Repercussions

by M. D. Cooper

  Kenaz sat back, eyes narrowed, and waited for the captain’s response.

  “Your victuals make a persuasive argument, which I’m sure you know,” intoned O’Bannon wryly as he chased the last bit of soup with a bit of the warm, soft yeast roll that had appeared from somewhere. He slathered on some of the real butter that came with it and chewed appreciatively. “I guess you can make these rolls, and there are several kilograms of this butter in that container, too?”

  “Absolutely. Hey, Goran, bring out dessert,” Kenaz replied with a grin.

  Dessert was strawberry shortcake with fresh strawberries, hot, flaky biscuits, and whipped cream. The captain just shook his head and dug in.

  “I suppose you think you can grow these on Icy Mama.” Kenaz simply nodded.

  “Well, you do make an interesting offer. You have a lot to learn about comet mining, but your record shows that you aren’t afraid of that. You also have enough training not to be an immediate danger to the rig and the crew…. I’m inclined to take you up on your proposition, depending on the percentage you want to squeeze out of us—I do have investors and a crew I need to satisfy. Before we go any further, though, I’m curious; why are you so determined to go ice mining?”

  “It’s very simple,” said Kenaz. “I want to get married.”

  * * * * *

  Recalling that conversation as he catalogued his aches and pains, Kenaz was a bit amazed that the captain had agreed so readily to the percentage he’d asked for. He wondered if he should have pushed for more, but knew it was best not to be greedy. His goal of raising a stake so he could purchase enough land on Ganymede for a farm capable of supporting a family felt within reach.

  Six months in, Kenaz was beginning to feel at home on the rig and like part of the crew, which, along with Icy Mama’s processors, had already worked halfway through the comet they were attached to, but it still dwarfed her. The Madre De Hielo was custom-designed for ice mining. Outwardly, she resembled a giant black widow spider, especially when she was consuming one of her victims. Her central core of control and processing equipment sprouted a dozen legs much longer than the rest of the rig. These legs enveloped the comet, connecting a network of electrostatic field generating hubs that kept the comet contained and feeding into the processors.

  Each hub was controlled by its own non-sentient artificial intelligence, and these NSAIs were all under the control of Dodson, the rig’s AI. The largest part of the rig were the tanks for the deuterium, refined from the comet’s ice, and cargo holds attached to the opposite side of the core from the legs.

  Circling the core was the one-hundred-meter-diameter hab ring with quarters and life support. Everything on the exterior of the rig was flat black. The comet itself had started with the albedo of a lump of coal, and the crew had made it even darker by dumping processed dust in a layer over the surface. The closer they came to having the cargo ready to move into a market trajectory, the more important it was to remain undetected.

  Like most criminals, claim jumpers in the Scattered Disk were lazy and preferred a ready cargo. Active scans were way too much of a telltale out here in the black, so visual detection was the rig’s biggest risk. They even covered the growing exterior cargo of interlocked ice blocks with a thin, black, monomolecular sheath.

  Kenaz felt at home on Icy Mama, even though it had only been six months since he’d joined the crew. In that time, he had expanded the rig’s hydroponics into several unused sections of the hab ring and made it his personal domain. Though they hadn’t exactly warmly welcomed him, no one on the crew had been overtly hostile, and they soon came to appreciate his culinary skills.

  Beads was two meters of wiry, dark Scattered Disk native. Kenaz found her attractive, but the feeling was not reciprocated, so he kept his distance. Juergens’ origins were also in the Scattered Disk, but he wasn’t particularly forthcoming about his past. Shaggy blond and as tall as Beads, but significantly more substantial, he was the expert jacker on the crew and spent a lot of time carving the comet to keep it feeding smoothly into the processors. Siobahn was the oldest of the crew, second mate and cargomaster. Petite at one hundred and sixty centimeters, with black hair and a pale complexion, she never admitted her age or place of birth to Kenaz. His efforts to discover these had become something of a game between them.

  The captain was Disker through and through. In a business where an addiction to gambling was considered a necessary trait, he had a reputation for bringing in valuable cargos on a regular basis. Kenaz was pretty sure he had been SWSF at some point in his past, which would mean that he still held a reserve commission. One thing was for sure about Captain O’Bannon: he was a master of low-g Kodokan judo and nastier forms of hand-to-hand combat. He gave the crew regular mandatory lessons. Kenaz had been a champion folk-style wrestler in his weight class on Ganymede, but he rarely avoided being thumped by O’Bannon in their training sessions.

  The captain also insisted that everyone learn everyone else’s job. The cross-training helped stave off boredom and provided redundancy, which Kenaz was pretty sure was O’Bannon’s unstated middle name. If there was a system on the Madre De Hielo that didn’t have a backup, he wasn’t sure what it was.

  One of the reasons Kenaz’s hydroponic skills were valued was the life support redundancy they provided. He really didn’t trust anyone else to look after his gardens, which was motivation enough to get him up and out of the autodoc and hobbling toward the galley. He still felt like hammered dog meat, but he could stand the pain better than inactivity.

  “Well, look what the cat, or Beads, at least, dragged in.” Juergens laughed. “Woo-wee, ‘Naz, that chunk of ice painted you some pretty colors!”

  Kenaz looked down at the multi-colored bruises on his right arm and leg. A sudden wave of nausea left him wishing that he hadn’t.

  “What caused the blowout?” Kenaz grated as he pulled a chair out and sat down at the galley table with the rest of the crew.

  “A vein of CO2 ice flashed and spalled off a good chunk of water ice just as you were passing by that point. That’s what knocked you into the void. The ES field slowed it down, or you’d be about two centimeters thick right now. The upside is that the impact with you slowed the mini berg down enough that the captain and I were able to net it while Beads recovered your carcass.”

  “Yay for physics,” Kenaz replied weakly. “At least I have a lead on an occupation as a doorstop when this trip is over. Sorry about phasing out on you, Beads.”

  “No worries, kid, at least we’re not holding your remembrance service right now and won’t have to tend to all those needy tomato plants of yours.”

  “I prefer the term ‘particular’. So how did that vein of CO2 heat up enough to make it flash?”

  “Dodson is trying to figure that out now. We haven’t had any repeats, so hopefully it was a one-off.”

  “So… did you pull out the ‘granny tights’?” Beads smirked.

  Kenaz refused to meet her eyes or dignify the question with an answer.

  Dodson chimed in.

  “Really, Dods? You could have kept that to yourself.”

 

  “ ‘Great galloping granny tights’? That’s disgusting language, Kenaz,” Beads admonished.

  The crew had no end of fun busting his chops over his refusal to use profanity and the creative expletives he came up with as substitutes—almost as much fun as they had teasing him about his goal of owning a farm and having a family when he didn’t have so much as a girlfriend.

  Kenaz just lowered his head, grabbed the bowl of freshly boiled edamame, and started popping the hot beans out of their pods and into his mouth.

  “Who cooked these?” he complained around a mouthful. “They need more salt.”

  “Nice change of subject, have you ever seen your granny in tights?”

  “Yes,
and she still looks a darn sight better than any of you,” Kenaz grumbled.

  “Alright,” said the captain. “As entertaining as all this is, let’s get down to business. We’re over halfway through this chunk of ice, and the D2 ratio has been good. We’ll probably have a full tank once it’s all processed. We’ve got a good chunk of silicates coming in and we’re tanking some ammonia and methane, as well. The next question is where do we sell?”

  The inhabited worlds in the Scattered Disk had a never-ending thirst for fuel for the fusion-powered mini suns that kept them alive. Profit margins depended on a host of factors like the proximity of the outer Sol worlds and the current state of the Scattered Worlds’ relationship with the Jovian Combine. Embargos were a frequently used political tool and an ice miner’s best friend when it came to making money. Because of this, Dodson, with his many AI contacts and his data parsing capability, was one of the crew’s greatest assets. He had to rely on what broadcasts he could bring in at their current location, though, since he didn’t dare give away their location by attempting two-way comms.

 

  “I’m in agreement with that analysis. We’ll have some skull sessions as the time gets closer. Kenaz, you are on light duty for the next forty-eight hours, then you, the autodoc, and I will reassess your situation. I’ll take a turn on Jacker duty during that time. I need to get armored EV time anyway. Full armor for any EV activities from here on out. If Kenaz had been in his, he wouldn’t look like a bad tomato right now. This berg has been squirrely from day one, and I don’t want any more injuries.”

  Kenaz resisted rolling his eyes. Armor was standard for Jacker duty, but cumbersome for the more delicate work he usually did.

  He spent his first light-duty shift harvesting and processing the produce that had accumulated during his time in the autodoc. He took the opportunity to get a number of lower priority tasks in the hydroponics modules done as well. Hand pollinating was a pain, but it didn’t require too much physical effort, and the fresh tomatoes were certainly worth it.

  He scraped the seeds out of one likely looking outcross and set them up to ferment for a few days to get rid of the gel so they could be dried and saved. He cleaned out the remains of a lettuce planting, stuck everything into the composting module, and checked that the pickles were fermenting nicely in their brine. A glance at the clock told him it was time to fix lunch, so he pulled out the ingredients for chicken and dumplings and got to work.

  The rest of the crew drifted in, drawn by the smell of the chicken, vegetables, and gravy bubbling away under the dumplings.

  “Are those pickles ready yet?” queried Juergens.

  Kenaz lifted the lid and speared a small one. “I think they’re close. Here, try this one and see what you think.”

  Juergens nabbed the gherkin and stuck the whole thing in his mouth, crunching contentedly.

  “Mmm..mm I think I’m going to kidnap you when this trip is done and set up a pickle shop on Makemake. I have no idea how I got through life without these before you came along.”

  “You know you can make them yourself, right? It’s not that hard.”

  Juergens chuckled. “Yeah, but I hate shoveling compost, and the only thing that grows willingly for me is mold. You’re coming with me. We’ll make a fortune if I can get just one percent of the population as addicted to these things as I am.”

  “You know I have other priorities after this trip.” Kenaz helped himself to a pickle. Yup, strong garlic and dill flavor with just the right level of pucker, still fizzy with CO2. Time to put this batch in the chiller.

  “Hey! Pass one this way before you put them up,” Siobahn complained, and Kenaz turned to see Beads and the captain waving for theirs as well.

  He dutifully doled them out and finally got the container into the chiller just as the timer for the dumplings went off. He pulled the pot off the stove and set it on a trivet in the middle of the galley table. Pulling the lid off, he allowed the steam to escape, revealing the puffy dumplings, and stuck a large serving spoon into the stewpot.

  “Dish up and don’t burn your tongue.”

  Kenaz grabbed the bowl of tomato-cucumber salad and sat down himself. He bowed his head and silently thanked God for the meal while the others dug in.

  The crew, with the exception of Dodson, regarded his faith with amused tolerance for the most part. He and the AI had some very lively conversations about the souls of AIs and creation. Kenaz was pretty sure the crew’s tolerance was largely due to how well they were eating this trip, and he planned to keep them happy.

  “How are we looking on chicken?” asked the captain as he blew on a chunk of dumpling.

  “We’re in pretty good shape, about halfway through what I brought. The only thing we’re running low on is the bacon.”

  “What?!” all four of the others blasted him.

  “Just messing with you, but you deserve it, the way you all go through the BLTs. What are you going to do if it does run out?”

  This earned him another set of glares.

  “How do you get these dumplings so light?” asked Siobahn.

  She was far and away the best cook on the crew next to Kenaz. The others were only allowed to assemble sandwiches, with supervision.

  “Put the lid on and don’t mess with them for ten minutes. Works every time. Anything shaking out on the broadcasts, Dodson?”

 

  “We’re far enough out and small enough that we shouldn’t need to worry about getting stepped on by the giants, but we’ve got plenty of homegrown trouble waiting for us out here if we don’t stay alert. Dodson, I want you and Kenaz to run an analysis of our optical sensor coverage. Make sure we have overlap,” the captain ordered.

  they both finished for him.

  “That earned you some extra lumps in randori once you’ve recovered, smart boy.”

  The meal broke up, and Kenaz went into salvage and clean mode. Out here, you didn’t waste any organic matter if you wanted to keep breathing and eating.

  PRIZE FIGHTING

  STELLAR DATE: 06.03.4127

  LOCATION: Ice mining rig Madre De Hielo, anchored to an uncharted comet

  REGION: Deep in the Scattered Disk, 200+ AU from Sol

  Four months later, Kenaz faced Captain O’Bannon in their hab ring dojo. They circled each other warily, looking for an opening. The captain reached with his right hand, and Kenaz darted his left hand out, locking on to the captain’s right elbow and simultaneously twisting to the left.

  As he twisted, pulling the captain to him, he dipped his right shoulder down and blocked his opponent’s right knee with an extended right hand. The block was just enough to move O’Bannon’s center of gravity from over his feet, and they crashed to the mat together, with Kenaz on top.

  O’Bannon nearly rolled him through, but Kenaz wrapped his right arm around the captain’s neck, tucked his own neck against O’Bannon’s right upper arm, and squeezed down hard.

  O’Bannon squirmed mightily, but he was rapidly losing oxygen to the brain and was forced to tap.

  Kenaz got up grinning.

  He had been waiting for the right moment to execute the sequence and could hardly believe that it had worked. O’Bannon had him go through
the moves in slow motion so everyone could see how it worked.

  “Nice trick to get me off balance there, and a quick transition to the arm triangle at the end. Let’s go another round.”

  This go-around was more typical. Kenaz was a bit too aggressive, trying for a foot sweep, and O’Bannon used his momentum to throw him halfway across the mat. Kenaz was just rolling to his feet when they were swept out from under him, and he landed hard on his back. The captain’s misdirected heel-palm strike thumped into the mat next to his ear, ending the match.

  “Let’s catch a break while Siobahn and Beads go at it.”

  Beads had height, reach, and mass on Siobahn, but Kenaz had never seen anyone—including the captain—use as many dirty tricks as Siobahn. More importantly, she was absolutely ruthless about pressing an advantage. Beads, for her part, presented all kinds of challenges and odd angles with her length and flexibility. She specialized in joint locks and unexpected bulkhead encounters, as Kenaz’s nose could attest.

  Juergens was probably the least scientific fighter among them, but with his brute strength and size, matched with a miner’s toughness, he was nobody’s picnic. His style was smash and grab and smash, repeating as necessary.

  The captain coached each of them to use their inherent advantages and never fight the opponent’s fight. The crew all learned judo grappling techniques that worked as well on someone in modern armor as it would against the Samurai armor the methods had been invented to counter.

  After an educational fifteen minutes of watching the women spar, they all headed to the weapons range to practice with pulse pistols and rifles. Kenaz had known that ice mining was a dangerous occupation, but he hadn’t quite appreciated just how dangerous the ice miners themselves were.