Jaimie smirked. “We don’t need anything. The old man just wanted the cockpit to himself so he could use the comm line to talk to Earline. He’s afraid if he doesn’t talk to her a couple times a day that waitress will run off with some long-haul driver that comes through the diner.”
Nathan shrugged and leaned up against the other side of the spooler. “Well, I’m back here. Is there anything I can do?”
“You could get the hell out of my light,” Tanker said, pointing to the floating trouble light. “If I can’t see what I’m doing, I can’t fix his mistake.”
Nathan stood up and walked toward the back of the cargo bay. A porthole there let him see the curvature of Earth outside. Riding over the day side he could see white clouds in the upper atmosphere passing lazily below them. He smiled at the view, never growing tired of it. Reluctantly he turned back to the twins. “Okay, come on. What do we need to do to lay out this string?”
Jaimie nodded toward an apparatus bolted to the floor of the cargo bay near the outer door. “The Goose could use charging. Can you handle that?”
“I think so.” Nathan moved over to the device. It had two parts: a sphere dotted with plugs and holes attached to a second, more rectangular piece. He knew it was more properly known as a graviton generator and modulator but the crew of the King’s Ransom just called it the Goose.
As Nathan activated the device he thought about that. People had struggled with a solution for cleaning up the junk in space for centuries. Big pieces could just be grabbed or pushed into the atmosphere. The small pieces whizzing around numbered in the millions and each posed a danger to the traffic that arrived at and left Earth each day. Archie had come up with a plan that might make him rich. He had been struck by a streak of clever and the Goose lived at the heart of it.
Nathan watched as indicator lights on the device started switching from red and amber to green. He didn’t know what they all meant but green usually meant good. “Looks like it’s… coming up.” He hated sounding unsure of himself. Archie might have had a point about knowing how things worked. “So, how’s the spooler coming along?”
Tanker closed the access panel. “I think it will work, at least it will if I can keep him away from it,” he said, pointing at his brother. Tanker gestured at the Goose. “You know what that does, right?”
“It creates gravitons?”
“Right. You can’t go faster than light speed without mucking around with gravity. I don’t understand it myself but—”
“That’s because you flunked out of FTL school, numbnuts,” his brother said.
“And you didn’t? Of course, I don’t need to understand it because the heap we’re flying in will never go faster than light speed. What we came up with is recycling these—”
“You mean, Uncle Archie came up with it?” Jaimie said.
“Right, that’s what I meant.”
Jaimie came over and leaned against a reel of line. “What Tanker means to say is that the generator and modulator is used in faster than light flight to generate gravitons, which are the particles responsible for attraction, and align them in a single direction, which is necessary for faster than light flight.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Anyway, the units get too weak for faster than light flight but they’re just fine for what we want to do, which is clean up garbage. Do you get how that works yet?”
Nathan shrugged. “It… uses gravity?”
Tanker rolled his eyes at Jaimie and the two of them shook their heads. “Maybe you should just stay up front, man. You know, just fly the ship and let us take care of this stuff.”
“Archie wants me to get up to speed.”
Tanker wiped his hands on a rag and shoved it in his back pocket. “Okay, look, this isn’t complicated. If it was, Jaimie couldn’t do it.”
Jaimie threw him the finger behind his back.
A red light over the cargo bay door turned amber. Nathan pointed at it. “What’s that?”
“That’s what we see when we’re coming up on a zone,” Tanker said. He picked up a pair of gloves from the tool cart and tossed them to Nathan. “Here put these on. You can help.”
“I should probably get back up to the cockpit.”
Jaimie laughed. “Hell, if Uncle Archie wanted you up there you’d be there. Grab the end of that line and drag it over here.”
Nathan slid the gloves on and walked over to a half-used reel behind the spooler. “Right here?”
“Yeah. Now grab the end of that line and give it here. We don’t have long.”
Nathan tugged on the line but it seemed stuck. He tugged harder but it refused to budge. “What’s wrong with this?”
Tanker shook his head. “What are you, a frickin’ girl? Give it a hard yank. If we get into position without having that line spooled up we’ll miss the mark and Archie will chew our asses.”
Nathan gripped the line with both hands and yanked. This time something clicked and the line broke free. Nathan fell on his butt and the reel spun freely, covering him in a wad of monofilament line. He heard Tanker and Jaimie laughing as he got to his feet. He opened his mouth to say something and the spooler started up with a screech and a roar. He whipped around and saw a spinning wheel sucking in line from a different, second reel. Tanker and Jaimie laughed at him so loudly he could hear them over the sound of the machine.
Tanker put out a hand and helped him up, his face red from laughter. “You a little scared?”
“Really? A little fun with the new guy?”
The deckhand shrugged. “It gets boring back here, you know?” He waved him to the porthole set into the cargo bay doors. “Come here.”
Nathan went to the porthole, leery of further pranks but Tanker pointed aft “Check it out.” A small drone flew away from the ship with the mono filament line attached.
“The drone goes out ten klicks, keeps enough thrust going to make the line taught and then we hit the button.”
Jaimie had his hand on a switch. “We send a burst of gravitons down it that lasts for a fraction of a second, creating a field. Anything caught in the field, like screws, paint chips or pieces of old rockets get attracted to the line. All that crap builds up and sticks to the line because the line stays charged with gravitons.”
“Get ready,” Tanker said. “It goes by pretty fast.”
“Yeah,” Jaimie said, “and we’re only going to do it about a hundred more times in the next week.”
Tanker shook his head. “I don’t think he finds any joy in his work.” He watched the lights above the door until they flashed green. “Hit it, brother.”
Jaimie pushed a button on the Goose and Nathan felt himself get heavier for a moment. He put a hand on the cargo door to brace himself. “What’s that?”
Tanker shrugged. “The graviton pulse. We get a little bleed through. Uncle Archie thinks he can fix it in the next version. Look outside.”
Nathan leaned toward the porthole. He couldn’t see the monofilament line, of course. It was a little thicker than a few strands of hair and not particularly reflective. Then something became visible. Shards of metal and other junk floated through space toward an invisible line and started forming up. It trailed out straight behind the ship.
“How far out does the pulse extend?”
Tanker screwed up his face in concentration. “Uncle Archie says it goes out about ten klicks, so it’s like a big bubble.” He turned to Jaimie. “How much did we get?”
Jaimie checked a readout on the Goose’s control panel and nodded approvingly. “Just over a metric ton.”
“Good one,” Tanker said. “We get paid by weight, so the more debris we remove the more we get paid.”
“You know what the rate is?”
“Nah,” Tanker said, “Uncle Archie handles all that.”
“It’s really only good for the small stuff, though, right?�
�� Nathan said. “I mean, you wouldn’t want something that weighed a ton flying through space at you.”
Tanker laughed. “Nah, the whole thing is modulated so that we don’t attract anything that weighs more than a few kilograms. You get some old Chinese rocket motor flying at you at orbital velocity and you can kiss your keister goodbye. You passed FTL flight school, didn’t you?”
Nathan nodded.
“Okay, then you know that the gravitons set up the attraction but the mass of the objects is what’s really important. Ten kilometers of monofilament has more mass than a nut or some old pieces of metal. You point that modulator at a ship larger than us and you’d pull us right into it.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Nathan said.
“Next, we get rid of the junk.” Tanker pointed at a monitor near the hatch. Nathan saw a sensor scan of space around them. “See, we just make sure there’s no traffic around, then we tell the drone to dive for the ground. The whole mess just burns up in a few hours when it gets low enough.”
“How come we don’t salvage any of this stuff instead of letting it burn up?”
Tanker waved him off. “It’s not worth the fuel to carry it back down planetside. No, just let it burn up. No one wants steel or aluminum that’s been up here for a couple hundred years.” The whole idea seemed clever and simple.
“Huh,” Nathan said. “Archie thought that up?”
Jaimie nodded. “Yeah, but not until he’d spent a couple decades up here trolling for debris the old-fashioned way, by dragging mesh nets behind a tug. Can you imagine how boring that would be?”
Nathan nodded. He’d only been up here two months and the thought of doing this for twenty years made him want to take a walk out of an airlock without a pressure suit.
“I figure Uncle Archie will get his patent on the process and then retire,” Tanker said. “Me and Jaimie will take over and we’ll be set up for life.”
“You know it, bro,” Jaimie called from the Goose. “We’ll be on easy street.”
“If things work out Nathan, you could have a job to retire from flying this tug around, cleaning this crap up. There’s so much of it out there you couldn’t get it all in three lifetimes. How’s that sound?”
Nathan thought it sounded dull but he smiled and nodded. “That’s a sound offer, Tanker. I might just have to take you up on it.” He smiled at Jaimie and walked out of the bay for the cockpit, sure in the knowledge that as soon as his contract expired he would never work for anyone but himself.
— «» —
When the van pulled up to Eldridge and Ari’s worksite, Epsilon Eridani bathed the area in a light that seemed to have too much orange in it. Nathan got out carrying a sack full of breakfast take-out and set it on the large table under the canopy. Duncan followed and set down another. They started removing containers full of waffles, breakfast sandwiches and bacon.
Ari came out of the tent she shared with Eldridge and gave them the stink-eye. “What are you doing here?”
Nathan offered her a cup. “Want some coffee? It’s much better than the stuff we had at the motel. Less roaches in it I think. Anyway, we thought we’d treat you to breakfast.”
She sat down at the table and put her head down on her arms. “You’re like those guests that don’t know when the party is over.”
Eldridge came out of the tent buckling a tool belt around his waist. “What’s all this?”
Ari glanced up. “Look, honey, the repo men have brought us breakfast.”
Nathan stood up and handed him a cup of coffee. “Dig in, Eldridge. We have a lot to talk about.”
He sat down and eyed Nathan as he selected an egg and sausage sandwich loaded with peppers and onions. “Thanks for breakfast. So, what do you want to talk about?”
“Dodger crashed my ship.”
“I remember. Is everyone okay?”
“They are, thanks to Marla,” he pointed at the opposite side of the table and she waved a forkful of waffles. “However, it has put a crimp in our plans to leave. For that, we’re going to need your help.”
Eldridge stopped mid-bite. “What do you mean?”
“Well, my ship can’t fly and we need to go. We’d like your help.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I need three or four of your trucks. We’re going to use them to haul my ship up to the Corkscrew and we’ll stow her in an empty bay for the trip home.”
“You must be joking,” Ari said. “Not only are you going to repo our ship, which, by the way, shouldn’t even be happening, but now you want to use our equipment to help?”
“That’s right. We’ll probably need some engineering assistance as well, to make the trucks do what we need.”
Eldridge shook his head. “No way. Ari is right. If you want to repo my ship, do it on your own. I’m not helping.”
Nathan put his fork down on his plate. “Listen, son, I wouldn’t be here right now if not for you and your crew. We were doing just fine up there until your girl Scooter decided to kidnap us and drop us down here. Everything that’s happened since has been because of that. So yeah, I expect you to do the decent thing and help get my ship off this rock and up into orbit.”
Eldridge shook his head. “I’m sorry for what Scooter did but…”
Nathan held up a hand, interrupting him. “Look, I’ve been thinking. The Corkscrew can’t hold that entire starliner no matter how many little pieces you chop it into. I figure you were going to make a few trips back to Earth anyway, right? You have to drop the salvage somewhere you’ll get paid for it, and there’s nowhere in the Epsilon Eridani system like that. Come on, tell me I’m wrong.”
Eldridge sighed heavily. “That’s true but the first trip isn’t supposed to go until the ship is full and right now she’s at seventy percent.”
“Which leaves more than enough room to store my ship until you get back to Earth. See? It all works out.”
Eldridge took a bite from his sandwich and chewed, considering the idea. “It would give me the opportunity to figure out what’s going on with the payments to the bank.”
“There you go.”
“I still don’t like it,” Ari said, “but it makes sense. I could keep things moving while you’re gone. We certainly have enough room to let the piles grow. We could just get caught up when you get back.”
“Yeah,” Eldridge said. “We can do that. What about Dodger?”
“What about him?”
“While we’re gone I don’t want him out here messing around and giving Ari a hard time. Daryl stopped by here this morning on his way out to his pile.”
“What did he want?” Nathan said.
“You. We’re supposed to call him if you show up so they can some get you. Then he reminded us about our deal with Dodger and how they can make this repossession problem go away. All we need to do is make one call.”
Nathan became concerned. “Did you do that?”
“No,” Eldridge said. “I’m not ratting anyone out to Dodger.”
“Did he hurt you?” Nathan said to Ari.
She shook her head.
Nathan ran a hand through his hair. “I’m so angry at Dodger that I’m not sure I can think straight about him.” He got up and walked a few steps away from the table.
Eldridge got up and followed him. “He’s not right in the head, you know? He chews that crap to get high and then he does crazy shit, like what happened yesterday. Maybe we should just take him down so we don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
Nathan turned. “Chief Bell wants me to testify against him but it will take too long. By the time we get to court I’ll be broke and out of business.”
Eldridge walked over to Ari and put his hands on her shoulders. “If we pooled resources, maybe we could take him down.”
“I’m not killing anyone,” Nathan said. “Tha
t’s not who we are.”
“I’m not talking about killing anyone but couldn’t we do something to get him arrested? We just need him locked up and away from us.”
Ari stood up. “Babe, what are you thinking about? I thought you wanted to keep paying him off and keep the peace.”
Eldridge took her hands in his. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about what your dad would do if he were here.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“No, you’re right. We need to stand on our own because eventually he’ll strip us down to nothing. As long as we have a credit to our name he’ll find some way to take it.”
“He can go to hell,” Ari said. “I’m not doing anything for them.”
“What about you?” Eldridge said to Nathan. “Are you saying you don’t want a little pay back? He crashed your ship and almost killed your people.”
Nathan took a deep breath. “You have to understand, Eldridge, that going up against him means that the gloves are off. He won’t hesitate to kill all of us. If we do this, and right now it’s only an ‘if’, we could just be buying more trouble. Bell said he’s connected to the Syndicate so it’s not just him. I’ve met these guys before and you don’t want to tangle with them.”
Eldridge nodded slowly, like he was considering Nathan’s words. He looked at Ari and Nathan knew what the answer was going to be. “Maybe he shouldn’t have messed with us.”
“You’re sure about this?”
Eldridge gripped Ari’s hand and she nodded her approval with a look of pride on her face. “Yeah, we’re sure.”
Nathan turned to his crew. “What about you? Are you all on board with this?”
Duncan put and arm around Marla and a look passed between them. “Let’s just be smart about it, okay?” Duncan said.
“I’m in,” Richie said.
Nathan looked at Tricia and she smiled. “He tried to kill me. If we can do something about that, I’m game.”
“Cole?”
He finished chewing the bite of sandwich in his mouth and swallowed before answering. “You talk too damn much, you know that? I told you last night that I’d back your play. So, what’s the plan?”
Bad Rock Beat Down (The Milky Way Repo Series Book 2) Page 22
