Castaway Resolution

by Eric Flint

  With three separate propulsion systems—a fusion reactor to drive a nuclear rocket, the Trapdoor Drive, or an extremely large-volume Nebula Drive—Raijin and its siblings could carry messages from point to point, or more importantly rescue people, at speeds far in excess of any conventional drive ship, if the job could be done by no more than three people.

  “Orado Station, this is Raijin. We are prepared for launch. Check our flight path.”

  “Flight path is clear. Launching now.”

  The bottom literally dropped out of the “egg-cup” in which Raijin sat, and the spherical ship shot outward. The launch bay was located on the edge of the rotating ring of Orado Station, and thus the centripetal force which had kept her sitting solidly on that surface was gone, releasing Raijin to follow the commands of Newton for a few minutes before she would end up sneering at him and Einstein both.

  “Wheee!” she heard from Dr. Pearce’s seat, and despite the gravity of the situation Sue chuckled. It was a rather fun way to launch.

  “Glad you like it, Doc. Some of my passengers have been less than thrilled with that process.”

  “I’ll bet they hate roller-coasters, too. How long to Outward Initiative?”

  “Depends on how good I am today.”

  According to the data, Outward Initiative had been at one billion, two hundred and fifty-three million, five hundred thousand kilometers from Orado Station at time…mark. Fortunately, the huge ship hadn’t entered “hot”—going at high relative speed—or it would have taken a long time to adjust her speed to match. The relative speed was about five kilometers a second, well within Raijin’s twenty kps delta-vee from its nuclear jet. That also wasn’t fast enough to matter much at Trapdoor speeds, so she discounted it for the most part.

  That’s just under a one-minute jump.

  The key to real performance here, however, depended on the pilot. Even the best AIs yet made could not match human gut instinct on the final instantaneous adjustments to the field just before jump. Some liked to claim this was proof of some ineffable human superiority, a sense beyond the material; Sue thought it simply showed that current AIs didn’t quite know how to integrate everything from the tactile feedback on the controls, the sound and vibrations transmitted through the ship, the miniscule variations in the system readouts, and simultaneously apply it to the external conditions that were fed to a modern pilot through their retinals and haptic simulation links that could make the pilot very nearly be a part of the ship.

  “Well, here goes. Orado Station, Raijin preparing for in-system Trapdoor jump, estimated time fifty-nine point seven seconds.”

  “Confirmed, Raijin. Jump when ready.”

  She grasped the controls, both physically and mentally, concentrated on the feel of the ship. Nice balance. Resonance sounds almost perfect. Very slight beat coming from coil seven…about five point seven hertz.

  She nudged the jump parameters just a hair…and activated.

  A faint green sparkle shimmered and Orado Station—and the stars themselves—disappeared. Raijin was now hurtling through a lightless void, the Trapdoor Space. The only light that existed there was from Raijin itself, but its perfectly spherical exterior had no angle or vantage to project light upon itself, nor to provide a view, so the screens were darker than the waters of distant Europa’s oceans, a perfect blackness that made ebony and pitch seem bright.

  “You said fifty-nine seconds?”

  “Turned out to be fifty-nine point six nine seven seconds by the jump command. The exact full time of transition varies slightly.”

  “You changed it?”

  “A bit. Felt right. If my instincts are still good; been a long time since I had to try this.” She felt the usual tension rising. “We’re about to find out. Here it comes. Jump completion in three, two, one—”

  The stars sprang into existence again—and in the first screen, to the lower left, something that was not a star, something large enough to show signs of structure.

  Sue let out a completely unprofessional whoop of triumph. I can see it without magnification! We’ve got to be less than six thousand kilometers away!

  “Outward Initiative,” she said into the radio, “This is Lieutenant Susan Fisher, pilot of Raijin, S&R out of Orado Station.”

  “From Orado?” came the same voice that had given the Mayday. “Thank God! Raijin, do you have any medical personnel on board?”

  “Outward Initiative, this is Dr. Carolyn Pearce,” her passenger said. “I am a fully qualified physician, frontier, traditional, and nanomedical.”

  The relief in the voice was palpable. “Wonderful. This is Masashi Toriyama, acting captain of Outward Initiative.”

  “We’re on our way, Captain,” Sue said, checking vectors and activating Raijin’s nuclear rocket. Acceleration shoved them both back in their seats. “We’ll be matching with you within an hour.

  “Now that we’re close enough to talk—can you tell us what happened?”

  “Something I’ve never seen before—nor heard of. We were cruising along on Trapdoor just as smooth as you like, and suddenly the field stability alert starts screaming. We followed the book, authorized an emergency stop, but the field oscillations were so out of control that it took us thirty seconds just to damp them enough to do the shutdown.”

  “Jesus,” Sue heard herself say. “Oscillations? You’re saying that the Trapdoor Field is what did that to you?”

  “Oscillation depths were increasing so fast that if we’d been a second or two slower in reacting it might have bit straight through into the main hull,” Toriyama said. “As it was…well, you saw. Took five chunks out of the hab ring, compromised the integrity of the ring itself—part of what took us so long to get here was that we had to repair the ring well enough to keep it rotating.”

  The hab ring—as its name implied—was where most people lived; it rotated, providing effective gravity for the crew and passengers. But that meant…“How many people…”

  “…did we lose?” Captain Toriyama’s voice was grim. “Fewer than we might have, I suppose. We happened to be in an emergency drill at the time, so everyone except a skeleton crew was in the lifeboats already. No one was killed in the living quarters, but we lost six lifeboats out of the hundred twenty on board. Wasn’t the worst of it, though, the bad luck was just starting. We lost all three of our ships’ doctors—two were on the lifeboats and the third…well, she was too close because she’d gotten a call that someone was sick on one of the boats and the captain gave her permission to go tend to them.”

  “That was a violation of—”

  “Lieutenant, I’m fully aware of that. So was he. But routine…routine kills, whenever routine stops. You know that. We’d had twenty-odd of these drills and everything had gone just fine.”

  Sue shook her head, but she couldn’t argue with Toriyama, either. There wasn’t an organization in the world that didn’t start to relax when nothing broke the routine and everything kept working fine. It was the price you paid for working with humans. “Never mind, Captain. Go on.” Raijin vibrated to minor thrusts, as the automatic systems adjusted their vector to match more closely with Outward Initiative.

  “Well, like I said, we lost six lifeboats and all three doctors. Total of sixty-two people, mostly colonists.” Sue’s omni informed her that this was out of a complement—passengers and crew—of one thousand, one hundred, and fifty-seven. “That was bad enough, especially since it included Chief Master Sergeant Campbell, our head of security and navigation and piloting backup. But it wasn’t long after we got shut down and started trying to fix the vital damage, that people started getting sick.”

  “Sick?” Sue repeated. A disease at the same time?

  “Good God,” Dr. Pearce said. “Trapdoor intersection radiation pulse, yes?”

  “I’m impressed,” Captain Toriyama said. “Took us a while to figure that one out.”

  “I was present at the cleanup for an accidental ground activation of a drive.”

&nb
sp; The thought of even a small Trapdoor drive being activated at ground level made Sue shudder. “So where the field was cutting off those chunks, it was also causing big radiation bursts.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Were the lifeboats taken intact or…not?” asked Dr. Pearce.

  “Thinking of survivors? Let me check.” There was a pause. “It looks like LS-88, LS-5, and LS-42 disappeared in a single piece. The others were…cut apart, one way or another. I don’t know if they actually stayed intact when they…fell across the field.”

  “You have recordings?”

  “Some, but they’ll need some cleanup, at the least. The Trapdoor radiation pulses damaged things severely. The lifeboats themselves are heavily shielded, but the hab ring is light and relies on ship systems to keep it protected from radiation when we’re traveling in interplanetary mode; of course, there’s normally no radiation in Trapdoor space except what we bring with us.”

  “How many people were affected by the radiation sickness?”

  “Two hundred thirteen—most of the skeleton crew, unfortunately, plus a lot of passengers whose shuttles were near the intersections; despite the shuttle shielding, a lot of people got hit hard. We lost fourteen—one of them the captain, which is why I’m acting captain now. About half of the others recovered fairly well, but we’ve had to improvise nanostasis for the rest; I’m hoping Dr. Pearce can help out there.”

  “I am sure I can. If you’ve kept them alive this long, they’ll make it. Anyone else?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. We had to repair and rebalance the hab ring so we could rotate and give most people some gravity again, and then we had to replace Trapdoor coils and balance the field…well, there were injuries, both among the remaining crew and the passengers.” His voice dropped to a confidential tone. “We’ve also got several Bemmies on board, and that hasn’t helped matters.”

  Sue let out a long breath. The genetically engineered amphibious version of the aliens discovered on Europa were viewed by many with a combination of suspicion, concern, and sympathy. There had been several very well-publicized breakdowns of the early generations, and many people didn’t like being around them—with “didn’t like” ranging from mild discomfort to raging anti-alien sentiment or plain old-fashioned phobia, since—by human standards—they could be pretty scary, like a combination of a vampire squid and a slug weighing up to three hundred kilograms.

  Add that kind of xenophobia to the panic on board a vessel limping into port after an inexplicable accident…“Have there been any…incidents?”

  “None yet, but I’m real glad we’re here now. The Bemmies’ pod didn’t get away unhurt, though; one of their younger children was on board one of the lost lifeboats.”

  “What? Why weren’t they all on the same boat?”

  “Harratrer followed procedure; he went to the nearest lifeboat, as the emergency rules dictate, rather than making his way four lifeboats farther down.”

  So in addition to all this, there’s a bereaved family of Bemmies. Never dealt with that before.

  Outward Initiative now loomed up hugely, the great ring arching above and below as they approached almost perfectly aligned with the immense ship’s main spindle-shaped body. “All right, Captain, I’m going to have to pause and pay attention as we dock. We’ve got towing vessels en route, and Dr. Pearce will tend to your injured. Once I’m on board, my job—our job—will be to figure out what happened.” She grasped the controls and looked somberly at the shredded remains of the hab ring. Because if this can happen once…it could happen again.

  Chapter 3

  “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Fisher, Dr. Pearce,” Captain Toriyama said. Sue was slightly surprised to see that while many of his features were as Japanese as his name, his skin was the color of coffee without much cream; he was also tall and not bad looking at all, and would probably be even better looking without the circles under his eyes and the worry lines engraved on his face. Next to him was a woman who looked to be about forty-five, some gray in her brown hair, tanned, narrow-faced with keen brown eyes.

  “Thank you, Captain.” Despite all the efforts of modern nanofilters, she could still catch a faint whiff of burned electronics. The air must have been foul for a while after the disaster. “Two tow vehicles, Alabastra and Vilayet, will be arriving here in a few days. Have you prepared a room for us to work in?”

  “The day briefing room is where we did most of our decisionmaking after the disaster. We could use that, as long as you don’t mind microgravity; it’s in the center of the main hull.” He looked to Dr. Pearce and gestured to the woman next to him. “Doctor, this is Janice White; she’s an RN and the closest thing to a doctor left on the ship.”

  Pearce and White shook hands. “You have a medical facility intact?”

  “Mostly intact. You’ll see when we get down there, Doctor. Follow me.”

  As the other two departed to address the pressing medical issues, Sue recalled herself to her own mission. “Microgravity isn’t a problem for me,” she said. “That will do just fine. Lead on.”

  As Toriyama led her down a corridor and then to one of the spoke elevators which connected the hab ring with the main body, she noticed something strange. “My omni’s not connecting with your shipboard network, Captain, just some local comm nets.”

  “That’s because the shipboard network is still mostly down, Lieutenant. All the major AIs were taken out by the radiation pulses, and we really haven’t had the luxury or, really, resources to devote to trying to fix or replace them. Assuming that the replacements work. No, don’t ask me how the radiation got to the central core; we’ve got a lot of guesses but no proof.”

  The elevator doors slid open; Sue jumped slightly at the sight of a horse-sized creature with three hook-clawed, multibranched arms or tentacles.

  “My apologies,” the creature said in a deep, slightly buzzing voice, “I should not have been waiting so near the doors.”

  “No, it’s not your fault at all. I knew there were Europans on board. I’m Lieutenant Fisher.”

  “My formal name is Kryndomerr, but please call me Numbers.”

  Toriyama was noticeably relieved by her reaction. “You’ve worked with Bemmies before?”

  “During my undergrad work on Luna, yes. Call me Sue, then, Numbers. I would guess you’re a mathematician?”

  “That is my profession. Analysis of datasets for anomalies is one of my specialties, which would seem a useful talent for this investigation, yes?”

  “Yes indeed. Glad to have you aboard, Numbers.” Now that they were in the central body, there was virtually no sensation of gravity—the radius of the main hull was less than a tenth of that of the hab ring—so she followed the big Bemmie by extremely long, flat jumps. “You’ve assembled all the data on the event?”

  “As much as we could without the automatics, and the damage that we have sustained,” Numbers said. “That is not quite as complete as we would like.”

  They reached what was obviously the briefing room, with microgravity chairs, presentation projectors, and other accoutrements of such locations, including a zero-g coffeepot. Sue turned to Captain Toriyama. “Captain, prior to the disaster, what was your position on Outward Initiative?”

  “I was second in command with a primary responsibility for the engineering department.”

  About what I thought. “Then, Captain, I must request that you leave and not involve yourself in the investigation further. A board of inquiry will have to be convened into this event, and you will be directly involved. If I find evidence of negligence or other irregularities, this may reflect poorly upon you; at the same time, if I find no such evidence, that work must be clearly done separate from your involvement.”

  Some of the worry lines deepened; he had clearly understood from the beginning that he might be held responsible for the disaster. “Yes, Lieutenant. That’s why Numbers here is available. He was a colonial, not one of the crew. I have had a list of other colonials you may be ab
le to consult, for information separate from that of the crew.”

  Well done. “Good work, Captain. I appreciate your cooperation.”

  Captain Toriyama saluted and then turned, departing the briefing room without a backward glance.

  She looked over at Numbers, who was arranging a number of articles in careful order. “Colonists? I didn’t know that they were yet allowing you—”

  “We are the first,” Numbers said; the pride in his voice was unmistakable. “Our pod petitioned extensively for the opportunity, from the oldest to the youngest. It was the proudest day of our lives when we were notified that we had been selected for this opportunity.” The vibrant shifting patterns on Numbers’ skin—generated by bioluminescent chromatophores similar to those seen on Earthly squid—suddenly grew muted and dim. “Little Harratrer was especially happy to go, because it meant he could stay with his best friend.”

  “Harratrer is the one of your people who was lost?”

  The Bemmie expanded and then contracted, causing his body to bob up and down—the closest equivalent to a nod that they could manage. “He was called ‘Whips’ and was my second son. Studying to be an engineer, and was near the top in his class.”

  And his best friend was obviously a human, since this is the only Bemmie family aboard. Interesting. “My sympathies, Numbers.”

  “Appreciated, Sue.” He completed his placing of objects (with appropriate adhesion clips to keep them from moving) on the table. “Might I ask about your profession? You piloted Raijin to us with frightening precision, but you are now an investigator?”

  Sue laughed. “My official title is Emergency Watch Officer, which basically means ‘person that you hope doesn’t have much to do.’ My job’s to respond to emergencies the automatics don’t know how to handle. Piloting’s my avocation, investigation and handling of emergency procedure’s my responsibility, and engineering analysis is my main professional training.”

  “I see. You have the skillset to get to an emergency quickly, the training and authority to run an investigation, and the professional knowledge to understand how the emergency happened.”