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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 3.

Chapter Three

Section Leader Ridge had a feeling of déjà vu as he looked up from his digital writing pad at the main table in the crew mess in WorkPod01. Ridge was a slim, wiry man with dark hair, strongly angular facial features, and large inquisitive dark eyes.

Rock music boomed from a speaker on one side, while holographic movies played in two or three corners, one woman lifted weights, another woman slept in a sling mat under an artificial sun-and-wind machine, and two men played chess over a tiny table. The table was littered with digital writing tablets, holographs of loved ones back home on Earth, and a hundred other little personal items that eight long-haul space mariners tended to accumulate around them in their everyday life. Last night had been Asian dinner, and in the middle of the table were piled half-empty food containers that smelled faintly of miso soup, sweet and sour shrimp and beef, eggs tofu garnished with seaweed, sukiyaki, and a dozen other ethnic dishes. Ridge had to admit: the Corporation took good care of the crew's culinary and other personal needs, as best that could be done two billion kilometers from home port on Luna.

Mahaffey, a welding tech 1, belched loudly in a corner. He watched a holographic remake of a Hitchcock suspense film. "Are you looking at that food again?" Mahaffey said in a booming voice. He was a long, slender man of African descent, and Ridge always found it amazing how Mahaffey could be comfortable wrapping himself into a ball in his white composite chair with those long stocking-footed legs protruding.

"I just glanced at the boxes," Ridge said. "Isn't it Lantz's turn to clean house?"

"Guilty as charged," said the athletic redheaded woman who was just then pumping iron in another corner--Lantz, a metallurgy tech 1, which Ridge thought of as a fancy term for welder, although lots of times the welding was delicate micro, nano, and even smaller stuff requiring world class microscopes and tools so small a sneeze would blow one's whole toolkit from here to the asteroids and back.

"It's E.S.P.," Mahaffey declaimed without looking away from his holo. "If anyone even thinks about food, I start getting gas." Mahaffey was a metallurgy tech 1 and as a much a competitor as a colleague of Lantz. Like everyone on board, they were a careful match made by expert Corporate social scientists interested in keeping peace aboard these long hauls. One did this with lots of work, a little play, and no stray emotional crosscurrents except a little vinegary banter.

"I'm still full from last night," Ridge agreed. He flicked his stylus idly around his nose while struggling with the words in a report. Other section leaders he'd known could simply dictate verbally and the tablets output text, but Ridge was too self-conscious about his own writing to let it flow like that. Briefly, he thought about the other sections in the vast ship. What were they doing in WorkPod02? 05? 69? There were something like forty self-contained workstations like their own, each manned by eight technicians capable of handling any emergency or maintenance task whether mechanical, electrical, or biological-or any combination thereof. "Hey, Mahaffey," Ridge said, "don't we have intramurals coming up soon?"

"Yeah, we have a round of volleyball due," the long dark-skinned young man said, folding large hands on a flat stomach. "When we get the large holds on front and stern emptied out on the return trip, we can play baseball in them under the lights, just like home."

Lantz chimed in: "Just like home, but no honey and no kids."

"You're not married," Mahaffey bantered back idly.

Sweat dribbled from Lantz's tightly braided golden-red hair and ran down her plain, healthy, freckled features. "Speak for yourself, Moses. I have one kid and when I get back he'll never have to play alone again."

Ridge chuckled to himself and tried to focus on his work while the others chattered playfully. "Tonight will be Greek night," he reminded them, as if rubbing it in. "Work hard today. Burn off the carbs."

"Cruel master," Lantz jibed. "Who else here besides me pumps iron? Nobody. If I don't do this, I can work all day and still be as wide as I am tall."

"Which is not very," Tomson said. He was a shorter, older dark-skinned biotech, EMT, usually called Doc. He was the best biomedical tech in the service, but Ridge and most of the others thought Tomson had developed a sour streak and should have retired long ago. How many million-dollar jobs did a person need to retire rich, before he or she was too old to enjoy a beach house on the Med or a villa in the Rockies?

"Says who?" Lantz said, stopping to towel her dripping face. She wore black and blue tights under a flowery torso garment. She also wore a white headband and a wide blonde-leather kidney belt.

Tomson grinned from his chess game. "Says a hundred bucks I have in my pocket. You want to bet I can't lose ten pounds faster than you can with all that sweating and puffing?" Tomson's quiet chess partner was Yu, a Bio-Engineer 1 who specialized in servomech wetware but could expertly handle any sort of halfway intelligent motile artificial tool.

Lantz puffed loudly as she hopped to her feet after finishing her sets. "Exhale and you'll lose ten pounds of hot air."

Brenna came out of her module and slapped palms with Lantz. Lantz headed off to the shower, while Brenna took Lantz's place on the exercise complex. Brenna was the tallest of the four women in WorkPod01, towering inches above Lantz, Jerez, and Mughali. The latter, an Electrical and Mechanical Engineer 1 from Mumbai, who was still asleep in her personal module, was despite the name a practicing Hindu with a red dot of kumkum powder on her forehead.

As he watched Brenna walk by, Ridge felt a strange skip in his heart. He felt a special affection for her that he believed she somehow returned, although these things were not supposed to happen. Like every person on the ship, whether in this workpod or any other, Ridge and Brenna had their own loved ones back on Earth or Luna. Ridge was from San Diego, where his wife Dorothy and their two children lived in the sunny seaside community of Imperial Beach. Brenna had a husband, Ricardo, and a little boy and girl, back on Earth in Buenos Aires. She was originally of Cuban-German extraction, having grown up in New England, but had married an Argentine airline pilot and moved to the Villa Santiago de Liniers, Buenos Aires to be a school teacher. Ricardo and she were very much in love. Ricardo came from a wealthy family of building contractors, but they had fallen on hard times. Ricardo and Brenna had decided he should retire from flying and go it from scratch in a new business as a cyber engineer, using his copious college and family connections. They had decided that one four-year haul around the planets would set them up for life. With an extended family including lots of aunts, the hardness on the children would pass and they'd benefit for the rest of their lives. Like most persons on board including Ridge, Brenna communicated daily with her family back home. Ridge's situation was much more straightforward. He'd graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at San Diego, done six years as an Air Force engineering officer, married a Miss San Diego (Dorothy) just out of junior college, and planned to do four full tours before retiring as a wealthy man. This was his third tour. He was in mid-career. Standard practice was to get a year at full pay and half time, usually consulting, which was very cushy, and they'd moved from the more military oriented Imperial Beach to the more upscale Mission Hills overlooking the bay. Despite all that, Ridge felt a chemistry with her (ironic, because as they had kiddingly observed, she was a Chemical Engineer 1) that made them feel exceptionally close, even when they were simply near each other, without even looking at each other or speaking. It was a potentially dangerous matter, and they let a little go a long way, spending very little time directly or alone together. By common practice, a person's single-room room ("cube") was off-limits to all others, so individuals rarely visited each other at such a personal level. Instead, the workpods were spacious and designed to offer optimal elbowroom and the illusion of far more room than there was.

Brenna sat in her stirrups, rowing. She was an attractive woman with rich dark-amber hair and deep blue eyes. She had pleasantly proportioned features that conveyed a delicate balance of strength and softness. She was disciplined, but kind. Ridge watched for a moment as she moved forward and backward in the soft light. Tiny golden hairs glowed on her long pale arms with their wiry upper-arm muscles. Other than being tall, she was generally unremarkable in stature, with smallish breasts and a tendency toward a beanpole straightness rather than much curvature, so he wondered what it was about her that made his heart beat this way, and his thinking grow fuzzy, and his fingers tremble just a bit. She glanced up at him as she rowed, and smiled faintly, with her eyes glowing briefly, deep blue, like a forest pond amid the tangle of her hair. Ridge nodded and turned away, feeling a flush in his cheeks.

A shudder or a creak or the faintest of groans or something passed like a wave through the room. That would be WorkPod01 starting to move on its tracks, heading toward the area where repairs were needed.

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