The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  While the crew of Gringolet had been checking into their hotel in Portland and easing into jacuzzi baths, Brutus had overseen a group of local dock workers who had packed up personal belongings and put them in rental storage. They dumped the Delta V and the Skipper in their wake, but Dinah insisted that they keep their requisitioned UteV, a few weapons, and some of their pilfered goods from the Doris Day. Of all the things left on board, the thing that broke Staples’ heart the most was losing her library. The books were a luxury, of course, and a heavy one to cart into space, but she loved them all the same. She placed them in sealed containers and, as with the rest of the jetsam, tagged them with transponders. She hoped that whatever lucky crew stumbled across their leavings would appreciate them, or at least find the volumes a good home.

  The days crawled. It wasn’t that there was little to do; running a ship normally crewed by six or more people with only three was enough to keep them all very busy. It was the mind-numbing grind of the labor and the people she was working with that made it so unbearable. Dinah was a poor conversationalist at the best of times, and the serious nature of their work and mission did little to improve her disposition. If she wasn’t making adjustments to the engines or tweaking controls in an effort to maximize fuel efficiency, she was stripping weapons and running diagnostics on the missile launchers and flak cannons. Staples quickly discovered that if she wanted human interaction, ironically enough, she would have to talk to Brutus.

  “Captain, this is the reason I did not want to tell you about Eris.” Brutus sat at what had been Charis’ astrogation console in the cockpit. Staples was taking a rare break in her usual chair, staring though the window to the starry dark beyond. It had never seemed so vast and so limitless.

  She refocused her eyes on him. “I know, and I appreciate it. I guess you know me well enough to predict how I would react.”

  Brutus nodded. “I did, though I did not think that you would bring Miss Hazra into our… conspiracy.”

  “It was a matter of practicality. We need her. You and I can’t run this ship by ourselves.”

  “I could have made copies of myself and filled this ship with automatons.”

  Staples twisted up her mouth. “It’s a nice thought, a whole ship full of you, but there wasn’t time. Also, everything more complicated than a toaster was either destroyed after Victor’s attack or is sitting in a vault waiting to be dismantled or reprogrammed. Besides…” Her voice trailed off for a minute and she stared out the window again. Brutus waited politely.

  “Besides,” she finally finished. “I need to see this through.”

  “Why, Captain?” Brutus asked. “There are others. You’ve done more than your fair share for humanity. Miss Hazra was a soldier, and I believe she still sees herself as one. For her, this is about duty. You are not a soldier. Why not let someone else shoulder this burden?”

  Staples scratched her chin, rubbed her eyes, and mussed her mid-length dirty blonde hair. “Did you ever read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”

  “Ken Kesey? I have not. I can download it quickly if it’s in the ship’s databank.”

  “Later. I mean, you should. It’s good. It’s about this man Randle P. McMurphy who figures out that if he acts a little crazy, he can spend a few months in a mental hospital. This was in the 1960s, and psychiatry was a burgeoning science. We didn’t know much at the time. McMurphy realizes that this hospital will give him free food and a good bed, and that it beats working in the fields under the hot sun. Basically, he’s there for a vacation.”

  “Vacationing in a psychiatric facility. What an odd concept.”

  Staples nodded absently. “Kesey was a little odd. Anyway, once McMurphy settles in, he starts to understand what’s going on in the ward. This evil Nurse Ratched has all the other patients completely cowed. She turns them against one another, humiliates them, and keeps them prisoner in order to maintain power over them. McMurphy decides to fight her, really to fight for the souls of the patients, and it ends up costing him dearly.

  “McMurphy doesn’t go in there looking for a cause to martyr himself for. He just wants a vacation. But then he stumbles across this wrong, this injustice, and he realizes that he can’t just ignore it. He has to fight, even if it costs him everything. Because there’s no one else.”

  “Interesting,” Brutus mused.

  “I don’t know if it was fate or chance, but for whatever reason, this cause fell to us. So,” she shrugged, “we do what we have to.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Brutus said.

  “Huh?” Staples looked at him. “For what?”

  “For coming with me. The truth is, I didn’t want to go alone.”

  Tedium, boredom, and exhaustion warred in Staples for what seemed like endless days. When she had a spare minute, she read on her surface, ate sparingly from their dwindling food supplies, or traded a few words with Brutus, but none of it helped very much. When Gringolet had been a commuter vessel, a lifetime ago, long trips to the Jovian sector had always been a struggle. There was always the knowledge that every kilometer they traveled was a kilometer they would have to retread on their way back. The knowledge that there would be no return from this journey made it even more difficult.

  Once they reached the middle portion of the voyage, they cut thrust, and the weightlessness compounded the psychological strain. They were already further out than all but a few brave explorers had ventured, and now the air on the ship took on a dead quality. Gringolet drifted in nothingness. Staples floated in space. She felt unmoored from the entire human race, addled and disconnected. Her routine was a slog. There was too much for her to do to allow her to rest, but never enough to engage her higher cognitive functions. The stasis tubes they had pilfered from the Doris Day and which were too bulky and light to bother ejecting tempted her sorely, but she could not leave the others to run the ship. She slept little, even when she had the time. She could see the strain on Dinah as well, though the woman tried to hide it for reasons that Staples sometimes had difficulty understanding. Even Brutus seemed affected. They were only halfway there when Staples began to feel that she might be losing her sanity.

  When the deceleration finally began and the illusion of gravity returned, the fog began to lift from Staples’ mind. She did not know what they would find when they reached Eris, whether they would be too late to stop Victor or not. In all likelihood, they would die. Staples knew that there were only a few possibilities before them. Most likely, Victor’s defenses would kill them outright, either by shooting Gringolet to pieces or by sending an army of automatons against them.

  They might successfully dock with the station and Brutus would interface with the copy of Victor and destroy him. Then they could stay on the ship until the reactor sputtered for lack of fuel and the battery backups failed. After that, they would either die of hypothermia as the ship froze, or of hypoxia as the air became toxic with their carbon dioxide.

  It was also likely that the engines would fail and they would drift further and further out of the system, careening past Eris at a speed impossible to recover from, until the reactor failed.

  Assuming they were successful, they could use whatever precious bit of fuel they had left to head for the core of the system again. Of course, with the reserves they would have left, it would take them years or even decades to reach an area with enough traffic that they might be detected. At that point Gringolet would be a frozen tomb. Staples comforted herself that this scenario at least might allow for Brutus’ survival, though it was likely that if anyone discovered what he was, he would be destroyed outright.

  Or, Staples reflected, they might find a supply of compatible fuel and use that to return. She thought she and Dinah might be eating shoe leather by that point, but there was a chance, however slim, that they might make Gwen’s next birthday party. She tried to manage her expectations, but the warmth of this thought hovered at the edge of her mind, teasing her no matter how much she tried to shake it.

  After three
days of deceleration, the ship began to shudder. It was an irregularity in the engines that Dinah could not correct without taking them offline and disassembling various housings, many of which were outside the ship. Even if she could have done it, the time they spent drifting would mean they would shoot past Eris, never to return. They decided to keep the engines burning and hope for the best.

  On the fifth day, the shuddering intensified. Gringolet groaned under the strain, the frame objecting to the violent vibration. Staples found that she could not close her teeth without them chattering, so fierce was the shaking. It made sleep impossible and eating an unpleasant challenge.

  Fortunately, Brutus had actually spotted Eris, and they were right on course. If the ship could just survive another two days, they would be at zero speed relative to the dwarf planet.

  Less than six hours out from Eris, the engines failed. The cessation of the violent tremors and engine noise was such a relief that for the first few seconds after they died, Staples felt nothing but relief. Weightlessness took over, and she sighed. Then reason kicked in and she knew that they had failed in their mission. They would pass Eris, probably closely enough and slowly enough to see Victor’s base, and then they would continue on their way out to the Oort Cloud, the sphere of icy debris that surrounded the solar system at a distance of some two thousand AUs.

  Staples undid her restraints, pushed herself out of her captain’s chair, and crossed the cockpit to the pilot’s station. As she moved around the chair, she half expected to see Bethany cozied up in it, hair drifting in her face, bony hands on the controls. The chair was, like every other chair around her, vacant.

  Staples had no talent in piloting, but she could pull an inelegant end-over using the retro jets. Because they had been decelerating, the rear of the ship was facing Eris. Staples first straightened the cockpit, and then she looked through the windscreen and tried to pick Sol out from the millions of starts in front of her. It was impossible with the naked eye. Her sun was indistinguishable from the rest.

  She maneuvered the ship clumsily around, and Eris came into view. It was still tiny, but it would grow quickly as they approached. A minute later she heard Dinah push her way into the cockpit. In the quick, efficient movements that years spent in space had brought her, she moved to Staples’ side and stabilized herself against the ceiling on a grip bar.

  “Afraid that’s it, sir.”

  Staples shook her head. “Doesn’t seem fair. It’s right there.” She looked through the window at the distant sphere.

  “We’re not done yet, sir.”

  Staples looked at her incredulously. “What can we do? We’re going much too fast.”

  “We still have the UteV, sir.”

  Even Staples knew that was pointless. “That craft holds enough fuel to thrust at maybe three Gs for ten minutes. We’d need hours to slow down.”

  “Not if we can stop Gringolet,” Dinah countered.

  “But we can’t. That’s the whole point. How do we… oh, no.”

  Dinah nodded. “If we time it right, sir.”

  Staples shook her head in mixed fear and wonder. “You’re crazy, Dinah.”

  A ghost of a smile flitted across Dinah’s face, gone so fast a hummingbird would have missed it. “Never claimed to be otherwise, sir.”

  “The trick,” Dinah said, “Isn’t stopping the ship. The trick is surviving it. We need an anchor.”

  “I… don’t think I packed one,” Staples confessed. She and Dinah floated in the largely empty shuttle bay nestled in the belly of the ship. Brutus stood on the deck plating, his magnetized feet holding him in place.

  “We already have one, sir. Victor’s station.”

  “How do you propose we tie ourselves to it, Miss Hazra?” Brutus asked, his head cocked.

  “We’re going to need to hit it.”

  Staples noticed that the edge that had tinged Dinah’s voice whenever she addressed Brutus’ robotic form was absent. Either she had finally left those demons behind, or she was too busy to care. “I was afraid you’d say that. Explain to me why that won’t kill us,” Staples said doubtfully.

  “It depends on how much mass the station has and if it’s moving. If it’s in orbit, which it probably it is, and we hit it from behind, the deceleration might not kill us,” Dinah explained.

  “Okay,” Staples said, doing the math in her head. “Like doing sixty and rear-ending another car. If the other car is going fifty, the jolt isn’t that bad.”

  “Correct,” Dinah said. “This wouldn’t work with a station in orbit around Earth. The orbital speed is too slow. But Eris is small, which means a tighter and faster orbit.”

  “Also,” Brutus added, “Gringolet would act upon the station, transferring some of its momentum. How much depends on how massive the station is.”

  “That’s the danger, sir,” Dinah continued. “If it’s too big, it’ll be like driving a car into a cement wall. We’ll impact, and the crash will liquefy us.”

  “Even if it’s even mass,” Staples said, “Cutting our speed by half in one second… I’m not sure we can take that.”

  “That’s why we’re not going to be on the ship, sir.”

  “Come again?” Staples asked.

  “You want to use the Utility Vehicle, Miss Hazra?” Brutus asked.

  Dinah nodded. “Together with some high tensile line we have. If we start behind the ship, in the UteV and attached to it by the line, when Gringolet hits, we can thrust as hard as the UteV will go. Between the thrust and the line, which will stretch, we shouldn’t experience more than thirty Gs.”

  “Thirty,” Staples said flatly. “I seem to remember you passing out around six when we found that satellite.”

  “Just for a second, sir,” Dinah said somewhat defensively. “And we will lose consciousness. Well, we will.” She looked at Brutus briefly. “For about ten seconds we’ll weigh close to two thousand kilos. We can expect burst blood vessels, possibly some damage to our vision, and maybe even some crushed bones.”

  “Your suits will help,” Brutus said. “But it will be exceedingly unpleasant.”

  Staples looked at him. “You have a talent for understatement.”

  “There’s also the matter of actually hitting the station without engines,” Dinah said once the three of them were back up in the cockpit. “We still have retros and battery power, and we might be able to vent some airlocks as a means to move the ship, but it’s going to be very difficult. I wish we had Bethany.”

  “Can we see the station yet?” Staples asked.

  Brutus was at astrogation examining the radar returns. “I have it, Captain. It seems to be smaller than Gringolet, which is ideal.”

  “Can we hit it?” Dinah asked.

  There were several moments of silence while Brutus shuffled numbers around and performed feats of calculus and physics equations the nature of which Staples could only guess. Finally he said, “I believe so, but I cannot be sure. There are a number of variables, and there is no guarantee that my father will not move the station if he sees us coming. There do not seem to be any Nightshade vessels present, but the station may have its own defenses.”

  “Makes sense,” Staples reasoned. “No one to defend himself against out here. Let’s hope that not bothering to bring a Nightshade out here means he didn’t bother to put point defense systems on his station either.”

  “If you interfaced with Victor, why don’t you already know what’s on that base?” Dinah asked.

  “Because this base was constructed by the copy that my father made of himself. From the moment that copy was made, the new Victor was an autonomous being. I know that he planned to use several small vessels, worker bees if you will, to construct the base out of ore from asteroids and Eris itself if necessary. What the final configuration of that construct is, I cannot say.”

  Dinah grunted but did not respond.

  “If we are to hit the station, I will need to begin to make minute adjustments to the ship’s trajectory immed
iately. Altering vector at this speed is difficult, and the sooner the changes are made, the greater their magnitude will be once we close the distance,” Brutus said.

  “Then get to it,” Staples replied.

  Five hours later, Dinah and Staples were nestled in the UteV. They had lined the back wall of the craft with grav cushioning scavenged from the new chairs Templeton had had installed on Titan Prime. Staples reflected that even now, though his ashes were mixed with the sediment of Mars, her former first mate was still helping them. Both of the women were suited, and they had stowed the few weapons they had not left in their wake in the flooring of the UteV. It made for very close quarters.

  The craft itself, about the size of one of Gringolet’s restrooms, trailed behind the larger vessel connected by a thousand meters of high tensile cable.

  Brutus was still on the ship so that he could guide Gringolet into the orbiting station. The station would be coming around Eris just at the right time for the ship to intercept it. Staples only had a dim sense of all of the math and physics involved, but she knew enough to realize that they were very, very lucky. If the station had been on the other side of the dwarf planet, they would have had no way to stop short of hitting the planet itself.

  Staples had objected to leaving Brutus behind. His chances of survival were diminished on Gringolet, especially in the cockpit, but it was really the only way. Someone had to pilot the ship and deal with any defenses or unexpected moves on Victor’s part, and Brutus was by far the most qualified. Both Staples and Dinah could pilot in a pinch, but Brutus’ reflexes were faster, his calculations vastly more accurate, and he was most likely to survive the crash. Of course, were he destroyed, they would have no way to shut Victor down short of using their guns on his mainframe. Which, Staples reflected, would probably work and feel quite therapeutic at the same time.