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.
14 February 2013
06 January 2013
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--
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--
17 October 2012
"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.
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:
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.
13 October 2012
The Veteran
[This is another one from the Far Edge and not my narrative voice but that of a kind of a website journalist working on Smitty's World, covering FTL trade news and related topics -- RX]
You've seen the type. A little out of sync, too quiet or too loud; unless he's sitting with a bunch of gray heads, he doesn't get the jokes. He doesn't go outdoors when the sun's up and it's no bet that he's wearing a counter-pressure suit right now and the helmet's within arm's reach. He can't sleep without the comforting hum and clank of machinery and if the air stops blowing, he wakes in the silence, heart pounding.
Where is he? It doesn't really matter, not to to him. Wherever he goes, it isn't home. It never will be. Say he's on Smitty's world; that works. There's no real "outdoors" on the sunless wanderer Captain Johann Cameron Harper Smith claimed for his own, no more than there is on a starship; it's a silent hell of frozen gases, frozen liquids, frozen rocks, frozen metals, kerogen frozen so hard they spend a year slowly warming the excavated rubble before feeding it into the hungry maws of the city's ever-running refineries.
There are bars and pubs and greasy spoons, gambling hells, flophouses and godowns; there are out-of-the-way corners not too close to the recycling bins and the City Patrol doesn't check that close. There's plenty of work for a savvy hand, few questions asked; and plenty to drink when the day is done, drink until it all goes blurry dark. There aren't nearly enough pressure doors, part of The Smith's crazy Defense Initiative that Official Citizens ignore questions about, changing the subject with studied, careful blandness when asked. A man with a temporary "wolf ticket," learning the secondary network of pressurized tunnels by being limited to it as the first step toward full Citizenship, why, he'll do all right even without regular work, if he keeps his wits. He'll even wonder at the wag who kept stenciling "sto pervyy kilometr" on the inside of the 2-level airlocks and laugh, once, after he's looked it up. Sometime it's a little chilly; sometimes it's too warm. But the air always keeps moving and there's a constant, tiny, comforting rumble and hum wherever you go. He'd tell you it's fine.
A man like that, if he glances in the spotted, wavy mirror behind the bar, what does he see? Not the years he skipped — maybe in the eyes, a little. The haphazard two-day's growth of a sloppy shave with a tiny windup razor doesn't conceal the grim line of his mouth, or the lines around it, etched in by the shipmates and friends he lost, pushing C in a hastily-built vehicle ducking in and out of reality, men and women who went mad from too long, too close in the glittering gray space of a Goubau-Droscher-Heim 'Drive field, who died slowly behind plastic when the reactor overheated or quickly when their helmet seal failed, or who just went out an airlock, wordless, quietly, just gone one shift-start, leaving a problem for the navigators and stardrive techs. He sees his posture, balanced, careful, anchored, lessons beat into bones and muscles from lousy Jumps, drifted calibrations, "Bad as an Earthbag," they'd laugh, until there was no humor in it and you'd listen for the strain and screech and pop that meant you'd be latching the helmet on, pulling gloves in place, dreading the bloat and dire farts when the pressure dropped.
Or does he care to see that much? Whatever, he won't look long. He knows what he'll see. Too many years, too many and not enough, skimming through the old "home" system (all he ever saw were pictures and those looked fake, who believed in penguins? Or elephants?) or some USSF/NATO-dominated planetary system ("All four!" his crewmates had jeered, and him along with them, but even one world is so big, so terribly big), listening for any comms, any broadcasting, photo-analyzing optics, passive RADAR quivering, look and listen and guess, then hop up superluminal, encrypt and infodump, take orders, resupply, repair, upgrade, reposition and do it again. And again, picking up speed, correcting radio tunings for Doppler, and every time you do it, two months have lept by in a fortnight, and then six months, a year, five, a decade... The War started in '50 or '51; his war began in '64, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears 21, grown up during the first long Jump to Peace-and-Prosperity and then onwards when Earth's ships showed up. Landed Trinity where his parents farmed, or tried to, signed up with the the old Jupiter Gang and off before the trouble there really started. '49, 50, or '62, it all dwindled to an end in '89 when he was 30, hair going gray, skin blotchy from low-pressure exposure, soul worn down by too long hemmed in, too many dead. They mustered him out not on Smitty World, oh no, on the world where his parents had settled, survived the troubles, prospered and grown old, dead and gone a decade ago. A hero's greeting for him and a random shipload: grizzled star-sailors, aggressively fit Mil/Space types, familiar strangers gathered across forty years of conflict. His friends, relatives, old playmates, either they went out and served and mostly died, or they were worse, old, old with lives lived, families, grandchildren.... He didn't know them. He didn't know anybody, not even the people he used to know.
The open sky and lovely landscaped lawns — the troubles were long past, clearing and replanting a shared faith and the region was "eighty-nine percent Earth life," they assured him, as if that meant something — made him feel like a bug on a plate; the farms were even worse and the cities, well, in both of them he just felt small and horribly exposed. It all seemed fake and one fake night — gawd, the nights, a sky full of stars and where's his air helmet? — one fake night he followed one fake drink with another and another and another again in a fake bar where fake people talked into fake phones as brightly-colored and plain-shaped as candy bars, just like their fake personalities, and woke up in a too-bright cell with a very real itemized bill of damages and at least six months of steady work to pay it all away.
He did it; he took the recommended tranks and the newer drugs that made everything dull, bearable gray, while everyone was so nice, so understanding. He begged to work nights, he found a basement apartment and painted the windows over and when he had made restitution, he went down to the port and took the first starship that would let him work passage. Some Bell or Cloche or Bowler or whatever they called them, fast, agile mid-size free-traders developed during the War. He didn't ask where it was headed. What difference would it make?
Falling back up into the sky was like going home; the old tension settled over him like a blanket on the run out to flat space. The vertigo, the nightmare feeling of a too-close, too-strong 'Drive field — damn, the little ships ran it close, even compared to the brilliant, hasty improvisations of the surveillance fleet — was like an old friend returning, or at least a comfortably familiar nemesis.
Even the "interlaced watch" was familiar — eight on, four off, four on, eight off and overlapped by the "night shift" — right down to alternating fours, semi-skilled helper one day and training the next. They didn't need a Responder, as his main job on the Wartime zap-ships had come to be known, "Emergency Responder," a job he'd said was like tacking jelly to a bulkhead, do it wrong and everyone got splattered; on a little ship, everyone was a bit of a Responder, as much as was ever needed or so they said. He ran through every job he was remotely qualified for, as far up as Navs Third, his old secondary skill. He'd have got higher, if he'd had less knack for doing the right thing in emergencies, maybe; he'd always loved the order and predictability of the math. He'd seen the technology change from the clanking, power-sucking "interpolator" sorting stacks of punch-cards with a fancy slide rule for fine figuring, having transitioned through spooling — spilling! — tape drives and overheating, easily-zapped germanium gates right up though safety-tripled, radiation-hardened microprocessors. His reaction to the improvements a few years of peace and officially-open trade had already made was the same mixture of frustration and delight he'd felt doing upgrades in the War years — minus the crawling fear during installation and training. It was like coming home.
And yet it wasn't. Like most free-traders, the crew were long-established, all family or as good as. Even when his Responder skills were needed, it wasn't a crewman gone dangerous from too long in a fragile tin can, speeding though the horrible void. No, it was the same old fire from the same old "borrowed" Russian design of an oxygen generator, the same old half-a-kludge that had taken out Marty Willson, seven years back or 15, depending how you counted. Once you'd been through the first one, it was nothing but routine and he was mostly puzzled when the free-trader's crew made much of his actions. He still didn't feel entirely comfortable, but a guarded friendliness had replaced guarded neutrality. Still, he spent some years aboard, teeth clenched for quiet when the nightmares got too strong, or when they struck on-shift, walking down a hallway too much like the place where a high-pressure steam pipe popped a bad weld and broiled Carrie Karlson before she really knew, and suddenly he was hearing them again, the sounds she'd made from what used to be her face before falling over like a dropped side of beef. Or the time in the lights flickered on a difficult transition and he was suddenly back on the heart-stopping supply and crew-exchange run to Cockroach Base on Cruithne when one of the really big USSF starships had popped out of Jump space far too close to the Earth-Moon system for an Earth vessel and screamed inbound decelerating at a g and a half, totally not on the intel predictive. They'd killed power to everything — ev-ry-thing — and coasted, hoping to pass as an overlooked blob of rock, a little too hot but maybe, maybe— It had worked. It shouldn't have, but it did. He felt it all again, the heart-pounding fear, and then he was back at his console on the free-trader, soaked with sweat, staring furiously at nothing.
He could have held on -- he was holding on -- but it ended when the Enviro super got married; there really was no job no room for her new husband despite what the Captain — her father — claimed and the long Jump in had been especially hard; he'd started missing time more and more, coming back to himself walking down a hallway, loading up a ration tray, staring at a Navs screen. When the ship emerged from Jump, the hum and mutter at the back of his mind kept on, as it never had before. They were inbound to Smitty's World, fiercely independent, favorably situated, a sunless wanderer found by chance and claimed by a First Fleet ship captain. Plenty of work for the willing, especially if the willing weren't too particular. Safely berthed, he gathered up his duffel and signed off the ship, putting down his name in front of a Purser (not coincidentally the bride's mother) who struggled to not look too grateful.
That kind of man, on a busy place like Smitty's World, can always find work fixing and hauling, packing small items, digging through bad wiring or balky code. He may not eat well or sleep on silk sheets, but he never has to miss a meal, at least not until the noise and nightmares get too damn loud. Even then, once a Responder, always a Responder: half fireman, half EMT, half policeman and "not quite spacecraft engineer," as the saying went; when alarms rang, he was there, doing the right thing.
True, there was no work for a Starship Astrogator, especially one with no more certs than scribbled letters from ship captains and Nav Ones. But there was plenty of work for a man willing to work hard, if he had a feel for technology. Best of all, the settlement was unapologetically what it was, domed over beneath airless, starry skies and dug into the crumbly compressed dust and hard rock, artificially lit, heated and ventilated, as sane and sensible as any starship, or just about.
He'd even tried applying to join The Smith's City Patrol, "Proctors," police and fire and crisis mediators all rolled into one; and been turned flat down. "Full Citizens only," they said. By then it was dawning on him that the complex, changing and by The Smith's executive fiat unmapped inhabitation had layers and lives that visitors and transients never saw, and past that, places no non-Citizen resident would never reach, and beyond that to habs and corridors and courtyard for only the fully-invested among even them.
But by then his hands were increasingly uncooperative and the nightmares sometimes too loud to drown in alcohol; and the work started to get simpler and lower-paying. He coped. If words sometimes fled, why, he spoke even less than before; and if drink alone failed to bring unbroken sleep, the exhaustion of hard physical labor helped. He even found a Medico, downy-cheeked and idealistic, who spoke knowingly of 'Drive Field Aggravated Combat Stress; it was then he realized, again, that no one who hasn't been there had even the least clue, or wanted to hear that his war — most crew's war — was boredom and bad math, not hand-to-hand in the uncaring vacuum or even missiles at extreme range. He made polite noises, paid his bill and left. He adjusted. He coped. Whatever it took.
And he still was who he was, who he'd been, who the War had made him into, catching patterns, catching the scent of trouble and dealing with it, no matter how unsteadily. He had a reputation and no bad one It came to a head one of his more-lucid days, when a "general labor specialist" spoiling for a fight came into the bar where he was eating a large bowl of thick stew, supper in trade for a half-day's dishwashing.
He'd gotten pretty shaky by then, swearing at the cooperativeness of his own hands, careful of his gait, each step sometimes a study; but it came and went and damned if he'd go talk again to another nosy medico, they way they got side-tracked into his service time, snootily disapproving or hero-worshipping, irritating either way. So he'd been struggling that day; when the much-larger stranger slammed through the door (and they're nearly all doors on Smitty's; world except for the locks between levels) and lit into a little dockhand drinking at the bar and casually straight-armed a bartender who tried to intervene, everything snapped into focus. He was up before anyone else and on the aggressor, hand going to a "C-clamp" compliance hold on the other's head. It went slow-motion as guy was turning away from the intended victim with a suddenly-visible knife. He did as he'd been trained and as he'd practiced: grabbed the knife-hand wrist and pulled in the direction it was going, while moving out of the way. The aggressor lost balance and he more-or-less rode him down to the deck, hitting with as much force as he could muster. It worked. —And then things sped up again and he was sitting on an unconscious fighter on the floor of a bar, bruised and splashed with stew. The proctors made a big fuss when they showed up. Seems the knifeman had been slashing his way though all his co-workers and the man at the bar has been the eleventh on his list. Word made it all the way up to The Smith himself, and word came back down that nothing was too good for such a hero.
He took full Second Level Citizenship when offered; but he never went back to that bar and rarely ventured into the visitor-and-transient-accessible warrens and domes afterward, either. He faded back into the shadows and small businesses and sometimes shadowy work, the small unsanctioned, much-wanted things that do little harm. As his condition became worse and worse, he found obscure corners, places out of the way, rarely-used accesses, and kept on.
A man like that, as his own body began to betray him, when things stopped making sense, would he search out help as he once helped? Would his pride let him continue, if he sensed the least pity or condescension? In the end, it wouldn't matter; there are some battles a man can't win, some emergencies too big to control.
I'm not sure how he'd've viewed any of this story, his story, or how you see it, either; but if you were stringing for a free-trader website on Smitty's world, keeping track of the more-colorful characters, buying drinks and listening to stories, and you had to wrap up a life lived without citing rumor, speculation or late-night tales that sound too tall when the lights are full on, you'd write it up like this:
Grey, Stephan, b. ~1950, Hoplite base, Luna; d. Thursday last, 5 October, 2012 (Earth, GMT) Newport, Smithtown; personal age, ~35. Raised in flight and on Trinity, Grey served aboard FCS "Longreach" surveillance/transport ships during the late conflict with Earth, retiring in 1989 as Astrogator 3rd/Prime Responder of LazyTongs. He is best known here as the man who stopped the 35-South Slasher five years ago. He was found dead in a utility corridor in the early hours of 6 October (GMT). Autopsy revealed advanced brain cancer, probably due to prolonged exposure to cosmic rays and high levels of 'Drive radiation.
Then you'd look at the screen and swear in frustration at everything you couldn't put in.
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(In memory of my friend, occasional nemesis and long-ago boss Steve C., who lost the battle last month; and of my Dad, betrayed by his own brain and gamely carrying on, so well we barely noticed as he started fading away; and to every soldier who returned home only to discover home was no longer there.)
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(In unfortunate synchronicity, horror/noir/thriller writer Tom Piccirilli is recovering from emergency surgery for brain cancer right now. More info and links to IndieGogo fundraiser; here's a publisher selling his works and passing along 100% of the profit to Tom.)
You've seen the type. A little out of sync, too quiet or too loud; unless he's sitting with a bunch of gray heads, he doesn't get the jokes. He doesn't go outdoors when the sun's up and it's no bet that he's wearing a counter-pressure suit right now and the helmet's within arm's reach. He can't sleep without the comforting hum and clank of machinery and if the air stops blowing, he wakes in the silence, heart pounding.
Where is he? It doesn't really matter, not to to him. Wherever he goes, it isn't home. It never will be. Say he's on Smitty's world; that works. There's no real "outdoors" on the sunless wanderer Captain Johann Cameron Harper Smith claimed for his own, no more than there is on a starship; it's a silent hell of frozen gases, frozen liquids, frozen rocks, frozen metals, kerogen frozen so hard they spend a year slowly warming the excavated rubble before feeding it into the hungry maws of the city's ever-running refineries.
There are bars and pubs and greasy spoons, gambling hells, flophouses and godowns; there are out-of-the-way corners not too close to the recycling bins and the City Patrol doesn't check that close. There's plenty of work for a savvy hand, few questions asked; and plenty to drink when the day is done, drink until it all goes blurry dark. There aren't nearly enough pressure doors, part of The Smith's crazy Defense Initiative that Official Citizens ignore questions about, changing the subject with studied, careful blandness when asked. A man with a temporary "wolf ticket," learning the secondary network of pressurized tunnels by being limited to it as the first step toward full Citizenship, why, he'll do all right even without regular work, if he keeps his wits. He'll even wonder at the wag who kept stenciling "sto pervyy kilometr" on the inside of the 2-level airlocks and laugh, once, after he's looked it up. Sometime it's a little chilly; sometimes it's too warm. But the air always keeps moving and there's a constant, tiny, comforting rumble and hum wherever you go. He'd tell you it's fine.
A man like that, if he glances in the spotted, wavy mirror behind the bar, what does he see? Not the years he skipped — maybe in the eyes, a little. The haphazard two-day's growth of a sloppy shave with a tiny windup razor doesn't conceal the grim line of his mouth, or the lines around it, etched in by the shipmates and friends he lost, pushing C in a hastily-built vehicle ducking in and out of reality, men and women who went mad from too long, too close in the glittering gray space of a Goubau-Droscher-Heim 'Drive field, who died slowly behind plastic when the reactor overheated or quickly when their helmet seal failed, or who just went out an airlock, wordless, quietly, just gone one shift-start, leaving a problem for the navigators and stardrive techs. He sees his posture, balanced, careful, anchored, lessons beat into bones and muscles from lousy Jumps, drifted calibrations, "Bad as an Earthbag," they'd laugh, until there was no humor in it and you'd listen for the strain and screech and pop that meant you'd be latching the helmet on, pulling gloves in place, dreading the bloat and dire farts when the pressure dropped.
Or does he care to see that much? Whatever, he won't look long. He knows what he'll see. Too many years, too many and not enough, skimming through the old "home" system (all he ever saw were pictures and those looked fake, who believed in penguins? Or elephants?) or some USSF/NATO-dominated planetary system ("All four!" his crewmates had jeered, and him along with them, but even one world is so big, so terribly big), listening for any comms, any broadcasting, photo-analyzing optics, passive RADAR quivering, look and listen and guess, then hop up superluminal, encrypt and infodump, take orders, resupply, repair, upgrade, reposition and do it again. And again, picking up speed, correcting radio tunings for Doppler, and every time you do it, two months have lept by in a fortnight, and then six months, a year, five, a decade... The War started in '50 or '51; his war began in '64, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears 21, grown up during the first long Jump to Peace-and-Prosperity and then onwards when Earth's ships showed up. Landed Trinity where his parents farmed, or tried to, signed up with the the old Jupiter Gang and off before the trouble there really started. '49, 50, or '62, it all dwindled to an end in '89 when he was 30, hair going gray, skin blotchy from low-pressure exposure, soul worn down by too long hemmed in, too many dead. They mustered him out not on Smitty World, oh no, on the world where his parents had settled, survived the troubles, prospered and grown old, dead and gone a decade ago. A hero's greeting for him and a random shipload: grizzled star-sailors, aggressively fit Mil/Space types, familiar strangers gathered across forty years of conflict. His friends, relatives, old playmates, either they went out and served and mostly died, or they were worse, old, old with lives lived, families, grandchildren.... He didn't know them. He didn't know anybody, not even the people he used to know.
The open sky and lovely landscaped lawns — the troubles were long past, clearing and replanting a shared faith and the region was "eighty-nine percent Earth life," they assured him, as if that meant something — made him feel like a bug on a plate; the farms were even worse and the cities, well, in both of them he just felt small and horribly exposed. It all seemed fake and one fake night — gawd, the nights, a sky full of stars and where's his air helmet? — one fake night he followed one fake drink with another and another and another again in a fake bar where fake people talked into fake phones as brightly-colored and plain-shaped as candy bars, just like their fake personalities, and woke up in a too-bright cell with a very real itemized bill of damages and at least six months of steady work to pay it all away.
He did it; he took the recommended tranks and the newer drugs that made everything dull, bearable gray, while everyone was so nice, so understanding. He begged to work nights, he found a basement apartment and painted the windows over and when he had made restitution, he went down to the port and took the first starship that would let him work passage. Some Bell or Cloche or Bowler or whatever they called them, fast, agile mid-size free-traders developed during the War. He didn't ask where it was headed. What difference would it make?
Falling back up into the sky was like going home; the old tension settled over him like a blanket on the run out to flat space. The vertigo, the nightmare feeling of a too-close, too-strong 'Drive field — damn, the little ships ran it close, even compared to the brilliant, hasty improvisations of the surveillance fleet — was like an old friend returning, or at least a comfortably familiar nemesis.
Even the "interlaced watch" was familiar — eight on, four off, four on, eight off and overlapped by the "night shift" — right down to alternating fours, semi-skilled helper one day and training the next. They didn't need a Responder, as his main job on the Wartime zap-ships had come to be known, "Emergency Responder," a job he'd said was like tacking jelly to a bulkhead, do it wrong and everyone got splattered; on a little ship, everyone was a bit of a Responder, as much as was ever needed or so they said. He ran through every job he was remotely qualified for, as far up as Navs Third, his old secondary skill. He'd have got higher, if he'd had less knack for doing the right thing in emergencies, maybe; he'd always loved the order and predictability of the math. He'd seen the technology change from the clanking, power-sucking "interpolator" sorting stacks of punch-cards with a fancy slide rule for fine figuring, having transitioned through spooling — spilling! — tape drives and overheating, easily-zapped germanium gates right up though safety-tripled, radiation-hardened microprocessors. His reaction to the improvements a few years of peace and officially-open trade had already made was the same mixture of frustration and delight he'd felt doing upgrades in the War years — minus the crawling fear during installation and training. It was like coming home.
And yet it wasn't. Like most free-traders, the crew were long-established, all family or as good as. Even when his Responder skills were needed, it wasn't a crewman gone dangerous from too long in a fragile tin can, speeding though the horrible void. No, it was the same old fire from the same old "borrowed" Russian design of an oxygen generator, the same old half-a-kludge that had taken out Marty Willson, seven years back or 15, depending how you counted. Once you'd been through the first one, it was nothing but routine and he was mostly puzzled when the free-trader's crew made much of his actions. He still didn't feel entirely comfortable, but a guarded friendliness had replaced guarded neutrality. Still, he spent some years aboard, teeth clenched for quiet when the nightmares got too strong, or when they struck on-shift, walking down a hallway too much like the place where a high-pressure steam pipe popped a bad weld and broiled Carrie Karlson before she really knew, and suddenly he was hearing them again, the sounds she'd made from what used to be her face before falling over like a dropped side of beef. Or the time in the lights flickered on a difficult transition and he was suddenly back on the heart-stopping supply and crew-exchange run to Cockroach Base on Cruithne when one of the really big USSF starships had popped out of Jump space far too close to the Earth-Moon system for an Earth vessel and screamed inbound decelerating at a g and a half, totally not on the intel predictive. They'd killed power to everything — ev-ry-thing — and coasted, hoping to pass as an overlooked blob of rock, a little too hot but maybe, maybe— It had worked. It shouldn't have, but it did. He felt it all again, the heart-pounding fear, and then he was back at his console on the free-trader, soaked with sweat, staring furiously at nothing.
He could have held on -- he was holding on -- but it ended when the Enviro super got married; there really was no job no room for her new husband despite what the Captain — her father — claimed and the long Jump in had been especially hard; he'd started missing time more and more, coming back to himself walking down a hallway, loading up a ration tray, staring at a Navs screen. When the ship emerged from Jump, the hum and mutter at the back of his mind kept on, as it never had before. They were inbound to Smitty's World, fiercely independent, favorably situated, a sunless wanderer found by chance and claimed by a First Fleet ship captain. Plenty of work for the willing, especially if the willing weren't too particular. Safely berthed, he gathered up his duffel and signed off the ship, putting down his name in front of a Purser (not coincidentally the bride's mother) who struggled to not look too grateful.
That kind of man, on a busy place like Smitty's World, can always find work fixing and hauling, packing small items, digging through bad wiring or balky code. He may not eat well or sleep on silk sheets, but he never has to miss a meal, at least not until the noise and nightmares get too damn loud. Even then, once a Responder, always a Responder: half fireman, half EMT, half policeman and "not quite spacecraft engineer," as the saying went; when alarms rang, he was there, doing the right thing.
True, there was no work for a Starship Astrogator, especially one with no more certs than scribbled letters from ship captains and Nav Ones. But there was plenty of work for a man willing to work hard, if he had a feel for technology. Best of all, the settlement was unapologetically what it was, domed over beneath airless, starry skies and dug into the crumbly compressed dust and hard rock, artificially lit, heated and ventilated, as sane and sensible as any starship, or just about.
He'd even tried applying to join The Smith's City Patrol, "Proctors," police and fire and crisis mediators all rolled into one; and been turned flat down. "Full Citizens only," they said. By then it was dawning on him that the complex, changing and by The Smith's executive fiat unmapped inhabitation had layers and lives that visitors and transients never saw, and past that, places no non-Citizen resident would never reach, and beyond that to habs and corridors and courtyard for only the fully-invested among even them.
But by then his hands were increasingly uncooperative and the nightmares sometimes too loud to drown in alcohol; and the work started to get simpler and lower-paying. He coped. If words sometimes fled, why, he spoke even less than before; and if drink alone failed to bring unbroken sleep, the exhaustion of hard physical labor helped. He even found a Medico, downy-cheeked and idealistic, who spoke knowingly of 'Drive Field Aggravated Combat Stress; it was then he realized, again, that no one who hasn't been there had even the least clue, or wanted to hear that his war — most crew's war — was boredom and bad math, not hand-to-hand in the uncaring vacuum or even missiles at extreme range. He made polite noises, paid his bill and left. He adjusted. He coped. Whatever it took.
And he still was who he was, who he'd been, who the War had made him into, catching patterns, catching the scent of trouble and dealing with it, no matter how unsteadily. He had a reputation and no bad one It came to a head one of his more-lucid days, when a "general labor specialist" spoiling for a fight came into the bar where he was eating a large bowl of thick stew, supper in trade for a half-day's dishwashing.
He'd gotten pretty shaky by then, swearing at the cooperativeness of his own hands, careful of his gait, each step sometimes a study; but it came and went and damned if he'd go talk again to another nosy medico, they way they got side-tracked into his service time, snootily disapproving or hero-worshipping, irritating either way. So he'd been struggling that day; when the much-larger stranger slammed through the door (and they're nearly all doors on Smitty's; world except for the locks between levels) and lit into a little dockhand drinking at the bar and casually straight-armed a bartender who tried to intervene, everything snapped into focus. He was up before anyone else and on the aggressor, hand going to a "C-clamp" compliance hold on the other's head. It went slow-motion as guy was turning away from the intended victim with a suddenly-visible knife. He did as he'd been trained and as he'd practiced: grabbed the knife-hand wrist and pulled in the direction it was going, while moving out of the way. The aggressor lost balance and he more-or-less rode him down to the deck, hitting with as much force as he could muster. It worked. —And then things sped up again and he was sitting on an unconscious fighter on the floor of a bar, bruised and splashed with stew. The proctors made a big fuss when they showed up. Seems the knifeman had been slashing his way though all his co-workers and the man at the bar has been the eleventh on his list. Word made it all the way up to The Smith himself, and word came back down that nothing was too good for such a hero.
He took full Second Level Citizenship when offered; but he never went back to that bar and rarely ventured into the visitor-and-transient-accessible warrens and domes afterward, either. He faded back into the shadows and small businesses and sometimes shadowy work, the small unsanctioned, much-wanted things that do little harm. As his condition became worse and worse, he found obscure corners, places out of the way, rarely-used accesses, and kept on.
A man like that, as his own body began to betray him, when things stopped making sense, would he search out help as he once helped? Would his pride let him continue, if he sensed the least pity or condescension? In the end, it wouldn't matter; there are some battles a man can't win, some emergencies too big to control.
I'm not sure how he'd've viewed any of this story, his story, or how you see it, either; but if you were stringing for a free-trader website on Smitty's world, keeping track of the more-colorful characters, buying drinks and listening to stories, and you had to wrap up a life lived without citing rumor, speculation or late-night tales that sound too tall when the lights are full on, you'd write it up like this:
Grey, Stephan, b. ~1950, Hoplite base, Luna; d. Thursday last, 5 October, 2012 (Earth, GMT) Newport, Smithtown; personal age, ~35. Raised in flight and on Trinity, Grey served aboard FCS "Longreach" surveillance/transport ships during the late conflict with Earth, retiring in 1989 as Astrogator 3rd/Prime Responder of LazyTongs. He is best known here as the man who stopped the 35-South Slasher five years ago. He was found dead in a utility corridor in the early hours of 6 October (GMT). Autopsy revealed advanced brain cancer, probably due to prolonged exposure to cosmic rays and high levels of 'Drive radiation.
Then you'd look at the screen and swear in frustration at everything you couldn't put in.
(In memory of my friend, occasional nemesis and long-ago boss Steve C., who lost the battle last month; and of my Dad, betrayed by his own brain and gamely carrying on, so well we barely noticed as he started fading away; and to every soldier who returned home only to discover home was no longer there.)
(In unfortunate synchronicity, horror/noir/thriller writer Tom Piccirilli is recovering from emergency surgery for brain cancer right now. More info and links to IndieGogo fundraiser; here's a publisher selling his works and passing along 100% of the profit to Tom.)
07 July 2012
Lunchtime Conversation
I denied it at first. As time goes on, I suspect she's right - but it still bothers me. It was during a lunch break from makee-learnee at Irrational Numbers that Jo pointed it out, in her odd take on an Edger accent -- she's got the telephone-operator enunciation, but with a musical lilt and faint accent that sounds like Zsa Zsa Gabor had learned English from leprechauns.
I commented on the way she never leaves the place for lunch if she can avoid it and she countered with the observation that I invariably pick up take-out food from Delta-Vee. "It is habit versus selection, Roberta."
"How so? You haven't been here long enough to have any lunch 'habits,' I'd think."
She laughed. "No -- but I am used to being on ship. Planets have too much distance. And the ventilation feels broken outdoors. It makes me nervous. So I follow my habits. You, on the other hand-- This is why you were chosen."
"You've lost me."
"Reclusion. Everyone knows: persons with reclusive personalities were preferentially picked for USSF tech crews."
I looked across the table at her. Her expressions are hard to read -- Edger reserve, mostly -- but she seemed dead serious. "It's news to me."
She quirked an eyebrow, looking more than ever like she should be hosting a National Geographic Special on the Wonders of India, were it not for that accent. "You were not told?"
"All they told me was, I had the aptitude for several jobs, nothing specific. I thought I was joining the Air Force! Besides, that's ancient history; I was out before I ever had a permanent posting."
"'Civilian' crew ever since. Why do you think that is?"
I snorted. "Because I'm good at it, maybe? Because it suits me?"
She smiled. "See?"
Edgers! A couple of the other students showed up about then and I managed to get her talking about her own life -- like a lot of Edgers, she was adopted out of disaster right on good old Earth, though unlike many, her entire family had been lost and she was barely five years old when it happened. It'd be easy to claim the space-born Far Edge types do that sort of thing out of the goodness of their hearts, and there's a grain of truth in it; the wider truth is, they are much concerned about genetic diversity. Whatever caused the senior of Materjack line, hitting dirt near (and under cover of*) the booming shores of Barisal, to take in a particular starving orphan, we'll never know; her adoptive father was lost at Ganymede. It certainly worked out well for all involved -- "Engine Jo" has a grasp of 'Drive engineering that leaves me working hard to keep up.
But I still think it's a crazy Edger rumor, on a par with the one about USSF/NATO recruiting combat troops from jailed violent criminals. Reclusive? Me?
__________________________________
* A fine old Edger trick. It usually works. Sometimes, not.
I commented on the way she never leaves the place for lunch if she can avoid it and she countered with the observation that I invariably pick up take-out food from Delta-Vee. "It is habit versus selection, Roberta."
"How so? You haven't been here long enough to have any lunch 'habits,' I'd think."
She laughed. "No -- but I am used to being on ship. Planets have too much distance. And the ventilation feels broken outdoors. It makes me nervous. So I follow my habits. You, on the other hand-- This is why you were chosen."
"You've lost me."
"Reclusion. Everyone knows: persons with reclusive personalities were preferentially picked for USSF tech crews."
I looked across the table at her. Her expressions are hard to read -- Edger reserve, mostly -- but she seemed dead serious. "It's news to me."
She quirked an eyebrow, looking more than ever like she should be hosting a National Geographic Special on the Wonders of India, were it not for that accent. "You were not told?"
"All they told me was, I had the aptitude for several jobs, nothing specific. I thought I was joining the Air Force! Besides, that's ancient history; I was out before I ever had a permanent posting."
"'Civilian' crew ever since. Why do you think that is?"
I snorted. "Because I'm good at it, maybe? Because it suits me?"
She smiled. "See?"
Edgers! A couple of the other students showed up about then and I managed to get her talking about her own life -- like a lot of Edgers, she was adopted out of disaster right on good old Earth, though unlike many, her entire family had been lost and she was barely five years old when it happened. It'd be easy to claim the space-born Far Edge types do that sort of thing out of the goodness of their hearts, and there's a grain of truth in it; the wider truth is, they are much concerned about genetic diversity. Whatever caused the senior of Materjack line, hitting dirt near (and under cover of*) the booming shores of Barisal, to take in a particular starving orphan, we'll never know; her adoptive father was lost at Ganymede. It certainly worked out well for all involved -- "Engine Jo" has a grasp of 'Drive engineering that leaves me working hard to keep up.
But I still think it's a crazy Edger rumor, on a par with the one about USSF/NATO recruiting combat troops from jailed violent criminals. Reclusive? Me?
__________________________________
* A fine old Edger trick. It usually works. Sometimes, not.
11 June 2012
Space Flu
I knew I was sick when I stirred my tea and the teaspoon flew out of my mug. Or so it seemed. The spoon handle, one of those thick ceramic ones, must've caught on the rim and I didn't notice. They call it "gravity flu" or "the teke bug" and while it doesn't really give you psionic superpowers or bend gravity, it might as well: it makes the afflicted unsteady, clumsy and fumbly. You don't know which way is up and you can't hang onto things. So the effect is pretty much the same. First described on that paradise Linden/Lyndon in 1954, it had been affecting residents since the first landing, masked by the far more serious problems they'd brought along or created.
Treatment is pretty much like how you'd treat a cold. Bed rest and fluids -- plus you should avoid anything fragile or complex. Give it a day and a night and you should be back to nornal. "Antigrav flu," hah! Though with my luck, I'd find a way to break my quilt.
24 hours later, I hadn't. Well, not break break. But I don't think those tea stains are gonna come out. Another lovely gift from the Far Edge. Gah.
Treatment is pretty much like how you'd treat a cold. Bed rest and fluids -- plus you should avoid anything fragile or complex. Give it a day and a night and you should be back to nornal. "Antigrav flu," hah! Though with my luck, I'd find a way to break my quilt.
24 hours later, I hadn't. Well, not break break. But I don't think those tea stains are gonna come out. Another lovely gift from the Far Edge. Gah.
09 June 2012
It's A Long Way Up. Or Down.
It's a long way just getting there, and that's even before donning the mandated pressure suit. Any time there's only one thickness of stuff between you and the Great Airless Beyond, any time you're out in the nobody's-regularly-there utility and leftover spaces of the vast starship USAS Lupine, the Enviro & Physical Plant safety types require you wear an actual pressure suit, with full tanks and working radio, just like on Buck Rogers. (Which mine kind of is, being mostly a mechanical-counterpressure type, but you wear coveralls over, more to protect it from rips and abrasion and to keep it clean than for modesty -- but it is not much more than a thick leotard and every time I put it on, I resolve to spend more time working out in the ship's gym. Humbling!)
Why suit up, if you can breathe the (stale and dusty) air? 'Cos it would be way too much trouble to go rescue you, all bloated and vacuum-dried, if you managed to, oh, punch through a radar-transparent plastic bubble or trip a fire-extinguishing air dump; they'd rather you were able to yell for help and had some chance of surviving 'til help would arrive, followed by debriefing and a hectoring lecture about what you did wrong.
In the present instance, I'd done nothing wrong but one of E&PP's inspector/cleaners had: he'd managed to flip the breaker for one of the ship's primary radars, the "Ship's Horizontal Axis Search," a/k/a "Arbitrary-H Main" which sits in a handy radome at the very top of a high, tower-like structure, at the very forward end of Lupine, bit to starboard of the centerline. He'd turned it right back on but the damage was done: the High Power Amplifier had cycled back up in "local," the E&PP crewman had not noticed (it's not his job, it's Engineering's) and was much farther along in his appointed rounds by the time the Navs boffins realized they were only seeing returns on the Arbitrary-V Main, which sticks out from the port side at the forward end on the end of a long, tube-like thingie, much like the hollow tower of H Main.
The Chief was out (it happens. Rarely); Dr. Schmid, 2/O, high brass indeed and our nominal big boss was definitely In and delighted to assign me the long walk out to see what the matter might be. He paged me up to Navs -- a warren of cubicles with three bulkheads covered in very large-screen displays, up a spiral stair from Jump Control -- and commenced to enthuse.
"It's probably something simple. Radar Ralph's software can be pretty flaky, though, we might have to shut it all down and bring everything back up in sequence."
I nodded. "Radar Ralph" O'Casey is something of a legend in the starships he's never seen and can't be told about; he's never been cleared for it and from everything I hear, he never will be. But his radars are great; no one does 'em better. He himself, that's a different story; he tried to insist he was the only person who could or should install and maintain his radar designs and the USAF team fronting for the Starship Company had to wave money, a free vacation and a course of therapy before he would relent. Even at that, the documentation is sketchier than I'd like and we've had to reverse-engineer his subassemblies. Since the Search radar do two jobs -- conventional radar-type work in normal space and mapping the shape of our pocket universe in Jump -- we have to have the very best and that means Ralph or the Ukrainians who've built all the high-precision units for the old USSR and current Russian starships and publicly-known space vehicles. Trust me: odd as he is, Ralph's easier to deal with.
A mere hour later, I was suited up and opening the pressure door marked, NO ACCESS. PRESSURE SUIT AND LOGIN REQUIRED PAST THIS POINT. Aw, they do care! A nice, healthy hike though the area our switch-flipper had worked (I could see his tracks) and I was at the hatch for H Main Radar; pop it and I'm in the base of the radar mast itself, with another little compartment where the radar electronics lives dead ahead. To one side and above me is--
A whole lot of UP.
You know what we have on the Hidden Frontier they don't have on the International Space Station or even the "starship Enterprise?" Spiders. (Also sometimes mice and rarely, rats or cockroaches). Ew.
Also, I don't know why it is, when I have the whole universe to fall into it doesn't bother me, yet a large enclosed volume gives me the willies -- but it does. So of course, as soon as I had Dr. Schmid on the radio, he asked if I could see the dish rotating. You should just be able to see the yoke glide across the opening where the stairs enter the radome, but I couldn't.
So of course, I had to climb up and make sure. In zero-g, you can just clip onto the steel cable going up the center of the mast and glide; but Lupine normally runs .75 g. It's to keep your bones and muscles from turning into mush and it makes life simpler (mostly) but not easier.
First things first! I checked the radar unit itself: it had defaulted to Local control and was plain off; I set it to warm up but not transmit (there's a "man aloft" safety key you remove and clip to your belt for just that). And then trudge, trudge, trudge, up and around. It's only two hundred feet vertically but you walk at least three times that far.
Up top, the dish was gliding serenely around, all right -- and tilted down as far as it can go, trying to image the steel platform it sits on instead of what's outside the radome (the parareality in between stars just now, a sparkling gray something outlining a more-or-less oblate spheroid). Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read tilt angles off the scribed marks, walking along with the yoke (a good way to get hurt -- Handsome Dave once got knocked flat trying it with the rotational speed just a little too fast, and a darned good thing it took him in the shoulder and not the helmet). Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right.
Back down to the equipment compartment -- look at the bulkhead beside you, not across; even down is better than across or up --
-- put the safety key back in, and pip! the radar's back up. Dr. Schmid checked his re-cal with the radar target on the fixed portion of the 'Drive mast, seven miles away at the far aft end of the ship, and lo, it was spot-on.
Another day, another $53.77 an hour, or whatever it will work out to. (We get paid for Earth-elapsed, which is like variable-rate overtime, hooray! But only because any other way complicates payroll; aboard ship, you're drawing against pay 'til next time Lupine gets back to the homeworld and they settle accounts).
Why suit up, if you can breathe the (stale and dusty) air? 'Cos it would be way too much trouble to go rescue you, all bloated and vacuum-dried, if you managed to, oh, punch through a radar-transparent plastic bubble or trip a fire-extinguishing air dump; they'd rather you were able to yell for help and had some chance of surviving 'til help would arrive, followed by debriefing and a hectoring lecture about what you did wrong.
In the present instance, I'd done nothing wrong but one of E&PP's inspector/cleaners had: he'd managed to flip the breaker for one of the ship's primary radars, the "Ship's Horizontal Axis Search," a/k/a "Arbitrary-H Main" which sits in a handy radome at the very top of a high, tower-like structure, at the very forward end of Lupine, bit to starboard of the centerline. He'd turned it right back on but the damage was done: the High Power Amplifier had cycled back up in "local," the E&PP crewman had not noticed (it's not his job, it's Engineering's) and was much farther along in his appointed rounds by the time the Navs boffins realized they were only seeing returns on the Arbitrary-V Main, which sticks out from the port side at the forward end on the end of a long, tube-like thingie, much like the hollow tower of H Main.
The Chief was out (it happens. Rarely); Dr. Schmid, 2/O, high brass indeed and our nominal big boss was definitely In and delighted to assign me the long walk out to see what the matter might be. He paged me up to Navs -- a warren of cubicles with three bulkheads covered in very large-screen displays, up a spiral stair from Jump Control -- and commenced to enthuse.
"It's probably something simple. Radar Ralph's software can be pretty flaky, though, we might have to shut it all down and bring everything back up in sequence."
I nodded. "Radar Ralph" O'Casey is something of a legend in the starships he's never seen and can't be told about; he's never been cleared for it and from everything I hear, he never will be. But his radars are great; no one does 'em better. He himself, that's a different story; he tried to insist he was the only person who could or should install and maintain his radar designs and the USAF team fronting for the Starship Company had to wave money, a free vacation and a course of therapy before he would relent. Even at that, the documentation is sketchier than I'd like and we've had to reverse-engineer his subassemblies. Since the Search radar do two jobs -- conventional radar-type work in normal space and mapping the shape of our pocket universe in Jump -- we have to have the very best and that means Ralph or the Ukrainians who've built all the high-precision units for the old USSR and current Russian starships and publicly-known space vehicles. Trust me: odd as he is, Ralph's easier to deal with.
A mere hour later, I was suited up and opening the pressure door marked, NO ACCESS. PRESSURE SUIT AND LOGIN REQUIRED PAST THIS POINT. Aw, they do care! A nice, healthy hike though the area our switch-flipper had worked (I could see his tracks) and I was at the hatch for H Main Radar; pop it and I'm in the base of the radar mast itself, with another little compartment where the radar electronics lives dead ahead. To one side and above me is--
A whole lot of UP.
You know what we have on the Hidden Frontier they don't have on the International Space Station or even the "starship Enterprise?" Spiders. (Also sometimes mice and rarely, rats or cockroaches). Ew.Also, I don't know why it is, when I have the whole universe to fall into it doesn't bother me, yet a large enclosed volume gives me the willies -- but it does. So of course, as soon as I had Dr. Schmid on the radio, he asked if I could see the dish rotating. You should just be able to see the yoke glide across the opening where the stairs enter the radome, but I couldn't.
So of course, I had to climb up and make sure. In zero-g, you can just clip onto the steel cable going up the center of the mast and glide; but Lupine normally runs .75 g. It's to keep your bones and muscles from turning into mush and it makes life simpler (mostly) but not easier.
First things first! I checked the radar unit itself: it had defaulted to Local control and was plain off; I set it to warm up but not transmit (there's a "man aloft" safety key you remove and clip to your belt for just that). And then trudge, trudge, trudge, up and around. It's only two hundred feet vertically but you walk at least three times that far.
Up top, the dish was gliding serenely around, all right -- and tilted down as far as it can go, trying to image the steel platform it sits on instead of what's outside the radome (the parareality in between stars just now, a sparkling gray something outlining a more-or-less oblate spheroid). Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read tilt angles off the scribed marks, walking along with the yoke (a good way to get hurt -- Handsome Dave once got knocked flat trying it with the rotational speed just a little too fast, and a darned good thing it took him in the shoulder and not the helmet). Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right.
Back down to the equipment compartment -- look at the bulkhead beside you, not across; even down is better than across or up --
-- put the safety key back in, and pip! the radar's back up. Dr. Schmid checked his re-cal with the radar target on the fixed portion of the 'Drive mast, seven miles away at the far aft end of the ship, and lo, it was spot-on.Another day, another $53.77 an hour, or whatever it will work out to. (We get paid for Earth-elapsed, which is like variable-rate overtime, hooray! But only because any other way complicates payroll; aboard ship, you're drawing against pay 'til next time Lupine gets back to the homeworld and they settle accounts).
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