Thank you for reading this short story from Another Scafverse Production, an installment in A Novel Change in the Scafverse.

This is the second draft of CAPTAIN OLIVER LOST HIS DRIVE, the 8,000 word short story that narrates the tale of an incident aboard a Spacefaring Merchant Trading Clipper Ship.  To go right to the story, skip ahead to the title line past the line of asterisks.

If you would like to contribute to a future draft of CAPTAIN OLIVER, the author would love your feedback.  What parts of the story are interesting, and more importantly where does it drag— where did you find your attention drifting from the story?  As you read, what might be unclear if you didn’t know the ending, or once you know the ending?  Did any scene go by too quickly, or any that should just be cut?  What promises did the beginning make to you as a reader, and were those forces developed throughout the middle? Did the story’s end deliver on that promise?  Did you find anyone’s actions “out of character” or otherwise non-sequitur (if x, then not y but z— as in, does not logically follow)?  Are there areas that I tell you about the action, and instead you’d prefer me to dramatize it?  There are a lot of language, grammar and punctuations errors— please let me know when you see one.

{SPOILER ALERT— please read story before highlighting hidden text below} Finally, did I convey the story I intended:  CAPTAIN OLIVER is about a low rank crewman aboard a Merchant Trading SolarClipper Ship in the Modern Fleet (how cool!) who sees Spacefaring life as boring because there are no “high seas” adventures like the ones of the ancient mariners.  Through the direct incompetent ineptitude of his beloved Captain Oliver (a clearly misplaced but devout loyalty), the SolarClipper is compromised in an avoidable but devastating catastrophe in its pursuit of Profits.  The crew unintentionally mutiny in favor of our hapless and unaware narrator, who gives the order to abandon ship to the Deep Dark of space with an extraordinary and perilous plan for “diving” to nearest planet (wow, even cooler!).  Our callow and deluded narrator fails to recognize both his role in and the “adventure” of the sequence of high stake caricatures of the “high seas” that he and the unfit Captain set into motion, and that only he, and the insane Captain, survive.

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CAPTAIN OLIVER LOST HIS DRIVE

2nd Draft, Ver 4, 8185 words

 

Part I.  Captain Oliver’s Problems

They say that with the right set of Tools, a civilization could settle the Galaxy at will.  Well, right now, Captain Oliver is having problems with his particular Tool— or more specifically— he dropped his Black Hole.

Sure, you can argue that he was running things a little too close to the edge, no margin for error, but that is sort of the way that he runs things— you knew that when you signed up for his Crew.  The key to profitable Shares when trading goods is to keep the Ship’s mass as low as possible, and I’m not talking cargo (that can’t be helped) but rather the main mass variable— Fuel.  And of course, when your Fuel is a Black Hole, you run into the tricky little problem that the lower mass a Black Hole gets, the more volatile and explosive it becomes.  Now in the cosmic scale, a Black Hole this size goes out with a tiny bang.  If you are on the ship attached to it, however, when the Black Hole evaporates so do you.  So when ours alarmingly ejected a bullet—a highly energetic knot of gas emitted at one-quarter the speed of light— out of its southern pole, the opposite pole that we were using for propulsion on this passage, Captain Oliver decided that we’d run it close enough.  It was too late to release the Electrostatic Matter Scoop (which accelerated particles into the Ship’s Particle Accelerator)— we needed to manually Re-Mass our Black Hole.

This scarcely used, timely, and expensive, (primarily because we will in all likelihood fail to meet the early delivery bonus deadline, thus taking a loss on the cargo shipment) procedure is fairly simple, and analogous to dropping a rubber ball straight down and catching it on the bounce (on a gravitied world).  In our case, every time the Hole De-Masses below Modern Fleet minimum regulatory parameters and gets run into the Vaporization Margin, we just pull up (well, not too close) to the nearest Star and “free” our Black Hole from its containment cage directly over the Star’s pole.  The mass of the Star attracts the motionless heavy mass of our Black Hole and pulls it into motion— straight down into its mass rich nuclear fusion-y core.  However, at that speed our Black Hole has quite a bit of momentum, and will pass clean through the fiery plasma at the Star’s center, on out to the other side–almost, but not quite, as far out the complete and precise opposite pole as we are on this side.  It does not reach escape velocity; after a motionless moment on that far side, its forward momentum lost, our Black Hole will fall backward, the Star’s mass yanking it back through its Core, inertia and momentum carrying it just shy of its precise and original starting position in the cage on the Ship.  The Ship, having more inertia to overcome than the Black Hole, also falls backward toward the Star on the same, original falling trajectory as the Black Hole, but much, much slower; containment cage wide open like a trap. On its return path from the drop, the Black Hole should reenter its containment cage, the Ship having moved close enough to cover the shortfall in distance from the kinetic energy lost to friction.  A few more drop-and-repeat-passes through the Star in this manner fattens the Hole enough to continue.  We can then lock our Re-Massed Black Hole down, zap it with a cathode-ray-tube ray to re-apply the negative charge and slight angular momentum, get the muons flowing out the Parabolic Reflector Nozzle and be on our way to the Orbital for cargo delivery and hopefully a full Share of the lessened profits.  Although, in this instance, that’s not what happened.

We’ve all heard tales, ghost stories to haze the new Spacers actually, but no one on Captain Oliver’s ship, not even Captain Oliver, has ever directly confronted this situation: we missed the catch. It just hasn’t happened to any Ship in the Modern Fleet in many, many Span.  It’s no great solace that we didn’t miss by much, the Black Hole impacted the cage and careened off at roughly a 90° angle away from the Star.  Ordinarily, the moment the Ship releases the Black Hole to be Re-Massed is terrifying, even Captain Oliver usually appears uneasy to have relinquished proper propulsion, and this time was no exception.  The moment you realize your Ship has actually missed the catch and is drifting not under the Ship’s power but rather under the gravitational influence of the largest massive body in whatever quadrant of space you are in, in this case, the huge spherical ball of hot gas and plasma nuclearly fusing 620 million metric tons of hydrogen each second on the other side of what now seems like a flimsy heat shield, surprisingly isn’t terrifying at all–at that point you no longer worry about anything— at that point you know.

Captain Oliver, the great man, didn’t share our paralyzing fatalism— his disappointment in us, his Crew, was apparent to all though he tried his damnedest to hide it;  his full, open palm was pressed hard into his face with tear-wet fingers spread across brow on his drooping head, body slumped in the Captain’s chair, shoulders shuddering, while the un-faced fist pounded into his thigh like a metronome— slow and steady.  The Crew stared at him dumbly, wide-eyed with slackened color-drained faces, but not me.  I wracked my brain until it realized the crucial piece of information that he saw and we, the Crew, overlooked— the Black Hole and the Ship were on the same side of the Star!  When MASSive Dynamic, Inc. retrofitted ships of the SolarClipper class for the Black Hole Drive, it dreadfully obsoleted the original propulsion system— but did not render it inoperable.  I arguably went well above my Station rank (the great man wisely never promoted Crew, he had a strict policy to hire only the highest paid Officers from rival ships) when I, a newbie deck hand barely of conscription age, admonished the Port AstroNavigator, a highly paid Officer, for failing to carry out Captain Oliver’s obvious unspoken order, Hoist the Solar Sails!

 

Part II. Hoist the Solar Sails!

The bewildered AstroNavigator looked from me, to the still slumped and quivering Captain Oliver, then his starboard-side counterpart, shrugged, and consulted the manual— they’d never flown Solar Sails on a heavyweight interstellar merchant ship.  They fumblingly followed the outlined procedure, keeping the Sails semi-furled to protect against the bashing and erratic Solar Storm gales fueled by constant coronal flares and other prominences this close within a star’s Proximity.  Captain Oliver was going to chase down his Drive!  As we gained distance from the inferno behind us, the AstroNavigator looked to me once more, so I looked to the great man, who now hunched against the Fore ArmorGlass, forehead pressing on an upraised forearm, a lone figure, his penetrating sapphire and bloodshot eyes on the shimmering rainbow iridescence of the Black Hole’s radiation wake.  It was evident to all aboard that Captain Oliver was immersed in the thrill of the hunt— I nodded, and for the second time this trip, an AstroNavigator gave an order that was probably above his Station rank, Full Solar Sails!

Running down a rogue Black Hole into the Deep Dark under the command of a singularly determined Officer, Solar Sails filled and bellowing with a steady stream of charged particles ejected from the upper atmosphere of the colossal Stellar mass to aft, invokes romantic notions of exciting life on the high seas; reminiscent tales of the Great and Ancient Sea Captains like Captain Bligh or Captain Ahab, bent on justice and vengeance, chasing down the enigmatic and ferocious Great White Whale.  That notion is wrong.  The scene aboard our Ship is far more placid than in a real adventure on the high seas.  There is no ocean spray in our faces, no high winds obscuring the shouting from the Navigator or the Lookout in the Crow’s Nest as he points the way toward the Great Beast, no white-knuckled Helmsman staring down the storm, always in danger of tangling his limbs in the lines, no strange dark Whaleman out on the bowsprit with a deadly harpoon at ready, no huge ocean swells threatening to sweep any Crew without lash overboard, no demented sea creature seeking to kill the entire crew save one, and no crazed Captains.  Space is not like that.

In reality, Space is an empty vacuum, and thus quiet against the insulated and protected Ship’s multi-layered pressure hull.  The AstroNavigators algorithm the paths of the Black Hole, our Ship, and every other object we could probablistically encounter within a few Lightseconds’ distance, using the sole interface of Observational Determinism with their main-console-bound Quantronics— no need to point at anything, no need to shout.  The inertial dampeners kick in automatically upon any movement and unless one sees the slight re-orientation of the distant stars through an ArmorGlass porthole here or there, most of the crew wouldn’t be aware of Ship movement without instrument verification— no need to lash oneselves to the deck.  This SolarClipper doesn’t have a bowsprit for an odd Whaleman.  Spacefaring to new and different Orbitals on new and different planets on a Black Hole powered Merchant Trading SolarClipper is boring; space sucks for a deck hand.  Unless we’re at Orbital hauling Cargo in or out of the Holds my job is to witness the great man doling out order after order to Officers.  Watch and learn! he once commanded the Bridge before dressing down an Officer for some transgression; an order I have followed every day since.  Captain Oliver’s reputation precedes him, he’s a great man— everyone agrees that he says so.

 

Part III. Full Speed Ahead!

Even with the well-behaved and steady Solar Winds blowing off this Star, we probably couldn’t make much better than 200 miles per second under Sail power alone. The Black Hole was doing slightly better, so while it wasn’t able to escape our view, the gap between it and us continuously widened. Captain Oliver was intent on recapturing his Drive Mechanism and his quiet stoicism as he lay on the floor by the Fore ArmorGlass spurred all of us on.  But to be fair, what else could we do? Without the Ship’s Black Hole Drive (and Power Plant, for that matter) we were never going anywhere outside this particular solar system again anyway, and who knew if they accepted our ShareCredits here?

In the Deep Dark, normal planetary time convention is inadequate; there is no single star rising and setting around any Ship with regular periodicity.  Spacefarers in the Modern Fleet instead measure the passage of time in Span, Rotes, Shifts and Thirds.  A single Span is 500 Rotes, or about two years.  Rotes are the “day” unit equivalent; each crewman goes through a simple Rotation, Rote for short, of four standard watch Shifts: Coming On, On, Coming Off, Off.  Each Shift is comprised of three three-hours Thirds: First, Middle, Last.  Our Chrono, (the ship’s clock) is synchronized with every other Chrono across the Modern Fleet— all Spacefaring ships throughout the Galaxy are all on identical Shift schedules.  Captain Oliver, however,  doesn’t hold the crew to standard watch shifts—we are to be ready for action at all times.  Many of us just hang out on the Bridge.

Three Rotes later on the Chrono, with the Black Hole nearly out of tracking range, the AstroNavigators algorithmed that our Hole was on a collision course with some unknown large Planet. The news fell across the Ship like a death sentence. The problem, as all the crew knew, was that our Black Hole could glide straight through said planet without losing noticeable speed as it would just consume each and every atom of that Planet it encountered (a fully Massed Black Hole of the proper safe size for propulsion of a loaded Merchant Trading SolarClipper Ship our size would only measures two nanometers in diameter, so our Hole would be about half that).  The solid Ship under sail would have to tack around it, losing valuable distance.  To compound the problem, the Planet itself acted as a huge Solar Wind Shield— casting a huge Solar Wind Shadow on its lee side.  Pursuit of our Black Hole under sole power of Solar Sails was impossible unless we crossed in “front” of the charging Planet to pass it by the on its high side, where the charged particles were less disrupted.  And therein lie the peril: the Ship’s speed is too low to cross without exposing the hull to the Planet’s “bow” shock wave, the standing propagating disturbance that forms when the supersonic plasma flows of solar wind encounter the immense matter displacing magnetosphere of a speeding planet and cannot react or “get out of the way” before it arrives, and gets shoved “forward” and re-routed into the surrounding space on all sides, displacing even more space (think: minnows playing in the 360° bow wake of a nuclear-powered ballistic missile Typhoon Class submarine charging through the Barents Sea).

The Crews’ spirit fell even further, cast under the heavy shadow of despair.  But not that of Captain Oliver, he had a devilish grin on his unshaven face and a twinkle in his squinting bloodshot eyes that said he had a plan.  The Helmsman looked from the great man over to the Port AstroNavigator and shrugged, who in turn looked over to me and pointed at the projected Ship’s path on the monitor and to what appeared to be one more higher gear for the Sails. We shook our heads yes in unison, agreeing to implement the order that will deliver the Ship safely out of reach of the Planet’s bow shock waves, Maxhoist the Sails for Full Speed Ahead for the High-side Tack!

A full Rote later following a 20% improvement in speed, there was a new buzz on the ship–the Black Hole did not pass through the Planet, it got stuck! Each Crew donned a clean Shipsuit (the brownish-grey one-piece mechanic’s-jumpsuit uniforms that all Crew wore while on duty) and found some excuse throughout the next Rote to find themselves with business on the Bridge, hoping to catch a glimpse through the Fore ArmorGlass of the Planet that saved us. To me it appeared as a little bluish sprite of light, as did many planets at this distance.  It would be another Rote, at a minimum, before we got an actual visual of this particular Planet.  The Port AstroNavigator was looking over at me with an ever-increasing frequency, which I found unnerving until it hit me— Captain Oliver was going to be furious that his order had not been carried out yet.  The Ship had too much velocity to stop on the Planet after gaining the necessary extra speed for the high side tack.  With the Black Hole found to be inexplicably lodged in the Planet, of course the call for Full Speed! would be cancelled.  Caught up in the moment, I gave the order, Drop the Solar Sails!

 

Part IV. Drop the Solar Sails!

For a breathless moment, no one on the Bridge reacted except the Port AstroNavigator, who was vigorously shaking his head up and down. Yes! Do it!  Perhaps making that call was also a bit above my Station’s rank, judging from the overall reaction, or lack thereof, of all personnel on the Bridge.  The Helmsman, confused at what to do looked around helplessly, first at the great man, then noticing the encouraging head gestures of the Port AstroNavigator, shrugged, and for the first time in his career, accepted an order given by a non-Officer with zero authority and attempted to execute it.  I say attempted because the mechanism to drop the running rigging failed.  Apparently (according to the manual), “Maxhoist” is not a running mode but rather a maintenance mode used to reseat or replace the clewlines, buntlines, and blocks within the Solar Sails re-haul motors— which burn out under the straining pressure of full cargo and stiff winds when not cleated properly.  With the Ship’s gas pedal stuck mashed to the floor, and us needing to stop, only one thing could terminate our stampede— Cut the Sails and Rigging Loose!  Captain Oliver roused his head from the console long enough to look over at me through those bleary squinting eyes, with what I supposed was unabashed pride.

It didn’t take long, maybe a Third or two, to cut the rigging loose.  The Ship’s Doctor confided in me with a distressed look and furtive glances towards the other Officers that Captain Oliver was starting rumors among the Crew about a primitive, but resource rich trading outpost in this area— the Doctor and the other Officers were concerned about the great man’s state of mind and ability to continue in his current capacity.  But I was thinking about the outpost rumor.  Smart man, I considered, gives the Crew something hopeful on which to hold on.  I myself assumed it was wishful thinking–there was no reason for any outpost to be this far away from any profitable trading route. Besides, if there were such a outpost, they definitely had our black hole drive by now– they would assume the worst and the Drive would be considered Fair Salvage–how were they to know that we would have lost the only truly valuable part of the Ship?  Ordinarily that’s a death sentence this far out.  I’m not sure the great man thought this rumor all the way through— had he considered that by implication we would have to try to buy our own Drive back? I don’t even think we had enough ShareCredits at our disposal to purchase one–which means that we could expect to have to make many runs to pay for our Drive before any profits went to our own Shares. If this were a busy Orbital, many from this crew would try to find berth on another Ship.  The closer we got to the Planet, the more quiet the crew got— each lost in their own decision-making process, although there were no decisions to make.

The AstroNavigators got alarmingly busy, almost frantic in their Observational Determinism.  We had not been under Sail power in over a Rote— with the Sails abandoned and no other means of propulsion we were on a pure ballistic trajectory, much like any asteroid that may pass through this space.  The AstroNavigators, Helmsman, Ship’s Doctor, First Officer and Chief Engineer were huddled in conversation, all of them occasionally glancing at Captain Oliver, then at me.  They nodded in agreement, and all mumbled something I couldn’t hear to each other in unison, each with their right hands piled one over the other on top of a book in the center of their huddle and left arm folded behind their backs. The Ship’s Doctor went to see Captain Oliver, while the Port AstroNavigator called me over and broke the bad news.  The dreaded issue was that the Planet had a moon that was not accounted for by the Quantronic— that moon’s gravity will throw us off course.  I wasn’t sure if that meant that we were now going to miss or hit the Planet or even the Planet’s bow shock wave— the now glowing blue Planet filled the entire right half of the Fore ArmorGlass.  I looked over to the great man, who was now dead asleep, the Ship’s Doctor hovering over him.  When the Doctor stood, he held a large empty bottle of Rum in his hand, swirling it around to show us that it was empty, and shaking his head side to side and holding his nose.  Had the Ship’s Doctor sedated Captain Oliver and strapped him to the Captain’s chair to help him with the stress of the past seven Rotes?  Obviously, the great man had already given them the next set of orders.  What were they?

As the AstroNavigators, Helmsman, Ship Doctor, First Officer and Chief Engineer huddled around me, I deduced that they for some reason thought I had the next set of orders.  Did I?  We were going to clear the blue Planet I determined, but maybe not the moon.  Captain Oliver’s plan came into focus— we must abandon ship.  I could see each of them stealing looks out the Fore ArmorGlass at the Deep Dark, at each other, and back at me to see if I was somehow making a joke— how could it be safer out there was the look plastered across each face?  As I laid out Captain Oliver’s plan in simple steps, they could see that I did not find this funny— only necessary, since the great man had ordered it.  The Chief Engineer and First Officer didn’t hesitate, and went to work securing the items and modifications the great man had requested.  A Third later, the Chief Engineer gave the order, Abandon Ship!

 

Part V. Abandon Ship!

Two more Thirds after that final order I was in the Ship’s external hatch chamber with the Chief Engineer, the First Officer, and a still sedated Captain Oliver, all of us wearing bright white safety suits or life preservers as we Crew called them— high altitude jump suits.  They look like normal suits for Spacewalks, but are reinforced for abnormal lateral stress and streamlined for high altitude rapid descent, and a chute that opens even if the person inside is unconscious— standard and required safety equipment for abandoning a disabled ship in low orbit of a planet.  Captain Oliver masterfully negotiated the purchase of these particular suits at our previous Orbital, selling our Fleet-issued and original ship’s safety suit equipment for almost five times as much— that was pure Profit to the Shares and a great haul for the entire Crew.  It was the Ship’s best profit in five Span and my best ever in my quarter Span aboard.  While the suits were designed for high altitude jumps, say 250,000 feet, they were not designed to withstand the heat from the friction of a jump much higher than about 120,000 if the planet has a thick, multi-layered atmosphere.

The First Officer, standing in the external hatch door, turned slowly and looked at me— panic on his face, the tiniest fracture of a gap between his mask and helmet becoming apparent. In his panic he reacted the wrong way— he took a deep breath like he was about to go under water.  The myth is that humans explode in the vacuum of space. The reality is that this comes from science fiction movies, not real life. Humans in space can survive as long as they fully exhale beforehand. This keeps the lungs from bursting, which would send air into the bloodstream. Without oxygen, however, the person would pass into unconsciousness and die from asphyxiation. Here, we could have just passed him back through the airlock.  This is one reason why space suits are so important: they let us breathe in the vacuum of space.  A failing suit with lungs full of breath was unfortunate for the First Officer— as the seam fully split, all the gases in his body went out of suspension at once, he literally turned into a giant fizzy red soda, oozing fluid from his eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film, not science fiction… It was just seconds until his death.  The Chief Engineer reached over and gave him a good push, setting him spinning off into space and out of our sight.  That was the eighteenth defective suit so far.  I checked my suit, mask and gloves again, not that it mattered, I wouldn’t be able to see the internal microscopic anomalies creating bubbles in the seals and seams that could possibly destroy the integrity of my personal atmosphere.  The Chief Engineer was yelling something at me— he was going to go, and then we would be last, a sedated Captain Oliver and me.

The overall plan itself was simple, if not hazardously doomed for failure— the great man’s plan was nothing if not daring.  At the precise right moment algorithmed by the AstroNavigators, with all Crew and Officers inside the detached heat shield like a raft, we shove hard off the main Ship’s hull with the good intention of catching the gravity well of the blue Planet and getting sucked down toward the surface; too early or too late and we miss the Planet altogether, facing an inescapable death from suffocation or freezing, depending on which life support system in the safety suit gave out first.  Assuming we’re tracking right on target, once the Planet has us in its gravity grasp and has dragged us through its exosphere and thermosphere into its upper mesosphere, the layer where most meteors burn up, the detached heat shield should perform the role of entry-vehicle, dissipating the main friction (read: extreme heat) of the atmosphere when it plays the role of “planet”— its blunt spherical shape forces heat to the surrounding air via its bow shock wave, that friction also acting as an “air brake”, as the same wide, upside-down umbrella-ish shape should slow our free-fall.  When the fiery aura created by forces beyond those associated with the normal thermal processes surrounding the heat shield subsides in the stratosphere, we are to jump over the side and dive for any spot that looked like clear land— speed won’t be a problem, from that height all bodies reach terminal velocity no matter their intentions.  Staying conscious for the six minute, thirty seconds fierce plummet is the penultimate task, as the final task is to pull the chute open before hitting anything solid— at that speed judging distance to the ground will be incredibly difficult— especially if suffering from the misfortune of blacking out from any one of the thousand things that humans who have tried routinely black out from on a long plunge like this.  Should anyone pull through, those survivors will wear the dubious distinction of being the first people in history to exceed supersonic speeds, over 1,000 miles per hour, outside of an aircraft.

Maneuvering from the Ship’s hatch to the free-floating heat shield was precarious— there were dozens of things from the shield’s detachment detritus to rip our suits, the Ship’s Doctor and two others had found three of them, looking like marshmallows on sticks, and a mis-jump would spin us away into the Deep Dark like the First Officer.  The now unattached and floating heat shield that already held fifty of my Crewmates and Officers was over 500 feet away— the kinetic energy of each Crew hitting the shield was transferred to the shield itself in the form of movement of its own away from the ship.  Still shaking from watching another human effervesce, I pushed us off as accurately and as gently as I knew how, as the distance still widens.

I pushed too fast, and slightly off course.  I floated flat, hands out in front of me as if I were swimming, Captain Oliver out in front of me perpendicular like a barbell; from overhead we looked like cheerleaders asking for a “T”.  From this vantage, I saw that diving for clear land on the Planet was almost humorous, (and if I weren’t so frozen from fear— and the cold, I may have laughed out loud); out here and finally getting a good look, the Planet gave the impression that it was almost completely covered in water (so that’s what made it appear so blue!)…  I imagined the horror of somehow actually making it to the surface of this Planet only to drown once the life support systems ran out under water, but then cleared my head of that thought— we were closing in on the shield.

They had a system:  one crewman would lean over the side of the shield to catch incoming crewman— there would be a crewman at each leg, and two more at each legman.  Seemed a pretty secure way to manage the process, so I gently pushed Captain Oliver to the catchman.  Funny thing about space, every action has an equal and opposite reaction— when I pushed the great man toward the crewman, it pushed me toward the underside, or wrong side, of the heat shield— the catchman scrambled to get the great man to a legman; when he leaned back down for me, we missed each other!  I found myself under the lustrous golden mirrorlike spherical part of the heat shield moving fairly rapidly across its bottom.  With nothing in space to counteract any more of my motions, I was unable to turn over to reach up, not that there was anything to grab on the worn, smooth surface anyway, and seeing my own panicked face in its reflection would have caused me to panic in earnest.  As it was, I could barely even see the shield through the very top of my mask, and then I couldn’t see it at all.

The refracted light in my periphery had changed; I must be clear through the far side of the shield.  I started the debate against myself with whether this was a fate worse than death, of course my rebuttal was that either way, missing the shield was death— so the real question I avoided by acting out a mock debate in my head was whether I had the guts to just open my helmet and end it, or was I going to wait for Space to take care of me?  My forward momentum stopped with a jerk and I hit my head on the “ceiling” of my helmet, interrupting my conversation with myself, and for some reason unknown to me I drifted back a slight bit.  Cautiously looking back, I saw not one, but two crewmen linked hand to boot like a ladder, with the closer crewman, the Port AstroNavigator, having my right boot-heel pinched between the puffy thumb and trigger finger of his bright white-gloved hand.  Twisting a little bit further I could see that two other crewmen had the further crewman by the boots, one of the bootmen I recognized as the Helmsman, the other in Mess, and the two of them reeled our entire human chain in like a fishing net, finally depositing me flopping on the correct side of the shield that from this side looked a lot more like an inverted grey metal trash can lid than a big, smooth, golden egg.

It was my duty to Captain Oliver in his strapped-to-the-deck, sedated, and otherwise incapacitated state, to stand, actually stand upright— for that’s what the great man would have done— and give one final sharp salute to our Ship, which was now nearly 750 feet away and backdropped by the Deep Dark and a dusting of bright stars; the rest of the Crew huddled as close to the heat shield as possible, grabbing on to whatever handhold they could find.  As I stood there hand to brow honoring our Ship from a distance, it brought to mind that step two of Captain Oliver’s plan involved a hard shove off that same Ship, so I sought out the Chief Engineer.  Some of the crewmen had been busy securing a length of wire (probably graphene) to multiple points on the heat shield. The Chief Engineer was holding the Black Hole Drive’s parabolic nozzle steady while one of the engineering staff was securing the unsecured end of the length of wire to the business end of that nozzle. I wasn’t sure how this was supposed to work, (the Ship seemed a bit too far to lasso), until I saw something else attached inside the nozzle at the focal point: our nuclear Containment Device.

Every transport ship in the Modern Fleet has an nCD that the Crew, or far, far more likely the Modern Fleet Administration or a planet’s Space Authority, can detonate to avert one of two typical types of disasters— either a hazardous, planet-life-threatening cargo that should, but could not be, Quarantined, or more frequently, a “dead-in-the-space” ship that was algorithmed by a planet’s Space Authority to be on a collision trajectory with one of its major population centers or Orbital; it was generally considered preferential to lose the ship, cargo, and crew rather than kill all the citizens of a planet en masse.  Besides, the ensuing blast, while vaporizing the ship and every Crew, cargo and atom on board, will have no effect (aside from adding some mass) on the valuable Black Hole Drive and Thrust system, which can always be collected by MASSive Dynamics, Inc., Re-Massed, and re-issued/ re-sold later depending on the leasing arrangements.

The Chief Engineer was talking to a particularly large, strange, and muscular fellow that I hadn’t seen before on his staff, pantomiming a throwing motion.  The big guy nodded, and began to swing his arm around slowly like a windmill or a clockhand, stretching out his lats and shoulder.  He and the Chief scurried over to where the AstroNavigators were indicating and gesticulating wildly with arms extended out toward an area left and just above the blue Planet, fingers rapidly pointing as if repeatedly ringing an imaginary doorbell.  If there were gravity out here in the Deep Dark, I expect that they would also have been jumping up and down and we may have even heard their shouts— they indicated a target that he needed to hit now.  Muscles, appearing even taller in his present company, looked down one more time at the Chief, then the AstroNavigators, eyes following their body language out to where they both were vigorously pointing, (it is good to have some fail-safe redundancy in these life or death situations, even I made sure they were both pointing to the same spot).  He hoisted the nozzle above his shoulder, stepped clear of the coiled length of wire, braced his front foot under a metal strut for support, shifted his weight to his back foot, reached back and heaved the nozzle with a quick and decisive forward movement of his outstretched arm, releasing the payload like a spear which flew true— nozzle with trailing wire tracking the target.

Collectively, we held our breath until we received the better advice to hang on for dear life, for that’s what it was, I suppose; the Chief Engineer would detonate the explosive, (and in the process acquire the honor of “First Officer of a Ship to Detonate Their Own nCD Intentionally”), once the wire was taut for optimal transfer of energy.  We had to wait for nearly half a Third for all the wire to unspool, which felt more like an entire Span.  The far end was well out of visual range and the wire still had not reached its fully stretched length; when it did, it was unlikely that the mass of the nozzle itself was enough to even register against the mass of the Crew-loaded heat shield, so the Chief held a section of wire loosely in his hand like an old fisherman waiting for his dinner to bite.  The Chief felt the slight tug at the end of the wire, gave the three finger, two finger, one finger countdown and squeezed the remote detonator lodged in his other hand.

Flash!  Poof!

The blazing blue-white flare of the nCD device erupting brightly in the far distance unleashed the atom destructing energy of nuclear fission within the nozzle, ejecting the resulting gamma rays through its only means of escape, and as the equal and opposite reaction launched the Parabolic Reflector Nozzle like a Kinetic Missile away from the center of the blast toward the blue Planet, (and thus also the attached wire).  White ghostly shadows were burned into my retinas— like having my head grabbed and twisted up, broken toothpicks propping the lids open, forced to look into the sun— I could only see the negative image of the explosion where I looked and had to blink it out; without the protection of the tinted mask I’d be blind.   At our end of the tether, the entire heat shield heaved to on the blast shock swell like the Pequod rammed from underneath by the Abhorred White Whale–several crewmen were expelled spinning into space, including the Chief Engineer who, with both hands busy failed to hold on. The force of the unrestrained nozzle acceleration against the massive inertia of the shield was greater than the tensile strength of the wire— it pulled thin and failed, the severed edge recoiling like a snapped whip faster than any of us could see, although we could see the several severed crewmen bodies that it tore through, entrails of what I suspected was once the Helmsman suspended in space around us.  The upshot was that Captain Oliver’s second step more or less worked— the quick pre-snap pull-force of the wire on the newly lessened mass of the Heat Shield achieved positive inertia away from the dead ship’s empty hull and crewmen entrails, vaguely in the direction of the blue Planet.

 

Part VI. Adrift

At our current speed it would be a full Rote or longer before reaching the Planet’s gravity well— the only near-term choice of activities for a crewman was whether to lay back and rest up with eyes closed, or just commence agonizing over the horrifying, enduring trials to which we were about to subject ourselves.  Hercules had it easy.  I chose to lie back like Captain Oliver and wondered whether he also felt vulnerable out here clinging to the deck drifting in the swirling, rippling currents of space.  Two more Thirds after being set adrift, the crew got nervous and fidgety— the collective vibrations traveling through the shield’s deck roused my curiosity.  Peering over the edge for a progress check, I wished that I hadn’t— our trajectory was diverging with that of the Planet.

I laid back down and from that moment avoided moving, it seemed prudent to conserve oxygen, and must have either dozed off or hibernated in the cold, because continual excited vibrations woke me nearly a Shift later.  Shaking off the few-hundred-degrees-below-zero chill, I peeked over the edge once more, a tidal wave of relief washed over my soul— our trajectory was now converging with that of the blue Planet–we were in its embrace.  Too excited and sore (my teeth hurt from chattering in the shivering cold) to try to sleep anymore, I regarded Captain Oliver; I imagined had a great grin on his face, but there was no way to confirm— I couldn’t see a thing through the bright blue reflection of the Planet that filled his mask.

 

Part VII. Falling

In crossing the threshold from space to atmosphere, terrifying does not come close to describing the feeling of falling faster, and faster, and faster, and so on until you are about to puke up your lower intestine while the out-of-control huge disk of scrap metal you’ve been using as a life raft metamorphoses into a gigantic fire ball hurtling toward an even more gigantic water ball.  It’s been noiselessly mute since stepping out the hatch— absolutely silent for so long that the thunderous uproar reverberating around my thrashing helmet hurts my disoriented brain.  I watched crewmen, after crewmen, after crewmen, and so on who had not lashed themselves to the deck get sucked out by the vacuum and turbulence created on this side of the shield, or thrown out by the tempestuous and raging waves of gaseous atmosphere on the other.  After an eternity in hell the inferno simmered, then extinguished.  My teeth hurt even worse— they apparently chattered the same way whether shivering from cold or fear.

Since no one else in the shield was moving, I un-lashed myself, bracing against the buffeting wind that threatened to sweep me overboard and sprang to implement Captain Oliver’s third step: helping those that were conscious jump over the side, and those that weren’t I simply picked up and tossed them over, relying on the suit’s altimeter trigger to fire their chutes.  With no Crew or Officers left in the shield, it was time for Captain Oliver and me to leave its safety.  I un-lashed the great man from the deck, he sat up slowly and either saluted the shield, or grabbed his head, it was tough to tell with the helmet surrounding his head; he then made his way unsteadily to his feet.  It was time to go— the shield was wobbling side to side in greater, and greater librations.  A tsunami of turbulence from below violently rocked the shield to a precarious angle— before I could react— the great man stumbled across the deck, grabbed me by the shoulders, lodged his shoulder in my chest, and shoved me out of the shield along with himself, much in the manner you expect a superhero to save someone just standing in the tracks from getting pureed by a speeding locomotive; the shield completely flipping over and over and over like a wood chipper behind us, the smooth golden side strobing in the sun.

We tumbled relatively close to one another, the occasional clicks of our helmets bumping together a constant reminder that Captain Oliver was there.  I could finally see inside his facemask, almost— there was a brownish-green slime-like film covering the entire inside of the facemask, the purpose of which I may never know.  His eyes were closed and slack mouth hung open, perhaps I caught him mid prayer or mid chant for his fallen crew or ship.  Our tumbling stopped, our descent stabilized, and with head down and arms tucked at side I could feel the rapid acceleration toward the now gargantuan blue water ball in front of us.  After a few minutes of trying to maintain myself as straight as a board so as not to create any drag and fall behind (well, above) the great man, the dropping sensation was replaced by one of sheer and peaceful weightlessness— terminal velocity.  I felt rather than heard my first low boom!, stole a glance over at Captain Oliver and saw the glint of sunlight that reflected off his helmet, and a cloudy diamond shaped shock wave cone appeared around his waist like a skirt, accompanied by a more explosive boom— we’ve just broken the sound barrier.  He wasn’t looking at me, though, or either of our shock wave cones— his randomly wobbling head appeared to be scanning a frantic, circular search pattern the ground, probably looking for good place to land. He looked so relaxed.  As I turned to look for clear plot of ground where I could land, I felt another, then another, then another concussive blast of my own sonic boom; the now gyrating terra firma advanced at literal breakneck velocity, the planet went fuzzy, my eyes started to water, I grasped at my ripcord, missed, grasped again— and then everything went black.

 

Part VIII. A Real Adventure

I awoke somewhat refreshed, blue sky above me, warm breeze across my sweaty face but hot, oh so hot. I looked down at my body and to my shock I was wearing a life preserver.  What the??  For some reason, my first thought was of the AstroNavigators conferring with Captain Oliver.  The events of the past eight Rotes fell into place all at once and my conscious mind nearly exploded; inexplicably I began to cry, which after a few moments morphed into a blubbery snot-filled laugh. I’m alive? Pulling myself together and dragging my suit sleeve across my nose, I stood and surveyed my surroundings while gathering in the canopy of my scarlet parachute, stopping said survey on a pile of at least two dozen bodies in safety suits that had been stacked in the shade of a immense tree by the pond at the base of the dusty windswept hill I was standing on.  Beyond that the landscape as far as I could see was littered with safety suits, bodies and body parts.  There were no telltale signs of parachute canopies— all those suits had failed.  I could detect no other movement in that direction.  As I sought higher ground to continue my survey, a surge of adrenaline coursed through my veins and my heart pumped in my throat— down the cliff to the left there was an impressive body of deep blue water with rhythmic, lapping waves that extended all the way to the horizon for 180°.  Real adventures existed out there; spray in the face, drawing a salty breath every moment of your life— your exciting life— on the high seas.  I could see at least a dozen more unmoving, un-parachuted safety suits bobbing facedown in the waves; it appears the suits do float.  I looked for Schooners and whales of any color until I noticed the sun was a lot lower in the sky than when I started looking.  Seeing nothing else in the water, I completed my survey of the land, circling halfway around to face uphill toward the top of the cliff and a rocky outcropping that wasn’t visible from my original position, my breath caught on a sharp intake— there, against the odds, was another survivor!

I ran awkwardly up the hill, still in my safety suit, which was clearly not designed for running.  When I got close enough, I pulled up short to gawk: he had fashioned himself some kind of robe and hood (like a monk), fabricated from a length of his ripped red parachute canopy, the support lines wrapped around his waist like a corded belt.  There was a wreath of leaves and flowers braided into his hair like a tiara, and what looked like runes and ancient symbols drawn on his arms, chest and legs, in what looked like mud, and probably blood.  His face was completely smeared with a handprint of blood, but I don’t think it was his blood, or even his hand judging from the angle.  He still wore the safety suit boots, which came up to his mid-calf.  I caught a glimpse of a puffy thumb and trigger finger of a bright white-gloved hand over the cliff’s edge, so I went to investigate hoping for yet another survivor and recognized the Port AstroNavigator.

“Don’t bother”, Captain Oliver called out behind me.  “They are all dead.  All of them.”

I looked back at the AstroNavigator— no movement, no ‘chute— the Captain was correct.

“That pattern of particulate flowing in the atmosphere is unusual,” he called out not turning to look at me, red finger from a red hand oddly pointing toward a grayish cloud on the horizon, the base of which I thought I caught a glint of gold.  Then I realized that it was not his red finger— his mud-rune decorated arm that stretched out from under the carbon-fiber-based-kevlar robe held in its grasp another human arm severed at the elbow; he was using it as a pointer.  “I’ll bet that smoke is from the Outpost,” the red finger jabbing in the direction of the cloud on each syllable for emphasis.

He turned to look not at me, but beyond me to the carnage under and beyond the tree once more, his steely gaze raked across the setting, falling on me last.  Softening he said, “Judging from that suit, you are one of mine.  Consider this your promotion.  You might as well pick your favorite Station rank and Division— you’re the only Crew I’ve got, for now.”

As he scanned particulates on the horizon once more, robes glowing with a translucent ruddy burn, sunlight flowers leaves and hair flowing over the hood hanging limply down his back, he looked like a grand, ungodly, God-like man on that rocky outcropping, helmet under one foot.  I started to strip myself of the safety suit so I could make my own robed Shipsuit.  Before I could even unfasten the first latch, the great man barked the order, “Let’s go find the Outpost, men— and get my drive!”

And with that Captain Oliver handed me the spare arm and set off down the other side of the rocky outcropping toward the source of the particulates, glimmering robes flowing out behind him.  And I, a newbie deck hand barely of conscription age promoted to First Chief Astro Officer by the great man himself, stumbled down the hill after him sweating in my life preserver, unable to shake the siren’s call of the seductive sea.  Enough of the doldrums of the Deep Dark, it was time to live a real adventure.

“Sir, can you sail?” I called out after Captain Oliver, the greatest great man I had ever known.

 

*          *          *          *          *          *

 

Thank you for reading this short story from Another Scafverse Production.  If you like what you’ve read, tell the author, or better yet, tell a friend.  CAPTAIN OLIVER LOST HIS DRIVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

This is the second draft of the short story CAPTAIN OLIVER LOST HIS DRIVE.  If you would like to contribute to a future draft of CAPTAIN OLIVER, the author would love your feedback.  What parts of the story are interesting, and more importantly where does it drag— where did you find your attention drifting from the story?  As you read, what might be unclear if you didn’t know the ending, or now that you know the ending?  Did any scene go by too quickly, or any that should just be cut?  What promises did the beginning make to you as a reader, and were those forces developed throughout the middle? Did the story’s end deliver on that promise?  Did you find anyone’s actions “out of character” or otherwise non-sequitur (if x, then not y but z— as in, does not logically follow)?  Are there areas that I tell you about the action, and instead you’d prefer me to dramatize it?  There are a lot of language, grammar and punctuations errors— please let me know when you see one.

{SPOILER ALERT— highlight text to read} Finally, did I convey the story I intended:  CAPTAIN OLIVER is about a low rank crewman aboard a Merchant Trading SolarClipper Ship in the Modern Fleet (how cool!) who sees Spacefaring life as boring because there are no “high seas” adventures like the ones of the ancient mariners.  Through the direct incompetent ineptitude of his beloved Captain Oliver (a clearly misplaced but devout loyalty), the SolarClipper is compromised in an avoidable but devastating catastrophe in its pursuit of Profits.  The crew unintentionally mutiny in favor of our hapless and unaware narrator, who gives the order to abandon ship to the Deep Dark of space with an extraordinary and perilous plan for “diving” to nearest planet (wow, even cooler!).  Our callow and deluded narrator fails to recognize both his role in and the “adventure” of the sequence of high stake caricatures of the “high seas” that he and the unfit Captain set into motion, and that only he, and the insane Captain, survive.

 

Note to reader: (inaccuracies in the science portrayed)  For the sake of plot in this short story, I took many liberties with the science portrayed, namely 1) A black hole used for propulsion would be roughly the same mass as the ship it was propelling— thus the ship and the black hole would “fall” into the star at the same rate;  2) by implication only, the words used to describe the “firing up” of the black hole drive actually come from separate theories on how a black hole drive would function;  3) A black hole with the mass of a mountain is smaller than a hydrogen atom; 4) the role of Earth’s “bow wake”; 5) the re-entry shield; 6) and of course, the console bound Quantronic.

 

CAPTAIN OLIVER LOST HIS DRIVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.