Short story #2

Sammy shook her head.  This was not going to go well.  The other Tech if you could call him that, was a born clusterfuck that should have never worn the badge of a Tech Guild Second Class.  Hell, he shouldn’t have even been a Trainee.  The trip started off okay until we were a month into the burn.  The Drega was a class C ship used for cattle crossing.  “Cattle” were the misfits, near-do-wells, and others unlucky enough to be caught in the round ups every few months and sent to the Wastes.  That’s what we called Mars back then.  Wasted land, wasted air, wasted lives, and wasted effort.  They should have all been pushed out the air lock and saved the time and effort.  You see, Mars wasn’t close to terraformed like they claimed.  The air was thin and cold, people lived in caves they called Urbs.  Sub-urbs to be exact.  Sub (underground), urban (what a joke) cities if you could call them that.  Always dirty, never enough food, never enough water, but lots and lots of “cheap” labor.  It had better be cheap; they got spent like grains of sand.

I should introduce myself.  I was born Samantha Garcia, Hernandez, Gonzales, Vargas, Rodriquez, Ancrew, Johnson.  There would have been more names, but there wasn’t any more room on the Birth Certificate.  That’s where the Ancrew comes from.  Not even a real name, just a place holder for the ones that didn’t get their names listed.  “And Crew,” get it?  You see I was born in the parking lot of a building supply store, and these were the guys standing outside looking for work when Ma’s water burst.  We didn’t have the money for real medical care, and the midwife we’d arranged for, hadn’t expected me for a week.  So there everyone was, Ma in the bed of a pickup truck, laid out on a paint splattered canvas drop cloth, doing quick breaths while the day laborers looked on and cheered.  Mom had wide hips and her labor was easy.  Not like the labor my sister endured years later.  Yeah, I was born August 19^th 2046.  Heh, pickup trucks.  Who’d have thought we’d still be using fossil fuels?  Anyway, life wasn’t easy, but it was a whole lot easier for us, than those that came after.  Cattle.  Those Day laborers had it good.

So there I was years later, tech first class, with a misfit tech crew of one.  I should have holed his suit for all the grief he caused me.  We had a thousand cattle and they give me a single tech, and a worthless one at that.  That first month I had sent him out to find out why the antenna wasn’t picking up the beamed news and he lost the entire auxiliary sled and tool kit for it.  How the Hell do you do that?  Well, the foolish ass didn’t tie it down and the acceleration did the rest of the work.  Not that the Drega had much acceleration.  Just a fiftieth of a G, but even a fiftieth builds up velocity when burned second after second, minute after minute, day, after day.  The fool could have used his jump pack to grab the sled before it was too late if he’d had anything on the ball.  To make matters worse, he’d taken the antenna half apart, and managed to lose most of it when he finally woke up to his fuck up.  So there we were, no sled, few tools and no news feed to keep the Cattle amused.  Not that it was all that important to keep them amused, but I’d been into season 14 of the all new Weeds show.  This would all bite us in the ass later, but by then, it was all par for the course.  The Captain wasn’t too happy, but like Tech Second Class Clusterfuck, he was pretty much worthless too.  This trip was not shaping up to be a good one.  I should have known it wasn’t going to go well.

At the three month mark it was time to shut down the main engine and start the turn-around where we swap ends so we could decelerate.  Yeah, good ol Captain Custerfuck and Tech second class made a great team.  Now if anyone knows much about Cattle ships, you understand you slowly back off the engine or the length of the ship acts like a spring.  Turn it off all at once, and the spring lets go.  Bad things happen because cattle ships are set up for compressive forces from their one direction drives.  Release the compression and spring!  Holds number three, five, seven and eight all lost air.  Holds seven and eight didn’t really matter as they were inert cargo.  Holds three and five however were filled with cattle.  Not a pretty sight.  Eh, while the Wastes would miss the moisture, freeze dried food is freeze dried food.  It’s all good.

Once we got the mess cleared away…  No scrub that.  We actually didn’t bother.  Cattle being what they are, we just made structural tests to make sure things weren’t completely fragged and set about turning the ship.  Now you need to understand Class C’s don’t like sudden moves, don’t ever see gravity, and need to be treated gently like a maiden’s nipple.  I don’t know what the captain was thinking.  I doubt he was able to think.  We were four and a half days into the turn around with just another five hours of side thrusters before we engaged the main engine again, (main engine my ass, fiftieth G?) and good ol Captain Clusterfuck (I swear him and Tech Second Class were brothers) had a Snail in the Control Room.  A SNAIL!  What a low browed cud chewing Cattlized Snail was doing in the control room is beyond me.  No, not beyond me.  There were stories of him and the first mate doing Snail drives through the Ward Rooms.  How did I ever get on this ship?  By then, I knew things were not going to go well.  I mean they hadn’t since the third week out, right?  Yeah, good ol Snail.  “Captain, what does this switch do?”  As she gave full power to the main engine while we were using the side thrusters.  We folded up like a pretzel.

Understand, our main engine pushed all of Drega at a fiftieth of a G, but the Drega was a big ship.  A very big ship.  Drives, bulk storage, new gear, replacement parts (Where I cobbled up a tool kit after Tech Clusterfuck lost the sled), propulsion mass, Cattle, hydroponics… Christ, everything that made Drega a cattle ship.  Pretty much broke in half.  Out gassing atmosphere pushing this way, other leaks pushing the other way, just a mess.  I’d been down in the engineering section taking readings (not much of a section, just a room with spares, some stores, and pipes, dials, gauges, valves and what not) when the main engine cut in.  Not a gradual start up, but a full on burn.  Remember that spring action from before?  Yup.  Side thrusters going so there is side stress to begin with and even though you try, the ship still gets all S shaped and wonky.  Most would look at the ship from out there in the Void and tell you it looked straight enough.  Yeah.  Sure.  Miss matched side to side stresses from the thrusters, and then the Main engine kicks in at max.  Not a pretty sight.

The off vector thrust threw me away from the pipe I had a toe hold on and sent me across the room.  Sounds like total mayhem, don’t it?  Well no, more like a slow motion train wreck.  It probably took a whole ten or fifteen seconds for me to get to a hand hold and by then it was too late.  I’d been stuck flailing away trying to reach anything to no avail.   When I finally got a handhold of a pipe, I scrabbled for the hatch, then to the air lock.  Didn’t care about Cattle, Captain or god, I’m not into breathing vacuum.  As I hit the air lock the main engines cut off, but by then it was too late.  The spring had sprung and we were folding, nothing to do but hunker down and kiss it goodbye.  There’s always luck though ain’t there?  Yeah, always luck.

They’re talking about a movie deal.  Something about some flight of the Phoenix.  Couldn’t save the Cattle, and after they ripped the Captain apart as their air ran out, wasn’t much point trying.  We’d only had the one sled anyway.  There were five of us down in the aft end with the engines and the Ponics.  We had the best half you could say.  Only four of us got back.  Somehow we misplaced a Tech Second Class Clusterfuck, but no one’s talking.  I was damned sure things would go well for once, and I was right.