.001 The Dreams

Rostam Hobbs never told anyone about the dreams.

Not when he’d been on-track to make Chief Engineer of AstroTech’s New Horizon Station before thirty-five. Not when exhaustion had caused miscalculations that nearly froze the entire west residence wing into a block of ice. Not when the President of AstroTech herself had demanded an explanation for his negligence and his direct supervisor, a man he nearly considered a friend, had looked at him with that crushing disappointment.

Not even when they had given him the choice-that-wasn’t-a-choice: resign, or take an assignment on this junk-bucket scout ship to get lost in some godforsaken corner of space.

They knew full well he couldn’t afford to resign.

Ross swiped his hand across the lift’s authorization panel and then scrubbed it over his face as the door obediently opened. He tried to shake off the fatigue as he stepped inside the narrow tube, straightened the shirt of his AstroTech uniform, and checked the shininess of his boots. Then he pushed the button for Engineering Deck.

“Authorization, please,” the computer prompted.

Ross sighed, closed his eyes. “Rostam Jonathan Hobbs. Electrotechnical Manager. Authorization: Charlie, Foxtrot, Tango, X-ray.”

“Authorization accepted.”

The lift slid downwards, and Ross leaned back against the wall. This same routine, every day. He dreamt about it. It and every other mundane, repetitive task of the Electrotechnical Manager. He dreamt about the end of this journey, too, about the planet they hurtled toward.

Dreamt they found it a desert wasteland. A dead end.

All this way for nothing.

He shook his head and pressed his palms into his eyes. No, that won’t happen. It can’t happen. We saw it on the scans. It’s there. It has water, vegetation. And there’s no cosmic events on the horizon. It will be there and it will be fine. There will be land again and real gravity and you can take a few days off. Just get there, Hobbs. Just get there.

Sometimes he took benzoids at bedtime and prayed the drugs would chase the dreams away. Sometimes he didn’t sleep at all, but kept up shots of vitamin B and caffeine and stayed up all night watching old vids and solving math proofs.

But it didn’t really matter anymore, anyway. His shot at Chief Engineer was ruined. They’d never give it to him now, no matter how hard he busted ass.

Goddamned dreams. He wasn’t supposed to dream.

Dreamers were supposed to have been identified and utilized by the time they hit puberty, and he was well past that. Maybe they wouldn’t take him now, given his age, but he didn’t dare chance it. Most people were blissfully unaware that Dreamers even existed. But he worked in Engineering.

He knew everything about Dreamers.

He straightened as the lift door opened and spat him out into the engineering airlock. He passed his palm across the remaining two door panels blocking his entrance and stepped onto the engineering deck proper, then nodded to Gina Holloway, First Engineer and his only subordinate aboard this ship.

“Hey, Ross.”

“Hey, Gina.”

She raked long fingers through shoulder-length red hair, hardly sparing him a glance as she scrolled through engine output readouts. “Rough night?”

He didn’t bother to ask why she’d ask such a question. He already knew why: he looked like shit. Felt like shit, too. Not sleeping properly for weeks would do that to a person. “Not particularly. You?”

She shrugged and leaned back in her chair, spinning her stylus in hypnotic circles on her desk. “Not really. Uneventful. Boring. Like the rest of this trip.”

“Tell me about it.” He took the seat next to her at the main controls, powering up his own workstation. If only his nights could be so boring and uneventful. If only he could get some damn sleep.

He logged into the engine report system and browsed over the output numbers from the night before. What did the Dreamers dream, he wondered? How did they stay asleep so peacefully? Was it simply that ignorance was bliss? That they had no idea of the magnitude of their service—or of the time it involved?

Maybe it was simply the cocktail of drugs fed steadily into their pod’s life support systems that kept them from waking. Maybe no one would notice if he slipped a vial out to his quarters. A little something to let him sleep … sleep without dreams, maybe. Something to keep him from jerking awake every hour with the fear of someone knowing about the pictures he played in his own head.

He scrolled through the colored lines of code, mostly green.

Green was good. Green was a-okay. Green meant he might be seeing Earth again someday.

A few yellows here and there, dips in machine performance he’d have to check out to prevent any unpleasant surprises later. And one red.

He stopped at the red. He didn’t much like red. He’d missed a red once, and it had cost him his ideal career. He scowled at it and jabbed a finger against the screen. “What is this?”

Gina came to lean over his shoulder. She smelled of lavender and vanilla, as always. Such a relaxing smell. It made him want to fall asleep. He wished she wouldn’t stand so close. “Oh yeah, that,” she said. “Not critical. Not worth waking you up in the middle of the night.”

I was awake, anyway. But she didn’t need to know that. He squinted at the readout. “This is, ah … this is saying engine output spiked at 0149 hours.”

“Yeah.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“Not on this ship. At least, not that high.”

“And you didn’t think it was worth calling me down here for that?”

She shrugged again and moved back to her own desk, flopping down in the chair with a grunt. “Nah. It wasn’t nothin’ the engines couldn’t handle. Never came near critical. You needed your beauty sleep.”

“It says engine output went up almost two hundred percent!”

She nodded again.

If this was something The Magellan’s engines could handle so easily, they hadn’t told him about it. But the possibility opened up whole new options for this little venture of theirs. “If the engines can handle this kind of output, why aren’t we running at two hundred percent all the time?” he asked.

Gina sat sideways in her chair to face him. “Because this ain’t a space station. We break down, there’s no one to hear us scream. The engines were built to handle a wide range of output, but run ‘em at two hundred percent, one hundred percent of the time, and they’ll burn out quick. Come on. Surely they told you that in orientation?”

“They said max safety parameter is one hundred and fifty percent.”

“Well, yeah. If they tell you two hundred, you’ll push it to two hundred all the time. They tell you one-fifty, you’ll keep output at true optimum levels and won’t risk frying the propulsion.”

He blinked at her. “Then how can you be so sure two hundred isn’t critical?”

She smiled at him, one of those pitying little smiles the crew had been giving him since he came aboard. As far as they were concerned, a space station—even one as far out from Earth as New Horizon—was equivalent to working planet-side. He was the misfit here, the one who didn’t belong.

“I been running on these AstroTech scout ships my whole life,” she said. “Was born on one, if you can believe it. Sad, but true. I know ‘em better than I know my own mother.”

He snorted incredulously. “Then why haven’t you made Manager yet?”

Her smile widened, and her eyes sparked with a conspiratorial light he didn’t much like. “Because I don’t want to make Manager. Why would I? I love where I’m at. My position is necessary and stable and hard to fuck up. Ambition is risky, Mr. Hobbs.” She stood from her chair and stretched, then patted him on the shoulder as she moved for the airlock door. “But you already know that. Anyway, I’ll see you tonight. Have a good shift.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, swinging back around to face his computer as she exited to hide the glare. “Have a good sleep.”

 

TO BE CONTINUED

ON FEBRUARY 16TH 2016!

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