Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,19

to be secured before the main thrusters came online. Everyone aboard had access to the same information. Everyone was assumed to be responsible enough to do what they needed to do to avoid injury and to provide adequate instruction and assistance to those in their care. And, apart from the rare exception of accident or illness, no special consideration would be made for those who failed to do so. Access to a constant stream of real-time information coupled with an implanted AI whose job it was to keep track of all of the details had shifted the focus away from assigning blame and pushed it back toward personal responsibility. Of course, the near-governmental powers of the various corporations had also done a number on the kinds of liability for which any entity could be held responsible.

I made my way to the cabin. It was a standard affair, little more than two meters square with an acceleration bunk and small locker for my gear. As I didn’t have any gear, stowing it was easy enough. I settled into the couch and had Sarah go back to feeding me news from the past couple of months.

It was going to be a long trip.

* * *

I drifted into the Bannon’s mess and immediately felt a sense of nostalgia wash over me. I’d served shipboard in some capacity or another for most of my lives, and regardless of the mission of the ship in question, crew galleys were the same the solar system over. It was, I supposed, an unavoidable consequence of the watch cycle. A ship under way never really slept. Standard ship time still kept a twenty-four-hour clock with crew rotations broken into three shifts. In theory, crew spent eight hours on watch and sixteen hours off. In practice, I’d yet to crew a vessel that didn’t expect everyone to pull double shifts at least part of the time.

That meant that the crew’s mess was always a mix of people coming on duty, getting off duty, or slogging through the middle of a long, long workday. It lent the place an air that, while it might not have been pleasant, was certainly unique.

The Bannon didn’t bother with artificial gravity. The technology was sound enough, but the power requirements were such that outside of passenger liners, working ships seldom used it. The added fuel burn tended to put too much of a dent in the bottom line. Nor had the cargo hauler been built to leverage rotation to simulate gravity, a more antiquated, if fuel-efficient, approach. But the added vectors made it impractical for something designed to move the maximum mass with minimum energy like the Bannon. That left the ship in microgravity.

I still wore my vacc suit, as it was my only available wardrobe choice. The suit had built-in magnetic boots, but I hadn’t bothered using them. Instead, I floated a few inches off the floor, surveying the room. It took only a moment to find what I was looking for. I reached out for the nearby handrail and gave myself a gentle push. It imparted enough energy that I drifted through the compartment, slipping down the channel between tables. I put out one hand as I reached my destination, using my elbow as a shock absorber to bleed off my forward momentum, and came to rest in front of what, in another day and age, might have been called a vending machine.

It was a little show-boaty, but I was all too aware of the eyes on me. I couldn’t help the little surge of pride that demanded I show the crew that I wasn’t some habber or dirtheel that was little better than cargo.

Bona fides established, I turned my attention back to my lunch. I didn’t bother trying to keep up with the watch schedule—I was operating on personal objective time. I’d eaten once this morning, and it was time for the second meal of the day. So, lunch. The machine before me wasn’t really a vending machine. It had some official name that no one used. In the parlance of shipboard life, if you were eating something that hadn’t been cooked in a galley from actual ingredients, you were eating from a replicator. The name wasn’t accurate—the technology at play had little to do with the science fiction from a 2D-vid from antiquity—but the name had stuck. It offered a limited selection of pre-programmed meals that the machine assembled from packaged ingredients. The menu was divided based on nominal mealtimes—breakfast,