Spacer Tales
The Lonely Engineer
S J MacDonald
Published by S J MacDonald
Copyright 2011 S J MacDonald
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The Lonely Engineer
It was a quiet evening at Kluskey’s. There were plenty of people enjoying the food, chatting around the bar and checking out the Wall, but not much of a buzz.
Too quiet, thought Tam Kluskey, and drew a long, foaming cornbeer, going to the end of the bar. An old man was sitting there, wearing baggy brown overalls. Jok Darrakin had spent most of his life travelling the stars. Now he worked for one of the many small companies providing tech services for starships in one of the League’s busiest ports. He called into Kluskey’s after work every day for a meal and a chat. One of Tam’s regulars, he could always be relied upon to spin a good story.
Putting the cornbeer down on the bar beside him as Jok pushed his plate away, Tam gave the old man a hopeful grin. Jok chuckled back, giving a nod and picking up the cornbeer. He saluted Tam with it and climbed up to sit himself comfortably on the bar.
There was an immediate rush of interest. People gathered around, many of them coming from where they’d been sitting in booths. The tradition of spacers telling tall tales in bars was almost as old as star travel itself and a hugely important part of spacer culture. Anticipation quickened as Tam dimmed the lights with a spotlight on the storyteller.
Jok took a moment to settle himself, giving people time to gather and casting an eye over them, gauging his audience. Almost all of them were spacers too. Kluskey’s was on Amarynth Station, one of the nineteen stations in the Neuwald system. Amarynth was a heavy industry station, spacedocks and starship service companies with a few shops and leisure facilities catering to the ten thousand people who worked there and the constant flow of spacers passing through. There was a good mix in this evening, with station workers, freighter and liner crew. There were even a handful of cadets from the Fleet Academy. Kluskey’s was one of the few bars the cadets were allowed to come to in uniform, since they maintained a strictly family-friendly policy until late evening when kids and cadets had to leave. There were a couple of kids in, then, spacebrats eating massive ice creams and bickering over which of them was going to finish theirs the fastest.
It was not, however, any of them that Jok focussed his attention on, but the one obvious groundhog. The kid looked about fifteen – a legal adult under League law but still likely to be at college. He was on his own, self conscious and a little awkward in the lighter gravity. Like all starships and space stations Amarynth had gravity set to League Standard which would be lighter than the natural gravity the kid had grown up with on Neuwald. He had been checking out the Wall, his manner painfully casual, as if trying to make out that he was a seasoned spacer and his looking at the ‘Crew Wanted’ listings was no big deal. In fact it was obvious that he was just a kid who’d heard that there was this wall-screen in spacer bars where you could get jobs working on starships. The Wall was something found in all spacer hangouts. In Kluskey’s it dominated one side of the bar, a huge holographic board showing readouts of the spacer network – ships and parts for sale and wanted, ships wanting crew, crew wanting ships, messages and items of mail which had been ‘put on the Wall’ to be picked up by spacers heading wherever it was addressed. The kid had been looking, no doubt, for any opportunity there might be for an enthusiastic but inexperienced deckhand. Now, seeing Jok sitting up on the bar, he came over to hover on the edge of the crowd, looking uncertain as to what was going on but not wanting to miss it.
Jok gave the kid a nod, and a couple of the regulars eased him through to be front and centre of the audience. It was done so casually that the kid barely realised what was happening. He was certainly unaware of the grins which were exchanged behind his back. He just looked thrilled that the spacers were even taking any notice of him, giving him friendly pats on the back and bringing him through to the front.
‘Right we are, then.’ Jok, having made up his mind, greeted his audience with the traditional start to any spacer yarn. ‘Gather up, folks, and hear the tale.’ He took a sup of his cornbeer. ‘This,’ he informed them, ‘is the story of the Lonely Engineer.’
Most of them knew that story already and had probably heard many versions of it in many bars on many worlds, but it was a good old favourite and got a pleased reaction. The few who didn’t know it – the kid and some of the cadets – looked intrigued as the old man paused, building a dramatic silence before starting to speak.
‘It was in the year twelve, out in Sector Nine. The freighter Surehaul Logistics 7 was hauling cargo out from Karadon to Canelon. A steadfast class whalebelly, it was.’ He looked at the kid, and seeing no recognition added for his benefit, ‘Six thousand tonnes, twenty eight engines. Slow old ships, but there are still quite a lot of them out there, packing cargo. The Surehaul 7 was an unlucky ship. It had an engine dephase the first year it was launched and four years after crashed into a spacedocks pylon, nearly writing it off. It was an independent for more than ten years under the name Emilia May, till the skipper went bankrupt. Then it sat in a spaceyard for more than a year till this Surehaul Logistics outfit bought it at a knockdown price. They changed its name, which as everyone knows is the unluckiest thing you can do to a ship…’ That got nods and murmurs of agreement from the spacers, which Jok took no notice of as he continued, ‘but worst of all, these Surehaul clowns had no idea what they were doing. They were groundhogs, money men, trying to get rich by buying starships cheap and hustling cargo. They gave the skippers next to no allowance for maintenance and ran with the cheapest crew they could get.’
There were murmurs of disapproval from the spacers, who knew how vital it was to invest in the safety of a ship both in technology and quality of crew. Tiny and fragile, starships hurtled superlight through wave space, perhaps not even seeing another ship for weeks at a time. They were entirely dependent on their own resources in the most hostile wilderness known to man.
‘There were seven souls on board,’ said Jok, with a tone which made it clear that nothing good was going to happen to them. ‘There ought by rights to have been ten or eleven, but the Surehaul owners wouldn’t pay for more than seven.
‘The skipper was Al Harthorn. He’d been unemployed for three years after being fired from White Star Freight for being drunk in command. A sour, bitter man who didn’t care about anything but his next paycheck. Then there was the engineer, Jernak Tamarez. He was forty two, and had been a deckhand for nearly twenty years before getting his mate’s ticket.’ The spacers nodded. In order to serve as skipper, mate or engineer aboard a commercial starship you needed qualifications and a licence from the Merchant Shipping Authority. Unless you were lucky enough to be taken on by one of the big shipping corporations who’d put you through college and their own officer training colleges, that could be a long, hard, expensive business.
‘He’d been stuck on Karadon for four months, trying to get a mate’s berth,’ Jok said, ‘and got the berth on the Surehaul 7 when their previous engineer walked off it, saying it was a coffin ship and he wouldn’t be responsible for it any longer. The other five – well, there was the cargo boss, who was no spacer at all but a groundhog hired by the company to hustle the cargo. Then there were three deckhands, one of them
a gambler, one handy with his fists, and a packer working passage.’
That was commonplace, tech-qualified backpackers working passage to travel between worlds. They generally weren’t fussy about the kind of ship they worked on, so long as it was heading in the right direction. The other two sounded like the kind of crew who’d struggle to get berths on quality ships, since few skippers were keen to have gamblers or fist-happy crew. ‘And,’ Jok went on, looking directly at the groundhog kid, ‘there was the galley hand. Sixteen years old, mad to go into space, he couldn’t get a berth at his homeworld so he’d bought a ticket to Karadon hoping to get something there.’
The groundhog kid turned pink. Like thousands of other wannabe-spacers, he too had decided that if he couldn’t get a job on a starship here at Neuwald he would head out to the League’s biggest deep space station. Everyone knew that Karadon was Spacer Central. Strategically located where eight major space lanes crossed, it was a duty-free trading station providing every facility for spacers. Cargos were bought and sold there, and spacers wanting