Captain's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper)

by Nathan Lowell

  She paused then and looked around at us. There was a strong sense of ‘it-could-have-been-us’ around the table. The simple fact that the ship across the way was a Barbell, just like the Tinker, re-enforced that feeling. Having been through one near calamitous environmental failure underway myself, I was only too aware of how fragile the ships really were. Around the universe, clippers sailed trillions of kilometers every day, and while the safety record for the big ships was actually better than planet-side pedestrian travel, periodically one got lost or destroyed close enough to you that it mattered.

  “Ms. Kazyanenko reports that there has been no response to hail, no distress call, and no sign of electronic emission since we’ve been here over the last twenty-four standard hours. Mr. Wang’s physical exploration of the bridge through the glass revealed no signs of life. The ship has been designated as abandoned under the Joint Committee rules, pending discovery of any living person aboard.”

  She paused again to let that sink in. There was a possibility that somebody might be aboard, but too injured to get to the bridge. If that person were a member of the crew, then the ship’s status would depend on a Joint Committee hearing and our salvage claim went up for grabs. We stood to make a lot of money if we actually managed to pull off the salvage. We might lose a lot of money by delaying our cargo delivery at Breakall.

  Fredi took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Our options are to sail on, to stand by and await the authorities, or to try to board the vessel and consummate the salvage claim.”

  We all knew that there might be somebody aboard over there who needed help. We also knew that the twenty-four stans we’d been sitting off their port quarter represented one standard day of pain and suffering to anybody who might be still there. CPJCT regulations required us to wait that long before we could attempt to break into the ship on our own. We were rolling the dice with other people’s lives, but the Joint Committee had to protect a variety of interests and, in the light of the evidence, we had no probable cause for suspecting any ongoing emergency condition.

  “Is your boarding team ready, Chief Engineer?” Fredi turned to look Mel in the eye.

  “Aye, Captain. Hardsuits and tool kits. Let the record show that I have assigned Spec One Power Sondra Strauss and Machinist Christopher Marks to attempt to key the emergency lock on the after nacelle.”

  “Thank you, Chief Engineer.” She turned to me. “Mr. Wang, I formally charge you with command of the salvage team in the name of Diurnia Salvage and Transport under the authority granted me by virtue of being captain of this vessel, and the long-standing rules and regulations of deep space salvage as outlined in the Confederated Planets Joint Committee on Trade, Title Twelve, Section Seven. Do you understand your rights and responsibilities under that charge?”

  “I do, Captain.”

  “And do you agree to accept this charge?”

  “I do, Captain.”

  “Very well, Mr. Wang. Please state for the record your intentions.”

  “As soon as is practically and legally feasible, I will convene a team consisting of the engineering crewmen previously named by Chief Engineer Menas along with Able Spacer Martin Udan and Spacer Apprentice James Belnus. We will use the ship’s launch to navigate to the emergency access lock in the engineering section of the Chernyakova. Assuming that the engineering team is successful in gaining access to the ship, my team will establish operational control of the vessel, stabilize its attitude and attempt to restore steerage way using ship’s engines, navigational thrusters and any other appropriate ship’s systems that might be available. We intend to render aid and assistance to any individuals found aboard, or failing to locate any living members of the crew, to consummate a good-faith claim of salvage in the name of Diurnia Salvage and Transport in as much as we are able to ascertain our legal standing with the information and understanding we currently possess.”

  I rattled it off pretty smoothly. It sounded like I knew what I was doing, but the truth was that Mel, Fredi, and I had banged the whole thing out over dinner in the wardroom the previous evening. I actually read the points off my tablet to make sure I had all the correct legal bandiflage needed to cover our collective stern quarters from any charges of breaking and entering or piracy in deep space by trying to take over a ship that, technically, wasn’t ours to mess with.

  “Thank you, Mr. Wang. You have my authority as captain to carry out your mission as outlined and ratified by this board consisting of the senior officers present in the area with names and ranks appended to the log record. This meeting is adjourned.”

  She reached out and clicked the recorder off before looking around the table. “Now, we wait.”

  Chapter Five

  Breakall System:

  2371-September-28

  The launch felt a bit crowded with the six of us. The two engineering crew just locked their hardsuits to the decking along the center aisle. I was back in the softsuit but Udan and Belnus wore only emergency ship suits with extra air packs. The plan was for the engineers to cross first and establish a line connection. They wouldn’t open the lock until I was there as senior officer. The access would then technically be under my direct supervision and responsibility, thereby serving the legal niceties. It seemed an awkward dance, but with that much money–to say nothing of the legal liabilities should things go wonky on us–everybody followed the forms down to the letter.

  Ulla remained quiet on the trip over. With the extra hardsuits and tools aboard, the launch probably handled about as nimbly as a brick in ice water and she proceeded with all due caution. It only took a few ticks to take up station directly astern of the Chernyakova and slightly above the huge, open mouths of her main engines. We didn’t want to be in line with those, even given the remote chance of their firing.

  She had enough of an angle to shine an arc-light onto the hatch area. We were able to see the ship’s wobble as the spot stayed steady while the outline of the door wove a lopsided figure eight in the light.

  “Ms. Strauss, Mr. Marks, you are cleared to debark and establish the line. I’ll follow you over on your signal.”

  They said, “Aye, aye, sar,” almost in unison and then lumbered aft to the lock and had to cycle it twice to get both of them out.

  “Hold the fort, Ulla,” I told her with a smile I didn’t really feel.

  She smiled back and nodded once in agreement.

  I cycled the lock and ran the suit check while I waited for it to allow me to enter. I could see Strauss and Marks using their suit thrusters to jet over to the stern of the ship, trailing safety lines just like in the exercises. By the time I’d cleared the lock and stuck my head out into the silence, they’d already clipped a line to the D-ring outside the hatch and I had a clear road from the launch to the hull.

  I heard Ms. Strauss’s voice on the common working channel. “We’re secure on this end, sar.”

  “On my way, Ms. Strauss.”

  I deliberately and carefully clipped my own link to the safety line, securing a second line to the launch, just in case. The softsuit didn’t have any maneuvering jets but hand-over-hand along the line worked just fine in zero gee.

  “We are at the lock, Captain,” I said on the common working channel.

  “Proceed, Mr. Wang.” Fredi’s voice sounded calm and cool on the radio.

  I turned to Marks and nodded my head inside the helmet. He smiled back and turned to the keypad next to the air lock. He had just started to attach his break-in tool to the locking mechanism when Strauss held up her hand to get his attention.

  I could see the puzzled look on his face through his helmet as she made a little shooing motion. He backed off a bit to give her room.

  She reached over and tapped a series of nine keys on the keypad.

  The tattletale over the lock turned amber to indicate that the lock was cycling.

  Strauss smiled and I heard her voice on the working channel. “Let the record show that the emergency access hatch responded to the default
access code. We didn’t need to crack it.”

  “Good thinking, Ms. Strauss,” the captain said.

  We had already determined that the lock would only hold two of us by experimenting back on the Tinker. As the two senior staff, Strauss and I got first look so we slipped into the lock when the outer door finally admitted us. Strauss punched the button that would cycle us into the ship.

  The inner door opened onto the Chernyakova’s hanger deck and their launch rested on its skids, locked down securely and, by extension, ruling out the idea that the crew might have abandoned ship that way. We shuffled out of the lock and I punched the cycle button while Strauss limbered up her atmosphere sniffer.

  “We’re inside, Captain. The launch is here. No signs of trouble.” I hoped I didn’t sound as spooked as I felt. “The lights are on but there doesn’t seem to be anybody home.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Wang.”

  “Mr. Udan, Mr. Belnus, if you’d join us, we’ll begin our search.”

  They responded on the working channel and I turned my attention to the hangar.

  Strauss held her sniffer up so I could see the readings. The carbon dioxide was low, but hydrogen sulphide and methane were elevated. Apparently, the scrubbers worked but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to smell the air. We did a quick survey of the hangar while we waited for the rest of the party to join us.

  Ms. Strauss used her local speakers to talk to me. “Could use a bit of a tidy, don’t you think, sar?”

  Odd bits of trash and cast-off equipment littered the hanger and the deck itself was in need of a good swabbing. I shined my portable light back into the corners and looked under the belly of the launch.

  I agreed with her. “I wouldn’t want to try to fly that out of here with all this flammable material in here.”

  “Given how little of it is tied down, I suspect there’s no danger of fire.” Ms. Strauss said. “I bet as soon as you opened the big lock door, most of it would be swept out by the first blast.”

  I measured the door and the space with my eyes. “Been a while since they’ve used this, Ms. Strauss?”

  “Looks that way, sar.”

  The lock popped open behind us. Mr. Udan and Mr. Belnus stepped onto the hanger deck in their softsuits. I saw them looking around uneasily. I knew the feeling.

  In a couple of more ticks, the lock cycled again allowing Mr. Marks aboard.

  “Salvage party now on the hangar deck, Captain. We are commencing our sweep.”

  “Carry on, Mr. Wang.”

  What followed was a nightmare. We found the crew. Most of them were where one might expect to find crew. Or at least where they’d have fallen. After the first few swollen corpses, we learned not to look too closely. There was nothing we could do for them. Even cleanup needed to wait until the forensics team arrived.

  In the meantime, we did what we could to regain stability in the ship. It was a challenge. The ship looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a stanyer. The watch standing consoles were smeared with dirt and grease in the engineering spaces. There were empty and near empty coffee cups, mess trays, and more odd bits of cloth and clothing than I had ever seen aboard a ship.

  We used standby consoles and the emergency bridge connections in Engineering to stabilize the ship and begin a preliminary investigation. We needed to know what killed them before we could take off our suits and the clock was ticking. I led Mr. Udan and Mr. Belnus forward to survey the bridge while Ms. Strauss and Mr. Marks started up the extra consoles in engineering and began looking at the ship’s physical status.

  The trip through the spine was difficult. I tried not to look too closely at what I had to walk around on the way. Hanging wires, broken ductwork, and the swollen body I had to step over didn’t make it easy to ignore my surroundings.

  When we got to the bridge, I fired up an extra console at the forward end. We used that to establish a control link to engineering. It gave us a look at ship’s status and provided access to the logs and autopilot. In a matter of half a dozen ticks, automated station keeping jets damped down the bobbing and yawing so we didn’t have to worry quite as much about losing balance and falling on or in something unfortunate.

  I sent Mr. Belnus to survey below decks and put Mr. Udan on bridge watch. While we were on ballistic trajectory–and while a corpse occupied the helm–there wasn’t much we could do except keep an eye open.

  Ms. Strauss called on the working channel. “I think I found it, Mr. Wang. Scroll back in the gas mixture logs, sar.”

  I pulled up the environmental logs and started scrolling back. The levels of methane and other gaseous by products of decomposing bodies showed clearely but I scrolled back almost to the point where the ship had gotten underway.

  I saw the reading on the screen but I couldn’t believe it. “Carbon monoxide?”

  “That’s what it looks like, sar. It’s gone now, but it’s in the record.”

  I traced back more and followed the history forward. Shortly after getting underway, carbon monoxide spiked in the ship’s atmosphere. The levels were in the fatal range and the physical evidence around us reinforced the record.

  “Why didn’t any of the alarms go off, sar?”

  My fingers tapped the keys awkwardly in the heavy gloves but I persevered and brought up the alarm status. They were all red. “Sar? The environmental alarms are all shut off.”

  “I see that, Ms. Strauss.”

  Mr. Udan watched over my shoulder and saw the list. “How is that even possible, sar?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Udan. It’s like the sensor control unit is gone. The sensors are there. The system is recording, but the alarm circuits are not active." I thought about it for half a tick. “That’s a general systems module. See if you can find what caused the spike in carbon monoxide, Ms. Strauss. I’ll go check the systems closet.”

  “Aye, aye, sar.” Her voice sounded distracted over the radio. “Maybe I can find the lead sensor in the data stream.”

  The data closet on Barbells was tucked under the bridge ladder. I left Mr. Udan on lookout and made my way down. It was the twin to the one on the Tinker and it took me only a moment to find the correct cabinet. When I pulled out the drawer, the gap in components was obvious. The slot that should have held the subsystem for managing alarm routings was empty. In its place was the red maintenance card required whenever a component was pulled for maintenance. Scrawled on the face was a date–July 21, 2371–and some initials. They’d been flying without alarms for almost two months. The sensors all worked. The systems recorded the readings, but when the readings reached critical stages, the interface that should trigger the ship’s alarm system wasn’t there to respond to the signal.

  It was an appalling breach of safety protocols.

  On a hunch I went down the passage to the spares closet and pulled open the door. It wasn’t completely empty, but very nearly so. On the Tinker we had a spare for every single component in the data closet, along with some spare racks and odd bits. I had never tried to do it, but when I’d been systems officer, I’d made sure we had all the parts we needed to rebuild the closet from the bulkheads out in case of emergency.

  The nearly empty closet in front of me was frightening.

  I opened the general communications channel and called to Ms. Strauss. “Find the source yet, Ms. Strauss?”

  “Yes, sar. A smoldering burn in a pile of castoffs in a corner of the engine room. Looks like an electrical spark from a broken lamp. The timing is consistent with kicker burn on their push out of Breakall.”

  “Check the fire detection systems, please?”

  “Doing it now, sar.” There was a pause. “Yes, they detected the smoke, but the heat signature was below threshold.”

  “Any indication of how long it burned, Ms. Strauss?”

  “Looks like about three days, sar. Fire system reset then and that’s consistent with the peak carbon monoxide readings.” There was another pause. “Their systems detected it. Why didn’t they respond?”<
br />
  “There were no alarms.”

  “Yes, sar, but the watch standers should have seen the readings.”

  “Which watch standers, Ms. Strauss?”

  “Environmental and engineering both registered it on the logs, sar.”

  “How long between the time the fire started and the carbon monoxide reached critical levels, Ms. Strauss?”

  I waited for her to check the logs. “Looks like about eight or nine stans, sar.”

  “Check the watch logs. They had to have had a change in duty during that time. Did they note anything?” I headed up to the bridge and crossed to where Mr. Udan had the extra console running. He had heard the exchange on the working channel, of course, and stepped back so I could access the terminal.

  “Looks like the first signs showed up just before they secured from navigation stations, sar. The readings were elevated but there’s no note in the logs.”

  I scrolled back in the OD logs and found the bridge records. “None up here, either, Ms. Strauss. Was there anything at the watch change?” I scrolled forward and saw only routine entries.

  “Found it, sar. ‘Elevated CO noted. Sensors flagged for malfunction.’”

  I shook my head to myself. “There’s nothing in the bridge logs. If they notified the bridge, it didn’t get noted.”

  The circuit got quiet. I don’t know what the others were thinking but I was imagining what must have followed. Around the ship, crew would have started falling into a final sleep as the carbon-monoxide gas built up in their bodies. Some of them probably had headaches. They might have noticed some blurry vision. Given the number of people we’d found in their bunks, only the few watch standers might have been in a position to make a difference. Environmental and Engineering watch standers would have been the first to succumb as the heavy gas pooled in the stern nacelle. It wouldn’t have taken long for the environmental systems to pump the forward section full of deadly gas as well. I wondered if the body in the ship’s spine might have been the messenger sent aft to find out why nobody back there was responding.