John Scalzi - Tales From the Clarke

“We’re selling it to the Earth folks as a way to get our foot in the door,” Coloma said.

Rigney rolled his hand toward Coloma. “Precisely,” he said. “And so we come to you and your crew. It’s perfectly reasonable that you would see a temporary assignment to a decommissioned ship as punishment for what happened at Danavar. But in fact, Captain Coloma, Commander Balla, what we’re asking you to do is a task that’s of great importance to the Colonial Union. Your job is to highlight the ship, to make the Earth people feel that it’s going to be of benefit to them, answer all their questions and give them a positive experience with the Colonial Union. If you pull it off, you’ll be doing the Colonial Union a service. A very significant service. One that means you’ll be able to write your own ticket afterward.”

“I have your word on that, Colonel?” Coloma asked.

“No,” Rigney said. “But that’s my point. Sell this ship and you won’t need my word.”

“Understood,” Coloma said.

“Good,” Rigney said. “Now. Tour the ship, check out the systems, tell me what you need, and you’ll get it. But do it quickly. You have two weeks from today before the Earth delegation arrives to see what this ship can do. Be ready for them. Be ready for us.”

“Here’s the problem,” Marcos Basquez said, pointing to a series of tubes in the engine room of the ship. He was yelling over the din of his crew banging away at updates and repairs.

“I see tubes, Marcos,” Coloma said.

“You see power conduits,” Basquez said.

“And?” Coloma said.

“We have two types of engines on a spaceship,” Basquez said. “We got the conventional engines, which push us through normal space, and we got the skip drive, which punches holes in space-time. Both of them are powered from the same source, okay? These days, because we know what we’re doing, we can seat the engines and the skip drive in the same place. Fifty years ago, when this pile of shit was put together, we had to separate the two.” He pointed to the power conduits. “These are the conduits that send power to the skip drive from the engine.”

“All right,” Coloma said. “So what?”

“So they’re degraded and need to be replaced,” Basquez said.

“So replace them,” Coloma said.

Basquez shook his head. “If it were that easy, I wouldn’t be telling you about it. This engine design is half a century old. This ship was the last of its kind in service. There isn’t another ship out there with this engine design. They haven’t made replacement stock for this engine design in more than a decade.”

“You can’t replace the conduits because the replacement conduits don’t exist,” Coloma said.

“Right,” Basquez said.

“Power conduits are still being made,” Coloma said. “We had them all over the Clarke .”

“Right, but they’re not rated for this sort of power output,” Basquez said. “Trying to use the current standard conduit here would be like stuffing a Great Dane into a Chihuahua sweater.”

Coloma had to stop for a moment to take in the visual Basquez just offered. Then she said, “Would these conduits last through our mission? We’re only skipping to the Rus system and back.”

“There’s two ways of answering that,” Basquez said. “The first one is to say that these conduits probably won’t overload and rupture, or destroy this section of the ship, or rupture the hull, or kill everyone on board, including those important Earth visitors. The second one is that if you decide not to replace them, I hope you don’t mind if I do my work remotely, like from Phoenix Station.”

“What do you suggest?” Coloma asked.

“How much time do we have before we have to be under way?” Basquez asked.

“Twelve days,” Coloma said.

“We have two options,” Basquez said. “We comb through CDF and civilian shipyards looking for this size of conduit and hope they’re not as degraded as these are, or we commission some made from scratch from the shipyards, based on this specification, and hope they arrive in time.”

“Do both,” Coloma said.

“Belt and suspenders, very wise,” said Basquez. “This is the part where you send a note to that Rigney guy telling him to yell at people to get those parts here on time, right? I want a couple of days with them to make sure they have the capacity we’ll need.”

“I’ll do it on my way to my next meeting,” Coloma said.

“This is why I like working with you, Captain,” Basquez said, and then turned his attention to one of his engineers, who evidently needed yelling at.

Rigney promised to get the conduit specialists at the CDF shipyards on Phoenix Station on the job and told Coloma to have Basquez send the specs to him directly. Coloma smiled as she disconnected from her talk with Rigney. Civilian captains and ships were almost always prioritized below Colonial Defense Forces ships when it came time to allot materials and expertise; it was nice to be at the front of the line for once.

Coloma’s next meeting, in one of the ship’s tiny conference rooms, was with Lieutenant Harry Wilson.

“Captain,” Wilson said as she approached him. He saluted.

“Why do you do that?” Coloma asked him. She sat down at the conference room table.

“Ma’am?” Wilson said, lowering his arm.

“Why do you salute me?” Coloma asked. “You’re Colonial Defense Forces and I am not. You’re not required to salute civilian captains.”

“You still outrank me,” Wilson said.

“That’s not what you told me at Danavar, when you flashed your security clearance at me and ordered me to give you my shuttle,” Coloma said. “Which you then destroyed.”

“Sorry about that, ma’am,” Wilson said. “It was necessary at the time.”

“You still have that security clearance?” Coloma asked.

“I do,” Wilson said. “I think they forgot they gave it to me. I’m pretty harmless with it. I use it mostly to check box scores for baseball games back on Earth.”

“I understand you’ve just returned from being a hostage,” Coloma said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Wilson said. “An unfortunate incident with the Bula. We ended up with six of their ships planning to blow us out of the sky. Ambassador Abumwe was part of the diplomatic team that got us released. They’re still ironing out the details of the ransom, I believe. Letting us go early was a sign of good faith. They have other things to hold over us.”

“You certainly find yourself in the middle of a number of interesting incidents,” Coloma said.

“I wouldn’t mind not having that talent,” Wilson said.

“I have a job for you,” Coloma said. “I’m prepping this ship to display and then sell to a group of representatives from Earth. I need someone to be their guide and liaison while they are here on the ship. I want you to do it.”

“Seems to me you have an entire diplomatic corps you can call on to do that job,” Wilson said. “I’m a CDF tech specialist.”

“You’re from Earth,” Coloma said. “All the diplomats I could use are from the Colonial Union. My job is to make these people comfortable with the ship and with us. I think it would be useful to have someone here who speaks their language.”

“I might not speak their language,” Wilson said. “There are a couple hundred of them in service on Earth.”

“It’s an expression,” Coloma said, testily, and pulled out her PDA. “I meant someone who has a shared history with them and who can cogently describe the advantages of the Colonial Union to them. Your technical background will come in handy because that means you can explain details of the ship to them, which no normal diplomat could do. Also, the files I have on these representatives says that they are all from either the United States or Canada. I think you will be able to speak their language just fine.” She played her fingers across the PDA. “There. I’ve sent you their information.”