Motherload: Stardrifter Book 01

by David Collins-Rivera

  “I’m afraid we have a few hours worth of forms to fill out,” ffolkes said with mock grimness, ” so you and I had best be comfortable. Can I get you something?”

  “Um, coffee, please. Powdered’s fine. Black.”

  “Right. Back in a jiff. No…actually, follow me, and I’ll show you the galley. You’ll be spending time there, after all.”

  We passed through a wide intersection, with plainly marked signs at the corners pointing toward “ENGINEERING”, the “BRIDGE”, a “COMMON ROOM”, and a section marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY”, which I took to be crew quarters. Ffolkes saw me looking at all the signs and smiled.

  “Candy is in charge of those. She likes to be thorough.”

  “Thorough is good,” I replied, and the other man nodded.

  “We’re just short of six hours until launch,” he then mentioned, as we walked. “Plenty of time to get the legalities out of the way. With passengers aboard, I’m afraid you’ll have to hit the deck running, Mr. Dosantos.”

  “Ejoq. Please. No problem with that. Hopefully, I’ll also have a chance to get familiar with the defensive systems, at least before we actually make starjump.”

  “Of course. Carmie intends to go over all that with you before launch, I believe…security codes, and such.”

  We were at the galley by this point, closed and locked (but properly labeled, of course) and ffolkes swiped us in with a ring key on his finger. It was fairly spacious as such things went – deep, and wide enough for two to pass without getting in each other’s way. It could have been a full-service kitchen had they wanted it to be, but it wasn’t geared up for much more than basic prefab meal prep. It needed a good cleaning (my job now), but the powdered coffee seemed safe, and the mugs, which bore the ubiquitous cat logo, were generous.

  “Our passengers are back aboard as of last shift. Newsvid crew out of Tyree, traveling to cover the Barlow unrest.”

  He stirred in the coffee for me while he spoke, and then handed it over. It was bland and bitter, just like it should be. Just like it always was. A thing to count on, among the countless stars.

  “They stayed at a hotel, onstation, while we’ve been docked. A party crowd, given the opportunity – benders every night while here, I think. And they must be masters of padding their expense account – re-boarded GRIZZELDA last shift with new clothes all ‘round, more luggage, souvenirs, and some rather severe hangovers. Still sleeping it off, I dare say. Had seventeen days with them already. We’ve fifteen more to go, subjective. At Barlow, it’s ten days in orbital dock while they complete their work on-planet. Then we get to do the whole thing over again in reverse. As passengers go, though, they’ve been friendly and easy to please.”

  “Well, I’ll drink to that,” I replied, and lifted my mug. He followed suit with his tea and we returned to his office.

  The legal, insurance-related, and ship-specific forms and notices were tedious, but only because we had to get through them all before the ship departed. Without such a tight deadline, this sort of thing would normally have been spread out over several days, allowing the bureaucrats of OASIS to get back to GRIZZELDA with whatever “yeas” or “nays” such people have the power to decree; ffolkes told me he’d send off my forms during the ship’s countdown, and they could stuff any “nays” at that point.

  During that intensive red tape dump, ffolkes came across as a man who knew his stuff inside and out, including what was important to the powers-that-be and what was merely formality. He also seemed to appreciate levity, without ever really being witty himself. He took two calls from the dockmaster’s office while we worked, concerning some picayune details about their cargo load, and one from Carmie, about me, I think. He seemed competent, business-like, and quiet, but not at all uptight. A total mystery, in other words.

  This proved especially true when, during one of those calls, I got up to look closely at a series of short vid clips playing on a small framed display mounted on the bulkhead. It depicted a younger version of this composed man under a bright blue sky, within some gravity well or other. The clip only ran a few seconds, showing him dash across some grass and dirt, throwing a dark ball roughly the size of his fist. The imagery jumped to what I assumed was an opposing player – a fellow holding a bizarre flat stick, like an old-time boat’s oar. This player missed the ball, which then struck upon and broke some tiny contraption on the ground behind. The sequence just looped over and over, but it never became less odd, or any more clear what I was looking at.

  “Those glorious days of youth,” the man said quietly from his desk, watching me watching him on the wall.

  “Is that a game?”

  “Yes. Cricket.”

  “…I’m sorry?”

  He repeated it, quite composed, but quite amused.

  “Like the insect?”

  “The words are spelled the same, yes, but are not the same.”

  “What are you doing in this clip?”

  “Bowling.”

  “You’re…I’m sorry…?”

  “Also not the same.”

  It was impossible to know if he was putting me on, and I didn’t want to fall any deeper into the gag in case he was, so I just smiled weakly and sat back down. Without a beat, he called up another form, and we continued along as if I wasn’t bent on being a fool.

  Nearly an hour later, he declared us to finally be in the bureaucratic clear. He excused himself from the nickel tour, citing a pile of customs verifications that he needed to cross-check with the OASIS mercantile library before we left. As a world with an agricultural-based economy, he told me, Barlow was primarily known for the production of high-quality hydrocarbon analogues, from a massive chemurgy industry that worked hand-in-hand with equally massive farming corporations. The Offs took a chance on Barlow, and invested in computer tech and machine parts, hoping to score some refined agro-chem products in trade. Compostable ballistics-grade plastics, for instance, were high on the wish list, since a return trip to Tyree with a hold full of that stuff would fetch a tidy profit indeed.

  There were other things, too, but I didn’t really pay attention. He might have picked up on that, because he called Carmie eventually to say we were done. She told him to send me forward to the bridge, so I thanked ffolkes for his time, then followed his simple directions.

  The Command compartment was to the fore, and up a small flight of steps that terminated in a large emergency iris valve/swingdoor combination that looked like it could keep the bridge crew reasonably safe in almost any situation. It was currently (and usually, as it turned out) open. The bridge had something of a non-standard layout, with all stations, including the captain’s, sitting side by side. Each display desk was more involved and complex than ffolkes’, but not dissimilar in layout.

  These were the duty stations for Carmie, E’lareda, Ira, and a slim blond woman in her early thirties. Ira was currently on the floor with a mess of cables and a memory core – this one of a different make than the one I’d seen him with earlier. The cables ran from under a particular display desk, into an open access panel in the floor. The woman I hadn’t yet met sat at a station marked (by the ever-diligent Candy, no doubt) “NAVIGATION”; she had tightly bunned hair, set features, and strangely impassive eyes that she cast at me when I walked in, before returning them to her board.

  “I’m not yelling, Ira, I just don’t understand what was wrong with the old backup core,” Carmie was saying, a touch of testiness in her voice. “We’re down to the wire here.”

  “A .4% block failure is not trivial, Carmie,” he replied easily, as if he’d had similar conversations before, and knew how they all turned out. “Yes, it was working fine, but my choice was to either change it now as an option, or change it later as an emergency. This new one has a different cable layout, but it’s not a big deal. It’s already up and running, with the old backup’s file environment cloned in. I’m just looking to see if we can do without some of these extra lines. It’s a bit of mess at the moment, but I’ll have
it cleaned up before launch. Comp is ready.”

  “Okay, fine,” she conceded, sighing. Then she noticed me and rose.

  “Mr. Dosantos. All set with Del?”

  “Call me Ejoq. Yeah, but he had some more work to do before launch, so he sent me on alone. Are one of these stations Gunnery?”

  She joined me at the door, but turned back to the room.

  “No. Gunnery was an afterthought on this class of ship, I’m afraid. The Pelican was originally designed for flexibility, with every system interchangeable. Though we’ve assigned regular duty stations, in a pinch, any of them can be called up and utilized from almost any display on the ship.”

  “God, I hate those things!” I said without thinking.

  “It’s come in handy a few times, actually,” E’lareda put in. He’d been watching us, and his tone was schooling.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” Carmie assured me. “The previous owners must have hated them too, because they remodeled one of the maintenance closets amidships into a dedicated gunnery station. None of the equipment in it is designed for use with the ship’s installed control software, though. It has lots of interface issues because of that. Our last gunner felt more confident of the original fire control software.”

  “Really? Can I get a chance to work with it before we leave? I might be able to pull it fully online if I have access to my union’s local resources.”

  “Well, we leave in three hours, and we’re not budgeted for any upgrades.”

  “You may not need any. And if you do, it might actually be quite cheap. Interface problems can sometimes be as simple as giving ship’s systems, and Gunnery, a place to sit and chat, so to speak. It’s called a conpipe. It’s the size of my thumb, and costs almost nothing. It gets wired to one of the inputs at the Gunnery station. We then run some brand-specific dialog software that installs there, interfacing all the systems that need to work with fire control. I can download the software for free from my union’s library so long as we’re still in-system. Debugging it can be tedious work, but its quite doable and…if I can say, inexpensive. I built a Gunnery station from the deck-up once. I can’t imagine that this would be harder than that.”

  “You haven’t even seen any of the hardware yet.”

  I smiled simply and tried not to sound cocky. “I’ll bet I have.”

  Carmie’s dark eyes showing puzzlement. The others were watching with similar faces.

  “Okay. Um, this way then.”

  We stepped back down the companionway, and stopped at a nondescript door – not a real pressurized hatch, mind – marked simply, “STORAGE”.

  She nodded her head at the sign and remarked, “We don’t want to make paying passengers nervous. If they knew this to be Gunnery, they’d get jittery every time someone went inside.” Then she waved her ring key over the door’s input pad. “We’ll get you set up with your own codes as soon as we’re done here. Alliance law states we have to talk about GRIZZELDA’s combat protocol, so we’ll set up a time after we’re under way for that. We follow standard AIN guidelines for civilian-class transports in most respects, but Pelicans have a few details you need to know about.”

  She had the door open, and was talking as I studied the contents.

  She hadn’t been kidding when she called it a former closet: former broom closet, to be accurate. About 1.5 meters in depth, and maybe 2 meters in length. Tactical displays of a familiar style and layout perched atop a homemade desk set inside an old slop sink (plumbing fixtures capped-off, thankfully). They were all so close-fitting, it was obvious they’d been assembled inside this space. Carmie pulled back a small ergonomic seat, which was attached to a makeshift track, and motioned for me to take a look.

  This was definitely a home-cooked system, with different kinds and brands of operating and tracking equipment that were never designed to work together. There were also some redundancies I couldn’t account for at first. As I had suspected, there wasn’t any equipment here I hadn’t seen before – but I’d never seen or heard of a set up like this.

  “So?” She asked after a full minute of me poking around the displays and interface devices.

  “Get me set up with those codes, and I’ll play with this stuff for a few minutes. A conpipe looks like a good candidate here. You know, these systems shouldn’t be able to work without a hardware interface. There must be some serious software hoo-doo going on just to make them network with each other at all – let alone with the rest of the ship.”

  “Yeah, Ben spent many weeks coding and patching. He hated it, I think.”

  “Ben?”

  “Our former gunner. He died here on OASIS two days ago. We’re still shaken up over it.”

  “I…didn’t know. I’m so sorry. Was it sudden?”

  “Sudden and violent,” she replied with a hard set to her mouth. “He was in a bar when a gun fight broke out. Wrong place, wrong time. He got hit with a stray shot. Several others died there as well.”

  “Oh, man. Yeah, I heard about that. They haven’t caught anybody yet, have they?”

  “Not that I know of. Looks like a gang thing…some kind of arms deal that went bad. I wish we could stay to see some justice done, but we simply don’t have the option. Look, Ejoq, I’m not going to mince words: Bennett Hamm was like family. It’s a small crew. We’re very close. You’re here because we need a new gunner, and you’re stepping into a big shadow. It might be uncomfortable for a while.”

  “Understood. Ben was probably a great defense spesh. But I’m not him. If I think I can improve things, I want to try. If this system, as it stands, is unreliable, then it’s really just so much junk. I think I can fix what’s wrong. Ben, maybe, never knew how. I’m not knocking the guy, that’s just how it is. I don’t want to add any to your grief, honestly – but I do want to do my job.”

  “This is only part of your job.”

  “Again, understood. But if you want to go to that, the galley needs a good scrub down, which I intend to tackle as soon as possible. Looks like it’s been a while.”

  Her face started to cloud over, so I rushed on.

  “It’s just a bad situation. You folks lost your man, you have a contract to meet, and time is short. I’ll do everything I can to fit in here…but please don’t fault me for wanting to work hard.”

  “I don’t. But don’t fault us for wishing that Ben was still here instead of you. It’s not personal.”

  I just nodded.

  “So…do I have your go-ahead to work on this? If I can at least bring up tactical and do a diagnostic, I can let that run while I dash to the supply house. It’s on this level of the station, but I’ll need a half-hour or so. And, I’ll tell you what,” I added, because I’m the Big Wheeler-Dealer, “I’ll do the purchase out-of-pocket. If you don’t see any results you like, I’ll eat the cost.”

  She seemed opposed to it on principle alone, as if allowing me to do this violated some unwritten familial contract with Bennett Hamm’s ghost. But she nodded tightly anyway, and fished out a keystick from a sleeve pocket, which she handed to me before walking off.

  I knew I’d like her then: not because she let me have my way, but because she could feel loss and grief, and uncertainly over an new element, and yet still do the right thing for the ship.

  “Mind our launch time, Ejoq,” she called over her shoulder. “If we have to hold for you, I’m going to be really, really, really pissed.”

  Motherload

  © 2014 David Collins-Rivera

  2nd Edition

  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

  Feel free to copy and share.

  This story is a work of fiction, and is not based upon nor meant to portray any person, living or dead, nor any particular place or situation.

  Contact the author at lostnbronx@cavalcadeaudio.com

  Visit Cavalcade Audio Productions. My site on Webs!

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