Craig flew us across from the Goodwill in the Red. It is not two kilometers, and still the approach felt like a journey. The Dauntless lay broadside against the stars, two hundred forty meters of dark metal, only the position lights and a row of windows at the hangar deck lit. We had bought her second-hand half a year earlier, an Idris-P, the civilian version without the big gun, from a company that was dissolving its security fleet. Since then she had hung beside the Goodwill, waiting for a crew we did not yet have.
The hangar deck runs through the whole length of the ship and has room for three small ships. Craig set the Red down in it without clearance; in the flight control above the deck there was nobody who could have given one. "I've landed on an Idris plenty of times," he said. "But never with nobody in flight control." It did not sound like a joke. Afterward the Red stood on the deck like a single chair in a hall. Ivo had powered up the deck, one corridor and the briefing room behind the bridge; the rest of the Dauntless lay in the dark, the reactor on minimum load. In one corner of the deck stood the heated container Ivo slept in when Craig no longer came to pick him up with the Red in the evening, which was most evenings. On the way forward we passed the sealed maintenance hatch to the keel channel where, on the military version, the railgun sits. On ours the channel was empty. Ivo rapped on it in passing, out of habit.
The Sick Bay
Alice, Myra and I took the detour through the sick bay. Ivo had not powered it up; we went with hand lamps. Five beds under protective covers, one of them in a separate room for procedures, the equipment covered, the air so cold that our breath stood in front of the lamps. The previous owners had left the bay clean. They had apparently never used it; the shipyard's seals were still on the cabinets.
Alice drew back one of the covers and looked at the bed the way she looks at a patient: first from a distance, then the connections, then the locks on the side rails. The bed was better than anything in service on the Goodwill. She laid the cover back over it, smooth.
"Better than mine," she said. "They stay covered anyway."
I had drawn the bay into my plan as a second medical unit. Alice had seen the plan and until this moment had said nothing about it. Now she said that she could not stand in two operating rooms and would not do rounds in two places, and that a bed without staff was a promise to a patient that we could not keep. She would put the bay into service when there was a second team. Not before, and not halfway.
"And who looks after your patients on the Goodwill if you go down?" Myra asked.
Alice looked at her and said we would talk about that in a moment. Myra went ahead.
The briefing room behind the bridge had twelve folding seats, and there were six of us. Ivo checked each one to see whether the latch still held before he sat down. Craig sat down before Ivo was finished. Nadia asked Ivo to stop the rattling, laid her list on the table and the headset beside it; she had routed the emergency channel to this room for the morning.
Six People, Twelve Chairs
There were two things for the meeting. One I had prepared: a projection of the Dauntless as a mobile operations base, the way she should look in a year or two. The sick bay with its five beds; the hangar deck as workshop and rescue deck; stores, quarters for twenty-eight, of which we needed six. The other Nadia had put together a week earlier at my request. I showed the goal and asked Nadia to lay her list beside it; the gap between the two was what we had to talk about that day. The list held no figures, but two columns: on the left every system in service on our two ships, from the operating room to the hangar deck; on the right the name of the crew member who kept it running day after day.
The list was considerably shorter than my plan. On the Goodwill: one operating room, one recovery room, the scanner, the landing bay with decontamination, the emergency channel, the ready room and one cabin block, of which we heated two cabins. On the Dauntless: the hangar deck, one corridor, this room. Beside every entry stood a name. Some names stood there three times.
Then Nadia came to the point she had been wanting to raise for days. Ivo had worked nights on the hangar deck that were in no plan, on the previous owners' maintenance list. Craig had not written down hours, for instance the morning after the Yela job, when he had waited in the landing bay instead of sleeping. Myra had restocked consumables from a reserve of her own that nobody knew about. As long as Jalen lay in the recovery room, Alice had slept nine nights on the bench in the ready room, because her cabin was cold. I had not heated my cabin in months and had considered that a decision that concerned only me.
"I can't plan what you don't tell me," Nadia said. "Every one of you keeps more running than the plan says. That's decent. It's also the reason I don't know which of you will still be on your feet tomorrow."
We had made a habit of running only what a patient needed, and of saving on everything else. That was right. We had only forgotten that a patient also needs a crew that has had some sleep.
"Then let's write down what everyone is carrying on the side," I said. "I'll start." I named first what was on no plan for me: the night hours and the cold cabin. The cabin I put on record with a certain dignity; I had been sleeping in two sweaters for weeks. Nadia nodded and wrote it down.
Myra wrote her reserve into the list. Ivo sent his actual working hours and, unasked, the previous owners' maintenance list; it was longer than both of Nadia's columns together. Alice had a heated cabin entered for herself, and two hours a day in which she was not reachable, except for the operating room. Craig asked whether he should enter the six o'clock rounds as well. "Those above all," Nadia said.
Craig's Service Years
Later Craig's eyes stayed on my sketch of the hangar deck, on the area I had marked as a rescue deck with first aid.
"I launched from a deck like that," he said. "Two years, on a Navy Idris. Do you know how many people stood on the deck when a bird went out?"
I did not.
"More than you've got here altogether." He counted them off: two in flight control above the deck, two at the ship, one at the door, one in the engine room doing nothing but reading the gauges. Plus the bridge, which had to be crewed as long as even one ship was outside. "Eight people so that a rescue ship gets out and back in safely. That's not the crew. That's the minimum before you start working."
"An Idris nobody flies," Ivo said, "isn't a ship. It's a dock with position lights."
Craig wanted to know who stood the engine watch while the Red was on a job. Who maintained the Dauntless when Ivo was sitting on a wreck. Who sat in flight control when he himself was flying. None of the three questions had an answer today. I switched the projection off. "As a plan for this year, that won't work," I said. "As a goal, it will."
Then Craig struck a job he had proposed himself: four days of escort for a convoy to Hurston. For four days he would have been gone, and without him there was no pilot for the Red; whoever put out a distress call in the belt in those four days would have had to wait for rescue from Orison. Nadia had already entered the job in the plan. She deleted the line without objecting, and asked whether the convoy was also available as a one-day job. Craig would ask.
Finally Nadia said the sentence she had been waiting to say since the approach. "We could leave her cold. A year. And stop drawing her into every sketch as if she were already here."
Nobody asked whom she meant. Ivo said she was cold already, and even a cold ship makes work; the maintenance list would not get shorter for it. Craig said nothing and looked out of the window. I said why I still wanted to keep the ship. The Goodwill can fly to a distress call too. But she is a hospital ship; she goes where there is shooting only with an escort, and we do not have one. Yela is not the only belt where people sit in wrecks, and not every patient survives the way to us. The Dauntless is a frigate, even without the big gun: armored, shielded, with turrets of her own. She can go where it is dangerous, take the wounded aboard through the hangar, give them first care in the sick bay and bring them to the Goodwill stable. And if someone is pinned down there because others won't let them go, she can fight them free if she has to. The sooner someone is treated, the better their chances; I had seen that often enough in Orison at the end of a transport that had taken too long. That had been the thought behind Stonehearst from the start; we just had not had a ship for it then.
If there was ever money to spare, I said, I would have the Dauntless refitted to the K configuration. Ivo had only been waiting for the cue. The kit puts a beam weapon into the empty keel channel whose hatch he had rapped on earlier, plus a missile turret and five point-defense lasers. "Point defense first," Craig said. "It keeps the missiles off us while we have to hold still because the Red is coming into the hangar with a casualty. And the gun hits hard enough that anyone thinks twice about coming at us at all. Most of the time it's enough that they see we have it." Ivo said the installation would take more than two hands, and looked at Craig as he said it. Craig nodded without looking up.
"All true," Myra said. "But none of it crews the bridge."
Alice said that for her the idea did not depend on a ship but on the operating room, and that it was on the Goodwill until there was a second one. She did not say it against me. She said it so that it would be in the protocol.
I proposed what I heard in all the objections together: the Dauntless stays cold for a year, as Nadia wanted, but maintained, as Ivo demanded; she appears in no plan we lack the people for; and in six months we ask the question again, with names instead of boxes. Nobody objected. Nadia wrote it into the protocol as its first line.
"I know people from my service years," Craig said. "A second pilot, maybe someone for the engine room. Whether they fit with us is another question. I'll ask anyway."
Because of Rina's invented eight minutes I asked for a second sentence in the protocol: whoever calls us only has to tell us what they know; we ask the questions, and nobody is turned away because they cannot answer them. Myra only added that Rina now took every one of our calls and on the last one had reported on her own how the dressing looked. Alice entered Jalen's date for the stitches in the list, behind Myra's name, and behind it mine, in case Myra could not make it that day.
Myra's List
Myra had prepared a file of her own. In it stood no ships, but people, supplies and times: Jalen's stitches, Rina's availability during her shifts on Grim HEX, our stock of infusion solution and dressings, the delivery time from Orison to Yela and the days on which Myra herself was not available. She disclosed her absence as plainly as every other entry.
I asked about cover. She looked at me and waited. In my plan stood a sick bay with five beds, and on every sketch I had silently assumed that Myra would be standing beside those beds and Alice in the operating room next door. I had asked neither of them. An hour earlier Myra had asked in the sick bay who covered for Alice, and Alice had deferred the answer. It was uncomfortable how self-evident it had seemed to me.
"I'm not part of the inventory," Myra said. "You don't just draw me into a sketch without asking."
She was right, and I said so, in front of everyone. Then I did the asking I had skipped. Myra said she would take the sick bay as soon as there was someone to cover for her on the days she was not there. Not before. Nadia wrote it into the protocol word for word.
Alice answered the question she had deferred. If she went down, the operating room was closed. Then the Red flew to Orison, the way Myra had flown for thirteen years, and nobody on this ship tried to operate in her place, me included. She wanted that in the protocol as a fixed rule, not as a fallback. Taking a patient to Orison was not a failure, she said. We would only have failed if nobody felt responsible.
Ivo proposed limiting the workshop on the Dauntless to one of the three hangar berths for now; more than that he could not keep in order alone. Craig wanted a workstation in flight control above the deck, from where he could oversee the launch positions. Nadia needed a fixed place for the plans and papers that more than one person could reach; the office next to the bridge was enough for that. Alice wanted nothing on the Dauntless, except that the seals on the sick bay cabinets stayed until she broke them herself. Together we needed less space than my plan provided, and more time from people we did not have yet.
Then we went through Myra's list a second time, entry by entry. For every task we recorded who could take it on and who took it on if the first was out. Where nobody had time, the entry stayed without a name. More entries stayed without a name than I liked. I put my name to two tasks that only a doctor could do and deliberately left a third open: an empty field was more honest than my name on a task I would not manage.
Protocol 001
In the break I went up to the bridge alone. It was not powered; only the emergency lighting was on, and through the windows Yela lay below us, gray, with the bright line of the belt behind it. From up here the ship looked as if it could do anything. Twelve stations for people we did not have. As a freelance emergency physician I had once spent three weeks on a freighter whose bridge was bigger than my parents' apartment in Prime and on which never more than four people stood watch. Back then I had wondered who buys a ship like that. Now I knew. I stayed until Nadia called me.
The Dauntless stayed in the plan, but on a smaller scale. For the moment the project meant: the hangar deck, one corridor and this room stay powered, as workshop, store and a place for meetings. The sick bay stays sealed until there is a second team. The rest of the ship stays cold. The Goodwill remains our operations base, with the one operating room in which three people do what takes six elsewhere. Craig's place in flight control and Nadia's office come next, as soon as Ivo can power them up; not before. Before the Dauntless moves a meter we need a second pilot and someone for the engine room, two names we do not have yet. And for every task on Myra's list a second name, before we take on a new one. We set no date for more.
Ivo wanted to go over the folding seats once more. Craig's seat had given way after all when he stood up; Ivo looked at him as if he had always said so. Craig helped him unhook the seat. While they did it Craig said, in passing, that he had received an answer from Aremis. He said no more, and nobody asked.
Myra went back to the Red with Craig; she wanted to place the order to Orison from the hangar deck while she still had the delivery time in her head. Alice went with them; she wanted to check on things in the medical module before sleeping, for the first time in weeks, in a heated cabin. Craig would bring the Red across once more afterward. Nadia and I stayed in the briefing room with the list. Through the windows you could see the Goodwill, gray, with a single lit module, and behind her the belt.
As I saved the first protocol, a message came from Rina. Jalen wanted to know whether Ivo could take a look at his revised mount; he had drawn the angle bracket, with his right hand. I called Ivo before I answered Rina. He agreed, and Nadia entered half an hour of workshop time in the list, with Ivo's name behind it.
