Palimpsest, Thunderfield [red queen ebook TXT] 📗

of coloured drapes, carpets and other fabrics. The floor was similarly covered plus additional pillows, cushions and quilts littered the floor and tiered seating.
A couple of dull white lights poked out from a top corner and a vent dropped down a half metre from the centre of the roof netting. Smoke weaved from various angles from the tiers towards a roiling mass in the centre of the space before being extracted up and through the vent.
Max quickly scanned the room and saw three females and four males, one with his head engulfed in the sparkling iridescence of a kopfgurtel’s charged particles. They were all in flaked out reposes sprawled along the tiered mattresses. Some quietly puffed their contribution to the smokey mass in the middle and he recognised a couple but no Ronan.
‘What chaos?’ asked Kemp.
Max was incredulous, ‘you didn’t feel anything a few hours ago?’
‘We felt a big bump, nothing else.’
Surveying the den Max visualised how these mellowed out folk in a yellow hideaway womb had been in a better place than his cabin, and he smiled at the thought, then frowned and said, ‘it shook the whole ship, what did you think was going on?’
‘We just figured something heavy on the deck above took a fall,’ said Kemp, who then added cheerfully, ‘what’s your poison?’
A small part of Max’s ambition to go to NA was a desire to put distance between himself and readily available weed back home. It had come as both annoyance and a pleasant surprise at the end of the first week of the voyage to find it being available on board. Kemp was crew though Max could not guess what his duties were or when he had time to attend to them, he always seemed to be in the foggy yellow den of his. It was an even bigger surprise and not so pleasant when a week later Ronan turned up. As far as either of them knew none of the other students had a weed habit.
The mattress store was between the loading bay offices and a hydroponic greenhouse. The two rooms shared both a common wall and a common secret with a small proportion of each misappropriated for Kemps unsanctioned commercial enterprise. Fifteen per cent of the crop located in the far corner of the greenhouse had been replaced with Grand Ganja, colloquially known as Double G on the streets back home. On board it was called Kemps Hemp or just Kemp. In fact the eponymous Mr Kemp was a resourceful entrepreneur with considerable skills in excavation, electronic surveillance, cultivation, retail and air conditioning. He had built a tunnel from the smoking room through the rest of the mattress store leading to a doorway cut through the wall into his private section of a hydroponics hall where he grew six varieties of Double G.
‘Not today, it’s really important I find Ronan.’
Behind Kemp’s shoulder Max’s eye caught some movement as the kopfgurtel wearer’s right hand lifted from his lap and disappeared into the glittering globe. A second later his fingers tapped a stop button and the kopfgurtel projection disappeared, his hand still touched the thick necklace of the comtube variant and his face displayed the typical startled look, with pinprick pupils in his eyes.
‘Yeah yeah,’ Kemp motioned Max to leave and hauled mattresses to cover the smoking room entrance.
‘If Ronan shows up, get him to call me immediately, better still can you call me?’
‘I don’t even know who you are,’ said Kemp.
‘Yes you do, so please call as soon as he turns up, Okay?’
‘Okay fella.’
Max wandered down the passage to Kemps hidden exit and looked at the wall of monitors and consoles.
‘How much can you see from here?’
‘Pretty much all the passages and corridors on this deck, why?
‘Can you check other decks? Can you watch out for Ronan that way?’
‘I can see some public areas, and even hack into the ships system. Don’t like to risk it too often but need to check my invisibility now and then. But no, I can’t sit here all day trying to spot young Ronan. Don’t worry he’ll turn up, probably come here first when he needs a fix.’ Kemp then gently pushed Max through the old door into the office.
Kemp watched his departure through his monitors and satisfied himself that Max took the prescribed meandering route back. A few minutes later Max neared the stairs to go back up to Deck Twelve, then he turned and waved at where he remembered Kemp’s camera position was and gestured with his thumb and little finger by the side of his head, call me.

* * *

‘Governance for Deep Space Vessels.’
It was 7PM as Captain Peirce returned to his office on the AdminDeck with Tarek towed behind in his wake. Pierce dropped the tome to his desktop.
‘Irrelevant,’ he said, ‘and get Lim and Redfern, and some more painkillers,’ Tarek nodded and left.
The small table and easy chairs were on his left, he desk to the right and the door to his backoffice was directly opposite. The only evidence of the shakeout event were the papers that covered the floor, overturned chairs and a packet of small cakes, also on the floor. He picked up the packet and tossed it into the trash can, affixed to the wall. He righted a chair and sat behind his plas-teak desk.
He looked again at the heavy manual that had guided his whole career, and slid it to the left of his workspace, righted a photo frame, and then checked his messages from his desk mounted monitor. His gaze lifted to the photo of his wife and three adult children, the glass was cracked across the image, and it triggered an unexpected reaction, he cleared his throat and turned the photo away from his gaze. A tear welled, and when wiped his eye the pain of his broken nose brought an audible ‘ouch’, everything was getting just too painful he thought.
Redfern knocked and entered, followed by Lim. They both looked at Peirce’s nose.
‘No time to fuss with it now, grab a chair men and give me some straight answers.’
He looked at the First officer, ‘Do we know where we are yet?’
‘Cartwright has men on the job, but right now we have absolutely no idea sir, there are no communications of any type detectable, no recognisable star formations or nebulas’ he replied.
Tarek quietly entered the office and placed a glass of dissolved painkillers on the desk.
‘Do we know where we emerged from? Can we trace back to the egress point?’
Lim replied again ‘We can trace our route directly back to when we discovered we had been ejected, but there are no signs of any wormhole, no transition zone, nothing to indicate where we emerged from.’
‘What has been our course and velocity since ejection?’
‘No deviation sir.’
Peirce brooded, and Lim was expressionless, eventually he lifted his head and looked at the print of Earthrise over the moon, pinned to the port side wall. Redfern fidgeted, then leaned forward and said, ‘until we know our location we can’t plan our next action, we can stop put and try to find the egress, but the propulsion power needed to get back up to speed again will drain our reserves far more rapidly.’
‘Mr Lim, what is your prognosis?’
Lim looked back to the Captain, unsure how to reply, Redfern jumped in, ‘There is no known occurrence of any wormhole ejecting a ship in mid voyage. Once discovered ingress and egress transitions have always remained stable. There is no evidence of wormholes bifurcating or disappearing, but right now do we even know if the Perryman still exists!’
In a flat voice Lim finally spoke, ‘we do not know when precisely we left the Perryman. We may have moved a considerable distance within the wormhole between us being aware of a problem and actual expulsion, or we may have been ejected before any awareness. At sixty per cent light speed velocity the exact moment of expulsion is critical, every second we vary our calculation equates to vast volumes of the void. In the worse case we confront an enormous envelope of space to search. Finding the transition where we exited may take years.’
After a long pause Redfern waved his arms and said ‘it might be impossible even if we had years.’
The Captain put his hand on the book, ‘Do we stop or keep moving? If we stop we can await rescue because within a day of our expected egress NA control discover our delay, and whilst we wait we search for the transition.’
‘Assuming Perryman is intact, how will any rescuer find the ejection point?’ asked Redfern.
‘It will be harder to locate the transition from within Perryman than we are having from outside because we at least have a vague idea where to look,’ Peirce then finally drank his medicine, which prompted a thought about medical supplies.
‘So we cannot assume a rescue.’
Lim remained impassive and Redfern shook his head.
Peirce continued ‘I must know our location and how long our critical supplies will last.’ He picked up the GDS and swivelled around and placed it on the cabinet behind him. ‘This book offers me no guidance. I know it back to front and trust me there is no section about what to do when your ship is lost in unknown space.’
He looked at the chief engineer, ‘Mr Redfern, what is our engineering status with Ramscoop propulsion?’
Redfern leapt into his reply ‘We noticed fluctuations on two of the twenty four petals and their magnetic field extensions show a decline in hydrogen harvesting, that has left maximum power at 98% potential. But if we stop we do not have enough liquid fuel on board to get up to 4% light-speed more than once, after that we will lose the Ramscoop.’
‘I understand that, what about the Podgrav?’
‘The Ramscoop continues to supply the Torus engines normally, and the Podborsky converter was undamaged so gravity generation will remain Earth normal sir.’
‘and ships power?’
‘Deck Thirteen engineering report all three nuclear power plants are fully functional, and if there is a recurrence of the problem the ultra dense lead shields have been checked, we can initialise containment from engineering control in seconds if we need to.’
‘Can you route the same control from my back office?’
‘Yes sir, I will see to it.
‘Everything else okay?’
‘Yes sir, internal electrical needs are fully functional.’
‘So we have almost unlimited internal power and propulsion power if we don’t stop more than once?’
‘Yes sir.’
Peirce then picked up his phone and dialled, he pressed the loud speaker button. ‘Life Systems’ came the answer.
‘Pierce here, with Redfern and Lim, I have a question, how long can our air and water systems last at normal consumption rates?’
‘The air from the hydroponics is recycled, but it is not a sealed system, we normally expect a five per cent loss over a week, but we do have substantial reserves. Water is more efficient at two per cent loss per week, both systems could last several months.’
‘and if we had to economise?’
The other man calculated, then said ‘De-compress the passages in the cargo holds would add 30% capacity to air, rationing water could double the duration of our supply. If you are trying to estimate our survival time we could triple it with some hardships, but it is not the critical system sir.’
‘What is?’
‘We would run out of food long before.’
‘Run out of food?’ Peirce glanced at the packet of cakes in the trash can, ‘how long with rationing do you think?’
‘We have