by Amy Spahn
Maureen smiled. “All right, Captain. I’d like you to close your eyes.” He obeyed. “Take a deep breath, and imagine you’re collecting all of your feelings of anxiety in your lungs. Then breathe out and exhale the negative tension into the air.”
Sure. Rolling his eyes underneath his closed eyelids, Thomas inhaled and exhaled, though he ignored the visualization part.
“And again,” Maureen prompted.
He obeyed.
“And again.”
Thomas was about to ask how many times he needed to do this when the ship suddenly lurched forward and threw him from his seat. He found himself lying on the ground, staring up at the ceiling.
“Captain!” In an instant, Maureen was helping him up, apparently having maintained her balance through whatever had just happened.
As soon as he regained his feet, Thomas tapped his personal intercom interface, a coin-sized device attached around his ear. “Page the bridge.”
“Paging bridge,” the computerized voice repeated.
At least something on the ship could follow orders perfectly.
More seconds than were strictly professional passed before the young man in charge of the night shift finally responded. “Uh, uh, Sergeant Ramirez here, Captain,” his voice came through Thomas’s interface.
“I just felt a sudden change in velocity. What happened?”
“Um, we aren’t sure, sir. We lost helm control to the reactor room for a second, but we have it back now. I’m sorry it disturbed you, and we’ll look into it right away, so please don’t be mad, because it really wasn’t anything we did, and …”
“Calm down. Try to determine what happened. I’ll be there shortly after I check on the reactor.” Thomas tapped the interface again to close the connection and turned to Maureen. “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut this session short.”
She smiled at him and finished righting the furniture. “I understand. Just try to take deep breaths throughout the day. It should help you with your stress.”
“Yes. Thank you.” Thomas had no intention of following that advice. He turned to go.
“Oh, and sir?
He stopped and looked back at her.
She smiled apologetically. “Whatever caused that instability a moment ago, I’m sure it’s nothing serious. My brother likes to experiment with new ways to improve the ship’s systems, and sometimes when he makes changes to the propulsion system, it …”
“Thank you for apprising me. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Considering Maureen’s words, and how he should react if they turned out to be accurate, he headed to the reactor room.
* * *
The Endurance wasn’t a big ship, so Thomas arrived in under two minutes. He found that he had intruded upon an impromptu party. The five engineers in the room each held a glass of champagne, and one of them—the man with the unibrow—was in the middle of some sort of toast. The group was facing away from the door, toward the Adkinsium reactor. The reactor itself looked a little different than normal, but Thomas didn’t have time to reflect on that. Officer Unibrow was concluding his speech.
“… for inventing the most amazing breakthrough in propulsion technology, to Lieutenant Matthias Habassa!” The others applauded. “Thanks to him, the Endurance is now the first ship ever to leave our solar system.”
“WHAT?”
Glasses broke and champagne spilled on the metal deck as the five whirled to face their captain. “What did you do?” Thomas demanded. Before anyone could reply, he whacked his intercom interface. “Page the bridge.”
“Paging bridge,” replied the interface, far too calm.
A moment later, Ramirez answered. “Uh, here, Captain. I’m so sorry, but we’re still trying to …”
“Where are we, Ramirez?”
“Uh, sir?”
“Our location. Get a report from the helm. Where are we?”
Some muffled conversation carried through the channel, which quickly grew in intensity. Then Ramirez came back. “Oh my gosh, Captain, I swear it’s not my fault!”
“What happened?”
“The solar system’s gone, sir! All the planets, and the sun, and … I swear I didn’t mean to blow it up!”
“You didn’t blow it up, Ramirez.” Thomas pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look at the stars, then use the navigation equipment to calculate our position.”
“Um, okay.” Ramirez didn’t cover the microphone on his interface, so his next words nearly blew out Thomas’s eardrums. “CHECK THE STARS, YOU GUYS!”
Thomas forced himself not to raise his voice, but the sweat of anger began to form around his temples. “Where. Are. We?”
“Just a second.” Thomas could hear someone reporting to Ramirez in the background. The sergeant swallowed audibly. “It seems we’ve, er, left the solar system, sir. We’ve traveled over twenty lightyears from Earth. But really, it wasn’t anything we did! The view through the ports suddenly got weird, and Nina threw up, and now we’re …”
Thomas cut the channel and whirled on the engineers, all of whom were now staring at him with wide eyes. Twenty lightyears. At the ship’s top speed, it would take them over 400 years to get back to their own solar system. As if the Adkinsium reactor would even last that long. He took a deep breath, gritting his teeth. “What did you do?”
Matthias raised his hand. “If I can, Captain? It was my idea. And I really didn’t think you’d mind.”
“You didn’t think I’d mind that you took the ship out of our solar system without asking for my permission?” The beads of sweat began to run down around Thomas’s ears.
Matthias shrugged. “To be honest, sir, I didn’t think you’d notice, either.”
Thomas lost it. “How could I not notice that you took us out of the solar system? How did you even DO that?”
Oblivious to the fury facing him, Matthias brightened as he launched into an explanation. “Well, sir, of course you know that faster-than-light travel is impossible, at least with our current technology. The power requirements would be ridiculous, and there’s no way human beings could survive accelerating that fast, so instead of trying to break the light barrier, I went around it. It was an idea I had in grad school, but it wasn’t until Captain Davis gave me permission that I started really pursuing it.”
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. “You had permission?”
“Yup. I can show you the research order if you want. He got it signed by the R&D people at Dispatch and everything.”
“Permission or not, you’ve effectively stranded us in the middle of nowhere with no way back!” Thomas couldn’t believe he was going to starve to death on his first command—on the freaking Endurance, no less—because his chief engineer couldn’t be bothered to have a little foresight.
However, that impression seemed to be wrong. Matthias looked appalled. “Captain, I would never do that! We were only in 4D for about ten seconds, so we should have well over 60 percent of our power left. And the prototype D Drive has at least another jump left in her.”
“The what?”
“The D Drive.” Matthias pointed at a large box attached to the top right corner of the reactor. It had most definitely not been there a few days ago. “It took me about ten years to get it working right. Had to renew the research permit a couple times, and it was pretty hard to get the testing phase approved, but Captain Davis was really nice about it. Basically, it projects an approximate four-dimensional axis onto the ship. That lets navigation calculate trajectories in 4D, so we can travel through it.”
Thomas had earned his one-stripe engineering patch—a requirement for command—but the theoretical physics classes had been a while ago. Unfortunately, he needed to understand what had been screwed up so that he could fix it. He swallowed his impulse to start yelling again and instead managed, “Clarify on that.”
“Okay.” Matthias ducked behind a work station and came up with a piece of paper and an orange marking pen. Why he stored art supplies in the reactor room, Thomas had n
o idea. The engineer held the sheet up. “So, this paper has two dimensions. The X and the Y—length and width.”
That much, Thomas remembered, but he managed to keep his cool. Breathe, Thomas. Deep breaths. He ignored the fact that he was following Maureen’s stupid advice.
Next, Matthias bent the paper in half and held the two ends about two centimeters apart. “Now it has a third dimension—the Z axis, or height.”
“Yes. I know that.” Deep, deep breaths.
Matthias unfolded the paper again and drew two dots on it with the pen, one on either end, and labeled them “A” and “B.” He held it up. “If you want to go from A to B in two dimensions, you have to go across the entire paper, about ten centimeters.” He then folded the paper again, holding the ends with points A and B close together. “But if you add a third dimension, you can cut across it and shorten the distance by a whole lot.” To illustrate his point, he drew a line through the air with his finger from A to B, which was about three centimeters.
Feeling a lot like a schoolchild, Thomas ground his teeth. Keep breathing.
The engineer put the paper down and beckoned around them. “Now, imagine that you can add another physical dimension—a fourth one. You could fold three-dimensional space and travel across the fourth dimension, shortening the distance you have to travel. That’s what the D Drive lets us do. It doesn’t make us go faster, it just lets us take shortcuts.”
Thomas tried to picture four-dimensional space and found that he couldn’t. Matthias watched him. “You’re probably trying to picture four-dimensional space. It’s not really possible, since we’re three-dimensional beings, but the math works, and that’s all that really matters. Want to see my calculations?”
“No. That’s enough.” Thomas’s mind was reeling, but he had at least a basic understanding of what his chief engineer had said. And it obviously worked, so there wasn’t much point in debating the validity of the idea. “You are going to turn us around and take us straight back to Earth immediately. As soon as we arrive, you are all confined to your berths, and will wait there while I look into disciplinary action.”
“But Captain, since we have the research order, I don’t think Dispatch will let you punish us. I guess we probably should have informed you, but I figured you had a list of all the current projects on the ship.”
Yes, Thomas did have that, but the list had been awfully long. Of the project abstracts he’d read, he’d only understood a few, and he had given up after about an hour of trying to puzzle out the actual concepts.
Unfortunately, the research order meant that he probably couldn’t have the engineers discharged from the corps, but he hoped to at least get an official reprimand in their files. “My orders stand. Get us back to Earth, now.”
Matthias shrugged and turned to the D Drive. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
“What a party pooper,” someone whispered.
Thomas didn’t have the patience to deal with that. He tapped his intercom interface. “Page the bridge.”
A moment later, Ramirez once again stuttered into the conversation. “Uh, hi, sir. We’re still trying to fix the problem, but …”
“The problem is under control, Sergeant. Set navigation back toward Earth.”
“Um, yes, sir. Do you mind if I ask what happened?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Thomas reminded himself that this wasn’t Ramirez’s fault. “Just set the course.”
“Yes, sir. Over and out.”
As the channel went dead, Thomas glared at Matthias. “Progress?”
“Almost there, Cap. It’s a prototype, so we have to be careful with it.”
Thomas glanced at his chronometer. It wasn’t even 0700 yet. He closed his eyes and took another deep breath. Keep calm, he reminded himself. This would all be over soon.
Matthias cleared his throat. “Hey, Captain? We have a slight setback.”
Or not.
* * *
Thomas surveyed the faces staring at him from around the table in the conference room. Ivanokoff had begrudgingly attended the meeting, though he’d been three minutes late. Areva had again startled Thomas by appearing behind him, and when he’d ordered her to sit on a chair like a normal person, she slid most of the way under the table. Matthias was there, still smiling, which made Thomas want to punch him, and Maureen sat poised, legs crossed, hands folded on the table. Chris Fish, who represented the scientists as well as the scanners team, stared at Thomas with narrowed eyes, probably trying to decide whether or not to categorize this meeting as part of a conspiracy theory. Thomas ignored pleasantries, as he wasn’t feeling particularly pleasant, and laid out the problem at hand.
“Due to negligence and insubordination on the part of the engineering team during a risky experiment, we are now more than twenty lightyears from Earth. While it allegedly should have been a simple matter to return, the device that brought us here is in need of a replacement capacitor, which we don’t have.”
“Fortunately, I can build one,” Matthias said. “We have all the materials, except that I ran out of chrioladium wire, so we need a little more of that.”
“Which is why I’ve called this meeting,” Thomas said. “We used scanners to determine that there’s a solar system within a day’s journey at our top regular speed.”
“We were aiming for it. It’s Struve twenty …” Matthias began.
“Lieutenant, that’s enough.”
“Sorry, sir.” Though Matthias shut his mouth, he bounced excitedly in his seat, something he’d been doing since Thomas had first decided to investigate the alien system.
“As I was saying, scanners showed several gravitational sources—planets—orbiting the system’s sun. Hopefully one of them has a deposit of chrioladium near the surface, and we’ll be able to retrieve it, fix the D Drive, and return home.”
“Question,” Ivanokoff stated. “Who is to retrieve the materials?”
“That’s part of why we’re here. You’re all department heads, so I need your input. We could use someone with geology experience to help find the compound in the first place. Then we’ll need someone with a perfect spacewalk record to retrieve it.”
Matthias’s hand shot up. “I have a perfect spacewalk record!”
Maureen gently pulled her brother’s hand down. “Matthias, you’ve done one.”
“But it was perfect.”
“I think the captain wants someone with more experience.”
“Yes,” Thomas agreed. “At least six.”
“Areva has a perfect record with ten spacewalks,” said Ivanokoff.
Thomas glanced at the chief of defensives, who was slouched so low that her face barely peeked over the table. “You do?”
Areva hesitated and nodded. “I like it out there. I volunteer when someone needs research done outside.”
She wouldn’t have been Thomas’s first choice, but she certainly wasn’t the worst. “Good. Then you can handle the retrieval part of the mission. Do any of the scientists have a background in geology?” He knew from the crew manifest that none of his team actually specialized in rocks, but he hoped someone might have taken a few courses or done some side research in the past.
Nobody raised their hands. Thomas frowned. “No one?” Certainly, they could use scanners to look for the materials, but without knowing where to look, a grid-by-grid search of even a single planet would take days. His frown deepened. “All right, then we’ll need to deploy the backup scanners in order to …”
“Ooh!” Matthias shouted. “I know! Ask Arch!”
Thomas stared at him. “Archibald Cleaver? The janitor?”
“Cleanliness enforcement specialist,” Ivanokoff corrected. “And I agree. Mr. Cleaver would be a valuable asset in this matter.”
“He’s very smart,” Chris said. “Even without a degree. Maybe too smart.”
“He knows everything,” Maureen said. Even Areva popped her head up above the table to nod.
Having as
ked for their opinions, Thomas really couldn’t argue, so he reluctantly called Archibald to the meeting room. The janitor shuffled in ten minutes later, beloved vacuum in tow. Thomas noted that Archibald kept himself in front of it, lest Thomas try and take it away again.
However, there were more important matters at hand. “Thank you for joining us, Mr. Cleaver,” he said.
“So Mattie got us lost, did he?” Archibald asked.
“We’re not lost,” Matthias said. “We know exactly where we are. We’re 25.428 …”
“Lieutenant.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Stop.”
“Sorry, Captain.”
Thomas faced Archibald. “Yes, we’re no longer in our own solar system. We can get back, but we need to find a nearby source of chrioladium. I was hoping something in your experience might help us locate it.”
“Heck, lots of stuff on the ship contains chrioladium. Just use that.”
Matthias shook his head. “Sorry, Arch. We need a lot more than that.” Seeing Thomas’s look, he shrugged. “It’s a big capacitor.”
“Of course it is,” said Thomas. “Mr. Cleaver, do you know of any way to narrow down possible deposits on the planets?”
Archibald scratched his head. “Seems like I recall a few pointers. What kinds of planets are we looking at?”
Chris pushed his computer pad toward the janitor. “We made a digital chart of each one’s gravity field, estimated size, and projected orbit.”
Archibald studied the data for a moment before speaking. “I’m thinking this one’s your best shot.” He pointed to the third largest of the seven planets in the system. “The gas giant’s no good; if it did have the stuff, we can’t get it, and we wouldn’t get out of the gravity afterwards neither. These three,” he gestured to the two smallest and the second-largest, “ain’t dense enough to have the metals. That one’s moving too fast for a safe landing. And that one,” he pointed to the last eliminated choice, “is ugly.”
Thomas paused. “It’s … ugly?”