A Vessel for Offering 1 Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven A Vessel for Offering by Darren R. Hawkins 2 Darren R. Hawkins Copyright 2007 Creative Commons License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ at the end of this document - it just means that you can do whatever you want with this and its contents as long as you give attribution for the original work. Chapter One 3 Chapter One This was certainly a good idea, this shimmying about inside ducts and vents and metal casements which thunder alarmingly beneath the unwanted weight of his passing. His life has been reduced to a pointless series of mechanical motions: forward with the elbows, plant them on a seam for traction, drag the carcass behind; pause a moment to catch a breath because it's only been, after all, a few hundred meters of constant inchworm contractions through a space barely large enough for his shoulders to pass, let alone his entire body. Someone who didn't know better might be tempted to think that he was going soft if he stops too often. So, he fixes his eyes straight ahead and tries to gauge his progress, but the flashlight's beam is jiggling too much for him to make an accurate guess. The strap that's supposed to keep the light snug against his forehead has been pulling loose for the last ten minutes. It's just another aggravation to toss atop the mounting pile. It stinks in here, too. Not the clean, coppery stink of sheet metal and industrial coolant that one should reasonably expect from ductwork, but some noxious chemical combination of sweat, dust, mildew and other assorted skanks that defy ready identification. He thinks about just succumbing to the heat and exertion and odor and just allowing himself to pass out. Let some other idiot worry about how they were going to get him out of here. Oh yes, it had been a good idea, indeed. Whoever had devised this plan in the first place should be given some sort of citation. With a hammer. To the forehead. Until he was freaking dead. Now the truth is that he's an adult. He's been inside his share of tubes and tunnels and cramped, clammy spaces. He's not normally one to give up in the face of a little grit. It's not the getting dirty that he minds at all, nor the heat and odor, nor the hysterically gibbering claustrophobe chained up in the closet in the very back of his mind. Rather, it's all the intersections. The right angles, to be precise. He hates those. Hates 'em. Absolutely. There are only so many joints in the human body capable of performing a ninety degree maneuver. The pelvis, the knee, the elbow, sometimes the neck, a few other odds and ends. A man forcing himself through a skintight metallic tube like raw bratwurst crammed into sausage casings uses all of them, and then finds that he must manufacture some new ones (or at least makes the old ones serve new purposes) if he doesn't wish to get himself permanently wedged between a terminal hither and yon. He's been finding creative ways to torture his body thusly for the last hour or better, so he feels qualified in making the determination that as right angles go, he hates the one he's confronting now most of all, a particularly diabolic specimen in the cosmology of Demonic Perpendiculatory Choirs he's been formulating as he has gone along. One of the planes in question is a chute of unpleasantly heated air boiling up from the main cooling tanks of the Van Nuys reactor. The other, the one he currently occupies, is a (currently) slightly less infernal duct branching back toward the Sub-Deck Kappa, Section Six tech-maintenance pod. Under normal circumstances, this duct is supposed to be a standard internal cooling tube loaded with envireon refrigerant and absolutely human tissue toxic, maintained at a steady hypothermia inducing eight degrees centigrade. Which it was, right up until about an hour ago when they'd cut off the flow at the main valve and flushed the tube with neutralizing agents for the sole purpose of shoving him in through the nearest access vent. The tube is supposed to be kept chilly because of the core, of course. Or rather that because without the induced chilliness, the vents that cooled the core would very shortly start to bake, then warp, then ultimately fail to provide safe and adequate heat exchange, which in turn tended to quickly result in things like radioactive contaminants spewing under extremely high pressures into other parts of the ship that don't seem upon initial inspection to be related to this duct in this place at this particular moment in time. The engineers Chapter One 4 have stressed all of this in the very recent past, over and over again. The engineers said that under normal operating circumstances the exhaust from the core is saturated by the microscopic envireon particles until it all evens out, until there's a nice equilibrium point established that keeps everyone happy and glow free. An elegant system, frightfully complex, not to be messed with except in cases of dire, dire emergency lest ducky circumstances suddenly and catastrophically unduck themselves. From his perspective, things are far from ducky already, here where the HVAC tube lips over into a vertical shaft that plummets all the way down to the reactor core. (Though the air in the shaft itself has been by this time scrubbed and rescrubbed, thoroughly nanomesh strained, then scrubbed once more for good measure until all the nasty radioactive bits have been purged and it was perfectly safe for consumption. Or so they said. "They" being a fairly nebulous concatenation of People Who Knew Such Things and People Who Issued Assurances so normal folk wouldn't have to worry about the obscene risks they were asked to take.) Wedged at the zero point between planes, contemplating the theoretical infinity of these axes with his nose and eyes and top of his head peeking over the edge of the HVAC tube and his re-breather unit bruising his cheeks because unlike the straps for his headlamp, these are too tight, is Ray Marlowe. He is sweating profusely inside his rubberized, slip resistant coveralls. His face is smeared with dark lines that look like camouflage grease paint, but really only mark the places where he has wiped the perspiration from his brow with the condensate, dust-bunny grit that inevitably gathers inside HVAC tubes. Ray has lain here contemplating his assault of the vertical shaft for a number of minutes now. It is a delaying tactic, a shameless procrastination. He has no interest in continuing the chase. The molten heat of superheated reacting agents emanating up from the core streams past his face in waves as thick and suffocating as a winter stack of grandma's old feather comforters. He imagines as he peers over the edge that he can see the lava glow of the cooling tanks four hundred meters directly below his current position, like peering into the mouth of a dubiously quiescent volcano. It is an unpleasant and completely fabricated hallucination and he knows it. He just doesn't particularly want to do the part that comes next. This is how it works: Nature, in its vast and quasi-nefarious complexity, has determined that there is a corporate value in the evolution of a particular type of creature whose sole contribution to the planetary biosphere is to recycle the detritus of other creatures. These are the scavengers, the bottom feeders (quite literally) of the animal kingdom--your hyenas and rats and barnacles and other generally disgust-inducing entities--who serve the imminently valuable purpose of making certain that waste products disappear and carcasses are broken up into conveniently smaller bits and that most other living things don't find themselves buried up to their necks in the byproducts manufactured by basic processes like living and eating and procreating and excreting and eventually keeling over. Perhaps even more importantly, they make certain that no biological resources go to waste in what is ultimately a closed ecological system. The lesson being: nature is a closed environmental system. Starships, curiously enough, are also closed environmental systems. Once upon a time, some hotshot, smartass engineering geek with too much imagination or more creativity than sense determined that most folks who traveled about in starships were sick and tired of being made physically sick and tired by the cocktail of laboratory biogenerate mosses and molds and single-celled organisms typically employed for the purpose of recycling starship waste. Biological organisms, no matter how carefully engineered, had a distressing tendency to overproduce themselves, to evolve into annoying flesh or structure devouring slimes, to spontaneously generate lethal spores or find other, similarly disturbing ways to manifest a hostile response to having been subjected to the extreme environment of outer space. Chapter One 5 Similarly, this aforementioned engineering geek realized that it would create another subset of discomforting circumstance to pack a starship with rats and hyenas and the like in order to process waste products with a level of efficiency approaching that of the natural world. Hyenas have too much of a tendency to eat indiscriminately if allowed to run loose, thus posing a danger to the edible-looking human types who happen to crew starships.