Tramp

by David Alexander

Illustrated by Randy Asplund-Faith

I could feel the off-balance tremor of the displacers through the soles of my feet as I worked my way down the cabin-way on the Orion’s starboard side. Every thirty-three feet I had to duck my head to clear the blow-out hatches Captain O’Bannion had been forced to install on Carlon’s World before the underwriters would let us break orbit. The welder’s beads where the modules were jammed against the deck plates still glinted a clean blue-black, as yet free of the verdigris that tattooed the rest of the ship.

The Orion was typical of the freighters plying the ports of the Middle and Outer Rings. She sported twin Murray Hi-Twist Injectors to warp the ship into Non-E where six GMF 4100 displacers maneuvered her at a cruising Equivalent Velocity of about one light-year per standard day, more or less. In the Orion’s case it was usually less as the synchronization of displacers two and five had degraded to 3 percent below book specs before Calipha’s incantations had finally seemed to take hold.

According to the chron we should have been about 200 hours out of Coffernam, but judging by the buzz I was now detecting in the plates and the asymmetric shudder which had begun to torque the frames if you knew just where to look, I guessed that Calipha’s magics were losing their potency and that our laboring displacers were again creeping to a higher level of distortion.

Today I was on the Charlie Watch, noon to eighteen hundred hours, with Adrian Mandell.

“Any traffic?” I asked Mandell as I took my place at the con.

“No, sir.”

I would have been shocked had he said anything else. Nothing short of a military ship running high cycles in our immediate “vicinity” (though in Non-E there is no real physical location, which is why it’s called Non-Euclidean Space) could have punched a message through to us. The first two hours of my watch were uneventful, as expected. The Prox would sound an alarm if anything came close enough to distort our bubble, the chances of which were about the same as two men three miles apart firing rifles in each other’s direction and having the bullets collide in mid-flight.

The real reason for our watches was to guard against power failure, desynchronization, or the most feared, fire. Anything will burn if you get it hot enough—aluminum, even steel. This was a cargo ship, which meant it contained motors, cranes, cables, hydraulic lines, and power connections, all of which could leak, spark, and overheat. If, God help us, a fire started in the engineering decks or the crew quarters, we would have to control it fast or face death by burning, death by smoke inhalation, or death by oxygen deprivation, the operative word in each case being “death.”

So, naturally, when the alarm sounded my first thought was, “Oh my God, we’ve got a fire!” and I immediately looked at the ship’s interior schematic for the location of the blaze, but the view was clear—no smoke, no hot spots. It was only then that I turned back to the general data screen and studied the red letters which now filled the plate:

Desynchronization Alert

Displacement Units Two and Five are now 4 percent out of synchronization and climbing. At present rate of decline, loss of Non-E space capability is anticipated in approximately 5.3 minutes.

“Turn that damn thing off!” I shouted to Mandell as I punched up Calipha’s code.

The alarm cut off, and after four rings the engineer’s sing-song voice blared in my ear: “I know, I know,” he shouted. “I’m doing the best I can!”

“Can you get them back into line?”

“I don’t have a crystal ball, for Christ’s sake! The damn things are fifty years old!”

“Look, Calipha, you’ve got three minutes or I’m going to have to drop us out. If we’re still under power when we top 5 percent—”

“Don’t you think I know that? Now let me do my job!”

“If I don’t see stabilization in two minutes-thirty,” I said punching up a real time display of the percentage variance, “I’m going to start powering down.” My earpiece was silent for half a beat, then, in a resigned tone, Calipha said “Understood,” and punched out.

“Get the captain down here,” I ordered Mandell without turning my head from the slowly increasing numbers on the plate—4.21 percent, 4.23 percent, 4.25 percent. Whatever Calipha was trying, it wasn’t working. A few moments later the alarm began to beep again.

“Damn it, Mandell, I told you to shut that damn thing off!”

“Don’t blame me!” he growled, “Look at your board.”

A new red lettered message had now appeared on the secondary monitor:

Collision Alert

An object has made contact with the exterior of the bubble. Analysis indicates metallic-ceramic composition. Object’s course—

Then the message flickered once and disappeared, replaced by the plate’s normal power generation figures and ship’s housekeeping information.

“Did you turn that off?” I asked, turning to Mandell.

“I didn’t touch it.”

“Well, what the hell—”

At that instant, the warning reappeared and the alarm began again. This time it lasted barely two seconds before flickering away.

“Mandell, punch the damn Prox system up on your plate and see if you can figure out what the hell’s happening,” I shouted, then turned back to my main display. The levels were not only still rising, the rate of desynchronization was increasing: 4.69; 4.72; 4.76.

“I’m shutting her down,” I called out and keyed the intercom. “Prepare for emergency drop-out. All hands: emergency drop-out commencing in fifteen seconds.”

“Dondero, what the hell’s going on?” I jerked around and saw Dennis O’Bannion swinging through the hatch. Dressed only in a hastily pulled on pair of jeans and a T-shirt, Captain O’Bannion’s face was puffy with sleep. He had pulled the Alpha shift, midnight to six A.M., and had probably gone to bed no more than four or five hours before.

“The displacers are crashing, Captain,” I called, turning back to the controls. “Calipha can’t hold them. We’re already 4.91 percent out of sync.” As I spoke I selected the “Emergency Drop-out” command with a ten-second delay, typed in my Command Authorization Code and hit the “Accept & Activate” pad.

“Jesus!” I heard the Old Man hiss, but I was too busy to deal with him at that point. My plate changed to a green and white color scheme to indicate that my command had been accepted and the system began to echo the countdown over the ship’s intercom.

“Drop-out in ten seconds.”

“Drop-out in nine seconds.”

The Captain hurried to the first officer’s chair and activated the restraints. The day before we were finally able to break orbit from Carlon’s World, our First Officer, Lin Chang, had come down with a case of measles and was barred from rejoining the ship. So now the ship’s principal officers consisted of just the captain, Mandell, Calipha, Everson, the navigator, and the ship’s second officer, me. I hit the button on my own chair and gallons of putty-like sludge were sucked from the tank beneath the deck and pumped into a series of bladders that expanded over my arms, legs, chest, and almost completely around my neck and head.

When the countdown reached three seconds, the data plate suddenly lit up for the third time with a collision alert, but this time the alarm did not flicker and disappear. Instead, overlaid against the computer’s drone—“Drop-out in three seconds.—Drop-out in two seconds.”—was the warbling beep beep beep of the Prox monitor, drawing our attention to the message’s glowing red characters.

When the countdown reached zero the ship shuddered like a wet dog emerging from its bath. Plates, frames, and racks of equipment groaned. The bridge lights suddenly flickered out and were replaced by the glow of two of the four emergency panels, the other two having failed months or possibly years before and their death never having been noticed, or if so, the failed units never having been replaced.

In my guts I felt the twisting, tearing shudder of a return to E-space barely ahead of a collapsing bubble, the leakage of Non-E slipping past the dying fields and surging through my flesh and bone. With a final subliminal shake the Orion settled into normal space. An instant later our main power flickered back on.

“Calipha, report!” I ordered over my headset.

“The displacers are shut down. It’ll take me a while to check them out. The engines are at nominal—no red lights.”

“Mandell, check out the rest of the ship for damage or injuries—”

“I’ll do it,” O’Bannion broke in, anxious to get the status of his command.

“—And turn off that damn Prox alarm.”

An instant later the beeping ceased and I keyed up several views generated by the proximity system: the first, a three-D schematic showing the relative positions of the Orion and the intruder; the second, a computer-generated, enlarged and enhanced view of the Orion and the other object; and lastly, a real-time visible-light view from the side of the Orion toward the point where the other object was supposed to be located. This third image showed only the black of interstellar space speckled with cold, distant stars.

Quickly, I ran through the spectrum down to IR then switched to active laser and radar. A dot about the size of a BB held at arms’ length appeared, and I zoomed the display until the image filled the plate. The object wasn’t a natural phenomenon, but I hadn’t expected it to be. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever detected any natural objects in Non-E Space.

The thing was sort of a half globe with a bulge in the front, rather like a lady bug with a very small head. According to the computer it was about the size of an in-system shuttle or a small courier ship, perhaps 5 percent of the volume of the Orion.

“Mandell, is that thing—” the Captain began but was immediately cut off.

“—I’ve got a distress beacon. Claims she’s the Montclair out of Piedmont. Engine failure. Only one person on board. Requesting assistance.”

“Dondero, take the boat and a couple of men. And draw a weapon from the arms’ locker. I don’t trust coincidences.”

“Yes, sir.” I slipped out of the bridge and made my way “up” toward the blister where the gig was stored just aft of the forward hold. On the way I called up two of the Cargo Master’s AS’s and ordered them to meet me at the hatch. I detoured just long enough to retrieve a pistol from the arms locker in the Captains’ cabin. By the time I arrived at his quarters he had already transmitted the code to release the panel at my command.

I’ve seen some old movies where the hero has some kind of a “ray gun” that fires a multicolored beam that burns its way through the villain’s chest. It’s always amazed me that it could do that to a man and yet be safe to use on board a ship operating in hard vacuum. Ridiculous, of course.

The Orion carried four old-fashioned pistols loaded with soft plastic bullets. They were useless against any target farther than nine or ten yards away and the loads were reduced so that at only two feet the projectile would not penetrate a standard sixteenth-inch-thick instrument panel housing. But then all they really needed to do was punish human flesh, and they did that very well. I know I wouldn’t want to go up against someone armed with one of those guns.

I grabbed a loaded HKC ten-millimeter automatic together with an extra eighteen shot clip and hurried up to meet the two men from Essabhoy’s crew, Sternman and Phelps, who were already waiting for me at the hatch for the midship boat blister.

“What’s up, Mr. Dondero?” Phelps, a slender man with a shaved head and lustrous, pitch-black skin asked me uneasily when he saw the bulge under my coat.

“Nothing to worry about. We’ve got a small ship in distress, only one passenger. The captain just wants to play it safe is all. OK, let’s get to it.”

I punched in my CAC, checked that the atmosphere light was green, then popped the hatch. The boat smelled of damp iron and ammonia and a hundred other spaceship odors from overheated insulation to rancid machine oil, all concentrated in a small, cold room whose air had not circulated through the scrubbers in two months or more. The boat (it had no name any more than the rowboat tied to the stern of a schooner would have a name) had seats for eight—two people at the command panel and two rows of three seats each behind. In shape the boat was similar to the Orion, a cylinder with a large Plex screen at one end with the seats down the center of the pipe. When stored, the floor of the boat was close to the hull so that “up” and “down” were what we would expect them to be, meaning we climbed “down” into the boat from the “B1” corridor. Of course, in flight, the boat’s occupants were weightless. Once I had settled into the command chair, I took a quick look around the cabin and confirmed that both my men had strapped themselves in. Then I turned back to the panel and keyed the intercom.

“Captain, we’re ready to separate,” I informed the bridge, then grabbed the joystick at the right center of the board.

“Acknowledged,” came the terse reply, followed by, “In three… two… one…” then a shudder, and a terrific acceleration as the craft was flung from the Orion. Then all trace of apparent gravity disappeared. I pressed the button on the top center of the joystick, activating the control, then spun the craft until the heads-up display overlaid on the front port showed that we were heading for the Montclair. It took only a few minutes to reach her, and except for her salmon-colored skin accentuated by teal-blue stripes, she looked identical to the image I had seen on the Orion’s screens. I positioned us facing directly away from the Montclair’s main port and keyed the boat’s radio to her frequency.

“Montclair, this is Second Officer Harry Dondero, of the Orion out of Xanadu. Do you read me?”

“Orion, this is Slater Eves on the Montclair. Yes, I read you clearly.”

“Good. I’m going to mate our locks. When I give you the word, undog your main hatch.”

“That’s not necessary, Mr. Dondero. I’ve still got a little power left. I think that with a bit of luck I should be able to follow you back to your ship.”

Sure, that was a good idea—let an unknown vessel with malfunctioning engines and carrying an uninspected cargo power up and head straight for the Orion. Not likely!

“Negative, Mr. Eves. I’ll need to make a personal inspection of your vessel. Please make ready for docking.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving the Montclair floating free out here. If you’re worried about me losing control, just attach a line and tow me over to your ship.”

“Sorry, Mr. Eves. Either let us on board to personally review your status, or find yourself another ride.”

“That doesn’t leave me much choice, does it?” Eves said testily.

Well, too bad. At that point I had problems of my own, namely, the Orion’s engines were down and we were floating around out here about eight light-years from the nearest inhabited planet.

“It’s up to you,” I told Eves, making it clear I didn’t much care if he was shy about having visitors or not.

“I’m standing by. I’ll release the lock when my board tells me that you’ve got a good seal.”

I didn’t bother to reply, just locked the rear camera on the Montclair’s hatch and selected the “Approach & Dock” menu choice. The boat’s computer plotted the most efficient course, moved the rear of the boat close to the lock, then deployed a flexible, reinforced tube with variable-viscosity gum around the leading edge. The computer positioned the open end of the tube around the hatch like the mouth of a gigantic eel, then applied an electric current through the gel at the end of the tube until the material had softened and made an airtight seal with the Montclair’s hull. By conduction through the plates I could hear the growing hiss of air filling the tube. Self-consciously, I patted the HKC under my coat, then released my straps.

“Phelps, you’re with me. Sternman, you stay here. If everything’s OK, I’ll tell you that ‘We’re coming over.’ If I say anything else, retract the tube and return to the ship. You got it?”

“Sure, but—”

“Repeat it.”

“We’re coming over. But, Mr. Dondero, what if you’re already in the tube?”

“Then don’t let us in. Look,” I said trying to contain my frustration with the whole peculiar situation, “I’m just being cautious. There’s probably nothing to worry about. Just do your job and we’ll all be fine. Phelps, you ready?”

“Uhh, yes sir,” Phelps said nervously as he sneaked another peek at the HKC’s bulge under my coat.

I led Phelps to the rear of the boat, opened the hatch, and pulled myself into the tube. Knotted lines ran down each side at shoulder height and we quickly traversed the tube’s fifteen-foot length. As we neared the Montclair’s hull, a rectangular pattern appeared as the hatch was first pulled in, then swung out of the way to our right. The yacht’s lock was tiny but Phelps and I both managed to squeeze in. In a few seconds the outer hatch cycled closed and the inner one opened.

The Montclair was barely more than one large room serving as command cabin, lounge, and galley. Two small sleeping cabins and a head made up the balance of the accommodations, with the deck below dedicated to engines, fuel, provisions, and supplies. Slater Eves was waiting for us in the center of the room with a relieved but not necessarily friendly expression on his flat, pale face.

“Mr. Eves, I’m Harry Dondero. This is Mr. Phelps.” Without the Velcro slippers Eves was wearing, Phelps and I would have floated helplessly around the cabin, so we kept our hands on the rubberized grips built into the wall near the hatch. Eves was slender with bone-white skin and a ruff of red-orange hair which, in this weightless environment, stood straight up perhaps an inch and a half above the crown of his head. Instead of the common disposable ship’s jumpsuit, Eves wore a fanciful outfit of tight red pants and an almost fluorescent lemon-yellow shirt whose full sleeves and a collar, with points at least three inches long, made him seem like a displaced showman or a clown who had removed his make-up but not his costume.

“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Dondero,” Eves said in a melodious, tenor voice. “Thank you for answering my call. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.” You would have starved to death, I thought to myself, but merely nodded to Eves, his unpleasant alternative being all too obvious.

“You said you were alone here?”

“Yes. Yes indeed. Just me.” Now why, I wondered, did Eves find it necessary to answer that question three times?

“Do you have an extra pair of those?” I asked, nodding at his feet.

“What?”

“Ship’s slippers. Phelps and I will need to borrow a pair.”

“What? Oh, slippers. Yes, of course. Let me see…”

Eves rummaged through several drawers and cabinets while Phelps and I watched him with growing disbelief. How could a man traveling alone on his own ship not know where everything was? He should have been able to find the damn things with his eyes closed, but it took him almost two minutes with his eyes wide open before Slater Eves finally turned them up.

“Here you go,” he said with a forced smile as he scratched his way across the rug and handed me two pairs of black elastic slippers with Velcro bands across the soles. I gave one pair to Phelps and we slipped them on over our shoes like old-fashioned rubbers Then Eves opened a hatch in the deck near the rear of the cabin and we descended to the engine room.

While I’m not an engineer, I’ve had the basic courses at the Academy plus over nine years in-service and I’d never seen engines like those. Oh, the basic power plant was standard enough, a GE Hercules 1900, but I didn’t recognize much of anything else. Luckily, I didn’t need to in order to figure out what had gone wrong. Eves had exhausted his main fuel bank and was well down into his reserves. Beyond that I couldn’t see anything else wrong, though his displacers could have been as bad as or worse than those on the Orion, and without a full systems check I wouldn’t have noticed a thing.

“OK, let’s take a look at your hold,” I told Eves when I was done with the engine room.

“Why?” he asked sharply. His face seemed to grow even more pale, if that was possible.

“We can’t allow any craft to approach our hull without knowing what it’s carrying.”

Instead of replying, Eves just stared at me as if I had suddenly begun speaking in a language beyond his understanding. “Mr. Eves?” I finally prompted him. Eves’s eyes locked on mine for a heartbeat longer, then he gave a slight shrug and nodded toward a hatch mounted in the middle of the engine room’s forward bulkhead.

“You’ll need to enter your code,” I said after a quick glance at the panel.

“Of course.” Eves’s voice was tight with an edge of barely suppressed irritation. He approached the panel stiffly, as if someone had shoved a steel pipe up his spine. I watched him type in his code, then open the panel. A bonging tone filled the ship when the hatch slid aside, and Eves had to enter five more digits to cut it off. Once inside, I wondered what all the fuss was about—the hold was essentially empty. All it contained were two small cartons of emergency rations, perhaps a week’s worth for one person, a small crate holding an assortment of gaskets and some sealant and emergency patches, and a cupboard stocked with towels and galley supplies. I didn’t even see the usual reserve drums of water or cylinders of compressed oxygen.

“Satisfied?” Eves asked scornfully as soon as I had completed my circuit of the room.

“Perfectly.” I motioned to Phelps and we all left the hold. I noticed that Eves didn’t bother to double-lock the hatch behind us. Stranger and stranger. As soon as we returned to the main cabin I nodded toward Eves’s sleeping room. “Better put together a bag of whatever you want to take with you.”

“What about my ship? You’re not going to just leave it here, are you?”

“Right now our engineer has his hands full readjusting our displacers so that we can get on with our voyage. When he’s done I expect Captain O’Bannion will ask him to take a look at your engines. If there’s nothing major wrong, he can probably fix them and you can be on your way. If not…” I let the sentence hang but Eves was having none of it.

“If not, what?”

“Our holds are full. We can give you a ride to Coffernam, that’s our next port of call. You’ll have to hire a ship and come back to get the Montclair. We’ll note the coordinates for you.”

“Just leave it here? Out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Who’s going to take her?”

“This is crazy. Can’t we secure it to your hull?”

Well, firstly, anyone with any sense knew that a ship’s bubble is carefully calculated for the craft’s mass distribution and shape. If we tried to weld the Montclair to our hull, God knows if our displacers would ever come close to synchronization again. Secondly, you never refer to your own ship as “it”—always “her.” If I were a military officer, at that point I’d have demanded to see Eves’s papers and his ID, but I was only the Second Officer on a tramp freighter so I did nothing.

“From what I know, that’s not practical,” I told him noncommittally, “but you can talk it over with the captain. We’d better get back.” Eves’s mouth opened, then closed soundlessly.

“All right, just a moment,” he said finally as if he were a shopkeeper dealing with a disagreeable customer. Eves opened the door to his cabin, pulled a few pieces of clothing first from a drawer, then from the floor, stuffed them in a dark blue crylon bag, and joined Phelps and me near the lock. “I’m ready,” he said firmly, as if he were about to march into battle.

“Fine, let me use your radio to let my crew know we’re finished here.” I left him near the hatch with Phelps and walked over to his panel and keyed in the boat’s frequency.

“Mr. Sternman, this Dondero. We’re coming over. Do you copy?”

“Uhh, yes sir. You said you’re coming over?”

“Yes, we’re coming over. Dondero out.”

If Eves was puzzled by our radio exchange he had enough sense not to say so. In less than ten minutes we were all back on the Orion. Over Eves’s objections I told Phelps to take him to my old cabin. This trip I was bunking in the first officer’s quarters.

“But I must talk with the captain about my ship!”

“Sorry, Mr. Eves, but the captain’s got other problems to deal with right now. When he has a chance, he’ll talk to you. If you get hungry, the next meal’s at eighteen hundred hours. Any of the men can help you find the crew’s mess but I suggest you stay in your cabin so the captain will know where to find you when he’s ready to discuss your situation.” I left Eves standing there, angry and frustrated, but keeping him happy wasn’t my problem. I headed back to the bridge to make my report.

“How’s our new passenger?” the Old Man asked.

“I put him in my old cabin until you have the time to talk to him.”

“And?” I had long ago learned not to play poker with the captain.

“And, if that’s really his ship, then I’m the Archon of Deniria.”

“You’re telling me he hijacked it?”

“I don’t know how he got it, but I don’t think he walked into the broker’s office and bought it.”

“Is there any reason why that’s our problem?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“OK, I’ll take care of him later then.”

“What’s Calipha found out?”

“A couple of fried lines, popped breakers, mostly minor stuff. The engines seem to have come through it OK.”

“Can he get the displacers back in sync?”

“He doesn’t even know what put them out of sync.”

“Wait a minute! Twenty hours out of Carlon he told me the concentrators were overheating and screwing up the PLL. Now he says he doesn’t know?”

Halfway through my tirade O’Bannion scowled and gave his head a brief shake.

“The concentrators are still overheating and the PLL is losing sync, but he claims that’s not responsible for more than a 2 percent to 3 percent variance. He claims he can’t find anything that should have pulled them off baseline by four percent or more.”

“Then how does he explain the feet that they were off by 4.97 percent and rising when I dropped us out of Non-E?”

“He can’t.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I’ll have him check everything again, then try to rig up extra cooling for the concentrator housing.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll power up the injectors and try again. Do you have a better idea? I swallowed as if I had just tasted something bitter, and shook my head.

“OK, tell the crew we’ll stay here one standard day to give Calipha time to check everything out, then we’ll be back under way. We may as well take advantage of the delay. I want you to put together a list of all the repairs and maintenance items that we haven’t had the time to take care of, prioritize it, and assign teams to complete as many of them as we can so long as you don’t divert any resources that Calipha needs to get the displacers back into working condition.”

“What do you want to do about the Montclair? As far as I can tell, Eves just plain ran out of fuel.” O’Bannion frowned and shook his head in disbelief.

“When he’s done with our engines and after he’s gotten a meal and some sleep, have Calipha take a look at Eves’s ship. If all she needs is fuel, calculate the minimum amount required to get her to the nearest port and I’ll authorize the transfer if Eves can pay port prices.”

“And if he can’t?”

“Then we’ll give him a ride to Coffernam and how he gets the Montclair home is his problem.”

“He’s not going to be happy about that.”

“Eves’s happiness is not our problem. You’d better get started on that list.”

Don’t be fooled by the theoreticians who will tell you that the most efficient shape for an interstellar cargo vessel is a globe. It’s always twice as expensive and three times more inconvenient to build and crew a ship where nothing is square. If the Orion had been intended to dive into a gravity well she might have been designed aerodynamically like an old time rocket or a flying wing, but the fact was that if the Orion ever encountered any substantial atmosphere it would certainly be an accident. Consequently she was built like a sewer pipe—a big tube with the bridge shielded amidships just forward of the crew’s mess.

Except for sensors and maneuvering engines, the front third of the ship was one big cargo hold. Aft of the bridge was crew quarters, then came the rear cargo hold, then the engines which fed energy to the displacers set at the bow and stern and the four compass points around the equator.

The early ship designs called for eight displacers, one at each of what would be the corners if the ship were a rectangular solid, but then they figured out that the inefficiencies of the fore-aft-cross arrangement were more than canceled out by the cost and maintenance savings of using six instead of eight units. After taking into account supplies, bracing, lifepods, crew quarters, and all the rest of the stuff that goes into a working starship, the Orion’s cargo capacity was about two-fifths of her total interior volume.

Some of the new Virgo class ships could supposedly top a 55 percent capacity versus the Orion’s 40 percent but after you amortized their higher cost, fuel, and maintenance and repair charges, the numbers didn’t make much sense to anyone but TransStellor and some of the other flagship lines. Consequently, sales of the new Virgos were slow and I had heard that the Alliance Yard was already talking about massive cutbacks in their production schedule, though they called it merely “restructuring discussions.”

No matter how you sliced it, if that happened, a quarter of a million people would be unemployed and shipbuilding capacity would be reduced for a decade or more. You don’t just decide to start manufacturing starships today and have them roll off the lines tomorrow. All of which meant that, relatively speaking, the Orion’s value had risen just enough to keep her costs of repair barely less than the cost of replacement. If Alliance went through with their planned cutbacks, barring death, destruction, or tax seizure, the Orion would be bustling her way around the Outer Ring for another decade or more.

On the other hand, if Alliance decided to bite the bullet and stimulate Virgo sales with a substantial price reduction, it would be more profitable to sell the Orion for scrap and use the money as a down payment on one of the newer Elliptic class ships that would be a drug on the market if the Virgos started selling at a discount.

Well, why should I care? I had my ticket and would no doubt get another berth if the owners decided to send the Orion to the breakers. Still, it bothered me somehow. I had seen an old flat pic at the Merchant Academy; I don’t know where it came from or even if it was true or just some writer’s imagination, but it upset me in ways I found hard to explain. It was only a few minutes long and had no plot. It just showed a great steel ocean-going ship grounded on a sand beach somewhere in Africa back on Earth. Hundreds of squat black men like an army of insects crawled over her from stem to stern and, armed with torches and pry-bars, wrenches, cables, and saws, they dismembered her right down to the waterline the way a swarm of ants might slice up and carry off a rotting pineapple.

Putting thoughts of broken ships and unemployed men from my mind I continued on down to the mess. Artificial gravity is a wonderful thing, I think, but unfortunately it’s impractical for anything smaller than carriers and heavy ships of the line. The military isn’t constrained with cost considerations—who cares how much power the damn things suck up if not having to carry spin means the difference between winning a battle and losing it?

Since we couldn’t afford the luxury of AG, the Orion maintained a spin sufficient to impart an apparent eight-tenths of a standard gravity at the ship’s hull, decreasing, of course, as one moved closer to the core. I didn’t care so long as the apparent gravity in the galley was sufficient to keep the food on my plate.

I grabbed a hurried dinner on the run and didn’t see Eves again until twenty-four hundred hours, when I wandered into the mess for a glass of tea before turning in. I had just left Calipha in the engine room where he swore that the coolant lines he’d jury-rigged around the converter housing should be enough to let us make three-quarters EV with a desynchronization of less than 2 percent. I took another swallow, not thinking of much beyond finishing my tea and falling into my bunk, then looked up to see Eves standing in front of me.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Have a seat. You get settled in OK?”

“When will the captain be able to talk to me?” he asked in a rush, ignoring my question.

“He’s going to be pretty busy until at least twelve hundred hours tomorrow, but he’s authorized me to have our engineer take at look at your ship.” Instead of an expression of relief, a few words of thanks, Eves frowned, then turned his gaze down to the deck.

“The Montclair is a very advanced design,” he said deliberately a moment later, struggling to control his frustration. “I’d prefer that no one fool around with its engines.”

“Moahmar Calipha doesn’t fool around with any ship’s engines. But if you want to leave the Montclair here instead of flying her back home, that’s up to you.”

“No offense meant, Mr. Dondero. I’m sure your Mr. Calipha is a qualified mechanic, but I’m somewhat protective when it comes to the Montclair. Couldn’t you just put it in your hold and take us with you to your next port of call—Coffernam, I think you said.”

“And what would we do with the cargo that’s already in the hold?”

“I suppose I could make good the loss,” Eves suggested gracelessly.

“Would you also explain to the consignees that we decided to throw their shipments overboard in deep space because you made us a better offer? What effect do you think that would have on the Orion’s reputation?”

Eves glanced around the mess, at the scarred plates, the bubbles in the dull gray paint where the walls met the curve of the ceiling, at the cheap plastic chairs and dented tables, at the chipped heavy white mug at my elbow, and suppressed a smile. “Surely the Orion could live with a little bad publicity, if the price was right,” he said easily. It was all I could do to keep from slapping his smarmy face. I took a slow swallow of lukewarm tea and turned back to Eves.

“The only way your ship will leave this pile of vacuum is if you fly her out of here yourself. As far as I can tell, her only problem is that you just plain ran out of fuel, but I’m not an engineer. I know I wouldn’t go charging off into Non-E assuming that’s all that was wrong. Quite frankly, it was a miracle that both our ships happened to drop out near each other this time. You can’t expect to be so lucky again.”

“Luck had—Look, Mr. Dondero, don’t you see—”

“I see that I’m tired and that I’m going to go to bed. I’d advise you to do the same. Get hold of me or the captain at 1200 hours tomorrow and let us know what you’ve decided.” Angrily, I stood up and roughly pushed my chair out of my way to the limit of its travel, then paused and turned back to Eves. “One more thing—if you expect us to supply you with any fuel you’ll have to pay for it at port standard prices. We’ll need hard funds, UCs or equivalent. Otherwise the whole question’s moot, anyway.”

I turned away from Eves’s burning glare, visited the head just long enough to splash some water on my face, and then crawled into my bunk. As I was lying there, balanced on the knife edge of sleep, I began to wonder what Eves had meant there at the end—“Luck had—.” Luck had nothing to do with it? He had to have meant something else. There was no way one ship could detect another in Non-E. Our drop-out so close together had to be the wildest stroke of fortune, equivalent to winning the lottery by randomly picking the right ten numbers between zero and ninety-nine all in the proper order. But people did win the lottery that way, every day, no matter how long the odds might appear to be. I rolled over, buried my head in my pillow and struggled to blot out all thoughts of Slater Eves.

At about 0500 I woke up with a start, my mind unnaturally clear. My cabin was still in deep shadow, the panels barely glowing at their lowest setting. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize myself falling back to sleep, but after a few seconds I knew it was hopeless, and I knew why. I had to take another look at Eves’s ship, to try again to figure out what was really going on. I pulled on a clean ’suit, splashed some water on my face, and headed for Calipha’s cabin.

“Get dressed, we’ve got work to do,” I told his bleary-eyed form when he finally staggered to the door.

“I just got to bed—” Calipha glanced at the chron near the door “—three hours ago,” he said wearily. “What’s happened? Did they find more damage?”

“We’ve got to check out Eves’s ship. Come on.”

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” he objected, his head sagging, his eyes already drooping half closed. “Captain wants to inject at 1400 hours.”

“So, take a stim. Come on, I’m not kidding. Let’s go.”

Calipha gave me one more exhausted glance, then wandered back into his tiny cabin. After a stop at the head and then the mess for hot sweet caff, we headed for the boat. I called the bridge and told Everson, the navigator who had the A shift today, to log Calipha and me as taking a check-out run on the boat.

“Eves know you’re doing this?” Calipha asked me a few minutes later, rubbing his face as the boat’s tube mated to the Montclair’s hull.

“It’s green,” I said, ignoring Calipha’s question and led him into the docking tube. When we reached the Montclair, I opened the access panel and punched in the CAC I had memorized when Eves’s had keyed his hold. The hatch opened silently and I headed in, ignoring Calipha’s hard stare. I led him below deck where he hummed and muttered and clicked his tongue in surprise at the machinery he found there. “Well?”

“Well what? I don’t know what half this stuff is, leastwise if it’s broken or not. Do you have the code for the online systems?”

Proper ship’s security called for different CACs for ports, holds, and computer access, but as I had already confirmed, Eves wasn’t a careful man. A careful man would not have run out of fuel in the vast emptiness between the stars. His codes for the main hatch and the main hold shouldn’t have been the same, but they were. I hoped that the same one would access the engineering computer as well. It did.

Calipha called up a schematic of the engine room, then highlighted each major piece of equipment that he didn’t recognize and hit the plate’s “More Info” choice. Slowly at first, then faster as he began to find his way around the system, Calipha dove through the contents of the on-line manuals. At first his explorations were punctuated with guttural noises, “hmmms,” and an occasional soft whistle, then, the deeper he got into the system, the quieter he became. Finally, Calipha closed the help window, turned to me, and let out a long sigh.

“I don’t know if she’s in working order or not, but I can tell you one thing: this ship doesn’t belong to Slater Eves.”

“Who does she belong to?”

“I don’t know. And maybe I don’t want to know. She’s experimental, a prototype; I can tell you that. No way some clown in red pants would be flying around in this baby on a joyride where he accidentally runs out of juice.”

“Experimental how?”

Calipha took a long breath, then waved loosely toward the plate. “It’s all in there. She’s got a new sensor suite, Prox-2 according to the manual. The on-line docs say that it can detect other bubbles in Non-E and plot a vector to them. It’s still pretty crude, not very good at calculating an intercept, but apparently it works.”

“So that’s why I kept getting a prox alarm just before we dropped out. When he started to run out of fuel, Eves found the Orion on that thing.”

“That’s not all.”

“What else?”

“Within certain energy ranges it can drop a target ship out of Non-E by destabilizing her bubble.”

“What! Do you know what this means?” I said angrily as I studied the strange equipment with a look of revulsion.

“I’m not stupid!”

“Who do you think built this? The Fed military? The Combination?”

“This is no government ship. My guess? Some company was researching something or other and one of their scientists ran into whatever phenomena this Prox-2 sensor uses. They start pouring money into it, maybe figuring on a government contract. Or maybe their plan was to go straight to the Combination. The hijacking business would probably repay the investment in the first six months.”

“We’ll be sitting ducks for these guys! Stolen cargos, ransacked ships, kidnapped passengers—it’ll be like it was in the old days of sailing ships. It’ll take the Feds years to outfit a fleet big enough to protect us.”

“How do you suppose Eves got her?” Calipha asked, no longer concerned about his lost sleep.

“If you’re right, maybe he was an executive with the company. He’s no scientist, that’s for sure. Or maybe it was his family’s business. He’s such a jerk, that makes more sense to me. A guy like that, he needs money, starts thinking about what he could do with a ship like this. He lets himself into the facility with a backdoor code he’s been saving and takes off ten minutes in front of the cops.”

“What are we going to do about this, Dondero?”

“What can we do? We don’t have any proof that it’s a stolen ship or that Eves or anyone else has done anything illegal, even if we were policemen, which we’re not.”

“But if they get this ship back—”

“Maybe they don’t need it back. It stands to reason they’d have copies of all the documentation, all the research.”

“If he didn’t take that too,” Calipha said, a crafty look creeping into his face. “If it were me, I’d have wiped out their records when I grabbed the ship. God knows the Combination wouldn’t pay twice. I would have fixed it so that I wouldn’t have to worry about any competition.”

“That’s easier said than done. We can sit here and spout ‘maybes’ all day but it won’t change anything. Close it down. It’s the captain’s decision, not ours.”

“Look, Dondero, I’ve seen broken ships, bodies floating in space. I’m not going to—”

“That’s Mister Dondero. Now shut it down and get back to the boat!”

Calipha’s red-rimmed eyes glared at me for a long heartbeat, then angrily he slapped the system off and climbed the stairs to the main deck. I stayed behind for another minute or two, then followed.

“What were you doing down there?” Calipha asked me when I joined him in the boat.

“Just double-checking that all the systems were off and that everything was back the way we found it. Making sure everything was shipshape.”

Calipha gave me a suspicious, sidelong glance, but I ignored him and a moment later we were pulling away from the Montclair.

“Go back to bed,” I ordered Calipha a few minutes later when we had returned to the Orion. “Get yourself a few hours sleep before you have to go back on duty.”

“But what about—”

“I’ll talk to the captain. Go on, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”

Calipha stared at me for a moment longer, started to say something, then thought better of it and turned away. As for myself, I went down to the mess, got some breakfast, then went looking for Captain O’Bannion.

“So there’s no proof he’s done anything wrong?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. Well, at least we can demand to see his papers.”

“And then what?”

“Whose side are you on, Dondero?”

“Suppose we’re right and he can’t prove she’s his ship? We leave her here and take him to Coffernam. Then the people who built her come back and get her and what good have we done?”

“All right, Dondero. What do you want me to do?”

“We’re not the police, Captain. We should mind our own business. What else can we do?”

Frustrated, O’Bannion turned back to the maintenance report I had just given him.

“You’ll have this finished by fourteen hundred hours?”

“If I get back to work right now.” The captain nodded, punched the “confirm” button on my CB, and handed it back to me.

“Get back here by the time Calipha’s ready to begin injection.”

“Yes, sir.”

As I was leaving the mess just after lunch Eves caught up with me.

“I need to talk with your captain,” he said with an edge to his voice as if daring me to argue with him.

“Fine,” I agreed, checking the chron. “He should be on the bridge right now. Follow me.”

I made Eves wait outside while I checked with Captain O’Bannion, then a minute later I ushered him inside.

“Captain,” Eves said warily.

“Mr. Eves. Will you be accepting our hospitality as far as Coffernam?”

“Thank you, but no. If I can impose on you for enough fuel to get me to Jasmine, I’ll take the Montclair there for refueling and supply.”

“Mr. Dondero did explain to you that I’m responsible to the owners? You’ll have to pay standard rates for the fuel.”

“Two thousand UCs should cover it, I think. I have that much with me.” Eves handed the captain his card with the debit already coded. O’Bannion looked at it, frowned, then inserted it into the ship’s reader. Eves applied his left thumb to the pad, then wrote his code longhand beneath the privacy hood. The reader’s light signaled that the codes and handwriting matched. The transfer would be completed as soon as the captain indicated his acceptance by the entry of the ship’s code.

“Captain,” I interrupted as O’Bannion was about to enter the Orion’s CAC, “I want to go on record as advising Mr. Eves against leaving in his ship.”

“What?”

“Mr. Eves, your ship may well have sustained serious damage or equipment failure,” I said, turning to the clown-like figure. “If your injectors fail or the displacers are too far out of alignment or if anything else goes wrong, you’re going to find yourself stranded light-years away from any help. If you leave under these circumstances it could well mean your death.”

“I’m not leaving my ship here.”

“As I’ve told you, there’s no way we can take both you and the Montclair to Coffernam.”

“In that case, give me my fuel and I’ll leave under my own power.”

“Captain, for the Orion’s protection, I request that you log my warning to Mr. Eves and record his acknowledgment that he’s assuming all of the risks of this ill advised action.”

“Mr. Eves?” the captain said, looking at our pale, orange-haired guest.

“Fine, log whatever you like so long as I can get fueled up and on my way.”

The captain turned on the log cameras and Eves and I repeated our positions for the record. An hour later the Montclair briefly glittered a faint, pale blue, seemed to twist in on itself, and then was gone. Immediately thereafter the Orion brought up her own bubble, slipped herself into Non-E, and disappeared as well.

Calipha was as good as his word. With the additional cooling lines he had installed around the converter the displacers were now synchronized to within 2 percent of nominal so long as we held her to no more than three-quarters rated EV.

“I figure we’ll make Coffernam about four standards late,” I told Calipha over a cup of hot, bitter caff late the next day, “but at least we’ll make it in one piece.”

“I never thought otherwise. The Orion’s got a few years on her, but the old girl will get us where we’re going.” Calipha took a long look at the roiling black surface of his caff, as dark as the empty stretches between the stars, then, in a musing voice asked, “What do you think’s going to happen to Eves? You think the Combination will catch up to him before he can sell the secret of that Prox-2 of his to someone else?”

“God, who knows? Maybe they already have it. Maybe it was developed under private contract for the Feds and he just ripped off the prototype. Maybe right now there are five copies of her plans in five different protected vaults.”

“And maybe Eves blew up the lab and killed the technicians before he stole her and the only set of her plans is in the Montclair’s computer.”

“Hell, anything’s possible.”

I knew, of course, what was really behind all of Calipha’s questions. In a year or two or three, were we going to start seeing ships suddenly missing, finding discarded bodies exploded in vacuum after thieves and rapists and thugs from a hundred worlds had picked the broken ships clean and disappeared invisibly back into Non-E? If Eves and the Montclair made it to any industrialized world, I figured that nightmare was as certain as death. If he didn’t, well, like I said, who knows? No matter how you figured it, someone discovered this Prox-2 once, and sure as hell it would be discovered again. It was just a matter of time. But how much time, how long would we be safe? Five years? Ten? Twenty? Someday before I quit spacing, unless my ticket got canceled early, I was sure I’d see those blown-out hulls, those bodies drifting slowly around a looted ship. But not today. Not for a while yet.

“I told him not to go,” I said softly, talking more to myself than to Calipha.

“What?”

“I warned him. A ship that’s failed once can fail again. He was no engineer. He wouldn’t know a good displacer from a sour one. Out here, anything can happen.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. It’s just a feeling I have.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“Just a hunch, like a cold puff of air on the back of my neck. Only a fool would trust a ship like the Montclair, experimental and all. I just don’t think she’ll make it to Jasmine. I’ve got this feeling that a few hours into Non-E something else is going to go wrong and dump Eves back into E-Space light-years from anywhere. And him with just those two boxes of emergency rations and no extra water tanks. I hope he finds an easier way out than starving to death.”

I glanced up from my cup and saw Calipha looking at me as if his eyes could pluck information directly from my mind if only he stared at me hard enough.

“Dondero, when I left you down there in the Montclair’s engine room, did you…? You didn’t…?”

Calipha’s voice trailed off as I continued to stare at a spot on the wall just to the right of his ear. “Uh… never mind.…” Calipha said finally, turning away. Then he looked back and spoke again a moment later in a more philosophical tone: “I guess a man shouldn’t get into this business unless he knows what he’s doing. There are just too many ways to end up dead out here if you happen to get the wrong ship.”

I didn’t say anything. For an instant I had a vision of the Montclair, dead and lifeless, floating out there somewhere in the black, empty space between the stars. Then I blinked, and it was gone.

Content

Tramp
by David Alexander