The Scramble

The Scramble

Two men sitting about a campfire cast shadows at the surrounding wreckage of their ship.

    "Well, that just about does it for today, don't you think, Jacobs?" one remarks with a note of sarcasm. Jacobs barely acknowledges. He scrapes a flake of sand from beneath his, up until around thirty hours ago, pristine looking sneakers, and releases a shivering sigh.

    "Now, now. I know this seems hopeless, but we have this!" 

    He gestures radially inwards at the embers, and after staring in the indicated direction a while, continues:

    "Maybe if you leave that crap on those springy clonkers and throw them to the flames, they'll end up glazed and safe from the elements for all eternity! Ha ha!"

    "Very funny, Harry. You know it could be weeks before they find us, you'd better cut me some slack for not being too happy about that."

    "It'd be a hell of a lot longer without that spinor device they made us fit last year... hardly a small hop from one arm of the galaxy to where we've elected to vegetate now; with those gravimeters of old, you couldn't even detect an elephant through a barn door!", Harry rebuts, a slow grin sneaking across his face, a gash opening in an almost tarp-like skin which stretches visibly over his acutely angled chin and cheekbones. 

    "Of course, I would expect a former flight engineer to know that."

    "Former?"

    Harry indicates the wreckage which surrounds them.

    "Fuck off."

    He nudges Jacobs' arm, displaying a sardonic upside-down smile, continues taunting with increasing agitation:

    "Ha! Ha ha! Aha! I wasn't going to rub your face in it! Ah ha ha!", tears beginning to stream down his leathery cheek in delightment at his quip, "Too bad about the shot huh? No use lying to some other Scoton captain about this when they only need a flake of skin to figure out who you are", he continues, gasping for air, the flames exacerbating the redness in his face. Jacobs, almost hypnotised by this viscera for several seconds, feels a sudden jolt in his back, and as if smitten, sits up and finally manages to look away. 

    Only yesterday all had been well with the Amphora, one of a fleet of capacitor ships of the Scoton Corporation. Like an army of leafcutter ants beneath the canopy of a desolate jungle, Scoton's harvesters had been gnawing the grassy planets of their arm for palladium, concentrated within the stems of the as yet poorly understood local fauna. Most of these smaller spheres were home to a uniform, bright-green growth observed to regrow on a timescale of near-enough to one rotation of the planet. The three spheres within Amphora's domain had each been fitted with a semi-shear, a structure fixed to the respective planet by two antipodal bearings, weighing as much as a small moon, and stretching from one to the other along a relative line of longitude. These shears, fixed to the local star by an atom sail, advanced about the surface of each green orb throughout their rotation, collecting the sought-after stems with cutters the size of city blocks, deriving mechanical energy from the northern axle. Upon each next pass of the shear, the grass had reclaimed its original height, each time transporting a fortune's worth of the planets' metallic cores to the surface in a sort of biological evaporation. The Amphora was to collect these spoils after each rotation of the planet and return them to a compressing station, where the eventually extracted metal was prepared for continued transport to other arms of civilisation. Propelled by an array of drum-shaped ion drives, the Amphora derived its energy from an immense parallel plate capacitor, slowly discharging and pushing its stored energy out behind the ship in a charged trail of ions. As in some kind of planetary ballet, Scoton succeeded in moving a considerable stream of raw materials homeward.

 

    Jacobs flitted through his shakily assembled memories of the preceding morning. During charging, Harry and Jacobs had found themselves sitting at a small steel table of the compressing station's small supply hall, one with a considerable collection of books and films, confectionary, even coffee grown offworld, which each of the two men indulged in today, on exception.

    "Harry?"

    "Yes?"

     "How can some rat fuck like you have enough money to his number to buy an entire cup's worth of coffee grounds?"

    Harry scraped the bottom of his metal cup for the grounds with a tiny, old-fashioned teaspoon, and spread this almost charred-looking paste around his mouth, then baring his teeth, coated thinly therein, at Jacobs.

    "Why don't you ask my dentist?", he lisped out at him.

    Jacobs shrank.

    "You're fucking filthy man. How'd they make you a mate?"

    "Don't you remember? Gave the captain plenty of incentive."

    Jacobs, nervously peering around for any onlookers, only facing his companion again after ensuring there were none, sat with a nervous composure, clasping and unclasping his own hands with a frantic rhythm. The hostess approached their table from behind the bar - she had been regarding the pair for some time with a pained expression. Jacobs, new aboard the compressing station, apprehended her name was Janet by the stitchings on her shirt.

    "Gents, they made the announcement. You're departing for Kallis in around 4 hours. Maybe they'll finally teach you some manners there."

    "Hasn't worked the last twelve times, has it?"

    Janet smirked.

    "One can only hope, Harold. Splitting the bill today gentlemen? I don't think Scoton will cover today's little delicacy."

    "Alright, bill me", Harry said, reaching out to shake her hand as she tapped at two boxes on her cashier's tablet, "and don't call me Harold again." 

    As their palms connected for but a brief instant, a small receptor in Janet's ring detected a sample of Harry's skin cells, reading out the number associated with Scoton's infungibility system, a string of nucleotides unique to every employee. Each worker received an injection after signing the papers; these appended an identical number to the genetic code of every cell in their body over a couple hours. Throughout the course of a career with Scoton, this number remained the surest way of knowing the identity of a colleague. Originally implemented to combat swathes of counterfeiters, clones, and credit frauds attempting to become hired into Scoton positions, the infungibility system became so essential to life on the stations that most Scotonites used it for all purposes of interpersonal verification. As Janet finalised the transaction, a small router under the bar verified Harry's skin data against a public register, and the three thousand units in question changed hands accordingly. This system, implemented at the individual level, was soon adapted by Scoton company-wide. The Solar Assembly had even contracted the Scoton Corporation as a consultant for their efforts to spread this technique to the entire species, a windfall for the still fledgling enterprise.

    "Well, that's that. Hope they give you a-"

    Janet paused.

    "What the fuck, Harry. You were thirteen light weeks away yesterday?"

    "Ah, you know, I have been having this issue all week. I shipped back in from vacation last Friday and the auxillary system lost power as we were flying by a mainer you know. Radiation shields came down. They had to reassign everyone's numbers 'cause the particles from that star must've tore a bunch of holes through 'em. I managed to give the Scrotons they put to it the slip, and-"

    He had been staring at the ceiling adenoidally, and finally, sneezed into his plate, throwing crumbs around the entire table.

    "Alright that's enough Harold. Still went through. Just get out of my hall now please. New guy, maybe find some other friends."

    "Working on it", muttered Jacobs. The pair departed for the charging hangar.

 

    "Repeat authentication", chirped the personnell entrance to the hangar as Harry struggled with its doorknob.

    "Great, of course I can't get in now."

    "Repeat authentication"

    "Argh! Alright, fine." Harry stormed off to the nearby bathroom to wash his hands. Dust could interfere with the scanner. Returning after a minute or two, he tried the doorknob again. This time it opened.

    "Welcome, F.E. Jacobs"

    "What?"

    Harry regarded the small display which flashed Jacobs' credentials at him: his height, weight, secondary school, home system, technical abilities. Some of Jacobs' cells remained on the doorknob, as this information would have to have been extracted from them.

    "Scanner's misreading, Harry. Close enough" said Jacobs from behind the door, "get a move on, launch window closing soon, they need all hands"

    Hours later, aboard the Amphora, Jacobs regarded the plates through the aft monitoring window with a pair of old-fashioned binoculars. The instrument felt unfamiliar in his hands, the buttons and dials at his control desk also not conveying their usual intuitive nature to him this morning. Dizziness from the coffee perhaps, a rare treat and admittedly one not always agreeing with him. Like many spacemen he simply followed the rites and customs without much objection, despite these effects. Long haul voyages to a new outpost were often celebrated just before the first service flight, and Jacobs, looking to make a good impression with the crew of the Amphora, was unwilling to break this unwritten protocol, even after his second engineer had revealed himself to be of such unsavoury character. Now, however, he was certainly regretting drinking the dark, fragrant mixture which he could still taste in his mouth.

    "Jacobs, are you watching your sector?"

    Jacobs jolted upright. He realised he had been staring into space, glanced at his watch, five minutes unaccounted for. The capacitor needed constant monitoring while they navigated the outer belt, as the immense charge on each plate attracted all manner of rocks. Suddenly he felt a sharp blow to his right shoulder blade. He was unable to determine precisely what part of his routine button-pressing and knob-twiddling was so unsatisfying to the captain.

    "Don't you see all that dust? You idiot, you're going to let the foil collapse!", the captain turned Jacobs to face him. Staring vacantly at a pulsating vein beneath the captains eye, Jacobs opened his mouth, stunned, as the captain visciously regarded Jacobs' station and shouted, "What school doesn't teach their engineers to-"

    A blinding flash of light interrupted the captain, as a sphere of debris pounced from one plate to the other, tearing a tennis-court-sized hole through it, lurching the entire ship into an uncontrolled roll and throwing globs of molten material into the void.

    "Yeah, what school doesn't teach their engineers to operate the capacitor wipes indeed?" Harry, suddenly stern, asked through the flames, "I ask only in place of our dearly departed captain, you know."

    Jacobs glanced aside. The wreckage appeared to him to shrink in towards them.

    "Was watching you from my post. What's wrong with you anyway? Letting that mound build up for so long. One button press! Even I know that, and you seem to think I'm an idiot."

    "I-"

    "Typical of 'em to send someone unfit for the job, trained on some greaseball planet God knows where. You know what? I won't be cutting you any slack at all. Not 'til I don't have your mug to stare at any more. Shouldn't take 'em an entire week to get here anyways, Kallis is charted after all and they know we're here. Enough food for a couple nights. You'll live to see the inside of a jail cell, so lighten up."

    "Alright", said Jacobs, having already resigned from even beginning to defend himself, falling silent, cursing the stars for their choice of sole survivors, as well as his tardiness the morning prior.

 

    The next day, however long or short nights may have been on the barren orb of Kallis, Jacobs found himself walking through the trough left by the fallen capacitor ship. His head felt as though it were on the verge of exploding off his shoulders. He had foregone to notice an injury to his right temple, seemingly his body just ignored the damage in the daze of the crash. The atmosphere of these Palladium mines was designed for human breathability, but the high heavy metal content of their surroundings would soon cause his body additional problems. 

    Harry was also exploring the bushes. Food was in short supply; they only had what the capacitor ship kept in stock for emergencies. The hold was scattered about their crater, Harry's and Jacobs' crater, and they had decided to split up to collect what they could, much to Jacobs' relief. This gave him some time to recover from his interactions with this sardonic creature he had called his shipmate. Naturally, his negligence, which could be unanimously proven with the flight recorder, would land him a warm and cozy spot in a coroporate correctional facility, so he would not be referring to anyone he could stand as his 'mate' any time soon. To his dismay, his 'mate' appeared from behind a mound of dirt, but carrying standard rations at least.

    "You ought to eat. Growing brains need food", said Harry, motioning with his free hand for Jacobs to come closer.

    "Go to hell"

    Harry shrugged. "I don't think we're terribly far away from there. I could heat these up for you. Maybe you'd stop pretending I did this to you"

    Soon enough, he had retraced their steps to the fire from the last night, out but still smouldering. Sitting down in yesterday's positions, the pair remained silent for a while, until Jacobs' began:

    "Listen. Harry. Look, by now, you're very much aware of the fact that I think you're a prick, that I hold that God did not have a say in your creation. When I went to the flight school on Glieses B, I learned of the many responsibilities a Scoton spaceman had to bear. The golden, gleaming fleets of ships staffed by none other than the finest, most integrable, sunny faces of the terran empire. These model men, staring out into unfathomable darkness, unflinching at the prospect of no return; that is the life I 'bravely' chose. Naturally, these lies, the propaganda, it would come to fall apart for me soon enough; I mean, I wasn't an idiot then, even though I may be one now, thanks to the head injury which you haven't even bothered to ask about. But, lies aside, I joined the fleet because I believe in practicality, if not the mythos with brings that practicality about.

    "Ever since I was a child, this work was what I had dreamt of. Now, I breathe in the metals that bring Scoton their billions, because I am practical. But what practical men do not understand is that they are often at the receiving end of their own practicality, and so they depend on themselves in a strange way. They have a strange relationship with themselves. They are forced to view their lives from both within and without. They need to judge decisions quickly, but also take the bigger picture of the company into account for every such decision. The success or failure of each mission is measured not only in its material outcomes, but also in the precedent it sets for the future operation of the company. Each time we haul a load, and the men running the ship become a bit more gruff, each time the apathy increases, the company suffers, even if we yield more product every day. You cannot simply only be practical. You also have to aspire to something of a higher order; something which augments the mundane doings of each day with a spark, a flame, a myth. The myth of the eusocial company, the corporation. Without this ideal, you die. You become incapable of completing your job. A practical man is a dead man, which is why I seem to have survived with you. I always believed that I could better a crew. That I could refresh their hardened attitudes and give them back something they had lost a long time ago, when they were young.

    "But that I should find myself confronted on my first assignment, my first - and without even so much as an indication that I had performed poorly, as to deserve such a dishonourable position - with a creature, a homunculus, a pithecanthropus such as yourself for a superior, if not in function but in rank, was one of the harshest blows I could have imagined sustaining. So yes. In a way, you did this to me. How was I supposed to keep the capacitors clear with a miserable abomination like you, breathing down my neck, grinning at me with rotten teeth, glaring and gaggling? What captain would agree to curse their vessel with you for a passenger? There's the real culprit, I think, but since they can't throw the mincemeat that remains of him in jail, I guess I'll have to do, won't I?

    Harry stared at Jacobs with wide and confused eyes.

    "What school?", Harry slowly asked Jacobs.

    "Yeah alright, I understand. Capacitor blades or whatever. Leave it."

    "No. What school did you go to, where they made you an engineer?"

    "The flight school on Glieses B"

    "That's impossible"

    "What?"

    "That can't be. That is where I went. We're the same age, we would have known each other. Tell me who your friends were"

    "Come on Harry, are you serious? I was always with...", Jacobs trailed off. He couldn't recall anyone from the flight school on Glieses B.

    "With..", he attempted again, a feverish expression traversing his face, not unlike the one it bore during the crash. Jacobs stirred, fell to one side, unconscious.

   A few days on, the pair, having exchanged no words after this, watched the assistance ship descend towards them. Two officials, clad with composite armor plates, clipboards and medical equipment, as well as a holstered pistol to one side, rapelled down from the craft towards the marooned spacemen.

    "Which one of you is Clarence Jacobs?", asked one. Jacobs stepped forwards.

    "That would be me."

    "You're under arrest on the charge of negligence leading to the wreckage of the Amphora. Give us your arm. We need to perform some tests before we can bring you in."

    The men scanned his hand.

    "You aren't Jacobs, your name is Harold Cramer"

    "Excuse me?", Jacobs was dumbstruck.

    "Stand aside. You. Come here"

    "You're making a mistake. I am Harold Cramer"

    "Shut up. Hand", the officer clearly indicating that cooperation was expected, and upon any disappointment thereto, his limb would be extracted with some other method. Before long:

    "Clarence Jacobs... What were you even trying here, Clarence?", and turning to Jacobs:

    "Why take the fall for this slob? On charges like these?"

    "Slob?", groaned Harry, the other official pinning both his arms to his lower back. Jacobs bounded up the access ramp behind the still struggling Harry, on whom the Scoton-brand sedative was now working its magic. Several ships were now swooping in, prospecting the wreckage, examining what might be recovered, and what they had better leave for Kallis' metal plants to resorb.

    Officer Simon surveyed the wreckage. The charred remains of the captain staring back out at him.

    "Look at this"

     Officer Dolbey, flanking him, regarded the grimly arranged, not entirely disarticulated body, whose breastplate bore, in raised lettering, the name 'Cramer'.