NanoSymbionts

by Joseph Philbrook

  “I wouldn't be so worried about that Mr Agroman,” captain Rivermon replied calmly. “As I'd be about all those rocky boulders in the surf that seem likely to grind us to bits. Before we ever make it to the damn beach.”

  Just then there was a severe impact on the aft end of one of the cargo containers. The force of which was sufficient to tear the container from its makeshift mounts even as it pushed the other container up into the crevice like gap, between a closely placed pair of the larger rocks. The cargo container became wedged between the boulders. The far end of the makeshift deck, which was no longer supported by the missing container, fell into the water. It's weight now pulled at the frame of the remaining container, causing some of it's seams to split partially open.

  There was one small bit of good fortune however, in that no one had been in the other container. Even as George and the Captain struggled to climb up the now severely slanted piece hull plating that had served as the main deck, they saw the other container suddenly disappear beneath the waters. Then they saw a burst of air bubbles as its seals failed. Neither of them chose to think about what force could have dragged it under ‘before’ the seals failed, letting water replace the buoyant air. As it was, if George hadn't been such a strong man, neither of them would have made it to the remaining cargo container. Before the the mounting bolts holding the deck to it failed. Allowing the irregular piece of hull plating to slip off the edge of the boulder and into the sea.

  The twisted remains of the mast swayed violently in the waves a few times before it suddenly vanished in the deeper waters. Just a stone throw from where the remaining container sat leaking water. As it's bent form was wedged between the boulders near the rocky shore. The wind and waves were still such, that no one could survive falling into the water. All they could do was to huddle inside the container and hope that the wind subsided. Before it tore them off of the rock that now held most of the cargo container just above the water line.

  While they waited, George divided his time between inspecting the ever growing cracks in the metal skin of the cargo container and taking inventory of their resources. He started by taking stock of the survivors themselves. The captain, he noticed, was still horrified at the fact that of the 20 crew members and 30 passengers that had been onboard the Starskewer when the marauding pirate ships had attacked them. He had only been able to save a total of six survivors including himself. He didn't let his horror show on his face anymore. Nor in his bearing but George could see it in his eyes.

  It had seemed to be a miracle, that the captain had been able to save anyone at all. Yet George knew that all the captain could see was that he had failed to save 28 passengers and 17 of his crew. A failure that would, no doubt, haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. The captain, born ‘Wilber Rivermon’ on a semi-pastoral ‘new colony’ world. Which had chosen to selectively embrace as much pre-space age technology as could be made to be ecologically friendly. Was a tall man at 2.7 arms in height. The captain was approaching middle age at, 322 Galactic Standard years old but except for the lines around his observant gray eyes he still looked like a young man of 200.

  He wore his black hair barely long enough to require grooming and had a thin close cropped mustache. That curved across his face until it passed below his ears and blended with his hair. He permitted no hair to grow in front of his ears. He was a strong and disciplined man who had managed to climb up through the ranks to become the captain of his first merchant starship. Only 30 GSY after he had disappointed his traditionalist father. By turning his back on the career his father had planned to pass on to him as a riverboat captain.

  George Agroman himself, at 385 GSY, wore his shaggy blond hair as long as was permitted by the crew dress code. Which required that no strand of his hair be allowed to grow long enough to reach his eyes. Which were an unusual shade of green. He was a bit shorter than his captain. Standing just 2.25 arms tall. George was also somewhat heavier. The muscles on his stout frame had been built up helping his family run their farm. Until it was noticed that he was actually smarter than the professor who taught his science class during his first year of the prescribed 5 year stint at a pre-adult boarding school. Which was actually designed to find minds such as his while they were still young enough to teach.

  The official plan was to turn him into a scientist. It was actually a good deal. He would be shipped off to one of the metropolitan regions of his technologically aggressive ‘new colony’ homeworld. He would actually be paid to learn. If he kept his grades up he would earn enough at school to not only afford his own private quarters and a few luxuries but he'd have enough left over to send his family enough to hire 2 or 3 farmhands to make up for his not being there to pitch in.

  Even so, as much as George's brilliant mind loved to learn, especially about spacefaring technology. He much preferred to get his hands dirty, even at some boring menial task, to having his nose stuck in a book all day. So he wrote his family a letter of apology and shipped out as a deckhand on a tramp freighter. He had always wanted to get into space. Even as a small child it was his favorite dream. He soon learned however, that life on a tramp freighter wasn't all that much fun. In fact it was downright dangerous. Worse, he soon heard rumors that the crew was being sustained with substandard biotech medicine.

  The same biomeds that were responsible for extending the average human lifespan, excluding accidental and other violent deaths, to nearly 800 GSY, had been standardized throughout the inhabited galaxies. With the exception of course for guild territory and some of the few remaining strongholds of the older Free Spacer clans. Where they still relied on the slightly more effective but much more expensive nanotech medpacks. Anyplace else ‘standard’ biomeds were readily available. So it just didn't make any sense that the ship would actually use substandard biomeds.

  There were of course, some very expensive ‘premium’ brands that one didn't expect to see but the ordinary ‘good enough’ stuff wasn't so expensive that even the lower classes of backwater worlds had to do without. Using ‘substandard’ biomeds for any length of time had long been known to cut that 800 year life expectancy in half. Worse still substandard biomeds were often blamed for unplanned and/or unsanctioned pregnancies amongst the poorest of the poor.

  George had no intention of becoming the father of an aborted fetus but like most of his age group, he found abstinence difficult. Fortunately for George, the tramp freighter's aging chief technician was always looking for able minded assistants. To do some of the more physically demanding maintenance tasks aboard the aging freighter. It wasn't long before he recognized the intelligence in his newest helper. While he wasn't exactly a kindly man, he decided to shield his useful slave from the worst of his new circumstances. He even made sure George got certified biomed supplements.

  It had taken George nearly two years of hard work to learn everything the old geezer could teach him. Then he stayed on another 3 years until his mentor succumbed to the illness that was the result of nearly 500 years of binge drinking and other exotic vices. At the next port of call he jumped ship and found himself a birth on a more reputable merchant freighter. He never did much formal schooling but he rapidly gained a reputation for being able to repair anything. Whenever he could he'd pay for an equivalency engineering class and skip to the final exam. He hadn't flunked one yet.

  A fact that had helped him get a spot on the Starskewer 75 GSY ago when it's new captain was looking for talented individuals to flesh out his crew for it's maiden voyage. George had a kind looking face. There was nothing in the appearance of this green eyed blond man to warn strangers that he had an explosive temper. Fortunately he had always been able to fix any of the inanimate objects that he broke from time to time as a substitute for smashing in the face of whoever had most recently ticked him off.

  Another survivor they could count on was the young brown eyed beauty, Linda Trinora. This warm hearted redhead of 206 GSY, had a gorgeously curvaceous frame and who's reddish brown hair slightly exceeded
the hair length limits officially permissible for female crew members, by cascading down to her shoulders. There was much more to Linda than her looks however. She was a brilliant logistics officer who could usually tell you exactly how far along, any given shipboard project was, without looking it up.

  She had a knack for organizing things so well that the Starskewer's crew had enjoyed a reputation for getting the right cargo in or out, of it's hold with all the appropriate documentation in place, in less than half the time than any other freightliner. Doing so without inconveniencing her passengers. Though as organized as her professional life was. Linda had always preferred to live her personal life spontaneously. As George, a few other crewman and occasionally one or two lucky passengers, had had the good fortune to find out on a few of the occasions when she felt promiscuous. She also had a reputation for being something of a wildcat as a few unlucky souls, who hadn't thought she had a right to say ‘no’, had found out the hard way.

  The captain had saved her neck in court, more than a few times. When some injured passenger tried to bring charges against her for assault. It was usually enough to point out that, while she and thus the Starskewer, was financially responsible for the injuries the passenger sustained. She had only been restrained from filing attempted rape charges. Because her captain had persuaded her that the criminal penalties for such an atrocity were such, that it was most likely that the civil charges would be dropped out of gratitude. If she decided to consider the whole thing a big misunderstanding. Only once had the passenger decided the jail time was worth the money his lawyer would have for him when he got out and captain Rivermon had paid that one out of his own pocket.

  At 536 GSY however, Randy Luborn had a slightly rotund hairless body of 2.6 arms in height and a light brown skin complexion along with coal black eyes. He was easily the best possible resource to count among the survivors. He was just possibly the only man among the entire crew of the Starskewer who could claim greater physical strength than George. Randy was strong like a bear. He was also friendly by nature and he almost never fought. Which was a good thing, because his idea of a fight was just plain old brute force. Which meant that unless he was fighting as part of a team with someone better at it, he wasn't that hard to beat.

  However, the reason George considered him the most valuable survivor, was because he was the ships cook. Not just any ships cook mind you. Randy had a reputation for being able to make anything taste good. Considering that most of the remaining foodstock, that hadn't been lost when the other container was pulled beneath the waves, was a very unappetizing collection of emergency rations. Having someone who could even make ‘those rations’ taste good among them, was arguably the best thing that had happened to the rest of the survivors.

  Somewhat less useful in George's opinion were the two surviving passengers. There was that self-centered Mathieu Naville. Who had evidently only ever cared about one person besides himself. His wife Donelle, who unfortunately hadn't survived. This resulted in Mr Naville's normally abrasive personality becoming that of a very angry man who was looking for someone to blame for his wife's death.

  When Mathieu had first woke up aboard the makeshift catamaran. He had, upon noticing his wife's absence, became rather abusive of the captain. Who he felt must not have done enough to save her. The captain had simply said that he was sorry but that she had already been dead when he fought his way to the remains of the Naville's cabin to rescue Mathieu. The captain had spared the man the gruesome description of how the unstable warp field had reduced the poor woman to a fine mist like coating of gore, that had coated the entire cabin. While somehow sparing her husband, who had been less than two and a half arms away.

  It would have been pointless to try to explain the unpredictable destructive nature of an unstable warp field to the man. He would simply have blamed the captain for activating the damaged warp system, instead of simply for having failed to pull her out of the wreckage.

  Mathieu was a product of a genetically altered branch of humanity, from one of the more exotic new colony worlds. Where the special enzymes needed to digest the food grown on his homeworld resulted in a strong blue skin pigmentation that was usually so dark that offworlders often mistook it for a shade of black. The same enzymes usually resulted in pink eyes and a variety of unusually bright hair colors. Mathieu's neatly trimmed hair and jawline beard were a bright shade of purple.

  It wasn't Mathieu's appearance nor even his unjustified anger at the captain, that was the reason why George didn't think he would contribute anything useful to their survival. Mathieu was one of those passengers who expected to be waited on hand and foot. He was after all a paying customer and he didn't see any reason why he should be expected to pitch in and do any of the work. Even under the circumstances of being spacewrecked on an uncharted world.

  That left the only other surviving passenger, an elderly lady of 613 GSY with brown skin and eyes. Her long hair still reveled that it too had been a dark shade of brown until most of it had begun to turn gray. She wore her hair in many beaded braids. Other than her advanced age, George wasn't aware of any reason to think of Yolonda Heroner as a burden on the rest of them. To be sure, she was likable enough but she was a somewhat pampered and very wealthy woman. Who's boardroom skills were not very likely to be of much use on this raging planet that they were stranded on. George would have been very uncomfortable however, if he had only known that the wealthy retiree was actually the majority shareholder in the holding company. That owned and operated the small fleet of merchant freightliners that had included the Starskewer itself.

  All six of the survivors were for the most part uninjured. There had been quite a few scrapes and bruises that, thanks to their biomeds, were already almost completely healed. Aside from that however, all of them were essentially healthy.

  Their other resources included a small collection of portable scanners. One of which was a medical grade bioscanner that could help them identify any nonpoisonous local foodstuffs they might find. One plasma torch that could cut through almost anything using superheated air. Though it's operation required a lot of energy. There were about a dozen emergency power packs. Three of which were fully compatible with the plasma torch. There were also a collection of solar recharge kits but even if there wasn't a single cloud in the sky, it might still take over a full day spent charging the power packs, to recoup the power the plasma torch used in just 15 cyclets of operation. Still given it's potential as a powerful defensive weapon. Along with how useful it could be to start a fire when the wood was all wet, George considered it priceless.

  That is it would be if the treelike shapes they had seen as they approached the large island turned out to actually be a form of wood. Which was hard to tell because of the snow that blanketed most of the island. The plasma torch would also be an indispensable power tool. As for other weapons, the captain had a small antique side arm that used compressed air to fire some relatively low velocity pellets. Which had been expressly designed not to penetrate the delicate hulls of an earlier age's space vessels.

  Fortunately Randy had, as usual, been wearing his cooks apron which had a number of his precious kitchen knives tucked away in their built in sheaths. Though George didn't think much of their chances of getting the man to think of them as weapons, never mind share them with others.

  Randy had also brought one other precious item with him. He had been only semiconscious when the Captain dragged him out of the remains of the ships galley but his arms had been locked in a strangle hold around his favorite soup pan. George himself had his pocket multi-tool which included a couple of sharp instruments that would be better than nothing in a pinch. There were also a few odd scraps of structural steel bar stock, that he figured he could convert into crude axes, with a careful application of a subcyclet's worth of power from the plasma torch.

  Aside from that they had perhaps a hundred days worth of survival rations that hadn't gone down with the other container. There were also about three days wo
rth of perishable goods that they should probably eat first. The survival rations included water pouches of course. There was no question however, that the single most important piece of equipment they still had was the portable water distillation unit that with energy from one of the power packs or failing that, even with heat from a small fire, could process enough drinking water for them to live on. Even from salt laden sea water, if they couldn't find anything more drinkable. The distillation unit itself would likely, with careful maintenance, last them for about 5 years. They had the clothes on their back. A collection of shipping blankets to keep warm with and a few mostly useless spare parts that he had happened to have in his pockets when they lost the other container.

  George lamented the loss of the assorted equipment he'd had in the other shipping container. It had been a stroke of incredible good fortune that one of the two shipping pods to break free of their mounts, and remain intact enough to float had been the one he'd been using to store the assorted tools and salvageable junk he'd accumulated over the years as he performed maintenance on the Starskewer. He lamented that he hadn't done a better job of redistributing the stuff between the two containers but some of that junk had been inconveniently bulky. Like the core system from that lifepod with the bad inertial drive. It had been quicker and easier to replace the whole core system, than to replace just the integrated inertial drive. Though since most of the core system was still functional, he'd stored it for the more easily replaced components within it. He'd doubted that he would ever have the time to replace the bad inertial drive circuits but if he did, he'd have a spare core system ready to go. Unless of course, he'd already reused too many of the more easily replaced parts to make it worth replacing them.

  As it was however, there wasn't much room for them to use as comfortable living space over there. So they had mostly stayed together in the other pod, with more than half of the emergency rations and a large supply of shipping blankets. About the only time anyone had used the other pod was when they needed a little privacy. Such as when someone needed to use the commode he'd cobbled together over there.