Key Crew

Key Crew is the senior crew of the ark ship Gilgamesh. Their suspension chambers stand in the ship’s own crew room rather than among the cargo, and the ship wakes them when a job needs hands and judgement. Most of the people aboard never leave cold sleep, so the Key Crew run the vessel in their place.

The people on it

Holsten Mason counts the departments as Command, Engineering, Science, and what looks like the whole of Security. The named members are Vrie Guyen, the commander; Isa Lain, chief Key Crew engineer; Renas Vitas, who heads the science team; Lem Karst, who leads the security detail; and Holsten himself, a classicist.

Guyen remembers that he never wanted Holsten among Key Crew, too old, too fond of himself, too proud of his precious education. When Holsten argues with Scoles for Lain’s life, his argument is that she is Key Crew, and that this makes her the best engineer on the ship. When Lain recruits Holsten against Guyen, her reason is one line: he is Key Crew.

Duties

The ship sorts everyone into Key Crew and cargo. Karst says Security was only ever aboard to keep those two in place for the duration of the trip. Every member is taught the drill that puts the ship to sleep, a double check of systems that the Gilgamesh mostly does for itself and that Holsten calls barely more taxing than reading down a list. At the first signal Lain has already been awake nine days, going over the ship, while Guyen, Holsten guesses, has himself woken early to be bright and brisk in front of a room of people still numb from their chambers. His briefing hands out the tasks: Vitas on the instruments, Lain on ship systems in the star’s gravity well, Karst getting his people back to their kit, Holsten on the beacon. Most of the group then crowds into comms to watch the answer to Kern’s maths test go out.

Later most of them work away from the ship. Karst and Vitas take a shuttle and drones to the grey planet, Lain and her engineers live on the terraform station, and Holsten is one of the few Key Crew who can do his work from the Gilgamesh itself. The station turns out to be more than they can keep up with, so Engineering thaws thirty trained people from cargo to help.

The Key Crew Aptitudes

Lain once read the Key Crew Aptitudes in the Gilgamesh’s records. The file is command access only, which costs her no more than the time it takes to notice that she wrote most of the access scaffolding herself. It holds the scores that got each member a place. Guyen scored high on long term planning, the ability to take a goal and work towards it through however many intervening steps, and Lain says the result is a man always four moves ahead. On her reading, his chase after the mutineers is not pique but a plan.

Arguments

Vitas tells Lain and Karst that Guyen’s upload project was brought before the Key Crew and left alone on balance, the process being too unknown and too likely to disturb the ship’s systems. She was the one who wanted to try it. Holsten’s own complaint about the whole arrangement is that the ship has no culture and no hierarchy, only a crew, with Guyen as titular head of the human race.

Later years

The group thins out. At the Command meeting on the return to Kern’s World, Holsten looks over the room and sees what is left of Key Crew: the science team, a handful of Engineering, Command and Security, all of them people who came aboard while Earth still had people living on it. Vitas has Alpash fetch Mason and the rest of Key Crew, and the young engineer behaves as though he is handling figures out of legend. Karst gives the chiefs of the new engineers the same responsibility as his own people, and some of the veterans he takes out on the hull are Key Crew who have been with him from the start. Karst himself spent months training in orbit because a place in Key Crew was what he wanted.

By then the engineers born aboard call themselves Engineering, and they are only crew. The three who tear the lid off Holsten’s failing chamber are ship born, one of them a grandchild of the science team.

Unanswered questions

How many members the original Key Crew had, and what became of the ones not named.
What else the Aptitudes file holds.
Whether the group means anything once the ship is emptied.

Sources

Children of Time, 2.1 Two Thousand Years from Home (chief Key Crew engineer, the cramped room of chambers, Guyen not wanting Holsten in the group, the shutdown drill)
Children of Time, 2.3 Enigma Variations (the whole group woken for the briefing, the departments, the tasks Guyen hands out, waiting together at comms)
Children of Time, 3.1 Rude Awakening (strangers in shipsuits who are not Key Crew, the empty chambers, Holsten the last to sleep)
Children of Time, 3.3 Rock and a Hard Place (no culture and no hierarchy aboard, only a crew)
Children of Time, 3.5 Bearing a Flaming Sword (Lain as Key Crew and therefore the best engineer on the ship)
Children of Time, 3.7 War in Heaven (the Key Crew Aptitudes and Guyen's score for long term planning)
Children of Time, 3.11 This Island Gulag (returning to the Key Crew sleep room before departure)
Children of Time, 4.1 The Cave of Wonders (the few Key Crew who can work from the ship, the engineers on the station, thirty more thawed from cargo)
Children of Time, 4.3 Notes from a Grey Planet (most of the group busy on the station, new people who know nothing of Kern)
Children of Time, 4.7 Not Prince Hamlet (two engineers Holsten takes to be Lain's original Key Crew)
Children of Time, 5.3 Old Friends (the group debating Guyen's upload project, Lain calling Holsten Key Crew as her reason for needing him)
Children of Time, 6.2 An Old Man in a Harsh Season (waking on the floor of Key Crew, the ship born engineers who are only crew)
Children of Time, 7.1 War Footing (what was left of Key Crew at the Command meeting, the chiefs of the new engineers, Karst's speech)
Children of Time, 7.3 Maiden, Mother, Crone (Key Crew as the Tribe's precursors, and the law that says so)
Children of Time, 7.7 The War Outside (Security's original job of keeping Key Crew and cargo in place, Karst's veterans, his training to win a place)

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