Motherload

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Motherload
by David Collins-Rivera
2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Normally, the sitting and the waiting were bad. This time, they were brutal.
There are always things to do on an old Bechel if you want the boat to keep running, but that's usually just maintenance stuff. It all falls into a routine pretty fast, and no matter how anal or conscientious you are, pretty soon you end up with time on your hands.
It was for exactly this reason that Sally caught a flux in the reactor's mag bottle that first month out. It was a little thing; diagnostics didn't even flag it. She was already so bored, she decided to run a sim based on the fluctuation's wave frequency and fractal quality. She was surprised at the result, and ran it again since she still didn't have anything to do. When it came back the same way, she called a crew meeting, and all four of us sat down in the common room for the bad news.
"Eighty, maybe a hundred hours, tops, at fifty percent throttle. Less at more, more at less."
"What'll happen, exactly? Will we explode?" Bayern asked. Captain Bayern when he was pissed-off or just wanted attention.
Sally stared at him for a moment like he smelled. "No, we're not going to explode. That doesn't happen when the magnetics go. The reactor'll shut down cold. We'll be on batteries then, but they'll drain out before we're even half-way back to Deegman. We'll either cruise through its orbital plane at a dead coast if our aim is good, or we'll impact it hard, at a dead coast, if our aim is too good. Either way, we'd never know, because our life support will have given out, oh, say, fifteen days before either of those scenarios."
"So you're saying we should turn around now, and head back?"
Sally looked at Genness and me for help -- but what could we do?
"We can't turn back now, is what I'm saying! We did a two hundred and twenty six hour burn on our way out before we even made the first major course correction, and then we ran it eleven days straight after that."
Bayern frowned at her tone, but was much too conscious of the fact that we could see he didn't quite grasp the situation to immediately comment.
"Can you repair it?" Genness asked, stepping in, his soft voice putting the tension a little further off. He was forever calming things down between Sally and Bayern, who clashed like orange on blue. She didn't suffer fools gladly, while Bayern had no choice, being one himself. The fact that he was, at least nominally, the boss, only made it worse for her, and Gen seemed to understand this.
"Yeah, I can fix it. But I have to shut the power plant down while I'm working. That means batteries for a couple of days, if the problem is what I think it is. If not, we'll have to play it by ear."
"But you'll be able to start it up again? The reactor I mean." Bayern had a forced grimness to his tone, trying hard to seem like he was on top of this now.
"Why would I shut the flaming thing down if I didn't think I could bring it online again?!"
"Hey, watch the attitude! We have a serious situation, and as captain, I need everyone at his or her best. Now, what we need is for you, Sally, to get right on those repairs. Do you want help? Who has tech experience here?"
"You know I'm Secondary Engineer," I said, with a look not far behind any of Sally's. This was getting on my nerves too: there were only four of us on the dang boat, including him, and he was supposed to be in charge. He'd had weeks to go over our backgrounds and should've known our secondary assignments before he even stepped aboard. For crying out loud, we might have only been a slapped-together crew, but he could at least have read the mission package the company had put together for our run: an itemized breakdown of all our anticipated shipboard duties for four months time, out past the gravity shadow of the system's orange star -- out where inbound ships would arrive from starjump; backgrounds and basic info on the hired crew; an overview of Dame Minnie, and highlights from her forty-eight year career; an explicit overview of our primary responsibility: namely, to screen any and all inbounds, and meet and repel suspected corsairs; and finally, tips on how to make nice-nice with each other until our run was over. I wished Bayern had read this last part most of all.
"Good. You help out in Engineering, Ejoq, and I'll cover gunnery duties until the crisis is over. Any questions?"
There were several, but they