Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  Pinta snorted.

  “I heard about it. I was in my rack but thought I felt unannounced spin come on without an alarm. Disturbed my nap and everything. Knucklehead!” He yawned pretending that only Gaston had character flaws.

  Pinta and Gaston were friends but manifested it in public with mutual derision. I felt the love.

  “Speaking of which, I thought I told you guys to take a rookie out with you on every space walk! I didn’t see one out there.” I snapped to re-focus him.

  Pinta smiled benignly.

  “I hear he did have one with him… . the kid was galumphing about over on the opposite side of the hull when the accident went down. Spun like a yo-yo literally out on the end of his tether. Terrified! I hear when they pulled him in the left leg of his suit was full to the brim with u-rine.” He grinned.

  “Great. Nothing like a dose of terror to add spice to the training program for my recruits.” I said sarcastically emphasizing the word ‘my’ pointedly.

  “Yeah… .” He agreed flatly. Sarcasm was entirely wasted on ancient old Warrant Officers. Because they had spent more time on fire that most humans have in being alive, warrants lacked the internal organs to understand irony. I drove on.

  “Chief? We have some work to do I think? Rear Admiral Wong forgot to update me on the installation of heavy lead radiation shielding we have been adding to the bow sections to absorb more of the Pi-Mesons we are generating whenever we strike matter while we are using the drive system for forward motion…”

  We squatted in mid-air in intense technical discussion about reinforcing the bow against rads and I caught a glimpse of Maureen looking increasingly distant and eventually she wandered off. Work for all hands seemed to be ubiquitous. Much of the work stemmed from the fact that the Gaia had been designed to dominate the oceans of Terra by the United States of America, but then had been pressed hurriedly into service as a hull primarily because her atomic reactor was serviceable and generated the electromagnetic energy necessary to run the supporting subsystems of the McMoran drive and the ship’s life support systems.

  The drive itself leveraged that energy both directly and indirectly to create a field of Gravitons twisted from “virtual” particles out of the quantum lattice spaces below plank length in an interaction with the space-time medium that allowed the warp drive to function under the basic equations of the Alcubierre metric through a process that came from the genius mind of Antonin Petrovski, a pimply grad student and the theoretical brains behind the drive. The arrangement was enough to make her the first ship capable of surfing the continuum of space-time at speeds at least near the speed of light and probably well above—our physicists were still arguing vigorously and sometimes viciously about it. They had not yet figured precisely how high the speedometer on Gaia would go—but they were definitely working on it with ever stretching eyes. Some of the limitations of Einstein’s physics appeared to be in the process of facing an end run by TESS and the physics community was wriggling emotionally and intellectually to adjust.

  I thought about that a moment. Free associating while the Chief worked a calculator with wrinkles in his brow, it struck me that the acronym “TESS” sounded rather female so most people thought of it that way. The service was rapidly and irrevocably becoming a ‘she’ after her androgynous birth some months before. Short words for complex things are useful especially in a shoe string outfit like TESS where everything was about as short as my temper today. Despite my personal reservations the Space Ship Gaia was the perfect emblem for an organization that evolved by accident, was formed from fear-filled filibuster and launched under extreme duress. On my better days I flattered myself that while the ship’s outer hull looked like a gas explosion in a junkyard during a tsunami it would have been more embarrassing if not for the fact that her insides often looked worse. I often thought that if a dictionary had a long winded definition of ‘extempore’ as an adjective they could impose a picture of my ship’s bridge and save ten thousand words. While ‘pretty’ was not a description that anyone would dare apply to her, ‘marginally’ in immediate proximity to the word ‘workable’ certainly was. Any of the planetary nationals who had so far traveled on her according to her mandate as an extraterritorial organization funded by many of the countries of Terra that wanted a presence in space tended to remark on just how dangerous she was to travel in—holding their breath the whole trip in anticipation of explosions in the mess facility, fires in their shower stalls and unannounced open portholes suddenly appearing in their sleeping compartment walls. If they were unaware of any danger my crew certainly made a point to fill them in fast. They just loved to make the ground-hogs flesh creep.

  It was stupid. The passengers tended to go home and fill the press with these tales which got repeated by still more press. Once the crew read the reports they snorted with derision having gotten their hackles up over the ignorance of the media and passengers. Bad, bad press! Silly passengers! It never entered their Jug-heads that they were responsible for telling the scary ghost stories around out reactor fire in the first place.

  Even though it was mostly their own fault though the service members of TESS were much attached to the Service and deeply insulted by any real or imagined slight made by outsiders about the organization they were now throwing their hearts, minds and fortunes into. Hearing any derogatory remark would make them pat her hull, more often than not caressing a patch or blob of Goop from a previous loss of atmosphere, and say simply ‘this old girl can really take it’ in a defensive tone very like that of a mother saying ‘ . . . But she does have hair!” in response to some random comment on infant baldness. Neither was a rational remark but each carried the same conviction and love that usually sprang in proportion to the pain they had endured during childbirth. TESS’ had been as bloody a childbirth as any in history. The service had come into existence over the dead bodies, both figurative and literal of a large number of people. The wounds and afterbirth following these violent contractions from delivering TESS had left us running non-stop to save the nascent space service from a universe and a humanity that seemed hell-bent on destroying their newest creation.

  In the heart of all this chaos there had simply not yet been enough time or expertise to fully perfect anything. I was thankful for the continuing blessings of Karma, Kismet and their daughters Fate that had allowed TESS to even get this far; but what bothered me from time to time that we could never seem to quite get our ‘shit’ perfectly straight either. Some day, I promised my inner self that TESS would be more polished, for now we were just getting by and damned glad to get that.

  Not that I was back into my slump now. I was well over today’s briar patch of annoyance. I had been weak in scratching the nettles earlier and knew it. Now I had rolled up my sleeves. Though I got a little weary of the near daily demands from the mother of invention to meet new and unforeseen repairs since the service’s inception during a gunfight, that was merely indulging in the negative. You have to accentuate the positive. On the plus side the spirit of continuous struggle had melded my TESS core team into a now expert group who knew their ship and business inside and out if only because they had to keep putting it back together after it broke. With those technical skills and confidence had come an intimate knowledge of their skipper too. We had been together enough that my crew were now perfectly sensitive to my moods. I often caught glimpses out of the side of my eyes as they studied my face like weathermen. In space I was as close to a god as any human could come and the crew knew a furrow in my brow could spell squalls and thundershowers mate—batten down the hatches and don the foul weather gear. I was the Master and Commander of Gaia and the Admiral of our entire service rolled up into one terrible demon. The crew exchanged significant and often amused looks when I began snapping at my subordinates like an over-hot dog and making them neaten something up—just to get anything anywhere ship shape. I never learned. Experience was a bitter mistress. The last three times w
e had tried getting something into perfect order the crew discovered that about a week after putting in the hard effort of doing it they’d just had to tear out all the new work and throw something else into its place using a wrench, spit, and great gobs of ingenuity. This cycle had become a game to the crew. Even though it made them sweat the crew needed the theater of trying to outwit my emotions. The “let’s bet on the skipper’s mood today” lotto was mostly accomplished to coincide with times we were not busy performing our grueling primary mission of support to the paying nations of the world. Despite my occasional despair for their intellects these were solid men and women whose essential good humor allowed them to carry on during our ‘down’ and difficult times.

  I left the chief to fixing our radiation problem and went off to a hundred other tasks. I did not want him to sense any growing optimism from me—it would disorient him.

  TESS’ mission accomplishment track record was actually damned good. Truth be told I was really proud of the service and its people. After only eleven months of nearly continuous missions TESS had deposited two lunar colonies, good chunks of two earth orbit space stations, dozens of satellites, many resupply missions and had even placed an automated observation platform on a Martian moon. It was hard driving and hard work though and added to the workload were all these charming little daily disasters like holed water tanks that collectively left little time for simple preventive maintenance on our one and only operational ship.

  I had gotten over this morning’s petulant sulk utterly by the time we got busy on our actual jobs for today. We’d maneuvered to, pulled in and fixed two broken satellites for two separate countries. Dusting off our hands and patting each other on the back we had looked around and found ourselves in a decaying orbit around the mother world.

  It was the usual. Just as we looked forward to our hitting our bunks I had to call in all hands to help with not burning up the ship in the atmosphere. It was broken things had led to our decaying orbit. Something had once again gone wrong somewhere in the electrical plate of spaghetti that reached throughout the ship. Small wonder since most shipboard systems piggybacked onto wiring harnesses put in place when she was still a submarine and tasked for completely different purposes.

  Right now, the Gaia’s primary difficulty was that (once again) when you pushed three buttons on the bridge they clicked authoritatively and rather suddenly simply did nothing. This was a deficiency that we normally lived with, duct taping over those buttons that apparently led to nowhere. Today was different though. These particular three buttons were critical and had worked as recently as two days ago. One of the buttons in question accounted for a quarter of the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. A second broke-dick button actually rotated an array that instantly and electrically tracked ten key stars that we now used to fix our position in three dimensional space giving the Gaia the XYZ of her whereabouts in space—the first ever celestial GPS as far as I was concerned. TESS should know. TESS had built it from a design suggested by Admiral Wong from various parts found in catalogs, a couple items lurking in corners of government warehouses from earlier eras and the ever useful shelves of a Radio Shack. When the gadget quit working the ship was suddenly blind to its true location in space and had to revert to TESS’ older method of navigation called trial and error. The old ways are less attractive. The law of averages lurked with a great big baseball bat waiting to smack us over the head when we used it. Then there was the last one. The third broken button merely provided power to the McMoran engines. In short, we had no idea where we were, could not maneuver fully and were facing a fiery death by falling into the atmosphere without our primary engine. Welcome to TESS. Good job today. Get to work.

  By afternoon I had put together work details of personnel on their ‘off’ time who were scouring corridors and conduits to help find the faults.

  As a long time TESS member, neither the oldsters nor I could really sweat the current situation. I had been lost and in trouble of falling out of the skies so repeatedly that the whole thing was pure routine now. What was really goading me to any sense of snappishness at the moment was that this kind of dirty laundry smacked of unreliability and today it could be flapping out in the open and fully observed by the passengers we were currently carrying. I hated outsiders to witness TESS’ overall slapdashedness. Luckily I had little time to ponder it, since I had forced the crew to work I had naturally felt compelled to lead by example and joined in the adventure of tracing out wires, pulling out cables and generally making the inner hull look like an overturned ant hill.

  Just at the moment my back ached, not because the influence of gravity was pressing me hard against a pointy edge as happened down on Earth, but because in the relative weightlessness of near Earth orbit I had twisted himself into a backwards pretzel behind some pipes to finger a particular wire to its end in a dark place at the ultimate end of my reach with lots of grunting, straining and writhing. It literally was the wire’s end, which hung out in space in that dark corner at the end of my arm and fingers, unconnected to anything whatsoever. I smelled a corrupt ship building contractor back on Earth and knew I would never have time to track them down and spank them as they deserved. I sighed dramatically and worked swiftly with my hands instead.

  A moment later I keyed my radio as I wriggled back out of my burrow. I floated a moment and stared absently at the bottom half of Pinta who was working nearby—bicycling his spindly legs about down the corridor trying to do something similar to what I had just done. For some reason Pinta eschewed underwear in favor of a neon colored ultra-tight Speedo. Practically a thong. I found myself staring at the unattractive result of him from the waist down. His much shorter arms meant he had thrust his entire upper body behind a cluster of pipes leaving only the disembodied legs performing a can-can. Like a tacky advertisement for wedding tackle.

  “Sparks!” I yelled again over my radio for Lieutenant 2 Maxmillian. It was a relatively new nickname we were trying on for size for my chief of electricity. His girlfriend had heard it at a party recently and thought it was cute so it had stuck. Maxmillian was undoubtedly cute too if your tastes run to huge black pandas.

  “Sir!” The former naval rating’s voice crackled in a newly made officer’s precise response. He had bridge duty today and seemed to enjoy it. He was shaping up as a leader.

  “Wire K-46… that’s Kilo four six is a dead end. I say again… dead end. Not hooked up to anything at all. I put an electrical cap on it to make sure it was not grounding into the hull! It ends in corridor Alpha, section 20 just over the di-hydrous oxide conduits portside up X axis. I have labeled it at the usual locations. Got it?” Just labeling wires at front end, back end and selected switch locations in route was much of our ongoing labor. Luckily the crew was growing slowly. Things were getting better as our TESS academy as the Bat Cave complex pumped out more and more trainees and they came aboard.

  I could catch the distant clattering on a keyboard over the open mike of the radio as Maxmillian scratched K46 off in his database as another wire to nowhere and added what I considered overly long notes while I hummed impatiently under my breath. The transition from submarine to space ship may have been hasty and sloppy, but after this morning’s shameful display of pandering to my dark side on my part I was trying to take the upbeat long view. That single electrical cap put in place meant that Order was very slowly coming to our little corner of Chaos—one wire at a time. A teeny tiny step in the right direction. The thought cheered me up an equally puny bit—I rewarded myself with that blip of satisfaction like a treat flung to a good doggy.

  “Roger, sir. Got it!” He finally said.

  “Do you need any more wires traced?” I crossed my fingers hoping for a ‘no’. For once I was rewarded.

  “No, Sir! All designated problem lines are being followed as we speak! Good news! We think we have fixed the thruster cable. Admiral O’Hara says in two hours we can test it out after Gaston gets back inside.�
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  “What in the corridors of space is he still doing out there?” I snapped at Maxmillian. The Lieutenant did not bother to answer, knowing general bitchiness wedged into a rhetorical question when he heard it and not deigning to enflame it with a reply. “OK… . fine! M’quarters!” I growled petulantly.

  “Roger, Sir.” Maxmillian clicked off.

  It was the one perk of being the guy in charge. No one questions you if you say you were going to your crib.

  I grabbed a pair of hard conduits and twisted to orient myself to bypass Pinta. I gave what was certainly the most adroit half twirl outside the flying Wallendas only to suddenly find myself looking into the liquid brown eyes of a shocked female face inches from my crotch. Her intrigued orbs were instantly protected as weightlessness caused her chador to float loosely over her eyes though she flapped her hands awkwardly to clear the obstruction and get a better look. I could almost hear her once she returned home, squealing to some aunt in her distant middle eastern cloister about a floating man wearing only his underpants inches from her mouth—undoubtedly the raciest story of her limited lifetime. I sighed. Another passenger who was out of the shipboard assigned country and was wandering about the ship’s working parts; a tautology—a lost sheep in Sharia.

  Beyond her I caught a glimpse of her theoretical TESS shepherdess. A smirking Sergeant First Class Anderson was seven meters down the corridor and was ostentatiously hanging with an elbow hooked around a stanchion in an exaggerated show of unconcern while she peeled a stick of gum from its wrapper. She was grinning at me as she chawed her gob of chicly and I instantly knew she had purposefully led the visitor here to let her view the local sights rightly thinking it would be more thrilling than staring at the bulkheads in the galley. Probably more exciting than gazing at what must be the majority of her own boring personal memories for that matter. In response to this thought almost instantly there was a man writhing blunderingly about from behind her—badly uncoordinated without much apparent gravity. He obviously came from the woman’s same ancient Arab cultural background that had been flash frozen in the 13th century. He was trying to scramble awkwardly and ineffectually in near zero-G to interpose his body between his female companion wearing the symbolic cloth burdens of their aged religion and with the move to block any further vision of my barely clothed manhood and shockingly bare legs. He was having poor luck. His movements perhaps more suited to urging a horse like the wind across the Rub’al-Khali than for the more primate rich skills needed up here. Between bouts of posing for awkwardness centerfold he glared jets of fury through his unkempt jungle of a beard at me, which rather lost its effect as he quickly bonked his head violently on a pipe and crossed his eyes into near unconsciousness. Lack of normal gravity placed yahoo passengers in all sorts of hazards including turning a corner and finding their face in the crotch of my Y fronts. I was unsympathetic and shrugged my mental shoulders with an inner sigh. If they must wander about in weightlessness like boobies, then they took their chances. I could guess that the essential hypocrisy of their culture made it a legitimate thrill for him to see our females in their knickers, but wrong for his woman to see a man in the same state. Cultural double standards were beyond my power to repair but not to ignore. I moved on.