Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (12 page)

‘Oh, that is weird!’  He exclaimed, laughing.  ‘It feels like my head is floating away!’

‘Definitely a natural.’  Buzz Burroughs commented from over at the command table.  As Mako turned and stepped away from the ladder, the Exec smiled at him.  ‘It will get a lot weirder than that in the launch, but it’s good that you’re laughing at it and not yelling and grabbing at things.  But do have a seat.’

‘If you’re sure you’re not too busy?’  Mako queried, and was assured that that was fine.

‘If officers are busy at this stage,’ Buzz explained, ‘something isn’t right.  We’ve already done the busy, demanding things, tech diagnostics, and documentation.  There are also always intensive wrangles with supplies during the last few hours.  But we’re good now.  We closed the manifest forty minutes ago, all documentation has been accepted, and all tech lights are reading green.  Permission has been given to vacate our parking orbit at 1825.  We salute the system as we do that, then we’ll be climbing up.  There’ll be about thirty five minutes of acceleration during which we’ll get you suited up, then ‘last calls’ is announced.  You have five minutes then to make any calls you want to before we hit the ‘launch minus twenty minutes’ point.  At that point, comms go off for all but essential traffic, the airlocks are sealed, and we start turning off all non-essential tech.

‘That, really, is your point of no return for deciding you want to get off.  If you’re still aboard when the airlocks are sealed, the circumstances would have to be extraordinary for any skipper to abort a run, though we could, at need, call for a pilot ship to drop you back into the system.  Not that I think we’re going to have to do that,’ he assured him, as the inspector gave him a slightly questioning look.  ‘I’m just making sure you understand what’s happening and are aware of all your options.’

Mako thanked him, but assured him he had no intention of getting off the ship.  Since Buzz obviously wasn’t busy and was happy to chat with him, though, he decided not to worry about making a fool of himself and just asked about the things that interested him.  One of the things that had struck him, before, was that there were no big screens on the command deck.  Even the watchkeeper’s screens on the datatable were a clutter of highly technical small screens rather than the big visual one he’d been expecting.  When he mentioned this, there was a ripple of mirth and even Buzz chuckled.

‘You mean like in the movies, where they operate starships with enormous visual screens as if they need to be able to see where they’re going?’ he queried, and at the inspector’s self deprecating grin and confirmation that that was what he’d been expecting, yes, Buzz grinned.  ‘Spacers don’t use those,’ he informed him.  ‘We
do
have visual readouts, which you may see on holoscreens about the ship, but they are purely scenic.  Nice for watching the stars go by, but useless for any practical purpose. 

‘Spacers use scopes and feeds, okay?  Scopes are readouts from the many different kinds of scanners we use and feeds are readouts from key tech, like the engines and life support.  The best one for you to look at is this.’  He indicated a screen with a schematic plan on it and a myriad tiny points of light, both stationary and moving.  ‘This is the Calibrated Thermal Imaging Display, known to spacers as heatscan.  This is actually a feed from the port authority, giving full overview of the system, but there’ll be a very similar screen from our own scanners once we’ve launched.  This is public access, in fact.  Any member of the public can access it on the Port Authority infosite.  Spotters, people who record and track ship movements as a hobby, pretty much live on this system.’

Mako gave him a startled look.  ‘People do that?  Seriously?’ he assumed that had been a dumb question, of course, as everyone laughed, but for once the joke was on the spacers.   

‘Oh yes.’  Buzz said, and addressed the seven crewmembers on the command deck.  ‘Hands up who was a spotter as a kid.’  Five hands went up, as did Buzz’s himself, with a certain amount of laughing embarrassment  ‘Most kids go through a phase of being into space, of course, drawing starships and having model ones and that kind of thing, but most kids grow out of it. 

‘Spacers, though, we don’t.  We just get more and more into it, to the point where, by high school, typically, we are members of the physics club.  We’re probably Fleet cadets, too, and the kind of kid who gets excited when a rare type or famous starship is in port.  This does not, as you will appreciate, give you high social status at your typical high school, so we were pretty much all despised as nerds and geeks, really.  And some of us do still spot for a hobby, recording any unusual ships we may encounter in our spotters’ logs. 

‘Though most spotters, in fact, will never go into space – we don’t count system space, for that.  There are spotters clubs galore, with people who otherwise live perfectly ordinary lives getting together to share their passion for the comings and goings of starships.  And it
is
fascinating, that, as a way to go into space in the spirit.  The more you get into it, the more you see your world as being just one small point in a vast nexus of worlds, with ships being like the pulse of life between them all.

‘Here – the controls on this panel let you adjust scale of view and select what type or size of ship you want to observe.  If we set it to a full system view and cut out all system traffic and parked vessels, you can see the ships coming in and heading out.’

Mako watched for a few seconds and got a sense of an arterial flow of shipping coming in beneath the system, rising into parking orbits, there, while an even greater flow of shipping was pumping out at the top.

‘They’re all coming in and going out the same way,’ he observed, at which there was another little burst of mirth on the command deck.

‘Yes, all League worlds do this,’ Buzz explained.  ‘Regardless of what direction you’re coming in on and heading out to, launch tunnels are always oriented on the proximal line.  That’s a line drawn directly from dead galactic centre to the centre of your star.  That changes, of course, over time, with galactic rotation and stellar drift, but port authorities orient the tunnels as often as needed to keep them accurate, so ships always know which angle to come in on.  There’s access kept clear, you see, through the Comet Cloud that surrounds solar systems.  It’s very diffuse, mostly dust and ice, but would be deadly for a superlighted ship to run into, so we have two access routes cleared through it, one in, one out.

‘This, here, is the entry station – actually, there are nine stations there, but this is the official port authority station which gives port entry clearance.  Ships coming in are assigned a holding pattern around the entry station while they complete port entry formalities, see.  Once you have clearance, you’re handed on to flight control to be processed through the deceleration tunnels and assigned a route to a parking orbit. 

‘Heading out, you get your launch clearance from the port authority and go to the holding pattern area, here, till it’s your turn to run through one of the launch tunnels.  Shipping management is vital even in a quiet system, because if a starship
does
blow up, it has the potential to take a planet with it.  That’s why launch and decel tunnels are always angled so that if a ship
did
lose control, it would be heading away from the system, not in towards it.’

‘Are accidents common, then?’  The inspector asked, and thought, not for the first time today, of a disaster which had been on the news some years before when a yacht had collided with some sort of tug.  It hadn’t looked like much on the news, just a double flare, two silent little puffs of light.  There had not even been debris, and no question of survivors from either ship.

‘Very rare, these days,’ Buzz assured him.  ‘Though you will forgive us, please, if we do not make any definitive statements about how unlikely it is that we will have any problems.  Spacers are highly superstitious, see, and it would be felt to jinx the launch, be tempting fate, for us to be bragging about how safe our ship is.  I expect you’ll notice quite a few little superstitious practices going on in the minutes before the launch.  We will have to ask you to be understanding about our superstitions and not to take official notice of them, if you wouldn’t mind.  The Fleet doesn’t especially want it to be publicised that many of us rub lucky talismans before we launch.’

‘Ah.  Understood,’ said Mako, but his attention had been caught by noticing that there seemed to be several times many more ships leaving the system than were coming into it.  ‘A lot of ships seem to be leaving,’ he observed.  ‘Is that because it’s evening, CCT?’

‘Partly.’  Buzz said, with approval.  All starships and space stations operated on twenty five hour, hundred minute hour Chartsey Central Time and it was something that the LPA inspector knew
that
, at least.  ‘Starships try to get evening launch windows if they can because that gives you all day for pre-launch.  But mostly, it’s because it’s the weekend.  Most of those are yachts, see, heading out for weekend cruises.’

Mako looked interested.  ‘One of our directors has a yacht,’ he observed.  ‘A starseeker, moored at the Chartsey Yacht Club Station.  I’ve been aboard it, though only for a social event, we didn’t leave the station.’  He heard the ripple of amusement at that, and continued cautiously, ‘I did rather get the impression that many people had bought their yachts as a weekend place, kind of thing, and that quite a lot of them never leave the marina.’

‘No, and that’s fine, spacers would very much rather starseekers stayed at marina stations, believe me!’  Buzz said, with a chuckle.  ‘If we had any say in it, they’d be locked and bolted
to
the stations.  Many spacers would tell you they’d only want them to be moved off airlock to be used for target practice, too.  They’re the bane of our lives, frankly.  Starseekers are the cheapest kind of yacht people tend to feel is intersystem capable and you just would not believe the hassle they cause.  So if your colleague is using one as a weekend pad, that’s just fine by us, because in our opinion that’s all they’re good for.

‘I mean, just look at that stream, there – if I call up registry stats, yes, more than forty per cent of them are launching with a hired pilot because their owners are not qualified.  That’s something they do to get around the regulations that restrict use of launch tunnels to qualified pilots.  They hire a pilot to see them through the launch, then a boat takes them off and leaves the unqualified owners to head off into deep space by themselves.  The majority of them will be heading off on picnic cruises, in which you can see a good many of them are turning up onto this course.  They’re heading to ISiS Capital Gate, which even a starseeker can do in fourteen hours or so, to enjoy the restaurants there and do some duty free shopping.’

Even Mako had heard of ISiS Capital Gate, of course.  The Independent Space Station had the same status legally as if it was a world in its own right.  It was within League space but came under the governance of no particular world.  ISiS were privately owned trading stations, often close enough to worlds for duty-free shopping trips, and were renowned for their luxurious leisure facilities.  

‘Those heading that way,’ Buzz pointed out a smaller stream going in a different direction, ‘are heading for Sharfur, which is about an eleven day journey for a starseeker.  We’ll be heading out that way ourselves for the first few hours of our patrol, just doing our bit in ‘preserving and assisting all vessels at peaceful endeavour.’  I hope, I really do, that all you see in that are trivialities.  But that is why we will spend the first few hours going out that way.  A significant proportion of those ships currently embarking for Sharfur will be doing so for the first time, with inexperienced owners who may not even have the certificates offered by yacht clubs for space competence.  And the same, of course, coming in, with yachts from Sharfur heading to Chartsey. 

‘We’ll be quite busy for the first few hours, checking in with all the yachts coming and going to make sure they’re okay.  But all being well, we’re scheduled to turn off route just before midnight and head over onto the Karadon lane.  ISiS Karadon,’ he clarified, seeing a questioning look.  ‘We’re not going there, it’s a seven week run, that, even for us.  But that is the route we will be patrolling out as far as the Pagolis Cluster.  Karadon is the biggest and most important of the ISiS see.  It is not far from the geographical centre of the League and is convenient to so many intersystem routes that it’s like a deep space crossroads.  All routes may lead to Chartsey as far as Chartseyans are concerned, but for spacers, all routes lead to Karadon.

‘Here, if we take the yachts out of the picture, you can see the freight shipping.  Most of that is heading out to ISiS Karadon.  That’s the Might of Teranor,’ he indicated one of the larger dots on the screen, ‘a long haul container ship, heading out to Altarb, via Karadon, Canelon, Klenghorn and Cwmbracha.  It may be ten months before they make port at Altarb and years before they’re back at Chartsey.  And that’s the fascination for spotters, see, travelling in the spirit, journeys of imagination.’

‘Oh.’  Mako was surprised.  ‘You know, I
see
that,’ he said.  ‘I must admit, I’ve never been interested in things like planetariums and spaceports.  I remember being taken on a school trip to a spaceport as a kid and just not being able to get, at all, why other kids were so excited about it.  But when you put it like that, I can see the fascination.  And it’s almost, well, romantic, isn’t it?  All those far flung, exotic places… all right,’ he acknowledged, as even Buzz dissolved into helpless chuckles at that, and several of the crew frankly guffawed.  ‘
Not
romantic?’