The Sanctuary Contract – Portal Authority #2
My editor tells me I’ve managed to avoid sequelitis, and this story is different from the first one. I’ve tried to change it up and keep from boring the reader. There are lots of different planetary catastrophes, so I’ve go material to work with.
This opening scene is from personal experience. During my military service I took a few phone calls and had my life change.
Chapter 1 Recalled
If you want to be successful you have to be willing to disappear for a while.
The Gentleman’s Rulebook
Stanford University
Jamie Cartwell’s phone rang. He was sitting in the university lecture hall listening with half an ear to the professor go on about the symbolism of pigs in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. The ringtone was the theme from the movie “Hellfighters”. He hadn’t picked the theme. The caller had.
He’d allowed himself to forget about his phone. It wasn’t an ordinary phone. It was practically indestructible, always on, and could be reached anywhere in the world. If he forgot it, he got a very sharp reminder from people he did not want to piss off. He’d let himself forget about the sort of people who could call him on it, too.
The shock held his hand immobile for a moment, then he took the phone from his pocket and thumbed the reply. Blackjack Waters sounded better than he had looked when Jamie had helped load him on to the medevac shuttle on the planet Fimbulwinter, 3000 or so light years from Earth through the Portal.
“How are you, Mister Jamie?” The nickname took Jamie back a couple of years. If Blackjack was using it, it would be his forever in those circles. Living up to the reputation attached to it would be more of an effort.
“Listening to an English prof rattle on about symbolism. So, I’ve been better.” This is business. Blackjack Waters didn’t call people up out of the blue just to chew the fat.
There was a short gravel chuckle. “I’ve got something better. We’ve got a Contract. This one is three drills. Number 1 is the big one, and I need a Driller for it.”
Driller. The MFWIC on the rig. The guy responsible for every living soul on the rig keeping on living. Jamie hadn’t made the standard in his brief stab at the job.
“You sure you want me?” Some damned bad memories came back to haunt him.
Blackjack’ voice went dead serious. “Nobody was right that day on Fimbulwinter. Nobody. Sure as Hell I wasn’t. I’ve got the scars. There was one guy with the smarts to know something was wrong and the stones to speak up. He was righter than anyone else. He was also the guy who kept it together and got the job done after I got medevaced. Yeah, I need you.”
Fimbulwinter had been the human nickname for the unpronounceable ultrasonic screech the insectoid T’laq’it called their planet. The Contract had been to vent the magma out of a volcano to prevent it inflicting an Ice Age on them when it blew. They had made the Contract by the narrowest of skinny margins, working in the wet high-oxygen Hell of Fimbulwinter’s surface. Jamie had inherited the job of Driller after the nuclear drill hit a methane pocket. The explosion had killed or injured half the crew, including Blackjack Waters.
Racing against time to finish the job while the T’laq’it fought a battle around them between the T’laq’it who wanted them to succeed and the T’laq’it who wanted them to fail had been … pretty scary. The voyage home had been … interesting, too.
“Just who do you think you are, flouting the rules of my lectures?” Jamie looked up in annoyance. The professor was not Jamie’s favourite. Aside from the affected British accent and tweedy look, he droned on, ignored questions, and managed to make a dull class he didn’t want to be in to start with even worse.
He was on the home stretch to his Bachelor’s degree in Geophysics, which was a cross-disciplinary salad of math, physics, geology and more math. Somewhere in the salad there had to be some arts and humanities courses, presumably to save him from being uncultured and inhuman. He fit them in as he had time. This was the last one.
He’d taken it because it was available. The Professor didn’t make any secret of his attitude. As far as he was concerned, trying to redeem the barbarism of engineering and science majors was a lost cause he had to follow anyway.
“You don’t know who I am. You don’t know any of your students. This lecture is about as as useful as a video. Less useful. You can restart a video.” Jamie’s voice cut across the classroom, slicing through the bored hum of conversation and Professor Sloan’s reedy nasal voice. It was the hard commanding voice he used on the job, to jack up someone doing something dangerous and/or stupid.
It took him a few seconds to realize why he had let this boring nonentity get to him. There had been a Jamie Cartwell who had pissed away his time and his parents’ money on lazy stupid easy-A courses like this one. Jamie wasn’t that guy any more. He had paid a lot of hard dues to leave that guy behind.
Sloan opened his mouth to say something, but Jamie beat him to the punch. Jamie had taught courses where the pass mark was 100% and passing the final exam meant not going home in a body bag. He was beyond unimpressed with Sloan’s teaching.
“Instead of picking at his adverb choices, you should be talking about how the book reflects the zeitgeist of the times. The anger informing it came from Orwell watching the promise of a socialist utopia get hijacked by bloody-handed psychopaths, which fuelled the rise of the dictatorships leading to World War II.”
By this time the room had fallen silent while Sloan gaped ineffectually and the attention of every student in the room was on Jamie. He swept a hard look across the lecture hall. “There is present day relevance here. The same populist anger is rising again, and it’s having an effect on the world you live in.”
Jamie snapped his attention back to Sloan. “If you don’t know your students, you can’t teach them. When I had the Hole 3 Crew on Fimbulwinter I knew every mother’s child on my crew. You don’t know your students, you don’t know your subject, you can’t even put together a decent canned lesson. Your boss should fire your ass off his crew and get someone who can do the job.”
The rustle of astonished exclamations running across the room told Jamie he’d just dumped the low-profile anonymity he’d maintained since the initial burst of publicity after the Fimbulwinter Contract and the release of the movie “Fire In The Hole”. The actor who had played him in the movie was a whole lot handsomer than he was. He’d just stopped caring about about low profile.
He turned his attention back to the phone, took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “Yeah, I’m here, Blackjack. Deal me in. I’m done here.”
Jamie picked up his laptop bag and strode toward the door, still talking on the phone. “Is the Prof on board for this one?”
“Negative. This one isn’t a volcano.” Blackjack said.
“I still need to talk to him about sensors and software. Book me by way of wherever he is, with a twelve hour layover.” Professor John Halliwell, Stanford University, was the reigning expert on making seismic data into a picture you could use to drill through solid rock with a nuclear drill without getting yourself blown up by a methane explosion or incinerated by a magma pocket. He was Jamie’s mentor and thesis adviser, but not currently on campus.
“Company jet. Tell the crew what you need. Get here ASAP. There’s a shitload of work to do.” The call ended.
Jamie pulled up the Prof’s private cell number and hit the call button. “Prof, we need to talk.”
The Twitter storm erupted thirty seconds later. #MasterBlastersContract.
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