Tevun-Krus #100

44 - The Station - @SteveJBWO - Dark SciFi

The Station

By SteveJBWO

The station wasn't finished when Steve's crew was assigned to it. When he got there, he was surprised to find that the general consensus was that it would never be finished.

"The Company has too much invested here to just bail on it." Steve said to the small group around the cafe table. "It cost over 3 trillion just to get the materials out here when they started construction."

"It must be over 10 trillion by now." Anna added, stirring her coffee. "Christ, they've been at it for a decade now."

Johnnie wasn't impressed though. "That's chump-change for these jokers though. They just bought Jupiter last month. Not mineral rights, not colonization rights. They bought the smeggin' planet outright!"

"Where did you hear that load of crap?" Steve wasn't to be deterred. "The Firefox Network? You know they make this crap up just to get ratings."

"Nah. Read your Company Quarterly Report." Johnnie was adamant about his facts. "The Company recently purchased the planet Jupiter in an IGS record-breaking land deal. The exact amount paid for the property has not been disclosed. I'm telling you Steverino, 10 trillion, 20 trillion; it's all meaningless to the Company. This station was obsolete by the time they had the first gravitational module assembled."

"Sorry Johnnie-boy," Steve responded with a note of sarcasm. "20 trillion is a big deal to anybody. You don't stay on top by throwing money away."

Anna decided she'd put the final touch on Steve's argument. "I got notification this morning that there's a new shipment of components docking tomorrow. So much for your side Johnnie."

"See?" Steve's spirits were bolstered by Anna's news. "You don't ship new components 16 light years to a station that's dead in the water. Anyway, they can't just abandon the station. You know how the Company is about intellectual property. It would cost trillions more for them to dismantle the station. Trust me boys and girls, we are here to stay!"

***

The Nav-con onboard the Interlaken III shut down the ship's hyper-drive as it approached the coordinates of the space station, Outer Banks. Not having found a way for humans to survive hyper-jumps, the crew of the Interlaken III was a biological-tertiary computer equipped with the latest AI operating system. Though alive themselves, the individual cells that made up the ship's processor and memory banks were not conscious and as such, were unaffected by the temporal mis-alignment that sentient creatures (like humans) experienced during a jump.

The AI entity housed within the billions of 'nerve' cells didn't skip a beat as it calculated the time frame, local to the Outer Banks. It sent a digital communique to the station's AI management system. The two computers arranged docking for 10 am, Station Time the next morning. The Outer Bank's AI began assembling the necessary teams to handle the unloading of the shipment and scheduling a maintenance team to check out the dock to ensure everything went smoothly in the morning.

Steve's team was assigned to the docking locks that would attach to the incoming vessel, locking it in place during the receiving process. Routine work, nothing too difficult.

***

"We've run the projections 5 time now." VanDermere said with determination. "Completing a Great Lakes class station now would result in a final cost of over 4 quadrillion dollars. When completed, these stations would be 15 - 20 years out of date. It just isn't financially responsible to sink those funds into a station that is technologically obsolete."

"I don't think any of the board members here are questioning the math, VanDermere." Wesley remarked. "But we have trillions invested in these stations already. The idea of abandoning the Great Lakes project at this late date is simply unsavory."

But VanDermere was confident in the outcome of this meeting.

"Gentlemen. Ladies, " He addressed the board. "We aren't here in this room together because we are soft or indecisive. In a business as important as ours, we are here to make the hard decisions that others are too weak to make. I'm confident you'll do the right thing."

***

At 10:00:01 am, Outer Banks Time (OBT), the last of Steve's docking locks clamped down on the transport ship. The atmospheric seals rotated into place and the life support system on the station began the process of filling the newly docked ship with that familiar blend of nitrogen and oxygen.

The Station's AI announced for everyone in the vicinity that docking was complete. The Receiving Team was assembling their loaders outside the huge cargo doors and Steve's maintenance team was packing their tools away in preparation for their next assignment.

Meanwhile, in the cargo hold of the ship, the detonator that was attached to a baker's dozen of nuclear warheads began its countdown.

10... 9... 8... 7...