Here is a revised draft. For the first time, I'm not going to publish a finished story. I need to continue this process in a way that accommodates healthy life choices. Like sleeping more than five hours a night.
Mother
Mother was warm. Mother was tough. Mother hummed with maternal care. Mother was wide. Mother was long. Mother hurtled through space at three times the speed of light.
At least, she did on a good day.
In the course of seven years she would travel from the shipyards of Earth to the deeper outskirts of the the Asimov system, where she would shimmer into conventional space. There she would commence braking maneuvers and go into orbit around Steven's Haven.
Lawrence Udero burrowed deeper into the blankets of his cot. The pressure tank ping'ed again and he snorted in frustration. Another ping. He moaned, sat up, and swung his feet over the edge of his cot. The floor chilled his feet when they touched it, and he curled his toes up as he staggered over to the bleed panel.
Fifth day on. Paco Tableman squinted into the metaform display, watching synthetic health trends for the primary drive packs. His brain itched and nothing he saw at made sense any more. He switched to the power distribution graph of the main drive antenna, looked at the side lobes. There was still only 10dB of difference between the side lobes and the main. It should be 40dB.
Mother was a third generation translight ship, and the first designed for colonization of another planet in the Goldilocks zone. She carried a thousand colonists. She swam through the undulating tunnels of hyperspace, power from an atomic plant feeding the drive antenna that hauled her forward. As she passed by the gravitational dimples made by stars and planets, the frequency and beam width of the drive antenna required constant adjustment. And so the geometry of that antenna must constantly change, too.
Paco's job was to coax a lump of software into regularly adjusting the antenna geometry so that Mother wasn't throwing away the large but finite capacity of her atomic pile.
It gave Paco headaches to bully the software into doing the right thing, and sometimes he had a go at trimming things by hand. His section chief fussed, but Paco was good.
Five days into an all-hands emergency, and Paco wasn't so good anymore. And for some reason all the heuristics in the software had gone lazy and the ship's drive antenna was running only 1% as efficiently as it normally did.
Mother was practically standing still, and might slip into conventional space at any moment.
This was not a good day.
Lawrence was awake now. The bleed panel's metaform display showed healthy greens on all the zone taps. His bedding lay behind him, inviting and warm. But Lawrence's eyes were fixed on the screen of his personal tab, and the raucously laughing girls who appeared on it, diving into a rec pool in ones and twos, swimming to the “shore,” climbing out, falling on top of one other in a tangle on the soft synthetic beach at the water's edge. He snagged a blanket from the top of the pile on his cot and wrapped it around him, settling in for the hour it would take him to feel sleepy again.
Mother's actual rec pool, all of six meters long, had been filled with vermiculite and manure and planted with cannabis sativa. Lawrence Udero didn't use it. Paco Tableman didn't use it, either. But they both knew people who did.
It wasn't until a couple of years into Mother's flight plan that certain things which had been hidden away began to surface. Everyone who has been in charge of a large organization, from a high-school principal upwards, can feel when something has begun to go wrong. But to determine the exact cause can take longer. To fix it, sometimes much longer. How long depends upon the nature of the crisis and the perspicacity of the executive.
Karyl Vacha was a very smart man. He had a couple of advanced degrees, one in drive engineering and another in planetary science, and he had been president of his class at West Point. But after his five obligatory years in the service, he had left for years of graduate training, driven by a hunger to know anything he might need to know.
He circled back to the executive suite eventually. He spent a long enough time there in terrestrial life that no one could question his qualifications to administer the civilian population of a translight ship for a seven year voyage. But he became executive of the entire ship when the ship's original exec died of cerebral artery dissection. That happened six months after launch.
Karyl Vacha was a very smart man, but he wasn't smart enough to detect the first signs of what an earlier generation would have called moral turpitude. Now, with two hundred recaltritants holed up in the recreation wing of the ship and a complicated series of translight shifts to oversee, Karyl was in over his head.
(c) 2011 Michael Bernstein
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