Four
Four days later – Caliban
Caliban’s system consisted of five planets – one tiny cinder near the sun, the inhabited ocean world itself, and three Jupiter-sized gas giants. The twisted, distorted gravitational fields of the three giant planets interacting with the star made navigation tricky for anyone coming in across the plane of the system’s ecliptic, as the Shade Tree was, but they couldn’t afford to maneuver for a better orbital path – time was too short.
“Past the innermost giant’s gravity well now,” Paolo Guerra reported. “Ready to shut the drive down.”
“Stand by.” Indira Krishnavarna had a crushing headache – one of the early signs of Bayer’s Plague. Well over half the crew was showing some symptoms now.
“Speed down to two hundred thousand kph,”
Krishnavarna tapped a contact. “All ready down there in the shuttle?”
“Ready here,” second watch helmsman Sean Weaver called back; he had drawn the straw to pilot the shuttle to the surface. “Captain, Gomp, McNeal and Doc Dodd are strapped down in back.”
“All right.”
“One hundred eighty thousand kph.”
“Shut down the drive,” the XO ordered. Paolo Guerra tapped several contacts. Below the deck, the mass tunnel of the Gellar drive fell silent. The ship was coasting, with no drive signature to alert Caliban Ground Control or the Skyhook that there was a ship in the area.
“Sixteen minutes to optimal launch point,” Giorg Constantine called from the navigation station.
The minutes ticked by like hours. Finally, Constantine spoke up again: “Launch point!”
Indira Krishnavarna hit the contact on the command chair again. “Sean,” she called, “Launch now-now-now.”
“On our way.” There was a slight shudder as the shuttle’s ion drive lit up, kicking it free of the ship.
The XO breathed a sigh of relief. “Are we still on course?”
“As before. We’ll arc into a decent high orbit, assuming nothing hits us, without using the main drive. We can adjust as necessary with maneuvering thrusters.”
“Very well.”
Beneath and behind the Shade Tree, the ship’s small landing shuttle dropped into Caliban’s atmosphere, extended its wings, and began the hammering drop to the surface.
“Hang on,” Weaver called back into the passenger compartment, “I’m going down fast, but that’s gonna be rough.”
In the back of the shuttle, Jean Barrett was preoccupied being sicker than she’d ever known possible. Her face was mottled with bruises, her lungs clogged with thick phlegm, her throat raw from a racking cough. The fever wracked her entire body with pain, making her feel as though she’d been beaten with an iron bar. Across from her, Hector Gomp huddled in his bucket seat, the burly ex-Marine almost doubled over in pain. Tim McNeal was even worse; slumped in his seat, semi-conscious. Only the doctor seemed alert, and she was coughing, too; her constant care for the three worst cases had taken their toll.
“Ten minutes,” Weaver called out. His head hurt, and he had fought a nagging cough for a day now. It was night over the Capital Archipelago; they had passed over Caliban’s one city, Capital, a few minutes earlier. He flipped on the shuttle’s navigation and landing lights, and picked up the radio mike, dialing the set into the frequency McNeal had given him.
“ViraTech Research,” he called the lab directly, since they controlled the island and its tiny landing field, “This is the Shade Tree shuttle, we are nine minutes out with the ship’s doctor, captain and two crew, all symptomatic. Request emergency landing procedures.”
A cool, calm voice came back immediately. “Roger that, Shade Tree shuttle. You are cleared for emergency approach on Landing Pad Three. Pad is the only one lit up. An emergency medical isolation team is waiting for you on the pad.”
Several kilometers ahead, Weaver saw a tiny square of light. The landing field.
“I have visual contact,” he called back. “We are now seven minutes out.”
Six minutes and forty-eight seconds later, the shuttle settled to the tarmac in front of a brightly lit hangar. Sean Weaver popped the hatch open to see several figures in environmental suits.
One of the figures pointed at the others. “Get the patients over to Isolation Two stat,” its voice boomed out over an amplification circuit. “Someone get this shuttle out of sight – get a tractor, get it in the hangar and close the door. Full decontamination on the shuttle – scrub it clean, UV and chemical. Move, people!”
In the shuttle, Doctor Janice Dodd listened, and smiled. They were still alive – and there was a doctor out there, one who sounded like he knew what she was about.
Maybe, she thought, just maybe we’ll live through this after all.
Hector Gomp and Tim McNeal had lost consciousness on the rough descent. Two medics loaded them on gurneys, and floated them away towards the laboratory. Jean Barrett, Doctor Dodd and Sean Weaver were led away by another enviro-suited figure.
In the laboratory, Doctor Katrin McNeal waited, all of her staff on alert, all computers, gene-sequencers and protein replicators running.
“Gene,” she told one of the techs, “I want blood drawn from each of them the moment we get them in isolation. Di, Jules, start isolating the virus immediately for analysis.”
“Doctor McNeal,” someone said, “we haven’t tested any of this, not even on mice.”
“I know that. Just do what I say,” the doctor snapped. “We’re just going to have to move our first clinical trials up a little bit.”
Out of the frying pan, she told herself, and into the fire. Needs must when there are lives to save – and if we can reverse Bayer’s Plague… The implications, the possibility that they may be able to cure viral diseases, were staggering to think of.
I sure hope this works.
***
The next day
Jean Barrett woke slowly. Her head ached cruelly, and her body still hurt, but she didn’t feel feverish any more.
A face hovered over her. She squinted, trying to make her eyes work. Reluctantly, they focused on a face that was somehow strangely familiar.
The face wasn’t masked. The half-seen form beneath the face wore only a white lab coat, no enviro-suit.
“Captain Barrett?” the face asked.
Jean finally recognized her; the woman looked like Tim McNeal, her Security troop. “Mmm,” she mumbled. “Doctor McNeal, I presume?” A weak smile.
“That’s me,” the face smiled back.
“What happened? Where are my crew?”
“Look to your right.”
Barrett turned her head slowly, painfully, and strained her eyes to focus. Hector Gomp lay in the next bed, grinning broadly at his Captain.
“Morning, Cap’n,” he said, and lapsed into a bout of coughing. “Great day to be alive, eh?”
“Yeah,” Barrett answered. “Where’s Tim?”
“Over here to my right,” Gomp said, “Sleeping like a baby.”
“I take it we’re going to live?”
“You’re going to live,” Doctor McNeal said. “Your Doctor Dodd is up and on her feet already – she wasn’t as sick as you and the other two. She’s helping administer our HKAV to the rest of your crew.”
“Aitch-kav?” Barrett asked.
“Hunter-Killer Anti-Virus,” Doctor McNeal answered. “A neat trick we only just figured out. A nano-machine, a bit of RNA with a protein sheath, like a virus, but programmed to find a specific virus and bind to it, effectively killing it. We were able to develop an HKAV specific to the plague virus from samples of your blood; you and the others got a massive dose. You’re clean, Captain; you just need to rest for a few days while your body recovers from the damage the virus did.”
“My ship?”
“Your XO and your Chief of Engineering are supervising decontamination as we speak, Captain. You had the worst case; well, you and Gomp. Any idea why? Were you more directly exposed?”
“We actually saw two of the bodies. Nobody else was near them, just near us.”
“So, you two were the index cases for your ship, and probably spread it from there – everyone else was secondary. If you hadn’t been directly exposed, the disease may have taken another two or three days to show up.”
And we would have been at or near Halifax by then. The thought was enough to make Barrett’s headache worse. Baxter was planning on that.
Barrett relaxed. She was still very tired. There was still one more thing…
“Gomp,” she called out.
“Cap’n?”
“Philemon Baxter. He tried to fuck us over, didn’t he? He had to know that the Orlando was infected. That’s why he sent us out after it, instead of his own people.”
“Can’t see any other way ‘round it, Cap’n.”
“When we’re up and around again…”
“Yeah, Cap’n?”
“It’s going to be payback time.”
Gomp grinned. “You betcher ass, Cap’n.”
“Thought you’d like that,” Barrett murmured, even as she faded off to sleep.
***
The Grugell frigate K-110
Six days –Grugell Standard Days, rather than the one-third longer Confederate Standard Days – had passed while the K-110 carefully backtracked from the assigned rendezvous point towards the mining colony at Adamstown. Finally, Group Commander Kestakrickell IV had found what he was looking for. Following a page from the frigate’s commander, he swept onto the ship’s bridge and demanded an update.
“You were right to order a backtrack towards the mining colony, Group Commander. It’s definitely a debris field,” Commander Chiksteskattitk II reported from the frigate’s Scanning station, where he stood looking over the technician’s shoulder. “Evaluate as wreckage from a Confederate cruiser, probably surplus from the war as there are no traces of any weapons in the wreckage. There are bodies in the debris field – the ship’s crew was destroyed as well.”
“What destroyed it?”
“Either an internal explosion – unlikely, that, like our own ships the Confederates build multiple redundant safeguards against such a thing – or an anti-ship missile.”
“This is the Orlando,” Kestakrickell announced. “The ship that has been delivering our diamonds. That was a converted cruiser.”
“That seems more than likely,” Chiksteskattitk agreed.
“Who would have destroyed an unarmed ship in the middle of this belt?”
“The Confederacy has a growing problem with piracy,” Chiksteskattitk said. “But given that message we received from the Confederate Baxter…”
“He ordered this done,” Kestakrickell concluded.
“It seems the only logical conclusion, Group Commander.”
“It is as I said it would be,” Kestakrickell mused. “It is a plot almost worthy of a Grugell, isn’t it? Baxter obviously had some intelligence of a diamond shipment coming across the border, and dispatched a ship to steal it – and he proposes to sell it to us at a discount, knowing that even so he will reap a greater profit than in the mineral-rich worlds of the Confederacy, and that he will have to explain to no one where the diamonds came from. Brilliant man, this Baxter; I would enjoy meeting him in person.”
“Perhaps that chance will come one day, Group Commander.”
“Perhaps.” The Group Commander stood silently for a moment, thinking. “We would seem to have the luxury of time; take us to the mining station. I believe I will harass Bolin over the loss of this shipment, and demand a second at a considerable discount. That will take some time, during which we can go to the rendezvous and pick up the first shipment.”
“Brilliant,” Chiksteskattitk fawned.
“Have your helmsman plot out the course to the mining station and from there to the designated rendezvous point. Baxter will no doubt contact us soon to explain what the delay in shipment is all about – and, while we wait, we will do some scheming of our own. Since Baxter has obviously stolen this shipment, what better price for his crime than to have the shipment stolen from him in turn, is it not so?”
Chiksteskattitk laughed. “It is indeed so, Group Commander.”
“This Baxter,” Kestakrickell smiled cruelly, “will have to learn to scheme some better schemes.”
stolen from him in turn
ever-green: criminals are the best targets
Scheme a little scheme for me?
Stars shining bright around you
Plague breezes seem to whisper “I kill you”
Alarms singin’ in the weapons free
Scheme a little scheme of me…
[wild applause]
You know who else rushed clinical trials?
The school nurse ?
Josef Mengela?
Baxter is just a mysterious name so far, right? Hasn’t actually been introduced?
He appeared in one of the segments.
Nope, he showed up last episode.
Too much scheming. Bolin poisons the ship to mess with Baxter and the Cape Fortune, knowing nothing of the Shade Tree and unworried about the Grugell. Baxter then knows the Orlando was contaminated and lets Shade Tree step into it and they’re blaming him instead of Bolin.
Sounds like the start of a Guy Ritchie flick.
some happy news
Man who stole and leaked Trump tax records sentenced to 5 years in prison
The man who stole and leaked former President Donald Trump and thousands of other’s tax records has been sentenced to five years in prison.
In October, Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosures of income tax returns. According to his plea agreement, he stole Trump’s tax returns along with the tax data of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” while working for a consulting firm with contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.
Littlejohn leaked the information to two news outlets and deleted the documents from his IRS-assigned laptop before returning it and covered the rest of his digital tracks by deleting places where he initially stored the information.
Littlejohn. Awesome.
Will he cut a deal and sell out Loxley?
OMB pays off a mistress — gets sliced into 19 different charges.
IRS dude steals thousands of people’s info — all consolidated into one charge.
The judge bitched about that.
He did it to save Democracy! He deserves to be awarded a medal! Not locked up! #DicksOutForLittlejohn!
Plot twists. I love them. Thanks Animal!
As always Animal, thanks for the stories. Liking this one.
Seconded.
I am enjoying this story line.
WRT to NotAdahn in the ded thred:
“fetterlumpery” is a word Im going to use in a sentence at least 3X this week.
Not sure how.
“The brouhaha over the border is so much fetterlumpery.”
“Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species – if separate species we be – for its reserve of fetterlumpian horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
My new word: Tupperwherethefuckisthelid.
Great stuff, Animal! I always look forward to Monday’s mid-day posting.
Generic and simplistic libertarian theory time:
Scenario 1: There are two policies, A and B, that are both libertarian. Any true libertarian supports both A&B happening. However, some argue that A without B would be worse than the current situation without either. And A is much more likely to be enacted than B. So these libertarians oppose A. To me, this is a utilitarian calculation, and while I disagree, it might even be true. But fuck utilitarianism. Getting either one is a moral win.
Dont let the perfect be the enemy of good.
Scenario 2: There are two policies, C and D, that are proposed solutions to the same problem. C is libertarianish, but not completely. D is full on libertarian. C is much more likely to happen than D, but D is getting discussed. It may be outside the Overton Window, but actual elected politicians are considering it. With enough pressure and time, D could become the solution, if not everywhere, but in a mix of US states, where some choose C and others choose D. Instead C is adopted nation-wide and D withers and dies.
Dont let the good by the enemy of perfect.
Your real world application of Scenario 1 is that A is going to be coupled with NB, and will be increasing NB to the same degree that A is implemented. So you’ll get not the perfect being the enemy of the good, but the terrible overwhelming the good.
Like I said, that is a utilitarian calculation, and fuck utilitarianism.
Like it or not, the world is utilitarian.
Kant would disagree.
Utilitarianism is the Land Value Tax, isn’t it?
Tee Hee.
The SLT no. Property ownership yes.
I agree with both Mises and George that there is no natural law right to property ownership, but its a useful fiction.
(Mises didnt think there is natural law at all, I disagree)
Once we agree that there is no right to property ownership, then issuing deeds is utilitarian. Taxing the rents makes it less so. Having the taxes going to the state instead of distributed to everyone would also be, but I aint an anarchist.
Oh, you’re sufficiently unrealistic to be one.
“…there is no natural law right to property ownership…”
I disagree to this extent – One has a natural right to free association. Two parties freely associating may form contracts.
Land ownership is a contract (association) between the landowner and everyone else. Landowner pays an up front price for the land and recurring payments thereafter (taxes) with the contract specifying everyone else stays off of the land. If property ownership is not a natural right (I disagree) then it is a direct outgrowth of a natural right.
How are you using the word “worse” if you’re not being comparative?
Im not “some” argue its worse, not me.
NB?
Would need to know how serious problems were, risk/reward odds,etc.
Only if you are doing utilitarian calculations.
Seems like kind of a cheap dodge honestly. Even if you’re strictly deontological, NB is bad. And if you can’t have A without NB, then your justification for evaluating A in isolation is gone.
But we already have NB. So getting A is an improvement in one area. And I think NB is unsustainable, although it might last longer than I will be alive.
And like my C/D scenario, maybe if we had A, it would put pressure to get B or at least a B’ in the direction of B.
Today in Missing the Point
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
Deplorables are mentally defective.
I’d be worried if Moonbat didn’t think I was defective.
“Some psychologists believe….” was a good stopping point for me.
The ones opposing him so vehemently are the ones with psychological issues.
I think any one of us could explain the “continued rise of Donald Trump”, and we’d be done before we finished our beer.
Seems to me that most prominent Dems and their celebrity synchofants are extrinsics too, pretending to be not.
It’s always projection, isn’t it?
George, borderline personality disorder much?
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people
We call these people “politicians”.
Never enough
the ship is roughly five times the size of Titanic and has a maximum passenger capacity of 7,600.
It cost $2 billion to build, measures nearly 1,200 feet (365 meters) from bow to stern, and weighs 250,800 metric tons.
At a briefing earlier in the month, Royal Caribbean Group CEO Jason Liberty described the Icon of the Seas as the “biggest, baddest ship on the planet.”
The launch of the giant floating resort has sparked renewed concerns about the environmental impact of cruise tourism.
The ship is built to run on liquified natural gas, which burns more cleanly than other conventional marine fuels but contains high levels of methane.
Methane is about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that methane emissions must be dramatically reduced to avoid the worst of what the climate crisis has in store.
“It’s a step in the wrong direction,” Bryan Comer, director of the Marine Program at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), was quoted by Reuters as saying.
Stay home, scratching in the dirt for subsistence. That’s what they want for you.
ps- You’d never get me on that thing.
I booked it already. The high level of methane will make it impossible for people to find my own personal source of methane which I emit after an evening of drink specials.
Also fuck the Greenies. If it makes them angry, I’ll do it. Maybe I’ll get to see Shpip there.
In the event of something catastrophic, how quickly do they think that can get 8K people off the ship?
Im making an assumption for number of crew.
well, they can all go into the water pretty quickly . . . . . .
She has 20 decks total.
Thats a long way down….
Oh, and a crew of 2,350 (according to their website)
I guess that should be 2,349 if the captain always goes down with the ship.
Not always so.
Turn it upside down and dump them out.
*Ernest Borgnine nods*
Now you’ve done it. Some folks will be wearing their life jackets all the time on board.
“If it saves just one life” it should be mandatory
“Methane is about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide”
Back to coal boilers it is.
The only vessel that should carry the elite across the ocean should be rowed by galley slaves.
Isn’t the methane burned as the energy source? If so, saying it is more potent than CO2 is irrelevant, because it isn’t emitted to the atmosphere in the form of methane but rather as CO2.
1) leakage
2) inefficient combustion
my guesses
leakage because there is no such thing as perfect transfer of fuel
What time tomorrow is the new site going up? Does it go up at midnight central, or mid day?
Asking for a friend.
It’s not up already? I thought that’s how the FNGs were coming in?
Swiss indicated Tuesday is the day of the new site. Opening for new people might not have been related. I was told to expect a rain of dogs and cats plus the potential of changes for contributors.
I should cast the horoscope for tomorrow.
Great idea. “Emergency Site Update Horoscope”
As an aside, I assume the update will break Eyepiece.
Assuming the site update doesn’t make Eyepiece unnecessary I’ll take a crack at updating it, though I’m in no way a front-end guy (I’m all about the back-end) and my cycles are limited.
If anyone wants to contribute, speak up – I’m certain Trashy would welcome new collaborators.
What time tomorrow is the new site going up?
No matter how slow or flaky my internet is, this site works (presumably because it’s clean and simple). Should I expect that to go bye-bye?
Microsoft is not in charge of the update.
The important thing is that we can still get the Cal score even if our internet is down.
In the event of something catastrophic, how quickly do they think that can get 8K people off the ship?
Im making an assumption for number of crew.
What are you talking about? that boat is impervious to any hazard.
Hmmm…
Some would say that I’m a back-end expert.
Back to Animal’s story: Was it the people? Or are the diamonds covered with the virus? Hmmmmm……