Because I run on obsessive compulsive behavior, I decided to try to fill out a full month of blogging to end the year, so naturally, I'm starting with some Space Guys filler. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.
The voyage went on. Morale greatly improved as soon as the life support ring reopened, allowing the crew to return to their normal quarters and stored possessions. At six weeks, the Janus reached the first visible benchmark outside the orbit of Mars, the asteroid belt. It took another month to cross it. In that time, they sighted at least a dozen asteroids and two mining ships. There was a running correspondence between Yuri and the crew of a survey craft called Platinum Star. They had a single mishap when a tiny particle hit the windshield of the Pegasus. He went into the depressurized cabin and returned carrying a spiderwebbed pane. He found Moxon loitering in the main corridor. “Let me see that,” he said. Jason held out the pane. “It’s strong, isn’t it?”
“It’s rated to stop a 2
cm cannon shell,” Jason said. “It probably would have.”
“We’ll see,” Moxon said. He took the pane and set it upright. Then he drew his trench knife. With a single, sudden thrust, he drove the narrow blade straight through the pane. He twisted the knife back and forth.
“There’s today’s science
lesson,” Moxon said. “Bullets are blunt. So are meteors. But a knife delivers
power straight to a point.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “Nice
trick.”
The trooper smiled. “I’m
sorry we haven’t gotten along better,” he said. “Maybe we got off on the wrong
foot. But there’s still 18 months ahead. Who knows?” Jason was already
withdrawing.
Jason watched Alek radiate as soon as she reunited with her robots. She happily introduced him to her workhorse machines, a silver machine she called Scarecrow and a gold one dubbed Patchwork Girl, or Crow and Patch for short. She insisted that they had discrete personalities, for reasons that remained elusive to him. He came closest to believing when he walked in on the pair alone.
The two robots were in the middle of the floor, on top of the hatch for an airlock. They grasped each other with pincers on the end of accordion-like arms as they did a kind of shuffle. What held his gaze was that they moved in a circle unsuited to their gait. He frowned, not at the behavior but a vague sense of order behind it. He narrowly stopped his jaw from dropping as he realized that they were going slowly and clumsily through the steps of a waltz.
“I taught them that a while ago,” Alek said in her plain lecture voice. He no longer started at finding her already at his side. She gestured with her mechanical pencil. “It was a test of their gyrostabilizers, originally. Now they do it when they are online without a task. It happens sometimes, when I give them an exercise without resetting their memory. I am still not sure which one started it. I believe Patch initiates more often than not.”
“Why haven’t you reset?”
Jason said, not really questioning. “The manual says to do it every month on the
outside.
“It is the only way to
test the emergent properties of their AI,” Alek said. “They do improve at their
tasks when I let them remember. Besides, would you do it?” Jason looked at the
robots again, and shook his head.
With the privacy of the lab, Alek began to show new sides of herself, sometimes endearing, sometimes puzzling and occasionally alarming. She did many things to please him, or with the expectation that he would be pleased. Then there were times when he found her weeping in anger or jealousy. In those times, she would play the target shooting game, whooping, screeching or hissing depending on her fortunes. But that could get her wound up over her chief grievance, that she was not an officer. Then, as often as not, she would take control of a robotic arm in her lab that genuinely terrified Jason. “I should have been one of the 12,” she had said on one occasion. “They call me `special technician’ so they do not no have to give me a weapon.” She proceeded to crush 3 empty rations containers and a damaged fuel pod. Jason had finally called out to Nick Chopper to restrain her. As the robot emerged and turned toward her, Alek looked ready to attack her own machine with the arm. The moment passed, and she powered down the arm. Then she wrapped herself around Jason.
Outside the privacy of the lab, Alek showed Jason the ship and introduced him to the rest of the crew. They spent much of their time in the science module, an ovoid shell 30 meters wide and 40 long that connected the life support ring with the Mission Fuselage. Its official purpose was to observe zero-gravity phenomena and test equipment. In practice, the off-duty crew frolicked back and forth across the enclosed expanse, whether leaping, propelling themselves with fire extinguishers and other improvised propulsion, or simply sliding along the flexible fabric of the inner shell. Alek’s favorite pastime was to give a yodeling call that would echo across the shell, making ripples in the supposedly sound-dampening lining.
He also spent a shift with Alek and old Yuri, long a presence more than a person, in the communications center beneath the ship’s directional communications dish. It proved to be a cabin the size of a storage shed lined with tiny monitors, which Yuri explained was a fraction of what they could receive. “This is the real center of the ship,” he said in his richly timbered voice. “If it went down, we would have no telemetry, no orders, and no movies except what we have on data discs or your record collection. Command on Gaia wouldn’t even know if we were dead or alive. That is why at least one officer is on duty at all times.” He patted the sidearm at his hip.
He pointed to a cartoon Major Maxon trading stylized blows with the monocled villain Heinz Himmelmann and his alien bodyguards. “That is from Houston,” he said. “The spaceport sends out the local station, sometime. The show, I have watched with my grandsons. They say it is a commercial for silly toys. They are not wrong. I like it. It is idealistic.”
“What about the solar
interference?” Jason asked. “We can never get a signal off on Mars…”
Alek shook her head at that. “That is not solar,” she said. “Not all of it. It is the high beams from Mons, Port Eris, Columba. They broadcast to Earth, Jupiter too. Nothing you have is powerful enough to get over them. They would not let you have anything that could.” Jason had only nodded. Yuri looked at him thoughtfully.
“You know,” the elder spacer said, “when the Federation and the Union proposed a joint space program, a lot of people said it was the best way to ensure the survival of the human race, in case something went wrong on Gaia. They never quite said what. What do you think? Why would you say you’re out here?”
Jason shook his head. “I
don’t know what happened back then,” he said. “But we aren’t anyone’s backup
plan. We’re here to find out what’s out here.” That had gotten a smile from
Yuri
They also paid regular visits to engineering, which to Jason’s discomfort was in the axis of the life support ring. He pointedly did not comment when Anastasia proved to be an equally frequent visitor. The outer chamber was a three-way intersection that was disorienting even for the Martians, where one of the engineers was invariably ensconced either reading or watching the single television screen. Anastasia had been on hand when Jason tried to argue over the safety of a reactor in the middle of the crew’s quarters.
“So, people get the idea
that nuclear reactors can turn into an atomic bomb,” Donald said. “That’s like
worrying that the engine on your petrol car will burn like a Molotov cocktail. If
you want a nuclear explosion, you make a nuclear weapon. If you want nuclear
power, you build something not to blow up. It’s really virtually impossible for
a reactor to explode.”
“Almost,” David said from the other side of the radiation barrier. “And comparatively speaking, really.”
“Sure,” Donald said. “There’s lots of things in a reactor that can brew up if someone does something stupid. Things like that can all be contained, if you designed it right. If things go as they should, they implode, not explode.” He chuckled. “When I was Dr. Czernabeg’s student, I advised the Sheng on their first fusion reactor. Six weeks in, we got a call from one of their senior officials. It turned out that an electrical fire had burned out the control system. They flew me in to inspect the facility. By then, you could see the smoke from Shanghai. The military had set up a perimeter, but they wouldn’t go anywhere near the building. They honestly thought the fusion reactor could blow up the whole country or even the world, like a star going nova. I told them to give me a suit and a helicopter to drop me in the middle. They did it, because they thought it wouldn’t matter. As soon as I got inside, I saw exactly what I knew had happened: The reactor had melted down, right enough, but it had melted down through the floor. Then the rest of the plant had caved in on top of it. The fire was from their instruments burning.”
Jason frowned. “Didn’t
the Federation have a reactor meltdown?”
“That was something different,” Anastasia said. “There was a factory that was making material for nuclear bombs, way too close to a big city. There was an explosion that blew open the containment and released the radioactive material into the atmosphere. There would have been less damage if a nuclear bomb had gone off. That was the real reason we made peace; that, and figuring out just how powerful the Alliance had become.”
That same night, Jason lay with Alek in his bunk, intermittently watching Sparky the squirrel. The adventure showed Sparky, Spunky and Tweel the Martian on Venus. They conveniently wore armored suits to protect them from the heat and pressure, at the cost of correspondingly limited movement. Sparky was currently struggling to pick up a wrench dropped while repairing their spaceship. At first, he simply could not get hold of it with the clumsy gauntlets of the suit. When he did manage to grip it, however, he found that the pressure made it impossible to pick it up. Spunky and Tweel tried to pry it off the ground, but only bent the tool. At first, he didn’t notice the raised voices, from the direction of the cabins across the main corridor where Jackie and Vasily slept, until he recognized Anastasia. He still might have done nothing, if Alek had not stirred. He patted her hand and climbed down, past Jax and Sarip. He had just passed the half-open privacy partition when Jackie crashed through the partition of Vasily’s cabin, kitty corner to theirs.
Jackie might have gone right into his own facing cabin, if he had not hit the frame of its partition. The partition he had just gone through clattered to the floor, derailed and deformed but not penetrated, as Vasily pushed his own way through. The moreno gave no more than a grunt as he assumed a defensive posture, easily drowned out by Anastasia’s shriek. The Federation pilot struck twice with his fists and once with a high kick before Jackie struck a single blow of his own, staggering his foe with a jab to the abdomen. Jason called out a half-articulate warning, before he found himself pushed aside. He glared in anger as Moxon strode past, brandishing his sheathed trench knife as a knuckleduster.
Anastasia came into view, clad in the bottom half of her fatigues and a half-fastened undergarment. When she grabbed for Vasily, he pushed her back and wheeled to face the interloper. Jason felt an irrational satisfaction as Moxon advanced. Let the man of Gaia try to separate two Martians unaided if he chose; let him try to part a lion’s jaws with one hand. Yet, he already had a foreboding sense that Moxon knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, Moxon moved faster than Jason could follow. One moment, Vasily was drawing back his fist. The next, he was crashing down on top of the broken partition, leaving behind a suspended spray of blood that ended at Moxon’s still-raised fist.
That was when old Yuri emerged from his cabin in the cross corridor. He raised a hand to Vasily, who protested but was not bold enough to raise a fist. The elder pilot gave another warning, then planted a foot on Vasily’s chest. The younger pilot’s face flushed in rage, but he was already put in his place. That was when Anastasia emerged, dressed only in the bottom of her fatigues and her half-fastened upper undergarment. She lashed out with an open hand. Moxon might have blocked the blow, but he might not have bothered. What was clear was that he caught Ana in the breastbone, slamming her up without effort against the corner bulkhead.
Yuri turned his stern gaze to Moxon, then to Anastasia. Moxon, in turn, looked to Vasily. He rose to his feet, lifting the partition. “Go to Dr. Cahill to have your injuries examined,” Moxon said. “Say nothing of what happened. Remain there for the remainder of the cycle.” Vasily ran away with a clatter down the corridor of the ring. The trooper looked to Jackie next. “Mr. Henderson, do you wish to file a charge with the captain?” The moreno returned his stare for a moment, then withdrew to his own bed.
The trooper released Ana. She retreated behind Yuri. “We gave you quarters with the officers and the married crew,” Moxon finished. “Return there; you are confined until I decide if other arrangements are needed.” Yuri silently lifted the fallen partition and shoved it back onto its track. Then he escorted Ana away, one arm around her.
It seemed to Jason that he realized only then that he was poised to lunge. “He’s got no right,” he said. “They aren’t on our side, but they’re ours. We take care of our own, one way or the other.”
Alek took hold of his
arm. “Don’t,” she said.
Jax came up more
cautiously at his right. “Don’t do it, man,” he said. “You know what they did
to us. We don’t know what they did to him…” That was what made him
untense and step back. At that very instant, Moxon turned his head just enough
to show him a half-smile before he strode away.
Table of Contents
Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!
No comments:
Post a Comment