This Corner of the Universe

by Britt Ringel

  It took another year for Renard’s lawyers to make the right arguments and push the right buttons to have Skathi reopened for economic development. Even before the system officially reopened, Renard sent in surveyor ships in preparation for the authority to reestablish mining operations. Understanding that they had no margin for error, Renard towed in an orbital prospector outpost. The orbital was Skathi-3’s first satellite and was positioned in technically a graveyard orbit, an orbit a few hundred kilometers above standard geosynchronous that satellites were typically moved into at the end of their lifespan.

  In times past, such a mining station would have been placed much closer to the mining area. However, costly experience had taught space-faring miners that placing their “home base” close to an easily navigable point in space made sense. In addition, if a larger refining station was brought in, it could use the gravity well of the uninhabited planet to safely dispose of the unwanted materials produced while preprocessing the ore for longer transport.

  In support of the station, one surveyor ship and dozens of ore extractors began work in the Beta Field. It was agreed that the Alpha Field could wait. Almost immediately, more trouble arose. A mining extractor decompressed while working on a large Beta Field asteroid. The crew survived but the ore extractor was removed from operation. Since the initial trouble, another extractor suffered extreme equipment failure due to large radiation saturation, and a third extractor went missing along with both of its crewmembers. Such attrition was not entirely uncommon in deep space mining operations. Extractors were relatively tiny ships that performed extremely dangerous tasks. The work continued despite the mishaps.

  Over several months, the Beta Field grudgingly yielded its riches and ore transport freighters began to dive into the system to haul the promethium to industrial systems deeper within the Republic. With the addition of freighters, a navigation buoy was placed at the Narvi tunnel point inside the Skathi system. This beacon, replacing the inoperative four-year-old fleet survey buoy, not only assisted with navigation but also acted as a signal repeater to enhance communications in the radiation-saturated system.

  As the output of ore from the Beta Field grew, the need to replace the orbital grew with it. A prospector outpost was too small to handle the quantities of incoming and outgoing ore. Thus, it was necessary for Renard to tow one of their four existing mining stations to Skathi. The Refining And Loading Facilities, called RALFs for short, were larger facilities better equipped to process mineral extractions from frontier mining systems. It took several months of coordination but eventually RT-17 inserted a RALF and loaded up the prospector station. It was during the loading phase of the prospector station that Skathi lost its first ore freighter.

  The ore freighter was a HandySize general-purpose freighter named Joanne J. Bellows, after the daughter of the original owner. Bought and sold several times since her launch, she was an independent freighter operated by Captain Louis Kendry. Bellows was heading to the Narvi tunnel point, navigating its way through the Beta Field, when she suffered major decompression and was lost with all hands. A search for lifeboats by the Renard surveyor ship and all of its excavators revealed nothing but the freighter’s ELTI. As word about the disaster spread, private freighter captains raised their prices to transport ore from the Skathi system and with Renard’s own ore freighter fleet heavily committed throughout the known galaxy, it had little choice but to pay. Where the loss of life had failed to spur an investigation into the myriad of Skathi mining accidents, the loss of revenue triumphed. Renard Mining Enterprises CEO Baltimore H. Renard III pressured the Brevic Republic’s governing counsel for assistance. As political pressure points were applied, the Brevic navy was soon given its sailing orders to divert some of its already over-extended resources into the Skathi system.

  * * *

  The physical manifestation of those orders dove out of the tunnel point, firmly secured to the bed of RT-17. After the wave of nausea passed, Heskan ordered a routine systems check along with a full sensor sweep. No ship had ever dove out of a tunnel point into the wrong system but that didn’t prevent ship captains and navigators across the universe from verifying their destination. Once satisfied Anelace was operating at full capacity and that they had confirmed transit to the Skathi system, Heskan ordered Ensign Truesworth to sensor ping the navigation beacon by the Narvi tunnel point.

  “No ships within immediate range, one ship transponder detected twenty light-minutes starboard, near the edge of Beta Field. The transponder signal is green and identifies herself as Renard Ore Extractor Thirteen. The mining station’s lighthouse shows green as well but I get no response from the Narvi navigation buoy to our ping, Captain,” Ensign Jack Truesworth informed and set about to reattempt contact with the buoy.

  Heskan sat back into his captain’s chair and muttered, “Things sure seem to break a lot in Durmont’s corner of the universe.” Indeed, the navigation beacon inside the Narvi system positioned by the Skathi tunnel point had also been nonfunctional when they dove into t-space toward Skathi. Right before the dive, Heskan sent a burst communication back toward Hulda for Lieutenant Durmont, informing him that Heskan was keeping his two fleet buoys stored in Anelace’s hanger in case he needed them in Skathi and that another corvette would have to travel out to replace the failed one at the Skathi tunnel point. He had not waited for a reply since it would not have come for several hours, as comm messages traveled across space at “only” the speed of light.

  Glad I didn’t wait since Durmont would have undoubtedly told me to replace the buoy in Narvi. Using that one there and now this one here would mean I’d be completely out before my mission even started.

  “Jack, once we detach from RT Seventeen, we’ll have to get a buoy up and functioning near the tunnel point,” Heskan told his sensor officer. Turning toward the ship’s navigator, Heskan ordered, “Ensign Selvaggio, please start calculating a course through the Beta Field to the RALF.”

  “Aye, sir,” Diane Selvaggio answered softly, her olive complexion and brown eyes revealing familial ties to the New Roma star system.

  Heskan had toured the ship and met the entire crew during the four-day tunnel dive to Skathi. He had made special effort to be introduced to his six officers and he had been impressed with each of them. As a whole, the crew was certainly young but each seemed to be interested in their respective jobs and happy to serve, if even on a “lowly” corvette. Heskan had taken every opportunity to make clear that being on a smaller ship meant more opportunities to shine and that the increased duties meant a much more rounded experience than serving on the larger ships. “You bloom where you’re planted,” Heskan had preached. The old expression had survived from the days of purely terrestrial militaries.

  “RT Seventeen is hailing us. She says her speed is now zero light. I confirm, sir, we are at relative rest in space.” Truesworth’s voice snapped Heskan’s attention back to the present.

  “Very well. Send my regards to the mining station manager and patch me through to Captain Darmer, please.”

  A nod from Truesworth and Heskan spoke, “Captain Darmer, we’re prepared to be detached. Please inform us when your crew is finished and thanks for the ride.”

  RT-17 confirmed and several hours later, the corvette was free from her bonds. After more pleasantries, the lumbering tug came about and dove back into the tunnel point, headed once again toward Narvi. Anelace floated alone at the tunnel point that was now inaccessible to her.

  “Jack, who’s deploying the buoy?” questioned Heskan.

  “Petty Officer Davis and Spaceman Ford.”

  “Okay, can you locate the dead buoy and send those coordinates down to Davis?” Heskan rose from his command chair and moved toward the bridge door. “I’m going to observe, it will give me a chance to tour the shuttle bay again. Lieutenant Vernay, you have the bridge.”

  The petite blonde responded, “Aye, sir, WEPS has the bridge.”

  Lieutenant, junior grade, Stacy Vernay was proof that g
ood things came in small packages. Graduating from the Brevic Naval Academy near the top of her class, she had demonstrated near savant qualities when it came to weapons operations. Her personnel file indicated two weeks before her commissioning to ensign, her assignment drop scheduled her to deploy to a command cruiser. Aghast, she begged her academy instructors to pull strings to get her reassigned to something smaller. Vernay didn’t want to be one of dozens of ensigns lost in the shuffle of a large ship. She wanted bridge experience and leadership opportunities. In a rare act of capitulation, Brevic Personnel Center relented and after serving only two years on the command cruiser Brazen, Ensign Vernay transferred to Anelace. Close to two more years and one promotion later, Lieutenant Vernay had almost four thousand hours of logged bridge experience as the head of Anelace’s weapons section and hundreds of hours of command experience as the ship’s third officer.

  In three months, Vernay was due for promotion to full lieutenant and transfer from Anelace. She was excited for the increase in rank but still very aware that promotion to lieutenant was but a modest accomplishment and only slightly more difficult than the one to lieutenant, junior grade. She had once sarcastically explained the requirements to Ensigns Selvaggio and Truesworth, both rapidly approaching promotion to lieutenant, jg. “You just have to have a pulse to make jay-gee,” she had said, “but you have to have a pulse and be able to fog a mirror with your breath for full lieutenant.” Vernay knew this was an exaggeration but she also knew that future promotions past lieutenant would be much more competitive. Her next assignment would be flowing from Brevic Personnel Center any week, and, although she looked forward to greater responsibility, she was sad to leave the Anelace family. In typical fashion, BPC had yet to assign her replacement.

  Vernay, along with first officer Mike Riedel, Diane Selvaggio manning navigation and Jack Truesworth at sensors, comprised the entirety of Heskan’s bridge officers. Though there were separate chairs for the captain and first officer and while they would both be on the bridge during emergencies, each normally took a different watch for routine operations. Anelace’s remaining two officers were the ship’s engineers who generally stayed in the engineering compartments located near the aft of the ship. It was the single largest compartment both in size and in numbers with Lieutenant Brandon Jackamore as Chief Engineer supervising twenty enlisted personnel and Ensign Elena Antipova, the junior engineering officer. With their hands full keeping power and propulsion systems running smoothly, neither officer had much opportunity or desire to stand a watch on the bridge. Jackamore, Anelace’s second officer by virtue of his rank, had never commanded the bridge in all his time on board.

  Compared to Engineering, the other organizational sections were small. Navigation, under Selvaggio, and Sensors, under Truesworth, had but three enlisted crewmembers in each. Only the crews in Weapons and Operations could come close to rivaling Engineering’s number. Vernay supervised eight enlisted personnel spread out among Anelace’s single mass driver and her four pulse lasers while Operations, under Chief Brown, had eight junior enlisted personnel to cover day-to-day operations and to act as damage control men and medics in the event of combat. The crew of Operations would also act as a marine contingent if the need to board a freighter arose.

  Together, these forty-three enlisted crewmembers and seven officers comprised the family that was BRS Anelace. If Anelace was a living thing, these fifty souls were the life’s blood that flowed through the ship. The average age was twenty-two and, Captain Heskan notwithstanding, each crewmember had been on Anelace for at least sixteen months. “Ana’s a good ship,” Lieutenant Riedel had told Heskan his first night aboard. He was right, thought Heskan as he moved quickly down the lower deck toward the ladder descending to the shuttle bay. After his descent, Heskan ensured the hanger’s airlock status indicator was a friendly green and entered.

  Anelace’s shuttle bay was the second largest ship compartment after Engineering. Designed to hold a Class C atmospheric shuttlecraft for general-purpose use, the shuttle bay also acted as a makeshift hold for large items. Currently, the bay held two fleet navigation buoys that Anelace had been stocked with prior to her attachment to RT-17.

  Standing just over six meters, the buoy not only acted as an easily located beacon to mark where a tunnel drive could safely initiate a dive, it also sequenced ships into an orderly traffic pattern to ensure safe jumps for each starship when conditions around a tunnel point were crowded. More valuable to the sporadic Skathi traffic, the buoy also could act as a repeater and amplifier for communication signals, helping punch data streams through the Beta Field distortion.

  Next to the buoy were two men outfitted in EMUs, Extravehicular Maneuvering Units. The EMU attached to the standard Brevic naval spacesuit and allowed for spacewalks. Alongside the two suited figures, a third crewman, Sensorman Third Class Deveraux, helped them make last minute adjustments in preparing the buoy for deployment.

  “PO Davis, how goes the prep?” Heskan queried.

  The sensorman second class raised the faceplate of his suit. “We’re nearly ready, sir. Spaceman Ford and I will have it operational within a couple hours.”

  “That’s fine, we have plenty of time so there’s no rush,” Heskan replied. “The way these buoys break in this system, let’s take our time and have a nice, smooth deployment.” We only have one more so we can’t afford anything but that, he thought. “One more thing, Davis, Ensign Truesworth will send you the location of the dead buoy. Do you think you can retrieve it?” Heskan asked.

  Davis arched an eyebrow. “We could, sir, but we really don’t have the necessary equipment or the spare parts to repair it. We’d have to cannibalize from the other functional buoy in the hanger. Brevic command kind of treats these things as disposable anyway.” He lightly kicked the side of the buoy.

  Heskan smiled and nodded while waiting for the petty officer to finish his sentence. “I don’t want to fix her but I would like to know why she broke.”

  Once the preparation of the new buoy was complete, Heskan and Deveraux retreated from the shuttle bay to its control room. From the safety of the control room, Deveraux’s practiced hands danced over the console’s controls and removed gravity and atmosphere from the bay. The entire floor of the aft end of the hanger opened and Heskan could see infinite space past the bottom hull of Anelace. He watched as Davis and Ford floated up slightly with the buoy and then over and down through the aperture.

  The EMU operation took three hours, two hours to deploy the new buoy and test its functions and one hour to “walk” to the failed buoy, capture it and stow it inside the hanger. By the time gravity and air were restored in the shuttle bay, both sensormen were drenched in perspiration. Heskan had long since returned to the bridge to better monitor the spacewalk but kept his comments to himself. The operation was Ensign Truesworth’s show to run and Heskan knew that if he stepped over the young ensign to try and dictate the process, he would not only show he didn’t trust him but also would garner his resentment.

  With the mission finished successfully, Heskan leaned back and smiled. “That was excellent work, Jack.” The ensign beamed. “Make sure you pass along my compliments to your whole section.” All three men had been involved: Davis, Deveraux and Ford. “Also, I’d like you to begin a forensic analysis of the dead buoy. If we can figure out why it died, maybe we can fortify our remaining buoy.”

  “Yes, sir. I’d bet it’s a case of radiation exposure but we’ll start from scratch so we don’t overlook anything.” Truesworth pressed a button on his console and started talking to his section.

  Heskan activated his own console on the left arm of his chair to bring up an image of the Skathi system chart. Far across the chart from their current position lay the system’s second tunnel point. The Skoll tunnel point and the mining station are a long way apart. I want to check on that other buoy by the Skoll tunnel point but I suppose we should go meet the station manager first. He closed the system chart and looked to Selvaggio, “Nav
igation, set course for the RALF. ETA?”

  Ensign Selvaggio answered immediately, “Four hours, thirty minutes to reach the station, sir.” The time spent traveling through the Beta Field at reduced speed added an extra hour and a half to the trip but it was still faster than skirting the asteroid field by moving out of the system’s elliptical plane.

  Heh, she must have been continuously updating the course to answer that quickly, Heskan smiled inwardly. I’m starting to love this crew. Six Allison T-22 drives lit off in unison and Anelace spun like a ballerina to point toward the Beta Field, some 20lm distant.

  Chapter 5

  Renard Number Three Refining and Loading Facility was twenty times larger than Anelace. Although much of that space was dedicated to the storage and refinement of ore, it still had roughly twice the livable space than the corvette despite the fact that it only housed twenty-five technicians. The RALF had two large docks that enabled the loading of semi-refined ore onto freighters that would then transport the resources to whichever planet would process them. Anelace had docked in the auxiliary location as the primary dock was hosting a 500,000 cubic meter HandyMax bulk freighter.

  The orbital station manager was a short and robust man with greying hair. His face was marked with the lines of a man who had seen more than his fair share of stress and as Heskan entered the station manager’s office, he assumed such was the case now. The manager nodded curtly toward Heskan but continued to talk in heavily Russian-accented English to the freighter captain in the room. “Further, I don’t understand why you people bring less than full loads of supplies. Is difficult enough to be operating in the frontier but doing it without full allotment of supplies makes it much worse!” The station manager looked exasperatedly around the room before finishing angrily, “It doesn’t even make sense, where is economic—” he struggled to find the right word, “—fortune in coming all way out here without full load? Renard pays by tonnage, not by trip.”