ripped it out of some other part of the ship. One problem led to another, like a string of dominoes.
To top it all, the dwarf pigs were dying.
Kiyoshi couldn’t understand it. He’d started out with eight of the potbellied porkers. Now he only had four. They’d thriven in the Monster’s garden, rooting happily in their runs. On board the Startractor, they’d grown listless and thin. One had gone lame from walking on the hard decks, and had to be put down. The other three fatalities had all been sudden, inexplicable. The Galapagjin had done post-mortems on the animals before eating them. Their internal organs looked healthy. “Twisted gut,” said the pig experts. “Maybe?”
“Stress,” said Sister Terauchi, the capable young nun who’d taken on a leadership role since their move.
One of the surviving pigs was pregnant. Kiyoshi took to keeping her on the bridge with him. He sat on the floor with her warm bulk across his legs, scratching behind her ears, in the hope that this would make her feel less stressed. She weighed about as much as a human baby, even though her actual mass was close to 70 kilograms.
He’d re-initialized the Startractor’s spin gravity, reluctantly, after the hydroponics experts said a few tenths of a gee would help the plants. Anything to support food production. But it was using reactor power he really couldn’t spare. The ship’s dwindling fuel reserves haunted him. Jun had given them all the He3 pellets he could spare before leaving. Even so, life support power requirements were drawing down the ship’s reserves faster than Kiyoshi would’ve thought possible. 568 people breathed a lot of air, drank a lot of water, and generated a lot of heat that needed dumping. The reactor itself generated heat that also needed dumping, and this crappy truck didn’t have a Ghost to help with that.
He ran some delta-V calculations.
Propellant / fuel reserves, as a percentage of requirements to reach:
Ceres: 67%
Jupiter: 108%
The slow orbit of 99984 Ravilious, relative to the planets, had brought it closer to Jupiter than it had been for decades. Kiyoshi had been to Ganymede a couple of times, picking up tech for the boss-man (such as antimatter generators). Never visited the other Jovian moons. Didn’t want to. He’d been born inside the orbit of Venus, where the sun loomed big in the sky, showering you with free energy. Out here it was too cold and dark.
6 Hebe: 139%
The stupid hub of the Startractor couldn’t grasp that 6 Hebe had been destroyed by the PLAN. The entrepot asteroid was now dust, but it kept popping up in Kiyoshi’s calculations, like the ghost of the carefree life he used to live, when his biggest worry was where to score drugs, rather than keeping 568 people alive.
39 Laetitia: 151%
That was a possibility. 39 Laetitia was a mining industry hub. Big precious metals market. Good Chinese restaurants. But Kiyoshi had been hearing a lot of radio chatter about how refugees from smaller rocks were flooding in, scared of PLAN strikes, eager to shelter behind 39 Laetitia’s Star Force garrison, and the locals were not best pleased by the influx.
The comms screen beeped, letting him know that the Monster had responded to his ping.
Finally! Kiyoshi rolled the pregnant pig off his lap. He confirmed that the hatches and doors were all locked from the inside. He usually surrounded himself with people when he talked to Jun. It did Jun good to see the children’s smiles, and it did the adults good to see Jun’s face on the screen, to know he hadn’t abandoned them. But not tonight. He couldn’t allow anyone else to hear the request he had to make.
He checked himself out in the mirrored cladding of the elevator shaft. His cheekbones stuck out like doorknobs. Was that a gray hair? It was. In fact, it was a whole gang of them. Fortunately, the dim lighting—nighttime settings everywhere except the farm decks, keeping the temps down—made it less obvious. He switched on the
To top it all, the dwarf pigs were dying.
Kiyoshi couldn’t understand it. He’d started out with eight of the potbellied porkers. Now he only had four. They’d thriven in the Monster’s garden, rooting happily in their runs. On board the Startractor, they’d grown listless and thin. One had gone lame from walking on the hard decks, and had to be put down. The other three fatalities had all been sudden, inexplicable. The Galapagjin had done post-mortems on the animals before eating them. Their internal organs looked healthy. “Twisted gut,” said the pig experts. “Maybe?”
“Stress,” said Sister Terauchi, the capable young nun who’d taken on a leadership role since their move.
One of the surviving pigs was pregnant. Kiyoshi took to keeping her on the bridge with him. He sat on the floor with her warm bulk across his legs, scratching behind her ears, in the hope that this would make her feel less stressed. She weighed about as much as a human baby, even though her actual mass was close to 70 kilograms.
He’d re-initialized the Startractor’s spin gravity, reluctantly, after the hydroponics experts said a few tenths of a gee would help the plants. Anything to support food production. But it was using reactor power he really couldn’t spare. The ship’s dwindling fuel reserves haunted him. Jun had given them all the He3 pellets he could spare before leaving. Even so, life support power requirements were drawing down the ship’s reserves faster than Kiyoshi would’ve thought possible. 568 people breathed a lot of air, drank a lot of water, and generated a lot of heat that needed dumping. The reactor itself generated heat that also needed dumping, and this crappy truck didn’t have a Ghost to help with that.
He ran some delta-V calculations.
Propellant / fuel reserves, as a percentage of requirements to reach:
Ceres: 67%
Jupiter: 108%
The slow orbit of 99984 Ravilious, relative to the planets, had brought it closer to Jupiter than it had been for decades. Kiyoshi had been to Ganymede a couple of times, picking up tech for the boss-man (such as antimatter generators). Never visited the other Jovian moons. Didn’t want to. He’d been born inside the orbit of Venus, where the sun loomed big in the sky, showering you with free energy. Out here it was too cold and dark.
6 Hebe: 139%
The stupid hub of the Startractor couldn’t grasp that 6 Hebe had been destroyed by the PLAN. The entrepot asteroid was now dust, but it kept popping up in Kiyoshi’s calculations, like the ghost of the carefree life he used to live, when his biggest worry was where to score drugs, rather than keeping 568 people alive.
39 Laetitia: 151%
That was a possibility. 39 Laetitia was a mining industry hub. Big precious metals market. Good Chinese restaurants. But Kiyoshi had been hearing a lot of radio chatter about how refugees from smaller rocks were flooding in, scared of PLAN strikes, eager to shelter behind 39 Laetitia’s Star Force garrison, and the locals were not best pleased by the influx.
The comms screen beeped, letting him know that the Monster had responded to his ping.
Finally! Kiyoshi rolled the pregnant pig off his lap. He confirmed that the hatches and doors were all locked from the inside. He usually surrounded himself with people when he talked to Jun. It did Jun good to see the children’s smiles, and it did the adults good to see Jun’s face on the screen, to know he hadn’t abandoned them. But not tonight. He couldn’t allow anyone else to hear the request he had to make.
He checked himself out in the mirrored cladding of the elevator shaft. His cheekbones stuck out like doorknobs. Was that a gray hair? It was. In fact, it was a whole gang of them. Fortunately, the dim lighting—nighttime settings everywhere except the farm decks, keeping the temps down—made it less obvious. He switched on the
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