The Test Run

Parts One, Two, and Three

PART ONE: Titania Keil, Pilot

Titania Keil sat eagerly at the controls of the just-commissioned Light Transport ship Venture — her first solo voyage after graduating from Flight School — waiting for the rest of her crew to gather.

She already had Gareth Clovar and Rutherford Andrews aboard back in the cargo hold. They had come on board in spacesuits through the giant cargo airlock with their precious invention, and had not left its side as the space had been slowly pressurized around them. Titania offered to have them come around to the smaller crew airlock so that they could monitor the hours-long process of pumping up the hold from the flight deck with her, but they had politely-but-forcefully declined.

Titania listened in on them over the radio to ensure they were safe back there until she grew tired of their continuous dry conversation about millibars and minor pressure differentials. Eventually, she turned on the privacy filter to listen to a scrambled version of their chatter for tone and emotion. She was only required to monitor them during this operation; there wasn’t going to be a test on the intricacies of their technical conversation later.

She passed the time watching the moon-like silver bulk of Adalia Prime spin out beyond the stationary mass of the gunmetal grey Arvad, thinking back to her recent training at the Flight Academy. She practiced switching her frame of reference on the fly.

AP is spinning, and the Arvad and I are still.

Blink.

I am sitting still on the outer skin of a rotating Arvad looking at a stationary AP.

Blink.

I am orbiting around the central axis of the Arvad that I’m docked to, which is orbiting Adalia Prime, which is orbiting the Star Adalia, which is just one part of a single spiral arm of the spinning Milky Way.

Blink.

I am the still centre of a galaxy dancing all around me.

Blink.

I am part of the dance, and only my destination is still.

Blink.

I am still, and I must dance over to MC-11697 and catch it.

Blink.

MC-11697 is still, and I and all the universe dance around it.

ThumpthumpTHUMP.

Her eyes flew open. She was on the flight deck of the Venture, and only her head felt like it was spinning.

Thump thump.

Heavy gloved hands pounding on the airlock door. Titania switched off the privacy filter frantically, but her scientist and engineer were still calmly talking about pressurization.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The forward airlock. Shit, she hadn’t been paying attention, and her captain for this mission was waiting in the airlock connected to the Arvad. Waiting on her.

Her hand fumbled for the radio.

“This is Venture Helm. Go forward airlock, over.”

“Helm, Venture forward airlock, permission to come aboard, over?”

“Forward airlock, Helm, permission granted. Prepare for equalization, over.”

The airlock was much smaller than the cargo hold and connected to the already pressurized Arvad, so it only took a moment to equalize with the flight deck. A light turned green over the airlock; Titania stood, released the primary lock and the safety lock, and threw the big lever to open the heavy metal door.

The distinctive smell of recently unbottled air and a bulky space-suited figure filled the tiny airlock.

The figure removed his helmet to reveal a face with a strong jaw, wrinkled and age-spotted skin, intense blue eyes, and a full head of white and grey hair the same colour as Adalia Prime outside.

He held out his oversized gloved hand for a handshake as he stepped in. “Scott Allen, asteroid miner,” he introduced himself.

Titania gave him a Spacer’s Slap — two quick gentle backhanded bumps of her open hand against the back of his — instead of shaking his hand. She had picked this up at Flight School recently, and it already felt natural to her.
“Titania Keil, pilot of the Venture.”

He tilted his head to the side, thinking. After a moment, he nodded. “I know that name,” he said, “I sit in your chair at the Prime Council.”
She laughed, thinking back to her days as Chief Hydrologist. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

“That’s okay, I got a new chair!” she said, gesturing at the pilot’s seat beside them.

He nodded, satisfied, and walked a bit further into the ship to remove his spacesuit. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you must also let in my counterpart, too,” he said grimly over his shoulder. “As much as I’d rather leave him in the airlock outside, I feel it would be exceedingly poor manners.”

Titania shut the airlock and cycled it. The far door opened, and the fifth and final crew member entered. Once he sealed the far door behind him, she cycled the airlock from her side again. A brief muffled whoosh and a drawn-out hiss, and the inner door was ready to open again.

The second figure removed his helmet, and Titania could see his stern expression, dark brown skin, short curly beard, dark eyes, and short-cropped black hair. He looked young, and he looked hungry. Like a shark, Titania thought.

“Cornelius Bain,” he said, not offering a hand to shake.

Silence stretched between them until they were mercifully interrupted by Scott Allen, who emerged from the back of the crew area, no longer wearing his spacesuit. He switched places with Bain and sat down behind Titania at the Conn seat while Bain walked purposefully aft to stow his suit.

Allen leaned forward and whispered to Titania conspiratorially. “Don’t mind him. He thinks you are little more than a chauffeur, so he’ll leave you alone. I have the conn on this trip, so he’s my problem.”

He leaned in even closer, almost whispering in her ear.

“But you and I both know whose boat this actually is, right?”

With this, he gave her a friendly smile and put a finger to his lips. He looked over his shoulder as Bain returned from the back and sat down in the third and final seat on the flight deck. He was quite tall, and loomed over the other two people on the deck, made even worse by how the flight seat sat lower than the other two, so they could see forward past her head.

“How soon can we get underway?” he asked almost immediately.

“As soon as the cargo is secured, Mr. Bain,” Titania replied.

“And when will that be, exactly, pilot?” Bain shot back.

“Bain,” Scott interjected, “you do know that Captain Keil here is not in charge of the cargo, right? Please direct your question to Quartermaster Andrews in the cargo hold instead, yes?” He spoke very politely, but there was no mistaking the firmness in his tone — especially the deliberate emphasis he had put on “Captain Keil,” stressing all three syllables unhurriedly.

Bain considered this briefly, then silently put on the headset for his seat.

When he radioed the cargo hold, his tone had improved significantly; Quartermaster Andrews was nominally Bain’s boss for now in the rapidly shifting social dynamics of post-Arrival life.

While Bain was absorbed in his conversation over the radio with Andrews and Clovar, Scott shot Titania the tiniest smile and nod, punctuated with a quick thumbs-up gesture.

“Your boat,” he mouthed.

Titania smirked and went back to her flight controls, thinking again about their route. She ignored Bain as he grilled Clovar over the radio and smoothly shifted her frame of reference again.

Blink.

MC-11697 is still, and I pirouette around it.

She planned out her next few steps in the great dance.

PART TWO: Cornelius Bain, Merchant

Cornelius Bain absently watched the rookie pilot maneuver Scott Allen’s Light Transport ship toward the asteroid selected for this second test run of the ‘eggshell’ smelter invented by Quartermaster Andrews and Gareth Clovar.
But his sharp mind was far away, thinking about the Arvad and the Adalia system in which she found herself becalmed.

Other upstart merchants were busily concerning themselves with the “Frost Line,” their name for the distance from the Star Adalia at which the belt’s metallic asteroids transitioned to icy ones. They were all excited about this brief liminal space where both metals and volatiles briefly overlapped, like a thin slice on a Venn diagram.

But Bain was obsessed with a different kind of line, less tangible but no less real.

On one side, the by-the-book utopian economy of the Arvad, where long-dead planners in the Sol system had worked out every detail of the lives of all the specialists and passengers aboard, almost two centuries ago.

On the other side, the descendants of the people born on the Arvad, working out their own solutions to problems never dreamed of by any long-dead planner under their blue skies and full gravity.

And in the middle, a thin liminal space where Bain felt alone and unappreciated amongst the waning schemes of the power structure inherited from the now-nearly-disassembled Arvad. A place of frozen, stagnant authority and new minds looking to prove their mettle. A Frost Line of the past and future.

Bain had come from nothing, a mere passenger, but he had amassed a decent — but ultimately finite — stack of the newly-minted SWAY through hard work, cleverness, and more than a bit of luck.

But now, he needed to pick his play carefully. The correct investment would set him up for life; the wrong bet could wipe him out and bust him back down to small-time gambles again.

He had worked it out so that he was on this trip under the pretence of doing a cost-benefit analysis on Andrews’ repurposed smelting furnace for the Prime Council.

But he was primarily here for himself.

If he was the first to know if Andrews’ invention worked — or even the first to know if it didn’t — that would give him an edge that he could use to get one more step further ahead.

But there were only three seats on the flight deck, so Quartermaster Andrews and his pet scientist Clovar were riding in the back with their cargo. Bain hoped to get a chance to talk to them again once they reached their destination. In the meantime, he was stuck with the rookie pilot and Allen.

He had nothing to say to the pilot and had already talked to the self-important Scott Allen more than he cared to.

But apparently, Allen wasn’t done talking to him.

“How is this trip working out for you, Bain?” Allen asked him suddenly.

“It’s a little too early to tell yet, Councillor Allen,” Bain replied stiffly.

“There’s no need for such formality; my appointment to the Prime Council was a matter of pure pragmatism, nothing more.” Allen made a dismissive waving motion in the air between them, like he was clearing away the atmosphere of a smoky backroom. “And I’m sure it will be only temporary, too, since I was already overdue to take on a protégé and retire at the time of Arrival.”

Bain made his pitch. “I have been fairly clear on my ambition to get on that Council.”

Allen laughed. “Well, you’ll need to learn a lot about asteroid mining if you want my seat. Although, technically, my seat is actually concerned with Hydrology.”

He shot another one of those conspiratorial glances at the young rookie pilot, who chuckled quietly to herself. Bain didn’t understand what was going on between them. Was it romantic? She was pretty but also young enough to be his daughter. He thought briefly back to his research. Didn’t Allen have a young daughter in addition to his sons? Bain couldn’t remember for sure.

“My hope,” Bain began at last, “is to do well enough on a few deals and earn enough SWAY to get a seat on the Council.”

“Bain,” Allen said patronizingly, “seats on the Prime Council aren’t for sale.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Bain shot back. “We aren’t on the careful and deliberate planned economy of the Arvad any more. We are moving from a time of Quartermasters to a time of Economists, and I intend to be one of the ones that rekindles the old objectivist flame again.”

Allen levelled a severe look at him. “You mean the same flame that burnt our first home to ash?”

Bain recoiled slightly. He was surprised by the sentimental environmentalism of Allen. He hadn’t figured on a professional asteroid miner living aboard a climate-controlled ship — the last in a long line of asteroid miners living entirely within such ships — to privately feel this way. Bain couldn’t figure it. Wasn’t this the old man that was always droning on about ‘pragmatism’?

He countered along a hopefully unexpected tangent. “And wasn’t your own Allen Mining Company once the largest company in history? Extracting the desperate wealth of all of humanity in exchange for lifeboats… with an Allen family child or nephew aboard every one of them?” Bain shouted back.

“Oh, not this again, Bain.” Allen suddenly leaned forward intensely. “My great-grandfather’s company saved humanity. You like that seat you are strapped into? The oxygen you are breathing? The ship and the fuel we are using?”

Bain grew more heated. “This ship is a hunk of scrap, drifting on fumes and piloted by a rank amateur. Did you know that you, the great Councillor Allen, are being flown around on the maiden flight of both this scrap-built ship and her untrained student pilot?”

Allen scoffed at this. “Did you find this out in your ‘research’, Bain? There’re twenty-five zero-gee pilots on the Arvad. All of them are working around the clock to train ten classes of forty cadets each. No one, not even members of the Prime Council, gets a full pilot for their flights. But I did ask for the best and brightest student pilot that they had out of all those new pilots, and simply trusted that I would. And you know what? When I met our pilot at the start of this trip, I knew that I had.”

“I looked at her flight record, Allen. An unremarkable student pilot only recently off shipbreaking detail.”

“Bain, it’s unspeakably rude to act like the fine captain of our boat can’t hear you.”

Bain did a slow double-take between the two of them for a moment. “But Allen, you are the captain, not the student pilot.”

“I am the commander of this mission, yes, but it is being performed aboard the fine boat of Captain Keil here.”

“Allen, you are on the Prime Council; you don’t get to pretend modesty by being polite to your inferiors,” Bain spat.

The pilot, who has remained silent until this point, spoke softly now, to no one in particular. “I used to be on the Prime Council.”

In the tense silence that followed, Bain looked over at Allen and rolled his eyes, making a sweeping can-you-believe-this gesture at the still back of the pilot below.

But Allen just nodded slowly. “Uh, yeah; she was.”

Bain ran out of words and slowly turned to look at the confident Allen and the silent pilot.

Allen finally spoke. “Do better research,” he said, “or you are not going to make it to the Prime Council, Bain.”

They flew on in silence towards their convergence with MC-11697. Bain returned to his thoughts.

PART THREE: Scott Allen, Miner

After the test run of Andrews’ and Clovar’s prototype smelter, Scott Allen surprised everyone by asking to ride home in the cargo hold with Cornelius Bain, but they ultimately obliged this strange request.

Allen’s mind wandered while they prepared the Venture for flight, thinking about what he was going to say to Bain, plus whatever other random thoughts that drifted through his mind. When the light transport gave a brief burst of thrust to lift off the asteroid MC-11697 and then coasted silently away from its very weak gravity before kicking on the big torch drive, Allen was suddenly reminded of the story his granddaughter had recently told him about her zero-gee adventures in the cargo hold of the Arvad, specifically her use of her shoes as a source of burst thrust for controlling her body while drifting helplessly. He had just asked the one right question — ‘Natalie, why are you just in your socks? — and the whole story flowed out in answer to that one question.

Allen was a big believer in the power of the right question. He turned to Bain and tried one.

“So, what do you think of this thing?” Allen asked, gesturing at the prototype in front of them.

Bain looked around, as if someone else he somehow snuck through the sealed airlock to join them.

Allen just looked him levelly, his face calm and inscrutable.

“Uh, me?” Bain asked cautiously.

“Yes you,” Allen replied. He paused, reflecting back on his last discussion with the young merchant. Could you call it an argument? Maybe it had been an argument. “Look, I’m sorry if I was too harsh with you before. I went after you a little harder than I intended. You’re an intense young man. A lot like me, back when I was your age. Too much like I was, maybe. I don’t know; you just get to me…but that’s on me, not you.”

Bain just looked at him, as if he didn’t know how to react to this sudden honesty.

“The smelter,” Allen reminded him. “What do you think of it?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, of course honestly! That’s why I’m not asking you in front of its inventors.”

Bain took a deep breath before answering. “I think it’s garbage. I think it’s the jankiest kludge I’ve ever seen. If it works half the time, it would be a miracle.”
Allen laughed. “Really, fifty percent up time? You think it can maintain that? You are too kind!”

Bain did that not-knowing-quite-what-to-say thing with his face again.
Allen continued. “I have in my shop right now a smelter actually designed for space. State of the art, rock solid, indestructible. A real tool for the job, not this…what did you say, ‘janky kludge’?”

Bain nodded.

“It also has a tiny mouth and a tiny little stomach, because it’s built to turn out tiny batches of lightweight materials for a satellite or two at a time. It can do, maybe, ten percent of the capacity of this piece of garbage. I have three of these little smelters, and they are the only ones for fifteen light years in any direction, and I can’t make any more. Three.”

He held up two fingers and a thumb to emphasize his point.

“This one smelter,” he continued, “running with only one third uptime, could double our industrial output. Every one of these things that Andrews and Clovar can make adds our entire present capacity again. More, if they can milk more uptime out of it.”

“Okay, I see where you are going with this, I think,” Bain said.

“That’s a different kind of math than any of us have worked with while we were on the Arvad. It’s the math of survival.”

“So you think I should invest my SWAY in this project, then?”

“I’m not here to tell you what to do, Bain. But I will tell you that if nobody champions this janky garbage here, we won’t be able to build anything else fast enough and we’ll just go extinct.”

“So that’s a yes, then.”

“That’s just pragmatism.”

The conversation stopped for a moment while they both stared at the bespoke prototype in front of them. It really did look pretty terrible, to be honest.

“You were right, you know,” Allen suddenly said. “Before. Well, half right, at least.”

“Oh? About what?”

“The time for the Prime Council is almost over. The time for Quartermasters is almost over. The time for me is almost over. It is almost time for people like you…almost. That’s the part you were only half-right about. The young have this way of seeing the future there in front of them, just inches away and perfect. But take it from an old man: it’s farther away and much clunkier than it looks to you.”

“I don’t follow,” Bain admitted.

Allen pointed. “It’s like this smelter. You came here to find out if it was ‘good enough’, right? You had some idea of a smelter that wasn’t a fragile shell wrapped around something completely unsuited to the task being asked of it, surely. But that’s not how progress works. It’s messy, and incremental. It’s full of dumb half-measures like this stupid thing.”

“Okay, I think I get you. Are you a miner or a philosopher?”

“I’m just a pragmatist. There’s no great ideology or philosophy at work in the universe. Just what works and what doesn’t work. Everyone’s all concerned with the theory behind everything, but no one’s thinking about praxis. Hell, most people don’t even know what the word ‘praxis’ means.”

“Uh, what does praxis mean?”

Allen smiled warmly. “Bain, there you go! Finally, two thirds of the way through this whole adventure, you finally asked a good question!”

“You aren’t going to tell me, are you?” Bain chuckled.

“You came on this boat like a squall line,” Allen said, evading the question. “All storm clouds and thunder. You put us all on the defensive, and I think you’ve lost all respect from our young captain. People close the storm shutters when they see a squall blowing in.”

“I know for a fact that you grew up on a climate controlled starship, same as me. Neither of us has ever even seen a storm.”

“It’s a metaphor, Bain. Well, technically, it’s a simile, but anyway. The point is, be like a breeze. No one closes the windows and the shutters against a gentle breeze. A breeze can get in anywhere.”

“So, be breezy?”

“Exactly,” Allen agreed.

Bain was smiling. Allen was grinning.

The radio chirped. “Flight deck to cargo hold, this is Andrews. How’s the prototype doing back there? Over.”

Allen toggled the mic. “Hold, flight deck, the prototype is doing fine. Try not to worry, Andrews. We were actually just talking about how impressed we were with what you’ve built, over.”

Allen released the mic toggle. “It does us no good to tell him that we thing it’s a janky kludge. We need him to believe in this thing right now so that he can keep investing himself in it. We don’t say anything critical until he’s working on the second model, deal?”

“Uh, deal. Is this ‘being breezy’?”

“Yeah, you’re getting it. Wanna mess with him a bit?”

“Uh, sure?”

Allen toggled the radio again. “Hold, flight deck, Quartermaster Andrews, I’d like to apologize on behalf of my granddaughter for the trouble she caused you, and wanted to know if you have come across her shoes yet, over?”

Bain made his not-quite-keeping-up face again. Allen silently smirked.

There was a rather long silence, then the radio came alive again.

“Flight deck, hold, say again? What?”

Allen burst out laughing. “It’s going to take him a while, but he’ll figure it out eventually, and it’s going to just totally derail whatever thought he’s having when it finally clicks.”

Bain watched Allen laughing and smiled, then started laughing as well.

“Flight deck, hold. Wait, that was your grandchild, Allen? Over.”
Allen and Bain started laughing even harder.

“Allen, Andrews. I’m going to want a receipt for those shoes,” Allen radioed. “They were deposited into your warehouse, after all. Over and out.”