Sidereal Quest
Page 20
He found her in Main Engineering.
"What's holding up repairs?" he asked her.
She glared at her chronometer, did some quick figuring. "They ought to be pretty well finished by now. Shouldn't have to do more than fine-check."
"Computer disagrees," Nicraan said, his tone soft as he empathized with the science officer. She had been on duty for nearly forty-eight nodes. The pilot could see the slump in her posture, the weight of her pregnancy slowing her down. Dark circles had begun to crescent under her tired eyes.
"There are still some things left to do, I know. But, after I'm finished in here, we'll back on schedule."
"What's been done and what's left to do?"
She ran a fast request through her portable reference board. "Well, it's been a small miracle, considering what I found under the access panels. When I built back up the damaged systems, I properly tagged and bundled all cables, shock-mounted all mechanicals, all the electricals are grounded and pulse-shielded. The tractor beam generator has been upgraded to a Mark Nine, and the hyperplasmic motivator to a Series Eight thanks to BeeTee's little scavenger run during the Pylon Crater survey.
"All sensor lenses have been replaced, have a duplicated Cassif-class battery regulator ... We're still blind on starboard leeward and aft section B and C. Scanners are blown and need to be completely replaced there," Moela frowned, her gaze quickly settling on the pilot's point of concern.
"I don't give a damn about seeing the aft sections B and C, or starboard leeward. I know what those areas look like. Anything else?"
"Reserve power systems. Remember the trouble with the secondaries?" Moela reminded, her free hand clenched around the railing of the section's small command platform, tense with strain.
"But the main drivers are fixed?" Nicraan asked. She nodded. "Then that stuff about the reserves will have to wait. We can take off without them, and do those kind of repairs once spaceborne."
"Is that a good idea? About taking off without having the secondaries fixed, I mean."
"Perhaps not. But I want out of here, and I want out now. We've very little time left, it’s time we got off the ground."
The computer's professionally neutral toned voice came on the intership to remind them that Nicraan was correct about Time. "Tee-minus One Node to Launch and counting. Tee-minus point Ninety-Seven Nodes to Storm Contact and counting. Tee-minus One Node point Forty-Four to Class-M Star collapse and counting. Range critical."
"We'll just make it," Nicraan said dryly, and then headed topside.
*
A hemisphere away from Pioneer 4, twilight was waxing into existence over a verdant valleyscape. From the dying world’s core, a superplume of magma filled every crevasse and catacomb as it surged towards the planetary crust. Two hundred cubic retems of searing liquid rock warped and evanesced the very earth from below; the spark to send the entire planet into a death spiral.
The superplume pressure came to a head, building beneath the lush evergreen forest filled with refreshing streams and exotic life. The elongated depression between uplands began to unzip as the basin’s land was roused to melt. Unseen by the hurrying Aidennians, a series of successive massive earthen eruptions punched skyward spewing lava in the form of gargantuan fountains over thousands of square mets across the buckling landscape in a zigzagged fiery line; causing destruction and devastation.
The wail of fearful animals filled the air. The wind was instantly foul, noxious and lethal; reeking of rotten eggs. Indigenous mammal-like reptilian wildlife was systematically eradicated either incinerated in a flash like paper in a flame or, by a poisonous brew of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide, in suffocating smog that swept outward from the hemorrhaging ground. Extinction ruled the land.
The planet rang like a hammered bell…then it began to split apart.
Seen from Space, the planet’s continents were arranged from the southern pole up to a series of splintered tropical peninsulas in an endless inland sea around the equator and toward the archipelagoes of the northern pole. Plants covered the land for the first time since the demise of the world’s intellectual beings that had first detected the onset of the solar group’s red giant’s march toward supernova. In the vast inland sea, marine life flourished. A cornucopia of movement, color, and shape swirled around endless coral reefs.
Without provocation, the inland sea’s floor rumbled. Roaring jets of superheated gas raged from below as fissures cracked the abyssal bedrock. Plumes of boiling water raced upward at high velocity. For millions of sea animals, death was inescapable. Both mighty predator and timid prey were helpless... both scalded in a vertical rush of heated bubbles. Underwater rockslides destroyed reefs in a matter of heartbeats. Then the magma spewed from the bedrock fissures. What followed was cataclysmic; a thriving animal kingdom was reduced to rubble. The only clue from above was the fallen armies of fish rotting in a percolating watery surface. More fatalities caught in the crossfire of a world soon to end.
Armageddon had arrived…the crack encircling the world was nearly complete. The bore-well installation near the crash site bubbled with activity.
A series of foreboding earthquakes occurred throughout the Pioneer 4’s prep for launch, affecting the entire region of its crash site. Off in the distance, along the volcanic ridge western horizon, smoke was pouring skyward with great intensity and purpose. The desert’s ground quaked once again gently at first while some distance away from the podship, ice on glacier-covered mountains shuddered, squealed, and ruptured. The mudflats began burping.
With the erratic orbit of the planet taking it further and further out of homeostatic rotation, the circadian rhythms of dawn and dusk gave little reference to real-time. A single blast in the early nodes of a then “morning” from the smoldering horizontal line accompanied a small earth temblor that rattled the bowport and the podship’s bulkheads.
The event didn’t faze the focused crew. Not until the explosion deep inside one of the ranges prominent volcanoes disgorged a dark column of ash in the strengthening light of the sunrise did the Aidennians take check of the situation. The column climbed upward above the ridgeline to a height of almost two kiloretems. It created a billowing cloud that began to fall as fine ash on the east side of the volcanic mountain range. The ash did not come from fresh hot magma rock but was caused by the hot magma rising deep inside the volcano and turning the water-filled rock inside the volcano to superheated steam. The effect created a cloud of condensed steam mixed with ash, which would linger until the main eruption that would occur some nodes later.
“Divided We Fall”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:
The disruption of the planet's atmosphere caused by the supergiant was affected from poles to equator. The planet lay enshrouded in clouds; great thunderstorms whacked the world. Where the land was not flooded, lightning seared the surface -- setting fires that added soot and ash and gases to the roiling clouds. The globe's temperature began to fluctuate because of the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere, causing the world to rapidly warm.
The Pylon Crater's volcanic rim's north face was swelling; it had already bulged laterally by some three hundred retems and was still distending at a rate of five retems a rotate. It was obvious the volcanoes that made-up the mountainous rim would not remain on "hold" much longer. Still, the third-of-a-met-wide rim looked drowsy enough in the bright sunslight. Its appearance did not change much even as successive earthquakes approaching 5.0 on the ancient Richter scale rocked the region. Hundreds of retems below, wispy steam breathed gently from the crater's throat.
The planet was starting to break up.
Unseen by the podship’s sensor/scanner pallet or the Aidennians, the planet’s north and south polar caps towering peaks, some five hundred retems above and capped by disintegrating glaciers, constantly whispered and rattled with cascading ice and rock. A high wind blew steadily across the remote stretch of arctic ice that had the appearance it had existed just as it was for centuries.
Something was traveling beneath the ice and snow. It was unseen, silent, and quite large. Without preamble, the ice began to crack like an eggshell, then it ruptured and finally erupted as billows of white and black smoke began to pour east in the high wind. At the bottom of each column of smoke there was suddenly a line of flame, burning brilliant white rather than yellow or orange – it looked molten.
Everything the magma fire touched it burned furiously, like torches of pitch. Craters on the inner and outer banks of the ice sea looked like beach firepits, spurting white flame into the air. Clearly there were strong winds funneling through the polar chasms, fanning the volcanic flames.
The land become warmer from the under-ice volcanoes; the ice at the bottom of the poles had begun to melt a bit. The water mixed with sediments from the volcanoes and formed a till – having the consistency like that of sludge-paste. Where the ice was riding over the till, it moved faster than usual, so ice sheets were now ice streams, like fast glaciers with their banks made of slower ice; becoming a river running off about half a dozen other ice streams into the polar shelves.
Interglacial temperatures sent a thermal pulse down through the polar ice sheets and had raised sea levels. Now seawater was running between the ice sheets and the polar bedrock, right into active volcanic eruptions. The ice sheets were breaking up, lifting, sliding out into the planet’s little sea, and being carried away by currents.
The climatological triggers were instantaneous as glaciers went to interglacial in nodes. The polar caps were suddenly brilliantly colored and articulated: the cobalt blue of the sea, the daisy chain of cyclonic cloud systems spinning away to the north or south respectively, the textured sheen of the suns on the choppy water, the great gleaming masses of ice, and the flotillas of icebergs, so white in the blue. Seething funnels of orange-tongued laced eruption columns now strangely mottled the comma-shaped polar continents, causing gaping blue-black cracks in the white. The polar seas were even more fractured, by long sea-blue fjords, and a radial pattern of turquoise-blue cracks. Offshore, floating tabular icebergs that had been pieces of the polar continents sailed away. The biggest ones resembled a chain of small islands, or even bigger.
Within the few weeks since the planet’s slippage countdown, the sea levels had raised about six retems. The catastrophic breakup of the polar caps would continue to raise water levels additionally two to three retems, in a matter of nodes. When all was said and done, the failing world’s sea levels would rise sixty retems. Just in time to see the planet’s last sunset.
A bolt of lightning flashed across the desertscape and the viewports shivered and rattled in the rumble of thunder. For Retho Capelsire it was a harbinger of what was yet to come.
By definition, the scientist knew what caldera meant: A large, roughly circular crater left after a volcanic explosion or the collapse of a volcanic cone. Calderas were typically much wider in diameter than the openings of the vents from which they were formed. It also was the cap to a magma chamber that surged below the caldera crust feeding lava into the vents that surrounded it.
All was relevant information, the podship was partially buried in a caldera whose magma was channeled into three volcanic ranges, one east by the inland sea, two west – the crescent range that surrounded the desert plateau and its sister concentric range around the coined Pylon Crater. Recent temblors could only mean magma was on the move and once-dormant summits were resurrecting while active peaks became more kinetic.
It was not the earthquakes themselves that drew the crew of the podship from their personal reveres out onto the flight deck. It was the realization that whatever was causing the ground to shake was more than just a normal seismic tremor. The environs rolled, heaved in the manner of a natural disturbance then mounted to a certain level and held there, steady and unvarying. Ignoring toppling plateaus, trembling gourd-trees, and the cracks that widened the caldera floor, the Aidennians hurried to their stations.
Across the desert landscape rocks were tumbling and bouncing down hillsides of brown and ochre. Cliffs cracked away as pinnacles and spires began to crumble like columns of dehydrated powder. As the planet went to blazes, the crew of the Pioneer settled into their roles. The storm and its dangers were forgotten. Everything was forgotten, except liftoff procedure. They were a unit now. Personal animosities and opinions were submerged in the long awaited desire to get the Pioneer Pod 4 off the ground and back into clean, open Space.
Nicraan Matasire was already positioned at the flight board in the command apse. Running through a rehearsed sequence, the major activated the Pioneer 4’s drive systems. “Diverting all podship controls to main computer,” he called out as he finished a control series, moving on to another. “Navigational holographic online,” he said. Then went on, touching a third set of controls, reporting, “Course confirmed for a slingshot exit of the solar group.”
As if in response to his declarations, the pop-up computers on the command console’s bowport sills arose like cobra hoods from their respective console’s housing. The primary function of these computers was to analyze all navigational data and control the propulsion systems according to the preprogrammed mission plan. In addition to flight details, the central dash computer’s subsystems monitored all medical, environmental, control, and food storage. Collectively, the three computers also interfaced with the podship’s scanners and spectrometer.
"Status reports, please," Capel Perezsire said, settling into the angled ergonomic contours (formed by a seat, leg rest, a headrest, a backrest and armrests) of the co-pilot chair. His jaw muscles were bunching and relaxing in a rhythm as the seat slid into position under the flight console spread.
Across the flight deck, computer walls came alive. Each computer featured over one hundred gigabytes of core memory which were fully protected via hard disk blades housed in the lower deck’s auxiliary control subdeck-positioned main computer tower. At the heart of each computer was a microprocessor capable of handling over one billion commands per micronode. All at once, with each computer activated, up to two thousand separate data channels multiplexed. Even though sapient interface was all but unnecessary due to the computers’ advanced design, for convenience and for situation and update purposes, data displays, and graphics could be viewed on holographic screens located strategically around the ship, especially on the flight deck.
Moela called out from the quarterdeck’s science station, her voice not quite steady. "The supergiant sun's influence is increasing. Visible light output from this planet's primary star has increased ten percent in the last five macronodes. The heating is starting to move some serious air. No sign of cloud dissipation. Estimate total cloud cover within point seven macronodes. And, Sir, the planet's core readings are extremely unstable, and they're changing rapidly --”
The science officer stopped talking as a strange sound dominated the airwaves. The noise drew every eye to look out the bowport.
“Look,” Retho said with wonder.
Out the curved sectional transparency the world spread out around the vantage point. It was a beautiful world that was strange and growing stranger. It was destroying itself. Far away, a glacier lapped at the foot of a westerly mountain, surging up in slow-motion waves. As the Aidennians watched, the ice crept forward, piling and folding and crushing itself against immovable stone, squealing and cracking and shrieking. The ice had completely engulfed the western half of the desert, inundating it like a silver flood.
Eventually the begetter of the icy avalanche reached the crash site caldera. The ground began to quiver and the Aidennians froze where they were, grabbing onto anything that hinted of being stationary.
> The quake intensified, till the leather plants on the desertscape all swayed and thumped together with a low and hollow sound, like bamboo. As the earth temblor reached its peak, a long and high-pitched hissing shriek, like nothing ever heard before, reverberated across the rocking surface. Broken slabs of stone suddenly projected up from the desert’s crust as a fault sundered the plain, splitting it into crumbling sections, then jammed them against one another.
A brilliant aurora splashed like an ocean wave as one edge subsided beneath another; an omen that the planet was dying.
Not waiting for the quake to fade, Capel said suddenly, "Notify all stations. Switch power immediately to launch status. Moela, assume engineering position and bring antigrav thrusters online. Conn, place concussion dampeners on flight configuration and place EmDrive on standby."
Obediently, Moela closed her science station and made the swift move to the sunken operations area of the flight deck and over to the engineering console just on the perimeter of the command apse.
“Life support systems are online,” Dara reported from her quarterdeck console, touching activation controls. “All environmental systems ready for ascent sequence initiation and transition into Space.”
"All stations confirm," Nicraan called back, checking a holoset on his command panel. "Verified, all EVA/ingress/egress hatches secured."
Both males studied the environs out the command-apse’s viewport. During their momentary observation, the clouds increased in amplitude and the rain on the horizon rushed toward them with all its intensity. Dust devils were spinning up everywhere, miniature tornadoes, and funnel clouds spewing dust and debris up into the air. Huge drops of rain hit with perceptible force and streaked down the polytherma panes as if to score their shining surfaces.
"There is a significant temperature rise ---" Moela began but was cut off by her superior.