Debts of My Fathers (Father Chessman Saga Book 2)

by Dan Thompson

  Stefan took another sip and shrugged. “Maybe. So far all I’ve gotten is a bunch of shifts and eddies, but no sign of either a vortex or sink.”

  “A sink?”

  He shook his head. “It’s complicated. This could be some transient event upwind from us, and that would be consistent with what I’ve seen. Or it could be a big storm, and all we’ve seen so far is the side-wind spurs.”

  “But I thought the really big storms were supposed to be on the charts.”

  “Most of them are, and there was a report of something in this direction. Of course, that was on the Ballison-Deshmon lane, so there’s no telling how much worse it might be out here. Then again, it was only a class one disturbance.” He spared a glance up to see Perry’s lack of comprehension. “A class one would be about as intense as we’re seeing here, but it would not have lasted this long. A proper storm would be class four or above.”

  “How high does it go?”

  “It’s logarithmic, so it theoretically caps out around eleven or twelve with galactic black hole collisions, that sort of thing, but anything above a six or seven would pretty much melt the generators.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah, damn. Weaving through this crap has already put us two hours behind, and that’s just today. If this is a full-blown storm, we may be in for a really rough ride.”

  “Then I guess I’d better get back to engineering.”

  “Yeah, and while you’re at it, check the procedures for running the generator at half-sail. We might need it.”

  Perry nodded and left.

  Stefan watched the third derivative spin twitch twice more, but then it was the vertical that caught him off guard. With no warning, the third derivative did a hard reversal with the second following only a moment behind. He pulled the Sophie hard to port 30 degrees until it stabilized.

  Five minutes later, he started nosing it back on course, but he had to stop while still 8 degrees off course. He shook his head. If there was a vortex lurking out there, it was worse than any he had ever seen.

  Alex Franklin strapped the holster to his leg and double-checked the charge on the pistol. His first partner had drilled the habit into him, but he knew now that there was really no point. Without firing, the charges would last for two years according to the manufacturer, so it seemed more like the paranoia the old man was showing about their little cook. He checked himself in the mirror, adjusted his collar, and slid the headset on.

  “This is Alex, coming on duty.”

  Nick responded. “I’ve got breakfast warming up in the galley.”

  “On my way,” he replied.

  He stepped out of the double cabin and walked down the hall. He paused in front of the girl’s cabin. Had she eaten the food? He put one hand on the butt of his Jansky and reached out for the door switch.

  “Alex, get your breakfast to go and meet me on the bridge.” It was Stefan over the headset. “We’ve run into some weather, and I want to take some time to go over it with you.”

  He sighed and stepped away from the door. “Will do.”

  Breakfast was scrambled eggs and toast. He grabbed two plates and headed for the bridge. Nick passed him in the corridor, coming back up from delivering the grub to Perry down in engineering. On the bridge, Stefan accepted the plate and started eating the eggs with his bare hands, never taking his eyes off the display.

  “So, weather?” he asked.

  Stefan nodded and pointed to the display. “It’s been crazy all night. Damn wind has been twigging all over the place.”

  “Is it getting worse?”

  “Hard to say. The last hour has been a bit easier, but before that I had three spin reversals in twenty minutes. First time I’ve ever seen that in my life.”

  “But we’re still plowing ahead, right?”

  Stefan shrugged. “I’ve been dodging around a lot, more to rimward than anything else.”

  “Rimward?”

  Stefan spared a glance at him. It was not a happy one. “Coreward, rimward, you know your galactic compass, right?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “I merely wanted to know which way that was, you know, with our current orientation.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got us back on a standard orientation, but angled south at about 15 degrees. I’m also hauling us back coreward, that’s starboard, to see if we can get back on course. Even then, I’ve had to make two turns in the last hour. All told, we’ve probably lost about three hours overnight.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah, damn. You can handle this kind of thing?”

  He snorted. “Hell, yeah. I didn’t quit that apprenticeship because navigation was too hard. I quit it because navigation was boring.”

  “Boring, eh? Well, you may get plenty of excitement today.”

  “Shall I relieve you now?”

  “You’ll want both hands for the controls, so finish your breakfast first and hit the head. Then yeah, I could use some sleep. But first I’ve got to check in on our young captain.”

  Michael was asleep on the floor when he heard the intercom.

  “What?”

  “Captain, it’s me, Richard.”

  He looked around at his empty cabin. “Where are you?”

  “I’m still locked in my cabin, remember? Are you okay?”

  He rose to his hands and knees and crawled toward the head of the bed where the intercom panel glowed on the wall. “I’ve been better. You hacked the intercom, right?”

  “Yeah. I still haven’t been able to reach anyone but you. I had the galley for a good five minutes last night, but then my hand slipped and fried part of the circuit. I thought maybe I’d lost it all.”

  Michael grunted. “Galley … hey, did you get to eat?”

  “Yes,” Richard replied. “They put a plate of leftovers in my room last night. Stale, but edible. And you?”

  He remembered seeing the food, but not eating. “Oh, yeah, no food for me. I got shot.”

  “Shot? Are you all right?”

  He reached back to touch his head. It was less tender than he had remembered, but he was still feeling very odd, almost disconnected from his body. “Feels weird. I think I’ll live, but I don’t recommend it.”

  “Damn that Dieter. When I get my hands on him, I’m going to bash his head in with that fucking sitar.”

  He rolled back into a seated position, resting against the wall. “I’d pay good money to see that.” Something nagged at him, something about not trusting someone. “Hey, Richard?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Can I trust you?”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  “I think Dieter sold us out.”

  “That’s right, Captain. He did. The hijackers told us so.”

  He could remember the hijackers shooting him, but he could not remember much of a dialog. There was something Carlos had said. Something about Dieter. “Carlos ... and Dieter.”

  “What was that, sir?”

  Michael blinked twice, unsure of what he was remembering. “I think Carlos is in on it too.”

  “Really? Why do you say that?”

  “Um ... navigation. They’ll need navigators. And I ... man, I barely passed that test. So much math and ... and left-handed spin ... or does that change with the derivative?”

  “Captain?”

  “Huh?” He was getting sleepy again.

  “Captain, maybe you should get some rest for now.”

  “Excellent idea, Mr. Mosley. You do that.”

  “Okay, Captain. I’ll check back in a few hours.”

  Michael mumbled a response, but not even he knew what it was supposed to be.

  Chapter 24

  “Trust flows both ways with crew. Trust them to do their jobs, and they’ll trust you to do yours.” – Peter Schneider

  ELSA STEPPED ONTO THE BRIDGE of the Fat Grizzly. Officially, she was stopping in for a midwatch update on their progress, but the truth was that she was trying to familiarize herself with the bridge crew and ge
t them used to seeing her there. Captain Gallows was nowhere to be seen, and the second officer had the con.

  “My lady?” he asked.

  “Merely stopping by to check our progress. It’s Martins, right?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Corwin Martins. And we’re doing pretty well, but we’re running into a touch of bad winds.”

  She nodded. There had been a note about it in the chart updates they received at Ballison. “Worse than the forecast?”

  “A little. From the looks of it, there’s a small storm off to rimward, but we’re only getting a few castoff eddies. It’s kept us lively the last few hours, but we’re pressing on.”

  “Any lost time?”

  “A few minutes at most.”

  “Good. If the Sophie’s Grace keeps to her usual speed, she’ll reach the rendezvous shortly before we do, and I don’t want to keep that team waiting.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She glanced around the bridge, noting the other three crew at their stations. The ensign at systems seemed a little idle, but he focused in on his work as soon as he noticed Elsa watching. The navigator was duly attentive, as she would expect during this kind of weather, and the pilot was reviewing a report on a wake detection.

  She turned back to the third officer. “You run a good bridge watch, Mr. Martins. You and your crew are to be complimented.”

  He sat a little straighter. “Thank you, my Lady. It is nice to be told.”

  She gave him a silent nod and headed for the door. “Carry on with your duty, Mr. Martins. I look forward to your next watch.” She passed Gallows’s ready room as she made her way aft and smiled to herself. Apparently, the dear captain had not done much to build confidence in his crew. This might be even easier than she had hoped.

  “Stefan, sorry to wake you, but we’ve got another spin inversion, and I’m having a hard time correcting.”

  Stefan shook his head and threw off the covers. The headset beside his bed was in speaker mode, so he turned down the volume and put it on. “What’s the problem, isn’t it holding?”

  “No,” Alex replied from the bridge. “It’s fluctuating between 8 and 15 degrees clockwise.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said and pulled on his pants. This was the third time he had had to get up in five hours. He may as well have slept in his clothes. The halls were quiet, but when he came onto the bridge, the navigation station was sounding an alarm.

  “What the hell?”

  Alex jumped up from the navigation station. “I don’t know. It just started!”

  Stefan threw himself into the seat and scanned over the display. The spin was fluctuating so erratically even the derivatives were unreadable, and both the vertical and cross winds had flipped. “Shit!” he yelled. “You’ve led us right onto a vortex.”

  “But I didn’t see anything,” Alex protested.

  Stefan did not waste any time. He pitched the ship hard down and turned it sharply into the tachyon wind coming from the port side. “Nick,” he called into the headset, “Drop us to half-sail immediately.”

  “What?”

  “Half-sail, now!”

  “How do I… wait…”

  “Dammit, I told you guys to be ready for this.”

  “Perry didn’t say anything about—”

  Stefan cut him off. There was no time for this. “Drives board, left side, red borders. Emergency half-sail. Hit it now!”

  “Done.”

  Their speed dropped almost immediately, and along with that, the rate of wind change dropped as well. Stefan made two more adjustments, one to port and another angling them to better catch the current tachyon spin, and settled into a stable seam.

  “There,” he said at last. “We should be able ride this band out from the vortex. With luck, we’ll be back at full sail in a few hours. It’s a miracle we got that far in without wrecking the sail generators.”

  Alex stood by, leaning against the ops station. “Do you want me to take over?”

  Stefan looked back and forth between him and the display. “No, I’ll take over for now. Just get me some coffee.”

  Alex left him alone on the bridge, and he took another look at the wind readings. The vortex was small, but the fluctuations were much faster than such a vortex would normally carry. It might be some gravitational fluke like an uncharted dwarf planet, or it might be some minor spin-off from a much larger storm. But if that was the case, where was the main body of the storm?

  Alex returned with a cup of coffee.

  It was going to be a long day.

  Michael woke to a clear head and a full bladder. He managed to stand but almost fell over immediately. His legs were not doing what he wanted them to. Hanging onto the wall, he made his way to the bathroom. Carefully, he braced himself against the wall with one hand while attempting to aim his stream into the toilet with the other.

  “Skipper?”

  He nearly jumped out of his socks at the sound. As it was, he almost sprayed Carlos in the face as he turned to see where the noise came from.

  “Whoa!”

  Michael got himself under control and zipped up. “Sorry about that, Carlos. I forgot you were down there.”

  “Well, no harm, no foul. It’s all on your side. Are you feeling any better?”

  “I think so,” Michael replied not sure why he was feeling the way he was feeling. “What happened?”

  “The hijacking, do you remember the hijacking?”

  Michael blinked a few times, and it all flooded back: the hijacking, their little chemical bomb, getting shot. “Shit … yeah, they shot me.”

  “That they did.”

  He nodded and only regretted it a little. His neck actually hurt more than his head at this point. He threw a towel down onto the floor and mopped up the mess. “The time since then is pretty fuzzy,” he said, “but I think I talked to Richard at some point.”

  “Yeah, I heard you.”

  “Did I give anything away?”

  “Hardly. You threw me in with Dieter as one of the hijackers.”

  He nodded. “What about Dieter? Have you made contact with him?”

  “It’s been limited, but it’s getting better. There’s a single metal plate between our two closets, and with enough fucking around with cupped hands and drinking glasses, we’ve been able to talk through it. He’s pretty pissed.”

  “At the hijackers?”

  “Specifically Richard.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It’s not just that Richard sold us out. It’s that he popped Dieter in the head with his own sitar, broke the damn thing.”

  Michael blinked twice, and Richard’s voice rang out clear in his memory. “I’m going to bash his head in with that fucking sitar.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Richard said yesterday. He said he was going to bash Dieter’s head with the sitar.”

  “Sounds like he already did.”

  “Well, that’s enough for me. It happened on their shift, so if anyone is in on this, it would be them, and with Richard mouthing off about the sitar, I’d say it’s got to be him.”

  “Damn straight, sir. I didn’t want to say anything before, but I never liked the prick. Too confident. Too straight. Never thought I’d seen the real him.”

  Michael nodded. He had always written it off as luck to find such a competent first officer, but in retrospect Richard had been too good to be true. He had probably been planning this for weeks, possibly from the beginning. “Of course, now I don’t know who to trust. He was the one who found Dieter, Vivian, and Hector.”

  “Good point, but after that sitar crack, I’m pretty sure Dieter’s got your back.”

  “Probably. Hey, I remembered why I got shot in the first place. Did it work?”

  Carlos grinned at him through the pipes. “Like a charm. I kept the steering controls live, but switched all the scans over to the simulation. Right now they’re fleeing an imaginary vortex at half-sail.”

  Michael chuc
kled. “Tricky flying, and at half-sail, we’re doing what, one-third speed?”

  “Something like that,” Carlos replied. “Most ships would be only quarter speed, but the Sophie’s sail is so tight even at half-sail, she’s getting better than standard capture rates.”

  “Still, it’s going to drag this out with some stressful shifts. I bet they’re getting tired.”

  “Richard, especially. Whether or not they brought a qualified navigator, he’s probably the only one of them who knows the Sophie well enough to pull her through something like that.”

  “You’re right. I know I never could have done it. Navigation is so …”

  “Not suited for everyone, Skipper. That’s all it is.”

  “Okay. What’s next in this little simulation of yours?”

  “Well, I admit I’m pushing a few tricks onto it, but I’m mostly playing out the great storm of Denalti. You know, that transient black hole that tore through the League of Catai back in the thirty-two hundreds?”

  Michael’s eyes went wide. “Jesus Christ, Carlos! I’ve read about that thing—something like six hundred ships were destroyed over sixty years.”

  “Worse than that. Eleven hundred more foundered. Only 456 were ever recovered with live crews. Sometimes I think the only reason the Catai survived their little rebellion was that the old Sol Republic was afraid to send a second fleet through that mess.”

  He nodded, remembering the history. No one knew how it had picked up such an incredible velocity, but the black hole and its gravity had swept through human space, wreaking havoc on tachyon winds and the ships that relied on them. It had killed the colonization efforts in the entire southern Pisces cluster, giving the Catai a buffer from the Solarian Union that was likely to last another century or two.

  “Do you think he’ll recognize it?”

  “Maybe, if we ever get that far. I put the center of it about thirty light-years along our original course, but I can’t see them trying to push past another twelve.”

  Michael nodded, but then the problems appeared. “But that’s only on the navigation console, right?”

  “Yeah, but they don’t have an extra man to put at the pilot’s console.”