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.

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.