Last Flight For Craggy (20 page)

'Good idea. See
you in a few months for another load.'

'Bye, Craggy
and thanks again.
'

* * *

'Hi, Jay. A bit
of a surprise getting a call from you,' said Dillow.

'Craggy told me
you had a problem with a load.'

'I hope that
old goat hasn't been having a go at you.'

'Not at all,'
said Jay. 'But of course I take it personally if my department
causes an accident. I'm so sorry it happened, Fawn.'

'It happened.
We fixed it.'

Another pause.
'But if that pipe had breached the outer wall...'

'Well, it
didn't. Don't worry about it.'

'It's my job to
worry about it. I'm having all the buckles tested before we use
them.'

That had Dillow
thinking. 'Could any more buckles be suspect? I don't fancy having
the ship destroyed because of a few dodgy parts.'

Moore had been
wondering the same thing. 'I can't rule out any more bad buckles.
I'd suggest you spend some time checking them out, but if the
cracks are fine, even microscopic, you probably won't be able to
see them, not without some magnification.'

'I kinda wish
you hadn't said that, Jay. Now I feel like I'm sitting in a ticking
time bomb.'

'Just telling
you how it is, Fawn. Best you're aware of the facts. I'll get back
to you once I've had the engineering report.'

'Thanks. Just
don't beat yourself up over this. It wasn't your fault.'

'I appreciate
you saying that. I'll get right onto the buckle testing. Bye.'

'Bye.' Dillow
sighed. One thing she didn't need was another headache.

Dillow settled
in for the last half of the trip. Craggy had done it again. Yet
another space walk, finding the problem and actually fixing it. And
yet to him, it was just one of those things. If she had simply
accepted the computer check and not done a “Craggy”, she would have
missed it. And Craggy found the problem simply by touching the side
of the ship. How mad was that? But that pipe had done serious
damage. Had it pierced the outer shell...It didn't bear thinking
about. That he had been destined to be a glorified toilet cleaner
was ridiculous.

She smiled at
the idea he was on his way to his lover. Misty was a lucky lady,
having a man like Cragg. She should be so lucky. But she had been
lucky in love, once upon a time. As Big Bird hummed along, she had
time to reflect on times long ago.

He was Security
Sergeant Hank Dale. One of her father's officers. It had been her
father's fortieth birthday. There was a special celebration for the
man nicknamed Armour Dillow.

She had been a
couple of months off her eighteenth birthday. Naturally, there had
been no alcohol. But that didn't stop a good time. Her dad had dug
out some old farts music. It was a wild, manic sound that surfaced
after the war of seventy seven. It represented what was supposed to
be the rebirth of Earth. It wasn't.

Hank was
wearing something called a Hawaiian shirt which shouldn't have been
allowed out in daylight. He was twenty two. Not regulation
handsome. But the cocky smile and the way he was always laughing,
cracking painfully bad jokes, did something to her. There was only
one problem. Armour Dillow.

Widowed fathers
were always overprotective of their daughters. Few boys ever had
anything to do with her. A father who stood over seven feet tall in
his helmet, who could kill a man with a single blow and was deadly
with any type of weapon, tended to keep potential suitors at a very
long arms length. Multiply that fear by a hundred for a father who
was also Space Security Commander and that Hank had actually asked
her to dance was impressive enough.

It turned out
her father wasn't the ogre everybody thought he was. He hadn't been
blind to the way other teenage girls had dates while his own
daughter never did. He had never tried to look intimidating
whenever a boy had shown any interest, but even smiling and saying
hi was enough to have them running for the hills.

Lance Dillow
liked Hank. Not just as one of his officers, but as a man. They
shared the same humour of bad jokes. He trusted Hank. They had seen
action where their lives were on the line. So when Hank actually
stayed around and love blossomed, Lance kept a discrete distance,
but with a naturally fatherly eye. Her father had told her if he
was ever going to like a boyfriend of hers, she couldn't go far
wrong with a Space Security Officer.

And he'd been
right. Nearly three wonderful years. She was in ship maintenance,
Hank was dealing with crime, on Moon and around it. They had
discussed things like living together, maybe even a baby sometime
in the future. Hank was kind, romantic and affectionate. Between
keeping Moon moving and safe, they spent all other hours
together.

Moon was still
very much under the control of Earth. Things were pretty bad on
Earth. The wars had created strange situations on the planet. The
West had a prisoner of war camp, as did the East. The trouble was,
the West stopped feeding their prisoners. It could have had
something to do with the top politicians who having caused the wars
whilst keeping themselves safe, had planned a one way trip to
Moon.

The four huge
ships were jamb packed with them, the ships being built for that
very reason, years before the Hydrogen War. It had no doubt been
something of a surprise to them when several hundred starving
prisoners stormed the ships prior to take off. Many politicians had
their careers suddenly terminated that day.

The pilots,
actually fairly indifferent to politicians in general, were only
too happy to take off for a new life on Moon. And had it happened
years later, the outcome would have been much different. The Earth
demanded the apprehension of those violent criminals the moment
they landed. Moon had no authority to ignore the commands from the
governing planet.

Nobody
understood quite what happened that day the four ships had landed
on the Moon. The prisoners, from many different countries, had
pleaded their plight, telling of how they had been locked up to
starve to death.

The Moon
Commander of the time had offered the prisoners a fair hearing and
a promise to be dealt with fairly, providing they came out without
weapons. This had been accepted. The Space Security officers were
heavily outnumbered but didn't expect trouble from prisoners
seeking amnesty. Perhaps hunger had snapped a few minds. Three
crazed prisoners came out all guns blazing, and the officers
reacted. Other prisoners, thinking the officers had fired first,
also came out shooting. Three officers died, including Hank. Her
father had ordered his officers to retreat and he finally persuaded
the prisoners to lay down their weapons if the officers did the
same. No more on either side died that day.

It had been
just a regrettable and in hindsight, preventable tragedy. The
doctors confirmed during the medical examinations that some of the
prisoners may have had their mental faculties affected by
starvation. Earth went quiet. Moon stopped listening. Those
prisoners became free and solid citizens of Moon. The ships were
used for making more useful ships, where trips back to Earth became
less of a priority.

Dillow had been
inconsolable for a month. No one was ever buried on Moon. All were
cremated, and traditionally, their ashes were added to the grey
sand of Moon, to become a part of the whole. The three officers
were cremated with full service honours, and their colleagues in
full black armour, stepped slowly as the ashes were taken outside
to what was known as Moon Ash Hill, and Fawn Dillow had been
allowed to cast Hank's ashes to mix with the sand. She used to go
there sometimes, and she would pick up a handful of sand and throw
it down the hill, which had become another tradition.

Dillow's
thoughts returned to the ship. The face of Hank faded. An
oppressive loneliness enveloped her, drowning her, crushing
her.

'Ship. There
had better be a man out there for me somewhere. The poor shmuck has
no idea what he's in for.'

'Okay. I want
to see that pod finished before the shifts over,' said Engineering
supervisor Luke Landers to one of his team. 'Oh, Jay. What can I do
for you?'

'I think we may
have an equipment issue.' Moore passed Landers a typical buckle.
'One of these fractured on Captain Dillow's ship. A pipe got loose
and breached the internal wall.'

'Damn. Is she
okay?'

'Yes. Thanks to
Craggy. Luke. I'm not loading another thing on that ship unless I
know the buckles are safe.'

'Fair enough.
You want these tested?'

'Right away,
please. Luke. I'm worried about Dillow. What if there are more bad
buckles?'

'This becomes
priority,' said Landers, waving the buckle. 'How many have you
got?'

'Not in use, a
little over four hundred.'

'Jeez. Okay.
Get your people to bring them over to the engineering workshop.
I'll get the technicians onto it right away.'

'Thanks, Luke.
On my way.'

Two weeks out
from Mars, Dillow had decided to stay with the convoy, rather than
use the ship's extra speed to reach the red planet sooner. The
incident had unsettled her and she took comfort in having two other
ships on her tail. The others made a point of contacting Dillow
regularly, just to chat and keep her spirits high. Rocky said
perhaps some modification could allow for a crew of two.

Dillow had
replied that anything delaying the relocation project wasn't an
option. Rocky even offered to be the one to take the ship on her
return trip to Moon, feeling the hot glare from Amethyst at such a
suggestion. She had been relieved when Dillow had declined the
offer. To have their flying island of love for just the two of them
was something special the other teenagers would be rightly envious
of. She wasn't about to give that up if she didn't have to.

On Cragg's
freighter, the old timer was going over the controls for the
nineteenth time with Morgan.

'Can I take the
blindfold off, Sir?'

'No. You almost
had it that time. One more go. Gently. I don't want any switches
accidentally triggered.'

Morgan took a
deep breath and slid his fingers across the controls. 'Left
thruster. Right thruster. Landing thrusters.'

'Correct.'

'Speed control
slide. Thruster balance regulator. Air regulator. Temperature
control. Computer systems check. Radio controls...'

Morgan scored
one hundred percent on control identification.

'Well done.
Now, if for any reason you lost lights in here, you could still
work the controls.'

Morgan proudly
removed the blindfold. 'Is that how you learnt?'

'Not really.
Unlike you, I didn't have such an enlightened teacher. I had
Freight Captain William Croxford. Big Billy he was known as. The
trouble with Billy was he didn't like rookies messing with the
controls. I mean, come on. How else is a rookie to learn? All I was
good for was all the dirty and menial jobs. I could only mess when
he was snoring his head off in his pit. The old codger went and had
a heart attack. Pretty much just dropped dead.'

'Jeez. What did
you do?'

'I managed to
get him in his suit to keep the stink in. But that left me on my
own to get the freighter home. To do that, I had to learn the
controls damn fast. I hadn't a clue what I was doing. I ended up on
a heading that would have me crashing into Venus. I focused on
those damn controls, figured it out, and got the old bus turned
around and heading for home.'

'Wow.' Morgan
picked up the blindfold and put it on. 'One more time, hey?'

'Good man,'
said Cragg, grinning.

Tim Reynolds,
chief engineering technician stepped aside. 'Take a look through
the magnifier.'

Jay Moore
looked at the offending article. 'I see a luminous line. Is that a
crack?'

'Yes. The
luminous ink penetrates the cracks making them more visible. It
would be impossible to see them with the naked eye. There isn't
much depth to the cracks either. Just a surface crack. But the
tension applied during loading is enough to open it right up. I
have done a tensile test and it failed miserably, well below
specification.'

'We work to a
specified tension. Webbing and buckles are designed to exceed that
tension by three times.'

'It's a faulty
batch. See this number stamped on it? B79xIA. That is for a batch
of twenty, a rubbish delivery from Earth. I tell you, I reckon the
less we have from those cowboys, the better. All the buckles with
different batch numbers have been tested okay. I've found fourteen
with this batch number having the same cracks.'

'My God. Where
are the other six?'

'You don't have
more buckles?'

'No. They are
all here. It could be the other six were used on Dillow's ship. We
know at least one was.'

Reynolds stared
at the fourteen faulty buckles. 'I think you have some damage
control to do.'

'Bloody great,'
said Moore, hurrying away.

* * *

Dillow took the
call. 'Jay. Nice to hear from you again.'

'You might not
feel the same way when you have heard the news.'

Dillow closed
her eyes, mentally preparing. 'Go on.'

'We have
identified the batch of dodgy buckles.'

'That's a good
thing, right?'

'Sort of. But
we can't account for six of them. Fawn. It's possible they are all
on your ship.'

That was hard
to swallow. 'One's already broken. There could still be five
somewhere.' She multiplied the damage caused by the wayward pipe
five times. That could wreck the ship and threaten her life.