The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  The ghosts of Coltraine and Toledo and Johnson and Fu-hsi might yet haunt that room, gazing from the shadows with disapproval at what had become of their legacy. Lately, Corrigan had felt their eyes upon him; had heard them rustling in the dark—shadows in a ship that had become itself a shadow. Gorgas scoffed at such notions. He gave no credence to ghosts of any sort, not even to Hand’s, who alone of all the prior captains might have reason to linger. If there were bangs and thumps and rattles, they signified imbalanced fans or water hammers in the pipes. A ship grown old enough could give a credible imitation of a haunting.

  “Mr. Corrigan,” Gorgas announced without preamble, “I shall need a suite of course revisions. We had not reached our planned coasting velocity when the engines went down, so the balk line must be reset.” It was like him to get right down to business. He mistook abruptness for efficiency.

  “What top velocity and braking power will we have available?” Corrigan asked, his stylus paused over his ’puter.

  “That will depend on how soon Mr. Bhatterji brings the engines back on line and how much thrust he can give us when he does. It may be a software malf and we will have full power by this afternoon; or it may be an equipment failure and we will only have partial restoration after days of work.”

  “But then, which…?”

  “Use your imagination, Number One. Give me an envelope. Find the boundary conditions.” It was unfair to ask a man to use what he has in short supply. Gorgas had flown with the second officer long enough to know that. You didn’t always have to tell Corrigan what to do, but it helped.

  Satterwaithe spoke up while Corrigan made notations in his ’puter. “Have you developed a plan to bring the sensors back on line?” She was an older woman, not so old as Ratline but her hair had grayed and there were deep lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. No one called them “laugh lines,” either. “We’re coasting at better than a hundred and fifty kisses against the Jupiter datum, and if we overtake any rogue bodies—”

  For just a moment, Gorgas flashed on encountering Hand’s body wandering the corridors of the main deck. He blinked a few times and ran a hand across his close-cropped hair while he considered how to answer; and even Corrigan gave the Third Officer a puzzled glance. “We’re in the Trojan Gulf,” Corrigan pointed out. “A resonance zone, nowhere near the Windward Shore,” and Gorgas nodded, pleased that the Second had seen his reasoning.

  But there were few things about ship handling that Satterwaithe did not know. She was quite content with Gorgas’s decisions so far—it was what she would have done in his place. What bothered her was that she was not in his place.

  “This region of the Shore lapped Jupiter a sixmonth ago,” she insisted, “and you know how Jupiter can jumble the edges of the Belt. He may have tugged all sorts of uncharted bodies into eccentric orbits. Remember: the Gulf is empty only of permanent bodies.”

  Gorgas had not expected debate. Hand had never been debated. Even when Hand had made questionable decisions—deplorably often, in Gorgas’s opinion—Gorgas and the others had maintained their silences. That was the proper way for a subordinate officer to conduct himself. In the Space Guard…Ah, but he seldom dwelt on his days in the Guard. “Are you teaching me my craft,” he asked, with just a touch of irritation.

  Corrigan, who knew how the ship’s course lay, was also puzzled by Satterwaithe’s comment. “We’ve received no rock messages from other vessels.” But he was half a beat behind on the subtext. Satterwaithe was not interested in asteroids.

  “Not your craft, Stepan,” she said, affecting a misunderstanding of “craft.” “Only a shareholder vote can appoint a permanent captain.”

  Gorgas bowed his head slowly, having finally understood that there was a second agenda. “That, of course, is the shareholders’ privilege.” He himself held a block of shares, as did the others. There were children on Earth who held a share apiece that their parents had bought to “Save the River!” There had never been a dividend paid.

  Satterwaithe shrugged. “The captain is barely cold in his grave.”

  “Deep space is a heat sink,” Gorgas responded. “He was ‘cold’ in his grave almost instantly.”

  Satterwaithe rolled mental eyes at Gorgas’s literal-mindedness. She did not consider that he had made a joke.

  “She’s right about the rules,” Corrigan said.

  “Personally, it would be a relief to be relieved,” Gorgas told him. “But nothing happens until we raise Dinwoody Poke. Until then, acting or not, my authority stands. That too Mr. Corrigan, is in the rules.”

  “I wasn’t questioning your authority,” said Corrigan.

  Satterwaithe, who had questioned his authority, said nothing. She imagined that Gorgas’s ambition mirrored her own. She was the sort of person who, like God, creates others in her own image and, when they fail to behave as the image ought, labels them disingenuous.

  The Engineer

  The openness, the abandon, the sheer forever of space both terrified and seduced Ramakrishnan Bhatterji. While he contemplated the upcoming EVAsion; while he suited up; while Miko, like a knight’s squire, tested his valves and fittings; while he waited patiently in the afterlock for the pressure to drop to the ambient of space, Bhatterji trembled—in his limbs, in his guts, in his heart—but whether they were tremblors of eagerness or of fear he did not know.

  For, when he stepped outside and planted his boots on the ship’s skin, an exhilaration ran through him like an electric current and he became more heightened in all his senses—as if he could hear the grinding of the crystal spheres or smell the sharp tang of the aether. It always puzzled him afterwards that this euphoria faded so rapidly while the fear remained to haunt his dreams; as if joy were a tide, which, at its ebb, leaves exposed the jagged rocks.

  The engine cages, along with most other equipments, were mounted around the rim, one engine in each quadrant. They loomed above their surroundings like the sacred monuments of a lost race. Around each, a bare space had been left out of reverence, if not for their monumental nature, then for the fusion plasma that pulsed from them when they spoke God’s name. When he reached Number Three, Bhatterji did not bother to inspect the projectors that knelt like acolytes around it, nor even the focusing rings that directed the plasma in the desired direction. He examined first where he thought the trouble would lie and gave a small grunt of dismal satisfaction on finding his intuition vindicated.

  The inner spherical grid, the anode, had melted. In place of gracile, superconducting geodesics, he found a ragged and warped tangle. In melting, the hoops had begun to sublime but had quickly frozen in the ambient of space, and they looked now as if they had been drawn in India ink and smudged by God’s careless thumb. Filigrees of metaloceramic curled where the radiating vapors had cooled. They were beautiful, like iron ferns. Bhatterji broke off a lacey branch with the thumb of his gauntlet. Brittle. The entire anode grid was a useless, blackened mass.

  “That looks bad,” Miko’s voice told him. Everyone on the ship was watching through Bhatterji’s suit’s cameras, but that did not inhibit the engineer as it might another. His life demanded an audience.

  “The hobartium hoops have been thermally stressed,” he told his apprentice in a stroke of understatement worthy of the Japanese paintings he favored.

  “Can we salvage the mass and redraw it to wire?”

  Musing on the failure mode, Bhatterji shook his head, then remembered he was on radio. “No. An overstress of this magnitude ruins the molecular alignment. The surface will have been hardened by the vacuum quench and will not draw without severe cracking. Describe the failure mode to me.” Miko must learn the craft, and the unexpected has always provided opportunities for learning.

  (“Describe the failure mode?” said Ratline aside to Satterwaithe. “Did he go blind?” But Satterwaithe did not laugh.)

  “Ah…The anode draws electrons into the convergence zone, which…” Miko spoke hesitantly, as if reciting. The mate too was aware of the
audience that watched and listened, but was less welcoming of its attention than the engineer. “…which creates a virtual cathode. And that, in turn, draws the ions so they can compactify and fuse…”

  “I asked not how it worked, but how it failed.”

  “Well, thermal stress is usually due to ionic or electronic impact. I would guess that the magnetic insulation failed.”

  “You would guess,” said Bhatterji.

  Miko hesitated. “I’m certain. Almost.”

  “Very good,” said Bhatterji. “Certainty must never be absolute.”

  (“Go to the head of the class,” sneered Ratline. Satterwaithe sought to hush him with a hand to his wrist, but the cargo master yanked his arm away and glared at the Third Officer. “You know better than that,” he whispered harshly.)

  “And so,” said Bhatterji, “we inspect the magnetic projectors.”

  Corrigan, from the bridge, interrupted. “Did you examine the fiber optic controls?”

  “They’re fried. The Florence struts are buckled too. Secondary failures caused by the anode slagging.” He touched a helmet control and his vision went to infrared and he was engulfed in a starless haze. The slagged anode was a dull ember. Far off to his left, he could just see Number Four still cooling down after the automatic cutoff. To his right, the comm tower obstructed his view of Number Two.

  Bhatterji examined the CoRE magnets and could see the residual heat in swirls of yellow and orange. The scale on his visor gave him the temperature and a whispered query to Ship told him how hot the coils must have gotten to be so warm yet. He did not like the answer, not at all.

  “The magnet overheated,” he said.

  “The safeties tripped,” Miko told him. But they had known that from the diagnostics soon after the shutdown.

  Bhatterji restored his sight to the visible bands. “So they did,” he said, “but perhaps a little too slowly. Two of the breakers I see are visibly worn. In any event, the CoRE superconductors have also been quenched.”

  Gorgas broke into the channel. “Can it be fixed?”

  Bhatterji snorted. “Of course. I expect it will be fun.”

  “Fun! This is a serious matter.”

  Bhatterji made no response. Gorgas did not know the pleasures of engineering. Indeed, Bhatterji did not think Gorgas knew any pleasures. Already, Bhatterji had thought of three possible repair designs and a workaround for the Florence struts, though which design he would use would depend on what parts and materials he could scrounge.

  “I am going to check Number Two now,” he told Miko.

  “But—that was the automatic shutdown, wasn’t it?” his mate said.

  “Think it through. The ship can boost on any three Farnsworths. The AI knows that.”

  “But, then—”

  “It can even fly on two,” Bhatterji went on. “Pay attention. It can even fly on two, provided they are antipodal on the rim. But if two adjacent engines go down, the ship will twirl around its diameter, which makes navigation problematical. So the AI performs a complete shutdown.”

  (“Damned cages,” Satterwaithe said off-circuit to Ratline, “you’d never get a failure mode like that with a magsail.” Ratline cackled.)

  “For two engines to fail at the same time—” Miko began to say, but Bhatterji interrupted again.

  “Ponder why the CoRE magnets failed. Don’t distract me.” He stood still for a moment, eyes closed, nerving himself for flight; then he loosened his boots from the rim and rose slowly on his suit jets. The conviction welled within him that he was falling away from the ship into a vast and endless pit. The hull was no longer a surface, but a precipice. Breathing hard, sweating, he brought himself to a stop at ten feet, paused to orient, then jetted toward the Number Two Farnsworth. A dangerous maneuver. Motion wants always a straight line, and that means tangent to the ship’s rim and her considerable forward velocity. But fear wants danger to vindicate itself, and that means tangent to one’s desires.

  Following the curvature of the rim, Bhatterji coasted above moribund shroud motors for the old magnetic sails; above empty connector cradles for long-gone luxury modules; around the antennae for the comm system; above a junkyard of sensors and couplings and equipments that resembled a great coral reef. His pulse rattled like a snare and his groin tightened into a hard ball. He tickled the jets himself, not trusting the suit’s AI to judge the complex topography below. If he miscalculated he would fly into the Void. But that was as it should be. A man’s fate ought to be in a man’s own two hands. Enver Koch had made a fatal error, but he had died a man.

  That one as terrified of the Void as Ramakrishnan Bhatterji would work in space affronted reason; but reason wasn’t in it. Some men find their fears more addicting than their loves and so come to love their fears. They take pride in defying them. Bhatterji could have swum through that reef, or even gone back inside the ship and across the quadrant, but he was more afraid of showing his fear than he was of the fear itself. History has named such men heroes, and at other times fools, and called their behavior brave or self-destructive as intellectual fashion decreed; but whatever she called them, history has always taken note. People write songs about the likes of Ram Bhatterji and whether the song is ballad or dirge or satire matters less than that it is sung at all.

  (Men like Gorgas inspire no music: a gray man with a gray mind; aloof and abrupt because he lived much inside his head; single-minded and unyielding when once he had grasped the pattern of events; but quick to see those patterns, as well. Such men do not inspire. At best, they merely convince.)

  Coming at last to Number Two, Bhatterji saw immediately that its anode had also melted. It was a curious thing to be so astonished at something so expected. “Both engines have slagged,” he announced. Something struck his outstretched arm and, turning, he saw the loose ends of the Hyne cables writhing Medusa-like in the airless void.

  Bhatterji peered closer at the torn cables just as two bare ends chanced to close with each other and a white spark jumped the gap. He had not actually grasped hold of anything and so was not grounded and the charge dissipated harmlessly; but his mind by reflex worked out the voltages. Miko, who was monitoring Bhatterji’s life support from within the ship, saw how the heartbeat spiked.

  “Miko,” the engineer’s voice said ever-so-calmly over the link, “I’ve found the source of that transient that concerned you. Please shut down all subsystem power to the Number Two pylon.”

  Miko threw the switches and locked them out, one by one. The engineer was terrified of outside work. He tried to keep it secret, but Miko could tell. A cold start would require recalibration of the flicker. Someone must physically adjust the focusing rings after each test burst. It was dangerous work, normally done in the Yards. Get the rhythm wrong—miss a beat—and a nanopulse of fusion would be more than flesh and bone could bear. The situation must be serious indeed if Ram was willing to accept that risk while under way and with a high velocity.

  Aboard The River only since Amalthea Harbor, Miko still found pleasure in contemplating duty, in being useful to a ship that had provided refuge from an intolerable life, and so had studied the manuals with great diligence, memorizing assembly and disassembly procedures, creating mental pictures from the views and sections. “I could do it.” The words escaped on a breath and Bhatterji, not quite making them out, asked for a repeat. Miko flushed and said, “Nothing.”

  Or did something else move the engineer beside a reluctance to entrust great work to a green apprentice? Miko sometimes sensed an edge to the older man, a fascination with death and risk. He might seek the Void as another might grasp a serpent—as an act of defiance. And yet, the Universe could be pushed only so far before it pushed back.

  Simultaneous failure argued a common cause. A whispered command to the AI brought the schematics up on Miko’s screen. What systems did Two and Three have in common?

  While his mate searched deebies, Bhatterji turned away from the damaged cage. He noticed that he was casting a shadow
and, turning to look, saw the smoky opal gleam of Jupiter off the fore starside quarter. It was a minute disk, not even a tenth the size of the Moon over the Bay of Bengal, and for just a moment, Bhatterji wondered what he was doing here, so far from the temples and the forests and the jangly cities. He remembered that Miko came from Amalthea and one of the wranglers from Callisto. They had signed the articles within a day of each other on the previous transit. Yet Circumjovia was the new frontier. Odd, how people fled from heavens that others scrambled to reach.

  Turning back to the rim, he squinted his eyes at the forest of pylons back the way he had come, then he lifted off the hull once more. This time, he stayed closer to the surface and toed down a moment later at the Ayesaki valve, halfway between the two damaged cages.

  “Mr. Bhatterji,” Miko said, “I think you should check the north exterior coolant diverter valve.”

  “The Ayesaki. Yes, I’m already there.” Bhatterji’s satisfaction at having reasoned so well was tempered by what he saw. The valve had cracked and molten lithium had sprayed, coated, and ruined every piece of equipment around it before the cutoffs could shut down the flow.

  “How did you—”

  “Because I have the ship up here,” Bhatterji told his mate, tapping his helmet—a wasted gesture, though Miko understood. “The anodes failed. Why? Because they both lost their magnetic insulation. Why did the insulation fail? Because the CoRE magnets failed. Why did the CoRE magnets fail? Because resistive heating in their coils quenched the superconductor. Why did the coils grow hot? An interruption in their coolant supply. And why two cages at the same time? A coolant failure at the diverter valve that served them both. You must always ask ‘why’ five times when diagnosing a failure. It’s really quite pretty, the way everything falls into place.”

  (“Pretty!” said Gorgas, who was watching and listening from the bridge.)

  (“It’s more than pretty,” Fife told Wong and the others in the common room. “It’s beautiful.” He had itched to track the root cause himself, but had lacked sufficient knowledge of the system to leap ahead of Bhatterji. Yet following another on the scent was pleasure still.)