Castaway Resolution

by Eric Flint

  Sue grinned. “Oh, no, Ambassador, something much more interesting.” The grin faded. “And something that has apparently destroyed thirty-seven vessels in the last fifty years.”

  She projected an image with her omni so the others could see it—a stylized representation of a Trapdoor vessel like Outward Initiative, with the Trapdoor field shimmering around it, a long ovoid shape some distance from the vessel’s hull. “Most of you are aware that a Trapdoor field is generated by precisely spaced coils of a particular design, which must be properly in phase to generate an effective Trapdoor field. Biases of the coils allow effective navigation, directing the ship, although most navigation consists of pointing the ship in the desired direction in normal space, then activating the drive.

  “In most cases, the drive envelope fluctuates slightly; this is partly due to variations in the…well, spacetime characteristics, I guess would be the best way to put it, of Trapdoor space. In essence, Trapdoor space isn’t completely featureless. The other fluctuations, much more noticeable, are from slight mismatches between Trapdoor coils, and at a ‘beat’ rate between 5 and 500 Hertz, or cycles per second, most commonly at particular peak frequencies which have to be damped out because they are resonance frequencies between the field coils—they could cause the fluctuations to go out of control. And in fact, that was what I initially thought had happened.”

  The simulated field showed oscillations of the field swiftly progressing to a destructive level.

  “However, once we started looking at the data, that just didn’t fit. First of all, as you can see from the simulation there, such an oscillation tends to actually cause the field to ‘pucker’ inward at the ends, trying to turn the field into a sort of donut shape; this would usually result in damaging the main ship body at its fore and aft ends. You can get radial spiking, but it’s rare.

  “More importantly, the data showed that the coils weren’t just acceptably balanced, they were exceptionally well-balanced. This was one of the best maintained ships I have ever had the privilege to examine.”

  “Well?” the Portmaster said after she paused. “Don’t keep us in suspense, Lieutenant. It wasn’t sabotage, was it?”

  “No. In all honesty, in a way, the crew of Outward Initiative caused the accident—just not in any manner they could possibly have predicted.”

  “What? How?” demanded Captain Toriyama.

  “By doing your maintenance too well,” she said.

  There was silence, then Bowie laughed. “All right, Lieutenant. Answer us the riddle.”

  “Resonance was the key,” she said. “Both Kryndomerr—the Bemmie mathematician—and I looked at the phenomenon and thought resonance, just from the way it all happened, but that seemed impossible. But then we happened to think about what it is that makes a really good resonance work.

  “Think about the classic trick of breaking a wineglass by singing or playing a note. There are two key requirements. The first is that there be a known resonant frequency; the second is that the energy input—the sound—be of a sufficient volume to keep the vibration increasing; that volume is determined by the quality of the glass, as a lower-quality glass will dissipate far more energy and require more input to achieve destructive resonance.”

  The others nodded.

  “Well, Trapdoor space, as I mentioned, isn’t completely uniform. And as it is the Trapdoor field that is an interface between the ship and Trapdoor space, any nonuniformity acts directly on the field, causing the variations I mentioned earlier. So—”

  “My God.” Toriyama had clearly seen it. “There’s some kind of underlying pattern—a field structure—in Trapdoor space. And if you have a well-enough maintained field…”

  “…and you travel long enough, not adjusting your course, leaving your field effectively ‘rigid,’ so to speak, and your field just happens to have the right size to vibrate at the right wavelength…yes. The intersection between the field and the space itself creates a positive feedback resonance that swiftly builds up out of control.” Sue showed them the graph that Numbers had created. “This was the real clue; Kryndomerr first saw this and pulled it out of the data. An entire population of well-maintained and mostly very large vessels going missing on long-run missions, whose fields—partly due to the development of standards in design, operation, and maintenance—have similar effective surface areas with respect to Trapdoor space.”

  The Portmaster was frowning. “Are you certain of this?”

  Sue considered. “As sure as I can be without running actual experiments. Kryndomerr and I came up with models showing how it worked, and demonstrating that the resonance was very likely to proceed along the radial dimension as experienced by Outward Initiative. In addition, the simulations and accident statistics indicated that this phenomenon may be a greater danger along particular routes and directions, meaning that the ‘structure’ of Trapdoor space has a systematic variation that may give us more clues as to the actual nature of the Trapdoor space.”

  Ventrella nodded. “Then you must summarize this report and have it transmitted to as many locations as we can reach. We don’t have many ships available to go long distances, but we’ll have to figure something out. This is vital information and we must get it to all the large colony and transport ships as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ventrella looked at the others. “Given this, I think this meeting is complete. Do any of you have any remaining questions?”

  After a pause, he stood. “Good. Inquiry complete; this was, effectively, an Act of God; no one could have predicted it given the known information at the time, and the crew did everything they could to minimize the damage to both ship and personnel. I will so state in the record.”

  She waited for the others to leave, shaking Bowie’s hand and—after a hesitation—giving the relieved captain a hug as well as a handshake.

  Once the room was otherwise clear, she turned. “Portmaster?”

  “What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

  “In the report—I want to include a full research writeup, for publication in the Journal of Interstellar Spaceflight.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Well, of course. That’s good research there, and worth probably more than one paper. Not bad for someone normally doing disaster inspection. What’s the problem?”

  “There’s one thing I need to make sure of…”

  Chapter 6

  Numbers stared at her with all three eyes, one of them flicking back and forth to look at the display near him. “The ‘Kryndomerr Resonance’?”

  “You and I did the work together, but you were the one who first found the pattern that showed something was causing well-maintained ships to disappear, and then did the hard work of deriving the function and building the models that showed that it actually worked the way we thought.”

  The Bemmie’s hide showed a doubtful blue-and-pink pattern. “You were the one who came up with the basic idea, though.” She saw, past the big alien, his pod or family, waiting at the nearby shuttle.

  “Resonance? Come on. We both thought ‘resonance’ at the beginning, we just couldn’t figure out how there could be a resonance once we saw the maintenance records,” Sue said. “Yes, I did come up with the idea that a near-perfect field might resonate, but you were the one that came up with the model that showed that it could actually happen. Numbers, thousands of people thought it should be possible for people to fly through the air, the idea was ancient, but only the Wrights, Langley, Whitehead, and a few other pioneers made it real.”

  Two eyes closed, the other narrowed, as different colors and patterns chased across Numbers’ body. “Is that the only reason you put my name on the effect, and my name first on the paper that you actually wrote? I’m terrible at writing.”

  She laughed. “All right, no, it’s not. You guys have enough roadblocks in your way getting ahead in our society. It costs me nothing but a little credit to put your name first, and this is a big, splashy, important event
in the history of space travel. If you get a lot of the credit, it will show a lot more people how much you have to contribute, not just by diving and swimming and so on, but in thinking fields, just as much as us. And you did do a lot of the work, so it’s not in any way a lie.”

  The big Bemmie rubbed his arm-tendrils uncertainly for a moment, then relaxed. “Then…thank you, thank you very much, Sue. I’ll make sure to always mention you if anyone asks.”

  She gave the alien a friendly slap on the back. “I’d expect no less, given how I’ll be talking you up.” She looked at her omni display. “Your family’s continuing on? You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” he said emphatically. “Whips…Whips would not want his loss to stop us. We were honored beyond all other pods in being chosen; we cannot give up now, or it is possible that it will be a long time before any of our people is given the chance again.” His colors muted again for a moment. “And it has now been nine months. More than enough time for any survivors to have made it here…and longer than any of them could have survived.”

  She held back a reflexive, well-meaning offer of hope. Kryndomerr was right; there weren’t enough supplies on any of the lifeboats to allow them to survive to this point, and even fewer supplies had been on LS-5, the boat that Numbers’ son had been aboard. “My sympathies again. But I’m sure you’re right.” She gripped the bases of two of his arms with her hands, the equivalent of a warm handshake. “Good luck on Tantalus. And maybe I’ll find a way to come out that way and visit.”

  “Please do. My pod…my family would be honored to have you as a guest.”

  She stood and watched as Numbers and his family—Windharvest, Dragline, and Pageturner—boarded the shuttle to the finally repaired Outward Initiative. All four of them stopped just before boarding and gave her a wave-and-flattened-bow that was the deepest sign of respect, echoed by the solemn color pattern on each. She waved and bowed back; a few moments later, the landing shuttle launched and was gone.

  Sue stood there a moment, just letting the quiet efficiency of Orado Station soak into her. She thought back to the time just before Outward Initiative’s arrival, and felt a pang of guilt. I was wishing something would happen then. I should always remind myself what “something happening” means in space. This “something” had cost over two hundred people their lives. Some might have died long after the others, drifting in space in nonfunctioning shuttles; they obviously had not survived.

  From now on, she promised herself, I will be happy to have nothing to do.

  She smiled, and headed towards Port Control. Back to what I devoutly hope will be many years of boring duty!

  PART 2

  SETTLERS

  Chapter 7

  “All right, everyone,” Laura Kimei said, “settle down.”

  Sakura knew this was mostly directed at Francisco and Hitomi; the two youngest members of their unplanned colony were running around, chasing a virtual animal projected on their retinals by Hitomi’s omni, which was running some kind of game for them. Looking around the big table in the center of the clearing, she could see most of the others were already seated and paying attention.

  Laura, Sakura’s mother, sat at one end of the long, oval-shaped wooden table. Akira, her husband and Sakura’s dad, was on her right, and on her left was Caroline, Sakura’s big sister. Laura had dark brown wavy hair and sharp brown eyes, and was the tallest of Sakura’s family at a hundred eighty-three centimeters, though Sakura thought she might pass Mom sometime soon. Akira Kimei’s hair was long, ebony black, and ruler-straight, and his eyes were the same color; he was about ten centimeters shorter than his wife, which made him slightly shorter than Sakura but still quite a bit taller than Caroline, whose hair was as straight as Dad’s but as brown as Mom’s; Sakura’s hair reversed that, being wavy but black as space.

  Hitomi, crowned with golden hair that had no precedent at all in their family, was just clambering into her high seat next to Dad. She hadn’t grown noticeably in the year since they arrived so she was still barely a hundred centimeters tall. Francisco Coronel was next to her, but though he wasn’t that much older than Hitomi his surprisingly red hair topped her blonde mop by thirty-five centimeters—and he was still the second-shortest of the group of castaways at that. His red-brown skin contrasted sharply with Hitomi’s light tan.

  Melody Kimei sat next to Caroline, her black eyes distant as she looked at something—probably a book or some set of plans—projected in front of her. Melody was the genius of the family, but somewhat less insufferable about it than she had been before the disaster.

  Between Melody and Sakura was a platform where other places had chairs; that was necessary, because next to Sakura was her best friend Whips, the only non-human member of their group, a Bemmius Novus Sapiens massing well over two hundred kilograms and almost two and a half meters long from his tripartite beak to the base of his tail tentacles. Built long and low, Whips needed a platform a good part of a meter high to allow him to see above the edge of the table, though he could raise himself up considerably on any two of his three multipronged tentacle-arms.

  Across from Sakura was the squat, powerful form of Tavana Arronax. Tavana’s cocoa-colored skin and black, fluffy hair, like his first name, came from his Polynesian ancestry, while his sharp gray eyes were a legacy of some unknown French colonial back in Tahiti’s history.

  On Sakura’s other side was Maddox Bird, about her own height even though he was a year younger, his hazel eyes glancing swiftly around the table from beneath his somewhat ragged light-brown bangs. Next to him was his older brother, Xander Bird, Tavana’s complete opposite as he was extremely tall—a hundred ninety centimeters—and topped with a profusion of curly blond hair above eyes as blue as Hitomi’s.

  At the far end of the table was Sergeant Samuel Morgan Campbell, topping even Xander by eight centimeters and probably another twenty kilograms of pure muscle. The grizzled, close-cropped graying hair contrasted with the dark-coffee complexion and eyes, and even more with the flamingly red hair, brilliant green eyes, and utterly diminutive stature of the woman on his other side, Lieutenant Pearce Greene Haley.

  “It’s been a few days since we got our new friends settled in their temporary home,” Laura gestured to the large emergency shelter on the farther side of the clearing, “and we’ve all been talking about how the arrival of Emerald Maui changes things, and where we go from here, and Pearce suggested that we should go over everything we know now.”

  Even Hitomi had stopped fidgeting. She’s changed. I guess we all have. She knows when we’re going to talk about important things and she really does want to know what’s going on.

  “That’s right,” Pearce said. “First, I thought you’d all appreciate a summary of what we’ve got on Emerald Maui, and so Caroline and I worked with Tavana and Maddox to get it all figured out. Caroline?”

  “Thanks, Pearce. Well, first, of course, we have the Emerald Maui itself. She can’t fly any more, and maybe won’t ever, but she’s still a watertight, very tough craft that could easily carry all of us if she had to. Not that we’d want to go looking for another place to build on, but it’s nice to know we could.”

  The whole group of colonists nodded. We’re living on a giant floating continent, Sakura thought. And we know from what happened to the sergeant’s group that even these things can break apart. So yeah, that’s a relief.

  “More importantly, Emerald Maui gives us access to a powerful reactor and generator. How long will it work, Sergeant?”

  “Well, that depends a lot on how much we work it, Caroline,” Campbell said easily. “But given the amount of boron-11 we have on hand…I’d say at least twenty years. The reactor itself is fully colony rated, which means as a system it’s good for at least seventy-five years. So if we could use the stuff we have to somehow refine more boron-11 out, the reactor could last us for many decades.”

  Decades. Electric power for decades. Sakura saw her own grin echoed around the table. She was proud of all the thi
ngs her family and Whips had come up with in the year and more they’d been marooned—candles and torches, hand-powered cranks to move things, ceramics and even, now, iron—but the thought of being able to get back some of the luxuries they’d lost…

  “Onboard, Emerald Maui—which was LS-88—was carrying a lot of stuff we will be incredibly happy to have. First off—Mom, they had a bunch of medical supplies that were part of your shipment.”

  “My shipment?” Laura leaned forward. “Which ones?”

  “We haven’t uncrated it to make sure, but according to the manifest it contains one of the nanoprogramming stations, a transportable field surgery, and one of the instrument and drug packages.”

  Relief spread visibly over her mother’s features. “Oh, thank God. I’ve been doing everything with improvised measures. Having even some of those supplies will make such a huge difference. Go on.”

  “Enough clothing for everyone to have two or three changes of clothes, if we don’t mind all wearing the same stuff.”

  “You mean real clothes, not the stuff we’ve been trying to put together ourselves?” Melody said eagerly. “I don’t care what it looks like, I’ll wear it!”

  “We already knew about the hundred emergency medical kits,” Caroline went on. “And about the three JD-CAT excavators. There’s a bunch of field rations left which would support us for a while if we needed it—we’ll save those for emergencies, along with the remaining Joe Dinners. The really important stuff, after the medical equipment, is that there’s a whole bunch of colonial hunting and survival gear, assorted hand tools, and a bunch of spare power packs in the five most common sizes.”

  “Hunting? Are we talking firearms?” Akira Kimei asked.

  “There are a fair number of firearms available,” confirmed the sergeant. “About twenty sidearms and thirty rifles, mostly for hunting, though there’s two military full-auto rifles in there—probably for the local militia. Plus there’s six hunting bows and quite a few arrows.”