Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer) (18 page)

“In
short just about everyone in stasis is sick, elderly, or terminally ill. Or all
of the above,” Sprite concluded.

“Injured?”

“A
few. Not as many as I thought. A few kids with terminal diseases, but not many
of them. Apparently no one has been put in stasis for several decades due to
the problems with the reactor.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah
oh. So if anyone is hurt they either get patched up or die.”

“Ouch.”
He frowned for a moment. “You said one wasn’t.”

“Correct.
She was placed in stasis due to crimes. She likes to cause trouble and
apparently was the daughter of a captain. She had skills considered critical
enough to keep her alive and around.”

“So
they didn't put her off?” he asked, curious about that. After all if she was in
stasis it wasn't like her skills could be used after all.

“Apparently
they didn't want to foster their problems onto someone else. Or the captain of
the time didn't want to part with her daughter.”

“Okay.”

“Should
we wake her?”

“If
she's a problem child then I don't see a reason to let her out. Besides, it's
not our decision anyway.”

Sprite
sniffed. “True.”

“Admiral
do you ever sleep?” Martha asked. She'd replaced a tired Fara. The teen had
been grateful for the relief and had stumbled off to her bed a little while
ago. Apparently this had been her second shift and she was flat out exhausted.

“Come
to think of it...” Irons stretched. “Yeah. I can jack in and let Sprite and
Proteus do their thing while unlocking a few of the bits that take a bit longer
to replicate.”

“Okay...”
She looked around. He smiled. “I'll be in the cockpit.”

“I'll
make sure no one disturbs you,” Martha said with a nod.

“Okay.
Help yourself to the food if you need it,” Irons said with a wave as he moved
to the cockpit. He closed the hatch door behind him and then settled into the
pilot's chair.

“Are
you really going to sleep here?” Sprite asked amused.

“It's
safe and relatively secure right?” he asked, running a quick check to make sure
no one had touched anything. Everything was as it should be. Good.

“I
would think you'd prefer to be more or less horizontal,” Sprite observed.

“I
can sleep like this,” Irons said, snuggling down until he got comfortable.
After all, he was military. A soldier or sailor learned to rest or sleep
whenever and wherever possible. He rested his right arm and felt it move. He
cracked an eyelid and smiled a little as a jack opened and a cable extended to
a universal port. Several other cables went with it.

“Might
as well get as much bandwidth as we can get,” Sprite said in explanation.

“Don't
hog it all,” he yawned. He really didn't need to referee any disputes between
the AI. He could feel his body relaxing. Good.

Irons
managed to get four hours of sleep. While he slept the Kiev maneuvered to
correct her course. Fortunately the course changes were far enough out and the
inertial dampeners were tuned enough so they didn't wake him.

The
main engines came online just as he woke. The rumble and vibration were
immediately recognizable to an old hand despite being in a shuttle in the ship.
“Report?” he ordered sleepily. He moved but his right arm was pinned down. He
looked down at it. It's still jacked in. Sprite must have locked it down to
keep him from jerking the cables out as he slept.

“Maneuvering.
Main engines are back online. That's the kick you just felt.”

“Feels
like the inertial dampeners are out of synch,” he observed dryly. He smacked
his lips and stretched and then scratched. He needed coffee.

“Probably.
The ship is old Admiral,” Sprite replied absently. It sounded like she was
busy.

“I
wasn't talking about theirs. I was talking about the shuttle,” he said
stretching and working some of the kinks out.

“Shuttle
inertials are offline admiral. Do you want me to bring them up?” Sprite asked.

“Never
mind. Coffee,” he said scratching his back and starting to get up. He felt the
cables unjack and retract.

“Never
get in between a navy man and his cup of joe,” Sprite quipped. Irons snorted as
he made his way aft to the food replicator.

“Damn
skippy,” he growled.

Orbit
of Triang was reached sixteen hours later. The bridge crew worked on trade over
the communications link. When the admiral heard about that little tidbit he was
amused. He had given Triang the radio system for situations like this. It was
good that they were putting it to use so soon. Irons had turned his attention
on the sensors a few hours ago. He was on the bridge, on his back tearing into
the underside of the sensor console with a tech handing him parts as they
exchanged greetings with the planet.

The
techs manning communications were surprised by the clear signal. “Must be a
good day down there,” the comm. tech stated.

“No,
I upgraded their systems when I was downside,” Irons replied absently, not
bothering to pull himself out to talk with them face to face.

“Oh.”

“Admiral,
I um... that is...” the tech sounded nervous. Irons slowed his work for a
moment. He peeked out from under the console.

“Yes?”

“I'm
well, I'm the cargo master.” Irons studied the Telerite. It was unusual to see
one in such a bright room without another of its species near. They were pretty
codependent. Also normally nocturnal.

Irons
chattered out an ultrasonic greeting with his implants. The Telerite stepped
back uncertainly then started to chatter its teeth in surprised amusement.
Irons noted it was wearing some sort of wraparound sunglasses. That explained
how it could tolerate the light level. After a moment the Telerite reached down
and shut off its old vocoder and then started chattering at him fast in its
native language.

Irons
hid a snort as the mole like alien went on and on faster than even he could
keep up with. No doubt Sprite was following along. He was pretty sure this
character was alone for a reason now; he had diarrhea mouth and didn't come
with a stop command. The vocoder probably forced the alien to channel his or
her chatter into something the machine could keep up with.

“Easy,”
he said holding up a hand. Text was scrolling across his HUD as Sprite
translated it. He couldn't keep up with half of it. A lot of it was the being's
life story. The human and Veraxin crew around them were looking confused. Irons
shrugged it off as he got to his feet. “Okay let's start with something simple.
Blur right?” he asked the alien in its native language.

Telerites
were marsupials. Terrans thought of them as bipedal moles. They had pouches on
both thighs, their abdomen and their lower back. This one was a small version
of the species, about a meter tall. Young obviously. They could range up to
three meters tall and two wide under the right conditions.

Blur
wiggled excitedly. “Oh sorry, sorry, it's just I haven't talked with someone in
a while and I get kind of excited. I'd love to talk with you for a while but
I'm kind of busy. I'm sorry to say this but we need your shuttle. Now we can
offload your things and...”

“Hang
on a sec,” Irons said interrupting the stream. The Telerite blinked at him in
confusion. “Just a moment there. I thought we settled this. My shuttle is
military issue. I am not going to part with it.”

“Oh
no, no sir. We're just going to borrow it for a week to transfer materials to
the ground and back. We need the extra space you see since we're behind
schedule. That crisis... Thank you by the way for fixing the ship! That crisis
messed up all our schedules. Oh Whoa, it is such a pain!”

The
admiral rubbed his temple. At this rate he was going to get a headache for
sure. “Okay. Look. I'll see if we can get another of your shuttles out. Will
that help? My launch isn't negotiable.”

Blur
pause and then dry washed his hand paws. “But we need the shuttle. We only have
so much material to transfer of course, you've been using some of the cargo to repair
the ship and we need to get this down fast. The contract for the magnesium
specifies...”

The
admiral held up a restraining hand. “Hang on a minute. I'll get the other
shuttle up for you. It's what a cargo shuttle right? My shuttle isn't built to
haul large cargo transfers.”

“Um,
we can do that but I need authorization to proceed. I'd like to you understand
it's just that...”

“I
get it. We'll get authorization. Start with Barry he knows who to talk to. Get
me a parts list and the materials and we'll get on it.”

“But
I can't spare the raw materials! You've taken so much and we need it to trade
or we'll be out of food soon and we can't have that! We also need fuel because
we're low on fuel and that's not good. We really need the fuel and can't afford
a delay...”

“Just
settle down.” Irons still wasn't sure about the gender of the Telerite. They
were hermaphrodites that could choose the gender they preferred depending on
their environment. They had a shaggy pelt due to the climate they had
originally evolved in. Normally they had a brown or black pelt. This one had a
white pelt with black leopard spots on its back and flanks. It's rear spines
jutted out from the fur along it's spine. They flexed as it breathed.

It
had two meaty hands with a pair of long thick digging claws embedded on the
back of the four fingered hands. The claws were hollow Irons knew. Each had a
venom sack in the hand that the alien could use in its defense if anything was
foolish enough to attack it.

“Look,
see if Barry is on duty. If he is and if you can get permission get him to take
the broken bits out of the shuttle and we'll use my replicator to use them as
the substrate to remake them. If that's okay with you right?”

“Oh
yes that's better. It sounds good I'm just not sure. You know it's so hard
dealing with the vocoder. You seem like a nice fellow. A very nice Terran. I
like talking with you. You can speak my native language though I detect a
metallic tone in your voice. Is there something wrong?”

“It's
my implants,” Irons replied amused. “Terrans can't speak at these ranges,” he
replied. He was glad the implants were shouldering the brunt of the work. If
his voice box had tried to handle the ultrasonic frequencies it would have
locked up on him for sure.

“Okay.
I'll see if we can get the permission from the captain. Oh I hate to bother him
though! He's such a grump sometimes. Really he is. I could tell you stories
that would turn your ears inside out. The Terran is quite vicious with his
odor. Not like you and I don't mean to complain. It's just some Terrans stink
if you know what I mean? I mean you can't help it and all; it's just your
nature. I wish, I so wish, we could talk more but I really need to get going. I
need to get this done right away so we can get the shuttle working. Oh I'd love
to have the other shuttle running again! It's a larger shuttle and we could
really use it but it had so many problems that it was unfortunately parked. Can
you really fix it? Of course you can you can do anything. Really. So amazing
for a Terran to do so much in such a limited time!”

“Okay,”
Irons said trying hard not to shake his head. The ultrasonic’s were starting to
become painful. He was glad none of the canines were here, they would have been
howling by now. “Get on it. I'll check with Barry as soon as this is done. In
fact I'll have my AI handle it now.”

“Okay
thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Telerite bounced and then rushed
off at a waddle. Irons snorted as the crew got out of its way and practically
urged it on. When the alien had left he sighed in relief. He wasn't the only
one in the compartment to do so.

“He's
a talker. Blur,” a Veraxin said with a head bob. A Terran nodded.

“It's
a he?” Irons asked.

“Sorry.
Not sure really. I don't want to hear the answer if I ever asked,” the Veraxin
replied. There was a chuckle of amusement from the others. Several people
nodded as they returned their attention to their work.

“Now
I know why he's cargo master. Could you imagine him running on with trade
negotiations? They'd give him anything he wanted just to get him to shut up,”
Sprite said to Irons. Irons snorted as he returned his attention to the
console.

“Okay,
where were we. Oh, yes, I was almost done here. We're just putting a pretty
band aid on this for now. To really fix this we need to go out on the hull and
rewire or replace the antenna.”

“We
know admiral,” the Veraxin said. “The primary communications array was sheared
off in a meteor storm centuries ago. The secondary is patched. I believe one
antenna is warped.”

“Probably.
The software situation is sorted out. I've replaced the processors but the
memory has errors. I'll swap that out and then we can track down the other
bugs.”

“Thank
you admiral,” the Veraxin said.