3.
Section Leader Ridge had a feeling of déjà vu as he looked up from his digital writing pad at the main table in the crew mess in WorkPod01. Ridge was a slim, wiry man with dark hair, strongly angular facial features, and large inquisitive dark eyes. Rock music boomed from a speaker on one side, while holographic movies played in two or three corners, one woman lifted weights, another woman slept in a sling mat under an artificial sun-and-wind machine, and two men played chess over a tiny table. The table was littered with digital writing tablets, holographs of loved ones back home on Earth, and a hundred other little personal items that eight long-haul space mariners tended to accumulate around them in their everyday life. Last night had been Asian, and in the middle of the table were piled half-empty food containers that smelled faintly of miso soup, sweet and sour shrimp and beef, eggs tofu garnished with seaweed, sukiyaki, and a dozen other ethnic dishes. Ridge had to admit: the Corporation took good care of the crew's culinary and other personal needs, as best that could be done two billion kilometers from home port on Luna.
Mahaffey, a welding tech 1, belched loudly in a corner. He watched a holographic remake of a Hitchcock suspense film. "Are you looking at that food again?" Mahaffey said in a booming voice. He was a long, slender man of African descent, and Ridge always found it amazing how Mahaffey could be comfortable wrapping himself into a ball in his white composite chair with those long stocking-footed legs protruding.
"I just glanced at the boxes," Ridge said. "Isn't it Lantz's turn to clean house?"
"Guilty as charged," said the athletic redheaded woman who was just then pumping iron in another corner--Lantz, a metallurgy tech 1, which Ridge thought of as a fancy term for welder, although lots of times the welding was delicate micro, nano, and even smaller stuff requiring world class microscopes and tools so small a sneeze would blow one's whole toolkit from here to the asteroids and back.
"It's E.S.P.," Mahaffey declaimed without looking away from his holo. "If anyone even thinks about food, I start getting gas." Mahaffey was a metallurgy tech 1 and as a much a competitor as a colleague of Lantz. Like everyone on board, they were a careful match made by expert Corporate social scientists interested in keeping peace aboard these long hauls. One did this with lots of work, a little play, and no stray emotional crosscurrents except a little vinegary banter.
"I'm still full from last night," Ridge agreed. He flicked his stylus idly around his nose while struggling with the words in a report. Other section leaders he'd known could simply dictate verbally and the tablets output text, but Ridge was too self-conscious about his own writing to let it flow like that. Briefly, he thought about the other sections in the vast ship. What were they doing in WorkPod02? 05? 69? There were something like forty self-contained workstations like their own, each manned by eight technicians capable of handling any emergency or maintenance task whether mechanical, electrical, or biological-or any combination thereof. "Hey, Mahaffey," Ridge said, "don't we have intramurals coming up soon?"
"Yeah, we have a round of volleyball due," the long dark-skinned young man said, folding large hands on a flat stomach. "When we get the large holds on front and stern emptied out on the return trip, we can play baseball in them under the lights, just like home."
Lantz chimed in: "Just like home, but no honey and no kids."
"You're not married," Mahaffey bantered back idly.
Sweat dribbled from Lantz's tightly braided golden-red hair and ran down her plain, healthy, freckled features. "Speak for yourself, Moses. I have one kid and when I get back he'll never have to play alone again."
Ridge chuckled to himself and tried to focus on his work while the others chattered playfully. "Tonight will be Greek night," he reminded them, as if rubbing it in. "Work hard today. Burn off the carbs."
"Cruel master," Lantz jibed. "Who else here besides me pumps iron? Nobody. If I don't do this, I can work all day and still be as wide as I am tall."
"Which is not very," Tomson said. He was a shorter, older dark-skinned biotech, EMT, often known as "doc." He was the best biomedical tech in the service, but Ridge and most of the others thought Tomson had developed a sour streak and should have retired long ago. How many million-dollar jobs did a person need to retire rich, before he or she was too old to enjoy a beach house on the Med or a villa in the Rockies?
"Says who?" Lantz said, stopping to towel her dripping face. She wore black and blue tights under a flowery torso garment. She also wore a white headband and a wide blonde-leather kidney belt.
Tomson grinned from his chess game. "Says a hundred bucks I have in my pocket. You want to bet I can't lose ten pounds faster than you can with all that sweating and puffing?" Tomson's quiet chess partner was Yu, a bio-engineer 1 who specialized in servomech wetware but could expertly handle any sort of halfway intelligent motile artificial tool.
Lantz puffed loudly as she hopped to her feet after finishing her sets. "Exhale and you'll lose ten pounds of hot air."
Brenna came out of her module and slapped palms with Lantz. Lantz headed off to the shower, while Brenna took Lantz's place on the exercise complex. Brenna was the tallest of the four women in WorkPod01, towering inches above Lantz, Jerez, and Mughali. The latter, an electrical and mechanical engineer 1 from Mumbai, who was still asleep in her personal module, was despite the name a practicing Hindu with a red dot of kumkum powder on her forehead.
As he watched Brenna walk by, Ridge felt a strange skip in his heart. He felt a special affection for her that he believed she somehow returned, although these things were not supposed to happen. Like every person on the ship, whether in this workpod or any other, Ridge and Brenna had their own loved ones back on Earth or Luna. Ridge was from San Diego, where his wife Dorothy and their two children lived in the sunny seaside community of Imperial Beach. Brenna had a husband, Ricardo, and a little boy and girl, back on Earth in Buenos Aires. She was originally of Cuban-German extraction, having grown up in New England, but had married an Argentine airline pilot and moved to the Villa Santiago de Liniers, Buenos Aires to be a school teacher. Ricardo and she were very much in love. Ricardo came from a wealthy family of building contractors, but they had fallen on hard times. Ricardo and Brenna had decided he should retire from flying and go it from scratch in a new business as a cyber engineer, using his copious college and family connections. They had decided that one four-year haul around the planets would set them up for life. With an extended family including lots of aunts, the hardness on the children would pass and they'd benefit for the rest of their lives. Like most persons on board including Ridge, Brenna communicated daily with her family back home. Ridge's situation was much more straightforward. He'd graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at San Diego, done six years as an Air Force engineering officer, married a Miss San Diego (Dorothy) just out of junior college, and planned to do four full tours before retiring as a wealthy man. This was his third tour. He was in mid-career. Standard practice was to get a year at full pay and half time, usually consulting, which was very cushy, and they'd moved from the more military oriented Imperial Beach to the more upscale Mission Hills overlooking the bay. Despite all that, Ridge felt a chemistry with her (ironic, because as they had kiddingly observed, she was a chemical engineer 1) that made them feel exceptionally close, even when they were simply near each other, without even looking at each other or speaking. It was a potentially dangerous matter, and they let a little go a long way, spending very little time directly or alone together. By common practice, a person's single-room room ("cube") was off-limits to all others, so individuals rarely visited each other at such a personal level. Instead, the workpods were spacious and designed to offer optimal elbowroom and the illusion of far more room than there was.
Brenna sat in her stirrups, rowing. She was an attractive woman with rich dark-amber hair and deep blue eyes. She had pleasantly proportioned features that conveyed a delicate balance of strength and softness. She was disciplined, but kind. Ridge watched for a moment as she moved forward and backward in the soft light. Tiny golden hairs glowed on her long pale arms with their wiry upper-arm muscles. Other than being tall, she was generally unremarkable in stature, with smallish breasts and a tendency toward a beanpole straightness rather than much curvature, so he wondered what it was about her that made his heart beat this way, and his thinking grow fuzzy, and his fingers tremble just a bit. She glanced up at him as she rowed, and smiled faintly, with her eyes glowing briefly, deep blue, like a forest pond amid the tangle of her hair. Ridge nodded and turned away, feeling a flush in his cheeks.
A shudder or a creak or the faintest of groans or something passed like a wave through the room. That would be WorkPod01 starting to move on its tracks, heading toward the area where repairs were needed.
Mughali, wearing an ornately decorated mustard sari of silk over her red tights, came from her cube to wash a few items of clothing in the laundry sink. "Looks like it's going to be a busy day," Mughali said in her lilting Universal Anglo. One of those laughing, happy, impromptu conversations about nothing and everything instantly ensued among the crewmembers. Ridge smiled to himself. He saw Mughali at the sink; Tomson and Yu playing chess; Lantz whistling as she swept from the showers in to her cube, wearing her carrot hair in a turban and a fluffy white robe over her newly exercised musculature; Brenna rowing away; Mahaffey curled up in front of his movie with his stocking feet outthrust; and now Jerez, the other woman, a cyber-engineer 2, emerged from her cube.
Each of the eight members of WorkPod01 had a round tunnel to crawl through, leading to the quiet and privacy of his or her personal space. Each cube was 20 feet to a side, and arranged as each person saw fit. Typically, it resembled a college dorm room with holos and a thousand little personal mementos attached to neutral beige walls, plus lounging space, a small collection of light recreational drugs approved by the home corporation, enough holofilms to last hundreds of hours, and access to a world's library. One could slide shut what Yu referred to as a moon door made of translucent plast, and be alone.
Jerez emerged from her moon door to find something cold to drink in the kitchen. Jerez was a slender, dark-haired woman of Filipino-Spanish extraction, who'd grown up in Singapore but married a Norwegian and had holos of her several blond children alongside a smiling Oslo businessman who, but for his buckteeth and daffy smile, might have been a Viking in some earlier age.
"Section Leader Ridge, are you there?" said the voice of Captain Venable.
Ridge ran his hand across the wall, and a cube of light flicked on. There was the image of the ship's handsome, graying captain who was from Paris and vaguely resembled Cary Grant. "How are you doing, Sir?" He added apologetically. "I'm working on my report about yesterday's repairs. I'll have those to you before we walk out the door today."
"No hurry," Venable said. "I'll take your report for both days if you want to pass that to me later this evening."
"I'll be tired," Ridge said. "I'd rather not fall behind."
"A sensible policy," Venable said. "Are you ready to go out?"
Ridge shrugged. "Sure, we all are."
"How are the crew taking the work?"
"You mean the disaster?"
Venable nodded. "Just a little concerned. I know you're all professionals but this was a close call for all of us."
Ridge nodded. "I think we are all calm and self-assured, Captain. No panic, nothing like that." He winked. "Your leadership, Sir, is exceptional, of course."
Venable winked back. "Flattery will get you everywhere, Ridge." Venable was an easy-going, confident captain of many years' experience on the Luna-Neptune run. His home was in Miami, where his wife still lived, although his two daughters had grown up, moved away, and married. Though only visible from the chest up, with a bland background in his office in the Bridge Command Post (CP) area forward, as opposed to WorkPod01's location amidships, he looked tanned and fit as always. His bluish-white uniform shirt looked well tailored and crisply ironed, and his little color-garden of decorations sat snugly above his shirt pocket. On his shoulders were four gold stars on a black epaulet, in contrast to Ridge's humble one black bar on a collar tab. In matters of rank and service, the gulf between the two men was vast, but both were graduate cyber-engineers and that made them colleagues and equals on some level. Venable said: "I'll speak to the group again when you are assembled and ready to move out for the day's work."
"Thank you, Sir. I hope by then to have this..." (Ridge made a show of gritting his teeth and preparing to toss his digital tablet into the screen where Venable's image glowed) "...Damned piece of scribbling finished and out of my hair."
Venable chuckled. "There are all sorts of artificial writing systems available on the market if you wouldn't be so damned stubborn, Ridge. Do things the easy way." He signed off, and the screen beside Ridge went blank.
Behind him, during that conversation, the dynamic of banter and conversation had whirled about some unseen axis. The crew one by one disappeared into their cubes. They soon stepped back out of their moon doors, fastening up the tabs on their jumpsuits. In normal working conditions, everyone wore white work suits or jumpsuits with orange trim on the shoulders for safety and visibility. Depending on their occupational specialty, their collar tabs might be tan (bio) or light blue (cyber) or gray (chemical, only Brenna in this workpod), and so forth. Ridge was the only one with a black collar and a black bar edged in white.
Brenna emerged from the shower and sat briefly beside him, drying her hair. She wore a thick, fluffy blue frotte robe and toweled her hair with a white towel. "Am I bothering you?"
"You're never bothering me. You're taking me away from this report thing that I hate."
"I'll write them for you."
"You're kidding. You'll do that for me?"
"You look so helpless."
"Gee, thanks. I didn't know it showed." He sat back in his chair, folding his hands over the flat of his belly. "Talk to home?" It was a standard question. There was no weather here to make small talk about. Calling home was the big event in everyone's daily life.
She nodded. "Ricardo bought a new car."
"What kind?"
"He didn't say."
"Did he look sad?"
She laughed. "No." She had a lovely way of rolling her eyes and smiling so that her teeth glowed and there was warmth tumbling all around her. And all around Ridge, who did not wish she would go away.
"Well, then it must not be too expensive, and it must be a nice car."
She nodded. "I would imagine that's what it is." Her features grew faintly more serious. "How are Dorothy and the kids?"
Ridge thought for a second. "Oh hell. I need to call home, don't I? This report has kept me so busy. Dorothy was fine, when last we spoke. My son and daughter are fine." He added. "In school, doing well." He added. "My girl plays goalie on her soccer team, and my boy is in Cub Scouts."
She leaned her head to one side and toweled in her ear. Then she repeated the procedure on the other side, turning her head that way. Her dark hair lay glossy and wet and tousled against the perfect shape of her head. She had a wide, tall forehead that made her look intelligent, he found as he studied her skin. She had fine, clear skin, without any particular scars or deformations, although her nose had a strong frontal edge and a nice knobby bridge. She saw him staring at her and looked away. As she did so, she twirled the towel and did a dervish thing from the waist up to form a huge fluffy turban in one smooth, practiced motion from having done it many times over many years. He smiled, thinking about all those little habits each person acquired over a lifetime and how they made everyone unique. He wondered again why she made him feel warm and energetic, and why he wasn't frightened since he had a wife at home who would not like to know the truth of such a diversion in his affections. What could he say to her? He placed his hands on his knees, preparing for her to leave and himself to get busy with other things. Should he say, we've got to stop meeting like this? How did one not have small talk with a person on a space ship a billion klicks from home? And what had they really ever done together but sit close, over cups of hot steaming tea in the lounge among all the other crew, and talk softly together about their own wives and children? She had never been to San Diego, but he had filled her with tales of strolling with Dorothy and the children along the sandy paths on Fiesta Island or among the goldfish ponds and botanical gardens of Balboa Park. Likewise, she had told stories of walking with Ricardo and their children along the Plaza de Mayo, on the breezy Avenida Emilio Castro in Liniers, on the beach near Cantilo in Belgrano, or motoring north for the weekend though Pueyrredon. In a sense, all cities and families, all lives and desires, had a universality that made them at once unique and interesting to tell about, yet interchangeable like clothing; or so Ridge had once remarked, and she had laughed that sensual, throaty laugh of hers while throwing her head back aglow with fond teasing. You are too much, amigo. So she had said, still dripping from the fountain of laughter, and he had said with much pretense of wisdom: Better too much than not enough, carissima.
She rose, pressing her turban between her palms, and said: "I'll write your report for you later when we get back. Just leave it there on the table for me."
"Thanks." He rose. "You're a life saver."
"You are a life worth saving," she said, walking to the privacy and secrecy of her cube in long, languid strides. She left him a sultry afterglance, a mix of innocence and hidden meaning he could not fathom.
Within an hour, Ridge stood by the portal and the others were beginning to form up in a casual line facing the video screen in the bulkhead beside the exit. On the other side of that dark, riveted metal door was a steel grid platform, and beyond that the vast belly of the cargo ship Neptune Express.
Ridge had an uneasy sense in remembering the meteorite impact. No surprise--the wounds and the shock were still fresh, and six plain white coffins sat in a special holding room far away in the stern of the ship, with Federal Earth flags draped over them--mute testimony to the frantic and chaotic days spent saving Neptune Express just recently. Once you lived through something like that, it took a long time to sleep well again and not to jump at the slightest tremor or noise. Then again, people were resilient. They joked. They fought. They talked. They started healing immediately. In space, you had to. There was no choice.
Since Brenna had made his day by relieving him of his report writing agony, Ridge spent some leisure time, first in his personal cube, then at the main crew table eating breakfast.
First he shaved and showered. The showers were in a common area, but each person had a reserved and private bath cubicle. (The potty facilities were also individual and private, located in another area of the workpod, and each crewmember had a virtual library in theirs.) For a good ten minutes in the shower, Ridge stood in the steamy atmosphere while needles of hot water exercised his skin. He changed the showerheads several times, settling finally on a nice steady stream. He used the special milled lavender soap he and Dorothy had picked up on a tour through Provençe, along with sunflower kitchen towels. He'd shaved using a new gold-plated four-blade razor and some very foamy cream, which worked fine as long as no stray suds escaped from the steamy confines of the shower. He changed from hot water to hot air and let the stimulating breeze dry him off. Grabbing a fluffy robe from a dispenser, he wrapped himself up and strode back, through his moon door (named after those round moon gates built into classical Chinese gardens and palaces) into the comfort of his personal cube. He felt much better.
He turned on the wall screen and dialed up San Diego. Familiar scenes of beaches, palm trees, botanical gardens, workaday streets, shopping centers, and freeways flashed by. Dorothy's face appeared on the screen, looking a bit formal since she'd had a makeover just to create this video reply. "Hello. I can't answer my personal comdeck just now, maybe because I'm in the garden or busy with the kids or out shopping, but if you will leave a message I will return your com as soon as possible. Thanks, and have a lovely day."
"Honey," Ridge said, "sorry I missed you today. Give the kids each a big hug for me, and a kiss, and maybe I'll have a chance to catch you after we get back from our work detail if I'm not too tired. You know how it is. Long hours, no sleep, and I'm too beat to even fall into the shower. Love you. Bye." These messages were always awkward, though he could tolerate them a lot better than writing reports.
With an hour to kill, and knowing the long exhausting shift ahead outside the workpod, Ridge crept into bed--a fancy sort of sleeping bag on a large upper bunk. He snuggled in to get comfortable, thinking it ironic that the living quarters were called the workpod, while the work was done anywhere but in here; although, one might allow, the entire lower floor consisted of specialty workshops for welding, brazing, chemical analysis-almost a mobile factory, so to speak. Closer to home though: in the cube, below the bunk where he now lay, was his desk, his thinking area, his place to speak recordings for home, read poems sent by his two small children, watch holovids directly on the desktop of Dorothy relating neighborhood gossip. Sometimes she would shoot him an hour or so of just plain day to day, moment to moment footage, like the mailman ringing, the children tramping through on a rainy day and getting yelled at, the golden retriever romping from couch to love seat and around all the living room furniture in one big circle while Dorothy, predictably, doubled over in a mix of laughter and yelling. These were the truly relaxing and wonderful moments of his day. What a miracle, that the tiny moments of life in a San Diego suburb could be beamed across such vast distances to such a tiny dot in space. Ridge had not slept well last night for some reason, and now his body hungrily sopped up the extra hour of sleep, like a plant soaking up a good watering.
As he drifted off, he looked forward to spending a little time, maybe a half hour, talking with Dorothy and watching the kids, all with a delay of several hours, of course. He and Dorothy couldn't directly talk because of the delay, but sent each other loving little messages. The pix of the kids were usually a few hours old. The time of day on board Neptune Express was synchronized with that in San Diego, but this time delay threw it all off. Dorothy liked to transmit early, so he tended to be watching early morning footage. He could just put it all together in his head, from the senses and from memory. He could imagine that the dew was still wet on the grass, and maybe the street lights were still lit against a dark blue sky, and the morning breeze smelled fresh with the faint distant undertones of ocean and desert, not to mention eucalyptus and jasmine wafting up from the canyons, and maybe a touch of anise, a scent of citrus blossoms, and of course always that noxious hint of hydrocarbons not burned well from a passing mail truck.
Daydreaming of Dorothy and his little son and daughter, he dozed off. Distantly, he thought he heard laughter from a card game in the galley. He felt regular little tremors as the workpod moved on its axis, as it crept along on greased mirror-like steel surfaces. What luck, he thought again, to be alive, when they could all have died if a slightly larger object had struck the ship.
As he dozed off, he could imagine what sorts of dreams the others might have. Lantz might dream of running along the deep, mysterious green rainforest trails around the Olympic Peninsula, her home. Mughali might dream of shopping for clothing in the fashionable Marais in Paris, where her parents had moved, in this cosmopolitan and global world. Yu probably thought of his family, who lived in a planned development on Chongde Lu near Huaihai Park. Tomson, on the other hand, most likely had stormy thoughts of a crowded neighborhood in Sand City in old Philadelphia, a blues joint, a good pizza, and a brisk whiskey before bed. What did Jerez think of...sleepily, he lost track and thought of Brenna strolling arm in arm with Ricardo on the Plaza Dorrego in Colegiales, Buenos Aires, or perhaps sharing a half-pint of Italian-style cerveza tirada while watching tango dancers and listening to sensuous but melancholy bandonéon music. Why did he somehow feel he belonged there with her? He almost sobbed with frustration at the impossibility of it. Why have these dark thoughts? Why have these forbidden fantasies? In his dreams, as he lay on his back savoring the quiet and comfort of his cubicle, Ridge forced his thoughts in another direction. He made himself think about how he would take Dorothy and the children up onto the breezy bluffs of Cabrillo Point, high above San Diego bay and North Island, with the sandy and sparkling Coronado far below, and the red conical roofs of the Victorian-era Hotel Del, and beyond that the high-rise condo hives of wealthy Mexican economic refugees along the Silver Strand.
Feeling rested and refreshed, Ridge woke about an hour later. He could still feel occasional gentle rocking motions as WorkPod01 traversed forward under pressure of its inner worm gears all packed with grease and silicon. He put that off--work would begin in the dimness, far from the sun, inside the vast hangar-like structures of the ship, and that was what they got paid to do, and do well. He washed his face at the sink, dried himself with a towel, donned fresh underwear, and changed from his robe back into his jump suit.
Out in the lounge area, a loud card game was in progress as the staff sat in their jumpsuits ready to go. They looked stiff and bulky in web gear with back and front packs containing water, oxygen, and tools. The place was cheery with laughter, the aromas of brewing coffee and tea, the sweetness of pastries, and the occasional exhilarating whiff of stimtube. The conversation was a customary desultory mix of cross-talk, some of it revolving around salaries. They were all paid well, on standard sliding scales, and everyone pretty much knew what everyone made, base, but of course the company strung them all along with various bonuses and nobody actually revealed what he or she really had waiting in their bank account back on Earth. Whatever it was, it had to be comfortable and the envy of Earthside labor, or these people wouldn't risk life and sanity out here in the eternal silence, so Ridge thought as he wandered through.
Ridge fixed himself a little breakfast in the galley and sat at the table. Someone had cleaned away last night's Asian detritus and the empty containers sat in an autowash incubator ready to get cleaned and processed for reuse as Greek or Tejano or Hawaiian or Belgian or whatever was the next culinary adventure. Ridge blocked out the general noise as he sat reading Homer's The Odyssey and slurping milk and cereal from a bowl. In artificial gravity, one could slurp from a bowl, albeit cautiously. A loose loop of sugared, cinnamoned, toasted wheat could float away in the low gravity ten feet above the baseline floor, get into a vent, and seriously hog up the whole show if it found its way into just the right--or wrong, Ridge supposed--tube or hole or whatever. As he read, he idly plashed a finger in the liquid that pooled around his cereal bowl. A milk container stood like a little tower nearby, still beaded with condensation from the fridge. Like much else on board the markings on the cereal box and milk carton were cheery, subdued, and functional without the excessive clamor of commercial advertising. There was, however, a small caricature of a smiling cow on the milk carton, and pictures of happy children with red cheeks on the cereal box.
A red light began to silently wink on and off, high up in the dark struts that resembled faux ceiling beams. The ship was loaded with psychological tricks to put walls of comfort between the interplanetary travelers and their natural fears, their loneliness, the constant nearness of disaster and death. For one thing, the ship maintained a natural cycle of days and nights in exact concordance with that at the travelers' most recent stay on Earth--the northern temperate zone space center near San Diego, where Colfirio had its global headquarters. Next, although the ship was a cylinder ten U.S. football fields long and one football field in diameter, with huge amounts of empty air space inside, one normally never saw any long vistas. There were tight spaces for coziness, wider spaces for communal but still cozy activity, and of course the huge warehouses for cargo. Most of the time, by day, you were surrounded by glassy and light-reflective surfaces reminiscent of the semi-arid mesas and canyons inland from San Diego. Dry, fresh breezes maintained the illusion further. By night, one tended not to see ceilings and far spaces, which stayed in shadows and countered any feelings of claustrophobia. In short, the ship was state of the art, first lulling the body with unspoken cues that it was in a familiar and safe place on earth. In so doing, the ship cued the subconscious into believing this information. Finally, this lulled the conscious mind into forgetting where its owner really was--on a fragile dust mote floating far from home.
Two images seemed to creep out at one from nowhere, at odd moments, unexpectedly, on a wall monitor here or there. One was the white and blue wispy globe of Earth with its cratered olivine Moon. The other image was that of another disconcertingly blue planet with wispy clouds, albeit four times the diameter of the home world, and choked with liquid methane: Neptune, named after the ancient Roman sea god. In that second picture, one tended to be looking over a greenish-glassy landscape pimpled like a melon's skin: Triton, Neptune's largest moon. That image came from Triton Base, the orbiting space station from which workers could rise or fall above Triton. As the image of Earth got smaller, the image of Neptune got larger.
As always, the ship performed miracles in managing its artificial gravity, spinning on its axis, and it was sometimes hard to remember one was deep in the solar system like a grain of sand in the ocean.
There was a definite shudder now. The workpod was moving slowly on its axis, heading through the vastness inside the ship toward the next trouble spot the crew must fix, resulting from the recent meteorite impact. The images of Earth and Neptune had not appreciably changed in size, but that was an illusion of the human eye and the ship's technology, for the ship was rushing along faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. All banter stopped for a moment, and the crew of WorkPod01 looked up.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen." A face appeared on the view screen, that of Captain Venable in his command module far away on the other side of the ship. The captain had a classic face, filled with a mix of severity and understanding. The colors were bad, and he looked a bit washed out. Ridge always thought it was the low sunlight this far out, but they had batteries charged up to the point of smelling and foaming, so it had to be just a few bad wires someplace. He'd thought about putting in a work order, just as a mercy thing, because the imperfect reception annoyed his engineering nature, but then he always dismissed the thought. Why volunteer for things, when it could only lead to complications and unexpected consequences?
"Good morning," the Captain said. He appeared to glance at a wall clock near his desk. "Still early." He smiled, like a friend who knew each of them personally, and each of the crew had met Venable at least once or twice. "I'm sure you are ready for a long, hard work day," the Captain said, "and I want to be sure to thank you for your great work in saving and restoring the ship thus far, and to tell you how much I look forward to our being completely back on line and in good shape as we approach our target planetary system."
Ridge nodded to himself, picturing: elevator-style, a dark blob amid lengthy dark and copper-colored shadows, the entire workpod would be moving toward the next trouble spot. On its upper side (up and down being artificial but necessary concepts here) WorkPod01 was a rather luxurious living area for eight. On its lower side, it contained a complete workshop. In a few hours, the entire pod could traverse huge industrial segments of the yawning interior of the ship. It was good this way. You could drive your home to your work, unlike uncomfortably commuting for hours between home and a job in the teeming and smoky industrial centers of Earth.
"Again," the Captain said, as he sat with his big, gnarled hands folded on his glass desktop, "thank you for your heroic and decisive action in saving the ship a few weeks back, and for staying on top of things so that we can make it safely to Triton for repairs. In the meantime, we have new secondary explosive damage in the outer cargo pods in Level..." (he paused, put on reading lenses, and consulted the gleaming readouts in his desk surface) "...61. That's where you will need to apply your next set of workarounds. I'm expecting..." (again he paused and waited while his desk computed data and spat out results) "...that you will need just two days to restore power and then splice together the cabling on 61A through 61L. It does get a little trickier. The shaft you're on is impacted all the way up to Ring 98, where we had a major blowout. WorkPod07 and WorkPod10 were unable to get close enough to make repairs..."
Ridge spoke up, helping the Old Man. "Sir, I believe those pods are more chemostatically oriented. We have the complete systech kit on our station for the repairs I think we'll need to make."
"Thank you, Senior Lead. You are absolutely right." The Old Man grinned feebly. "At least, I feel reassured to hear you say so."
Laughter rumbled through WorkPod01.
"We'll make you proud of us," Ridge boomed. He winked at Lantz and Mughali.
"Set your chronometers," the Captain said. "Thirty-six hours max, and I expect you'll return for an equal rest period. Insurance regulations, you understand."
Ridge spoke for everyone else. "That sounds good to all of us, Sir. Let someone else carry the load while we rest."
"That's right. Division of labor." The Captain looked pleased. "Thanks again, and best of luck. See you all back here safely at the end of your shift." Captain Venable signed off.
Tomson gave his usual supercilious look, and Lantz regarded Tomson with faint displeasure. Yun gave a thumbs-up sign demonstrating his equanimity, while the pragmatic Jerez quietly helped herself to a slice of bread, which she started buttering.
"All right," Ridge said as he carried his cereal dish to the sink, and tucked his Homeric classic on a shelf under the table for later reference. "Let's clean up so we return to a clean home." It seemed childish, but they had to be reminded sometimes not to act like a bunch of toddlers. It was all part of the human condition.
Just then there was a pounding on the door.
"What's that?" Tomson said, frowning. As EMT and sergeant at arms, as well as Bones or Doc, whatever epithet best clung to his strong shoulders at that moment, he was the first to push the others aside and stride to the portal. The gate was not quite ready to open, but he pulled aside the stiff canvas drapes covering a wide, narrow window in one door, and several persons cried out in shock and anguish.
A nightmarish and violent scene-a desperate scene without rhyme or explanation-was taking place before their eyes.
A man was outside the door, pounding on the glass window with the palms of his hands so that the door shook. The man was screaming, but his words sounded muffled and incoherent. His eyes were wide with terror and pain, and he seemed to be throwing himself against the door repeatedly.
"My God," a woman cried out-Jerez.
"We have to help him," someone said, but another person said: "No, don't open the door, he looks crazy." Another person said: "He looks berserk. He's scaring the shazzam out of me."
Ridge and Tomson exchanged glances. Tomson reached up in a small box above the door and pulled out a handgun. He looked at Ridge and shook his head. "Keep the door closed until we know what's going on."
"Anyone know that guy?" Tomson said.
There was a murmur of negation, a collective gasp of horror.
"I'm for that," Ridge said. Tomson tossed him a gun, and he caught it deftly while picking up a hand-phone from the wall. Pressing the buttons 3-3-3, he attempted to connect directly to Venable's CP while crew shrieked and nervously laughed all around him. The desperate man kept pounding on the window, but more feebly. He was leaving bloody palm prints now. It was getting hard to see through the reddish gore. "Hello, Captain?" Ridge was puzzled. "Sir? We are having an emergency of some sort." Instead of the Captain, he only heard static as if the line had been severed. "Sir, we need to know if something is going on out there."
There was a general shriek, and the techs inside fell back as the man suddenly appeared to be attacked from behind. He looked over his shoulder and made a face of sheer terror. Just one more time he looked into the window through the haze of his own dripping blood and gore. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open as if he were yelling-a warning of some kind, Ridge thought-and then gray shapes flashed by, tearing him away. It was all over in a second or two. Ridge did not get a good look at the man's attackers, and he was sure nobody else had. The window was just that gory and dirty by now. They had a single fleeting glimpse of the man being torn away backward, his eyes rolling up in his head, his arms twisted behind him. Grayish shapes, maybe men in pressure suits, briefly appeared on either side of his receding figure, and then he was gone.
The techs and engineers stood frozen in shock and disbelief, looking at the smeared window. Ridge hung the phone back up. "Nobody home," he told Tomson.
"What do you want to do, Ridge?" Tomson asked.
Ridge stepped forward. "We will go out as an armed work party. The work has to get done. There is no choice. The ship needs to be repaired, and we are on a tight schedule."
"That's pretty scary," several people protested.
Lantz asked in a kind of lamely hopeful tone: "Do you suppose the man lost his mind, and the ship's constables came to take him away?" Nobody answered her, and Ridge thought her scenario might have some faint grain of hope, but then again he'd never heard of an arrest going down in quite this manner. Wouldn't they leave one guy to knock politely on the door and tell everyone it was okay to come out? Ridge shrugged. "We'll carry guns and watch our backs. We cannot afford to slip schedule. Everyone okay with that?"
He received only pale, scared looks, but nobody refused. He thought grimly, as Tomson handed out the rest of the side arms, they wouldn't dare-they get paid too much. "The show goes on as scheduled," he told them. Nobody made a sound in reply. Armed and uncertain, they all fell back as Tomson rolled open the door. Ridge felt the blast of stale, oily, almost decaying air from outside. He felt goose bumps on his arms, and prickles of fear up and down his spine. There was not a sound to be heard, except for the distant dripping of water, and all the faint little noises that a huge ship naturally made, like wind rushing through tunnels, and metal popping as ambient temperatures changed.
"Door's open," Tomson said as if they needed to be reminded to step outside.
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