Chapter 4
About 168 Onts earlier, at about 6 Sthlins past 13 o’clock, ship time (a week before the time Effie left the dining quarters), Star date 11/12/2605 when the Unfindle, Shipping Associate second class Asthem of the DRCS Get ‘Em While They’re Hot, unrolled from his tight, scaley ball with a sigh and climbed out of his sleeping alcove. The crew quarters were dimly lit, they nearly always were, they needed to sleep in shifts to keep the ship moving after all, and the buzzing in his brain, delivered by the implant drilled into his scaley skull (it was in the required qualifications section, it was in almost all job qualifications sections) told him it was his shift on the observation station. The Get ‘Em While They’re Hot was a prospecting vessel, scouting the unknown reaches of space for resource rich asteroids, habitable planets, and assorted other lucrative investment opportunities, it was the size of a warehouse and nearly as slow at sub-light speeds, which was technically all speeds since it travelled through artificial wormholes to bypass the light barrier, the massive tears in space time were similar to very small black holes, though, technically they did not have the mass of one, and winked out of existence once the vessel passed through.[1] Asthems 4 clawed feet touched the floor of the sleeping deck, he was mildly excited, despite himself, as once his shift was over, he would get to see Heath again. Their work kept them both on different ends of the vessel, Heath in the engine room and Asthem in the observation deck, with very few sthlins they were not working, eating or sleeping.
Partially this was necessary for ship safety;
Although the negative mass produced in the ships FTL engines would allow the ship to pass through it unscathed, but if anything went wrong with the artificial blackhole or the negative mass generation, it would most likely spaghettify and shred the ship and crew ‘til they were hawking radiation, or if they were lucky, it would just explode and kill them instantly. As such it was very important they monitor the area surrounding the ship for several thousand kilometres for anything that might effect, or be effected by the sudden acceleration caused by the wormholes gravity which may hit the ship or fall into the wormhole disrupting the traveling process. So every 4 irrrk the survey crew was changed. Asthem was in the final shift and he had had sleeping for the last 5 irrrk in preparation, going into a torpor to conserve energy between two shifts. Technically this was against Dunwarun labour law, which required 5 irrk of personal time personal time a day but outside of Dunwarun or even any Unfindle space, it was hard to enforce such regulations, and the government inspector had been delayed past the point of their departure. So his ship had been sent out with a minimum crew, allegedly because of supply shortages in Feesha Star port had left the ship under stocked for a full crew, so the other half of the crew had been left behind on “paid leave”. However, though it was against company policy, Asthem had kept in contact with several of the crew who had been left behind until the ship had left communications range as it moved into its first wormhole jump. The other crew had been diverted to man another ship to supplement the delivery fleets run by Ghriton Deliveries, another subsidiary of the Ghriton Space fleet conglomerate that sponsored their exploratory vessels.
The Company was technically not their employer, legally they were “independent contractors”, under commission form the government and loaned to the company along with the vessel but if they all died and the ship was lost the insurance still went to the company, except for the company provided, government mandated life insurance policy, which paid out quite handsomely to their next of kin. The company supplied their uniforms and set most of their mission goals. Asthem put this down to government bureaucracy being inefficient, but Heath had put down to the corporation dodging business regulations surrounding employment as government workers were exempt from the right to strike due to the presumed importance of their work. To compensate for this, they usually had one of the most generous sets of benefits in all of the Republic of Dunwaru. Usually. Not in their case, they were auxiliary government workers, which meant they got paid by the contract fulfilled and were expected to work in dangerous conditions with only the life insurance policy, and an optional pension plan which ate three quarters of all your payments, as benefits. The payment due to the company and the government each providing half the wage was actually pretty good. Hazard pay, it was called, going into the unknown to seek out a fortune for the glorious Dunwaran nation. It was not a desirable job as such, but any Unfindle who managed to survive the 5 year service to space faring vessels across the Dunwaru’s vast interstellar economy it promised a life of relative ease for whatever lifespan they had left after the various radiations and ship board accidents had taken their toll, and if they died, well, their families were set for life.
So Asthem plodded over in the half light of the ship’s night cycle to the clothes cupboard he had stored his uniform in when he went under and put it on. It was a navy blue, coverall which zipped along the front with the Silver Chiflic of the Republic of Dunwaru on one shoulder and the Ghriton corporate logo on the other. His position as a member of the stellar cartography division shown by the green stripe running along his tail sleeve. It contrasted quite well against his orange keratin scales, though those could only be seen at his four clawed feet, his nearly useless but for digging long clawed hands and his more adeptly manipulative tail, which was uncovered at the moment but would itself be gloved when he got into the observation room.
He knocked on the wall next his crewmates cot, “Wakey wakey lovebirds, it’s time to make sure the ship doesn’t explode again”
There was an uncomfortable snort, as two people shifted around from what Asthem was sure was definitely a state of torpor and his work colleagues, dare he call them, his friends, rolled out, landing on the floor with a thump.
They were stark naked.
Asthem politely averted his eyes as Synthia and Taglia unfolded themselves and got up, Synthia gave him a look of indignation at his comment whilst Taglia retrieved their uniforms, “shove off Asthem, don’t be crude”
Asthem chortled, “I’m not the one who just rolled naked out of bed with another crewmember”
Synthia’s cheeks flushed purple under the thin layer of red scale which covered her long, snouted face. [2] “who I have in my bed is none of your business Asthem,” then, because it was a generally understood that the sound proofing on the sleeping burrows was prone to being faulty she raised her voice slightly and added “Nor anyone else’s business for that matter." Hen more quietly she said "and for your information the door to her torpor burrow is broken and the heater in mine doesn’t work, so this seemed the best solution, only, those uniforms stink when slept in so we decided…” She hesitated as a thought occurred “and how did you know we were both in there anyway”
Taglia was getting her suit on by this point and called over in a mocking voice “He must have overheard us last night, we know he likes to listen at doors when everyone else is sleeping”
Now it was Asthems turn to blush, he was grateful his scales, a muddy orange, hid it nearly as well as Synthia’s did.
He played it off as mock outrage with an exaggerated scoff and then stuck his extremely long tongue out at Taglia. “Well, someone has to stand watch whilst you teach new interns how to clean the piping”
Synthia for her part walked over to Taglia and grabbed the scaley scruff of her neck, taking her own uniform out of her hands as she did so, then pulled her over to Asthem and bonked their heads together. “Enough with the crass humour you two, or we’ll be reported to UR”
All three of them laughed at this remark, the three years they’d been working for the prospecting fleet, none of them had ever heard of a complaint to the Unfindle Resources department which had been answered. Many of the crew joked that the computer shortcut for UR complaints was actually just a delete file function. Although Heath, who did shifts in the IT department as well as engineering, said he had once seen the files safely stored in the ships databanks, whilst doing a data inventory, probably just so the captain could say they kept them, but that they were seldom opened.
As a result, half the ships in the fleet were filled with work-place accidents, nepotism, harassment, and sometimes STD’s.
It was said half of all captains in the prospecting fleet would spend most of their retirement and a quarter of their very generous pensions fighting lawsuits from former crew members even if they survived the many journeys they took into unknown space.
In any case they got dressed and walked down to the astro-navigations room to start their shift. The Astro-nav was just off the ship’s lab, where collected samples of space debris or, in a tight spot, biological specimens could be stored and examined, close to the ships sensor and emitter array.
After seeing off second shift Synthia and Asthem checked all the LiDAR and microwave scanning instruments and reviewed second shift’s records whilst Taglia rigged the state-of-the-art, very expensive EMR machine to block the transmitters on their cortical implants, so that they could talk without management yelling at them for being inefficient before they settled in for a long boring 4 irrks of shooting invisible particle beams into the void of space, then reading what feedback they got.
After the first 3 Sthlins, they had a pretty good idea of what space looked like within the standard area of effect of the ships wormhole drive, matched it to the previous shifts observations and slowed down the frequency of their scans to a pace where they could monitor for changes without too much energy (Theirs or the equipment’s) expended.
To break up the tedium, Taglia brought a pencil and paper and she and Asthem started a tally of who could find the largest asteroid in the new system. Synthia, on the other hand, was glued to her instruments all the time she wasn’t reading through the previous shifts, she was, at heart an astronomer, and delighted in the unique personality of each celestial object she came across, loving attaching an alpha-numerical designation to each one.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Taglia, and Asthem were mostly there for the money, but occasionally gave in to the sheer wonder of the cosmos around them, even if it did want them dead. According to scans from long range telescopes, the system they were heading to, which they had hopefully arrived at in the last jump had at least a few planets in its habitable zone. These would be of special interest to their upper management, they got first dibs on any habitable planets for mining rights, though their lobbyists had lost out to those of the civilian transport industry for colonisation rights, an issue they were sure to solve in the next year or two through a very profitable merger with a civilian transport company, at which point both fleets would likely be downsized to save money. Asthem just hoped his tour would be finished by then, maybe he could even use his departure package to purchase a place on the knew colony, set up a farm and retire.
“So what are you gonna do with your savings Taglia” he asked out of curiosity.
Taglia finished laughing at a very oddly shaped asteroid and glanced up at him, “Why, are you asking me to settle down with you?”
“You wish,” he replied, “I just needed to know where to send the post cards showing all the fun I’m having without you”
They’d had this exchange before, but it was a way to pass the time, and the answers often changed.
“I’d like to go home and buy that house I told you about,
You know, the one up on Ringlet Hill. The one with the nice, sheltered balconies, and the massive open air garden?” Said Taglia after a moment’s thought.
Asthem’s eyes boggled at the idea, “How do you know it’s even up for sale? You said most of Sictcha was owned by three corporate landlords and the University, you just gonna walk up to the corporate headquarters and demand they sell it?”
“I have a friend in the land management department at the place which owns it, he says he can slip the sale past management if I get back this time next year”
Asthem had forgotten Taglia had joined the crew over a year before him, and wondered for a moment what life would be like without her. Would Synthia finally get fed up with his sense of humour once Taglia was no longer there to serve the jokes back to him? Would he have to make it through another year of this without their company? He pushed the thought aside, and continued.
“You’ve got friends all over the place Tal, don’t know why you’d bother slumming it with the likes of us peons, instead of getting a cushy job in the upper management of a corporation”
Taglia scoffed “You think I didn’t try? I have friends in local level positions, but the upper management is basically a closed system. It was surprisingly hard to even get this job with my professional record”
Asthem shrugged, “Well if you will go rabble rousing instead of keeping your head down, what can you expect”
Taglia seemed a little more hurt by this, pouting as she replied “I could expect a little more sympathy from my coworkers, and anyway, I didn’t do the rabble rousing, I was the rabble being roused, not my fault things went bad”
Perhaps realising he had gone a bit too far, Asthem simply said “I suppose not, sorry.”
He turned his long, snouted head to Synthia and gave a quick chirp to get her attention, “What’s your retirement plan Synthia? Going to open your own university or science institute?”
Synthia scoffed, “How much money do you think goes into creating scientific institutions let alone maintaining them, I’d be lucky to even pay off the last of my debts from high school text books, let alone the down payments for the degrees required to enter a scientific institute.
Now Asthem was a cynic by tendency, but this comment caused him to stir. He’d been born in the run down region of Akraino city colloquially referred to as the Raindrops, because its residents were so seldom availed of the necessities of healthy living that the streets were often more scaled than the residents. As a result his only schooling had run out around the age of fifteen as recent state cutbacks to public schools had cut off. He got another burst of learning during the on-the-job training program the prospector fleet offered its new members as part of a partially charity funded, partially government funded program to encourage the destitute and homeless to join up with either the prospector fleet or the military, the two largest employers in Dunwaru. This meant that whilst he had a good grasp of particle physics where they applied to his job, he hadn’t much knowledge of the typical operation of the world of advanced scientific research or higher education.
“So wait, how much does it cost to set up, like, a small university or college?”
Synthia took a moment to recall the statistics she’d learned for the finances of higher education
“About sixty million for the science equipment, textbooks, insurance, buildings, campus, etc, if you were starting from scratch for a student capacity of four thousand a year plus instructors salaries, then add additional expenses for employment benefits, student accommodation, transport costs, eating spaces etc, anything really good would be over a hundred million, with maintenance costs climbing into the billions in the course of several decades.
Asthem boggled at the notion, a natural Unfindles had to high emotion moments both positive and negative, his eyes bulging in and out of their sockets several times at the shock of the notion. The final pay for a five year tour, once all taxes were out of the way, and the pension was accounted for was eight hundred thousand Kalloran, if you avoided health care expenses, only ate company provided food and otherwise saved up all your monthly wages over the course of those five years, you might get over 1.4 million, but that relied heavily on luck and good health which was hard to maintain in the work conditions the Ghriton company tended to provide. Middle management regularly recommended that associates whose state of the art environmental isolation beds broke down should double up. Strictly speaking this was against regulations but the beds broke down regularly and fixing took time since no one in upper management ever wanted to hire a bigger technical staff, which meant the ones they did have were overworked keeping the ships running and rarely got through the backlog before more break downs happened. Heath regularly complained about this during their periodic meet ups. As such the idea that it would take a team of six hundred successful graduates of the school of hard knocks that was the Ghriton-sool Expeditionary space fleet association, just to set up the smallest of the schools he had been told all the upper crust of Dunwarun Society sent their offspring temporarily overloaded his brain.
“WHAT IN THE GREAT BLACK YONDER!?” He exclaimed, causing his companions to shush him briefly. When he had calmed down he continued “What are the fees for these places?”
Taglia gave him an incredulous look. “six to twelve thousand a year on average, did you never consider going into post secondary education?”
Asthem shrugged, stuck somewhere between embarrassment and annoyance and said, “Parents were, never rich enough to even bother looking into it, they told me loans weren’t worth the risk so I didn’t bother. I went straight into work once my education was finished”
An awkward silence followed during which the crewmen pondered the inter-personal gap left by their different backgrounds. Then Synthia laughed it off and said “Well, it’s not like knowing the costs did Taglia and I much good, and we all bring our own blind spots to work with us”
Taglia nodded, her parents had enough money to pay her way into secondary education but even with their income added to hers, they hadn’t been able pay for university.
“It’s not like we’d be sitting here with you if we got masters degrees in law in the Ketswahmi College of Law at the University of Ethford”
Asthem gave her a look of mild irritation “I’m not that upset, you don’t need to condescend to me, I know enough to care for me and mine”
Synthia was taken aback by the remark. Apparently Asthem was in one of those moods. “No, asthem we’re not…/” but Taglia cut her off, “HA! If we ever wanted to condescend to you, we’d just recite your boring-ass poems to you and tell you they were good”
This broke the momentary tension and released a chorus of nervous laughter from the three of them.
Synthia finally turned back to her work checking the medium range equipment, scanning the large planetoids in a 4 million kilometre radius.
Asthem and Taglia continued the game gradually as they sorted through last shifts reports, noting down the rough approximations of the size of asteroids, their trajectory and their density.
4 irrk’s later, Taglia had won the contest with an asteroid around 50 thousand cubic kilometres in volume, Synthia had named 900 new celestial objects and Asthem had an ache in his neck from leaning over his workstation for too long. Still, he got to go meet Heath after this, so he was in a fine mood as they set about the preparations for shift change.
They dismantled the improvised signal jammer and all 3 of them winced as the last 4 irrks of notifications loaded into their brains, telling them which services were available at the ship’s mess hall, the progress on repairing the recreation and fitness centres and the numerous side jobs they could do to earn a little extra on the side either between or whilst they were doing their assigned duties. Asthem wrote the conclusion to their report with the information he knew the ships navigation team and captain would want, 40 foreign objects moving close enough to the ship to disrupt any jumps for the next day. Recommend running gravitational repellent field for at least 12 irrks before attempting any jumps. Then 4th shift was delayed on account of having too many assignments to finish. So they waited an additional 15 agonizing sthlins before they arrived. Asthem was counting the hikah under his breath, his workplace obligations vying with his desire to get out of here and enjoy some time with his friend.
Finally the members of 4th shift trickled in from their other jobs and checked in. Asthem shoved the report into the shift leaders arms, checked out with his tail, bid his co-workers a good day and rushed out of the room.
Synthia and Taglia looked at each other. “Can you imagine he called US lovebirds this morning?”
They sniggered.
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[1] Author’s note, FTL: So I am not well versed astro-physics, but when talented physicists use imaginary numbers (numbers that are the square roots of negative numbers) in the mathematical formula’s used to calculate how mass relates to the speed of light, the result came in that matter with mass equal to the square root of a negative number could only travel faster than the speed of light, more importantly when working with negative numbers with equations relating to gravity as the bending of space around mass, that stuff with mass equal to a negative number would bend space in the opposite direction to normal mass, so if you had something with negative mass half way between two points in the universe that were appallingly far away from each other, then a black hole in one location could be linked to a white hole in the other, creating a tunnel through space where you could travel from one to the other, presumably faster than conventional travel would allow, because the two points had been brought closer together, I am bending the logic of this principle by having the vessel generate the negative mass through unknown means and essentially bringing the desired end point to them, then patch up space time through some other unknown means.
[2] Unfindles Physically resemble giant Pangolin’s with more prehensile, multi-ended. They come in many colours and have wonderful scales.
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