The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “The only thing left,” Bhatterji said, “is to discover why the valve failed.”

  (Corrigan, who was on the bridge with Gorgas, shook his head. “No! What’s left is to fix the forsaken thing.” But Gorgas silenced him with a gesture and Bhatterji never heard.)

  The engineer studied the equipment closely. Frozen lithium coated everything with a grim yellowed frost. The Lotus Jewel’s comm antennae were badly damaged. As for the valve itself, what Bhatterji saw was so simple that at first he could not comprehend it. His mind tried and discarded a dozen templates while he struggled to understand the bent and mangled casing. Curiously, of the others watching through his suit camera, only The Lotus Jewel, who did not know what was reasonable, saw plainly what must have happened.

  “We have been struck,” Bhatterji concluded at last, something like awe in his voice; as if he had won a cosmic lottery or, more accurately, lost one in which winning had been ensured. “By a small object, the size of my fist.” Yes, there were the broken ends protruding on the far side of the shell. Bhatterji wondered at the trajectory and squatted to sight through the holes.

  Gorgas had watched Bhatterji’s EVAsion on the ship’s monitors, watched the man’s progress from one piece of equipment to the next, saw through the suit camera what Bhatterji saw; and if Bhatterji saw puzzle and The Lotus Jewel fear, and Satterwaithe vindication, it was Gorgas who saw beyond the immediate phenomena to a glimmer of what lay ahead.

  Evan Dodge Hand had always allowed Bhatterji a time to decompress after Outside work. Though he never spoke of it, Hand had been well aware of his engineer’s phobia and had granted him this grace period before reporting; and Bhatterji (who also never spoke of it) was grateful for both the grace and the silence. Over the years, that grace had metastasized into a right, one of those “customary privileges” that accumulate in any crew.

  But there sat now a pharaoh who knew not Joseph. Stepan Gorgas waited in his day room with increasing impatience for Bhatterji to appear. While he waited, he replayed the video from the engineer’s EVAsion, freezing and zooming on the damage the man had found, extrapolating from that damage to the likely bill of materials, hyperlinking to stores inventories, considering and discarding a dozen possibilities. Every now and then he would glance in irritation at the door and growl, “Where the devil is that fellow?”

  “That fellow” was one level up, naked, and rubbing himself vigorously with a moist scrubber. Intellectually, Bhatterji knew that the sweat of fear had no distinctive odor. It was indistinguishable from the sweat of hard work or the sweat of vigorous play; but this knowledge was only knowledge and before he would report to Gorgas he rubbed himself and rubbed himself until his skin tingled and he wished Miko were with him. Gorgas would never have noticed. If there was a smell to fear, it was Bhatterji who caught the whiff; Bhatterji who must wipe it clean.

  The engineer completed his decompression ritual in the deckhands’ mess. It was a favorite spot of his. Though nominally an officer, Bhatterji always felt more relaxed among the crew. The talk was easier up on the crew deck, the atmosphere more relaxed. The near-beer had fuller body than down below—though the officers’ mess drew its own “neer” from the same tanks.

  Miko had come to help him celebrate a successful EVAsion. The Lotus Jewel had come to ask about her antennae, but she had also come to kick near-beer with him, and had already filled two squeezers with the hoppy brew. Bhatterji accepted one but surreptitiously replaced it with another that he had brought from his own quarters. Sometimes a man wanted to get a little nearer, and to hell with the Prague Convention.

  Three of the wranglers were there as well, though for their own reasons. They were also celebrating a successful evasion, this one of Ratline’s attention. Evermore and Akhaturian—slim and beardless and humming with vitality—were candy to Bhatterji’s eye. Oh, hour of thoughtless youth! But Evermore greeted him with wary hostility and Twenty-four deCant, the Third Wrangler, had her nails deeply embedded in Akhaturian’s arm, so neither lad was properly on Bhatterji’s to-do list. DeCant was one of those predatory females that Bhatterji dreaded, a falcon eager to swoop and always—so it seemed to him—on those whom he fancied.

  But the talk ran high and the laughter flowed, though most of both were Bhatterji’s doing. He squeezed neer out of his ziggy bottle and gulped the writhing, iridescent globules like a fish snatching at bits of floating food. Miko, anchored a little to the side, disapproved. Loose food, especially loose liquids, could gum the inboard filter systems and require hours of digestion by Grubb’s microbots to unclog them.

  Bhatterji, attributing her slight frown to thoughtfulness and the pursed lips to a thrown kiss, threw his mate a reply—at which sight deCant, watching, unaccountably giggled.

  They chatted for a while over trivia but the talk, no matter how it might orbit, spiraled inexorably into the matter of Bhatterji’s EVAsion.

  “I would have taken the surface route around the hull,” Evermore said with the placid assurance of the bystander. “It would have taken longer, but there’s less risk.” Rave Evermore was the sort who was always more expert at other people’s jobs.

  Bhatterji made allowances both for the boy’s youth and for his beauty, though the latter was fading with the deepening voice. “Life is risk,” he told the boy. “Anything can kill you. Anything. Do you know how many people have died taking a dump? If you did, it would—”

  “—scare the shit right out of me,” Evermore finished the sentence and Bhatterji, realizing that he must have used the line rather too often, joined in the laughter.

  “Everyone dies,” he said with a smile as sharp as a blade. “Not everyone lives.” Evermore flinched and looked away.

  “What are the odds on being hit like that?” Akhaturian asked. “By a meteor! They must be a million-to-one!”

  Bhatterji shrugged. “And how many millions of minutes of flight time has this ship logged? Given enough opportunity, even the rarest event must happen. We live in an unlikely world, boy. Everything that happens is impossible! What odds, Ivar, that your parents would ever have met? Or that, on one particular day, that one particular sperm reached that one particular egg ahead of all the others? One small diversion and—ping!—no Ivar. It’s like the poet, Carson, once said: ‘Life is all collisions.’”

  “None of that ‘random sperm’ muff applies to me,” deCant said in tones both defiant and sad. “But…” and her smile was a blossom of red against the raven black of her skullcap hair as she rubbed Akhaturian’s back, “…I’m just glad your probabilities worked out in my favor.” The junior wrangler glowed under her touch. Imprinted like a duckling, Bhatterji thought sadly.

  “How bad was the damage to my antennae?” asked The Lotus Jewel, bringing the discussion back to practicalities. “I get intermittent reception. I don’t think I’m transmitting at all.”

  That wasn’t quite true. The Lotus Jewel was transmitting on several frequencies. Certainly, Evermore was receiving, the way he tracked her every move; and Akhaturian too despite the grapple on his arm. Even Eaton Grubb used the pretext of checking particulates just to pass through the mess and catch a glimpse of her. The Lotus Jewel had a laugh like small bells. It was hard for anyone to ignore her when she was in the room. Even Bhatterji enjoyed her company. They were alike in so many ways, the two of them: loving sport and physical exertion, enjoying their own bodies, both craving the attention of others.

  “There was a bit of damage to your equipment,” he told her.

  “I was watching the feed, Ram. It looked like more than ‘a bit’ to me.”

  “I’m tired of muffing freefall,” deCant said. “My muffing head feels bloated and swollen. My nose is stuffy. I blew breakfast for three muffing days. When can we get acceleration back? A couple milligees isn’t much, maybe, but it beats the heaves.”

  “I haven’t reviewed the videos yet,” Bhatterji said, “but I thought of three or four patches while I was eyeballing the damage. Don’t worry,” Bhatterji added wi
th no sense at all of prophecy. “If I can’t fix those engines, they can’t be fixed.”

  Bhatterji had read the lack of a summons from Gorgas as a lack of urgency and therefore was puzzled and upset when the captain grilled him over his whereabouts when he finally did report.

  “Decompressing,” Bhatterji answered. He did not add a sir. No one had said “sir” on The River of Stars for twenty-three years.

  Gorgas would neither plead nor rage. His practice was to inform people of their transgressions and let their own sense of duty shame them. He steepled his fingers before his pursed lips, and said, “You didn’t think the ship’s condition important enough to warrant an immediate report? Well, never mind that, now. It’s the forward plan that matters.”

  Bhatterji, who had no shame to appeal to, took the brevity of Gorgas’s reprimand as a further sign of unimportance. If Gorgas had really wanted an immediate report, he would have spent more words on it. But that was only because Bhatterji nearly always said what was on his mind, while Gorgas let it remain there until it was ready to be said. Consequently, each judged the other irresolute, though for opposite reasons. In this judgment, both were nearly correct, but only nearly.

  “You need to concentrate on Number Three,” Gorgas told the engineer. “That requires the least work.”

  That sentence was only the final one in a long string of intricately interwoven sentences. Unfortunately, as it was the only one spoken aloud, it was the only one that Bhatterji heard. Gorgas’s thoughts were like icebergs, only the tips of them showed, which was why many in the crew thought him cold.

  “I’m sorry,” Bhatterji responded, “at which university did you study fusion engineering? I’ve forgotten.”

  Bhatterji being elliptical, Gorgas often thought, was like the Russian army in 1914 performing a maneuver. It was never well executed, but it astonished one to see it tried at all. “You have only five days,” Gorgas pointed out, revealing another facet of his iceberg thinking.

  The engineer was no innumerate and could now guess at the hidden dimensions. He understood where the limit came from because he had performed the same calculations himself. If three engines were available, the ship must begin deceleration in five days or she would be going too fast to enter Jupiter orbit. If all four engines were on line…“It’s nineteen days to the balk line,” he said. With only two engines, it was already far too late.

  Gorgas pursed his lips a moment and, closing his eyes, reviewed the various options and possibilities he had considered. The path ahead was a winding one, with many branches, through a dark forest, and most of those paths did not lead to where he wished to take the ship. “There are not enough spares to repair both engines. There is a lithium-grade valve that you can use in place of the damaged Ayesaki, but…”

  “The repairs are straightforward,” Bhatterji insisted. “If the ship has the parts in stock, that’s fine. If not, I’ll fab them from raws.” He spread his hands, as if to say “end of story.”

  “But there are no spare grids,” Gorgas began.

  Bhatterji rolled mental eyes. “I can draw wire down from hobartium rod and spot weld the geodesics.”

  “And the command logics?”

  “Oh,” said the engineer, deliberately boastful, “I’ll cannibalize some of the damaged components and frankenstein four of the five I need.”

  Gorgas raised an eyebrow. “You have an action plan?”

  The engineer cocked his head. “Yes. I plan to act.”

  “A little prior analysis might be useful,” Gorgas suggested. He wouldn’t mind Bhatterji’s impulsiveness quite so much if there were some evidence of thought behind it. But is thoughtful impulsiveness an oxymoron or a Zen-like insight? A smile passed briefly over his lips.

  The sneer irritated Bhatterji. Gorgas, in his estimation, not only failed to jump to conclusions, he failed to walk up to them when they were lying supine in front of him. He would circle and stalk forever, as if the hunt mattered more than the kill. How in space had Hand tolerated the man?

  “I’ve roughed out a tentative bill of materials,” he said, but this was an exaggeration. What he meant was that he thought he knew what he would need. He wouldn’t really know until he dove into the work.

  Gorgas wondered why it was that no one on board understood contingencies, or that plans needed to be robust against the unexpected. “Suppose you can repair only one of the engines?” he suggested. “What then?”

  “Then I’ll never enjoy the eulogy.”

  Blinking, Gorgas wondered if he had stumbled into a different conversation. “Eulogy…”

  “Because a man can’t hear the eulogy at his own funeral; and the only way I can’t repair both engines is that I’m dead before I finish the second.”

  Gorgas tried once more. “At three-quarter’s power…”

  “By the Bull, Gorgas!” Bhatterji explained as to a child. “You saw the damage. Could you repair either one in only five days? No one can. Not me, not even Enver Koch. So blitzing one cage just isn’t an option. It’s got to be both.”

  Gorgas sighed. “Very well.” He had expected as much, but had thought the chance worth pursuing. He wondered though whether the impossibility of a five-day blitz repair were a fact of nature or of the engineer’s legendary inertia. He called up a planning matrix on his screen. “Here is the plan I prepared. I would like you to—”

  “That you prepared…”

  “Yes. While I was waiting for you to report. Time not wasted, eh? I would like you to review it and make any changes or modifications that you think are needed. I will expect the engines calibrated and ready by no later than the twenty-eighth. Oh. One other matter. The damaged lithium pump served engines Two and Three.”

  “And the south pump serves One and Four. What of it?”

  “It struck me as curious. Why not One and Two on the first pump and Three and Four on the second?”

  Bhatterji, for just a moment, could not process the question. It seemed to emanate from another pocket universe. The words were Anglo but, strung together like that, made no sense. “I don’t know,” said Bhatterji, choosing the only possible response.

  Gorgas frowned. “Two and Three sum to five; and so do One and Four. I had thought there might be some significance in that.”

  Now Bhatterji frowned. “I don’t think it matters,” he said slowly.

  “Very well.” This, briskly. “Then there is no need to renumber them. Now, you are confident that you can restore both engines, and to full power?”

  It was a request for reassurance, but Bhatterji took it as a token of doubt, which infuriated him still further. “Of course,” he said.

  “And within nineteen days.”

  The second of course was not coarse at all, the words having been ground fine by Bhatterji’s teeth.

  “Because, at our current velocity,” Gorgas continued, “and at full deboost, it will take this vessel two-hundred and sixty-three megaklicks to slow down to the Jupiter datum.”

  The engineer unsnapped and kicked his way to the door. The way he looked at things, this meeting had used up an hour and a half of those nineteen days.

  “I shall want daily progress reports on the status of the repairs,” Gorgas said to his back, but Bhatterji ignored him.

  When the engineer had gone, Gorgas returned to his personal quarters, adjacent to the day room. He called up the waybills detailing their various cargo consignments and compared the promised delivery dates against the revised ETA, given that the ship would be coasting for a week or more. He had bid low on the contracts in an effort to win them from faster ships, but that left only a razor profit margin. Late delivery would likely mean no repeat business with that client. Checking the penalty clauses, he estimated the probable losses; then, as he frowned over the unpleasantness of the result, thought of five things that might delay or impede Bhatterji’s repairs.

  He knew he ought to recalculate the losses for each of the thirty-one combinations of the five potential delays, but “wo
rse” was probably a close-enough approximation for now. Instead, to relax and forget his troubles, he called up the Alamein Campaign onto the wall screen at the point when the Libyan 1st and 2nd Mechanized Brigades had overrun the surprised Egyptian battalion at Sidi Omar. There was a strong position on the Halfaya Pass around which he could build a counterattack, but the situation southward toward Siwa was precarious.

  The Engineer’s Mate

  Bhatterji resembled Grubb in the following manner. The cook could, from any random set of ingredients, concoct a meal. It might not be cordon bleu, but it would serve. Similarly, Bhatterji could concoct a repair from almost any random collection of parts and materials. It would not be OEM, but it would work. This was a valuable talent to have, because the River carried nowhere near the number and variety of parts that would be needed to restore two slagged Farnsworth cages to as-built condition.

  The River lived from hand to mouth, poor even for a tramp. The difference between FOB and COD could be critical to her financial existence. During her more than two decades of tramping, onboard repair-and-maintenance inventory had been slashed and then slashed again. Reorder levels had been lowered and some part numbers dropped entirely, all in the name of reduced operating cost. Other items had been sold and pawned and bartered. After all, at constant boost no replacement was more than a month or so away. Why shlep?

  Unless you slagged two engines at once. Coasting did not mean that The River wouldn’t get where she were going—at present velocity, she would reach Jupiter eighteen days sooner than in the flight plan—but in this case, sooner meant later, because she would also arrive eighteen days before Jupiter did. Space-faring shared many traditions with seafaring, but not the one in which ports of call remained fixed.