The Black Ships (3 page)

Engineering Office, Dodge Island,

Miami, Florida

January 4
^th
, 2026

"O
ff to Finland tomorrow, you poor stiff?”
Davidoff’s tone clearly indicated that sympathy was not being offered. Frank
Bender kept working for a few seconds, finishing his train of thought before
turning from his 243
^rd
email of the day to face the designer.

“I am,” he said in his usual tone of mild
surprise and amusement. “Leaving at 9:00 am, getting back Friday at four in the
afternoon.” Davidoff held out a plastic container and Frank reached over to
take an apple slice. “Looks like I’ll have to catch up on emails when I get
there; I have another eighty or so to go before I’m up to date with all your
damn changes!”

“Hey, they ask for it and I draw it in.”
The designer waved off Frank’s accusation with his free hand. “If they want a
toilet put in the middle of the casino floor, I’ll put out a rocket to the
architects.” He leaned against the drawing table as he grinned at Frank.
“Passengers would likely start dropping casino chips in and pulling the handle,
especially the three-day cruisers.”

  Frank could feel a rant coming on so
he pulled out his new tablet, plugging it into his laptop so he could be sure
of a full charge. The distraction worked. Instead of an increasingly angry
tirade about the lack of manners among short-duration cruisers, Frank was
rewarded with a low whistle.

“That the new version with the full density
holographic screen?” Davidoff came over to the cubicle entrance, unable to
resist a neat gadget.

“Yep,” Frank replied. “No pretending to
work on my laptop like all the other idiots on the flight. I’ve got this baby
loaded to the gills with graphic novels, music and the whole second season of
Legacy.”

The sci fi series about a Mars colony had
come out as the first ISS mission was on its way to set up habitats on the red
planet. It portrayed a future where Earth was wiped out by a massive comet,
leaving fifty colonists as the only humans in the universe. The timing couldn’t
have been better and the show was a massive hit. Bender had been a fan after
borrowing the first season from one of the other engineers.

“Speaking of graphic novels, when does
yours go on sale?” Davidoff asked as he moved back to his comfortable perch on
the drawing table.

“Dunno. I figured the first would be up by
now but all the big retailers have had the file for over two weeks and still no
sign of it anywhere.” He gave a good natured shrug. “Probably the soundtrack
that’s slowing everything down.”

“Will you still remember all of us little
people when you’re rich and famous?” The designer smirked but he still sounded
like he believed that day would come.

“Oh sure, you can design the environments
for me when I switch over to 3D.” Frank’s smile had a wistful edge to it. “Just
imagine, building an entire city, or even a cruise ship without having to deal
with execs screaming at you over timelines and budgets.” He shook his head, not
willing to let himself believe the dream until he had solid sales figures
first. “If that story takes off, I’ll be out of this stinking job so fast it’ll
make my own head spin!”

“I thought you enjoyed swanning about
Europe, building the largest cruise ship on Earth,” the designer frowned. “At
least the largest for a couple of months; I’m hearing rumors already from the
other end of the harbor.”

Frank sighed. “That’s part of it. I take a
lot of heat from hundreds of people and when it’s all done, I get to stand at
the back of a large crowd and watch the Operations guys take a Bow.
Leviathan
will be the largest in the world but it means nothing. Two months after she
launches, a dry dock in Italy will open their flood valves and the latest
largest ship will slip out into the Mediterranean.”

He shook his head and stared out the window
as a rival line’s ship sailed out into the Atlantic. “It’s the constant
pressure. I get heat from the fourth floor about the budget, I get heat from
the second floor about nailing down a guaranteed shakedown date, and those
idiots in Operations are constantly trying to change the designs without going
through channels. I caught the Staff Captain telling our systems integrator to
move half of the bridge equipment. I dropped on that moron like a crane
accident.”

“You gotta watch out for the Ops guys,”
Davidoff warned. “They’re the folk that deal with the paying customers. Howard
is always reminding us that it’s the crews that bring in the actual revenue.
They can make a lot of trouble for us.”

“See, that doesn’t make sense to me,” Frank
countered. “Sure they deal with the customers but they’d be absolutely useless
if
we
didn’t build ships for them.” He raised one eyebrow. “How exactly
would a crew make money for us if we weren’t doing our own jobs?” He sighed in
exasperation. “This whole business of treating them like royalty is bullshit.
They need to start taking their responsibilities to the project more seriously
and quit playing politics.”

“You know they can’t resist trying to blow
their own mistakes out of proportion and then pin it on some patsy.” Davidoff
was getting into a bad mood. “You should hear the fuss they’re making about the
size of the central atrium on the second ship in the
Leviathan
 
class. Everything’s their idea until they don’t like it and then it suddenly
seems like I do the damn layouts single handedly.” He wagged a warning finger
at Frank. “Mark my words, that staff captain is pushing a whiny complaint
straight to the top.”

“Oh, I’m counting on that,” Frank answered
in a dark tone. “I’m pretty sure that genius sent a blistering email all the
way up the chain to Howard’s office.” He gazed out the window as a speedboat
burbled its way through a restricted speed zone. “As soon as it gets to me,
it’s going to get a
reply-to-all
  explaining how he exposed us to
huge liability.

“For one thing, talking to a sub-contractor
violates the Prime Contractor clause. If an accident happens at the shipyard
and he’s been giving orders to the subs,
He
ends up in jail, not the
lead contractor’s superintendent. Doesn’t even need to be related to the
console he had changed. Some tin-basher falls off a scaffold and dies – the
staff captain’ll find himself in court.

“Even worse, if any one of those panels
were to malfunction and cause the ship to run aground, the designers would
point to
his
changes and say it’s our problem.”

“Did his changes make sense at least?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Frank grinned. “And
that’s part of the point I want to make when Howard comes to next week’s
progress meeting. The Captain and Staff Captain were part of the layout
consultations right from the start. They would rather show up on site and give
last minute orders than simply ask for it to be fixed at the start. Makes ‘em
feel important. They saw the console layout and actually
signed
each
one.”

“Seems to me, that would have been a pretty
good time to correct obvious errors in  the layout,” Davidoff mused. “So
what was the issue?”

“A lot of consoles need to be moved. Policy
on watch keeping changed a year ago and most of the operators will end up
needing their terminals switched.” He raised an eyebrow. “You might recall,
Kim,  that we’ve been rotating the rest of the fleet through the dockyards
to update the older bridges?” Not for the first time, Frank wondered if his friend
had been named for Kim Philby, the high ranking Soviet double-agent.  Old
Ivan Davidoff never did talk about his childhood in Russia.

Davidoff smacked his forehead. “Sorry,
Frank; I must have pulled an old template when we drew up the bridge layout for
Leviathan
. Want me to send a change request to the Architects?”

“No, I should send it. They’re supposed to
be the ones that know where the terminals go in the first place.  That
way, if I have it on one of my own change requests, I can track the cost of the
change to my
Stupid crap that Ops want done at the last minute
total.”
He reached out for a second slice of apple. “The last fifty changes have all
been over the budget line so I have to take every new one upstairs to get
Howard’s autograph.”

“So,” Davidoff’s face reflected the import,
“every week Howard hears about how Jim decided to change the thruster wattage,
or…”

“Or how the Staff Captain waited until the
last minute to blunder in with an expensive change?” Frank got up and started
stuffing his gear into his carry-on. “I should be able to keep your name out of
this. If push comes to shove, we can always throw the architects under the bus;
the whole watch change idea was their recommendation anyway.”

“Yeah, those idiots!” Davidoff half-joked.

“Seriously, I have to agree with that
sentiment.” Frank turned back to the designer, his carry-on in his hand. “They
shouldn’t even be looking at the individual terminal names on
your
layouts – you’re responsible for traffic flow. They’re supposed to be the ones
who call the technical shots. All they really end up doing is copying your cad
files and pasting whole sections into their title blocks and it’s
their
drawings
that I’m gonna take upstairs next week.”

“Thanks, Frank.” Davidoff smiled. “If you
get them to send the change before you leave Finland. I’ll hammer them about
the conduit changes so they remember to sort it all out in time.”

“Thanks,
moi droog
You want me to
bring back a bottle of
Lakka
 for your dad?”

“Sure. You know, he’s still waiting to hear
when you and Ellen can come over for some ‘gator.”

Frank had started down the hall but paused
to think for a moment. “Let’s aim for this Saturday and I’ll clear it with
Ellen tonight.” He continued towards the elevators. “See you Monday, Kim.”
Then, with a wave over his shoulder – “Saturday, I mean!”

Washington, D.C.

January 4
^th
, 2026

N
athaniel Parnell walked into the room, followed by Sam and Mary.
“Mary, if you want to talk about aliens, shouldn’t you be standing in front of
a tar-paper shack or a pile of gravel or something?” He strode to his seat,
nodding at the military and civilian staff arrayed around the table who all
sprung to their feet. “I mean, the stuff my son watches on TV - the UFO
interviews always show some borderline lunatic with a pint-shaped lump in his
pocket.” He dropped into his seat, the rest of the room following suit. 
“Nice start on a story, but maybe throw in some zombies or a couple of
sensitive vampires.”

Mary, her attempt at a heads-up having
failed utterly, nodded to the young captain who held the remote. “Mr.
President, we were advised by the head of NASA that we lost contact with
Vinland Station for a very specific, very alarming reason.” The screen at the
end of the room flickered on, the image showed Mars. She reached out and took
the remote from the officer.

Parnell leaned forward, his right hand
touching the frame of his glasses. “So, what am I looking for here?”

Mary touched the remote and the video feed
began to run. The scene pulled back to reveal a massive ship with a profusion
of modules and antennae hanging from underneath. The hull was a dull dark grey
– almost black, and it consisted of a central docking framework that could hold
six independent triangular vessels in a circular array. Three of the
sub-vessels were still docked. She paused it again. “These ships are believed
to be connected with our loss of communications with Vinland Station.”

Parnell tore his gaze from the screen to
look at Mary, one eyebrow arched. “Director Perdue, are you telling me that
someone built this thing and launched it to Mars without any of our high tech
gee-gaws letting us know about it?”

Mary hit the play button. “Technically,
sir, that’s the long and short of it.”

Parnell was still staring at her. “How the
hell could anyone pull that off?”

Mary paused the video at the next marker.
“Because, Mr. President, that ship didn’t come from this solar system. “ Having
learned from her parents – both Hollywood producers - she let the scene on the
monitor do the rest of the talking for her.

Quiet gasps and exclamations rippled around
the room as realization dawned. The scene showed an insect-like landing vehicle
hovering outside the mine entrance on Olympus Mons. A squad of figures were
frozen in their advance on the entrance, their proximity to a NASA surface
rover making it easy to estimate their height.

“They’re the size of children,” the
Secretary of Defense mused. “What is that behind them? It almost looks like
they have…”

“Tails?” Mary finished for him. “That’s the
general consensus upstairs. Whoever these little guys are, they’re definitely
not from here, folks.”

The president reached behind his lenses to
rub his eyes. “I suppose there’s no chance of someone flinging the doors open
and yelling
Surprise!
”. He looked back up. “Mary, where did you get this
imagery from?

“Chuck Gray got it from Ed McAdam, the CEO
of Red Flag Minerals. They were over at Moffett field for a progress meeting on
their heavy-lift airship project when one of Ed’s minions called him with the
news. I was on the phone with Chuck at the time talking about assistance to
JAXA.”

“Haven’t I met Ed? The ribbon cutting at
Moffett?” The president turned to Sam. “Tall guy, sour face, chewed my ear off
for ten minutes about a registry for mineral claims on the moon?” He looked
around the room. “Is this guy reliable? I mean, it could be a hoax that got out
of hand, couldn’t it?”

Mary shrugged. “Hockey could be a hoax for
all I know - a bunch of grown men in short pants chasing a puck around the ice.
I’d believe you if you told me it was all some sort of mob front for money
laundering.”

Parnell pointed a finger at her, “Watch
yourself, young lady. You’re on thin ice, talking about hockey like that.”
Nobody was certain whether Parnell truly loved the Capitals, or whether he just
thought it wise to support the hometown team.

Mary was pretty sure he was jumping on the
hockey comment to give himself a few seconds to wrap his head around an almost
unbelievable dilemma. “Mr. President, Chuck has staff in Hilo and they’re
probably arriving at the observatory on Mauna Kea as we speak. We’ll have
independent confirmation from them any minute now. Until then, I thought it
best if we proceed as if we were sure of the threat.”

Parnell nodded. “You made the right call,
pulling everyone together. If this does turn out to be a hoax, I’ll be more
relieved than angry. Hell, I’ll take all of you up to the residence for a
kegger!” He looked around the room, taking a deep breath. “So, if it’s not a
hoax, what do we do about it?”