Stowing away

There's a lot of myths about stowing away aboard spacecraft. Some of them are even true. Many have some grain of truth in them, whilst some are reiner Schwachsinn. Pure bullshit. One of the common ones is that it's simple to stow aboard any ship. All you have to do is avoid being seen boarding, and avoid getting caught aboard. And, while there is some grain of truth to that little myth, the fact is that it depends almost entirely on the configuration of the boat and the diligence of her crew.

There's a lot of signs when there's a stowaway aboard. Some easier to see than others, and some more or less dependent on the boat in question. Examples? Easy. Skipping past the obvious "getting found by the crew" parts, you get to the root of it. Passengers breathe. They eat, drink, and excrete too. Unless they brought along their own air, water, and food, they're going to put some sort of load on the ship's life support. You can figure out there's someone extra aboard just by keeping an eye on the life support monitors. That's without any kind of fancy on-board security systems.

Of course, the bigger the boat, the smaller the proportional load'll be. If the boat's old and creaky to start with, like an old tramp freighter, chances are no one'll notice. Some of those boats lose enough atmo through the hull seals that a stowaway would just look like noise. Thing is, on a smaller boat, an extra passenger will show up right quick on the life support load. Hell, if your navigation suite's any good, an extra 50 kilos moving around the boat will show up on the maneuver console.

Wave Equation, in spite of her range and performance, was a small boat. She wasn't old, and she wasn't creaky.

And I didn't use a lot of life support.

Now, I was right gratified that AuroraBlue had decided to come along on this little excursion. It would be good to spend time with my little girl. What I hadn't quite expected was to find I had another passenger. Though, to be sure, I hadn't really needed any fancy monitoring to figure out there was a third person aboard. No, Kari hadn't actually bothered to hide. She'd just curled up on the bunk under a blanket and waved when I came back into the cabin.

Reminded me of Nack's comment that his sister didn't like to travel off world much. Seems he wasn't entirely up to date on her flight preferences. Having her aboard would make for an interesting trip, but I couldn't complain. It would certainly make the flight to Athens interesting.

The entire point of this trip, aside from a stop to see Sabrina and another to swing by Surfer's New Paradise for fifty kilo's of fresh coffee, was to stop at the Jesuit University of New Fresno on Athens. Specifically, to see a mathematician who was guest lecturing there. She wasn't in a position to travel and a Cortex bridge wasn't secure enough for our needs, so I would have to go and see her in person.

It was kind of an odd situation, really. Intel Section had mathematicians I could tap if I needed to. The Signals Intelligence and Cryptology units were loaded with them. But they weren't professor Sinclair. Plus, they served other masters. By reputation and everything I'd been able to research, she'd stayed in academia because, for her, Universities didn't care so much about what she was working on. Only that she was doing it. And sharing it. Which left some folk in the Alliance a little annoyed, especially when she'd published a paper that effectively broke about a third of Parliament's secure comms traffic.

Just the sort of person I needed to talk to.