Twenty-four hours after Imelda’s conversation with Ferguson, the Gabriella launches with a full crew compliment. Somehow, Ferguson has found another senior researcher, a good one. Josué Palmet has served with distinction on more than a dozen vessels and is much more qualified than Imelda Fleites is.
He also has more debts than she does.
He says a cursory goodbye to his family, fully expecting to return in six weeks, and disappears into the Gabriella, as do fifty other souls, the minimum crew required to run a ship like the Gabriella.
The Gabriella is a refurbished military vessel that looks vaguely like an infinity symbol. Only two different engines rotate what would be the two empty centers of the symbol. From a distance, it looks like the Gabriella has a black infinity shaped exterior with a white ghostly fog filling those center holes.
Upon closer examination, the edges of the engines appear, their motion so constant that it’s impossible to see their actual shape.
The military no longer uses the infinity shape. It is too vulnerable, too confusing. Most of the ships of that design were scrapped, but several were sold to nonmilitary organizations for use in distance travel, the thinking being that if the ship did not engage in military exercises, its complicated design wouldn’t be a handicap.
After its purchase, the Gabriella went through a series of retrofits, mostly to add further protections to the engines. Even though the engines seem vulnerable and open in the original design, they did have triple shielding, as well as a clear bubble case made of the most solid materials available at the time.
The first retrofit left the bubble case intact, and added extra casings. The second retrofit upgraded all of the shields on the ship, and the third added a tiny backup engine to the detachable bridge at one end of the infinity design.
Williams & Docket, the company that purchased the Gabriella, paid extra to keep the weapons system intact. Other retrofitted military vessels had their weaponry removed.
Technically, civilian ships shouldn’t have weapons systems like that. In addition to paying extra for the systems, W&D probably followed the same procedure other companies did when getting a fully functional military vessel: they paid bribes within the regulatory agencies and the military itself.
The bribes are impossible to track down, but W&D did receive the same treatment that other companies, later convicted of bribing officials, received. Those companies kept the systems and were required to maintain those systems, using one particular certification arm of the Regional Government of Yaguni.
Certifications, issued by that arm, show that W&D complied with the standard maintenance of those weapons systems, but whether or not the certifications are based on actual inspections is impossible to know. Other companies convicted in that later bribery scandal sometimes had actual inspections, while others did not.
What we do know is this: The Gabriella complied with the inspections of her engines and her upgraded shields. The certifications she received on those were from a different branch of the Regional Government of Yaguni, as well as the star port itself.
According to those certifications, the shields were upgraded with each advancement in technology, something some experts believe to be unusual.
“You don’t willy-nilly just upgrade things,” Harrison Carter, ship systems manager for Chapel Distributing, told me one sun-drenched afternoon in Ciudad Orilla. “Some of these new systems, they aren’t truly compatible with the technology in the older ships, no matter what the developers of those systems say. And with military ships, that goes double, since the military has its own tech and its own tech secrets.”
Chapel Distributing owns three ships with the same infinity design as the Gabriella, but unlike W&D, Chapel Distributing has not continually upgraded the systems. Carter wouldn’t tell me if Chapel maintains the weapons systems on its ships, but he led me to believe they had the systems removed.
“Weapons systems cause too much trouble,” he said. “Regular defensive systems are good enough for most ships. With strong shields and enough firepower to hold their ground until help arrives, most ships stay out of trouble.”
Does he believe that the Gabriella’s extra weapons and the continual upgrades contributed to her loss?
“Unless you’ve seen the logs of a ship that’s gone down, you don’t know what destroyed her,” he said. “Speculation helps no one.”
He was necessarily circumspect—Chapel Distributing was one of W&D’s biggest rivals, and benefitted the most from W&D’s dissolution two years after the Gabriella was destroyed. But he pointed me to various research studies about the retrofitting of the infinity ships.
I needed help with the technical readouts, and consulted with a variety of engineers and experts. They looked over the Gabriella’s specs, and told me conflicting things: that she was off-balance because of the extra shields, that the weapons systems would leach poisons into the environmental systems of a ship of that design unless preventative measures were taken; that the detachable bridge could detach accidentally under stress. Those are just a few of the things that the engineers and experts told me, and are the only ones that even a few of them agreed on.
The rest of the problems those engineers and experts mentioned include a whole host of gloom-and-doom scenarios, all of which have come to pass on other ships, but none of which happened to the Gabriella before her launch on that fateful Monday afternoon.
“Whatever we tell you is complete and utter bullshit,” LaTonya Eircolan, a decorated expert in ship design and sustainability who teaches at two separate universities on Ius Prime, told me. She was the only expert willing to say that the experts might be wrong.
She said, “Most ships owned by struggling companies do a lot of off-the-books maintenance at places that don’t comply with Ochoa’s regulations—or any regulations, really. We have no way of knowing if the Gabriella went through that kind of maintenance, but I would wager she did. It’s pretty common, especially for ships that operate on a shoestring, like the Gabriella.”
When W&D dissolved, its records and holdings became property of the courts based in Ciudad Orilla because of that city’s proximity to the Ochoa Star Port. The records are, as Eircolan posited, woefully incomplete.
I brought what I could find to her, and she pointed out a list inside the logs labeled Staff maintenance, along with various dates.
“Staff maintenance means that the crew repaired systems, often on a journey, and those repairs were allowed to stand.” She shook her head a little as she explained this, and her expression was sad. “Most well managed companies have outside agencies review in-transit repairs. Crews don’t always have access to the latest equipment or even to the right tools to affect a proper repair. It’s best practices to have a ship examined after each long journey. I’d prefer a ship to be examined every single time a staff repair occurs, no matter how small, but that’s costly and few companies do it.”
She sighed, and added, “More lives would be saved if all ships just followed those simple rules.”
She has spent much of the past few years arguing with regulatory agencies and the star port for just those changes. I had expected to hear some of that advocacy when she spoke to me, but I hadn’t expected the sensitivity in her tone.
She is cognizant of the lives lost on the Gabriella, and, it seems, she mourns them.
I wonder how many deaths she has seen due to improper repairs and maintenance, but I did not ask her that question.
I am afraid of the answer.
The questions she did answer unnerve me enough.
“There is nothing in W&D’s records that indicate any review of in-transit repairs, not just for the Gabriella, but for all of W&D’s vessels.” She spoke matter-of-factly, her sad expression remaining. “I wish I could tell you this is unusual, but it is not. Not for a company on the brink, like W&D was.”
W&D is the source of my greatest consternation in writing this account. At first, I thought it a shell company, because of the monies it had promised the crew of the Gabriella. According to financial records, W&D did not have the funds to pay the crew the elevated salaries it had promised.
Yet, it paid the signing bonuses out of an account that took me half a year to track down. That account linked W&D to other corporations, some of whom vanished when W&D dissolved.
W&D’s dissolution is one of the great difficulties of my investigation, hampered also by the deaths of two of the principals, Sari Docket Marberry, and Lochlyn Quartz. Their deaths, first ruled suicide, have been deemed suspicious, and the government of Ciudad Orilla has locked down all information pertaining to them until the deaths are resolved.
Enough evidence leaked out to posit third-party involvement, perhaps with an entity no longer allowed to do business in this part of the sector, but any chance for further clarification is not, at this point, possible.
W&D was not always a struggling company with shady business practices. For nearly three hundred years, it was considered the gold standard of the industry, sending ships all over the sector. Early explorers who arrived on Ius Prime traveled in W&D ships.
W&D mined Yaguni, finding the best places for colonies. Many of those colonies turned into flourishing cities, including Ciudad Orilla. The early government of Ciudad Orilla contained family members of the owners of W&D, and a lot of W&D money funded everything from arts centers to Prime University itself.
Even Ochoa Star Port has links to W&D, allowing W&D ships to operate out of the port without the proper licensing and restrictions, something W&D took advantage of as its financial fortunes floundered.
Initially, news organizations reported that the money for the Gabriella’s trip to Nájar Crater came from W&D itself, and its desire to once again become one of the great exploration companies of the entire galaxy. But a deeper dive into W&D’s finances shows that W&D did not have the money to finance a trip like this.
It received large payments for the use of the Gabriella with notations that lead me to believe that more payments would come with the Gabriella’s continued success in exploring the rumored wealth of Nájar Crater.
Just like the crew members of the Gabriella, the Gabriella herself stood to make more and more money with each successive journey to the crater.
The owners of the Gabriella either did not demand an overhaul of the ship before she launched that fateful Monday or Giles Ferguson held them off.
Ferguson had captained the Gabriella for most of his adult life. He treated her as his own. Every time something went wrong on a journey, he retrofitted the ship to prevent something similar from happening again. He did some of the repairs himself.
He also hired the same crew over and over again, until they moved on for better pay or managed to be one of the few spacers to retire. Imelda Fleites had first served on the Gabriella nearly a decade before, also on an exploration run which, she tells me, held no surprises for anyone.
Whenever she was available, Ferguson tapped her, as he did several other crew members. She estimates, and Beta Linde agrees, that Ferguson had a rotating roster of 150 regulars who would venture out with him on any given mission, depending on the mission’s needs and some vagaries that neither of them pretend to understand.
Ferguson himself is a bit of an enigma. Married twice, father of four, his inability to stop moving made him more of a visitor than a member of any family. He seemed to like it that way.
Even in his first marriage, which lasted seven years, he had his own apartment at the star port because he hated spending too much time on land. He had a prenuptial agreement with his second marriage—unusual for a man of modest means—which stipulated that he and his second wife maintain their own residences, and any children born of the marriage live with his wife.
They did not have children—his four children came from the first marriage—and the second lasted less than two years. Even though he proposed a third time, to Keiko Flores, she repeatedly turned him down, saying she had no interest in tying herself financially to a man who had proven unreliable twice before.
She was unable to extricate herself from emotional entanglements, however, and when she spoke to me about him, she had to excuse herself often to wipe away tears.
She did not spend any time before launch with him. That was their customary practice, because he wanted to focus on the upcoming journey. The last time she saw him was a week before the Gabriella left, and their interaction was more practical than romantic, preparing for the flight, the long separation, and yes, the influx of money.
He wanted to give her half of his signing bonus, but she turned him down. She is a well-respected professor of literature at Prime University, and her salary there more than covered her needs.
She repeated their long-standing tradition of keeping their funds separate, but he had smiled at her, and held out his hands to her.
If this works, Keiko, I’ll be a wealthy man. I want to share that with you.
Share it with me when it happens, Giles, she told him. Not before.
He had no will, so what money he did have (which was not much), his apartment, and all of his holdings went into a standard escrow for those lost in space. After five years, his children petitioned for—and received—access to his estate.
Keiko is not bitter about this. She believes anything he had earned should have gone to his family. She sees herself as an interloper in his life. His children and his previous wives suffered from their relationships with him, she told me. Her time with him, she added with tears punctuating the words, was the best in her entire life.
She smiled at herself when she talked about the launch.
“I imagine it as a big sendoff, with sweeping music and fireworks and waving children, like you see in the old videos of the early launches from the port. And, yes, I do know it was nothing like that.”
Nothing at all. The launch is as prosaic as all other launches. Most family members do not come because they cannot see anything.
Ochoa Star Port has a viewing area for the arrival of tourist ships, has none for the daily launches and arrivals of commercial vehicles. If a family member wants to see a ship off, the family member must petition to go to the pertinent bay, stand in a steel-gray corridor, and watch as the crew member heads through the bay doors.
Not all crew members go through bay doors. Many of them use maintenance entrances, sometimes because of the equipment they’re carrying, and sometimes because those entrances are more convenient to certain parts of the residential wing.
Some senior crew members, like Ferguson himself, sleep onboard the night before launch, if they sleep at all.
“I spend the night before launch double-checking systems,” says Naomi Ruhl, Captain of the Angelina, which also launched that day. “I have a great crew, but they are not responsible for every aspect of the ship. I am. I take that responsibility seriously. I know Giles did as well. He always thought of the Gabriella as his. I think he would have bought her if he could have saved the funds. But Giles was like most of us in this business. He had no idea how to hang onto money.”
On that fateful day, Gabriella launches three minutes early. Launch times at a star port like Ochoa are fluid things, based not just on what traffic control says, but also on when the crew arrives.
Star port records show that all 51 crew members arrived three hours before launch. The Gabriella ran through standard launch protocols, not waving any of them. Ferguson does not file a travel plan, but that’s not required at Ochoa, the way it is at many other ports. Nor does he have to state the nature of the mission.
Because the Gabriella always docks at Ochoa, the ship does not have to follow the star port’s strictest regulations. As is the case for most small commercial vessels that regularly operate through the port, what the ship does on its routine trips does not interest the authorities.
But this is not a routine trip for the Gabriella. When she has gone on exploration journeys in the past, she has traveled with half a dozen other ships, and they spend their time mapping the outer edges of known space. The methods they use are time-honored and somewhat old-fashioned.
Those ships explore regions of space that have been thoroughly mapped with long-range scanners. The ships’ journeys are as much about scanner calibration as they are about discovering something strange and new and different.
The Gabriella’s mission this time has nothing to do with strange and new and different. It is supposed to confirm the rumors that have long haunted Nájar Crater.
The Gabriella is not the first ship to undertake such a mission, and unfortunately, she is not the last.