Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Three

DaSilva sat alone the next morning at breakfast, not really eating and not really thinking. He looked up briefly when Spencer sat down at the other end of the table, but then said nothing. Finally, after taking a drink of his juice, he grimaced and said, “I think I stayed planetside too long—this juice tastes like oil.”
“It is oil,” Spencer chuckled. “They call this juice, hot cereal, and toast, but it’s really oil, oil, and oil. It’s infused with nutrients, but everything’s artificially constituted—mainly out of soy and vegetable oil. It’s what you get when you’re on rotation—why ship the good stuff up here? In a few weeks, we’ll be on planetside rotation and it’ll seem like heaven after this.”
DaSilva laughed obligingly at this, then studied Spencer for a while before making another overture. “What were you doing on C’bathos?”
Spencer shrugged. “I had a job re-fitting engines, but really I was there to get away from home.”
“First time away?”
“No. Just restless, you know. Getting out into space felt like shaking everything off for a while.”
DaSilva nodded. “I hear that.”
“And you?”
DaSilva took a long drink of his oil, grimacing again, and then shrugged. “Just another delivery. I take long runs for a while, build up a little cushion, and then spend it all someplace nice.” He laughed. “Ever been to SeaCap Station?”
Spencer shook his head.
DaSilva smiled in a way that was faintly disgusting, but did not elaborate.
Spencer rolled his eyes and turned back to his cereal. “Is that your next stop, then?”
“Nah. I’ve got another few runs to make. SeaCap’s expensive. I’ll probably spend my next vacation out on a border colony. A little money and a few souvenirs from home make you a regular celebrity out there.”
Spencer nodded, smiling.
DaSilva tried to pick up on it, saying, “So, C’bathos isn’t the furthest you’ve been?”
But Spencer had finished breakfast, and he picked up his tray. “What’s your itinerary?” he asked abruptly.
“Itinerary?” DaSilva laughed. “I haven’t had one of those in a while.”
Spencer’s forehead wrinkled. “I thought you had a delivery to make.”
“That stuff’ll keep for a while. Besides, who knows when Pathways’ll get around to issuing me a code. I could be here for a while.”
“Yeah, about that: what happened to the one you had?”
DaSilva caught the sarcasm in Spencer’s voice and responded in kind. “I guess I lost it. You know, when someone’s chasing you at high speed through a Lepinski depression, you throw out anything that’s slowing you down.”
They both laughed, but it was perfunctory, forced.
“Well, if you’re here for a while, why don’t we work on your Ojira for a while?” Spencer offered. “You can’t turn down free labor, can you?”
“No, I suppose I can’t. Thank you.”
“Sure. No problem.”

Hawking having already freed Spencer up from the duty schedule, there was nothing to stop Spencer and DaSilva from spending the whole morning—about five and a half hours all told—repairing burns, pits, scars, streaks, and scalds from the outer hull of the Ojira. Half of them had stories behind them, which lengthened the work out, but many of them were purely incidental to the dangerous nature of the long space haul—and the scars were so old that Spencer didn’t go ten whole minutes at a time without reminding DaSilva where neglectful pilots went when they died.
Jimenez joined them an hour before they broke for lunch, his own ship recently refitted with an engine they could not talk about in front of DaSilva. DaSilva suggested they race the two ships, but Jimenez politely declined and said, “I’m not sure if the engine they fitted me with is supposed to shoot me across the solar system or just pop like a balloon and kill me. Better to find out on my own.”
When they broke for lunch, DaSilva and Jimenez headed for the mess, but Spencer said he was going to take a nap, so they split up. Spencer grabbed a sandwich from the cooler in the shop. Then he headed for Ecksel’s office.

“Now listen, Spencer, I’m not going to make you any promises, and I certainly don’t want you to think you have to tell me every detail about everything that ever happened to you—just anything you think might be relevant. I’m going to call this therapy, but that’s just so you still get paid for sitting around on your ass for a while telling me stories, okay?”
Spencer nodded.
Ecksel was parked in his office chair, a small terminal on a swing-arm slung up next to him; he had a cup of coffee steaming on a little table, and his sock-feet were parked on a little stool. He looked comfortable.
Spencer decided to get comfortable, too. He got up from the chair he was sitting on and moved to the couch, stretched out, and propped his head on a cushion.
“I’ve had black-outs all my life,” he began.
Ecksel listened intently.

I’ve had black-outs all my life. My parents would call them seizures, but that was just their way of trying to understand them. I wasn’t unconscious, comatose, or catatonic—I was simply acting without memory of what I was doing.
To the observer, I was acting with complete clarity. I appeared deliberate and aware of my surroundings. Frequently, my actions had a positive impact on others—as with this latest episode with Corsi—but I have to stress that to this day I remain completely unaware of my actions during these black-outs or even my intentions. I can’t claim that rescuing Corsi was an act of honor or selflessness because I don’t know how or why I did it.
The best comparison I can draw is to sleepwalking—although even that one is a stretch. I do know that I have woken up sometimes with a sense of well-being and calm; other times I have woken up feeling sick and lonely and frightened. Some have speculated that I felt upset or frightened on the occasions that I was interrupted or woken up prematurely. I can’t attest to this, since I know so little—and only second-hand—of how I spend this ‘lost’ time.
My mother says that I experienced two of these black-outs at school when I was very young. I don’t remember them—I only remember being sick a few times, and I can’t recall time missing that early on. However, I had an episode when I was eight years old that I remember with much greater clarity. I’ll give you the short version of that one.
We lived on Kiyos which, as you know, was a mining colony. I used to attend school in a pressurized facility near the center of the town. I was in school one day, and there was a practice evacuation. Just when the signal was given, I blacked out. I had a dream that time—nothing like what actually happened—which I will tell you about later. When I woke up, I was being transported to the medical facility. Not the school’s medical facility, the one in town. My mother was in the transport with me, and I realized that it was much later in the day. I asked her what had happened, and she said that I had saved someone’s life. I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was at home. My father was there, and it was morning, and I realized he was not going to go to work, and that made me happy.
My parents explained to me then what had happened.
Our school facility had a detachable module for evacuations. It was like a large transport, and all the children would board it in emergencies. Then it would roll away from the school until the crisis had passed. It was important that we board the module quickly and that it detach correctly to maintain pressure within the module—otherwise, the module would de-pressurize and we would all suffocate.
Just as the signal was given for the practice evacuation, I apparently stood up and announced to everyone that there was a seal breach, and that we should remain where we were. My teacher was upset at first, not only because I was counter-manding instructions, but also because everyone in the classroom obeyed me almost unthinkingly. He took me by the hand and told me to remain at the end of the line, and he instructed the other students to line up. Then I fell to the floor and began shaking, and he contacted the administrative team to cancel the drill.
A few moments later, the seal breach became critical, and the detachable module was compromised. Alarms went off, and the man at the outer door only just had time to uncouple the module and seal the school in order to prevent a massive decompression. Had anyone been on the module, they would have been caught outside and most likely killed.
I heard all of this second-hand. I do not quite believe it myself.
The only part I know about first-hand is the dream, which I will tell you now. I have had similar dreams many times since, both during my black-outs and during normal sleep cycles. I do not pretend to know what it means, although if you are familiar with it, the history of Kiyos might suggest an interpretation.
I was standing in the school, looking up through a skylight that didn’t actually exist in the classroom, and I saw ships—alien ships, or at least ones I had never seen before—firing great bursts of green light into the surface of Kiyos. I knew why they were there, and surely enough, the ground soon began breaking up, until I was certain that Kiyos would soon cease to exist.
The same dream has come to me many times—and it always prominently features these ships I have never seen before, as well as the destruction of my home. When I lived on Kiyos, it was Kiyos being destroyed. When I lived on Serpeset, it was Serpeset. It is always the same.

Spencer stopped for a minute, taking deep breaths, and then he turned to look directly at Ecksel.
“Now you tell me, Dr. Ecksel: Kiyos, Serpeset, C’bathos … what do these three places have in common—besides that they are all places I have lived?”
Ecksel kept a stone face and said simply, “They are all places that no longer exist.”

Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part Two

Though they had planned on being best friends with DaSilva throughout his brief stay on the station, Spencer and Jimenez quickly found that DaSilva did not have trouble making friends. Later that evening, Jimenez found him sitting in the pilot’s mess—surrounded by crew and pilots alike—telling one story after another. If the first story rode the edge of credibility, the next one sailed right over that edge and took the whole audience with it.
“The cargo hold is full of explosives and the guy is smoking this big cigar, but I can’t say that, so I tell him it’s ice!”
“I was holding the hatch shut with one hand and steering with the other!”
“There we were, buck naked except for our gunbelts, being escorted through interplanetary customs like a pair of celebrities!”
“I was so drunk, I don’t know what I said, but they gave me a commendation for boosting company morale!”
“I was at C’bathos that day, oh yeah. I was there when the rings blew off. The shockwave from the explosion knocked me into my console—I thought it was my own ship going up, I was praying and crapping my pants at the same time!”
By the end of the night, there was both applause and loud, good-natured booing at the end of each story—but no one would have put money on what was true or what was good old-fashioned fertilizer.
“You were at C’bathos?”
The buzz died down a bit, and DaSilva stopped laughing, scanning his audience slowly to see who had spoken.
Spencer obligingly raised a hand. He was propped up in a corner, and he had been quiet and apparently inattentive for most of the evening, but now—though he appeared relaxed and casual—he was leveling a penetrating stare at DaSilva as he waited for the answer.
DaSilva paused, sending a searching look back to Spencer, then nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said, “I docked on the outer ring about an hour before the ships that caused the explosion.”
“So why weren’t you on the station already when it happened?”

The intermediate stop for any traffic leaving Earth’s solar system was an enormous space station approximately one billion kilometers outside Pluto’s orbit. The station was called C’bathos.
Its official name was Station 1147, and on some books it was still called Ryan’s Station. It had once been a waystation orbiting Saturn—serving mining efforts and the inevitable crew of border patrol Pathways officers—but for the last fifty years of its existence Station 1147 had formed the core of a much larger space station. Maneuvered carefully out of the solar system and fitted with an array of outer rings that hosted docking facilities and transfer protocols for connecting travelers, Ryan’s Station was promoted from a mining resource to a full-fledged galactic colony, complete with a mayor and a permanent Pathways office.
The first mayor of the new station was a man named Velasnik, and he had been a refugee from a town on Earth called C’bathos, a town with a tough history and a tragic ending. Velasnik continually referred to the station as a town and nicknamed it New C’bathos, and for the long-term citizens—including medical, engineering, and scientific posts—the name stuck. Visitors were welcomed to C’bathos, the town in space.
But the name brought its history with it. The town on Earth that had been known as C’bathos was the site of an energy plant malfunction that obliterated the entire town, a pointless and incomprehensible end to a struggling community. The station known by the same name suffered a similar fate.

“I don’t understand,” DaSilva lied.
Spencer shook his head, not sure why DaSilva was leading him this way. “Come on, DaSilva,” he drawled, elaborately casual, “if you docked, registered, underwent standard inspection, passed through medical, and got yourself tagged for the civilian sections, you still would have had a good fifteen minutes to get to the bunks or the cafeteria before the attack.”
“I said ‘about an hour’ not ‘exactly an hour’ for one thing,” DaSilva murmured, “and for another thing, I don’t think anyone who was there would have called it an ‘attack’ so much as an accident or a bit of bad luck.”
Spencer said nothing but waited.
“As it happens,” DaSilva proffered, “I was a little anxious about the cargo I was carrying, and I didn’t know of anything on C’bathos tempting enough to draw me out. I was planning on sleeping in my crawlspace—I hear you like to do that, too.”
There was a little applause at that, and Spencer chuckled and nodded, but he still didn’t say anything.
“So you’ve been to C’bathos?” Da Silva probed.
Spencer nodded.
“There when it all happened?”
Spencer paused, then nodded.
“Well, if you’ve got a story to tell, let’s hear it!” DaSilva waved graciously at Spencer, and most of the crowd turned to look at him.
“I’m sorry to disappoint, but I was in the medical hub at the time. I don’t remember anything about the attack. By the time I woke up, they were evacuating us on any ship still able to disembark. There weren’t many left.”
DaSilva nodded slowly. “I was docked about ninety degrees along the ring. I didn’t see the ship, but I saw the blast. I was just lucky the power shorted on the docking clamps. My ship almost decompressed, but when the ripple effect reached us it whiplashed my ship away from the ring, and I was loose. And I was alive.
“No one called it an attack. There were plenty of mining supply ships coming and going from C’bathos every day. Fortunes are still made running supplies one way and loading up with raw goods on the way back. Unfortunately, a very precious commodity for miners is weapon-grade explosives.”
Spencer wasn’t looking at DaSilva anymore. DaSilva seemed about to add something, but suddenly turned on the humor again. “Anyway, I heard it wasn’t the ship’s fault at all. It was all over the news nets. Turns out there was this rookie engineer working the docks that day—bumbling little guy named Trevor, apparently couldn’t tell which end of a spanner was which—and he was on rotation when the ship came in. My guess is: he docked the ship freehand, didn’t know his positive from his negative, shorted the whole ship out—and then when the lights were out, he struck a match to see what happened—and BOOM!”
This interpretation of events was met with uproarious laughter, and once DaSilva had the crowd’s attention again only Ecksel noticed Spencer get up and stumble out.

Ecksel headed Spencer off halfway to the bunkhouse.
“Fyodorim, freeze!”
Spencer faltered, turned around bewildered. His face was a mess. Ecksel thought he might have been crying a moment ago.
Ecksel caught up to him a little. “Hey, listen. I’m a medic, so it’s my job to notice things, so I’m just doin’ my job when I tell you that you are one scary son of a bitch.”
Spencer blinked hard. “Is that your professional opinion?”
Ecksel snorted, then let loose a real belly laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that. Listen, I’m concerned—just concerned right now—and it’s not because we’ve got a flight-certified pilot who has seizures, and it’s not because you wake up yourself and everyone else on a regular basis with these recurring nightmares, and it’s not because you punched me in the face once and now you’re looking like you want to do it again!”
Spencer realized with a shock that he had, indeed, been clenching and unclenching his fist. He relaxed with a visible effort.
“That’s better,” Ecksel said. “Now, I’m not taking this to the next level—at this point, I don’t see a real need to alarm Hawking or Graeber about this—what?”
Spencer was chuckling. “They already know.”
Ecksel let out a slow breath. “Well, I knew that, but I didn’t know that you knew that.”
Spencer rubbed his chin. “I knew that you knew, but I didn’t know that you didn’t know that I knew they knew.”
Ecksel snorted again. “See? There you go again. You know, sometimes you can be downright familiar and friendly.”
“And the rest of the time?”
Ecksel gave him a frank stare. “You are a mystery and a freakshow.”
“Thanks, doc.”
Ecksel grimaced. “Now, listen, I meant that in the nicest possible way. It’s not that you have all this weird shit in your past—it’s not that at all. It’s the way you deal with it that’s the problem.”
“Is that the problem?”
“Yes, that’s the problem. So here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to come see me every other day—say, on the B and D rotations. It’ll be easy to remember because B. D. stands for Boring Doctor visits, right? And when you come to see me, we’re just going to talk.”
“Talk.”
“Yes, talk. We can start by talking about C’bathos, since it is the first part of your enigmatic past to surface. Come by just after evening meal; you can tell everyone you’ve got the squirts if it makes you feel any better.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Well, tell them whatever you want then, but the first B or D rotation I don’t see you, I’m taking this straight to the top. Do you understand?”
Spencer nodded.
“Alright, then.” Ecksel turned to leave, then did a double-take. “Were you really in sickbay during the incident on C’bathos?”
Spencer nodded slowly.
“What were you there for?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Lost time. I’m sure you’ve had time since to think about what that might mean.”
Another nod.
Ecksel returned the nod, hesitated over what he was about to say, then plowed ahead. “So there might be some feelings of responsibility for what happened.”
Spencer froze inside. He must have frozen outside as well, and it didn’t escape notice.
Ecksel took a step toward him. “They reported on that incident for years afterward, Spencer. Hell, they’re still reporting on it when there’s nothing better to talk about. I’ve watched a dozen different analyses of what happened. If you had been there, you’d be dead right now. There’s no doubt about it.”
When Spencer spoke, it was with a depth and a bitterness that was a little frightening. “I wasn’t at my post. Maybe there was something I could have done. Maybe there was nothing I could have done. But I wasn’t there. That means someone else was. No matter how you slice it, someone is dead instead of me. Or because of me. I don’t see any difference.”
Either Ecksel could think of nothing to say, or he couldn’t see the point, and a moment later Spencer was rounding the corner and out of sight. Ecksel began preparing mentally for D rotation the next day and the first session with a new patient. He began by going back to see DaSilva.

Jimenez and DaSilva were arm wrestling. Jimenez made a little show of grunting and huffing, but he had the shorter arm and all the upper body strength; after a minute, he slowly clamped DaSilva’s wrist to the table amid cheers.
“Left arm?” Jimenez offered gallantly.
“What would be the point of that?” DaSilva laughed.
“So, you owe me: what’s on your ship?”
DaSilva shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re going to be a little disappointed. All I’m carrying is bird seed.”
“Bird seed!” exclaimed a few of the men. Someone coughed out a colorful name for a liar, and laughter followed.
“No, really,” DaSilva insisted. The colony I’m working is running a trade for game birds, and the price includes a load of bird seed. I got here in my Ojira, but I’ll be going back at the helm of a big Senuti full of cages, and every one of them a drugged game bird.”
“Is that legal?” someone asked.
DaSilva looked around as though he hadn’t heard the question.
“Were you in your Ojira when you docked at C’bathos?” Ecksel called out from the next table.
A couple of pilots groaned at the change of topic, checked the time, and left. DaSilva and Jimenez shook hands, and then Jimenez headed for the door, turning at the last second to make a gesture to Ecksel: two fingers pointed at his eyes, then the same two fingers pointed at DaSilva. Ecksel nodded and waved him off.
DaSilva sipped some coffee from a cup, then slid it away, grimacing at the taste. “I guess you get used to that stuff after a while, huh?”
Ecksel nodded, waited.
“You want to know if I was in my Ojira when I sat there and watched the largest space station ever built—the largest one there ever will be, if I am to put my faith in the interplanetary directives—crack open like an egg and spill people out into space.”
“Yes.”
“What difference does it make what I was flying at the time?”
“It’s a detail you left out, that’s all. You seem to have flown a lot of really rare ships—at least, if I’m supposed to believe everything I’ve heard tonight—and this is the one story where you don’t say what kind of ship you were on.”
DaSilva eyed Ecksel coolly for a moment, then said, “A Gulang.”
Gulangs were big cargo ships usually converted nicely into bunks for traveling groups. If one needed to charter a ship to take twenty or forty people on a long haul, a Gulang would accommodate them cheaply without making them feel like cattle.
“What kind of cargo were you carrying?”
DaSilva looked him dead in the eye. “Refugees.”
Ecksel let out a slow breath and looked away.
DaSilva picked at a loose patch on the shoulder of his jacket. “You know, a couple of years before C’bathos, I got in debt over some contract disputes—back when I let other people make the rules for me—and they were going to take away my last ship, a Vertex B! Well, I got desperate and started taking any job that came along. Lo and behold, one day a guy comes to me begging for help; he’s got a shipload of people stranded and they need to get back to Earth.
“Now, I hedge at first until the guy offers me a body bag full of money, and then I get all magnanimous, tell them I will do whatever it takes to get them home. I trade my VeeBee for their fat ride and arrange to pick it up on the return trip.
“Just when we get in range of Pathways—right when I’ve got my hand on the hailing switch to clear us through—the leader of this little group of castaways reveals to me that they’re illegals. They don’t have any clearance to enter the atmosphere, they can’t go through customs, everything they’re carrying is fake, and they need me to do a dead drop. You know what that is, right?”
Ecksel nodded.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t. First they tell me to outrun the Pathways welcoming committee—which I’d never done, so that was a learning experience—and then they tell me to aim for the ocean.”
Ecksel shook his head. “It’s not much better than just aiming for hard ground—and then they wouldn’t have to be rescued.”
“Ah, but rescue is the whole point for these people. If they arrived in one piece, hair in place, carrying bags, it would be no trouble arresting them and deporting them. But there’s something about a disheveled, wounded, frightened animal that you snatch from the jaws of death—makes you want to keep it safe a while longer.”
Ecksel snorted. “And how many of them died in the crash?”
“An acceptable number, by their account.”
“Right.”
DaSilva took a deep breath. “Anyway, my ship was returned to me in a timely fashion, I was paid handsomely, and I decided to screw the politics and help the little guy. I’ve been doing dead runs like that ever since.” He leaned forward a little. “Now, why did you want to know all that?”
Ecksel shrugged. “Mostly for my own edification, but I do have a tangential interest on behalf of one of my pilots.”
“The one who was in here, I assume.”
“Yes. Tell me: was your ship full when you arrived at C’bathos?”
DaSilva stood up abruptly, grabbed his jacket, and headed for the door.
“It was empty, wasn’t it?” Ecksel demanded.
DaSilva kept walking, didn’t turn.
“You were there to carry away survivors, weren’t you?” Ecksel called after him.
The door clanged shut behind DaSilva, and Ecksel was alone in the mess hall.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Three - Crossed Paths - Part One

Spencer was drawing in a hammock while several other men egged on Affwell and a tank-shaped man named Jimenez who were wrestling and had been locked in a tough hold for a while—when there was a bang on the door and Hawking leaned in.
“Jimenez—and Spencer—on deck, now. We’ve got a visitor.”
After their latest visitors, the crew were wary about the word, so there was some hesitation. Hawking didn’t move, and Jimenez suddenly seemed to snap out of it. He punched Affwell in the shoulder and said, “Re-match later, che,” and then he was out the door with Spencer close behind.
“Who’s the visitor, sir?” Jimenez asked on the way to the flight deck.
“Not a client, if that’s any relief,” Hawking grunted.
Jimenez’s eyebrows shot up. “Supplier?”
“Nope.”
Jimenez shot a look at Spencer and got the same look back, both of them at a loss. After they entered the bullpen, Hawking cranked the manual seal and thumbed a code into the commlink on the wall. Spencer didn’t recognize it, but Jimenez did; it was a black-out code, effectively sealing off the room against eavesdropping. The temperature seemed to go up in the room.
“Alright, listen closely, you two,” Hawking murmured, barely moving his lips. He was apparently concerned with lip-reading from the video surveillance, which could not be counter-coded. Spencer glanced up at the cameras in the corners involuntarily, then chided himself for doing so.
“I don’t know where this guy is from, but the manifest he transmitted to us is fake, he is arriving at—not leaving from—Earth, his ship has battle scars, and he is carrying cargo in lead-lined containers. He says his name is DaSilva, which is basically Portuguese for ‘Smith’ and he … uh,” Hawking cleared his throat, “well, he says he ‘lost’ his passport code.”
Jimenez and Spencer both snorted in unison, which made Hawking crack a small smile.
Pathways, the official police of the space lanes, issued an algorithm to every ship authorized through inter-planetary customs, and that algorithm governed the transmission of a code sequence back to Pathways that was unique to the ship to which it had been issued; it was always programmed remotely, and if a ship was not broadcasting its code it meant it was not cleared to navigate into planetary space. Marques Station, in upper Earth orbit, was at the limits of planetary space, and such stations usually charged fees for ships leaving orbit to lay over until a customs crew could inspect the ship. For DaSilva to claim that he had already been issued a code was obviously false, but it raised a question: how had he left the last planet he’d docked without one?
“So he’s a pirate,” Jimenez muttered, mimicking Hawking’s careful stone-face.
“Oh, no,” Hawking quipped, “this guy is just a poor, wayward pilot in need of an emergency layover. Now, he’s going to think you two guys are interested in his ship—which you will be when you see it—and I want you to get as good a look as you can while it’s docked here, but most importantly I want you two to never … leave … his … side while he’s here. Is that clear?”
Jimenez and Spencer nodded carefully, and then Hawking led them to the hatch that opened onto the deck. He stopped to thumb a code into the commlink, and then cranked the hatch open.

DaSilva—whatever his real name was—was sitting on a crate just inside the bay door of his ship, but neither Spencer nor Jimenez noticed him at first. They were staring at his ship.
The Ojira was a class of ship all by itself, long and sleek, shaped like a dart but with a cone-shaped cockpit and a ring-shaped propulsion unit. It could have been a small cargo ship for its capacity, but the engine in it made too many mouths water in the private sector, and for the first few years of its run it was bought out almost exclusively by rich, immature guys with racing streaks. On an almost daily basis, interplanetary trade was interrupted by the twin streaks of two Ojiras trying to outstrip each other—followed closely by a Pathways officer at a safe distance. Although the Ojira was un-catchable at its peak speed, when it inevitably ran out of fuel—racers usually had lightning quick reflexes but no math skills to speak of—the Pathways officer would come toodling along and tow the ship and its meek owner back to impound.
Pathways started a collection of the ships at first, but by the time the second series of Ojiras came out, they had had so many instances of people stealing the first-run Ojiras from impound that they decided to just auction them off as soon as they could and use the proceeds to obtain faster ships and bigger guns to combat the few who had begun to use the Ojiras for bootlegging and gun-running.
DaSilva’s Ojira was in bad shape. Most wealthy ship owners would have restored an Ojira, treating it with every protective coating they could apply until it shone in the decklights, effectively putting it off limits to everyone and every thing. The idea was to make the ship look never used. Well, this one looked used. The long, trim Ojira had prominent—and painful-looking—scarring along its prow, corroded gels on its landing lights, scoring on the viewplates, some kind of welding or melting on two of the struts, and other, more serious structural problems. Far from trying to protect his ship, this guy seemed to be running her into meteors.
DaSilva laughed out loud at the horrified looks on the men’s faces. Hawking introduced them, told Jimenez and Spencer to “get DaSilva squared away,” and then disappeared.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” DaSilva chuckled.
“Well, that’s a relief, because it looks pretty bad,” Spencer growled.
DaSilva looked taken aback. “Hey, she’s my ship, not yours, buddy.”
“You’re damn right,” Spencer snapped, “because if she was my ship, I’d at least have her sand-blasted. You need to see a domestic abuse counselor, ‘buddy’.”
DaSilva laughed out loud at that, and Jimenez shook his head.
“Seriously, though,” Jimenez interjected. “This is either the oldest Ojira I’ve ever seen, or you are guilty of criminal negligence, muchacho. Did you take a wrong turn through the asteroid belt on the way here?”
“She’s old—she’s an original. See the wing tilt? They didn’t do that on the second series, or any series after that. But the scoring is from asteroids.”
Jimenez tried nodding as though that was a perfectly reasonable explanation, didn’t quite pull it off, and then was rescued by Spencer breaking into a rowdy laugh.
DaSilva seemed to freeze for a moment, then decided it was safe to laugh as well. “Yeah,” he drawled, “those asteroids sure put up a hell of a fight. Especially when you’re not broadcasting your customs code.” They all laughed again, and everyone was trying to sound natural for different reasons.
“Damn asteroids,” Spencer cracked, “think they own interplanetary space and everything in it, am I right?” Then he laughed so loud and with such a phony bent that they all stopped laughing and dropped the charade all at once.
Jimenez spoke first. “Just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page.”
For a full minute, Spencer and DaSilva stood staring each other down while Jimenez tried to think of an excuse to get on the ship. Finally one occurred to him.
“So, did you mod up your console or what?” He took a step toward the hatch, and DaSilva intercepted him neatly.
“Nah, I like her just the way she is,” DaSilva said, and as they watched, he thumbed a code into the hatch door and then closed a levered hatch over the code pad. As soon as he had done this, he returned to the cargo bay door, activated the mechanism, and turned to stare them down, while behind him the bay door groaned and hissed shut and then thunked loudly three times, old barlocks ramming into place automatically from the inside. “Hey, anybody hungry?” he asked suddenly, and began ambling toward the bullpen hatch.
Jimenez and Spencer hung back a bit.
“Suspicious old fart, ain’t he?” Spencer hissed to Jimenez.
“You get the code?” Jimenez hissed back.
“Of course.”
“Me, too.”
And then they followed DaSilva off the deck.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Four

It was Corsi, fittingly enough, who extended the first olive branch to Spencer. They were on the same rotation for meals and sleeping that week. One day at breakfast, Corsi sat down across from Spencer and started eating, not saying a word.
Spencer’s eyes flicked up at him once, but then he didn’t say anything either. Halfway through the meal, Corsi salted his toast. It was one of his personal quirks. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then picked up the salt and salted his toast, too.
Corsi watched him take a bite. “Good, huh?” he said.
Spencer nodded. A minute later, Spencer poured some of his juice in his hot cereal. After Spencer had taken a few bites, Corsi did the same. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then Corsi nodded.
Finally Corsi said, “You saved my life. I feel like I owe you. Anything you ever need, just ask and it’s yours—no questions.”
Spencer shrugged a little and said, “I don’t remember doing it. I mean, they told me the whole thing three times, but—I don’t remember.”
Corsi looked around. There were a few crew members at the next table pretending not to look, probably pretending not to listen, too. “Look, I might as well tell you, because this kind of thing gets around. I know your medical records are supposed to be confidential, but we all know Keter wets the bed, so there’s no sense pretending we don’t, right?”
Spencer nodded, but didn’t look up.
“And we all know this has happened to you before. Black-outs, I mean; stuff you don’t remember. So, I mean, the whole crew knows.”
“Do they?” Spencer had a dull, resigned look on his face now.
“Yeah, and they don’t care.”
“Is that so?” he said with a little edge in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s so,” Corsi insisted.
Spencer stood up to leave.
“They don’t,” Corsi repeated, but Spencer was headed for the door. Corsi grabbed both of their trays and headed the other way.

Over the next few days, however, Corsi’s words came back to him a dozen times.
One day the food processors went on the blink and the men were forced to eat “cold mash”—which meant they were eating raw foodstuffs like wheat grain, fruit pulp, uncooked ground beef, and cheese, smashed together into a loaf. Spencer saw some of the men collect a loaf like that in the mess hall and leave with it. He took a loaf for himself and was about to leave when Durrang steered him out a different door.
“Bring it down to the deck,” Durrang said.
Spencer was taken aback by the directness, but followed Durrang. When they arrived at the flight deck, he found a line of men waiting for the deckhands. As he and Durrang neared the front of the line, Spencer could see what they were doing.
A few deckhands had plugged in superheaters—the type used for welding and other hull repairs—and as the men reached the front of the line, the grunt would hold out a bowl-shaped piece of hull. The crewman would drop in his loaf of “cold mash” and then shield his eyes. A brilliant flash would go off, and then the grunt would hand back the loaf, steaming. The crewmen would wrap it in paper or foil and head out.
Durrang saw the light go on for Spencer and laughed. “I eat it all the time, and I’m still alive.” Then he clutched at his chest and dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. The grunt nearest to him shook his head.
“Real funny,” he said, as Durrang let his loaf fall into the metal bowl. “That some kind of comment on my cooking?”
Durrang—now miraculously recovered—pointed an accusing finger at the grunt. “Mickey, you burnt mine last time. Shave off about point-zero-zero-five this time, will ya?”
Mickey rolled his eyes, but turned around and clicked a dial on the machine behind him. “Ready?” They shielded their eyes and the blue flash went off.
“Ah, now that’s gourmet cooking,” Durrang murmured, gathering the loaf up into a sheaf of papers. He nodded at Spencer. “Your turn, mate.”

Later, Spencer was preparing the cockpit of a pod for a test run when the power was tripped for the whole deck. The ships ran off of power from the station while docked, and Spencer was not actually in the cockpit but stuffed into an access tube behind the control panel; what little light he’d had wasn’t working, so it was pitch black and cramped. The headset he was wearing, which was wireless, filled with groans and barks for a minute as the pilots bad-mouthed the deckhands and control personnel.
A few seconds later, the control tower announced it was a local drain of power and would take a minute to isolate. More groans and foul threats poured into Spencer’s headset, so he took it off and laid it to one side.
Spencer knew it was useless to do anything but wait for power to come back on, so he settled himself in. It was a very close space, but he didn’t mind, and it didn’t seem worth it to leave and come back. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing a bit. It seemed like he had just begun to meditate, when suddenly the lights came on and people were shouting at him.
“Hey, Spence, you okay?!”
“Get him out of there! Does he have air?!”
“What’s going on!? Is he dead?!”
Then he was being dragged feet-first from the access tube by a giant of a crewmate, and when he saw the crowd that had gathered, his first words were, “Did I fall asleep?”
“Did you—what?” someone said, and then the whole deck was laughing. Someone near the wall thumbed a switch and said, “I hope you got that.”
“Yeah, we got it,” the voice came back. “I’m writing it down next to ‘Did I do something wrong?’”
Affwell—the one who had dragged Spencer out of the tube—was just staring at him, incredulous. Later, Spencer and Affwell talked for over an hour. Spencer told Affwell about his father and the mines, and how Gregor Fyodorim would sometimes nap under the bed in Spencer’s room. There were never any monsters under Spencer’s bed—just homesick miners.
Affwell, it turned out, suffered from claustrophobia, and so stories about the mines and small, confined places where Spencer had fallen asleep as a child fascinated Affwell to no end. He would shiver and rub his hands together as though chilled to the bone when Spencer would talk about cave-exploring.
After that, Affwell—easily twice as big as Spencer—would pause in the middle of a story about some cramped cabin or narrow tunnel and turn to Spencer to say, “You know, the kind of place that would put you right to sleep,” and then guffaw and stomp his foot.

Abruptly one day Spencer was surrounded at the mess hall. One minute he was sitting by himself pouring synthetic sweetener on his eggs, the next minute his table filled up with crewmen who had no trays. At first, Spencer’s alarms were going off. It looked like an ambush—which it was, but not the type he was expecting.
“Where are you from?” The tone of the question bordered on threatening, but Spencer was not intimidated. Rather he was caught off guard.
“Excuse me?” he hedged, trying to read the body language of the other men. If they were going to interrogate him for information, they were giving off either a very surly or a very lazy vibe right now.
“We want to know where you’re from,” the same guy demanded, leaning a bit closer. His stare was pointed, but not angry.
“Why do you want to know?” Spencer stalled. He had a vague idea that they had pegged him as being from somewhere they disliked. With his past, he could claim any number of places as home—but not knowing which one to claim made him nervous. The men were exchanging shifty looks now, too. What was going on?
A hand descended on his shoulder, and Spencer turned his head slowly to look up a little at a large pilot with a dimpled chin and a handlebar moustache. “We just want to know, that’s all,” the man said in a voice that was so calm it sounded more menacing than ever.
“Hey,” an accented voice said from across the table to his left, “we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.”
There was a different kind of silence after this remark, and suddenly the guy with the moustache said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way? What the hell are you talkin’ about, Oren?”
“Yeah,” somebody said, and Spencer realized nobody was looking at him anymore, “what the hell, man—you want to beat it out of him?”
Some of the pilots laughed, and Spencer gave a relieved snort too, but that made them all get quiet again.
“Listen,” a short, dark-haired deckhand explained, “we got a little bet going—what?”
Spencer’s eyes closed and he slumped—with obvious relief—until his forehead touched the table.
“You okay?” the deckhand demanded, with genuine concern.
“Is he passing out? Is that what happens when he passes out?” somebody asked in the back.
“I’m okay,” Spencer interjected, raising a hand and looking around at the small crowd. “I’m okay. I was just trying to figure out what you guys wanted.”
Realization dawned on a few faces. “You thought we were here to kick your ass!” somebody cackled, and there were a few congratulatory gestures passed around as though that had been the plan all along.
Spencer let out a long, slow breath and wiped a hand over his face.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Three

Corsi’s ship was less than a minute from impact.
Twenty men in space suits were sitting in the bullpen, holding onto their seats.
Three more men in space suits were moving through the crawlspace under the deck.
Corsi was buckled into his seat, and he had run a strap from his right arm to a handle above him; hopefully, even if he passed out, the handle would be pulled.
Hawking hadn’t looked at Graeber once throughout the ordeal. He looked now. Graeber had his eyes closed, and his lips were moving. At first, Hawking couldn’t figure out what Graeber was doing, but when it came to him he said, “Amen,” and turned back to the viewscreen showing the deck below.
He gave the command to open the bay doors.

Either fuel or power to the reversed engines gave out while Corsi’s ship was still moving. Then the explosion of air from the bay doors opening slowed the ship down considerably—but it also tore a couple of smaller ships loose from their magnetic moorings. And finally, as predicted, Corsi’s ship slammed into the deck with a force that was felt all over the station.

Corsi had no helmet, but he didn’t think he was going to need one. You don’t need a helmet when you’re dead. Fortunately, as Hawking predicted, it was a ricochet landing, and Corsi had just the amount of clarity necessary to engage the magnetic docking clamps after a bounce. Within three seconds of entering the bay, he was docked—poorly done, but a record nonetheless.
Corsi had all of two seconds to congratulate himself. Then the alarm sounded in his tiny cabin and his blood froze.
It was the imminent explosion alarm. Impact had jarred a tank loose, and there was already a blowtorch of flame shooting out somewhere.
Corsi looked up through the porthole and saw the airlock cycling on the ship next to him. He didn’t understand that, but he didn’t care. He was waiting for the signal that minimum compression had been reached, so that he could get the hell out of his ship.
Hawking’s voice came barking over the commlink, but Corsi didn’t need to be told what to do. He paused for a split second to pray that his head didn’t explode, and then he reached for the hatch bolts—
With a popping sound that was barely audible in the low pressure, the hatch flew free, and in the sucking wind from the hatch came Corsi, falling to his knees and choking—and Spencer was there, slapping a breather on his face and dragging him toward a trap door.
In a few seconds, the men under the deck had yanked Corsi and Spencer into the dark tunnel, and no sooner had they sealed the trap than the second deck-quake in thirty seconds struck the space dock. In the darkness, a tinny voice said, “Tell me they got in. That’s the only thing I want to hear. Say it.”
Someone struck the intercom with an elbow and a muffled voice replied, “Two in hand. They’re alive.”
Hawking slumped into his seat, and below him somewhere the bullpen doors were bursting open so that men in suits could repair the bay doors and re-pressurize the deck. Graeber unbuckled from his own seat and slapped Hawking on the shoulder on his way out. “Nice work,” he said simply, and left the control room.

Graeber preceded Hawking into the medical bay only by rank—Hawking had gotten there first, but Ecksel had the transparent door secured. They could see him hooking Spencer up to life support systems, but Ecksel ignored the impatient paging and knocking for a full five minutes, taking readings of Spencer’s brain activity, heart rate, and other vital signs.
Finally, when they were allowed in, Graeber seemed completely nonplussed at not being able to congratulate crewman Fyodorim on his original thinking and heroism on behalf of his crewmate. “When do you think he’ll wake up,” he demanded of Ecksel.
“I don’t know if he’ll wake up at all,” Ecksel muttered, making notes and calling up Spencer’s files on the wall display. “I don’t want to jump the gun here, but I think this kid is dying.” He looked them right in the eye to make sure they’d heard and that they knew he wasn’t joking or exaggerating.
Hawking spoke first. “Dying? I mean, in his file it said that he goes into a coma or a very deep sleep, but—what makes you think he’s dying?”
Ecksel took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “He’s got low-level brain activity, which is inconclusive—he could stay like this for years, or he could snap out of it any second—but what really has me worried are his vitals. His heart rate is very slow, like someone with hypothermia or an extreme drug problem; his blood is running high in indicators for [not finished—really need to show him at death’s door and bring in the negative effects these events have on his body and mind]

Hawking called a meeting of the senior crew later that evening, while Corsi entertained visitors in the medical bay and Spencer slept, attended closely.
“You all understand that he doesn’t remember anything that happened. He can’t explain it, and he keeps asking for details that we don’t have—things he did when he was out of contact with us.” Hawking let out a slow breath. “The file on this one is going to be slightly modified. Usual trash we feed clients when things go wrong, but not a word about Spencer in any of it. Understood?”
The men looked around at each other for a minute or two, and then someone said, “Nearly as I can recall, Spencer was in the bullpen with us the whole time. Didn’t we play cards or something?”
“Yeah, we always play cards,” someone else said. A few voices agreed, and some plausible stories were suggested. When they had reached an agreement, Hawking adjourned the meeting.

Thirty-six hours later a delegation from the client showed up—the people who owned the engine in Corsi’s demolished ship—and the men were forced to endure the usual barrage of interrogations and re-tellings. What was unusual was the level of tension displayed by the Marques crew. They were accustomed to having every move questioned; Corsi and the deck crew had been rehearsing their lines for weeks. However, they were not accustomed to having to leave out entire chunks of the story—and the client’s delegation seemed to pick up on it.
One member of the delegation in particular, an engineer who had helped autopsy the ship, cornered one of the deck crew—completely by surprise—and said, “There are holes in this story I could fly a barge through. When are you guys going to tell us what really happened?”
Durrang, the deckhand, just blinked a couple of times and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The engineer stared him down for a moment, then turned and stalked off.
Durrang let out a long breath and shook his head, then turned around to leave.
Spencer was standing in the corridor, watching him.
Durrang raised a hand briefly, but Spencer ducked through a hatch, and Durrang went off the other way.

It was Corsi, fittingly enough, who extended the first olive branch to Spencer. They were on the same rotation for meals and sleeping that week. One day at breakfast, Corsi sat down across from Spencer and started eating, not saying a word.
Spencer’s eyes flicked up at him once, but then he didn’t say anything either. Halfway through the meal, Corsi salted his toast. It was one of his personal quirks. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then picked up the salt and salted his toast, too.
Corsi watched him take a bite. “Good, huh?” he said.
Spencer nodded. A minute later, Spencer poured some of his juice in his hot cereal. After Spencer had taken a few bites, Corsi did the same. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then Corsi nodded.
Finally Corsi said, “You saved my life. I feel like I owe you. Anything you ever need, just ask and it’s yours—no questions.”
Spencer shrugged a little and said, “I don’t remember doing it. I mean, they told me the whole thing three times, but—I don’t remember.”
Corsi looked around. There were a few crew members at the next table pretending not to look, probably pretending not to listen, too. “Look, I might as well tell you, because this kind of thing gets around. I know your medical records are supposed to be confidential, but we all know Keter wets the bed, so there’s no sense pretending we don’t, right?”
Spencer nodded, but didn’t look up.
“And we all know this has happened to you before. Black-outs, I mean; stuff you don’t remember. So, I mean, the whole crew knows.”
“Do they?” Spencer had a dull, resigned look on his face now.
“Yeah, and they don’t care.”
“Is that so?” he said with a little edge in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s so,” Corsi insisted.
Spencer stood up to leave.
“They don’t,” Corsi repeated, but Spencer was headed for the door. Corsi grabbed both of their trays and headed the other way.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Two

Ecksel was in the bullpen when Spencer entered. He took one look at Spencer—distracted, nervous, and flexing his fingers—and realized that Spencer was having an attack. No one else seemed to realize it.
Ecksel did nothing. He stepped back against the wall and watched.
Spencer headed straight for him.
Ecksel opened his mouth to say something, but then Spencer reached past him to the intercom, removed the handheld unit, and left the bullpen.
After a moment, Ecksel followed.

Hawking and Corsi were still debating when the intercom sounded. Someone answered, and then Hawking was interrupted by Ecksel shouting, “The rookie’s in the crawlspace—I think he’s headed for the deck—Hawking, he’s having some sort of a seizure—,” and then Ecksel was cut off by Spencer’s voice, eerily calm like a sleepwalker, saying, “Stay put, sir. It’ll be fine.”
For a moment, no one moved. Hawking closed his eyes and took a moment to regret ever letting Spencer get comfortable. Graeber was surely questioning his judgment.
On the deck and in the control room, the men began shaking their heads and murmuring, the general consensus being that Spencer had lost it completely now.
“Did you hear me?” came Spencer’s voice again. “Stay put.”
“Why does he keep saying that?” Hawking asked no one in particular. “Where does he think we’re going to go?” He reached for the commlink, but stopped as Corsi’s voice poured out.
“Oh my God! He’s right!” Then louder. “That’s it! That’s it!” Over the ship’s transmission, everyone could hear Corsi suddenly begin demolishing the cockpit. He must have just grabbed the nearest heavy object and started smashing everything—the console, the viewscreen, the overhead controls—and suddenly Hawking realized what he was doing.
“That boy’s a damn genius,” he whispered.
Spencer’s voice came back, echoing a little. “Clear the deck. Brace for impact.” The echo turned into a whine of feedback. He must have passed an intercom in the crawlspace—
“Crawlspace!” Hawking hissed. “Ecksel, where did you say he’s headed?”
“To the deck, sir.”
“Why through the crawlspace?”
“Clear the deck, please,” Spencer droned, still sleepwalking.
Hawking realized that only a few of them could hear the request, and he quickly thumbed an open channel, shouting, “Get off that deck! Now! Clear the deck!”
“Do you want me to open the bay doors, sir?” someone asked behind Hawking.
“No!” Hawking barked. “Not yet—he’s down under the deck. I think he’s planning on coming up under one of the ships.”

Hawking, Corsi and Spencer were now on the same page.
Ships like the ones they were testing were usually cobbled together with parts from decommissioned ships; if someone built a new engine or a new propulsion system and wanted it tested, they could integrate it into a cheap ship built out of spare parts instead of building a whole new vessel. Fancy prototypes were usually built once all the bugs in the various systems were caught.
What Corsi was flying was a ship with a scavenged console, which was why it had frozen up on him—but being scavenged meant it had Pathways protocols in it already, and one of those protocols was called “Stay Put.”
Stay Put was an emergency procedure that the ship could perform without any help. Basically, in the event that the navigation system became inoperable, the ship would retain its last reported position—or as close to it as feasible—and signal for help until towed or until it received course instructions, demonstrating that it could be piloted again.
When the console froze up and the ship kept moving, Corsi waited only a minute for Stay Put to take over before he assumed that the ship was not equipped with it. The problem was that the ship was still receiving course information from the console—even though Corsi could not get in to change it. This also explained why Hawking was unable to access it remotely.
In order to get Stay Put to kick in, Corsi was going to have to render the console completely useless in the next three minutes. After that, even the ship’s computer would not be able to brake fast enough to avoid the station.
There was a chance that, even if the ship fired its braking thrusters in the next minute or so, it would still impact with the station at high enough speed to kill Corsi and demolish the flight deck. Hawking had an idea of his own, but he didn’t know if he could communicate with Spencer—he wasn’t sure Spencer was capable of actual discussion in this state. They would just have to wait and see.

Within a minute, the station received a signal from the ship—and it wasn’t Corsi’s voice. It was the ship itself, asking for assistance. Over the simulated voice came a whooping, cheering voice that was definitely Corsi’s, and he informed them that the braking rockets had fired.
Hawking cut off the loud response from the crew and asked for quick calculations as to the ship’s deceleration arc and distance from the station. He needed to know whether they should open the bay doors now, or wait, or not open them at all.
The tricky part was knowing whether Corsi would survive if they kept the doors closed. This was the best option for the station and the crew—and if Corsi could withstand the impact, he would probably come out of it damaged but alive.
The next best option was opening the doors at the last moment and doing so without decompressing the deck. This would force a jet of air out, probably damaging the doors, but hopefully slowing the ship just a bit before it slammed into the deck or one of the ships inside. Instead of a direct impact, it would be a ricochet, sparing Corsi some damage but severely damaging the deck and perhaps obliterating another ship as well. Hawking hoped that Spencer was headed for the right ship. The wrong choice would put him in as much danger as Corsi.
Hawking looked up as one of the techs finished his calculations. The news wasn’t good.

Hawking silenced everyone before opening a channel to Spencer; he wasn’t sure Spencer would even hear him, but if he did then it had to be clear.
“Spence,” he called out. “Are you on deck yet?”
For a moment, nothing came back. Then a voice said, “Stay put.”
Hawking exhaled slowly. “Stay put. Got it. What now?”
There was silence. Hawking waited. The crew waited. Nothing came back.
“Spence,” Hawking called.
Nothing.
“What now?”
Silence. Then a crackle, and a static-smothered voice said, “Blow the hatch, and get the hell out of there.”
It made no sense to Hawking; he looked around and got blank stares from everyone else as well. Turning back to the panel, he said, “Blow what hatch?” But that was the last time Spencer spoke to anyone for a while.
Corsi was coming in, and he was coming in fast. Hawking projected cool with every spare bit of energy he could muster, but under the surface he wanted to scream. He closed his eyes and began mentally surveying the ships on the deck—
“That’s why his voice was breaking up; he’s gotten into the airlock on one of those ships, but why?”
—the controls to the bay doors—
“They don’t blow open, they just slide apart, that can’t be it”
—and Corsi’s ship—
“It’s got a hatch, but he can’t get off the ship, he’s got no suit, why would he get off the ship?”
And with another rush of adrenaline, Hawking caught up to Spencer again. He lurched for the open channel and began shouting commands. This wasn’t just going to be close—they were about to have a by-God catastrophe on their hands. The braking thrusters had given them about five or six extra minutes, but that was the last reprieve they would get. Everyone on the station was moving.

Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part One

For more than a month after the incident, the people funding the Ghail project plagued the station, poring over reports and interviewing Spencer and everyone else. The Pathways officers were in and out fast; this type of paperwork and investigation was ongoing and routine for them since their main jurisdiction was off-world transportation. Spencer endured the scrutiny for about a week, but then Graeber stepped in on his behalf.
“I don’t care how long you boys want to go over and over this with me or my staff, but the crew are now off limits; they have jobs to do, and this company comes to a complete halt when you waste their time like this. You have depositions, video-, audio-, and testimonial records; you also have the ship itself to study. Call us when you find something.”
The next day, Spencer had a new assignment. Things went back to normal. For a while.

He was sketching something on a tablet again, tuning out the other men—who, in turn, seemed to be talking about him as though he wasn’t there.
“Anything good?”
“He’s drawing some ship I never seen before.”
“Is it any good?”
“Look, it’s a ship; what do you want?”
“Well, I can’t draw.”
“You can’t bluff either. Call.”
“I wanna raise—”
“No, you don’t. Look at these.”
“Shit.”
The intercom came to life, cutting off the game and the conversation.
“Ray? You down there?”
One of the guys thumbed the wall unit. “Ray’s in the can. What do you want?”
“You guys should get up here. I think Corsi’s gonna eat it.”
There was a moment’s silence, then someone barked, “What’s goin’ on?”
“He’s on a collision course with the station and he can’t steer.”
Ray appeared from the toilet, yanking his coveralls over his shoulder. “Say that again!” he shouted, struggling to get dressed.
The voice in the wall complied.
Ray snapped the portable unit out of its clip in the wall, and the voice came through in stereo for a moment until Ray got out the door, several of the men behind him.
Spencer listened to the technical details spilling from the wall unit, and heard Ray—moving at high speed through the corridors—confirming parts of it.
Corsi had been setting a course back to the station when his ship’s entire navigation system seized up. The computer was basically worthless now, and he could not gain access to the actual engine from the cockpit. Just as he’d been about to call for a rescue, the main engines had fired, sending him hurtling toward the station at high speed. Now he had about ten minutes until the ship smashed into the station unless they found some way of diverting it—but diverting it almost certainly meant sending him streaking toward Earth with no brakes.
When he’d heard enough, Spencer launched himself from the hammock and headed for the bullpen himself. He wasn’t morbid, but he could not sit in the bunkhouse and hear about this over the intercom.

Premonitions are tricky things. Before Spencer arrived at the flight deck, he had realized that the crew would not be allowed in; the deck would most likely be depressurized in anticipation of an emergency landing—surely someone could think of a way to stall the ship. The crew would, however, be crowded into the bullpen waiting to rush in and help if Corsi somehow managed to dock in one piece.
Spencer had a clear plan in his mind, but he was doing his best to ignore it. In his mind, he saw himself bypassing the bullpen and entering the flight deck via one of the service crawlspaces; he could not imagine why he would want to do this, since he did not know what use he could be. He rejected the plan for several other reasons, chief of which was his certainty that the deck would be a vacuum already when he arrived.
He rounded a corner and ducked through the low, metal door into the bullpen. All the doors leading into the flight deck—from the observation deck, from the control room, from the bullpen—and any door leading into one of those three sections was oval-shaped and equipped with a magnetic seal in case of emergencies such as hull breach or decompression. The doors were supposed to be closed at all times, and a pilot would “knock” (a slang term for checking instruments and calling an all-clear) before opening any of them; it was merely a courtesy ninety-five percent of the time, but the other five percent of the time it was a life-or-death requirement. Spencer didn’t notice as he ducked through the door to the bullpen that it had been left open, but when he saw the next door open, he looked back and thought, ‘There’s something really wrong here. Why haven’t they decompressed the flight deck?’
Pushing past the few men in the bullpen, he stepped through the next door and found the men standing on-deck, listening to the conversation between Corsi and Hawking.
“I don’t think you can afford to crack your console; if it doesn’t work, you’ll have no way of correcting your course.”
“I’m reasonably sure I can make the change—and if I can’t then I’m stuck on this course anyway.”
“Not true. If you can drain a tank and get the deceleration protocols to kick in, you’ll spiral—it’ll give us time to get someone out to you before you get too close to the atmosphere.”
“You hope it will. I think I’m better off trying to short one of the engines; it’ll make me peel off course more slowly, but it’s a more reliable option.”
“Yes, and then you go shooting into the upper atmosphere at high speed—besides guaranteeing no one ever finds a piece of you, it will leave us with no autopsy. It’s bad company policy, Corsi,” Hawking joked.
Considering the situation, it was about the closest to emotional Hawking was likely to get—at least on the intercom—and the men on deck were deadly silent.
“How long?” Spencer whispered to the guy next to him.
The pilot turned an ugly eye on Spencer, and a wave of disgust washed over Spencer. This was not the time for politics.
“How long!” he demanded loudly.
“Six minutes until impact with the station,” the pilot hissed, then shoved past Spencer and into the hall.
“How long does he have left to change course?” Spencer asked the rest of the crowd in general.
“About four,” someone murmured.
The image of the crawlspace had been intruding on his thoughts the whole time, but now another image went off in his head like a camera flash. Spencer blinked hard and mumbled, “Stay put?” His head ached all of a sudden, and he pressed his palms to his forehead. What was going on?
He tried to reconcile the two impressions that he was getting, but his headache was getting worse. He smelled something familiar, and with a sharp stab of fear realized it was oranges.
He was having a seizure.

Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part Three

Chapter One: A Death Wish (cont.)

Every member of the crew—forty-six all told—was on deck except Spencer Fyodorim and Stan Robinson. It had taken just about every hand to secure the station; they would be cleaning up the mess hall for days. Six men had hauled themselves—by means of the emergency railings—through the halls at low-gravity down to engineering to restore systems and prep the station for rotation again. It had taken hours, but now everyone was back on their feet, literally and figuratively.

Several of the crew were holding portable video units and replaying footage both from inside and outside the ship. Of particular interest were the scenes where Spencer seemed to be vomiting in all directions at once. Understanding the physics that made this possible did not in any way lessen the comedy, apparently.

Hawking had chosen Stan Robinson to go make the rookie’s first rescue. This was tradition: Robinson was the last man to be rescued. It gave the crew a little balance, something of a pecking order, and a chance to redeem themselves after a humiliating ordeal.

Robinson’s ‘disaster’ had been merely stalling out in deep space; he was in a high-speed vehicle with a miscalculated fuel reserve, and he had meekly contacted the station for pick-up only after hours of attempts. He had tried gleaning fuel; he had tried re-routing power from every other system; the “autopsy” crew—the boys who took the ship apart for its return to the client—even found evidence that Robinson had attempted to breach the hull, thereby propelling the ship back to the station on precious air.

By the time Robinson returned with Spencer, the two should have been well-acquainted and—hopefully—on fairly even terms. But they weren’t.

The crew had crowded into the bull-pen—where the deck crew usually waited while the deck was open to space, decompressed while ships launched and landed. As soon as the shuttle was magnetically grounded, the deck sealed off, and atmosphere restored, the men poured in. They were disappointed at the greeting they got. When Robinson got off the shuttle, he was stone-faced. He reported to Hawking and then hung back to see Fyodorim’s welcome.

The crew had seemed ready to hoist Spencer on their shoulders a minute ago, but now they hung back as Spencer lowered himself from the shuttle. He had splashes of vomit on his coveralls; he was as stone-faced as Robinson had been; and when he met the eyes of his crewmates, they looked away. Spencer seemed to know they had been enjoying his predicament, and they gathered that he had no sense of humor about it.

Now Spencer looked around at them with a mixture of disapproval and weariness. He scanned the crowd and made straight for Hawking, and the crowd parted before him with uncomfortable faces. Hawking seemed no more eager to see him than the crew now.

“Well?” Spencer demanded.

“Well what?”

Spencer’s brow creased. “Did I do something wrong?”

There were some snickers and snorts at this—though they were quickly stifled. Then Hawking heard one of the men repeat the question to someone behind him. It would not be long before it would be passed around as a joke.

Hawking shook his head. “Better head to debriefing, Mr. Fyodorim.”

Spencer studied Hawking’s face for a moment, then turned and walked off the deck. The clang of the door behind him was followed by the muffled laughter of his crewmates recounting his brief inaugural adventure. He wondered what Graeber had to say.


“I’d say you’re having trouble making friends,” was the first thing Graeber had to say.

Spencer looked around the table at Graeber, Hawking, Trask, and Daly—all of his superiors, at least until they got around to firing him—and didn’t see any reason to take the bait. He returned a stubborn gaze to Graeber.

“Please,” Graeber drawled, “offer us an assessment of the Ghail.”

The four men on the weighty side of the table regarded Spencer with poker faces.

“Well,” Spencer began, “first of all, I would declare it unfit for human transport.” Someone snorted at this, but Spencer didn’t see who. “I went by the book during departure, followed procedure for disconnecting from the station, and then engaged a course that was designed to stress the ship.”

“I dare say you accomplished that,” Graeber conceded dryly. “So what went wrong?”

Spencer’s eyebrows went up. “What do you mean? Nothing went wrong.” He looked around at the others. “If you mean, how did the ship respond to the stress, then I would say it responded poorly, that it was built inadequately, and that the designers have some research to do. However, as to the test itself, everything went just fine.”

Graeber nodded at Daly, who was in charge of overseeing autopsies.

“The autopsy crew agrees with you,” Daly began, “as to the stress on the ship; both simple and complex maneuvering significantly impacted the frame. It’s built like a juice carton; probably modeled after ships that are supposed to be full to capacity with cargo, not with loose passengers. However, the causes behind the ship’s actual separation into two pieces are in question. Were you aware of the explosion just prior to separation?”

Spencer concentrated, but did not remember two explosions. He spoke slowly. “Are you referring to explosive decompression of the main cabin?”

Daly shook his head. “No. What you perceived as decompression was actually a minor explosion. It could have been much greater.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “When you first engaged minimal thrust to put the required distance between the Ghail and the station, it apparently burst a seal in the fuel delivery system. It was a defect in the part itself. Actually, an alarm did sound—though it was the wrong alarm.”

Spencer spoke without thinking. “The fire alarm.”

Hawking’s eyes closed, and a curse formed on his lips.

Daly nodded. “This was an opportunity for you to halt all maneuvers and assess the ship.”

“I knew it was erroneous.”

“How? How did you know?”

Spencer shook his head slowly. “I guessed,” he admitted.

Daly went on. “The burst seal should have been reported as such. Nevertheless, a fire is also serious enough to warrant an abort. Yet you continued with your flight plan. The seal went unnoticed—which in itself might not have negatively impacted your test run. This was compounded, however, by the aggressive nature of the maneuvers you chose for the ship’s paces.

“A leak occurred within the compartment where the fuel cells were stored. By the time you applied full acceleration—after, of course, bucking the ship around like a wild ass for a while, resulting in decreased structural integrity—there was enough leaked fuel to have lit up space for a while. You were basically sitting on a torch. It should have turned the whole can into one of those old-style rockets and landed you in another solar system.” Daly chuckled at this image, but a look from Graeber put him back on track.

“Luckily for you there were two separate explosions. The first one was the leaked fuel exploding, and that was the one that split the ship in two. If the ship hadn’t actually broken apart at that point, you probably would have been obliterated in the second explosion. So, you’re only alive because you wrecked your ship.” Daly looked around at the others. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

“And you won’t ever again,” Graeber barked.

“If I may,” Hawking interrupted, “I would like to clarify a few things. First of all, we’re talking about several design flaws: the seals on the fuel cells are antiquated and—I checked—obsolete; the overall structural integrity of the ship was weak-sauce before Fyodorim laid hands on it; and there is still the matter of the safety measures we’re not discussing. Can someone tell me why?”

Trask spoke up, startling Spencer. The man had not moved a muscle this entire time. “The ‘matter of the safety measures,’ as you put it, is completely irrelevant. You saw how he responded to a fire alert. I doubt all the alarms going off at once would have stopped him.”

“You’re probably right,” Spencer blurted out rashly. “It would have just looked like a universal systems failure.”

Trask’s gaze went from impassive to piercing in a heartbeat. He leaned forward slightly, and Spencer leaned back slightly without even knowing it. “But Mr. Fyodorim, that’s exactly what should have happened.” He was speaking calmly, but his voice was intense somehow, threatening. “Prior to the explosions, you had an imminent hull breach, an electrical systems failure, and a fuel leak that—even if it did not cause an explosion—would have poisoned everyone in the main cabin if you had actually had any passengers. Every alarm on that ship very well should have gone off simultaneously; and if that had happened, and if you had responded with any reflexes, you would have been back safe on this station hours ago—and perhaps the whole ship might be in one piece.”

Graeber sighed deeply. “Which is why you’re off the hook on this one,” he groused.

Hawking slumped visibly, relief washing over him.

Spencer looked around, confused. “I don’t get it.”

Daly laughed. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, kid.”

“What’s a horse? And why is this all suddenly someone else’s fault?”

“It’s hard to see from the pilot’s position sometimes,” Hawking explained, “but, from where we were sitting, what happened to you was even more of a surprise to us than it was to you. Do you realize how connected we were to what was going on? How do you think the crew got the video of you puking everywhere?”

Spencer grimaced.

“We only realized afterward that there were no warnings—no alerts, no alarms, nothing—before the ship blew apart. Now, either there were some serious failings in the central computer or—”

“Someone sabotaged the computer?”

Graeber nodded slowly. “We’re investigating; so are the Pathways officers. It’s happened to us before—happens to all the test-piloting firms from time to time—when someone wants to make sure a new ship doesn’t get built. Of course, this time it’s a little more serious—”

“I could have been killed.” He said it so matter-of-factly that everyone looked up at him.

Daly chuckled again. “Hey, that’s every day around this place, kid.”

Spencer shrugged and shook his head. “Well, better luck next time, I guess.” Perhaps Hawking saw the statement for what it was, but everyone else passed it off as test-pilot bravado.

“After all,” Graeber had often said, “you gotta have some kind of a death wish if you want to work here.”

That night, after the last of the crew had laughed himself to sleep—probably watching that clip again—Spencer lay awake considering the irony of the day. Someone he had never met had tried to kill him, and it had nothing to do with him but with someone who felt threatened by a ship being built.

It hadn’t been so long ago that he had tried to take his own life, and today he had come that close to losing it again. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

He turned on his tablet again and began to draw.

Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part Two

Chapter One: A Death Wish (cont.)

Hawking barged into the crew quarters as though angry—merely out of habit—and found the newest member of the crew in a hammock, drawing on a lap computer with a stylus. Spencer Fyodorim holstered the stylus and sat up, but his eyes flicked only briefly at Hawking before resting on the floor.

“On your feet, Fyodorim. You’ve got work to do.”

They were both on their way out the door at a brisk pace before either spoke again.

“So, I’ve been approved?”

“Everything checks out. Surprised?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s good. Have you ever piloted anything larger than a Dreg?”

Spencer lagged a little, confused.

Hawking enjoyed a smirk while Spencer couldn’t see it. ‘Disappointed with your first assignment, Spence?’ he sensed. “Speak up,” he barked over his shoulder.

Spencer shrugged. “I didn’t know there was anything larger than a Dreg—except the place they park the Dregs,” he grumbled as they kept moving.

Hawking rounded a corner quickly, his long legs giving him a natural lead, and Spencer jogged to keep up. “And why is that?” Hawking quizzed as they moved up a ramp toward the lift.

“It's impractical. Anything bigger than a Dreg sucks too much fuel on accel and decel—plus the Dregs are difficult enough to maneuver as it is. I guess I just assumed that for the number of passengers you can fit in a Dreg, they're just about the limit of efficiency.”

“You assume correctly. Some greedy bastard is hoping to make an advance in colony transports and win over the commercial transports; my guess is that he's built a whale of a ship with crappy materials and almost no engine. It's just a giant balloon with a fuel tank strapped to it—a death trap for whoever charters one.”

“So they want us to test it?”

Hawking stopped suddenly and turned to face Spencer. “They want us to go on and on about how well-made it is and how smooth the ride is. So, my question is: what do you think I want you to do?”

Spencer took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “I'd guess you want me to shake the damn thing apart.”

Hawking snorted, then turned and moved on. “That's exactly what I want you to do,” he called back.

Spencer shook his head and ran to catch up.


Graeber joined Hawking on the observation deck. Below, through several layers of transparent shielding, they could see the enormous ship—called a Ghail—connected by a short docking tube to the side of the space station.

“He out there already?” Graeber asked, settling himself in a chair.

“Yes, he should be loose any minute now,” Hawking replied, moving from console to console, activating remote cameras and communications inside the Ghail.

“Is he checked out on the Ghail?”

“No. I didn’t give him anything to read, and he got no simulations. But he has flown the Dregs before.”

“He said that?”

“No; it’s in his file.”

“So you’re setting him up to fail?”

“With that monster? At least if he does, it will be a spectacular mess.”

On the big screen, Spencer appeared. He was sitting perfectly still, eyes closed. Graeber looked from the screen to Hawking and back again.

“Is he meditating?”

“I have no idea.” They waited for a minute or two. Graeber was cycling through some other views of the interior of the Ghail on one of the monitors. Hawking was pinging some of the instrument monitors to be sure they weren’t just getting echoes.

Finally, when Graeber started outright fidgeting in his seat, Hawking leaned down to the commlink, but just as he did so, Spencer launched into action on the screen.


His eyes snapped open. He knew what to do. The idea was to force the inevitable—to make the unexpected happen now, while the ship had only one passenger—and there was only one way to do that: stress. The ship would have to experience sudden and compounded stresses. He set to work quickly planning it out.

Ships had always been easy for him. Spencer adjusted the consoles and familiarized himself with the controls almost at a glance. He was a little surprised that Hawking didn’t bring him up to speed on the ship before turning him loose, but it made almost no difference.

“You want me to shake this thing apart?” he murmured. “Let’s do it.”


Hawking choked on his coffee.

“What did he say?” Graeber barked.

“I didn’t catch it,” Hawking lied, thumbing the audio off.

Graeber mashed his palms against his temples. He mumbled, “Anything beats retirement. Anything beats retirement.”


Spencer’s hands flew over the controls. With one hand, he was disengaging the connection to the space station, and with the other he was keying in a fairly ambitious flight plan. The moment the proximity signal from the docking tube went silent, while Spencer was still fastening the five-point harness across his abdomen, the Ghail lurched forward and an alarm sounded. It was distant—not in the pilot’s cabin, but somewhere else in the cavernous ship.

There was a fire somewhere.


“What was that?” Graeber demanded. An alarm was also sounding on the control panel in the observation deck. He thumbed a control on his armrest, and two of the auxiliary screens changed to Ghail schematics. Nothing unusual showed up.

“It’s nothing; there are always some bugs in the internal monitoring,” Hawking hedged, but he looked uncertain, and Graeber noticed.


Spencer ignored the alarm, assuming it was erroneous, but he hoped Hawking was paying attention. If there really was a fire, then what he was about to do would be more dangerous than he intended. Hawking had at least two minutes to warn him before the flight plan got ‘frisky’.

The Ghail was now a good distance from the station, and Spencer did some quick mental calculations. ‘Far enough,’ he decided. With the ship still in the middle of a rolling turn, he fired a pair of breaking thrusters and braced himself for the bucking in store. There was one violent whiplash, and Spencer cursed as his head struck the headrest. He was fairly certain the hull had just been breached; the buck was probably explosive decompression of the main cabin.

The ship attempted to continue with the flight plan, but all that happened was a slow turn—and only half the ship turned, Spencer gathered, as the creak and groan of metal told him that the ship was wrenching in two.

Then the tail section exploded, propelling Spencer and the control room into a spin—and away from the station at high speed. As Spencer flip-flopped, his stomach flip-flopped as well. He opened his mouth to call for help on the commlink, but, “Oh no,” was all he got out of his mouth before the vomit started flying.


Graeber saw the hull of the Ghail spinning toward them—the rear of the ship—and ignored the fact that his newest crew member was now whipping off into space somewhere. “Ben,” he drawled, strapping himself into his seat, “you sure can pick ‘em.”

Hawking sounded an alarm and slapped the console in front of him to communicate with the entire facility. “Attention, crew: brace for impact! I repeat: brace for impact!” He switched off the intercom and, to Graeber, said, “So, what do you think? I’m guessing the rotation of the station should deflect—”

At the moment of impact, Hawking was slammed into the console. He would have a mottled bruise across his chest for weeks, but what would really hurt later were Graeber’s next words. The lights threatened to go out, but power held, except that the station was slowing in its turn—causing everything to come loose and float.

Hawking tried to hold onto the console, but only succeeded in shoving himself up to the ceiling and then rebounding right into Graeber, who appeared perfectly composed, still strapped into the command seat.

“Well, Ben,” Graeber chuckled, “you have virtually assured yourself that I will never retire.”

Levi's Rock - Chapter One - A Death Wish - Part One

Chapter One: A Death Wish

Setting: Marques Space Station, Upper Earth Orbit


Graeber chewed on the unlit cigar and kneaded his forehead with calloused hands. He was eyeing a stack of flimsies on his desk and thinking about sliding the whole stack into the incinerator slot in the wall—

The door opened and Hawking walked in. “Don’t do it,” he chuckled.

“You don’t know how close to retirement I am,” Graeber growled. As the door closed behind Hawking, Graeber thumbed the locking protocols under the arm of his chair and activated a scrubber in the ceiling. Before Hawking was even seated, Graeber had the cigar lit and was reclining, eyes closed, forehead smoothing out, shoulders relaxing.

“I know exactly how close to retirement you are,” Hawking laughed. “You’re so close, you’ll never do it. You’ve got enough credit to live on forever—which you won’t, if you keep up with those—and you still do rotations up here, where you’re not needed. Why don’t you at least stay planetside and run things from a hammock?”

Graeber laughed at that. “You wish, boy.”

“Yes, I do—and not just because you’re thirty years older than me and seventy pounds fatter—I think I’ve earned a little trust. You don’t have to check up on me like this.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Graeber asked, eyes opening, real concern on his face.

Hawking smiled. “Just checking.”

Graeber shook his head.

“No, apparently it’s more serious than that,” Hawking continued. “You’re up here every three months because you can’t stay away—you’re obsessive about it. You need to be put in a home for old folks. Admit it: your life is over. You’re dried up and useless. Step aside for the younger generation.” He smoothed his hair comically.

Graeber puffed away in silence.

“Hey,” Hawking soothed. “You know I’m only joking, right?”

“You think you are,” Graeber groused.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Tell me about this problem-child you’ve adopted,” Graeber said finally.

“Oh, him,” Hawking groaned, but Graeber noted that he seemed grateful for the change of subject. “Well, he’s not a child; in fact he’s too old to be a test pilot.”

“Then why’d you hire him?”

“I talked to him. For two hours.”

Graeber’s eyebrows went up. “Smart?”

“No one who applies for this job could be called that. No, it was just his knowledge of ships. He seems to have been a test pilot somewhere else.”

“Seems? You didn’t check?”

“Of course I checked,” Hawking objected, genuinely hurt. “You won’t believe what I found.”

“Is it in this stack somewhere?” Graeber gestured at the flimsies with disdain.

“No, I didn’t make any copies of this,” Hawking murmured, offering a slip to Graeber.

The slip was some new-fangled pocket device, and Graeber had difficulty figuring out how to plug it into the wall terminal, but when he did so the screen filled with pages quickly. Graeber yanked the cigar out of his mouth and coughed. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah, that was going to be my whole report on this guy—just those two words, with a date and my initials.”

“Is this a scam? Maybe he fudged some of this.”

“He doesn’t even know I looked for it. I hired him on the spot; why would he need to make any of this up?”

“On the spot? Just because he knows a lot about ships?”

“I trust my instincts. He seemed sincere, he knew his job, and he said he’d accept any payscale. I thought the worst case scenario would be firing him after the background check.”

“What about running off with one of our ships—or crashing one into the station?”

“He hasn’t flown anything yet.”

“What are we paying him to do, then?”

“We’re not; he’s paying to lay over here until his paperwork goes through.”

Graeber grunted. “I’m suspicious already. Why isn’t he still planetside?”

“He was never on-planet. He came in a relay ship.”

“A cargo freighter? From where?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Hawking said, standing. “Finish reading my report, and then talk to him yourself.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to give him his first assignment. Now that the boss has approved him, there’s no sense paying him to sit around, right?”

“Who says I approved him?”

“You will. Come see him when he gets back.”

Graeber grunted and turned back to the wall terminal. He let out a low whistle and began reading. “Spencer Fyodorim. Hmph. Where’ah you from, kid?”

* * *

The entire crew wanted to know the answer to that question.

Ever since Spencer Fyodorim had set foot on the station there had been something to complain about—and usually it was loss of sleep. Forty-seven pilots—soon to be forty-eight when Spencer was official—slept in five overlapping shifts that rotated through three different bunkhouses. There were some mats, some hammocks and a lot of cots; some men slept with isolation equipment such as tents or blindfolds and earplugs; one of the bunkhouses had sounds piped in—machinery and air recycling noises, some of which were sounds the actual equipment no longer made, but which had been recorded and looped to lull the older pilots to sleep; and one of the bunkhouses had been graffiti-ed into an eyesore by several pilots who reasoned that it didn’t affect anyone’s sleep.

What did affect everyone’s sleep was being put in a rotation with the rookie.

From the day that Spencer had arrived, he hadn’t gone one night without waking up at night—usually screaming—and then becoming almost amnesic about the episode. When asked about it, he would have trouble remembering anything. Not that many of the crew asked him about his episodes; most of them staunchly ignored him. After all, he was not—strictly speaking—part of the crew yet.

Generally speaking, what happened in the crew quarters was the crew’s business—like the graffiti, or the gambling, or the occasional “family member” coming to visit—so Hawking knew from the outset that he shouldn’t interfere with how any new crew member acclimated himself to the group. The trouble was that Spencer didn’t seem to be acclimating himself at all. Scorned at meals and ignored anywhere else, Spencer moved about as though he were the only occupant of the station—it seemed that he was giving everyone else the silent treatment and not the other way around.

Some of the men complained enough to Hawking that he moved Spencer to the guest quarters, which was a nice-sounding name for solitary confinement. The guest accommodations amounted to little more than a tiny room sequestered in a wing of the facility populated by computers so that little, if any, sound reached the room. It was a privilege reserved for visiting observers, usually commercial dealers insisting on a completely unnecessary first-hand look at the testing process. Isolating them from the crew served two purposes, since it also allowed the men to belligerently bad-mouth the client in the bunkhouses. Boys will be boys, after all.

While Spencer spent a few days in the guest quarters, the men wasted no time in venting about him and his nightmares back in the bunkhouses.

“Always under attack, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, or some planet coming apart under his feet.”

“Sounded like a name that one night, didn’t it? Laurie? Dora?”

“Nah, man, he was callin’ for his mama when he woke me up.”

“Oh, not one of those. Brinker, how’d you cure that one momma’s boy?”

“Didn’t. I just drugged him every time he was on my rotation.”

“Well you shoulda drugged this guy. What’d you give what’s-his-face?”

“I ain’t sayin’—I might need to use it on you one of these days.”

“You know, he had an attack right in the mess hall today.”

“An attack?”

“What do you mean? You mean like a seizure?”

“Pretty much. He started talkin’ funny, and the next thing we knew? He was passed out right on the table.”

“Did Hawking see it?”

“When’s the last time Hawking ate in the crew mess, genius?”

“Well, did you tell him?”

“What for?”


One day, Spencer awoke in sick bay with the distinct impression that he’d struck someone across the face. He looked around for the attending medic, but finally decided he was alone. He sat up slowly, felt no ill effects, and eventually got dressed and left before anyone returned to check on him.

Watching on a monitor in an adjacent room, one of the station’s nurses—a man named Ecksel—pressed a cold pack to his eye. He’d had his instructions from the pilot who’d delivered Spencer to sick bay: write no report, give no treatment, attempt no retribution. Ecksel felt sorry for Spencer and wanted to help him with the seizures, but Spencer hadn’t seemed like he was having a seizure when he closed Ecksel’s left eye for him.

The story the pilot told him had intrigued Ecksel, however, so he began doing some research on the type of seizure Spencer was having. He included all the variables as they’d been related to him: Spencer got a medium- to severe-headache just before the attacks; he had commented more than once about a smell like oranges during an episode; he spoke clearly, perhaps a bit louder than usual; and he seemed to need to complete some urgent task—and if impeded, he would lash out or black out immediately.

Such had been the case today. Spencer arrived in the company of the pilot, but apparently the pilot had told Spencer they were headed for the observation deck. When Spencer found out they were at sick bay, he fought both the pilot and the nurse briefly and violently. Then without any warning, he turned off like a switch had been thrown somewhere.

Ecksel found some reading material on his planetlink about unusual behavior during semi-conscious states, and he stayed up all night reading.


Hawking didn’t find out about the seizures first-hand or from the crew; he read about them in one of a series of eye-opening documents that turned up in the paper trail that was Spencer Fyodorim’s past. He’d hint cryptically to Spencer each time they crossed paths at what he’d learned, but the two did not chat casually. Both seemed to feel that this would be detrimental to Spencer’s already rocky relationship with the rest of the crew.


After only a few nights being sequestered from the rest of the crew, Hawking realized the error he’d made; relations between Fyodorim and the crew were worsening as long as Fyodorim was treated like an outcast. He put Spencer back on rotation with the other men in the bunkhouses, but advised him to see the station medic for a sedative to suppress the dreams.

Hawking never followed up on that visit, but for the next two weeks Spencer did not wake up at night. The crew were mute on the matter, but Hawking was willing to settle for indifference—for now.


Hawking suffered Spencer—and overrode protests from the crew—for one simple reason: he could tell where Spencer belonged.

In fifteen years Hawking had run through so many pilots that he felt like he had a sixth sense about them. He looked at some and knew they weren’t worth keeping around—the kind that would get themselves killed or someone else killed, or the kind that whined and moaned about the milk-runs but wouldn’t stick their necks out for the dangerous trips.

He especially loathed the ones that sat around talking about the ship they were going to buy some day—the ones that were fascinated with one ship, or one class of ship, to the exclusion of all others, so that every conversation eventually came around to their pat recitation of the specifications of their dream ship.

A good pilot, in Hawking’s opinion, could be read quite neatly by the way he talked about ships: finding something interesting or noteworthy in any class or make of ship; demonstrating a wide knowledge not only of engine lore but also of the history of ship design; or clamoring for the chance to fly the unusual ships that came in—not just the sleek, the fast, or the expensive.

Unfortunately, as Hawking had also learned, some of the best pilots were lost in testing ships that were death traps from the drawing board up. There was no way to predict who would be lost, and it was not worth hiring fools and hoping they would be the ones taken. Great pilots all too often met death on terms they gladly chose for themselves: at high velocity, and in the vast emptiness of space.

For this reason, Hawking was determined to keep Spencer around. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that they’d struck a chord when talking about ships they’d flown; perhaps it was a character-driven hunch; but more likely it was the simple belief, on Hawking’s part, that a pilot only belonged in one place.

And if he was wrong about Spencer, so what? Every pilot should have that chance to see death coming—and not blink. Let Spencer Fyodorim get himself killed out here one way or another. If Hawking read his past right, he’d earned it.


So, there was one point on which everyone—including Spencer—was in agreement, though no one had put it to words: that if Spencer met with an unfortunate accident testing a ship, it would not bother them much.

The crew saw nothing about him that impressed them much; Hawking saw it all, but respected Spencer’s decision; and Spencer was ready to die—though as of yet no one, not even Hawking, knew why.