Fool's War (7 page)

Schyler clucked in wordless sympathy and changed the subject. “You’re all set.” He got to his feet. “Your clearances will be listed on your cabin boards when you get settled in. You can bring in thirty-five pounds of personal effects. Sorry about that, we’re trying to run a little light this trip. Do you want to see where you’ll be?”

“Thanks.” She let her necklace go and put a smile back on her face. “I’d actually — ”

The left-hand wall beeped, cutting off her sentence. “Tully to
Pasadena
,” said a man’s tired voice.

“Schyler, here.” Schyler tilted his head up.

“Can you let me in?” Dobbs tracked his voice to the intercom patch below the left-hand memory board. “There’s some stuff I still need to get out.”

Schyler leaned both hands against the table. “I’m not on my own in here, Tully.”

“Thirty seconds, that’s all I need. Just left some stuff in my cabin.”

Schyler pressed down harder. With the light gravity, Dobbs thought he might actually lift himself off his feet. “You’re checked out, Tully. I can bring what’s left… ”

“Come on, Tom. Thirty seconds.”

Schyler leaned back and let his hands drop down to his sides. “I’ll be right out. ‘Bye.”

He turned to Dobbs with a worried look. “I’m going to have to give you the tour later… ”

Dobbs waved her hand dismissively. “I’m a Master Fool, I’ll find my way around.” She spun on her toes and marched straight into the wall. “Ow.” She clutched her nose and staggered backwards. “Eventually,” she said, rubbing the offended appendage.

Schyler gave her a grin that might have become real if she’d had a few more minutes to work on him.

Dobbs let Schyler escort her out the door. She stepped out of the bay and didn’t give Marcus Tully, who was fidgeting by the elevator doors a second glance as she got into the lift and picked her floor.

As the lift began to sink, Dobbs remembered that when she had left the cafe, she had intended to try to find out what was really going on with the co-owners of this ship.

That, she fingered her necklace, may take longer than I thought.

“Port Oberon to
Pasadena
, prepare for transfer to docking trolley.”

Yerusha looked out the window above her station boards and watched the trolley slide into place underneath
Pasadena
. The camera displays on either side of the window showed the flat-bed cart reaching out its waldos and grabbing ahold of the
Pasadena
’s side just before the docking clamps retracted into the skin of the station.

Yerusha had been glad to see that
Pasadena
sported a real window. Cameras were fine, and virtual reality was very useful, but she never felt quite comfortable flying without a direct look at what was actually between her ship and where she was going.

The trolley began to tow them out of the docking ring. The slight jerk buffeted her gently against her straps. The gravity was so light she barely retained any sense of up and down. On the displays, the curving walls of the modules fell behind as trolley trundled towards the pinnacle of the station. The landscape became nothing but silver panels sliding away underneath the black dome of vacuum.

If she squinted at the top of the left-hand screen, she could see the shining edge of Oberon, just barely visible beyond the station. Titania though, was somewhere on the other side of Uranus’s blue-grey bulk.

She was glad. She didn’t want to see the Free Home right now. She just wanted to get through the next two years.

“Port Oberon to
Pasadena
. Thirty seconds to release.”

“Thanks Oberon.” Yerusha chided herself for daydreaming. She had a job to do and starboard Watch Commander who didn’t seem as though he was a great believer in second chances for Freers.

Doesn’t matter
, she reminded herself.
For now, you are
Pasadena.

Yerusha rested her hands on her boards. The flat keys glowed with the designations she had written across them, including the
OVERRIDE
key. That one would cancel out all the programs she had labored over for the past two days and would let her command the engines directly if anything unpredicted happened on course to the jump point.

The ship had been slow to learn her writing and short-hand because there was no AI running the internal systems. Al Shei was obviously almost as paranoid about humanity’s progeny as Lipinski was. Yerusha shook her head. With attitudes like that surrounding her, it was going to be a long run, that much was sure.

The
Pasadena
slid out from under the module rings and the gleaming panels that the view screens showed came to a halt. Out of the window, she saw the silver-white curve of the station and just a glimpse of the ghostly globe of Oberon.

“Three to release,
Pasadena
,” said the Port voice. “Two…one…release.”

The trolley opened its clamps and Yerusha watched Port Oberon and the stark, white moon fall away from the
Pasadena
.

She knew that the relative motion was the ship’s.
Pasadena
was falling away from the station, from Oberon and from the sun. Without any acceleration pressure to tell her otherwise, though, her mind believed what her eyes saw. As the minutes ticked by, Port Oberon dropped back, becoming an elaborate silver mobile surrounded by moth like ships that darted between the spindly arms of cranes and the bloated hulls of the fuel tanks. All of them hung against the backdrop of Oberon’s white and black speckled surface. The moon itself was nothing but a cardboard circle suspended in the limitless black pool that made up the universe.

“
Pasadena
this is Port Oberon we have you at a eight clicks at five minutes, fourteen seconds. Hour 15:24:16. Mark.”

“Marked, Oberon.” Yerusha checked the clock at her station automatically. The clock showed both the length-of-flight time and time of day. The
Pasadena
’s flight clocks had to be in synch with each other as well as with the outside, but not just for timing torch bursts for sub-light navigation. Navigation past light speed was impossible. To change direction, they would have to drop down to sub-light, change the ship’s flight angle and jump again. The trick was, if they made a mistake in their calculations, they might not know which system they were making their correcting jump from, and it might take days to work out where they were, much less where they were headed, if they were able to do it at all. Ships did disappear for want of good timing.

“In sync, Pilot?” came Schyler’s voice from her right hand. The bridge was laid out so that all the vital stations were on one side of the drop-shaft. The other side held the back-up boards, the conference station and the virtual reality simulator. During her shifts, Yerusha would don the VR gear and run through flight simulations, looking for ways to cut down the run time and fuel consumption, as well as bringing herself up to spec on just what the ship she was flying could and could not do. If an emergency course change were called for, Schyler could put on the gear and run through the programs she fed in from her chair, using full-blown simulations of
Pasadena
.

“In sync and on line, Watch,” Yerusha replied in her best doing-my-job voice. From Schyler’s station he could call up a display of exactly what she saw, but safety and approved protocol called for a direct check.

To Yerusha’s left sat the pilot’s relief, only other member of the bridge crew on duty at this time. He was a round, little man named Cheney who had Asian eyes and had let himself go almost completely bald. This was his third run with Al Shei as a pilot’s mate, he’d told her. He had described each trip with the single word every shipper with more than one working synapse wanted to hear.
Uneventful
.

The other two members of the bridge crew were waiting out launch in their cabins. Most of the work had been done while the
Pasadena
was still in dock. Schyler, Yerusha and Al Shei had mapped and timed the route while figuring the requirements for fuel and reaction mass. Yerusha had programmed the simulations. When the stats lined up to her satisfaction, she wrote them into
Pasadena
’s computers. Both Schyler and the ship had verified them.

Al Shei and her crew had been on board even before Yerusha, re-checking the ship inside and out. When it came to flight capability, it didn’t matter to Al Shei that the
Pasadena
had been checked over less than forty-eight hours previously by a Lennox expert. Yerusha couldn’t fault Al Shei’s caution. She and her crew would be depending absolutely on the ship for the next six to eight months, she and her crew should be the ones to decide if it was ready to go.

It had taken a day of drill calls and simulations to get the new crew used to each others’ speech patterns and how the orders were given and confirmed. After that, Al Shei and her engineers had remotely warmed the reactors and accumulators with the “hot” mix of deuterium and tritium. Once warmed, the Pasadena’s engines could run on the much safer mix of hydrogen and boron (11). The ship was humming and ready when they all were allowed back on board to strap down and start out.

“Oberon to
Pasadena
, we’ve got you at fifteen klicks at eleven minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Good luck and see you soon.”

“Thanks Oberon. See you soon,” replied Schyler. “Clear to go whenever you’re ready, Yerusha.”

Yerusha checked the angle of the jets one more time to make sure they were pointing away from the station and the incoming traffic. “Intercom to
Pasadena
,” Yerusha called. She lifted her hands and held them flat over her boards. “Counting down to acceleration. Ten, nine, eight…”

She heard no sound of movement under her countdown. There was nothing to do. The systems were all up and running. The final set-up had been completed four hours before the docking clamps had let them all go. Now was the time to rest in the harness, pay attention to the monitors and remain quietly confident that nothing unexpected was going to happen.

“Three… two… one.” Yerusha brought her hands down on her board. The ship read her fingerprints and sent its signal down to the engine compartment. “Torch lit,” she reported, just before a low rumble that echoed all the way up the drop shaft confirmed her call.

Gradually, Yerusha’s head settled on her neck, her neck rested against her shoulders and the floor reached up and pressed against the soles of her feet. The harness went slack against her shirt and trousers as her body settled into the chair.

Despite two hundred of years of attempts to separate it out, gravity had remained a property of mass and motion. Without enough of either, you had free fall. Al Shei ran her ship at close to one gee acceleration. In that respect at least, the run was going to be comfortable.

The displays on the monitor in front of Yerusha all remained green. She read the numbers and thrust ratios one by one. Each was exactly as it should be.

The intercom started bringing up the voices from engineering.

“Station One, all normal and constant,” said Javerri, the FTL Assistant, who didn’t look like she ever got enough sleep.

“Station Two, all normal and constant.” Ianiai, a big, black bear of a boy who though the knew a lot more than he did.

“Station Three, all normal and constant.” Shim’on, who wore a yamulke and wouldn’t eat even cloned bacon.

Groundhogs at core, all of them.

“Check and check,” Al Shei’s voice answered them. “Intercom to Bridge. Engineering reports normal and constant, Watch.”

“Thank you, Engineering,” said Schyler. “Time to jump, Pilot?”

Yerusha touched a key and brought up the official time on her board. “Thirty-eight hours to jump point.”

Pasadena
needed flat, smooth space to start from. Thirty-six AU from the Sun would put them close enough to the top of the Solar system’s gravity well that they could jump the rest of the way out.

Pasadena
was, of course, a long way from being the only ship starting for a jump point this day, even this hour. A lot of the flight planning had involved logging in with Port Oberon’s flight-schedulers and finding out who else had registered a route so she could pick a clear path and reserve it. Yerusha had done runs that were held up at Oberon for over a week before there was room in the direction the ship needed to go. The delay this time had only been a day. She counted herself lucky.

“Received and agreed,” replied Al Shei’s voice. “Thirty-six hours to jump.”

“Intercom to
Pasadena
,” said Schyler. “Secure from free fall.”

Yerusha snapped the catches on her harness and scratched hard under her left armpit. The new arm was a little stiff, but there wasn’t any of the pins and needles sensation that could accompany a new graft. Her discomfort came simply from the fact that no one seemed to have designed a free fall strap that didn’t chafe.

“And there ends the exciting part,” said Cheney, stretching both arms over his head until Yerusha could hear the joints pop.

“I wish,” muttered Schyler, letting his head fall back until he stared at the ceiling.

Yerusha exchanged a glance with her relief, who just shrugged.

“Pilot,” Schyler lifted his head, “we need to get some projections for the Vicarage to Out There to Wyborn Station jumps. Al Shei’ll want to go over all that at the next briefing.”

“Right away, Watch.” Yerusha got to her feet. “Relief,” she said to Cheney as she crossed the deck to the VR station.

“Relief active.” Cheney picked himself up out of his chair and plopped down into hers. He pulled out his pen and activated the reconfiguration menus to set the boards back to the way he liked them.

She wasn’t even halfway across the deck when the intercom beeped.

“Intercom to Watch,” Resit’s voice sounded out. “Schyler, if she’s free, I need to see Yerusha down here.”

Yerusha froze in mid-stride, but she managed to screw a “what the hell?” expression on her face.

Schyler gave her a heavy glance. “Acknowledged, Law. I’ll send her down as soon as I’ve gone over a couple of things up here.”

“Thanks, Watch,” said Resit. “Intercom to Close.”

Cheney bent over the boards, even though there shouldn’t have been much to see. Schyler jerked his chin towards the drop shaft hatch. Yerusha nodded and walked through the hatch. She heard Schyler’s footsteps follow her.

Inside the drop shaft was a staircase that spiraled all the way down to the engine compartment. The walls were lined with junction boxes, bundles of cables and wires, and endlessly branching ceramic pipes, color-coded in green, red, blue or orange depending on what they carried. Maintenance displays dotted the chaos, their readings shining bright green.

Yerusha walked down a couple of steps and turned, resting her new hand against the railing. Schyler followed her a split second later. He stopped one step above her.

Schyler leaned close to her and Yerusha felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. There was a cold sheen in his eyes that she had not seen there before.

He kept his voice soft and relaxed. “I already have one massive problem on this run,” he said. “If I find out your presence is going to add another, I will boot you out of here without slowing the ship down. Understand?”

“Absolutely.” Yerusha matched his conversational tone and folded her hands behind her back. “But if you’ve got problems this run, Watch, they’re not coming from me.”