David Alexander: Tramp

“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.