I, Plumber (Sample)

By DR Montgomery

            “Uhn?”  It’s two in the morning when my line rings.  "Finn here."

            “Finnegan, deary, are you available?”  The woman on the other end is half tobacco rasp, half disapproving mother.  She grates on me – always has, always will.     

I shake off the desire to bash my combination phone/data thingy into oblivion and sit up.  Interfaces like mine are specialized and hard to replace.  Besides, she’s the voice of dispatch.  Which means work.  Which is good, if only because I’d rather not be homeless next month.  The twenty square metres I’m renting is freaking expensive, and if I don’t take her offer I may not get another one. 

“Yeah.”  My mouth tastes like a clogged drain and my grey matter’s a blob sludge, but I still get my meaning across. 

Details follow in a stream so fast I can’t keep up.  All I retain is the when and where:  Topside in thirty.   

I have to hurry.  

I keep a concoction of exotic herbals by my bed for emergencies like this, and slam it back.  The taste alone is enough to get me on my feet.  By the time I stumble into the bathroom I can feel the tingle in my tongue as mucous membranes absorb the juice and my blood starts pumping it into my brain.  It’ll hurt later when I crash out, but right now it’s a wellspring of sweet, sweet energy. 

I hit the lights. 

My apartment barely accommodates a single bed, second hand desk, and small video-screen.  Sum total of my furniture.  I’m obsessive about keeping it clean and uncluttered, although little odds and ends keep creeping in, encroaching on what little room I have.  Stills of family and friends, knickknacks I’ve picked up who knows where and spare gear:  there never seems to be enough shelf space or hooks on the walls. 

I pull a pair of orange coveralls with reflective stripes off its hanger and climb in.  They’re insulated and armored, rated for heavy industrial work and all its inherent hazards.  Rings around the wrists and ankles seal on my boots and gloves and the collar contains a pop-out helmet and re-breather in case things get dicey.  I grab a small utility knife and strap it to my belt.  It’s basically an ornament, technically useless, but I can’t seem to let it go.  My mentor gave it to me when I turned journeyman, so I guess that makes it a badge of honour.   

I grab my kit and head out.  The corridor outside is raw tunnel; whoever owns this particular hole wasn’t big on extras, which is mostly why I live in it.  Originally Barnaby Station was a mine, at least until its namesake got absolutely, ridiculously stinking rich.  Cyrus Barnaby the third was a prospector; staked his claim to one of the rocks in orbit around Big Brown, the local gas giant.  His first shaft hit veins of precious molecules and elements: platinum, gold, silver and copper, among others. 

Lucky man. 

They dried up eventually, so he sunk a dozen new shafts looking for another big strike.  When that didn’t happen he went into real estate, parcelling out little chunks of tunnel to anyone desperate enough to pay for a piece of the action. 

Turns out there were a lot of takers.

Apparently he still runs the place, a silent king of sprawling mines and tunnels and caverns; benevolent ruler to the hundred thousand people who live in them.  Over seventy percent of the population comes from that first wave of buyers.  The rest of us are newcomers: tourists and investors and service providers that keep this little rock greased up and spinning.     

I’m here because a friend of a friend told me shipping traffic and tourism run pretty heavy out this way.  I was eager, so of course I leapt before I looked, and you can guess how that turned out.  Getting here took six months and cost me two years’ indentured service.  Buying tools of the trade added another and every advance I need to make rent tacks on a month.  Journeyman or not, I’m stuck in this hole until my debts are paid.  

Not that it’s completely depressing. 

If my overtime keeps up, I might be able to break even a year ahead of schedule.  In a couple of decades I’ll be able to live someplace with old fashioned gravity.  I have dreams of Edenand Eternity, sister planets with oceans and rivers and forests and mountains, suns that rise and set and breathable atmospheres. 

And weather; God what I’d give for real weather. 

I catch the express tram and zip over to the dock shaft.  The trains are running fast at this hour, although there’s always someone else in the car: a guy heading off to work like me, exhausted couples out too late and skittish kids looking for fun. 

Nothing out of the ordinary. 

I transfer to a vertical line, get off at dock Station and make my way across the plaza to one of the restricted access terminals, dodging tourists and statues and blocky fountains along the way.  I’ve gotten to know most of the security details, and consequently get waved through their scanning field without much of a pat down.  These meatheads have checked my permits enough times to know working me over’s a waste of time. 

Passing through the cordon is a little like getting slapped awake; not so much pain as sudden surprise.  One step you can still hear the murmur of people wandering over colourful mosaics, remarking at the Plaza’s arched ceiling and crystal chandeliers.  The next you’re in a corridor filled with the taste and smell of oil and coolant and hot metal fumes, and all you can feel is the heavy and heady vibrations of heavy industry: drills and hammers and saws blending into the cacophony of welders, crane jockeys and engine tests.  

I love it here.  There’s a physical vitality to the place, hit’s me the second I leave the connecting tunnel and step into the Barnabydocks.  I’ve never seen anything even close to this:   the ceiling’s a kilometre overhead, riveted with massive airlocks.  Ships that range from twenty meter yachts to five hundred meter behemoths sit in berths on the floor and up the walls while ant sized people swarm over everything. 

Looking up is always a trip; there’s something unnatural about people walking on the walls.  Differential gravity makes the transition between surfaces seamless, although I still get a little antsy when I have to go up there.  It’s hard to trust gravity fields when they’re at right angles to each other.  Still, it’s one of the few places trades people gather in any number, people just like me all working, repairing and surviving, sometimes even telling the machines where to go.  It’s loud and massive and everywhere, the one place I’m more or less comfortable.  Too bad I’m not working here today.  

My client’s a cruise-liner called Baakhira, and it’s parked on the surface.  It’s a hell of a lot easier to get into the port service areas from down here; all I need to do is take a lift up.  No need for cavity searches. 

While I wait, I plug into my Tablet and digest the job’s salient points.  Report says there’s a problem with the water supply.  Guests have been complaining about rashes and odours.  No other specifics.  Probably an algae bloom in her water tanks or a couple of backed up pipes, since Liner companies tend to push their maintenance schedules.  The Baakhira came in a little over an hour ago, so I should have a good stretch of time to fix it up before departure.  Barnaby tends to be twenty four hour layover, and the casinos give both crews and passengers a chance to burn off excess energy before battening down for the home stretch.  I’m not much for gambling, since I tend to lose what little I have in a hurry, but even I have to admit there’s a wilder edge to it on a remote station like this. 

The lift lets me off in one of the main staging areas, where cargo trucks and fuel teams wait for their green lights.  Ninety percent of the terminal’s infrastructure is underground, linked to a dozen retractable gates by a network of double bore tunnels and loading ramps.  Once a ship lands the gate raises and extends a split level airlock.  Disembarking passengers are treated to a view of the planetary landscape and starry sky before boarding a tram to customs, all the while oblivious to the work being done underfoot. 

I hitch a ride on mechanized flatbed; the auto-driver drops me within a stone’s throw of the appropriate gate with a few minutes to kill, so I’ve got time to dig up details on the ship itself.  The Baakhirais Abdul-Byeon property, and they scream money.  Its hull is an eggshell build with recessed thruster ports and a lot of windows.  The design maximizes lateral space and maintains very smooth, tapering lines.  That way every cabin gets a nice piece of the view, while the overall effect is just unique enough to be memorable, and just different enough to escape infringement claims from Lukas Sphericals. 

I skip the amenities; don’t really care if the ship’s outfitted with theatres or spas or buffets or whatever.  I’m more interested in her technical specifications, although even those amount to little more than a couple of impressive looking figures.  Mass to thrust ratios and total cubic volume; public information is always useless. 

My alarm beeps. 

Review’s over; time to find my primary contact.  A lieutenant is a little high on the ladder for my kind of work, but I’ll take what I can get.  I see the uniform first:  dress whites with red accents.  Cruise companies still differentiate their uniforms by gender, and hers is designed to accentuate curves and show a little leg, rather than broad shoulders and a muscular chest.  Or whatever stereotypes are popular in the tourist trade these days. 

She’s got a pair of sleek power braces on her legs, and it’s hard not to check them out.  Matt-black supports snap tightly around her thighs, calves and feet and artificial tendons connect her hip chassis to reinforced joints at the knees and ankles.  Definitely not the kind of technology you see anymore:  must be allergic to whatever they use to re-grow nerves and bone in spinal reconstruction.  Anyway they’re impressive as hell.  Her legs are nice too.


To be Continued...