Chapter 50 Day 131 Uneasy Watches
I started my evening inspection of the ship in the engine room. I ventured only as far as the control platform. Ten meters below Riv, Lili and Tenry were installing the last of the newly fabricated fuel pipes. I didn't feel the need to see more and they didn't need to see me. I make a point these days to steer well clear of my engineering staff whenever possible. They're not pleasant company. And they don't like seeing me.
Today – according to our original course profile – was the day we'd have begun our deceleration for Zilantre with the main engine. Earlier today, when I asked Riv when we'd be able to begin testing that engine, I gathered from his imprecise and brief snarls that it'd still be at least four or five days more, depending on how soon the (deleted) service bots finished the job of severing the fractured four meter after section of the rocket nozzle from the engine. Working with D-matter is never easy, and cutting the inner D-Rad lining of the nozzle with a circular saw, had been a (deleted) job from the beginning...
The bright side is – that with the exception of how long it's been taking – everything has gone more or less as planned. Everything suggests that when the work is finally finished, the main rocket engine should be available for full use. The remaining four or five days (taken with a grain of salt) of the project would burn through our built-in delivery time leeway and we'd need to aggressively use our balancing rockets to augment the breaking power of the main engine to make our deadline, but we'd still be using them less than if we'd chosen to rely on them alone. So beneath all the crew's weariness and ill temper, there was a solid base for optimism that the gamble will pay off.
I won't catalog all the delays of the last thirty some days – I don't have the time – so I'll just use the process of moving the engine as a typical example of the type of friction that has pushed our schedule back by several weeks.
Engines wear out faster than ships, so ships and engines are designed to make replacing them a fairly simple process. Both engine housing fixture and engines are standardized, designed to accept a series of appropriate engines which are slipped into the ship's engine housing like a cartridge. The engines have ribs along the outside casing which fit into slots in the ship's engine fixture. Both are perforated with holes used for bolting the engine in place. To move the engine down, these securing bolts had to be removed. A shipyard has specialized robots and tools designed to do this task efficiently. We had to make do with spanners and general service bots which required much more time and supervision. Much more than the engineers seemed to have budgeted for, though in fairness, they never had done anything on this scale before, which they were quick to point out, but still...
In addition to unbolting the rocket engine, all the various fuel and cooling pipes, pumps and controlling machinery connected to it had to be disconnected (and eventually relocated) as well.
Once freed, moving the massive, 40x10 meter engine down was not, in theory, a particularly challenging project. Since an object in motion tends to stay in motion, we merely had to slightly accelerate the ship to leave the freed engine behind. Before doing that, we attached cables to it so it had only a slight amount of free travel and ever so slightly accelerated the ship which had the effect of dropping the engine down until brought up by the cable. The problem was that there's just enough clearance in the slots between the engine and the ship to allow the engine to twist enough out of true – holes on one side would align while on the other side they would not quite align. We had a great deal of fiddling to do using the cables to get the engine perfectly true. (The engine, when installed properly, is set hard up against a massive circular harness under the control deck at the very top of the fixture, so this probably was not a big problem in a shipyard install.)
Adding to the friction, is the fact that moving the engine down meant that the whole engine room had to be in hard vacuum because the bulkhead sealing the engine room where engine meets the stern bulkhead is part of the engine, so moving it down, broke that seal. A new bulkhead had to be built, but not until the engine was in place, so that the work of moving and aligning the engine had to done in space suits, which, as a general rule, means everything takes at least twice as long as working without one. And all the little delays of suiting up, and moving materials into and out of the engine room through an airlock add up.
We've the onboard facilities and skills to design and print the parts we needed to make the changes, things like a new sealing bulkhead for the engine or the extensions to all the pipes. However, the size of our tempering furnace limits objects to two meters, so that many of the new parts had to be designed, printed and assembled in multiple pieces. And in addition, we did not carry enough of raw steel blanks on board to construct all the additional fuel lines, so we had to stage scavenger hunts through the ship and the ship's holds to gather enough inessential steel items to melt down and be printed into the parts we needed. Ideally these extensions would have been D-Steel, but we could not work with D-matter with our onboard machines. And since most of this extra material had to be stripped from the ship's holds, we had to go outside the ship to get at it, since the holds are not accessible from the crew section. And because of our velocity and the density of the space we were traveling through, we had to suit up in our armored space suits – which are more like manned mini-boats – to go outside the ship. Working with these large space suits was slow, tedious – and apparently non-budgeted – work.
The end result was that even with the whole crew working on the project around the clock, all of these friction points in the process caused the project to fall behind schedule. It didn't take more than a week to see that the engineers' original time line wasn't going to happen. I just had to go with the flow. Not that I'd a choice. Engineers can be a pretty snarly bunch even in the best of times if outsiders – even ship captains – poke their noses too deeply into the affairs of the engine room, and when things start going awry, even looking at them can set them to barking and growling. I steer clear of them whenever I can these days. I won't admit to being actually intimidated by them – it's just that there's no point making enemies – they know what needs be done and are working as fast as they can to do it, so nothing I can say or do will help matters. It's just good diplomacy for me stay on the control platform and not linger long...
I caught sight of what I thought was movement in the corner of my eye and turned to see who was coming down the main access well. There was nobody there. Just shadows. I stared at that complex pattern of shadows created by the ship's ribs, pipes, and equipment and nothing moved. Again. But nevertheless, I felt something was there.
I was beginning to get spooked.
This was not the first time in the last day or two that I've found myself turning to greet somebody only to find no one around. This was not the first time I felt that I wasn't alone, but was. This was not the first time I wondered if I was being driven down the dark hole by worry and stress – though I don't feel any more stressed than I have been since taking command. I was resigned to whatever the Dark Neb had in store for us, we'd make the delivery deadline or not. It wasn't my choice. And we were doing all we could to make it work. I wasn't any more worn and stressed than everyone else aboard, and yet, I was seeing things move out of the corner of my eyes and feeling a presence on the nape of my neck that not only wasn't there, but couldn't be, as well.
Stories about unknown and unwanted visitors to ships in space are as old as Terra itself. We've no doubt thousands of them in the ship's library in words and vid. I've read and viewed my fair share of them. And while most of them are “galactic fiction” – stories set outside the nebula in fictional star ships and such, there are hundreds of stories set – more or less – in real ships that ply the Nine Star Nebula as well. The problem for writers, as well as real people, is that it's extremely hard to get aboard a ship undetected without the aid of someone on board. Successful pirates – if they actually exist outside of the deep drifts, and only if you believe the
old spaceer yarns – are said to be able to find ways of doing it. Somehow. But aboard a ship that takes all the prudent precautions, as we do, I don't see how it'd be possible. Neb, the environmental system would detect and return an error if someone unaccounted for was aboard drawing un-budgeted resources. And seeing that we're more than four months into a voyage, I can't imagine how any intruder could've avoided detection for so long or why the intruder would be active now. The alternative, that the intruder had come on board in passage, is impossible. The ship is sealed tight and traveling in empty space at millions of kilometers an hour. Any breach of the airlocks or hull would set off alarms. Which left only the supernatural.
I didn't want to accept the supernatural, though being no more superstitious than your average spaceer, it's sometimes hard not to accept the supernatural, sometimes. Space can be rather eerie.
The only possibility, as far as I could see, was from the two quarter boxes we had up in no. 4 hold. They'd been packed and sealed by a bonded expediter, and the seals on containers are designed to be impossible to alter without leaving a telltale, so I felt the risk was slight, but not impossible. Still, if I'm not imagining the whole thing – and I'm certain I am – the boxes would be the only avenue of unauthorized entrance to the ship. I decided I needed to check the seals on the boxes just to rule them out.
I made my way upwards through the ship. It was quiet. Outside of the watch on the bridge and the crew in the engine room, everyone else had retired to their cabins, so the decks were empty, save for Illy, who was, as usual at this time, reading on the awning deck before retiring. I stopped to chat with her for several minutes and swung up for no. 4 hold.
As I may have mentioned, no. 4 hold can be spooky even without seeing things moving in the corner of your eye. The shadows seemed to move about in no. 4 hold all the time. So I wasn't keenly looking forward to this last stop on my tour. Of course I could turn on the lights. But you can't let imagination carry you away. Still...
Still, I managed to pass the light switch in the companion way and stepped into the semi-gloom of the hold, lit only by half a dozen dim safety lights set in the bulkheads. I stood and took my usual survey of the hold. I'd go over and check the seals of the two containers in the far corner, and the locks of the strong rooms, and...
And the shadows moved.
They flew from above and behind me. I may have yelped.
The Neb-blasted cats. The cats that are usually content to silently watch me from the shadows of the mezzanine. They had launched themselves and were landing at my feet. And meowing and looking up at me, milling about my feet. Rubbing against my boots.
I didn't know what to make of it for several moments. I just stared down at them. There were a lot of them, but were enough alike that I couldn't keep them straight enough to count. But suddenly they were very friendly, almost pleading, happy for my company, so I bent down and asked them what was going on.
'Meow,' pretty much summed up their answer, but they not only let me pet them, but crawled up on me to look me in the eyes and tell me directly, 'Meow'. This degree of friendliness was unprecedented in the no. 4 hold's tribe of cats. They've never, in the sixteen years I've been aboard, paid attention to anyone, unless Dyn in secret. Dyn is our official director of animal management, but I doubt that even he did little more than manage the population reproduction and make sure their automatic feed and recycled feed disposal units were in proper working order. And yet now, I seemed to be their best friend in the whole Nine Star Nebula. What, indeed, was going on?
After a while, I stood up and made my way to the quarter boxes, trailing a stream of cats. Using both my com link and my eyes, I inspected the seals on both boxes – neither showed any evidence of tampering. I slipped through my escorting cats and sat down in the shadows by the lockers and benches we've set up in the corner where we kept the various athletic gear and toys. The cats kept me company, both sides attempting to communicate, and succeeding only on a basic level – we were all more comfortable together than alone. I can't say hold no. 4 was any more eerie than I usually found it and with the company, even a bit less than usual. As long as I didn't think about why the cats were acting the way they were. Which I tried not to.
Eventually, I was tired enough to sleep, so stood, said good night to the cats and made my way to the access well. They followed me to the well meowing. And I thought they might follow me down as well, but no. They gathered around the edge of the well and watched me descend to the bridge deck, and on to my room.
I made a note to have Dyn see that the no. 4 hold cat's feed and recycling systems were working properly, on the theory that was the most likely and least eerie explanation for the cat's behavior.
As much as I appreciated the companionship of cats, I hope that is the explanation.