Motherload: Stardrifter Book 01 Read online

  “Only as a surge at the beginning, to stabilize the waveform. We’ll run a jumper outside to one of your charpacs. Weapons-grade accelerators use capacitors for instant power for the first round. What do you call it? Chamber something…?”

  “Keeping one in the chamber. It allows us to get one shot off at all times, without the need to charge weapons. It’s standard procedure for these kind of guns.”

  She nodded, and pointed to an area she’d highlighted on the schematic.

  “Well, that works out well for us now. We’ll just insert a line right there. Then, when we’re ready to start, you fire the thing off, and the surge goes directly to the power plant down here, instead of running through the weapon. I’ll just have to monkey-up a regulator of some kind to rectify the gun surge with the power plant’s needs.

  “Should we tell the others?”

  “Probably, but I can’t deal with Bayern right now. You run and give them the basics, while I disconnect the dead batteries. And tell them not to bother me for a while. This will be hard enough without an idiot’s questions.”

  And she gave me a hard look.

  It was actually easier dealing with the captain than I expected, because I kept the conversation on the technical side and he just nodded sagely and acted like he understood and approved. Genness, on the other hand, who, as an apparent matter of personality, had been unstressed by anything since we’d launched, now seemed genuinely disturbed.

  “We have to at least keep emergency comm open,” he protested, “in case we can’t fix this problem.”

  “Who are we going to call, Gen?” I responded with a shake of my head. “We’re too far out for anybody to come get us in time. The only shot we have here is for this to work, and it can only work if we have all available power. Besides, we can always scrape together some juice for comm, if it comes down to that. We’ll want to tell Deegman what’s happening before we shut down, of course, and what we’re going to do about it. Once the power plant is back up, we’ll have to return to port ASAP: without a decent set of emergency backup batteries, we don’t want to meet up with any bad guys out here.”

  “Can’t we have passives up, at least? They hardly pull any juice on their own. I realize we’ll be keeping computers down to minimum levels, which means no sensor analyses, but I can handle those myself if I have a little time. I mean, if we do get visitors, we ought to know about it.”

  That seemed reasonable to me, but Sally had to think it over once I relayed the request. Sensors on a Bechel are bundled together in two preinstalled packages, with passives and actives sprinkled rather equally along the port and starboard sides. If you cut power, they both go. She ruminated for a bit, then said she could run a shunt to passives through comp, since we’d be keeping low levels there active anyway. This way, we could still tap the tiny backup power cells in the sensor suite (actually located in a bulkhead amidships), while still keeping one eye open. This was a good idea, but I couldn’t help but be a little irritated: if anyone but Genness had asked her for this, she’d have dismissed it out of hand and spat rivets.

  Disconnecting dead batteries is just a matter of rerouting a few cable connections, so what was left of the bank was ready for the shutdown at this stage. We set everything up for manual deactivations, made sure everybody onboard had a flashlight or headlamp, had some water and ration bars handy, had gone to the fresher recently (we would have to use emergency biowaste bags until this was done), and then started pulling plugs.

  It really takes longer than you’d think to shut down systems that were never meant to be shut down while in flight. There were virtual and physical fail-safes to bypass; checks and double-checks to make of each system’s own backup power supplies (if applicable); and, in two particular cases, replacement of small, though vital, components that were failing, but which had yet to show up on diagnostics. In a few hours, we were floating in Zero-G, draped in darkness, and smothered in silence. Actually the other two guys aboard were smothered in silence – Engineering was still subject to the bang/hiss of the atmosphere exchanger.

  The inner core of the power plant had an emergency vent to the exterior, so as to blow plasma or super-hot vapors out to vacuum should it ever be necessary. Sally used it this time, however, to simply cool off the core – now shut off, but still searing. When that looked good, she took a cordless vibrosaw and began cutting through the reactor housing.

  She wasn’t kidding about Value Powers!

  As she worked, periodically having me hold or fetch something, she explained how the small reactor would normally have been serviced and rebuilt in the factory: giant automated prying tools would pop off the housing case; other tools would extract each integrated component and test it; the faulty emitters would be replaced; and the whole thing would have been reassembled in a matter of minutes. An easy process, apparently, for a robotic factory. Not so easy for people who were in the dark, weightless, using hand tools, and with the clock ticking.

  Despite our best intentions, we did end up taking a ration bar break after a few hours. We’d made coffee before the shutdown, and had insulated Z-G cups of hot joe to wash the dry, tasteless things down. A little-enough reward, maybe, but it picked up my spirits some.

  Bayern had popped in periodically over the previous few hours, always saying something inane meant to bolster our morale, and then withering fast under Sally’s sarcastic responses. He chose this moment to float in again for an update.

  “We’ve opened the array. Now we have to start working on the emitters themselves,” I told him.

  “Well, that’s pretty good,” he replied, pleased. “Sounds like we’ll be up and running soon.”

  “This was the easy part,” Sally corrected, burning her tongue on the coffee. “Ouch! We have days of hand-machining and testing ahead of us yet, so just hold your water. We’ll be done when we’re done, and not ‘til we’re done, savvy?”

  “You know, Sally,” he said, trying to sound like a concerned manager, “we would all get along better if we could just be a little more polite to each other.”

  “What’s this we, Bayern – you have multiple personalities? If so, do you have one that’s not an idiot?”

  “See, now that’s what I’m talking about…”

  “If everybody in this tub just did their fornicating jobs, and let everybody else do their fornicating jobs, we’d all get along just fine! Keep bothering us down here, and none of us – not one person – will have to worry about getting along with anybody ever again! Is that polite enough for you, Captain Bligh?”

  Bayern looked at me, but I just held up my hands. As he turned to go, he motioned me to follow him out to the companionway.

  “I’m concerned about Sally,” he stated grimly, once we were alone, still in manager mode. “Do you think she’s up to this?”

  “Look, don’t take it personally,” I replied, steadying myself in the weightlessness, “you just get under her skin.”

  “It’s not her engineering skills that are in question here,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “it’s her ability to work under pressure. Can she handle the stress of our current situation, or should I be thinking of change?”

  “Think whatever you want. Our lives are riding on Sally right now, because nobody else aboard – myself included – can hand-machine those spheres without ruining them. Just give her some space, Bayern, and she’ll get us home.”

  He chewed it over like he had a choice, then shook his head with a sigh.

  “Okay, Ejoq. But I want you to watch her closely. If she starts to crack, we have to be ready to take action.”

  He shoved off and floated down the companionway until he had to take a corner, then smacked right into the bulkhead with a painful oomph. After that, he sort-of floundered off out of sight.

  I’d known bigger fools in my time – even ones who were ostensibly in charge – but this was an emergency. If he kept bugging Sally, we’d have to tie him up and gag him.

  She was still fuming w
hen I returned to Engineering.

  “Is Bayern talking fecals about me, Ejoq?! I’ll space him, I swear it!”

  “Sally, please don’t sweat the guy. Yes, he’s a moron, no argument — and he’s certainly not helping any now. But you seemed to hate him from day one. Why does he bug you so much?”

  She grumbled inarticulately, and turned away to the exposed magnetics. I thought that that would be her only reply, but after nearly a minute of silence, she spoke again without turning around. Her voice was quiet and sounded fatigued, as if she’d been running a marathon.

  “Every time I look at Bayern, I see my first husband. He was shorter, maybe, and with dark hair instead of fair, but I’m telling you, they could be brothers.

  She paused then, and shook her head, remembering a past she’d left both years and lightyears behind.

  “I come from a gravity well named Waverley. I met Binn when I was fresh out of school and still a kid. How’s that song go? Stars in her eyes and vac in her head… That was me all over. Binn was born in jumpspace, and had never lived on a planet in his life. He was everything I wanted to be – if you could overlook a few flaws. Seems he had a taste for graino – you know, that nasty rotgut from Barlow that they distill from used cooking oil – and he was a mean drunk. It might surprise you to hear it, but I wasn’t always the kind of person I am now. He bounced me off the bulkheads for three solid years. His family owned the ship we were on – HASTER, it was called – and he was being groomed to take the center chair someday. Naturally, then, it had to be his lazy groundpounder of a wife’s fault every night, right? Even I believed it. I wanted to be a spacer so badly, Ejoq, you can’t imagine! I wisened-up eventually, but it took cultured bone grafts in my jaw and right cheek to do it. Each time Bayern says something stupid, I just want to lay Binn’s head open with a tube bender.”

  “Sounds like unfinished business,” I said quietly.

  She turned back to me at that, now with a sad grin. “I jumped ship at SANDLEWOOD STATION, over in Manyas System, and showed my purple face to a local magistrate. She annulled the marriage on the spot. She tried to have him arrested too, but under the Alliance treaty, a Free Trader is considered a sovereign power, and no reason short of direct military, commercial or civil threat from said can justify violating sovereign territory…etc., etc. He agreed to the divorce, and promised to leave me be, so…they couldn’t go in after him. She was so pissed-off, she pulled some strings and had HASTER’s contract with the local trade commission pulled. A minor thing, on the surface of it, but Sandlewood was part of their annual route back then. I figure the loss adds up to a couple of million by now, so maybe there’s some justice in space after all.”

  “If there was,” I replied, “you wouldn’t still want to beat the guy to the floor, via Bayern. Looks aside, don’t let our current boss get to you, Sally – he’s pretty close to useless and he knows it. He asks a lot of questions and gets under our feet so he can pretend like he’s contributing. If you just tell him to shut-up and leave it at that, we won’t have to mutiny. I don’t want to lose my bonus.”

  She laughed and gave me a quick hug. “I’ll do my best, Ejoq. Just do your best, and keep him out of here. And pass me that microspec over there. I need a close look at this crap.”

  She spent the next hour or two examining the surface of the fist-sized emitter spheres, cursing twice on the third one, which she put aside before continuing on. None of the other fifteen seemed to offend her, so she put them back inside the housing carefully. She then held up the flawed sphere as if I could see what was wrong from two meters away.

  “They sure don’t make ‘em like they used to…especially at Value Power! What a piece of trash! Look at this thing: instead of a composite shell of iron carbide and titanium-tungsteel crystal – which is the very minimum that Alliance construction regs allow for, by the way – we have what looks like a hollow aluminum shell, coated with a thin layer of iron in a polymer base. There are two scratches in this paint job: here, and here. I figure a couple of specks of this cheap paint must have come off under the influence of the power plant’s magnetic field, and they, in turn, gouged away even more of it. Doesn’t seem like much damage, does it? If the paint kept eroding, which would be inevitable in my view, the mag field would have deformed and been unable to maintain the fusion reaction. No reaction, no power. And worse yet, in the milliseconds between the drop of the mag field and the end of the controlled reaction, the hot plasma would have flashed out to the inner edge of the frame holding the spheres.”

  “And…?”

  “Well, in a quality power plant, nothing: the magnetics fail, there’s a flash inside the casing that nobody sees, and the system switches to standby batteries with maybe, at most, a flicker of the lights to show that it happened. Nothing inside a good unit could be hurt, and whoever services it after that finds everything fine and dandy – except for the original problem, of course, whatever it was. With this piece of bowel business, though, we’d have a flash, and the distinct smell of burning plastic, and maybe even some visible smoke. Open it up, and you’d find sixteen blackened and stinking spheres, good for absolutely nothing now that their polymer coatings have been charred off by the plasma.”

  “In other words,” I commented, “there’d be no way to fix them at that stage. I suppose I can take it as a given that there isn’t a bucket of this paint just lying around in stowage somewhere?”

  She chuckled mirthlessly.

  “No, and it wouldn’t work that way anyway. That polymer would have to be applied by a computer that could spread a uniform depth, with a uniform distribution of iron atoms over the entire surface. We couldn’t hope to match that here, even if we could whip up a batch of the stuff – which we can’t.”

  “Can’t? We can’t fix those scratches?”

  “Well…I don’t know yet… lemme think…”

  That was Sally-speak for “Don’t bug me for a while”, so I took the opportunity to update the others. I found them both in the little cockpit that stood in for a bridge on DAME MINNIE, and I hung out in the hatchway while I talked. Bayern clucked and fretted, wondering aloud if he should step in and handle things personally. Both Genness and I ignored him, and I think he ignored himself too.

  I was about to leave when I noticed a flashing light on Genness’ board. It was a proximity alert.

  “What’s that?”

  He looked over and humphed, then jumped screens a few times.

  “Hello…” he muttered, “…and where’s my audible tone…gone with the power-down? How long was this flashing, Ejoq?”

  “I just noticed it now. I take it it’s new?”

  “Maybe,” he replied, while focusing the boat’s full suite of passives on the coordinates.

  “What’s wrong?” Bayern asked, confused.

  “What was the trigger?” I wanted to know. “What’s prox-sen 5 set to? Infrared?”

  His brow furrowed uncharacteristically as he pulled up the sensor datalog on one side of his screen. “Graviton,” he replied.

  We had company from outside the star system.

  Bayern appeared grim and focused, which meant he couldn’t follow this at all.

  “A ship,” I told him, by way of explanation.

  “A pirate…?” And suddenly, he looked anything but grim and focused. “Do we have missiles active yet?”

  “We can’t open the hatches on the any of the bays without power. It’s way too early to fret over, anyway – we don’t have any idea who this is. What’s their transponder say, Genness?”

  He had a deep frown on his face that I didn’t like.

  “I’m not getting a transponder. A quick diag says…no, we’re good. They just don’t want anybody to know they’re here. No active sensors from them either.” He shook his head slightly, and turned to Bayern at last, saying, “I don’t like this. These guys are acting shady. This might be the real thing after all.”

  Bayern looked like someone told him nine months after a really
bad bender that he was a father; and I, anyway, felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

  “We’re in a bad way right now,” I said, knowing even then just how unhelpful that was. “Genness, what’s our EM output?”

  “…uh, I don’t know. How do I…?”

  “Set your general passives all the way up and key a full-spectrum run, but zero-out the bogey.”

  He played with the keyboard for a while.

  “Um…okay…I read 7.85% of normal. I assume that’s us, but…?”

  “No output…or dang little output, anyway. Bechels have an average of 7 centimeters of polynium alloy for the hull and another 5 in composite armor – all the wrong stuff for a stealth vessel, since none of it will mask a signature too well, but I’m betting that it’s plenty thick enough to scatter our output right now…especially if they’re only running on passives…”

  But then I thought of something scary, and turned to kick off down the companionway, back to Engineering. Bayern grabbed my calf, and stopped me.

  “What’s going on, Ejoq?” He looked genuinely scared and perplexed.

  “They don’t want anyone to know they’re here, right? Well, neither do we!”

  I was gone from there before he could reply, hoping against hope that I’d be on time.

  Sally was just switching on the laze when I came in, the errant emitter sitting under it like a diseased grapefruit. The cramped space hampered my movement, so all I could do immediately was scream at her to shut it down, which she did with a startled jump.

  “Ejoq, what the flux…?!”

  “Pirate! Inbound. He probably hasn’t made us yet because of our power-down, but any big draw might flag us.”

  Her eyes were big and very serious then, as she looked around at the gutted mess that Engineering had become.

  “How far off?”

  “Not far enough. Maybe two light seconds it looked like – counterclock/thirty degrees off-plane. Tell me you can work magic, Sally…”

  “In my bunk, maybe! If they catch wind of us now, we’re out of luck, Ejoq, and no mistake!”