The occasion of the rescue of the Virtue initiated my first meeting with Senior Command: the Captain and subCaptains. So I would not feel overawed in such company, Elia Riles, my immediate supervisory officer, would also attend.
Today the power and freedom of the Star Captains is greatly reduced, but when I first shipped among the stars, each one was the ruler of his or her domain: that is, the ship and all her activities, whether economic, scientific or political. Since quantum repeater satellites were relatively new and not yet numerous enough for sector-wide instant communication, a Ship Captain had to have the authority to negotiate in the best interests of his House and Ship. The only authority a captain answered to was the Board of Directors, and most boards were understanding in the extreme, since they were themselves retired captains for the most part.
Since mass is an issue on any ship, the Captain's Quarters were not large by planetary standards. The decor, however, was exotic, expensive and elegant. Instead of the usual digital artwork or color patterns on the bulkheads, she had mounted various physical artifacts with informative laser-etched plaques instead of active screens. Rare and wonderful fabrics covered the rest of the bulkheads (what you dirt-eaters would call walls), the deck (floor) and furnishings. I recognized panzi leather, kurta silk and digifabs of nanopolymers produced at the permanent space station Alpha.
Elia had instructed me to wear my ship's dress jumpsuit, less ostentatious than a planet-side dress black uniform, but still impressive. The assembled company were similarly dressed. Glossy blacks, reds, yellows, greens and blues, denoting the various ship's specialties, glimmered in the multitude of pinpoint biolumeniers lighting the space. Service ribbons decorated each chest, the more senior the spacer the more glittering nanopowered decorations they sported, the ribbons being interwoven in the fabric itself. I was not eligible for any decoration yet, although I would soon receive my first year service stripe for my sleeve.
The Captain stood near the drink dispenser, serving each officer herself, a mark of her democratic nature. This equality did not extend outside this room, however. Captain Jenna St. Cloud was the sort of leader who seemed comfortable in her role, commanding without seeming to order, leading while preserving initiative, projecting an easy familiarity while reserving dignity. I may sound like a star-struck young spacer even now, but a spacer's first captain is like his first love.
Bosun Riles guided me lightly by my elbow into the line of officers. At the pace we were moving, I would be eye-to-eye with the captain in a few moments. Riles whispered in my ear.
"Just be yourself, Ish. She's not going to nuke you."
I nodded, swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to inhale past the constriction in my chest. The officer in front of me stepped aside and Captain St. Cloud looked directly into my eyes.
"You must be Ishmael O'Connor penDragon. The young bosun's mate that couldn't get himself lost. Glad to have a chance to meet you before I have to send your letter."
She referred to the Condolence Letter spacer's families dreaded.
"Yes, Ma'am; er, well, no ma'am."
"Which is it, young penDragon?"
"Yes I am Ishmael O'Connor penDragon and no you won't have to send that letter yet, ma'am."
"Well answered!" She offered a wai and I returned the bow, inclining slightly lower and waiting until she rose to straighten, then standing upright myself. "What will you drink, Ishmael?"
"I...uh, well, to be honest ma'am, I don't know what I want. Choose something for me, if you will."
"A man who isn't afraid to admit his ignorance! Better and better! Well sir, since you have saved the House over thirteen million credits by returning that scow, not to mention your own valuable hide, I will pour you some yCigIII terrolia brandy."
Those officers standing close by laughed. A yellow-suited Health Services officer said, "Not too much, Cap. Else he'll be in sick bay and miss his rotation."
The Captain poured a generous beaker of milky-purple liquid and handed it to me. She picked up her own beaker, half-full of some black substance that moved like liquid tar.
"Officers, I give you Bosun's Mate Ishmael O'Connor penDragon."
The group rapped their beakers with various rings, bracelets or such, making a musical ringing sound.
"Bosun's Mate penDragon, I hereby award you a Medal of Merit for your creative rescue of yourself, your cargo and your ship. Any command is important, and you preserved yourself and the House materiel in your charge as a good commander should. Well done!"
I stood there with my glass half-raised, no doubt looking foolish. My face grew hot. I'm sure I turned several shades darker. Less than a year in space and I had earned a decoration! True, the Medal of Merit is the lowest award, just above a Journey Badge, which only denotes a spacer's presence on some significant journey; nevertheless, it was a decoration. There were plenty of senior spacers who had nothing but their Journey Badges after decades in space.
I stammered my thanks to the captain. She nodded and gestured that I should circulate. The others came up to me and offered me their names and congratulations. A small group encouraged me to tell my tale, which occupied my time until the mess bell sounded. I found my place marker, which glowed in digiscript on a prismatic marker that extruded itself from the table surface, so those across from me could discretely remind themselves of my name, and I could know theirs. I thought this a clever way to save strangers the embarrassment of forgetting a name, especially when the Captain was required to entertain people she had just met, or had never met and would probably never meet again. The ship's processors stored this information along with all the other the terrabits of data she accumulated.
The dinner was not lavish by planetary banquet standards, but it was quite a bit nicer than typical ship's rations. One or two of my companions made sure to inform me that such was not the usual case, but this was the monthly officers' dinner and thus a special occasion. There was the usual soy-based proteins, but seasoned more exotically than usual. Vegetables and fruits from all over the Sagittarius A arm of the Galaxy. Fresh baked bread!
Conversation was lively. Elia, my faithful supervisor, sat across from me, and helped cue me to those conversational items I might not understand. Those officers seated near me related their own stories of misadventure, usually presented in a humorous, self-deprecating tone that down-played the danger and emphasized the individual's luck in the face of a maliciously unpredictable universe.
After the food was cleared and after-mess drinks dispensed, the Captain sat herself in the head chair once again. All eyes turned to her.
"Spacers, here's to long life, vast riches and undying love!" We acknowledged her toast and waited for the business we assumed she was about to present.
"In twenty-seven days we will cross the orbital plane of the XV234.45 star system. One hundred and fifty years ago, relative, the House schooner Star Queen called upon the colony established on the fourth planet of the system, named Reliance. They have a pioneer-agarian economy with a feudal-democratic sociopolitical government. According to processor projections we have equipment they could use. It's possible they will have surplus goods by now. We have data/voice acquisition via direct laserbeam data transmission. They indicate they have food products available. We know we can always sell food products. I am ordering a Trade Mission to Reliance. We expect you will be on journey for about six weeks ship time, about six months relative."
The term 'relative' referred to the time distortions implicit in high-velocity (near light-speed) travel. When a spacer referred to time, he usually meant ship time, that is to say, the chronometer-measured time of the ship itself. Traveling at a fraction of the speed of light, time passes at different rates on the relatively static planets or space stations. And of course, all these are moving through space at their own velocities and orbits, so time, such a simple, directional concept, becomes quite complicated when long-distance space travel is taken into consideration.
The captain named off the officers who were to lead this Mission. His eyes fell on Elia Riles.
"Bosun Riles. I know you would like to go, but I want one of your juniors to get the experience, so select someone to go as Bosun of the Bridge for the Quest." I knew I was too junior to go as the bridge bosun. But the captain's eyes fell on me next.
"And make sure Ish goes along as second."
"Yes ma'am," Riles answered, but she cast a hard look at me. I think for that moment she was jealous.
The rest of the evening passed without much to interest me. My mind was filled with the thought of being one of two crew members responsible for piloting the barquentine Quest, a medium-sized auxiliary ship capable of transporting a crew of ten or so, along with a vast hold area suitable for almost any type of cargo. She would have a fore-and-aft rigged particle-sail to boost her plasma drive. Very fast, with an atmosphere-capable orbital shuttle, she was the largest 'boat' that could be carried by a schooner-sized vessel like the Ody. And that is how I came to learn the pain of being a spacer.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Chapter Four
"Ish." Bosun Riles swung her seat forty-five degrees to face her new Bridge 'Ox'.
"Yes?"
"We're coming up on the Ryan Asteroid Field. I'd like you to take a scow and place auto-miners. Feel like doing some real piloting?"
I thought my chest would explode with excitement! I would be a command pilot! Well, true, it was a microcosmic command, but I would be pilot of a vessel and that was considered a command position, no matter how lowly. Of course, I'd be 'commanding' robots and not humans, but for a young man dedicated to spacing, a cargo scow was better than nothing.
"Processor-central will notify you when the boat is ready. Kabila's on her way to the bridge now, so when she arrives you can return to your quarters and prepare for extraship voyage."
"Thank you, Riles."
She turned her pilot's seat back to her array of monitor panels floating over her work surface. "Sure, Ish. Don't blow it."
"I'll certainly try not to," I answered. Did she think I was going to deliberately screw up?
As soon as Shanti Kabila relieved me I made my way to my pad. I sat in front of my processor screen. With no one to observe me, I navigated the database until I found the manual for the XA23 Cargo Scow. Just for review, you understand. I had flown the thing for hours and hours in the simulator at the Academy, of course. And the simulator was real in every sense but the most important: you wouldn't die after a mistake in the sim.
My proctor at the creche had told me many times that "a good spacer never takes any command for granted." Of course, that was his duty, as a proctor, more or less to be a father-figure, a role model of exemplary spacer behavior. Silas Warner was his name. I hadn't thought of him for years, but as I reviewed the control panels of the boat his image seemed to hover over my shoulder, nodding approvingly.
The scow, like all machines, was Intelligent, with a capital I. All machines were, to the degree necessary to perform their functions. The complexity or duration of these tasks varied, obviously, so a simple surface maintenance 'bot might spend its service life of a hundred years doing nothing but scrubbing and repairing carbonfiber structures; a spaceship might spend a hundred years or more processing terabytes per second and executing millions of complex tasks. So why are humans in space at all?
It is the age-old debate, hearkening back to the very foundations of space exploration, centuries ago on Earth: robots or men?
Robots have nearly every advantage in space: they do not require complex lifesupport systems, only minimal temperature/radiation/moisture protections. They have virtually unlimited life spans, decade after decade of function without rest or relief. Certainly they are subject to accident, wear and malfunction, but if they failed it was only money lost, not a human life, unique and never to be seen again when claimed by death. The only quality robots lacked to be perfect space explorers was the one quality at which humans excelled: ambition. Robots' only motivation is their programming. If the programmers did not anticipate a situation, the robot was incapable of dealing with it. Despite the complexity of current robots, no one has understood how to make a robot curious, independent, or greedy.
I am not being cynical when I list greed as one of the uniquely human qualities that has sent humanity across the Milky Way. The House of penDragon was spawned in greed. It was the acquisitive nature of the Founding House Captains that sent probes, then explorers, then colonists, then great interstellar clipper ships, bearing information and goods and culture everywhere within their reach. Humanity will breed. We are organic, we are animal, it is our nature. As humans populate, then over-populate, we need the space. While we have changed over the centuries, evolved and changed, like all other components of the universe, we are still animal life. If stars and galaxies change and evolve, why not we, the products of those stars and galactic forces? After all, we are stardust, literally.
And the universe is big enough to accommodate us; we haven't even begun to infect our galaxy to its limits, so why consider a future lying a billion years away? At this point in my career we had encountered a few other planets with Earth-like ecologies, but none contained species with culture—the ultimate definition of humanity: an animal with culture. Some worlds were closed to exploitation because the Exploration and Settlement Directorate deemed them too important to the future to be exploited in the present, but there were a lot of planets available, when you include those amenable to terraforming, so few Houses grumbled when the Directorate closed a system to exploitation.
My processor chimed and a text message glowed on the virtual screen.
Scow Virtue is ready for extraship voyage.
I grabbed my voyage kit and fought myself not to run to the hanger deck. The trip seemed to take hours, although it was only minutes until I stood at the hanger entry port, which irised open when the scanner read my ID implant. The boat Virtue squatted about twenty meters away, her impulse engines glowing in warm-up mode.
Scows have an unglamorous role in space, but they are vital, nonetheless. XA23s were capable of robotic spacing (spacers never say flight), but when a pilot was available, and I certainly needed the command time, human-piloting was standard. The ship is essentially a space-worthy, self-powered container, elliptical in shape, with a wide cargo door and bay in the stern, a tiny command station in a bubble-extrusion on the dorsal bow.
(Ship surfaces are named like the surfaces of a body: dorsal=top, ventral=bottom, bow=front, stern=rear. Left and right are used for clarity, rather than the old nautical terms. Since ships are not streamlined in any way, except for gravity-well lifters, various parts' locations may be designated as proximal or distal, medial or lateral to the central axes of a ship.)
I entered through the open cargo hatch in order to inspect the load. The automining satellites had all been loaded robotically, each magnetically locked into place until dispersal. I verified that all the magnetic locks were glowing green, then entered the accessway to the cockpit.
"Close the cargo hatch," I said as I settled into the pilot's couch. A light on the virtual screen went dark. The restraints on the couch locked into place, a reassuring feeling, although after a few hours the confinement became most uncomfortable. Pressure-reducing pneumatics in the couch began a rhythmic massage to prevent injury to this fragile flesh that contains the Mind that is I.
"Odysseus Control, Virtue is ready for launch."
"Odysseus Control, roger. Virtue is ready for launch." I could not distinguish the owner of the voice. It may have been robotic.
I scanned the processor screen, saw all indicators were 'in the green'.
"Board is green. Commencing launch cycle."
"Magnetic port will be go in T-minus thirty." The rotating 'vacuum' beacon and warning klaxon started their cycles, informing anyone in the hanger they had better leave the area now if they did not wish to become a frozen corpse drifting forever in interstellar space.
I touched the control that toggled autopilot to 'off'. I would take Virtue out of the hanger under my own control. No one would expect me to give my first launch over to robot control.
"Port is clear. Virtue is go for launch. Good voyage, Ish."
"Port is clear. Virtue go. Thank you." Despite the personal wishes at the end, I still could not be certain it wasn't just the ship's processor routines that wished me a good voyage.
I nudged the control joystick with my thumb and forefinger, felt the split-second delay as the scow's control circuits processed my actions, then Virtue lifted from the hanger deck and edged forward. I was concentrating too hard to revel in the moment. I pushed the joystick forward a bit more and with the slight rushing-fluid noise of the impulse jets, the little bug-like scow seemed to scuttle forward and squirt out of the hanger bay like an ejected watermelon seed from an accomplished spitter's lips.
I was in space! The ship emerged from the schooner's shadow. I looped around and over so I could see Odysseus against the starlit background of space. My mind was brought to silence at the sight of the ship, my ship, my home in space, my village in the vacuum.
"Engage auto-navigation. Bear for Marker Point Alpha."
"Roger." The Virtue used a female voice. I could have reset the preference panel for any of a dozen possible voices, but the default choice was fine with me.
Now that the ship was autopiloting, I could relax and enjoy the view. How can I describe the universe to a planet-bound human? What words will fill that limited perception with the enormity, the sheer prolific spectacle of our galaxy?
Odysseus' route lay in the Sagittarius A arm of the galaxy, so the view out the ports was thickly packed with stars. Great gas clouds lit from within like some cosmic lampshade hung in the distance. Spacer-clones are genetically engineered to perceive a wider spectrum of light than other human-derivitives, so for me the space around me shone with jewel-like colors, every possible hue from the sickly purple of ultraviolet to the throbbing glow of infrared. The stars beamed perfect and steady, unfiltered by atmosphere, undimmed by any nearby star's light.
We were passing one of House penDragon's star systems designated SagGamma3, where we, or rather I, would release fifty robot mine/factories, which would locate, recover and process various metals and chemicals from the drifting chunks of rock and ice. Every few years a schooner would orbit close enough to send another scow to collect the products, possibly even old Ody herself. I checked the rangefinder to verify it was set to automatically detect and avoid collisions. Some jockeys like to shut that feature off when in deep space, as being unnecessary; and spacers dislike anything unnecessary. "It can't fail if it isn't onboard." Even now that comparative luxuries are a routine part of shipboard life, spacers dislike anything, with mass or without, that is not necessary. It's just something else to go wrong.
My viewpanel created a digital display of our section of space, with the Ody designated as a warm yellow dot, our destination in blue, and the Virtue in red, with a trail of small dots indicating our course, green for ahead of the ship, an arc of orange dots showing our course so far. Another window on the screen showed an image of the asteroid belt itself. Behind it, glowing like a great orange and red ball, I could make out the disk of the nearest planet, a gas giant no one had bothered to name or catalogue. Gas giants were too common to be interesting for resource development; nearly every star with a planetary system had one or two. All the frozen methane you could want for the taking. No, a far-away gas giant was useless and uninteresting, but the asteroid belt it had created sometime during the system's evolution, that had valuable metals and chemicals, even sometimes water and interesting biologicals, depending on the type of asteroids present.
I was scheduled for a six-hour voyage. Two out, two there, two back. Easy trip, just something to give the newbie a shot at piloting and evaluate my performance. Of course The ship was in constant communication with Ody's processors and voicecom was immediately available if required. The ship knew where I was and what I was doing every second, the voyage data constantly recorded and analyzed for any interesting anomalies that might increase profit or improve safety or any other aspect of penDragon interests that might find some bit of datum useful.
On schedule the field grew in size in my viewfinder, the visual display adjusting to give me an enhanced perspective of the field. If I looked out the forward canopy there was nothing to see at all, for little chunks of rock, even those ten kilometers across, don't show up so well until so close an encounter could wind up being permanent. The display condensed and processed the information to make it comprehensible at a glance. We were approaching the field from about thirty degrees below the plane of ecliptic. When we were close enough, the ship would match orbits with a reference asteroid, then accelerate so the ship was moving faster than the field itself as it orbited the double star in the distance. Then the autominers would be released periodically and begin their exploration, survey and development of the field.
Just for the experience, I brought the Virtue into position manually, just using the instruments. I used quite a bit more fuel than the ship's own processors would have, of course, but I managed to match orbit and speed on my second attempt. My reward was a message on my viewpanel: "Orbital insertion successful."
A voice crackled from the cockpit speaker, broken up by cosmic radiation.
"Good job, Ish. Now go to auto, please."
"Roger, Riles. I was about to switch over."
"Roger that, Ish. Enjoy the ride."
"Will do. Out."
"Odysseus out."
I basked in the public compliment and tapped the touchscreen stud that turned the ship over to processor control. I suddenly felt confined in the pilot couch and squirmed and twisted to try to relieve my restless muscles. I tapped the couch control to increase the stimulation/pressure relief system, thinking the feeling was caused by blood pooling in my extremities. That relieved some of the discomfort, but on and off for the next four hours the feeling would return, an almost irresistible urge to move, to be able to stand up, walk about, turn over...anything but be on my back, held like an object in a gloved hand. I think it's simply a deeply-rooted instinct against remaining immobile for too long, a need that hearkens back to our days when we were prey as often as we were predator. Even after all these eons we are still prisoners of our ape ancestors' needs.
Virtue was now moving at ten times the orbital period of the asteroid field. When the first autominer was ready, a green light glowed on my screen, the hydraulic latches on the cargo door released and the door opened. I felt a mild vibration as the first satellite was loosed from its magnetic locks. The cargo-area viewer displayed the autominer sliding on its track to the open door, then tumbling into space. The processors onboard the satellite then took over, impulse engines fired and the autominer traveled on its long voyage into the field. One by one the ship's processor launched her cargo into the field as we traveled. From time to time I could see enhanced images of some of the larger asteroids on my realtime display.
"Odysseus to Virtue."
"Virtue here."
"Sensors...(static)...high-energy...(static)...on...(static)...stand-by course correction...(static)...".
I concluded that Ody was trying to tell me a stream of cosmic radiation had been detected in my area and the processor was implementing a course correction to avoid it. I touched my control screen to see what Virtue's own instruments detected and immediately the screen displayed a powerful stream of charged particles crossing my course. The processor was calculating a new route, the figures displayed in a sidebar legend faster than I could follow. Suddenly, all around the ship a purple-ish glow began, rippling in ghostly waves as the ship's hull encountered the outer edge of this river of radiation. There was nothing for me to do, since the ship's processor could handle such situations far faster than I could. I waited, unconsciously holding my breath for a long moment.
The auxiliary maneuver jets kicked in, causing the Virtue to lurch violently right and ventral, angling the ship below the margins of the charged particle stream. The g forces pressed me against the couch, the restraints cut into my limbs, I felt blood pooling in my belly and legs, then surging into my head, causing me to feel as if my brain would crack my skull open.
The violent thrust-vector changes caused the ship to roll and change attitude rapidly. I focused my vision on my datascreens, avoiding the sight of stars whirling about outside the cockpit ports. The processors were working at capacity. One datascreen window indicated no contact with the Ody's processors, so the ship had to rely on its own sensors and data. The eerie glow of charged particles surrounded the ship. I heard the faint sizzle of interference in the processor circuits as the ionized atmosphere of the ship interfered with the electron streams the processor used. A large trickle of sweat ran down my forehead and dripped from the end of my nose, the first indication that my brain was beginning to appreciate the nature of my situation.
Although we were leaving the stream at full emergency power, this river of charged particles was wide and deep. Small crackles of energy roved over the Virtue's hull, like miniature lightning strikes. The cockpit was filled with sizzling sounds, the dataviewers started to break up, displaying only random pixels of light. There was a loud bang as a particularly strong static charge leapt from the ship's hull to contact some tiny piece of space debris. The entire cockpit went dark, while the ship began to roll slowly to the right, dead in space.
I was in a completely disabled scow, two shiphours from any assistance, drifting in space. Ody's sensors would have great difficulty locating me without any signals emanating from Virtue and the interference of the particle stream.
I was literally on my own.
"Yes?"
"We're coming up on the Ryan Asteroid Field. I'd like you to take a scow and place auto-miners. Feel like doing some real piloting?"
I thought my chest would explode with excitement! I would be a command pilot! Well, true, it was a microcosmic command, but I would be pilot of a vessel and that was considered a command position, no matter how lowly. Of course, I'd be 'commanding' robots and not humans, but for a young man dedicated to spacing, a cargo scow was better than nothing.
"Processor-central will notify you when the boat is ready. Kabila's on her way to the bridge now, so when she arrives you can return to your quarters and prepare for extraship voyage."
"Thank you, Riles."
She turned her pilot's seat back to her array of monitor panels floating over her work surface. "Sure, Ish. Don't blow it."
"I'll certainly try not to," I answered. Did she think I was going to deliberately screw up?
As soon as Shanti Kabila relieved me I made my way to my pad. I sat in front of my processor screen. With no one to observe me, I navigated the database until I found the manual for the XA23 Cargo Scow. Just for review, you understand. I had flown the thing for hours and hours in the simulator at the Academy, of course. And the simulator was real in every sense but the most important: you wouldn't die after a mistake in the sim.
My proctor at the creche had told me many times that "a good spacer never takes any command for granted." Of course, that was his duty, as a proctor, more or less to be a father-figure, a role model of exemplary spacer behavior. Silas Warner was his name. I hadn't thought of him for years, but as I reviewed the control panels of the boat his image seemed to hover over my shoulder, nodding approvingly.
The scow, like all machines, was Intelligent, with a capital I. All machines were, to the degree necessary to perform their functions. The complexity or duration of these tasks varied, obviously, so a simple surface maintenance 'bot might spend its service life of a hundred years doing nothing but scrubbing and repairing carbonfiber structures; a spaceship might spend a hundred years or more processing terabytes per second and executing millions of complex tasks. So why are humans in space at all?
It is the age-old debate, hearkening back to the very foundations of space exploration, centuries ago on Earth: robots or men?
Robots have nearly every advantage in space: they do not require complex lifesupport systems, only minimal temperature/radiation/moisture protections. They have virtually unlimited life spans, decade after decade of function without rest or relief. Certainly they are subject to accident, wear and malfunction, but if they failed it was only money lost, not a human life, unique and never to be seen again when claimed by death. The only quality robots lacked to be perfect space explorers was the one quality at which humans excelled: ambition. Robots' only motivation is their programming. If the programmers did not anticipate a situation, the robot was incapable of dealing with it. Despite the complexity of current robots, no one has understood how to make a robot curious, independent, or greedy.
I am not being cynical when I list greed as one of the uniquely human qualities that has sent humanity across the Milky Way. The House of penDragon was spawned in greed. It was the acquisitive nature of the Founding House Captains that sent probes, then explorers, then colonists, then great interstellar clipper ships, bearing information and goods and culture everywhere within their reach. Humanity will breed. We are organic, we are animal, it is our nature. As humans populate, then over-populate, we need the space. While we have changed over the centuries, evolved and changed, like all other components of the universe, we are still animal life. If stars and galaxies change and evolve, why not we, the products of those stars and galactic forces? After all, we are stardust, literally.
And the universe is big enough to accommodate us; we haven't even begun to infect our galaxy to its limits, so why consider a future lying a billion years away? At this point in my career we had encountered a few other planets with Earth-like ecologies, but none contained species with culture—the ultimate definition of humanity: an animal with culture. Some worlds were closed to exploitation because the Exploration and Settlement Directorate deemed them too important to the future to be exploited in the present, but there were a lot of planets available, when you include those amenable to terraforming, so few Houses grumbled when the Directorate closed a system to exploitation.
My processor chimed and a text message glowed on the virtual screen.
Scow Virtue is ready for extraship voyage.
I grabbed my voyage kit and fought myself not to run to the hanger deck. The trip seemed to take hours, although it was only minutes until I stood at the hanger entry port, which irised open when the scanner read my ID implant. The boat Virtue squatted about twenty meters away, her impulse engines glowing in warm-up mode.
Scows have an unglamorous role in space, but they are vital, nonetheless. XA23s were capable of robotic spacing (spacers never say flight), but when a pilot was available, and I certainly needed the command time, human-piloting was standard. The ship is essentially a space-worthy, self-powered container, elliptical in shape, with a wide cargo door and bay in the stern, a tiny command station in a bubble-extrusion on the dorsal bow.
(Ship surfaces are named like the surfaces of a body: dorsal=top, ventral=bottom, bow=front, stern=rear. Left and right are used for clarity, rather than the old nautical terms. Since ships are not streamlined in any way, except for gravity-well lifters, various parts' locations may be designated as proximal or distal, medial or lateral to the central axes of a ship.)
I entered through the open cargo hatch in order to inspect the load. The automining satellites had all been loaded robotically, each magnetically locked into place until dispersal. I verified that all the magnetic locks were glowing green, then entered the accessway to the cockpit.
"Close the cargo hatch," I said as I settled into the pilot's couch. A light on the virtual screen went dark. The restraints on the couch locked into place, a reassuring feeling, although after a few hours the confinement became most uncomfortable. Pressure-reducing pneumatics in the couch began a rhythmic massage to prevent injury to this fragile flesh that contains the Mind that is I.
"Odysseus Control, Virtue is ready for launch."
"Odysseus Control, roger. Virtue is ready for launch." I could not distinguish the owner of the voice. It may have been robotic.
I scanned the processor screen, saw all indicators were 'in the green'.
"Board is green. Commencing launch cycle."
"Magnetic port will be go in T-minus thirty." The rotating 'vacuum' beacon and warning klaxon started their cycles, informing anyone in the hanger they had better leave the area now if they did not wish to become a frozen corpse drifting forever in interstellar space.
I touched the control that toggled autopilot to 'off'. I would take Virtue out of the hanger under my own control. No one would expect me to give my first launch over to robot control.
"Port is clear. Virtue is go for launch. Good voyage, Ish."
"Port is clear. Virtue go. Thank you." Despite the personal wishes at the end, I still could not be certain it wasn't just the ship's processor routines that wished me a good voyage.
I nudged the control joystick with my thumb and forefinger, felt the split-second delay as the scow's control circuits processed my actions, then Virtue lifted from the hanger deck and edged forward. I was concentrating too hard to revel in the moment. I pushed the joystick forward a bit more and with the slight rushing-fluid noise of the impulse jets, the little bug-like scow seemed to scuttle forward and squirt out of the hanger bay like an ejected watermelon seed from an accomplished spitter's lips.
I was in space! The ship emerged from the schooner's shadow. I looped around and over so I could see Odysseus against the starlit background of space. My mind was brought to silence at the sight of the ship, my ship, my home in space, my village in the vacuum.
"Engage auto-navigation. Bear for Marker Point Alpha."
"Roger." The Virtue used a female voice. I could have reset the preference panel for any of a dozen possible voices, but the default choice was fine with me.
Now that the ship was autopiloting, I could relax and enjoy the view. How can I describe the universe to a planet-bound human? What words will fill that limited perception with the enormity, the sheer prolific spectacle of our galaxy?
Odysseus' route lay in the Sagittarius A arm of the galaxy, so the view out the ports was thickly packed with stars. Great gas clouds lit from within like some cosmic lampshade hung in the distance. Spacer-clones are genetically engineered to perceive a wider spectrum of light than other human-derivitives, so for me the space around me shone with jewel-like colors, every possible hue from the sickly purple of ultraviolet to the throbbing glow of infrared. The stars beamed perfect and steady, unfiltered by atmosphere, undimmed by any nearby star's light.
We were passing one of House penDragon's star systems designated SagGamma3, where we, or rather I, would release fifty robot mine/factories, which would locate, recover and process various metals and chemicals from the drifting chunks of rock and ice. Every few years a schooner would orbit close enough to send another scow to collect the products, possibly even old Ody herself. I checked the rangefinder to verify it was set to automatically detect and avoid collisions. Some jockeys like to shut that feature off when in deep space, as being unnecessary; and spacers dislike anything unnecessary. "It can't fail if it isn't onboard." Even now that comparative luxuries are a routine part of shipboard life, spacers dislike anything, with mass or without, that is not necessary. It's just something else to go wrong.
My viewpanel created a digital display of our section of space, with the Ody designated as a warm yellow dot, our destination in blue, and the Virtue in red, with a trail of small dots indicating our course, green for ahead of the ship, an arc of orange dots showing our course so far. Another window on the screen showed an image of the asteroid belt itself. Behind it, glowing like a great orange and red ball, I could make out the disk of the nearest planet, a gas giant no one had bothered to name or catalogue. Gas giants were too common to be interesting for resource development; nearly every star with a planetary system had one or two. All the frozen methane you could want for the taking. No, a far-away gas giant was useless and uninteresting, but the asteroid belt it had created sometime during the system's evolution, that had valuable metals and chemicals, even sometimes water and interesting biologicals, depending on the type of asteroids present.
I was scheduled for a six-hour voyage. Two out, two there, two back. Easy trip, just something to give the newbie a shot at piloting and evaluate my performance. Of course The ship was in constant communication with Ody's processors and voicecom was immediately available if required. The ship knew where I was and what I was doing every second, the voyage data constantly recorded and analyzed for any interesting anomalies that might increase profit or improve safety or any other aspect of penDragon interests that might find some bit of datum useful.
On schedule the field grew in size in my viewfinder, the visual display adjusting to give me an enhanced perspective of the field. If I looked out the forward canopy there was nothing to see at all, for little chunks of rock, even those ten kilometers across, don't show up so well until so close an encounter could wind up being permanent. The display condensed and processed the information to make it comprehensible at a glance. We were approaching the field from about thirty degrees below the plane of ecliptic. When we were close enough, the ship would match orbits with a reference asteroid, then accelerate so the ship was moving faster than the field itself as it orbited the double star in the distance. Then the autominers would be released periodically and begin their exploration, survey and development of the field.
Just for the experience, I brought the Virtue into position manually, just using the instruments. I used quite a bit more fuel than the ship's own processors would have, of course, but I managed to match orbit and speed on my second attempt. My reward was a message on my viewpanel: "Orbital insertion successful."
A voice crackled from the cockpit speaker, broken up by cosmic radiation.
"Good job, Ish. Now go to auto, please."
"Roger, Riles. I was about to switch over."
"Roger that, Ish. Enjoy the ride."
"Will do. Out."
"Odysseus out."
I basked in the public compliment and tapped the touchscreen stud that turned the ship over to processor control. I suddenly felt confined in the pilot couch and squirmed and twisted to try to relieve my restless muscles. I tapped the couch control to increase the stimulation/pressure relief system, thinking the feeling was caused by blood pooling in my extremities. That relieved some of the discomfort, but on and off for the next four hours the feeling would return, an almost irresistible urge to move, to be able to stand up, walk about, turn over...anything but be on my back, held like an object in a gloved hand. I think it's simply a deeply-rooted instinct against remaining immobile for too long, a need that hearkens back to our days when we were prey as often as we were predator. Even after all these eons we are still prisoners of our ape ancestors' needs.
Virtue was now moving at ten times the orbital period of the asteroid field. When the first autominer was ready, a green light glowed on my screen, the hydraulic latches on the cargo door released and the door opened. I felt a mild vibration as the first satellite was loosed from its magnetic locks. The cargo-area viewer displayed the autominer sliding on its track to the open door, then tumbling into space. The processors onboard the satellite then took over, impulse engines fired and the autominer traveled on its long voyage into the field. One by one the ship's processor launched her cargo into the field as we traveled. From time to time I could see enhanced images of some of the larger asteroids on my realtime display.
"Odysseus to Virtue."
"Virtue here."
"Sensors...(static)...high-energy...(static)...on...(static)...stand-by course correction...(static)...".
I concluded that Ody was trying to tell me a stream of cosmic radiation had been detected in my area and the processor was implementing a course correction to avoid it. I touched my control screen to see what Virtue's own instruments detected and immediately the screen displayed a powerful stream of charged particles crossing my course. The processor was calculating a new route, the figures displayed in a sidebar legend faster than I could follow. Suddenly, all around the ship a purple-ish glow began, rippling in ghostly waves as the ship's hull encountered the outer edge of this river of radiation. There was nothing for me to do, since the ship's processor could handle such situations far faster than I could. I waited, unconsciously holding my breath for a long moment.
The auxiliary maneuver jets kicked in, causing the Virtue to lurch violently right and ventral, angling the ship below the margins of the charged particle stream. The g forces pressed me against the couch, the restraints cut into my limbs, I felt blood pooling in my belly and legs, then surging into my head, causing me to feel as if my brain would crack my skull open.
The violent thrust-vector changes caused the ship to roll and change attitude rapidly. I focused my vision on my datascreens, avoiding the sight of stars whirling about outside the cockpit ports. The processors were working at capacity. One datascreen window indicated no contact with the Ody's processors, so the ship had to rely on its own sensors and data. The eerie glow of charged particles surrounded the ship. I heard the faint sizzle of interference in the processor circuits as the ionized atmosphere of the ship interfered with the electron streams the processor used. A large trickle of sweat ran down my forehead and dripped from the end of my nose, the first indication that my brain was beginning to appreciate the nature of my situation.
Although we were leaving the stream at full emergency power, this river of charged particles was wide and deep. Small crackles of energy roved over the Virtue's hull, like miniature lightning strikes. The cockpit was filled with sizzling sounds, the dataviewers started to break up, displaying only random pixels of light. There was a loud bang as a particularly strong static charge leapt from the ship's hull to contact some tiny piece of space debris. The entire cockpit went dark, while the ship began to roll slowly to the right, dead in space.
I was in a completely disabled scow, two shiphours from any assistance, drifting in space. Ody's sensors would have great difficulty locating me without any signals emanating from Virtue and the interference of the particle stream.
I was literally on my own.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Chapter Three
As soon as I plugged my personal data cube into my pad's processor receptacle, the screen on the wall came alive. An image of the Dragon House logo appeared in exquisite detail, then an image of my immediate supervisor onboard ship resolved.
Elia Riles, Bosun of the Bridge, spoke her recorded message to me:
Welcome aboard the Odysseus, Spacer-designate Ishmael O'Connor penDragon. If you have any issues with your quarters or supplies, please consult CWO Ross. We are here to train you and despite what you may have heard in creche or at the Academy, in space each ship is its own world, and each crew their own society. We work together for the benefit of all because that is the only way humans can survive in the Universe. That cooperative spirit is expected to extend to all your shipmates, as best you can. Save any impulses you harbor toward exploitation and domination for our competitors and enemies. The House of the penDragons has survived all these centuries by being faithful to each other. Remember, we are all creche-mates! We are the Spacers of the House of Dragon! Work in keeping with that spirit and we will all live long and prosper. Report for duty at 1300 sh.
Stories in the creche about spacing included lurid accounts of space pirates and horrible alien creatures...and the constant watchfulness required against the machinations of the other great trading houses: the Kai-bad Cartel, Rodriquez-Miller GmbH; Swiss Re, the enormous re-insurance cartel...oh there were plenty of other Houses working the lanes of the Milky Way, sending their own ships spinning off on orbits of a hundred years or more. And there were dangerous planets with hostile life-forms, although at the time I first shipped into space no one had heard of the Ones.
The Academy taught us celestial navigation, processor engineering and a million other subjects. They also drummed into us night and day the need for cooperation among crew...that officers were there to lead by example and promote the professional growth of their crews. That crews worked together for the survival (at the least) of all. One profound error in space can be the last for all aboard. A constant-fusion reactor running at 300 gigawatts is not a toy.
On board ship, however, the culture was somewhat different. At least, on aboard the Ody, as the crew called her, life was quite relaxed, almost to the point of casual; yet, despite this feeling, the work that should have been done was done, and more besides. The Ody was an old ship, requiring constant monitoring and complicated replacement schedules. The ship's processors could keep track of these requirements, of course, but with a ship as old as the Ody, a human still had to initiate the programs and allocate energy resources manually. Of course the latest generation tenners are self-healing, but the ship I was on had been built before that sort of technology was even dreamed of.
In order to maximize our efficiency, which was the only real factor we could control when it came to the long-term profitability of the ship, we had to keep everything running within specs and safety limits, within the budget or below. Constant data streams were feeding our processors from House systems all over our arm of the galaxy, and these data determined where we would be a decade hence, or perhaps fifty years hence...or further into the future. Who really knew all the machinations the Strategists cooked up? Who knew what long-term strategic decision had just been made that would send your ship to a scrapper or a used-dealer and yourself a thousand lightyears away? The House employed thousands of people and used millions of processor-hours modeling possible futures that could change a spacer's life in nanoseconds.
In any event, the atmosphere aboard the Ody was helpful to a newbie like myself. And so, eight ship hours (8 sh) later I reported to the Bosun of the Bridge, the person ostensibly in charge of ship's operations from moment to moment. The only officers who could issue ship-wide commands were the Captain, of course, the Executive Officer, and the Bosun of the Bridge, of which there were usually four or five on a ship our size. All other Commands had to clear a ship-wide order through the Boson or one of the general officers, who either would buck the order upward or take it upon himself to approve it. Obviously the incentive here was for communication and team-resolution of problems, with just enough authority to handle emergency situations without delay.
Bosun Elia Riles was gray-haired, face deeply lined, but she still had a spacer's slim figure and delicate grace in low-g environments. Her eyes glittered with Erulian prostheses which I had only heard of but never seen. They were much more beautiful than organic eyes, being grown of diamond-crystals laced with biosensors. Hers were tinted green, and they shone like two rose-cut emeralds. She smiled old-style carbonfiber synthetics, colored a creamy-white that reminds one of pearls instead of the latest syns of cell-mediated tissue generation. Those are real teeth, for all purposes, made of the same stuff as the originals, sure to last a hundred years or more with good care. I made the Bosun to be somewhere around two hundred and fifty, based on the age of her prosthetics. I strode with as graceful a space-walk as I could manage and came to a perfect halt in front of her console. I gave her the salute I had seen other Ratings give noncommissioned officers. She waved me to a chair, then remembered to return my salute.
"We don't go in for that saluting stuff all that much here," were her first words to me. "But I suppose on your first shift report it's a reasonable formality. Just don't get all 'Space Navy' on me, okay?"
"Okay." I leaned back a fraction of inch in my seat.
"You're going to learn more this year than you learned in all four years of Academy. And that's not to disparage the Academy, it's just that there you learned theory. Here you learn the real thing. This is not a simulator. If you overload the reactor, it will melt down and leave you with no power, no propulsion and no life support. If you were to miscalculate a course you could cost us a generation's worth of profit. We like to say here that there is no unimportant job—just unimportant people. Don't let yourself become unimportant, because onboard a spaceship, anything unimportant gets jettisoned as soon as possible. We don't carry dead mass!"
"Yes, ma'am. I understand."
"I'm sure you do. You're a good student, Ish, by your record. Not the best at any one thing, but pretty darn good at them all. Very high economics score! Ever thought of the Purser's Office? No? Well, don't rule it out, son."
I cringed at Riles' mention of the Purser's Office.
"Anyway. Your console is right here, next to this one. You're Bridge Auxiliary, which means you verify every ship's order, see that the master log processor provides you with a summary at the beginning of your shift and then match the final tally at the end of your shift to make sure you've reviewed each order and verified its receipt by the Command responsible. Of course, most of those orders are coming from me, so if you don't understand an order, you're going to be right here to ask for some help implementing it. During our quiet times, and there are many, we can discuss the reason certain orders are given and the protocols for certain routine emergency situations."
"Routine emergency? The Academy said there were only two conditions in space: all nominal and emergency."
"Well, around here, if we thought every little glitch was an emergency we'd be at Red Alert all the time. So we save 'emergency' for such things as the total destruction of the ship and all aboard her, or some other really big disaster. Otherwise, most emergencies are conditional emergencies. Once they're resolved, they turn out not to be a big deal. Of course, a little emergency can turn into a big emergency. But usually, if that happens, you've only got seconds to live anyway, so we don't worry too much. If we screw up real bad we're all going to die. So don't screw up."
"Yes, ma'am. I'll do my best not to."
"Of course you will." Riles paused. "But you'll screw up anyway. And your shipmates will save your bacon, just as you will save theirs."
"I understand."
"See that you do. We don't need heros. If you think something's wrong, talk to someone about it. Don't wait until for an unmitigated disaster to mention you think something might be wrong. Better to be told you're an idiot than prove it by overlooking a fault in the ship."
I took my seat at the console next to Bosun Riles and began my first tour of duty on the bridge of a real interstellar ship. Today, so many years later, I cannot tell you what happened that day...nothing of consequence, obviously...but that first moment, seated at the auxiliary controls of the Ody, I remember how I felt: filled with power, awed with responsibility, gnawed by doubt, glowing with pride...emotions whirled around me like the rings of Acturus III, chaotic whirling ice-gas clouds, if you've never seen them.
At first the work seemed overwhelming. There was so much to do I thought I would be constantly in catch-up mode, but after about thirty shifts in the 'Ox', as the auxiliary chair was called, with Riles or one of the other bosuns who normally 'rode the Ox' showing me the board, I soon began to learn when I could relax, what required instant action, how to organize myself to survey the streams of data without being bogged down in useless detail...in short, how to do the most basic job of a non-commissioned spacer.
There were the 'non-emergency' emergencies, of course. Each bosun would explain, as their fingers flew over the input screens and they murmured orders into throat mikes, what they did and why they did it that way. They were uniformly calm and precise men and women, rarely raising their voices while working. The one trait all the bridge crew shared were 'restless' eyes. They scanned their data streams unceasingly, tapped various data readouts while talking to you about your creche days.
Standard shift at the console was four hours. Research had demonstrated the optimum work shift for humans at ship controls spanned no more than six sh and no less than three. Crew were given twelve off-duty sh, although some of that time was spent in training or other duty-related activity. There were emergency drills at various times which required all hands to duty stations. As nearly as possible, however, crew were kept to the ancient Earth-standard twenty-four day. Interior lights were dimmed or darkened on that schedule, although one's own pad could be either full dark or full light or anything between, of course.
Chantilly's own planetary day was eighteen Earth-hours long, but the creche and the dorms at the Academy were run on ship hour time anyway. In many ways life aboard the Ody was disappointingly similar to my life on planet, except for the .3g which made me feel almost buoyant, and the occasional acceleration-vector changes.
A spaceship is designed to accelerate in any given direction, but given the difficulty of realigning fusion/plasma jets, the acceleration vector was changed using small impulse jets mounted on all sides. Since 'gravity' was provided by acceleration, all decks (floors) were oriented along the thrust axis. When the ship accelerated in a straight line the crew would be standing or seated and feel this as if it were 'gravity'. This makes walking and moving around inside the ship much easier, and helps the human inner ear keep our brains oriented, thus avoiding the main cause of nausea in low-g environments. Deceleration simply causes one to feel a bit lighter, or acceleration a bit heavier. All vector and speed changes are announced by the ship's systems before hand, and counted down in the time-honored if slightly old-fashioned manner.
Certain areas of the ship may be oriented differently, according to function. So the factory modules, which are fully automated and virtually independent in function are not necessarily provided with decks or bulkheads to accommodate human requirements. The nanoassemblers work best in a zero g environment and are magnetically isolated from the ship's movements.
From the above description one might think voyaging in space to be all dull routine. At the time I started as a spacer perhaps three or four House ships might be lost each trimester, the 120-standard day cycle the House uses for reporting purposes. Out of hundreds of ships that is not a large loss, but each ship represented several dozen to over two hundred people dead, and enormous economic loss. But sailing the cosmic sea is dangerous work and only the best, raised from birth for the task, can survive.
Aside from the obvious dangers of technical failures, there are many hazards in space. Any long voyage subjects the ship to various conditions, from intense gravitational fields to deadly cosmic ray streams; a single stray asteroid or comet could wreak havoc; cruising too close to an imminent supernovae or black hole were obvious dangers; everything from worm holes to asteroid fields presented their various dangers. And then there were the onboard dangers: radiation, EVA accidents, equipment failures and, from time to time, encounters with planetary conditions that threatened crew members. Most spacers survived to return home and retire in comfort—but not all. Many left their corpses on strange worlds or orbited forever in the depths of space.
Still, for the first six weeks aboard the Ody, nothing of any import occurred, except that I was slowly absorbed into the crew, became one member of the team and learned my job as a Spacer 1, to which I was promoted at the end of my six week evaluation. All five of the other Bridge 'Oxes', along with Riles and CWO Rossin, threw a party for me in the Enlisted Crew's Club. Even Alistare, whom I had not seen since our boarding, attended. I received my rank tattoo with great pride: a single hash mark on my right cheek.
Elia Riles, Bosun of the Bridge, spoke her recorded message to me:
Welcome aboard the Odysseus, Spacer-designate Ishmael O'Connor penDragon. If you have any issues with your quarters or supplies, please consult CWO Ross. We are here to train you and despite what you may have heard in creche or at the Academy, in space each ship is its own world, and each crew their own society. We work together for the benefit of all because that is the only way humans can survive in the Universe. That cooperative spirit is expected to extend to all your shipmates, as best you can. Save any impulses you harbor toward exploitation and domination for our competitors and enemies. The House of the penDragons has survived all these centuries by being faithful to each other. Remember, we are all creche-mates! We are the Spacers of the House of Dragon! Work in keeping with that spirit and we will all live long and prosper. Report for duty at 1300 sh.
Stories in the creche about spacing included lurid accounts of space pirates and horrible alien creatures...and the constant watchfulness required against the machinations of the other great trading houses: the Kai-bad Cartel, Rodriquez-Miller GmbH; Swiss Re, the enormous re-insurance cartel...oh there were plenty of other Houses working the lanes of the Milky Way, sending their own ships spinning off on orbits of a hundred years or more. And there were dangerous planets with hostile life-forms, although at the time I first shipped into space no one had heard of the Ones.
The Academy taught us celestial navigation, processor engineering and a million other subjects. They also drummed into us night and day the need for cooperation among crew...that officers were there to lead by example and promote the professional growth of their crews. That crews worked together for the survival (at the least) of all. One profound error in space can be the last for all aboard. A constant-fusion reactor running at 300 gigawatts is not a toy.
On board ship, however, the culture was somewhat different. At least, on aboard the Ody, as the crew called her, life was quite relaxed, almost to the point of casual; yet, despite this feeling, the work that should have been done was done, and more besides. The Ody was an old ship, requiring constant monitoring and complicated replacement schedules. The ship's processors could keep track of these requirements, of course, but with a ship as old as the Ody, a human still had to initiate the programs and allocate energy resources manually. Of course the latest generation tenners are self-healing, but the ship I was on had been built before that sort of technology was even dreamed of.
In order to maximize our efficiency, which was the only real factor we could control when it came to the long-term profitability of the ship, we had to keep everything running within specs and safety limits, within the budget or below. Constant data streams were feeding our processors from House systems all over our arm of the galaxy, and these data determined where we would be a decade hence, or perhaps fifty years hence...or further into the future. Who really knew all the machinations the Strategists cooked up? Who knew what long-term strategic decision had just been made that would send your ship to a scrapper or a used-dealer and yourself a thousand lightyears away? The House employed thousands of people and used millions of processor-hours modeling possible futures that could change a spacer's life in nanoseconds.
In any event, the atmosphere aboard the Ody was helpful to a newbie like myself. And so, eight ship hours (8 sh) later I reported to the Bosun of the Bridge, the person ostensibly in charge of ship's operations from moment to moment. The only officers who could issue ship-wide commands were the Captain, of course, the Executive Officer, and the Bosun of the Bridge, of which there were usually four or five on a ship our size. All other Commands had to clear a ship-wide order through the Boson or one of the general officers, who either would buck the order upward or take it upon himself to approve it. Obviously the incentive here was for communication and team-resolution of problems, with just enough authority to handle emergency situations without delay.
Bosun Elia Riles was gray-haired, face deeply lined, but she still had a spacer's slim figure and delicate grace in low-g environments. Her eyes glittered with Erulian prostheses which I had only heard of but never seen. They were much more beautiful than organic eyes, being grown of diamond-crystals laced with biosensors. Hers were tinted green, and they shone like two rose-cut emeralds. She smiled old-style carbonfiber synthetics, colored a creamy-white that reminds one of pearls instead of the latest syns of cell-mediated tissue generation. Those are real teeth, for all purposes, made of the same stuff as the originals, sure to last a hundred years or more with good care. I made the Bosun to be somewhere around two hundred and fifty, based on the age of her prosthetics. I strode with as graceful a space-walk as I could manage and came to a perfect halt in front of her console. I gave her the salute I had seen other Ratings give noncommissioned officers. She waved me to a chair, then remembered to return my salute.
"We don't go in for that saluting stuff all that much here," were her first words to me. "But I suppose on your first shift report it's a reasonable formality. Just don't get all 'Space Navy' on me, okay?"
"Okay." I leaned back a fraction of inch in my seat.
"You're going to learn more this year than you learned in all four years of Academy. And that's not to disparage the Academy, it's just that there you learned theory. Here you learn the real thing. This is not a simulator. If you overload the reactor, it will melt down and leave you with no power, no propulsion and no life support. If you were to miscalculate a course you could cost us a generation's worth of profit. We like to say here that there is no unimportant job—just unimportant people. Don't let yourself become unimportant, because onboard a spaceship, anything unimportant gets jettisoned as soon as possible. We don't carry dead mass!"
"Yes, ma'am. I understand."
"I'm sure you do. You're a good student, Ish, by your record. Not the best at any one thing, but pretty darn good at them all. Very high economics score! Ever thought of the Purser's Office? No? Well, don't rule it out, son."
I cringed at Riles' mention of the Purser's Office.
"Anyway. Your console is right here, next to this one. You're Bridge Auxiliary, which means you verify every ship's order, see that the master log processor provides you with a summary at the beginning of your shift and then match the final tally at the end of your shift to make sure you've reviewed each order and verified its receipt by the Command responsible. Of course, most of those orders are coming from me, so if you don't understand an order, you're going to be right here to ask for some help implementing it. During our quiet times, and there are many, we can discuss the reason certain orders are given and the protocols for certain routine emergency situations."
"Routine emergency? The Academy said there were only two conditions in space: all nominal and emergency."
"Well, around here, if we thought every little glitch was an emergency we'd be at Red Alert all the time. So we save 'emergency' for such things as the total destruction of the ship and all aboard her, or some other really big disaster. Otherwise, most emergencies are conditional emergencies. Once they're resolved, they turn out not to be a big deal. Of course, a little emergency can turn into a big emergency. But usually, if that happens, you've only got seconds to live anyway, so we don't worry too much. If we screw up real bad we're all going to die. So don't screw up."
"Yes, ma'am. I'll do my best not to."
"Of course you will." Riles paused. "But you'll screw up anyway. And your shipmates will save your bacon, just as you will save theirs."
"I understand."
"See that you do. We don't need heros. If you think something's wrong, talk to someone about it. Don't wait until for an unmitigated disaster to mention you think something might be wrong. Better to be told you're an idiot than prove it by overlooking a fault in the ship."
I took my seat at the console next to Bosun Riles and began my first tour of duty on the bridge of a real interstellar ship. Today, so many years later, I cannot tell you what happened that day...nothing of consequence, obviously...but that first moment, seated at the auxiliary controls of the Ody, I remember how I felt: filled with power, awed with responsibility, gnawed by doubt, glowing with pride...emotions whirled around me like the rings of Acturus III, chaotic whirling ice-gas clouds, if you've never seen them.
At first the work seemed overwhelming. There was so much to do I thought I would be constantly in catch-up mode, but after about thirty shifts in the 'Ox', as the auxiliary chair was called, with Riles or one of the other bosuns who normally 'rode the Ox' showing me the board, I soon began to learn when I could relax, what required instant action, how to organize myself to survey the streams of data without being bogged down in useless detail...in short, how to do the most basic job of a non-commissioned spacer.
There were the 'non-emergency' emergencies, of course. Each bosun would explain, as their fingers flew over the input screens and they murmured orders into throat mikes, what they did and why they did it that way. They were uniformly calm and precise men and women, rarely raising their voices while working. The one trait all the bridge crew shared were 'restless' eyes. They scanned their data streams unceasingly, tapped various data readouts while talking to you about your creche days.
Standard shift at the console was four hours. Research had demonstrated the optimum work shift for humans at ship controls spanned no more than six sh and no less than three. Crew were given twelve off-duty sh, although some of that time was spent in training or other duty-related activity. There were emergency drills at various times which required all hands to duty stations. As nearly as possible, however, crew were kept to the ancient Earth-standard twenty-four day. Interior lights were dimmed or darkened on that schedule, although one's own pad could be either full dark or full light or anything between, of course.
Chantilly's own planetary day was eighteen Earth-hours long, but the creche and the dorms at the Academy were run on ship hour time anyway. In many ways life aboard the Ody was disappointingly similar to my life on planet, except for the .3g which made me feel almost buoyant, and the occasional acceleration-vector changes.
A spaceship is designed to accelerate in any given direction, but given the difficulty of realigning fusion/plasma jets, the acceleration vector was changed using small impulse jets mounted on all sides. Since 'gravity' was provided by acceleration, all decks (floors) were oriented along the thrust axis. When the ship accelerated in a straight line the crew would be standing or seated and feel this as if it were 'gravity'. This makes walking and moving around inside the ship much easier, and helps the human inner ear keep our brains oriented, thus avoiding the main cause of nausea in low-g environments. Deceleration simply causes one to feel a bit lighter, or acceleration a bit heavier. All vector and speed changes are announced by the ship's systems before hand, and counted down in the time-honored if slightly old-fashioned manner.
Certain areas of the ship may be oriented differently, according to function. So the factory modules, which are fully automated and virtually independent in function are not necessarily provided with decks or bulkheads to accommodate human requirements. The nanoassemblers work best in a zero g environment and are magnetically isolated from the ship's movements.
From the above description one might think voyaging in space to be all dull routine. At the time I started as a spacer perhaps three or four House ships might be lost each trimester, the 120-standard day cycle the House uses for reporting purposes. Out of hundreds of ships that is not a large loss, but each ship represented several dozen to over two hundred people dead, and enormous economic loss. But sailing the cosmic sea is dangerous work and only the best, raised from birth for the task, can survive.
Aside from the obvious dangers of technical failures, there are many hazards in space. Any long voyage subjects the ship to various conditions, from intense gravitational fields to deadly cosmic ray streams; a single stray asteroid or comet could wreak havoc; cruising too close to an imminent supernovae or black hole were obvious dangers; everything from worm holes to asteroid fields presented their various dangers. And then there were the onboard dangers: radiation, EVA accidents, equipment failures and, from time to time, encounters with planetary conditions that threatened crew members. Most spacers survived to return home and retire in comfort—but not all. Many left their corpses on strange worlds or orbited forever in the depths of space.
Still, for the first six weeks aboard the Ody, nothing of any import occurred, except that I was slowly absorbed into the crew, became one member of the team and learned my job as a Spacer 1, to which I was promoted at the end of my six week evaluation. All five of the other Bridge 'Oxes', along with Riles and CWO Rossin, threw a party for me in the Enlisted Crew's Club. Even Alistare, whom I had not seen since our boarding, attended. I received my rank tattoo with great pride: a single hash mark on my right cheek.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Chapter Two
The Voyage of the Odysseus
I reported to the space elevator at 0615 Tetris, 10924.534CE. After presenting my identifier the 'vator clerk gave me a mocking salute.
"Non-uniformed personnel are not entitled to a salute," I said, my tone no doubt a bit stiff. I was young then, and the creche was quite strict on matters of protocol.
"Dumb crechie," he muttered to my back.
I took a seat, fastened the restraint systems as directed by the 'vator attendant, endured the seemingly interminable delay until the unit received processor-mediated clearance. A chime, a robotic announcement and with an almost imperceptible sensation the 'vator compartment began the long lift out of Chantilly's modest gravity well. Four hours later the compartment came to a rest and the passengers, some twenty-three of us, entered the Lagrange 1 Point Waystation, then waited in the lounge, eating and making small talk, until the various shuttles announced their availability. After forty minutes only two of us were left in the lounge, a girl from my creche, Alistare penThommasson, who was trained to work in the ship's medical section and myself. We had seen little of each other over the years and were, for all intents, strangers.
The active-matrix environment announced, "Pinnace Roxanne is now available for boarding to System Ship Odysseus. Please have your boarding orders on-screen for scanning."
Alistare and I walked to the pressure lock, cycled through, showing our identifiers for scanning as we passed. The outer lock door cycled and we walked into the shuttle, bound for our first space assignment.
The Odysseus was a constant-thrust-type general freighter, usually called a 'schooner', forever orbiting about the various stars, planets and space colonies within the central parsec of Sagittarius A. The ship was eternally in motion, its various pinnaces, barqs, and brigantines rendezvousing with each destination. Cargo and personnel came and went via these smaller, impulse-powered craft, while the mother-ship itself looped about the star and its planets on its way through the local system. Since the schooner-type ships never changed velocities by more than a few percent, they were economical to operate for the long time/distance-spans involved in trans-stellar commerce.
The ship also carried factory modules which produced auto-miners and other equipment to harvest raw materials from various astronomical bodies, terraform suitable planets and for sale to others. An asteroid miner, for example, might be sent into orbit in an asteroid belt and left to operate for decades, accumulating sufficient refined materials to make an economical shipment when the next schooner or shorter-range vessel came calling. In essence, the Odysseus was a space colony itself, although personnel came and went more frequently than any colony ship could manage.
Each ship was owned and operated by one of the Great Houses of Trade, such as the House of penDragon. As a direct descendant of a penDragon I was expected to either work in planetary operations or take to one of the ships. At the age of six, as I have said, I was sent to the Spacer Academy, so my destiny was to join the fleet of ships ruled by my House. Since there are, by now, thousands of penDragon descendants, most of the personnel are, in some distant way, family. The economics of star-commerce is complicated and terribly risky. A shipment can take generations to reach its destination. How can a merchant know what cargo will be profitable in such-and-such a place at the time the ship finally arrives? Perhaps in the ensuing years the cargo is superfluous or outmoded, or the material is no longer worth its original value. How could a merchant actually make money in such an environment, where the transactions could take place over generations?
The answer was the eventual development of the Great Trading Houses, who, bit by bit, explored, established and maintained the trade routes of the galaxy, spreading outward in all directions from the old home world, Earth, and advancing, decade by decade, century by century, moving and adapting with technologies and new materials and then contact with other cultures—the entire history of the home world played out over parsecs of space instead of leagues of ocean and wilderness—yet much the same process. The distances, and the time-dilation effects of faster and faster ships, caused the expansion of the Empire to take many centuries.
Granted, empire was perhaps a bit grandiose a term, given the communications delays involved. Over all this time the eternal corporate body of the trade houses, descendants of the multinational corporations of ancient Earth, survived and grew, keepers of a vast storehouse of knowledge, tradition and organization. These entities are corporations, they live forever if managed properly. Certainly the science of corporate management developed and grew along with the technologies that made them powerful and rich beyond the imagination of the wealthiest capitalist robber baron of any period. Only the Houses, with their immortal lives, could plan far enough into the future to make such a difficult situation profitable. And everywhere they went they set up light-speed communications transceivers—the early quantum repeaters and now the latest coherent-quantum particle repeaters—which speeds system-to-system communications by three orders of magnitude. With this new, high speed communications, the House of penDragon, who owns the patent on the CQPR, has increased by 4.57890 percent for the average fiscal cycle (the House uses a ten PSY cycle) over the previous period.
I understood basic interstellar economics, of course, but hoped no one would recognize my skill in that area, for being a ship's purser was not my ideal of a life-time occupation. I, like many others of my genetic background, felt destined for a Captaincy, of course. All young idealists think they are capable of anything. It is only long decades of experience that teach us the truth about ourselves. But that is getting ahead of our story.
Alistare and I took our berths onboard the Roxanne. The only crew were the pilot and co-pilot, locked in their secure bridge compartment at the fore-end, or bow, of the ship. The passenger module was automated, to reduce lifesupport-systems load. Both of us were too excited to sleep for some time, so we sat in the observation dome lounge, strapped into acceleration couches to protect us from the high g thrusts the ship would require in order to accelerate to match the Odysseus' speed. This would require several days of alternate thrust applications and coasting until our orbits were matched.
Alistare watched the stars outside the clear dome. Her dark eyes seemed to reflect the black space all around us.
"We're gone for good," she said, her voice a bit wistful.
"Yes," I answered. "At last."
"I suppose you won't miss the creche, or the Academy?"
"Well, this is what I've trained for all my life, what I've studied and practiced and imagined doing. I feel as if I'm being born again." I paused, realizing her mood. "You aren't?"
"Well, sure, in the way that you say, yes." She sounded a bit defiant. "But there were some crechemates I'll miss. We'll likely never see each other again, any of us."
"Well, that's a spacer's life. 'Though I hear that many of the long-timers wind up seeing one another many times throughout the years."
"Do you think you'll be a lifer?"
"I don't know, Alis."
"I'll put in my mandatory, of course, but then I hope to work on a colony."
"You're going to deep space?" I thought she'd want a planet-side or orbiting colony assignment.
"I want to go on the Ramses."
"Intergalactic!" I was surprised and my voice rose. "You want to go all the way?"
"I think it's our destiny and I want to be a part of it."
"Talk about never seeing anyone again!"
"I'll see the same people my whole life...centuries, perhaps."
"Well, that's true."
"I want a family," she whispered. "I want to work in the gardens."
"Well, I don't really know about colony ships. Do they really have gardens?"
"They have to be self-contained, obviously. How are they going to feed people without growing it?"
"I thought it would be ship's rations."
"A colony can't live on ship's rations."
"I suppose not."
I'd lived on rations for weeks at a time without any loss of fitness. Granted, it's bland and monotonous. I suppose a lifetime of it would be intolerable. Still, I wasn't sure the mass/fuel ratio for gardens was economical for such a large spaceship. I hadn't paid much attention to the project, since I had no interest in leaving my own Galaxy to live forever in the great emptiness of intergalactic space. Even at 25%co the colonists would never live to see their destination. Many generations later, their clones might look upon a new galaxy, but whether the new brainscanners would really record your 'selfhood' was still an unsettled question. I personally wouldn't have wanted to rely on one, although eventually I settled the question for myself. But that is another story.
"Well, what is it you dream of, Ishmael?"
"I want to sail the Ocean of Stars, Alis. I want to see the Galaxy! I want to command a ship of my own, following the greatest profit, exploring new markets and resources...running the fastest, newest ship around all the arms of the Milky Way."
"Oh," she said. Her large, round, dark eyes looked disappointed, as if I had declared something infinitely sad, or a character flaw of great pettiness.
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing. I realize all the progress to date has been due to men of the House like you...Yes, Ish, I can see you as a Lord Captain, Member of the Board, forever orbiting the Galaxy on your own star-cruiser. May the Fates smile upon you."
She lifted her arm against the great pressure of acceleration to pat my arm, as if she wanted to take the sting of her earlier remarks away.
"Whatever lies ahead, we have many years ahead of us. I intend to learn as much as I can about shiplife medicine and prepare myself for the great voyage."
"Thank you for your words, Alistare penThommasson. I hope your dreams come true for you as well, whatever dreams you have in your heart."
We settled back to watch the pinnace hurtling through space, that strange sensation of barely moving, only the thrusters and nearby space objects providing points of reference. If I watched only the stars it felt as if I sat in a bubble drifting through space, with a billion colored lights gleaming bright and steady, unsullied by atmosphere and distortion.
When the acceleration-off warning chimed we unfastened our restraints and for the first time as real Spacers we floated in 0 g. Of course we had been acclimated to 0 g over our entire lives. The constant velocity ships had a kind of artificial gravity provided by the thrust of the ship's engines, but smaller ships which had to accelerate and decelerate subjected their passengers and crew to the inescapable laws of Newtonian physics. But Spacers are bred for spacelife. Weightlessness or high g acceleration does not bother us in the least.
The trip was days long. After we got over the excitement of our first mission in space, there was little for us to do but study our ship's manuals, write messages to those crechemates we cared for, sleep and eat, watch vids, play games. Much like life in the creche, I realized after the third day.
Early on the fifth day of travel the processor announced, "ETA to Odysseus - 3 PSH."
"Better get our gear packed, I guess," I said.
"I'm packed. I want to watch our approach from the lounge," she answered.
We watched, fascinated, as the schooner rose into view, growing rapidly larger and larger on the magnification screen, until soon we could see it with our own eyes, looming ever larger above us. For those who have not seen such a ship, I will describe it briefly, to orient the planet-bound to the place where I expected to spend many years of my life. Whether measured by planet years or the more accurate Einsteinian relative time, this was to be my home for a long time to come.
As I have said, the Odysseus was a constant-velocity local-system general freighter, designed to spend her entire useful life in transit, never stopping her journey. This ship was very old by fleet standards, coming up on her one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary. There were a few older scows here and there, but she was one of the oldest schooners in the Dragon fleet.
Nonetheless, she functioned economically and that was the only real requirement. As long as a ship's operational costs did not exceed her profit potential she could remain in the fleet, although assignments and functions might change as time dictated. This type of ship, an inter-system nuclear-electric/solar generator freighter, could operate quite economically for centuries, as long as no other ship could operate any faster or with greater mass/fuel/thrust ratios, this type serviced its regular route, decade after decade, reliably and efficiently.
Like most space ships, the Odysseus was an open-skeleton, space-frame type, using mostly carbon-based nano-materials available at the time—light, flexible and strong. They are easy to repair with high-strength, fast-setting epoxy resins that work in vacuum and cold. She had a six-point axis design, clumsy-looking, to be sure, but in the vacuum of space, graceful lines were simply anthropomorphic eccentricities. She had a bridge compartment located on the forward axis, with the usual crew's quarters module located behind and to the right. As with all docking modules, which are standardized, this one was located on the left and just behind the bridge. Since the bridge module is spherical, observation windows are placed where necessary for visually monitoring docking procedures, still required with these older, smaller ships.
The propulsion module was the lowest axis, slung from girders that aimed the thrusters in the required direction. There were sets of thrusters on swivels, for guidance, and an entire set of identical thrusters facing exactly opposite, to help keep the vectors of the ship as close to those required as possible. Nothing wastes fuel and acceleration like maneuvering a huge ship, so all systems need to work in good synchrony to keep the ship directed on the proper course, taking advantage of gravity slings to aid in slowing or speeding up, and other gravity eddies or pools and plasma or cosmic ray streams to alter course without using engines, and fuel.
The largest module was the cargo/factory module, which was actually many smaller modules linked together as needed. There were the factory crews quarters nearby as well. Although they shared the ship's crew systems, they slept closer to work. The final module was the small environmental/crew support systems (E/CSS) module, powered from the propulsion module's fusion reactor or solar panels. Nearly every space ship is made up of these same modules, although the size and functions vary according to the ship's purpose. Additional drive modules could be added to make a faster ship, or the cargo/factory modules could be reduced to decrease mass, or that module could be eliminated and a passenger module inserted instead, along with an additional E/CSS module to sustain the additional biological load. Other specialized modules could be attached as required. The space-frame of the Odysseus bore thousands of scars where modules had been welded on or cut off and new framing and modules epoxied in place.
The final module was the large, nearly empty hanger space, where the ship's boats were docked when not in use or requiring maintenance. The Odysseus had a complement of two pinnaces, a fairly fast barq, and an old, rather battered barkentine. Only the barkentine sat in the hanger as we approached.
The ship loomed up now, filling all the space above the dome where we watched the docking procedure, as the pinnace's speed was final-matched to the mother ship and her course was locked in for the hanger. The magnetic field approach control was activated, lighting the pinnace in a blue-white fuzzy light that blotted out the view outside the dome. We could not leave our couches during docking, so we sat, basically blind in a white-out of ionized gases as we covered the final decameters and entered the hanger. As soon as the pinnace was inside the hanger the magnetic field stopped abruptly, showing us the enormous arcing ceiling overhead.
Since there were just the two crew and two passengers, the ship's dock officer did not pressurize the entire bay, but extended the pressurized umbilical for us. We saw the pilot and co-pilot for the first time when they met us at the exit hatch, an unremarkable pair of veteran spacers, pale and pudgy, as we would no doubt become in a few short years.
At the entry office the dock officer examined our identifiers one final time then offered a hand.
"Welcome to space, you creche-wienies. The Ody may be fat, slow, ugly and running on a mobios strip in space, but she's a by-the-gods real space ship, so you're now real-live Spacers," he said.
"Thank you, sir," we said together.
He waved a hand at the two pilots as they trudged past and turned into the lift to take them to quarters. "You follow them. The CWO of Quarters will be there to meet you."
We thanked him again, joined the tired spacers in the lift, felt our roiling bellies buck a bit harder as we sped along a railed track in an arc along a girder, suspended in a tiny pressurized booth with ship and space all around. For the first time in my life I thought it possible to actually vomit in space. Neither Alis nor I had ever ridden on such a device, and description was inadequate to convey the sensation. Worse than in a suit with a powerpack during an EVA. We exchanged green-gilled glances and swallowed hard.
The lift settled into its notch in the crew's module, the panel retracted and we followed the pilots into the reception lobby. An old Spacer sat in a power chair behind a small processor station. He nodded silently to the pilots, who nodded back and entered the port directly in front. Alis and I stopped at the processor without being told. It was obvious.
"Alistare penThommasson, spacer-designate, medical services, Class A? And Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, spacer-designate, Class A, junior bridge officer?"
We nodded and once more displayed our identifiers.
"I'm Chief Warrant Officer Rossin penDragon. So you and I must be cousins to some power or the other," he smiled at Ish. "You'll learn soon enough, however, that onboard a ship, no one uses their full name. Call me Ross. You'll be Alis and Ish to everyone except the XO and Captain, and you'd better hope they don't use your full name...you'll be in trouble if you hear them address you directly. But everyone else, feel free to consider them shipmates. The Boson of the Bridge is Riles, a fine woman, top of her field, she'll take you under her wing Ish, so don't worry. And Medical is a cush job, young female, no heavy lifting...", he laughed, "cause we're a .3g ship!" He chuckled at his own joke.
"Your pads are through those door and then to the right. You'll see your names on the door panels and the lock's already programmed to your iris pattern. Just look into the lock eyepiece, like any iris-lock."
"Thank you, sir," we again said together. We laughed at the inadvertent chorus we provided.
"It's Ross!"
"Thanks Ross," I said. "We've both passed the processor orientation tests, of course. But it all seems a bit different when you see it in real-time."
"That it will, lad, that it will. Just stick to the rulebook and listen to your shipmates and you'll both do fine."
We entered the port ahead of us, turned as directed and after following a winding corridor for some distance came upon a door with a panel glowing the name "Alistare penThommasson".
"Must be your pad," I said. We touched cheeks in the old crechemate way. "Good luck."
"You too," she murmured. The port opened when she looked into the eyepiece. "Go well, Ish."
I turned and followed the corridor until I came upon an identical port with my own name glowing on it. The space was exactly like my creche pad on-planet, except much smaller. It didn't matter to me. I owed two work uniforms, a casual-dress blouse and slacks, work booties and dress 'hard' shoes for off-ship; a data-cube networked to my pad's processor terminal; my personal care items, medications and such notions as a new spacer was imagined to require. All of it fit in a couple of drawers and the barely filled a third of the hanging locker. I assumed that after a few years in space I would acquire more.
I reported to the space elevator at 0615 Tetris, 10924.534CE. After presenting my identifier the 'vator clerk gave me a mocking salute.
"Non-uniformed personnel are not entitled to a salute," I said, my tone no doubt a bit stiff. I was young then, and the creche was quite strict on matters of protocol.
"Dumb crechie," he muttered to my back.
I took a seat, fastened the restraint systems as directed by the 'vator attendant, endured the seemingly interminable delay until the unit received processor-mediated clearance. A chime, a robotic announcement and with an almost imperceptible sensation the 'vator compartment began the long lift out of Chantilly's modest gravity well. Four hours later the compartment came to a rest and the passengers, some twenty-three of us, entered the Lagrange 1 Point Waystation, then waited in the lounge, eating and making small talk, until the various shuttles announced their availability. After forty minutes only two of us were left in the lounge, a girl from my creche, Alistare penThommasson, who was trained to work in the ship's medical section and myself. We had seen little of each other over the years and were, for all intents, strangers.
The active-matrix environment announced, "Pinnace Roxanne is now available for boarding to System Ship Odysseus. Please have your boarding orders on-screen for scanning."
Alistare and I walked to the pressure lock, cycled through, showing our identifiers for scanning as we passed. The outer lock door cycled and we walked into the shuttle, bound for our first space assignment.
The Odysseus was a constant-thrust-type general freighter, usually called a 'schooner', forever orbiting about the various stars, planets and space colonies within the central parsec of Sagittarius A. The ship was eternally in motion, its various pinnaces, barqs, and brigantines rendezvousing with each destination. Cargo and personnel came and went via these smaller, impulse-powered craft, while the mother-ship itself looped about the star and its planets on its way through the local system. Since the schooner-type ships never changed velocities by more than a few percent, they were economical to operate for the long time/distance-spans involved in trans-stellar commerce.
The ship also carried factory modules which produced auto-miners and other equipment to harvest raw materials from various astronomical bodies, terraform suitable planets and for sale to others. An asteroid miner, for example, might be sent into orbit in an asteroid belt and left to operate for decades, accumulating sufficient refined materials to make an economical shipment when the next schooner or shorter-range vessel came calling. In essence, the Odysseus was a space colony itself, although personnel came and went more frequently than any colony ship could manage.
Each ship was owned and operated by one of the Great Houses of Trade, such as the House of penDragon. As a direct descendant of a penDragon I was expected to either work in planetary operations or take to one of the ships. At the age of six, as I have said, I was sent to the Spacer Academy, so my destiny was to join the fleet of ships ruled by my House. Since there are, by now, thousands of penDragon descendants, most of the personnel are, in some distant way, family. The economics of star-commerce is complicated and terribly risky. A shipment can take generations to reach its destination. How can a merchant know what cargo will be profitable in such-and-such a place at the time the ship finally arrives? Perhaps in the ensuing years the cargo is superfluous or outmoded, or the material is no longer worth its original value. How could a merchant actually make money in such an environment, where the transactions could take place over generations?
The answer was the eventual development of the Great Trading Houses, who, bit by bit, explored, established and maintained the trade routes of the galaxy, spreading outward in all directions from the old home world, Earth, and advancing, decade by decade, century by century, moving and adapting with technologies and new materials and then contact with other cultures—the entire history of the home world played out over parsecs of space instead of leagues of ocean and wilderness—yet much the same process. The distances, and the time-dilation effects of faster and faster ships, caused the expansion of the Empire to take many centuries.
Granted, empire was perhaps a bit grandiose a term, given the communications delays involved. Over all this time the eternal corporate body of the trade houses, descendants of the multinational corporations of ancient Earth, survived and grew, keepers of a vast storehouse of knowledge, tradition and organization. These entities are corporations, they live forever if managed properly. Certainly the science of corporate management developed and grew along with the technologies that made them powerful and rich beyond the imagination of the wealthiest capitalist robber baron of any period. Only the Houses, with their immortal lives, could plan far enough into the future to make such a difficult situation profitable. And everywhere they went they set up light-speed communications transceivers—the early quantum repeaters and now the latest coherent-quantum particle repeaters—which speeds system-to-system communications by three orders of magnitude. With this new, high speed communications, the House of penDragon, who owns the patent on the CQPR, has increased by 4.57890 percent for the average fiscal cycle (the House uses a ten PSY cycle) over the previous period.
I understood basic interstellar economics, of course, but hoped no one would recognize my skill in that area, for being a ship's purser was not my ideal of a life-time occupation. I, like many others of my genetic background, felt destined for a Captaincy, of course. All young idealists think they are capable of anything. It is only long decades of experience that teach us the truth about ourselves. But that is getting ahead of our story.
Alistare and I took our berths onboard the Roxanne. The only crew were the pilot and co-pilot, locked in their secure bridge compartment at the fore-end, or bow, of the ship. The passenger module was automated, to reduce lifesupport-systems load. Both of us were too excited to sleep for some time, so we sat in the observation dome lounge, strapped into acceleration couches to protect us from the high g thrusts the ship would require in order to accelerate to match the Odysseus' speed. This would require several days of alternate thrust applications and coasting until our orbits were matched.
Alistare watched the stars outside the clear dome. Her dark eyes seemed to reflect the black space all around us.
"We're gone for good," she said, her voice a bit wistful.
"Yes," I answered. "At last."
"I suppose you won't miss the creche, or the Academy?"
"Well, this is what I've trained for all my life, what I've studied and practiced and imagined doing. I feel as if I'm being born again." I paused, realizing her mood. "You aren't?"
"Well, sure, in the way that you say, yes." She sounded a bit defiant. "But there were some crechemates I'll miss. We'll likely never see each other again, any of us."
"Well, that's a spacer's life. 'Though I hear that many of the long-timers wind up seeing one another many times throughout the years."
"Do you think you'll be a lifer?"
"I don't know, Alis."
"I'll put in my mandatory, of course, but then I hope to work on a colony."
"You're going to deep space?" I thought she'd want a planet-side or orbiting colony assignment.
"I want to go on the Ramses."
"Intergalactic!" I was surprised and my voice rose. "You want to go all the way?"
"I think it's our destiny and I want to be a part of it."
"Talk about never seeing anyone again!"
"I'll see the same people my whole life...centuries, perhaps."
"Well, that's true."
"I want a family," she whispered. "I want to work in the gardens."
"Well, I don't really know about colony ships. Do they really have gardens?"
"They have to be self-contained, obviously. How are they going to feed people without growing it?"
"I thought it would be ship's rations."
"A colony can't live on ship's rations."
"I suppose not."
I'd lived on rations for weeks at a time without any loss of fitness. Granted, it's bland and monotonous. I suppose a lifetime of it would be intolerable. Still, I wasn't sure the mass/fuel ratio for gardens was economical for such a large spaceship. I hadn't paid much attention to the project, since I had no interest in leaving my own Galaxy to live forever in the great emptiness of intergalactic space. Even at 25%co the colonists would never live to see their destination. Many generations later, their clones might look upon a new galaxy, but whether the new brainscanners would really record your 'selfhood' was still an unsettled question. I personally wouldn't have wanted to rely on one, although eventually I settled the question for myself. But that is another story.
"Well, what is it you dream of, Ishmael?"
"I want to sail the Ocean of Stars, Alis. I want to see the Galaxy! I want to command a ship of my own, following the greatest profit, exploring new markets and resources...running the fastest, newest ship around all the arms of the Milky Way."
"Oh," she said. Her large, round, dark eyes looked disappointed, as if I had declared something infinitely sad, or a character flaw of great pettiness.
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing. I realize all the progress to date has been due to men of the House like you...Yes, Ish, I can see you as a Lord Captain, Member of the Board, forever orbiting the Galaxy on your own star-cruiser. May the Fates smile upon you."
She lifted her arm against the great pressure of acceleration to pat my arm, as if she wanted to take the sting of her earlier remarks away.
"Whatever lies ahead, we have many years ahead of us. I intend to learn as much as I can about shiplife medicine and prepare myself for the great voyage."
"Thank you for your words, Alistare penThommasson. I hope your dreams come true for you as well, whatever dreams you have in your heart."
We settled back to watch the pinnace hurtling through space, that strange sensation of barely moving, only the thrusters and nearby space objects providing points of reference. If I watched only the stars it felt as if I sat in a bubble drifting through space, with a billion colored lights gleaming bright and steady, unsullied by atmosphere and distortion.
When the acceleration-off warning chimed we unfastened our restraints and for the first time as real Spacers we floated in 0 g. Of course we had been acclimated to 0 g over our entire lives. The constant velocity ships had a kind of artificial gravity provided by the thrust of the ship's engines, but smaller ships which had to accelerate and decelerate subjected their passengers and crew to the inescapable laws of Newtonian physics. But Spacers are bred for spacelife. Weightlessness or high g acceleration does not bother us in the least.
The trip was days long. After we got over the excitement of our first mission in space, there was little for us to do but study our ship's manuals, write messages to those crechemates we cared for, sleep and eat, watch vids, play games. Much like life in the creche, I realized after the third day.
Early on the fifth day of travel the processor announced, "ETA to Odysseus - 3 PSH."
"Better get our gear packed, I guess," I said.
"I'm packed. I want to watch our approach from the lounge," she answered.
We watched, fascinated, as the schooner rose into view, growing rapidly larger and larger on the magnification screen, until soon we could see it with our own eyes, looming ever larger above us. For those who have not seen such a ship, I will describe it briefly, to orient the planet-bound to the place where I expected to spend many years of my life. Whether measured by planet years or the more accurate Einsteinian relative time, this was to be my home for a long time to come.
As I have said, the Odysseus was a constant-velocity local-system general freighter, designed to spend her entire useful life in transit, never stopping her journey. This ship was very old by fleet standards, coming up on her one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary. There were a few older scows here and there, but she was one of the oldest schooners in the Dragon fleet.
Nonetheless, she functioned economically and that was the only real requirement. As long as a ship's operational costs did not exceed her profit potential she could remain in the fleet, although assignments and functions might change as time dictated. This type of ship, an inter-system nuclear-electric/solar generator freighter, could operate quite economically for centuries, as long as no other ship could operate any faster or with greater mass/fuel/thrust ratios, this type serviced its regular route, decade after decade, reliably and efficiently.
Like most space ships, the Odysseus was an open-skeleton, space-frame type, using mostly carbon-based nano-materials available at the time—light, flexible and strong. They are easy to repair with high-strength, fast-setting epoxy resins that work in vacuum and cold. She had a six-point axis design, clumsy-looking, to be sure, but in the vacuum of space, graceful lines were simply anthropomorphic eccentricities. She had a bridge compartment located on the forward axis, with the usual crew's quarters module located behind and to the right. As with all docking modules, which are standardized, this one was located on the left and just behind the bridge. Since the bridge module is spherical, observation windows are placed where necessary for visually monitoring docking procedures, still required with these older, smaller ships.
The propulsion module was the lowest axis, slung from girders that aimed the thrusters in the required direction. There were sets of thrusters on swivels, for guidance, and an entire set of identical thrusters facing exactly opposite, to help keep the vectors of the ship as close to those required as possible. Nothing wastes fuel and acceleration like maneuvering a huge ship, so all systems need to work in good synchrony to keep the ship directed on the proper course, taking advantage of gravity slings to aid in slowing or speeding up, and other gravity eddies or pools and plasma or cosmic ray streams to alter course without using engines, and fuel.
The largest module was the cargo/factory module, which was actually many smaller modules linked together as needed. There were the factory crews quarters nearby as well. Although they shared the ship's crew systems, they slept closer to work. The final module was the small environmental/crew support systems (E/CSS) module, powered from the propulsion module's fusion reactor or solar panels. Nearly every space ship is made up of these same modules, although the size and functions vary according to the ship's purpose. Additional drive modules could be added to make a faster ship, or the cargo/factory modules could be reduced to decrease mass, or that module could be eliminated and a passenger module inserted instead, along with an additional E/CSS module to sustain the additional biological load. Other specialized modules could be attached as required. The space-frame of the Odysseus bore thousands of scars where modules had been welded on or cut off and new framing and modules epoxied in place.
The final module was the large, nearly empty hanger space, where the ship's boats were docked when not in use or requiring maintenance. The Odysseus had a complement of two pinnaces, a fairly fast barq, and an old, rather battered barkentine. Only the barkentine sat in the hanger as we approached.
The ship loomed up now, filling all the space above the dome where we watched the docking procedure, as the pinnace's speed was final-matched to the mother ship and her course was locked in for the hanger. The magnetic field approach control was activated, lighting the pinnace in a blue-white fuzzy light that blotted out the view outside the dome. We could not leave our couches during docking, so we sat, basically blind in a white-out of ionized gases as we covered the final decameters and entered the hanger. As soon as the pinnace was inside the hanger the magnetic field stopped abruptly, showing us the enormous arcing ceiling overhead.
Since there were just the two crew and two passengers, the ship's dock officer did not pressurize the entire bay, but extended the pressurized umbilical for us. We saw the pilot and co-pilot for the first time when they met us at the exit hatch, an unremarkable pair of veteran spacers, pale and pudgy, as we would no doubt become in a few short years.
At the entry office the dock officer examined our identifiers one final time then offered a hand.
"Welcome to space, you creche-wienies. The Ody may be fat, slow, ugly and running on a mobios strip in space, but she's a by-the-gods real space ship, so you're now real-live Spacers," he said.
"Thank you, sir," we said together.
He waved a hand at the two pilots as they trudged past and turned into the lift to take them to quarters. "You follow them. The CWO of Quarters will be there to meet you."
We thanked him again, joined the tired spacers in the lift, felt our roiling bellies buck a bit harder as we sped along a railed track in an arc along a girder, suspended in a tiny pressurized booth with ship and space all around. For the first time in my life I thought it possible to actually vomit in space. Neither Alis nor I had ever ridden on such a device, and description was inadequate to convey the sensation. Worse than in a suit with a powerpack during an EVA. We exchanged green-gilled glances and swallowed hard.
The lift settled into its notch in the crew's module, the panel retracted and we followed the pilots into the reception lobby. An old Spacer sat in a power chair behind a small processor station. He nodded silently to the pilots, who nodded back and entered the port directly in front. Alis and I stopped at the processor without being told. It was obvious.
"Alistare penThommasson, spacer-designate, medical services, Class A? And Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, spacer-designate, Class A, junior bridge officer?"
We nodded and once more displayed our identifiers.
"I'm Chief Warrant Officer Rossin penDragon. So you and I must be cousins to some power or the other," he smiled at Ish. "You'll learn soon enough, however, that onboard a ship, no one uses their full name. Call me Ross. You'll be Alis and Ish to everyone except the XO and Captain, and you'd better hope they don't use your full name...you'll be in trouble if you hear them address you directly. But everyone else, feel free to consider them shipmates. The Boson of the Bridge is Riles, a fine woman, top of her field, she'll take you under her wing Ish, so don't worry. And Medical is a cush job, young female, no heavy lifting...", he laughed, "cause we're a .3g ship!" He chuckled at his own joke.
"Your pads are through those door and then to the right. You'll see your names on the door panels and the lock's already programmed to your iris pattern. Just look into the lock eyepiece, like any iris-lock."
"Thank you, sir," we again said together. We laughed at the inadvertent chorus we provided.
"It's Ross!"
"Thanks Ross," I said. "We've both passed the processor orientation tests, of course. But it all seems a bit different when you see it in real-time."
"That it will, lad, that it will. Just stick to the rulebook and listen to your shipmates and you'll both do fine."
We entered the port ahead of us, turned as directed and after following a winding corridor for some distance came upon a door with a panel glowing the name "Alistare penThommasson".
"Must be your pad," I said. We touched cheeks in the old crechemate way. "Good luck."
"You too," she murmured. The port opened when she looked into the eyepiece. "Go well, Ish."
I turned and followed the corridor until I came upon an identical port with my own name glowing on it. The space was exactly like my creche pad on-planet, except much smaller. It didn't matter to me. I owed two work uniforms, a casual-dress blouse and slacks, work booties and dress 'hard' shoes for off-ship; a data-cube networked to my pad's processor terminal; my personal care items, medications and such notions as a new spacer was imagined to require. All of it fit in a couple of drawers and the barely filled a third of the hanging locker. I assumed that after a few years in space I would acquire more.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Chapter One
Damn it! E really does equal MC2!
- Dr. Norman Allsworthy, U of Mars, 3579CE
I Am Born
A great Earth novelist once wrote:"To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night." So I too am forced to take for granted that certain facts about my early years are hidden from my direct knowledge and will remain so forever. I must depend upon the processor records and what others have said. On the score of my childhood, I have little to report, for I was destined for the Ocean of Space and voyaging from age six years onward. So there are many experiences another child might tell you about themselves that I will not possess in my inventory of memory, that warehouse of experience which defines ourselves to ourselves.
I will, however, relate a long life spent voyaging among the many stars of this Galaxy, known to Humans as The Milky Way. As a child I did not know what the name referred to, since I had never seen mammalian milk which had not been processed and sanitized, rendering the liquid a pale straw color, the color of blood plasma, not at all like the brilliant gleaming silver-white highway in space, filled with stars, and many of those stars accompanied by planets, and some of those planets containing rare and valuable goods or materials or services.
To go to Space was to commit one's life to the voyage, like the French fur-traders of old North America. Yes, I know my History, for the Law of Chantilly, where I was born, is strict concerning education, in order to prevent the loss of our Humanity, as has occurred in some other Colonies, despite their claims to the contrary. Although the dissolution of the Empire occurred a thousand PSY (Planetary Standard Years) ago, Earth is still our Home World for us Chantillians. As natives of Earth we are and always will be Human. The fact that Earth's current situation renders it nearly uninhabitable to a Chantillian is irrelevant.
Now I am retired, and health allows me only these few hours at the terminal of my processor. Relating the stories of my many voyages among the stars and planets distracts me from the pain that necessarily accompanies the star-sickness. Even though I knew it was inevitable I would contract it after a hundred star-years of sailing, I continued for another four hundred years.
(The reader keeping in mind that space-years are not equal to Planetary Standard Years. Depending on your reference point, a single space-year could equal several thousand years on any given planet. Such is the price of space-sailing.)
Call it greed, call it denial, call it reckless disregard for my life...I care not what you choose to call it. I spent my life according to my own choosing, at least, according to my own possibilities in a Universe which does not offer all choices to all beings. After all, it is not my fault that Einstein was right and the increasing mass of an object as it approaches the speed of light prohibits translation to post-light speed. I didn't make the laws of physics, I only lived by them.
So, in short, I was born Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, son of Isis O'Connor penIsrael and Arestese Indria penDragon, or so the genetic processor files say, in the Common Era Year 10908.678. I came into the world in the conventional way, that is, the technicians opened my culture vessel when the fetus that was I became able to survive independently in normal interior atmosphere. I do not recall the moment. The trauma of taking that first breath of raw oxygen, carbon dioxide and trace gases has erased that memory. In any event, only scraps of images remain of those first two or three years. My earliest memory is pedaling an exercise machine while a vid showing interstellar views played on my visor. I recall particularly the glowing reds and blues of the Crab Nebulae. Of course, as a child I did not know the images I was seeing were processor-rendered. I recall the deep disappointment of seeing the real thing with normal vision from a viewport in a space-cruiser.
The House of Dragon (pen meaning 'child of') has been one of the Great Traders since our origins on Earth itself, although that is a long time ago, and the data files are mostly unreadable by today's processors; the storage devices themselves inaccessible to us, based as they are on technologies too old to use with today's bio-quantum disseminated processor systems. Nevertheless, our documented history goes back to before the founding of the Chantilly Colony by charter from the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Office, and that is 3500 PSY ago. When the Corporation for Space Development merged into the Earth-Space Directorate in 7897.422CE, the House of Dragon and other Founding Houses petitioned for self-rule, which was granted without demurrer on 7899.598CE. Since that time, our world has been run according to the Founding Contract, as amended.
Since a space-sailor must be trained and educated for that career from an early age, all I experienced while housed in the children's creche was designed to prepare me for that life. Of course, we played the usual creche games, and I imagine my childhood was little different from the reader's, so why detail those events that occur to every child: loss and gain; winning and losing; esteem and shame; courage and cowardice; disappointment and achievement. I cannot claim to have been an exceptional student, nor was I among the plasma-streamers bringing down the class average. At the age of sixteen, I graduated as spacer-designate class A, entitled to ship on small, inter-system, nuclear-electric/solar-generator schooners without the big solar wind and cosmic energy-current sails of the big trans-system galleons and ships-of-the-line, ships capable of ten-percent light speed and thus generally called 'tenners'. Within fourteen Chantillian days I was ordered to report to the Odysseus.
- Dr. Norman Allsworthy, U of Mars, 3579CE
I Am Born
A great Earth novelist once wrote:"To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night." So I too am forced to take for granted that certain facts about my early years are hidden from my direct knowledge and will remain so forever. I must depend upon the processor records and what others have said. On the score of my childhood, I have little to report, for I was destined for the Ocean of Space and voyaging from age six years onward. So there are many experiences another child might tell you about themselves that I will not possess in my inventory of memory, that warehouse of experience which defines ourselves to ourselves.
I will, however, relate a long life spent voyaging among the many stars of this Galaxy, known to Humans as The Milky Way. As a child I did not know what the name referred to, since I had never seen mammalian milk which had not been processed and sanitized, rendering the liquid a pale straw color, the color of blood plasma, not at all like the brilliant gleaming silver-white highway in space, filled with stars, and many of those stars accompanied by planets, and some of those planets containing rare and valuable goods or materials or services.
To go to Space was to commit one's life to the voyage, like the French fur-traders of old North America. Yes, I know my History, for the Law of Chantilly, where I was born, is strict concerning education, in order to prevent the loss of our Humanity, as has occurred in some other Colonies, despite their claims to the contrary. Although the dissolution of the Empire occurred a thousand PSY (Planetary Standard Years) ago, Earth is still our Home World for us Chantillians. As natives of Earth we are and always will be Human. The fact that Earth's current situation renders it nearly uninhabitable to a Chantillian is irrelevant.
Now I am retired, and health allows me only these few hours at the terminal of my processor. Relating the stories of my many voyages among the stars and planets distracts me from the pain that necessarily accompanies the star-sickness. Even though I knew it was inevitable I would contract it after a hundred star-years of sailing, I continued for another four hundred years.
(The reader keeping in mind that space-years are not equal to Planetary Standard Years. Depending on your reference point, a single space-year could equal several thousand years on any given planet. Such is the price of space-sailing.)
Call it greed, call it denial, call it reckless disregard for my life...I care not what you choose to call it. I spent my life according to my own choosing, at least, according to my own possibilities in a Universe which does not offer all choices to all beings. After all, it is not my fault that Einstein was right and the increasing mass of an object as it approaches the speed of light prohibits translation to post-light speed. I didn't make the laws of physics, I only lived by them.
So, in short, I was born Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, son of Isis O'Connor penIsrael and Arestese Indria penDragon, or so the genetic processor files say, in the Common Era Year 10908.678. I came into the world in the conventional way, that is, the technicians opened my culture vessel when the fetus that was I became able to survive independently in normal interior atmosphere. I do not recall the moment. The trauma of taking that first breath of raw oxygen, carbon dioxide and trace gases has erased that memory. In any event, only scraps of images remain of those first two or three years. My earliest memory is pedaling an exercise machine while a vid showing interstellar views played on my visor. I recall particularly the glowing reds and blues of the Crab Nebulae. Of course, as a child I did not know the images I was seeing were processor-rendered. I recall the deep disappointment of seeing the real thing with normal vision from a viewport in a space-cruiser.
The House of Dragon (pen meaning 'child of') has been one of the Great Traders since our origins on Earth itself, although that is a long time ago, and the data files are mostly unreadable by today's processors; the storage devices themselves inaccessible to us, based as they are on technologies too old to use with today's bio-quantum disseminated processor systems. Nevertheless, our documented history goes back to before the founding of the Chantilly Colony by charter from the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Office, and that is 3500 PSY ago. When the Corporation for Space Development merged into the Earth-Space Directorate in 7897.422CE, the House of Dragon and other Founding Houses petitioned for self-rule, which was granted without demurrer on 7899.598CE. Since that time, our world has been run according to the Founding Contract, as amended.
Since a space-sailor must be trained and educated for that career from an early age, all I experienced while housed in the children's creche was designed to prepare me for that life. Of course, we played the usual creche games, and I imagine my childhood was little different from the reader's, so why detail those events that occur to every child: loss and gain; winning and losing; esteem and shame; courage and cowardice; disappointment and achievement. I cannot claim to have been an exceptional student, nor was I among the plasma-streamers bringing down the class average. At the age of sixteen, I graduated as spacer-designate class A, entitled to ship on small, inter-system, nuclear-electric/solar-generator schooners without the big solar wind and cosmic energy-current sails of the big trans-system galleons and ships-of-the-line, ships capable of ten-percent light speed and thus generally called 'tenners'. Within fourteen Chantillian days I was ordered to report to the Odysseus.
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