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13
Paying Paul
Captain Mironova turned her back on Marina and Lev, facing the many consoles across the bridge. Marina hung there in the weightlessness of the bridge waiting for something to happen, but the captain did nothing, she was looking over the navigator’s shoulder, analyzing what their console saw from inside the purple storm of the transit dimension.
Marina and Lev exchanged glances. Captain Mironova didn’t do anything, Marina’s patience ran short enough that it compelled her to action over the tight laced protocol. “Captain…”
The captain turned around slowly, her thin patience showing through the hard wall of command demeanor in front of her face. “Yes? What do you need, why are you still here?”
“Call them.” Marina said firmly.
Captain Mironova blinked and crossed her arms as she hung weightless on the bridge behind the row of crew still manning their stations. “Run that by me again, Assistant Engineer Marina.”
Marina squared her shoulders and held eye contact with the captain. “Call Langok station. Now.”
“I beg your finest pardon, Marina?”
Lev spoke up. “Captain Mironova, we need you to call the people on the station. Right now. You, as well as everyone else in the room, everyone on the ship knows, we’re getting close to our jump window. And we need more power to jump, or else we’ll miss the window.”
The captain drummed her fingers on her elbow, glancing between Marina, Lev, and the crew. Marina tilted her head, scowling at the captain. Lev hooked his toes into the lanyard loops on the floor and secured his footing, setting his jaw. Marina glanced at him as his shoulders hardened, his muscles flexing as he readied himself.
Marina was surprised, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead with a combination of respect and apprehension as Lev physically readied himself. But the captain paid him no heed as she rolled her eyes and waved for the two of them to follow her, calling over her shoulder to no one in particular in the bridge staff. “You have the con while I am gone, be back soon.”
Out in the hall, once the hatch shut behind them, Captain Mironova turned on them both. “Not everyone knows about the problems, we’re trying to prevent panic. Obviously, time is critical, but next time take a damn hint. Let’s not make a fuss about this. If you can’t wait five minutes for me to make the call in private, you can come with me to my stateroom, and we’ll do it there.”
“Who knows what it’ll take, we might need that five minutes.” Lev said sharply.
The stateroom wasn’t far, and Mironova let the silence hang as they drifted down the corridors. The flustered captain wasted no time once inside, pulling up the display, shuffling through the menus and placing the call. An actual wired connection through the cabling down the length of the scaffolding extending ahead of the Stalingrad as it pushed the doughnut shaped space station ahead of the ship. Langok station slowly spinning about the center axis at the end of the latticework to give the colonists functional gravity inside the station. It was a long time before the call was answered. The display resolving into the round, bald head and the jowly, meticulously clean-shaven face of Peter, the elected governor of the colony station. Head of a small city. A city already doing its best to function normally, as the spaceship behind them changed the location where they functioned.
“Captain Mironova, this is a surprise. You’re several hours…” The glowing transparent head of the holographic projection from the video call looked down as the man on the other end checked the time “… a couple of days ahead of schedule for making this call.”
Mironova gripped the edge of the long table occupying the stateroom, using it to pull herself down to the floor, miming standing. “This is not a scheduled call, Governor Peter,” she said gravely.
“Well, normally unscheduled calls would only be made in emergencies, because otherwise…”
She cut him off. “It is an emergency. You are correct, we’re more than a day out from our scheduled jump back to heavy space. But it is now a question of if we can make the jump to return to heavy space at all.”
Lev and Mar exchanged glances as Governor Peter spluttered. “You? What? Not? Going? Captain Mironova, we have to make the jump. If we don’t jump on time, we’ll be irrevocably off-course. This is not something to just casually state. We have to…”
“No, Governor Peter, you. Not we, you. We have been doing all we can. I won’t bore you with details, but there’s been a reoccurring malfunction in Stalingrad’s main reactor, and while we’re operating fine on the secondary, it doesn’t have enough bandwidth to handle the instantaneous load of the jump back to heavy space. We’re working on manually realigning the shield plating inside the main reactor compartment, but there’s lots of small plates, and it’s extremely precise, and it will take time. Not hours or days, but weeks. What you are going to do is power down all nonessential systems on Langok station and back-feed us all the surplus power you can.”
There was a long pause. Lev broke the silence after staring at the motionless projection of the station’s governor. “Did we lose connection somehow, or…”
“No, I’m still here.” he spoke up as he raised his round head. “The system isn’t designed for this, there’s no way of knowing if such a thing is even possible.”
Marina stepped in, “Cables are cables governor, electricity flows both ways. The only concern is if we can get enough power from you to us, without something else going wrong.”
“Frankly, even if more stuff does go wrong, it doesn’t matter. As long as we can make the jump at the scheduled time and place. We can figure anything out once we’re back in reality. We won’t have a time crunch there.” Lev said. Both Marina and the captain turned to look at him. The captain’s hardened face telling him he had spoken out of turn, but he didn’t shrink back from her glare.
Marina continued, “It’s not a question of if we can, it’s a question of if we can enough.”
The governor drug his hand over his face. “So you’re telling me we’re stuck here in this alternate dimension unless we can send you the electrical power from our reactor to feed your engines.”
“More than that Mr.Peter, replied the captain. We need you to do it with the utmost precision, for the timing must be within a fraction of a second. We need this power, all of it, on an instantaneous basis.” Captain Mironova said.
“How do we know it will work? I mean… what if it doesn’t work?” He asked quietly, his voice afraid of the question it was asking.
Captain Mirinova’s shoulders sagged. “If it doesn’t work, what we do afterwards depends largely on how long it takes to get the main reactor back online, and how long it takes to actually make the jump back. Then, assuming everything goes swimmingly after that, we do a lot of navigational calculations and make another jump to get back. Be it back to Langok, or back to Sol is a different question.”
Peter shook his head, waving to someone off camera. “Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it, Captain. Let me get my engineers in on this too.”
Marina took the opportunity to break in again. “What if we tested it before the jump? Is there some way we could do that so we don’t run into any unpleasant surprises?”
“Any more unpleasant surprises” corrected Peter.
“You two head back down to the reactor control room,” ordered the captain. “I’ll coordinate with the governor and his people so we can get things flowing, and then you guys be on standby for the test.”
Lev and Marina set off back down the passages. Halfway there, Lev asked over his shoulder. “How exactly are we going to test this without actually making a dimension jump? I mean an early jump is going to be just as bad as a late jump.”
“We’ll figure that out when we get there, Lev.”
“Well, we’re going to be there in like forty-five seconds. So….
“We can just reduce the secondary reactor’s output and then bring in the station’s reactor, shunting the load to it, to simulate the instantaneous draw of a jump.”
He scrunched his face up as they entered the reactor control room. “That’s not the same.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“I don’t think it will be half as much draw as the actual jump will take.”
“Well, it’s not like we can just jump for funsies” Marina retorted as she logged into the terminal. She sent a message to Captain Marinova’s private terminal.
Back at the control room. Want to reduce power of secondary reactor once the input from the station is online, and then shunt the load to Langok’s reactor, best instantaneous stress test I can think of.
Stand By came the reply.
Lev and Marina waited, the nervous silence dragging on as Lev drummed his fingertips on the console housing. Helena shot Lev dirty looks in the sterile white space of the reactor control compartment as she tapped away on the other terminal, sparing a hurried glance now and again at the floor to ceiling array of physical dials and indicators on the wall opposite the hatch. Marina, feeling claustrophobic in the silence, had to speak.
“Hey Helena, we’re going to run a stress test for the supply lines from the station’s reactor.” The other woman’s head whipped around sharply, her ponytail swinging wildly behind her head in the zero gravity.
Marina continued her explanation, softening the other woman’s anxious expression. “We need to reduce the secondary reactor’s power output without the capacitor banks stepping in to take up the load. And we need to do it at the same time we take on the connection from the station’s reactor. That way the load gets put on the station’s reactor and we can stress test the system. It’s going to be a trick to do it without the automatic safety measures stepping in to stop us.”
Lev watched as the two women tapped away on their terminals, writing scripts on the fly, deactivating interlocks, shutting off automatic safety systems and feeding other sensors false positives to prevent them from tripping. He commented on their work with a lopsided grin. “You know, I have done some sketchy Bolshevik in my day, but this feels downright dangerous.”
Both of them shot him dirty looks, and he waved his hands defensively and turned away as they worked. They weren’t far from done when another text message came through from the captain.
Have things sorted out with Governor Peter.
We’re almost ready, give us a couple of minutes to test the scripts first, and then we’ll hit it.
Lev watched, pretending to understand as Marina and Helena typed away at their keyboards, then stopped and exchanged glances. He may understand the hardware, the machinery, the parts he could touch and see and use tools on. But the software, the ones and zeros, the imaginary code that he could not touch or see was beyond his understanding despite his years of education and training. He resigned himself to not understanding, writing software off as black magic. He was happy to let someone else handle that.
The lights flickered, causing Lev to flinch, fearing another malfunction. But the two women pushed off from their consoles and slammed into each other, embracing in the middle of the room, giggling and patting each other on the back.
“It works!” they squealed in unison before throwing their heads back in laughter at having spoken in sync. Lev allowed himself to smile. Glad to have their mirth lift the mood despite the seriousness of their circumstances. He knew things were bad logically, but without the immediate threat of bodily harm, he didn’t feel the looming problem emotionally.
He clung to the side of the console as Marina returned to it and typed out her message to Captain Mironova. The test worked, we’re ready.
Lev drummed his fingers on the plastic shell of the console as they waited for the captain’s reply. He was starting to wonder, and inhaled to speak when the console booped with a new message. Peter says he’s turned over control. Send a ping to confirm.
Marina typed a single command on the keyboard and slapped the enter button. Both Helena and Marina leaned in, watching the text scroll across the screen as they waited for the computer to process. Lev looked away, feigning casual disinterest to hide his lack of understanding code. Wordlessly, the women high-five’d as the results came through, and Helena drifted back over to the other console before she typed out a message too. Ping successful, local control confirmed, running stress test now, built-in timer will delay event by five minutes. Gives Langok Station time to prepare.
Marina looked over at Lev seriously. Unsure of what her expression was asking of him, he offered a small smile and a shrug in reply. She nodded sharply and looked over to Helena. Who said in a small voice, “The longer we wait.”
“The longer we will have to worry,” answered Marina as she re-ran the program they had just written, but not a simulated trial run this time.
“So, five minutes, you said?” asked Lev.
Marina bobbed her head. “Now we wait.”
“Hopefully Langok Station is ready for this too.” Helena commented.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” ventured Lev. “Something goes sideways, and both reactors shut down, we’re all dark and drifting. can we restart our secondary from the capacitor banks?”
“Yeah,the capacitors are a huge reserve, they gotta be able to handle the load of a jump.” explained Marina.
“And while the colony station doesn’t have the same high-speed discharge rate, their power storage is massive, they’ve got a huge reserve they can restart their reactor no problem.”
Lev shook his head, “I don’t trust these huge banks of capacitors. They’re all packed in together, and if one fails, it could easily cause a huge cascade failure.”
Marina waved a finger at him. “Probes and military ships have been using large power banks like this for decades. They’ve made many, countless jumps using reactors and power banks for the instantaneous load. It’s a well-proven system.”
“I am still not sure if I can trust it. It’s a new system.”
“It might be new to the civilian market, but it’s not a new philosophy, it’s a well-proven method. I mean, it got us here, didn’t it?” Marina
“But will it get us back out?” Lev wondered half to himself, half to her.
Her face contorted as anger flashed across it, insulted by his insinuation. But before she could speak, the compartment went dark again.
“The lights should come back on as the power cycles in from the station’s reactor,” Helena said. They waited, and the lights did not come back on.
Lev sighed, blowing out his cheeks. “Means we’re going to have to try something else, doesn’t it? Space walk anyone?”
Update 38: Edits for Book III of The Descendant Saga called Knowledge of Gods. The Artist is still working on the hand painted water color art that will be the cover of the book. After which it’s a matter of formatting. The next book will be released second, or third week of August 2026. Please subscribe below to not miss the release announcement or any other updates for Tight Beam, and our serial novel Pending Pending Receipt.
The Descendant Saga 