The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (2 page)

              “Hey there, boy. It’s good to see you again,” she said aloud. As she spoke, her eyes drifted down and spied her friend and first mate walking down the loading ramp and onto the sand. Rather than moving to meet him, she waited for him, looking back up at her ship. Her chin-length blonde hair whipped about, unsecured in the wind, and brown eyes squinted from a broad pale face at the sun’s reflection gleaming on her vessel. After a few minutes, Templeton reached her. He was, she thought not for the first time, looking a little tired. Though he was only a few years past fifty, his sandy hair was greyer, he walked a bit more slowly than he did when she first met him a few years ago, and he breathed somewhat harder. He was breathing a bit hard now.

              “Welcome back, Captain.” He turned and looked up at the ship with her. “Never get tired of looking at it, do you?” he asked rhetorically, knowing well his captain’s love of her ship. This was not the first nor third time they had stood like this and gazed up at the instrument of their livelihood.

              “Indeed.” The captain’s high clear voice carried over the wind. “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night.”

              Templeton raised an eyebrow. “It’s still daytime.” She didn’t reply. “Lemme guess. Hamlet?”

              His captain turned to him, shaking her head. “Romeo and Juliet.”

              “Would’ve been my next guess. Seriously,” he replied, turning back to her from the ship. “So don’t keep me in suspense. I’m dyin’ here.”

              She allowed some satisfaction to creep into her voice. “We got the job.”

              “Great!” he almost shouted, and for a minute she thought he was going to take her by the shoulders or hug her, but instead he simply rocked up on his toes and back down again. “Am I going to like it?”

              “Probably not, but it pays a ton, and it should be easy enough. Shall we?” She gestured towards the ship, and together they began walking back over his footprints in the sand, heads bowed a bit against the wind which had been picking up as the day progressed. “It’s a delivery job. Our first port of call is Mars for a pickup. We’ll be there for a few days, and then we head all the way out to Cronos Station at Saturn for a drop off.”

              Templeton grunted. “Something told me it would be a Jovian run. You know Mars is on the other side of the sun right now. That will turn what should be a two day journey into a week.”

              “If we thrust all the way, yes.”

“And,” he continued, “I could be wrong, but I think that Saturn is pretty much the complete opposite direction right now.”

“I’ll need to check with Charis, assuming she updated the astrogation charts, but I believe you’re right.”

“It doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. Why not wait until the planets are closer? Why not hire a ship already on Mars to bring whatever they want transported here, and then we could take it on to Saturn? Did they say?” They reached the ramp and began ascending into the cargo bay of the ship. Templeton’s breathing became a bit more labored.

“Maybe there are no ships available on Mars, or no appropriate ships, or no good ships with our record. As for waiting, they seem to be in a rush, which will make sense once you hear the full details. They’re paying well for a chartered flight.” She shrugged. “They didn’t say why, and I didn’t try to talk them out of it.”

              “What’s the cargo?” he asked as the shadow of the vessel fell over them.

              “Two passengers, their effects, and a few cargo crates. That’s all. For that we get six hundred and eighteen thousand.”

              “They’re paying us all that to run just two people and some crates all the way to Saturn? It seems like a waste to me.” He held up his hands, adding, “Not complaining.” They reached the shuttle bay and headed across, past the shuttles and jump ships, to the elevator at the back of the cavernous space.

              “Well, it’s a relocation move.” She paused to organize her thoughts, and then began. “The meeting was with a couple of executives from Libom Pangalactic. You know how paranoid those types are about corporate espionage and the like. That, I assume, is why they wanted me to come alone. I had to sign a waiver saying that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the job if I decided to turn it down before they would even
tell
me what the job was.” She pressed the button in the elevator for deck two.

              “It
seems
,” and the way she stressed the word made it clear that her faith in the stories of corporate energy executives was somewhat lacking, “that the key computer engineer on Cronos Station died in an EVA accident.” Templeton displayed the frown of those who hear of a tragic death that holds no personal meaning for them. “They need to replace the man who died, and since this accident has slowed production, they want some redundancy. So they’ve hired two new computer techs, a scientist and an engineer. Both are top dogs in their field, and Libom is paying through the nose to relocate them. First class all the way.” The elevator came to a smooth stop and the doors slid open quietly. Staples led them, a half a step ahead, towards the mess hall.

              “By first class, do you mean…” Her first mate let his question drift.

              “Yes. They’re not to lose any time, so that means stasis tubes.”

              Templeton shook his head. “You know we don’t have any stasis tubes on board.” Staples stopped and turned to him, looking up at the taller man with a nearly expressionless face that communicated quite effectively. “Okay, that was stupid. Of course you know that.”

              “It’s true we don’t have any tubes on board at present,” she said, continuing, “but we have the reception bays for them in CB4. Libom is paying for the tubes, and we will get to keep them when we’re done. I made it part of the deal.” Again, self-satisfaction edged into her voice. “I’m a bit peckish,” she added as they entered the mess hall. Templeton eased himself down at one of the benches while his captain rooted through one of the refrigeration units. “So we head for Mars and spend two days there. We’ll meet the engineers and give them a tour of the ship. Not much point, I suppose, as they’ll be unconscious the whole trip, but I don’t like to let anyone aboard my ship I haven’t met. Plus, it need hardly be said that the ethics of transporting people who begin and end a journey in stasis are sticky at best.” She emerged with a raspberry yogurt, plucked a spoon from a nearby magnetic tray, and settled down across from her friend.

              The man shrugged slightly. “Naturally. Gotta be sure that the people
want
to go where they’re goin’.”

              “Indeed. After the tour, the technicians in Tranquility freeze them, we bring them aboard, and we’re off to Cronos Station.”

              “Mm.” He grunted.

              “After we deliver the stasis tubes and they’re revived, we’re done. And because I know you’re wondering, we will be paid forty percent before we depart Mars and the rest upon delivery. I trust that you’ll handle informing the crew and dispensing pay?”

              He nodded his graying head. “Sounds easy enough.”

              She smiled wryly and said, “It always does.”

Chapter 2

The next day, Clea Staples sat in her seat in the ship’s cockpit, the seatbelt snug around her waist and shoulders. Her hair was held back from her face by two small colorless metal barrettes, one on each side. The chair itself was scuffed metal and partially covered in well-worn and comfortable black leather. From it she had a slightly raised view of the room and the sleepy Oregon coastline towns beyond the windows. Bethany, the pilot, sat directly in front of her, her small frame nearly swallowed by the chair. Only her coffee colored hands were visible as they flew over the controls, running final system checks.

              “Yegor, do we have final clearance from berth control?”

              “We do, Captain,” the Russian replied with little trace of an accent. He sat to Bethany’s right and somewhat back along the curve of the front of the cockpit. “Are you set, Bethany? You have EM control?”

              The pilot’s high thin voice was barely detectable over the sounds of the ship as it throttled up. “Yes, Captain.”

Staples turned to her left and addressed Templeton, who was seated next to her. “Final check. Is everything in order?”

He scanned down his surface, verifying the check list. “All cargo secured, double checked. All crew on board. Go from control. Mmmm… yep. All set.” He looked up and nodded, then turned to the console on his left side and depressed a coms button. “
Gringolet
ready to depart. Everybody check your belt.” His loud voice rang out through the cockpit and the rest of the ship as he spoke. He shifted his finger to a side console and typed in a three-digit code. “John? Is Gwen belted?” Charis, sitting to Bethany’s left, shot him a look of gratitude.

“Yes, all set.” John Park’s voice came through the speaker over the first mate’s console scratchy but loudly. “Thanks.”

“Yah hum,” Templeton intoned, and then turned back to his captain. “Set.”

“Bethany, the ship is yours,” Staples said. Her voice carried the air of a task that has been completed often enough to become routine, but whose potential for disaster should never be forgotten.

There was no response from the small young woman, but as she manipulated the controls in front of her, the ship began to rise steadily. The electromagnets increased their power output, pushing the vessel upwards. As they did so, Bethany gently allowed thrust to creep out from the VTOL engines. The thrust provided by the magnets waned, and the pilot increased the thrust proportionately, keeping the upward velocity almost perfectly constant. The goal of any good pilot was to transfer the thrust from the magnets to the engines without too many jolts, and preferably without the downward facing engines disrupting the tides below. Particularly bad pilots could earn fines for their ships by bringing up the thrust too early. Staples thought that she had rarely seen a pilot, especially one only twenty-one years old, able to strike that balance as well as Bethany Miller. Eventually the ship began to tilt skyward. There was a hum as the atmospheric wings extended. The crew felt the ground move from beneath them to behind them, and the moon came into view in the early morning blue sky. Bethany continued her manual ballet, and the ship slowly picked up speed, accelerating towards escape velocity with barely a shudder.  

Ten minutes later, Bethany’s long black hair began to drift away from her head and shoulders. She brushed it lightly out of her face, her heavily shadowed eyes intent on the gauges in front of her. It rippled back like an eel and rallied for its return. Her hands continued to push it away, the actions seemingly part of her work. Eventually, her manipulations slowed as she restricted herself to the odd attitude correction. “Wings retracted, low orbit established. We are atmosphere free, Captain,” she said, her voice just audible against the quiet hum of the computers and the deeper rumble of the engines.

“Excellent work as always, Bethany.” Staples found herself hoping that her young pilot would become more emboldened as a result of the confidence she placed in her, but it had yet to happen.

Bethany took the compliment in silence, tilting her head down as she smiled a bit and allowing her hair to drift in front of her face for a moment.

“Captain, berth control reports no problems and, naturally, no fines. Total bill for docking is four hundred, thirty-two fifty,” Yegor said, reading off his communications console. “Okay to pay?”

“Please do.” Now that they were in space again, the takeoff having been among the smoothest she had experienced, Clea Staples sighed and relaxed. She missed Earth when she was away, but not as much as she missed her ship when she was anywhere else. She undid her safety harness and pushed off lightly from the base of her chair, stopping herself easily with a hand when she reached the forward observation window. “Mind giving me a roll, Bethany?” She looked down at the girl next to her, dressed head to toe in black. Not for the first time, she wondered what strange events had landed this quiet but amazingly talented girl on her ship.

As Bethany reached for the control sticks, Templeton turned to his control console and depressed the shipwide coms button again. “Prep for a roll,” he stated out of consideration for the vertigo-prone crew members like himself, and then fastened his eyes on the floor.

Gringolet
rotated along its Z axis to the left, spinning the blue and white world in front of them. It moved from below to above, and as it did so, Staples pushed up and back from the front console. She grabbed the grip bars on either side of the skylight and surveyed the planet of her birth. The clouds and storms swirled over the surface, and as she watched and the ship gained some distance, the islands of Nippon crept into view off to her left. She smiled, and her breath fogged the window, obscuring the view. As Bethany continued the roll, Staples allowed herself to drift away from the glass, pushing off at the last second to send herself back to her chair.

“Don, you’d better check on our new recruits. This is their first time under thrust on a starship, didn’t you say? We’ll get under way at…” she looked at her watch, “noon.”

“Had that same thought myself, Captain,” Templeton replied as he undid his seatbelt and maneuvered himself towards the door at the back of the cockpit.

After making his way down to the crew deck, Templeton expertly pushed his way forward from handhold to handhold, allowing his fingers to drift over the walls from time to time. Finally he arrived at the last doors of the hallway, and he paused for a second to listen. Two male voices issued from within, both heated, and he heard more than one impolite word. He knocked on the door of the cabin. A moment later the door opened, and he was looking at Dean Parsells, one of his new hires.

“Hey there, Dean. I thought I’d come down and check on you two.” The man, though the smaller of two new crew members, was nonetheless large. He floated at close to two meters tall, and his weight was approaching one hundred kilograms, at least on Earth. He had short, dark hair, and his chin was too small and his eyes set too close together to be considered handsome. Templeton looked over Dean’s shoulder as a table drifted by. A second later there was a loud bang as the errant furniture ricocheted off the wall. Parsells regarded him and smiled.

“Yeah, come in. We’re having some trouble, I think.” His voice was heavy. He moved aside and Templeton pushed himself into the room. Instantly, he had to duck as a chair came drifting towards his head.

“Whoa,” he declared, and reached out a hand to catch another chair spinning in place on his right. The room was a mess. At least they hadn’t unfastened the beds. “So, I know you boys have been in space plenty. Wouldn’t’ve hired you if you hadn’t.” He looked over at Harrison Quinn. Templeton reasoned that he was well over one hundred kilos. He had the face of a boxer, of a man who had been in plenty of fights. That he had scars on his fists and not his face indicated that he had won most of them. “But this is different from mining ore in zero G on an asteroid. See, the floor is the floor when we’re planetside, but that,” he pointed at the wall to his right and the general aft of the ship, “is the floor when we’re under thrust, which will be most of the time.” The two men looked at the wall, at him, and at each other. The marauding table drifted quietly past them again, pinging off a chair and taking on a new trajectory.

“We use this time in zero G to reorient the ship. That’s what most of the crew is doing right now: rearranging their rooms. That’s why all of your furniture comes unclamped from the floor. You need to clamp it to that wall there. That’ll be your floor in,” he looked at his watch, “about two hours. And it’ll stay that way till we reach Mars, most like.” The larger man looked at him and shook his head, not in confusion but in exasperation. It was a look that said
this is so freaking weird
. “It takes a bit to get used to.”

“Wait,” Parsells said, considering. “So if that wall becomes the floor,” he pointed at the same wall that Templeton had indicated, “how do we get out of here?”

“See how the door is wide and located at the left side of the room? It’s designed to convert. And see this switch?” He pushed himself over to the wall and indicated a light switch covered with a hinged piece of plastic. “Watch this.” He lifted the plastic and flipped the switch. There was a distinct
thunk
as ten centimeter wide panels in the floor and ceiling retracted. Each was about a half a meter across. Suddenly there were ladders in the room, built into both the floor and ceiling. “There ya go. There’s another one in the hall; they’re all over the ship. You’d better get comfy with climbing around while we’re under thrust. If you need to go from aft to fore, well… the ship’s two hundred fifty-two meters long. Thrusting, that makes it over two hundred meters tall.”

Understanding was dawning on Parsells’ face, but Quinn still seemed to be struggling with the concept. “Look, think of it this way. When you got on board, the ship was on its belly, right? So this,” he pointed to what the men currently thought of as down, “was the ground. But when we’re thrusting, which we normally do at about point six Gs, it’s like the ship is sitting on earth, but on its butt, nose to the sky. Getting around means literally climbing the walls.” He grinned at his own joke.

“But what about the bridge, um, sir?” Quinn inquired, consternation still plaguing his face. “Do they have to climb up to their seats? And if they do, isn’t that like lying in a bed all the time?”

Templeton pushed off from the wall and intercepted the floating table as it drifted back his way. “They can do that if they want, but the whole cockpit tilts. We call it the cockpit. It tilts ninety degrees. The whole nose of the ship does. The upside of that is that you get to sit normally when we’re thrusting. The downside is that, well, you gotta look up through the skylight to see where you’re going. Doesn’t matter much; we don’t steer by sight too often.” He expertly pushed off the far wall and grabbed a handbar on the aft wall, swinging the table into place with his other hand. “Here, one of you help me clamp this down. Parsells?” Parsells moved over to him somewhat awkwardly. Their resumes said that the men had a few years of zero G experience, but it also said that it had been a few years since they had been in space. It was evidently a bit more difficult for Parsells than hopping back on a bike. “Quinn, you grab that chair and bring it over here. Look,” he said to Parsells, “see that thumb latch on the table leg? Just press it against the wall and hit it like this.” He flipped the switch to demonstrate. “It doesn’t matter where. Once we’re thrusting, you can rearrange it wherever you want.”

Still yawning, Captain Staples walked into the mess hall in search of some light breakfast before the morning shift. The room was occupied by two burly men who sat next to each other, each with a plate of eggs and potatoes about half-eaten in front of them. They looked up at their new captain, and the smaller of the two smiled awkwardly.

After a moment, Parsells spoke up. “Good to be aboard, Captain.” Quinn nodded at her.

Staples smiled in welcome. “It’s good to have you both aboard. Do you have any questions that I can answer?” She began rummaging through a refrigeration unit.

Quinn looked at his friend, who faced her in turn. “Yeah, actually. We wanted to have a real beer with dinner last night, to celebrate our new jobs and all. Can’t drink a toast with lemonade.” He gestured towards his cup.

“I don’t allow alcohol on my ship, Mr. Parsells.” This news clearly did not sit well with the two men, who looked at each other as if the horse they had chosen to bet on had just broken a leg. She carried her yogurt and a spoon over to the table and sat down. “Travelling between planets is not dissimilar to how many describe war: long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of terror. In my experience, boredom and alcohol mix poorly, and terror and alcohol even worse. We have movie nights, poker nights, a plethora of board games, a small gymnasium, and somewhere between two and four billion stars to count in this galaxy. The day-to-day running of the ship will take some of your time as well.” She tried for a genuine smile and suspected that she had pulled it off.

If Parsells had further thoughts about the dry spaceship, he did not share them. Instead, he said, “If you’re here, who’s running the ship right now?”

“No one, actually.” Parsells’ eyes grew wide with concern.

“But someone’s steering, right?”

She took a bite and shook her head.

“What if we hit something? What if we go off course?” Quinn was beginning to look alarmed as well.