Motherload: Stardrifter Book 01 Read online

  A Stardrifter Novel

  Motherload

  David Collins-Rivera

  for Debbie

  one

  *

  Normally, the sitting and the waiting are bad. This time, they were brutal.

  I mean there are always things to do on an old Bechel if you want the boat to keep running, but that’s usually just maintenance stuff. It all falls into a routine pretty fast, and no matter how anal or conscientious you are, pretty soon you end up with time on your hands.

  It was for exactly this reason that Sally caught a flux in the reactor’s mag bottle that first month out. It was a little thing; diagnostics didn’t even flag it. She was already so bored, she decided to run a sim based on the fluctuation’s wave frequency and fractal quality. She was surprised at the result, and ran it again since she still didn’t have anything to do. When it came back the same way, she called a crew meeting, and all four of us sat down in the common room for the bad news.

  “Eighty, maybe a hundred hours, tops, at fifty percent throttle. Less at more, more at less.”

  “What’ll happen, exactly? Will we explode?” Bayern asked. Captain Bayern when he was pissed-off or just wanted attention.

  Sally looked at him like he smelled.

  “No, we’re not going to explode. That doesn’t happen when the magnetics go. The reactor will shut down cold. We’ll be on batteries then, but they’ll drain out before we’re even half way back to Deegman. We’ll either cruise through its orbital plane at a dead coast if our aim is good, or we’ll impact it hard, at a dead coast, if our aim is too good. Either way, we would never know, because our life support will have given out, oh, say, fifteen days before either of those scenarios.”

  “So you’re saying we should turn around now, and head back?”

  Sally looked at Genness and me for help – but what could we do?

  “We can’t turn back now, is what I’m saying! We did a two hundred and twenty-six hour burn on our way out before we even made the first course correction, and then we ran it eleven days straight after that.”

  Bayern frowned at her tone, but was much too conscious of the fact that we could see he didn’t quite grasp the situation to immediately comment.

  “Can you repair it?” Genness asked, stepping in, his soft voice putting the tension a little further off. He was forever calming things down between Sally and and the captain, who clashed like orange on blue. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, while Bayern had no choice, being one himself. The fact that he was, at least nominally, the boss, only made it worse for her, and Gen seemed to understand this.

  “Yeah, I can fix it. But I have to shut the power plant down while I’m working. That means batteries for a couple of days, if the problem is what I think it is. If not, we’ll have to play it by ear.”

  “But you’ll be able to start it up again? The reactor I mean.”

  Bayern had a forced grimness to his tone, trying hard to seem like he was on top of this now.

  “Why would I shut the flaming thing down if I didn’t think I could bring it online again?!”

  “Hey, watch the attitude! We have a serious situation, and as captain, I need everyone at his or her best. Now, what we need is for you, Sally, to get right on those repairs. Do you want help? Who has tech experience here?”

  “You know I’m Secondary Engineer,” I said, with a look not far behind any of Sally’s.

  This was getting on my nerves too: there were only four of us on the dang boat, including him, and he was supposed to be in charge. He’d had weeks to go over our backgrounds and should’ve known our secondary assignments before he even stepped aboard. For crying out loud, we might have only been a slapped-together crew, but he could at least have read the mission package the company had put together for our run. That had included an itemized breakdown of all our anticipated shipboard duties for four months time, out past the gravity shadow of the system’s orange star – out where inbound ships would arrive from starjump; backgrounds and basic info on the hired crew; an overview of DAME MINNIE, and highlights from its forty-eight year career; an explicit overview of our primary responsibility: namely, to screen any and all inbounds, and meet and repel suspected corsairs; and finally, tips on how to make nice-nice with each other until our run was over. I wished Bayern had read this last part most of all.

  “Good. You help out in Engineering, Ejoq, and I’ll cover Gunnery duties until the crisis is over. Any questions?”

  There were several, but they didn’t amount to much: was Sally sure we had enough life support to get us through the situation? (Yes, batteries should last for weeks on standard power rations.) Were there any expected escorts out, or challenges coming in, during our anticipated downtime? (A small Free Trader named POCKY or PONTE or something was outbound from Deegman right now, but we would most likely be up and running again before it reached the system starjump point.) Would our bosses back on Deegman give us crap over all this? (Probably.)

  I was hungry, so I heated up a frozen meal after the meeting broke up and followed Sally down to Engineering with it. Her domain was a cramped space of pipes, cables and creepy shadows; not to mention a nagging bang-BANG-zap-hiss from the small atmosphere exchange unit, underscored by a discordant two-toned hum that set my teeth on edge from both the drive system (on idle right now) and the power plant in question. I bumped my head painfully on a projecting bolt while climbing over a plasma duct to get to Sally’s desk, and swore blue thunder.

  I hated this job, truth be told. Oh, not the temporary reassignment to Engineering so much: I had minored in Ship Systems in higher-ed, and had maintained a partial interest in Civilian-Class defense boats – of which our tiny DAME MINNIE was one. And not because I’d be helping Sally out: true, I preferred working alone on my Primary assignment, but then we all did – Sally with her engines and systems; Genness monitoring and maintaining comm and computers; Bayern with whatever it was he did all shift (no one was quite sure, even him); and me, with my defensive systems and combat sims. Besides, even though Sally had at least ten years on me, she was in really great shape, had a sexy potty-mouth when she was pissed-off, and a good brain at all times. I didn’t expect anything to come out of that, because she and Genness had been together since about a week after we left Deegman, and he was young, handsome, quiet, and in great shape himself; while I was short, kind of fat, and prone to complaining when I was bored – which happens a lot on extended picket duty.

  And this was exactly what irked me the most about this job. Three months before, the big corporate container ship I’d been signed to was hauling Fleet supplies, and it had just arrived on Deegman when the news caught up with us that its parent company had been bought out. They have SOP’s for these sorts of things, one of which is to immediately downsize the crew. I got a good reference, a crappy severance, and the axe. My luck running to type, the piracy problem in Rilltule started getting bad right about then, and the big outfits just stopped coming. Traffic from privately owned ships was up for a while, but even that started tapering off. I was left sitting on my ever-widening posterior, watching vids, running scenarios on my tiny wristcomp, and filling my face with the spicy fried food the locals seemed to love. Deegman imports almost everything it needs, which means almost everything it has to offer is at robbery prices. Six weeks and my savings started getting tight. By ten weeks I was facing homelessness – which is one harsh prospect on a vacuum-wrapped planet, believe me.

  An acquaintance of an acquaintance tipped me to the fact that the mining interests on Deegman had gotten together in secret and bought a used Bechel, which they wanted to crew and launch in the next couple of months. As a privately owned vessel, it fell
outside the boundaries and direct control of Deegman Security Corps, which was more police force than military body, anyway. SecCorps had Deegman and the other inner-system settlements covered nicely with a moderate collection of mismatched orbiters and transports, and they did a respectable job of keeping the peace. They had nothing for command and control of Rilltule’s jump point on the outer edge of the small system, though – exactly where pirates had been hitting. One old Bechel wasn’t much of an improvement on that situation, but they had to start somewhere, I guess.

  I wasted no time and applied, and while I might not be much to look at, my resume is a killer. I was hired on the spot. Sally said later that she had quit her previous position on a medium-size freighter a couple weeks before this, over advancement issues, and had already been signed to DAME MINNIE’s first run by the time I showed up. Genness told me he’d been knocking around town for some time, and had been on big couriers before that. Bayern flew a transport for one of the mining outfits, and was the Company Man on board. He was a last minute replacement, but, to be fair, he was a great pilot and never dumped a lot of rah-rah go-company crap on us – which is not to say he was easy to work for. In his own way, though, he seemed as bored and miserable as we were, and he even told me once, about three weeks out, that he missed his little shuttle job dreadfully.

  Ostensibly, we were pacing Deegman in a solar orbit of our own around Rilltule – out beyond where that small queasy orange star’s gravity shadow extended into extra-dimensional space – and thus where ships traveling to or from Deegman via starjump had to show up before continuing on. The fact that there was nothing else of any interest here besides the mining town on Deegman that had hired us, plus a few settlements on space stations that strolled along in lazy solar orbits further out from there, made our present general locale the only area worth guarding. Of course, we’d had to weave in and out of many orbital trajectories in the weeks we’d been out here, so as to (sort of) keep pace with Deegman, half-a-billion kilometers closer in-system, but all outbound vessels were told to rendezvous with us first before making starjump. That meant any “unconfirmed contacts” (read that: pirates) would have to go through us in order to pick off one of the little merchanters with their small but extremely valuable cargoes. Since Free Traders had to buy their loads outright instead of getting anything on spec, and Bechels like DAME MINNIE had no starjump capabilities whatsoever, everyone was kept fairly honest.

  Actually, in my free time that month, I’d developed a scenario wherein a gunboat like ours, doing our job, could waylay the cargo ship it was intended to protect, board it, coldwalk the crew, and then take off with it to parts unknown. This was just professional speculation, of course: you’d need conspiring crewmates without any morals; some rather specific training in shipboard combat techniques; and all the command codes needed to override the target ship’s computer. This last was the hardest of all to manage, which was why my little scenario, or any variation thereof, virtually never occurred. Oh, people had tried it before, but only a legendary few had ever succeeded. Studying this sort of thing was my bag, and, lustful fantasies of my shipmates aside, I knew the difference between speculation and reality.

  “He’s a bleeding pile.”

  Sally didn’t elaborate because she knew I understood. Instead, she motioned with her hand to wait for something, so I waited.

  “There…that’s what I’m talking about. See what I mean?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “You didn’t feel that? The mags were spiking. It’s like a wave passing through you.”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry. It must be one of those educated palate things. You said that even the computer didn’t pick it up.”

  “No, it does register, it’s just that diagnostics doesn’t rate it highly enough to consider it a problem. Even a well-balanced mag bottle has a range of variance that includes occasional peaks and valleys – small ones, anyway. If we were involved in combat, or training maneuvers, or really anything at all that could have been a distraction, I doubt I’d have pursued it myself. Most variances are due to outside causes, like power draws elsewhere in the vessel, or even solar flair activity, if you’re close enough – which we’re not. This flux is from the magnetic field propagation array, which is in the early stages of failure. Now, with the big boys, like those solid state Kategils or Magnars that Fleet uses, this would never be a problem. Even their small gunboats use Vlassingweil magnetics – which do have arrays, but…”

  My eyes must have been glazing over, because she frowned and then waved at the fusion plant.

  “Anyway, these cheap Value Power jobs aren’t really made to be fixed by the user. You’re supposed to sign a service contract with the dealer, and then pay through the colon whenever something goes wrong, because, of course, nothing that’s likely to go wrong is ever covered. That’s not an option for us. DAME MINNIE’s almost fifty years old. She’s gone through a lot of hands, but this power plant is the original unit. It doesn’t owe anybody anything, I guess, but that still leaves us with a big stripdown and reassembly.”

  “Where do we start?” I asked, finishing up my dinner.

  “I want to do a full service test on the entire battery bank, so we don’t have any nasty surprises when we shut down the plant,” she answered, leading the way.

  “Each battery? Can’t you just run diagnostics? It’d be a lot faster.”

  “Oh, I already did that, and they look fine. But the battery monitor subroutine is some homegrown thing one of the previous owners wrote, and I just don’t want to trust some yo-yo’s tollhouse cookie program on something this vital. Don’t know what they did with the factory-issued routine, anyway – it comes with the package.”

  I didn’t have any answer to that, of course.

  two

  *

  “Those god-fisting, mother-mating swindlers!! What the flying fornication are we supposed to do now?!”

  I didn’t have any answer to that either.

  One battery at 57%, another at 31%, a third at 18%, and the remaining seven all flatlined. Meanwhile, diagnostics said there wasn’t one battery in the entire bank under 94%. At least now we knew why they’d installed their own routine: to sell an old Bechel to a bunch of rubes without having to replace the emergency standby batteries. Replacing an entire bank would’ve taken a deep bite out of any profits, while a fake diag program might not have cost anything.

  Sally seemed madder at herself than anyone else. “I should’ve done this check before we left Deegman, but I was going crazy getting the main drive ready.” She cursed steadily for several minutes, before tapering off to a mutter.

  “Can we still do the repairs if we work fast?” I asked her. “How long will the power from those three last?”

  “Not long enough. If we shut down now, we’d normally have a week or more with this much juice. But these will drain out a lot faster than normal – they’ve been undercharged for so long they won’t be able to hold what little they’ve got. Heck, I’ll be needing to use heavy tools too: the bench drill and the laze on the emitters that we take out of the power plant – that’ll eat a lot of juice right there. Then we have to reinstall, run a diag of the whole magnetics system with the installed package for the power plant – which I hope to Crawling Savior we can trust – and then take them out again and fine-tune the work. And we’ll probably have to do all this several times to get it right.”

  “Then we’ll just have to be extra careful the first time, right?”

  She shook her head as if I were vexing her on purpose.

  “No, Ejoq. We don’t have precision tools onboard. If this works at all, it’ll be a process of elimination. Nip and tuck here, check it; nip and tuck there, check it; until we get it exactly, precisely right. This old tub isn’t much, but it’s still a far cry from some broken-down aircar you could tinker with in your back yard. The fusion reactor won’t work at all if the mag bottle isn’t right, and the bottle won’t form until the emitters
are right.”

  “In other words, it’ll take as long as it takes, no matter what our battery problems are,” I translated for myself.

  She just grunted, and turned back to the bank.

  After a moment, she said, “If we cut the dead units out of the system, we’ll probably gain a few kilowatt hours from the resistance we’ll save. That’s better than nothing.”

  “That doesn’t solve the problem, Sal.”

  “I know what the fornicating problem is, Ejoq! Don’t ride me like some low rent Bayern! I need your help in this, and right now you can help me most of all by shutting up. I have to think.”

  She went to her desk and began to check some numbers, adding and subtracting on a calculator program to one side of the screen, while she studied a schematic of the power plant. She mumbled, swore to herself, and even punched the flat screen at one point and spat, “Oh, you son-of-a-mutt!” I went and got coffee for us both, but she let hers get cold by her elbow as she worked.

  Finally, after nearly an hour of concentration, she turned back a little calmer than before.

  “Okay, here’s what we do…we shut everything off – and I mean everything – except heat, air, and the computer’s core functions. We rewire a few of the backup power packs for specific systems into the main trunk line, to help feed that crappy battery bank. You and I work without break until the job is done, and we just might make it.”

  “Now, don’t yell Sally, but…wouldn’t just shutting off AG be enough? That’s a big draw right there.”

  She sighed, but kept her temper.

  “Artificial Gravity uses a lot of power, yes, which is why we’ll shut it down too; but we’re probably going to eat up most of anything we save there by running the power tools – they weren’t designed to conserve energy, keep in mind. If we have to use them three or four times before we get it right, then we sure-as-defecation better have the power we need.”

  “What about the restart?” I asked her. “We’ll need a couple of megawatts to bring the system back up to critical.”