Chapter 2
Each of the giant, self contained cargo modules had its own artificial-intelligence foreman, answerable to ships-mother and responsible for ensuring the cargo arrived in the best possible order. Kell uploaded her tablet data and moved to the next check on her list.
“Frank, data uploaded. Frequency domain analysis indicates your coax open circuit is under the flooring somewhere thirty metres from the junction point here. Which direction does the cable bundle run?”
She had named her module’s computer-foreman Frank and she had even stuck a little nameplate on the front of his processor racks up on C-deck just for the fun of it.
Frank replied, the audio routed through Kell’s tablet, “Thirty three point five metres places the potential fault at the under floor junction 100274 and 679352. I have assigned a maintenance unit to confirm, and repair if required.”
“I can do it Frank. Direct me to the spot and I’ll pull up the panel and have a look.”
“That is unnecessary Kell. The maintenance unit will perform any repair more efficiently and safely.”
“Oh screw you Frank, let me do something useful.”
“Please proceed to the next check location Kell. Next test overdue in four minutes.”
“Yes, yes alright.”
The Company had originally structured its ships to be fully automated but studies had shown a two point seven percent improvement in efficiency across fleet operations by adding a layer of human employment. Despite their unreliability, dishonesty and general fragility, humans were actually quite well engineered and good at both problem solving and thinking outside the box. Amazing what all those years of genetic selection could achieve.
And humans were readily available, cheap and disposable.
So they were employed as bio-organic machines to catch the strange outlier faults that no amount of machine coding ever quite seemed to be able to detect. Humans were also perfect canaries in space, and little that was designed for planetary use, living or inert, enjoyed the harshness of cold vacuum. Circuit boards, rubber, plastics, seeds, foodstuffs, and a thousand other things had a shortened lifespan when frozen, or bombarded by cosmic radiation. The highly controlled temperature, humidity and filtration inside the shielded modules was not engineered for the benefit of the solitary crew, it was a function of preserving the goods for delivery.
Kell checked the feed lines to the arachnid cases. How many little spider generations would pass before they arrived? She add a note to her little paper notebook that she carried in the leg pocket of her coveralls. ‘Spider lifecycle.’ It had become her habit to learn all she could about whatever was in the cargo. The ship carried the entire human knowledge database along with the entertainment cache. ‘Someone in the Company had been having a slack day when they let that privilege slip through to crew,’ she thought. Perhaps it was one of the weird tenets of the human employment act and she had plenty of time to study. Her entire social life consisted of seven video monitors.
The feed lines running from the floor tanks to the trays showed green and Kell noted the rates into her tablet. She peered in through the viewport to the trays of spiders within. A big black funnel-web climbed up the inside of the thick glass. Kell’s self education so far had been limited to identifying the various species and which were the most dangerous. This one was highly venomous but generally reclusive and only aggressive if provoked. Kell shuddered involuntarily, her skin crawling at the thought of hairy legs touching her.
Frank said, with no preamble, “Kell, Mother informs me that work shifts will be extended by fifteen minutes per day to make up for an anticipated loss of programmed work time.”
“What? What loss of work time? It’s not like I can go on strike or something.”
“Our route will take us through an active Hyperspacial Energy Anomalous Field. As a precaution, Mother will suspend all maintenance activity and human crew will be confined to their CAP for the duration of the field transit, while I and the maintenance robots will be in hibernation. To maintain maintenance efficiency and ensure the cargo reaches its destination, work schedules require minor alteration.”
“Are you talking about a gyres field?” Kell said.
“A Hyperspacial Energy Anomalous Field, or gyres anomaly, is an energy field that exists within fold-space. They are variable and erratic in intensity and so Mother will take all due care during transit. Full data is available to you in the ship’s library. Also Mother has prepared a brief for all human crew and placed it in your inbox. You should study it at your leisure.”
“I know what a gyres field is, Frank. Is this one powerful enough to cause concern, and when will we hit it?”
“Mother will take all due precautions and crew will be notified prior to transit. Electronics will be minimised, ship’s power will be diverted to additional shield generation. Human crew will be granted additional shielding by their CAP. Now the next test is overdue. Please proceed.”
The standard ship day was divided into two shifts, A and B, each seven hours with a five hour break between. Kell had adopted a pattern of sleeping four hours after B shift and grabbing a cat nap sometime on the break after A-shift. That was life on a straight-shot FTL haul: work, rest in your CAP, work, CAP, work…rinse and repeat ad nauseam for 740 days. Plus most crewies broke the tedium with some form of exercise by pounding the decks or rigging up a gym. Kell knew Ashi8 had created a climbing wall with rearrangeable handholds mag-locked to the containers.
The modules’ computers did not allocate any work time to maintenance of the crew accommodation pod. That was a job for Kell to do on her own dime. Old habits learnt living in artificial atmosphere meant that she spent time every day performing one or two checks from the list she had pinned up on the wall of her accommodation. Today she had set aside time for the environmental suit.
‘How old is this thing?’ Kell had seen K-model suits like this in films when she was a child.
The comms wiring on the back of the helmet was frayed and she had not repaired it first time through. She pulled on the rest of the suit and checked the seals, tanks and scrubbers. The helmet she took into the rec-room and placed on the table while she made a meal.
Everyone was on line for a change, transmitted into Kell’s rec-room in the orderly two rows of four, from module one to eight. Wei1, Zen2, Adah3, Hondo4, then Chica6, Flynn7, and Ashi8 were all there.
Wei1 was working on a set of domino tiles, engraving a bas-relief of traditional figures on the surface and studding the numeral dots with little pieces of cut glass. Slow work but they all had plenty of time for a hobby. Zen2 and Chica6 were braiding their hair, discussing and comparing techniques over the link. Chica6 watched Kell for a moment then said, “What are you doing with that old antique, Kell? You don’t seriously expect that thing will actually count worth a damn if you lose atmo.”
“Someone once showed me that every edge counts in space,” Kell replied.
“Doesn’t sound like they knew much,” Chica6 said.
“More than you I’ll bet. You ever spent much time on rocks or in ships where there is less than two minutes of air between a breach and hard vacuum?”
“Okay, don’t get all snippy,” Chica6 said.
“Kell’s right,” said Ashi8. “The suits are ancient but they and the CAP are your last chance if the module vents.”
“Adah will be alright,” said Hondo4. “She’s got all those fancy mining exo-rigs in her module. Full life support and EVA for months if she needed to use all of them.”
“I suppose so, I hadn’t really thought about that,” said Adah3.
Zen2 chimed in, “The chance of losing atmo from the module is zip. Mother keeps it buttoned up tighter than Adah’s virginity, no offence Adah, and it is triple hulled, shielded and repairable by the maintenance bots. It would take hours to vent and the embees would patch any leaks.”
“Well sometimes it happens,” said Ashi8.
“More importantly,” said Chica6, “What’s with the extended work shifts? I assume it is not just Module 6 that works an extra half hour a day?”
“Mother will have her pound of flesh from each and every one of us,” said Hondo4.
Adah3 added, “What are these energy fields anyway? I read the briefing but I am now more confused than ever.”
“They sound dangerous,” said Flynn7.
“Ah, they weren’t in the brochure when you signed up were they?” Hondo4 said, “No mention of how dangerous FTL is, no sir.”
“What are these HEAFs? Are they dangerous?” asked Adah3.
“Ah poor newbies. Babes in space,” said Hondo4. “For a start only military wankers and boffins call them Hyperspacial Energy Anomalous Fields or HEAFs. Proper spacers call them gyres.
“They are named after some mythical god of storms,” said Wei1.
Ashi8 said, “ The name comes from Greek mythology, Gyres was one of the three Hekatonkheires.”
“The what?”
“Heck-At-Tonn-Kear-Ees. They were the offspring of Uranus the Sky Father and Gaia the Earth Mother and they helped Zeus and the Olympians overthrow the Titans. Gyres was one of three brothers who could summon thunderbolts and other such mayhem. A monstrous giant and all round angry god.”
Hondo4 said, “For a Jap, you know a lot about Greek mythology.”
Ashi8 let the slur pass. “A victim of some classical study in the long boring hours of space. In Japanese culture, they might be referred to as Raijin, but in the universal tongue they are called gyres.”
“So if gyres are so dangerous why not go around them?” Flynn7 said.
“Did you read the briefing?” Wei1 asked.
“Kind of skimmed it. It was pretty technical.”
“Well, I can see we have to start at the beginning. When the practicalities of the fold-engine were first sorted out and fold-space was turned from theory to a reality, everyone assumed it was completely empty.”
“Or that it was real-space folded so you just had to navigate around the existing matter in a curved space-time,” said Zen2.
Hondo4 said, “But fold-space isn’t either of those things. Science still does not really know what it is, it was just useful and convenient to get from A to B so off humanity went. The closest analogy is that when we go superluminal we exist in tiny soap bubbles of real-space zipping across fold-space.”
“And fold-space isn’t a total vacuum anymore than real-space is,” continued Wei1. “There is no solid matter but there are energy fields. Four if I remember correctly.” He ticked the different categories off on his raised fingertips. “Firstly, there are charted fields, which are largely fixed. Secondly, there are untethered fields which are known and tracked but drift about. Then there are the transitory fields which are like energy-comets shooting across fold-space. No one knows if they follow a kind of orbit or if they just form and what they are emitted from. We just don’t know enough about fold-space physics yet. And there is a fourth gyres, which escapes me right now.”
“The fourth type is a cross dimensional object,” said Ashi8. “Something that exists in both real-space and fold-space at the same time.”
“Yeah they don’t really exist in both planes simultaneously but phase between the two so rapidly and continually that they may as well,” added Hondo4.
“So there you go kids,” said Zen2. “Hyperspace isn’t just a big blank canvas you can draw a line across and only worry about what you might be banging into when you transition back to sub-light at the far end. It contains big scary Greek mythology that can really tear a ship up if you are not careful.”
“Told you FTL was dangerous,” said Hondo4.
“And so what type of gyres is this one we are entering?” Kell asked.
Wei1 said, “A charted gyres that lies smack bang across this route. I have done this leg a few times and we have always crossed it safely.”
“So you’re not concerned?”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not cautious. The problem with all the gyres is their unpredictability. The closest real-space equivalent I can think of is a solar flare. You can predict them based on their usual pattern of behaviour and you can anticipate the effects on satellites and surface radiation, but occasionally they really blow off steam and can seriously zap the crap out of a planet. Gyres are the same, they ebb and flow and every so often cut loose with a real shit storm. You don’t want to be near the field when that happens.”
“What is the effect?” Adah3 asked.
“Do you know the parable that there cannot be any tales about pirates if there are no survivors to tell the tales? Well this is the same. No one really knows what happens to a ship caught in a gyres storm because not only are there no survivors, there is no ship.”
“What about analysis of wreckage and stuff like that?” Flynn7 said.
“No. I mean literally no ship. No ship in fold-space, no ship in real space. Poof, vanished.”
“Don’t let him scare you,” said Zen2. “That is true in a few instances but other ships caught in a gyres event have been shunted out of fold-space back into real space. Not pleasant, but survivable. It depends on the intensity of the storm.”
“Sounds wonderful. So back to the question of going around?” Flynn7 said.
“Too inefficient,” said Hondo4. “Mother will re-calculate the nav-plot if the predictions are for a serious storm, but for now we press on. Schedule is king.”
“And what do we do when we hit the storm?” Adah3 said.
“We take a day off locked in the extra shielding of our CAP and sleep or pray or medicate. Whatever it is that gets you through the day. Even the foremen-computers get the day off,” said Wei1.
“And in the mean time we work a little extra to make up for Mother’s grand benevolence of giving us leave locked in our pods to await our fate,” said Hondo4.
“That about sums it up,” said Zen2.
The conversation drifted on to more general and less concerning topics, and Kell quietly picked up her helmet and went to finish her maintenance using some of the small tools in the shop on G-deck.