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“Yet?”

“Adding a new slot has an effect on the finances of the ship. You’re an expensive insurance policy, and we need to get you contributing an added value or the company will take the slot away once we solve the EMP problem.”

That put a different complexion on the situation. “I understand, sar, and thanks for telling me. We’d best get at this then, huh?”

“I wouldn’t sweat it, Ish. Compared to what we’ve pulled off already, the rest is going to go just fine.” He laughed and started running me through the console diagnostics.

Being on the bridge reminded me a bit of the library at the university on Neris. When I was too small to leave at home, Mom would take me with her when she did her research. I remember the quiet purposefulness of the big halls. There were low conversations all around and occasionally heated arguments in some of the graduate study rooms, but generally there was a kind of low hum of background activity. Everybody had something to do there and, for the most part, they got on with it.

Information displays around the bridge were the main source of illumination. Consoles had red glow patches so you didn’t bump into them in the dimness, and the screens all showed data on a black background to keep the ambient light levels down. It was all rather moot while docked, because the orbital, which was only a few meters outside the forward port, glowed like some monstrous full-moon peeking in the window. It was bright enough to cast shadows in the otherwise dim bridge.

We finished running diagnostics and brought the console up. “Normally you won’t need to run the diagnostics. We haven’t used this station for a while, so it’s just as well. Does it look familiar?”

“Yes, sar, it’s the same basic station as in environmental.”

“Correct. The hardware is standardized throughout the ship. All the consoles in all the divisions are the same. Cheaper that way. The only real difference is the software behind each. Down in environmental you didn’t need the reactor controls, and down in power they don’t need the scrubbers. About ninety percent of the code base is shared in common and, while that cuts down on code error, it also means that if the code that turns on the lights in berthing is wrong, then the code that turns on the sail generators is equally wrong.”

“Isn’t that a little risky?” I asked.

“Like getting into this tin can and sailing out into a vacuum isn’t?”

“Well, if you put it that way…”

“We won’t be playing with that stuff. It’s in; it’s tested; it’s good. What we have to concentrate on, and ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the time it’s as boring as environmental, is to keep the systems alive and kicking. Data archives, systems backups, optimizing data, and the occasional hardware replacement is our biggest tasks. Until we came into Betrus and blew out the data cabinet, the most serious problem I had to deal with in the two stanyers I’ve been aboard was a burned out comm repeater down in the spine that kept sending all the engine control commands back to the bridge with the data equivalent of: occupant unknown.”

“Understood, sar,” I said. Privately I wondered if the magic show was not over, but slipping into a more subtle second act. If the ship was as reliable as he said, it made no sense for me to be sitting on the bridge.

Mr. von Ickles slipped into the seat at the next console—obviously his normal post—and began bringing up displays of his own. “I’ll slave your console to mine for now. You’ll be able to watch when we get underway and when we get secured from navigation stations. Then we can begin putting together all those lovely pieces of equipment down in the office.”

“Yes, sar!”

He ran through a quick systems tour on the console and showed me how to configure the bridge consoles to act like any other console on the ship. The elegance felt right to me. He brought up a schematic of the ship that was the same one I used for VSI and overlaid the fiber data runs, wireless access points, data storage closets and consoles. It included my environmental sensor packages along with every other sensor, feedback, and control package in the ship from locks, to cargo container latches, and to engine mount gimbal positions.

“Impressive, sar.”

“That’s just the static picture,” he said. He hit a function key on his console and they all started to blink. “That’s the data flow view. The speed of the blink represents the amount of data flowing. Some just spit out a packet every once in a while, others are constantly being updated and sending data back.”

It was like looking at a viewer showing how all the nerve cells in the ship were firing in real time. He shut it off and we went back to the static picture.

“No need to leave that running if we’re not going to be here,” he said. “Let’s get some lunch before the show begins.”

I looked at the chrono—12:00. The morning had sublimated and the reality hit me then. The ship would pull out and I would be going. I had a new job. I had a new boss. Lois was not done with me yet.

As we headed down to the mess deck, Mr. von Ickles said, “Consider yourself on third section and grafted to my hip. We haven’t had a chance to figure out what to do with watches in port yet, but underway, you’ll be on third section rotation for the time being. We may shift you to second eventually to cover systems support on a wider span on the clock. It’s all new to us, Ish, so have patience with the jerking around you’re probably going to experience.”

“Sar, I’m just glad to still be here to be jerked around. Believe me.”

“Your first task underway is going to be putting the
uh-oh
box together and getting the ShipNet to run on it. I hope we never have to use it, but if we do, I want it up immediately. We’ll need to figure out some protocol for it, so be thinking about where to store it, how to bring it up quickly, and anything you can think of that restores some minimum level of control in the event of another data cabinet crash.”

“Makes sense. Then what, sar?”

“Then we find out how an EMP got through the shielding and burned out that data cabinet, and we figure how to stop it from ever happening again.”

When we stepped onto the mess deck the number of smiles focused in my direction shocked me. Things had been moving so fast all morning, that I had not had a chance to tell anybody. Brill, Bev, and Diane all sat at the same table, along with Francis and CC. I grabbed some grub and settled with them.

Francis grinned at me. “We just cannot get rid of you, can we?”

“Not yet anyway.” I grinned back.

Brill smiled and Diane had a big grin of her own pasted on her face. Beverly looked almost teary and I wondered if she felt okay. The last time I had seen her she was crawling back aboard snarling. I made a note to get her aside and find out what was going on with her.

CC asked, “So, how’d you manage this?” It came out a bit colder than I think he meant it to.

I could see Diane start to tense up so I jumped in. “After the accident coming in, the officers re-evaluated their systems support needs and convinced home office to add a new slot. At least long enough to figure out what happened and how to deal with it.” I shrugged. “I got first dibs.”

“Nice,” Brill said. “What’ll you be doing?”

“First task is to recreate the emergency network controller. They don’t want to rely on my portable.”

“Good plan,” Francis said. “Then what?”

“Well, then we try to find out how the EMP did all that damage to begin with.”

“How are you going to do that?” Brill asked.

“No idea, but I can’t imagine that’s the first CME this ship has been through in nineteen stanyers, not even the first with an EMP.” I turned to Francis, “You’re the expert in astrophysics. What are the odds?”

Francis grimaced. “Well, first, I’m not sure we’re talking about the same things. These CMEs happen all the time on every star we’ve visited. They all have some things in common including a leading wave of high-energy charged particles.”

CC turned to me and asked, “Who is this guy, Mr. Science?”

“That’s Doctor Science to you,” I said with a grin. “Go on, Francis.”

Francis snickered at the look on CC’s face but continued. “So, a surface event on the star splashes some of the corona out into space. It’s not like a ripple on a pond but more like a sneeze. Star snot.”

“Francis, we’re trying to eat here,” Bev said. “Not all of us have the same strong stomachs that you environmental people do.”

“Oh, sorry,” Francis said. “Anyway, this stuff goes sailing out into space and it goes a long, long way. Depending on the nature of the original event it might be tightly focused or it may be really loosely dispursed, but it can happen as often as ten or twenty times a day, every day during the stellar maxima, maybe only once a day during minima. It’s not predictable.”

“So, the EMP?” I prompted.

“Oh, yeah,” he got back on focus. “These events are layered. The front layers are highly energized particles really similar to a classic EMP. They can toast electronics and disrupt electrical systems. They hardly ever interact at planetary levels because the atmosphere intercepts them. They could in theory threaten the orbitals, but they happen so often that the orbitals are designed to deal with them. So are ships, for that matter.”

I think everybody had glazed over by then. So Francis said, “Okay, think flash-boom.”

Diane said, “What?”

“Flash-boom,” he repeated. “You ever see lightning on a planet?”

“Yeah,” she said, “of course.”

“Well, the flash of the lightning is like the high energy particles from our stellar sneeze. The boom is like the actual mass that’s being ejected. It trails it.”

I jumped in with, “But we went through the mass, I heard it hit the hull, and then the EMP took out the generators.”

“Well, maybe yes, maybe no,” Francis said. “Remember that normally, the energized particles are moving out a lot faster and ahead of the CME residue. Whatever we ran into was not the standard particle front.”

“Okay,” I said, “but then what was it?”

“Once in a while a CME front gets a charged particle front behind it, either from a second event in the same area or from a kind of secondary splash. We don’t really know why, but the effect is that the outer shell of particles forms a kind of magnetic cup that holds those highly charged particles.”

Diane said, “Can you translate that?”

“A regular highly charged particle front is like a lawn sprinkler, this other thing is more like a water balloon.”

“That doesn’t sound like EMP,” I said.

“It’s not—EMP is just a kind of pop-physics shorthand to tell people what happened to their satellites without having to get into the actual messiness of what really happened.”

“And you said, these are rare?”

“Yeah, that’s why we know so little about them. We can see them on stellar coronagraphs as they occur but getting in front of them is a matter of luck.”

“Bad luck, in our case,” Brill said.

“How rare? One in a thousand?” I asked.

“We’re not really sure. Could be like one in a hundred or maybe one in ten thousand. We would need to put a shell of detectors around a star to find out and so far isn’t enough creds in the galaxy to justify that kind of effort.”

“Wait,” I said, “What did I hear hit the hull? Sounded like a veil of sand.”

“Probably was,” Francis said. “Little bits of grit that got swept ahead of the wave. Not the particles that came from the CME itself, which are usually hydrogen molecules and such, but space is filled with actual dust.”

My brain did a kind of two-step as I looked around the table. Francis was more alive and animated than I had ever seen him. It was as if he had worn some kind of disguise, for all those months I had known him and this was his real face. Everybody around the table, except CC, were—if not mesmerized—at least paying very close attention. I got one of those weird flashes and thought,
Francis is in the wrong place.

My fork clicked on the empty plate and I looked down, wondering what had happened to my lunch. I looked around to see if somebody had taken it, when I noticed Mr. von Ickles was bussing his dishes. He looked in my direction and I gave him a nod. “Well, shippies, duty calls and I must answer.”

As I was walking away from the table, I heard CC ask, “Does he always talk like that?”

I think it was Diane who answered, “No. Sometimes he gets really weird.”

We got to the bridge just ahead of the captain and the other officers. Captain Giggone took her seat and waited. It made me think of what it must be like backstage at the ballet. The cast was gathering. I could almost hear the orchestra tuning up in the pit. Mr. von Ickles pulled up the overlay and flashed a snap of the data map. On the right panel on my console he put a status chart showing communications packets in various modes—voice, email, synchronous text, video, control, command, and about eight others I didn’t recognize. On the left was a scrolling log of traffic identified as system main status messages. It scrolled too fast to read unless you were completely focused on it. The middle screen refreshed every few seconds, but it was not live.