Few more months of working freight, and I was able to afford another new ship outright. I found a deal on a an older medium duty hauler that could handle most of the regular loads I had set up. I went out there to check it out first-hand. Never believe the ships you find online, you know?
Landing there at the ship lot on Artemis Omega three, I saw hundreds and hundreds of ships just sitting out there in the hot dry sun. I walked up to the main office, and naturally there were a good half-dozen sales idiots lounging around waiting for people to show up. After the usual spiel, we got out onto the field and started looking at the lines of ships.
The medium hauler Pers Korman was a Imgen class VI, about twenty years old and around three hundred thousand tons of haulage, but a pretty minimal ship. We walked in, and it smelled dank, stale, and a bit rusty. Everywhere I looked the interior was in shades of grey, blotched and poorly repaired. The life support system seemed to be operational, but it was on shore power down here in the dock. The core wouldn’t even start. I decided to give this one a pass.
We checked out then next ship in the price range, which was a Thegen Super Hauler. This one was listed in the brochure as a five hundred thousand ton hauler with limited jump capability and a pretty small crew complement. Designed to do mostly point to point cargo duty, it could handle a lot of cargo for the cost. We walked up into the enormous cargobay, which was broken up into roughly four sections by beams and pillars. You could probably fit a lot in here, but the pillars precluded it from being used effectively as a ship transport like the Thrack Yar had been used. There was a great deal of vertical height, though. It seemed in fair shape in the cargobay so we headed towards the interior lift. The lift on this ship, the Octon was not more than a simple cargo platform. We stepped onto the high-grip surface, the salesbeing stepping carefully so as not to scuff its hideous white shoes with tassles. The grasped the dangling industrial looking controller hanging from a cable as thick as my wrist, and pressed a massive up arrow. The lift began to jerkily rise with a huge shrieking noise. We ascended this way for easily fifteen minutes before I decided that was it, I was good.
“Ok, no, I’m good. That’s fine, let’s go back down and look at the next ship. Nobody has time for a ship that unloads this slowly.”, I said. They nodded, and we began the slow and screeching descent to the deck a hundred meters below. We were were nearly down when the lift stopped.
“That’s it, is it? Fine.” I leaped off, landing easily enough in the planet’s single G. The salesperson gestured helplessly and asked if I could get help for them. I waved, and headed to the office.
“The lift in the Octon out there is stuck, and your salesbeing is stuck. You’ll want to send someone” I said, and then I headed back to my ship to put this miserable shipyard behind me. From the extreme comfort and clean smelling bridge of the Thrack Yar I engaged the autodeparture and we took off smoothly with a slight rumble from the well-maintained engines, leaving that scrap heap of rusting crap behind.
I realized I loved my Thessily class V3-2200, and it wasn’t worth pinching pennies like this just to torture someone. I contacted Interstellar Haulers Company, the makers of the Thessily class to see what was current. They had an upgraded version of my current ship, the V5-5000. It was a generation newer than my ship, and had a crew of 5 with a five hundred thousand ton cargo load. Amazing ship, it looked like, but it was also thirty million credits. A bit too rich for my blood. I had saved up enough to go to maybe eleven million, tops. I hunted around, and found a V4-3500, same generation as mine but the bottom of the medium haulers. At three hundred and fifty thousand tons with a crew complement of four, this one was capable of four jumps and four dedicated stations. I just needed to cruise around and find a used model that was in reasonable shape.
I contacted a few different used ship brokers, and finally got one on the station orbiting Gamma Entreides Five. They had a few of them, apparently, having been refitting them for various expeditions for years. Perfect. I jumped at the next load that took me to that system, even though the load only made me a profit of a few thousand. I just couldn’t handle the idea of soaking the jump fuel cost for a look. Just because I could technically afford to waste the money, why?
After I delivered the little load to the third planet, I flew out to the station. This was a newer shipyard station called Waypoint Epcott. The Interstellar Haulers Company had a dedicated facility here where they made custom ship configurations on their various base models. There were actually eight different 3500 based ships currently in their lot, three in drydock and five on the line. First we toured the drydock, and amazing minimal pressure enclosure over three cubic kilometers. This was pressurized to one quarter atmosphere and used to for things like paint work and certain kinds of tests. I’d never been in a structure that size before, it looked impressive from outside, but from inside it was even more impressive. We zipped along, Bojan, a cereb salesperson, and myself, in a monorail transport that was attached high up on the ‘wall’ of the facility. There were several small ships in here and a larger one. The largest of them was nearly eight hundred meters long itself, and looked even vaster inside than it would outside. It completely dwarfed the small transports which were only a few hundred meters long. The paint booth was in the process of doing an exotic paint job on a group of pizza racers. The first ship they showed me was parked near the behemoth cargo hauler at the end, looking miniscule in comparison. It was roughly the size of one of the engines on that huge cargo ship.
This version of the V4-3500 was designed for mining duty, and the four staterooms were set up as a sort of luxury office suite, and the body of the ship was otherwise mostly skeletal. It had a beautiful wasp look, with the rounded window-pierced top deck and the skeletonized “Cargo bay”. Basically just a framework that you could attach enormous icy asteroids or huge metal asteroids to. It could move three hundred and fifty thousand tons, but in this particular ship it was really designed to tow that, rather than haul that. A bit single-use for my purpose, but I enjoyed the tour of the offices. The rooms were situated across from each other behind a really well laid out bridge, and there was a single nice bunk room with six racks for the senior crew, captain’s cabin, and then two office or conference rooms with large holo tables for working out details.
The next one they showed me was a search and rescue ship, and by contrast with the mining ship with its skeletal ribs and wasp waist, this one looked like it had eaten something funny. It was large and almost puffy looking, as the design was made to enable the craft to hold another craft of nearly the same weight class inside the cargo bay. The bridge looked quite small from outside because the body was so oddly oversized. When we toured the interior, it was clear that the forward and aft cargo bay doors could be opened simultaneously to form a long slightly puffy tube that you could actually fly through. There were racks and armatures for all manner of equipment, and quite a lot of hardpoints for mounting nearly anything in here. It was equipped for landing on a planet, but it looked like it would very ungainly and hard to handle in atmo. The bridge here was very simplified, with just a captain and navigation station. The other stations were located in that huge hangar deck of a cargo bay, and were specially dedicated to do repair or salvage work.
The third wasn’t even fully assembled right now, but it was a nice chance to note the gleaming beauty of the structure that went into these ships. The bridge and passenger compartments were clearly a module that was attached to the chassis, as in this case it was hanging from a gantry a few hundred meters above the body. The body on this ship was currently just the ribs and a bit of cabling, and the modular engine core hadn’t been installed. It was sitting on its own huge lift rack a few hundred meters away, swarmed with suit-clad engineers and robotic machines that were making it space worthy and giving it a full overhaul.
After looking at these, we headed for a shuttle craft and went outside.
“I think here we’ve got something you’ll really like. I had a feeling you would either like the SAR model or the Mining model, but I think you really want something that’s multi-mission, am I right? If it’s multi-mission you like, lifting off with food one day, fighting pirates for salvage the next, and then delivering station parts the day after, I have just the ship for you.”, the salesman said. Sorry, they prefer salesguides.
We sped out into the huge exterior yard where a number of fully space-worthy craft were docked to long arms that came out from the sides of the shipyard. Looking like models on a huge sprue, there were hundreds of ships out here. Only a few were the ones we were looking for, however. There was a whole arm that was nothing but V4 Thessily and Uranium models. They were beautiful in their consistency and uniformity. The Uranium model was the latest series, but they started at fifteen million used, or thirty million new. The Thessily models like the Thrack Yar started at around four million used depending on crew complement and cargo capacity. We got out to the V4 3500 set, and he skillfully maneuvered around them so I could get a good look. One of them was a bit more utilitarian looking, but one was absolutely a fast mover. It had a mostly circular body, cereb-style, with the engine and bridge deck sitting above it. He brought up a graphic on screen that showed how it could actually separate and detach the huge cargo area from the engine/bridge module on its slender gooseneck and swap in a different module if required. This was something I had heard of by never seen.
“Well, the cargo module is self-contained, and has some very light-duty thrusters, just enough to maneuver in space. Nothing for planetary use, you understand. The main body there has the engines, so you can leave behind a cargobay designed for doing in-flight salvage and take one designed for carrying frozen food as easily as buying a different module. Many of our customers have quite a few different cargobays for these, and then they swap the bodies out for repair or usage as needed. This keeps the ships flying even while the cargo is being loaded or unloaded. No sense in tying up a ship! There are probably two to three hundred standalone cargobays per engine body in service right now. The engine bodies or modules go for about eight million depending on jumps, and the cargobays about a million to fifty million depending on what it’s configured for. The top end are obviously repair or research bays and things like that with a lot of sensitive scientific or research gear. One of the governments that uses these in their fleet has the bays built as science stations, they’ll leave them in a system for months at a time to study various things. The shippers usually have hundreds of them just set up as basic transport or refrigeration units and move them constantly. What would you do with yours?”, he asked.
“Well, that’s a good question. I knew nothing about this. I’ve mainly been just moving cargo around based on the jobs available, but I have several consistent reliable customer jobs now that are just point to point. Something like this could really make that more efficient, I could leave a cargobay at either end and just swap them around. That asteroid mining seems interesting too, but I’ve never gotten into that in any depth. When it comes down to it, I’m mainly just a delivery driver.”, I said, thinking about this for the first time. Maybe it was time to do more? What could I do with five or ten of these cargo bays and really consistent deliveries?
“Tell you what, I know you were looking in the eleven million range. I’ve got one down here at the end that is going for eight million with no jumps on it, the customer went under before they were able to take delivery, but wanted a bit of a weird configuration. If you’re willing to take it in “as-is” condition, or at least pay for any adjustments yourself, I can throw in two of the basic transport cargobays. That’s ten million worth of ship for eight million.”, he said, all smooth and polished.
“Depends - what do you mean by ‘weird’”, I replied, suddenly a bit cagey.
“Well, let me just show you.”, he said, and we cruised up and docked just above the huge dormant engines, ninety degrees off from the the side attached to the station arm.
The mating went very cleanly, and we floated down the short gangway to the hatch. He pressed his auth module to the door, and it opened for him. Inside, I saw that the small hatch opened directly into a very small hallway, too small for moving cargo. We passed quickly down the very short hallway and another hatch opened into a huge and empty cargo bay that I couldn’t even see the far ends of with my light. The salesguide pressed a control on his auth module and rows of huge lights engaged, illuminating a huge round space probably three hundred meters in diameter, and maybe fifty meters tall. There were three enormous doors on the walls, evenly spread so that the cargo bay looked like it could be loaded or unloaded in three sections. The roof was crisscrossed with girders from which depended a number of hoists and arms. There were recessed rails in the floor that looked like they could be used for a very heavy duty version of the skids in my ship. There was a cargo master’s office up in the center of the roof, far overhead. It had windows to all sides, and appeared to be slightly recessed.
“Ok, this is our fairly standard one-twenty bay. It’s called that because there’s three cargobay doors, three loading ramps, three access points, three lighting zones, you get the idea. It’s split perfectly in one hundred and twenty degree areas to make it easy to access everything for loading and unloading. Three hundred and fifty thousand tons can be quite a lot of cargo to move, after all. It takes time and planning. We’ll give you two of these. They don’t support atmosphere, so there’s none of that forcefield stuff here. You load/unload in vacuum or planetary atmo or whatever happens to be outside. In transit, you can fill it with an inert gas or whatever makes you happy. Customers generally just leave it at low pressure unless they’re going in atmo with it. Just to reduce hull load, you understand. Let’s go back to the engine module now.”, he said, and led us back into the little hallway. This time rather than go through the hatchway into the cargo bay, we went up this time instead and the hallway was a lot longer than it seemed. I realized we must be walking up the spine of the engine body over the top of the cargobay. It was a bit time consuming, and I mentioned this.
“Yes, I docked just above the engine as you no doubt noticed. There’s also a dock right off the bridge for convenience. I thought it best to go this way to give you an idea of the scale. There’s no grav plating in any of this part of the ship, partially because this would be pretty awkward to traverse under standard gravity. With mag boots, of course, it’s perfectly comfortable.”, this was true of course. It also meant the engine compartment would be in microgravity, but on the other hand, it meant the engine compartments and their accompanying radiation were one hundred and fifty meters from the passenger compartments, which was pretty reassuring. Many ships were only a hundred or so meters long in their entirety and I was used to having all that heat and radiation pretty close to me. This was almost safe by comparison.
We finally arrived at a heavy airlock marked “Deck 1: Bridge”, and passed through the luxurious airlock with decontamination facilities into a beautiful carpeted room that stretched out ahead of us. Carpeting? On a space ship? I looked askance at the salesguide, who shrugged. “I told you it was as-is. You’re absolutely right, your mag boots will not work well on the bridge. The entire bridge and passenger deck is carpeted. Fortunately, it’s also outfitted with gravity plating.” he said, and then spoke in a language I didn’t recognize, and I felt gravity gradually settle on me. About half a G it felt like.
“It’s currently only programmed for my species’ language, but we’ll be happy to upload additional for free. That’s no problem at all”, he said. “Now, if you’ll follow me?”, and then proceeded to put boot coverings on his exo suit boots, and then lead the way onto the bridge. We both did likewise, and followed. I wasn’t sure if there was atmo or not, but I wasn’t about to remove my helmet until the salesguide did.
The whole bridge was laid out in really odd wood grain and light pastel colors, with a thoroughly unusual station design. There were two stations that flanked a massive screen, then two stations that looked off to the left and right, at a right angle to the screen, and then the captain’s chair in the dead center on a little raised plinth. It would be fairly unergonomic to work under these conditions. I had a feeling what the salesbeing meant now. This was definitely not a typical layout. Plus, the stations were all flatscreens, no augmented reality stations at all.
“So what we have here are a sort of retro station, these are all pretty primitive by current standards. There’s an engineering, helm, tactical, navigation and command station, essentially five stations. The trouble is none of them are what you or I would consider very useful. There’s also a bit of an issue with the crew quarters. This is, of course, a ship designed for a crew of four. Let’s take a look at those.” he said, and we walked to the edge of the bridge, and I noticed there were two doors leading off the sides of the bridge.
"There’s two staterooms, but both have four bunks in them. Pretty tight. The other side is just like this room, but mirrored. I looked into the spacious room that had been ruined by the splitting up. It could be turned into a single huge and comfortable room easily enough, but that would leave everyone else tucked into one uncomfortable room. Somehow these people had planned to cram a crew of eight onto a ship designed to support four, which would be uncomfortable at the best of times. No rec facility, no private bathrooms, no cargobay to walk on. It wouldn’t be comfortable at all. Then with that carpeted bridge, that’d be really rough.
“How do we get to the cargomaster’s office?” I asked, since I knew Bojan would want to know. He’d been very quiet this whole tour.
“Oh, sure, let me show you.”, the salesguide said, and we walked around the bridge partway to a small and easily missed door. It was labelled “CARGO”, and opened onto a ladder that descended into a fairly nice office. I could see that the cargomaster’s office was considered part of the engine module, as there were huge thick windows in here, more like portholes. This would be a pretty impressive view when the cargobay was detached.
There were banks of consoles, and two seats in here, and they were up-to-date augmented reality types. Bojan took a seat, and smiled.
“I like this”, he said with a rare smile. He looked really at home here. Okay then.
“Alright, we’ll take it, but something will have to be done about that bridge, I agree. I’ll pay to have it fixed, of course. Along with those quarters.”, I told the salesguide who was suddenly all smiles.
Looked like my eleven million credit ship was about to become more like twelve…