by Eric Flint
“Basically. There aren’t many of us in any given solar system, which is good…because it means that there aren’t enough emergencies like this to require more. Modern safety systems are extremely good.”
She floated to the table. “Records of the event from all systems…testimony from witnesses…video recordings…prior maintenance data…you’ve done a good job pulling this together.”
A ripple of light and color showed Numbers appreciated the compliment. “I simply thought about what I would need to fully understand the event.”
“Well, you seem to have thought it out well.” She strapped into one of the seats; floating at random was a pain. “Let’s get started, then.”
Chapter 4
Sue shoved her hair back and forced it back under the restraining clip. “Well, now I’m even more mystified than I was before.” She drifted over to the coffee dispenser, filled the transparent carbonan cup again.
Numbers floated nearby, chaotic patterns flickering over his hide. “Yes.”
“I’d expected to find a flaw somewhere—neglected maintenance, a mistuned coil, a one-in-a-million abrupt coil failure, something. The symptoms sure looked to me like some kind of beat between coils that turned out to have a positive feedback resonance. But…” Sue shook her head.
“Agreed. Instead, we have found nothing but exemplary records of service, coil condition monitoring records showing microtuning being regularly performed to maintain an overall synchronization less than one microHertz, absolutely nothing to show a fault anywhere in either maintenance or design. No apparent manufacturing or component flaws, either.”
“No. Those would almost all show themselves immediately in the synchronization data, if nowhere else.” She looked across to the Bemmie’s two visible eyes and grinned. “Good news for Captain Toriyama and his crew, anyway.”
“Yes. There will still be a Board of Inquiry but this part will be mostly formality.”
Her smile faded as she looked down. “But knowing what it isn’t doesn’t help so much. We need to have an answer for what it was, or at least whether it’s something that could happen again.”
“I have acquired data on all known lost ships,” Numbers said. “I assumed that if anything like this had occurred before, we would already know about it. Therefore, if this phenomenon had been encountered by anyone else—”
“—the ship would have been completely destroyed. That fits with the recordings; Captain Toriyama was right in guessing that his ship would have been completely destroyed if they had been a second or two slower to respond. Good thinking.”
Sue checked status first. In the last few days, the tow ships had arrived, docked and deployed their oversized Nebula Drives. Outward Initiative was finally underway to Orado; it would of course take a few months to actually reach Orado from this far out. Sue was tempted to go back to Orado Station using Raijin, but she really did have everything she needed to carry out the investigation here.
She took a sip of coffee, resettled herself in the seat. “All right, let’s see if we can get anything from that data.”
Her omni displayed the data as a multidimensional plot of glittering stars, showing time and date of loss, type of ship, location of loss, ship size, and many other factors. The first thing that struck her was that there was too much data from the past. “I think we should filter to, um, nothing older than about fifty years.”
“Why fifty years?”
“Because that was about the time that they deployed the current Trapdoor Coil design and basic operation guidance. Ships before then would have had some of the flaws the redesign was intended to eliminate.”
Numbers buzzed pensively. “That will heavily reduce our numbers.”
“I know, but it doesn’t do any good to look at data that’s on ships not built like this one.”
“True. It’s just that with delays on the order of a year between scattered systems, and months even on closer systems, propagation of records and data can take years. We’ll be missing a lot of the most recent info.”
“Let’s try it anyway.”
The plot darkened, then reappeared, this time with far fewer dots—but still quite a few. Across human-settled space, we’re using a lot of FTL vessels.
There didn’t seem to be a clear pattern here. “Do you see anything?”
“No, I…” Numbers’ multibranched arms slowed, froze. “Wait. Let me try something.”
The display darkened again, and then suddenly rematerialized. The scattering of dots representing lost ships had returned, but now they were mostly grouped into two separate populations, one low down and spread out along the x-axis which seemed to account for about seventy percent, one higher and focused far down the x-axis, though with still considerable spread, that comprised twenty-five percent of the total; the remaining five percent were scattered separate points.
Sue sat forward abruptly, knocking the sealed coffee cup away; she ignored it for now, as it was practically indestructible and not large enough to hurt anyone. “Well, that is interesting. What are our axes?”
“Estimated travel distance at loss for the x-axis, versus maintenance score history on the y-axis.”
Sue stared. “That means that most losses in the last fifty years fall into two separate categories—one group is what you’d expect, ships that weren’t maintained too well. But the other…”
“…is ships with extremely high maintenance scores—usually new ships, or commercial vessels like this which try to keep all the drive systems in tip-top shape for efficiency and economy of operation! Yes, yes!” Numbers quivered and patterns like strobing squares and triangles circled across his body. “How fascinating! Not at all what I would have expected.”
“I certainly wouldn’t have.” Sue’s brain raced, trying to make sense of this. It was an assumption in essentially any engineering discipline: keep your machine in top condition, and it was less likely to suffer failure. But this graph seemed to say that you were actually safest if you kept it in ‘pretty good’ condition—not neglected and mistuned, but not perfectly tuned and polished either, and that made no sense.
Except, of course, it had to make sense. The division was too clear to ignore. “What’s the p-value on this division?”
“Extremely low—about 0.00004.”
“So essentially no chance that this just a random artifact in the data.” She rubbed her chin. “Freaky, as a friend of mine might say. Why hasn’t anyone else noticed this?”
“Well, I can’t say that no one has, but it’s only been relatively recently we’ve been accumulating enough data to make this pattern obvious. For all I know, of course, there could be a paper on it already published and on its way from Earth.”
The coffee container gave a rippling chime as it struck the table; she caught it and put it back where it belonged. “You know what this means?”
“Probably not in the sense you intend. What?”
“There’s some kind of flaw in the current design. A subtle one, but just the kind of thing that doesn’t show itself for years until enough people are using it, or when you extend the design to some new regime. Can you sort this by size of ship?”
“Certainly.”
The new plot showed what she suspected. “Looks like this disproportionately affects larger ships, don’t you think?”
“Yes; p of less than 0.009. What sort of phenomenon are you talking about?”
“Well…” she searched her memory for a good example. “Oh, here’s one engineering students have looked at for years—the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Earth, back in the 20th century. They built this really long, very narrow and shallow bridge high up over an area that had regular high winds. The design might have been fine somewhere else, under other conditions, but where it was it got exposed to winds of the right magnitude to induce really severe aeroelastic flutter that ended up tearing the bridge to pieces. After the fact they figured out what was going on, but no one really thought much about it beforehand, and it was rea
lly some minor design changes that led to the disaster.”
“Oh. I think I remember that, but my instructors called it an example of runaway forced resonances.”
“Argh,” Sue said, rolling her eyes. “It’s been mistaught like that for centuries, I suppose it always will be. It looks like a resonance effect, I’ll admit. But it’s not, really. Resonance comes from a natural frequency of the structure, like my coffee container here”—she bounced it on the table, causing a ringing chime before she caught it—“being stimulated by some external force. If the stimulation’s in-phase with the natural frequency or frequencies of the object, the resonance can build.”
“But this isn’t a resonance effect.”
She shook her head. “No. The coils were all pretty much perfectly in tune. No sign of beats or resonances between them. The field was about as perfect as a crystal…” she trailed off as a sudden idea struck her.
“What is it, Sue?”
She picked up the coffee container, stared at its shining crystal perfection. “Perfection…that might be it!”
The big Bemmie gave a momentary flicker of reddish annoyance. “Might be what?”
Lieutenant Sue Fisher sat forward eagerly. “Come on, Numbers—I’ve got some simulations for you!”
Chapter 5
Portmaster Michael Ventrella—newly inducted a month and a half before—gestured for everyone to sit as he entered. “We’re not a huge organization, let’s not get too formal,” he said. “I hereby convene this official Review and Inquiry Report for Incident OR-7-FTL, the event which resulted in crippling damage to colony vessel Outward Initiative. Are representatives of all interested parties here?”
Captain Toriyama stood. “I am Acting Captain Musashi Toriyama. I represent both the crew of Outward Initiative and the Colonial Initiative Corporation, as there is no ranking official of the corporation present in Orado system.”
Sue saw the portmaster raise an eyebrow. “That puts this doubly on your head, sir. You understand that you may be in the position of having to remove yourself from command, or worse, if you or those under your command are found culpable?”
“I do, sir. But as the current commanding officer of Outward Initiative, the corporate directives are clear as to the fact that I also represent the company, and there are hardly any representatives of CIC here at the moment; I understand a new office is under construction and will be occupied in four to six months—”
“Never mind, then, Captain. As long as you understand your position, we can proceed.” Toriyama seated himself.
The androgynous person who rose next was someone Sue already recognized. “Len Bowie, Ambassador for the System,” they said. “We will represent the interests of the citizens of the System who were aboard Outward Initiative and, if it is acceptable to you, those of the few citizens of other colonies who do not have representatives present.”
“The System,” in Bowie’s context, meant “the original solar system.” Earth’s system was fairly well united, unlike most of the scattered colonies, and its massive population and industrial base still dominated humanity’s policies.
“That is acceptable. Lieutenant Fisher, you represent Orado Port and the investigative team?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good enough. Let’s get this underway, then. I’m not much for formality, so we’ll just move forward as makes sense. Lieutenant, you want to start?”
Sue stood up. “Thank you, Portmaster. Just to review, a quick summary of the events: Outward Initiative was slightly more than halfway through its journey to Tantalus, a new colony a bit over a hundred light-years from Earth. There had been no incidents of note during the journey, and all systems were operating at nominal.
“At 17:35 local ship time, during a routine emergency drill, a fluctuation developed in the Trapdoor field. This fluctuation grew at a tremendous rate, completely overwhelming automated attempts to damp it down by stabilizing the field generators further. An alert was immediately sounded and the crew attempted to counter the fluctuations sufficiently to shut down the Trapdoor drive safely. They did in fact achieve this by attempting a synchronized unbalancing of the drive coils—a risky approach, but probably the only one that would have worked, given later data. However, this was not achieved in time to prevent severe damage to the hab ring and the loss of six lifeboats and, at the time, sixty-two people. Radiation pulses also caused a cascading shutdown of multiple systems, including all shipboard AIs.”
She played an excerpt of the logs she’d been able to recover—the sudden eerie half-appearance of a starfield, the green blazing fire of a Trapdoor field shearing through metal and composite, the shocking destruction of the proud colony vessel in a matter of seconds.
“With the Trapdoor Drive finally shut down, the Outward Initiative was in normal space, severely damaged. It required two and a half weeks to use onboard resources to sufficiently repair and reinforce the vessel and allow it to rotate again; during that time, the extent of radiation sickness became obvious, affecting over two hundred crew and passengers, of which nearly half had to be kept in nanostasis. Those lost from the immediate and subsequent events included all three medical doctors and the ship’s commanding officer, as well as others.
“Nonetheless, basic repairs were completed, the Trapdoor coils rebalanced sufficiently to fit the changed profile of the Outward Initiative after the damage, and the ship made a relatively uneventful emergency trip here to Orado, the closest colony to their path at the point of failure, a trip of slightly less than two months.”
“A question, if I may?”
She looked over at the Earth system representative. “Yes, Ambassador Bowie?”
“You mention that six lifeboats were lost. Were any sufficiently intact to function?”
“We believe three of them were physically intact. Whether any of their shipboard systems still functioned remains in question.”
“Have any search and rescue ships been dispatched to search for survivors?”
She glanced at Ventrella, who rolled his eyes but nodded. “No, Ambassador, there have not.”
Bowie’s blue eyes narrowed. “Then may I inquire as to why not?”
“The short answer is that it would be a waste of time and energy. Do you wish a longer answer?”
The eyes met hers. “Yes. One with sufficient detail to satisfy me, unless the answers are inherently unsatisfying.”
Sue chuckled. “All right, Ambassador. In a way, they are inherently unsatisfying. The best answer is that, as the old book says, ‘space is BIG.’ Even with the recordings of the event that we’ve been able to recover from Outward Initiative, we can at best determine when by shipboard time the lifeboats were severed from the ring. But they, and the final shutdown of the Outward Initiative, were separated by up to thirty seconds, and thus by millions of kilometers. If Outward Initiative had been able to do the search itself, right then, the lifeboats could probably have been recovered. But the starship’s sensing suites were badly damaged, those of the lifeboats undoubtedly were worse off, and Outward Initiative was in no shape to search.
“But we can’t actually tell exactly where that accident happened. There are a few flashes of a starfield in the moments during the oscillation, and of course clear images after the ship stopped, but that is not in any way good enough to locate the accident to within better than, say, a volume the size of the entire Earth System, with nothing to serve as a marker. The lifeboats measure perhaps thirty meters long; finding a thirty-meter object in a volume billions of kilometers in radius is a very nontrivial task.
“We’d also expect, if anyone was on them, they would attempt to make it to the nearest colony—here. There are Trapdoor drives on those lifeboats, although they have to run periodically rather than constantly; so we actually haven’t quite reached the point at which we would expect to see them arrive; it took more than two months for Outward Initiative to make it here and at best the lifeboats would take nearly three times that long—almost six mo
nths—to make the trip. There is, unfortunately, effectively no way to detect them underway.”
“I see. But from your tone I presume you do not expect them to arrive?”
“Well…LS-42 and LS-88 had more than enough rations to survive that long. LS-5…well, maybe, but they had a Bemmie on board who would have needed a lot more food, plus the dry environment on the shuttle would not have worked well for his survival. More importantly, though, simulations based on the damage suffered by Outward Initiative indicate that many shipboard systems would have failed. LS-88 might have had the right combination of personnel on board to survive—if they weren’t irradiated to death—but the others…”
Bowie nodded. “Understood. My apologies for the diversion.”
“Not at all. It was an important question.” She took a breath. “Returning to the main point of this meeting…First, let me address what is undoubtedly the most pressing question.
“It is our considered finding, backed by physical evidence as well as modeling and deduction, that the crew of Outward Initiative were in no way responsible for what happened to their vessel. Indeed, the record shows that they had taken exemplary care of their ship throughout its lifetime, maintaining it to the highest standard of civilian or, truth be told, military organizations. This was a ship, and a crew, that others would use as an example. In addition, their swift and efficient actions on the day the disaster happened were in fact responsible for saving the lives of most of those aboard; a delay of another second or two could easily have led to the destruction of the entire vessel.”
She could see Toriyama’s shoulders sag in relief; he closed his eyes, then opened them, smiling brilliantly. “Thank you, Lieutenant!”
“I thought you’d like to find out your fate right away,” she said. “Good work, Captain.”
“Then,” said Bowie, “what was the cause of the disaster? An unexpected component failure?”