Work has begun in earnest on editing book three in The Descendant Saga called Knowledge of the Gods. The original opening chapter to the book was very technical and not exciting. We have our author working on a new intro, with new characters, and as much as the heavy revisions pain Chace, the improvement has not been just incremental, but exponential as we continue to work towards not just what is best for the book, or the audience but for all literature.
Rather than each newsletter having its own short story as we have in the past, Nerd Smith Consolidated is going to start a running series of serial releases written by our main author Chace (Yes main, as in there is a secondary author, but more on them later.), a completely new story within The Descendant Saga, called Pending Receipt with one segment per issue of Tight Beam. We will be increasing the posting frequency from once a month to twice a month. Here’s the first installment of Pending Receipt.
01 Stacking Tolerances
The lights on EFS Stalingrad went dark. Only briefly, just long enough to be noticeable to perceptive members of the crew, leaving others questioning if it had actually happened or not, but not Marina Tereshkova. When the lights came back on, they sounded different. She could hear them, and the buzz grated on the inside of her skull like a cat clawing a couch. She hammered at the keyboard of her console, chasing answers.
The chief engineer, Konstantin, drifted by from one console to another across the compartment behind her. “Mar, what’s twisted your tail? Computer owe you money?”
“No, trying to figure out what made the lights blink” “They’re lights, Mar, they do that.”
“But it’s not right, don’t you hear the hum? They’re humming now and they weren’t before it blinked”
“Humming? You alright Mar? I don’t hear anything.”
She waved at him dismissively as she kept working the console. “You’ve been around heavy machinery too much. Your high frequency hearing is probably shot. The lights are humming now.” She couldn’t find any answers that satisfied the itch growing in her skull, as the hum of the lights tickled her gray matter maliciously.
Konstantin shouldered in next to her at the console, hanging to the edge of the keyboard to keep himself steady in the weightlessness aboard the ship. “Look, shift’s just started, we can’t chase whatever you’re after. We’ve got work to do. It’s a long way to Langok. This is the first colony, we have to succeed.”
She shot him a look over her shoulder. “Isn’t there something like a dozen and a half colonies already?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, but those started as mining operations. They got a military escort, then the military set up a base, and it grew from there. This is the first civilian lead mission, with the intent to be a colony from the outset. We’re setting the standard, this has to work.”
“So… you don’t want me to figure out why the lights flickered?”
“I want you to do your assigned duties. Get your stuff done and stick to the checklist. The Stalingrad isn’t going to fly herself. If you need me, I’ll be in the reactor room.”
“You can’t actually go into the reactor.” She quipped at him.
He rolled his eyes again as he kicked off from the console’s base and made for the hatch. “You know what I mean. I’ll be in the control room, the reactor control room. Not the actual reactor compartment, stop intentionally splitting hairs.” She could hear the smile in his voice.
She smirked as Konstantin left and worked on catching up on her checklist. Hours later, as her shift was coming to a close, the hum of the lights was getting louder. The constant buzzing of the electricity irritated her, leaving her with a pounding headache. Her frustration kept her at her console, plying it with query after query, trying to track down what was causing the humming. Was the Stalingrad picking up some unforeseen interplanetary interference? Gritting her teeth, she fought to concentrate through the throbbing pain between her temples, the ache just behind her eyes.
Lev, coming to relieve her for the ship’s night shift, worked open the hatch behind her and drifted into the compartment. Yet she didn’t yield the console to him as her fingers danced over the keys, the rhythmic tapping and clicking of her fingers on the keyboard as she sifted for minutiae through the computer system.
“Marina, your dedication is admirable, but I have my own work to do. Log off so I can get started.”
“Are you gunna fix the lights before I come back for the next shift?”
“The lights?” He looked up, glancing between the several LED fixtures illuminating their service compartment outside the reactor control room. “Look, Mar, we’ve only been underway for what, two weeks? You’re going to have to hold yourself together better. This is a colony ship, we’re not just in it for the long haul, we’re in for the duration.”
“Hold it together? How can you not hear the lights? It’s giving me the worst headache in the solar system, feels like my skull is too small for my brain. Remember when you were a kid, going through a growth spurt, and your feet got too big for your shoes before your mom got you new ones? It’s like that, but inside my head!”
“Uh… no… I don’t know what that’s like.” He scrunched his eyebrows. “What are you talking about? What do shoes and your childhood neglect have to do with the lights or our shift change?”
Marina looked up from the console, narrowing her eyes at Lev. “Sorry we weren’t all spoiled with new shoes every year. Probably why your senses are so dull too. Shut up and let me fix this.”
“We’re two weeks into the rest of our lives, don’t get snappy with me.”
She turned on him, one hand keeping her latched to the console as she drifted. “Snappy? Snappy?! For starters, we’ve been underway for seventeen days, not two weeks. Furthermore, something isn’t right, something isn’t right already. We can not afford to be having problems and leaving them uncorrected this early into it. We’re leaving the whole solar system and Kepler four fifty-two is far away. We have to fix our own problems.”
“Mar, I see no problem.” He held up his hands in feigned surrender as she jabber her finger at him, punctuating each sentence.
“I don’t SEE anything either, but I hear it, I feel it. I feel it way too much. I feel it all the time. Something is not right, for my sanity at the very least, I’ve got to figure out why and fix it.” She turned back to the console, hammering away at the keys, her frustration slamming her fingertips onto each button like a Heron lunging its head into the water after a fish. “It’s not right, something’s not right, we can’t afford it to be wrong. We have to live with it, for years most likely, if not indefinitely.”
Marina pulled up the schematics for the compartment lighting, for the ship’s lighting. She pulled the specifications for the spare bulbs and fixtures in the ship’s inventory. She opened the readings from the power distribution panels and relays, the pop ups flashing across the screen as her eyes scanned their data with tense fervor.
“Look, the AC to DC inverters temp is high.”
“It is a little, but it’s still in tolerance.” Lev grunted, dubious.
“It’s something, though. Let’s go further upstream.” She worked through the layers of the interface, muttering under her breath as she had to put in her access code a second time, despite being sure she had typed it correctly the first time. “The input frequency has drifted. Look. The inverter is probably running hot because it’s working too hard, and the higher frequency meant it’s not getting filtered down to true direct current.”
“They are higher than normal.” Lev admitted, “but we’re still not in the red zone. I don’t see why this is anything to worry about. The ship has been accelerating under sustained thrust for days. The system is bound to be running a little on edge.”
“Not acceptable. We’re supposed to be colonizing a new planet, building a new Earth with this ship. We can’t afford to live on a margin of error, a ‘good enough’. It has to be better. Maybe we can shut off some of the secondary lighting, lighten the electrical load until we can get a permanent fix.”
“Permanent fix? We’ve already broken lunar orbit, we’re well on our way to the jump point at L3, there’s no turning back, we can’t go back to earth to get parts, and we’re already way out of any regular orbital paths, there’s no supply drone that can catch up to us to bring us spares either.”
“There’re tons of drones that are part of this operation.”
“Yes, but they’re either already under way, or coming along after us. They’re aiming for the planet, weeks or months apart, not at the Stalingrad, not hours apart.”
“It’s just not right, even if it’s within tolerance, everything is on the high end, and tolerances stack. Subsystems might be okay, but is it really okay?”
The lights went out, and they stayed out.
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The Descendant Saga 