Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “I recommend that the Space Service join the effort to try to contact Orleans, and until such a time as contact is established, no ships be dispatched.”

  She waved the message. “This is important, sirs. More so than you might think. I thought about this a good deal when I was on vacation. We should have thought about this a good deal more than we did. There should have never been a reactor delivered, just an auxiliary power supply. One that had, in fact, already existed and was supplying sufficient power to deal with the life support needs of the vessel... a spare though, might have been helpful.

  “That vessel should have been taken in tow, not dangerous passenger transfers attempted. A tug could have returned them in plenty of time to Earth orbit, and the same shuttles used to effect transfers from Jupiter’s orbit would have worked even better closer to home.

  Captain Gilly, I know we want to provide every assistance to those we rescue, but we are going to have to learn when ‘enough’ is enough. There are any number of reasons why the responses undertaken might have been needed -- but they needed to be evaluated first and not put on the table at the outset.”

  The President turned to Admiral Delgado. “Call a meeting of the interested parties in the Federation-to-be. Include yourself, Admiral Kinsella and Captain Gilly. Discuss the rules of rescue. Be very sure that rules for non-member nations being dinged for the costs has a high billing.”

  “Sir,” Captain Gilly said, “I’ve been too enthusiastic. Once, when I first brought Professor Kinsella to Washington, she told me I was too easy to seduce. I thought she was speaking about one thing in particular.” He laughed at several stricken expressions, “No, not that! What she meant was that I was easily swayed in doing my duty. I spent too much time trying to make happen what I’d been ordered -- and too little on whether or not it was a good idea.”

  The President sniffed. “Your mother has trained you well, Admiral Kinsella. I believe you could have said the same thing as me in short Anglo-Saxon sentences.”

  “Sir, my father also trained me, although he’s happy to leave me to my own decisions these days. He taught me that gratuitous advice to those who should know better is invariably ignored.”

  “I can’t say I’ve not ignored your advice. I can say I’ve almost always regretted it later. We digress. Admiral Delgado, arrange the conference.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Chapter 6 -- Space Can Be a Friendly Place

  The President left and Becky stood with everyone else, trying to arrange her emotions. Every one of the people she’d met on -- Orleans -- was now dead, except the one useless coward. They had been marginal at their duties, from the captain on down. Still, it was hard to contemplate those deaths with equanimity.

  Admiral Kinsella looked at her. “Lieutenant, you are the most junior at this table. It’s something I’m still having to come to grips with. You feel responsible.”

  “No, Admiral. I don’t want to contradict you, but what I feel is sadness, not responsibility. We tried.”

  “You tried. A truism that my father shared with me when I was much younger: you can lead a donkey to water, but it’s still an ass.”

  Becky grimaced, but didn’t say anything.

  “Ignorance and stupidity killed that crew -- aided and abetted by the even more ignorant and stupid people who commanded them from down on the ground.

  “With all due respect to the President, to Admiral Delgado -- aloft you are being paid for your best judgment -- not slavish devotion to orders. Whether through ignorance, malice or whatever, for the time being we stand at risk from the exceedingly ill-informed judgments of those who are culpably ignorant. You’re a fool if you obey an order you know is ill-considered or just plain stupid. Preserve your life -- preserve the lives entrusted to your care. Ignore the morons! Maybe you’ll be cashiered -- perhaps even worse. But you’ll be alive, and so will those entrusted to you. And that, Lieutenant, will always be the bottom line.”

  “I’m probably being subversive to good order and discipline, Lieutenant -- but Admiral Kinsella is right,” Admiral Delgado told Becky.

  “Let’s wrap this up... Orleans was damaged in a fan accident of unknown origin. Period, finish... end of story. We’ll recommend that GE model 5 fans not be used for transition to High Fan until they’ve been tested further,” he concluded.

  Everyone nodded in agreement and the meeting ended.

  There was never a resolution to the Miracle at Orleans beyond that. The Rescue Service bought a dozen GE Model 5 fans for testing, and yes, they failed under High Fan. With the one famous exception, when the fans died, the ship returned to normal space, and it could be detected and retrieved.

  The other significant piece of fallout was that the results of the investigation were leaked to Sarkozy of France, who used it to devastating effect against his political enemies. An untested ship with thousands of French citizens had been sent to a planet not known to exist, greatly endangering the crew and colonists.

  Moreover the French government had spurned the efforts of the rescuers and had gotten the French banned from further rescue attempts. Every expert interviewed about the risks involved had been frankly stunned that any of the risks had been found acceptable. Only the US Space Service Rescue Branch had prevented the loss of thousands of lives, but had been unable to prevent the pointless loss of hundreds.

  It’s embarrassing to lose a vote of confidence. When you can only muster a handful of votes from the most stalwart members of your party, it is career ending. Sarkozy had paid a stiff political price for helping start the Federation, but now he was handed his old job back on a silver platter, and since he’d campaigned on joining the Federation, his election was seen as a mandate to do just that.

  For Becky, it was back to work. Most of what she did was training. As a junior officer, she spent a lot of time evaluating new gear and writing reports on it. She quickly gained the reputation for being tough, but fair.

  The fact was she was a generally competent person in space, with a specialty in nuclear power systems. There weren’t that many nuclear powered vessels and mostly they functioned without problems. Fans occasionally failed, but there were two classes of fan failures -- when the containment worked and when it didn’t. In the first case you called for help, a tow came and fetched you and all was fine. Not many ships survived containment failures.

  She was aware that Captain Gilly was saving her for the rescues where she could specifically help -- and thus allowing more people to gain experience. She couldn’t fault the logic behind it. It was what Admiral Kinsella was doing, after all. Admiral Kinsella had led two successful exploratory expeditions -- now it was other people’s turn. So she first worked on the design for a new generation exploratory vessel, but she came up with a number of other designs as well, each targeted for a different function.

  Then came the end of the year and the transition of the US Space Service to the Federation Fleet. It was funny, because she’d been told that a lot of national sensibilities had to be taken into account. That meant a great number of officers from individual services of other nations wanted to transfer to the Federation Fleet. She thought that her sensibilities didn’t seem to amount to much -- she went from well up in the top of the promotable range to senior lieutenant to well below halfway.

  She laughed. She was less than two years out of the Academy and she was back to being a couple of years away from another promotion? Her classmates were hoping for the same promotion.

  And if it was bad for her, it was far worse for others. Captain Jacobsen took a bust to commander. Like Becky, Commander Jacobsen hadn’t been upset at the result. “Do you know what this means? It means I can go back out. Who wants to fly a desk for the next ten or fifteen years before I retire?”

  Becky had been detailed to bring her former mentor up to speed on the accident. Like everyone else, Commander Jacobsen could only shake her head. “The admiral has the right of it. There are suggestions and hints -- but nothing certain. Some
thing extraordinary happened to those fans. Initially I had a feeling it had to do with the reactor, but the fans fail no matter what the power source. We’ve had telemetry on those fans now that beggars the mind -- and taxes available bandwidth. All we know about the event is that it is extraordinarily short.”

  Becky had been looking at the pictures of a test vehicle’s fans coming apart. Short? The event happened, always, at 122,252 RPMs? Looking beyond the fans, towards the gravity well, it was always the left hand fans that failed, ran the line. Did they stop at the last fan? Or start on the next side? The event always occurred, if you consider zero degrees straight up and ninety degrees to the right, at 238 degrees. The exact angle was difficult to measure, but the engineering consensus was that it was always the same.

  At 122K RPMs the two-meter in diameter turbine blades, at their tips, were traveling close to 2300 kilometers per second. The event melted about a two-degree swath of the blade, and then the unbalanced turbine broke up. Maybe a fraction of a nanosecond was all it took?

  Becky looked at the picture as the event unfolded. Then it came to her. “There are some GE 5’s left, right?”

  Commander Jacobsen agreed. “About a half dozen. We’re saving them for research at a later time when we might have half a clue.”

  Becky regarded her. “Suppose we ran another test. We run pairs of turbines, because paired they are easier to balance. We can aim the gravity well to a degree, and we put it on the centerline. It’s the fans to the left of the centerline that are failing.

  “What say we hook up a test vehicle with two in line, instead of paired laterally? We put them to the right of the centerline. We can determine the center of mass of the vehicle easily enough -- if everything is on the right, instead of the left, what’s going to happen?”

  “The brass are going to have conniptions if anything happens to those turbines. On the other hand, every fan engineer worth his or her salt is flogging every computer that they can get access to. No one has come right out and said it, but this has to be a fundamental characteristic -- one that we don’t understand.

  “Anyone who figures it out is going to earn some major chops. Yeah, it’s an experiment that’s worth doing, no matter how many panties are twisted. God, some of these new officers are worse than my granny! She’s a hundred and ten and born during the First World War.”

  The experiment was run, the test vehicle went to High Fan and came off on schedule. The suggestion that they try it again, but with the fans on the left, was met with flat denial.

  Once again, things fell into routine -- not that the rescue service was ever routine. Admiral Kinsella presented new ship designs to the Fleet -- cruisers to range among the stars, large enough to deal with most possibilities, frigates that were designed to stay within a single solar system, able to deal with any eventualities that might come to pass, and corvettes, that were the messengers.

  Becky got a message from Anna that the ship she had been building was entering the final testing phase, and that they were starting the framework of the second. Would Becky come for the formal christening? She agreed, and spent two days and nights being feted on Psyche. That was the only way to describe her reception.

  Anna grinned at her, as they formally launched her second ship. “I have a question for you, Becky,” Anna said as they watched the ship pull away from its dock.

  “What Anna?”

  “The Australians have completed a second exploration vessel, the Southern Star. She’ll have an Australian CO, but they’ve picked Krista Jacobsen as the engineer. It will be going out flagged as a Federation ship. It’s a done deal, but not official yet.”

  Anna waved at the ship she’d supervised the construction of. “I’m doing this again. We’re pretty sure we can get her done in less than a year this time. Most of the structural material we’ll fabricate in the Belt, along with most of the consumables. The Israelis have put a great deal of thought into it, and have a new generation reactor for her, designed for space, not for duty at sea.

  “I have access to the highest levels of government in the US, Taiwan, Israel and Australia. Say the word, and you can help me build the next one. They tell me that I’m too valuable to risk as a crewperson, even as captain. Becky, I’m a happy camper, creating things of beauty that are going places I’ve dreamt of, but the older I get, the less motivated I am to see what’s out there for myself.

  “Say the word, and you can be my number two for the next one. Or, if you’re braver than I am, I can get Krista Jacobsen to take you on board the Southern Cross. You’ve earned your heart’s desire.” She laughed, “Not that you’ll be more than a watch commander if you go with Krista. She’ll have an Australian number two on her black gang.”

  Becky turned to face her. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say ‘you’ or ‘Krista’. I’ll even accept ‘Commander Jacobsen’ as a valid answer.”

  “I still have no idea what to say. Can I think about it?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the Rescue Service?”

  “You’re not privy to the big wigs’ discussions. They are going to create a ‘Solar Patrol’ that’ll be a branch of the Fleet. Rescue Service will be subsumed into the Fleet. The ‘Patrol’ will be just another duty assignment, like into a ship. Right now, you and your peers are too specialized. That’s good, in the long run. The Fleet will need officers who can deal with a wide variety of tasks... a little specialization is good -- get over-specialized and you’re a dinosaur on the short list for extinction.”

  Becky thought until late that night and when she arose the next morning, she still didn’t know what to say. She went to the VIP mess and had some breakfast, her brain working furiously once again.

  Reluctantly it came down to two things. She wanted to see other planets -- and she wanted to work with Anna Sanchez. There wasn’t, she realized, much of a chance of combining the two desires.

  That meant the decision was going to be based on how much she wanted to work with Anna. That led to the question of why she wanted to work with Anna.

  That was a question she shied away from. What Anna did was interesting, fascinating work. She was like an orchestra conductor, waving her arms, making this group go faster, slowing down another group and encouraging a new line to add to what was already there.

  The hard, blunt truth of it was that it was like a conductor playing the same symphony, over and over. Oh, there were going to be minor changes, differing nuances. Going into space -- that was going to be a different sort of symphony, one with infinite variety.

  Why then, couldn’t she make up her mind about what should be an easy choice?

  Because of how she felt about Anna Sanchez. On the face of it, that was absurd. Anna Sanchez was famously fixated on male penis size. The only thing even faintly romantic that had passed between the two of them was Anna admitting that at three beers she just might be motivated to pat Becky on the butt. Romantic? In what universe? And Anna had told her on that particular evening she was going to avoid beer and pack instead.

  Becky finally dragged the naked truth into the open. She was in love with Anna Sanchez. She’d hidden it as well from herself, as everyone else.

  What did Anna think? The woman who was famous for equating penis size to a man’s worth? With sudden insight, Becky realized two things. Anna wasn’t stupid, and had to know that the two things wouldn’t correlate. And just how did Anna rate women?

  She wanted to cry; it was insane. What in the world could she do? Give up her dreams of walking under another star -- or walk away from someone she was now quite sure she loved?

  If her mind had been in a whirl before, now it was crazy. Nothing made sense.

  What happened next was to demonstrate that nature abhors a vacuum -- even if it created an unimaginable volume of vacuum than anything else.

  Someone shook her. “Lieutenant Cooper! Come quick! There’s been an accident!” She looked up and saw it was the habitat manager shaking her. Levi Greenb
urg, she remembered.

  She focused. “Yes, sir. Sorry, I was thinking.”

  ”Lieutenant, it’s Miss Sanchez! Come, hurry! It’s very serious!”

  Five minutes later, she was as close to tears as she’d ever been in her adult life.

  She’d had to don a vacuum suit -- that told her that it was more than serious.

  Anna was lying on her back, a structural member pinning her left leg to the deck. Becky moved quickly forward, keying her phone as she did. “Lieutenant Rhymer!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant!”

  “Repair aboard our shuttle and pull a three by four meter sticky tent. Pull a two-meter rescue bubble. Tog up. There’s been an accident. A member of the habitat’s crew will bring you here. Hurry!”

  Her second in command acknowledged and rushed to obey.

  Becky looked closely at Anna and had to look away. She forced herself to look back.

  “Yeah,” Anna said. “I was distracted, looking another way. Make a note, Cooper. The preferred orientation of workers in microgravity situations is at right angles to the local gravity vector.” Becky avoided a sob by superhuman effort.

  “So noted, Anna.”

  “I don’t dare move, you understand?”

  “I understand, Anna. This is something I can deal with, it’s something I’ve trained for.”

  “God, girl! I want to build more ships! I don’t need two legs for that! But I need to be alive!”

  Becky turned to the habitat manager. “We need a space-qualified doctor. One who can perform surgery out here.”

  “He’s on the way,” the habitat manager told her. “It won’t be easy to do surgery out here.”

  The doctor and the other member of her crew arrived at the same time. One feature of the Rescue Service -- unless you were on leave -- you were on call, so she had a standard Rescue Branch shuttle and a junior crewman, an Aussie, it turned out, right to hand.