The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (27 page)

Laplace faced her and considered another moment, his eyes never leaving hers. She returned his gaze with the same intensity. “Very well.” Without looking away from his new computer scientist, he addressed Staples. “Does your report contain some theory as to why these ‘professional pirates’ wanted to abduct my new employees?”

“It doesn’t, I’m afraid, other than the probability that good computer scientists can be hard to find for pirates in Jovian Space,” Staples returned.

Laplace grunted and continued to look at Evelyn. “Well, I’ll have to read over your report. I assume you’ll be here for a few days.” It wasn’t a question. “I’m sure I’ll have many more questions. In the meantime, Mr. Ducard here,” he finally turned his eyes to Staples and gestured to the man at his side, “will see to your needs. Payment, of course, is something that will also need to be discussed, but only once I contact my superiors.”

“I assumed as much.” Staples tried to keep her face expressionless, but the conversation was turning out to be every bit as difficult as she had feared it would be. “We may be here longer than a few days. We need to refuel and resupply, that’s true, but we also need repairs. The destruction of the attacking ship damaged ours, including our engines.”

Ducard stepped forward, smiling his crooked smile again. “Sure, sure, I can help with all of that. Get you fixed right up. Can even maybe spare some manpower if you can pay their wages.”

Laplace stared daggers at his subordinate and cut in abruptly. “No one is to lose time from their shifts. If anyone wants to spend downtime working on their damaged ship for some extra cash, I would allow that, but it must not interfere with production.” The tone of his voice made his dim view of the other man clear.

Ducard took a breath with an expression on his face that was as good to Staples as an eye roll, but said, “Sure, sure, no one will lose shift time.”

Staples decided that the shorter man was by far the better conversationalist, and addressed her next query to him. “I have a crew that could really use some shore leave, such as it is. Do you have any local watering holes or other R and R facilities they could make use of?”

“We sure do!” Ducard grinned widely.

“I am glad to hear it.” She gestured to Templeton, who seemed to have calmed some since Laplace’s implied insult. “I’d like to send Mr. Templeton here with you to make arrangements for repairs, refueling, and relaxation.” She looked at Laplace. “I’ll see Evelyn to her new quarters.” She did her best to match the commander’s tone, one that did not brook discussion. “And I’ll make arrangements to have her effects and Herc’s body brought aboard.”

Laplace looked them all over, his gaze lingering on Evelyn, then he nodded curtly and strode towards the door, followed by his entourage of security guards. Ducard gestured that way as well to Templeton, and he followed. As Staples turned around to speak to Dinah about making the arrangements, Evelyn leaned over to her and whispered, “he was sexy, don’t you think?”

The captain looked at her in surprise, then smiled and shook her head.

Once out of the receiving room, Templeton found himself in a miniature version of a city. There were small walkways that might have been streets crisscrossing back and forth; each ran by not a city block, but a large building. The structures were anywhere from one to three stories high, and were uniformly made out of metal. Some sported decorations. Four buildings down on the left, for example, a wooden sign swung over the door naming the building, a bar Templeton assumed,
Saturn’s Satyr
. As he watched, a man and a woman in dirty work overalls walked through the door, speaking animatedly. Other buildings around them seemed to be server rooms, administration buildings, and guest quarters. He thought that the bunkhouses must be located in another section of the cylinder. Looking up was somewhat dizzying to him; he expected to be able to see the far side of the cylinder with similar buildings and people walking among them on what for him seemed to be the ceiling, but there was another cylinder, smaller, within this one blocking part of that view. That cylinder ran the axis of the space station like a thick straw in the center of a thermos. Long sections of the smaller cylinder emitted light, and that seemed to provide the majority of the illumination in the metal shell.

As he gazed up at the large steel housing, perhaps half a kilometer across, he stopped walking. Ducard stopped as well and looked up. “That’s the elevator system for harvesting liquid helium from the atmosphere,” he said by way of explanation. “See, the top half of that is cable,” he pointed towards the end of the station oriented away from the planet it orbited, “and the rest is the elevator itself. We lower it down into the upper atmosphere and siphon off the liquid helium. It comes up the hose attached to the cable and then we pipe it into a storage tank.”

Looking at the way the far walls curved up and around the elevator housing was giving Templeton vertigo, so he dropped his head and refocused it on his tour guide. “Where do you get the storage tanks?”

“We make them. We have several foundries on the inside of the station.” He pointed vaguely towards the far ends of the larger cylinder. “We use reshaped rock and some ore we mine from the local asteroid belt. That’s where we get our water too. When we fill one up, we slap a booster rocket on it and off it goes to Earth.” It was clear the large man was enjoying explaining the workings of the station to his guest, and for his part, Templeton was curious to hear about it. “Libom catches them and decelerates them, then puts them into orbit and presto: profit.” Ducard showed his broad grin again. “You know, my great granddad did something similar in his day; he worked on an oil rig a hundred years back. I guess it runs in my family.”

As they resumed their walk, Ducard in the lead, Templeton asked, “Did he work for the same company?”

“Yep, Libom’s been around a long time. For an oil company, I guess they adapted pretty well to a planet that ran out of oil.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Left up ahead,” he added more quietly. After they had gone past a few more buildings, the curve of the floor had become obvious, and it felt as though they were walking uphill. Templeton began to breathe harder, and Ducard was already sweating, but this did not stop him from speaking. “I guess you guys had a rough time out there. What was it like?”

Templeton had expected this. The two men obviously shared more than their positions as seconds in command. The two of them were about the same age, and Templeton assumed that like Staples, Laplace had picked a more personable subordinate to handle social matters, an area that he was clearly lacking far more than the captain. Two dirty and smelly men in even dirtier and smellier clothes walked past them, and Templeton would have bet money that they were headed for
Saturn’s Satyr
. “Just like the captain said,” he replied succinctly, trying to convey a finality indicating that he did not intend to expand on the subject.

Ducard may or may not have understood his charge’s guardedness, but either way, he did not press the matter. “We’ll head to the EVA office and see what they can tell us about getting your ship repaired. Refueling shouldn’t be a problem, we’ve got a fair bit of uranium, and though you’ll find better food at Titan Prime, we can probably fill your fridges just fine if you don’t want to make the stop.”

Templeton decided to press his own line of questions since the moment seemed appropriate. “Speaking of EVA suits, what happened to your last computer scientist? I heard he died in some kind of an EVA accident?” He hoped it sounded nonchalant.

“Matt Spicer,” Ducard said. They were clearing some uniform buildings and had just emerged into a long park. There was green grass stretching perhaps half a kilometer down the long axis of the station, and it was dotted with a few fountains and several benches. People strolled here and there, couples sat on benches, and a few people relaxed on the grass with surfaces or drinks and food. It was a more idyllic scene than Templeton had expected from a latter-day oil derrick. “This is Cronos Park. Not a very original name. Thought we’d walk through it on our way to the EVA office.”

“Sounds nice,” Templeton replied. “I’m surprised that Libom paid to ship all this dirt out here.” He glanced down at the greenery as they walked along a stone path towards a fountain. “It is real grass, isn’t it?”

“Sure, sure, real grass.” Ducard looked down at it as well, and gesticulated as he explained. “Paying people to live far from home has always been a tricky business. You know, five hundred years ago, used to be people’d work a few towns over, maybe see their families a few times a year. Then later people would work in other countries, but they’d still fly home for the holidays, that sort of thing. But working all the way out here… it can really get to you. Men and women get lonely surrounded by all this space. They miss their kids, their parents, their friends. Turns out, it doesn’t matter how much you pay people; if they’re really miserable, they quit. So the company tries to keep them as happy as they can.”

“By building parks,” Templeton stated. They turned right at the fountain, and he was relieved when the sensation of walking up a gigantic drainpipe disappeared.

“Among other things. They fund the bars here, the gyms, movie theater, pool hall, that sort of thing. We’ve even got minor sports teams, a full library, bunch of restaurants, all to keep people willing to stay out here and provide fuel for everyone on the core planets. Even with all of that, people get three months off out of every eighteen. The company actually sprang for their own private transport ship to move people back and forth to the core planets. It can take fifty people.”

Templeton was surprised; it was unusual for companies to keep their own ships of that size. Most interplanetary transportation was handled either by a few major companies, the natural outgrowth of the airline industry of the early twenty-first century, or by private charter ships like
Gringolet
. “Huh. Why not just have your ship bring Evelyn… Ms. Schilling out here? Why hire us?”

“Because the ship isn’t due back here for another month, and we have been in rough shape since Matt died.”

Templeton seized the opportunity to learn more. “The computer scientist?” he asked, feigning forgetfulness. “He had an accident of some kind, you said?” He was momentarily distracted by the sound of a light breeze and birds tweeting until he spied the speaker hidden at the edge of the grass.

“Yeah, poor Matt. He was on the elevator down in the atmosphere calibrating the hydrogen pumps. He had to go outside the chamber in an EVA suit to, I don’t know, do some computer thing on the intake tubes. We don’t like to go out while in atmosphere, but it’s not really that dangerous. The EVA suits are rated for it. We don’t know what happened. Maybe a small stray meteor,” he held up his chubby fingers about a centimeter apart, “maybe a corrosive pocket of gas. He just stopped talking, then all of his vitals went dead. By the time we got him inside, he was too far gone.”

“Was there a hole in his suit?” They were coming to the end of the park, such as it was, and Ducard turned them left and towards another group of buildings.

“Yeah, we don’t know what from.”

Three hours later, Templeton sat at a large surface with Ducard looking at a crude three-dimensional representation of the ship he called home. Ducard’s EVA team had taken scans and pictures of
Gringolet
in a small utility vehicle not unlike the one that Dinah had used to claim the satellite from the
Doris Day
, though now Templeton doubted whether Vey had ever really been trying to obtain it. With Templeton’s help, Ducard was highlighting various sections of the hull and engines, marking them for repairs, and adding notes about the type of damage as they looked over the pictures. Templeton was adding to these notes with his own knowledge of the ship and how it should look.

Finally, Ducard sat back from the screen and puffed out a big sigh. “I think you’re looking at… seventeen days. Maybe more, maybe less, it depends on how many of our crew want to put in extra hours doing the repairs. I know that Laplace won’t want to fund those repairs and the extra pay for the crew, but I think I can talk him into it. The hydrogen pumps never did get recalibrated, and we’ve been running at about half capacity ever since. Having Schilling here should get us up to speed, and hopefully no one will care about a petty cash outlay for ship repairs.”

“That’s damn generous of you, Davis,” Templeton said.

“Hey, the way I see it, you guys got roughed up helping us. It’s the least we can do.”

Templeton smiled. “You might be from a long line of company men, but you sure don’t sound like it.”

“Well, I’m middle management. I’m high enough up to spend some of the company’s money, but not so high up that my neck ends up on the block if the quarterly earnings are down. That makes me dangerous.” He tipped a wink and a mischievous grin at Templeton and leaned back towards the surface.

He returned the grin. “Good place to be, I suppose.” His attention turned back to the surface and the highlighted list of repairs. “Still, seventeen days. We were hoping to be back on Mars by the end of April.”

“Doubt you’ll see that, but you could be back on Earth in time for some May flowers. I’ll get working right away on putting a crew together for repairs. I’ve got my own job to do, but I can come by and check in once they’re going. Are you able to stay here and supervise the repairs?”

“Yeah, I think so. Me or Dinah, anyway.”