Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  I had intended to take a break soon after here. But whether I would be able to take one remained to be seen. If I couldn’t make a deal here on the cargo I’d been hauling around for here, then I’d have to find somewhere else to sell it to. Carrying around extra cargo for extra time meant extra mass I needed more energy to transport. I had been in business with the Demeter for ten years, and I always planned things down to the gram, down to the minute, and down to the penny. Yet lately it seemed like my plans always needed far too much adjustment when I was “on the road.”

  I was about to open my mouth to the guy in front of me again when I heard the beeping of one of the Demeter’s cargo loaders from behind me. I turned around and spotted May sitting in the driver’s seat of the boxy gray loader, her hard yellow spacesuit helmet closed over her head. She stopped the loader and gave me a thumbs-up, but I had to flash her a thumbs-down.

  She was pretty close, so I saw her surprised face. Then I saw her slow frown.

  “I should have used my communicator sooner to tell you to wait!” I said then, my right forefinger now pressing the suit-communicator button on my other arm. “The deal hasn’t been done yet.” I spun back around to the guy in blue. “Well? Should I get back in my ship and leave or what? Do you people even give a shit?”

  Apparently, they did give a shit because, though it took half an hour, we finally struck a deal close enough to the original deal I had planned. And it was a good deal: the station also agreed to take half of my extra cargo.

  *

  Hours later, May and two other loaders were finally moving from the station to the Demeter, carrying the hydroambin cargo I had been promised. Someone had stacked it farther back in the station than it should have been stacked, and it took longer to remove than it should have taken, but at least I was able to get some. I knew we would be getting too low on reactor fuel soon, and at some point Gary would need to electromagnetically fix more pellets to rods and fully reload the reactor, probably before we would get to the next layer of space, where we had to make another drop-off, right before we would hopefully be on our way to some much-needed rest….

  The tall GS guy in blue was named Cambridge, and I worked with him at that same black desk in that same big room to finalize the transaction forms.

  As we were doing that, Cambridge said, “Where you headed to next? Hope you’re not on a schedule.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” I said, looking at him. “I’m making a drop-off at Sereska Station tomorrow.”

  Cambridge pointed a broad, dark hand up at the ceiling. “Storms now. Look at the weather reports from Weather Central here.”

  My eyes widened at him, but there was no computer anywhere in sight, and I didn’t have a portable computer on me; I couldn’t confirm Cambridge’s statement.

  So I just nodded at him and said, “See you later,” then turned around toward the exit.

  Soon, I was walking back through the quite dark sleeve toward the light at the opening of the Demeter’s cargo bay, and then I was stepping into the bright bay and Chen was coming toward me fast and telling me about the weather and that we couldn’t lift off for several hours at least, possibly not until the morning, or even later.

  “What!” I said loudly, stopping so short that I dropped all of my transaction forms. “You’re kidding.”

  Chen shook his head and sighed as he bent to pick up my papers. “I wish I was. But I’m not that funny.”

  I was frowning heavily. “Well, if we’re stuck here, we’re stuck here. What can we do? I guess some of you can take this time to hang out at the hotspot Genteran Station is. I’ve never been in such a stimulating place with such passionate people. It took me thirty minutes to get them to accept that I wanted only one loader lifting at a time because there was no fucking room for more than one in the shitty narrow spot where they’d stacked the ambin. Have they been huffing the Hash for breakfast every day?”

  Chen had pressed a palm over his blue shirt, and he was laughing hard now, his shiny black hair shimmering beneath the cargo-bay lights.

  A small smile on my face, I slowly shook my head from side to side as I took the forms back from him. I turned away to walk across the cargo bay—and then I spotted Babs, my science expert, walking in; she was in her usual black shirt and pants, and her muscular thighs beneath were pumping fast.

  “How are you doing?” I said to her when I reached near her and the spacesuit drop-off closet.

  “Oh, I’m all right,” she said in a gruff, rushed voice, running an equally rushed hand over her black bob of hair.

  I slipped off my yellow spacesuit and placed it in the slot where it would be vacuumed clean by the closet. I smoothed my hands over my red shirt and red leggings, then readjusted my belt and turned on my communicator built into there. When I turned around again, Babs was still there.

  “How’s Derry doing?” I asked Babs. Derry was her girlfriend and Derry had been taking care of some of the cooking on-ship—except for the past two days because she’d come down with a bad cold and had been in their cabin most of the time, which was at my suggestion, or really my order: an outbreak of anything on a spaceship just wasn’t good, even if it was only a common cold.

  Babs walked with me out of the cargo bay and into the hallway. “Derry’s all right, but I wanted to talk to you about the reactor. I was just down there getting numbers from Gary, and he told me he had to recalibrate again and make more adjustments. There was also some contamination—”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, I told Gary three times over the past few weeks to douse the fuel rods with perfluor in the order of their location, so each calibration would last longer, but he didn’t listen to me!”

  “Babs, I think he’s actually done what you said, if I’m not mistaken. He told me that yesterday. But, are you saying he’s being sexist? Because if you are, I’ve known him for fourteen years, and I haven’t seen anything like that from him.”

  Gary had been the lead engineer of my ship for five years. He was a few years younger than I, but we were both over thirty-five, so we’d been around long enough to have quite a bit of experience behind us. Babs, on the other hand, had only been working on ships for a few years, and she and Gary often bickered over how to do the work here. It was one of those things that I felt I shouldn’t interfere with as a captain: Babs and Gary were both adults, so fixing this friction with each other was their responsibility. At some point, though, I probably would have to interfere, and that point seemed to be coming up….

  Now Babs was saying, “I didn’t mean sexist; I meant stubborn.”

  I couldn’t help laughing a little under my breath. “Well, that I have noticed about Gary.”

  Babs smiled; then she rolled her brown eyes.

  And, as if Gary had heard us talking, my communicator went off, and Gary’s voice came off my side and into the hall.

  For an instant I was afraid he had heard us talking about him, but his words gave no indication of that. “Lydia,” he said, “could you come down to engineering as soon as you can?”

  “All right. What’s up—something new?”

  “No, just something old. But I’d rather explain in person.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  *

  Babs kept going down the hall, but I disappeared down the stairway to the engineering deck, which was the lowest deck on the ship; the ship’s vast belly was below engineering, and there were a lot of workings in the belly area because of the reactor assembly above and because of the exhaust nozzles positioned around the ship.

  I’d been in the belly of my ship before; it was a hot, rather dark place I didn’t enjoy visiting, so I hoped when Gary had said to come down to engineering, he meant engineering ONLY.

  *

  Fortunately, he had meant engineering only; unfortunately, he wanted me to come near to the reactor, near to the main reactor shaft, which was another thing I didn’t enjoy doing.

  “You don’t expect me to go
in there, do you?” I asked Gary. We were getting suited up in red, maximum-protection suits in one of the more open spots in engineering, where a dozen busy crewmembers were moving around working.

  Gary turned to look at me now, his long fingers snapping up his red suit. His helmet’s diamond-glass was still open, and inside there, his thick, golden-brown mustache twitched above his mouth, as if he felt like laughing but he didn’t want to let it out. His brown eyes on me were sharp—with humor and maybe something else, a familiarity, like, You know I know how you feel, Lydia.

  And now he said, “I go into the shafts most days. Why so afraid?”

  “Well, if there’s nothing to worry about, why the suits?” I shot back. “There’s the field around the shafts anyway. The suits seem like a redundancy.”

  “They are, really. But what if the electrical power failed and then the shafts were exposed to the air with no field around them to lock any free ambin that accidentally escaped from the core?” He must have seen my too-wide eyes and that my hands had stilled on my suit. I heard his low laugh, saw his mustache vibrating. “Stop worrying, Lydia. The field and all the ambin sensors are working fine; there’s no free ambin out here and, at worst, if there were free ambin and no water vapor nearby for it to rob hydrogen from, it would fall on your skin and give you a temporary rash till your skin cells regrew in.

  “Always remember that this isn’t a true nuclear reactor. Even the hydrogen we fuse has been ambinized, so fusing it isn’t the same as with normal hydrogen isotopes. And any free quasi-neutrons can’t make it outside the core; they’re recaptured in the hydroambin-splitting fission process or in the ambin reduction chamber, or they’re absorbed by the stable neutron sponges in the core linings and workings. And, really, there’s never more than minimal a-day-at-the-beach radiation in the rod-shafts. Hydroambin reactors really are the safest kind of reactor ever built.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I still don’t want to be near them. Humans didn’t exactly evolve in a reactor of any kind.”

  “Nor in a spaceship, but you live most of your life in one.”

  “Touché,” I said, and I could feel my cheeks were flushing. I yanked my suit’s red helmet over my head, to help hide my face.

  And I saw the clear smile on Gary’s face now.

  “So,” I said, “how’s the recalibrating work going? Oh—did Chen tell you about the weather reports? It looks like we’ll be stuck overnight! Chen says there’s too many strong electromagnetic eddies in the upper troposphere to lift off safely. He’s afraid the eddies will ‘scratch’ weaknesses into the outer shield.”

  Gary nodded slowly, the short waves of his sandy-brown hair sliding against his cheeks beneath his red helmet; he pressed the final button to seal his suit just as I pressed the equivalent button on my suit. We waited a few moments for our bodies to adjust to breathing the suit-air. Then, over the suit-communicators, we continued our conversation, while moving toward where the shafts were in the back half of engineering.

  In a careful voice now, Gary finally said, “Chen’s right about the eddies…but I could strengthen the shield and neutralize the eddies, one-by-one, if we move through the troposphere very slowly while running the atmospheric damping injectors.”

  “We’ll use up more fuel then, Gary. You said you had to replace some of the beam engine filters, so you probably don’t have the beam engine running now, huh?”

  His mustache shifted down at the corners; his face twisted in annoyance. Then he said in a hard voice, “I really don’t think lifting off would be a problem.”

  We had almost reached the reactor shafts, and now I remembered my conversation with Babs. I stopped walking. “Gary, did you douse the fuel rods based on what Babs suggested recently—about their order?”

  His helmeted head jerked toward me. “Where on earth did that come from?”

  “Could you answer my question, please?”

  I thought I saw his mouth tighten before he spoke. “Well, actually, yes. I did follow Babs’ suggestion…but something went wrong somewhere. I must have missed something or accidentally contaminated one rod with the effluent from the other’s dousing. It isn’t always easy working in the shafts using the robotic arms, or even when I’m in there myself, or if Steve is or whoever. Nothing’s a certainty.”

  “You love saying that,” I replied. Then: “Gary, we’ve known each other a long time, and I love you, my friend…”

  “…You…what?…”

  “…But,” I continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “you have tendency to dismiss other people’s suggestions and stick to a predetermined plan. You’re in here far too much and you’re too used to controlling the whole show here!” I spread my arms to encompass the big space around us. “I’m giving you an order to make sure you fully consider other people’s suggestions. There’s more than one person who knows how to do each thing on here for a reason. Science is about looking for where you could be wrong. I know you probably know best once you take all the factors into consideration, but probably no one always knows best.”

  Beneath the slight golden tint of his helmet’s glass, Gary’s cheeks reddened, a lot.

  And then I felt kind of bad for what I’d said. Now I added quickly, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, Gary.”

  “You didn’t.”

  I just glared at him.

  And then he sighed hard. “All right. You did. But, maybe I need embarrassing once in a while. You tend to set me right somehow.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah.”

  We began walking again, and we finally reached the entry to the main reactor shaft. The shaft was on the right side of the large, long, box-like structure of the core, which was oriented parallel to the Demeter’s long axis.

  The core wasn’t visible because three red rod-shafts surrounded the forward end of it, and in the back area, where several nozzles connected to the core’s combustion chamber—that back area of the core was behind a field and more walls, both of which protected the rest of engineering from the high temperatures of the combustion chamber and nozzles.

  The core area was effectively a segregated space inside engineering, and the solid red wall of the shaft in front of me and Gary rose high toward the room’s gray ceiling. Gary pushed two buttons on the wall’s black electronic panel: one button to increase the protective field’s strength, and the other button to open the shaft. An instant later, the gaskets on the red panel wall and a connecting wall unlocked, and then the red wall in front of us slid open along a groove in the gray floor.

  Inside the area between the shaft’s walls, it was somewhat dark. But I could still see the numerous, black-and-red speckled rod extensions; they pointed to the left, where the core’s primary vessel was, behind another field and a black wall.

  “This is nice,” I said to Gary now, “but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. You said you wanted to show me something. So what am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Just watch,” Gary said, his gloved fingers manipulating some more buttons on that exterior electronic wall-panel.

  And as he did that manipulating, I spotted something inside the shaft, over on the right side, where the back end of the rod extensions fitted into the side wall; a patch of foggy green began growing and glowing there, till it looked almost like Genteran’s sky. The bit of sky clung to the wall and curled toward the rods, then stopped just short of touching the hydroambin there.

  My mouth fell open as I stared at the odd miasma. “What is that?”

  “It happens only very occasionally,” Gary said. “It’s an exterior reactor plasma from a combination of factors.”

  “Did the contamination do this?”

  “No—though I think it’s probably increased the plasma’s lifespan. The few other times it happened, it lived so briefly that I didn’t get a chance to show it to you.”

  I turned my head toward him. I could feel a curious little smile on my face. “How come you wanted to show it to me so much?”

&n
bsp; My question seemed to have caught him off-guard, because now his head jerked slightly and his hands fell to his sides. Then, his brown eyes locked right onto mine and he said in a lower voice, “Now that is the question—”

  Another voice broke into our conversation, coming from outside of our suits—Steve’s voice. “Gary, how long are you gonna be there? We’re supposed to back up Karen with the ion-pad installation….”

  Gary pressed the speaker-button on his suit. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said into the room around us. Then he clicked off that same button—and then his brown eyes slid right to my eyes.

  I smiled at him and glanced back into the shaft; the green glow was still there, but it seemed to have shrunk a bit. “It looks smaller.”

  “Yeah,” Gary said. “Maybe it’s finally going for good.”

  “Well, I’m glad I got to see it while it was alive and thriving!”

  “Me too,” Gary said, and he smiled big at me then, his brown mustache curving in a really pleasing-for-me way.

  *

  A few minutes later, Gary was walking away, and I was removing my protective suit. When I was finally in my regular red clothes only, I grabbed my transaction forms from where I’d left them on one of the panel-tables; then I walked out of engineering and went up two decks, toward my office, which was near the bridge.

  When I had almost reached my office and was still standing in the hall, I ran into Babs again, who said: “Chen’s back on the bridge.”

  “I know,” I replied. “Babs, could you come into my office?” I walked in there now. “I was down in engineering talking to Gary, and my fears were getting the better of me at one point. Could you give me an outline of the initial reaction in the reactor again?”

  Babs shrugged and fell back into the black armchair across from my silver desk. “All right. Whatever you say, Boss.”