*
“I did try to say, Captain,” said Stepan. “But you said Issoar, so …”
Hesperus dabbed gingerly at his nose. Although painful, it did not seem to be broken, and the bleeding had stopped. He had gathered the Dubious Profit’s crew – with the exception of the atmospheric reprocessors: all attempts at communication with them were now met with chittering laughter and a stream of vulgar noises – in the ship’s mess, to explain their situation. Arae, he had told them (and here he cited Stepan’s copy of Blood and Plunder as authority), was quite mad: tragically she had murdered his good friend, the jovial and generous Mr the Haute Sherman Sunderling, and had vowed to destroy all who would not swear allegiance to her. Hesperus, conscious of his crew’s honour, had firmly declined to do so, at which point she flew into a rage and ordered him off the station, before launching the treacherous attack from which they had, thankfully, escaped unscathed. He then opened up the meeting to discuss what he had referred to as “our current shortfall in consumables”, and Rus had hit him with a chair. Afterwards, the engineer had become much calmer, and now sat and watched impassively as Gasazck, the angular, emaciated avian ship’s cook (and – on the principle that he owned the sharpest implements on board – ship’s surgeon), staunched the flow of blood from Hesperus’s nose.
Hesperus sniffed, experimentally, then wished that he hadn’t. He held up one hand, and shook his head fractionally. “No, Stepan, no, I have no regrets,” he said, nasally. “Issoar was absolutely the right choice, the only practical destination. There is no sense in raging against the vagaries of fortune: rather we should accept such, ah, challenges, with dignity, and fortitude.”
Rus grunted.
“Facing adversity,” continued Hesperus, “we may discover within ourselves unknown wells of resourcefulness. Acting together, bending our efforts to the common good, we can overcome any difficulty. I am completely confident that my crew – my fine and loyal crew – that together we will win through, and we will be stronger, more united, and … and more—”
“I’ll settle for ‘alive’,” said Rus. “And that’s not going to be easy. Forty-six hours to reach Issoar. Forty-six hours and twelve minutes: you couldn’t have picked a longer witchjump if you’d tried, could you?”
“As I said,” replied Hesperus, “Issoar was the only choice! Yes, it’s a long jump, but you’ve seen the alternatives: what would you have done?”
“Bah!” said Rus. “What’s done is done. Now we’ve got to deal with it. Which, inevitably, means that I’ve got to deal with it. Of course, if certain members of the crew would volunteer to stop breathing for the duration, that would make my task a lot easier … How about it, Captain Hesperus? Care to lead by example?”
“Mr Rus,” said Hesperus, “I am so pleased to see you maintain your sense of humour in these trying times. Now: to business. The carbon scrubbers. You can keep these running? Can you construct any more?”
“Auch … faugh.” Rus wiped his mouth, and scowled. “What we’ve got already is all we have. I’ve got about all I can out of the available materials,” he said. “I could try electrolysing water: bleed off the hydrogen, liberate the oxygen, but we’ll need to be careful … Cook’s Constant, and all.”
‘Cook’s Constant’ was a curious physical phenomenon, hovering around the borderlands between theory and superstition. In essence, it was this: a ship in witchspace is a wholly self-contained universe, and all universes tend towards a state of energetic equilibrium. Therefore, went the theory (or superstition), any large-scale flow of energy within a ship-universe worked directly in opposition to the laws of entropy, with potentially dire consequences. The most popular version held that an offending ship would suffer cosmological inflation, expanding exponentially in all directions faster than the speed of light, creating vast gulfs of brand-new spacetime in a brand-new universe orthogonal to our own. Such a ship’s crew, however, would not have the chance to enjoy their new genesis, having been reduced by the process to a smear of hot quarks, anti-quarks and gluons. Physicists across the Co-operative had constructed elaborate mathematical arguments to prove, and refute, this theory (or superstition), without ever reaching a definite conclusion.
But the fact remained that ships did go missing in witchspace. They would jump out to a star, and never re-emerge; and ships with heavily loaded power grids were, it seemed, the most likely to disappear. No-one knew if there was a causal link, but even so, ships’ engineers everywhere maintained strict controls over internal energy transferences while in witchspace. There was no consensus on what the actual margins might be; engineers, however, liked to joke that the maximum amount which could be safely concentrated in any one area was that sufficient to prepare a meal for the crew: hence, ‘Cook’s Constant’.
“Of course,” said Hesperus. “Do what you can. Stepan, you can make an audit of the pressure suit air bottles; see what we have there. Gasazck: it’s probably best if you retire to your quarters; try to – well, try not to breathe too much. And I will try, once again, to reopen negotiations with the atmospheric reprocessors. At this stage I am prepared to offer them Kob’s Ladder in a bag, if only they will reactivate the air-plant.”