Long Shot

by David Mack

  Kavalas nodded and puffed his vocal sac. “You mean the maintenance depot.”

  “Exactly. You know where it is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Your people might not have known what they were doing when they made this mess, but there’s a chance they left us what we need to fix it.” The engineer gestured toward the nearest exit. “Take us to the maintenance depot, Doc. With a bit of luck, we’ll scrounge the parts we need to build a phase-correction coil—and get your console back.”

  • • •

  Facing the eight refugee Austarans down the length of a table in the mess hall, Theriault was thankful their species exhibited greater cosmetic variation than most she had encountered, or else she would have found it difficult to tell them apart. Each of the stranded astronauts was distinctly different from the others. The three things they all had in common were their triple eyestalks, wiry ­physiques—likely a prerequisite for space service—and ­pensive reactions to Theriault’s account of the crisis threatening their planet as well as the Sagittarius.

  Commander Beiana, whose golden skin was accented by tapering black stripes that reminded Theriault of a tiger’s markings, regarded her with his enormous green eyes. “So, if I understand you correctly,” he said, his voice processed in real time through a universal translator Theriault had given him, “a group of scientists on my planet stole some technology from a crashed alien starship. They tried to build a generator based on it, but it was made to backfire. Now it’s creating some kind of distortion that’s scrambling the laws of probability, and no one knows how to turn it off. Does that about sum up the situation?”

  “Pretty much. Though I’d say, ‘No one knows how to turn it off yet.’ ”

  Doctor Pylus said, “Your optimism would be more encouraging if we weren’t sitting in the path of a coronal mass ejection.”

  Theriault remained upbeat. “Technically, it’s still just a predicted CME.” Her qualification didn’t seem to impress the team’s senior engineer. His green skin darkened, an apparently involuntary emotional reaction that increased its contrast with his face’s trio of parallel white stripes. Hoping she might yet win him over, she added, “Several possible scenarios suggest that if our landing party can shut down the generator in time, the CME might not happen at all. Which . . . you know . . . would be good.”

  “Until the next global catastrophe unfolds,” said a softer-voiced member of the team. Theriault noted the female Austaran’s plain gray skin and jewel-tone emerald eyes and searched her memory for the junior engineer’s name, which came to her just in time to reply.

  “I know the situation looks bad, Nasutas, but we’re doing everything we can to help your people find a solution before it goes any further.”

  There was suspicion in the golden eyes of the group’s second-in-command, a dark brown male whose visage was adorned by irregular beige spots of varying sizes. “Not that we’re ungrateful, Commander Theriault, but I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t ask: Why are you and your shipmates so eager to risk yourselves for us?”

  “I wouldn’t call us ‘eager,’ Major Septen. ‘Willing,’ maybe. But as to why? Because that’s what we do. It’s one of the core values of our culture: to help those in need.”

  All the astronauts pondered her answer while slowly puffing out their vocal sacs. She hoped their collective behavior was a sign of appreciation and not a warning.

  Beiana looked around the table at his crew, then faced Theriault. “Your surgeon showed us how to use your ship’s escape pod, but we’d rather share our people’s fate than live on after them. If the worst comes to pass, you and your crew should reach safety. We will stay here.”

  “A noble gesture, Commander. But I don’t think it’ll make much difference. The pod doesn’t have enough thrust to get clear of the CME unless we deploy it now—but if I try to send six of my crew to safety in advance, those of us left aboard might not be able to hold the ship together long enough to complete our mission. So it looks like we’re staying put, too.”

  Perplexed looks passed between the astronauts. Their medical specialist, Doctor Kaolula, a bright aqua-hued male with black spots and sapphire-tinted eyes, asked Theriault, “Your ship normally has a crew of fourteen people, does it not?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why does it have only a single six-person escape pod?”

  A baffled shrug. “If I had to guess? It’s either a cynical estimation of how many casualties we’d have to suffer before we’d actually abandon ship, or it’s the dumbest starship-design flaw I’ve ever seen. Personally, my money’s on the latter.”

  Beiana regarded Theriault with the mien of one space veteran extending sympathy to another. “Apparently, some concepts truly are universal. So . . . I guess this means ­escape is no more an option for your crew than it is for mine.”

  “Looks that way.” She stood and wobbled a bit, looking for her balance. Doctor Babitz had reduced the gravity in the mess hall to sixty percent of normal to make it more comfortable for the Austarans, whose bodies needed time to adjust to their sudden return from zero gravity. Considering all they had been through in the past couple of hours, Theriault thought, if the astronauts felt overwhelmed or emotional, they were doing an impressive job of hiding it.

  “So,” Beiana said, standing with her, “what will you and your crew do now?”

  “Our best to fix this mess,” Theriault said. “Even if it means we go down fighting.”

  16

  The phase compensator had been jury-rigged and jerry-built from a dozen salvaged components Ilucci barely recognized, and half a dozen more he couldn’t identify on a bet. He had been forced to trust the assurances of the frazzled Doctor Kavalas as to the alien components’ capabilities when he and Hesh had raided the facility’s maintenance depot for raw materials.

  The engineer sat back from his knee-high, alien-tech Frankenstein’s monster. “That ought to do it. Let’s give it some power.”

  Several paces away, Hesh regarded the cobbled-­together device with trepidation. “With all respect for your skills, Master Chief, I continue to think it would benefit from an additional layer of insulation around its coil transformer. The deleterious effects of its secondary—”

  “We’ve been over this, sir. Our hosts don’t have insulation dense enough to make a difference. We’ll have to hope we can make it work without pushing it past eighty percent.” He beckoned Hesh. “Help me move it into position.”

  The two of them picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, thanks to its transuranic-metal power core and improvised lead shielding. They labored to keep it level as they hauled it up the control center’s stairs to the uppermost tier, where Kavalas and the captain stood waiting for them. Taryl, as usual, kept her distance on the pretense of patrolling the room’s perimeter and the surrounding corridors, to keep an eye out for trouble.

  When they set the gizmo down in front of the ghosted main console, it landed on the carpeted floor with a resonant thud and a muffled echo underfoot.

  Ilucci looked at Kavalas. “Are these tiers hollow?”

  “Yes. They share a welded frame, and there’s space underneath for engineers and technicians to make repairs to the workstations’ wiring and other systems.”

  Hesh looked at the floor. Ilucci imagined the figurative wheels of the science officer’s imagination turning. Hesh looked at Kavalas. “How large is the gap beneath the platform?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Confrontational, Ilucci faced the lieutenant. “Yeah, why?”

  “The metal frame might provide a small but perhaps not insignificant amount of additional shielding from the secondary—”

  “Stop,” Ilucci cut in. “We don’t have time to rejigger this thing to project upward instead of forward, and I’m telling you to relax about the ‘secondary effects.’ We’ll be fine.” To Kavalas
he added, “We’re ready to get this show on the road, so you and the captain should head to the other side of the room, for your own safety.”

  Confused, Kavalas did a double take between Ilucci and the phase compensator. “I thought you said its secondary effects would be negligible.”

  “They will. It’s the primary effect I’m worried about. I’ve got a pretty good idea what it should do to the master console. As for what it might do to someone on the edge of its emission zone . . . that’s where I’m a little less sure what to expect. So, by the big window, if you please.”

  Kavalas and Captain Terrell withdrew in a hurry, ostensibly taking Ilucci’s warning to heart. He kneeled and powered up the phase compensator. “Okay,” he muttered to Hesh, “it didn’t blow up, so we’re doing better than I expected. Patch the tricorder into its control board.”

  Hesh manipulated his tricorder’s settings. “Done. I have control of the compensator.”

  “All right. Let’s back out of its emission zone and start cycling it up. How far out of phase is the main console?”

  “I’m detecting a positive synchronic distortion of point zero zero one nine percent.” He looked up from his tricorder. “Enough to render it immaterial while remaining visible.”

  Ilucci ran computations in his head while they backed away from the compensator. “Okay, taking into account the mass of the console, the range of our compensator, and the need to avoid pulling the whole shebang too far in the other direction—”

  “Chief?” Hesh sounded almost apologetic. “I can gradually cycle up the power in picocochrane increments until the console becomes solid.”

  “Oh.” He masked his relief at being absolved of the need to perform complex mathematical operations in his head. “Well, if that’s how you want to proceed, sir, have at it.”

  The gadget’s low hum grew slowly louder and deeper. Hesh nudged the power level upward on the phase compensator while he watched the display of his tricorder.

  “Phase variance at negative zero zero zero eight . . . negative zero zero zero nine.”

  “Sir? Maybe you could save time by just reporting the last two digits?”

  “Will that not be imprecise, Master Chief?”

  “I’ll manage, sir.”

  “Very well. Negative eleven . . . negative thirteen.” A few meters away, the master console shimmered and for a moment turned more opaque than translucent. “It’s working!”

  In the moment it took Ilucci to lift his hand to give Hesh a congratulatory pat on the back, something went wrong. The master console flickered like a cheap hologram, then started to fade even more rapidly than it had before. Ilucci snapped, “Turn it off! Off!”

  Hesh scrambled to comply. It took him only a few seconds to shut down the phase compensator, but by the time its thrumming dwindled to silence, the master console was even less visible than it had been before they’d started.

  “How far out of phase is it now?”

  A glance at the tricorder’s display made Hesh’s face fall. “Point zero zero three one.”

  Ilucci swallowed a growl of frustration. He turned away from the device to see Kavalas and the captain hurrying back up the stairs to join him and Hesh.

  Terrell asked, “What happened?”

  “Well,” Ilucci said, “there’s good news and bad news.”

  “Today of all days, Master Chief, that’s the last phrase I want to hear.” He looked at the faded console and frowned. “Start with the bad news.”

  “Our attempt to force the console back into phase has pushed it farther out of phase. It must have a safeguard against what we were trying to do.”

  Kavalas’s temper boiled over. “I thought you said there weren’t any new traps!”

  “Technically, Doctor, this was just an extension of the original trap.” To the captain he added, “Here’s the good news: As Hesh and I predicted, because the console is out of phase from the rest of the facility, it can’t be used to trigger any new surprises.”

  The captain crossed his arms and skewered Ilucci with a look. “That’s not really good news, Master Chief. It’s just an absence of worse news than we already have.”

  “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Take your wins where you can, that’s what I always say.”

  “I’ve never heard you say that.”

  “Maybe you weren’t listening.”

  A sharp intake of breath signaled the end of the captain’s patience. “We need answers, Master Chief, and we need them now. Do you have any more ideas we can try?”

  “Besides blowing this place to hell?” He shrank from the captain’s glare. “No.”

  Hesh stepped forward. “I might have an idea, sir.”

  “Let’s hear it, Lieutenant.”

  “We were able to scrounge parts for a phase compensator. If we can find enough working spare parts, why not build a replica of their master console? If I can gain access to its original operating software, I might be able to debug any software-based traps, while the Master Chief can correct the physical design flaw that facilitated the original sabotage.”

  The captain looked at Kavalas. “Would that work?”

  “It might. But you can’t just plug it in anywhere. A master console needs a special, dedicated data conduit to operate all of the plant’s systems. That was the only one in here.”

  “Hang on,” Ilucci said. “There must be another data conduit like that somewhere.”

  The scientist thought it over. “There’s an auxiliary control center farther down the accelerator, but it was never completed.” An embarrassed shrug. “Budget cuts.”

  “Don’t get me started,” Ilucci said. “Doc, get Hesh a copy of that source code. Captain, I need you and Taryl to help me raid the junk pile for parts. We’ve got a master console to build.”

  • • •

  Every channel’s news was worse than the last, but Beiana kept cycling through them. He and the rest of his crew were huddled in front of the bulkhead comm panel in the Sagittarius’s mess hall. They used its controls as Theriault had shown them, to patch into the handful of audio and video signals the ship was able to intercept from the planet’s satellites. The transmissions were weak and intermittent, but they painted a consistent portrait of a world on the verge of annihilation.

  On the screen, a tidal surge of churning gray seawater roared through the streets of a coastal metropolis, sweeping away vehicles, debris, and people. It tore the façades from buildings and pushed the broken hulls of dozens of small watercraft up the main boulevards.

  Professor Mufungo breathed a pained sigh. “Change it, please.”

  Beiana fiddled with the wall panel’s controls. The screen turned gray and a male voice was barely audible behind a low scratch of cosmic background noise. “A major earthquake struck the Enolo Peninsula twenty-one minutes ago, causing widespread damage in the northern district capital of Sillum. Aftershocks continue to plague the region, which remains in the grip of an as-yet-unexplained freak summer snowstorm. Evacuations of the peninsula are ongoing as—”

  A squelch of noise as Beiana changed the channel in search of better tidings. The image of a female Austaran’s orange face filled the screen. “—provided no explanation for the error, which appears to have affected the entire global financial network. Leading economists find themselves locked in debate as to whether the erasure of the world’s public and private debt records will lead to economic revival or collapse, but so far the government has declined—”

  Septen changed the channel. “I bet they’ll still find a way to foreclose on my house.”

  The screen flickered, then settled on an image of a wildfire tearing though a remote forest. All the astronauts gaped in shock at the sight of a small village tucked into a glade in the heart of the forest—it was completely intact and surrounded by a ring of trees untouched by the blaze. The newscaster narrating the foota
ge sounded as surprised as Beiana felt. “—described the path of the fire as ‘miraculous.’ Firefighting teams have been unable to reach the tiny hamlet of Keeso, whose only water source is a centuries-old, hand-dug well. Vids recorded by the residents show the wildfire diverging around their village, despite the absence of firebreaks or other—”

  Beiana muted the audio. “At least someone’s having a bit of good luck today.”

  “That was more than a bit of good luck,” Pylus said.

  “Just as our hosts warned,” Nasutas said. “ ‘Disasters and miracles.’ ”

  Nelonnuk looked deflated. “And we’re up here, clear of the storm.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Specialist Heelar said. “You heard Theriault. This ship’s in just as much danger as our planet. We might not be in the middle of the mess, but we’re not out of it.”

  Doctor Kaolula added, “And let’s not forget, the only reason we’re still here is this ship and its crew. If not for them, we’d already be dead, instead of lamenting our good fortune.”

  Beiana showed his thanks to Kaolula with a half-bow. “Well said, Doctor.” To the others he continued, “Now isn’t the time to give in to despair, or beat ourselves up with survivors’ guilt. We were lucky to make it off Xenopus alive, but like Heelar said, we’re still in trouble.”

  Septen stewed. “Not as much as people living through earthquakes and tidal waves.”

  “Not yet,” Beiana said. “But we need to face reality. There’s nothing we could do to help the ones living through those disasters—at least, nothing that others aren’t already doing. Look at us. If the ship’s doctor hadn’t lowered the gravity in here, I’d bet most of us couldn’t stand up right now. My knees, hips, and back are killing me as it is.”

  Nasutas and Kaolula nodded at his words, but Pylus seemed to share Septen’s resentment of their powerlessness. The engineer met Beiana’s gaze. “Is that supposed to make us feel better? Should I be any less upset while I watch my childhood home vanish in a flood?”