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.