Mutiny in Space by Rod Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

visit. We decided we were happy with our current employment and remained onboard after that.
    We reached New Sibersk without incident. The colonists had three old AstroSpace HT-9 cargo shuttles. Between all three shuttles and Arthur’s cargo drones, we managed to get the entirely of the wheat crop loaded in three and a half days. Arthur worked around the clock for those three days, and I helped him manage the robotic arms and drone systems that unloaded the cargo containers of wheat and secured them in the
Rusalka
’s cavernous cargo bays. I learned a lot about automatic cargo handling during those four days, along with more than I ever really wanted to know about robot programming.
    Turns out programming the cargo robots properly is really, really important, otherwise they start putting containers in the wrong places and the whole thing becomes a hideous and ruinously expensive mess. Fortunately, Arthur, Corbin, and the other techs knew what they were doing, and we got the ship loaded with no major incidents and only two or three equipment breakdowns.
    We left New Sibersk and headed back towards the Thousand Worlds, and life settled back into the previous routine, though we saw even less of Captain Williams. Hawkins had more or less become the de facto captain by this point, which was fine with everyone. I kept working, and studying, and I thought I would soon be ready to take the next certification test. Then I could become a junior technician in my own right.
    We were on our twenty-fifth hyperjump home when we found ourselves with unexpected company.
    The empty system didn’t have a name, just a designation—NR8965. Likely some astronomer’s bored research assistant had slapped the designation on a list a thousand years ago, and it had stuck ever since. It was a binary star system—NR8965A was a red giant—and NR8695B was a smaller, hotter blue star paired with it. I thought the combination made them look like the galaxy’s biggest pair of Christmas lights. The system had nineteen planets—twelve rocky, airless inner ones, and seven gas giants, each with their own moon system—three asteroid belts, an Oort cloud, and the usual Kupier belt. A bunch of the rocky planets had valuable mineral deposits, but no one had gotten around to mining them, at least not officially, most likely because the radiation from the blue star drove up the overhead costs. A few of the gas giants had moons in the habitable zone, so a colony would likely wind up here someday.
    I was working with Arthur that day. We had a day and a half of sublight transit until we reached our next hyperjump point, and Corbin had decided to use that time to fix a longstanding network error between the automated cargo robotics and the central computer. Arthur blamed the problem on the central computer’s process handling, while Murdock blamed it on Arthur’s programming. They had both complained to Corbin about it at length, and in exasperation he finally ordered them to lock themselves in the computer room and not come out until they had figured out what was going on.
    And, lucky me, it was my day to shadow Arthur.
    So at 0600 I staggered into the computer room, still trying to wake up. It was a small room located midway along the dorsal corridor, with one wall covered entirely with sixteen screens showing various computer functions—running processes, storage usage, CPU utilization, network balancing, and so forth. Arthur was already there, tapping away at a console.
    As for Murdock, think of what a typical computer programmer looks like, then imagine the opposite. He looked like a middle-aged weightlifter who had just started going to fat, but was still capable of cracking some heads if he got irritated.
    At the moment, he looked
very
irritated.
    “The problem,” he said, “is your programming logic. It has too many subroutines and dependent loops. Too much information comes through, and the interface–”
    “No,” said Arthur. “The problem is