"I have to be aboard by 08:30. You?"

"Not till noon," she said.

We both looked at the chrono, 03:15.

"Do you want me to leave so you can sleep?" I asked.

"Actually, I was kinda hoping you'd stay and sleep a little with me."

I rolled over and pulled my tablet out of my jacket, set the alarm, and put it down where I could grab it easily, before punching the light controller and pulling the blankets around us.

"What time did you set it for?" she asked, already beginning to drift away as she snuggled into me.

"06:00. That should give us enough time to go around again before I leave-if you're interested that is."

She giggled sleepily and said, "Good." Then she nodded off.

Chapter Sixteen.

Betrus...o...b..tal

2352-June-18

Wendy kicked me out of the room at 07:45. "With you around, I'm impossible. I'm not going to stop grinning for a week," she said, wearing only a smile and a sheen of sweat as she kissed me goodbye at the door. "Get," she said, and slammed the door in my face. I could hear her giggling behind it. I had time for a quick shower and fresh shipsuit before I met with the captain to find out what was happening so I headed for the ship.

Fong was on watch when I went through the lock. He blinked when I came in. "You musta had quite a party if you're just coming in now," he said with a smirk.

"Yes I did. Now I get to find out what the captain has cooked up."

"Good luck, Ishmael. I think everybody on the ship is rooting for you."

"Thanks, Fong, I expect I'll be around awhile longer. I just don't know in what capacity." I waved as I headed into the ship and, in spite of my brave words, hoped it wasn't the last time I would be coming aboard.

Sally Green was in her bunk and saw me come into the berthing area. "Woo hoo, look at you. Just dragging yer tomcatty b.u.t.t back in now?"

"Dragging is the operative word there, I think," I told her with a wink.

I got cleaned up and into a shipsuit just in time. My tablet bipped at 08:45 with my summons to the captain's cabin as I zipped into a fresh shipsuit.

"Good luck, Ish," Sally called.

"Thanks, Sal." I gave her a little salute on the way out.

The captain had all the usual partic.i.p.ants with her at the table, along with Mr. von Ickles who sat to the left of Mr. Maxwell.

"Thank you, Mr. w.a.n.g," the captain began as soon as I braced to attention. "I know this has been a difficult time for you, but in spite of that, you have performed your duties with your customary professionalism and grace."

"Thank you, Captain," I said after the pause.

"We've been waiting for a message from home office that authorizes us to create a new position. In light of the critical failures which we encountered coming into Betrus, the senior officers submitted a pet.i.tion to create an a.s.sistant position in systems and communication to aid Mr. von Ickles in his duties. That authorization arrived at 08:30. In light of your contributions to the resolution of our systems failures, we are prepared to offer you that job. The position is a spec two systems slot, reporting to Mr. von Ickles. It pays scale for spec two, and carries the customary full share and ma.s.s allotment. What say you, Mr. w.a.n.g?"

"I say, yes, Captain. I would consider it an honor."

"Mr. von Ickles?" she said.

"Yes, Captain?"

"Find us that flaw before somebody loses a ship."

"Aye, aye, Captain."

Mr. von Ickles ushered me out of the cabin and we headed for the bridge. "Rather anticlimactic, wasn't it?" he asked.

"Not from where I was standing, sar."

He grinned at me. "Were you worried, Ish?"

"I knew you were all working hard on something and I knew that if anybody could pull it off, the officers of the Lois would. But, yeah, I was worried that it just might not have been possible at all. There had to be some doubt as to whether or not it would fly because we've been waiting all this time."

"Good a.n.a.lysis," he said. "Just between you and me? I was sweating bullets."

"It's behind us now and I am very pleased to be working with you, sar."

"Sucking up already, Mr. w.a.n.g?"

"I believe in getting off to a good start, sar."

"Oh, we are gonna have such fun, aren't we?"

"I believe so, sar," I said. "What do we do first?"

"Well, we need to get you set up on the bridge and find you a duty station. There's a spare systems console there and you'll be with me there during navigation evolutions-pull out, docking, transitions. That'll be your duty station. There's not a lot to do if everything goes well. If it goes bad, then it'll get furry fast."

"I can understand that."

We stepped onto the bridge with a lot less formality than I had in the past. Remembering that, I asked quietly, "Do I need to ask permission or anything when I come up here by myself?"

He just shook his head. "You're part of the bridge crew now. You're required to be here." We crossed to a row of stations, not unlike my old post down in environmental. "When you need to be here to work, just come up and work. If there's something going on, stay out of the way. If it's really interesting, pay close attention. Best still, if there's something happening, watch the ship's network and see how it works. You've got a little bit of a grace period here, Ish. Everybody's gonna be adjusting to the fact that you're here and not expecting too much from you-yet."

"Yet?"

"Adding a new slot has an effect on the finances of the ship. You're an expensive insurance policy, and we need to get you contributing an added value or the company will take the slot away once we solve the EMP problem."

That put a different complexion on the situation. "I understand, sar, and thanks for telling me. We'd best get at this then, huh?"

"I wouldn't sweat it, Ish. Compared to what we've pulled off already, the rest is going to go just fine." He laughed and started running me through the console diagnostics.

Being on the bridge reminded me a bit of the library at the university on Neris. When I was too small to leave at home, Mom would take me with her when she did her research. I remember the quiet purposefulness of the big halls. There were low conversations all around and occasionally heated arguments in some of the graduate study rooms, but generally there was a kind of low hum of background activity. Everybody had something to do there and, for the most part, they got on with it.

Information displays around the bridge were the main source of illumination. Consoles had red glow patches so you didn't b.u.mp into them in the dimness, and the screens all showed data on a black background to keep the ambient light levels down. It was all rather moot while docked, because the orbital, which was only a few meters outside the forward port, glowed like some monstrous full-moon peeking in the window. It was bright enough to cast shadows in the otherwise dim bridge.

We finished running diagnostics and brought the console up. "Normally you won't need to run the diagnostics. We haven't used this station for a while, so it's just as well. Does it look familiar?"

"Yes, sar, it's the same basic station as in environmental."

"Correct. The hardware is standardized throughout the ship. All the consoles in all the divisions are the same. Cheaper that way. The only real difference is the software behind each. Down in environmental you didn't need the reactor controls, and down in power they don't need the scrubbers. About ninety percent of the code base is shared in common and, while that cuts down on code error, it also means that if the code that turns on the lights in berthing is wrong, then the code that turns on the sail generators is equally wrong."

"Isn't that a little risky?" I asked.

"Like getting into this tin can and sailing out into a vacuum isn't?"

"Well, if you put it that way..."

"We won't be playing with that stuff. It's in; it's tested; it's good. What we have to concentrate on, and ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the time it's as boring as environmental, is to keep the systems alive and kicking. Data archives, systems backups, optimizing data, and the occasional hardware replacement is our biggest tasks. Until we came into Betrus and blew out the data cabinet, the most serious problem I had to deal with in the two stanyers I've been aboard was a burned out comm repeater down in the spine that kept sending all the engine control commands back to the bridge with the data equivalent of: occupant unknown."

"Understood, sar," I said. Privately I wondered if the magic show was not over, but slipping into a more subtle second act. If the ship was as reliable as he said, it made no sense for me to be sitting on the bridge.

Mr. von Ickles slipped into the seat at the next console-obviously his normal post-and began bringing up displays of his own. "I'll slave your console to mine for now. You'll be able to watch when we get underway and when we get secured from navigation stations. Then we can begin putting together all those lovely pieces of equipment down in the office."

"Yes, sar!"

He ran through a quick systems tour on the console and showed me how to configure the bridge consoles to act like any other console on the ship. The elegance felt right to me. He brought up a schematic of the ship that was the same one I used for VSI and overlaid the fiber data runs, wireless access points, data storage closets and consoles. It included my environmental sensor packages along with every other sensor, feedback, and control package in the ship from locks, to cargo container latches, and to engine mount gimbal positions.

"Impressive, sar."

"That's just the static picture," he said. He hit a function key on his console and they all started to blink. "That's the data flow view. The speed of the blink represents the amount of data flowing. Some just spit out a packet every once in a while, others are constantly being updated and sending data back."

It was like looking at a viewer showing how all the nerve cells in the ship were firing in real time. He shut it off and we went back to the static picture.

"No need to leave that running if we're not going to be here," he said. "Let's get some lunch before the show begins."

I looked at the chrono-12:00. The morning had sublimated and the reality hit me then. The ship would pull out and I would be going. I had a new job. I had a new boss. Lois was not done with me yet.

As we headed down to the mess deck, Mr. von Ickles said, "Consider yourself on third section and grafted to my hip. We haven't had a chance to figure out what to do with watches in port yet, but underway, you'll be on third section rotation for the time being. We may shift you to second eventually to cover systems support on a wider span on the clock. It's all new to us, Ish, so have patience with the jerking around you're probably going to experience."

"Sar, I'm just glad to still be here to be jerked around. Believe me."

"Your first task underway is going to be putting the uh-oh box together and getting the ShipNet to run on it. I hope we never have to use it, but if we do, I want it up immediately. We'll need to figure out some protocol for it, so be thinking about where to store it, how to bring it up quickly, and anything you can think of that restores some minimum level of control in the event of another data cabinet crash."

"Makes sense. Then what, sar?"

"Then we find out how an EMP got through the shielding and burned out that data cabinet, and we figure how to stop it from ever happening again."

When we stepped onto the mess deck the number of smiles focused in my direction shocked me. Things had been moving so fast all morning, that I had not had a chance to tell anybody. Brill, Bev, and Diane all sat at the same table, along with Francis and CC. I grabbed some grub and settled with them.

Francis grinned at me. "We just cannot get rid of you, can we?"

"Not yet anyway." I grinned back.

Brill smiled and Diane had a big grin of her own pasted on her face. Beverly looked almost teary and I wondered if she felt okay. The last time I had seen her she was crawling back aboard snarling. I made a note to get her aside and find out what was going on with her.

CC asked, "So, how'd you manage this?" It came out a bit colder than I think he meant it to.

I could see Diane start to tense up so I jumped in. "After the accident coming in, the officers re-evaluated their systems support needs and convinced home office to add a new slot. At least long enough to figure out what happened and how to deal with it." I shrugged. "I got first dibs."

"Nice," Brill said. "What'll you be doing?"

"First task is to recreate the emergency network controller. They don't want to rely on my portable."

"Good plan," Francis said. "Then what?"

"Well, then we try to find out how the EMP did all that damage to begin with."

"How are you going to do that?" Brill asked.

"No idea, but I can't imagine that's the first CME this ship has been through in nineteen stanyers, not even the first with an EMP." I turned to Francis, "You're the expert in astrophysics. What are the odds?"

Francis grimaced. "Well, first, I'm not sure we're talking about the same things. These CMEs happen all the time on every star we've visited. They all have some things in common including a leading wave of high-energy charged particles."

CC turned to me and asked, "Who is this guy, Mr. Science?"

"That's Doctor Science to you," I said with a grin. "Go on, Francis."

Francis snickered at the look on CC's face but continued. "So, a surface event on the star splashes some of the corona out into s.p.a.ce. It's not like a ripple on a pond but more like a sneeze. Star snot."

"Francis, we're trying to eat here," Bev said. "Not all of us have the same strong stomachs that you environmental people do."

"Oh, sorry," Francis said. "Anyway, this stuff goes sailing out into s.p.a.ce and it goes a long, long way. Depending on the nature of the original event it might be tightly focused or it may be really loosely dispursed, but it can happen as often as ten or twenty times a day, every day during the stellar maxima, maybe only once a day during minima. It's not predictable."

"So, the EMP?" I prompted.

"Oh, yeah," he got back on focus. "These events are layered. The front layers are highly energized particles really similar to a cla.s.sic EMP. They can toast electronics and disrupt electrical systems. They hardly ever interact at planetary levels because the atmosphere intercepts them. They could in theory threaten the orbitals, but they happen so often that the orbitals are designed to deal with them. So are ships, for that matter."

I think everybody had glazed over by then. So Francis said, "Okay, think flash-boom."