Destination Europa: Chapter 6

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Jun 07, 2024

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Previously, Bowen was unsuccessful in tracing the strawberry thief. Quill had a nightmare about Priska, then saw a ghostly image of a face like hers in the Observation Lounge viewport.

Quill woke from a restless sleep to find his cabin bright with morning spectrum light. A reminder was pinging at him: his weekly shower slot started in ten minutes. The apparition of the night before bubbled in his consciousness as he grabbed his towel and shower slippers and padded to the bathrooms. It churned like greasy meat on an upset stomach as the hot water trickled down his back and belly. He lathered himself with lemon-scented soap from the dispenser, moving fast to finish and rinse off before his time was up. Out of habit, he scrawled 1913 with a soapy finger in the condensation on the side of the shower cubicle, but his mind was on Priska’s fungus-pale face in the viewport, mouthing his name. Something’s wrong. She needs help. But what can I do?

It was past breakfast time when he arrived in the mess, hair drying rapidly in the Leifr’s recycled atmosphere. Quill grabbed a coffee from the self-service machine and found a quiet corner to sit. Is this a spiritual attack? Is it because I’ve been weak lately? Undisciplined? Or is it a kind of vision? A warning? A reminder to pray for her? The coffee tasted sour in his mouth. He wasn’t hungry, but fetched a cinnamon roll to sweeten the taste, and sat picking bits off it until the coffee was gone.

He had meant to spend that morning working on the next lesson for his Habitat Engineering class, but when he got back to his cabin, he paced the three steps back and forth for half an hour before opening a message interface.

Hey Archie. Hope all’s well at home? Could you do me a favour? I’m worried about Priska. Any chance you could find out how she is? Casually? Like bump into her old man at the depot or something. I’ll explain more later, but yeah, this is important to me. Ta muchly! Love to Kath and the boys!

He knew it might take his brother a while to reply, but felt better for doing something. He was even able to get half an hour’s worth of lesson planning done before lunch.

Tuesdays were pizza day in the mess. Quill didn’t feel hungry, but took a couple of slices of mushroom & potato and joined the others. They had almost finished eating.

“You OK, Quill?” asked Safira as he sat down. “You look.. rough.”

“Didn’t sleep well,” he said shortly. He took a bite of pizza, the faux mozzarella forming long yellowish strings of elastic between the slice and his mouth. It tasted like vanilla, the way it always did. My Italian great-granny would turn in her grave if she tried this.

“I have a draft of the letter ready for everyone to look at,” said Demas, looking slowly round the table. “I want your comments. Today, if you can.”

“Where?” asked Safira.

Demas pulled a small qube out of the breast pocket of his overalls and passed it to her.

“I want nothing on the ship systems,” he said. “Open it only in a DPS, with a secure shell. Add your comments, then pass it to Singh. There’s a list of who to give it to next. Got it?”

Safira nodded. “Roger that.”

Demas snapped his meal tray shut and stood up. “Quill,” he went on, looking slightly awkward. “I, ah, I know you ain’t keen on this. But whether or not you sign, I could do with your input on the text. You understand these • better than most of us. Can you at least do that?”

Quill nodded, only half-reluctantly. It might be for the best if he were able to look at it. Maybe I can pour some oil on troubled waters.

“Good,” said Demas, brushing pizza crumbs out of his beard. “Actually, Saf, give it to Quill after you’ve read it. Quill can give it to Singh then. See you guys later.”

“Any news on your strawberries?” Quill asked Bowen, after Demas was out of earshot.

Bowen shook his head sourly. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Rock. And Security still says no to a scan. They’re not taking it seriously.” The Chief Botanist gave Safira a glance, and she gave his thigh a reassuring squeeze.

“Oh well,” said Quill, unsure what to say next.

“Tell me about this oxygen discrepancy,” Safira broke in. “Bowen mentioned it,” she added, seeing Quill’s puzzled look. He wasn’t sure why Safira would be interested.

“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s all within system uncertainties. And Bowen already told me the Farm output is fine.”

“Fine,” said Safira. “Good to know.” She sounded strangely authoritative. She gave Quill a hard sharp look, as if trying to read his mind, then slapped Bowen gently on the thigh and got up. Bowen followed her. Quill breathed an inward sigh, nodded goodbye, and popped open an interface. He could read another chapter of The Thirty-Nine Steps while he finished his pizza.

He had just settled into Hannay’s chase through the heathery Galloway hills when a shadow cut over his interface.

“Mind if I join you?” said Tark, sitting down opposite him.

Quill hastily closed the interface. Don’t show annoyance. Be nice. Make the most of the opportunity. She’s seeking you out, that’s progress!

“Hey, Tark! How are you?”

“Good, good,” she replied, sliding her tray open. “I’ve been working on that oxygen thing. Guess what?”

“What?”

“I think there’s more to it than you thought.”

Quill sat up a little straighter, his last half-slice of pizza hovering halfway back to his tray.

“What?” He put the pizza down. “What do you mean?”

“I looked at all the outputs,” she said confidentially. “And I found that the Farm has actually been producing a little above quota this voyage, at least in the last couple of months.”

“So there’s nothing to worry about,” said Quill.

“Don’t you get it, Dr. O? If the Farm has been over-producing, that makes the discrepancy bigger than we thought! There’s more O₂ being produced, but the overall level is that tiny bit lower than it should be. The imbalance is more pronounced.”

“Huh,” said Quill slowly. I should have realised that, yesterday. Why didn’t I see that? I’m not thinking straight.

“So what shall we do now?” asked Tark, chewing her salad.

The problem pounded in Quill’s head all through his treadmill session. He felt reluctant to take it to the FSS crew without more concrete data. Tark, as a fellow Earther and FSS citizen, might be able to talk to them without treading on their toes to the same extent, but she was also employed by SymbioNor and he knew there was plenty rivalry between the company and the federal space agency. But to get more concrete data they would need access to more of the Leifr’s systems, and they probably couldn’t get that without talking to the FSS guys.

The treadmill slowed as his run ended, and Quill unclipped himself from the harness. Alex from Navigation was on the neighbouring treadmill again. Quill grabbed his hand towel and wiped the sweat from his face and armpits, gazing blankly across the room, preparing to start on the weights machine. What should I say to Tark? Can we just leave it? I’m going to have to look at Demas’ wretched letter later, too.

“Like what you’re looking at, sailor?”

The room snapped back into focus. Quill realised, too late, that he had been staring directly at Alex’s muscular legs and backside. His face flushed. He didn’t even know Alex very well, despite sweating in the same space twice most weeks for the last twenty-one months. That’s an upper limit of 168 times, but some weeks our gym schedules don’t align the same so the real number is lower…

“Hi, ah, Alex. I wasn’t staring at you, sorry, I was just, uh, staring into space, you know?”

Alex gave a half wink as he picked up his own towel. “Just kidding,” he said. “I know the feeling. No room to even look anywhere on this tin can.”

Quill nodded, relieved that Alex was only joking. Seize the opportunity. Maybe he can help.

“So, uh, how’s the voyage going for you? I mean, I see you in here all the time, but we never really got chatting, so..”

“Yeah, good,” said Alex, rubbing his towel across his hair. “Well, you know how it is, Navigation these days is mostly done by the ai, so there’s not that much for us to do.”

Quill took a drink of water. Keep the conversation going. “Is that kind of frustrating? I mean, do you have stuff like checking the ai’s work and stuff?”

Alex shrugged. “In principle, sure. But you know how it is.” He moved over to the cross-trainer.

Quill hung his towel on a peg next to the weights. You know how it is? What does that mean?

“I better get on with this,” said Alex, harnessing himself into position.

“Sure,” said Quill. “Me too, I guess.” Quick, don’t drop the ball. Say something more! Invite him to hang out?

“Alright, nice chatting to you, Aquilla.”

“Quill, please. But, uh—”

Alex looked right into Quill’s eyes, an oddly intense look. “Quill. Got it. You know what? I’ve been thinking lately I should get to know some of you guys a bit better. You want to grab a drink later?”

“Uh, yeah, that’d be great!” Play it cool, don’t look like an idiot.

“You free this evening? Say twenty-hundred hours in the coffee cabin?”

“Sounds good to me! The coffee cabin by Engineering?”

Alex shook his head. “The other one, Deck 3.”

Enemy territory. Quill shook the thought from his head as he launched himself up the shaft towards Deck 3. Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. Like most of the Martian engineers, he rarely ventured into the forwardmost decks of the Leifr, where the FSS command crew and admin personnel were based. The FSS crew, for their part, tended to avoid the aft decks. Quill was glad of the middle decks, where the mess and the gyms and some of the other common facilities were.

He could have approached Deck 3 by one of the three Blue Ring corridors, but he was running a little late. The zero-g shaft that ran the length of the Leifr, the longitudinal axis around which the habitable part of the ship rotated, was sometimes a faster option. A good shove off the hatch at Deck 8 could bring him sailing straight up without touching the ladder, as long as the shaft wasn’t busy. At this time of the day, it was nearly empty.

Quill automatically straightened his overalls after swinging through the hatch, and landing gently on the floor of the Yellow Ring at Deck 3, his legs automatically adjusting to the spin. He glanced around curiously. He’d never been in this particular corridor. It looked like the series of windowless rooms on this floor were for HVAC or ai servers or something of that sort. He climbed down the gravity gradient into the Green Ring then was about to lower himself onto the ladder to the Blue Ring, where the Deck 3 coffee cabin was, when an FSS officer started up the ladder from the other end. Quill stepped back into the Green Ring and waited.

The officer nodded stiffly to Quill as he passed, then disappeared round the Green Ring corridor towards the officers’ quarters. Quill swung himself back onto the ladder and started to slide down when he heard brisk footsteps bouncing along the corridor. His head was the only part of him still above Green Ring floor level when he saw who it was. Safira.

Quill slid down the rest of the ladder as fast as he could. For some reason he didn’t want her to know where he was going, and he suspected she wouldn’t want him to know what she was doing either. Probably an affair with one of the officers. I don’t want to know.

He looked round to orient himself and find the way to the coffee cabin, but he was too late. She saw him when she was halfway down the ladder. He saw her mouth open then close again, probably swallowing a curse, then slid herself down to the floor before she spoke.

“Quill, what a surprise! What are you doing up here?”

“I’m, uh, going to the coffee cabin. You know Alex from Navigation? He invited me up here for a drink.” Why do you sound so defensive? It’s not like you’re doing anything wrong.

“Cool, cool.” Safira sounded distracted. She rummaged in the pocket of her overalls. “Oh, hey, here’s that thing.” She palmed him the qube, looking him in the eye as she spoke, so that the small black qube, no bigger than a die, stayed out of her line of sight. Quill kept her gaze as he slipped it into his own pocket.

“Sure thing,” he said. “So where are you headed?”

“Oh, just back to Eight,” she said vaguely. “Just dealing with some stuff, you know.”

“Sure. OK, I better go. See you later.”

Safira nodded and turned towards the corridor in the direction of the aft decks.

A blast of laughter came out the door of the coffee cabin as Quill entered. He scanned the room anxiously, looking for Alex. It was busy, with several knots of crew clustered in different booths, but no sign of Alex. Quill sidled past the booths and stood by the vending machine, pretending to look at the options even though they were the same as every other vending machine aboard. He was about to creep back out and walk along the corridor while he waited, when a ping came from Alex.

On the way. Sorry. There in 5.

Quill relaxed a quarter notch and selected a cup of chocolate, then sat at a table in the corner, facing the door. He looked round while he waited. He’d been in this coffee cabin once or twice before, but only to refill his water bottle while walking the long corridors that ran the length of the ship in the Blue Ring.

The layout was similar to the Engineering coffee cabin, but the photos and paintings on the walls showed images of seafaring and spacefaring heroes from FSS history, rather than SymbioNor engineers. Leif Erikson had pride of place, of course, but Quill also spotted Amundsen and Tereshkova and Mars pioneer Grýlukerti Nikólasdóttir as well as a portrait of the Leifr’s current commander, Captain Tormod Strand.

Another roar of laughter rose from the adjoining booth, where six or seven men were crowded. Quill couldn’t see most of them over the partition around the booth, but the aikons he saw hovering over their heads told him they were all mid-ranking crew.

“That’s nothing!” he heard one of them say, his voice loud enough for a Bergen pub. “When I was on the Suilven — now that was a rackety old tub for you — when I was on the Suilven, I saw some weird •.”

“Is this another of your tall tales, you old blowhard?” someone interjected.

“Cross my heart and swear to end up in sweet Mother Freya’s arms tonight. We were on a regular lunar run, bog-standard, just putting into orbit waiting for some cargo from the Imbrium mines. I was a junior then, so I got back watch, just passing time sitting in the bridge with my book, when an alert pings up on the screen.

“Hell, I think, what’s this? We got a meteroid or some junk like that coming in, big enough to trigger a ping, we’re in trouble. But when I look at the screen, what do you think I see?”

“A nice cask of Glenfiddich!” someone shouted.

“• you, Benny!” The speaker’s voice lowered, and Quill had to strain to hear him properly. “What I saw on the screen — I swear on my mother’s life — was a ship. Appeared out of nowhere, like some • cloaking technology was real. And not just any ship. Gentlemen, it was the Artemis Máni.”

A deathly silence fell on the neighbouring booth, though there was still a hum of conversation from other tables. Someone cleared their throat.

“That’s not • funny,” said one of the men. “Hell, Jonas…”

“I’m not joking. I saw the Máni, like she was before the landing, right there on the screen, five hundred metres and closing. The ai had ID and everything.”

“What happened then?” somebody asked.

“I pinged the Captain — old Hansen, you know — and started emergency maneouvres. The Captain comes storming onto the bridge a minute later, half dressed. But when he looks at the screen, guess what?”

“What?”

“Nothing there. And the ai denied there ever being anything there, though the ai had displayed it right there on the screen.”

Quill felt a cold prickle travel down his spine.

Just then, the door opened, and Alex breezed in. “Quill, my man, great to see you! Come, let me introduce you to these guys!”

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