Starship Engineer

Chapter 122

About twenty days into the voyage, some crew began to experience subspace sickness. For most, it was not serious, just headaches and mild nausea. Not much was known about what caused it, and the only treatment was to exit subspace and rest in normal space. The Squirrel were immune apparently, and only about twenty percent of the human crew experienced symptoms. The Tirani were the worst off. They couldn’t walk or fight normally, losing their sense of balance and seeing double.

Of course, Doc thought this was all very fascinating and spent time trying to figure out why races had different reactions to prolonged time in subspace. The Squirrel scientists were involved, and when they found that myself, the entire Martis family, Tora, Nero, and Gabby had no symptoms, they assumed it had something to do with us being phased from the planetoid wave. All of us maintained shadows in subspace. I still wanted to be unphased from subspace.

The best explanation they could come up with was by being phased; my molecules were more stable in the various layers of subspace. They had a larger foundation to withstand the variances in subspace. They ultimately cornered themselves in their own logic as to travel the higher bands/layers of subspace, a person would be required to be phased among the different layers to safely travel them.

The Squirrel were found not to be immune either. It was just that their physiology prevented the manifestation of the symptoms. This at least made the Tirani Marines on board feel better about being incapacitated.

All this made the test with the shuttle more and more relevant. I permitted to upscale the fuel conversation. The fuel could still be used normally if the experiment was a failure—or at least that is what the Squirrel physicists believed. We were either blazing new ground or wasting resources, but that is what science and discovery are all about.

We started a conversation on six during the trip. Half the lower passenger cabins were being converted into a hydroponics facility. I agreed to the change because I wanted fresh food. However, I learned that one-third of the space was regulated to growing the alien fruiting bushes, which had been deemed safe by Doc. It made excellent fermented wine, and Cori had found ways to incorporate it into her cooking.

Doc copied me on three requests for permission for children, two by Squirrel and one by Andie Niaz, also known as Doc. Will Swain, also known as Scrubs, had finally broken her. Although there was no future marital union, they decided to have a child together. I approved all three requests and expected more in the future. I was definitely going to need a much larger ship with the number of children.

As Celeste and Amos were gaining more and more cognitive ability, I spent a lot more time with them. The trip had my time divided among the children and helping Damian with the FTL drive and emitters. Twenty days into the trip, the in-transit maintenance was rising daily. We cycled emitters offline to cool them and service them. We had multiple people keeping a focus on the power core. The greatest threat we would face was if the fuel feeds got clogged and caused the reactor output to oscillate. Damian had cleaned everything thoroughly before the long trip, but that didn’t mean much with the prolonged trip. We also had a mix of civilian and alien fuel, giving it more impurities. At least when I was in Union, I never had to question the purity of fuel. I had still checked it but never found an issue.

On day twenty-five, we started to run into a cascade of problems. Too many emitters needed to be serviced, and the fuel lines were getting narrower. With four more days to reach the Helliphante system, I decided to continue and press through the danger. Damian and I started working twenty-hour days to keep us safely in subspace. I had balanced the odds, and dropping out to service everything would have cost more time than pushing to the destination and then extra weeks servicing the FTL systems. As an engineer, I would have dropped from subspace, but I made a different decision as a captain.

When we exited subspace, I breathed a sigh of relief. We were at the extreme edge of the Helliphante system. Our subspace drive was going to be down for at least ten days. Damian was sending me maintenance schedules now, and it looked like it would be closer to fourteen days. I had the ship on full alert and ready to go stealth mode if we had trouble.

The sensors began to populate the holo tank, and there were a lot of ships. As Elvis fed the scans to Julie, she had trouble identifying more than half of them. She began highlighting the larger ships of interest by size. Eighteen battleships, two hundred cruisers, seven hundred eighteen frigates, and thousands of smaller ships. The volume of ships in this multi-race trade system was well beyond expectations.

Everyone on the bridge was busy, and we soon learned why there were so many ships. This was a pseudo-ship bazaar. Star nations brought old ships and captured ships here to sell. We couldn’t figure out who was in charge of security in the system as none of the ships we identified as warships were patrolling. Over half the ships were now classified by Julie as being mothballed, waiting to be purchased for scrap by someone in desperate straits. This reminded me of when I purchased the Void Phoenix but on a much grander scale than Silverstream station.

Julie was working as fast as she could to translate the alien languages with the Squirrel comms officer, Hyrena. What we learned was kind of shocking. This region of space was a collaboration of alien species, almost like an alliance. None of this was in the Brotherhood database. We also learned the planet with the orbital elevator was an ancient empire’s industrial capital. They were cutting up the structures on the planet and sending the scrap metal into orbit for sale. The reason the Brotherhood hadn’t wanted this information to get out was obvious. They didn’t want any human factions to join this alien collective.

We established communications with the systems traffic controller. We were not the first humans to visit this system; they had a few human dialects on file. Haily turned from her station and said that we had radiation warnings from the systems nav buoys. The central star had waves of intermittent lethal radiation. The ships in the system used planets and moons to shield themselves. When we translated the data on the ambient radiation, it would not be strong enough to get through our alien-plated hull. However, the actual sunflares could overcome our defenses, so we still needed to be careful.

I compared this system to a used carcass that was being picked clean before the sun’s activity made the system completely inhospitable. Whatever race had built a planet metropolis had either perished or abandoned it due to the volatile sun. Now, a massive salvage operation was underway. Even the orbital ring surrounding the planet was being disassembled. That meant our precious metal trade goods might not go as far as I had hoped.

Hyrena sent me the data she had filtered with Haily. I looked it over, and it appeared like the network of alien species in this Alliance used a universal currency. It only took a single request to get all the star systems currently occupied by the alliance members. Well, damn. Nearly 1,200 stars with two-hundred seventy-eight listed as viable refueling locations.

This may have changed the Union fleet’s waypoints. Even the planet where they planned to settle was marked as under the control of the Lleshan, a race that appeared humanoid but closer to the Wren with fur, fangs, and pointed ears. They definitely were not cat-like, Elias said they looked closer to furry bats.

This species alliance had twenty-nine species, each with its own space fleet. They freely traded goods, technology, and ships. My xeno specialist, Dr. Abraham Zaire, couldn’t believe all these races existed in harmony. It went against a species’ biological imperative to assert dominance over others. Zoe quipped that maybe that was only a trait of the human species.

I called Suruchi to the bridge. She was the trade specialist, and she now had an opportunity to get the best return on cargo. She had artwork, precious metals, and unique flora to trade. She eagerly took a seat and opened communications with Hyrena and Vicky, the logistics officer, assisting. It looked like we were going to be able to refuel and resupply here.

The Tirani were eager to get off the ship after the long, unpleasant voyage. I tasked them to take a shuttle with Edmond, Francis, Abby, and a few other crew to gather intel on the station. There were four Union frigates in the ship graveyard. I guessed that is what the Union fleet had bartered away for supplies. Perhaps some Union personnel went AWAL here and were still on the station. Elvis was only doing quick scans, and we were too far out to get detailed scans. Since we had exited at such a safe distance, it was going to take eleven hours to make our way to the planet.

I ordered the ship to proceed. It seemed like a viable location, and there were no red flags so far. Celeste came on the bridge, and when she heard there were dozens of aliens on the orbital ring, she wanted to visit the station. She almost went into a temper tantrum but held back. I promised her if it was safe, then Eve and I would take them to the station. Doc was already preparing pre and post-screens for alien microbes. With this many new species, her database was extremely likely incomplete.

It turned out that the infectious disease and parasite database was free to download so Doc quickly added it. They even already had a translation for humans. Doc was still going to do her own scans, but at least this would give her and our xeno specialist a head start.

As we approached the planet, Elvis was going wild with excitement. Since we were closer, he could do detailed scans. Every ship he scanned wasn’t in the database. He documented thirty-six different races as well—at least their morphology. He also had seventeen ships that were stealthed in the system. At least these ships were not on the universal radars. A trio of these stealthed cruiser-sized ships with mixed-species crews appeared to be the system’s primary defense. They were stationed close to the orbital elevator but stayed on the planet’s dark side.

Although we couldn’t grasp the technology from the scans, Elvis and Julie interpreted it as inferior to the Brotherhood by a good margin. The Squirrel scientists and physicists were clambering to go on the station, and I granted their request. The ring was impressive from the scans and visual feeds.

It had been about three kilometers in thickness and circled the entire planet. Now large sections had been reclaimed as they salvaged it. The planet was larger than Earth by 20% but also twice as dense. Elvis’ sensors turned on the planet through the impossibly thick toxic haze, and we were awestruck. The entire surface was covered in structures over ten kilometers thick! There was almost no surface water, and only an area around 100 kilometers near the space elevator had been cleared. It was going to take centuries to reclaim all the metal on the surface. That was good because it was likely the sun would destroy everything in the system in about five thousand years.

Dr. Zaire was curious about the race that had built and inhabited this world. There was some archeological data available. The race was referred to as the Giant Arachnids when translated. They did not look like spiders but were four meters tall with eight limbs and two arms in addition. Their head was small and bulbous. They had a variance of chitin that was laced with titanium fibrils. It made their limbs strong and flexible. The aged corpses recovered in the city dated to be 124,000 years old. Hyrena dubbed the race the Pavuk from an obscure human dialect.

The Pavuk never achieved FTL travel. Instead, they hauled thousands of asteroids to their homeworld and processed them to build their massive cityscape. A museum on the station was dedicated to the Pavuk, and Gabby was excited to visit it. She wanted to recreate the lost race as a new advanced bot. I encouraged her as projects like these would help her expand her skills.

We docked on the orbital ring 18 kilometers from the space elevator. We would be able to take shuttles to the primary station in order to trade. Walking 18 kilometers was not feasible. Abby and I were just worried that it would take too long to gather the crew at the station if we had to leave in a hurry. As the crew departed to explore in groups of five, I met with Suruchi in the conference room to discuss what our trading possibilities were.