Saint Vladnitz Page 2

CHAPTER 2

  "When are you going to tell the others?" Horst asked his old friend, Boris. They were the only two on the bridge of the Arkhangel.

  Vladnitz sighed, a bone-weary sigh. "Not just yet, I think."

  Horst tapped a callused finger against the column of numbers running down the monitor, his touch leaving a smudge behind, a natural result of his unnatural affinity for oiling his thinning hair. At least the oils were not scented. They would have been overpowering in the close quarters of the ship. Men had been killed for less out here. With an effort, Vladnitz refocused on the unpleasant topic at hand.

  Horst leaned in closer. "Boris, the numbers don't lie. Even if that shell had been an honest M-class, loaded with metal, it would only have prolonged things by a year or so. We've been living on borrowed time for too long."

  "Time borrowed at too high an interest rate you mean," Vladnitz industriously wiped away the smudge on the monitor. "The thing that most upsets me, though, is those corporate hacks getting their hands on the Arkhangel. I would do anything to keep the old girl away from those dirty money-grubbers, maybe even turn her into a Flying Dutchman."

  "A what?"

  "Flying Dutchman, you know, the old myth? Doomed to sail the seven seas until Judgment Day?"

  Horst shook his head. "Never heard of it, but it sounds like more of that romantic crap that appeals to you. I'm more worried about our current balance sheet and what we are going to tell the crew and not some story from long ago."

  Vladnitz sighed again. "I will tell them, Horst, I promise. But not just yet. They really cannot do anything until we are back in the elliptic. Tell them now and all they will be able to do is worry." Not to mention stop even pretending to work, he thought. "I will tell them just before we get back, okay?"

  "Okay." Horst nodded, a sad smile breaking across his coarse features. He patted Boris' shoulder and stood up. "It's been a good run, my friend, a damn good run."

  As Horst left, Boris found himself running a hand through his own thick, graying hair. He had to force himself to stop, but at least he had a decent head of hair and without using enough oil to keep the ship's gimbals lubricated for a year.

  Ernestine swung the ship's sensors around in a wide arc only to have the screen go blank. She carefully aimed a slap at the back of the monitor. The screen flickered back on. She sighed. She had not expected to find much of anything this high above the elliptic, but that was okay. It was her watch and she was alone on the bridge. They were still several days away from rendezvous with the snowballs they needed for refueling. Unfortunately, the snowballs looked smaller than they had originally thought. She could tell the Captain of her latest estimate, but that was Solo's job, not hers. The Captain would be surprised if she did not let the stuck up pilot bear the brunt of his wrath.

  The Captain had been in an even fouler mood since the exotic had turned out to be a mirage. It was so unfair of him to blame Mister Schroder for it. The scans had looked like a multi-tonne exotic. She had almost spoken up in defense of the ship's purser, but, like usual, she had found her courage lacking. Not that the Captain would have listened to her, anyway. He still treated her as a complete noobie and she had been on the Arkhangel for months. How many years would she have to serve on this ship until he gave her any credit?

  Ernestine flipped a switch and the view screen became transparent, showing the glorious heavens. The mass sensors might find the neighborhood boring, but her eyes did not. She was the first person in history to view this multitude of stars, their hard light undimmed by the faintest wisp of atmosphere or dust. Well, maybe not the first. The generation ships, the largest structures ever built by man, may have headed out this way, at the beginning of their centuries-long journey to possible greener pastures out there, somewhere. Generations being born, living, and dying shipboard. The holos portrayed it as a heroic act on the part of humans. Ernie thought it more a desperate one. There had been less than a dozen built, before humanity decided the cost was too high, the payoff, if there was one, too far in the future.

  She shook her head. That was not her concern. For now, she was an intrepid explorer, just like in the holos she had watched as a kid. Bright, diamond chips covered most of the screen, showing the view in front of the ship. To one side, as if a paint stroke from the hand of an impatient god, ran the Milky Way. She sighed in contentment. This was where she belonged.

  The Arkhangel slowly closed in on the small swarm of snowballs. Although they did not mass as much as her crew originally hoped, the hydrocarbons would still help replenish their stores. Sean Franklin aligned the electromagnetic net and then hit the switch. Microwave radiation lashed out at the cometary remains. The deckhand's experience was evident as the net deftly captured most of the resulting volatiles and greedily sucked them down. Wildcatters, like the Arkhangel, spent months traipsing around the Kuiper, so they had evolved to be markedly self-sufficient. That did not mean they could not eventually be replaced by others, thought Vladnitz, sipping the last of his hoarded bourbon as he followed Sean's progress from the Captain's cabin.

  The asteroids and moons of the inner solar system had long been stripped bare and, as had been the human pattern for millenia, eventually demand grew enough that the misfits, the crazies, those with nothing left to lose, set off for new horizons, in this case the Kuiper Belt, to replenish those resources. The powers that be had said it could not be done, but the wildcatters did it, eventually, and at great cost in terms of lives and sanity.

  Once convinced by the wildcatters' hard won successes, the large multicorps started deploying robotic harvesters. The harvesters operated within preprogrammed patterns. To use a metaphor from ancient times, from when Earth still had forests, the robotic harvesters were clear cutting the Kuiper. Regardless of how small an object was, they harvested it. If it was a snowball, they burned it for fuel, if it was a rock, they sent it looping in to the capture yards at Pluto, Haumea, or Makemake, where it was processed and the refined metals sent inwards to the great factories at Triton or one of the moons of the other gas giants. The robots were not as smart as the wildcatters, but then they did not have to be.

  Vladnitz forced the last drops of bourbon from the squeeze bottle. The last real bourbon. Now he would have to put up with the on-board alcohol rations, flavor inflicted via a pre-packaged powder. He shuddered. A scratching at his cabin door interrupted his consideration of the yawning abyss. He did not think his newest crew member had lowered herself to scratching, rather than knocking, although stranger things had happened out in the far reaches. However, it was not Ernie. It was Lucky, the Arkhangel's shipboard cat. Strictly speaking, the orange tabby was Qing's cat.

  Vladnitz hated cats. When he was twelve, he had asked his parents for a dog, after reading stories and seeing pictures. But dogs were almost nonexistent in the far reaches and he had received a cat. He hated that cat and in the perverse way that the universe had, the cat followed him everywhere. Until he went off to college. The cat stayed with his parents, scratching out a living as wildcatters. Boris had not planned on coming back. That was not why his parents had taken chances and run themselves and their ship ragged to send their smart son to school. After graduating, one Boris Vladnitz, a young man full of himself, had made it inward as far as the Triton colony with the occasional bit of financial help from his parents, when word came that his parents' luck had run out.

  Boris found himself the reluctant owner of the Arkhangel, along with the cat. Much as he wanted to, he found he could not get rid of the cat until it died. And, opportunity having passed him by, he could not get rid of the Arkhangel, either. He could ignore the scratching at the door, however. At least for now.

  Ernie reached down to pet the cat, which was insistent on rubbing against her legs.

  "She recognizes an easy mark when she meets one," Qing smiled across her cabin at the young woman.

  "Yeah, unlike the Captain. He hates Lucky," Erni
e picked up the cat and rubbed noses with it before plopping it into her lap.

  "Why do you say that?" Qing frowned.

  "Well, for one thing, he's always trying to kick her," Ernie pointed out the obvious.

  "Has he ever succeeded?"

  "Huh?"

  "I said, 'Have you ever seen him actually connect?'"

  Ernie thought, while giving the topic of discussion a good skritch behind the ears. "No, I guess not. Lucky always seems to move just out of reach."

  "And yet she keeps going back for more," Qing's look was skeptical.

  Ernie chuckled. "Yeah, what is up with your cat? Are you just a slow learner?" She asked the purring cat.

  "Boris, Captain Vladnitz, is the one that insisted the Arkhangel have a cat, you know, not me. She is even listed as a member of the ship's crew on our register."

  "No," Ernie's green eyes widened.

  "Yes. Helps to get her through quarantine. Besides, Boris said it wouldn't seem like home without a ship's cat. We've had at least four since he took over from his parents."

  "Really? I just thought that the Captain didn't even want to be here. Home?"

  "For some of us," Qing hesitated, studying the girl. Experts had been saying for years that redheads were a dying breed. Apparently Ernie's parents had not gotten the memo. Even with the crew members' mandated weekly trips to the solar bed, how Ernie had such generous freckles, Qing did not know, but the girl did. "How about you, Ernestine? Do you want to be here?" A deep blush spread across Ernie's fair skin, a blush almost the shade of her red hair.

  "Yes, I do. I do want to be here, although, maybe not quite like this. You have to understand, ever since I was little, I was hoping for Navy. Something that would get me out of the Orbitals."

  "I see," Qing murmured. She had visited a couple of the Orbitals, huge factories in Earth orbit. They had offered shining, cutting edge opportunity a century ago. They still housed the descendants of the original workers, but now were largely run-down hulks, with tantalizing views of the stars the only thing that still shone. She nodded, "I see indeed."

  "But I didn't have the connections," the girl's blush deepened.

  Qing's voice was soft. "Few do."

  "Then I had to get the DNA protection treatments to go into space. That isn't cheap. It took everything I had, well, more than that really..." Ernie's voice trailed off awkwardly.

  Qing decided to change the subject. "You know, I've been out in the Kuiper for so long that people think I was born here, right in the engine room according to some of the more imaginative stories."

  "You weren't? I mean, I know the bit about the engine room, I mean..." Ernie stammered to a halt.

  "No, I was born on one of the farming communes on Mars."

  "Really? If you don't mind me asking, ma'am, how did you end up out here?"

  "I don't mind the asking. The ma'am, bit though, just call me Qing, okay? Like you, I was space crazy. I wanted to get away from grubbing in the dirt in the worst way. I had some mechanical aptitude and a lot of desire. I managed to get in with the Navy as an Engine Tech One, but-"

  "The-the actual Navy?"

  "Sure, but I didn't last long, I was stationed on the Navy's shipyard orbiting Mars, barely made it off planet. Didn't look like I was going to go any further. After that I went to work for Monogene. I figured they wouldn't be so hide-bound."

  Ernie had forgotten all about the cat, much to Lucky's annoyance and she batted at Ernie's hand. "Monogene? They're one of the top agricultural corporations, one of the biggest multicorps going, I know people that would die to get in with them."

  "They can have them," Qing replied, with a bitterness in her words that Ernie could never recall hearing before. "They're even worse than the Navy. I slaved away for Monogene for almost two decades, watching others being promoted past me. I finally got a supervisor, who, in a moment of kindness, told me that I would never work my way up the ranks. I didn't have the wasta, the connections. I just wanted to get away from the whole corrupt system. I got in touch with an old friend that I heard had headed out this way, a wildcatter, and she invited me to join her and her husband. She was Boris' mother.

  "So, you see you and I are not so different," Qing reached out and took Lucky from the slack-jawed young woman.