us. How could I possibly pass this up?” The second question usually caught the interviewee by surprise. “Do you realize that every government on Earth wants this ship and will do anything to get it?” Only twice did Simon make a note that the applicant wasn’t ready for a position aboard Galileo. One other impressed him enough, twenty-two years old, straight A’s, finished high school a year early and in college, majored in physics while getting respectable grades in creative writing, to have Kitty talk to her and get a second opinion. One thing all four were universally agreed on: finding others to take over the interviewing process.
The scientific staff had been hand-picked by Stephen and they were soon found poking into various and obscure portions of the ship in search of ... whatever. The science department had grown to somewhere in excess of one hundred and was making great strides in cataloging the technology, or at the least, getting an idea of what could be grouped with what as far as basic effects were concerned.
Several things had emerged for certain already from that quarter: that the massive matter converter that fed the factories comprising the entire center of the ship, the teleportation system, and a small device found in the mess halls and called a food processor, were offshoots of the same technology. And the computer had a virus that was slowly lobotomizing it.
The propulsion s
ystem was giving the scientists fits because they had finally figured out that the basic fuel was anti-matter monopoles, and Doctor Barnes identified the fact that the computer was infected with what was quite probably the same virus that killed the crew, being composed, she guessed, of the same material as the aliens themselves.
Each day ended with a debriefing for the four friends. Three weeks after the first scientists came aboard, Stephen sat down at the ready room table and started without preamble. “I have bad news and good news. And it comes in the same statement. The computer is lobotomizing itself. According to Dr. Barnes, remember her?” Even Kitty made a comment some time back that it was getting harder to work with. “Apparently it is a gradual thing.” He put his feet up on the desk, indicating that the matter wasn’t about to bring their dream to an abrupt end. “It seems that somehow some of the virus that killed the crew got past the hermetic seal on the computer housing. It goes after higher brain functions first, so we are losing its speech programs and most of its self-willed protocols. We’ll still have the autonomous functions, though, like environmental controls and gravity control. Now, before we go any farther, I’ve got to say that I like the idea, in a way. If there are any lingering ... things in there, like commands we haven’t found, they should be gone by the time we get the upper hand.”
Simon nodded. “Joanna Barnes?”
“Right. Anyway, she seems to be on the trail of a way to fight this virus. It looks like information is written to and read from the memory core by means of something she calls whisker lasers. Doctor Barnes thinks that since the original owners used their own proteins, the core was susceptible to the virus and it was only a matter of time before it happened. She and a hand-picked team worked day and night to identify the virus and now are in the process of getting the computer to disinfect itself.”
“I really don’t want to sound like too much of a dummy,” Simon said, “but just how will she do that? If the core is infected ...?”
“Apparently,” Stephen said, “all she needed to do was to clear a portion of the gel manually, then get a set of commands inserted into the cleared core, and the computer would take control of the lasers and target and destroy any traces of the virus remaining in the gel itself.”
“And has this process worked?” Simon asked worriedly. “If we don’t have a working computer ...”
“As far as we can tell at this time, it’s working,” Stephen said. “It isn’t as simple as I made it sound, of course. Barnes has assembled a team on her own to fight the infection. She has medical doctors, computer techs, laser specialists, and I don’t know how many others working on the problem. She seems to think that it will only take a few more days before the system is cleaned up. One good thing is that due to the fact that all the colony infrastructure data was in so many places in the factory section, we seem to have kept all that. We did lose all data on the alien language though. Apparently no one bothered to copy it out. I guess they thought that they had plenty of time. The bright spot is that we can reprogram the computer to our specifications as we go, and by the time we’re ready to leave orbit, we should have a full set of instructions for it. If not, we can handle most functions manually.”
“Well, then,” Simon said, “as uncontaminated space becomes available, start inputting anything you think we need. Navigation programs, astronomical data, whatever. If we are going to leave orbit and start building a space dock, we need all the information we can get.”
“I’ve got it under control,” Stephen said.
Simon’s feet joined Stephen’s on the ready room table as the end-of-day briefing wound down. “The news about the computer is both good and bad as far as I can see,” he said. “I don’t know how much ‘disk’ space we have, but keeping unnecessary things off the hard drive is one of the things people try to do with computers. This virus looks like it’s going to do that for us whether we like it or not. The fact that most of the things we call ships’ services are going to survive is good. Bad is that we are losing all language skills, astrogational data, and automatic traffic control. Bad is that we have no idea what else we’ve already lost or will still lose before Dr. Barnes gets this thing under control. Good is that Dr. Barnes and her team think that we may have that accomplished in the next few days. Good is that Stephen’s people think that we can make do with manual control of most of those things until someone can work out new programs to handle autonomous functions.”
He waved a sheaf of interviews in the air. “Another good thing is that every one of these kids has more formal education than I ever dreamed I would get,” he said. “Kitty and Gayle say damn near the same thing about each one of their interviewees that I do about mine.” He tossed one interview out on the table. “Eager, ambitious, intelligent.” Another paper. “Enthusiastic.” Another. “Determined and smart.”
He laid the balance of the stack on the table carefully. “One thing I do not want to do is let us fall into the thought that it takes age to be prepared for service aboard this ship. Everything is new to all of us and I think that the younger folks that we attract, which is going to be a very high percentage, are just as capable, maybe even more so because of their age, as any of the four of us at this table tonight. These are the people that the future ‘captains of industry’ would be drawn from under other circumstances and I think that we can use most of this bunch as the core of our primary command teams. Put them in charge of various departments or second in command to one of Stephen’s people until they are competent to run the department themselves.”
Kitty raised her hand during Simon’s summation and when he nodded at her, asked, “Are you sure that that is the best course of action? Shouldn’t we have older people in charge?” She let an embarrassed look cross her face. “I don’t want to sound like I’m discriminating based on age, but I guess that’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?”
Simon grinned at her. “Yes, you are, Dear. And I was guilty of the same thing for a while. ‘Make sure to have wiser heads running the show,’ I told myself until I started reading these interviews. You haven’t seen Gayle’s or mine, but they all say things like ‘conscientious, level-headed, responsible, or trustworthy.’ Keep in mind that these ... kids have all had a chance to spend time away from the nest and while a few aren’t ready to take on the burden of command, most of them seem to be. And as far as I can see we got a lot better than we deserve with this first batch. Especially since all of this is almost as new to them as it is to us.” He hesitated for a moment, and said, “Another problem I see is that we need teachers in various things, so a priority on our return will be to recruit as many people capable of teaching astronautics, physics, and anything else we decide on to the rest of the crew. I would imagine that some of the scientists already aboard would fill those slots admirably. They would get to stay aboard and study the ship and train people at the same time. We get the best of both worlds: older heads laying down the framework, and younger, more ambitious people to implement our decisions.”
He effectively ended the session by adding, “We really should reward the courage and adventurousness this batch showed in making the trip up here in the first place. Command will be a good way to punish them for that courage, don’t you think? Besides, if you look at this thing as a military operation, we have the captain, first officer, security chief and science officer all in agreement about a course of action. We will of course add members to this council as we come to trust them. We keep ultimate control among ourselves and can demote or retrain anyone we think isn’t making the grade. But since this has turned into a military operation, there can be only one Captain, one final authority. Unfortunately, that happens to be me, thanks to you,” he looked meaningfully at Kitty. “I’ll gladly trade positions with any one of you if that’s a problem.” The offer to step down was ignored by all present as each one planned their next moves.
All levels teemed with people moving from one place to another as they learned their new jobs, or carried out so
me chore necessary to the comfort and well-being of over nine hundred people crammed into one big container. Some were already moving into quarters and spending more time aboard than on Earth.
The pilots had started making training flights with the shuttles and there was a waiting list for fighter training. That one was going to take some time. The differences between a shuttle and fighter were enormous. The main one being that the fighters weren’t flown by intuition or seat-of-the-pants, but by a more direct neural interface. Fighter pilots wore a skin-tight suit containing a myriad of receptors connected to various ship functions. An accompanying helmet tied the pilot into the sensor suite accessing the heads-up-display and even throttle control.
Half a dozen engineers were aboard getting the factories prepped and most positions were fully staffed. The bridge crews were shaping up and Astrometrics, led by Stephen, had identified six different locations that were suitable for space docks.