Of Salt and the Seas of Titan Ch. 02

Keen had scraped together every last credit to buy De Hiep--a battered, thirty-year-old, decommissioned Navy mining ship. Officially, she was rated for a crew of five, with bunks for ten. In actuality, she was a one-man operation, because that was all Keen could afford: one bucket of bolts and the AI that came with it, and the hope that he'd find something that would make his life worth living again. Hopefully in the form of a major mineral find, like gold, or platinum, or even osmium.

Of course - this was all highly unlikely. Instead, he'd find rocks, rocks, and maybe more rocks. Maybe some aluminum or nickel, which would at least pay for the fuel and provisions to for hauling it back.

He couldn't even afford the 10,000-hour overhaul the shuttle needed, either. The ship's AI, once politely attentive, had started sounding downright anxious. The ship was originally built by a Dutch shipbuilder, and apparently the AI was also originally Dutch. He'd done his best over the last year or two to convince it that it needed to communicate in english, since he was more fluent in this than dutch, but sometimes, it slipped back into it's native tongue, for reasons unknown.

It also refused to stop reminding him about various maintenance tasks that were beyond overdue. Some of them, it became almost plaintive, as if the AI had emotions, even though he knew that it did not. But it sure did simulate them well. He almost felt bad for the AI, but he really couldn't afford the repairs, and that was just reality.

Now every-time he used the shuttle, he got stronger and stronger pleas to do the overdue 10k maintenance, with things like:

"Warning, captain: Shuttle docking seal overdue for replacement. Probability of catastrophic decompression: high. Likelihood of survival in vacuum: very low. May I recommend--"

Keen had to mute the AI before it could get to the part about what hypoxia felt like, or how starvation could set in if he drifted off course with no beacon. He'd heard it all before, in increasingly colorful detail. He kept telling himself "one more trip, this one I'll strike it rich, and I can do every repair, paid in full!". And every trip, he made barely enough to cover his costs, and yet, chose to try once more anyway, sure that the next trip would be the one that made it all worthwhile.

Lately though, he had started to wonder if De Hiep was eventually going to refuse to allow him to undock at all; but this was probably his overactive imagination. It was also weird when it randomly switched to Dutch though, this was what inspired it's name - De Hiep, or the bucket of bolts. At first, he had thought the ship needed a majestic name, fitting of it's long Naval service, but the moment he'd boarded, and heard the ships plaintive cries for maintenance, he knew the perfect name.

It started on the very first day - he bought her mostly sight unseen, as she was floating out at what was nearly a ship graveyard, more like the last step before heading to the ship breakers. He first felt that he was saving the ship, but sometimes, well, he had a few regrets. But he did love the ship, she had a lot of character.

While he'd immediately set the translator option to English, it would randomly slip back into dutch, sometimes mid-sentence.

"Captain, shuttle maintenance is now overdue by--"

The voice hiccupped, then restarted, this time in clipped, rapid-fire Dutch.

"De kans dat u sterft bij de volgende lancering is nu aanzienlijk, hoor! Doe alsjeblieft iets!"

He sighed. "Translate?"

The AI paused, as if considering how blunt it wanted to be. "Probability of death on your next launch: considerable. All maintenance schedules are overdue". It continued, "Probability of component or subsystem failure: extremely high. Probability of your survival of such a failure: low"

"Yeah, yeah. I guess we can make a list, but it's probably going to be a while."

If the ship could have rolled its eyes, it would have. Instead, it played a gentle little ping--a digital sigh of resignation.

------

Keen had been out near the moon Titan, mostly looking for stray asteroids, or even some that were caught in Saturn's gravity, but were mineral rich. Thus far, he had mainly found the usual: rocks and water. But there was always the possibility that he'd find gold, or any number of rare elements; or even a solid nickel astroid - and these would make all the trips worth it.

As he let the computer scan for objects of interest, he undertook as many repairs as he had the spare parts and energy for. He had loaded up on used spare parts for this ship, and others of similar classes, filling many of the unused bunks with random parts. Given enough time, he was pretty sure he could build another ship out of all the random parts at this point.

After a particularly long and grueling day of repairing one of the ice collectors and purifiers, he was tired, covered in grime, and was pretty sure people could smell him on neptune. After a successful repair, he finally decided to call it quits, and decided it was time for a "hollywood shower", of the hot steam mist kind. His ship probably hadn't come with a real shower, even though it had the capability to generate artificial spin gravity, but either the Naval Captain or his later successors had decided that they needed a hot shower, even if he was okay with his crew only having sonic showers. He also apparently upgraded the bed, as there was a genuinely huge bed instead of the usual single bed, in the Captain's quarters. He didn't know what he'd ever use that for, but he was pretty sure it was "for the really good sex", as the old song went. For him, at least it meant he could spread out, if he was willing to waste the energy to put the ship into a light spin to create some gravity. He'd tried it once without the artificial gravity, and as it turns out, impacting something else while sleeping will wake you up, very quickly. It was fortunate that he slept in at least some clothes, or else he could've damaged something important, rather than the bruise he got instead.

So he prepared the shower - just to the temp he liked, and set the steam to maximum, so that it would fill the whole shower chamber. It wasn't the same as a real shower on earth, but it had it's merits. Nothing could replace the feeling of hot water cascading over his face, but the steam shower did try pretty hard to do so. It was like being in a warm mist, covering his whole body, both wet and moist, but also pretty efficient. Plus, he didn't have to put the ship into spin gravity to do it, whereas the full shower required reaching near full earth gravity to work correctly. Having water suddenly go the opposite direction due to spin gravity abruptly failing - well, that was a sure way to get water up his nose, as he'd found out already.

As he enjoyed the mist enveloping him, he couldn't help but let his mind wander, and thought of a guy whom he'd encountered at the last refueling stop in the belt. Keen wasn't really into guys, per-se, but this guy was gorgeous. He was of small to medium size, but obviously worked out, and had platinum blonde hair. Keen didn't have any reason to interact with the guy, he was himself getting some sort of repairs or provisions for his own ship. But the guy glanced at him, and smiled, and he had the cutest dimples. The smile was infectious, and as soon as he had started smiling, Keen was smiling back at him. Keen could feel a warm glow start in his chest, as the moment passed, and the guy went back to ordering from his kiosk. Keen wanted to talk to him, but really had nothing to talk about - so instead, turned back to his own kiosk, and ordered his own fuel and provisions to be loaded on his ship. When he finished, and turned again, wanting to at least say hello, the guy was gone, probably having left several minutes before. Keen glanced around the station to see if he could spot him, but he was gone, and he hadn't even gotten his name.

In the shower, thinking about this guy, and even though it was kind of a new feeling for him - Keen couldn't help himself, and began jerking off. He was really getting into it, and felt nearly ready for release, when a sudden high pitched trill interrupted him. Definitely going to be blue balls, apparently.

The trill continued, until he asked Hiep to acknowledge the alarm. Hiep helpfully decided to inform him that it was the emergency distress beacon signal; not like he hadn't drilled on that tone and heard it for years already.

"Captain, that is the emergency distress beacon. By law, you must acknowledge it, and if able, investigate and provide assistance."

"Acknowledged, Hiep!"

"Captain, you cannot ignore the emergency distress beacon, it may indicate a ship in distress. You must cease your lubrication efforts immediately and investigate."

Great - now the AI was coming up with new euphemisms for jerking off. He wasn't sure the AI actually understood what he was doing, but he was sure that it chose that exact time to sound the alarm, as if it did have some idea of what he was doing. He regretfully dried himself in the heat lamp and air dryer area, and put on clean underwear and a shipsuit. Not that these really needed to be clean, but maybe he'd be meeting someone new soon, plus he hated putting on dirty clothes when he was clean.

The beacon was showing that it was launched almost a week ago, which wasn't surprising, but more of an issue that the occupant that had launched it, probably wasn't around anymore; either due to fixing the issue and departing, or departing in another way. While he didn't want to go find a ghost ship - he felt he had to do something, at least investigate, as there was a chance, however slim, that the person who launched that beacon still needed help. Worse, he was at least a day away, and the seals on his pressure suit also really needed work that he didn't have time to do. The ships sensors and AI could analyze the ship if he found it and could dock with it, to see if it's own systems were reporting sufficient pressure and breathable oxygen - so he decided that it was worth the risk. Plus, for right or wrong, if he did find a ghost ship, this might actually at least pay for his costs of this trip.

He set his AI to chart a course reversing the along the trajectory of where the beacon came from. The beacon had travelled in more or less a straight line more or less, going into a ballistic coast once it's fuel had run out, and once it was outside the gravity of wherever it came from. He wasn't entirely sure how far away the ship that the beacon originated from, but given it's speed and trajectory, as well as it's standard fuel load, the computer estimated only 1-2 days travel time from his current location to intercept the ship. That was a good start, though the ship might not be where it was when it launched the beacon, especially if it'd repaired and moved on, or if it were orbiting something.

As he waited out the days travel, Keen spent his time working out, and maybe a little bit on "personal time". He'd not really been with anyone since his wife, and although he knew that he needed to move on, he just hadn't found the right connection. Plus, he was just on the go all the time, with very little downtime except out in the black void. But once he was out there, it's not like he had company except for a cranky AI that was hellbent on teaching him Dutch, apparently. When he wasn't working out, he was usually turning a wrench somewhere, whether it was a water recycler, or an air recycler, or even some of the mining collection and processing machines. The AI was right - everything needed repairs, but realistically, he just couldn't get to them all, the ship needed a shipyard and hundreds of workers to really do everything at once. And in his ship's case, you often had to make repairs on interdependent systems, as once you repaired one, you caused a failure on the next one in line due to the first one working more efficiently and putting more load on other systems. Days were lost to repairs, and as it turns out - finding the ship wasn't that hard, but it did take longer than expected, being almost 3 days since he'd gotten the beacon signal before he found it, orbiting Titan.

The reason why it wasn't hard to find, was not only that it was in orbit, but also that the ship gleamed, and was continually scanning the planet, putting out it's own shout to anyone paying attention. The fact that it was still scanning, probably meant someone was alive onboard, or at least that was his hope. Not that he wouldn't have salvaged a derelict ship, but he'd honestly prefer not to. It felt like robbing the dead to him, and it bothered him, even if he understood that it was the right thing to do; not just for him, but also to keep a dead ship from becoming a space hazard to someone else paying less attention later.

As he approached the vessel - he tried to initiate a video transmission, but the other ship seemed to not have the capability, or else this was affected by whatever failure that had caused it to launch the beacon. Or maybe there was no one alive to answer. He hoped it wasn't this last option. Instead, he sent a standard greeting via text, hoping that someone would reply. It didn't take long, only a few seconds, which felt like minutes - but then there was a text response - "Have had a systems failure, need assistance, please help".

He wasn't sure that the brevity was due to the issue occurring, or if maybe the transmission had been in another language, and it was some weird translator problem. Either way though - the message was clear. Someone was alive on that ship, and needed help. Help that he could give, even if his ship had it's own problems.

The ship had a shuttle, as well as a direct docking collar for space ports - but it seemed like a dangerous risk to his ship to try to dock De Hiep with the smaller ship directly, as that ship probably didn't have thrusters, so he'd be relying on his ship handling the process completely, and that it didn't glitch and crush the other ship, or send it into the atmosphere of Titan. So as much as he didn't want to - he was going to have to take the shuttle. Which left the issue of his pressure suit and it's repairs. He knew that the repairs were urgent, but so was the water and air recyclers. He had a spare - but it also had its own issues, namely that it didn't do a very good job of actually holding pressure, which kind of defeated the purpose of its existence. Maybe fine for an emergency, but not a good idea in this case.

He decided to risk it - he could have the ship's AI (he called her Hiep in his head, which was really short for heep of junk) analyze the other ship's diagnostic data as soon as he docked, so he decided that this was really his only course of action. He had the ship approach, and then stop at a safe distance, and then prepared the shuttle. He was going to include his faulty pressure suit, but the shuttle was really cramped, and if there was a person alive, they might need that space to ride back. So as much as it went against his navy training, he decided to leave the pressure suit. It would only be a few minutes to cross the gap in the shuttle, and once there, the ship could tell him if there was a dangerous condition beyond the airlock; and then he could simply undock and return if so. This is definitely going to go just fine. The one allowance he made for his own safety (and definitely not just to look cool) was wearing his brown leather jacket over his ship suit, which would at least keep him warm if the other ship's environmental controls were offline.

The shuttle powered up and undocked with no issues, green lights across the board. This didn't stop Hiep from trying to convince him to abort his current mission in favor of maintenance, but really, this wasn't the time for that kind of advice. He ignored it, and undocked, and slowly maneuvered across the void to the smaller ship. The small ship was a small exploration vessel, barely larger than his shuttle really. But, unlike his shuttle, it had obvious ability to cross between inter-planetary space, so he guessed maybe it had 1 or 2 people at most. And like his ship and shuttle, it was way too small to have any form of artificial gravity. It was also gleaming, having a very silvery coating, more shiny than even normal steel or polished aluminum. Ah - heat reflective material. It made a lot more sense when you considered that its primary purpose was exploration, and not a navy ship where gray and black were more standard colors, even if they made no sense in space.

Once docked, and after re-examining the diagnostic data from the other ship, Keen cycled the airlock and opened the outer door. The first thing Keen noticed was the slight smell of vanilla and something else he couldn't place, almost like a spice in the air. He had always loved the smell of vanilla, though he wasn't sure he'd ever smelled the real, organic version, since that had been mostly extinct since before his birth. But this smell - it smelled good, almost an earthy scent combined with a spice, and what smelled like the cleanest vanilla he'd ever smelled.

As Keen pushed off and floated across the threshold between the ships, he got a major shock, and knew in this moment that the universe definitely had a sense of humor. The man on the other end of the tunnel in his own airlock was the guy he'd momentarily encountered at the last refueling station. The man who had occupied way too much of his thoughts since departure, but instead of being platinum blond, now he had radiantly gold hair. His hair radiated with almost celestial light, as if the sun was directly overhead and almost blinding in its intensity. Of course, this was impossible, as they were so far away from the sun that it was a tiny star and it's light couldn't do this at this range. He also appeared to have several tattoos and facial piercings, which Keen though was hot. Not that he had any experience in such things, but it really just looked attractive to him, in so far as he was able to judge a man for attractiveness anyway.

As he floated across the passage, Keen swore the man was hard (or was maybe he was just impressively sized and today was underwear wash day?), which immediately caused him to picture the man naked in all his radiant glory. The man reminded him of what he imagined an angel to look like, well except for the naked and hard part; but we don't have to mention that, do we? He also noticed that the scent was even stronger here, as he got closer to the man.

Keen did his best, calling on all of his years of serving on naval vessels to ignore what he was sure was a huge... well, ignoring it. He was sure he'd seen stranger things in the navy, and he definitely wasn't insanely distracted right now whatsoever. He did his best to smile (and stop his imagination), as he slowly let himself drift across the space, catching a handhold as he neared the other airlock. As he did, he extended his hand, and said "Hello, I'm Sam Keen. My friends call me Keen. Do you need help?"