by C. Gockel
The notion was noble albeit idealistic. Many saw it to be counterproductive because it caused unnecessary fatigue. But traditions die hard, and Alvarez had come to expect the pain. Pain was his personal yardstick. A prolonged absence of pain was unsettling. He felt guilty, because progress required suffering. It wasn’t really about whether he deserved to feel pleasure or not. He liked to have fun like everyone else. But he knew there was a difference between fun and happiness. The road to genuine satisfaction was always a painful one.
On missions with a larger crew, at least one of the officers would have medical training and could dispense injections to strengthen his veins. But not on this mission. He had forgotten his ointment. That desk job made me soft and forgetful, he thought.
Alvarez spoke to Parker. “What’s your status?”
“All of the posts have checked in for the new shift except for the systems operator,” Parker said.
“Jitters?”
“Yeah. We called his quarters, but he didn’t answer.”
“Stay at the helm. I’ll be back to relieve you in two minutes.” Alvarez had seen this situation before, but he wasn’t sure how to handle it. Apparently, Jitters hadn’t changed. He was up to his old tricks again.
Alvarez reentered the main corridor. The noise from the cargo bay welcomed him. He passed the officer's quarters and arrived at the grunts' barracks. Posted on the door was the official title: “Enlisted Service Persons' Living Quarters.” But no one used this term in common speech. “Grunts” was more descriptive, and it saved time.
Only two interior doors were commonly closed: those for the officers' quarters and the grunts' barracks. Alvarez disengaged the lock with a wave of his hand and manually slugged the massive door open. Once inside he slammed the door. A boom reverberated throughout the compartment.
The grunts' quarters consisted of one skinny hallway. On each side were tiny cells stacked two high. A short ladder was attached to the wall for the upper cells. He found Jitters’ room, one of the lower cells recessed down into the floor like a garden apartment. A piece of plastic was taped above his door over where his legal name should have been. Scribbled in red marker, it read “Jitters.”
Alvarez opened the door without knocking. Jitters was shirtless and barefoot, passed out on his bunk. Alvarez looked at the ceiling, trying to locate the source of a high-pitched squeal. It came from a filtering system, a standard issued item in all living quarters. Novos and other corporate settlements had learned long ago not to mess with people's vices. The extended, isolated experiences tempted even the staunchest abstainers.
Alvarez figured Jitters left the filter on all night, burning out some component. They weren't meant for continuous usage. Alvarez flipped it off.
On Jitters’ chest was a ceramic inhaler, undoubtedly used to ingest whatever had knocked him out.
Alvarez was conflicted. He was perturbed with Jitters’ behavior, but they went way back. They owed each other their lives. He was embarrassed because Jitters was one of his men, and here he was acting like a junky. And he was angry because whatever he did in the past to help Jitters had failed.
Empty bottles lay scattered on the floor, and several inches of melted ice remained in a bucket beside the cot. Alvarez picked up the bucket and poured it on Jitters. Jitters sat up gasping. The sight would have been funny if Alvarez wasn’t angry.
“You’ve got work to do,” Alvarez said. Jitters stared, shamefaced. “You’re part of a team now,” Alvarez said. “You can’t pull this junky act on my ship. If you can’t keep it together, I’ll confine you to quarters for the rest of the mission.”
Jitters tried to stand up, but he winced as his right foot touched the floor. He collapsed back onto his cot. Alvarez saw a nail file and a pile of skin on the floor.
“What did you do to yourself?” Alvarez asked.
“I-I-I wanted new skin. I wanted to feel like a b-b-baby. I t-t-took the callouses off my right foot. Then it started to hurt, so I stopped. It was dumb, I know. Too much…” He picked up his inhaler.
Jitters was no criminal. Drug prohibition had expired in most corporate settlements a century ago. What was protected were the rights of others. If someone got intoxicated and crashed a ship or got into a brawl, the private courts exacted judgment. But if someone destroyed themselves, there wasn’t a legal thing you could do to stop them. The non-aggression principle forbade it.
Addictions were usually career hurdles, causing people to be looked over for promotions because they seemed unreliable. The incentives rewarded persons to stay clean, but substance abuse was rampant. Especially by grunts in space.
Jitters finally spoke, “I-I-I’m sorry, Colonel. I-I-I was just itching so bad last night. I needed a break.”
“You get twelve hours between shifts. Can’t you make it work?”
“No. I get stir crazy. I just needed a way out. I didn’t plan it this way. It just got away from me. It won’t happen again,” said Jitters.
“No one gets out of problems,” Alvarez said. “There’s no getting out of it. You can’t go around them, ignore them, hide from them. You can only go through it. Nothing changes until you do that.”
Jitters didn’t look convinced. “S-s-sir, you don’t know what I’ve been going through.”
“Maybe so. But whatever it is, you're not going through it. You're doing everything you can to get out of it, to go around it. Every attempt to avoid a problem only makes it worse. What are you dodging anyway?”
“You know some of the stuff we saw back in the Fight. I still hear those guys’ voices from back then.”
Alvarez stood there for a moment. He said, “That's not it.”
“What do you mean?” Jitters said self-righteously.
“You're not running from the Fight. I have those dreams and hear those voices too. We all have to bear that curse. But Jitters, you were running from something the day I met you.”
“B-b-back then, it was just recreational.”
“Nobody uses like you did just for fun. Listen to me. No one's coming to save you. I've certainly tried as have others. You use up people's sympathy after a while. No one's coming, Jitters. No matter how bad-off you get, there’s no point at which life will take pity on you. It has to be you. Nothing’s going to get better until you stare it down, whatever it is you're running from.”
Jitters listened but was still unresponsive. Alvarez said, “Clean up, get some coffee, and meet me on the helm on the double.” He walked to the door. He turned, looking back. “And Jitters, wrap up your foot.”
Jitters grinned. “Yes, sir.”
Terra York, the only woman aboard the Constance, outranked most of the crew. But chief mechanic was still considered an enlisted position, meaning she slept in a tiny cell just like all the grunts. She wasn’t fazed. Compared to growing up as a marauder, she had an indulgent life: hot chow, hot showers, and a warm bed. She even earned vacation time, but never took them. Where would she go?
She was pretty enough, even though she down-played it by buzzing her hair short. Beneath her oversized mechanic's overalls, she had a desirable figure. On these missions, it didn’t matter how she looked. Unsolicited advances from bored, barely post-adolescent crew were incessant. She needed a stick to beat back the dogs.
But being the only female crew member did have its perks. Novos built a small set of women's quarters—they were still cells—and lavatories separate from the men's. They shared the same compartment as the aquaponics station.
York enjoyed her shower in solitude. The gurgling sounds from the aquaponics tanks were barely audible over the hissing spray. But she was getting antsy. She had been in too long. She, like most of the crew, took short showers, even though she wasn’t required to do so. There was no need to conserve water; the ship recycled all of the waste fluids back into H20 with perfect efficiency. And heat wasn't a problem either. The reactor core produced enormous amounts of it. Most heat was vented into space. For the other crew, the thought of showering in s
omeone else's filtered excrement tended to hasten bathing. But for York, it was something else. She couldn’t get used to the excesses, the indulgences, of corporate life.
She turned off the water and was met by hot, dry air that beaded moisture away from her skin as she stepped out. With her buzz cut, even her hair was dry. She looked for her clothes. Her dirty coveralls lay on the ground along with socks and underwear. She had forgotten to bring clean clothes, but it wasn't a problem. She was alone, and her cell was close by.
She grabbed the towel from the dispenser and wrapped it around herself. It was too small. She headed towards her quarters on the other side of the aquaponics station. As she passed the fish tanks, she admired every space traveler’s favorite color; life affirming green lettuces grew on grow-beds above the tanks.
Except for the occasional machinist work in the cargo bay, aquaponics was the loudest source of sound on the ship. She heard it at night as she tried to sleep.
York rounded the station and the gurgling diminished. She kept her head down, watching her step on the slick, tiled floor. The room was always humid, shower or not. Only a few feet away, she darted for her door. In her haste, she nearly knocked down David Parker.
“I'm so sorry,” said Parker. “I wasn't watching you—I mean—I wasn't watching where I was going.”
“It’s completely my fault,” she said. York dropped her dirty clothes and used both hands to keep her towel secure. “I should make a request to Novos for longer towels,” she said.
Parker tried to laugh, but little came out. Ears red, he kept his eyes on the floor.
“I left my clean clothes in my quarters,” she said, “and I didn't realize it until I’d finished.”
“Oh, I see. I mean, I understand. I would probably do something like that, except the officer's quarters have their own showers.”
“Don't brag,” she teased.
“Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I just...”
“It's okay. I'm kidding.” She tried unsuccessfully to make eye contact. “What are you doing here anyway? Feeding the fish?”
“No.” Parker belted. “I was looking at—I mean for… I came to talk to you.” Parker swallowed hard. He appeared less comfortable fully clothed than York did half naked. “I was wondering if you finished the performance report on the warp field generator,” he said.
“Yes, it's still on my console down in the cargo bay. I would have sent it to you directly, but I wanted to go over it with you.”
Parker looked up. Work talk distracted him from the awkward situation. “Were there problems?”
“Not really. Everything’s running smoothly right now. I guess it's more of a hunch than anything else.”
“Something with the data?”
“Small temperature spikes,” she said.
“During the Davidson particle cycle.”
“Right. Most of the heat gets ejected into the fabric of space-time. But there's residual that’s tacitly stored in the warp field itself.”
“And released once we come out of IST,” Parker added. “That’s to be expected. It's usually an insignificant amount of heat. And the ship's hull should protect us from a much greater release of energy than from what accumulates during Davidson cycles.”
“I'm not worried about it endangering us directly; I'm worried about the cooling system getting over taxed.”
“The heat should dissipate almost instantly,” Parker said. “Even if the cooling system was temporarily turned off, we wouldn't be in danger from heat.”
“I know, but the system doesn't have the intelligence to know that this huge spike we're going to experience is temporary. The system is going to react as if the core is melting and will kick into high gear. All kinds of interdependent parts could fail, and we haven't tested them at the ramped-up level they will be performing at when we come out of IST.”
“Can we short-circuit the cooling system, so that it doesn't overreact?”
“I thought of that, but it's an active system as long as we're in IST.”
“So in other words, we can't turn it off while we're in a warp field without it overheating, and the longer we're in a warp field the more likely the cooling system will fail when we come out of IST. I designed the ship, but I still didn't catch this problem.”
“It's not your fault. Novos should’ve tested longer before commissioning her,” York said. “Any chance Alvarez would let us drop out of IST early?”
“To dispense the residual heat from the Davidson cycle before it gets critical?”
York nodded.
“I doubt it,” Parker said. “We're running on razor thin margins as it is, and Novos wants no delays. Besides we're within twenty-fours of reaching the probe. If we're going to have problems with the cooling system, we might as well reach our destination first.”
“I guess we've got a tiger by the tail then,” she said.
“And we're about to release it.” Parker looked away, but this time he didn't look embarrassed. His mind was elsewhere.
“Well, I better get dressed,” she said. “I'll see you at the next shift change.”
She walked around Parker who looked back down at the floor. She entered her cell but left the door ajar. Through the crack, she saw Parker approach one of the fish tanks. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small bag. With a childlike expression, he dropped pellets into the tank. She heard the water’s surface come to life as fish thrashed in a feeding-frenzy. York smiled and closed her door.
So far, this mission was like all others; it was feast or famine. Alvarez had done it enough times to know not to complain about the lack of challenges. Boredom was a blessing. When the challenges came—and they would—they would be all-encompassing. These moments were the quiet before the storm.
At his command console on the helm, he pulled up the crew manifest. Although the Constance could hold more than forty crew members and Novos had promised him the best, there were only a dozen grunts on board. Including the officers—Parker, Brennen, and himself—it totaled fifteen. If this had been a mining expedition, the Constance would be packed to the brim with men. Instead Novos, always conscious of the bottom line, sent an excess of equipment but only a skeleton crew.
Despite the limited personnel, Alvarez was glad to be working with these people. David Parker was the best space-architect employed at Novos, and Terra York seemed to be top-notch. Alvarez noticed that the two seemed to balance out each other’s deficiencies.
Dr. Michael Brennen, he knew all too well. They were best friends before the Fight broke out. But since then, they only spoke when it was absolutely necessary. Alvarez trusted two things about Brennen: he needed to be right, and he usually was right. As irritating as Brennen was, Alvarez respected his abilities. If he proffered his opinion, it was usually because he had already thought through the problem and had found the best solution.
Then there were the grunts. Alvarez only knew two of them: Jitters and Sergeant Robert Fields. Anyone with a military title was of special interest to Alvarez. It meant they were veterans from the Fight. Although Novos had adopted non-martial titles, those persons who had attained higher rank during the Fight retained their military titles out of respect.
Everyone called Fields “Sarge.” He was the old dog on the ship, older than Alvarez, Parker, or Brennen. The manifest showed he was fifty-eight years old, which was three years past the Novos’s normal cut-off. Appearing on this roster meant Sarge had earned more than just Alvarez's respect. Someone at Novos broke the rules to keep him employed. The rest of the grunts had names he didn't recognize, which didn't surprise him. It was a wonder Novos could get anyone out here for the certs they payed grunts. Grunts were able-bodied and proficient in at least one hands-on skill. Most were decent mechanics, and some—like Sarge—were ex-military. Grunts followed orders and kept to themselves. Most importantly, they were willing to face the monotonous, socially deprecating life of a tin-can-packed sardine for six weeks or more.
Alvarez asked Jitt
ers, “What's the estimated time of arrival?”
“Just under two hours, sir.”
Alvarez thought six days would pass quickly, but after the excitement had worn off, the monotony set in. He was glad to get this part of the trip over with.
Parker entered the helm. “Colonel, I’m ready to relieve you.” Officers only addressed each other formally in front of enlisted crew.
“Parker, you can take the wheel, but I’m going to stay at the helm since we’re coming out of IST in less than two hours.”
“That's fine with me. I was a little anxious about our IST drop anyway.”
“Something I should know?”
“Well, it has to do with the Davidson particle cycle and the residual heat that is stored and then released after the warp-field generator is disengaged. The untested parts in the cooling system, specifically the energy-transfer coupling, will be stressed and may behave erratically from the elevated system response.”
Alvarez nodded trying to keep up, but these engineering problems were over his head. York slipped in as Parker continued. She interrupted but in a way that didn't seem rude. “Sir, we're worried the cooling system will be overtaxed when we come out of IST. But we're ready to respond if it does.”
“Missions never go smoothly,” Alvarez said. “I'm sure with the two of you, we can handle whatever engineering problem comes our way. If there’s trouble with the cooling system, I expect it to be just the first of many bumps in the road. Excuse me,” he said as he activated the ship's intercom system.
“Attention crew, this is Colonel John Alvarez. We're coming out of IST in under two hours. I want all persons, including off-duty personnel, to be on alert and ready for future orders. Alvarez out.”
