Milo

The spinach based pasta sauce had a great blend of salt and bitterness. Gorgonzola made the dish amazing. But not perfect, not yet. Milo wondered how excellent it would taste with real from-Earth ingredients as he swallowed another spoonful. Savoury and full of texture. His mouth watered. Milo could not recall Earth, but he remembered how dad detailed it: green fields and blue skies. Real, live animals. The lab grown stuff would never be as good as the real thing. Never. But where would he be able to find a goat and how would he ever keep it in his small apartment?

Milo put the dirty dishes into the small dishwasher, which he could reach from his even smaller dinner table. The dishwasher grunted along as it started to clean its content. Dinner finished, the single stove cooled off, dishing ongoing and coffee brewer prepared for the morning. The fantasy book dad had leant him lay beside the brewer so he would not forget it the next time they met. A Robin Hobb book was always a real treat. He fell into his bed, which stood almost a whole two steps away from his dinner table. Talk about luxury living. But he lived alone. So many in Europe13 shared living spaces. Maybe he should try to save up to a nicer apartment with a fully equipped kitchen? The dream.

A space city never slept. Time cycles were a bit finicky without a real sun. You could not define night and day, you just had to sleep when you did not work. Weekends were a blessing of relief. Without proper night cycles someone was always on the move. Weird sounds. Ventilation fans spinning. Carts speeding along their tubes from one end of the city to the other.

He never slept well, even if you could remove all the noise, the city’s smell would never go away. The nicer apartment complexes in the inner rings would of course not smell, but here where the middle class lived the tangy smell of sweat and waste could never be cleaned by the outdated filters and aged hydroponics plants.

He finally fell asleep, eventually dreaming of dogs herding a flock of disobedient goats across a green hill.

But sleep didn’t last long. Milo woke up and gasped for air in the dark apartment. Everything tingled, his body trembled and soaked in sweat. He sat up and looked at his opened hands. The tension needed to be let out or else sleep would never find him. With a frown he tried to will the tension out, through his hands. The tingling sensation varied as he closed and opened his hands repeatedly. Brief sparks of electricity jumped between his fingers. He wiped his mouth. Had he eaten something sweet before going to bed? Back in bed he tried to sleep anyway.

The next day he woke up late. Yet again. He grabbed the grey coverall from the chair it hung on, but before he stepped into it, he stopped. With the press of a button a section of wall turned into a mirror. The fat gut had not magically vanished during the night. He placed a hand on it and thought, like all the previous days, that maybe he should do something about it. Had it grown fatter? He did not dare weigh himself because he very much knew the truth already: a thirty-six year old with almost thirty kilos above the average. He sighed and jumped into the coverall, the zipper struggled across his gut, and filled his travel mug with coffee before leaving for work. Two sugar cubes made two splashes. The scent of newly brewed coffee felt like a warm, cozy hug. The apartment’s door slid closed behind him and locked automatically with a distinct click.

The carts were suspended in midair inside metallic tubes which traversed to different parts of the giant city. “Railgun tubes”, the people called them. The technology was practically the same as the one used in the real railgun weapon: magnetism. A human body would be crushed under the immense pressure which the munition is launched at. But humanity finally conquered the long standing issue with inertia. This led to all sorts of breakthroughs in science and especially with the expansion into space. And now he conquered inertia commuting to work. Wild. He gulped from his travel mug.

Milo chose one of twelve seats in the cigar shaped cart and strapped in. There were no windows or any means to look outside the cart. The relative motion of moving at such extreme speeds was sickening. A lot of puking had to be done by test passengers before someone cracked the idea to skip windows in the hull design. With the lack of any visual reference points of the outside and the dampened inertia, Milo couldn’t feel when the cart was launched forward at over five kilometers per second.

One point three seconds of travel time. He had traveled to the outer rings of an adjacent quadrant. Heavy industry had to be located at the rim of the city to avoid hazards. For obvious reasons you could not build the massive dreadnoughts inside the city and having the shipyard close to the actual construction site was time efficient. The walk from the railgun tubes was a short one and the corridors were filled with people in differently colored overalls carrying all kinds of equipment with them. Everyone was going at their own individual pace with specific destinations in mind.

Milo’s hand terminal chirped in his overall’s front pocket. He pulled out the thin metal sheet and answered the call by pressing his thumb on the green circle that was on the terminal’s display. “Captain Samuels” the display said. A black man with a sharp jawline appeared on the screen.

“Good day, Milo!” Sam greeted him.

Milo caught his breath before replying. “Hi, Sam!”

“I need you to take a look at the electronics for the Final Sight’s railgun. Not enough juice is transferred from the reactor,” Sam explained while scratching his bald head.

Milo sighed. The captain was a friend, but an issue like this would take time to troubleshoot and he would have to do it during his free time. Sam could not captain an underperforming corvette so the issue had to be dealt with today.

“Can’t the Navy fix Navy problems?” Milo asked.

“My mechanical engineer could possibly fix it, but she is off duty for a few days. You know that I do not want that douchebag Anderson touching my ship. I will pay you handsomely,” Sam explained. “Why the dock master hired the man I cannot understand. They must be family.”

Milo could not say no to a friend. Helping each other out was one of the basic rules. “Of course I will help. I will be there after work.”

“Excellent. I should hire you,” Sam said. “Then I would never have to deal with Anderson again and you would be paid directly from the Navy coffers. Talent is paid plenty.”

“I am not interested in dying young,” Milo said. “Those corvettes are tin cans ready to be peeled open by nukes.”

Sam looked down. “Alright. You are damn stubborn sometimes, friend. Luxuries of life. This pay would he...”

Milo severed the call before Sam could finish and pocketed the hand terminal. “Don’t you tempt me,” he muttered.

Corvette class starships were fast and well-armed with an emphasis on small and vulnerable. Redundancy meant nothing if the hull had been vaporised. It would be a quick death, but a death all the same. Intended to hunt down pirate ships or protect heavier ships from close range fire, the corvettes had their use. Going into Navy engagements in a tin can like that didn’t sound promising for his life expectancy. So, no.

“Hi, Linda!” Milo said as he entered the shipyard’s reception.

The cute receptionist smiled at him. “Be safe out there!”

She looked away and typed something into her hand terminal. Maybe one day he would ask her out. But not with this fat gut.

Since he ran late the locker rooms were empty. His vacuum suit stood like a person at ease with the exception of it being hollow and made out of metal. But a real person could not stand so perfectly still. Milo placed his hand on the back of the suit. The suit produced a brief hum before seams grew out from the place his hand touched. Light seeped out from the seams as the suit powered up and the segments folded back on themselves revealing its hollow interior. Milo stepped inside and felt a pressure against his fat gut, but the suit adapted its size to fit him and the pressure released. The segments folded closed behind him and merged together, encompassing him completely in its protective metal. A holographic display popped into existence in front of his eyes with icons, suit readouts and information windows. A systems check cleared oxygen levels, motor muscles, motion receptors, suit integrity and other critical functions. As he moved his own limbs the motion receptors picked up the action and the motor muscles sang their song and translated Milo’s movement into suit motion.

He moved out of the locker rooms and made his way to the airlock. The city’s gravity core could not reach outside the outer hull plating. Well, to build a starship with Earth-standard gravity would be a pain in the ass. The airlock ran its cycle while Milo waited between the two doors. When the outer door opened Milo jumped into space. The half-finished dreadnought class starship hung in space two hundred meters from him. It was large. A lot larger and more impressive than Sam’s meagre corvette. When finished it would be four kilometers long and five hundred meters wide. Milo engaged the suit’s thrusters and took flight. To the grind.

-

At the end of his shift he left the vac suit in the locker room, grabbed a kit of handheld tools for electrical work and made his way to the shipyard’s repair bay. Captain Samuels looked like the man you wanted to have on your side of a tavern brawl. Milo greeted him. Final Sight rested locked into docking clamps behind the big man.

“You made it!” Sam announced and gave Milo a strong pat on the back.

Milo recovered from the pat. “Of course! I would not break my promise.”

“The rest of the crew is having some well-earned down time from our last mission. Another piece of scumbag space pirate thinking he could do whatever they wanted,“ Sam explained and continued to mumble, but Milo being tired just wanted to get the repairs done so he could go home.

“I will fix up some coffee while you go and do your thing. You know where to go,” Sam said. “Was it black with two sugars?”

“Yeah,” Milo replied.

“When are you going to drink coffee like men?” Sam said with a joking smile and walked him inside the corvette.

Milo stumbled backwards as someone walked right into him.

“Arse! You are loco!” the Mexican man yelled, hands waving, wild eyes stared at Milo.

Milo smiled. “Diego Rubalcava, how are you this fine day?”

“Apparently walking into arseholes,” Diego replied with a distinct “r”. “Captain, did I pronounce that correct? With the 'r'.”

Sam stepped forward. “Yeah, you did good, doc, but a little smoother next time. Go on now. Will you pick up a taco for me too?”

“Roger that, captain. It will be some time. I have promised Claire to try out a new coffee shop at the market,” Diego said and saluted Sam as he strode away.

“Good luck,” Sam gave a half hearted salute in return and turned back to Milo. “So where were we?”

“You asked me when I was going to drink coffee like a man and I was just about to reply with a sassy: When you grow a head full of hair. But I feel like the moment kind of died off,” Milo said.

Sam laughed deep. “It didn’t. Would a wig count?”

The Final Sight was indeed small, even when fully crewed it held only fifteen people with the possibility of a few passengers and prisoners. Storage capacity was nothing to brag about: a few Navy graded combat suits, weapons, foodstuff, some spare parts, the crew’s hibernation pods and living quarters. A mess hall and some utilitarian compartments. Crewmates generally lived on their assigned ship instead of owning a real apartment in the city. A perk with the job. Milo thought about these things while he made his way through the ship’s main corridor. Sam departed to the mess hall. Milo walked past some closed doors and to the two elevators, the ship had three floors in total. He made his way to the bottom floor and the access point to the ship’s single railgun mount. On his way he noticed the fresh scent of fir trees. A little envious he continued to the access point.

The access point looked like a metallic box attached to the floor. Most of the ship’s wiring ran behind walls, ceiling and floors with the access points providing the easiest entry. But in some instances you needed to have wires in the actual hull plating, which essentially meant inside the layers of the bulkhead hulls that created the corvette’s oblong shape. The corvette’s hull compromised of a three layer design with cushioning and insulating materials in between. Hopefully the issue would not be too deep, because crawling behind those plates was not his idea of well spent free time. Milo unscrewed the bolts with a handheld power tool and opened the access hatch. The wiring was neatly done, his own work, and every cable was marked to tell you what they connected to. He brought out his hand terminal and with a prodding stick started to measure the wires’ outputs.

Captain Samuels arrived with mugs of hot coffee in both hands. Milo stretched his back and grabbed the offered mug. With a short sip he confirmed that Sam had managed to add the sugarcubes despite their conflicting opinions.

“How’s it looking?” Sam asked.

“Something is wrong, alright. This wiring hub is not receiving enough voltage… It looks like this set of wires are the culprit. I have to look at the reactor output, also, to determine the actual issue,” Milo replied.

Milo swallowed a mouthful of coffee and headed to the reactor chamber with Sam in tow. Milo tapped on the hand terminal, looking at a layer of blueprints displaying wiring, voltages and access points.

“The ship is not picking up the correct voltage either. Which is why pinpointing the problem could take time,” Milo muttered quietly. “I think you need to purge the ship’s software and install a more stable version. A sectioned update will not cut it, you might have a bug in the system. Or maybe it is a hardware fault. Some sensors are glitching out. But before that I need to fix the voltage output.”

At the reactor chamber he found no errors, with the core hanging inside its chamber in the center of the room. The reactor core ran fine with its humming sound and glowing light. Output looked correct.

Milo went from access point to access point, going through the hubs’ electrical outputs and checked if all cables were behaving correctly. Captain Samuels tight on his heels.

“So the Au-delà will arrive in a few months. I, my crew and the Final Sight will have front row seats to the show. The Commander has ordered all crews and ships to be present and ready,” Sam said. “You know, because of space pirates possibly throwing wrenches into the machinery. What will you be doing?”

The term space pirates, who had originally came up with that? He didn’t know. History was not his strong suit. But it felt stupid to glorify scumbag criminals. People stealing what didn’t belong to them and hurting innocent, hard working civilians. It must have been a criminal who coined it and it stuck hard.

Milo started to unscrew yet another set of titanium bolts. “I don’t know. There have been talks about parties, but I don’t know. I will probably keep dad company,” Milo replied. Why did they name that ship a french word? Wouldn’t English be the larger language in a European space city? He shook his head. If you sent a city building starship into the depth of space why not give it a cooler name than “beyond” in french? Something had obviously gone wrong with the ship since it was coming back. It departed from this very city thirty years ago, before Milo and his dad had even traveled and settled here.

Sam sipped his coffee. “Exciting times nonetheless.”

Sparks flew up from the hub when Milo pulled off the access hatch. “Found the problem. This cable is not connected properly. Some jackass did a really crappy job constructing this hub,” Milo explained.

“Can you fix it? They were not meant to return at all, you know. Find resources and build a new city. A new frontier. The mantra of the city building starship crews,” Sam said and drank some coffee. “I would like you to be on my ship when the Au-delà returns. You never know when you need a great electrician like you. Especially if the pirates start to feel cocky. You can never be safe enough. Regarding electrical issues you are able to leap to conclusions faster and more accurately than anyone else,” Sam proposed. Yet again, Milo grew tired by all the times the captain had tried to hire him.

“No, thanks. If there is combat I will not be aboard this tiny vessel,” Milo explained. “Yep, I can fix this. I only have to reconnect the cable properly,” Milo replied. But that would require shutting down the fusion reactor and that would take even more time. Milo just wanted to go home, he had a new shift in eight hours and need to sleep before that. Milo knew how his body reacted to electrical currents, but Sam did not. No one did. Sam would freak out.

“I will commence the shutdown,” Sam announced and pulled out a hand terminal of his own.

Milo smiled. “No, skip that. I will need some sleep tonight.”

Milo reached down for the cable with his bare hand and grabbed hold on it. His entire arm tickled as the high voltage traveled through his body. Like someone pinching you lightly, but in a thousand places at once.

“No!” Sam yelled.

Sam spilled his remaining coffee on his uniform and stepped forward to help Milo. But Milo gestured the man away.

“Don’t. You will be electrocuted,” Milo said and squeezed a good hold on the cable. Sparks of electricity flew around his hand and arm. No pain, only a tickle. He licked his lips, a sugary taste. Maybe it was time to stop putting sugar in his coffee.

“But… What are you doing? You should be suffering from a heart attack,” Sam said loudly, towering over him. The captain’s uniform had a new large black coffee stain.

“High voltage has never bothered me,” Milo said.

He twisted and turned the cable before finding the sweet spot and re-attached it to the hub. He slid back the hatch and tightened the bolts.

“But how?” Sam asked, stepping back.

“You know where to transmit the funds. See you around, Sam,” Milo said and exited the ship heading back to his apartment.