by Rod Walker
I blinked. “Are you asking me to join you at Starways?”
“I am,” said Corbin.
“Won’t they be pissed that everyone in my family was a terrorist?” I said. “Except you, of course.”
Corbin shrugged. “New Chicago isn’t all that big of a place. It’s a backwater, really. All the Thousand Worlds are out there, Nikolai, and New Chicago is just one of them. Even if you don’t want to stay with Starways, you can put in some time, find someplace new to live once you get your feet under you.”
I thought about it for a moment, but there really wasn’t anything to consider.
“All right,” I said. “One condition, though.”
“What’s that?” said Corbin, frowning.
“We never come back to New Chicago again.”
Corbin looked relieved. “Deal.”
That afternoon we drove to the local Starways office, and I signed all the necessary papers. The next morning, I spent the remainder of Mom’s money on the tools I would need and gathered together everything I wanted to keep in a pair of footlockers.
Three days after that, Corbin and I left New Chicago on board the Rusalka, a long-distance freighter, and I began my new life.
My first year with Starways and the Rusalka was uneventful, but it was busy, busy, busy.
Let me tell you about my first love, the Rusalka. She was a big, ugly ship, and she looked like a fat gray trash can with a sublight engine bolted to the end, but she was old and tough and she was good at what she did. She could move five hundred thousand tons, so Starways used her for the heaviest jobs, such as moving comet ice to colonies, or transporting an entire wheat crop, or hauling immense quantities of ore from asteroid belts and heavy metal planets. She was a true starship, so she couldn’t put down in an atmosphere, which meant cargo shuttles had to carry her loads down to planetary surfaces in relays. She could dock easily enough with orbital stations or deep-space platforms, though.
Keeping her spacing was a lot of work. And a big chunk of that work fell upon Corbin and me.
The Rusalka was nearly a kilometer long, but for such a massive ship, she didn’t carry much crew. The crew complement was only one hundred and thirty, and Corbin’s official rank was Master Technician. Beneath him he had a dozen technicians and one overwhelmed apprentice.
Each technician had a different area of expertise and focus—life support, ion thrusters, mechanical systems, cargo handling robotics, weaponry, gravitics, and so forth—but we all worked together as a team on the bigger jobs, both for the sake of efficiency and for cross-training in case of accident and illness. I spent a lot of time with Corbin, but he regularly rotated me out to each of the specialized techs to learn their systems. Starways Hauling Company did not hire from any of the major universities, since so many of them were infested by Social Party members and their curricula reduced most of their graduates to uselessness, so the company maintained its own certification program.
That was to my advantage, because once I finished four years of apprenticeship, I could take the tests and get my own technician’s certificate without ever having to set foot on a university campus.
I liked life aboard the Rusalka. The work was hard, but it was never boring, and I learned something new every day. Alas, there wasn’t much opportunity for mischief. Nothing could kill a man faster than the hard vacuum of space, and if a crew member slacked off during a hyperdrive overhaul or an airlock refitting, his carelessness could doom everyone on board the ship. That awareness of constant danger hung over everything we did, and the crew knew it had to work together to survive. Mom used to say nothing united people quite like a common enemy, and aboard the Rusalka we all had a common foe—the airless vacuum, the hard radiation, the possibility of hyperspace navigation errors, space debris, and a thousand other hazards.
To summarize, everything in space wanted to kill us, and we were always aware of that.
We spent a lot of time in space because the Rusalka took unusually long trips, and we would spend three or four weeks in transit at a time. Everyone called human-inhabited space the Thousand Worlds, but only something like one to five percent of stars had planets capable of supporting human life. So human-inhabited space really ought to have been called the Hundred Thousand Worlds, but I suppose that was too much of a mouthful. To get from one colony planet to another, the Rusalka had to hyperjump through ten or twenty or even thirty barren systems first, like a kid jumping over a stream using stepping stones.
However, just because a system was barren didn’t mean it was uninhabited. Sometimes enterprising merchants set up refueling platforms, or the sort of space stations where they offered goods and services that were illegal on most of the Thousand Worlds. Miners dug out rare ore from asteroids, and a few enterprising colonists carved out tunnels on barren moons and built elaborate hydroponic setups. There were a lot of little colonies out there like that, usually founded by religious fundamentalists or political extremists of one kind or another.
There were also a lot of dead little colonies like that, because, as I mentioned, space is dangerous.
In addition to the natural hazards, pirates also liked to set up shop in deserted systems, along with slave traders based on one of the Prophet worlds. Sometimes the pirates worked for themselves, sometimes they were government-sponsored privateers, and sometimes they were Social Party revolutionaries.
So in addition to maintenance and repair, we spent a lot of time in weapon and self-defense drills. I discovered that I wasn’t a very good shot in real life despite my years of experience playing shooters. It was a bit of a letdown, to be honest.
Corbin had a lot of friends among the crew. He had been with Starways for a long time and served on a bunch of different ships. Our executive officer was a man named Robert Hawkins, and he looked the part of the dashing captain from a movie. Apparently he and Corbin had served together in the Coalition navy before joining Starways, and Hawkins took it upon himself to teach me how play poker. The ship’s computer operator was another old friend of Corbin’s, a man named John Murdock. He was taciturn, sullen, and ill-tempered, but very good at his job. Whenever I needed something from him, he produced it with no more complaint than a sour glare.
The youngest technician on the ship had been Corbin’s previous apprentice, and he was named Arthur Rodriguez. He was in charge of cargo robotics, and he was close enough to my own age that we became friends. We spent a lot of time playing video games in our off hours in the technicians’ lounge. I won the racing games, but he always won the first-person shooters. Our favorite game was Gunno-Tatakai, probably because we were equally matched and both tended to win about half of the time.
Overall, I liked working on the Rusalka, and I got along with most of the crew. They were nothing like my mom’s friends, which I appreciated. I don’t know what Corbin had told them before I came aboard, but none of them ever said a single word about the bombing or my family.
There was only one fly in the ointment… but it was a pretty big fly.
We all hated the captain.
Captain Thomas Williams looked the part of a sober starliner captain— tall, a bit paunchy, with a magisterial gray beard and a dignified bearing. If he was in a movie, you would expect him to stand stoically upon the bridge while the ship went down and the women and children headed for the escape pods. The first day I met him, I expected him to stop and make a speech.
Instead he scowled at me and glared at Corbin.
“What’s this?” said Williams. “He looks like you, Mr. Rovio. You hook up with a stripper on New Chicago seventeen years ago?”
I blinked a few times.
“No such luck, sir,” said Corbin. “This is my nephew, Nikolai. I’ve taken him on as a technical apprentice.”
“Did you, now?” rumbled Williams. He squinted at me. “You’d better listen to your uncle, boy, and work hard. You look like a hooligan. Are you a hooligan?”
I was half-impressed by the perceptive observation. I had,
after all, indulged in my fair share of hooliganism on New Chicago.
“No, sir!” I said, then amended my statement in the interest of honesty. “Never on board this ship, sir.”
“Good! I’ll have no hooligans on this ship, Mr. Rovio.” He flicked a finger against my forehead, marched off, and as near as I could tell later, entirely forgot about my existence.
So Captain Williams was a jerk. That wasn’t so bad in itself. A man can be a jerk, and so long as he’s competent, in space it doesn’t matter so much. The problem was that Williams was both incompetent and lazy. He spent days inside his cabin, refusing to emerge for any reason, and Mr. Hawkins served as de facto captain on those days. Frankly, Hawkins would have made for a better captain anyhow. Whenever Williams finally emerged from his cabin, he made a mess of things. He interfered with work schedules, or gave orders that added several days to our delivery times without any discernible reason, and sometimes did things that made no rational sense.
The crew worked around him as best they could. I was a new kid, “green as vat-grown algae” as Murdock liked to say, but even I could see that Williams didn’t know what he was doing. To the experienced crewmen, he must have been intolerable.
“Why does he still have a job?” I asked Corbin one day as I helped him rebuild an oxygen scrubber on the crew deck.
Corbin grunted and held out a hand, and I passed him the appropriate size of wrench. He blinked at it and looked at me.
“How did you know to give me the five-eighths wrench?” he said.
“Because,” I said, “you’re removing the oxidation module. That means the five-eighths.”
“Good,” he said with approval, loosening the bolts. “You’re learning.”
“I can only learn by asking questions, right?”
“Right,” said Corbin.
I glanced around the corridor, but the crew deck was deserted at the moment.
“So why does a guy like Williams have a ship and you don’t?” I said.
“Because he’s the captain,” said Corbin.
“He might be the captain,” I said, “but even if he used both hands, he couldn’t find his own…”
“Nikolai,” Corbin cut me off and I shut up. “It’s against company regulations to criticize the captain.”
“To his face,” I said. “In public. Anyhow, I’m not criticizing, I’m asking.”
Corbin sighed. “Very well. If you must know, nepotism. His brother is on the company’s board. His younger brother, I should point out. I suspect Thomas Williams has always been the family’s-.”
“Black sheep?” I suggested. Corbin passed me the five-eighths wrench, and I handed him a screwdriver.
“No, they haven’t cast him out,” said Corbin. “Their incompetent sheep, let us say. He’s bounced around from one career to another without making a mark, and he finally had to beg his brother for a job. Of course, the relative of a board member can’t do something useful like repair work or navigation, no, of course not. He has to be a bloody captain, so the rest of us just have to deal with him.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“World’s not fair,” said Corbin, checking the air filter in the scrubber.
“We’re not on any world right now,” I said.
Corbin snorted, unimpressed. “Universe isn’t fair, then. We’ve both learned that the hard way.”
“True,” I agreed. “So what do we do when an idiot is the captain?”
“Stay out of his way, mostly,” said Corbin. “We do our jobs and we get paid. It’s Mr. Hawkins’s job to deal with the captain, which is why he makes the big money. Such as it is. That’s why I buy Hawkins a bottle of brandy when we complete our runs. He deserves it. Besides, I doubt the captain will be with the Rusalka much longer. Sooner or later he’ll get rotated to another ship. Meanwhile, we’ll just do our jobs and let Hawkins handle the captain.”
That was sensible advice.
However, I soon discovered that neither Corbin nor Hawkins were actually following it. One day Corbin left a file open on his device while he was checking an airlock, and I saw that he, Hawkins, and Murdock had been recording a list of the captain’s various misdeeds and derelictions of duty, complete with date, time, and ample supporting documentation. Sooner or later, I realized, they were arranging to get Thomas Williams fired.
I was fine with that. Especially after the incident on the bridge.
It happened about three months after I joined the Rusalka. A bridge console had blown some fuses, and replacing them was a time-consuming and tedious job, but a simple and necessary one nonetheless, which made it a perfect job to fob off on a technician apprentice.
I gathered up my toolbox and the replacement fuses and drove a little electric cart down the main dorsal corridor to the bridge. The Rusalka was a big ship, and all the vital areas were scattered around the gray metal cylinder of the cargo hold, for redundancy in case of asteroids or radiation or attack or space debris. Walking everywhere was much-needed exercise, but sometimes you needed to get places in a hurry, and that’s where the carts came in handy. Plus, that toolbox got heavy fast.
The steel blast doors hissed open, and I stepped onto the bridge, which was mounted on the front of the ship’s dorsal ridge. It was a big oval-shaped room with consoles lining the walls, windows of transparent armor-alloy looking into space. That day, we were making our way through an empty system to the next hyperjump point, and a sullen red giant blazed off the ship’s port side like a big, cranky eye. Mr. Hawkins sat at the executive officer’s console, and a half-dozen other crewers sat at their stations.
I hesitated a little when I saw Captain Williams in his chair, but he took no notice of me. He was, in fact, playing a card game on his device. That violated all kinds of rules, and I imagined Hawkins had already made a note of it in his file.
“Rovio,” said Hawkins, turning in his seat. “The younger.”
“Sir,” I said. “Corbin sent me for the cargo console.”
“Yeah, you had better do it now,” said Hawkins, gesturing at a console in the corner of the bridge, its displays dark. “If we have to coordinate the drones from the cargo bay, it will double our unloading time.”
“That long, sir?” I said.
“Maybe even longer,” said Hawkins. “Trying to unload a ship with each drone doing its own thing takes forever. Time is money in this business.”
“Yes,” said Williams. Both Hawkins and I glanced at him. The captain hadn’t looked up from his game. “Then stop jawing and get back to work, both of you.”
I felt an overwhelming urge to ask him about his card game, but I managed to restrain myself.
“Yes, sir,” said Hawkins. “Rovio, you heard the captain. Replace those fuses.”
“Sir,” I said. I crossed to the console, pushed the seat out of the way, and got to work. For some reason, whether from stupidity or malevolence, or possibly both, on the part of the designers, the fuses in the console were located behind the backup power supply and the local hard drives. So to swap out the fuses, I had to disconnect the power supply, pull it out, unmount the drives, and put them aside. Then I would have to install the fuses, boot the whole thing up, and do an integrity check on the drives and the console’s processor.
I had removed the power supply and was just starting on the first of the three hard drives when a boot clanked against the deck.
I looked up to see Captain Williams glaring down at me.
“Captain?” I said.
“A question for you,” said Williams.
I saw Hawkins watching us from his station.
“Should I finish the console first, Captain?” Pieces of it were scattered on the deck around me.
“It can wait,” said Williams. “There is something I want to know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, waiting for the question.
He stared at me, scowling, and I realized that he wanted me to stand up. My uncle had taught me never to leave my tools scattered around a job an
d he had also taught me never to walk away from an unfinished job unless my bladder was about to explode or I was spraying arterial blood or something, and that training screamed for me to pack up my tools and get the wires out of the way.
But I already been told it could wait, so I got to my feet instead.
Williams strode to the far end of the bridge, where the windows looked out upon the Rusalka’s scarred hull and the blackness of space beyond. For the most part, the kinetic deflectors kept meteors and other debris from carving up the hull, but here and there I saw scorch marks where something had gotten through them. Beyond, I saw the sullen fire of the red giant star, and the blaze of the star fields. We were far enough out that the sun’s light didn’t drown out the stars, and it was a magnificent sight.
You can’t get a view like that planetside. Unless the planet has no atmosphere, in which case you are choking to death and do not have time to contemplate the view.
I glanced at Captain Williams, and saw that he was frowning. “Well, Mr. Rovio,” he said in an unfriendly manner.
That couldn’t be good.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“What do you think of the Rusalka so far?” said Williams. “You’ve been aboard for what, two months now?”
“Three months, sir,” I said. “And she’s a fine ship, Captain, with a good crew.”
Williams nodded. “Corbin Rovio speaks very highly of you.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“But he is your uncle, you know. Of course he would speak highly of you.”
I’d been warned about this. The Captain’s moods were as volatile and as unpredictable as a solar storm. He could turn from friendly and joking to coldly furious on a dime, often for no discernable reason. I would wonder later if he was mentally ill.
