He had an evasion course programmed, and he found himself holding his breath as the clock ticked downward, holding a single finger supported by the others, ready to stab the button which would cause his ship to engage in fairly violent maneuvers. He nervously checked his harness with the other hand as the numbers on his boards dwindled toward zero.

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Chapter 11
 
 
Ted was jolted awake by the strident screaming of the collision alarms. He had been in the middle of the most beautiful dream, which for him was practically unheard of. It took a moment for him to reorient himself before he was able to free himself from his webbing and a twitch of his powerful arms sent him flying across the small space of his ship from his bunk into the pilot’s station. He drew himself down into his chair and strapped in with one hand while the other stabbed frantically at his control boards, silencing the horrible cacophony of the audible alarms and bringing up a display which showed him the threat he faced.

“Holy shit, it’s a ship!” He worked frantically for another moment while he muttered to himself. “Crap, it’s not just a ship, that’s a goddamned Fleet Strike Carrier! What the flying fuck is a big ass fucking ship like that doing out here?!” Luckily for him, his sensors were still on passive mode, so the only thing his tiny craft was emitting was a very minor IR signature, just the heat required to keep his environment livable radiating into the cosmos, and it would take more than just an alert Sensors Op to detect him, it would take a freakin miracle. The problem was, they were on a collision course, and unless that big assed hunk of metal moved, he was gonna be a little cloud of impact debris in just a little under 3 minutes. “I can’t make any kind of move, not even to avoid smashin into that big motherfucker, or they’ll know I’m a ship and I’m toast!”

It was almost another full minute until he came up with an alternative to maneuvering, but it was chancy at best and he knew it. Still, it was either that or take a chance on almost certainly getting captured by that carrier, and the best thing he could do was just hope against hope that his ruse would work and that whoever was over there on sensors would be able to see and avoid what to them would appear to be a random bolide on an incoming course.

His fingers didn’t dance across the controls, they practically scorched a path into the surfaces as he frantically keyed in commands to his EM shield array. At 1 minute to impact, he forced himself to lean back and watch, knowing that his ship now appeared to be just a highly metallic ball of rock to anyone looking. He’d pulled almost this same trick before while prospecting for metals among the rings and knew that it worked even against military grade sensors. The only question in his mind now was whether the sensor watch on the other ship was alert enough to detect him and avoid collision.

He had an evasion course programmed, and he found himself holding his breath as the clock ticked downward, holding a single finger supported by the others, ready to stab the button which would cause his ship to engage in fairly violent maneuvers. He nervously checked his harness with the other hand as the numbers on his boards dwindled toward zero.

50 seconds until collision. He didn’t want to die just because he had to take a nap! Suddenly the passive sensors of the other ship switched over to full active and he knew he had been spotted! It was another dreadful wait of almost 10 seconds before he saw the other ship start to maneuver, but not the way he expected it to. Somebody over there was far better than he had even considered possible, and as the countdown continued, he had to almost go into a meditative trance to keep from activating his evasion sequence. Only when it was clear to him that he would miss the other ship by a bare few meters could he force himself to relax just a bit. When he raised his finger from the boards, he was shaking so badly that he almost missed the majestic sight of the carrier’s hull whizzing by just an arms length away from the transparent windows of his command station.

He would never admit it to another soul, but he very nearly shit his pants. Unfortunately, not all sphincters are the same and what applied to his anal muscular control didn’t seem to apply to other areas. Right at that moment, he didn’t care, but when the adrenaline had ebbed just a bit, he decided that he had to change into a fresh shipsuit and mop out his command chair, for both were completely soaked with urine. By this time, he was comfortable in the belief that the carrier had not seen him as anything other than an errant hunk of rock.

After cleaning up and changing into a clean shipsuit, he relaxed enough to treat himself to a carefully hoarded few hits from his vaporizer. As he breathed in the vapor and held each lungfull for as long as he could, he reflected on the irony of what he was doing. One of the plants that provided the very air he breathed also gave him one of the few things that helped to make being a solo spacer tolerable. It didn’t hurt anything that he had been able to get off of the heavy synthetic meds that made him incapable of independent function. Without that, the phantom pain from his missing legs would surely have driven him mad long ago, not that he was sure he hadn’t crossed that particular line anyway.

The hatch that had severed his legs 3 years before had also saved his life, for if it hadn’t closed with such finality, he would surely have died, either from being sucked out into the cold vacuum or just from explosive decompression. The irony of that was not lost on him, and in truth he considered himself lucky that the hatch had not closed just a second sooner because then he might have been rendered sexless as well as legless (If he had survived). It was only by the quick action of his crewmate who had applied tourniquets to the stumps of his legs and hit the emergency atmospheric flood in the compartment that he had survived at all. That wasn’t much comfort to him in those early days. The company paid for his medical treatment and it paid well, but the cold hard fact was that he would never work for another rockjack outfit again, not with his disability.

He had seen before him the end of his days as a spacer, but the company had paid him off just well enough that he was able to buy a small prospecting ship out of his settlement. He could have chosen to spend the rest of his days in some nice safe environment, being pitied by everyone he encountered and using either a grav chair or crutches to get around, but he chose instead to buy the Wanderer. Its grav generators were running at something far below maximum efficiency and it would not have been economical to bring it up to par, but he didn’t mind spending most of his time in microgravity. For most other spacers it would not have been an attractive purchase but for him, it was about as close to perfect as he could get.

Within a year, he had managed to completely repay his mortgage on the ship and even pay for some new components for the grav system. It wasn’t that he wanted to spend his time in a grav heavy environment, but the plants did need it to grow properly and he wanted more than anything to be self sufficient. So he spent almost every moment that wasn’t occupied with mining reengineering the ship. Another 3 months saw his ship rebuilt almost completely to his liking, micrograv everywhere except in the aeroponics bays.

By that time, he had become so accustomed to the increased agility of his body in microgravity due to his lack of legs that it seemed like a major imposition to him to spend time tending the ship’s greenery, even though it provided most of his food and almost all of his air. The ease of movement conferred upon him by his more compact body seemed almost like a blessing until the pain came back, pain from limbs he no longer had. He hated the way the pain meds made him feel, all fuzzy and unable to think properly, so he began to wean himself off of them.

Eventually his research gave him an answer, albeit one that was unsatisfactory to him. After some experimentation, he decided that he had his solution. It was satisfactory in more than one way. It turned out the plant that produced a drug he could take without noticeably impairing his functionality also had an extraordinarily high CO2 to O2 conversion ratio in its vegetative state, so he could effectively kill 2 birds with one stone. The thing about it was that the plant had to go into budding stage to produce the drug he needed to enable him to tolerate the pain and in that state it produced far less oxygen.

For him by himself, that wasn’t a huge issue. He could devote almost half of the ship’s ag areas to growing his pet plant and let the rest produce food and extra oxygen for him. Since the ship had been designed to support a crew of 3, it was more than ample. He actually made side money selling fresh produce to the crews of the refinery ships he docked with to sell his ore. That ended with the war and suddenly things became more difficult. He had to adjust to grow more and different food to replace what he could no longer be certain he would be able to purchase and alter his production of the drug to compensate. It meant that he had less of the drug and that meant he had to ration it carefully and just deal with the pain. That state of affairs would ease somewhat when the marine protein sources he was growing in his water recycling tanks reached maturity and helped to supplement the food supply.

That didn’t mean he had to be happy about eating some of the things he would have to eat to be truly self-sufficient, though. He’d never been a big lover of seafood and though shrimp were delicious, some of the other things he was growing made him almost sick to think about. He thought with longing about the last 10 pounds of beef he had been able to buy at exorbitant cost just before things went over the edge into full blown war.

“Oh well,” he mused, “at least I was able to buy the stuff to be able to start this marine ecosystem. Pain in the ass keeping it all balanced though.” As difficult as it may have been to maintain, that ecosystem allowed him the possibility of long term self reliance, the ability to live almost indefinitely without having to have contact with any other human beings. It was a lonely life, but at least it was a life and the only option that he could bring himself to contemplate. Anything else would have left him marooned out in the vastness of space, slowly dying of malnutrition as the materials he needed to sustain life were depleted without any possibility of replenishment.

His ship continued off on it’s orbit as he lost himself in monitoring his systems and making minute adjustments to nutrient levels, the carrier vanishing slowly into the distance behind him, not quite forgotten but no longer truly relevant to him.

Sarah Masters found herself unable to sleep. There was something nibbling at the back of her mind, something about the sensor readings she had gotten from that hunk of rock she’d had to dodge earlier. It was subtly wrong and like a loose tooth, she couldn’t resist wiggling it with her tongue, over and over. She finally gave up on the attempt at sleep and pulled up the sensor logs from that encounter, going over them carefully, and gnawing a little at her bottom lip in concentration.

Suddenly, the answer practically leaped off the screen at her and she stared at the readout in shock. She fretted about waking the captain, but this was important enough to risk one of her legendary ass chewings so she keyed the combination for her private com. She was surprised to see the captain’s face fill her screen in only a few seconds. “Lieutenant Masters, I assume you have a good reason for this call?” It wasn’t quite a question.

“Maam, I was going over the sensor logs from earlier and I found what was bothering me about it.” She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. “The temperature of that object that almost hit us was too far above ambient to be a result of anything natural. It has to have been a ship, just very heavily stealthed. Everything else said rock, but that temperature profile fits a small prospecting ship.”

Helen carefully held her face impassive as she listened.

“Maam, whoever it is was either in trouble or just scared stiff of us and I didn’t see any evidence of radiation leakage or anything like that, so I’d go with scared. Gotta give em credit for brass balls though, depending on our maneuvering out of their way like that.” Her face flushed as she realized what she had just said to the captain.

Helen thought about this for a moment, turning this new information over in her mind. This could be a godsend if Sarah’s theory was correct. Her ship had many things, but the equipment to properly engage in prospecting and mining was not among them. The decision almost made itself for her. “Lieutenant, report to your duty station in five minutes.” She broke the connection and unhurriedly donned her uniform, fully aware that the young woman who had called was doing the same.

The young woman in question was setting new records for speed in dressing and scrambled out of her cabin in just over a minute, still pulling her blonde mane into a tidy looking knot at the back of her head as she sprinted toward the bridge. She arrived at the hatch just a bit out of breath and paused a moment to settle her beret into place and slow her breathing before she entered. She was relieved to note that the captain had not yet arrived as she relieved the officer on duty at sensors and slid into place before her displays, calling up the data she had just been poring over in her cabin and beginning course calculations for an intercept of the other ship.

Helen deliberately waited until the five minutes was up before she cycled the hatch and strode onto the bridge, unsurprised to find a feverishly working young lieutenant at sensors. She allowed herself an instant of pride as she settled into her own station, leaving the shockframe unfastened. “What have you got for me, Sensors?”

Sarah jerked out of her intense focus at the sound of the warm contralto. “Relaying to your displays now, maam. Looks like he’s still pretending to be a rock, no change in trajectory. I was able to get a little refinement on emissions signature and it is definitely a prospecting ship.”

“Very well, thank you lieutenant. I see you’ve already computed an intercept course, but I really don’t think we need to take the entire ship just to bring in a stray rockjack, do you?” She was pleased to notice new courses for not just one but two intercept options flash onto her displays almost as soon as she was finished speaking. She considered them for a moment. “You said you saw no sign of damage to the ship, correct?”

Sarah glanced back at her readouts before replying. “No maam, no radiation leakage, nothing that would indicate anything other than a really good job of hiding. Even the temperature anomaly that got my attention is just barely detectable. I’d say whoever it is has done this before.”

Helen allowed herself a small smile. “Well Lieutenant, I think it’s about time we gave him back a little of the scare he gave us, wouldn’t you?” She couldn’t see the grin on Sarah’s face, but her tone of voice gave her away.

“Oh, yes maam, I do think that would be very appropriate!” It was all she could do not to giggle in anticipation as she heard the captain order 3 fighters to launch on a least time course to intercept. Less than five minutes later, the smaller craft were on the way.

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