“Good morning, are you having a strange day, too?” I asked her with a nod toward the galley.
She rolled her eyes and snorted. “I don’t know what to think. She barely moved all night. I was so worried about her. Then this morning, I wanted to walk up to her and ask, ‘Who are you and what did you do with Sarah?’” she joked softly.
I dug into my omelet and split open a biscuit. The omelet was good, but the biscuit was unlike anything Cookie had ever made. I like Cookie’s biscuits, always have, but this was something else entirely. The texture was light and flaky whereas Cookie’s were more cake-like. I put a dab of margarine on it and tasted it again. The old saying about ‘melting in your mouth’ came back to me.
Bev was looking at me strangely. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said after I swallowed. “Try this, though.” I handed her a chunk of biscuit.
She looked at it closely, shrugged, and then popped it into her mouth. I could see it register on her face. “Where’d that come from? And are there any more?”
“Pip’s got a whole basket full over there.” I motioned toward the window.
Then the cred dropped for Bev. “Sarah?”
“Yup, I came up earlier for coffee. She was giving biscuit lessons to Cookie and Pip. Apparently, this is the result. The thing is, when I saw them, I didn’t see her doing anything really terribly different than Cookie taught me. Of course, I didn’t see the whole thing, but Cookie was paying very close attention.”
“Well, whatever it is. I hope she doesn’t stop.”
She started to reach for my other biscuit, but I playfully spanked her hand. “Mine!” I said with a mischievous smile. “Go get your own.” She got up to do just that, and I added, “And bring back a couple for me since you’re up.”
She stuck out her tongue. “Get your own,” she mocked me with a big grin. When she came back, though, she dropped a couple extras onto my plate.
Francis and Diane came onto the mess deck and waved as they got into the breakfast line. “Never overlook the obvious,” I mumbled to myself.
“What?” Bev asked.
“Something that Francis made me think of,” I told her. “Remember back on Margary when we were working that first booth?”
“Yeah.”
“He and Diane had a collection of brocaded vests, and he kept putting them out one at a time.”
“I seem to recall that, but how is it significant?”
“Originally I thought he was displaying them one at a time in order to drive the price up because people would think they were one of a kind or the last one or something. When I asked him about it, he told me that it was just easier to keep track of.”
Beverly raised her eyebrows and looked at me like I had started speaking in tongues.
“Seeing him just now reminded me of that. I was attributing more thought to something that was just convenience. In hindsight I’d over thought the situation and missed the obvious thing.”
“Okay…” Bev gave me a strange look. “And this relates to what?”
“Our little changeling in there.” I motioned toward Sarah.
Bev pondered that for a tick. “And what’s the obvious thing?”
“Something happened over night to convince her to trust us.”
“You base this on…?” she prompted.
“The hair.”
“You are one strange man, Ishmael Wang. Hair?”
Just then, Sarah walked by the open galley door and I saw Bev’s eyes flick over toward the movement. “Oh,” she said as she looked back at me with a speculative glint in her eye.
I shrugged. “Either she trusts us or she’s testing us.”
“I wonder what happened overnight,” Bev pondered.
“I don’t know, but it might be as simple as waking up fed, rested, clean, dry, and safe.”
Bev wrinkled her nose at that. “Kinda simplistic, but I suppose.”
“You probably don’t remember because you’ve been aboard so long, you ole space-dog, but my memories are still fresh. When I came aboard, the only time I felt afraid was meeting Mr. Maxwell for the first time. My first pullout and first jump were a little nerve wracking, but I don’t know if I’d call what I felt as fearful. Despite all the unknowns, I’ve always felt safe aboard.”
There was a little pause then I added softly, “Trust Lois.”
Bev gave a little chuckle. “Indeed, and if Sarah keeps making biscuits like these, I’m going to need to work out more.”
I finished the last of my omelet and looked at the chrono. “Speaking of which, I didn’t get my laps in last night, and I’ve got a stan before I have to report for duty in environmental. If you’ll excuse me?”
She nodded and waved. “Have fun.”
***
It felt good to let everything all go while I ran. Of course, I already felt a lot better to begin with. Sitting with Brill for just those few ticks and getting a kind of overview of what I could expect had gone a long way to assuaging my concerns. Seeing Sarah already beginning to fit in, helped as well. I was angry that somebody could have done something to make her act as she did, and I was able to channel some of that energy while I pounded out some distance around the track. Whatever had happened was back on St. Cloud so distance would help her as well.
I cut my run short, and made another mental note not to run so soon after eating. I found Biddy, Francis, and Rhon in the sauna when I got in there. They were almost giddy over the success of the co-op. “So, do we have a rough idea of the final numbers?” I asked them.
“Commissions and fees brought in something around four hundred creds,” Biddy said. “I’ll get the exact figures later.”
I sat down hard on the bench. “How can that be?”
Francis said, “We had almost twenty of the crew selling in the booth at one time or another. Most of them broke a kilocred so they paid the ten credit cap.”
Rhon chimed in with, “The commission on consignments made up the rest. There was not all that much on consignment, really, but it still amounted to more than kilocred.”
I gave a low whistle. “So the splits would be something like two hundred for the co-op and fifty for each of the managers?”
Biddy nodded. “Something like that. We need to account for the booth and table rental, so we’ll be getting our tablets together later today.”
Rhon said, “Pip has a way to get us sync’d up so we’ll have a running total from day to day in Dunsany. It was one of those things we didn’t really think about coming in.”
They all got up and headed out shortly after that, and I sat for a few more ticks, marveling at how well everything was working. It could not last, of course. Something was bound to blow up in our faces and soon no doubt. I chided myself for my own fatalism as I headed for the showers. I wondered just how many creds Pip and I had accrued and how much yarn he had bought. He had made some comment about twenty kilos and I wondered where he had stashed it all.
***
I grabbed a quick shower before zipping into my shipsuit and heading back to environmental. I got there a few ticks before 08:00 and found Diane, Francis, and Brill waiting. “Okay, people,” Brill said, “we’ve got pullout at 14:00 which gives us six stans for any last port-side maintenance. Recommendations?”
Diane and Francis looked at each other briefly before Francis said, “Sludge. If we do the number one tank now, it’ll be good almost all the way into Dunsany. It’s gonna be due in three days anyway. Number two tank should be good until just before transition.”
Brill nodded. “Diane? Where are we on the scrubbers?”
“We did number three just before docking. Number four is due this week. Then we’ll restart the cycle.”
“So, do we do number four while we’re docked or wait until we’re underway?”
“Six of one, half dozen of the other,” Diane answered after a moment’s thought. “The matrix should be viable for another couple of days.”
“Okay, le
t’s hold off on the scrubber then and get full use out of that matrix before we trash it. If we all work on the number one tank, it won’t take too long.”
Everything sounded logical to me, but I was not really sure what the meeting was all about. Surely, nothing they said was news to any of them, and I wondered why they spent the time telling each other what they must have all already known. With the meeting out of the way, we headed over toward the number one particulate precipitation tank. “Francis, you’ve got the duty, and Ish is your helper,” Bev said.
“Aye, Chief,” Francis acknowledged and pulled out his tablet to slave it to the watch stander’s station. He started to show me how to do it, but I turned my tablet to show him it was already set. By then we had reached the tank. “We have to close off the intake valves first,” Francis began and then walked me through the whole shutdown procedure. Once the water was diverted to the second tank, he started pumps that emptied the first back into the dirty water reservoir and we waited for the tank to empty.
The rest of the process I had been through before and it went smoothly. We were done by 10:30 and all the loaf pans were in the freezer. It was a messy job and Diane and Brill headed off to clean up while Francis and I finished restarting the number one tank. As we waited, Francis showed me the routine maintenance charts and explained that sometimes we would pull out small filters and replace them. We did one so he could show me and it looked relatively easy to do. It was just a simple matter of yanking out the old one and slapping in a new filter. The trick was knowing where they were and how to get the old one out without breaching the lines. We had our heads together over the ship schematic when the automated system integrity check came up and Francis did the acknowledgment.
“That reminds me,” he said, “after we get cleaned up, we’ll have to make the inspection tour.” Brill and Diane came back in fresh shipsuits and we headed for the engineering san to get cleaned up ourselves. Before we left, Francis formally passed the watch to Diane temporarily.
“Somebody always has to be on duty,” he explained. “And that means available to respond more or less immediately. We get a lot of leeway because we can slave the tablets to the station and do most routine things even if we’re not sitting right there, but if I’m going to be in the shower somebody else has to be minding the shop.”
“I can see where having more people to share that load would be good.”
“Yeah, we have enough for three sections, and if all we had to do was watch, it would be dead simple. It’s the extra stuff that takes two or more people that disrupts us, but we keep the ship well maintained so little things like scrubber maintenance and sludge recovery don’t get in the way too much. You’ll see.”
We both ducked into the showers and within five ticks we were back in shipsuits and heading down to Foggy Bottom. When we got there, Francis relieved Diane formally and then stuck his head in Brill’s office. “We’re going on VSI now,” he told her. “I have my tablet and it’s slaved.”
“Okay,” she said. “Be back in time for lunch. Stay on the path. Write if you get work.”
As we headed out, I started asking questions, “VSI?”
“Visual Site Inspection. We’re supposed to do it once each watch. By tradition we do it somewhere in the middle, just to break up the monotony, but you can do it at any time.”
“What’s that mean? Visual Site Inspection?”
He pulled up his ship schematic and changed the view to place a sensor overlay on it. “All the readings we see on the monitor back in the section come from these sensors,” he explained. “The readings are only as good as the sensors, so we visit each one several times a day. It takes twenty to thirty ticks to make the circuit, depending. It makes for a nice stroll.”
“Be back in time for lunch?”
“She’ll hang out there in the office until we get back, just in case we need something. But she wants to go to lunch on time.”
“Stay on the path?”
“If something goes wrong, they know what route we’re taking through the ship and can find us quickly.”
“Is that likely?”
“It has never happened yet. But it’s a good practice.”
“Write if you get work?”
“Bip her if there’s anything that needs attention. The whole thing is kind of a ritual.”
We arrived at the first sensor package and Francis showed me the test port. He stuck the end of his stylus into the small hole and the sensor icon on our tablets blinked red, then green again. “Okay, next!” There were a lot of sensor packages to test, many only a few steps from the previous one. He had me use my stylus on some of them and check the display. There was not a lot to this part of the job.
“Doesn’t this get boring?” I asked after about the fiftieth package.
Francis snickered. “You have no idea—yet. But the alternative is sheer terror. You only have to live through one nasty environmental crisis to appreciate boredom,” he said with a smile. “Of course, if it’s really nasty, you don’t get to live through it so the boredom becomes moot.”
“What’re the odds?” I asked him, trying not to sound too alarmed.
“We’re good,” he said. “You have a higher probability of being murdered than of dying from lack of oxygen, for example. The key is keeping on top of things even through the boredom. As long as we keep checking, keep up with filter replacement, and stay on top of our air and water chemistry, you’re safer here than planet-side. Ships that are sloppy because it’s boring—or expensive—are the ones you want to be wary of. The Lois is not one of those.”
He took me down the length of the spine—the three meter diameter tube that connected the bow and stern sections of the ship—and we clicked off more sensor packages in there. It was five hundred and twenty-eight meters long and had eight airtight hatches along the way.
“It seems small for being the backbone of the ship,” I said, looking at the hexagonal spaces that we walked through.
“Yeah,” Francis agreed, “but remember that each cargo container is locked to the ones around it on the outside shell of the ship. The connections to the spine are really only needed for alignment. The real structural integrity—the reinforcements that keep the backbone from breaking—are on the outer edges of the containers.”
We finished out the tour by visiting the boat deck and engine compartments in the aft. It was the first time I had been down the spine, so I had never even visited this part of the ship in all the time since coming aboard. I was shocked by how large the ship’s boat was. Probably because it was the first time I had stood beside a shuttle craft and seen it resting on its landing struts. This one was basically an undersized planetary shuttle.
Francis saw me gawking at it and said, “They take it out for a spin a couple times a year. It doesn’t get much use because it’s expensive to run. It seats twelve but you don’t really want to ride in it with that many people. It’s a bit crowded.”
The Dynamars Auxiliaries were monsters. For months when I heard people talking about the kickers I had this mental image of a little rocket in the back of the ship. These were huge. I did not even begin to understand how they worked, but as I stood beside them, I realized that they needed to get a lot of ship moving. I chided myself for my own naiveties.
“How do you know if you checked all the sensor packages?” I asked Francis.
“We did them in sequence. If we’d gone out of order, the test would have gone red and then changed to a blinking green instead of a solid green. The missed sensor would have blinked yellow so you know where to go back to. That’s assuming the sensor passed. If it failed, it would go red and a blinking red would indicate a failed package test, but the missed packages would still blink yellow.”
We finished the tour at the aft engineering office and started back for environmental. We even made it back in time for lunch.
Chapter 10
ST. CLOUD ORBITAL
2352-FEBRUARY-21
The mess de
ck was crowded with all hands back aboard. The captain scheduled pullout for 14:00 and I knew that Cookie, Pip, and Sarah would have their hands full with people hanging around until 13:30. Francis and I stood together in line and he kept his tablet where he could see it. I glanced at mine periodically, but nothing showed up. I kept waiting for the automated systems check to pop up but it had the decency to wait until we were seated.
“Shouldn’t we go back down?” I asked as Francis settled in at a table beside Brill and Diane.
Brill said, “You can if you like, but as long as your tablet is displaying properly,” she nodded toward mine and continued, “and yours is, then you can see anything from here that you could see from there. Alerts and alarms will pop up on your tablet. We have it a bit easier than the bridge and engine room crew because of that.”
Diane asked, “Well, Ish? How’s your first morning as part of the Foggy Bottom gang?”
“Well, let’s see—it started out slogging and freeze drying sludge, then a marathon hike down the length of the ship and back up, but we’re all still breathing so I guess all in all not too bad so far.”
Francis patted me on the back. “You’re doing great.” He cupped a hand around his mouth, leaned over to Brill, but spoke loudly enough for me to hear, “I didn’t have to use the cattle prod once!”
Brill tsked. “He’s spoiling all your fun, Francis.”
“Maybe later,” Diane added with a mischievous grin.
“Okay,” Brill said, “here’s the drill. I’m first section, Francis—and by extension Ish—second, Diane third. We’ll be setting second watch when we secure from navigation detail at around 17:00, so Ish and Francis will get off at 18:00. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you two will be back on duty at 06:00.”
Francis added, “When underway, we run a modified twenty-four stan watch schedule, Ish. You already know we change on the sixes and twelves, but only two sections get the duty in any given day. That means we get one day off out of every three. The basic pattern is six on, six off, six on, twelve off, then six on, six off, six on, twenty-four off and it repeats every three days.”