New cover for “Family Law”

I’m going to post this for my Amazon page soon. It will also be on paper books soon. The cover is by the author Sarah Hoyt. She does covers for her own books and is obviously better at it than me.

Progress

I’ve sent out revisions of “The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet”. It will be better for all the help I received.
I’m still on track to get paper books. I may be able to have a limited number of hard bound books and intend to sign some of them.
The fellow I’m working with had a worker get sick and then he moved and had some health issues himself. This really messes things up in a small start-up company with no big crew to take up the load if somebody is out of action.
I still have every confidence they are a good outfit to stick with although they offered to release me if I wanted to find somebody who could act faster for me. Fast is not always best…

It’s amazing –

Different beta readers have wildly different takes on things and see different errors. Not that my copy isn’t perfect – must be computer errors…

“The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet” out to beta

I’m getting a few misspellings and conflicts, but best of all I’m getting some good feedback on story line and continuity with the first book. It will make it a much better book.

April #6 – snippet

This may not end up the first chapter but it’s where I started. Just 3K words. No working title yet. Raw copy – not edited at all – nobody has seen it.

Chapter 1
The sun was very dim but sufficient illumination to work once your eyes adjusted. If they had been back at Home the glare off the ice would have required him to drop the polarizing filter and gold coated glare screen that rode clipped back from his clear faceplate. Here he’d only used it once, when he’d used it as an expedient welding mask. He’d never welded anything before. It wasn’t the first specialized skill he’d had to fake and probably wouldn’t be the last. At least they’d requested a short video demonstrating vacuum welding for him to watch first.
The result wasn’t anything of which Barak was especially proud. It looked more like a keloidian scar than an expert weld. He’d laid two more overlapping beads on top of the first line so he was pretty sure it was strong if not pretty. The brace wouldn’t have been bent and cracked if his boss, Harold Hanson, hadn’t tried to force it into the ice instead of waiting patiently for the heater to do its work. He found he was spending a great deal of his attention anticipating his boss doing something stupid, and staying out of the way so he wouldn’t get killed too.
He’d tried to tell Harold to slow down and think through every move working in vacuum, but the man rejected his suggestions and was easily irritated with him. He’d explained his problem to Deloris his friend in the privacy of his cabin and she hadn’t been surprised.
“You don’t owe Hanson any instruction. He’s supposed to be supervising you, not the other way around. If you keep irritating him I predict he’ll complain to the captain that you are insubordinate. I know you plan to work for your close friends in the future, but a bad report in your job file may be a problem fifty years from now. You just have no idea what may come back on you, so let it go. You didn’t hear it here… but jackasses take care of each other, so if he complains to the captain guess who is going to get the blame? Just… stifle it.”
“It’s surprising,” he explained. “The man is so precise and careful in the lab. Showing me how to help him there he is thoughtful and cautious. But when we get outside he is anxious to get it done and back inside. I suspect he thinks it is beneath him doing manual labor, but it certainly isn’t menial. You’d think he’s being asked to wipe down corridor walls and scrub out the toilets.”
“Uh huh,” was all she said. Indicating to him she was done talking about it and said all she intended to.
Today they finished up anchoring the last ion drive. There were nine of them in a circle around their ship, the Yuki-onna, which was anchored nose first into the center of the circle. Three guy lines from the tail braced it in place. Each engine in the circle had a feed line and controls frozen in a shallow trench radiating from the ship. They were each marked with a sprayed line of bright yellow paint to make them safer from accidental damage. Barak pushed the data cable in the last motor until it locked with a snap he could feel even with double gloves and tugged on it to make sure it was seated. The insulated water feed he inserted in the port and twisted to lock. A big cotter pin went through the flange to made sure it wouldn’t work loose. He bent the end over and put the pliers back. He checked that no tools were missing and folded the tool box closed and clipped it to his suit. “And… done,” he said. “If they all run smoothly we shouldn’t have to come back out here until we are back in the Moon’s shadow,” He said, satisfied and a little relieved they were done and Harold hadn’t busted anything new today.
“They’re pretty simple reliable engines,” Harold said. “I’ll be surprised if any fail.”
That was true, but Harold was far more trusting of equipment than he was. April’s grandfather, Happy Lewis, had couched him on working in vacuum back when Jeff and Happy were working on a ship together in the Lewis cubic. Happy didn’t trust anything. Barak intended to live a long time and keep all his extremities just like Happy.
Harold held on to the post for the safety line that ran back to the ship’s lock and kicked it with one boot and then the other. The ice tended to build up on the boots. They were insulated but still warmer than the ice and it melted when compressed. Barak chipped it off carefully with a screwdriver. It might not be lethal, but if the mooring post for the safety line cracked off and sailed away from being kicked it would make it that much riskier to get back to the ship and they’d have to retrieve it and reset it. The slight gravity of the ice moonlet was actually more irritating than helpful working. Things fell but in slow motion. You couldn’t get enough traction to really walk or even hop well. It was borderline whether you could jump off the ice ball, but for sure you could throw something over the escape velocity.
Harold unclipped his safety line from the closest brace that ran down into the ice for the ion engine mount. He started back to the ship along the line hand over hand. Barak stopped and let him get ahead a bit. He took the moment to look at Jupiter. It still took his breath away filling half the sky. He didn’t hink he’d ever get used to it. Then he reclipped on the line and followed Harold. He said nothing to him about working untethered, following Deloris’ advice.
When they got to the ship Harold waved him past. It was a work rule the supervisor came in last, responsible for knowing he’d brought all his crew in. With just two of them Harold had ignored the rule as silly for a two man crew, but been reminded of it by the captain, so he was diligent about that one point now. He’d accept instruction from Jaabir, if not graciously. Harold grabbed the line post again to knock the last of the ice off his boots. It had a bit of ammonia dissolved in it, which was a bonus for value, but when it melted in the lock it stank and Harold hated it.
Barak leaned around him and got a good grip on the line strung down from the lock to the first post before unclipping and reattaching to it. He had to push off crooked to get around Harold and then pulled himself back on course for the lock with the taunt line. The hatch was open to facilitate quick entry from their side if there was an emergency. He grabbed the take-hold beside the opening where the line terminated and twisted to rotate in. There was a brief odd sound on the radio like somebody blowing on a microphone to test it. He transferred his grip to the inside take-hold and leaned out to unfasten the safety line so they could close the hatch. When he looked down Harold wasn’t there.
He looked along the safety line running back to the engine they’d just finished working on, thinking maybe he went back alone to retrieve something forgotten. That would be stupid to do without telling Barak, but only too believable. The line was visible and taunt, the posts on both ends secure. There was no sign of him along the line or at the engine sixty meters away. He leaned out and looked to each side… nothing. He called on his suit radio. “Harold? Where are you? What are you doing?”
The bridge monitored their suit radios, so Captain Jaabir came on com and inquired, “Is there a problem?”
“Possibly. We returned to the airlock and I entered. When I turned around and looked back out Mr. Hanson is not in sight, and he doesn’t answer a radio call either.”
“Well then I suggest you go back out and look for him,” the man said, like it was obvious.
“I will, when somebody suits up to go back out with me. You don’t send somebody out alone if there is anybody at all available to partner with them. That’s basic rule one.”
“Yes, but Mr. Hanson is partnering with you,” Jaabir insisted.
“Not any more he isn’t. I have no idea where the hell he went, but I’m not going to descend to the ice without a partner in the airlock ready to drag me back in on the end of a safety line if whatever befell him gets me.”
“Why isn’t Mr. Hanson on a safety line for you to pull back inside?”
“Because he unclips himself any time he feels like it and flaunts the rules. He unclipped at the engine a few minutes ago and came back to the ship hand over hand untethered. He does it all the time and I gave up telling him about it because he’s the supervisor and he got all crappy about me telling him what to do. When he started saying ‘Yes, Mother’ in a sarcastic voice I stopped telling him anything. ”
Jaabir didn’t say anything for a moment. Barak was waiting to hear him challenge that, but he didn’t. “Nevertheless, I’d like you to go back out and look,” he insisted. “I don’t have a camera that can see in close to the anchored nose of the ship.”
And why didn’t you set one up one of the drives looking back at the ship? Barak wondered, but didn’t say it.
“I’m sure tormented souls in hell would like raspberry ice cream too, but they’re not going to get it.”
“Are you refusing my direct order?” Jaabir asked.
“Damn right. You are master, but we are not under military discipline. Nor are we underway. You are ordering me to take actions off your vessel. You can order me to take my helmet off and breath vacuum right now too, with as much chance I’ll do it.”
“Some would argue the entire snowball became my vessel when we outfitted it with the means to move it.”
“Then fire it up and move it,” Barak challenged. It wasn’t ready just yet and Jaabir damn well knew it. His silence spoke volumes.
“If there is an inquiry later and you are asked if you know the safety rules for vacuum work and why you failed to monitor and see they were followed it will be bad enough. If you actually order them to be ignored it isn’t just passive neglect, it’s actual felonious breach of duty. I’m not going to give them two dead crewmen to charge you over. One is quite sufficient.”
“You… do not know Mr. Hanson is dead,” Jaabir said. But his voice was very unsteady.
“Missing in vacuum and doesn’t answer the radio? I’ll bet you three Solars at even odds he’s dead.”
“It’s unseemly to make bets over a man’s life,” Jaabir protested. “I have the watch and can’t leave to suit up. I’ll have Ms. Keynes suit up and join you,” he said, singing a different tune now.
“Do you have somebody to run a suit check on her?” Barak asked, knowing the answer coming.
“No, everyone has vital duty.” He didn’t reveal what his XO was doing or why he didn’t pick Deloris.
“Then tell Alice I’m going to pressurize the lock and she can join me. I’ll do an external suit inspection on her while we are pumping down and then I’ll go out.”
“She’s on her way,” Jaabir said.
Barak used the time waiting for her to unclip the line hanging out the hatch, flood the airlock at a normal pace and record his radio log for the whole shift on a private memory stick. He had his whole log on it from day one. He didn’t trust the ship’s log and archives wouldn’t have a catastrophic failure. Happy Lewis had told him that beam dogs knew from long experience official video and radio logs seemed to be subject to sudden failure. “Probably due to being provided by the low bidder,” he’d said with a wink.
Alice looked grim when she came in the lock. She went through the check list with him confirming air and battery charge and turned and twisted in the cramped lock to let him examine every joint, seal and pressure port.
“You check out,” Barak verbally confirmed. They were done well before the pressure pumped down to a dangerous level. That was technically a violation right there, but a common one.
“What happened?” she asked. “The Captain informed me Harold is missing. Where the hell can you go missing on a snowball no bigger than some buildings back home?”
“Well the horizon is really close. I’d guess about three hundred meters here. I suppose if he jumped he could be somewhere on the ice still. Or if he jumped straight up hard enough he’d take a long time to come back down. I didn’t look up. In this suit I’d have had to lay on my back with my helmet hanging out the hatch to do that. Even then he might not come back down straight. It would be easy to land beyond our horizon.”
“I don’t see Harold for a jumper. He might push you, but he had entirely too good an opinion of himself to ever be self-destructive. Captain, you on circuit?” Alice asked.
“Yes Ms Keynes, of course.”
“Is it possible to check with the radar and see if Harold is nearby but off the snowball?”
“No, I’m sorry but with the nose of the ship anchored we can’t use it and it is integrated into the ship so thoroughly it was deemed impractical to remove. It has so little range it wouldn’t have been of use navigating so they decided not to provide an auxiliary system.”
“OK, thank you. It was just a thought.
“You want me to go down or watch over you?” Alice asked.
“I’m used to the surface here. I know how the ice is supposed to look. Just monitor my radio and watch out the hatch so you can haul me back in my line if I get in trouble. I may go out of sight. The line is long enough to go around to the far side of the ship. But if I do I’ll keep up radio chatter so you know what’s going on.”
“OK, Your rebreather numbers all check good?” she asked. There was no external monitor for that unless she jacked in. The bridge had telemetry, but she wasn’t counting on that. Barak appreciated it.
“Numbers all good. I have a week before I need new packs. I’m purging at ninety five percent pump-down.”
There was no objection from the bridge. They had a huge margin on air supply.
The ice under the lock was packed hard from their foot traffic. He didn’t expect to see any marks or debris there and there wasn’t anything. He turned and scanned all around slowly, looking hardest where he couldn’t see from up in the lock hatch.
“There’s something under the overhang,” Barak told Alice. “I’ll be out of sight just a few seconds.”
“Oh shit… ”
“You OK? You need reeled in?” Alice asked worried.
“Just fine. Coming back in sight. I have retrieved the… object. I’m sorry but Harold is dead.”
Jaabir on the bridge said nothing. He had the camera feed from Barak’s suit helmet.
Barak pulled himself back up the line and swung in the lock. He handed Alice the boot from Harold’s suit. Not the insulated over-boot but the pressure boot. The flange with locking lugs was fractured half way around and the one lug that was not cracked bent over when the pressure blew it off. The suit would have emptied itself in a heartbeat and propelled Harold off the surface like a rocket.
“What a horrible way to go,” Alice said.
“There isn’t any good way to go,” Barak insisted. “I can’t blame the suit maker. Harold has been kicking the ice off his boots for the last two weeks. Space suits are not designed to kick things. Cold metal gets brittle and this was simple abused until it failed. If you made a suit you could treat like that the thing would weigh as much as a ground car and be impossible to move in.”
“Why don’t you come in and de-suit. I’m going to declare everybody take a rest day to recover from this… shock. We’ll discuss how this affects us and what accommodations we’ll have to make later. I’ll send word back in the daily report,” Jaabir said.
“Alright,” Barak agreed. “There wasn’t anything else visible out there. It wouldn’t really make any difference if I found anything else now. We are bringing pressure back up in the lock and will help each other unsuit. If you need any details not in the radio log let me know,” Barak offered. “If I’m to be off duty for a full shift I’d like to have a drink and sit and decompress a bit. But if you think I’ll need to suit back up I won’t drink anything.”
“No, no. Feel free. I may have a medicinal dose too,” Jaabir said, although it wasn’t his custom. “After I review the log and write a report.
Barak guessed there was little chance he’d be asked for a formal report or written response. Jaabir was going to be happy to do the whole thing, putting himself in as positive a light as possible. Fact was, even if he’d been a stickler for rules and rode Harold hard, the captain always caught some of the blame when things went this badly wrong.
When they were out of their suits and everything stowed properly, including the lone boot, Alice turned and hugged him hard.
“Do you think Jaabir will tell Deloris?” she asked him.
“Jaabir isn’t thinking about anything but covering Jaabir’s butt right now.”
“Then I’d like to come tell Deloris with you and stay with you guys tonight.”
“Of course,” he agreed. But they stood there silently holding each other for a moment before they went to the cabin. Neither wanted to clean up and change in the suiting room. They just wore suit liners back to the his cabin.
It was a good thing the motors were in place before this happened. He’d have dreaded working with Jaabir or one of the women to try to drive anchors and position them. Harold hadn’t been his favorite person but he was fairly big and strong enough. It would have seemed a terrible and selfish thing to say out loud and he never really considered it. Six people was just not enough for this deep a voyage he decided. It was going to still be a hardship going back shorthanded. He’d talk about that later between just the three of them before having to hear Jaabir’s take on it. No, not tonight. He might still say things he’d regret. Tomorrow, he decided.

Long Voyage of the Little Fleet is done.

Quite early this morning wrapped it up.
I’m spending the day with my wife and letting it get out of my head for a day. Then a quick read through and it goes to the beta readers.
Paper books still coming.
Now I’ll go back and do another April book and perhaps finish up ‘Outcast’ when I need breaks away from April #6.

The Long Wait for The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet

It’s been so long getting it out I decided I should drop another chapter on y’alls. This is the book that has snippets in the back scroll as ‘Family Business’. Please be aware these are the rough unedited snippets like you’d get in an advance reader copy. – Added a paragraph later in the day.

Chapter 5
The Small Fleet picked a star beyond the Bunnies’ that the Roadrunner had not visited after passing through the Bunnies’ system or in the arch back to them. The system turned out to be unusual in that it had twenty planets. Several with moons. None were water worlds, nor did any show signs of life and none huge gas giants. That there was no large band disturbed by the gravity of large planets which helped explain such a crowded system.
The odds one had a particular heavy concentration of an important mineral was not worth tying up the Fleet to do a survey. They recorded the general scan information and moved on. Radar showed nothing unusual within the orbits of the planets.
* * *
The next system never formed planets. It was a disk of unconsolidated material. The Little Fleet stopped short and cautiously moved over the plane of most of the orbiting junk. There was a radar return from deep in the mess, suspiciously similar to the alien reflectors marking the mineral rich asteroids previously. Gordon was unwilling to risk even a shuttle to investigate this one. It did suggest the unknown aliens could safely navigate in a cluttered system that intimidated them. They moved on.
* * *
The next system was a hierarchical three star system. A tightly orbiting pair and a larger companion. Only it wasn’t when they looked closer. There was a brown dwarf orbiting the larger companion instead of a simple three body system. Not many brown dwarfs had been examined closely. There was one about six light years from Earth, but like most it didn’t have sufficient mass to make jumping into its gravity well a safe transition. There were no interesting planets in the system, a couple small gas planets way out and some asteroids than were far too thin to call a belt. The brown giant however had satellites and that was so unusual they took a closer look. On the way in they scanned the system hard with radar. The echo they got was not off in the fringes of the system, but right where they were going.
There were several rocks tagged with reflectors, the same crude sort they’d seen before. These were a bit smaller and more of them. The brown dwarf was lousy with moons and moonlets rich in elements of high atomic number. One moon had been excavated so much it had a pit in one side. There was a bigger boom anchored next to the pit, bigger than the ones used to mount radar reflectors. Everyone quickly agreed it was a ship mooring mast. After sampling showed platinum group metals, tungsten, osmium, gold, thorium and uranium on various rocks the consensus was that this moon system was far from played out and it was abandoned while being worked.
The rock with the uranium deposits appears to have been so rich it was once critical for a period of time, the Fargone Marines exploring by suit informed them. There were elements consistent with the decay products of fission products and laser vaporization even revealed traces of transuranics.
The end of the mooring mast had clamping marks and discoloration. Testing with the laser showed the yellow markings were from a bronze alloy. Most of the rubbed off bronze had been eroded by micrometeorite impacts. The system wasn’t that dirty, so the mast was old.
Gordon sent The Champion William to orbit a claim satellite around the whole brown dwarf system. There was enough here to make them all rich many times over.
They didn’t have a real Astrophysicist, but a fellow in engineering followed all the latest research as a hobby and they’d loaded all the recent papers for him. Gordon gave him a call.
“Ernie, are there any current theories of stellar formation that would explain such a system?”
“No, not a one. I can confidently say nobody predicted this, but if I were you I’d keep the find quiet until you have to make it public. If only we can figure out why it formed we have a much better chance of finding similar systems. I would really like first shot at putting a clam satellite around them too.”
“Don’t you think this one will give you more money than you could ever spend?”
“I don’t think you can imagine how much I could spend. I’d like to be able to buy and sell deep space explorers and warships like Lee. You’re damn near as rich as her from Providence. Does that mean you’ll be turning down your cut from this find because you have enough?”
“Uh…”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Brown dwarfs are not that uncommon but we don’t have many in the sphere of human exploration. It would be expensive to visit a brown dwarf all alone by itself. They don’t have enough mass to make it a safe transition unless you have an ungodly velocity, so going to and from one will be expensive in fuel. You come in close to one too, so it takes a lot of fuel just to vector away from hitting the damn things. If there isn’t another gas giant associated with one you’d have to mine it directly for fuel and most of them are still pretty damn hot, even if they haven’t ignited as main sequence stars.”
“This is a pretty fortunate combination then, isn’t it?”
“It sure is. We have a couple small gas planets further out to fuel up and the bigger star the brown dwarf orbits lets us make a safe jump in. We should look hard for this combination. I’d hate to make a fast pass through a system and miss a brown dwarf hidden on the back side of the main star. That’s assuming there are similar moon systems around others, but the possibility of finding more is exciting and certainly worth pursuing. I’m having a hard time understanding how so many heavy elements congregated, but I have even less of a clue how they accrued in separate masses, so concentrated.”
“Thank you for your help. I’m recommending you for a double share on this one, for your advice.”
“Excellent, that’s why I came along. But I admit seeing such systems ahead of the big boys with all the proper degrees and professional reputations is sweet. But have they found any more artifacts?”
“Not so much as a busted bolt and we have the Fargone Marines crawling around that mined out pit, looking in every pocket and crevasse with hand lamps. Whoever they were, aside from the reflectors, it seems like they were obsessively neat.”
* * *
“That’s it?” Thor asked two days later, looking sort of peeved. The object was round with a scalloped edge. “What is it?” He asked. He made no move to take it from Gordon’s hand.
“A cap of some sort I’d guess, see the other side is concave with threads.” He flipped it over in his hand. A spiral of threads ran down the side wall to a flat inside surface.
“And no bottle to screw it on?”
“We almost missed this. It was under some dark ore pieces and it was only because the Marine took the initiative to poke around with the rod he was carrying that it came to light. I put him on the list for a double share.”
“It might not go on a bottle,” Lee objected. “There are tanks on machinery that hold lubricants and other fluids. I used to carry specimen bottles for bugs and small plants that had a similar lid. The body was glass too, not the same as the lid. The lid was some sort of plastic. What is this made of?”
“Aluminum, with a little silicon, tin and traces of magnesium, hard anodized and dyed,” Gordon supplied. “That’s why it has a little bright chip in the surface on the inside flat. They cut a little piece out on the milling machine to analyze. The machinist was helpful too. He looked at the threads under a magnifier and told us they were milled on with a spinning cutter that had the thread profile along its edge. You also need a robotic machine tool to do that, you can’t feed it in by hand. A single point tool could do it on a lath, but that’s not how it was done.”
“The edge tells us they have fingers,” Lee said confidently.
“I don’t know. Why not tentacles?” Thor asked.
“Tentacles aren’t going to be as strong. If they had tentacles the edge would have little knobs you could wrap a tentacle completely around. I’ve struggled to get jammed jar lids off before. Sometimes I had to get my dad to take a knife and rap it all around the edge to get them loose.”
“You scare me sometimes,” Thor admitted. Lee just shrugged. It seemed obvious.
“Ah, it tells us something else,” Gordon said, with a smug smile. They just looked at him and wouldn’t beg to be enlightened.
“Their hand is at least big enough to span across it and have enough finger length to fold over the edge and engage the dips on the edge.”
Lee put her own small hand out and fit it over the cap. It was about a hundred millimeters across. “Yeah and most of them had a bigger hand than I do, it’s a real stretch for me.” The Derf though had more than enough reach.
Gordon frowned, deep in thought. “I’d caution that it has likely been hundreds of thousands of years since this rock was mined. We should not presume the same race made the reflectors and the screw lid. This might be from someone like us, who came through exploring long after the original miners and got sloppy and left an artifact behind. I’m not saying it’s likely, but it is possible.”
“Whether there was one race or two, the fact they are so neat about cleaning up a site, says a lot to me. They are either different than us psychologically or they have had bad experiences meeting others and now don’t want to give them any clue about their race by leaving artifacts behind,” Lee said.
Thor nodded agreement. “Things we consider an aberration or impairment might be normal. You might have an entire race of obsessive compulsive people. They might never allow randomness. Piles of objects oriented every which way would offend them. Everything would have to be turned the same way and lined up. Someone who was a slob would be institutionalized as crazy. I bet they’d see patterns whether they were there or not, like humans who get involved with numerology or astrology.”
“I saw a little of that in the Bunnies,” Gordon suggested. “They drove that road across the continent and it was going to be level even if they had to tear down a mountain range to do it.”
“Not to mention they had a fixed idea about the Teen and there was no making a partial change or adjustment. It was all or nothing,” Thor said and actually shuddered.
“We have been leaving claims satellites,” Lee reminded them. “If it’s dangerous to leave things that tell a lot about you then I suggest we clean up after ourselves too. Just in case. Let’s not leave anything more complex than those beacons. They tell much more about us than these radar reflectors, but there isn’t much we can do about that while the Survey demands they be placed for claims. We might suggest back home that something like the reflectors is safer than a big squawking radio beacon.”
“We should pick them back up on the way home,” Gordon decided. “The chance somebody will cross over our path and claim something we didn’t tag is so small. If somebody decides to do a deep voyage like us surely they will go off a different route. Following us they could expect we’d have already claimed the good stuff and their effort could be wasted.”
“It sounds sort of paranoid, but I agree,” Thor said. “I just wish we had somebody who could give us an accurate idea how old these reflectors are. I’m going to have one of the small ones here put whole in the vacuum sample box on our hull. When we get back maybe somebody can date them.”
“I wonder how long one of our claims satellites will keep transmitting? They only hold the claim for five years, so I doubt they spend money to make them last very long,” Gordon guessed.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Lee decided. “Are we done here?’
“Oh yeah,” Gordon set the cap down. “We’ll let the off shift stand a watch and we’ll transition out of this system in the morning. I sent Roadrunner to look closer at the binary orbiting around this star and they should be back and grappled to Murphy’s Law by our shift.”
* * *
Ernie Goddard from engineering left a message he’d like to talk to Gordon overnight. Gordon wondered if he’d ask for a bigger share than a double. The man seemed a little avaricious, but he was spot on Gordon didn’t want to limit his own wealth, he had to admit. Why didn’t he just leave a text message? Gordon already had too many messages to sort every morning.
“Ernie? Gordon here. What did you want to talk about?” The man was up already and dressed.
“I understand you have a couple weaponized jump drones?”
“Yes, though I’d appreciate if the Little Fleet didn’t broadcast that in port. They are a very dangerous weapon to use. I only bought two and I’d be very reluctant to use them except in extreme circumstances. If you guess wrong you could easily kill an innocent ship or station on the far side of jump.”
“I can see all that. But I’ve been thinking about these brown dwarfs. If we find another that is harder to make a safe jump in and examine with a ship, perhaps you could put a few sensors and recording equipment on one of those drones and it could safely make a jump in and examine a brown dwarf system for rocks and moons like the jackpot we found. Now, I don’t know if the warhead is easily removable, but if you can take even some of the warhead mass off it will make the drone even easier to transition into a low mass system. Would you consider that and see if it’s helpful?”
“The warhead is a separate Fargone package on a New Japan drone, so it’s relatively easy to yank it out and put it in storage. We can even put it back in later if we expend the other drone and really need it. All the extra computing power it carries will allow us to give it detailed instructions for doing a survey too. I’ll have your boss start making a sensor pack and data recording system for one of the drones and I’ll tell him it was your idea.” Gordon got a twinge of guilt at his first thoughts about Ernie. “And Ernie, this is what makes a crew really successful, good ideas from everybody. Don’t let it go to your head, but I’m going to put you down for another share for exemplary service. I’d keep it to myself if I were you. Some of the others who are not as quick with ideas might be jealous.”
“That’s nice and good advice, thank you sir. Being appreciated is nice too, besides the money.”
“Call me again if you get any more ideas,” Gordon invited and broke the connection. If he kept coming up with stuff this good Gordon might have to pay him a fourth share. He was worth it.
* * *
They transited seven more systems with no alien artifacts, no significant planets and nothing really unusual except one star had a large planet so close it had baked off all the volatiles and the iron core with a thin crust was orbiting the star yellow hot and molten. It turned so fast the night side didn’t have time to freeze. It simply had a bit of a graduated glow as the edge turning into the dark was hotter than the edge going back to the light. They were tired again and planned a rest if the next system was suitable. It was stressful going through a bunch of boring systems, while keeping alert.
* * *
“Do you realize? We’ve been taking the longest safe jumps on the same vector away from know space, so the distance has added up quickly. We are now almost as far from what was considered the frontier as it is across all of explored space to the far surface of expansion,” Gordon told them.
“And we haven’t been out six months yet. That just justifies it to me,” Lee said. “It just shows how slow everybody has been going.”
“We have enough right now to turn a profit against the cost of the expedition. We have a water world, a huge deposit of silver, a moon system with so many heavy metals I think it will take centuries to mine out and of course a living world,” Gordon enumerated.
“But we can’t claim an occupied world,” Lee complained. “We may be in the history books for finding it, but if the Bunnies don’t get their act together and trade with us we won’t make a Dollar off finding them. I suppose we can put a brag gem in our earrings, but I wouldn’t feel right to even survey and mine their outer system. It would feel like plundering the kitchen in somebody’s house and excusing it because they were confined to an invalid’s float chair in the living room and couldn’t use it. Did anybody try to mine in the outer systems of Hin or Derfhome?”
“Somebody tried to file a claim for Hin and the Claims Commission disallowed it in pretty strong language. They made it clear enough that nobody tried it on the other occupied worlds,” Gordon told her. “I would suppose you could get a license from them to mine for the natives, but with the Bunnies I suspect they’d want you to do it for free, since the Teen already owns it.”
They were orbiting a beautiful gas giant with enormous rings to shame Saturn and a couple dozen moons. All the ships were fueling up on a slack schedule. There were minimum crews on duty and even those taking turns off. There were card games with IOUs changing hands, making wild assumptions about what their shares would be worth when all the claims proved out.
The Hinth holed up in their suite for this break and Thor explained as delicately as possible that three Hinth was a breeding group, the neuter third sex being the one who sat the nest and hatched the single egg. “They are a bit like Humans and consider it indelicate to discuss the details in public,” he told Lee.
Nobody got so blind drunk they made a nuisance of themselves and the crew had hoarded enough materials and entertainment that nobody was short at the six month mark. There wasn’t any shortage of food or spare parts. The hydroponic garden in The Champion William was a sour fuzzy mess however. They stripped it out, sterilized the soil and reinnoculated it with bacteria and worms from the Retribution. They also sent one of their gardeners over to supervise and see if he could have similar success with the garden there.
There was concern there might be some source of fungus and mildew aboard that would recontaminate it. A few cabins that the Hinth, with their sensitive sense of smell, declared had a ‘funny’ odor about them were pumped down and opened to hard vacuum as a precaution. One crewman’s cabin the Hinth wouldn’t enter. He was forced to vacuum clean all his clothing while he did a personal supervised scrub down and decontamination procedure in the clinic while his cabin was cleaned. One pair of his soft shoes was double bagged and incinerated as beyond any known cleaning regimen. He was then assigned a supervisor to make daily checks of his cabin and person.
Thor taught Lee how to play Go, but she found out chess was no fun to her. It seemed needlessly complicated and she grew bored and antsy after a dozen moves. Maybe she’d like it better when she was older, Thor predicted. For some reason she couldn’t articulate, that irritated her.
The engineering department converted the jump drone to a Brown Dwarf explorer and put it back in the launch tube ready to deploy before they took a well deserved break. The cooks prepared a few special treats like actual cakes that were hard to do when there was variable acceleration and maneuver to contend with. They dug a few items out of stores that were not served every day like prawns and whole fish. It made their break seem different and special. The last day shift of the break they had a Mexican supper and a German breakfast, complete with Mariachi music and Polkas. After six days everybody had received a minimum of two days off and they were ready to move on.
* * *
The next jump the new clock in the old cabinet on Sharp Claws, that had varied a few nanoseconds from the others before was slightly off again. They tore out the entire chassis, examined it and the mounting studs on the bulkhead, checked for sharp points and cracks, ran new wiring from the clock to the computer and power source and added isolating shielding on the runs. When they reinstalled it they fabricated a new housing and put another clock in a fourth cabinet, altering the software to run comparing four clocks instead of three. The Captain didn’t like Gremlins and was just about ready to run all six clocks they owned instead of three, but his navigator dissuaded him, saying that whatever was wrong was likely beyond their current understanding and no number of clocks was likely to fix it. He promised to yank the clock in the refurbished cabinet out of play and trash the entire assembly of hardware if it was off again. They’d keep it in storage and have somebody study it when they got home.
The system was uninteresting. A single star. No worlds worth looking at closely. There were no unusual radar returns. The Sharp Claws did all their repairs under way and they jumped out together.
* * *
They transited six more systems, another uninteresting stretch that wore them down. Gordon had by this time gained trust in the off shift crews to the point they went ahead and recorded data and picked a target star and jumping out while the main shift crew slept. They racked up a lot of light years quickly, before they took another break. They could have done one more, but they were tending low on fuel and this system had a nice gas giant. There was no telling if the next one had such an easy fuel source and how deep the jump after was.
* * *
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the alter-shift crew making transitions while we are sleeping,” Thor told Gordon the second day of their break.
“Tell me why. Is there any particular person in the off-shift that worries you? Did somebody say something or do something that made you lose confidence?”
“No, I never got confident. You saved the transitions for the first crew until just recently. Why did you change that arrangement?”
“They seemed to be doing a good job and it seemed peevish to make them wait to start a jump run, or accelerate slower to time it so we’d take the bridge before jump. And it slows us down. It adds an extra day every fifteen days or so.”
“They aren’t as good a crew as ours. I mean, they’d be fine, more than good enough, for say taking a freighter into a know system. But would you have wanted them sitting the conn when we were at war exiting the Fargone system and ran head on into the USNA destroyer Phoenix? Would they have made a split second judgment to fire blind at the emergent point the fleet waiting in ambush for you would use? Would they even have understood there was a trap waiting for them behind the destroyer?
“I admit, I have my doubts. We did luck out on that one.”
“No, that’s my point, we didn’t luck out. You read the situation perfectly and the entire crew all responded flawlessly in seconds, under fire and damaged, to take us to safety and defeat their fleet. The Fargoers on Murphy’s Law told us they’ve all had the record of that battle played for them, synched with the real time system scan, so they would know just what they were dealing with to serve under us. They are universally awed to hear you ordering complicated spreads of fire and a low probability escape jump with a hole burned through our middecks, calm and unhesitating and then politely inform system control of changed jump plans, like you decided to take a ship load of socks to Bountiful instead of New Japan on a sudden whim. That’s why the Fargone captains were nervous having you in close orbit. It wasn’t the weapons load out on the ships. You scare the crap out of them!”
“I’ve always had a hard time accepting a compliment. But thanks for spelling it out.”
“I don’t know that we’ll meet anybody out here. And I hope we don’t cross runs with somebody who starts shooting at us immediately, like the Phoenix did. But if we do, I’d sure rather have you in that chair than anybody else, including myself. I don’t think we should allow jumping into a virgin system to become routine. It’s easy to do when we do one after another, but there is nothing routine about it. We may run into something none of us can deal with,” he said with a shrug, “But let’s not do it because we had the ‘B’ team up.”
“You’ve convinced me. Now, can you tell me how to change back and not make the whole shift feel slighted and resentful, killing morale?”
“Blame it on me.”
“OK,” Gordon agreed grinning, “I will.”
The rest period over, the new scheduling chief, Thor, posted the new rotation, switching a few people around and returning to reserving late run to jump and transition to the prime crew. There was little bitching, just a few “Oh gods no. Not him.” muttered when Thor’s name was on the header over the duty roster posting, surprising Gordon. “Why so few complaints?” He asked Thor.
“They like you,” Thor explained. “Even knowing you are the law between the stars and a master to be feared, they still think you will listen to a bunch of nonsense and try to keep everybody happy. Me, well, they don’t like me, indeed they expect the worst. I have not found that an impedance to command. At best they know I’ll mock them if they complain, at worst I’m likely to put them on slop well and filter cleaning duty if they waste my time complaining.”
“I wish I’d know this months ago,” Gordon marveled. “I’d have sent all the pestering fools to you and saved untold hours. It doesn’t faze you either, does it?”
“It’s like throwing mud on a pig,” Thor answered. “He doesn’t know it’s supposed to bother him.”