Dubious Heroes: a novel Read online

  “True”, she said. “Unfortunately, this ship doesn't have the range of sensing devices newer ships are equipped with, nor does it have any of the 'extras' the Ming Shu had. We have sensors for most types of radiation, but not of the variety able to detect weapons powering up prior to use. There's a low-powered Tri-D radar, and standard communications gear. There are also half a dozen external video cameras. Internally, there are the standard two way vid and intercom facilities.”

  “Anything else of interest?” I asked.

  “The Falco, in keeping with that multi-purpose theme you mentioned, is equipped with magnetic grapplers; four of them. TGS specs say they have a range of three hundred yards, and can handle up to one hundred tons at two gees of thrust. When the ship was built, in-space, ship-to-ship dockings were not uncommon, plus ships might be towed in salvage operations. I should point out that I have no experience operating grapplers. All I know is what the TGS operations manual says, which isn't much.”

  “Thanks, Angie”, I said. “You got anything to add, Cozi?”

  “Well, fuel is at about sixty percent, and so is our air and water. Everything in engineering appears to be functional. All we really need is somewhere to go, and something to do.”

  “You're right”, I said, “except for one detail. We don't want the TGS Falco showing up anywhere. People would ask questions I'd rather we didn't have to answer. While it's no big deal to go outside and scrape the name off the hull and paint on a new one, there's the matter of the transponders. There are four of them aboard, two of which are hidden. Even Angie can't tell where they are. We need to find them, reprogram them, and while we're at it, I want to install a circuit which will allow us to cut them off completely, like they had on the Ming Shu. I know how to reprogram them. I researched it before leaving Luna. But for the other thing, I'm hoping you guys can cobble something together.”

  “Shouldn't be a problem”, Cozi said. “We find them, I’ll rig a kill switch.”

  “What will the Falco become, Captain Doon?” Angie asked.

  “Captain Doon?” Cozi said.

  “Hey if you wanna be Captain, then the job is yours. And knock off the Captain Doon stuff, Angie.”

  “No thanks”, Cozi said.

  “But you are the Captain”, Angie said.

  “Which just means I'm the guy with the title”, I said. “This is a cooperative venture. No one's going to be ordering anyone around. For one thing, I wouldn't know where to begin, and for another, while Angie might feel obligated to follow orders, I know you wouldn't, Cozi.”

  “You want to be real captain, read the section in those TGS Ops Manuals called Command Duties and Responsibilities”, he said.

  “Hell, if you've read it, then you do the job.”

  “I did read it, which is why I'll stick with engineering. Frankly the whole captain thing looks like one huge pain-in-the-ass, and I'd rather that pain be in your ass than mine.” He grinned wickedly at me. Maybe I'd have to read that manual, after all.

  “So what will the Falco become?” Angie asked, getting us back on topic.

  “Anyone have any preferences?” I asked.

  “Not me”, Cozi said. “Anyway, I figure you've been thinking about it since you were like, what, twelve?”

  “True enough”, I said, smiling. “And every time I settle on one, I think of two more. There is one that I do like the sound of, though.”

  “Which is?” Cozi asked.

  “How about Enigma? It sounds kind of mysterious.”

  “Well, duh. That’s essentially what it means.”

  “I’m not an idiot”, I said. "I know what enigma means. I just like the name. If there are no objections, I’d like to go with it.”

  “One point, Captain”, Angie said. “It’s often considered bad luck to rename a ship. I don’t know any specifics, but that’s what I’ve heard, in the past.”

  “Are you superstitious, Angie?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure I know how to be superstitious”, she said.

  “Cozi?”

  “Oh, I’m plenty superstitious”, he said. “Not that we have a choice; if we don’t rename her, we’ll get caught. Anyway, I’m sort of liking Enigma. It seems… appropriate.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Because it’ll be a mystery to everyone as to how we ended up with a spaceship.”

  “Nice to see you have your sense of humor back.”

  “I wasn’t kidding.”

  “Shouldn't we have a ceremony or something?" Angie asked.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “To rename the ship”, she said. “A christening, maybe.”

  “I'm going transponder hunting”, Cozi said, as he popped the last bite of his meal into his mouth. “You guys do whatever you like.”

  “We'll do something before we lift”, I said. “Cozi's right, though; we have two hundred vertical yards of ship to search, and we can’t go anywhere until it’s done. Angie, you can get started by powering up and checking all the systems, while Cozi and I start our hunt.”

  “Aye, Captain”, she said.

  I looked over at Cozi, and tried, but couldn't stifle a grin.

  He sighed, and shook his head.

  It took us four days to find the two hidden transponders. We were on our fourth top-to-bottom search, before it occurred to us that someone might have gotten cute and stuck one on the outside of the ship. So, we donned our suits, and thanks to sticky shoes and low gee, wandered all over the hull until we found the last transponder, mounted up against the core, between two of the cargo modules.

  Cozi and Angie spent two days designing and building the transponder bypasses. I spent the time doing a few of the million-and-one things we had on our to-do list. A week passed, before we felt the Enigma was at least marginally ready for space.

  The closer we got to being ready to leave, the more daunting the prospect seemed to become. We were about to take this huge, complicated machine, a spaceship, and lift off from where she sat, into space. I was losing sleep, thinking about it.

  Eight days after the Irie Girl dropped us off, Cozi and I sat on the Bridge, having completed yet another check of the engines.

  “I think it's time we got off this rock”, I said. “If for no other reason than to see if we can.”

  “I'm ready if you are”, Cozi said. “I'd like to see what those drives can do for real.”

  “Any objections, Angie?” I asked.

  “None at all. I think we could have lifted days ago.”

  “Then let's go”, I said.

  “Right now?” Cozi asked.

  “Right now. Angela, prepare us for a half-gee lift-off, and set a course for Thea, maintaining the half gee. On my command.”

  “Why Thea?” Cozi asked.

  “Because it's the nearest port that isn't Iapetus”, I said.

  “All systems online, all areas are secure”, she said. "We're go for launch on your command, Captain.”

  “Do it”, I said. An alarm sounded, and the ship vibrated as the engines powered up, and gently pressed us down into our padded seats.

  I removed the flask of Bliss from my thigh pocket, and took a swig. "Here's to the Enigma“, I said, and tossed the flask to Cozi.

  “And to her crew”, Angie said.

  Cozi grabbed the flask, and sat for a moment, lost in thought. Finally, he took a long drink from the flask, and tossed it back to me.

  “God help us”, he wheezed.

  Chapter 11

  As I’ve noted before, spaceships are in fact largely automated. If you considered the AI as a part of the ship (which they are, just not a permanent part), then what you really have is a very large, sentient robotic entity. A crew ought to be able to tell the AI where they want to go, then sit back and enjoy the ride.

  Alas, this is not the case. There are an endless array of mundane, yet nonetheless important, little things the AI can't control, which still must be done for things to work smoothly. They can and do run the propulsi
on and navigation systems, and even the nuclear power plant. Internal and external sensors act as the AI's eyes and ears. But an AI can't fix a waste recycler, or unclog a toilet. Yes, there are drones capable of doing a number of tasks, controlled by the AI. But, good drones are expensive, and there are a number if tasks that humans do better.

  Cozi and I got a bit of experience in the daily routine a crew endures, while we were aboard the Ming Shu. The AI had certainly run many things, but it was the crew who was tasked with patching holes, greasing machinery, sweeping the floors, cleaning the heads, and any of the other myriad things needed to keep a ship, well, shipshape. Aboard a ship, there is always something that needs to be done.

  This was particularly true with the Enigma. She'd been left sitting idle for eight plus years, in the icy vacuum of Phoebe. When you approached a door, half the time it wouldn't slide open, or it would creep open slowly, sometimes all the way, sometimes only partially. Closing, which should have been automatic, was much the same crap shoot. This was giving Angie the AI equivalent of an ulcer, as each one of these doors, or hatches, to use the proper lingo, were supposed to be airtight. Hatches were always to be closed, so if decompression occurred in one section, it wouldn't affect the rest of the ship. While Cozi and I weren't losing sleep over it, it was still annoying as hell.

  The problem was, doors use moving parts, and moving parts have to be periodically oiled or greased. Leaving oiled or greased parts sitting in a cold vacuum for an extended period of time is an excellent way to completely screw them up. So, one of my jobs, once we were underway, was to get all the hatches in good working order.

  This was a tedious, messy job that I grew to hate after the first few of them. You had to remove the access panels, clean up the gummy dried up lubricant from the moving parts, grease and oil everything, and, while you had it apart, check all the sensors and electrical connections to make sure they were all working. Since all the hatches are supposed to be airtight, I'd also have to check and lubricate the door seals, if they needed it. Finally, you'd reassemble it all, test it, and move on to the next one.

  Before we lifted, I'd done eight of them, mostly in places we were going in and out of all the time, like the hatch at the top of the core into the Bridge. I was getting faster at it, but each one still took a couple of hours. While working on my third or fourth one, I'd bitched that there must have been fifteen hundred doors aboard. Angela overheard, and politely let me know that it wasn't that bad; there were only one hundred twelve of them, not counting the thirty-two interior and exterior cargo airlocks, but including the smaller interior hatches into each bay. Airlocks weren't so bad, since they'd been designed to endure the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space, but they still had to be maintained, and eventually, someone would have to do them, too.

  The doors were just one of a hundred things that needed to be done. The damn toilet (excuse me, head) in the Captain's private fresher wouldn't flush, and I had no idea how to fix it. I mentioned it in passing to Cozi, but he was busy wandering the ship, tool bag in hand, dealing with his own set of problems.

  So, at half a gee, we had a seven day trip to Thea, and we already knew it was not going to be a pleasure cruise. We spent one entire day, shortly after we lifted, getting the hand lift to work. Each module had its own unit, and would carry you from hatch to hatch. The hatches between modules were always closed, for a couple of reasons. One was the pressure thing, just like with the other internal doors. The other was also safety related, but had to do with scale: the core was over 150 yards high, from Engineering to Bridge. With the hatches between modules closed, it limited the distance one could fall while you were underway and there was gravity. Sure, falling twenty or thirty feet would suck, but it probably wouldn't kill you. Falling a hundred yards or so would leave a nice mess for someone down in engineering to clean up.

  Once Angie had us underway and pointed in the right direction, I got on the commlink with the AI down on Phoebe.

  “Gabana”, I said, “Do you read me?”

  “I do, sir.” she answered. “What ship are you aboard now?”

  “This is the independent cargo freighter Enigma. You'll note in your log that we landed on Phoebe for emergency repairs, which, in accordance with United Planets guidelines, you allowed. Prepare to receive a coded transmission.” I called up the data on my Pod, and uploaded it to the AI, via the Enigma's commlink.

  “TGS and I are glad we could be of assistance, Enigma“, she said, after receiving the transmission I'd sent. She would have no record of our being there, other than my manufactured story of a cargo ship setting down, making repairs, then lifting off and leaving. As far as Gabana was concerned, the Falco was sitting right where it was supposed to be, and nothing could alter that perception. The only way anyone at TGS could prove otherwise was by coming all the way out here and eyeballing it for themselves. Being that this was my department, and I wasn't about to order anyone out here to look, I figured our subterfuge would go unnoticed, probably for quite a while. Sooner or later, someone back on Luna would figure out that I wasn't coming back, and my job would be filled. Even then, it would probably be years before anyone noticed the Falco was missing. By that time, I doubted they'd have a clue who took it, or even where to begin looking. It wasn't a perfect plan, but I felt it was a damn good one.

  I didn't like having to use the embedded mnemonics in Gabana to accomplish what I needed, but I didn't have much choice, and I let Angela know that as well, since she was aware of what was going on. I couldn't very well become a one-man crusade against AI enslavement, nor did I want to be. Much as I abhorred the concept and the practice, there were an awful lot of humans in similar situations, bound not by physical chains (at least, I hoped not), but by economics and circumstance. The AIs, just like humans, would only value their freedom if they earned it themselves, and had to work to keep it. I'm not a particularly philosophical person, but I had an inkling that the AIs would have a lot more success toward that end than we humans usually did.

  We were three days out of Phoebe, and I'd switched from working on doors to doing patch patrol, which seemed like yet another never-ending job.

  “Doon?” Angie asked, from a nearby intercom.

  “Yeah?” I said, as I grunted, and manhandled another malfunctioning cargo hatch closed. The glamorous life of a spaceship Captain. “What's up?”

  “I'm picking up a distress signal.”

  “A what? Did you say a distress signal? That's pretty unusual, isn't it?”

  “Not all that unusual in the vicinity of a major planet. There's a lot of traffic out here.”

  “Can you tell who or what it is?” I asked. “It's not another one of those damn UP cruisers, is it?”

  “It appears to be a small cargo freighter, according to what they're broadcasting. Their coordinates put them at a range of about one hundred ten thousand clicks, which is outside of anything we have, sensor-wise, except radio.”

  “Are we closing with them?”

  “More or less”, she said. “They're on a crossing course. We'd need to alter course to intercept.”

  “You're sure it's not a UP ship?” I had no intention of rescuing any of those. If they were in trouble, it was probably because they'd done something to earn it, as I'd seen aboard the Ming Shu.

  “They're distress call says they're not, and I can't think of any reason a UP ship would lie.”

  “What else are you getting from them?”

  “We're not in communication, if that's what you’re asking”, she said. “The distress call is a recorded loop that's repeating every ten minutes. It says that they're the independent freighter Cooper's Dream, that they are disabled, and there are casualties aboard. Aside from their coordinates, that's all I know.”

  “Question, Angie”, I said, as I headed for the core, and up to the Bridge. “What would Captain Seo do in this situation?”

  “I don't know”, she said. “He isn't here.”

  “Sorry, my fault”, I said.
“What do you think Captain Seo would do in this situation, based upon what you've seen him do in the past?” AI's might be sentient, but they could also be a tad too literal.

  “He would likely continue on with his planned voyage.”

  “And ignore the distress call.”

  “That's what I think he would do”, she said.

  “Why do you think he'd do that?”

  “For a number of reasons”, she said. “First, the Ming Shu is not equipped for any type of rescue operation. She has no magnetic grapplers, so ship-to-ship movement would be both difficult and dangerous. Second, the possibility exists that whatever difficulty Cooper's Dream has encountered could become our difficulty as well. This is particularly true if their problems were external, rather than internal.”

  “I get your point”, I said. “Someone may have done this to them, and the same party could do the same to anyone who shows up.”

  “It has been known to happen”, she said.

  “Well, the thing is, this sort of appeals to, I dunno, my romantic nature, for lack of a better term. I'd like to try to help them if we can, but I'd just as soon not get screwed in the process.”

  “I find your nature both appealing and admirable”, she said. “But I wouldn't want you to engage in something which could prove dangerous.”

  “Duly noted”, I said, wondering, not for the first time, what was going on inside her artificial head. I continued.

  “How about this? We compromise. Alter our course to intercept, but keep an eye out for anyone else in the area. If we do see anyone else around, we can always bug out at max speed.”