Motherload | Page 7

was shorter,
maybe, and with dark hair instead of fair, but I'm telling you, they
could be brothers. I come from a gravity well named Waverley. I met
Binn when I was fresh out of school and still a kid. I had stars in my
eyes and vacuum in my head. Binn was born in jumpspace, and had
never lived on a planet in his life. He was everything I wanted to be --

if you could overlook a few flaws. Seems he had a taste for Slicker --
you know, that nasty rotgut from Barlow they distill from used cooking
oil -- and he was a mean drunk. It might surprise you to hear it, but I
wasn't always the kind of person I am now. He bounced me off the
bulkheads for three solid years. His family owned the ship we were on
--the Haster -- and he was being groomed to take the center chair
someday. Naturally, then, it had to be his lazy groundpounder of a
wife's fault every night, right? Even I believed it. I wanted to be a
spacer so bad, Ejoq, you can't imagine. I wised-up eventually, but it
took cultured bone grafts in my jaw and right cheek to do it. Each time
Bayern says something stupid, I just want to lay Binn's head open with
a tube bender."
"Sounds like unfinished business," I said quietly.
She turned back to me at that, now with a sad grin. "I jumped ship at
Sandlewood, over in Manas Sector, and showed my purple face to a
local magistrate. She annulled the marriage on the spot. She tried to
have him arrested too, but under the Alliance treaty, a free-trader is
considered a sovereign nation, and no reason short of direct military or
commercial threat from said can justify violating sovereign
territory...etc., etc. They couldn't go in after him. She was so pissed-off
she pulled some strings and had Haster's contract with the local trade
commission pulled. A minor thing, on the surface of it, but Sandlewood
was part of their annual route back then. I figure the loss adds up to a
couple of million by now, so maybe there's some justice in space after
all."
"If there was," I replied, "you wouldn't still want to beat the guy to the
floor, via Bayern. Looks aside, don't let our current boss get to you,
Sally -- he's pretty close to useless and he knows it, so he asks a lot of
questions and gets under our feet so he can pretend he's contributing
something. If you just tell him to shut-up and leave it at that, we won't
have to mutiny. I don't want to lose my bonus."
She laughed and gave me a quick hug. "I'll do my best, Ejoq. Just do
your best, and keep him out of here. And pass me that microspec over
there. I need a close look at this crap."

She spent the next hour or two examining the surface of the fist-sized
emitter spheres, cursing twice on the third one, which she put aside
before continuing on. None of the other fifteen seemed to offend her,
though, so she put them back inside the housing carefully. She then
held up the flawed sphere as if I could see what was wrong from two
meters away.
"They sure don't make 'em like they used to...especially at Value Power!
What a piece of copulating diarrhea! Look at this thing: instead of a
composite shell of iron-carbide and titanium-tungsteel crystal -- which
is the very minimum that Alliance construction regs allow for, by the
way -- we have what looks like a hollow aluminum shell coated with a
thin layer of iron in a polymer base. There are two scratches in this
paint job: here, and here. I figure a couple of specks of this cheap paint
must have come off under the magnetic field, and they, in turn, gouged
away more of it. Doesn't seem like much damage, does it? If the paint
kept eroding, which'd be inevitable in my view, the mag field would
have deformed and been unable to maintain the fusion reaction. No
reaction, no power. And worse yet, in the milliseconds between the
drop of the mag field and the end of the controlled reaction, the hot
plasma would have flashed out to the inner edge of the frame holding
the spheres."
"And...?"
"Well, in a quality power plant, nothing: the magnetics fail, there's a
flash inside the casing that nobody sees, and the system switches to
standby batteries with maybe, at most, a flicker of the lights to show
that it happened. Nothing inside a good unit could be hurt, and whoever
services it after that finds everything fine and dandy -- except for the
original