by Randy Moffat
“That didn’t work?” I asked absently.
“No. It was not just the switch on the bridge. A new switch did nothing to fix the root problem.” He admitted. “In addition we then tested the circuit three times to the interrupt points and circuit end to make sure the harness is intact throughout. We found two slight breaks or near breaks there along the circuit path. We are calling the wiring tentatively repaired and operational…” He wound down.
“So that worked then?” I asked feeling confused.
“No, Sir.” He replied a bit chagrined. “Even though the circuit now checks back to the navigation unit, but have not yet gotten a solid position fix on the ship. So there appears to have been more than one problem in the system that was showing up on the single idiot light up here.”
I nodded sagely rather than saying something stupid like “You should check that!”. Instead I kept picking away for the status.
“And so that explains the number two light you got after you started tinkering?” I asked. I was feeling dopey. It had been a long day.
“Yes and no. Now we think there was a second wire shorting across the harness for the nav system. Not only do we get a reading of a fault with the navigation system, we are also getting an indicator for something else wrong on the same light. Our best theory right now is that we think it is showing the application of power to the waste chutes down in the mess since the light coming on coincided with out trash dump earlier. A warning from that system was intended to let us know that the outer tube hatch is open. Obviously the launch tube worked locally earlier but any light should have gone off after we dumped. I had Gaston check while he was out on the exterior and the outer hatch is definitely closed. The light is still on. We haven’t found any problem between the bridge and mess yet… my best guess right now it is that our challenge is physically in the compressed air system to the chute down in the galley, but I have a gal working on it to find out for sure.”
Electrons are complicated. Trial and error is often the only proper method of testing them. Electrons make me tired. I glanced up and caught a bearded glare from the same glowering male tourist I’d encountered in the corridor earlier who was now up in the eleven forward lounge area overhanging the bridge. It was as close as they were allowed to come to the operations center. The ongoing puckering of his face was a just one more background annoyance. Pissing off a Saudi prince for flashing his female friend was only so much more noise among a day’s serious work.
I selected my strategy. I looked up and smiled at him hugely and gave him a thumbs up which confused him long enough to allow me to put him out of sight and mind. I floated further aft and under the decking of the lounge—below his line of sight. For all I knew giving a thumbs up was the same as giving a man the finger in Saudi Arabia. Actually I hoped it was.
“Carry on!” I called out to Maxmillian and went aft for a nap.
A servo in the hydraulics to the trash masher turned out to be the bottom line down in the kitchen. We found that out within two hours. Found where one wire was crossing another five hours after that. It was fourteen more hours until they found the final navigation system problem. The problem ended up being the last thing they checked—ultimately it turned out that the gyro inside the nav unit at the end of the wiring had burned out. So goes the chase for electrons—it is always the last thing you check.
We found that last fix down earth-side because by then I had gotten totally fed up with the Saudi ground-hogs milling about and headed back without waiting, anxious to boot them off ship. With the navigation system shot, we’d had to ‘feel’ our way back by the seat of their pants in the old school way of short hop, look, short hop again. It was good training for the academy boys and girls who had only learned using the newer tools. Only my oldsters had experienced navigation by guess work like that. It was exciting for them to have to do it just like Jeeter and I had first accomplished things when we first traveled using the McMoran drive. A great confidence builder.
As always we were grateful to pour our guests back onto a boat alongside as we floated in the Gulf of Aden. I stood on the deck and diplomatically waved goodbye to the passengers despite the occasional outraged hairy stare back. Within minutes, TESS re-launched the ship to orbit via a quick hop into Lake Baikal to refill fresh water tanks for our next mission which was to provide some of that water to the British colony on the moon—the Brits were there to make sure the Americans were not the only lunar inhabitants who might someday forget the international treaty on lunar land use and get it in their head to “claim” the satellite. Of course, “colony” was a big word for three UK guys huddled in a half buried Quonset hut, but I had noticed they always got several boxes of twelve year old Scotch along with their other supplies, so perhaps life in his Majesty’s colonies was not quite as bad as it looked from outside. And they could soon count on the company of five jolly Vietnamese who would arrive in two months when we were scheduled to plant their colony a dozen miles from the US base. They didn’t want the Americans to own the moon either and were pitching a tent nearby. Knowing the Brits I imagined they would challenge the Vietnamese to a cricket game soon. That should last several weeks. Perhaps longer in zero G when a bad lob at the wickets could inadvertently achieve orbit. An insipid sport. I sighed. Politics had come to space along with the hardware and sports.
The next day I counted and I had underestimated; I got not one, but three heated notes from three separate Saudi agencies and imams pontificating about Sharia and the need for total modesty in dress. I flushed them all into my trash icon with a certain glee and the general curse – ‘Tourists!’ I scratched my scrotum by way of luck.
I had much bigger fish to fry. Several some-ones were always out to destroy TESS and I meant to head them off. We dropped the water on the moon using a landing sled with a tank affixed and I relaxed a mite. I watched it from lunar orbit as the sled landed and skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust that hid if from view for an hour. Though I lost sight of the delivery I could make out the British tractor as it trundled from their base to haul it back. I gave the wagons-in-a-circle sign to the bridge crew and the universe outside flickered as the Petrovski effect engaged. There was a carefully planned gap in our schedule right now. A special mission we needed to run just for TESS.
CHAPTER 2
An obscure leverage at the fulcrum of intelligence
The SS Gaia, wasn’t called the flagship of the Terran Exploratory Space Service purely as a formality. The actual flag in her designation ‘flagship’ tended to hang in a limp tangle. Particularly when she was too far outside the proper gravity well of the mother world to cause the banner to hang down properly. A proper admiral’s pennant on a naval ship of the 18th century would have flown in a brave slash of color from the masthead in the spanking breeze as its hull nobly shoved aside the waves. Here in space our ship shoved itself through vacuum with only a few molecules in every square meter. Certainly not enough matter to lift up our flag gloriously, particularly since we kept it inside. It fact I knew from personal experience that the damned rag only managed an occasional desultory flap when a hatch was opened and the air circulating fans were on maximum. Annoyingly it had been mounted so that it dangled just behind my desk. I usually had to tie a knot in it to keep it from draping itself over my head when it did manage an odd annoying flutter. I would long since have chucked the damn thing out a hatch as an annoyance, except that it had been the brainchild of TESS’ posthumously ranked Captain Baxter who had ordered its initial manufacture just before being blown to pieces by a bomb wearing terrorist. That changed it from a mere scrap of cloth and turned it into a sacred icon commemorating the first martyr of TESS. I kept it and displayed it out of respect to his memory and as a nod to those obscure naval customs that military men revel in, mostly dripping a tear or two in a beer just before they pass out. I made my twelfth mental note to affix the bottom of the flag to the wall better with some duct tape when I had a spare m
oment. It would be a while. My next ‘spare’ moment was currently estimated to be in 163 years.
I was tapping out notes on a pad when the flag gave a slight warning flap. I looked up and grinned. Milton Murray floated through the hatchway… looking like a dugong shaped dirigible in an aloha shirt flying through its native element. He smiled and awkwardly seized a conduit overhead to arrest his motion. Behind him Rear Admiral Sam Wong floated in adroitly towing “Caveman” Craig by his shirt collar. Craig’s arms were spasmodically clenched across his chest and his fists balled to white knuckles. He clearly hated being without weight. He had failed to bind his long brown and white mop of hair so that it floated over his face, blinding him. Sam Wong grinned, winked at me and smoothly put Craig into a chair bolted to the deck where he clutched the chair bottom with both hands forcefully to hold himself in place while Murray blundered into a seat beside him looking utterly delighted at being in free fall at last. Sam arrested himself like a real space pro in mid air where he hovered directly over my desk surface. Conferences in all three dimensions took a little getting used to.
“Welcome aboard, Captain Craig and Mr. Murray… a request for a visit from my Chief of Security and my Chief of Intelligence at the same time makes me nervous… I believe this is the first visit aboard for both of you? I would never have suspected it. You are both such… . naturals here.” I lied diplomatically. I quietly handed a rubber band to Craig. “For your hair… .” I explained.
Craig, who absolutely never looked happy no matter where he was reached for the band, half floated off the chair, frantically grabbed it again with both hands and sat as if waiting with his shoulders hunched for the ceiling to fall in. I manfully kept from guffawing and held his eyes patiently. He gripped the chair with both legs and one hand and cautiously extended his fingertips long enough to snatch the band from my fingers and re-grip the chair. His hair was floating out now in a halo that made him look like the mad woman of Challoit. The rest of us were in positions of spectators holding our breath while trying to suppress giggles as he wrestled to find some combination of personal forces within his body that would allow him to put the follicular mess into a pony tail. It took him two minutes of agonizing tries but he finally accomplished it with rapid darts of his hands and his legs quivering with effort from clutching the fulcrum of the chair legs with his ankles. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief simultaneously on its final snap. The sensation was not unlike a family group tightening their belly muscles and willing a four year old to be successful on his first bicycle ride.
“What’s it about gentlemen?” I asked quickly to get us back on track from the Craig matinee.
Murray and Craig exchanged glances and somehow communicated the lead. Murray spoke up.
“First we wanted to update you. There is some good news. With Captain Dixon’s compliments, he hopes to have the Leninskaia . . . excuse me… the renamed “SS Tellus” ready for space trials in approximately a ten days.”
I nodded. I knew this already from teleconferences with the former British naval officer whom I had handpicked to command the second TESS spacecraft. She was a former Victor III class Russian submarine who had recently been re-commissioned Tellus. We had learned a lot from creating and launching the Gaia and where possible the more painful lessons were being crow-barred rapidly into the Tellus as design improvements. Dixon had already completed limited and hurried sea trails in the Pacific and she had been towed to the heavily guarded and secured naval yard in Groton, Connecticut for the highly secretive loading of her TESS classified McMoran drives that made space flight possible. The work was nearly complete under the general direction of Captain Johnson and Mr. Aziz along with several people from the original Q-Kink team including Dr. Feathersgait and Chief Warrant Officer Killien. Feathersgait was lazy in his arrogance and of limited help, but as usual TESS had no assets to waste. Killien was a weightlifter though and could be physically intimidating at times. The threat implied in the Warrant’s broad shoulders and occasional glower helped check Feathersgait’ low level sociopathic leanings and he did make himself useful at times. They had begun training a handful of the key members of Dixon’s crew in the drive’s mysteries after several closed door sessions whose dire tone echoed the same blood curdling camaraderie found at the annual picnic of the Black Hand. The gist was that they raised their right hands and swore to maintain secrecy about what they were to learn on pain of pointy objects being shoved forcefully up into their soft bits. In short, the information must never be revealed to anyone outside the inner circle of TESS. No one was fool enough to believe our secrecy would last forever, but the way I figured it… a single generation would be enough for TESS to fully establish itself as the guiding force on the new frontier. After that humanity could take its chances.
Since our expansion team’s investiture, work at Groton appeared to be moving apace and the launch of the Tellus was vital to me since it would double the TESS fleet and allow me to accomplish twice the missions to further chip away at the bottomless workload that awaited the agency while growing the agency’s influence.
“Anything new there?” I asked.
“Sure… delays, subversion and incompetence everywhere.”
“Anything new?”
“Bribery is increasing…” Murray said casually and Craig nodded to back him up as head of security. “We’ve tracked some biggish bribes that penetrated through the first three circles of our security at Groton. We have TESS loyalists on the inner circle there and they stopped it cold. I back tracked the money to a strong probe by the French and a separate rather weak sally by the Brazilians. As near as I can tell that makes just about every intelligence agency on earth has now tried cash to buy their way into owning drive information.”
“Nothing about these came from the Chinese though?” I asked. I had been expecting an update from him on China.
“No. Intelligence organizations have foot prints. Distinctive ways of doing business. Throwing money about is definitely not Chinese style. They are… impecunious… poor as church mice. Or at least really cheap. As a result they tend to use humans where other nations use a buck or electronics. Lacking bribes from China, I looked hard at the Human Intelligence side and I have detected five or six possible Chinese intelligence plants put into our recruiting programs. We are allowing them to penetrate through most of the training to keep them ever hopeful, but they will end up in dead-end jobs Earth-side that keep them from seeing anything useful. Ever.”
“Anyone else showing really strong interest right now?”
“You mean other than everyone else? Nothing to write home about… the Israeli’s have shown a certain cunning and the Iranians have been bumbling around in a rather cute middle eastern manner… . still… . I think I’ve caught something from you. I have been growing apprehensive about the Chinese lately. I am just now getting a hint of a bad odor over there. Hints and allegations is all there is now, but I think someone down there may have negotiated some kind of deal with reactionary elements among the Russians and believe it or not… the Japanese.”
“Wow! The Japanese and the Chinese are chums now? Pals? Pizzos? They haven’t been in bed together since before the rape of Nanking. What next? Men and women on the same wavelength? Can Ragnarök be far behind?” I added absently. “TESS is the new great promoter of world peace. Apparently just about anyone will ignore a cultural grand canyon that separates them and band together to try and steal our stuff… . or just plain kill us…”
Murray looked sour as he usually did when I made a funny.
“All right… M.” I relented. I have no idea what M stood for in James Bond, but the nickname fairies in TESS had it on good authority that our ‘M’ stood for ‘Murray.’ Tell me what you are thinking.” I had learned to deeply respect Murray’s opinion. He was much more often right than wrong as a prognosticator of human evil. An easy game. Humans so often opt for evil… it is generally cheaper and easier tha
n being good guys.
“The Chinese are up to something. The word on the street is that they are trying to assemble a drive of their own and they may be having some luck.” He said.
“How is that possible?”
He shrugged.
“It may not be. It is all scuttlebutt right now… water cooler gossip… I hope to have more hard information in a couple weeks… . I have some things in the works.”
I could guess what that meant. I hated cloak and dagger on general principles but I was not an idiot either. In nature the right to self defense is never denied. I did not see why TESS should be different from rest of the rank and file of animals. I let Murray do his thing because I wanted TESS to survive.
“Is there any way I can induce you two to get to the point?” I asked, tired suddenly. I was surprised that it was Wong who answered.
“Craig and Murray are being circumspect, Bear.” He said politically.
I craned my neck back and met his eyes where he hung above me. His body was oriented the opposite direction from mine so his frown looked kind of like a smile. I shook my head to clear the fatigue.
“I take complete responsibility, boss…” Wong went on with the bad news, “But the American’s have apparently pulled back from continuing their earlier stabs at penetrating money close to our inner circle. They seem to have figured out it wasn’t working. Like any good opponent though, they changed their tactics. They managed to go the Chinese route. They slipped in an actual agent. The agent got all the way to our Phase V training before we detected them. ‘Phase V’ was graduation from our academy and preparation for entry into the fleet. I flushed in anger. On top of my current list of annoyances it just wasn’t fair—my thumb was already wrinkled from being stuck in my mouth recently.
