It was perfect. Clarke mouthed his qualifications to a red-faced foreman and assigned himself to a small team of haulers for whom the trip to New Angeles marked the start of their first two-year-long contract.
By the time the damage to the container row was fixed, Clarke was so tired he welcomed the incoming zero g. His body burned with physical exertion, but machines handled most of the heavy lifting nowadays. It was the numb sensation of his mind that he enjoyed the most, like he had achieved a miniature nirvana for a brief moment. He knew that, when he went to sleep for the night, he’d have no dreams, just a refreshing rest. Good, because otherwise he may think too hard about what the EIF’s had in store for him, and he may balk before hearing them out.
Instead of Captain Navathe’s six-hour estimate for leaving Jagal’s spaceport, it took twelve hours before the announcement blared on the speakers.
“Attention all crew and passengers,” said Navathe’s invisible voice, coming down from the speakers, “all preparations are finalized. Take-off will begin shortly. Report to your stations and to your assigned seats.”
Clarke’s assigned station was all the way to the first deck, close to the captain’s cabin. Before he made his way to the airlock on the second deck, a couple of his new contractor friends stopped him and invited him to ride the acceleration g’s in the crew quarters. Clarke accepted at once. He wasn’t ready to face the EIF. There’d be enough time for that, since the trip to New Angeles would last six weeks.
The Beowulf, like most commercial cargo ships, was designed as a belly lander, an optimal configuration to store cargo, and a poor configuration for human beings. Belly landers’ engines were situated at the stern of the ship, perpendicular to the keel, and opposite the command cabin, which was traditionally set at the bow. This tradition was avoided in military ships, since the command crew preferred to be as far away from incoming fire as possible.
When a belly lander crosses the distance between planetary space and the nearest Alcubierre point (a spot in space where the conditions were optimal for FTL travel, with enough distance to a star’s gravity well being the most important) it uses the explosive characteristics of the oryza to power its fusion drives.
This means that, during the two to three days it takes to reach an Alcubierre point, the ship’s acceleration creates a fake gravity centered on the engines. To better understand why this is annoying, picture having to spend three days walking on the walls of your house, not allowed to come down to the floor, which is now just another wall. Good luck sleeping on that bed.
Edge engineering firms’ solution was to add special crash-cushioned seats for everyone on board, built to lend support to the squishy human body against the ball-crushing effects of sailing through space while accelerating at three to five times Earth’s gravity. During those three days, not a single soul is allowed to leave the seats, with pauses for bathroom use, eating, and stretching.
After the ship reached the Alcubierre point and generated its energy-density ring, six weeks at zero g would follow, with its own problems and annoyances for the crew.
Veteran sailors called this switch “Pop’s old one-two combo.”
Clarke strapped himself to the first available seat, updated his location in the ship’s intranet (so the computer wouldn’t flag him as missing), and turned to the contractor next to him, a pock-faced guy of about fifteen years old. Clarke realized the kid was staring with dismay at the speakers by the quarter’s walls, listening intently to Captain Navathe’s announcements like a religious man in a church sermon.
“First time aboard a spaceship?” Clarke asked him.
The kid tried hide his apprehension by toughening into a frown. But when he realized Clarke wasn’t making fun of him, he nodded slightly.
“We’ve all been there,” Clarke said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. You brought any good videos in your wristband? Better for you to be distracted until the combo.”
Most of the crew was useless during the three-day window, except for the command crew and a few others. When he had been but a cog in the Defense Fleet war machine, Clarke and his fellow ensigns had come to see it as a prolonged rest day. The alternative was to stew in your own sweat, painfully aware that your heart and balls were trying their best to envelop your spine.
In the bridge, Captain Navathe finished her pre-take off litany. Clarke couldn’t see it, but he knew that, somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of Jagal’s spaceport, a gigantic industrial hand was hauling Beowulf from its storage position and gently pushing it to open space. When the ship’s computers reported that the distance between spaceport and the ship’s fusion engines was safe enough, the spaceport’s flight controllers would unlock navigation access back to Beowulf, and then they’d leave Jagal.
As the ship left the starport’s spin, gravity vanished. All around Clarke, sailors strapped themselves to their seats. He followed suit.
No going back now, Clarke said to himself. Next to him, the young contractor began to pray in a whisper.
7
CHAPTER SEVEN
DELAGARZA
When Delagarza caught sight of the shuttle that would take them out of the spaceport and back into Alwinter’s dome, he burst into laughter. He couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?” asked Krieger, a few meters ahead of him, while she cleared the departure procedure with the foreman of the enforcer’s private hangar.
“It’s just too much,” he explained, pointing at the aerodynamic, slick monster that buzzed softly in front of them. “What, are you guys planning to wage a war in Dione? Overthrow a shadow yeti government, maybe?”
“Yeti?” Krieger asked, frowning.
“Just local folklore,” Delagarza said, still smiling.
Truth was, it was only part of the joke. The shuttle, unlike a starship, was built for planet-fall and atmospheric re-entry. It was bullet shaped, with the fusion engines (no Alcubierre) at the bottom of the ship and the crew at the top.
At some point during the shuttle’s design, someone decided to make it stealthy.
Clearly, not a military design, but living proof of what happened when you gave unlimited budget to independent contractors. Stealth ships in this day and age belonged to the realm of imagination and movies. Yes, technically, the oily black surface of the shuttle could reflect radar, to a point. Delagarza harbored no doubts that the ship had bleeding edge jammers and inner systems would hide all the on-board chatter and radio noise. Hell, even the main weapon (anti-starship machine gun, .50cal depleted uranium shells) had what amounted to big silencers on its barrels.
The price tag must be ridiculous. More credit put together than what Delagarza’d see in his entire life.
And it didn’t matter one bit because there was no power in the known universe that could do anything to hide the heat of the fusion engines’ torch. Oryza-powered, and radioactive as fuck, it made the emissions even easier to detect than a normal, atmospheric-flight-only craft. The SA may be top dog in this part of the galaxy, but thermodynamics carried the leash.
It was a perfect ship for the enforcers. Overpowered, overpriced, over-clocked, and it would only ever be useful in worlds they already ruled and where no one wanted (or could) bring them down.
Besides, it looked like a black shark’s head. Personal vehicle of Major Nicholas Strauze, no doubt.
“Whatever,” Krieger said, when the foreman left her side, “keep your local fairy tales to yourself. Focus on cracking that computer, so I don’t have to stay at your ice block planet any longer than I have to.”