It was a strong start for the Vipers, and we maintained our lead for a while. Eventually, we began to lose ground. Part of that was from my flagging energy -- all that darned scobble, for sure -- and part of it was from the increased use of strategic pitches on the part of the Lightning. I eventually gave up my place on the court to Lili, who helped keep up the pressure.
We lost the game, but the final score was close -- far closer than any time the two teams had faced off in the past. The Life Support Lightning played very well, so it made them look at the Vipers differently, you can be sure.
It had been a lot of fun. I came back up to the court when the buzzer sounded, to shake hands, and slap backs, and all that.
"How's your foot?" the tall woman asked, when I congratulated her. She was still puffing hard from the final play of the game, and sweat poured off her brow.
"It'll be purple by morning," I predicted, and she laughed, not a trace of the aggressive spirit displayed just minutes before.
They opened the back room in the pub for us, as both teams retired there to hoot and holler and drink and brag. There was a new waiter -- new to me anyway; he turned on the lights, and got us all wrangled like a pro.
Laydin might have been gone, but the need to service the party never stopped.
* * *
Hanging out with Floy became kind-of a thing over the next week or so.
We'd be our usual selves in R&D, where, in point of fact, she didn't make many appearances due to her various other responsibilities, but we had dinner at my place once (take-out -- I can't cook), and went for a long walk later in the week.
The night of the walk, she pulled me behind a tall anchor block for one of the sweeping support cables, out near a quiet observation lounge, and kissed me. She was dressed in a plain tunic top and slacks, and had teased out her slick-backed hair into a wild shag. She looked very nice, and felt even better.
I kissed her back, but didn't ramp it up. It seemed to be the right approach emotionally, and an even better one trouble-wise. We found a bench, and sat down, leaning against each other, watching the stars through the lounge's large shieldglass window.
Dieter called then. I got up, and moved off a few steps.
"We have a problem," he stated without preliminary, looking and sounding quite serious. "There's a print defect in the plasma flow chamber of the new transfer unit."
"I didn't know we'd gotten one of those."
"The propagators aren't to spec for us," he explained, looking hung-over and annoyed at the same time. "They have to have their own transfer unit. It was part of the package you delivered."
"How bad is it?" I asked into my fist.
"Bad enough: it'll burst if we put it under stress. I can't retool anything up here: that requires a machine shop. And we have no time to have another unit printed and delivered. We'll be dead from asphyxiation before it comes up in the fabrication queue."
"What can I do to help?"
"I think I can make an inner sleeve to contain the flow during use, but I need about two square meters of nano-particulate sheeting, and a tube of molecular binder...no, make that two tubes. I used all mine up."
I looked back at Floy, who watched patiently. To her this was an Admin Security thing, and she gave me space.
"I'll get them to you by early firstshift."
In my eye-view, he nodded grimly, said thanks, and closed the line.
"Do you have to go?" the Seven asked, when I came back.
"I'm sorry. It's...important."
"Okay," she smiled, then kissed me again -- quickly this time, like a peck -- before walking off. "See you tomorrow."
Nano-part sheeting was a standard material used in hull repairs. It was unbelievably strong, but fairly flexible, so it could be cut to size with a normal parting tool. It was placed over punctures, or wrapped around damaged support beams or other equipment. It was then often covered in a permanent coating of polynium glaze -- a process known as plasterizing, for no apparent reason.
I'd seen old boats and ships that seemed to be held together solely by plasterized patching, so it was reliable enough. The sheeting could certainly hold a plasma chamber together, even without polynium, but only if it was securely attached. This was where the binding cement came in, bonding the nano-particles of the sheet to the metal of the chamber at the molecular level. After glueing, the sheets became part of the plasma chamber itself, and would be able to hold it all in place, despite the excessive pressures exerted by a fusion reactor's magnetic bottle.
R&D had both these items, I was sure, but they would be stored within the domain of Hull Design, and those guys were a bunch of weenies. I'd have to make some plausible excuse or other, then talk to this foreman, and that project director, and then to a warehouse supervisor who would invariably be off-duty at the time. And it would have to be checked and rechecked, anyway, as a valid pass request by the Team johnnies on duty.
No, the sheeting and cement would have to come from somewhere else, and the station's Hub seemed like a good candidate. Workers up there would be certain to have that kind of material available, since minor ship repairs, as well as patching the station's hull from micro-meteorite damage and the like, were all part and parcel of their jobs.
I took a deep breath, then climbed aboard an elevator at the bank over where Pillar Four met the wheel of the station. (Spoke Plaza had been closer, but I'd stayed on the tram.)
The ride up took a few minutes, because it seemed to stop at nearly every floor in the pillar, but eventually, the doors opened upon the massive space of Mylag Vernier's Hub. It was a busy place, and noisy too. Team guards near the elevator were verifying IDents, and I waited patiently while they checked mine. My Admin Security status was now showing prominently in the system, and it seemed to have some heft.
"Ah, very good, sir! Can I direct you somewhere?"
"Maybe. Do you know where the supply manager's office is up here?"
The young woman didn't, but she called someone who did. She checked a map, then pointed at a cluster of storage units several hundred meters above our heads; rectangular buildings, appearing to hang down from the roof of the place. She did me the courtesy of summoning a Team automated roller, and I cruised over in style.
Scoring the nano-part was easy -- they had kilometers of the stuff in tall rolls, extending up to the storeroom's ceiling like tree trunks. The manager on duty had no problem with clipping me off a few meters of the fabric, and even found a bag to put it in. I didn't have to offer an explanation: being AdSec was good enough.
The molecular binder, though, was harder. When the supply chain started back up upon Team's invasion, apparently one glaring exception had been this exact type of cement. It was annoying everybody, and a special emergency shipment of it was already inbound from the jump point. But that wouldn't arrive until next week.
"Yeah, see, this is kind of urgent," I told the guy. "You don't happen to have a few tubes stashed away somewhere, do you?"
"Well..." and the guy shook his head. "There is a small supply put by, but we need it for emergency repairs. If the station gets a hull puncture, we absolutely have to have this stuff on hand. I'm sorry."
"I see. Do you think a bottle of Certified Greenbelt scotch could help you folks be even better prepared?"
"It's been known to make all the difference," he replied without skipping a beat.
The roller was still there when I came out, so I had it run me over to one of the other elevators. I told it to wait. Back down in the station proper, I dashed to the closest recdrug kiosk listed in the station directory, and bought a liter bottle of Roberta Batewell Five Year Old.
Auntie Bob, as it was often called, was, hands down, the most popular liquor among stationers. This was mostly due to a brilliant distribution strategy implemented over a century before by the company's founders, way over on Savanna Station -- an artificial super-farm in solar orbit around the Greenbelt system's yellow primary. It had been a business plan so aggressive and s
uccessful that the basic principles were sometimes taught in military colleges as an example of flawless campaign execution.
No matter where you went in the galaxy, you could always find Auntie Bob in stock (including within many booze-free dry systems over in Churchspace, if you knew who to ask). The fact that it was a solid mid-shelf whiskey kept it popular, lo these many years later, and my supply guy was only too happy to part with a couple tubes of glue that weren't his to begin with, in exchange for a bottle of the pretty-good stuff.
Then it was a stop by the closet, where I hooked the bag of repair supplies to the ascending cable, closed up the vent, and called Shady Lady to let Dieter know his stuff was ready for pick up.
It was easy. I just walked away.
How had it gotten so easy?
I hadn't needed help. I hadn't even needed a lookout.
I could be evasive to a friend (or whatever Floy and I were becoming). I could track down obscure materials. I could pass through guard details. I could bribe people. I could transfer packages to hidden comrades. I could keep secrets.
So many secrets.
And none of it was hard. I had trouble remembering a time when it was.
Once again the need to leave this place surged up, and I had to lean on a bulkhead to catch my breath. I looked around at the clean, bright station, and the clean, bright people who walked by, busy with their tasks and lives.
Nothing in sight was familiar. The offices, the shops, the facilities were all weird and new. Not one thing I laid my darting eyes upon looked mundane.
For a long moment, half in panic, I didn't know where I was -- what this place was.
Or, maybe it was me I didn't recognize.
||||||||||
Right after the start of firstshift, on Day-6, I got a nose bleed. Both nostrils, but no pain. I hadn't bumped it since the hatch burst open on Day-1. It just started on its own, with little droplets floating out into the cabin, one after the other. I tore off a few more tiny strips of cloth (you don't want to know where from); just little ones that I stuffed up my nose, while trying not to think about high-energy particles.
This was the state of things when a warning chime sounded at 23:22 that same day, and a dozen status reports popped up on the cockpit screens to indicate that our return to the natural universe was imminent. I felt that stomach-expanding lurch that was typical of exiting jumpspace, but it was very harsh, and I actually got quite nauseous, vomiting up energy bars into a biowaste bag.
My companion didn't react at all.
I'd been hoping he'd come out of his spell once we arrived where ever we arrived, but it was no good. He still sat there, breathing jaggedly but regularly, shaking like a frightened dog. His face was still off and perched on his forehead. I still had that rag over his eyes. I touched one arm, and called to him again, but it was the same as before. The man was lost until he could get some help. Even the screens in front of him, though now showing new information, still refused to respond.
There was one small status panel that looked like a communication interface. It showed a steady pulse which I hoped was a broadcast signal. If anyone came for us, and arrived somewhere in the neighborhood, they'd be able to pick that much up and maybe spot us among the natural EM background noise of outer space.
There were no windows, and no external vid feeds -- at least none active, which was the same thing.
In terms of subjective time -- that is to say, the amount that had passed for us in the bubble universe -- it took seven days to make the trip.
Returning to this universe, our graviton wake had been big and ugly, blasting out from the exit cone in the superluminal fashion of starjump. It washed over the sensors of stations, traffic satellites, and space-borne vessels within a radius of three light-years ...easily a million times bigger than a normal jump wake. I wouldn't learn these details until much later, but they filled in a lot of blanks.
Naturally, this was unusual, and therefore garnered immediate action, since anything starjump-related that was unusual was usually bad. We were easy enough to pinpoint by a cross-angular survey of the wake coordinates detected by the various sensor systems, so emergency rescue vessels were dispatched on the double -- including one large Fleet jumptug.
Which meant we were now over the border.
||||||||||
twenty-five
* * *
I decided to follow up my package delivery the next day with an in-person visit. The instinct to bolt from this mission hadn't much abated, though I wasn't paralyzed by it any more.
Shady Lady still smelled bad, and there was trash all over the place. If Stinna had gotten much of the funk off her in that mandatory shower, I couldn't tell.
It was hard to imagine this, even though I was looking at it, smelling it, and stepping carefully over it. Just before I climbed up into the fire vent, I grabbed a big box of trash bags from a shelf in the closet. It was my steward's training kicking in, I guess, or a premonition.
Before I even tried talking to any of them, I started bagging up garbage.
"Been meaning to get to that," John muttered, eyes on another vid game. Stinna just watched me.
"That's a help," Chris put in. He was neat and fresh-looking compared to the others. He could have tidied up the ship at any time -- but maybe he hadn't been able to. Maybe that was how his own cabin fever manifested itself. Besides, I figured that if I was coming back at some point, I wanted it clean.
Dieter was in the middle of something in Engineering when Chris called to tell him I was aboard.
I went through every open section of the ship, one by one, and gathered up loose stuff. They had taken to stuffing some of it in Gunnery, which I was tempted to howl about. I already knew they could get in. This clearly meant they didn't care if I knew, which rather put the pin to my paranoia balloon.
When all the scattered trash was bagged up, I took out an extensible mop and folding bucket from one of the storage drawers, and drew some water. I grabbed a scrubber and some liquid soap from the fresher, and started washing the deck, and other surfaces.
I had a full shift at R&D ahead of me, and at least a few hours going over and adding comments to Nine Maelbrott's precious reports, but I couldn't ignore this any more. Whatever the cause, they apparently couldn't help themselves. I was on my hands and knees under the table in the Common Room, asking Stinna to move her feet for the second time, when Dieter finally came out.
"Thanks for the delivery yesterday," he called to my butt, as I worked.
"Of course. It's what you needed, right?"
"Yeah, but it'll still be a few days before I actually do."
"You made it sound urgent," I grunted, while wiping up something dried, pernicious, and unidentifiable.
"I thought it was my next step," he confessed, getting some Vaussermin (but not with the red cup, since John didn't say anything). "It turns out I need to make adjustments in the mag field first, otherwise it might sheer the nano part off the wall, despite the glue. Those forces are pretty severe."
"I getcha," I told him, but didn't really care at that moment. My jumpsuit was getting soiled along the knees and cuffs, and my back was aching.
"Nice game the other day," Stinna said then, almost as a mutter. It took a moment to realize she was talking to me.
"Oh, you saw us play?"
"You lost," she stated.
"Yeah, well, we tried."
"I'd like to try. I like smackball."
"Really? I...didn't know that."
"I watched your practice sessions, so I started watching pro games, too. I think I'd like to play."
"I'm sure you would," I answered, very put off by her uncharacteristic loquaciousness. "Maybe you can join a league when we get back home."
But she didn't reply, and just moved through holographic screens of code and data tables, restlessly, mechanistically.
No one else seemed to care about smackball; leastways, no one picked up the conversation, which was just as well.
/> They had been putting garbage in Mavis' cockpit, too. I didn't even think to check up there at first. Something gooey had leaked out of a food tray from the thali restaurant, indicating that Chris had made more than just quick dashes out. That place was on the other side of the ring.
He probably went wandering, and maybe even used the tram. It was a sign that the other two, who didn't dare step aboard the station, were all the more isolated -- that they were shut-ins, with all the behavior quirks that implied. No fault of theirs, but it was impossible not to see the problem here. SS1 and SS2 were both still needed on a daily basis, sifting through and editing the station's data stream, otherwise it might have been more attractive for them to just sleep through it all, like Mavis.
That thought led me to call Chris up front, while I worked.
"So, what about waking her up?" I asked with a mutter, rubbing soy sauce stains off the back of the pilot's chair.
"I'm going to give John to the end of the week...three days. If he doesn't have her problem cracked by then, we'll go with the restart, like you suggested. I hate to take the chance, but we're almost out of options."
I nodded, satisfied with this approach. If John could pull it off, Mavis might even be able to call up some information about what had actually happened to her, based on internal diagnostics and/or something she might have remembered organically. If he couldn't pull it off, she might need re-educating, at least to some degree, and we'd probably never learn what really happened.
I was running late by the time I looked up from the sponge. Even then, I had to wait for an unexpected arrival in the closet below: a work crew in need of supplies. Our motion sensor in the place saved my bacon fat, and I just sat on my bunk inside Shady Lady for John to give the all-clear.
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 36
