The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (12 page)

              “Here they come.” Four technicians were wheeling two large metallic boxes down the concourse towards them. The boxes were as wide as a bookshelf and three times as thick. The technicians had them on trolleys slanted back at a thirty-five degree angle. The stasis tubes would probably have been too heavy for them to handle if not for the light Martian gravity. The technicians were accompanied by Parsells and Quinn, whom Templeton had sent to meet them at their vehicle to provide security. It was really just a formality, but he figured that it was better to be safe than sorry. The two men looked as dour as ever to be up early. The entourage was rounded out by a man in a blue lab coat and scrubs; the lab coat listed his name on the lapel, Pelzer, as well as the name of his company, Stasis Solutions, across the back. Greetings were exchanged, digital documents shown, fingerprints given, authorization granted, and finally they were ready to push the tubes one at a time down the tubeway and up the ramp to the ship.

              As tube A went by her, Staples looked down at the signed transfer documents on her surface that assured Stasis Solutions that she and her crew took full responsibility for the man and woman in the tubes. “A is Evelyn,” she said, imagining the lovely woman unconscious in the huge metal coffin. There were no windows in the devices. She felt a touch of nervousness as she realized that there was no way for her to be sure that it was in fact Evelyn in the tube. Perhaps Doctor Pelzer and Stasis Solutions had made a mistake and sent Evelyn off to Venus like a lost suitcase. She tried to put it out of her mind; they were professionals, and anyway, there was nothing she could do about it at this point.

              “B is for Bauer,” she said as the second tube passed her. Once everyone had walked down the tubeway, Staples took one last look around the concourse. People still milled about, walked to work. A shop keeper was opening his store for business on the other side of the large room. A good-looking man in his mid thirties with black hair graying at the temples leaned casually against another closed storefront. A woman spoke in heated tones to a child who looked as though she was on the verge of tears. A man with a black duster and greasy black hair stood further away, looking in her general direction, shifting somewhat nervously from foot to foot. Clea Staples took one last look at Tranquility and walked towards her ship.

Chapter 7

Day two.

“Do we really gotta do this?” Parsells asked, sweat dripping from his face. He and Quinn were both standing, their feet spread, bent over, their hands on their knees. They wore weighted vests over their sweat-damp workout shirts. The tall, bald, dark form of Kojo Jang stood near them, his hands on his hips. He seemed unaffected by his weight vest, and he was barely sweating. His breath came easily, while Parsells and Quinn both gasped. Jang had just had them run ten sprints, from the base of the back wall of the cargo bay up to where the elevator disappeared into the ceiling when the ship was horizontal. Parsells stood up and put his hands behind his head, desperately trying to catch his breath. “Can’t we at least take the weight vests off?”

              “Then what would be the point of this? We are currently accelerating at about six tenths of normal Earth gravity. Quinn, your file says you normally weigh one hundred and nine kilograms under normal Earth gravity. Right now, you weigh about sixty-five kilograms. That makes exercise easy, and it’s a good way to get soft. People who spend a great deal of time in space tend to lose muscle mass.”

              Parsells looked at Quinn and tried not to roll his eyes at his friend. “But we used to live in zero G, and we didn’t work out that much then.”

              “You were also, if memory serves, spending ten hours a day mining asteroids. Here, it is easy to spend days or even weeks without encountering physical exercise. It is important to stay in shape.”

              “But,” Parsells groped for another objection that might put off the next set of sprints another minute, “if we gotta fight, it’ll be on Mars, or the space station around Saturn. That’s light gravity or no gravity!  Why should we-”

              “Get used to being heavier than you normally are?” Jang finished his sentence, pointing to his forty kilogram weight vest. “Do you remember, just over a week ago, when we were decelerating at nearly three times normal gravity?” The looks both Quinn and Parsells wore on their faces said that they did. “What if you were called upon to fight, or to run, or to climb under those conditions? Adrenaline can only be counted on to do so much. You must be ready. Now,” he pointed to the far end of the cargo bay, “ten more sprints.”

              “Drill instructor from hell,” Parsells muttered under his breath. It came out louder than he intended.              

Jang did not reply, except to shout, “Go!”

              Five minutes and ten trips across the cargo bay later found Jang breathing a bit more than he had previously and Parsells and Quinn lying flat on their backs, gasping like stranded fish on a lakeshore. Their lungs burned, their legs hurt, and Quinn had a stitch in his side that he might have traded for stomach cancer had he been given the option.

              Jang let them rest for a minute before beginning on his next lecture. “There are advantages to working in a variable gravity environment; one of them is training. Few ships accelerate at greater than sixty or seventy percent of Earth gravity, though most are capable of more. It is comfortable for the crew, and the faster one thrusts, the greater the fuel consumption becomes. Most crews allow themselves to become soft, their muscles to atrophy. They do not understand the advantages that can come from training for high gravity environments, especially when operating in a low one.” He looked down at the two men. Parsells was working to get himself into a sitting position, but Quinn remained prone. The security chief removed his vest, letting it drop heavily to the floor, and indicated that the men might do the same. They did so gratefully, Quinn struggling up as he did so.

              “Observe,” Jang said, and then took off running towards the elevator shaft which bisected the back wall of the cargo bay currently serving as the floor. After a few meters, he leapt into the air and landed a seemingly impossible ten meters distant on the far side, having easily cleared the three meter tall elevator shaft. Quinn and Parsells looked at each other in disbelief. A few seconds later, Jang jumped up on top of the elevator shaft and into view again. He put his hands on his hips in a manner that Parsells was quickly beginning to hate.

              “The effects of light gravity make feats possible that would have been considered superhuman only a hundred years ago.” His deep voice echoed around the large chamber, bouncing off the UteVs and jump ships arrayed above them. Far above them, currently acting as their ceiling, the cargo bay doors stood closed and sealed. It made the two men nervous knowing that empty space and instant death were on the other side of those doors, but their new boss seemed to be quite comfortable with the setting.

              “What if someone bumps the wrong button on the bridge - the cockpit,” Parsells corrected himself, “and accidently opens those doors?” He pointed up as he spoke.

              “As I am sure was true when you were mining asteroids, there are a dozen safety protocols in place to prevent that from happening,” Jang replied as he lightly leapt down from the elevator shaft, making it look like no more than a one meter drop.

              Parsells snorted laughter. “Probably not as many ‘safety protocols’ in place as you think, but yeah, they were careful with us.”

              “Just so.” Jang walked up to them. “Next is weapons training.”

              Quinn smiled, and Parsells nodded. “Sounds a lot better than running sprints. Where do we do that?”

              Jang began walking over to a metal case that stood two meters tall with gripbars arrayed around it. The case was nestled on the floor against the wall next to the elevator. “In here.”

              “In here?” the usually quiet Quinn asked. The worried look had appeared on Parsells’ face as well.

              “With live ammo? Isn’t that dangerous?”

              Jang leaned over and typed a six-digit code into the keypad on the weapons locker. “It is, but only if we shoot each other.” He pulled open a locker and removed a projectile rifle. “The hull of this ship is twenty-five centimeters thick. It is designed to deflect small asteroids if necessary, provided we are not going too fast. You wouldn’t get through the hull with one of these in a hundred years.”

              “But there are weapons that cut through hulls,” Parsells said, bringing himself to his feet, his wet shirt clinging to his chest.

              “Yes. We have a few, and I want you to be familiar with them, but we do not train to attack other ships. We train to defend ours.”

Day four.

              Clea Staples stood in the dorsal observation lounge, looking somewhat down towards her home planet. The viewing window stood at a forty-five degree angle, extending over a meter up to meet the wall in front of her. When the ship was horizontal, the window acted like the rear windscreen of a car. Now she stood at the base of it, looking backwards to the constantly shrinking red planet and the tiny blue world beyond. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there, somewhere beyond the sun. The stars blazed as always. She considered the facts that any burgeoning astronomer understood: that the light of the stars she was observing consisted of photons that had been born in the heart of a star and sent on their way thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before.  The tiny particles had travelled for centuries to find their home, finally, in her retinas. It was old knowledge, but it still amazed her.

The engines were not visible from the viewport, but the blue iridescence that they created obscured her view to a small degree. Here, in one of the aft-most rooms on the ship, their noise punctured the bulkheads and filled the chamber. A metal table and chair hung clamped to the wall behind her; no one had come through this room to reorient the furniture the last time they had been in zero G, and the effect was somewhat disconcerting. Rearranging the furniture did much to alleviate the feeling that the crew was standing on the walls when under thrust, but there was no need and no desire to change every room each time the ship entered and left atmosphere. Staples suspected that this observation lounge had last been used on Earth, perhaps for a game of cards or a private luncheon.

              There was a knock at the door. Staples frowned and waited. The knock came again, and she sighed and said loudly, “Enter!”

              The door, in the ceiling from her perspective, opened outwards and Yegor Durin’s head poked through. He was squatting on the bulkhead wall that held the door, and his mop of unsecured dark hair hung down around his face. From his perspective, the door was a trapdoor in the floor.

              “You don’t have to knock, Yegor. This isn’t my bedroom. The lounges are public places, unless they’ve been reserved.”

“I… alright. Mind if I join you?” he asked a bit hesitantly.

Staples shook her head broadly. “Come on in.”

The panels in the floor had been left retracted from the captain’s climb down to where she stood. Yegor swung himself around and began clambering down the ladder. He wore a black tee shirt and well-worn jeans, an outfit she had seen him wear many times when off duty. His hair was wet as though he had just showered; the tips of it brushed against his shoulders.

“The door,” Staples reminded him. It was important to keep the heavy doors secured when they were not in use. If the ship had to cease thrust or take evasive action, heavy doors swinging loose could be a serious danger.

“
Da, Kapitan
.” He took a few steps back up, leaned over, grabbed the door, and swung it into place as he descended again, being sure to latch it closed securely. He then made his way down the rest of the ladder and walked over to stand next to his captain, gazing down through the window as he approached her. She turned back and regarded it with him silently. A minute or two passed.

“Amazing, yes?” he asked finally.

“Always,” she responded. Another moment of silence.

“You know, I grew up in Vladivostok,” he said suddenly, apropos of seemingly nothing.

“I think I remember that, yes,” she replied, still looking through the window but curious as to his intention.

“I grew up in a generation of young men sold on the idea of spreading the city into the ocean. The water had risen to cover some of city at that point, and we knew it wouldn’t stop.” He puffed his chest out and threw his shoulders back some as if touting some glorious plan. “So the new plan was to expand into the ocean.” His shoulders dropped. “Everyone was looking down. I kept looking up. I wanted to go into space, but they kept saying, ‘no, Yegor, we need you to be part of bold new expansion of Russia!’” He chuckled lightly. “I didn’t even like swimming. When I was sixteen, my parents made me take underwater welding classes. I was so angry, I ran away from home.” He was silent for a while, and they both looked down through the portal as if hypnotized.

Finally, Staples, smiling a bit, prompted him. “Did you go join the space circus?”

He looked at her quizzically. “Space… circus?”

She shook her head and turned back to the window. “Never mind. It’s a thing, a common joke. Running away to join… never mind. You were saying?”

He chuckled again. “I returned home two days later, mugged, beaten, and ready for class. Decided that space wasn’t for me. So I worked hard in school, studied communications. I went to college, got job in underwater communications strategies.”

“Were your parents proud?”

“Very proud. Then I started looking for other jobs. Figured I was going to work underwater for the rest of my life, but at least I could do it somewhere not Vladivostok. I found the job opening at GTS working in space. I applied, got the job.”

“What did your parents say?” she asked, turning back to her coms officer.

He pursed his lips together speculatively. “Don’t know. Never told them. They went to bed one night. When they woke up the next morning, I was gone.” He was silent for a few more moments, and then he looked at her. “Not their life to live.”

She nodded. “I’ve been thinking lately. We all have these ideas about how people should live their lives. ‘This idea is terrible,’ or ‘that opportunity was wasted.’  I think the truth is that people have the right to spend their lives anyway they wish.”

Yegor nodded in agreement. “I think so too.” He turned back to the window at their feet and regarded the stars.

She continued to look at him. “Yegor, was there something that you wanted to talk to me about?” she inquired.

“I don’t want to bother you while you’re off duty.”

It was her turn to chuckle. “Well, I think you’ve blown that.”

He turned to her, appearing suddenly apologetic.

“Relax,” she soothed. “I’ve quite enjoyed our talk. Besides, I’m the captain. I’m never really off duty. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I wanted to ask you about the new coms suite we got from the satellite. If I tie it into the existing coms hardware, it will extend broadcast sorting, strength, and clarity.”

“Would you have to take coms offline?” she asked.

“Oh yes, for a few days I think.”

She arched her eyebrows somewhat disapprovingly.

The man shrugged and raised his hands apologetically. “It is what it is. I can get them back up in two days as long as everything goes well.”