Bank Shot

Aboard FCS Contract Tactical Vessel "Billiard," November 1963

     Kwa-FWOPP!  The sound hits with a shock that shakes the whole ship, or at least it feels that way.  That's not the worst part.  Set on auto, the EMP-gun fires any time there's a load ready to go and the targeting crew has lined up on a "valid target," any large-enough radar return lacking IFF. The rising thrumm of the Marx high-voltage generator recharging underpins the ratcheting clank and slam of the "gun" cycling a fouled barrel out and a freshly-loaded one in — the Marx's output driving the exploding-helix first step, helix pumping the stacked-disc EMP generator, ready for their one-and-only line-dance of death — isn't the worst part, either.

     No, what he's come to hate are the moments each side of firing: the dull "clack" of grounding relays ticking over, shutting down or isolating in every system but the trigger, the tiny hiss of the pneumatic-delay briefly audible in the silence left with life-support offline, Kwa-FWOPP! and an instant of shocked silence, waiting for the first few isolating relays to un-isolate and release the rest.  That's the part he can't stand: it always takes just long enough that he starts to wonder if it's not going to happen this time, leaving ship and crew — him — adrift in their primitive "tin suit" space suits, trusting to passive IFF and the clumsy navs systems for protection from pitiless, automated friendly fire.

     Airflow, cooling and commo comes back on okay this time, with an insectile buzz and a pair of warning telltales on the alarm board beside him: the long dielectric wedge in the barrel just cycled out has to be replaced and is, of course, jammed.  As he unstraps and unplugs, the second telltale — "TEMPERATURE ALARM" — blinks and goes out and the buzzing changes pitch.  Already cooled enough to work on, at least in his suit.  The wedge is a weak point but without it, eddy current would melt the barrel to unusability after a single shot.  The system that's supposed to slide the old wedge out and a new one in every five firing cycles is notoriously balky; there's a tradeoff between available replacements and cumulative damage at about four and a half shots — or five, if there's a tech on hand to fix foul-ups.

     In theory, the EMP-gun is locked out as soon as he cracks his tiny pod.  Despite the barrels and "shells," it doesn't send anything solid downrange, just a blast of electronic death that turns most spacecraft into useless junk.  The other side, NATO's Combined Space Forces — primarily the USSF, augmented by the Commonwealth's (Yes, HRH Elizabeth R's very own UK, Colonies, Possessions and ex-Colonials) Space Arm and an increasingly-reluctant French Navy (!) contingent — still hasn't come up with entirely effective shielding and thus, here he is, shooting zaps at them.  Outside the layered mu-metal, ceramic and gold-screen of the pod, the gun he services would stop him even faster and better than it stops NATO spacecraft.  So when he's unshielded, the gun is locked out, mostly.  Mostly: his pressure suit incorporates a lighter version of the same shielding and its standalone life-support is non-electric; the Bridge can override the lockout and he's supposedly protected from at least a single shot.  It's a last-ditch gambit; he worries more that the gun will cycle without firing while he's working on the jammed barrel.

     It doesn't happen this time.  The stuck wedge gives way to pure brute force, three clumsy free-fall hammer swings, thud-thud-thud and it sldes free.  He can feel the heat though his gloves — and to a lesser extent through bootsoles and his legs when he was bracing in place. It adds up but if you're used to it, sweating's not a big problem, natural cooling with the moisture recovered in the rebreather whirring on his back as long as the power's on. He steps through the rest of wedge-replacement manually, not trusting the machinery to pick up where he left off.  Back in the pod once more and — hey, presto! — he's no more than snapped the final latch before there's a multiple clack, an instant's quiet and Kwa-FWOPP!  There's a heart-stopping pause before dim, red pod lights and a reassuring rush of air come back on again, just fine.

*  *  *
     He hadn't set out to be a soldier — who had?  He'd been working maintenance at a station in a small but metal-rich asteroid belt in Peace-and-Prosperity's system when NATO had come in with little warning.  As the "Federation of Concerned Spacemen" fleet scattered and and some planet-bound Far Edgers had managed skip out to meet it, a pair of NATO/USSF Jump-drive carriers were dropping fast armed scouts and steam/fission "teakettle" troop transports near every off-planet source of RF. Reaching his station, they'd taken the still-incomplete "big wheel" that held living quarters, command/control/communications and other activities requiring a definite up and and down, but misjudged the physical size and population of the remainder of the operation.

     The area where he worked, "backside" of a large rock without line-of-sight to the Wheel, had been overlooked.  The last flyable vehicles had skipped out in the confusion, leaving one pilot, four techs and a "Heron" with a bum #2 realspace engine.  The Heron was an awkward little general-purpose spacecraft, modified for up-close use in the relatively-dense asteroid belt.  Originally an underpowered Jump drive had given it limited capability; modified with copies of FCS-recovered WW II German "Glocke" Drive field generators, it could span a solar system in a few hours subjective time.

     Working with desperate haste, power all but shut down, he and his peers had managed to repair a similar but less-damaged engine from the shop's boneyard, wrestle it into place, and ready the tubby little craft for travel.

     Normal crew was three: pilot and navigator/copilot at the nominal top, peering out through windowed turrets, radio/radar/Drive operator at their foot level and room a little cargo or one passenger below and forward of the radio position.  One passenger if he wasn't planning to move around much.  Life support for four days, longer with an added pod.  Fuel for six days.  Four people, max.

     They got five in, awkwardly, depressurized the hanger bay and set Jumped out, interpolating and extrapolating from out-of-date course cards on a best-guess vector, and got lucky: much closer to the FCS fleet than NATO's ships, the electrical racket of their emergence from Jump prompted a tight-beamed challenge on the Edger traffic-control frequency.  Bona fides established, they were given coordinates and met an FCS ship with hours to spare on life support, last spacecraft out of the the system.

     ...And out of friends, home and a job.  Sure, there was always work for a spaceship tech, but the rough-and-ready skills of mining-ship mechanic weren't so good a fit with the huge ships of the FCS Fleet.  For that matter, neither was he.

     When he heard a minor ship-Captain named Filiaggi was setting up a "military contractor" to meet USSF/NATO's aggression with force, he made contact as soon as he could get through, joining a large number of mostly young, mostly displaced Edgers who favored fight over flight.  When the shadowy leadership of what was still more conspiracy than government put out a Notice For Bids to run "reconnaissance and intelligence" missions in Earth-held systems including the Solar System itself, Filiaggi's organization won the bulk of the contracts — and put him to work.

     And now here he was, babysitting an improvised "Pulse Cannon" all of Mark II — or possibly this one was a Mk. III, the changes were slight — shooting and being shot at, all because his father (and several hundred others) hadn't wanted to set up an atom-bomb missile base on Earth's Moon.  He thought the irony of fighting even a defensive war for peaceniks was a little muted when you were wearing a pressure suit, taking fire in an already-hostile environment, living on short rations and at the present moment trying to shake sweat from your eyes; all he wanted, personally, was for the shooting to stop.

     It didn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

"...A Worm Unknown To Science..."

 [Typed MS, by the look of it a carbon copy and made on a very old machine, discovered in a trunk marked "J. Philli{illegible}" filled with books (mostly by A. Conan Doyle) and old papers purchased in a second-hand shop in Star City on Linden/Lyndon.  I have no idea what to make of it. --RX]

     It's been twenty years and I am light-years away, or so they tell me.  Have been for twenty years and my conscience pangs me yet.

     I don't feel at all guilty about the way I left -- "I'll just nip back in and get my bumbershoot," indeed!  Nor can I see how Mr. Isadora P———, well-known reporter  and duellist of some note could have come to any more humane an end. 

     I regret the finality of it and would that it had not been at my hand, though.  It was in the spring of 18--, in the very last decade of the dear, lost 19th Century, and I had been acting as the Aeroship Company's British factor or agent for the better part a decade, collecting and forwarding all manner of biological specimens, compressed foodstuffs, arcane machinery and whatnot -- not the least of which were popular magazines and even the London papers.  Mr. P——— must have been approached at about the same time as had I, but in his case, the journalist's natural inquisitiveness and a certain degree of what I can only conclude was an innate duplicity, some dark stain of the spirit, led him to learn far more than he should have known -- and to eventually threaten to publish unless paid.

     Had his motive been a pure concern for the truth, I might have demurred the assignment; instead, he had more than suggested that his report could be "lost" were he in receipt of a truly staggering financial consideration.

     The Aeroship Company had lately suffered considerable losses in connexion with their base of operations in California, the so-called Sonora Aero Club; the cause was never entirely clear to me, some sort of fire or explosion, but the extent of the loss was palpably real.  They simply could not have met the cost and telling the blackmailer "publish and bedamned" was completely out of the question.  Even then, the gathering fires of war had convinced the engineer Peter Mennis and Aeroship Company President August Schoetler that their contrivances and vehicles must be kept an absolute secret.     

     Murder was out of the question.  Only one course remained.

     The so-called "darter slug" is unknown to Earth's science, and for good reason.  Neither slug nor insect, it haunts the shallows and muddy banks of watercourses on a distant world, a peaceful world the Aeroship Company has, at great effort and expense, made habitable by Mankind.  Though small, it is a dangerous beast; like the honey bee, it has but a single sting -- but that sting brings immediate, incurable madness on whoever receives it.

   I did it--  I contacted Isadora P——— and gave him the matchbox, promising it contained irrefutable proof of his literally incredible tales of persons commuting to and from a distant star.  I had scarcely left his flat when I heard the terrible groan of his last sane moment.  I could not nerve myself to return and retrieve the darter slug

     Within the week, I had slipped away from my remaining friends in London, through a simple trick and on the slimmest of excuses.  An umbrella?  An escape!  In disguise, I boarded the cutter A—— and when it "vanished" in a cloudbank, I was one of her passengers.  Of course it was a ruse; Aero Dora III lifted the ship whole, we transferred to the pressure hull as she rose and carried the cutter to our destination, where it now sails an unimaginably distant sea.

     I have not returned to Earth since.  The flights have become less and less frequent.  The hazards are too great, especially since Dellschau -- poor, mad Dellschau, first victim of the same species of worm that stung Isadora! -- escaped from a supply trip to Texas.  (Thanks to a merciful providence, he was unable to let the cargo of cattle loose, though there is evidence he tried.)  I may never return in this life, but this letter shall, and I can go on with a clear conscience. 

     And I hope, Mr. W—— and especially Mr. H——, that you will not think too ill of me for having left you three such puzzles.   

Wait, What? Working On A Starship

     The call was for Big Tom; the starship Lupine was well out of Jump, inbound to Farside City, snug on the unEarthly side of the Moon, and at the start of first shift, the ship had just been caught up to by the first Mad Russian ("Express Delivery Service," a/k/a "BisPosEtKom," or what FedEx would look like if they went faster than light and were run by ex-Soviet Space Force courier and fighter pilots -- no, it's both better and worse than you think).

     "Engineering, Roberta X speaking...."

      "Is Big Tom working today?"

     "Yeah, he's right here" I moved the handset away from my mouth, "Tom, it's for you--"

     The voice in my ear protested, "I don't need to talk to him, just tell him his '42' is at the mailroom."  And he hung up.

     I repeated the message to Tom and asked, "What's a '42'?"

     He grinned.  "It's a secret."

     C. Jay was at the desk next to me, deep in e-mail from some Earthside manufacturer who hadn't bothered to ansible out any service bulletins; he had a lot of catching up to do. "Somebody sent Tom The Answer to Everything."

     In the corner at the Calibration bench, old-timer Gale Grinnell looked up in annoyance from where he had some kind of data transcoder laid out in pieces and was poking through it with a 'scope.  He'd served aboard Lupine when she was a warship and and thanks to various time-dilation effects ended up so far out of sync that he has never gone back home (by the calendar, he's well over 70; by his calendar, he's barely past 50) and he figures everyone else in Engineering is in a conspiracy to waste his time.  He gave me a dark look and muttered between clenched teeth, "Probably a damn' stripper.  Foolishness."

     The boys rose to the bait.  C. Jay, "Ooh, a stripper.  '42' could be gooood.  Or it could be bad."

     Big Tom: "Yeah.  It's probably her shoe size!"

     Gale just grunted and went back to his scope-probing, while I endeavored not to blush.

     Undaunted, C. Jay speculated onward, "Shoe size?  42?  Oh, man, a clown stripper!"

     Tom and I both expressed revulsion, but not for long.  From The Chief's tiny office opening off the back of the Engineering Shop there came a determined and somewhat censorious throat-clearing.  "Tom.  That forty-two-inch monitor is for the EVA monitor wall in the Environment & Physical Plant console room.  They're in a rush to get it before the outside work really starts."  He'd been moving as he talked and was at the hatch to his office by the last word, fixing all of us with a gimlet eye.  "Seems they got too involved skylarking and one of the techs put an elbow through the old one.  A-hem."

     Tom headed out.  The rest of us got back to work.

*  *  *

     Via the big dishes at Farside City, we're close enough to dear old Earth's original Internet (with seven herbs and spices) that a web search is possible if you don't mind  the answer taking a bit over a day to come in.  "Clown stripper" sounded like a real bad idea, which could only mean one thing: someone was already doing it.  Ew.  Sure enough, there's a video hit: Ew.  (Link is sans nudity but probably NSFW.)

Ed

    Aboard the USSF William Mitchell, inbound to Trinity's Star, autumn of 1981 back home, around about oh-dark-fifteen.

Ed
     Silver-haired and gone just a bit fleshy, he sports a cookie-duster mustache that would make a WW II British fighter ace envious.   He walks with the least hint of a limp but somehow still projects an impression of keen-eyed health, often with a ghost of a smile lurking in the corners of his eyes.

   He isn't smiling right now.  He looks—  He looks for all the world like a college professor about to administer a test and hoping his charges have learned all he's tried to teach them: a kind of annoyed-hopeful foreboding.

     There's a cane tucked under his left arm and a fat file folder in his left hand.  He's walking down a narrow corridor, metal walls, metal-grating floor, low metal overhead nearly covered in piping and conduit.  He comes to a doorway — a hatch? — spins the wheel at the center and steps through silently.  Inside, lights are dim red.  Bunks line the walls, four high, two rows deep with another half-row row in the back center.  A small table and a half-dozen latched-down chairs take up the open space left.  It smells like sleep and the sound of gentle breathing and quiet snores provides a counterpoint to the muted hum and rush of the ventilation system.  Every bunk visible is occupied.

     He spares himself time for a quick, fierce grin and turns to the bunks at his right, right hand taking the cane from under his other arm, and raps vigorously on the upright supporting the nearest corner, producing a shattering clang-clang-clang!  "Wake up, geeks!  Waaaaake uuuup!"

     The result is immediate: a few startled grunts and a general scramble to get out from under covers and vertical, side-by side in front of their bunks as rapidly as possible.

      He flips on the white light, sudden and bright and while his hapless charges may be squinting, not a word or sound of complaint is heard.

     "Well!  Are we all bright-eyed and ready for our cornflakes, or what?"

     The "geek" nearest him — one of the four occupants of the bunk he used as an impromptu bell — blinks though thick lenses and says, hesitantly, "Um, 'Or what?' Cornflakes don't usually come with paperwork."

     "Well-spotted!  'Or what' it is.  Billy Mitchell will be emerging into real space in two hours; Intel says there will be Edgers on the far side, probably military, and we drew the short straw.  Get up, get fed and be in the tank room in under a half-hour; we'll ride it out in the cockpits and drop our drones on emergence."

     The room is silent for a beat and then from the back of the room a voice: "Whoa.  Whoooooa..."

      The young man who spoke earlier pushes his "birth control" glasses up.  "Sir?  We've never done this—  For real.  I mean, when there was gonna be anyone—"

     "That's right, you haven't.  You've run simulations.  You've ridden out Jumps hot into friendly space, into empty space.  You're not going to get any more ready for 'for real' than you are right now.  Tank room.  25 minutes."  And he leaves, cane, mustache, file folder and all, closing the hatch behind him, spinning the wheel and— Stopping.  Listening.

     And he hears a cheer.  Maybe a little ragged, but a cheer.  Ed nods and heads back down the passageway, heading for the "tank room," where eleven teleoperation cockpits await ten two-man teams and one officer: him.

     Ed's done this before, but never in command of a green crew.   He did it time after time, when you went out there and did it in person, in realtime, and he wishes he still could.  This is next best.  His wife claims it's "better." Well, maybe.  His thoughts return to his crew of "remote pilots," the end result of a harsh selection process, and he smiles to himself again, a small and somehow wolfish smile.  Green, yeah, but he's run them through sims, he's pushed them through Jumps, he's pushed them to the edge and right on through, or as close as you can come when the price of failure is a "Game Over" and an after-action review of why.  They're ready.  They can do this.

     It's the job, and they're going to do it.

-30-

     In memorial, Maj. Edward J. Rasimus, USAF (ret.) 1942 - 2013  (Biographical link, automatic audio, NSFW!)

Remote Operators

     They're essential personnel on any large starship, drift or space station.  You'll find them anywhere asteroids are mined or cargoes are transferred in freefall or microgravity.  Half crane operator, half pilot, one-third computer games junkie and 100% space crew, they're usually referred to as "flying crane pilots" or "remote operators" and they're a weirdly assorted lot.

     When you see a skinny geek with bad digestion striding along with that "pilot" look in his eyes, or a smiling, tiny young woman in a powered wheelchair talking shop with a squirt-booster driver or a rigger, you've found yourself a remote op.  On a civilian starship like Lupine, you're sure not going to be able to ID them by their collar pin: they won't wear them.

     There is one, modified from the USSF "tin wings" badge, a cartoon robot astride an equally cartoony rocket, with a hand silhouette behind the whole thing, but about the only ones you can find are undersized replica version in the dusty back corners of souvenir shops ("Collect the whole set!") and pictures in a couple of textbooks.

     Of course there's a story behind it, going back to the later parts of the covert War between USSF/NATO and the Far Edge.  There's no shortage of various kinds of "pilot" on the Hidden Frontier, from the esoteric Jump Pilots or Star Pilots (more like playing 3-D billiards while solving calculus problems, having bet your life and that of all your shipmates on the outcome) to the more-usual kind of "piloting" at the controls of small short-range ships and squirt-boosters; even that is mostly flying a decision tree rather than the kinds of hands-on-the-controls, instruments and seat-of-pants "piloting" most planetbound people think of when they hear the word.  The  only kind of space-piloting that consistently comes close is operating very small tugs, flying forklifts not much more than a main reaction motor and a set of directional trimmers with about as much "cockpit" as a real forklift and an arrangement to couple it to whatever it's pushing.  The operator wears a pressure suit and it's dangerous work.

     So dangerous that about as soon as it became practical to stick a set of TV cameras in the thing and move the operator inside, everyone did.  It's still risky but an ill-considered move doesn't cost a trained operator's life.

     It worked so well that USSF cast about for other ways to move the highly-skilled away from danger, while remoting their skills to where they were needed.  A starship -- a warship -- entering an unknown solar system emerges from Gobau-Heim-Droscher space and drops "scouts" while still moving at a significant percentage of the speed of light; the starship decelerates while the scouts zoom on, radar and optics alert for any sign of danger, radioing back Doppler-shifted reports and, eventually, using their rudimentary Jump and reaction drives to slow and return to the mother ship.  It can take months and it's lousy duty, a tiny ship with a tiny crew, running right up to her own radar with the slight but ever-present chance of encountering something with insufficient warning to evade.  As the War wore on and the two forces found each other more often, the little scoutships were armed.  It didn't take much -- at such high velocities, intersecting the opposing vessel with a bag of trash would to terrible damage and a scattering of high-density cannon shells, even worse.

     Naturally USSF decided to teleopeate the scoutships.  Light-speed lag and all.  Even with the most sophiticated decision tree to ease the job, it took very specialized training to create plots who could fly a ship based on speed-of-light-lagged, time-compressed telemetry, but it seemed to work.

     At least it appeared to be working until two USSF long-range carriers (the Mitchell and the Doolittle), entering the same solar system from vastly different vectors at almost the same time and found the Federation of Concerned Spacemen-settled world Trinity, an agricultural world with a ship-building facility on one of its three undersized moons.  They dropped armed scouts, the FCS -- Mil/Space -- ship-building base scrambled their own armed "bells," and in the ensuing mess, one of Mitchell's scouts impacted Doolittle, with the loss of all hands; Mitchell herself limped out out of the system under attack, the carrier and her remaining remotely-operated scout spacecraft fighting a valiant but impossible battle right up 'til Jump, abandoning two unmanned scouts but managing to recover one.  The two left behind were captured by Mil/Space and one of them survived the war, still serving as a "gate guard" at the Mil/Space facility on T3 (there is very long story on the naming and renaming and re-renaming of Trinity's moons, deeply connected to the Troubles there, but this isn't the time to tell it).  Also lost in the exchange was one of Doolittle's manned flying cranes, which had been engaged in replacing the ship's belly radar dish when the scout hit.

     USSF tried to issue medals to the pilots who'd been remotely flying Mitchell's scouts.  They refused. Point blank.  To a man.  They were threatened with disciplinary action -- and still refused.  They were unanimous in maintaining that had the scouts been manned, Doolittle would not have been destroyed and the action might well have been victorious for Earth.

     Censured but unmedalled, too highly-trained to be drummed out, the scout-ship remote pilots took to not even wearing their "tin wings" (about what you'd expect -- astronaut wings with a robot at the center) and as the story of the disaster at Trinity spread through the USSF fleet, so did their peers.  After a few more and fortunately lesser accidents, USSF gave up on teleoperated scouts, but by then refusing to wear wings or accept decorations had become a tradition among the specialty.

     And to this day, on earth's side of the fuzzy "border" between the FCS Edgers and us, remote operators won't wear the pins that identify their trade.  You'll know 'em when you see them -- or not; but no matter if you do or you don't, they'll be there, in their funky little cockpit-carrels, not running into things.  It's a point of pride.

The Overnight Report

[This is way out of chronological sequence, as it comes after events on Frothup were...resolved.  I'll get back to that.]

     Might as well start with what I'm eating now: an omelet of genuinely impressive weight and density: filled with diced pork roast, carrots, chives, some leftover -- and sans dressing -- broccoli coleslaw mix and a little random hot pickle, topped with a slice of Swiss cheese.  A truly fridge-clearing garbage omelet and I don't care what your option of it is.  It's ambrosia!

     And I earned it.

     Some months ago, when the boys from the Power Room pointed out to Dr. Schmid, Lupine's 2/O and my boss's boss some irregularities in the assignment, designation and projected end-of-life of the UPSs (and one in particular) serving the Engineering control-type areas (Drive Control, RF/Reaction, the large electronics-rack compartment betwixt 'em and trailing off into Jump Control, that worthy nodded sagely and allowed as how we'd have to set a time to put it right after having made proper arrangements to, and I quote, "Minimize the impact."

     The Chief decided that the "impact-minimizing" part of the three-ring foofraw should fall to -- or perhaps on -- Gale Grinnell (he's a tough old dude, don't be fooled by the gender-neutral name) and little ol' me.  My first thought was along the lines of "Ejectejecteject!" but from out here where the starlight is runnin' thin it's still an awfully long trip home even if I were to steal a bicycle, so instead I tried to look sanguine, sagacious and mildly curious while asking if we were going to be doing this in Jump?

     The Chief asked if I was taking up making faces as a hobby and allowed as how that would be a darned poor notion; the work scheduled for the run-in to approximately-neutral Smitty's World, next stop in our little show-the-flag tour and a little over six weeks away.  Not a bad choice -- lacking the usual sort of star, Smitty's is a wandering planet, a frozen ball of (it says here) carbonaceous chondrite, thorium ores (!) assorted frozen gases accreted from Ghu knows where, and a whole lot of ice-type ice: it's hard to see, despite radio beacons, honkin' overpowered transponders and assorted other tricks you'd like to know about, which means starships drop out of 'Drive early and sort of feel their way in, leaving plenty of extra time.

     Time for things like, oh, I dunno, shoving a huge lot of load from uninterruptable power supplies  U4A and U3A onto U1C and "unprotected power."  Because aw, hell, what's all that junk do besides help us avoid stuff we might run into?  Plus U1C is nearly at capacity and U2FGP,* we do not even consider adding more load to.

     So, plenty of time for prep, plenty of time for the job, right?

     Riiiiight.  Also, we're sellin' vacuum, two jars for $20, you want to buy in?  I kept getting other "#1 priority!" projects, along with the usual parade of broken small things; Tech Grinnell (an old USSF hand, one of the men adrift in time from too much FTL service during the War) was in the same fix.  Tick-tock, and suddenly there was a week left.  I made a list, checked it twice, and handed it off to Gale, who added a half-dozen things and handed it right back.  Along about then, Doc Schmid got in the act with another half-dozen items to add to the must-be-repowered list....

     From there , it's a skip, a hop and a lot of cadging parts to me sitting at a bench, frantically wiring up receptacle strips to power cords for temporary use, making 1.5X as many of each type as I think we're gonna need, while the erstwhile Grinnel, G. and Conan the Objectivist scrounge extension cords.

     Comes the day -- actually, an "overnight" watch, which means Conan (t. O.) gets swept up in fun, that being his normal shift, more or less -- and there we are, having already moved everything we could square with our consciences over to plain, un-backed-up power, checklists in hand, temporary power strips and quad boxes tie-wrapped and Velcro'ed in position, finishing up the last of the must-dos when a moon-faced kid from the Power Room shows up carrying two radios.

     "Kid," I say, and Joe is young; but he looks younger and talks like the huntin', fishin' country boy he was and still is, and never you mind about the EE (power) degree, or the reactor-engineering certification.  He's the 2200-to-0600 el Supremo down where the fusion roars and the MHD units run ripplin' to the stern, and he's here to put us in the loop, with a hearty, "Heya, tube-rats.  Bobbi."

     "That's us," I told him, like he didn't know.  "Are your guys ready?"

     He snorted,  "We've been ready.  Question is, are you?"

     "Just about.  Gale?  Ask the big boss if we're good."

     Doc Schmid himself came around the corner, looking as harried as he ever does (not much) and took a radio.  "We're ready.  Pull the switch."

     ...Of course something went "BLOOoooooop."  Half the monitors went out and I heard Sol West in Drive Control splutter, "Hey!"

     The 2/O didn't even blink, just keyed the radio, "Back on.  Back on."  He let up on the switch, fixed Gale and me with a beady eye: "Find it."

     We did, stupid Dansteel data-buffer frame in rack 70 plugged into an unlikely circuit, and the go-command was given again.

     Noting important went out that time, though a half-dozen alarms started beeping from the things with two power supplies we'd left half on the now-unpowered UPS.  I made a quick walk-through of RF/Reaction and through the rows and rows of racks, ending up at Drive Control where Sol looked resolute but gave me a thumbs-up.  The row of second-priority monitors at the top of the bulkhead his the DQ console faces were all out, items being monitored elsewhere or low-pri enough we were letting the slide.  I made my way back through the racks -- meeting Gale, Conan (the Obj.) and the 2/O along the way, and through RF/Reax, across the passageway and into the Engineering Shop.  Nothing to do but wait!

     ...I was just about snoozing when the seldom-used PA clicked on.  "Need an engineer in DQ.  Engineer to DQ!"

     Strolled out the long way and met Conan and Gale at the hatch.  Beyond, Sol was fuming.  "I don't have no censoredly-deleted intercom!  Navs says they've been yellin' at me for five minutes and there's no way to even tell!"

     Couldn't be in his panel; that's just controls and some basic audio.  Off to Rack 15, Operations-commo, and looky!  A whole row of, oh, call them crosspoints, dark!  --But don't they have dual power supplies per row?

     No.  No they do not.  The have bright, shiny lights that I had assumed indicated dual supplies but really only let you know the two (count them, two) DC power rails are live -- and it takes both of them to tango. (I know that now.)  Ah, but sometime long ago, we'd been careful!  We'd moved the critical intercom stations to one row, and put it on -- guess, oh, just guess! -- the UPS.  The the UPS, the one that is presently off.  Easy enough to correct and so I did.

     There were a few more brushfires and then Sol found me to announce he wasn't getting any data from the 'Drive finals, idling just enough to modulate Lupine's effective mass, and the other data he was seeing indicated a problem.

     A real problem: "Are you feelin' kinda light, Bobbi?"

     Maybe I was, at that.  I sat down at the RF/Reax data terminal and started digging and eventually figured out a serial-to-ip tunnel interface wasn't talkin', a Harlington-Straker ESD1400 (if you're taking notes).  The more I messed with it, the worse it got; and I was really feeling light.  I went back to the Shop and grabbed a laptop, called up the manual, headed back to the terminal  and dug in; about then the new, improved UPS configuration came online but I hardly noticed.  I did notice when Doc Schmid slipped in behind me and leaned against a rack; when I looked back, he asked me how it was going.

     "Not well, sir.  Not well.  It's got data coming in -- good data -- but it's not pushing packets out."

     "So put in the spare."

     Awkward: "D- Sir, that is the spare.  The spare."  He just nodded.  I'll hear about that later, probably after The Chief has.  Oh, my preemptively burning ears!

     I finally thought to bring up the "Notes" tab.  One line popped up on the page I was at: DO NOT REBOOT WITH SERIAL INPUTS ACTIVE.  IT'S NOT SMART ENOUGH TO RESTART WITH LIVE DATA."

     Could it be that simple?  Really?

     I tried.  It was. You could feel the effective thrust pick up as the 'Drive finals resynchronized.

     ...After that, a couple of  relatively-easy hours returning power plugs to the (new) normal condition, restowing and cleaning-up, and I was free.

     And ravenously hungry.

     The nice thing about being in Engineering is that your card key gets you just about anywhere it's safe to go unescorted (and many places that aren't).  The kitchens, for instance.  The kitchens where the chefs and lower food-service ranks were using up odds and ends to feed -- and amuse -- themselves.

     Which takes me right back to the great big garbage omelet where started this tale of daring-do.  It's down now, plate licked clean, coffee cup empty.  I'm turning the dishes over to the dishwasher, hopping on a slidewalk and heading home, where I will sleep like a hibernating log -- sleep and with any luck, not dream of UPSes
___________________________________________________
* It doesn't really have ancillary letters but  someone who didn't want it to feel left out very carefully painted "FGP" right after "U2" on the hatch not all that long after deciding to make her career on Lupine.  Er, that is--

"Mo" (Frothup -- Vignette)

I stumbled off the bus in the twilight and realized I'd misread the destination: I was across the park from Tweed,  back at the commune/university Finley Micheals had called "R&D."  What the heck; it was as good a place to start looking for Finley and Doc Daugherty as any.

     They'd added a sign on the other side of the main gate from the "Builder's, Crafters and Maker's RULES" poster I'd seen on my last visit (anarchists with rules!  Sheesh, Edgers.).  It looked like a list of sponsors, elegantly lettered and not yet graffitti'ed.  Tweed was the third company listed.  It figured. The large open area under the vast roof was mostly empty -- way over at one side, a group was laughing around a fire and nearby, a larger bunch was eating at a long table.  The walled section on the far side was all lit up, though, so I headed that way.

     The open, office-like entry only had a few people in it, engrossed in work at their desks.  A murmur of voices was coming from down the hallway at the left, so I headed down it.  Classroom after classroom, transoms opened and classes (or something similar) obviously going on from the sound of it.  The only open door was a couple of rooms in, with a sign in the hall next to it:
    
Mo On Programming
TONIGHT
Last Session!  Last Chance!
     Looking in obliquely, I could see the instructor -- Mo? -- from the back, casually seated at a desk facing the rest of the room, speaking animatedly to a rapt audience that had pretty much filled the available seating.  From the looks of the displays and graphics along the visible walls, the topic was robotics and as I came closer, I was wondering if someone in that room had programmed the smart-alec luggage carrier at the Port that'd nearly run me down the day I'd landed.

     When I came up even with the door, I could see more of him.   His voice carried clearly into the hall:  "Out there in the world, I'm in competition with you.  We're going to be after the same job or the same berth and if I'm between gigs, I'm not going to pass up anything that turns up!"

     It got a laugh and no few thoughtful nods.  The lecturer was nearly slouched in his chair, relaxed, comfortable. A slightly stocky man, dressed in a nice suit entirely in hues of olive-green except for a gray stripe in his tie, jacket and overcoat draped over the back of his chair.  He smiled as he spoke, a three-day vandyke beard in contrast to his bullet-shaven head.  Unusually for an Edger, he wore glasses.  He had the over-enunciated Edger accent, all right, and punctuated his words with short, confident gestures.

     He was expanding on the topic of jobs: "...I'd signed up to rewrite NavCorp's UI for the Mark Fours -- while I was still working for Port Authority here -- and then RUR came to me wanting help with their new line of utility machines.  It was a great deal, totally free hand with the software.  The catch was, their deadline was two months away.  And NavCorp needed the UI in six weeks.   I was hacking code at lunch, I was hacking code while people were on smoke breaks and something had to give: Port Authority and I parted company.  Smoke breaks they were okay with.  Software breaks, not so much."

     He talked about the business of free-lancing while I stood listening, mesmerized.  With that level of interest and activity, small wonder the Edgers had such an edge in automation!  I looked down the hall: empty, just a row of closed doors.  I was trying to remember where the boffin's office was that Mike had taken me for a review of 'Drive theory as Edgers knew it (or as much as they were willing to share).  Down a hall that opened off this one or should I go back to the common room and start over?  Start over.  As I turned to head back, another sentence drifted out: "Check out a new ship online, ask around.  Run the search engines; look up the captain and the owners  If they're assclowns online or on planet, they're probably worse assclowns underway."

     Sounded like good advice to me.
*  *  *
     I eventually managed to locate Doc but it took some time; he'd carved out a space way, way back in the dug-out warren of work/living areas the anarchic bandobast (if that's not an oxymoron) had established where a hillside intruded on the roofed-over area.  On our way out -- him talking a mile a minute -- we passed by a group chatting and dining around a fire. I recognized Mo and several of attendees from his talk.  Doc slowed down to greet a friend and was caught up in the edges of  the conversation.  I wanted to hear what the programmer had to say -- sure, my skills are barely good enough to make a BASIC Stamp do simple jobs, but there's always something to be learned.  He leaned forward, towards an especially fish-out-of-water-looking youngster and laughed, remarking, "Anyone can come together around food!"
 
     Amen to that, I thought.  Doc was still nattering.  I noticed a sparkle of light from a tiny cross on Mo's lapel and someone else did too.  You don't see that much on the Edger worlds.  They're religious enough but it's uncommon for Edgers to be very open about personal religious faith or to proselytize, especially after what happened on Trinity (and, as I learned later, the terrible problems aboard Sirius Business that preceded it) and I missed what he was asked but his answer struck me as particularly graceful: "Faith has meaning. You know about the non-profit I'm running?  It's almost a fulltime job!  Sure, I work with hard numbers and harder reality; faith is what's behind the numbers -- and the padding around them, too."

     Poetry, sure, but the kind of poetry that you need in the lonely dark.  --And the kind of poetry that holds a society together.