Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “Mr. Shannon?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bob replied.

  The other waved a hand at a chair. “Have a seat.”

  Bob sat down with alacrity. Was this another good sign? If you’re going to get a purple rocket, you typically got it standing up.

  “Tell me, Mr. Shannon, do you know why I’m here?”

  Bob started to speak, and then realized the pronoun wasn’t the one he’d expected.

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m a trouble shooter for Delgado Holdings; amongst other things, Delgado owns Beowulf Construction. They are the people who built this habitat and are now putting in new generation habitats in a half dozen systems, including here at Tannenbaum.

  “It seems some dirty-foot Beowulf execs back on Earth have come up with a truly amazing idea about how to reduce labor costs.”

  Bob shook his head, not having a clue, not a single clue, where this was going. None.

  “What they did was to advertise heavily back on Earth for people in the regular construction trades. Dirty-foot construction. Buried way, way, down in the fine print is a little notice that they will be working at a remove from regular services, but that spouses and children may accompany the worker if it is the worker’s desire. And nowhere at all in any of the fine print do they bother to mention that this ‘remove’ is an asteroid habitat on the Rim. And that what they would be doing is vacuum work.”

  Bob blinked. “Oh.” That was... monstrous. Hideous and monstrous murder. Not to mention an outright lie. Such people weren’t permitted to work on the Rim. Not until they had the requisite certificates.

  “The thinking, I suppose, was that they would be able to pay them about two-thirds of what they’d have to pay for Rim Runners, and because they want to build so many habitats, there is indeed a labor shortage which would have further increased wages.” The general manager’s eyes were ebony flint. “Pity about the wastage.”

  Bob gulped. A really smart dirty-foot, one who was willing to learn and spent the time to do it, had about a ten percent chance of killing himself on the job in the first three years. Dirty-feet made that transition all the time; there was a procedure for it. It took, on average, two years for the training and another year as journeyman, learning the ropes. Nine out of ten made it.

  But it left a tenth of them dead or if injured, likely crippled. As a voluntary thing, it was something everyone on the Rim understood -- it was how their ancestors got out here, after all. As subterfuge? It was unthinkable. It left him shaking with rage.

  “A few days ago there were about three thousand dirty-foot workers on Peach scheduled for Tangerine habitat at New Texas, along with about five thousand of their dependents. They are, shall we say, somewhat upset. Delgado himself was more than upset -- the people at Beowulf who made these decisions are no longer with the company, and are now on the list of people who may not ever, ever, manage in any fashion, anything having to do with space.

  “The problem I have though is that about a thousand of the adults have elected to stay. They wish to work; the rest are on the way home.”

  Bob could only nod.

  “The company has guaranteed the training of those who wish to stay and the dependent training as well.

  “So, I’m having to reach out for instructors.” Bob’s eyes met the general manager’s. “Up for a little fun and sun?”

  Bob blinked. That was the standard joke name for F & S, which was the abbreviated name for Fill and Shake – that was the first step in preparing dirty-feet to understand the realities of life on the Rim of Space. Fill them with the awe and grandeur of space and then shake their confidence until it fell apart.

  Bob wasn’t stupid; he knew the General Manager wasn’t stupid either. “I thought I was here to hear about my hot approach.”

  The general manager shook his head. “It’s not been signed off yet by the morons down there at the Fleet Aloft base, but it will be -- even if they don’t want to. The medics told you that you had two hours, tops. Those are Rim Runner medics: they knew what they were telling you to do. You knew what they meant when you agreed to the flight. I’m sure as I can be that they knew what they were asking and the controllers here knew what was going on. You didn’t boost without ten different sets of eyes on everything you did.

  “The only people upset are dirty-foot Porties who are married to rules. Forget it. It’s not a problem.”

  Bob sighed. “Fleet Aloft sure sounded like they were upset.” It was, after all, his Flight Certificate at stake.

  “The moron who commands here is a good buddy of the Port Admiral. Nuts to them both. I went to Laz Delgado himself; it will come back down and both Fleet Aloft and Port will shut up. Forget it.”

  Bob blinked. Heinrich Wolf was one of the most famous habitat managers alive. If he told you he went to bat for you, he had. And if he told you that you didn’t have to worry about breaking every single inner system flight regulation, then you didn’t have to worry about the fact that you were eight times the legal maximum velocity in the inner system, that your vector ended as close as made no difference to an orbital habitat. Nor did you have to worry about the fatal ding the hot, close approach would normally leave on your record. A hot approach that had been letter perfect.

  “I’m not sure that I’m ready for much more fun, sir. But yes, I’ll lend a hand.”

  “Dependents, obviously. Not the youngest ones, but teenagers. It’s been my experience that people your age listen best to people your age.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bob agreed.

  “Thank you again, Mr. Shannon.”

  “No problem, sir.”

  “And of course, I forgot the sweetener: a ten percent bonus over the usual rate, considering that there is so much work to do.”

  “That too will be fine, sir.”

  “That will be all, Mr. Shannon. Get with Liu Kim; she’ll work up the flight schedules.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And FYI, Mr. Shannon, I’ve navigated a bit, here and there around the Rim. I ran my own calculation of how I’d have flown your mission. Our tracks were almost identical. Except that I arrived a half tick later than you did.”

  Bob went out and the administrative assistant had paper work for him. Then Bob went to the Flight Operations office, and he talked to Liu Kim, the Flight Dispatcher.

  “You will have to wait until day after tomorrow for your first flight,” the stocky Korean woman told Bob. “General Manager Wolf has told Fleet Aloft that you are no longer suspended, but they are proving stubborn. I give them another day, tops, before someone reminds them just who Lazarus Delgado is, what Beowulf does and above all, who Heinrich Wolf’s father is.”

  Bob smiled and went back to his cube. Back in the Twentieth Century, about the time of the first manned space flight, more and more children became latchkey kids. Society tends to move like a pendulum; at times there were more, at times fewer. On the Rim, mostly it tended towards the fewer all of the time, but Bob was an exception.

  His mother was a planetary geologist, currently working survey out towards Orion. His father was the most sought after Benko-Chang engineer in this part of space; he could tune ship engines as few others could. There were enormous demands on his time and currently his father was over at the Shackelton system, working on a FTL heavy hauler whose engines would not sync up.

  It was a good thing his parents weren’t around, too. His mother would have been screaming at Fleet Aloft about the ding on his pilot’s certificate and his father would have been threatening mayhem. Better by far to have it over and done with, before they got back. And getting a job! That was icing on the cake!

  He’d taken the medivac flight because he was there, at Tannenbaum VI, running proof orbits for his certificate on Deep Well Maneuvering. He’d just finished his sixth atmospheric skip flight, two less than he needed for the certificate, when the medical emergency had occurred. He’d been going like a bat out of hell to get out of VI’s gravity well. It hadn’t seemed worth while
to slow down when he was in a hurry; he’d made the fan transition, down again as close to Peach as he could, less than twenty minutes at three g’s to dock. He’d run the numbers, the people at VI had run the numbers; the people on Peach had run the numbers. It was as safe as a church.

  Sure, he’d been going much faster than regulations permitted in the inner system, pointed entirely too close to Peach and was slowing down exceedingly fast. Twenty minutes they had told him; that’s the margin he had left when he docked. He couldn’t have gone slower and gotten her back in time. Forget it.

  * * *

  The next morning he stood in a small classroom, ten kids in it, ranging from twelve to sixteen.

  “I’m Bob Shannon, your instructor,” he told them.

  The class was half girls, half boys, weighted more towards the older end of the spectrum.

  “You are dirty-feet. Get used to the name -- you are going to hear it for the rest of your lives. My father was born on Earth, and he’s been on the Rim since he was eight; he’s still a dirty-foot. He’s lived on the Rim longer than I’ve been alive, yet he’s a dirty-foot and I’m not. He’s the best fan engineer in space -- and he’s still a dirty-foot. Rim Runners though, give competent people of any origin a lot of slack.

  “Yes, it’s not a nice name. Get used to it; there’s a reason for it and you need to know why.”

  Bob waved around them. “This is Peach Habitat; we’re in the L5 position with Tannenbaum and Tannenbaum’s sun. In no direction from where you sit is it more than a kilometer and a half to hard vacuum. That way,” Bob pointed towards the right, “a mere one hundred meters. There are ten thousand ways that number could go to zero in the next second.

  “If it did, every last person in this room would surely die -- except me. That’s because, unlike you, I know what to do to stay alive in an emergency. My job is to teach you what I know -- so you can stay alive. That’s the name of the game here on the Rim -- staying alive. The second rule here is do your job and do it well.

  “More times than you want to know, people have swapped Rule One and Rule Two, deciding the job is more important than living.”

  Someone raised a hand, one of the older boys. Bob nodded to him to speak.

  “I went to class on the ship that brought us out here; now I’ve signed up for this. I know what to do.” The boy waved around him, “I recognize some of these others from my classes, too.”

  Bob blinked in astonishment. “Come here.” He waved at the boy to come up. The other stood and came forward.

  Bob addressed the class. “Does anyone in this room have a certificate? For anything?”

  There was no sound, no movement.

  “Let me put this as simply as I can: whichever of your parents who hired on with Beowulf was cheated by the company. As family members, you were cheated by the company. I talked to General Manager Wolf yesterday; none of the people with Beowulf who were in any way involved with this are employed by the company any longer; from the top of the company to the bottom -- all of them are gone. Further, the Rim keeps a list of people who should never, ever, be allowed to manage anything having to do with space. Those people are now on the list. Getting your name on that list is the biggest black mark imaginable on the Rim.

  “Your one chance of survival out on the Rim is education. The simple truth is that if dirty-foot education was any good, we wouldn’t need certificates. But we do have certificates and there’s a reason for that.

  “On Earth there are jobs that require professional licenses. On the Rim every single job requires professional licensing. There is not a single person working on this habitat who does not have certificates... many certificates. It is why your parents are not working: they have none. Without the proper certificates, it is a felony to work. It is a felony to hire someone without the proper certificates. These are serious felonies; if someone gets hurt it becomes a capital crime -- you will stand trial for your life.

  “Knowledge is the coin of the realm on the Rim. Certificates are proof of that knowledge.

  “We take it seriously, very seriously. On Earth, most places don’t have the death penalty; we have it here on the Rim. One of the things that can get you shot out here is called ‘Criminal Incompetence.’ The most common reason someone is charged with that is that they faked a certificate or lied about it, resulting in someone’s death.

  “Simply faking a certificate will get you charged with that. Sure, we typically don’t shoot morons whose crime was faking something -- unless you are found out on the job. Then you’re given the requisite certificate exams and if you fail one, then you will be shot. Because you were recklessly endangering everyone around you.

  “So, here you stand, telling me you went to a class, a dirty-foot class, about life on the Rim. Tell me, do you have a clue why I would live and you would die, why all the rest of you in this compartment would die -- if this cubic vented to space?”

  The young man standing next to him looked upset, but shook his head.

  “Because none of you is wearing a shipsuit. I am.”

  The young man spoke up. “It’s just a uniform; I’m not into uniforms.”

  Bob ran his hand down his plain gray shipsuit, seemingly ignoring the comment. “A shipsuit is one piece of fabric. Where there is air pressure, like in this compartment, it breaths like cotton. If there is no pressure, the fabric compresses, trapping air in the fabric weave. There is more air in the buckyballs that run through the fabric. That air is sufficient to keep the average person alive for about ten minutes.”

  Bob walked over to the young man’s desk, reached down, and popped the catch under the chair and pulled out a bubble. “This is a bubble. You will see the little bubble sign, all over the habitat; you will also see it on ships. They are everywhere.” He waved around the room, pointing out locations. “This room has nearly a hundred bubbles. Most rooms this size have fewer, but there are plenty, everywhere.

  “So, I can live in vacuum for about ten minutes, until I can reach an emergency air pack, also all over the place. None of you would live more than thirty to sixty seconds; there would be nothing anyone could do to save you. And no one would try.

  “Shipsuits do come in various colors and otherwise they are indeed uniform. Those colors specify your job or your primary skill. It’s a real help in an emergency if someone’s been injured to be able to look around and see a red shipsuit, and call on that person to see to injuries. If you need an engineer, it’s helpful to know that a person in a light blue shipsuit can help. White shipsuits are for people without specialties -- unless they are in the Fleet and then it means Line Command. You won’t ever see a Portie in one of those.

  “You will want to learn the meaning of the various colors; your life could depend on that knowledge.

  “This is a non-certificate class; it is an orientation only. The purpose is to fill you with stories about life on the Rim, then take you out in space and let you experience it for yourself -- in a safe and controlled environment. You will not be in space again, unless and until you have certificates attesting to your competency to be there.” Bob pointed at the boy’s seat. “Sit.”

  “We will now take a sixty minute break. When you return, you will all have shipsuits on.”

  One of the girls spoke up. “Where do we get them?”

  “There are stores on the main concourse,” Bob told them, addressing the class, not her in particular.

  Another girl added, “And what do we use for money? My parents are pretty tapped.”

  “Life support on the Rim is free, always.” Bob smiled, “Well, not exactly free. At the store they will tell you what a shipsuit costs. You can pay or not -- you can’t deny someone a shipsuit. On the other hand, if you don’t pay, or make arrangements to pay, then don’t expect to get more than the time of day from them again, if that.

  “Life on the Rim isn’t difficult -- you just need to know what’s safe and what’s not. None of you know what’s safe. My job is to get you started down that
road. Now, one hour, and then be back here.”

  Bob sat down at the desk, and pulled up the records of the class members. John Evan Kerrigan -- that was the name of the one who’d first spoken up. Nancy Marie Lopez y Gonzales; her parents were tapped. Ellen Felter, who had asked the best question of the class. Dee Cee Williams, the black girl. Hanta Yar, the boy he could not place by race. Susan Yee, probably Chinese. Sam Benjamin, Israeli and quiet, but who had serious eyes. Alexander, no last name. Probably Slavic, Bob thought. Thomas Sewell Grant, from Richmond, Virginia. He recognized them all. The last picture was a mystery; he’d counted noses, twice. Ten kids; the last was Sarah Grant, sister to Thomas. She was short, blonde, about twelve years old. It was odd that he couldn’t recognize the face and that she was so much younger than the rest.

  Bob looked at the clock -- forty minutes were gone. It wasn’t good that no one was back. Or, failing that, the best: they’d done it as a group. It would be amusing if they went as a group, to find out who organized it.

  Sure enough, about ten minutes before the hour was up, they returned together, everyone wearing a shipsuit instead of carrying it. Twice he passed over the last person, before he finally saw her. It was a very odd thing. Her picture was more remarkable than the person. She was small, quiet and nondescript. She looked younger than her age.

  “Now, everyone put on a bubble,” Bob told them quietly, watching the group intently.

  They looked at him and then looked at each other. It was Sarah Grant who had her bubble out of the seat and on, a second later. A simple thing; alignment didn’t matter, nothing mattered. You put it over your head, the bubble and the shipsuit took care of the rest.

  Two people fought that, and, of course, lost the battle.

  “Good, you now all have bubbles on. Do you notice that you can hear me?”

  There were nods. “That’s not because the compartment hasn’t depressurized; that is, not because there is still air to transmit sound. It wouldn’t matter; there are receivers in the bubble. They are very, very tough and multiply redundant.”