“Which side of the dome was Alder in?”
“I’m sorry sir. It was port cabin 11.”
While the damage reports were sketchy, coming in one at a time as the computers rebooted, one thing was clear, very few people in port side cabins had survived. “Okay. Do they have power in the environment dome? Can anyone tell me?”
Tallen interrupted, an engineer’s response. “Sir. We are fully enveloped in the cloud. We must move the ship to a defensible position...”
Pilton waved his hand. “I asked a question. Does anyone know if they have power in the environment dome?”
“Yes sir.” Engineer Rhye responded from her station. “The inner hull has power and pressure on all decks.
“But we’re out of contact.” Com Tech Reilly piped in from another level up. “There’s a primary break. We’re getting backup radio response only.”
Pilton cursed. “I have to know where he is. Do we have a tube running into the dome?”
“It’s still there but it’s not pressurized sir.”
“Damn. Okay, get me a rescue team in suits.”
“Sir!” Tallen stood up. “We have injured and stranded crew all over the ship. We’re registering vacuum outside of twenty-four bulkheads....”
“Yes, and Alder’s the only one of us whose shown any hint that he understands why. I’m not moving this ship or doing anything else until Alder tells me what his nanobots are doing. They’ve eaten through everything of ours that they’ve touched. Now that the cloud has exploded over us, I can’t say that I’m sure why we haven’t been eaten too...” He paused. “What’s the hull temperature like?
“96 K” Someone responded.
“Why?” Tallen asked.
“Have we not heard from the science bay at all?”
“Sorry sir.”
A glance at the monitors showed that the science bay was still there but missing several instruments and ominously dark. “And what’s the temperature around us?” The temperature outside had been falling steadily since the initial fiery blast had buried them in the cloud three hours before.
“128 K and still falling.”
“Sir. If I can just...”
“Shhhh.” Pilton waved a hand at Tallen. “Alder said that heat sped the action of the nanobots. Maybe heat attracts them as well.”
He turned on Rhye. “Turn it off. Turn it all off.”
“Sir?”
“I want to hull of the ship to cool at the same rate as the space around us.”
“So you want me to put the reactor in standby and go to quiet running?”
“No. I want you to turn it off; all of it. I want two things running on this ship; the shields, and a radio to the rescue crew in the environment dome.”
“But sir. We’ll be unable to defend...”
“I have to tell you Shalim.” Pilton said to Tallen. “I’m not very afraid of alien marines, or whole planets that maliciously blow up if you turn a sensor on them, but I’m pretty convinced that Alder’s Technoprey killed Martin and the others because they were warm. So were the scouts we sent into the cloud. I understand about hull breeches, and injured crew. I don’t understand Technoprey. Turn off the environment, turn off the water. Turn it all off but the shields and then get me Alder.”
“Potted”
It was strange to be isolated in the Environment Dome. Although they knew the rest of the ship was still with them, the communications break down and thick cloud of dust and ash swirling outside made it feel as if they were a tiny mountain of light and air swimming in the void. Standing at an observation port staring into the gloom to where he knew the command pod was barely two hundred meters away, Alder felt suddenly very sad for the world carrying turtle of Indian myth. How strange to find yourself swimming endlessly in the sea of space. Did it know there was a world of life and heat on its back or was it forced to face forever forward into the void, swimming alone?
His thoughts turned suddenly to Micki Span, a girl from his elementary school in Darver Town on Make Make where he’d lived for several years as a child. “Well, I just hope it’s a boy turtle.” She’d said in the hall after a lesson about Terran religions.
“Why is that?” Young Alder had asked naively.
Micki Span had rolled her eyes and gestured expansively. “Because, if it’s a girl, it’s only a matter of time before some bloke comes along and tries to climb her back. That won’t be so good for the earthlings will it?”
Alder smiled at the memory. His ears had burned as the children around him laughed at what seemed to ten year olds like a very funny joke.
“Commander?” Lieutenant Harshaw, an environmental Tech’s voice broke his revere. She had slipped into the room behind him.
“Yes, Allayah?” As third in command of the Duster behind Pilton and the Chief Executive Officer, it was not surprising that Alder was the ranking officer in the dome when the shock wave hit. Nor was it surprising that the survivors in the dome had immediately and amicably set up shop under him in the three hours since the blast. They’d been through a lot together over the years and worked well together under any stress.
He didn’t mind being in command, but after being so close to Gabba Rehans as her life ended and having found a fair number of her fingers on his side of the bulkhead when the lights came on, Alder found himself trying to hide in the quiet of one of the remaining rooms.
“Dr. Alder just called in. She’s in Med bay two.” She reports seventeen injuries, none of them life threatening.” Amazingly, none of the survivors in the dome seemed to be badly hurt. Elana herself had about the worst injury with a fractured forearm. She’d struck something during the impact. Alder suspected it was Wen Ye’s face. He dove into the compartment with her a few seconds ahead of the blast and had an inexplicably broken cheek bone and bloody lip.
“That’s fine. Thank you. Do we have a full count yet?” Until the computers came back on there was no way to know how many people had been sucked into the void or were lying frozen in depressurized cabins but they should at least know how many survivors they had when command finally got through to them.
“Yes Sir. Crews have been through all the pressurized areas between levels two and fourteen. There are eighty-six survivors.”
Alder rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. His crew needed him to be on his game. “All right. Eighty-six survivors and only seventeen injuries. Not bad. Do we have any idea of what sort of talents we’ve got? Who was here when the blast hit?”
“It’s a pretty mixed lot. My full third shift second cycle crew was on duty so you’ve got a full complement for the gardens and equipment, that’s twenty-six counting me. The rest were off duty from all over the ship; mostly first shift and some second.”
“Okay. Talk to me about resources.”
At twenty-three when they’d launched, Allayah was one of the youngest on board. Elana had commented several times on how well she had developed in the rigors of space. She was tall and athletic, with skin darker than chocolate. She looked more like an Olympic Athlete than the officer in charge of half of the high tech ranch that kept the ship fed. While the social engineering behind the ship allowed crews to cross train and move task to task, Allayah had stayed steadfastly beside her crew and livestock. “We’re in pretty good shape. Preliminary reports show that air, thermal and water are all running on main or backup power. We’ve got local systems running with a few small exceptions. We haven’t been able to link back to the main computer. It looks like the blast took out most of the linkages running parallel to the tubes. We know the emergency system is transmitting. We don’t know if anyone is listening.”
“Oh they’re listening.” Alder reassured her. “The little flickers of light out there,” He gestured at the window, “are dust particles hitting the mobius shields and frying themselves.” They’ve got power over there. We’re probably just waiting for a reboot.” Optical computers were frighteningly fast but a little twitchy. If you got them out of sync somehow, it was virtu
ally impossible to get them back into line. The only real solution was to turn systems off and let the main system turn them back on one at a time.
With a gesture, Alder steered them away from the cloud of dust and into the hallway. “We need to run on the assumption that the rest of the ship is intact and will need food and water to be running at full steam when contact gets made. I don’t have to tell you how fast seven hundred people can get hungry.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll also want to keep everyone busy. It’s maybe more important than actually making food. I want you to take what crew you can as alternates for your staff. Their normal rotation will be over in an hour. See if you can scrounge a second shift environment crew out of the extras we’ve got. Let’s also get an engineering crew together, anyone that can hold a welder. I want all the exterior breaches examined. I don’t really care what. Just make sure everyone has a task. We’ll …”
The main lights went out and were replaced a half second later by the low, blue tinted emergency lights.
“...and get someone to look at the lights.” Strips of yellow warning lights flared along the baseboards of the wall.
“Gravity failure.” Harshaw hissed. She twisted quickly and launched herself at a table and chair set against the outside wall. Alder wasn’t as quick to respond. His next step launched him awkwardly into the air in a roughly right foot over left shoulder turn. He squawked loudly.
“Commander!” Harshaw called, her arms wrapped firmly around the back of the chair which itself was anchored to the floor. “Grab my feet.” She stuck her legs straight out at Alder.
“Umm. No good.” Alder knew better than to kick and flail against the unsupporting air but several billion years of evolution beat out twenty years of training and he found himself pitching over and over against his will.
Harshaw, seeing his dilemma, pulled her feet under her against the back of the chair and launched back at Alder. They met, her midriff to his thighs and his spin reversed so that his feet were pitched back over her back. He grabbed two handfuls of her shirt and together they pinwheeled into a set of potted plants that shattered off their anchored bases and ricocheted off in a cloud of broken masonry and dirt. Alder and Harshaw rebounded hard off the wall behind the plants and headed back across the hallway on a new but slower trajectory. They were both yelling, “Hold still! Hold Still!”
With thumps of dirt and a clattering of broken ceramics, they arrived at the junction between the outside wall and the ceiling. Harshaw managed to grab hold of the molding and top of the door frame that led out from there. Alder chuckled in spite of himself. He had both arms wrapped around Harshaw’s waist, her head was hooked under one of his knees, and his face was planted firmly in her right ass cheek. He chuckled again.
“Good...um...catch Harshaw.”
Harshaw, who clearly saw the humor of the situation, unhooked her head from his leg. “Don’t worry sir. I won’t tell the crew about the flailing.”
“Yes.” Alder laughed more loudly. “It was a bit awkward.”
“It was a personal moment sir. I feel very close to you right now.”
They hung side by side, clinging to the rail as laughter mixed with tears overtook Alder. Harshaw, who was chuckling also, hung beside him quietly.
Alder understood that he was in shock and his body was trying to let out the stress. He let it go, his sides aching as laughter and tears rolled out of him. After a few minutes, pain sensors around his body began to register, calming him down. He had several scratches and bruises and his right thigh had taken a hard shot, probably from Harshaw’s hip.
“Thank you.” He said quietly.
She nodded.
He looked up and down the long, curving hallway. In the dim emergency lights he could see a loose constellation of potted plant parts bumping its way along to their left otherwise they were alone, sticking incongruously out of the wall.
He signed heavily. “Well, here we are.”
Mutiny
Captain Pilton had to be very careful with the word mutiny. Once someone was found guilty of mutiny, there wasn’t a lot you could do with them. They were well past the age where you could kill mutineers or just abandon them on some passing planet, although the second was sometimes tempting. Leaving a crew member in lockup was not terribly effective either. For one thing the ships “detention center” was really just a locking room in medical bay. More importantly, mutinies didn’t happen in isolation and locking up the leader or leaders was more likely than not to excite loyalty for the prisoner out of the remaining crew members. No the word mutiny was just not usable, even if it was a very exciting and dramatic word.
Pilton glanced over at Tallen where he floated between two guards. The fact that the guards were clearly listening to Pilton and not Tallen probably meant that this whole incident could be explained away later as stress. The med tech beside Pilton poked something painful into the bleeding temple wound Tallen had given him with an elbow. He winced. ‘It’s a shame about mutiny.’ he thought.
Pilton waved the tech away and pulled himself upright against the back of his command chair. With the power out, the screens and overhead lights were all dark. What light there was came from flashlights and a few blue alarm lights that stubbornly refused to stop doing their jobs. He felt a little woozy but not, in his opinion, concussed. His breath mushroomed in the frigid air. Without the air handlers on, the moisture from their breath was trapped in the room with them, forming spiderwebs of frost across the monitors as the temperatures plummeted.
His crew was nervous, riding on a razor’s edge. Seven hours after the explosion no one knew how badly damaged the ship was nor could they go about finding out until the power was back on. By now, every minute that they spent looking for Alder had a body count attached to it. He’d had Dr. Thomas’ radio silenced, not because Dr. Thomas was wrong to be shrieking about the people dying from the lack of electricity, but because he needed the bridge crew to worry about other things. Now, after the moment of violence, he was in danger of losing control.
He didn’t have much of a chin, more of a small cuplike indentation under his lips, but he pulled himself upright as best he could in zero-g and surveyed his frightened and freezing crew.
“It has been an amazing honor to lead this crew.” He said loudly enough to be heard by all. “Most of the time, I have hardly felt like I was leading at all. You all work together so well, support each other so well, that I often feel I could stay in my bath for a week and nothing would go amiss.” He paused.
“I have to admit that there is nothing in the manual about how to deal with miniature robots that eat through anything. I also have no more idea than any of you do about how badly the ship is damaged.” He paused again and nodded slightly as if in answer to a question only he had heard.
“Maybe our journey is at an end. That would be very sad. I will tell you this though; if this is to be our end, we will meet our end as a crew; as the crew who have served each other so well all these years. We all have loved ones and friends in the dark and the cold. We owe it to them to work this problem together or to go down together trying. We’ll have no more shouting. We’ll have no more violence. We will have scientific inquiry and we will have answers.” He nodded one by one to several of the nearer faces mooning at him over their darkened consoles.
He turned to the guards holding Tallen. “Commander Tallen is relieved of duty until further notice. Please escort him to the Primary Medical Bay. Tell Dr. Thomas...
The memory of Thomas’ shrieking came back to him. Maybe Tallen and Thomas shouldn’t be spending time together just now. “Umm. Let’s just keep him in the conference room for now.”
Tallen scowled sullenly as the guards pushed him towards the conference room door. Pilton almost felt sad for him as he drifted out of the room. LOP Command, had been concerned enough that the Duster would meet hostile aliens or have disruptions among the crew that they’d sent the combat veteran Tallen along in the midst of crew
that was otherwise picked for their cooperative nature and technical skills. Tallen had never really fit in, never really belonged. Now that he had acted violently against the captain, it was unlikely that he would ever be accepted by the crew again.
A drop of blood from his wounded temple slipped into the corner of his eye. He pushed it back out with a pudgy finger. Maybe he didn’t feel too bad for Tallen.
A radio crackled to life behind him. He whirled to yell at who ever had turned it on, but was stopped by the voice of Ensign Crough who he’d sent to the environment dome. “Crough to command.”
Pilton pushed himself off the chair toward the console but did not get there before Reilly responded.
“This is command. Go ahead.”
“I gained access to the environment dome through number four airlock. I’ve got Alder.”
Pilton pressed his hand down on the controller. “He’s there?” He asked.
“He’s with me now sir. He can hear you.”
Pilton gasped with relief. “Can...are you...what about the nanobots?”
Alder’s voice was scratchy over the primitive radio. “I’m sorry sir?”
“We turned off all the systems so that we would stay cool; so that the nanobots wouldn’t eat the hull. We don’t know how to stop them.”
“Oh,” Alder’s voice came over the wire. “Yeah, if that was going to happen, it would have happened right away.”
Pilton’s eyes slid round to the listening bridge crew. “Are you sure? It seemed like a reasonable precaution.”
“Sure I’m sure.” Alder’s voice was dismissive. “The nanobots function at just a few degrees above absolute zero. At this temperature, they’d either eat us immediately or overheat. Most likely, they were only programmed to live for a set number of generations. The fire probably got the last of them.”
Pilton shifted uncomfortably aware of the eyes burrowing into his skin. “Well, good to know. Umm. We’ll get our systems rebooted.” He nodded to the crew who began tapping their consoles, bringing the ship to life.
Alder's World Part One: Mass 17 Page 4