The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (3 page)

Her voice was reassuring. “There’s not much to hit. The average density of space is about one atom per cubic centimeter.” She held the thumb and forefinger of her right hand about a centimeter apart to demonstrate. “Most of space is just that: space. It’s aptly named,” Staples offered. “As for course corrections,” she continued, “we’re pointed at Mars. The computer can handle things for a bit while we eat and sleep. All it has to do is not turn. There’s almost always someone in the cockpit to keep an eye on things. And if we did somehow get off course, well, we’ve got thirteen more days to Mars. What’s one hour one way or the other?”

Parsells grunted, clearly a bit embarrassed. He turned back to his food.

A minute later, a well-structured, slightly gaunt man with deep black skin and a bald head entered the mess hall. He wore a tight grey shirt buttoned down the front that left little of his well maintained physique to the imagination. Where the short sleeves, which looked close to bursting, ended at his biceps, muscular tattooed arms extended and ended in powerful hands. Staples read the situation and decided to let her security chief have his moment with his new recruits. She stood up and smiled at the men, taking the remains of her breakfast with her.

“I have some work to do. I’m sure I’ll see more of you in the coming weeks.”

As the captain exited, the new entrant crossed to the food that the ship’s cook had left in warmers on the counter. He quickly and efficiently spooned the eggs and potatoes onto a plate, plucked a container of orange juice, and finally sat across from the two men with his breakfast.

Fork in hand, he looked at them and said, “This is probably as good a time as any to introduce myself. I am Kojo Jang, and you work for me.” His voice was deep, and though his English was impeccable, it carried traces of a Swahili accent.

“I thought we worked for the captain,” the normally laconic Quinn responded. His friend looked at him in surprise and tapped him with his elbow. Parsells smiled in apology for his friend.

Jang did not smile back. “No. I work for the captain. You work for me, though you should always listen to her. I must apologize for not meeting you earlier, but I returned to the ship only shortly before takeoff, and there was much to do.” He took a bite of potatoes, perhaps to give them a chance to reply. Neither said anything, so Jang swallowed and continued. “I will need to show you around the ship. You must study the blueprints until you can find your way in the dark. This may seem excessive. It is not. If the ship ever loses power, you will be grateful for the knowledge. We will need to go over firearms procedures; I was told you both have firearms training. Is this correct?”

Parsells answered quickly, perhaps before his friend could. “Yeah. We were both security guards at a prison; we carried pistols, trained with them, all that.”

“Good.” It was clear from Jang’s quick response that Parsells had offered more of an answer than he wanted. The two men ate and listened silently as Jang spoke. “We will continue to train. We will need to go over ship procedures. You must learn what to do when we both arrive at and depart a planet or moon so that your first mate does not have to move your furniture for you.” The men had the decency to look sheepish. “We must train in hand-to-hand combat.”

Parsells laughed. “On a spaceship? I mean, I know Templeton told me that we’d have to know how to fight, and we do, but really, what are we gonna do, throw a knife out a window at another ship?”

Jang regarded him silently, and his smile died. Finally, he responded. “No. We will not be throwing knives at other ships. Not all operations that this crew performs happen aboard this ship. If the captain needs to meet a contact in a disreputable bar, you may need to provide security for her. If Mr. Burbank and Mrs. Trujillo, two of the work crew, are loading valuable and desperately needed medical supplies into the cargo bay destined for Phobos and they are attacked by criminals hoping to sell said supplies on the black market, you will need to provide security for them.” The new hires looked suspiciously like teenagers being given a lecture. Jang was clearly not finished. “And if pirates attack and board this ship in an attempt to take our fuel, our food, our cargo, and our personnel, you most certainly will fight to defend this ship.”

At this, Parsells spoke up. “Pirates, really? I mean, we’ve heard stories, but does that really happen?”

Jang drew himself up and looked down at the two men as much as was possible while they were sitting. “There is not a scenario I have described that I have not experienced.” He paused for dramatic effect. “You must be prepared for these and many other possibilities. Everyone on this ship does their part and helps where they can. If that means helping Mr. Park to work on the reactor, then that is what you will do. There are no responsibilities outside your job description, only those you have not yet learned. The men who previously held your positions found me a harsh task master. I don’t doubt that is part of why they chose to leave this ship, but I do not take chances with the lives of my crew. Security,” he added as if speaking some great aphorism, “is like insurance. One pays for it and, if everything goes well, one never needs it, but one would never wish to be caught without it when things do
not
go well.” With that, he stood and headed back to the buffet for more food. Parsells rolled his eyes at his friend, and they both went back to finishing their breakfasts.

Chapter 3

The ship had been at six-tenths of a G of thrust for just over a day when Yegor Durin spoke up. “Captain, I’m getting some noise.” He tilted his head to the side and pressed the earpiece into his right ear. Staples, regarding the back of his head, his short ponytail, and his tanned profile, waited patiently for his report. The two of them and Charis MacDonnell were the only people in the cockpit. It was the beginning of first shift, and most of them were still waking up. A long minute passed, then two more while the coms officer listened and ran numbers on his console. Possible identifications flashed up on his screen, and he sorted and dismissed them almost as quickly. Finally, he turned to her.

“I think it’s a satellite, Captain. I make it a Yoo-lin mark VII. It’s still got enough power to transmit; the signal is pretty strong. General distress. It’s damaged-“

“I’ll say,” Charis interjected.

“-and it knows it,” he finished.

“We’re way past the green line out here, Captain,” Charis offered. “Could be good salvage?”

“Maybe,” Staples assented. “How far?”

Charis and her compatriot both turned to their consoles, firing numbers back and forth and exchanging data verbally. After a minute of this, Charis reported: “If we turn and slow down at…” she winced as she said it, “two-point-seven Gs for three hours, we can stop in time to salvage it. It will cost us the better part of a day, depending on how hard we thrust back up to speed. We would still have time to make our appointment on Mars if we stopped.”

“Three hours. That’s going to be uncomfortable. Yegor, I’m going to call the staff to the cockpit. Be ready to give us a rundown of that satellite in five minutes.”

“
Da, Kapitan
.” The man muttered, unconsciously reverting to his native language as he concentrated on the signal and pulled up data from the ship’s computer.

Four-and-a-half minutes later, the chairs in the cockpit were filled just as they were during the ship’s departure from Oregon the day before. One of the four guest chairs lining the back wall was also occupied by a swarthy man with a strong nose, dark eyes, short-cropped hair, and an excellent profile.

“Decided to join us, Doctor?” Staples asked as she spun around in her seat. Though medical was a fifty-meter climb down the ship, the man wasn’t winded in the least. He was in his mid-thirties and in excellent physical shape.

Jabir Iqbal smiled charmingly. “You know I love to watch you work, Captain.” The smile broadened. Perhaps coming from Templeton or Durin, the comment would have seemed inappropriate, but the doctor seemed to pull it off, and Staples found herself close to blushing. She gave a curt nod and spun her chair back round to face the rest of the staff, as much to hide the spots of color in her cheeks as to do her job.

“Dinah, are you patched in?” Staples addressed the air.

From down in the ReC, Dinah’s bold voice issued from the speakers. “I’m here, sir.”

“Yegor?” she said, indicating that he should start.

“Captain,” he nodded back at her, and then looked around at his fellow shipmates. “The satellite is a Yoo-lin mark VII. It’s a communications satellite. I repaired one once in high orbit. Best guess is, given how far out it is, that it collided with a meteor or another satellite and spun off out here. Lucky us.

“The Mark VII is nuclear powered, and judging by the strength of the distress signal, the reactor is still online. That means uranium, which we can adapt to our reactor. The Mark VII reactors were rated for at least a hundred years before replacement, and they were put up mostly around 2105. It should still be about eighty percent fueled, which will be more than enough to cover what we’ll burn slowing down. Circuit boards and electronics will be resalable, but not for too much. The wiring should be worth something. The Yoo-lins were designed to provide military and spacewatch eyes as a way for the company to make money from government contracts, and that means the lenses are valuable. Some of the mechanisms use soft metals, including gold. Most valuable, though, is the communications suite itself. It may be twenty-five years old, but I should be able to adapt it to our systems and provide some versatility and horsepower to our coms. Summary:” he glanced down at his surface, then back up at the captain, “about one hundred thousand dollars worth of materials, fuel, and an upgrade to the ship.”

Templeton whistled through his teeth. “That’s a nice little bonus for the crew. I assume we’ll have to slow down in a hurry?”

Staples replied. “Yes. Charis says three hours at close to three Gs, and every minute we spend deciding makes that thrust more uncomfortable, so we need to make the call now. I’m inclined to stop and pick it up, unless there are any objections.” A moment of silence passed. “Dinah, are you ready for a turn and burn? Charis will send down the exact data.”

“I think so, sir,” the head engineer’s answer was nearly instantaneous. “All readouts show green. A sustained three G thrust should be a strain, but not a problem.”

“Excellent.” The captain turned to her left, shooting her first mate a look.

Without words, he turned and opened the shipwide coms. “Heads up, people.” His voice issued from every speaker on every deck. “We’re going to turn and burn for a nice little salvage stop. We’ll be pulling two-point-eight Gs for about three hours. Strap in, grab something to do, and try to ride it out. We begin burn in…” he paused and looked at Charis. The blonde navigator held up four fingers, “…four minutes.” He released the coms button and looked at Charis again. “Where’s Gwen?”

Without looking up from her control panel, she answered, “She’s with her father. It’s math lessons this hour. He’ll take care of her.”

As he finished, Charis cut the engine thrust, and a moment later, the sense of weightlessness became apparent. The navigator continued her work on the controls, and Bethany took the ship through a gentle one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pitch. After two minutes or so, an Earth much smaller than the one Staples had regarded the day before crept back into the window, finally settling above them in the skylight and somewhat to their right. Staples spent a few precious seconds gazing at it through the skylight above her chair, and then said, “Do it.”

Charis’ voice came through the speakers this time, counting down the time to thrust. “Prep for bedsores in five, four, three, two, one…”

One-and-a-half grueling hours later, Yegor spoke up again. “Captain, I’ve got chatter coming in from another ship… and it’s close.”

Staples leaned forward in her seat and almost immediately regretted it. Under the weight of the intense gravity incurred by the deceleration, her normal sixty kilograms became over one-hundred-and-fifty, a weight her medium frame was not used to. She had experienced high-G conditions before, of course, most of them had, and the body could be conditioned to deal with them through time and exposure, but it was never enjoyable.

Charis frowned, looking down at her instruments and readouts. “I’m not getting anything,” the navigator commented, making adjustments and looking over her data. “Is it far out or right behind us?”

“Right behind us, I’d say.” Yegor replied. “They’re warning us off the find; say they’ve got the prior claim.” The captain looked back at her navigator.

“No way,” Charis countered. “No way. I scanned far enough before our turn. Nothing was close enough to get there before us unless it was moving fast to begin with
and
willing to pull six Gs of deceleration. Even with gravity couches, that’s dangerous.”

“Hold on,” Yegor interjected, his attention clearly divided between the headset in his ear and what Charis was telling him. After a few seconds passed, he added, “They say they’re not there yet, but they have tagged the satellite with a claim beacon and will be there shortly.”

A bad feeling crept into Staples’ gut.

“That don’t fly,” Templeton stated emphatically. “Salvage code says ‘first come, first serve.’  They can’t just fly around space tagging debris and calling it theirs. So what if they’ve got a rail gun that can shoot transponders at .25c? If they don’t get there ‘fore we do, it’s ours. That’s what the code says.” He nodded at his own assessment of the situation.

Staples’ jaw tensed. “Not everyone respects the code as much as we do, Don.”

“But it ain’t legal. What are they gonna do, shoot us?”

Every set of eyes on in the cockpit was on them. Even Bethany, her hair hanging straight down about her face like icicles, her dark eyes wide, had leaned around her seat to watch the two of them converse.

“No, I don’t think anyone out here would risk that.” The captain tried to assuage her crew’s concerns. “The lanes between Mars and Earth are a little too well monitored. They’d never get away with that. But if we go to the police and tell them some rival crew stole our salvage, well… half of them see salvage as theft anyway, green line or no.” She looked pointedly at Charis. “Is there any way to tell how far out they are?”

Charis shook her head. “Not if they’re coming at our ass.” She thought for a moment. “Unless we could power down the engines for five or ten minutes, then I could get a clean radar sweep. But then we’d shoot past the satellite, which kind of defeats the point. Unless of course…”

              “…We resume deceleration at three Gs or so.” The captain finished her thought. The moment stretched. The harder they pushed the engines, the more painful the ride became. Three Gs was generally considered the safety limit; no captain was happy to push their ship or their crew up to three, and certainly no one in the cockpit liked the idea, but it was difficult to plan without knowing how far away the other ship was. If the other crew had a reading on them and knew their engines were burning in their direction, they’d know the Gringolet wouldn’t be able to ascertain their position. “Five minutes to get a fix?” Staples asked.

              The navigator frowned and shook her head. “I can’t promise it’ll be that short. The further out they are, the longer the wait for the radar return.”

              Staples tapped her fingers on her armrest for a second while she considered, then said, “Okay, let’s do it. We need the information, and we’ve wasted too much time and fuel on this to come away with nothing. Don, let everyone know what we’re doing.” As Templeton leaned back to his shipwide coms button, Staples added, “Wait. Yegor, did that transmission contain an ID?”

              “
Da
, Captain. It’s the
Doris Day
.”

Captain Logan Vey’s deep voice flowed clearly from the speakers and through the cockpit. “So it’s clear, Clea, that we’ve got the prior claim. We saw it first. We tagged it first. Our
property
is currently attached to it. You wouldn’t steal from another crew, would you?” Vey was speaking to her as if she were a rebellious teenager, one who had been caught shoplifting and who would regret their decision if only they could be made to see the error of their ways.

“If by property, you mean that three centimeter transponder, you can have it,” Staples retorted evenly. She allowed a trace of contrition to enter her voice. “And not that laying eyes on something matters, but what makes you think you saw this thing first,
Logan
?”

Due to the distance between the two ships, the response took a few seconds to come through. “The fact that I know exactly what kind of radar suite you have on that old ship of yours, and that mine is twice as powerful. I’ve got a Narda G223. Ask your Russkie or Missus MacDonnell over there; they’ll confirm that.” Staples looked at Yegor, who thought for a second then regretfully nodded in confirmation. His face changed to a shrug, which his shoulders tried to match, though the movement clearly pained him. She couldn’t blame him; the man weighed about two-hundred-and-seventy kilograms at present. The expression was clear, however:
if he’s telling the truth
. She suspected he was. Logan Vey’s vessel was newer, faster, and more expensive than hers.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Some kid with a high-powered telescope on earth might have seen this thing before either of us. I don’t plan on leaving it there until he comes to pick it up either. If we beat you to it, that’s it.” The captain hoped she sounded certain and flinty, but her buttocks and legs were paining her dreadfully under the strain of the engines, and she just wanted it to end.

Vey continued, undeterred. “Look, Clea, I like you. I like your ship. Don’t make me-“ Staples tapped a button on the surface inlaid in her armrest and the transmission cut off. Templeton smiled over at her. He tried to project approval, but his face was tinged with concern.

“It seems,” Staples spoke over her right shoulder without turning the chair around, “that you chose a very interesting day to visit us up here, Doctor.”

“Indeed,” the doctor replied in his richly accented voice. “As fascinating as this is, I cannot help but feel that I should be in the medical bay, especially if this
ibn il-Homaar
intends to make good on his bluster.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Doc.” Templeton interjected, turning in his chair. “Medical’s twenty meters down ladder from here, and you weigh, what, two-hundred-and-twenty kilos right now? I know you like to keep in shape and all, but if you got hurt, who’d patch you up?”

“I’ll overlook your well intentioned comments about my weight, Mr. Templeton, and simply say that I can go and get ready to receive casualties once we stop,” he rolled his R’s subtly and unconsciously, “though I have the utmost faith that our captain will bring us through without a scratch.”