Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “I’m sorry I’m so shy,” Anna said later.

  “Love, I understand. One day you’ll understand why it doesn’t bother me. In the meantime, I have no complaints.”

  “It’s more fun to watch than I expected,” Anna admitted. “I think I understand voyeurs much better now.”

  “Voyeurs, love, see a flat picture; they miss how people feel and react to each other. You are seeing me; watching you back makes it worth all the tea in China.”

  “Now I’m going to be unromantic and go back to work. I’m trying to build an algorithm that will turn all the nooks and crannies into useful space -- and that will leave critical crew close to their duty stations. It’s kind of like a scheduling program or one to assign students to classes -- you have priorities and slots. The strangest things are the fights we’ve had over dimensions.”

  “You fight over dimensions?”

  “Well, I don’t -- everyone else does, though. Engineers want so much cubic, captains want so much cubic for their bridge and captain’s cabin. There are a lot of disputes over crew size. Even the simplest things can turn into knotty problems.

  “Steph designed Ad Astra with more or less eight foot ceilings, and two feet between decks. Ten is a nice round number! Except it wasn’t really eight feet, it was two and a half meters and half a meter -- she just told the powers that be ‘eight feet and two feet.’ Three isn’t as round a number as ten, but it’s still pretty simple to understand. When I went to design the Palmach, they wanted three or four meter ceilings and a meter between decks.

  “The truth is two and a half meters is a better ceiling height that three or four meters, and a half meter is way better for between deck measurements. About the only compartments that benefited from higher ceilings were the engineering spaces and storage compartments.

  “I listened to them argue that for a week. Sheesh! Grown men and women who can’t figure something like that out! I asked, ‘Why does an engineering compartment have to be the same height as crew quarters?’ You’d think I was asking them for their first-born! All the ships I design have ceiling heights appropriate to the compartment’s function.”

  “It doesn’t seem worth arguing over,” Becky replied.

  “Ha! I ran up a block diagram of their design for the Palmach. I had to do it twice, because they didn’t believe it the first time. Oddly, when you add two and a half meters to each deck, the ship is larger. The ship was nearly two hundred meters in diameter and would have cost twelve billion dollars. Even the ship with three-meter ceilings was a ship 150 meters in diameter and cost eight billion dollars. You’d be surprised how fast people change their tune when they find their numbers sink the project.”

  “We’re back to economics,” Becky said wistfully.

  “That’s right. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again -- this is all tied together.

  “Becky, we’re kindred spirits, but that spirit manifests itself in different ways. You’re able to do rescues, and you’re good at it. Yet you are here, looking forward to being just another power engineer on a starship. Yeah, the starship thing makes it cool beyond words, but there are thousands of power engineers sitting around power plants down there on Earth. Yet, you’re here and they are there, and the vast majority of them wouldn’t trade slots with you for all the tea in China.

  “Three basic kinds of people go into space, Becky. Economic adventurers, malcontents, and the just plain adventurers. Quite frequently they combine more than one trait in one person.

  “The adventurers go out, look around -- and then go find another mountain to climb or vastness to plumb. They don’t put down roots very often. The malcontents -- they are always looking for a new place to go where they won’t get in trouble. They put down roots, lots of roots and pray that those roots will keep them in place.

  “It’s the economic adventurers that are the key, though. They are determined to make a buck or two. Most of them are looking to make a lot of bucks. Sure, there are some that are brain-dead stupid, but most have a sort of cunning that keeps them alive where others fail.”

  “Anna, I’m none of those things,” Becky said plaintively. “I’m not in it for the money, I’m not in it for the rush and I have never been happier in my life.”

  “Beck, you are the worst sort of economic adventurer there is. You want to go to space to find the true gold. You want to find a beautiful place, filled with golden opportunity for your family. You want to look out the front window over a vast sweep of whatever even vaster sweep you want to look at and be content. You want to be surrounded by your family. In short, you are that sort of economic adventurer known as the ‘pioneer.’ You want to go someplace and wrest it for yourself.

  “Oh, you follow the rules. You will keep busy doing that what it is you do. You, Eagle and Kat are filled to the brim with the pioneer spirit. Did you finish Kat’s book?”

  “It was really dense in places, and I didn’t always understand it.”

  “Think about it and read it again after you’ve thought about it. Steph thinks Kat’s going to win the Nobel; she thinks someone should get some sort of award to getting mankind into space. Kat is far more likely to be hung, drawn and quartered if she showed her face on Earth.”

  “Because of India?”

  “Partly, but mostly because she defends colonial economics.”

  “I saw that, but it seemed pretty obvious -- even I understood that part.”

  Anna laughed. “Sweet Beck, you didn’t. I said it a minute ago -- pioneers go out and wrest their living from the colony’s environment. On a planet, they cut the trees, plow the fields, hunt, and fish -- pioneers do all those things environmentalists hate. She makes a case for ‘long term economic development of sustainable resources’ and careful conservation of resources that might be limited. All good, smart, prudent things to do with the abundance of material wealth we’ve found in the last few years.

  “It also makes the entire environmental movement obsolete. Worse, we’ve gone to planets now whose carbon dioxide levels are nearly toxic to people -- planets some of which are in ice ages -- not in the throes of global warming. It’s still early days in the research, but it’s clear there isn’t a direct relationship between carbon dioxide levels and warming -- which anyone who has ever tracked carbon dioxide levels and reliable temperature proxies for the Earth would have known -- if the real agenda had actually been doing something about the weather -- instead of the real objective -- crippling capitalistic economies.

  “Kat’s book, without ever mentioning anything outside of colonial economics -- past and present -- drives a stake through not only communism but socialism as well.

  “And of course, there is the non-trivial issue that a lot of Indian commentators are still outraged over her threat to nuke first France and then India.”

  “Leaving out she never said anything about nuclear weapons.”

  “The left reads with a selective blindness that is breathtaking. They read about dropping rocks on cities and abstract ‘nuke’ from thin air. Kat doesn’t even mention the favored economic theories, and they abstract the tiniest grain of meaning that might conceivably, possibly be. Hypocrisy has never had to make sense. And there is something that has happened in the last quarter century, called the ‘internet’ that has really bollixed things up -- people have been studying things. And hypocrisy is one of the easiest rhetorical devices to see through.”

  “What does it all mean?” Becky asked forlornly.

  “It means the people who have been holding back society for the last fifty years have been shown to be exactly what they are -- spoilers. Most of the big media outlets were controlled by them and they haven’t let on that their days are numbered. But a huge number of people have read Kat’s book -- it’s at the top of the Amazon charts.”

  Anna laughed nastily. “The New York Times said it was a textbook and they don’t review textbooks -- yet it’s selling more copies than their number one bestseller.”

  “I am humbled
by what I don’t know.”

  “You, sweet Beck, were sick, and not only flat on your back, but unconscious a good part of the time and with a French Hun for a doctor who wouldn’t let anyone see you -- or give you any news that might upset you.”

  “Ah, Anna dear -- a French Hun? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

  “Hun or nun, one of those. A fascistic socialist.”

  “Isn’t that another contradiction?”

  “The Nazis didn’t call themselves the ‘National Socialist Workers Party’ to hide their conservative leanings. You dear, were asleep while you were sick. Like I was saying before someone interrupted me, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. And my leg, missing or not, hurt like the devil. Reading helped -- so I read a lot.”

  “Everyone seems to spend more time reading than I do,” Becky said wistfully.

  “Be grateful you have something real to do. They are already saying I’m wasted as a project engineer and that I should be doing something larger.” She looked at Becky. “I love the work, I really do. The temptation though, to find out if I have something bigger to give -- that’s a serious temptation.”

  “When I was at the Academy I was told that I’d spend a couple of years sweating to learn my profession. Then one day I’d look up and realize I knew my profession -- what else was there to do? Commander Jacobsen was blunt. ‘Those that look for new worlds to conquer frequently find them. Those that never look, never find them except in rare accidents -- and then most often don’t know how to make proper use of them.’ That was good advice.”

  “It was indeed.”

  “Yet, Commander Jacobsen was fine staying where she was; so was Captain Gilly. Even Admiral Kinsella doesn’t seem to be trying to get promoted.”

  “Steph?” Anna hooted with laughter. “She was promoted to a rank she was manifestly unqualified to hold. Air Force officers who were only too content to foist her off on the Navy did it. They thought she’d fail utterly; failing that they thought she’d blow her stack when they assigned her a menial job on the Ad Astra.

  “They should know that Stephanie Kinsella is the fastest study in the known universe and she’d aimed to get just the assignment she wanted. Her duty station was on the bridge where she could study and learn -- and make sure they weren’t going to do anything crazy.

  “People stay in their jobs because they’ve come to love them, and the thought of doing something else isn’t as attractive. Like you say -- one day you wake up and realize that it’s time for something new. This stint in the hospital was my wakeup call.

  “I have you, I have a purpose -- the universe is my oyster. I talked to Kat, after you were sick. She came to hold my hand in your place, which was a very nice thing. I love you, Beck -- and I’ve been a very bad girl. I cried on her shoulder.

  “We had such a run of bad luck. I was feeling down, depressed. Oh, how I missed you!”

  “Kat though, she’s the ultimate pragmatist. Whether it’s chucking some poor sod out the airlock, threatening nuclear powers like France and India -- or burying her daughter. She says her secret is she doesn’t dwell on the bad. She has her husband, she has her son and she has another baby baking in the oven -- although the amnio says it’s a girl. She’ll love her just as much as she would have a son.

  “’We joust with the universe. It’s only hubris that lets us think space is a dangerous place, more so than home. You read the stories in the papers; you listen to the news and learn every day children die in terrible, unspeakable ways. And some just die.’

  “What happened to me? That was a routine industrial accident that happens a couple of times a day in the US and even more often around the world. Yeah, it happened to me in space, but that doesn’t make it more or less tragic than what happens to anyone who gets a leg or arm crushed. People die in those accidents all of the time.

  “All we can do is live our lives, taking the bad with the good. We strive to do better, we strive not to repeat the same mistakes... but above all we strive.”

  Anna looked funny. “I’m jousting again. Call the doctor.”

  Becky took one look and did just that. Anna was unconscious when the medics arrived a few minutes later. They threw Becky out, but by then Becky knew Anna was burning with fever.

  It wasn’t a trivial problem -- it had been life threatening. However, it really made Anna’s point. Some time during their earlier activities Anna had bumped her stump and some of the wound drainage ended up in her blood stream, where it turned septic.

  The doctor was understanding to a point. “I understand the nature of relationships is to get physical. Until Miss Sanchez’s stump stops draining, she has to be careful. You need to be careful.”

  When they told Anna that they were thinking of pulling her from the crew, Anna went into a towering rage. “I screwed up. You dealt with it. You didn’t require resources from the ground; you just dealt with it. You can ask Captain Cook, but I’m sure he’ll tell you he won’t cut the mission short for a routine appendectomy or tonsil removal.”

  The discussions about Anna’s future never devolved to Becky’s level, but Anna wasn’t shy about keeping Becky up to date.

  One surprise was a visit by Admiral Kinsella and Captain Gilly. A larger surprise was a Steph/Becky moment.

  “You are worried that you jeopardized Anna’s chances to go on this mission,” Steph told her.

  “I sure didn’t help,” Becky said.

  “I’m going to tell you a secret -- a Top Secret Kinsella secret.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Ask Anna, she’s worked on a Top Secret Kinsella project -- that’s the whole point -- people aren’t supposed to hear about them.”

  Becky grimaced. Duh!

  “I told everyone we’d gone to Tuscany for our honeymoon. I described the light on the Tuscan hills... actually we were in Las Vegas, which is a place no one would ever look for me.

  “Married couples -- well, I expect you are more restrained than most married couples still, but well, we fool around. Not our wedding night, but the next afternoon we were fooling around in bed, trying to see who was most ticklish. I was winning; I’m pleased to say.

  “Then my dear, sweet husband decided that if he couldn’t win by fair means, he’d cheat. He rolled us off the bed. I landed on the bottom and he landed on top. He broke four of my ribs and punctured my lung.”

  “My God!”

  “I’ll never forget the doctor’s advice at the hospital -- ‘Learn judo. It’s all about landing right and leverage.’” She grinned wickedly. “For the rest of our honeymoon, he had to let me be on top.”

  Becky blushed and the admiral laughed. “Yeah, more than you ever wanted to know.”

  “I still don’t understand -- why me?”

  “I expect you never will, either. You simply don’t see yourself as others do. You see all your weaknesses -- everyone else is so awed by your strengths, they never bother to look further.

  “We all have our strengths and weaknesses. The trick is playing to our strengths and avoiding our weak flanks.

  “I was in New York City once, with a couple of days to kill while the lawyers went over things. I went and played chess at a chess club there.

  “I play master-level chess. I thought I’d do well, but the guy who recommended opponents pegged me at a glance. I’ve never met anyone before or since who could see through me so completely and on such a short acquaintance.

  “He set me up with a fellow he called ‘Prop.’ I had no idea where the name came from, but it didn’t seem important. The fellow’s real name was Murray. And PROP was an abbreviation for ‘Professional Rook Odds Player.’ The first thing he did after it was settled who played white, was take one of his rooks off the table.

  “I thought that was crazy. You can’t spot a master a rook and have any hope of winning.

  “Except in short order I found myself in trouble and even though I took my play up a notch, I still lost.

&nbs
p; “I was furious -- at myself -- and wanted to play again. He dropped a hundred dollar bill next to the board and said, ‘The first game was a freebie. Remember I’m a professional.’ I covered that and then added another couple of hundred to cover the odds I’d win. He laughed -- and an hour later scooped up the money.

  “At first I thought I was rusty, then I thought maybe he was a Grand Master, scamming the tourists. Finally he won the third straight game and that’s when I did the smart thing. I asked how he could win.

  “’You learn a new sense of caution, down a rook.’ I couldn’t argue with that!”

  “I’m as much in the dark as ever, Steph.”

  “You aren’t brilliant like I am. You care about things that I may never care about. You are humble, steady -- but you understand that you’re down a rook in the game of life. And so you are very, very careful about how you play.”

  She looked at Becky and grinned. “I understand from your father you are prone to tell secrets.”

  “He doesn’t talk,” Becky said defensively.

  The admiral waved her hand airily. “Do you understand why the things you told him are secret?”

  Becky shook her head.

  “They are things the politicians just as soon would not have their own people know -- almost always because they are politically embarrassing. And yes, he doesn’t spread the word. You have, Becky, never been told during the course of your career a real secret and you are unlikely ever to be in a position to hear one.

  “Up to now, that is.”

  Admiral Kinsella drew herself up. “For a minute, I’m an admiral and you’re a lieutenant on the fast track for bigger and brighter things. I know and understand that you are thinking about leaving the Fleet; I hope not.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant. What is the first rule about how to go about winning a battle?”

  Becky shrugged. “I haven’t ever really studied that. Oh, I’ve studied great battles in the past, albeit mostly naval battles. But a single rule for all battles? I’m not sure there could be just one.”

  “It is the most elementary rule in the universe: first, don’t lose.”