Quarter Share: A Trader's Tale from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper (9 page)

***

Down in the berthing area, we spread my stuff out on the table. Midafternoon was quiet since most people were on day watch and those who weren’t were either sleeping or engaged in their own pursuits.

Pip whistled when I brought out the computer. “This is a really good machine. It doesn’t mass anything like I would have expected it to.”

I shrugged. “Mom used it for her work, although I stripped her stuff off and sent it all to storage. It’s pretty empty now except for basic software.”

We started cataloging the courses I’d brought from Neris: astrophysics, plant sciences, ecological studies, accounting, advanced mathematics, and at least ten others. We didn’t get through the list because we kept getting side tracked by things we found and had to head back to the galley before we got through all the storage cubes. Pip kept exclaiming, “I can’t believe this.” Before we left I gave him the computer and credentials so he could use it.

“Thanks, Ish. This is going to make things much easier.”

“What simulations are you running?”

“Oh, just some trading sims.”

“Uh, huh.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, but I let him off the hook as we shifted into the evening routine.

Chapter 9

Darbat System
2351-September-28

The run into Darbat Orbital wasn’t terribly different then leaving Neris. The daily mess cycle gave all of us a structure to our day that became second nature. Cookie and Pip closeted themselves with the computer and whatever simulations they were running during the afternoon break. I took that opportunity to load up engineering training, intending to take the engineman exam after Darbat. I flashed through the instructional component in about a week and started taking the practice tests. I didn’t do too badly, but I couldn’t seem to get a passing grade.

The cargo materials were pretty straight forward: container types, cargo handling procedures, various techniques for securing containers and the proper way to use cargo manipulation tools like grav-pallets. There was not a lot of meat there, and I see that somebody might get a bit bored. The cargo handlers packed it in, made sure it didn’t move while we were underway, and unpacked it on the other end. I vowed never to complain about mess duty again as I tried to envision forty days in a row of: yup, it’s still there.

The other side of that coin would be that you’d have a lot of time to study for another rating. Looking ahead to cargoman, I saw the program got into various cargo types, trade rules, and some other more interesting stuff about the classifications of stores. The study guide contained lessons on margin, profit, and more safety regulations. Mr. von Ickles’ comment about turnover at the cargo handler level made a lot more sense once I saw what the job was, at least on the tablet.

I ran through the cargo handler instructional materials in one evening and took the practice exam just for fun. I aced it. Thinking it was a fluke, I tried another test the next afternoon and passed with flying colors again. Smiling, I sent a calendar note to Mr. von Ickles to reserve a seat at the cargo handler rating exams when they came up.

***

Midmorning, about a week after jumping into Darbat, we had a suit drill. Pip and I had almost finished the breakfast clean up when the klaxon started doing a whoop-whoop sound at about a billion decibels. My coworkers dropped everything and ran to a panel at the back of the galley. By the time the klaxon stopped and the announcement came, they’d already pulled out three lightweight suits with helmets attached and tossed one at me.
“THIS IS A DRILL. THIS IS A DRILL. ENVIRONMENTAL INTEGRITY HAS BEEN BREACHED. ALL HANDS DON PROTECTIVE GEAR. ALL HANDS DON PROTECTIVE GEAR. THIS IS A DRILL. THIS IS A DRILL.”

The sudden silence came as a blessed relief as I struggled to get into my suit. I had one leg in, and was working on the other, when I noticed my two co-workers looking down at me through their clear helmets.

Pip looked at Cookie for permission before speaking. “This,” he said, indicating me sitting on the deck, “is why we drill.”

Cookie spoke inside his suit, but I couldn’t make out the words. It sounded like a short report made in a formal tone. I continued to struggle into my suit, but before I got the second leg fully in, the announcement came,
“ALL HANDS SECURE FROM DRILL. ALL HANDS SECURE FROM DRILL.”

The captain’s follow-up announcement came immediately after,
“This is the captain speaking. Very good work people. At the end of three minutes only one person was listed as dead. Carry on.”

“Dead?” I asked.

Cookie took off his suit and nodded. “You have three minutes to get into a suit when the alarm sounds, young Ishmael. If you don’t make it, your department head lists you as dead.” I saw the disappointment in his face.

Pip and Cookie stripped off their suits, marked them as used by pulling a red tab on the hanger, and racked them back in the locker. Afterward Pip helped me, and we practiced with the suit for a stan before we had to set it aside and help Cookie with lunch. During the mess line, nobody mentioned it, but I could feel my ears burning and I knew everybody figured out I was the deader.

After lunch and the subsequent clean up, Pip continued to drill me. Two stans later, I still couldn’t get the suit on in under three minutes. My feet kept getting tangled in the legs no matter what I did. The longer it took, the more frustrated I became. For his part, Pip was right there encouraging me with, “Just once more. You’ll get it this time.”

Eventually, Cookie came over and watched me struggle under my friend’s direction for about three ticks, before he interrupted. “Very funny, Mr. Carstairs. Now would you care to show young Ishmael how to do it correctly?”

Pip had the decency to look abashed as he had me turn the suit around.

“You had me trying to put it on backward for the last two stans?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Sorry. Entertainment is in short supply out in the Deep Dark.”

“Jackanapes,” Cookie cuffed him on the back of the skull with the tips of his fingers. “What if he’d needed to get into that suit in a real emergency?”

I was having trouble not laughing myself even as the butt of his joke.

Cookie took the suit, folded it up so it looked like it came from the locker, and showed me where to grab it. A quick flick of the wrists and I stepped in, pulled it up, and shrugged into it in almost one smooth movement. A quick toss of my head and the helmet slid into place and I locked it down on the first try.

They took turns showing me things like the radio, patch kit, and the instrument panel mounted on the sleeve.

Cookie pointed to the air supply timer. “This is for emergency use only as it has just one stan of air. Use it just to get to a soft-suit or a lifeboat. You cannot survive long in it so you must be sure you know what’s going on around you if you ever have to put it on.”

Pip patted me on the back. “Next time you won’t be the dead one.”

“How often do we have these drills?”

“At least once every ninety days. Sometimes more.”

I took off the suit, folded it in the approved manner, and put the used indicator across the top before hanging it with Pip and Cookie’s. Several more were in the locker.

I pointed to the hangers with red tags. “What happens to the used ones?”

Cookie answered, “Someone from engineering will collect and reset them for use. Never take a used emergency suit because you won’t know how much air is left in it. You can’t change out of them in a vacuum and it would cost your life if you needed forty-five ticks and only got thirty.”

It was a sobering thought and I took it to heart.

As I closed the panel, I reached for my tablet. The ship’s schematic had an overlay showing all the emergency suit lockers. I made a mental note of the one nearest my bunk.

Cookie in the meantime turned to Pip. “You will be doing evening clean up alone for the next week, Mr. Carstairs.”

Pip nodded. “Aye aye, Cookie.” He may have tried to look contrite but he still had a big grin on his face. So did I for that matter. It wasn’t something to joke about, but still, it struck me as funny. Personally, I think Cookie left the galley then so he could have a good laugh, too.

Funny as it was, I was getting a little tired of being in the dark so I went to Beverly after dinner clean up. I found her reading in her bunk.

“Bev? Can you help me?”

She looked at me over the top of her tablet. “Dunno. Whatcha need?”

“What’s the story with these drills? I’m getting tired of being caught off guard by them.”

She chuckled. “Well, they’re supposed to be a surprise, but if you’ve never been through them, I can see why you’d be frustrated.”

“It’s making me a bit crazy. I’m okay with fire and suit drills now, but are there others coming up that I should know about?”

“It’s in your tablet under ship emergency procedures but I think the only one you haven’t been through is lifeboat drill. Do you know what your boat assignment is?”

I shook my head.

“Look up your record. It’s down near the bottom.”

I pulled out my tablet and found the notation. “It says boat four.”

“Odd to port, even to starboard,” she said. “Four should be the second boat back from the bow. You know where the boat deck is, right?”

I nodded. “I’ve seen the hatches under the track, but I didn’t look too closely at them.”

“Next time you’re in the gym take a look. Make sure you know where boat four is.”

“That’s it?”

She thought for a moment before saying, “There are some specialized drills, damage control and battle stations and such, but we only do those once in forever. Fire, suit, and lifeboat are the big three and we’re required to do each of them once a quarter, so get used to ’em.”

“Thanks, Bev. I’ll remember.”

I climbed up into my bunk and, on a hunch, I went through
The Handbook
and found a section on klaxon calls. The raspy buzz of fire, the whoop-whoop of hull breach, and the pingity-pingity-pingity of abandon ship were all there along with battle stations, general quarters, and a dozen others that I didn’t recognize. Even mealtimes had special tones that announced each one.

We were still a week out of Darbat Orbital when I arranged to visit environmental during the afternoon break. I’d been working through all the instructional materials on engineering, but I hadn’t been able to score a passing grade on the practice tests. There wasn’t any one thing I was missing, but rather a kind of diffuse inability to keep everything straight, particularly with the environmental stuff. All the scrubbers, filters, cleaners, and recyclers kept getting jumbled up in my head. I contacted the section chief on my tablet and made an appointment for a tour.

I knew the Environmental Section Chief, Spec One (Environmental) Brilliantine Smith, from seeing her in the mess line. She was easily the tallest person on the ship. I’d guess her height at something over two full meters. I’d also seen her in the gym and sauna. She didn’t carry an extra gram of fat on her frame. The best description I could think of was, willowy. She kept her chocolate-brown hair short like the rest of the crew and had a kind of generic galactic citizen, appearance, except that she had to duck to pass through most of the hatches on the ship. She walked with a kind of stoop, learned no doubt through hard experience.

Walking into environmental for the first time was like stepping into wet gauze. The smell was unmistakable, but I didn’t really find it objectionable. It was kinda funky and green smelling. Not quite fishy, but there was a hint of that, too.

Smith watched me enter and nodded approvingly. “You’re okay.”

“Excuse me, sar?”

She grinned. “No, sar, for me, Ish. I’m no more officer than Cookie.” She grinned even more. “Just taller. They call me Brill, among other less flattering appellations, I’m certain.”

“I—see,” I said, although I only got about half of what she was saying.

“You’re okay because you didn’t wrinkle your nose when you came in.”

“That’s good?”

She nodded with a wink. “Between the humidity and the smell, about half the people that come in here turn around and walk right back out. The humidity’s from the matrices and the smell is from the algae.”

“Okay, that much I understand. But there is still a lot I’m confused by.”

“How far have you gotten in the instructional material?”

“All of it, actually, but I can’t seem to pass the practice test. Things I get right on one, I miss on the next and around and around. I can’t seem to keep the scrubbers and the filters straight.”

“Filter the water and scrub the air down, mix water and algae to make it all brown.” She chanted it in sing-song with a smile.

“Wow, I actually understood that,” I said with surprise as it slowly penetrated my brain.

“First practical piece of advice we give people. Water gets filtered and air is scrubbed. Then they get mixed together. It starts with running the water through a collection of different media to filter out finer and finer impurities. Eventually, it goes into the scrubbers where it keeps the algae matrices wet. That’s probably where your brain gets confused because the scrubbers work on both air and water.”

“Okay, that makes sense so far. So, the air doesn’t get filtered?”

“Actually, it does, but we don’t have a separate filtering system for it. Not like the water. There’s a simple electrostatic field that the air is passed through when it first comes into the system. It snags all the dust and other particulates out of the air. Technically, that’s not a filter because a filter is a physical barrier, like when you make coffee. The weave in the paper has holes that allow the infused water to pass without permitting the grounds themselves. It’s the same idea with the water system although the chemical processing is a bit more complex.”

I nodded. “And because the air is passed through a field, and not a physical barrier, you call it scrubbing instead of filtering?”

“Exactly.” She nodded and smiled. “The scrubbers also grab any odd gases that make their way into the system. Those are usually byproducts from work on the ship like trace amounts of free esters, ozone, and so forth. The goal is to keep the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and trace gases consistent. The air coming into the system is high on carbon dioxide and low on oxygen so we feed it into the wet algae matrix where the algae absorb the carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Have you ever noticed that the berthing areas don’t smell like a locker room?”

I nodded.

“The algae loves the stuff that makes that smell. It would reek if not for that.”

“Right, thanks, that helps.”

“Come on.” She turned and beckoned me to follow with a wave of her hand. “I’ll give ya the half-cred tour.”

For the next stan, she showed me the inner workings that kept our air and water clean. I expected to be disgusted by some of the processing. Sewage isn’t exactly appealing, but I found myself fascinated by the way the air and water systems intertwined on the ship. There was a certain amount of unrecoverable waste, but almost ninety-eight percent of the air and water was recycled. At each port, we topped off the elements that got lost, used up, or destroyed. I even got a perverse bit of entertainment out of the notion that coffee was continually recycled through the crew’s kidneys, down to environmental, and back to the mess deck where it started the cycle anew.

When we got to the algae matrices, the-makes-it-all-brown part of the doggerel became apparent. According to
The Handbook
, the algae were a blue-green variety but when they were wet, exposed to light, and healthy, it wasn’t green at all, but a kind of reddish-brown. The matrix itself, was actually a synthetic film that held each little alga suspended to maximize its surface exposure. My preconceived notions about tanks of blue-green pond scum were blown away.

I laughed out loud and she turned a quizzical eye in my direction. “I don’t know why, but I had this idea that I’d find big vats with bubbling slime.”

She grinned. “That’s a common misconception. The bacterial recovery tanks are the closest thing we have to fit that impression, but they don’t bubble. We actually have to aerate them to keep the aerobic bacteria alive, not the other way around.” She looked pensive. “Now if we could just find a use for the sludge…”

“Sludge? What do you do with it now?”

“We press it into blocks, freeze dry it, and give it away to planets that need terraforming material. It’s not worth selling, and we’re prohibited from jettisoning it.”

That struck me so oddly that I laughed again. “Are they afraid the galaxy will fill up?”

She shook her head. “No, actually, back in the thirty’s it was okay to just drop ’em out the airlock. The problem was that one wound up splattered across the main viewing port of a passenger liner.” She did a good job of keeping a straight face, better than I could have. “Rumor is that several members of the CPJCT Steering Committee were aboard at the time and didn’t fancy having their view ruined by streaks of spacer sludge.”

“Thanks, Brill. This has helped a lot.”

My break was over and I needed to head back to the mess deck so we said our goodbyes and she gave me a friendly wave as I headed out.