Junkyard Heroes

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “You actually vomited? In front of the entire Bridge?” Ségolène asked, when she was done.

  “Ignore the implications of alien intelligence a piece of manufactured metal holing the ship might represent,” Cai said dryly. “Let’s discuss how she threw up in terror of her own daring, instead.”

  “I think you’re missing the point there, too,” Peter told him. “Noa is a classic introvert. We all are. Vomiting is a common reaction in moments of high stress. It’s not that she threw up on Magorian’s shoes that is great. It’s that she stayed in the room afterward and still held her ground.”

  “I hadn’t missed that point at all,” Cai said stiffly. “Yet even Noa’s rare and extreme courage pales next to the significance of the origins of the splinter.”

  “You heard Noa,” Lizette said. “There are chunks of metal all over space. It sounds as if the ship is lucky this didn’t happen a long time ago.”

  “Actually, metallic asteroids are rare,” someone said, behind Noa.

  Everyone looked up. Noa turned on her chair. She already knew it was Haydn Forney standing there. The dry tone was already familiar.

  He was wearing the same clothes and the long heavy coat as yesterday. There was a big glass of some sort of ale in his hand. Above the dark stubble on his chin, the bruising on his cheekbone was a deep purple, drawing her gaze to his black eyes and the thundery brows over them.

  “The ship’s leading astro physicist told me space was filled with them,” Noa said defensively.

  Forney smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “It depends on what you mean by ‘filled’, doesn’t it?”

  “And you happen to have a different interpretation?” Cai said, his tone just as dry.

  “I do.” Forney hooked the spare chair—the chair where Daniel had always sat—and pulled it out with his boot. He stepped over the back of it and straddled it, resting his ale on the front edge of the seat, between his thighs.

  Noa drew away from him, shifting her hips to maximize the distance. Peter, on the other side of him, picked up his chair and moved it closer to Lizette with a distasteful expression.

  Forney didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at her, Noa realized. “There are millions of asteroids and rocks and particles out there,” he said. “Millions upon millions. You’re thinking in human scale and figuring that means they’re all packed in together like rubble.”

  “Bannister called it junk,” Noa admitted.

  “Then it’s true,” Forney said. “You were on the Bridge, with Magorian?”

  “People are saying that?” Noa asked, stunned.

  “I don’t think anyone is talking about anything else tonight,” Cai said gently.

  “Captain Owens said it would be a night of reflection,” Noa said.

  Ségolène sighed loudly.

  Forney raised his ale to his mouth. “I’m sorry about your friend, by the way.” He drank.

  Everyone just looked at him. Their combined disapproval didn’t seem to register, however. Forney put his glass down again. “Bannister understands the theory. He’s very good at theory, as it happens. He just doesn’t get it though. Not in his bones. He’s falling into the same trap untrained people do. He’s forgetting the scale of interstellar space.”

  Cai made a frustrated sound. “You’re better trained than Bannister, is that it?”

  “He thinks in figures. I don’t,” Forney said shortly.

  Lizette smothered a laugh. Peter rolled his eyes.

  Finally, Forney reacted to them. His scowl deepened. “Look,” he said, holding up his hand. “My fingers are space junk. Inside the area of my hand, it’s all packed in tight. If I increase the area, though…” He spread his fingers. They were big fingers. Strong. “That’s just doubling the volume of space and that’s just on two dimensions.” He dropped his hand. “Do any of you understand what a kilometer really is?”

  “There are three of them, from stem to stern,” Ségolène said quickly.

  Forney nodded. “Multiply that by a factor of a million.”

  Cai frowned. “The junk is spread out…”

  “On average, there’s a decent sized asteroid every five hundred thousand square kilometers and that’s if you’re staying in the orbital plane of a single solar system, which the Endurance is not.” Forney leaned closer to Noa, making her draw toward Cai. “Did Bannister talk about the force fields?”

  “Well, yes. He said they fend off a lot of stuff. Anything smaller than a tankball.”

  Forney nodded. “Something got through. That’s the issue.”

  “If it was bigger than a tankball…” Peter said, frowning.

  “If it was bigger than a tankball, we wouldn’t be sitting here,” Forney said impatiently. “Something bigger than that wouldn’t just put a dainty little hole on either side of the ship. It would tear through the ship and rip it apart. The forces involved would disintegrate the ship almost instantly.” He picked up the glass and smiled humorlessly. “Journey’s end. Destination. Just not the one we’re aiming for.” He drank.

  Cai was frowning, his hand on his precious board. “Bannister says the ship steers around the bigger ones.”

  Forney wiped his mouth. “Long range scanners can pick up the bigger stuff thousands of kilometers away. The ship would predict the trajectory and adjust direction to avoid a collision. Then it would adjust back to course, after. I’m talking about a tiny adjustment. A degree at most. That’s all that would be needed to avoid the big stuff.”

  Noa reconsidered the image she had formed in her mind of the ship moving in semi-circles and wriggly lines through space, tracing out a path through a maze of dangerous objects. It was not really like that at all, if she could trust Forney.

  “How is it you know all this stuff?” Cai asked him.

  “How do you know what you know?” Forney shot back. “I can read, the same as you.”

  “The composition of space is esoteric,” Cai said. “You didn’t just wake up one morning and go ‘oh, I know, I’ll find out what space is really like,’ and start reading up on it.”

  Forney turned his glass around on its base, making the contents swirl. He watched it turn.

  “You did it because of your father…” Noa said, putting it together with an almost audible click in her mind.

  Forney’s scowl deepened. Then he shrugged, raised the glass to his lips and drank the rest of it in large swallows, while everyone watched him.

  “So…” Ségolène said, her tone light. “Daddy thinks there’s a cave out there. You think the complete opposite.”

  “I don’t think so. I know,” Forney shot back. “Facts are indisputable.”

  “The facts in the Archives, that your father says are all lies and fiction?” Cai asked, his tone polite.

  Forney glared at him.

  “I saw them,” Noa said. “The stars. Space. I saw them through the hole.”

  Forney twisted to stare at her. The scowl had gone. “You saw them? What did it look like? Was it totally black?”

  The quick questions peppered her, making Noa blink. “There was black. There was color, too. A glow.”

  Forney sat back in his chair and let out a deep breath. “You saw space…” His awe made him look younger and vulnerable.

  “She’ll see more than that,” Lizette said, pride in her voice. “Noa might be the one to go outside the ship.”

  Forney turned his head to look at Noa once more. His black eyes seemed to glow with heated emotion. “They won’t send just one person out there alone. Let me come with you. I can help.”

  Noa drew back, away from his abrupt entreaty. She felt Cai’s hand on her back, holding her steady. “I’m not sure…” she began weakly.

  “That’s not a decision Noa can make,” Peter said stiffly. “Besides, if she was going to pick a partner, it would be one of us. Cai, most likely, as he just knows stuff.”

  “I know stuff,” Forney said firmly. “I’ve studied this all my life. Physics, space, stellar cart
ography, astral navigation.”

  “Anything your father thinks is bullshit, huh?” Lizette said.

  Forney seemed to realize where he was, and the impression he was making. He withdrew back inside himself. Noa could see him do it by the way his shoulders drew in. He sat straight on the chair, no longer towering over her. His gaze went back to the empty glass.

  “Damn, Forney, you hate the man that much?” Cai asked.

  “I know what I’m talking about,” Forney said stiffly.

  “Yeah?” Peter said. “Prove it.”

  Forney pressed his lips together, making them thin and whiten. Then he looked at Noa. “On the Bridge, did they say anything about pressure suits?”

  Startled, she nodded. “They don’t have any.”

  Forney nodded. “They’ll have to build them and there are only ancient schematics to go by. They don’t know what they have to build for.”

  “They already talked about having to stay tethered to the ship,” Noa said, deliberately letting him think the tether idea had not been hers. “Air to breathe, of course.”

  “Did they talk about shielding for radiation?” Forney asked. “Puncture protocols to check for small holes in the suit? Biological waste management? Heating and cooling? Water?”

  Everyone was staring at him, now.

  “I don’t think…” Noa began. She halted, confused. None of those things had even been mentioned. “I’m just stepping outside to see what’s there,” she said defensively.

  “Ninety seconds out there without radiation shielding will kill you,” Forney said flatly.

  She stared at him, her heart thudding erratically. She was shaking. “I don’t even know if they’ll pick me to go,” she said. Even her voice shook.

  Forney put the glass on the table and turned on the chair to look at her directly. He wasn’t leaning over her, this time. He gripped the back of his chair, his knuckles white. “You have to make them pick you.”

  Cai laughed.

  “I mean it,” Forney said, his voice quiet. “They need you. They just don’t know it yet. I can make you so valuable to them, they wouldn’t dream of sending anyone else out there.”

  “If I take you with me,” Noa said. Her voice sounded weak, after his.

  He raised a brow. “You need me, if you want to go out there. How badly do you want to get outside the ship and find out what happened to your friend?”

  “Not badly enough to cozy up next to the son of the original Caver himself,” Peter muttered.

  Everyone laughed, except Forney and Noa. She couldn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny having someone read her mind.

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning, as Masud Magorian had ordered, Noa reported to him directly. She took Lizette with her.

  Although neither of them had conferred with the other, Noa laughed when she saw that Lizette was wearing her engineer’s overalls and jacket, just as Noa was.

  Lizette brushed at the clean overalls with a self-conscious gesture. “I don’t have anything near grand enough for the Bridge and besides, we’re going there to work, aren’t we?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Noa told her. She didn’t speak of her desire to stay apart from all the professionals and experts and consultants surrounding the Captain. It seemed important to her that they not be mistaken as part of the fawning group. They were, as Lizette said, there to do work.

  The Bridge guards took an inordinately long amount of time to go through both their profiles, once they had scanned their wrists. Noa shifted on her feet uneasily, aware of time passing. Magorian would be expecting her by now. It would sound like an excuse if she said the gate guards made them late.

  “Maybe they don’t want to let me in,” Lizette said, leaning closer to keep her voice down.

  “I explained who you were. You heard me.”

  “Yeah, we’re two mechanics demanding to speak to the Chief of Staff,” Lizette said and rolled her eyes.

  The guards didn’t seem to be excited or grumpy. They ignored the two women and stared at screens neither of them could see.

  A tall figure appeared at the end of the corridor that led into the interior of the bridge area, walking swiftly. Noa straightened with a snap. “Oh…”

  “That’s him, isn’t it?” Lizette said. “Magorian?”

  “Yes, but what is he doing here?” Noa said in an undertone. She bit her lip, wondering if Magorian had changed his mind about letting her be involved in the project.

  Masud Magorian came right up to where they were standing at the barrier. He looked almost exactly the same as he had yesterday, except the shirt and trousers were shades of dark green, rather than brown. He was far more elegant than either of them. He nodded at Noa. “I’ll walk you to security and arrange passes for you. This is your friend who can read legacy code?”

  Noa introduced Lizette, who stood taller than Magorian. Her height didn’t seem to bother him at all, as it did some men. It was as if he had not noticed at all that he had to look up at her. He shook her hand politely and repeated her name, then beckoned them both toward him.

  The barrier lifted, letting them through. Magorian walked swiftly through the wide, white corridors to a big room where many more Bridge guards were sitting at desks and standing and talking. There were more black uniformed guards, too. They were the civil guards, who maintained security and peace on the ship. Noa tended to think of them as the workers of Bridge security, while the Bridge division were more privileged.

  A cheerful guard in a black uniform processed their prints and asked them to scan their wrist chips once more, then nodded. “You’re cleared,” he said. “General Bridge access, with standard restrictions.”

  Magorian took them back through more corridors, which grew gradually wider, until there was room enough for a dozen men to walk shoulder to shoulder. Noa didn’t remember travelling through such corridors, yesterday, although she had been distracted and had barely noticed anything except for the numbers of guards everywhere and how clean and tidy everyone but she had looked.

  Surely she would have noticed a corridor so wide, no matter what her state of mind?

  The corridor ended with a door as wide as the corridor. As they approached the door, it opened automatically, both sides sliding apart soundlessly.

  Noa and Lizette stopped just inside the room beyond the door, looking around, while Magorian strode the length of it, over to another man on the other side of the oddly shaped room.

  There was a screen at the far, wider end of the room. It was a very old fashioned static screen and was currently showing nothing. The man standing in front of it had a portable terminal sitting on a shelf that had been slid out from the wall next to the screen. The terminal was plugged into the wall itself.

  He looked up from the screen he was working upon, as Magorian approached and nodded. He was taller than Magorian, with red hair and a full beard that was the same color.

  “Wow….” Lizette breathed. “This is the Bridge itself, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah,” Noa whispered back, glancing at the big chair in the middle of the room.

  Magorian turned to look at them. “Lizette, this is Dennis Meyrick, a senior coder with the organic coding institute. He will help you access the navigation AI. Then you will help him interpret the feedback.”

  Lizette caught at Noa’s fingers in a compulsive little squeeze. Noa squeezed back. Then Lizette moved farther into the room, heading for the big screen.

  Magorian moved back to where Noa was hovering by the door. “Ms. Doria, if you would follow me?”

  “I’d feel much better if you would call me Noa,” she told him.

  Magorian’s smile was a touch warmer. “I don’t know if I could manage such informality, here on the Bridge.”

  “Oh.” She bit her lip.

  His smile broadened. “That was a joke, Noa. You look as though you’re ready to leap out of your boots if someone made a loud noise behind you.” He rested his hand on her shoulder, with a
light touch. “Come with me. I know just the thing to calm your nerves.”

  “I doubt it,” Noa told him.

  “Oh, but this is a miracle cure,” he assured her. “Come along.”

  * * * * *

  Noa sipped the hot chocolate doubtfully. It was very hot. That didn’t disguise the explosion of flavors in her mouth and she held still, exploring the unexpected delight.

  Magorian just smiled and sat back in his chair behind a desk that was only slightly smaller than Captain Owens’.

  Noa made herself swallow the first mouthful. “It doesn’t taste anything like hot chocolate I’ve had before. Is it really chocolate?”

  “More real than the printed chocolate you’re used to,” Magorian told her. “That is earth-grown chocolate you’re holding. Grown in the Palatine under special environmental bubbles. Cocoa trees very nearly became extinct a hundred years ago. Now, there are more of them.”

  Noa put the cup on the edge of the desk and sat back, pressing her hands beneath her thighs.

  “You’re not drinking,” Magorian said.

  She shook her head. “It must be horribly expensive. You can’t waste it on me. You should be giving it to…to people like Bannister, yesterday.”

  “He would much rather drink Merlot, or any red wine he can find. Relax, Noa, and drink. If you don’t, the whole cup will be wasted and that won’t do. Not for such expensive chocolate as that.”

  She picked the cup up reluctantly. “Well, if it would be wasted otherwise…” Secretly pleased, she sipped it again. The flavor was delightful.

  “Thank you for bringing Lizette to our attention, by the way,” Magorian added. “I’ve heard of some highly unusual hobbies in my time. Self-taught ancient coding is not one of them.”

  “Lizette wanted to be a coder.”

  “I’m looking at her profile right now,” Magorian said, nodding toward a screen. It was an air screen and Noa could only see the shimmering edge of it.

  Magorian leaned forward, putting his hands on the table. “Lizette will work with Dennis to consult with the navigation AI. The other half of this project is the production of pressure suits. Two of them, to begin.”