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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 93: Cooper 103
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 286
Dark side landings on Mercury were preferred. The combination of the movement of the planet and the gravity of the sun gave a slight advantage to that. The crew once again strapped down for touchdown.
Brian was not at all certain he wanted to deboard for shore leave. The dark side of Mercury never saw the sun, and the winds in the thin atmosphere were violent as convection from hot air on the hot side rising and spreading toward the dark side as cold air from the dark side rushed in to replace it. Lodotti had radioed ahead for his family to meet him here, but the other Mercurian crewman was a hot side Mercurian, and travel to the cold side would be prohibitive. A few of the other crew were planning to visit the tourist center, a small town with numerous amenities including several drinking establishments and what Brian deduced must be a brothel, but most were staying aboard. He had been with Lodotti on the Venus outing, but the senior sailor was not really friendly to his juniors.
Of course, there was work to do aboard the ship, and one of the benefits of shore leave is it got you out of a lot of the routine maintenance. Brian, though, didn’t mind the labor, most of which was less work than moving cargo, and moving cargo was relatively easy on a planet with such low gravity.
Being one of the first out of the ship to offload cargo, he got a glimpse of the world in its darkness. The combination of the facts that they were entirely in the umbra of the planet and that the atmosphere was so thin that it neither carried sunlight into the night sky nor filtered much starlight made the heavens a field of glowing diamonds; there were also lights all over the ground, marking trails of transport routes and centers of darkside industry. Then the loading area lights lit, and work began.
Barrelmaster was outside under those giant lights held up by huge sturdy posts when he heard a shriek in the distance. Looking that way, he saw a dust cloud rising toward the horizon, reflecting the ground lights in one area, and getting ever closer with every passing moment.
Holding a box about to hand it off to Kark who was standing with him near the exit slide from The Energetic, he nodded his head.
“Weather? Is it a problem?”
“Weather on Mercury can be a real problem. Not as bad as Jupiter or the storms on Neptune’s oceans, but a real rocktosser storm can make the Captain take us up to orbit in a hurry. No, that’s the tri-rail with our shipment to Jupiter.” Kark took the box, and Barrelmaster went for another, ten feet one way and back to Kark who was on the cart and taking the boxes and strapping them down. Kark smiled. “You never lose your curiosity, do you? Right, well, Mercury on the hotside has open pool mines of molten liquid metals with solar mirrors to make them hotter. Lots of the heavier metals, gold, platinum, tungsten, tantalum, iridium, and osmium, are cheap on Mercury and expensive on Jupiter. The iron fission reactor on the train drives the whole thing at a great speed, and the third rail is magnetized to keep the train from flying off when they go around a curve at two hundred miles per hour. It's needed to get through the rough air at the Dayline.”
Brian gaped. He did some gestures at calculations in his head.
“That must require a lot of power.”
“Metals and power from iron fission and solar power and wind power are things Great Mercury is not short on. Now get me another box.” Barrelmaster did as he was bid, and the nuclear-powered train, overbuilt to make it outlandishly sturdy and monstrously heavy, pulled into the port with a screech of brakes that threw sparks in a high and wide wave on both sides that fell down around the uncaring stevedores heading toward the train, and some almost reached The Energetic two hundred feet away. Soon enough he would be like them, he knew. Within the hour, when The Energetic was finished offloading, the second mate chivvied them to reload.
“I know, I know, you just unloaded, and you’d like a break, but every minute the nuclear train is here costs money. I’ll bring back food from the town for all of you tonight.” This brought a cheer, and the slow-walking sailors stumbled into a run. This was harder, as the heavier metals were, well, heavier, but it still was a low gravity planet so it did not bother him that much. The peculiar thing was that although the cargo didn’t weigh much, it had the same mass as it would elsewhere and so required the same force to get it moving.
That night, that is, ship night (this side of the planet was always night), the main lights had been extinguished and there were only a few ground lights providing illumination around the ship. Barrelmaster sat with the rest of the crew on the ground near the ship in two lines facing each other as cooks brought out a thirty foot long stuffed and baked snake from the town. While many others took two or even three servings, he stayed with his one palm-width serving. The internal guts had been removed, and some of the bolder (including both Martians) ate of this separate dish. Inside the snakeskin where the gut used to be were vegetables in a creamy sauce, and around them was a flaky dry pink meat with a slight metallic tang that tasted vaguely of pork.
Cooper thanked the second mate for the evidently fancy dish as the man was walking by after getting up to get some drinks from the table at the end of the lines.
“Oho, I paid for the drinks, but I forgot--Reani, stand up. Our newest crewman doesn’t know why we’re having Mercurian great snake tonight.”
The young Jupiterian, Chief of Fighters, stood. He was well over Cooper’s height, and twice as broad, and his youthful face flashed a shy smile. Gingerly, he pulled his yellow tunic off his massive purple Jupiterian body, and showed to Barrelmaster his back left shoulder.
“I’ve done the Grand Tour.”
Cooper read a tattooed list on the young man’s back. Each of the names and many of the X’s had clearly been done by different hands. The “Mercury X” was clearly fresh, and bleeding purplish-red blood in small drops.
Jupiter XXXXX
Titan XXXX
Ceres XX
Neptune XX
Pluto X
Mars XXXX
Uranus X
Venus XXX
Earth X
Saturn XXXXXXXX
Luna X
Mercury X
“Legally, I’m able to go back home, and run for public office now if I want to. So, we have a big feast now to celebrate. I hope you enjoy.”
“This is the very best snake I’ve ever had,” Cooper said truthfully. “Congratulations.” Everyone clapped, and the bashful giant who was a dread warrior smiled before sitting down again.
Barrelmaster had no intention of getting tattoos and from talking to the others he heard this was mainly a custom among Jupiterians, Titanians, and some Plutonians. For himself, he supposed he could list universes: NagaWorld first of course, William Tell’s Switzerland, Berkeley with its supers, and now here in a world where they did not use radioactive elements for fission but iron instead. For a moment he missed Earth. Yes, sitting here, for a few moments he missed the quiet of his backyard porch and the small green lawn, even if the local water authorities kept cutting how much water one was allowed to use.
A jest by a nearby sailor drew him back from his melancholy rememberings, and he joined in the songs of the sailors, except for the ribald ones. Eating and drinking, singing and joking, the feast wound on with many cheers for the young Jupiterian. Murane told jokes, and even the always tired Captain was persuaded to retell the tale of the Blockade Run of Saturn when he was but a second mate which had earned him enough money to buy The Energetic. Leaning back on his arms, Barrelmaster let the feast digest as he listened, and heard why the Captain was always tired. He had suffered brain damage in the blockade run, and now could not sleep well. Five minutes here and ten minutes there was the nature of his rest. Cooper wondered if it were possible for him to be the agent of God’s healing to the Captain. It was something he would need to consider later.
Glancing around, he saw a few of the sailors had gone to sleep and others were getting seriously sloshed when he noticed a bit of snake skin wobble in a sudden, tiny breeze. For some reason, perhaps the similarity between this and the beginning of the Santa Ana winds, he looked around. The clouds in the distance, obscuring the stars, were scudding rapidly their way, high up; but down low to the ground a cloud of dust reflecting the surface lights approached more slowly.
He tried to find a closeby sailor with some experience, but Lodotti was asleep, and Eng was on the far end of the line, but Zait was dozing three sailors down on his left.
“Zait. Zait!” he called, but nothing happened other than a few looking over his way and returning to rolling the dice in some game with extremely complicated rules. He tried to get up, but his legs had been crossed so long that he was stiff, so he just reached out, grabbed a chunk of snake, and flicked it at Zait. Hoping for a shoulder, he instead managed to hit the Senior Reactor Man over the closed right eye. Someone near him looked at him incredulously. This was something Murane might do, or a few others. The gentle and polite Cooper was either picking a fight, or making a joke, or had gone mad. Their looks at him suggested they thought madness most likely as Zait opened his eyes, and the bit of snake meat fell off his face.
His green face flushed black, and several sailors were yelling ‘whoa’ or ‘fight’, but even as Zait came at him, Cooper was not defending. Instead he was pointing to the horizon. Zait landed on him, his hands going around Cooper’s throat, and squeezing.
So this is how I verse out?
But still, he pointed and did not defend, so that Zait took a half second to glance up. What happened next was even more frightening. All that black fury in his face drained away, like liquid down a sink, and his former green color became faint yellow.
“Captain! Emergency lift now!” Without an apology, Zait leapt up and began staggering to the right and left as he headed toward the ladder. Barrelmaster, rubbing his throat, followed him. Ten other sailors were on their feet, some who had been unconscious a second ago, and all of them were heading to the ladder even if their brains were not fully awake. That meant that some of them ran right over the tops of others still asleep, stepping on the overfilled stomachs of their companions, or kicking over wine bottles. Zait was first up, with Cooper three feet behind at the ladder.
Zait began climbing, and then fell off. Cooper caught him.
“I’m drunk. Get the ship going sailor,” he ordered Cooper who paled, and then scrambled up the ladder as others relieved him of Zait. Not everyone was drunk, he knew. There were always a few who were on duty so they did not imbibe and some who had very high stamina when it came to alcohol. The Saturnian, Gli, had been putting back bottles like they were Coca-cola cans, and was one rung behind him, and Cooper could smell the alcohol on his breath, but a glance down saw the man as steady as iron. But everyone had eaten and goofed off, and gotten tired, and so it was a mess.
Barrelmaster raced into the ship, and in the low gravity of Mercury found himself using microgravity techniques to push himself down the ladders swiftly. Even as he did, he heard the ship thrum like a drum as the wind hit it for one brief quarter-second.
He had to get to the reactor room at the bottom of the ship, or the ship was a goner. The men on board also goners. Perhaps they should have fled to the port’s shelters, but those had been far away, and none of the sailors had thought of anything but ‘save the ship’. Only now as he entered the second cargo bay did he realize that it might have been wiser to do that. The first blast hit the tall, slender ship, and it rocked. Now he knew why the lampposts were so sturdily built. Mercury’s weather was nice, until it wasn’t.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #531: Versers Roam. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
