“How’s the framing drive?” Alder asked.
“We don’t know. Why? Is there an issue?”
“We just need to make a jump before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“If we don’t jump soon, we’re going to be the newest moon in the galaxy.”
Pilton humphed and frowned, waiting for more explanation. He was trapped. He could sense that he was quickly losing face with the bridge crew but the curiosity was too much to bear. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say, ‘moon.’”
Revelation
A flight of sparrows rose up beating their wings against the steel sky. There was an odd flatness to the shape of their flight, as if they were rising up on an invisible sheet. It was curiously hypnotic. Something about the angle of attack and the symmetry of the movement caught the eye. Before they were more than twenty meters in the air, another flock, similar to the first but at a stronger angle rose up in a clattering of wings.
“y=1.5x” Some dim corner of Alder’s mind remembered. He couldn’t really focus on the thought. Part of the point of the virtual tank, and one reason it could be addictive, was that is allowed for direct stimulation of the sense processing centers in the brain, bypassing and overriding the urge to think.
Another flight took off, a more complex pattern, y=4x^2 +2 or something, he couldn’t remember; a parabola anyway. Some people used the tanks for complex fantasies, often sexual Elana assured him. He preferred the math tutor he’d built for himself in college. Monomials, binomials, quadratics, derivatives, things that he assured people were flying bird versions of synthetic division; it unhooked his mind and gave him a peaceful feeling.
There was a sky and some trees. He never really noticed them. It was the birds, sparrows, with swallows weaving in and out in some more complex functions that held his mind and gave him a break from his troubles.
The edge of his mind tickled about some problem that was not a Mandelbrot of birds; the ship, trouble with the ship. As if in response to the rising distracting thought, the birds began chirping a third tones translation of the pattern they were flying. He hadn’t programmed it. Music wasn’t his thing but the program had amused when he’d found it so he’d added it shortly before they’d left home. He was always glad he had. It wasn’t a song really but it was rhythmic and reflected the changing numeric patterns underlying the program.
The birds had just started the non-linear equations when a small puff of wind hit his face. Tiny, but a warning. Reality was about to come back. The puff came again and rose, rolling over him pushing the sky and birds away.
Blackness.
Alder blinked groggily as low lights lit up the “virtual tank,” really just a small pad in a darkened tube. Sliding back the cover he, found himself in a quietly lit room of similar tubes. As many as eighteen of the Duster’s crew could vacation from reality at the same time in this room and there were two more like it in the ship. They were available twenty-four hours a day and you could live out pretty much any fantasy you could program in, with the condition that Elana, the ships psychologist, regularly reviewed the choices to watch for potentially dangerous patterns.
It was Elana who had suggested that Alder spend the last hours before the meeting in the tank.
“It’s insane.” He’d said as they lay in their bed the night before. “Everyone will think I’ve gone mad.”
Elana had nodded dreamily. She was curled up against his side naked. Their bodies wore a fine film of sweat. Alder had passed on the grieving sex but the wave of stress sex that was sweeping the ship had not missed their cabin. Her broken arm lay in its cast over his head. Her good arm rested on his hip. She spoke from the edge of sleep. “What’s happened to us is beyond anything we imagined possible but it’s not crazy. Pilton wants you to do the talking exactly because you speak clear headed science.”
“It’s not clear headed science. It’s insanity. I’ll get us all killed.”
“Maybe.” Elana agreed, her knee moving slowly across the front of his thighs. “But, if you do, it will be because you found the best odds for us and they just didn’t play out.”
Alder sighed and rolled onto his side so that Elana was spooning him.
“Listen Sam,” Elana murmured into his ear. “This isn’t a space ship any more. This isn’t about exploration any more. It’s about rescue and survival. You’ve always been the one who could see clearly. You knew the Aft Patterson field was going to fail. You told Pilton where the safe position to watch stellar collision was and when to be there. This crew is going to have to do some impossible things and it’s you, not Pilton that needs to tell them. They’ll believe you.”
“What about Garson? She’s the chief executive officer. If Pilton doesn’t want to do it, Garson should.”
Elna laughed slightly. “Come on Sam. You know Treva isn’t right for the job. She lives in the numbers, not in real life. I don’t even think she’s been on the bridge since the explosion.” She snickered again. “You should see some of the fantasies she plays in the tanks.”
“Let’s out her aggressions there?” Alder asked.
“Oh yeah.”
Alder didn’t argue. If there was a weak link in the command of the Duster it was Triva Garson the Executive Officer. Bookish and brilliant with data, Garson had a well known penchant for being nowhere to be found when difficult decisions needed to be made. They lapsed into silence. Elana’s hand had wandered dreamily down into the nether land under the sheets as if checking to see if Alder might be up for another round of stress release or maybe it was just visiting an old friend. “Look El. I’m just a science officer…”
“You signed on to be just a science officer. You want to be just a science officer. But that’s not what you are now. You are this crew’s best hope; just like you were the best hope for Cab and Carol; just like you were the best hope when we were stuck in the Environment Dome. I don’t know if we can do this, but I know you are the best hope we’ve got.”
Alder sighed again and Elana’s hand gave up its exploring, sliding up instead to rest on his shoulder.
“Just do what you do tomorrow. You’ll be fine. Go spend an hour in the tank. Let the birds straighten out that beautiful mind of yours then go tell them what they have to do. They’ll do it.”
‘Elana was right,’ Alder thought as he left the virtual tank bay headed for the bridge conference room. His head always felt clearest after a trip to the tanks. The hallways were as empty as the tank bay had been. Everyone was already in front of a vid screen somewhere waiting for the broadcast he was about to lead.
It had been a long time coming. For seven days the crew had welded plates, gathered the dead, repaired hatches, tended chickens, screwed like mad, and done anything to keep their minds off the real question, ‘was the framing drive ever going to come back on?’
When it became clear that the very best printing technology in the world couldn’t print all the pieces the framing drive needed, it was never coming back on, another week passed while every asked, ‘Do we have enough ion engines left to fly out of here?”
Alder and a few of the others of the command crew understood that the question wasn’t just, “Will we fly?” it was, “Will we fly in time?” Not wanting to spread panic among the crew, they’d waited. The numbers said they could wait for some time. By the end of two weeks though, with the messages coming back from Chief Engineer Mbaka, sounding more and more like, “Maybe someday if a miracle occurs,” Pilton had decided it was time to explain to the crew exactly what the real danger was. It was also his idea to present the issue in a somewhat dramatic fashion. “No room for doubt, Alder.” He’d said, “Got to say it in a way that everyone believes the first time.”
Crossing the bridge without noticing eyes of the skeleton crew manning the command stations tailing him, Alder entered the conference room. All of the positions were filled. None of the seventy-eight deaths during the explosion had been among the command crew and most
of the firsts and seconds had been spared as well. Alder’s science team had taken the hardest hit. All fourteen of the crew in the science bay at the time had been lost, including Subramanian and Alder’s second Dr. Lowen. There hadn’t been much cleanup, fortunately. A breech across three levels had pretty much cleaned up behind itself. Alder would like to have had the time to grieve for his lost friends. As it was, he mostly only had time to grieve for the missing equipment.
The conference room was quiet except for Com Tech Rielly who was trying to confirm that all six hundred and forty-three survivors were listening in.
Alder moved to his position but didn’t sit down. He glanced nervously at Pilton who was reading something that Garson was showing him on a hand held screen. Both Elana and Pilton seemed to think it was terribly important that Alder lead this meeting. Alder didn’t really understand why.
Rielly nodded to Pilton who put down the device and addressed the camera cluster mounted on a tripod in the middle of the desk.
“Good morning everyone. Ship’s time is 9:36 AM, 112th day of the year 2360. What does that make it, April, on Earth? I can never keep track. Snowy weather at my home on League Prime anyway. Good time to be out touring the galaxy.” He harrumphed.
“You all know I’m pretty fond of saying that this ship is not a democracy, and it’s not, but we find ourselves in a pretty mess this time and I wanted to be as open about what’s happening as possible.”
He nodded toward Mbaka. “You’ve all seen Mbaka’s report. We’re missing one hundred and thirty-three wave guides on the port side. That’s eighty more than we can run the framing drive on. Additionally we’ve lost a lot of ion engines. We can reprint most of the parts for the engines but the designers never imagined we’d survive a shot this bad and we don’t have enough diamond weaves to cover our wave guide losses. You all know diamond weaves have to be grown. We can’t print them out here.”
“Now we all know that Mbaka is one hell of an engineer and there’s been a lot of talk that, given enough time, he’ll get us flying. I sure believe if anyone could pull it off its Mbaka and his crew. I really do.”
He cleared his throat and pulled his chin in over his jowls. “There’s more to it than just the wave guides and ion engines of course, and that’s why I’ve called this meeting.
“Mass 17 is an odd fish and there’s no doubt about that. I uhhh.” He stopped, and appeared uncertain what to say, something that never happened. “Well, it’s complicated. Why don’t I just have Alder explain it to you?” He fell silent like a stone.
“Right.” Alder faltered picking up the ball. He stammered for a moment, stunned by Pilton’s abandonment. “Let me just show you.” If the crew wasn’t panicked enough yet, the failure of the normally verbose captain could not be missed. Alder tapped the screen in front of him and a ball of grey haze rose up in the middle of the table around the camera. “What I’ve sent to your screens is the current visual from one of our drones. What I want to you notice is the block of data in the lower right. The third number there is the current distance in kilometers from our ship. Right now, it’s hanging at just over two-thousand kilometers out, roughly straight off our bow. Watch what happens if I order it to continue away from us.”
For several seconds nothing happened then the distance reading began to move up, slowly at first but increasing rapidly. “What you’re seeing is the dust cloud that enveloped the Duster after the explosion. We should pass out of it right about twenty-two hundred kilometers.”
It didn’t happen all at once. First there was a glimmer of star light, ripped away almost at once, then a rent in the cloud, then the probe broke free. There were audible gasps from the crew around the ship as the video fed in. The sky broke open, cold, massive, and filled with stars. It was a stunning sight. Mass 17 was hung before them, transformed yet again. Where before there had been a seething mass of gas and dust, a planet had formed. The sun hung over its right shoulder leaving the surface to the imagination. What could be seen were a series of fiery red cracks spread around the dark face and a halo of neon colors that seemed to pulse and whirl around the poles, spreading out in sheets and bands clear to the equator. Rising with the halo were knots of color, strange iridescent objects that seemed to pull the aurora with them.
Alder waited a moment before going on. “What you are looking at is the crust of the newest planet in the Galaxy. Once the burn out that hit us passed, the planet collapsed quickly. A lot of our instruments are offline but we think it’s a little smaller than Earth. It’s only about two-thirds as massive. It’s hot. The cracks are gaps where the plates are still fusing together. But, like everything else in this system, it’s strange. It’s cooling extremely rapidly. Something, you can see them as blips rising with the aurora, is forcing or pulling super hot plasma out of the poles. The process started by the nanobots is clearly ongoing. The heat of the planet is being pumped into space to cool. Specifically, all the carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, and other free gasses are being super heated and coaxed off the surface.”
“They’re building an atmosphere?” Someone around the table asked.
“It sure looks that way.” Alder went on. “though maybe on accident. This process probably wasn’t meant to begin until all the massed collided far in the future. For whatever reason, those knots are causing the planet to cool a thousand times faster than you’d expect. There’s no free Oxygen but otherwise it has all the hallmarks of a terraformable planet. And that’s good for us.”
He didn’t wait for any of the hundreds of voices around the ship to ask why. This was the part they were all waiting for and dreading. They knew there was an issue. Only a few had guessed what.
Touching a few keys on the console, Alder swung the probe around. “This is our problem.” He said, as a great, grey cloud that stretched from behind the probe all the way out of sight behind the planet came into view. It was beautiful, gray and purple, full of subtle bands and waves, highlighted by the blue white of the star.
“Some of you will realize that this looks something like a small protoplanetary disc. Notice the bulging center and the bands of dust stretching out of sight. That ring goes all the way around the planet.” He paused. The conference room and the rest of the ship were deathly quiet. “Undoubtedly, after the eruption all the mass of Mass 17 was supposed to fall back onto the newly formed planet. As it turned out, there was a large object, us, in orbit and several million tonnes of debris from the explosion have gotten caught in orbit with us. The reason we can’t wait for rescue or any other solution is because gravity is pulling all that mass in on us. As the dust settles, it will put steadily more pressure on the mobius shields. Each particle is light but there’s more settling on us every hour. We’re carrying about fifty tonnes already. Just that pressure has pushed the operating temperature of the shields up three degrees. We estimate that the shields will hold out for between sixty and ninety days. When they fail, we’ll become the heart of Mass 17’s new moon.”
“We have to think about the children.” Elana moved into the conversation at a jarring right angle. “I’m sure most of you have thought this through but we’ve been eating directly from the biodome for almost a month. That’s a full menstrual cycle without automated birth control. Within the year our family will start growing. Dr. Thomas tells me that he believes we could have as many as seven pregnancies on board already.” A ripple ran around the table and came back over the microphones from around the ship. Alder noticed Wei and Garson glancing at each other across the desk.
“And the center of a moon is no place for children.” Pilton jumped in. “Go ahead Alder.”
Alder’s shoulders slumped. He let the titter of the staff considering children give him reason to pause. While he agreed that bringing up the pregnancies was a good way to prepare the crew to listen to anything, he still couldn’t believe anyone would go for what he was about to suggest. “Our main problem is the total mass of the dust cloud. It outweighs us by several orders of magnitude and is
leaning on us more each day. If we try to push out of it, we will, at best, pull it with us. That might buy us a little time but, in the end, our shields will still fail.
“There is a kind of, unorthodox, option.” He pressed a button and a 3d schematic of the ship appeared in the view. “As you know, we were the first of the Solo class ships put into service. Since we were an untested spaceframe with a long expected flight time, the designers saw fit to back up a lot of our systems with radio-isotope or other nuclear batteries.” A set of red boxes flared around the ship schematic. “None of it’s bomb grade of course, but, if we bombarded it, it should enrich up to about a single twenty megaton bomb.”
“To do what?” Treva Garson, the ships executive commander asked from her place at the table. “Blow the cloud apart?”
“Exactly.” Alder responded. “It will create an opening. We’ll have a few hours with the cloud off of us to build a little momentum. It would give us a chance to set down on the planet without bringing the whole cloud down on us.” Alder barreled on not waiting for people to process ‘set down on the planet.’ “We’re not built to land, but we can definitely collapse our orbit and force ourselves to the surface. In simulation, the ship can survive entry into a thin atmosphere and the shields can survive impact with the surface. It’ll be the end of them, but we’ll be alive.
“Our best odds are to get down to the surface before the cloud…” He paused. Someone was crying audibly over the intercom. He looked at Elana for support but she only nodded for him to go on. “Once on the surface we would have the ability to gather new resources. Maybe even do a bit of terra forming. Lieutenant Harshaw has…” The crying was steady. Whoever it was was sitting close to the microphone. Alder waited, hoping Elana would step in. “Look.” He said finally, “I know you’re scared. I know this is crazy but this ship is being crushed to death. It’s been dying since the explosion. Maybe it’s hard to imagine us not being a ship’s crew anymore but we’re not. We’re survivors on a rescue mission and this plan is our best chance of survival.” He paused. “I did the math. This is our best chance. I’m sorry.”
Alder's World Part One: Mass 17 Page 5