Half Share

Brill tsked. “He’s spoiling all your fun, Francis.”

“Maybe later,” Diane added with a mischievous grin.

“Okay,” Brill said, “here’s the drill. I’m first section, Francis—and by extension Ish—second, Diane third. We’ll be setting second watch when we secure from navigation detail at around 17:00, so Ish and Francis will get off at 18:00. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you two will be back on duty at 06:00.”

Francis added, “When underway, we run a modified twenty-four stan watch schedule, Ish. You already know we change on the sixes and twelves, but only two sections get the duty in any given day. That means we get one day off out of every three. The basic pattern is six on, six off, six on, twelve off, then six on, six off, six on, twenty- four off and it repeats every three days.”

“Ah! Disorientation,” I exclaimed. “Something I’m used to.”

Francis and I finished up quickly and headed back down to environmental.

“Now what?” I asked when we got settled back in.

“Now we watch and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“End of watch, or something to go wrong.”

“That’s it?”

He nodded. “It’s a good time to study. The trick is staying alert. About eighty percent of your watch will be just sitting here, but the other twenty percent is stuff like the VSI and acknowledging the system integrity checks.”

“How do you spend the time?”

“It varies. I like to take a walk through the section periodically. Check for valve leaks, and keep an eye out for physical signs of malfunction. Just kinda keeping my fingers on the pulse as it were. Sometimes you spot something going wrong before it gets to the point where the sensor picks it up. That’s usually a good thing.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“Study, read.” He shrugged. “I’m not too motivated right now. I don’t want to leave the Lois and there are no spec two slots in environmental here. I should get the rating eventually I suppose, but like I said I’m in no hurry. It’s not like I need the extra money a promotion would bring, and I like life on the Lois.”

I frowned a little trying to remember what he had told me back on Gugara. “You’ve got a doctorate don’t you?”

He looked surprised that I would remember a casual dinner conversation from months earlier but shot me a rueful grin. “Yeah. Astrophysics, but don’t hold that against me.”

I smiled. “I won’t. My mother had a doctorate in ancient lit. I know how it works.”

He laughed at that.

“So what brought you to the Lois?”

He chuckled a bit bitterly. “Well, a Ph.D. isn’t what it used to be and astrophysics has gotten very political these days. Most of the money is in corporate positions in R&D.”

“R&D in astrophysics?”

“Yeah, almost of the big corporate conglomerates have what they call R&D branches. It’s really exploration and development. They send ships out to sit in the Deep Dark and look for new systems to exploit. They take about a hundred little probes with them and send them out in likely directions. The probes jump out, do a programmed survey, and jump back. Usually they jump back where they get picked up. The companies extract the data, refurbish the probe, and send it out again.”

“But don’t we know where the nearby stars are?” I asked.

Francis shrugged. “Yes and no. We need a pretty clear spot to put a ship in when we jump into a system. The Burleson drive gets unstable otherwise. You probably wouldn’t want to be on a ship that jumped into, say, a dark- matter cloud.”

“Why? What happens?”

“Dunno. We’ve never had anybody come back to tell us. I suspect it’s not because it was so nice that they just decided to stay.”

“Oh, that put transition in a whole new light for me. I’m glad I didn’t know that all this time.”

Francis saw my expression and gave me a reassuring smile. “In the shipping lanes, it’s not an issue. They’re scouted out well in advance of any big ship rumbling in. To answer your other question, yes. We do know mostly where the nearby stars are, but we don’t know a lot of detail about their systems. There are a lot of systems out there that are in exploration range that aren’t necessarily within commercial jump range. So, finding a commercially viable system usually means finding some way that it can be of value.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“Typical trip is eighteen months between ports.”

“Ouch! That’s a long time without fresh stores.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I thought forty days was long. So, you used to work on those ships that did the probing?”

“Yeah. Eighteen months at a whack is a lifetime, or at least it feels like it. First trip, I thought I was going to go out of my mind before we finally got back, but I was contractually obligated to make a second trip. While I was out there, I needed something to occupy my time so I studied”

“Ah, I see so that’s how you got into environmental?”

“Yep, when I got back I took the spec three test at the Union Hall and caught the next freighter out of the system with an open berth.”

“After three years in the Deep Dark, I’m surprised you wanted to ship out!”

“I got into astrophysics because I love it out here. I just didn’t like what they had me doing. Those long treks were just too hard to take. I much rather prefer life on the freighters. I like sailing out for a few weeks, getting to a port and then going out again.”

The automated systems check popped up again and Francis acknowledged it before continuing, “Three months I could have handled. No sweat. Even four. Maybe even six. It was interesting work and in my field of expertise but eighteen months in a tin can was way too long.”

Brill and Diane came in and I noticed that it was almost 13:30. Pullout in environmental was no more exciting than it had been on the mess deck. Francis and Brill sat in the only two chairs. Diane got a folded blanket out of a storage locker and put it down on the deck next to a bulkhead for us to sit on. We did not expect anything bad would happen, but things were occasionally known to go wrong on pullout so we settled where a little bumpiness would not send us crashing into each other or some critical ship’s component. We got the familiar announcement, “All hands, brace for pullout. All hands, brace for pullout,” over the ship’s speakers and I felt the familiar thump of the docking ring letting us go from the bow. This was followed by the weird moving elevator feeling for just a few seconds. The speakers then told us, “All hands. Pullout complete. Tugs cast off in three zero ticks, mark.” That was it. We were underway again. I wondered, briefly, how Sarah fared in the galley.

It felt strange to be just sitting there so I asked Diane, “Well, we’ve got three stans. If nothing else is happening, should we replace that algae matrix?”

“Good idea, but it’s against standing orders. We have to keep all the shipboard equipment up and available during navigation detail. When we shut down gear while underway, we need to notify the bridge and actually get permission first. They never turn us down, but it keeps everybody running the ship informed as to what’s happening down here.”

“So, we sit.”

She gave me a grin and a half shrug. “Unless you brought some playing cards.”

I sighed. “This is going to take some getting used to, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Welcome to the other side. It’s not harder, just different. You’ll adjust.”

I thought for a while. “What’s the regulation about project work?”

“What do you mean by project work?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What if I wanted to experiment with making a growing medium out of sludge, for example?”

“You can do what you like so long as you can see the readouts. Anything that keeps you from falling asleep is