Confidence Game

by Britt Ringel

  Undeterred, Brooke crossed her arms and proclaimed, “I still think I’m on to something.” She studied Lochlain intently but when he offered no further remarks, she dropped her hands to the console. “Well, whatever the case, we’re the last ship in orbit and we’re filled to the brim so there’s no point sticking around this doomed planet. Shinshin’s life support is burning.”

  “When does the planet’s magnetosphere collapse?”

  “In a little over three hours.” She entered the commands that would break the virtual freighter from its orbit. As she set her course for the Adrastea tunnel point, she said, “I’m going to push the drives beyond limits. I think we can break point-two-three-C while in normal space.”

  “Isn’t there a huge risk you’ll destroy the inertial compensators or burn out a drive?”

  “I’m going to burn out a drive,” Brooke answered matter-of-factly. “Probably more than one. I don’t care what Shinshin’s condition is so long as we make it to the Adrastea orbital. Every minute in space counts for those poor people in the PRESERV containers.”

  “I guess we’ll be restarting the game after this run,” Lochlain stated dryly. “Maybe we should just start over now.”

  The game console chirped and Engineer Shi’s image appeared over the refugee list. The pleasing features of the woman’s face easily carried through her hologram. “Greetings, Captain,” the image began with its usual welcome. “We have a transmission from the surface.”

  Brooke’s eyes danced over the screen, widening as she silently read the communique. Her lips peeled away from her teeth in a macabre grimace. She sat at the console, silent and stunned.

  “What?” Lochlain asked too loudly.

  “It’s from the remaining colonists,” she replied. “They—they want to come with us.”

  “Well there’s no more room,” Lochlain said harshly. “We’re packed so full that I’m not even sure our life support will last for the trip to Adrastea.” He considered Brooke’s troubled expression. “How many more want to come?”

  Her eyes shimmered and her shoulders slumped. Her normally rich voice could only muster a whisper. “All of them. They say they’re willing to ride in standard cargo containers.”

  “That, that’s suicide!” Lochlain stammered angrily. “Standard containers don’t have life support. Hell, even if you put only ten colonists inside, they’d run out of oxygen in a matter of hours. The tunnel to Adrastea is twenty hours long!”

  Brooke swallowed hard in an attempt to rein in her emotions. Her voice was tight. “They say that they want their bodies to go home. They don’t want to be abandoned on an irradiated planet.”

  Lochlain rose angrily. “Who wrote this game? This is beyond morbid!” He vaulted from his chair and stomped toward the exit.

  “I—I’m going let them, Reece,” Brooke whispered miserably. “Maybe if we give them oxygen candles…”

  “Mercer,” he reasoned from near the lounge’s doorway, “oxygen candles will never hold out with the hundreds of people who will be jammed into each container. Besides, the atmosphere inside will grow so toxic it won’t matter if there’s oxygen present.”

  Her eyes closed. “I know,” she confessed.

  “Then why do it?”

  She raised a hand to gingerly wipe under her eyes. “Because I don’t feel like I have a choice. They just want to go home.”

  Chapter 36

  Lochlain watched his deck officers work in tandem. “Steady as she goes but update our position continuously once we’re inside of five light-minutes of the tunnel point. We have to know our exact position when we dive.”

  “Understood, Captain,” Lingenfelter confirmed. “With the triple buoys, I should be able to plot our spot within a few thousand meters.”

  Lochlain saw Truesworth cringe at her statement. “Something wrong, Jack?” He had quickly learned to seek the sensorman’s input.

  Truesworth ducked his head slightly. “No, sir. We’re doing the best we can with the equipment we’ve got.” He paused but added with longing, “I just have a feeling that I’m going to really miss not having a Naka-Fujita sensor suite.”

  Lingenfelter looked blankly at him.

  “Military-grade sensors, Elease,” he explained. “A thousand meter margin of error in a Brevic destroyer would get you tossed off the ship in a hurry.”

  The woman’s narrow frame slumped. “I’m sorry.”

  Truesworth quickly reached out and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Hey, I didn’t mean it that way.” He gave her a squeeze. “It’s not your fault that this old freighter doesn’t have a destroyer’s sensor capabilities.” He tugged gently on her shoulder until he could see her pale, blue eyes. The intensity of her stare made him shiver. “I, uh, you’re doing just fine, Elease,” he finished awkwardly.

  “Thanks, Jack.” She continued to take in the suddenly reticent man. “I know I’m a good navigator. I’m just brand new. It’s hard to match up well to people like you and Captain Lochlain. You guys have years of experience on several, different ships. Zanshin is the first starship I’ve ever taken into space.”

  Her frank admission sent a new barrage of ill tidings through Lochlain as he eavesdropped. He was taking Zanshin into the Izari Nebula. He was risking Brooke’s life and his entire crew on a trade route that even behemoth freighters avoided unless absolutely necessary. Furthermore, the arguably most important cog in the machine that would determine their success or failure was nascent at the helm. He cleared his throat to dislodge the doubt stuck inside it. “Just remember that you’re not alone, Elease.” He poured confidence into his voice. “Every, single crewman with even the most basic nav training is going to be backing you up and plotting parallel courses next to yours. We’re a team and we’re going to get to Carinae as one, so don’t think for a moment that you have to do this all by yourself.” He flashed his best carefree smile. “Got it?”

  Half an hour later, Zanshin maneuvered delicately near the tunnel point. As the freighter breached the 30ls barrier, a navigation buoy transmitted a final warning of the dangers ahead, including the fact that no ship had attempted the trip in the last nine weeks.

  On Zanshin’s system plot, three differently colored freighter symbols represented the individual efforts of each deck officer on the bridge. They had been meticulously calculating the ship’s position over the last ten minutes and comparing their results. The three markers overlapped to the point where they were almost a single symbol. Still, Lingenfelter continued to refine Zanshin’s position at the tunnel point for another ten minutes.

  “We are as close to dead center as I can get us, Captain,” she stated while wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. She glanced to the upper right of her panel. “Tunnel drive is active and ready to accept the charge.”

  “Execute,” Lochlain ordered after curling his hands around the arms of his chair. A chime bleated through Zanshin three times as Lingenfelter activated the dive bell and Lochlain felt his body twist itself into tunnel space. The familiar queasiness passed rapidly.

  “We’re inside the Menali-Carinae tunnel, Captain,” Truesworth confirmed almost at once.

  “Position plotted at 10:03:09.6 ship’s time,” Lingenfelter announced immediately after him. She pushed the virtual throttles forward smoothly and eyed her panel. “Running up to point-one-C. We’re on our way.”

  Lochlain felt his stomach knot. It was irrational, he knew. The first fifteen hours of the 100-hour tunnel trip would be uneventful. Traveling this leg of the route was as simple as their trip to Menali had been. Yet still, he knew what lay beyond. He forced himself to exhale slowly and leaned back against his chair. “It should be smooth sailing for the first part. Elease, it’s your shift until 14:00 when I’ll relieve you.”

  Lingenfelter nodded but kept a paranoid eye on her panel, as if the ship could somehow swerve out of the tunnel without constant watch.

  “Then Jack takes over for me at 22:00,” Lochlain recited. It was the same
schedule he had voiced twice before. “And don’t forget that everyone meets in the ship’s mess at 01:00 tomorrow morning for our first round of anti-rad therapy.” He silently berated himself for repeating his orders. After another cleansing breath, he raised his arms over his head in a stretch. “We should get some rest, Jack. We’re going to need every bit of sleep we can get early on.” He knew that staying in the bridge might be seen as a lack of confidence in his navigator. Lochlain forced his body to accept the command to rise. While standing, he could almost read the navigation panel from the captain’s position. Forcing himself to look away, he walked stiffly to the exit.

  Truesworth stood from his own console and patted Lingenfelter’s shoulder lightly. He then strode to the portal and waited for his captain.

  “Remember that you’re not alone, Elease,” Lochlain repeated nervously again. “We’re just a ping away.”

  “I got this, Captain,” she answered in a confident tone.

  He nodded once and left the bridge with Truesworth. He could have sworn he heard his navigator exhale a sigh of relief after he left the compartment.

  * * *

  Naslund drank his glass of water as if his life depended upon it.

  “Skål!” Lingenfelter toasted cheerfully before tipping the contents of a small polymer bag into her mouth. She downed the sixty milliliters of medicine and swallowed rapidly. Immediately, her face puckered and she waved her slender hands. “Oh, God! That’s wretched!” She grabbed a nearby glass of water and drank greedily to wash away the aftertaste.

  Lochlain felt his own mouth sour as he tasted the anti-radiation medicine. He forced himself to swallow the vile liquid and then continued to swallow stubbornly several more times as his vision blurred. Reluctantly, he reached for his own glass of water. “Okay, she’s right. It’s awful.”

  Brooke hoisted her bag in a salute to Truesworth and poured the contents down her throat. The Brevic returned the gesture. Both let loose with gagging noises after they finished.

  Truesworth reached for water and confessed with watering eyes, “I wanted to be the big, bad Brevic but this stuff just sucks.” He took a cleansing pull from his glass. “It’s like drinking baby vomit.”

  Brooke gasped for breath after emptying her own glass. “I know this medicine will save our lives but deciding between drinking another seventeen doses of this crap or dying a horrible, irradiated death is a close call.”

  Zanshin was fifteen hours into her tunnel dive and weathering the journey well. In five minutes however, the trip’s second leg would begin and the danger would increase exponentially as the freighter pierced the perimeter of the Izari Nebula. The radiation protocol called for standard doses of anti-rad every ten hours during the next part of the journey. Thirty-five hours into the nebula, a spike in the radiation’s intensity would necessitate medicine to compensate every five hours. That third leg would continue for thirty-two more hours until the nebula’s intensifying emissions would warrant ingesting the powerful drugs every two and a half hours until Zanshin exited the tunnel.

  Lochlain placed his empty glass on the kitchen counter. “Well, I can see this is going to become a fun, little ritual.” He collected the empty bags and pushed them into the recycler. “The ship is looking good so far but the easy part is almost over. In a little under five minutes, we’ll be inside the nebula. Let’s stick with our watches and keep up with our course tracking.” He returned to the group hovering around the kitchen island. “We do that and we’ll make it through to Carinae where I promise the shots we drink won’t taste like baby vomit.” He smiled as his crew laughed. “And I promise that the first round is on me.”

  Truesworth excused himself to return to the bridge and finish his duty shift. Naslund and Lingenfelter, likewise, excused themselves for the comfort of their respective beds. After the crew departed, Lochlain finished gathering the glasses before walking out of the mess with Brooke and down the hall toward the stairwell. He turned when he reached the steps but Brooke stopped short and tapped on a wall panel to activate the dim lighting inside the aft spine.

  “I’m going to get the second circuit for the nav shield running,” she explained.

  “Shouldn’t we keep that in our hip pocket?” Lochlain asked.

  Brown hair fluttered around her face as she shook her head. “No, it doesn’t work like that. As soon as we enter the nebula, the timer starts and emissions begin hitting the hull. It’s all cumulative so strengthening the shield at the midpoint won’t make everything Zanshin’s already absorbed go away.” She looked around the ship’s hallway fondly. “It’s better to use it now and delay the clock starting for as long as it works.”

  “And how long will it run?”

  She shrugged delicately, wincing as her back reminded her she was still recovering. “Not long. Maybe ten, twelve hours.” Hazel eyes dropped to the deck plating. “It’s better than nothing.”

  Lochlain offered her a warm smile before starting down the stairs. “Well, come get some sleep after you’ve turned it on. You’re going to be a hot commodity once it fails.”

  Chapter 37

  The chime of the datapad grew in intensity. It began as a faint sound, a gentle nudge in the darkness of Lochlain’s bedroom, but before long it was a blaring claxon. He slapped at the datapad several times before his hand made contact with its surface.

  “Captain, I need you up here!” It was Truesworth and his voice was very insistent.

  Lochlain lifted his head and squinted at the datapad. His mouth moved but no sound came out. It was 00:33 and he had been asleep for less than three hours since completing his last shift. He swallowed again and croaked out, “What broke this time, Jack?”

  For the first hours inside the nebula, the freighter had traveled seemingly without concern. Lochlain thanked providence for Brooke’s improvised navigation shield circuit and simple, pure luck. During those opening hours, Zanshin had glided, impervious to the massive radiation she traveled through. However, at the thirtieth hour, on the second day into the tunnel dive, Brooke’s circuit had failed spectacularly, burning a nine-meter dark, hideous scar into the bulkhead of the ship. The damage was purely cosmetic but the scorched interior wall had been a harbinger of things to come.

  Zanshin’s first, real failure manifested two hours later. Four hours into Lochlain’s shift, the ship had flashed a security error code on the bow airlock door. The malfunction was insignificant in tunnel space, not even worth fixing. After all, there was no guarantee that a repaired airlock door would not malfunction a second time before reaching Carinae. Brooke decided that it would be more efficient to repair the defunct portal during their approach in-system to the Carinae orbital rather than dedicate resources now that would be better spent fortifying Zanshin’s critical systems.

  As the journey progressed, the freighter continued to rack up a litany of broken or breaking items through the evening although one of the cruelest had occurred roughly one hour after the airlock door seized. Lochlain discovered the ship’s coffee maker had died after he took a sip of gritty sludge meant to see him through the evening. This repair was deemed essential and both engineers had dedicated nearly an hour to its resolution.

  Truesworth’s voice matched the gloom inside Lochlain’s bedroom. “I don’t know what broke but it’s something major. Bring an engineer with you, Captain.”

  The sensorman’s response vaulted Lochlain back to the present. He slid his feet to the floor and threw back the sheets. Since entering the nebula, the entire crew had taken to wearing shipsuits to bed. The jumpsuits had a tendency to bunch uncomfortably but most sleep patterns were already interrupted by the anti-rad therapy every ten hours and the ever-growing list of action items on Zanshin. He reached out and shook Brooke next to him. “Mercer, wake up.” He walked around the bed. “Mercer, we’re needed on the bridge.”

  Brooke mumbled a reply. “I don’t want to go to school today.” She pulled the covers over her head.

  Lochlain shook her harder. “M
ercer, wake up!” He grabbed the edge of the sheets and ripped them off her.

  The woman groaned loudly but begrudgingly began to move. “You’re so mean.”

  “Something’s wrong on the bridge,” Lochlain repeated. “We need to get up there.”

  The pair stood behind Truesworth less than two minutes later. The Brevic sat at the navigator’s console and worked furiously to clear the page full of flashing errors before him. Lochlain glanced at the bridge’s wall screen and saw the lengthy list replicated over the navigation plot. Zanshin was in the middle of her thirty-eighth hour of the trip. His eyes refocused on the errors and he realized he did not recognize most of the blinking codes. “What happened, Jack?”

  Truesworth helplessly lifted his hands from the console. “I have no idea. One minute we’re sailing right along, the next all hell breaks loose.” He pointed at the screen. “I’ve never even seen half of these codes before.”

  Lochlain pecked at the panel to eliminate one of the faults. The error message disappeared but returned an instant later with a harsh buzz. “What?” he muttered in confusion.

  “Yeah, it’s seriously broken,” Truesworth agreed.

  “Mercer, what’s Error Code 3634EN-43F?” Lochlain asked.

  She consulted her datapad. “It’s some kind of translation error between the Encountrix sensing array and the navigation computer.” She pointed at the code under it and recited from memory, “That’s a navigation calculation failure, right there.” Her eyes read onward before again referring to her datapad. “The one after that is a Failure to Find error for a navigation table. The whole nav system isn’t receiving data from our sensors.”

  “What’s that mean?” Lochlain and Truesworth asked in unison.

  Brooke pursed her lips as she looked at the two men. “It means we’re sailing blind.”