Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  “I expect it will,” he said, “but I cannot say that I am certain. We don’t know what effect the object’s transmission had on the control mechanism of the drive, and we can’t examine the jump core to find out. All jump drives are Varoki built and are sealed modules which we cannot access, and we wouldn’t know what we were looking at if we could. My own engineering department does not know what a Varoki jump core looks like inside or its principle of operation. All we can do is replace defective external components.”

  “Thank you for your honesty, Captain Bitka.” She swallowed and kept her voice level and calm. “If your worst fears are realized and the next jump does not take us to Eeee’ktaa . . . do we have any options?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll have the engineering department replace every component in the jump drive. I have already checked the inventory and we can do a complete trade-out of control systems and jump actuators, everything but the jump core itself. Then we’ll jump to Eeee’ktaa.”

  “Why not do that first?” the same man who asked the question about a distress call said.

  “It will take us the better part of two days to change out every component,” the captain answered, “and there is always the chance in an operation that involved that something will not work right afterwards and require additional adjustments. Since we don’t know there is anything wrong with those components it makes more sense to just make the jump now, and if something goes wrong then we will begin replacing components.”

  She wondered, What if that still does not work? But she did not ask it. She looked at him, looked into his eyes. Bitka was afraid, and now she was more afraid than ever, but she merely bowed her head in acceptance, deliberately copying the gesture of the Buran.

  Seven hours later Hue strapped herself into the acceleration couch in her stateroom and thought about what the captain had said and what he had left unsaid. She wished she had been able to speak with Koichi, her friend the chief engineer, but he had been on almost continuous duty since the meeting. Perhaps he could tell her something about the jump drive, something which would at least let her organize her thoughts, her questions. The one conclusion she had come to was that Captain Bitka was not the complete fool she had originally suspected, but that also meant his confidence was a sham.

  She set the smart walls, ceiling, and floor of her stateroom to show the external view. She was suddenly surrounded by deep black with a dusting of stars. When they jumped, she would immediately see the bright yellow-orange primary star of the Eeee’ktaa system.

  Or not.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Three days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay

  19 February 2134 (three days after Incident Seventeen)

  The first jump had been tough to accept. Sam had almost expected the results of the second jump, where they had attempted to jump to Eeee’ktaa but had instead just ended up another one hundred twelve light-years away from K’tok. So they spent two days meticulously swapping out every component of the jump drive they could replace, everything but the jump core itself. There was no replacement for that, but logically replacing everything else had to correct the problem. Still, he was reluctant to order the jump, wondered if there was one more diagnostic sequence he could run that would put off the fateful moment.

  That was stupid. Waiting wasn’t going to change anything. Either the problem was fixed or it wasn’t. Better to find out, and if it wasn’t fixed . . . well, then what? That depended on a couple things, and neither of them were important if the next jump just took them to Eeee’ktaa like it was supposed to.

  No, not actually to Eeee’ktaa, toward it. The second jump had left them one hundred forty light-years from K’tok and a little shy of one ninety from Eeee’ktaa, which was more than they could manage in a single jump. They would still emerge in deep-deep space, light-years away from the closest star, but they would at least be going in the right direction.

  If it worked.

  “Ops, execute the jump.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Lieutenant Brook answered and triggered the jump warning chimes throughout the ship. He waited for twenty seconds and then put his hand over the jump actuator control. “Jump in five, four, three, two, one.”

  Again that sensation of floating free of time and space, then a wrenching return to wherever this was, a rise in body temperature, perspiration. He opened his eyes and saw the same blank field showing no sign they were anywhere near a star and its associated planetary system. That was okay. They knew they wouldn’t be near a star this time.

  “Ops, tell me Eeee’ktaa is out there about seventy-five light-years ahead of us.”

  Brook didn’t say anything for several long seconds as he worked his panel and Sam could feel the tension build on the bridge. How many of the bridge crew were even breathing?

  “No joy, sir. It’s not where it should be.”

  Sam’s stomach tightened and he felt dizzy, felt panic beginning to tickle his throat. He heard groans from the bridge crew, a mix of anger and fear.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Now what’s wrong?”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Belay all that,” Sam shouted above the babble and the bridge quickly fell silent. “We’ll figure it out. Work your stations. TAC?”

  “No nearby objects,” Lieutenant Alexander reported. “No energy sources, nothing identifiable as a tactical threat.”

  “COMM?” Sam asked.

  “In the dark, sir,” Lieutenant Bohannon reported from COMM One to his left. “No communication signals on any band we’re monitoring. I’ll start a systematic sweep of the spectrum.”

  “Very well,” Sam said, although he was pretty sure what that would turn up: nothing.

  “Two hundred sixty-one light-years from K’tok’s primary, sir,” Brook reported from Ops One. Sam noticed that Brook hadn’t moved since coming out of jump, hadn’t spoken except for those brief reports. Brook knew what this last jump probably meant.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sam said quietly. Another one hundred and twelve light-years, exactly. Another hundred light years from Cassandra, from understanding what happened, from figuring out what to do next with his life. He shook his head. Not the sort of thoughts a good captain would have.

  “Can you plot our course from K’tok to our current location, Mister Brook?”

  “Yes sir. I have it right here. We are moving almost directly toward the galactic core but slightly offset, seven degrees to spinward.”

  “Have all our previous jumps since leaving K’tok been on that same plot?”

  “Yes, sir, all three have been on this same course track, straight as an arrow.”

  “Very well, Mister Brook. Now shoot me a view forward and tell me the distance to the next star directly on this course, assuming there is one. Or get started on it but have your number two finish. I’m going to set up a holoconference with the senior staff.”

  Sam had considered all the possible outcomes of this jump he could think of and after the actual event he was down to two possibilities. Either the jump core was damaged and locked on a random course, or it was deliberately reprogrammed with a specific destination in mind. They’d find out soon enough.

  Sam turned to Lieutenant Bohannon in COMM One. “Tell the department heads and the XO to helmet up and we’ll holocon. Mister Brook, Mister Alexander, that means you too.”

  Sam picked up his helmet from the mount beside his workstation, clipped it on, and plugged his suit’s life-support umbilical into the socket in his workstation. With his helmet on and visor down it could get stuffy quickly.

  The helmet had hologram cameras on the inside to record his face and on the outside to record his body movement. The view of the other conference participants was projected on his helmet faceplate. The only really odd thing about seeing them was he knew they wore helmets but they looked as if they did not. The helmet cameras recorded in and out from the helmet, but could not record the helmet itself. Holoconferences were normally used to allow officers on differen
t ships to meet. On the same ship the meetings were almost always face-to-face but Sam needed to talk to his senior officers right away, in private, and didn’t want to pull them away from their duty stations.

  He slid his visor down and was immediately in a virtual conference room, a neutral grey, seated at an oval table. As the others closed their visors they appeared, first Alexander, then Running-Deer, Acho, Brook, and finally Ma.

  And Sam was back to the two possible explanations: random damage or a deliberate destination.

  If it was simply damaged, if they were headed in a random direction, they were all dead. Space was too big for there to be any possibility they would happen onto a star system with a human-habitable world before they ran out of power, food, or oxygen. Their only hope was that the course was to somewhere, a destination they could reach before they ran out of something critical. He suspected most of his officers had figured this out as well, but he wondered which ones had. Time to find out.

  “So which is it?” he asked. “Some random course a damaged jump core spit out, or a specific course to somewhere?”

  “Or did engineering screw up the component replacement?” Lieutenant Brook said. “Who’d you fob this job off on, Ma?”

  Sam was surprised by the anger in Brook’s voice and expected an explosive retort, but instead Ma just shook his head.

  “Wish a mistake was the answer, Ops. I wish to God that was all it was. But XO checked every component we replaced.”

  Running-Deer nodded. “I did. The captain checked my work, and Lieutenant Acho checked every part number out of inventory and every replaced component back in. That’s why we took two solid days. There’s no mistake. Every component in the jump control suite was replaced by a fresh component from storage.”

  “Had to be the Varoki,” Lieutenant Alexander the TAC boss said. “That probe that did whatever it did to our jump drive, it had to be Varoki. Who else knows how to get into a jump core and mess with it? Nobody.”

  “I’m not so sure, TAC,” Sam said. “The code’s nothing like their jump scrambler weapon, nothing like we’ve ever seen from any Varoki operating system.”

  “Who else can it be, sir?” he asked. “Can you imagine anyone else who could possibly be responsible?”

  “No, I can’t, TAC. But the thing to remember is the universe is not limited by my imagination, or yours either.”

  “I don’t know who did this,” Lieutenant Ma said, “and I think it’s too early to start guessing. We just don’t know enough yet. But I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t think it’s random damage. Damage might lock in a course, but whatever this is it’s done more than that. When we jump it sucks every bit of power out of our energy ring, except the cells we physically disconnect from it. I think someone wants us to go somewhere and is in a hurry for us to get there.”

  “But if they want us there,” Alexander said, “why suck the power dry? If we hadn’t had that malfunction the first jump we’d be dead.”

  Ma shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, but maybe whoever set this up, their power systems work differently than ours do.”

  “Varoki power systems are exactly the same as ours,” Alexander shot back.

  “I know that, TAC,” Ma answered, “so you might want to rethink that theory.”

  Sam couldn’t see any plausible candidate for who had done this, but the emerging consensus was clearly that it was deliberate, not a simple accident. On one hand, the idea that anyone even had the ability to reach all the way down into their jump core and make it do whatever they wanted was not simply impossible, it was terrifying. On the other hand, they weren’t dead yet. They at least had a chance.

  “Wait one,” Brook said and held up his hand. He turned to the side and listened, apparently to his commlink.

  “Understood,” he said and turned back to the group.

  “That was quartermaster Ortega in the Ops Two chair. I had him working on the calculations of a possible destination. We’ve got a preliminary, sir, but bear in mind that at these distances those stars aren’t where we see them anymore. They’ve been moving for a long time since that light started moving our way, but we’ve got a baseline projection of their drift over time. I’d like to deploy our large visual array and get a better look.”

  “But you’ve got a candidate,” Sam said.

  “Yes, sir. K2 class star with enough wobble to suggest a good set of planets. Distance is two thousand seven hundred and forty light-years from here, give or take.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Alexander said. “Did you say almost three thousand? Are we going to go all the way out there?”

  “I don’t know, TAC,” Sam said, “but right now it looks as if someone wants us to.”

  “But why would the Varoki want to send us out there?” Alexander asked.

  Sam shook his head. “That’s why I’m not onboard with that theory, TAC. It would be quicker and easier for the Varoki to just kill us. The destination star is about three thousand light-years from K’tok. That’s twenty-five hundred light-years farther than any Cottohazz survey mission has ever gone. As bizarre as this sounds, we have to face the possibility we are dealing with an intelligence the Cottohazz had never encountered before.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but then how do they know how to reprogram a Varoki jump drive?” Alexander said.

  “I don’t know. None of this makes sense, yet. But the important thing is we’re going somewhere. I think most of you had already realized that since we cannot change course, if we weren’t aimed at a star system, we’d be dead inside a couple months, and not much we could have done about it. But we are aimed at a star system, and that means we’re still alive.”

  They sat in silence, stunned silence, Sam thought. Finally Running-Deer shook her head. “An alien intelligence. And it’s controlling our ship. We’re going to have some very frightened people on our hands.”

  “Yeah,” Lieutenant Ma said, “including me.”

  “Scares the hell of me too,” Sam said, “if that’s any consolation. Once we break out of this conference, though, all of you need to hide that fear way down deep. You’ve got officers and crew and civilians looking to you to set an example. We can’t change the course, but we can control when we jump, and we can control how far by how many power cells we disconnect, and that’s something. We decide how long this trip takes. Mister Ma, how’s our fuel endurance look?”

  “Um . . . I’d have to check sir. We’re in pretty good shape, I think.”

  “I have it here, sir,” Running-Deer said and looked at her data pad. “The reaction mass tanks are over ninety-five percent and if there’s a gas giant at the destination we can scoop more hydrogen from it. Fuel pellet supply for the fusion reactor is our critical power limit, since we can’t fabricate those. But the Bay was designed with the alternate peacetime role of deep interstellar survey. That’s why we’ve got twice the jump range of any combatant ship in the fleet and lots of reactor fuel. We’ve got twenty-one hundred hours and change on the reactor—about three months at continuous peak power. We can easily triple that endurance, or more, if we aren’t maneuvering and jumping all the time.”

  “Good. What about food, water, and oxygen?”

  Lieutenant Acho, the logistics officer, answered immediately. “We recycle every drop of water and scrub the carbon out of the air. Those aren’t an immediate problem. Because we are liable under treaty to serve as a Cottohazz transport in emergencies, we carry compatible protein stock for all six intelligent species. We have rations for five and a half months for the Human passengers and crew, effectively unlimited for the fifteen Varoki and twelve Buran on board—because there are so few of them compared to the stocks we carry.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, “I figure we’re twenty-five more jumps from our destination—let’s just start calling it that: Destination. Twenty-five jumps. If we stick to one jump a day we’re looking at a month there. If we can get whoever reprogrammed our jump drive to change it back, it’s another month back to Eeee’kt
aa. Sounds like we’ve got fuel and rations for out and back with a considerable reserve. So that’s something positive right there.”

  “How are we going to make whoever’s waiting for us reprogram our jump drive?” Alexander asked.

  “When I know that, Mister Alexander, I’ll tell you. We’ll break now. I’ll take care of the announcement to passengers and crew. After that, you department heads start meeting with your officers and chiefs. I want a list of ideas for possible contingencies we may have to face and drills to deal with them. XO, I want to meet you afterwards, say fifteen minutes in the briefing room.”

  “Sir, the briefing room is up in the habitat wheel. May I suggest we use the alert wardroom here in the main hull? If we go up into the wheel we’ll be mobbed by a lot of frightened passengers with questions we won’t have the answers to yet.”

  “Good point and good suggestion, XO. Okay, see you there.”

  He raised the visor of his helmet, the connection broke, and he saw the bridge crew at work around him again.

  Sam sat there, alone with his thoughts for several long seconds, but the truth was for much of the last two days he had thought through what to say to the passengers and crew in this nearly worst of all possible cases, to the point that he felt he had already spoken the necessary words many times. He had Bohannon connect him to the all-ship comm circuit.

  “Attention, this is the captain speaking. As most of you have seen by now the jump did not take us to the Eeee’ktaa system. Instead we are in deep space on the same course as in our last two jumps. Our conclusion is that the object we encountered somehow managed to corrupt our jump core, which we have no access to or ability to repair. As a result, we are locked on a course toward a star a considerable distance away. We are not helpless, however. We control when we jump as well as how far. We just can’t change the direction. We also have an extensive sensor suite and as we approach our destination we will use it to study the star system and gather whatever information we can.