Chewing Rocks (10 page)

Sno toggled open comms calling on the
contract ship’s specific frequencies and on an open broadcast frequency. “Sedona calling the Blinkin, the Nod or the Winkin: do you read?” At this distance there would not be any time lag in the conversation. If someone was on one of their bridges, they would hear her and respond, but only if her comms were working.

If
Sno lived with her Dad in his condo on Ceres, she would have just checked the power outlets, fuse boxes, and even the lights in her neighbor’s windows to see if all of the power was out. However, on the Sedona this should not have happened. Everything ran on different circuits with different backups running on different power supplies.

She snapped open a panel and saw one lone red light blinking. It was the automatic distress signal
indicator. When the ship shut down, the distress signal was activated automatically and began broadcasting. As it was battery operated, power outages would not affect it.

Other shi
ps had receivers that could not, by law, be shut off. Someone somewhere would get her distress call, but they were not legally required to help as Good Samaritan laws had not reached this part of space.

Sno
snagged her flashlight out of mid air and with a push she left her chair, sailing down the corridor to the engine room. She had spent the last few years living on the Sedona. She knew every handhold, foothold, every brace, grip and clamp needed to move about faster than she could have walked with the gravity working.

The Sedona
had four separate power supplies. There was no way all four would or even could, be shut down at the same time. Yet, none of the four machines were working. They did not normally make noise or even vibrate when they were running, but there wasn’t any power output. She checked the fuel bins; they were all packed to the top with inert scrap rock, with the exception of the charlie unit. It showed a slight decrease in its fuel bin. She had been using the charlie engine on her outbound trip from Ceres and the amount of missing scrap rock appeared normal for such a short trip.

Sno tossed some of the
bravo unit’s fuel into the rock crusher’s chamber. She slammed the door closed on the huge bin. The system was designed to pull apart rock from mined asteroids, breaking them into component matter and then transmit the matter direct to the Whyte Mining warehouses coffers. Put anything in the bin, close the door, close the huge garage-sized hatch in the ships hull, hit the button and the system started to pull anything inside apart at a molecular level.

Only now
, it would not operate on no matter how many times she mashed the transmit button. There was an emergency shut off button at her fingertips. She pushed the button in frustration, but nothing happened.

She took her flashlight and
floated back to the bridge. On the way she stopped by the equipment room and grabbed a screwdriver. She swam up to a panel on the back wall of the bridge, placed the screwdriver in the slot and hit the button. Nothing happened. The powered screwdriver drew its power wirelessly from the engines, just like all powered equipment on the ship. And just like every piece of equipment on the ship, there wasn’t any power to draw.

“Da
g-nab-it,” she cursed at herself. “I am such an idiot. I should have known it draws its power directly from the engines. I guess I have to do this the hard way.”

Sno headed
back to the equipment room, pausing at the galley hatch. She wanted to just toss the offending screwdriver on the galley counter top and put it away later. But if she started doing that there would come a time when she would not be able to find anything on the ship. With a sigh she passed the galley to go to the equipment room and hung the screwdriver on its designated peg. Without looking she knew there wasn’t a manual screwdriver. Why would there be a manual screwdriver when a power driver always worked?

Returning to t
he galley, she grabbed a butter knife and headed back to the bridge. She resisted the urge to rush. She knew life support was off. For that matter everything was off. Rushing around would just get her heart rate up and that would get her breathing up and that would just use more oxygen.

The Sedona was not a big ship as mining vessels
go, but for a crew of three or four it was big enough. For just one person it gave Sno plenty of room to move about. She estimated she had at least a year’s worth of water and food if she rationed it properly. Even with that, the ship’s larders were not even close to full. The Sedona could generate and recycle more with the material already in storage. But without power, all of the recycling systems were off. Besides she would be out of air in thirty-six hours, give or take a breath or two.

She slipped the knife’s edge into a screw slot and twisted. It took her much longer than normal
to loosen and remove the screw because the butter knife was not under power and the blade kept slipping out of the slot. But sooner, rather than later, the panel popped free. Sno placed it beside her, letting it hang in mid-air and turned back to the computer panels. All of the lights were lit. The calendar/clock was ticking along normally. All of the lights that were normally green were still green. The battery back up system was working fine and all computer systems seemed to be on and operating.

“Okay
,” Sno said. “Let’s try a complete reboot.” She hit the power button. One by one the lights blinked out. She counted slowly to fifteen and then turned the computer back on. One by one the lights came back on. The display flashed command after command and the system booted back up.

Sno wondered, “Why boot? It’s a computer
. It is not a foot, so why do we say it boots up?” Then she wondered, of all of the things she had to worry about, why she would wonder about that at time like this. The computer came up, all systems looked normal. She pulled out the keypad, unrolled it, and plugged it in. Typing slowly, one finger at a time, she typed in “QUERY.”

The computer responded, “READY.”

Sno typed “RUN DIAGNOSTICS.”

Immediately the computer responded, “DIAGNO
STICS COMPLETE.” Even the fastest computer could not have run diagnostics on all of the ship’s systems so quickly. The Sedona certainly could not have performed a complete diagnostic is less than a minute.

Sno typed, “DISPLAY POWER OUTPUT FROM
CHARLIE UNIT.”

The computer displayed a graph showing the output from the
charlie unit at one hundred percent.

Sno typed, “
DISPLAY LIFE SUPPORT APPLICATION READOUTS.”

The computer display showed life support functioning at one hundred percent, even the gravity was reading at
one standard Earth gravity.

Sno glanced at the wall panel and her flashlight floating in the air. The Sedona’s computers were reading everything was going working fine, but nothing was.

“Queene Mines!” she spat out. “Those sons-a-mothers sold us defective computer applications and core. The stuff is reading right, but not sending the command data to the systems. I am going to beat that Queene Earther to jelly when I get back…if I get back.”

“Stop
,” she told herself. “I may have been screwed by Queene, but I will only make it worse if I let myself get angry and do something stupid. Getting angry will burn as much oxygen as rushing about. Be calm, think slow, act slowlyer…or slower…more slowly?” She smiled in spite of herself. “I never was much good at grammar, not much call for goodly talking when I chew rocks by myself.

“All right, M
iss Whyte. Dad is right. Let’s try to keep our emotions under control. Think like a princess.”

Sno grabbed the panel
floating next to her, slowly putting it back in place. She glanced out the main bridge viewport toward where the three contract ships were. Of course, she could not see them, but she had been sending messages for hours now. Plus her emergency signal would be screaming at them. If they came to investigate, and left as soon as they got the emergency signal, under minimal power they would not reach her for a couple of hours.

A mining ship could travel at exceedingly fast speeds, up to tens of thousands of miles per hour if given enough time. But they were designed to start slow and build speed as they went. They were not sprinters, but more of a long haul design. The slowest part of any trip was the first or last one thousand kilometers.

Since Sno had plotted the three contract ships at about ten thousand kilometers away, they would be able to reach a high speed getting to her, but they would also have to start slowing down at the midpoint or they would shoot right past her when they got here. That is, assuming they would bother to break off mining operations to come to her aid.

“Lunch first. I think its lunch since I remember eating once since I woke up. So, it can’t be breakfast. What time is it anyway? Maybe it
’s dinner time.”

Sno snapped off the flashlight and found her way to the galley in complete darkness. The flashlight ran on rechargeable batteries, but no telling how long they would last if she ran the light all of the time.
She had to turn it on again in the galley to find a meal.

She took her lunch back to the bridge
, sat in the command chair and snapped on the flashlight to eat lunch. She knew it was lunchtime and not dinner because the meal she selected was clearly labeled a “lunchtime feast for the discerning working woman.” It claimed to have all of the nutrients and vitamins necessary for a hard working career woman, but with just the right amount of calories and carbohydrates to keep her figure trim. It was shelf stable, requiring no refrigeration and it was self heating. The picture on the box showed a career woman in a dress eating at a desk.

Sno snorted. “
As if I am going to wear a dress to work! I don’t care so much about trim and fit; I can’t seem to put on weight even when I want to. There aren’t too many fat rock miners in space. This had better taste good or I’ll…no…” She stopped herself. “There I go again, I was just about to threaten the…” Looking at the bottom of the pack she continued. “The Promise Food Company of India, Indonesia and Brazil, a division of General Consolidated AgriScience. That is just not princess behavior.”

She
slowly chewed her lunch. She smiled and thought, “Not bad, not like Mario’s though. It’s a little chewy, but a nice flavor in a strange sort of way.” She looked at the package again. “What the heck is ‘mandarin orange squid over fettuccini?”

She knew when money got tight, the Whyte Mining Company had a tendency to buy it’s foodstuffs in bulk on the spot market. That sometimes meant
buying whatever was cheapest, even those brands and flavors no one else wanted.

Sno
snapped off the flashlight again. She glanced out the viewport to where the three contract ships should have been. She would not be able to see anything until they were practically on top of the ship, but she could not help but look. She propped her feet up on the main console and tilted her chair back. She tried not to stare out the viewport, but in the dark there wasn’t much else to do.

Sno woke with a start. She was still on the bridge
, leaning back in the chair. She could have been asleep for hours or just seconds. Without power to anything on the bridge she had no way to know how long she had been asleep. She could not even tell by how stiff she felt, because she had fallen asleep in zero gravity.

Even though she was theoretically seated in the chair, she had only lightly strapped herself in
. She had done it more out of habit than requirement. She often slept in her bunk without strapping in or dropping the privacy screen. In zero gravity there were no pressure points to rub or any gravity pulling at her muscles.

She looked out the viewport towards the contract ships, but there still wasn’t any sign of them. Something had
awakened her.

“Maybe I just have to pee.”
She told herself.

She reached up to grab her flashlight. It should have been floating where she left it, but it wasn’t there.

“Excuse me?” she said. “That isn’t right.” She waved her arms around her, but could not find the flashlight. Her movement caused her hair to fly about her head, but instead of just continuing to sway about in the zero gravity, her hair slowly settled into place across her face.

She almost whooped in delight. “
We have air movement! Life support must be back on.”

She felt her way along the console until she reached the wall. She reached down to the air vent and her hand bumped into her flashlight.

“There you are,” she said to the errant flashlight. “You mustn’t run off on Princess Sno.”

She put her hand back down to the air vent to feel the air flow. Her heart stopped. It was
not blowing air. It was drawing it in. She knew the Sedona better than the back of her own hand. It was her home and her workplace. The return vent on the bridge was on the opposite end of the bridge console. This vent should have been blowing air, but it was sucking the air out of the room.

Sno snapped the flashlight on. Sure enough, the ends of her fine red hair were
being drawn toward the vent. She braced her feet on the wall and pushed across the bridge to the opposite wall. She leaned down toward the other vent. It was normally the return air vent, so it was a bit smaller than the other side. The empty lunch packet had been pulled down by the airflow and now completely blocked the vent. Even with the slight sucking of the air it was stuck there.