He could hear the dull rumble of the thrusters far behind him, and wondered if there was anything he had forgotten to check. How much fuel was left in the reaction chamber, for instance. Surely Engineer’s Mate Vachon would have mentioned it if there was only a fragment of reaction matter left? There were thousands of other details he knew he could worry about if he allowed himself to, but there was nothing to be gained by it. There was nothing he could do about the situation they were in but try to make the best of it. If something went wrong, he could deal with it when it happened. Until then, he had to sit and wait, monitoring the systems while allowing his mind to dwell on things he’d rather it didn’t dwell on. He envied the others the cleaning and maintenance duty he was about to assign them.
7
Samson had allowed his eyes to close. His mind drifted through the chaos of half-sleep—the jumbled thoughts that took on a life and form of their own, preying on the worries and anxieties that had occupied it while it was still fully awake. He recalled sitting in his quarters on Terran Union Naval Base Arcturus, where he had been confined after the mutiny was broken up, waiting for the knock on his door that he knew was coming. Waiting for the consequences which he knew would follow. He heard the knock, and jolted awake.
The bridge was quiet, the lights dimmed. He looked at his command console, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. He was tense from the abrupt way he had woken, and took a deep breath to relax. The ship lurched as he did, throwing him forward in his seat. He gripped the armrest with one hand and scrolled through the displays on the console with the other. There were no alarms showing, but a ship didn’t behave like that unless there was something wrong.
‘Mister Vachon, anything to report?’
‘On my way to the engine bay, sir. Will update once I’m there.’
Samson waited, and tried not to let his imagination run away from him.
‘I think you better come down here, sir,’ Vachon said a few moments later.
Samson considered asking for the bad news anyway, but reckoned perhaps it was better to find out first, before the rest of the crew did. He checked everything else was in order, then called for Harper to attend on the bridge. As soon as she arrived a moment later—one of the benefits of being on so small a ship—he set off to find out what had happened.
Vachon was standing by the power plant’s reaction chamber when Samson went into the engine bay.
‘What’s the problem, Mister Vachon?’
‘Dirty reaction matter,’ Vachon said. ‘It explains the power surge.’
Samson went cold. ‘How dirty?’
‘Enough for it to have fragmented.’
Samson grimaced, and his heart increased its pace a few beats. Reaction matter was a crystal precisely shaped during manufacture—a perfect sphere that was then held suspended in a magnetic field. The exposed surface area of the sphere was one of the factors that controlled reaction rate. The reaction chamber’s injectors bombarded the reaction matter with energised particles that created a multitude of tiny fusion reactions, the combination of which gave them power for propulsion, and to charge their agitator and the many other energy-hungry systems on a space-going vessel.
With pure reaction matter, the reaction matter crystal held its shape, slowly reducing in size as it was used until it could no longer provide a sufficient reaction rate. When that happened, it would be replaced during a standard space-dock service. When there were imperfections in the reaction matter—dirt or flaws introduced during substandard manufacture—the crystal could fragment under particle bombardment, increasing the surface area and causing reaction rate to increase uncontrollably, usually completely without warning. More than one ship had been vaporised as a result.
It was a problem Samson had been very hopeful he would not encounter. In the Navy, bad reaction matter was unheard of. On a junker like the Bounty? Apparently not.
‘Is fragmented matter the only answer?’ Samson said.
Vachon nodded. ‘Might not always be the only answer, but this time it is. It’s not too bad right now, but it’s definitely fragmented, and that’s a sign of things to come, as often as not.’
‘Could powering up too quickly have shocked the crystal?’ Samson said. If that were the case, another fragmentation was unlikely to happen. A dirty crystal, on the other hand, could have numerous flaws and the potential for many more fragmentations.
Vachon shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t say it helped, but a good crystal shouldn’t be fragmented by the way we powered up. Only time that happens is when there’s foreign material in it. What kind of fool uses dirty reaction matter?’
‘The type who shoots at heavily armed Marines,’ Samson said.
He rubbed his temples, trying to remember the protocols for dealing with fragmenting reaction matter—he didn’t want to have to ask Vachon for a refresher. In this day and age, it wasn’t something that happened on naval vessels, or any vessel operating at the standards required by the safety codes. There were plenty of ships that didn’t meet them, but this was a new problem for Samson. Even a heavily damaged naval vessel would be destroyed by other issues before the shielded reaction chamber became a problem. Even then, there were ejection systems, and always a store of spare crystals. He was a warfare officer, and the exotic problems one might encounter when dealing with reaction chamber matters weren’t his daily problems. He pulled the procedure out of the murk of his memory.
‘Okay, let’s power back to idle and see how the crystal holds up. If it keeps fragmenting, we’ll eject and re-prime the chamber with a fresh crystal.’
Vachon grimaced.
‘There aren’t any spare crystals?’
Vachon shook his head. ‘Not that I can find.’
‘Wow,’ Samson said. ‘This guy really must not have
