Summer's End, page 3
“Yes, sir.”
“Now I’ve looked over your records and, honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t wait for a better berth. I know what we’re paying you, and you didn’t even try to ask for more —which, considering that we couldn’t take off until we hired another engineer . . . ” He looked at me expectantly.
“I didn’t know I could have asked for more, sir. I also didn’t know that you were shorthanded,” I replied. I’d have to let Ben know that if there ever was a “next time” to negotiate.
“You haven’t broken any laws, have you, son?”
I shook my head. “No, sir. Well, not recently. Got in a few fights back in public school. But that’s about it.”
“So you just took the first offer you got?”
“I was going to wait, but my brother told me that I’d just be wasting my time. I think he looked at what was due to land and what the upcoming openings would be. He’s usually right, and I barely had enough money to cover the bus fare, so I took his advice and took the berth, sir.”
“Well, we all have our reasons, and to be honest, I’m happy we got you. You’re a damn sight better than the last engineer we had onboard.”
“Chief Briggs mentioned something about him. She said he got in trouble at a casino or something?”
“Yes, he wasn’t the brightest diode on the display. I’ve already put in your records that you’re the acting third engineer. If I’d put second, no one would believe it. Once you’ve got enough time in, I’ll see about bumping you up a rating to get you a little better pay, seeing as you’re already doing the job.
“We make a lot of long hauls on this ship, the company sends us wherever the money is, and that usually means long hauls, short turnarounds, and very little time for sightseeing. Any questions?”
“Um, yes, sir. Where are we going?”
“Jupiter. You didn’t know?”
“I just wanted to get a job and get off Earth, sir.”
The captain nodded. “Well, I’d say it’s safe to say you’ve accomplished that. A little advice if I may?”
I nodded, “Yes, sir, I’d appreciate it.”
“Stay here at least two years. People will want to see that you’re able to stay in a job. For most people, working for a company like Damascus Freight is the end of the line, they can’t find work anywhere else. Sure, the pay’s not the best, but nobody here asks any questions. We don’t sail to the nicer places; a lot of the places we sail to are anything but nice. So don’t go wandering off on your own and don’t go thinking you can beat the house when it comes to gambling. Do a good job and I’ll write enough recommendations that when you do leave us, you’ll be able to find something a lot better.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Welcome aboard, Dave,” the captain said standing up and offering his hand.
“Thank you, sir,” I said shaking hands as I stood as well.
“And do come up with a better story for why you’re here.”
I blushed. “I’ll get right on it, sir.”
* * *
“Well, what do you think of our fair captain?” Dot asked as I came back down to Engineering.
“Perceptive,” I said with a shrug.
“I suspect when you’ve been a captain long enough, you get to the point where you’ve seen it all before. Now, let me show you the grav drives before they call us for dinner.”
She led me through a hatch on the aft side of engineering and this time there really was a ladder and we climbed up to the level above. We were out in the cargo hold and I could see the ladder went up another two levels.
“Ship’s lifeboat is up there,” Dot said pointing up the ladder. “Straight aft past the stairs that leads down to Engineering. There’s supposed to be two, but with half the crew, they figured we only needed half the gear.”
I just nodded and hoped we never had to use it.
She led me down the main aisle that split the hold in two, all the way to the back of the ship.
“Environmental is through there.” She pointed to a hatch. “There’s also a machine shop where we rebuild the bad panels and make anything else we need.”
“Who’s in charge of Environmental?”
“Bosun Smith handles it. He’s pretty good at it too. Probably used to be an environmental tech or something before he ended up our bosun. Now, this is the panel to open the access for the grav drives.”
I watched as she opened up a protective cover and pressed two buttons down together. A large red indicator light came on, and the deck we’d just walked down split open.
“There they are.”
I looked down the trench that had opened in the floor and there they definitely were, bolted down to the keel with fastening nuts a good ten centimeters across, our three gravity drives. The first two, from the bow back, were the two-twenties. There was an open space next, then there was the old fifteen hundred. The cabling to them was all neatly laid out and secured on the starboard side of the keel, with a narrow passageway on the port side.
“The overhead contains a crane that we can use to lift anything heavy. It stows in the ceiling over there,” she said, pointing to a spot just above hatch into Environmental. “We do a weekly inspection, and a monthly. Once a year we get a rebuild, that takes a week, and we also get a crew in to run some extensive tests two times a year.”
She pressed the buttons and the deck laid back down into place.
“There’s a hatch in the space between decks that leads to the space underneath the next compartment if you need to get in there without opening the floor, but other than making sure the hatch works and it’s kept clear, we don’t use it.”
I nodded and looked around the hold for a moment. It was as wide as the ship and was three levels high. The containers on this level were stacked five high, or forty feet.
“How far past this bulkhead does the ship go?” I asked her.
“Fifty feet. Ship’s plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning is on the level below; ship’s computer, radio gear, gym, and miscellaneous gear is on the level above.”
At that point the dinner chime sounded through the ship’s intercom.
“Ah, perfect. Let’s go see what Shelly’s made us today!”
“I’m guessing Shelly’s our cook?” I asked.
“Yup, and a decent one. She’s the captain’s wife too, so be polite.”
“Got it.”
* * *
The only person who wasn’t at dinner was Chief Parks. Dot introduced me to Shelly. She looked a little younger than the captain, was thinner and shorter than Dot, though perhaps a little shapelier, but then her shipsuit was obviously tailored to show that she was an attractive woman. Not beautiful, but pleasant.
The second mate, Pam Wells, was there as well. Pam’s shipsuit was a looser fitting one like Dot’s, but couldn’t contain the fact that Pam was built very impressively. I started to wonder if maybe she was Chief Park’s wife, even if she looked a lot younger than him, because you wouldn’t expect a woman with those kinds of looks to be on anything other than an elie passenger liner.
Bosun Hank Smith looked to be about my father’s age, maybe a few years younger, and his “squeeze” was a handsome and well-built young man by the name of Chaz who was probably younger than me.
I smiled and shook hands with all of them as I was introduced and knew better than to comment on either the second mate’s looks or the bosun’s preference in lovers, even if the age difference was a little surprising. I just hoped that, if they had any fights, Chaz didn’t end up coming to me about them because I was the closest one to his age onboard.
I had enough drama in my own life already that I wasn’t at all capable when it came to helping sort out someone else’s.
“So, Captain, what trick did customs try to use this time?” Hank asked when he sat down to eat.
Captain Roy laughed. “Oh! They were pretty creative this time! He told me that the new health regulations required that on hot days he needed to spend five minutes of every hour out of the heat. So I had to let him into the living areas where it was air-conditioned.”
“What’d you do?”
“I took him over to the edge of the cargo bay and pointed to his car, which he’d left idling, and told him I’d wait up here while he took his break.”
“How’d he take that?” Dot asked.
“Not well, he stomped around, told me I had to do it, but the union guys started giving him a hard time as they were being forced to wait in the sun for him to finish, and then threatened to file a grievance. That got him moving! He just signed off and left in a huff without inspecting the rest of the cargo.”
“Why wouldn’t you let him go inside?” I asked, a little confused.
“By treaty, unless the vessel is registered here on Earth, no Earth officials are allowed to go anywhere but the cargo deck, and only until after we’ve unsealed the bay doors,” Dot said.
“If I’d have let him in,” the captain continued, “that prohibition no longer exists.”
I grimaced as the implications became apparent. “He’d search the whole ship then, wouldn’t he?”
“Him and twenty of his best friends,” Dot replied. “And anything that wasn’t legal here on Earth, they’d confiscate and fine us for.”
“Or worse yet, arrest somebody,” Hank added with a nod.
“Is this a common problem?” I asked.
“Only here on Earth,” the captain said. “Last time we were here the inspector claimed he had diarrhea, and I just pointed to the cargo bay door and told him he could hang his ass over the edge. Surely the loaders would understand.”
I had to laugh at that.
The captain regaled us then with a few more stories about other, past times, where either customs, or some other port official, had tried to “violate the sanctity of the ship.” I had to admit some of them were pretty ingenious, if not funny. But the lesson was clear and it was another one of those things that I wasn’t taught in school, but should have been.
After dinner, Dot cut me loose to go get settled in. I found the storage cabinet for sheets, blankets, pillows, and towels, made my bed, set my alarm, and crashed. It had been a very long few days.
THREE
Iowa Hill —Ganymede Orbit
Transit time to Jupiter was about nineteen days, with a six-hour window of no acceleration, during which time they flipped the ship and we’d spend the rest of the time decelerating, or maybe it would be better to say we were accelerating away from our destination. Not that we flew in anything even remotely approaching a straight line. The course we flew was more of an S shape, because everything was in motion, moving in orbit around the sun or even another planet.
So we spent the acceleration portion of our trip matching the ship’s velocity to the orbital velocity of our target, as well as accelerating toward it, until we were actually going faster than our target. Then during the deceleration portion we also adjusted that vector and velocity to rendezvous with our destination at almost zero relative velocity.
I was told in school that military ships and the high-gee passenger liners flew more of a single arc, instead of the S that most cargo ships used, because it was faster. And because they didn’t care about the costs involved. But for ships like the Iowa Hill, money and safety were the deciding factors on everything. So we flew the cheapest, and hopefully safest, course we could.
Our destination was actually an artificial satellite of one of Jupiter’s moons, one of dozens that orbited it. There were hundreds or maybe even thousands of artificial habs that orbited Jupiter or one of the larger moons these days. There were probably more people out here than there were on Earth. Or at least, that’s what some of the instructors back in college had claimed.
Dot had a pretty standard routine. We spent an hour cleaning Engineering every morning. The next four hours were spent inspecting gravity plates. After that it was lunch, then an hour or two inspecting one of the many systems onboard the ship, then off to the machine shop to repair or replace anything that needed repairing or replacing.
“What happens if we don’t have anything that needs to be fixed?” I asked her that first day when we were repairing a valve that we’d just replaced from stores.
“Why, we take the rest of the day off!”
“Really?” I was surprised by that.
Dot laughed. “Honestly? I have no idea. On a ship this old there’s always something that needs repairing or replacing, or cleaning, or inspecting. If we had a full engineering section I suspect we could catch up with it, but then what?”
I shook my head. “I don’t follow.”
“There’s not a lot to do onboard ship during transit. If we didn’t have all this to deal with” —she waved at the ship around her —“it’d get boring. The captain and each of the mates do a full ship inspection everyday during the non-bridge watch portions of their shifts. You’ll see them doing inventories of gear or inspecting the cargo tie-downs. Just looking for anything out of place or things that might be a danger to the ship or the crew.”
“Just to keep from being bored?”
“Well, that —and remember, if anything breaks out here, getting rescued isn’t all that easy. Even if we stop accelerating, we’re still carrying a lot of speed and inertia. Add to that the vastness of space, and, well, there are a lot of Flying Dutchmen out there and nobody really wants to join them. Objects in motion and all that stuff.”
I nodded. I hadn’t really given it all that much thought. Oh, there are the famous disasters everyone’s all heard about, like the Harlow Lines Firebird, a fast passenger ship that experienced a complete engine room blowout just prior to flip and deceleration. Three hundred passengers who were now on a cometary orbit that wouldn’t be back for a couple hundred years, circling the sun for the rest of eternity.
Nobody wanted that.
“What’s the schedule for after dinner?” I asked.
“Sitting watch and if anything breaks, we fix it. If you’ve got any books to read, shows to watch, or studying to do, that’s the time to do it.”
“The captain said that once I get the time in, he’d bump me up a grade?”
“Yes, and . . . ?”
“How much time does it take to go from fifth to fourth? They told us it takes a couple of years of sailing, but they never really told us what the requirements are.”
Dot nodded, “It’s pretty simple, you need a thousand hours on watch and to pass the test. So about three months.”
“What?” I said shocked. “Three months? They told us it took a year or two!”
“Well, on a normal ship with a full crew, as the junior engineer you’d probably only get a four-hour watch a day, and maybe not even every day. On a larger ship with a larger crew, you might not even get that much. And that’s only when you’re underway. But here? Here you’re legally on watch twelve hours a day.”
“I am? Oh right! There’s only two of us.”
“And we spend as little time in port as possible. So you’ll definitely have the time in four months. Moving up to third takes an additional two thousand hours, so say six to eight months.”
“How hard is the test?”
“Not terribly. A couple of hours if I recall correctly. We’ve got study materials onboard, so if you’re looking for something to do in your spare time, that’s probably a good place to start.”
“Is there anything else I need?”
“If your boss signs off on you, you don’t have to take the physical examination, which is where they run you through an engine room and make you identify everything and explain how it all works.”
“So I could make third engineer in a year?”
“Yup. Getting to second is a lot tougher, though, four thousand hours and five years as an engineer. It’s also a much longer examination and for the physical part, they take you on whatever random ship they can get access to and you have to tell them how to run it and fix it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t even want to know what you have to do to make chief.”
“Some folks never do. There’s a lot who are happy as second. Hell, you can make a good living at third. The bigger ships and most habitats have engineers dedicated to specific areas like environmental, gravity, fission, fusion, waste processing, you name it. There’s a lot of specialty ratings you can pick up at third and it’s usually useful to pick up a couple.”
“Such as?”
“Grav panel refurbisher and certifier,” Dot said with a grin. “That alone right there lets me write my ticket on any ship with an opening and pretty much every habitat either wants to hire me, or has room for another shop offering repairs.”
“Huh, they never taught us that.”
“’Course not; most sailors think you gotta take it to a shop. Because most shops are run by engineers who decided to settle down and raise a brood.”
“And how do I get one of those certs?”
Dot smiled again. “I’ll teach you all about it. ’Course you can’t file for it until you get your third engineer’s rate, but once you do, it’ll be worth it.”
* * *
I spent the next two weeks mainly learning my duties and learning the ship. Inspecting the grav panels was interesting, because getting to them was often difficult. There were five hundred and four of them and half were in the top of the ship’s hull while the other half were in the bottom. We averaged about ten a day and alternated each day between the upper ones and the lowers.
The grav drive theory was pretty complex, but simply put, the panels all had special superconducting coils wrapped around them, through which “gravitons” flowed in a circular pattern. The bottom panels flowed “right-hand” rule, while the tops did “left-hand.” What this meant was a force was generated coming out of the front of the coil that pulled us along, and another force operated perpendicularly to the panel that provided gravity in the area between the two panels.
The ratio between acceleration and the artificial gravity that a panel provided was mainly based on the panel’s construction. The Iowa Hill had “Ten-Ones,” which meant that the gravity was ten times the acceleration —usually. There were things that could be done to change that ratio a little bit, like when they cut acceleration for the flip halfway through the flight we still had ten percent gravity, because being in pure freefall with only microgravity often led to problems.
“Now I’ve looked over your records and, honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t wait for a better berth. I know what we’re paying you, and you didn’t even try to ask for more —which, considering that we couldn’t take off until we hired another engineer . . . ” He looked at me expectantly.
“I didn’t know I could have asked for more, sir. I also didn’t know that you were shorthanded,” I replied. I’d have to let Ben know that if there ever was a “next time” to negotiate.
“You haven’t broken any laws, have you, son?”
I shook my head. “No, sir. Well, not recently. Got in a few fights back in public school. But that’s about it.”
“So you just took the first offer you got?”
“I was going to wait, but my brother told me that I’d just be wasting my time. I think he looked at what was due to land and what the upcoming openings would be. He’s usually right, and I barely had enough money to cover the bus fare, so I took his advice and took the berth, sir.”
“Well, we all have our reasons, and to be honest, I’m happy we got you. You’re a damn sight better than the last engineer we had onboard.”
“Chief Briggs mentioned something about him. She said he got in trouble at a casino or something?”
“Yes, he wasn’t the brightest diode on the display. I’ve already put in your records that you’re the acting third engineer. If I’d put second, no one would believe it. Once you’ve got enough time in, I’ll see about bumping you up a rating to get you a little better pay, seeing as you’re already doing the job.
“We make a lot of long hauls on this ship, the company sends us wherever the money is, and that usually means long hauls, short turnarounds, and very little time for sightseeing. Any questions?”
“Um, yes, sir. Where are we going?”
“Jupiter. You didn’t know?”
“I just wanted to get a job and get off Earth, sir.”
The captain nodded. “Well, I’d say it’s safe to say you’ve accomplished that. A little advice if I may?”
I nodded, “Yes, sir, I’d appreciate it.”
“Stay here at least two years. People will want to see that you’re able to stay in a job. For most people, working for a company like Damascus Freight is the end of the line, they can’t find work anywhere else. Sure, the pay’s not the best, but nobody here asks any questions. We don’t sail to the nicer places; a lot of the places we sail to are anything but nice. So don’t go wandering off on your own and don’t go thinking you can beat the house when it comes to gambling. Do a good job and I’ll write enough recommendations that when you do leave us, you’ll be able to find something a lot better.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Welcome aboard, Dave,” the captain said standing up and offering his hand.
“Thank you, sir,” I said shaking hands as I stood as well.
“And do come up with a better story for why you’re here.”
I blushed. “I’ll get right on it, sir.”
* * *
“Well, what do you think of our fair captain?” Dot asked as I came back down to Engineering.
“Perceptive,” I said with a shrug.
“I suspect when you’ve been a captain long enough, you get to the point where you’ve seen it all before. Now, let me show you the grav drives before they call us for dinner.”
She led me through a hatch on the aft side of engineering and this time there really was a ladder and we climbed up to the level above. We were out in the cargo hold and I could see the ladder went up another two levels.
“Ship’s lifeboat is up there,” Dot said pointing up the ladder. “Straight aft past the stairs that leads down to Engineering. There’s supposed to be two, but with half the crew, they figured we only needed half the gear.”
I just nodded and hoped we never had to use it.
She led me down the main aisle that split the hold in two, all the way to the back of the ship.
“Environmental is through there.” She pointed to a hatch. “There’s also a machine shop where we rebuild the bad panels and make anything else we need.”
“Who’s in charge of Environmental?”
“Bosun Smith handles it. He’s pretty good at it too. Probably used to be an environmental tech or something before he ended up our bosun. Now, this is the panel to open the access for the grav drives.”
I watched as she opened up a protective cover and pressed two buttons down together. A large red indicator light came on, and the deck we’d just walked down split open.
“There they are.”
I looked down the trench that had opened in the floor and there they definitely were, bolted down to the keel with fastening nuts a good ten centimeters across, our three gravity drives. The first two, from the bow back, were the two-twenties. There was an open space next, then there was the old fifteen hundred. The cabling to them was all neatly laid out and secured on the starboard side of the keel, with a narrow passageway on the port side.
“The overhead contains a crane that we can use to lift anything heavy. It stows in the ceiling over there,” she said, pointing to a spot just above hatch into Environmental. “We do a weekly inspection, and a monthly. Once a year we get a rebuild, that takes a week, and we also get a crew in to run some extensive tests two times a year.”
She pressed the buttons and the deck laid back down into place.
“There’s a hatch in the space between decks that leads to the space underneath the next compartment if you need to get in there without opening the floor, but other than making sure the hatch works and it’s kept clear, we don’t use it.”
I nodded and looked around the hold for a moment. It was as wide as the ship and was three levels high. The containers on this level were stacked five high, or forty feet.
“How far past this bulkhead does the ship go?” I asked her.
“Fifty feet. Ship’s plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning is on the level below; ship’s computer, radio gear, gym, and miscellaneous gear is on the level above.”
At that point the dinner chime sounded through the ship’s intercom.
“Ah, perfect. Let’s go see what Shelly’s made us today!”
“I’m guessing Shelly’s our cook?” I asked.
“Yup, and a decent one. She’s the captain’s wife too, so be polite.”
“Got it.”
* * *
The only person who wasn’t at dinner was Chief Parks. Dot introduced me to Shelly. She looked a little younger than the captain, was thinner and shorter than Dot, though perhaps a little shapelier, but then her shipsuit was obviously tailored to show that she was an attractive woman. Not beautiful, but pleasant.
The second mate, Pam Wells, was there as well. Pam’s shipsuit was a looser fitting one like Dot’s, but couldn’t contain the fact that Pam was built very impressively. I started to wonder if maybe she was Chief Park’s wife, even if she looked a lot younger than him, because you wouldn’t expect a woman with those kinds of looks to be on anything other than an elie passenger liner.
Bosun Hank Smith looked to be about my father’s age, maybe a few years younger, and his “squeeze” was a handsome and well-built young man by the name of Chaz who was probably younger than me.
I smiled and shook hands with all of them as I was introduced and knew better than to comment on either the second mate’s looks or the bosun’s preference in lovers, even if the age difference was a little surprising. I just hoped that, if they had any fights, Chaz didn’t end up coming to me about them because I was the closest one to his age onboard.
I had enough drama in my own life already that I wasn’t at all capable when it came to helping sort out someone else’s.
“So, Captain, what trick did customs try to use this time?” Hank asked when he sat down to eat.
Captain Roy laughed. “Oh! They were pretty creative this time! He told me that the new health regulations required that on hot days he needed to spend five minutes of every hour out of the heat. So I had to let him into the living areas where it was air-conditioned.”
“What’d you do?”
“I took him over to the edge of the cargo bay and pointed to his car, which he’d left idling, and told him I’d wait up here while he took his break.”
“How’d he take that?” Dot asked.
“Not well, he stomped around, told me I had to do it, but the union guys started giving him a hard time as they were being forced to wait in the sun for him to finish, and then threatened to file a grievance. That got him moving! He just signed off and left in a huff without inspecting the rest of the cargo.”
“Why wouldn’t you let him go inside?” I asked, a little confused.
“By treaty, unless the vessel is registered here on Earth, no Earth officials are allowed to go anywhere but the cargo deck, and only until after we’ve unsealed the bay doors,” Dot said.
“If I’d have let him in,” the captain continued, “that prohibition no longer exists.”
I grimaced as the implications became apparent. “He’d search the whole ship then, wouldn’t he?”
“Him and twenty of his best friends,” Dot replied. “And anything that wasn’t legal here on Earth, they’d confiscate and fine us for.”
“Or worse yet, arrest somebody,” Hank added with a nod.
“Is this a common problem?” I asked.
“Only here on Earth,” the captain said. “Last time we were here the inspector claimed he had diarrhea, and I just pointed to the cargo bay door and told him he could hang his ass over the edge. Surely the loaders would understand.”
I had to laugh at that.
The captain regaled us then with a few more stories about other, past times, where either customs, or some other port official, had tried to “violate the sanctity of the ship.” I had to admit some of them were pretty ingenious, if not funny. But the lesson was clear and it was another one of those things that I wasn’t taught in school, but should have been.
After dinner, Dot cut me loose to go get settled in. I found the storage cabinet for sheets, blankets, pillows, and towels, made my bed, set my alarm, and crashed. It had been a very long few days.
THREE
Iowa Hill —Ganymede Orbit
Transit time to Jupiter was about nineteen days, with a six-hour window of no acceleration, during which time they flipped the ship and we’d spend the rest of the time decelerating, or maybe it would be better to say we were accelerating away from our destination. Not that we flew in anything even remotely approaching a straight line. The course we flew was more of an S shape, because everything was in motion, moving in orbit around the sun or even another planet.
So we spent the acceleration portion of our trip matching the ship’s velocity to the orbital velocity of our target, as well as accelerating toward it, until we were actually going faster than our target. Then during the deceleration portion we also adjusted that vector and velocity to rendezvous with our destination at almost zero relative velocity.
I was told in school that military ships and the high-gee passenger liners flew more of a single arc, instead of the S that most cargo ships used, because it was faster. And because they didn’t care about the costs involved. But for ships like the Iowa Hill, money and safety were the deciding factors on everything. So we flew the cheapest, and hopefully safest, course we could.
Our destination was actually an artificial satellite of one of Jupiter’s moons, one of dozens that orbited it. There were hundreds or maybe even thousands of artificial habs that orbited Jupiter or one of the larger moons these days. There were probably more people out here than there were on Earth. Or at least, that’s what some of the instructors back in college had claimed.
Dot had a pretty standard routine. We spent an hour cleaning Engineering every morning. The next four hours were spent inspecting gravity plates. After that it was lunch, then an hour or two inspecting one of the many systems onboard the ship, then off to the machine shop to repair or replace anything that needed repairing or replacing.
“What happens if we don’t have anything that needs to be fixed?” I asked her that first day when we were repairing a valve that we’d just replaced from stores.
“Why, we take the rest of the day off!”
“Really?” I was surprised by that.
Dot laughed. “Honestly? I have no idea. On a ship this old there’s always something that needs repairing or replacing, or cleaning, or inspecting. If we had a full engineering section I suspect we could catch up with it, but then what?”
I shook my head. “I don’t follow.”
“There’s not a lot to do onboard ship during transit. If we didn’t have all this to deal with” —she waved at the ship around her —“it’d get boring. The captain and each of the mates do a full ship inspection everyday during the non-bridge watch portions of their shifts. You’ll see them doing inventories of gear or inspecting the cargo tie-downs. Just looking for anything out of place or things that might be a danger to the ship or the crew.”
“Just to keep from being bored?”
“Well, that —and remember, if anything breaks out here, getting rescued isn’t all that easy. Even if we stop accelerating, we’re still carrying a lot of speed and inertia. Add to that the vastness of space, and, well, there are a lot of Flying Dutchmen out there and nobody really wants to join them. Objects in motion and all that stuff.”
I nodded. I hadn’t really given it all that much thought. Oh, there are the famous disasters everyone’s all heard about, like the Harlow Lines Firebird, a fast passenger ship that experienced a complete engine room blowout just prior to flip and deceleration. Three hundred passengers who were now on a cometary orbit that wouldn’t be back for a couple hundred years, circling the sun for the rest of eternity.
Nobody wanted that.
“What’s the schedule for after dinner?” I asked.
“Sitting watch and if anything breaks, we fix it. If you’ve got any books to read, shows to watch, or studying to do, that’s the time to do it.”
“The captain said that once I get the time in, he’d bump me up a grade?”
“Yes, and . . . ?”
“How much time does it take to go from fifth to fourth? They told us it takes a couple of years of sailing, but they never really told us what the requirements are.”
Dot nodded, “It’s pretty simple, you need a thousand hours on watch and to pass the test. So about three months.”
“What?” I said shocked. “Three months? They told us it took a year or two!”
“Well, on a normal ship with a full crew, as the junior engineer you’d probably only get a four-hour watch a day, and maybe not even every day. On a larger ship with a larger crew, you might not even get that much. And that’s only when you’re underway. But here? Here you’re legally on watch twelve hours a day.”
“I am? Oh right! There’s only two of us.”
“And we spend as little time in port as possible. So you’ll definitely have the time in four months. Moving up to third takes an additional two thousand hours, so say six to eight months.”
“How hard is the test?”
“Not terribly. A couple of hours if I recall correctly. We’ve got study materials onboard, so if you’re looking for something to do in your spare time, that’s probably a good place to start.”
“Is there anything else I need?”
“If your boss signs off on you, you don’t have to take the physical examination, which is where they run you through an engine room and make you identify everything and explain how it all works.”
“So I could make third engineer in a year?”
“Yup. Getting to second is a lot tougher, though, four thousand hours and five years as an engineer. It’s also a much longer examination and for the physical part, they take you on whatever random ship they can get access to and you have to tell them how to run it and fix it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t even want to know what you have to do to make chief.”
“Some folks never do. There’s a lot who are happy as second. Hell, you can make a good living at third. The bigger ships and most habitats have engineers dedicated to specific areas like environmental, gravity, fission, fusion, waste processing, you name it. There’s a lot of specialty ratings you can pick up at third and it’s usually useful to pick up a couple.”
“Such as?”
“Grav panel refurbisher and certifier,” Dot said with a grin. “That alone right there lets me write my ticket on any ship with an opening and pretty much every habitat either wants to hire me, or has room for another shop offering repairs.”
“Huh, they never taught us that.”
“’Course not; most sailors think you gotta take it to a shop. Because most shops are run by engineers who decided to settle down and raise a brood.”
“And how do I get one of those certs?”
Dot smiled again. “I’ll teach you all about it. ’Course you can’t file for it until you get your third engineer’s rate, but once you do, it’ll be worth it.”
* * *
I spent the next two weeks mainly learning my duties and learning the ship. Inspecting the grav panels was interesting, because getting to them was often difficult. There were five hundred and four of them and half were in the top of the ship’s hull while the other half were in the bottom. We averaged about ten a day and alternated each day between the upper ones and the lowers.
The grav drive theory was pretty complex, but simply put, the panels all had special superconducting coils wrapped around them, through which “gravitons” flowed in a circular pattern. The bottom panels flowed “right-hand” rule, while the tops did “left-hand.” What this meant was a force was generated coming out of the front of the coil that pulled us along, and another force operated perpendicularly to the panel that provided gravity in the area between the two panels.
The ratio between acceleration and the artificial gravity that a panel provided was mainly based on the panel’s construction. The Iowa Hill had “Ten-Ones,” which meant that the gravity was ten times the acceleration —usually. There were things that could be done to change that ratio a little bit, like when they cut acceleration for the flip halfway through the flight we still had ten percent gravity, because being in pure freefall with only microgravity often led to problems.
