9.== BJT2

 

 

Joe awoke refreshed and Hugh was standing by his bed with a hot cup of coffee. He stretched sat up and reached for the coffee.

 

Hugh said, “We are five hours from our destination sir. We had to wait for forty minutes to allow other traffic to pass us by I decided to let you sleep a little longer sir.”

 

Joe said, “Very good Hugh. I would like some fruit juice and some toast for breakfast in fifteen minutes Hugh.”

 

Hugh said, “Yes sir”

 

Joe thanked Hugh as he left the compartment. He got up and walked through the nano shower then started to dress. He missed the hot water showers from home but after living on a spaceship for years he was used to the sonic showers and this one was similar enough.

 

Nanos made up a large part of Joe’s world. As a child his mother started to teach him about nano science as soon as he showed an interest in things mechanical. He was twelve when he was able to construct his first one. It did not work but it was a nano and his mother rained approval on him for it. When he was in University he had redesigned the original model so it would work and his professors made a fuss over his abilities. It just came naturally to him big machines and little ones. To Joe they were all moving sculptures real works of art. Where a painting or a poem would not keep him more than a few moments, much to his father’s dismay at times, a simple water pump used to irrigate the fields had kept him absorbed for hours. The first time it needed repair Joe went with his father and helped him to do the work. Two years later Joe went by himself and rebuilt it so that it was more efficient than it had been when it was new, he had been seven at that time. His whole life had been devoted to machines of one kind or another.

 

He had tried programming and other sciences and had some successes. He was very good at building the repositories for artificial intellects (AI’s) but the programming of those was beyond him. He had tried many times to combine AI technology with nanos. Most AI’s contained Nanos that supported the system and helped to maintain the physical repositories. Not many knew that the nanos also acted as a failsafe and could be shut down remotely so that if an AI malfunctioned it could be shut down physically, basically starved by the lack of supporting nanos.

 

The other leg of Joe’s world had collapsed twenty three years ago when he was in the University of Dublin on New Eire. The news was six months old by the time he heard it and it took another month to find out the details. His family had been taken in a raid by pirates and was presumed dead or enslaved. His professors convinced him to stay and finish his degree a mere five months. In order for him to agree one of them promised to help him find out as much as he could about the pirates. It became a side study for several graduate classes in statistical analysis, historical research, and astral navigation. The end result was that they led him right to the pirates when he started looking for his family. It took him several years to find his family and to rescue them in the end his sister Julie was the only one who survived. His entire family was killed except her. His mother had died trying to save them and his father had been killed where he stood. His two other sisters had died in the time it took to find the pirates. There were many other survivors after the “authorities” finished the pirates on their home world in Probenet. There was also a substantial reward in terms of bounties that Joe was able to collect. After a discussion with his sister they decided to return to their own world which had little population left after the raid.

 

The planet was partially repopulated by other survivors from other worlds. Joe used a good portion of his money for this endeavor but still had lots left. They renamed the world Ellen’s Dream after his mother. He decided after discussions with his remaining family his sister and her new husband that he would purchase a trading vessel or two and try his hand at trading. He had learned how to pilot and maintain space craft of many types while searching for his family. He was a success and soon had a small fleet and then a large fleet. Then twenty years ago the fracture happened and the third leg of Joe’s world became apparent to his Family and the one or two friends he still had.

 

This leg is puzzles he is obsessed by them. Not the normal kind but the kind that make men climb mountains or charge off into the depths of the oceans or eventually even into the Beyond. Joe has this kind of intensity and for no particular reason for the last twenty years he has been obsessed by the fracture.

 

The Fracture is an unknown what it is and how it came to be have not been discovered although the Summoned might have a clue if so they are not saying. Joe can’t stand not knowing but he works towards the answer in every thing he has done for the past twenty years with a patience that is staggering and a persistence that almost made his sister lock him up on Ellen’s Dream. She had the backing of the counsel and could have done so. Joe very carefully and calmly talked her out of that by proving that two of the loudest voices in the counsel were trying to gain control of the interstellar shipping company he had built. Had she committed him they would have been able to take over the counsel and the company. His sister was no dummy and made sure the two conspirators got what they deserved. Having narrowly escaped the loony bin he decided to complete his plans for going to the fracture to solve this puzzle.

 

He had been at this now for Twenty years and he was close to the end of it all he hoped. Susan had given him the last piece of the solution and it sat on a desk in his workshop less then ten meters from where he stood yet he turned toward the smell of the toast in the galley car. He sat and ate and as he did so he did not even think about the work he was about to attempt he thought instead, of Susan. He wondered if she had made it out of Thotgo.

 

The coordinates he gave her were inside Thotgo and they were very close to the port he mentioned but they were in space. They were in fact inside or should have been inside a drifting freighter he happened to own. The Capt was a very capable woman who would be frozen for another thirty days or so along with the rest of the humans aboard. When Joe had held Susan’s arm he had transferred some very unique Nanos into her. They would have rendered her unconscious upon her teleport.

 

She should have appeared somewhere in the massive and all but empty hold of this ship and come gently to rest against stellar netting that is used to rescue a person in space. This stuff can stretch a very long way while gently accelerating or decelerating the person relative to the rescue ship. Timing is every thing and there are no second chances. The problem was that Thotgo automatically adjusts for speed and velocity relative to the destination. Because she believed she was heading for the port and the coordinates were close enough they would have adjusted her direction and velocity to the new location. The difference between that and the ship may be several hundred Kilometers per hour. The hold is completely meshed with the netting in hopes that it will catch her and bleed of the velocity difference before she made contact with the inside off the hold. Once caught a couple of medical robots will recover her and place her in a cryogenic bed for the drift back to Stelnet. He hoped they did not simply wind up scraping her off the walls of the hold because of the all the people he had smuggled out this way and the few in, he really liked Susan.

 

He slowly ate his meager breakfast and made small talk with the butler. He thanked Hugh for the meal and for the conversation and meant it for the meal. Even with the upgrading he had done with Hugh it was hard for the android to carry on a conversation of any complexity. He got up and walked through the living room and into his work area. He sat at his bench and picked up some of the tools he needed for his tasks and began testing them and calibrating them. He went through this routine very methodically and very thoroughly not hurrying any step. Mother had been very cross with him whenever he hurried in his work, efficient and economical was ok, but haste was forbidden in her lab.

 

Once he finished his set up he took the container and placed it on a flat ceramic plate that held a small metal object on it. He turned on an energy field around this surface he then picked up a pair of energy tongs and grasped the jar; he removed the lid with a second set of tongs. He poured the entire contents into what appeared to be a dull metal container. The container sat on three short legs and was a bit like a tea pot in shape. It had some very thin wires coming from the upper surface in random places. Joe placed a lid on the metal container and it sealed itself seamlessly.

 

He stood looking at his work for several minutes he ran a few tests with various types of equipment close to hand and then he turned off the energy shield and ran more tests. When he was nearing completion of his tests Hugh opened the inner door of the car and announced lunch was ready. Joe thanked him and immediately went to the galley for a lunch of sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Hugh was the conversationalist during this meal and Joe said little barely replying to Hughes polite questions about weather and family.

 

After eating he went back into the work shop to finish his work. He finally sat back for a second considering what he was about to do and how it could effect all humanity then reached out and touched the side of the dull metal object. It had begun, he had place a number of nanos onto the outside of the object. It was now up to them to do what needed doing. He thought of erecting another energy shield to prevent anything from happening to his work but decided that would be useless. He went to the door to the living room and there was Hugh about to announce dinner. He ate and returned to his shop but nothing had happened yet. He ran some tests but there was no way to tell if anything were happening.

 

He decided to sleep and took a pill to put himself under with instructions to Hugh to wake him if anything were to need his attention. He closed his eyes and dreamed:

 

 

Joe woke knowing it was not time but did not care. He went to his shop not dressed but in haste and in haste he went to the bench and saw that his creation was gone. He sat on the stool by the bench and cried. Hugh found him here when it was time to wake up several hours later. Not knowing what to do he helped Joe into the sleeping chamber and left him there.