Nightmare
Meriel screamed as she sat up in her bunk, panting and
sweating, the ten-year-old image of her dying mother as clear as a vid. She
grabbed the sim-chip and medal on the chain around her neck and took slow, deep
breaths to calm herself, fighting not to close her eyes again. No wonder
I can’t keep a roommate. Damn, I need more boost.
Still groggy, she sat up in bed and took a moment to orient
herself. This was her first jump on the Tiger, a new ship with new
routes. It was also her first private cabin in her new post as chief warrant
officer of cargo, and the first time she had ever slept without someone else’s
butt a few inches from her nose. Her new berth still smelled of disinfectant,
and the putty-gray walls bore the shadows of vids and knickknacks of the former
occupant.
She rose from her bunk and went to the cabinet for some
juice. Then she went to the sink for a damp towel and sat with her head back
and the towel over her eyes to help recover from the disorientation of the long
jump.
The ship’s clock told her that they had dropped out of the jump
early. Perhaps the nav system dumped them at some obscure singularity known
only to the navigators. Being in the wrong place did not worry Meriel the way
it had on her last ship. The Tiger’s routes were safer, and Molly
Vingel, the XO, told her there were five other marines on board who could help
in a fight.
“Incoming,” Meriel said to trigger the communications console.
“List.”
“Security,” the link responded.
“Bah,” Meriel said and removed the towel from her eyes for
the console to scan her retina. She then
lay back down with the towel on her forehead.
“Littlebit. Harry, urgent. Bell, Jeremy,” the link recited.
Little Harry. Damn. They had torn him away from his
older sister, Anita, and the siblings still missed each other. God, how
cruel the law could be for the powerless.
“Bell. Go,” she said, and the message from her lawyer,
Jeremy Bell, began.
“Enterprise Station, ET 2187:98:21,”
the console recited, and Jeremy appeared dressed in a colorful Hawaiian shirt,
lounging on a veranda with a view of a tropical beach.
Meriel moved the towel to cover her eyes again.
“Good news and bad news, Ms. Hope,” her lawyer began. “Good
news: the case for the Liu Yang moved to up to Court-5. That’s the court
of appeals on Enterprise.” Liu Yang. That’s what they called the Princess
now to hide her while the Princess’s papers showed her scrapped and
recycled. “That means if they decide in your favor, you get your ship back with
no more legal hassles, and you can return the registry to the Princess.
Bad news: Court-5 only hears pleas from licensed representatives, and they are
expensive. It’s not up to me, M. I’m pro bono on this, and I’d do it if they’d
let me, but the reps of the court are specialists and do not negotiate. It’s cost-plus
and, there’s not enough money in the account. Estimate attached.”
“Pause,” Meriel said. She raised the corner of the towel to
view the attachment and whistled. The estimate was two years of her gross
salary. “Damn, I don’t have that kind of money,” she mumbled and leaned back
again. “Well, Princess, I guess we’re just gonna have to wait. Play.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Ms. Hope,” Jeremy said, “but
we cannot wait. There’s more bad news.” He waved a vid sheet. “Court says you
have twenty-one days to submit evidence that the Princess was not
carrying contraband when you were attacked. If you can’t, they’re going to
auction her from impound to cover dock fees and expenses.”
Meriel sat up quickly, and the towel fell from her eyes.
“What!” she said without thinking, and the console replayed the last sentence
and continued.
“Some clerk wants to close the case, and the issue remains
unresolved,” the lawyer said.
“They can’t take her. She’s ours!” The playback paused. The Princess
was their only asset; her only means to get the kids back together and keep her
promise to her mother. Without the Princess, they would all drift apart.
Meriel stared at the wall with her mouth open.
“Play,” she said.
After walking a few steps to a file cabinet, Jeremy removed
a vid sheet from a file within it. Above the file cabinet was a porthole with a
view inconsistent with the tropical beach scene. Apparently, the beach was just
a mural on one wall of a tiny office. The porthole showed what seemed to be a
spaceship-repair station—or a junkyard.
He scrolled through the vid sheets and waved one in front of
the camera. “They towed your ship from the boneyard at YR56 to the impound dock
at Enterprise. Except for the patch on that big hole, she’s in good shape;
she’s still inert at low pressure with supporting electronics asleep. I’m sure
that decision saves on dock fees, but it’s good for her as well.”
Jeremy leaned closer to the camera and frowned. “About the
kids and custody,” he said, “the cases are all weak until they have a place to
go. The courts would never take the kids from the foster parents without proof
of neglect, but we could negotiate for visitation. Only a few of you are of age
now, and the contracts have a few more years to run. I’m working on it.” He
glanced at his link. “I’m leaving for meetings on Lander in a few hours. Give
me a call if you’re in-system, and we can chat more. Twenty-one days, Ms. Hope.
Don’t forget.”
“End message,” the machine said.
Meriel sat with her head in her hand and rubbed the sim-chip
on her necklace. “Never leave them,” her mother had said. But without the
Princess, there would be no choice. She reached into her kit, took a vid sheet,
and stuck it into a corner of the mirror. It was a sales brochure for the Princess
when she was new—years before Meriel was born.
“It’s not fair,” she whispered. Without the Princess,
her dream would die, and her promises to her mother would die with it. Without
their ship, the kids would dissolve into the billions of anonymous spacers,
lost to each other and without a future or family to help them.
She had been content to keep the Princess on a low
priority at the edge of her attention while she worked out the funding and
legal issues. Sometimes, she could even go a few weeks without thinking about
her, hoping that things would eventually work out. Not anymore.
“Acknowledge,” she said, and a reply to Jeremy opened in the
send queue. “Jeremy, I’ll try to see you on Lander. But how in hell can we
clear her in twenty-one days? We tried for years to prove a negative. See ya.
Send,” she said, and the message went into the send queue where it would wait
until the Tiger could synchronize with the next communications beacon.
Meriel touched the vid sheet, and the Princess’s
brochure displayed a white ellipsoid stretched on the long axis. It was sleek
and featureless as a polished river stone—a shape that would be welcome in a
closed palm.
According to the ship’s clock, her shift would not start for
hours, but she dressed for work regardless. She was cargo chief now with a
logistics-5 rating, and checking the cargo lashings before and after jumping
was her responsibility.
She went to the cabinet and took out the pack of meds her
contract obliged her to take for the nightmares and grumpy moods. She took out
a pill and held it between her fingers. One pill and the nightmares and
flashbacks will disappear for a few days, she thought, no cold sweats,
no anxiety attacks. And I won’t have to wait until Lander to get boost. One
pill and I’ll forget about the attack and freezing and…what I did.
She rolled the pill between her fingers. But if I do,
I’ll also forget about Elizabeth and the Princess and stop caring again.
No, never again. I promised. She crushed the pill and
sprinkled the dust directly into the toilet, just as she had done every morning
for seven years.
She zipped up the high collar of her shirt to cover the long
scar that crossed her chest and then flipped her hair to cover the white tip
that ran behind her ear. The visor that fixed her hair in place included an
embedded link that was much safer than an implanted link and made it less
likely that a brief moment of stupidity would command a bot to take a shortcut
through the hull and space the entire cargo.
“Crap,” Meriel said
and walked to the cargo bay. There’s nothing I can do about the Princess
now. She scanned the Tiger’s roster on the heads-up display of her
visor. Let’s see. Maybe twenty-five crew and another twenty-five passengers.
A crewman in blues with silver bars on his lapels caught her
attention. He’s a nav-4, she
thought and scrolled the roster for photos. Let’s see…medium tall…brown
hair. What’s his name? Smith, John. As she walked up to introduce herself,
the view through the window caught her eye, and she stopped.
The window ran the length of the passageway and overlooked a
sea of pearlescent green with red filaments of hydrogen weaving through
towering pillars of black and gray.
“Makes you want to suit up and go EVA,” she said to break
the ice.
“Uh-huh,” he murmured and just stared out the window. After
a few moments, he noticed her reflection
in the window and turned to her.
“Say, aren’t you the new cargo chief?” he asked, and Meriel
nodded. “I’m John Smith.”
Meriel folded her arms and leaned against the bulkhead. “So
where are we, Mr. Navigator?”
“Well, we jumped from Sector 48, so judging from the show
outside, that should put us somewhere between Ross and Lalande.”
Meriel looked him straight in the eyes. “You’re clueless,”
she said and looked back to the field of stars.
John smiled. “Well, that’s our flight plan. Wait till my
shift starts and give me about ten minutes at the screens. By eight ten, we’ll
be on our way.”
“I heard Jerri’s pretty good too,” she said, referring to
the senior pilot. “Bet you a scotch she’s done before you get there. Say, you
don’t talk like a spacer. How come you’re sitting nav?”
“I grew up on L5, and you do what you have to,” John said
and looked back at the nebula.
“Damn,” Meriel said softly, surprised. Her face softened,
and she looked at him more closely. John did not look like what she expected a
refugee from L5 to look like. She expected disease and deformity and, well,
damage. However, the man standing next to her looked perfectly normal—kinda
nice, actually, with that smile. Meriel realized she was staring at him,
blushed, and looked away.
“Sorry,” she said, but before she could say more, John’s
comm link interrupted.
“Bridge to Smith,” his link squawked. “Your link says you’re
awake. Report, please.”
“Smith here,” he said with a smirk. “I’m off duty, Socket.
What do you want?”
“Jerri told the OOD that we’d get
moving a lot sooner with your help. So he says to get to the bridge stat or let
me know why not.”
John raised his eyebrows. “Jerri said that?”
“Uh-huh,” Socket said. “Get over it. So you coming or not?”
“On my way,” he said with a wink to Meriel.
Meriel smirked at John’s confidence. “The bet stands. Ten
minutes.”
“Piece of cake,” he said. “See you at sixteen hundred.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
“A real scotch is worth it. See ya,” he said.
“Uh, yeah.” Oops…did he think I meant real scotch? she
thought and watched him walk away. He doesn’t move like a spacer; he’s heavier
on his feet, solid, not afraid of losing gravity.
“Hello, Meriel,” a voice behind her said. She turned to see
Patrick Ferrell, the ship’s doctor, walking toward her.
Oh, crap. “Hi, Doc,” she said with a warm
smile but took a step backward. “Sorry, but I’m in a hurry now. I need to check
the cargo lashings before some crate turns into a projectile—”
“Then stop for a minute,” Ferrell said. “You left me in the
middle of our conversation yesterday and haven’t been to see me like you
promised. I thought we had more to talk about.”
“Sorry, Doc,” she said, walking slowly backward. “No more
interviews. Nothing personal. I did all my talking on the Thrace and with the
Troopers a decade ago, and there’s nothing left to figure out.” She paused. “My
last ship had no complaints.”
“You’re taking your meds, right?”
“Sure, Doc.” She lied.
“The drugs help you cope, Meriel.”
“I’m coping fine. You see me ripping anybody’s head off?”
“Well, I hoped something like that would never cross your
mind. The meds help with the blackouts, too. We can’t have you blacking out on
a cargo loader, now can we?”
Meriel looked around, hoping no one else had heard him. She
walked back to Ferrell. “I don’t have blackouts, Doc,” she said softly. “That
was only when I was a kid. I just get nervous sometimes.” Damn, I
just gave him more ammunition.
“I understand completely,” he said. “I’ll make an
appointment for—”
Meriel brightened, seeing the possibility of escape, and
started to back away again more quickly. “Sure, Doc. Before we complete the
circuit.”
“No, next shift,” he shouted after her.
“Right. Next week. OK, I’ll be there,” she yelled back over
her shoulder and ducked around the bulkhead.
Bridge
John took a roundabout way to the bridge through the mess hall to pick up a mug of coffee from the replicator.
He knew Jerri could find their way with the computer alone, but it would
require lots of short jumps and fuel. Margins were tight, so the longer he
delayed, the more they would appreciate his talents.
“Smith on deck,” John said as he paused at the door to the
bridge. “Permission to enter, sir.”
“Jeez, there you are,” said Steven, the OOD, signaling for
John to enter. “You stop for a manicure?”
“Seven twenty-three. Mark the time,” John said, walking to
the navigation station next to Jerri.
“Sure. Just find out where the hell we are,” Steven said
pacing the bridge. Jerri noticed the hot coffee in John’s hand and shook her
head.
The nav-a station projected a star map with an overlay of
what looked like an ice-cream cone with the point at the start of their last
jump. The scoop of ice cream at the end of the cone represented where they
might be now—their sphere of uncertainty.
“Sphere’s too big to plot a jump,” Jerri said and switched
the projection to the smaller nav-b station, where John sat. “We’d end up in a
star.”
“Did you try to triangulate the Doppler?” John asked.
“Nope,” Jerri said with an impatient frown, “just waiting
for you.”
“What’s coming in, Socket?” he asked communications chief
Suzanne Soquette, or just Socket—a nickname she rather enjoyed. She was
beautiful, even for a spacer, and John always had to limit his gaze to avoid
staring.
“Some chatter for the buyers and lots of encrypted garbage,”
Socket said with an extra flash of her eyes which increased his discomfort.
“All EM, clear as a bell. Who’d think anybody’s listening
out here?”
“Pipe some of the chatter over to me,” John said. While he
waited for the feed, John turned to Steven.
“Say, I met the new cargo chief in
the passageway just now,” he said. “What’s her story?”
“Came over from Jeff’s boat, the Jolly Roger, saying
she didn’t like the routes and had trouble sleeping,” Steven said. “Jeff said
she’s the best cargo mate in the sector. Lifetime spacer who knows the boards.
Said she could man any seat on the bridge if she wanted it, so Molly bought out
her contract.” Molly was XO and rated exec-4 with laser-sharp instincts, so she
would know. Steven’s link flashed, and he went back to his console.
Jerri leaned over to John. “Is this academic or are you
interested?” she asked with a timid smile and raised eyebrows.
“Nothing’s academic.”
Socket leaned over. “She’s too pretty for you.”
Jerri dropped her smile. “If you ask me, I think she’s got a
past. Something that won’t forget her, won’t let her go.”
“So, what’s got the hooks in?”
“Well, rumors say it was from a long time ago and bad,” she
said, “something that needs drugs. Pirates, I heard, but that’s just a horror
story. I really don’t know.”
“Done,” Socket said, hit a button, and leaned back in her
chair. She turned to look at John. “Say, sailor, why don’t you just ask her?”
she added with a wink.
“I’ll do that,” John said. His nav-b monitor lit up with
comm chatter, and he pulled up a parser to extract the time stamps and origins
from the packets. “Too many gravity wells to
make this exact,” he said, “but let’s give it a go.” On Jerri’s star map, he
added three rays from the center point that represented the vectors of the
incoming signals. He rotated the projections until the sources aligned with the
three well-known stations. A new sphere appeared around the locus of the rays—a
sphere that was still much too large.
“Not good enough,” Jerri said with a smug grin. She folded
her arms across her chest again.
John recalled the second law of
navigation—everything is moving all the time; nothing stands still, ever.
He adjusted the locations of the sources based on the time stamp on the EM and
time dilation. This changed the position of the station from where it was
currently to where it was when the EM originated, and the sphere contracted. He
added some reliable EM from Earth and then added two more sources for
fine-tuning. With each line, the sphere shrank until it was a point with a
fuzzy halo. John zoomed into the star map—their current most probable location.
“OK, Jerri, check for a match,” John said and leaned back in
his chair with a smile. “Say, did we get the score on the outbound?”
“Fourteen to nine, final,” Steven said. “Socket wins the
pool.”
Socket smiled but kept her head down.
Jerri pulled John’s data to her station and matched the
major stars by their spectra and red shifts. “There we are,” she said. Their
actual position lay just outside the original sphere. “Mass was wrong.”
“Are we hauling military?” John asked.
Steven frowned and nodded. “They’re gonna get someone
killed.”
“Who’d know?” Jerri said.
“Time seven thirty-one. Eight minutes. Remember that if
someone asks,” John said with a smile and cued up a text to Meriel.
To Hope: 8 min.
“Stick around to check my course corrections,” Jerri said.
“Sure,” John said. He grabbed the visualization goggles,
leaned back, and put his feet up.
Steven walked up to John, threw his coffee in a recycler,
and knocked his feet off the console. “This is Meriel’s first post as cargo
chief, John,” he said softly, “so don’t eff it up, OK? And don’t startle her. She’s
qualified marine-three.”
Cold Case
“I’m parking the Cruiser,” Meriel
said to Lev Tyler, her cargo-3, who waved back at her from the cargo-bay
console. She backed the power loader to the bulkhead, secured it, and put the
servos on standby. With a half-liter thermos of coffee wedged into the power
loader’s cage, she watched Lev complete the data-integrity checks on the ship’s
memory cargo.
Twenty-one days and I don’t have a clue, she
thought and played with the sim-chip on her necklace. “It’s all here,” her
mother had said ten years ago. But it wasn’t all there. The files were
unreadable after the police returned the chip to her. She rubbed the medal, a
symbol of the Church of Jesus Christ Spaceman, between her fingers. Is this
what she meant? Have faith? No. Esther believed, but Meriel was sure she
meant the sim-chip. They would have to try again.
Meriel thumbed a text to her only nonspacer friend, a hacker
named Nickolai Zanek on Enterprise.
To nz:
Panic. I need your help. I’ve got twenty-one days to prove the Princess
was not a drug boat, or we lose her. Forever. We need to bang on the sim-chip
again. There has to be something there. See you on Enterprise.
Love, M
It would be a week before she could see him. What could she
do until then?
She scanned the schedules for the other kids. Tommy
Spurell’s ship, the Jennifer Edwards, would dock at Enterprise about the
same time as the Tiger would. He was twenty now and stable as a rock.
She texted him.
Let’s touch base on Enterprise. M.
What else? she thought. There’s gotta be
something we’ve missed all this time.
The police filed the case as “unexplained,” but that left
everyone with only the wrong explanation—that their cargo was contraband, and
contraband meant drugs. Meriel knew it could not be true, but the slander would
stick if she just walked away.
OK, then. Space is huge. How could pirates have found the
Princess in deep space? Aunt Teddy might know, but she’s not
here. How about a navy guy?
Meriel pulled up the display on the cargo loader and keyed
in a search of the crew and, specifically, marine qualifications. Let’s see,
she thought, marine-2, another two, a six. Meriel whistled aloud. Wow,
a marine-6 as chief of security. Sergeant Major of the Marines, Charles Cook.
That’s fleet class. How’d this little ship get somebody that good? She left
to visit the security office and find Sergeant Cook. Instead, she found a note
that said, “At the gym.”
The Tiger’s gym
was unusual because it had open mats and did not smell like stale sweat. Meriel
found a big man with short blond hair demolishing a training droid. Faster
than his bulk, she thought and went to the mats and stretched.
She began her kata on the mats almost as a meditation, a
ritual she’d started as physical therapy for her wounds. Her movements were
smooth, except for the strike at the end of each position. The big man stopped
to watch her during her second iteration, and on the ninth position, he
intervened.
“May I?” he asked. Meriel stopped and nodded, skeptical that
he might have useful coaching. “Your rear knee should be bent, not stiff, and your
heel off the mat when you begin your strike.” He leaned over and touched the
outside edge of his hand to the inside of her knee to flex it.
Meriel smiled. “And you are?”
“They call me Cookie. You’re marine qualified?”
“Yes, sir. Name’s Meriel Hope.”
Cookie raised his eyebrows at her show of respect. “Oh yeah,
new cargo chief. Marine-three, huh? Weapons?”
“Blasters, pulse rifles, nothing heavy.”
“Combat?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“S’OK. Shooting for marine-four?”
Meriel shook her head. “Not yet. I want to get better where
I am.”
“OK, good. Then you do your kata, and I’ll oppose you.”
“I’ve never done that before,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s what happens when you train by holo,” he said
and put an instrumentation cuff on his forearm. “Now, repeat position nine beginning
from eight.”
Meriel lined up in position eight and rotated both feet for
a downward strike with the blade of her hand. Cookie stepped back and blocked
with his forearm raised and left hand poised for a punch, but he did not
strike. Meriel struck his padded forearm.
“Hold that position,” he said and moved to her side. “See,
if your heel is down before you begin your strike, the power comes from your
muscles. That’s weak. We want the power from your center.” He slapped his tummy
with his palm. “Drop the heel with your center and then strike simultaneously.
Like this.” He demonstrated the strike and drop. “Now you.”
Meriel repeated the move. He frowned and tapped her forehead
with his index finger. “Get out of your head. Your body knows the pattern. See
from your center, not your eyes,” he said and patted his tummy again.
Meriel repeated the move until Cookie nodded. She felt as if
her whole body had struck his forearm. He raised the instrumentation cuff to
show her the readout. “See. Twice the impact force.”
Meriel raised her eyebrows.
“OK, next position,” he said, and Meriel pivoted.
“Stop,” he said. “Good. Pivot is fine, but just before the
end, your rear foot is planted, and your body turns from the hips in a motion
to strike, like a coiled spring.”
Again, Meriel repeated the moves while Cookie opposed her,
and they finished her kata.
“OK, now from the start and speed it up. Don’t think,” he
said.
Now her kata looked like a fight, each strike opposed by a
block, each block followed by another strike. Cookie was huge but moved like a
lion. At the end, they were both sweaty, and welts rose on Meriel’s forearms
and shins.
“Don’t take the impact of my blows,” Cookie said as he
toweled the sweat from his forehead. “Sure, it’s a kata, but I outweigh you two
to one in muscle. Divert my blows, and don’t try to absorb the impact. Blend
until you can strike. Improvise.”
Meriel nodded.
They bowed to each other and went into the showers.
“Say, you’re marine-three,” he said over the shower
partition. “You passed zero-g defense, right? Gymnastics and center of gravity?”
“Yes.”
“That makes you an optional for my security team,” he said.
“You OK with that? It’ll bump your pay a grade.”
“Sure.”
“OK, let’s call that your interview.”
“Who’s on the team?”
“There’s Suzanne Soquette in comm, Nobu Draeger in the
galley, and Lev Tyler, who works for you in cargo. Lev is my number two. Staff
Sergeant Tyler, actually. Good man. Your marine-three cert will make you a
squad leader like Socket. The captain’s marine-two rated, but I don’t count
him. I’ll let you know when we meet.”
“Sure,” Meriel said. “Say, do they teach you how to attack
ships in space?”
“Uh, yeah. Hull breach, hand-to-hand weightless, EMP weapons. It’s history mostly, not practice. Why?”
“How about defense in open space?”
“No,” he said. “They always tell us that surprise is
unlikely, even impossible without betrayal.”
“How so?” she asked and finished her shower to listen.
“Well, if you are smaller than a moon, it’s too hard to find
you in open space unless your attacker knows right where you’re going to be,”
he said and left his shower. “If your attacker is waiting for you, you can see
him before he sees you.”
“How does that work?” Meriel asked.
“Well, if you want a better explanation, you need to ask a
pilot about coordinating in space and how hard it is. It’s just easier to find
relatively fixed targets like stations. Nothing like sublight in atmosphere. Jerri
will know, and Smith would too.”
Meriel nodded slowly, going over the implications. “What
about smugglers? If it’s so hard to locate each other, why even try a drug drop
in space?”
“Expense and time aren’t issues when it’s illegal or when
secrecy is paramount,” he said.
Drugs again. This doesn’t help. She finished dressing
and saw John’s text calling her bet. Then she met Cookie in the passageway.
“Just let me know when you want to do this again,” he said.
“You can usually find me in the gym or the galley. I can qualify you to marine-four,
if that’s your goal.”
Meriel nodded again. “Eventually, sir. Thank you.” She
smiled, grateful for her good luck, and turned to leave.
“Hey, I don’t mean to pry, but is this about the Princess?”
Meriel looked at him silently. She did not talk about the Princess,
because the first thing people usually said was “sorry” or “poor girl” or “oh
my God!” The last thing she wanted was pity.
“Don’t misunderstand, Chief,” he said. “I got nothing
against you. I’m head of security. I read the files. If you qualified marine-three
and logistics-five, you’re good on my team.”
“Appreciate it. Just not ready to talk about it yet.”
Cookie nodded. “No problem. I’m off to the galley. Where you
headed?”
“The mess to study. I have a nav-three test coming up.
“Isn’t it noisy there?”
“Sure, but studying gets lonely, especially since that’s all
I do when I’m off duty.”
They walked together to the mess hall, and Meriel sat down
at a table. Cookie brought her coffee.
“I’ll bet Smith can help you with nav,” Cookie said with a
glint in his eye.
“Uh-huh,” Meriel said with a look that said, “Mind your own
business.”
“Hey, just saying,” Cookie said and went back to the galley.
Meriel used her link to cast a holo of her test prep but
could not concentrate. She was preoccupied by the threat of losing the Princess
to the station lawyers and her helplessness to stop it. Calm down. Jeremy
will have an idea.
The five-minute claxon interrupted Meriel, and she returned
to her cabin to prepare for the jump. There she drank the nutrients, took the tranq
without boost, and had another nightmare.
[1] Tranq
boost: Tranquilizers, called “tranq,” are needed to overcome the long periods
of disorientation during jumps. Tranq-boost is a stronger tranq that suppresses
the imagination and memories, which can overwhelm during jumps.
[2] ET:
Earth Time. A useful baseline for coordination in time. Loosely based on Earth
Standard Time and the convenient assumption that there is one single time for
everything in the universe, which is useful in all astrophysical calculations
and has nothing whatsoever to do with the timekeeping devices on each ship or
mass. An exact correlation is very difficult over light-years because
everything of interest moves at fractions of the speed of light. Navigation
computers only have a useful approximation.
[3] Pro
bono: pro bono publica, or literally, for the public good. Lawyers and
other professionals are often obliged by their canons of ethics to do free
volunteer work for the general public.
[4]
Communications beacon: The physicists had not figured out how to send radio and
other electromagnetic (EM) signals faster than the speed of light (FTL), so FTL
ships consistently outran their messages. At first, the stations started
something like a postal delivery by running shuttles between stations and Earth
to synchronize messages. They later swapped the shuttles for drones. Still, that
was slow, expensive, and hard to coordinate. Eventually, every ship carried message
and news-storage systems that synced with the station beacon every time they
left a station, and resynced when they entered a new system. Each ship that
downloaded the beacon received some revenue, and every upload was charged a
small amount. People had gotten used to asynchronous messaging from letters and
then e-mails for centuries, so this was not an issue. With the very regular
syncing of information each time a ship passed a beacon, information was as
current as FTL could produce. But things could get strange. Since messages were
sent physically, and there were always ships faster than yours was,
occasionally a response to your message would be waiting for you at your
destination before you arrived.
[5] Nav-4:
navigator, rating-4. This designation refers to the skill level of a navigator
as assessed by an independent agency. In this case, John’s post is chief warrant
officer of navigation. A nav-5 rating would qualify him to be posted to pilot
and senior navigator for the Tiger, but Jerri currently held that post. The
post is different from rank, such as captain, commander, pilot, chief warrant officer,
petty officer, or seaman. Rank and post are also different from skill level.
[6] Mess
hall: On ships, the kitchen is called the galley, and the eating area is called
the mess.
[7]
Sphere of uncertainty, sometimes just known as sphere: when you jump, there is
uncertainty in time and space about where you will end up due to your lack of certainty
of the positions and masses of everything along your path. This
uncertainty is shown by drawing a sphere around a calculated destination. The
second law of nav says, “Everything is moving all the time,” so
it is difficult to calculate precisely where you will end up, unless you know
every mass and where it’s all going. That’s impossible to do without infinite
compute resources. So there is always an uncertainty of where you’ll end up,
and that uncertainty can be shown as a sphere. It’s actually more like a sphere
with a hollow center because there is absolutely no chance that you will
hit what you aimed at. The sphere grows exponentially with distance, so shorter
jumps have smaller spheres.
[8] EM:
electromagnetic waves, like radio, TV, light, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma, and
X-rays, which travel at the speed of light.
[9]
Gravity well: a large mass that distorts space-time like a bowling ball on a
trampoline.
[10] In
common language, the three laws of navigation can be stated as (1) all
positions are relative (there are no fixed reference points, only
conventions);(2) everything is moving all the time; and (3) you
can only know for sure where things were, not where they are A
law 0 was included later to keep the math honest. Law 0: the arrow of time is
unidirectional.
[11]
Cruiser: Mark IX Cила Грузчик, or
Power Loader designed on a Russian colony near Bernard’s Star. They are
nicknamed “Cruisers” because in English, the name sounds like “silly
cruischick.” Cargo handlers will sometimes refer to themselves as Cruisers, but
it is considered an insult if used by anyone else, especially if referring to a
woman.
[12] EMP:
electromagnetic pulse. A strong EM wave that essentially zaps all nearby
electronics.
[13]
Wink-in: when an FTL object comes into your view, you have no sense of it
before it physically arrives because it’s moving faster than the photons or EM
radiation that would tell you that it’s coming. When the FTL object arrives, it
appears along with its EM, and it looks like a weak flash or a wink.
[14] AU: astronomical
unit. One AU is the distance from the Earth to Sol, or about 149-million
kilometers. The speed of light is about 0.3 million kilometers per second, so
it takes an electromagnetic (EM) signal about eight minutes to travel one AU.
That’s a huge distance!
(c) 2014, 2015 Benjamin R. Strong, Jr.
(c) 2014, 2015 Benjamin R. Strong, Jr.
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