Chapter 17: Disaster

It was with a great deal of relief that Mike waved good-bye to the two peace negotiation teams, his President, and the tiny fleet that had spent the past week in orbit. It had disrupted his home life, his work flow and his sense of calm.

The sailors and officers of the fleet had behaved in exemplary fashion, making nice with the locals and (under strictest orders from their captains) avoiding intoxicants. A few had forgotten about checking their sunscreen and had mild sunburn in places usually not exposed and a couple of sailors had managed to get lost for several hours trying to find the Capitol's main beach, ending up in a delicious photo op as they asked a comely local lass for directions. Other than that, the week had been incident-free.

Now as he waded through the back correspondence, Alphonse Frattini, his press attaché, knocked on his door.

"Boss, you got a minute? We've got something interesting."

"Sure, Al. What's the issue?"

"Well, it involves your your mother-in-law, Mrs. Carter. Her Lunar City Bridge Club got this wild idea to challenge the Capitol Bridge Club to a tournament. They'd like to come here."

"Does my mother-in-law know about this?"

"If she checked her e-mail this morning." Al paused for a second. "This could be good on a diplomatic basis. Cultural mixing between Solaria and Spica, that sort of thing." He handed the note to Mike, and pointed to the bottom paragraph.

"'We are aware that as this is to happen on Spica II, the dress code shall be Nude.' Well, at least they're removing that doubt."

Mike pondered for a moment, then gestured toward one of his office chairs. Al politely placed his towel on the chair and sat down as Mike dialled home.

"Hi, honey, is your Mom there? She is? Can you put her on? Hi, Mom. Have you checked your e-mail this morning? Yes, you'll want to." Mike fought back laughter. "Yes, your friends back at the Lunar City Bridge Club are challenging another club to a contest. Here. In Capitol City."

Pause. Long pause.

Even Alphonse could hear the scream. "Here? HERE!?"

"I just knew you'd be delighted," Mike deadpanned. "What a wonderful chance to see your old friends again. I'll forward the note to the Capitol City Bridge Club, if that's all right with you." A pause. "Yes, now that you mention it, they will see you naked." Another pause. "Actually, I strongly suspect from the wording on the note, you'll see them that way as well. OK? Mom? All right, take care. I'm going over to deliver the note in person this afternoon. I'll pick you up at one."

At the designated hour, Mike escorted his mother-in-law to her favourite social club, which was housed in a single-storey building near the Foreign Quarter. She usually arrived at about this hour, so her presence excited no comment, but for her to bring along a handsome, middle-aged gentleman did. All of the members of the club were retired, long removed from their 40's, and tended to be unattached females, mostly widows — even with the advances in medical care since the 20^th century, women still tended to live longer than men.

"Emma," she whispered to one of her regular card partners, "Who's the Club president?"

"Well, I am," responded the elderly black woman cheerily.

"This is my son-in-law, Mike. He has something for you, from the Bridge Club I belong to back home."

"Oh? Oh, Ambassador Miller!" Ears throughout the busy room pricked up.

"Something?" he whispered to Lynn. "You don't want to be more specific? It's from your club, after all."

Emma's attention darted back and forth between the two Solarians.

"Well," sighed Lynn, "My bridge club back home was watching the coverage of President Yamashita this week..."

"Yes?"

" ... and they decided, well, it might be fun if they challenged your club to a bridge tournament. For fun, you understand."

"Oh? That WOULD be fun, wouldn't it?"

Nobody was playing bridge at the moment. They were too busy taking in the "private" conversation at the far end of the room.

"Yes, they thought so too."

"Will they be coming here?"

In response, Mike passed over the challenge, printed out on an A4 sized piece of reusable plastic. Emma looked read through the paper twice.

"Well, we'd be delighted to accept, I'm sure." She turned to the assembled room. "Ladies and gentlemen, we've been challenged to a bridge tournament by a Solarian club. They want to come here to play!"

The room erupted. While most expressed delight and amusement, there were a few questions of the practical variety: how long would they be here, where would they stay, how do we pay for all of this?

Mike left Yuki's business card and left his mother-in-law to settle things with Emma. The chauffeur was waiting for him with a worried look: "You have an urgent call from the Embassy. There's an emergency."

Mike picked up the handset of the video-phone and saw Yuki's worried face. "What have we got?"

"There's an SOS from a passenger-carrying freighter, the Bucyrus. It was on its way to Pi Virginis with fifty souls on board, and had a major engine malfunction. Spica II is the nearest inhabited star system, but it hasn't got any deep-space craft. Solaris Federation Ship Firespike is the nearest rescue ship, but she's a Flower-class corvette — she doesn't have a great deal of medical staff or equipment, or capacity for that matter."

"Understood."

"The Bucyrus is from Arcturus, which doesn't happen to have a diplomatic mission here. Arcturus' population is fairly small, so they rely on friendly nations. They have asked us to handle things for them in this incident."

"Have a cultural summary of Arcturus downloaded to my PDA. Do we have any idea about casualties or damage to the ship yet?"

"No, but aside from its disaster beacon, Bucyrus has stopped sending signals."

"That's never a good sign. I assume the Spican Navy has been notified?"

"They have the Orbital Guard rather than a navy, and yes, it knows to expect them. Shuttles have been brought up to the Station, ready to accept casualties. Doctors, nurses and EMT's are standing by at the station as well. Some private yacht owners have volunteered their vessels too."

The typical shuttle, he knew, could take ten people, more in a pinch, but only four if rigged with pressurized stretchers. He hoped the survivors were ambulatory.

"SF Hospital Ship Lister is on its way here. They'll take the survivors to whichever port of call is better," Yuki advised.

When he arrived at the Embassy, it was a hive of activity. Communications had arrived from Arcturus indicating the names and nationalities of everyone on board, and a message torpedo from the Firespike had popped out of hyperspace with the first report of the accident.

The report was grim. One of the ship's reactor cores had gone unstable, resulting in the eventual destruction of the starboard engine. Before the engines blew apart completely, the captain had the engineering section detached from the cargo, passenger and command spaces. The resulting explosion had taken out all communications except for short-range lidar, and had caused the now-weightless forward habitable sections to tumble end-over-end. Because aside from those on bridge duty nobody had had time to strap in, most of the injuries were of the physical trauma variety, fortunately most of those being no more serious than fractured bones that would eventually heal completely. A couple of the engineers were missing and presumed killed in the initial moments of the accident, but the rest of the 50 on board were alive.