by Jim Rudnick
He looked over at his accompanying companions and stared at one of them until he got a nod back.
“Agreed. We will have a team of, say, three traders meet with up to three of your own to discuss what we can rollback. I’m not saying that we can do much, but we need to, in this very limited case, work with Faraway rather than against it to counteract this change to trading here on the RIM.”
He sat up a bit straighter and leaned forward a bit to speak to the minister. “I’ve heard that you can perhaps put this Barony Drive on a life-pod—and it’d go anywhere on the RIM just like a ship … things are so very much in change,” he said as they finished their discussions.
#####
Professor Beedles was the one who was in the way. There was no doubt about that, as the techie from engineering on the Atlas didn’t even have enough room to pull back his forearm out of the depths of the bin below the equipment on the far wall. The bridge had, as most did, full walls of display items, equipment displays, lights, gauges, and displays that no one even knew what they were.
Most went up quite high, at least to eight feet, and had the xeno team even known what they were, it would have been well over their heads, and they couldn’t even have read what the gauges said, let alone understood them.
Below those wall displays were cabinets with movable doors that they’d been opening, photographing, and then closing. They’d opened up all twenty-seven of the cabinets and had made no real finds but had noticed one thing.
Each of the cabinets had what looked like a kind of a power supply cable—that was unattached.
All had the same cable. All the cables were hanging loosely and not one was inserted into the cable outlet that lay very close by.
Beedles, the xeno team member who was in charge of the artifacts area, made the request to plug one in.
Not all. Just one. Just a random cable to be plugged into its own power outlet.
He argued for it for more than two days and had, as he’d hoped, worn the team members down to making the one single plug-in an allowable test. He had been a bit perturbed in that the xeno team leader, Professor Reynolds, had insisted that they get an engineering techie down here to actually do the plug-in job itself, and even though Beedles had pooh-poohed that point, it was a pre-requisite, so he gave up on that argument.
It had taken almost a day to get the techie down here from the Atlas up in orbit, and the young man had been walked directly to the bridge. He’d tried to stop to look at various items on the way, but with Beedles almost pushing him along, he’d swallowed those questions and now knelt in front of Beedles at the cabinet opening.
“Simple, techie. That cable into the plug-in outlet. Got it?” Beedles asked as he pointed out the two items in the cabinet.
The techie nodded and said, “More light here, please,” which stopped the whole process.
They didn’t have lights, and by the time someone remembered every shuttle carried battery-drive lights in their support bays, more than half an hour had gone by. Professor Vincent was sent double-time, Beedles commanded, to go back down the long walkway to the shuttle, get the lights, and then get back to the bridge ASAP. Rising, Vincent smiled and said, “I’ll only take some extra time to have lunch there first, but I’ll be back …” and he ignored the protestations from Beedles as he slowly walked off the bridge back toward the shuttle that lay outside the wrecked ship.
That took another half hour, and by that time, Beedles was beside himself. He’d already called the techie too cautious, said he’d do it himself and the xeno team was wasting time and their careers by waiting on such a tech wimp. Professor Reynolds, the xeno team leader, finally told him to shut up and wait, and the lights were on their way.
They waited and soon, Professor Vincent showed up with a brace of spotlights and a battery pack over his shoulder. As he took it off, the engineering techie grabbed same and set it all up so the whole cabinet could now be lit up.
“As I suspected, there are two outlets here. One, we can all see, and yet, there is another deeper inside, and it’s on an angle that one can’t see. Which do you want me to plug into,” he asked, and that got them all quiet.
Beedles spoke first. “Let’s try both, of course. We’re here to get intel, so we need to try both. One at a time, order is unimportant, I’d say,” he said and looked at the rest of the team.
Shrugs, nods, and not a single head shake were the answers, so he turned to the techie.
“This one first,” he said as he pointed at the one up front and in full view.
“One thing to say first. That this is a manual plug. That a hand—or something like a hand—unplugged it. This is not AI controlled, as far as I can tell—the outlet itself has no controllable disconnect prongs that an AI could control. This was a manual disconnect,” he said as he picked up the cable end and snapped it into the outlet up front, pulling his arm out quickly.
Nothing happened. No chimes or aural notifications. No lights or anything else was reported by the professors who were staring at the bridge console monitors. Not a single new icon appeared or disappeared. From all intents and purposes, the plug-in failed to make anything else happen.
Beedles said, “Okay, then let’s unplug and try the other outlet.”
The techie looked at the xeno team leader, got a head nod to indicate go ahead, and then pulled the cable plug out of the outlet.
Twisting it slightly, he re-aimed the closest spotlight to show the rear canted outlet and then plugged it back in too.
Again, not a single thing happened. No notifications or sounds or lights or anything on the bridge console monitor either.
Beedles was disappointed and said so.
“What the hell does that mean? You’d think that anyone who can build a ship with this level of technology would also get their AI to recognize a new connection was just made,” he said, his voice sarcastic in tone.
Reynolds said, “As I thought, there is not a single thing attached to this kind of plug-in.”
Vincent said, “Glad I had to go all the way back to the shuttle to get lights that were a waste of time …”
Professor Irving nodded and said, “Looks like a loser of an idea, Professor Beedles,” and she smiled at him at the same time as chuckles sounded on the bridge.
Reynolds nodded to the techie and said, “Disconnect the cable, and let’s leave well enough alone.”
The techie nodded back and reached into the cabinet to do just that.
The sound of what must have been the alien klaxon was loud, braying over and over.
The pot lights in the ceiling on the bridge changed color to be much brighter and amber in color.
The bridge console monitor flashed, and then in the top left-hand corner, a new icon appeared in bright, bright amber in color, pulsing over and over, Professor Scholes reported loudly.
“It looks like that did something,” Reynold shouted over the din of the klaxons, and they all waited.
And they waited and waited, and nothing else happened.
Finally, Beedles got up off his knees and went to look at the bridge console, and before anyone could stop him, he jammed a finger stiffly on top of that new flashing amber icon—and the klaxons stopped. The flashing icon went away, and the room was quiet.
“That, using even the most liberal of xeno rules and best practices, was the wrong thing to do, Professor Beedles,” Reynolds said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“We don’t do anything—we observe, we find, we record … Xenoarchaeology is a science of observation. I am sorry to say that perhaps I am responsible as I was the one who okayed this cable testing idea. But the records will show—in full—who did what here today.”
Beedles waved him off. “What I just did, Professor Reynolds, was to test further than anyone else has done, as to the AI on this ship. A simple plugging in of a cable was all that happened—and that got the console to note same—and that was a notice that I’d say was meant to warn these aliens of that disconnect. I
’d say that we’re much ahead, Professor, and I can’t wait for the record to show who was responsible for that advancement in our xeno team knowledge. Very happy indeed,” he said, and his voice was certainly full of himself.
Reynolds came over to look at the console monitor. “Nothing else new?” he asked in general
“No,” replied Professor Irving.
“Ellen, make sure to get this vid archived soonest and include it in the dailies that I need to send to the admiral at end of business today, would you please?” he asked.
He turned to the techie then. “Thank you for your help here today, please pack up your equipment and lights too, and you are dismissed,” he said, and then he turned to the rest of the xeno team.
“We’re done for today. Please, reports in soon … and tomorrow, let’s do a post-mortem on this. I want to know what kind of a disconnect would cause such a notice. Please also in your briefs, I want to see annotations from other alien cultures should you find same and be as thorough as possible …”
Epilogue ~
Mindy looked once more at her department report on screen and asked herself, ”Is this as accurate as I can make it?”
She re-read the column headings; they were correct in that she’d simply copied them from the report she’d been cadging her own reports from for the last three months.
She checked the entries below each of those columns and paid much attention to the ones labeled under the outstanding and pending totals.
Just a month ago or so, before the last RIM Confederacy Council meeting held here on Juno, there had been almost eleven hundred outstanding new tariff applications.
Those eleven hundred applications had been the cause of everything that went wrong here in Customs, she knew.
It had driven almost forty percent of their staff off on long-term or short-term disabilities or on their sick day bank usages.
It had been the driving force to ramp up the HR department and their hiring practices to find new candidates to hire. This, of course, had been a disaster as the prospects had learned quickly that staff had left because of the huge new increases in workloads. So they’d nicely declined the customs ministry as a place to apply and had moved over to one of the thirty different ministry openings across the Confederacy government opportunities.
It had been the reason that in only five weeks, she’d gone from office temp—placed in the customs application department by HR—to a full department head, and she’d risen almost six pay brackets.
“Better perks,” she said as she now got free parking below in the building parking lot. The fact that she didn’t even own a car was beyond the point. She also got a full eight weeks of vacations, free vacation flights anywhere on the RIM via her position too, and she always wanted to see the Randi waterfalls so that too was a great perk.
What had been the biggest surprise was that in the past three days, her department had received and processed almost nine hundred customs application revocation requests. Both the Leudie and Faraway applications had all of a sudden been rescinded—and the real outstanding number was less than two hundred applications.
She double-checked that one more time. She keyed in the latest hourly reports from her aide and found that nine more had been rescinded in the past hour. If I wait to file this ‘til end of business today, it might mean so many more would disappear, she thought but then realized the minister’s aide had requested her department report within an hour … and her time was up.
She nodded to herself.
The huge number of outstanding applications was down—way down.
That would lessen the load on all of her department. It would mean that staff off on disability might come back to work sooner than had been thought. It might mean that the big quest for new staff would be much lessened. It might mean that her department would quiet down, and she could do what all bureaucrats did—come in, watch the clock, and leave at five.
She smiled as she clicked the SEND button, and her report went via the Confederacy network to the minister’s offices.
She looked at the clock and noted she still had twenty minutes to kill before she could leave, so she used her own secure key-press pass code to put up her game of solitaire on screen and whiled away those minutes with red on black.
BOOK TEN OF THE RIM CONFEDERACY
Brothers Pride
Prologue ~
She dreamed as mostly all long voyage sleepers dream, the dreams long and complex and intertwined with her past and her future. She felt like she needed to scratch an ankle, but the knowledge that she was in a cryogenics tank, submersed in the freezing solution so that she couldn’t even reach all the way down to her ankle was there.
She knew that she was sleeping her way to the RIM, but that didn’t make the dreams any less real to her.
She was floating, like a bird or a dirigible, over the landscape below, it’s darkened colors almost too monotone to even make them out. The frozen side of Branton lay behind her, she’d floated for thousands of miles already in the sub-darkness, with stars only above and after hours of that kind of dream, the light ahead was getting closer.
Branton was a tidal locked planet; it kept one face towards it’s sun all the time. She knew that this effect is known as synchronous rotation. A tidally locked body takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner and Branton had rotated around it’s own star for billions of years.
One side that was hot, very hot and very sere and very much tough to live on. The other side, then one she’d just flown over was dark, almost no light got to it at all. It was cold. It was uninhabited for the most part unless one went to the tropical areas on the equator.
Still no light, but there was some bleed-over of heat there, and in this twilight kind of living, many millions lived. The band around the planet, was about three hundred miles wide, where the hot scorching sun lay on one side and the cold arctic climate ruled the other.
Three hundred miles wide, this band of civilization held the citizens of Branton. They lived therein, they worked therein and yes they spent as much time as they could in the habitable zone.
But the planet of course, lay before it, both hot and cold. Sometimes they needed to go out into the hot areas and others into the freezing cold. To mine for ores, or to get access to more water or even just for scientific observations.
She flew over the last few miles of the darkness and ahead the light was growing brighter and brighter. Soon, she squinted as the sunlight caught her at this height and she couldn’t slow or turn…she was propelled on wards into the light…and the heat.
After not more than a few more miles, she realized that she was heating up—her brow dripped sweat in rivulets right off her forehead. Her underarms, were pocketed with dripping sweat as well and yet she flew on, towards the brighter and brighter lights that lay ahead…
Branton…called her…and she had no choice but to fly towards the light…
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Dear Reader…
If you've made it this far, you're most likely thinking that this was the best SciFi you've ever read.
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Jim Rudnick
2016
