James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 03

by Bodicea

  You should be able to provide an analysis of the objects, or whatever they are, and enable us to project what will happen when they enter the system.”

  “So, it could be bearing down directly on the colony,” Grace Jones said with some concern.

  “That is a remote possibility,” Zoetrope conceded. “At that velocity, even a piece of gravel could have devastating impact on the planet. We would have to map the trajectory of every piece of debris, assess the threat to the planet, and determine an appropriate action to take.” Miller had considered this possibility. The larger pieces could be vaporized with Nemesis missiles, the smaller ones with other elements of Pegasus’s arsenal. Pegasus could also use its gravity engines to generate a kind of deflector shield to direct debris away from the planet. It would be complicated, dangerous, and require precise deployment of all the ship’s resources. It would exhaust both ship and crew. On the plus side, he was imagining all sorts of interesting ways to smash bits of debris into one another, and into the uninhabited planets and moons of the 10 655 Vulpeculus system. That would make it all worthwhile.

  “Another possibility is that those objects are artificial in origin,” Miller said. “The sheer mass makes it unlikely. On the other hand, building the Pathfinder Ships took nearly every resource our worlds could spare. They are almost to the limit of our ability to build something this large and propel it through space at practical speed. If a species exists capable of building far larger ships, then we have to proceed with caution.”

  “The Aves Xerxes has been optimized for making tactical assessments, in the event these unidentified objects turn out to be artificially constructed.”

  “The best tactical decision might be to run like Hell,” said Dylan Canada. He was the oldest of the three pilots, a dust of gray and white at the tips of his blond brush-cut. At one time, he had held the sweetest position in the Republic Defense Community, first pilot of Republic One, the President’s personal ship. Republic One could make the transit to Sapphire in half the time of any other ship, and was as comfortably appointed as a First Rank Liner.

  However, Canada had found the most recent Republicker president, and his staff, quite insufferable. His re-appointment to Odyssey might have been looked on as a demotion, but the pilot of Xerxes could not have been happier at how things worked out.

  Miller pushed back the display. “Some of you are wondering if this debris field, or whatever it is, could have come from the Medea system. We have extrapolated its course and, it could not have traveled in a straight line from Medea, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t dealing with the same set of nasties. We’ll keep it sharp, and be ready to execute Flt. Lt.

  Canada’s suggestion if conditions warrant.”

  “Once we reach the MTM, our mission will be to identify the phenomenon, learn as much as we can, and assess the threat, if any, to the Vulpeculus system. Then, we will return.

  Pegasus will maintain a beacon for us to follow into the system. Depending on how long we stay with the MTM, it will take another ten to fourteen days to catch up with Pegasus once we depart.”

  “That’s a long time to spend in the Aves, campers,” he continued. “So, I expect we’re going to know each other a lot more than we’d like to by the end of this thing. That’s the price of being good enough to wear this crest.” He touched the Odyssey Project crest on his uniform jacket. “Anybody who doesn’t think he is good enough, you have twenty-nine minutes to bail on us.”

  He looked around the landing bay, knowing nobody would bail. “Very well. All right, that’s my briefing. Um, there will be the standard pre-mission prayer and blessing, but otherwise, be on board in twenty minutes.” He dismounted the stairway that had met the ship’s top hatch, threaded through the others and met Cree BladeRunner. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  The Astro-Physics Specialist nodded eagerly. “You bet, commander.”

  “Most of our time will be in transit. I hope you don’t get too bored,” Miller said levelly.

  “What’s on the pad?”

  An active datapad shook in BladeRunner’s Nervous hands. “These are the latest set of sensor scans on the trailing objects. I thought you would like to see them” Miller scanned it briefly. “A large spheroid object with a density of 5.72 kilograms per meter, surrounded by an array of oblong and spheroid objects of slightly greater density.” He frowned. “It’s looking more and more like a rogue planet and less like a ship, isn’t it? A planet surrounded by a debris field.” Miller thought of how he would have liked to have been there at the event that created such a phenomenon; an exploding star pushing out a pulse of dense, superheated plasma, blasting away everything in its path, stripping away the atmospheres of planets in milliseconds, shattering whole worlds from pole-to-pole — creative destruction on the scale of titans.

  “Are you thinking of scrubbing the mission?” Cree asked, concern in his voice. Miller remembered Cree had not been on actual away mission yet.

  “Neg, we’ll proceed. There is no way of knowing what’s out there unless we go in for a look. Besides, an occasional endurance mission is good for Aves and crew alike.” Cree looked pleased and relieved. “They’re waiting for you on Hector,” Miller prompted.

  “Thank you, sir.” The specialist left toward his ship. Miller reviewed the data again. If this was just a rogue planet, there would be no need for another senior tactical officer. Perhaps he should give Honeywell the option of remaining on Pegasus. Then again, perhaps not.

  “Hey, Bladerunner,” he called. The specialist turned around.

  “If it does turn out to be a rogue planetoid, maybe we can name it after you.”

  “Or it could be a completely unknown phenomenon.”

  “I, for one, would consider it an honor to have an unknown phenomenon named after me.”

  Cree grinned again, then rejoined the rest of the party, who were preparing to board Hector. He turned to his Marine Specialist, Ana Ng, who would accompany him on Prudence.

  “You ready?”

  Ng was a dark-skinned woman, small and slight of build, but fierce. He had trusted her with his life on Meridian, and though he had seen little of her since, he knew he could trust her again. “I’m missing the Wally Ball Semi-Finals,” she replied. “This better be worth it.”

  “It won’t,” he assured her. He didn’t care for wally ball, but knew she was a fanatic.

  “Is that your wife over there?” Ng asked.

  Miller turned around. Flight Captain Jones was standing there, next to one gleaming wingtip of the Aves Xerxes, bathed in the harsh light and steam of the landing bay, almost like a vision. She came forward and gestured for him.

  “Be right back,” Miller muttered, handing his landing pack to Ng. Without looking back toward her, he walked toward the other Aves and met his wife beneath the Shriek at the end of its starboard wing.

  “You came to see me off,” he said, sounding pleased.

  “I would have gone if you would have had me,” she replied, sounding not.

  “You’re on point for Mission One to Esmerelda. I couldn’t ask you to give up that for a Deep Space Bug Hunt.”

  “You could have,” she told him. “What about you? Are you going on this Mission to get away from me?”

  “Neg,” he answered looking into her eyes for the first time in weeks.

  “Honestly?”

  “I think getting away from the ship will do me good. I’m through my guilt about what I did to you on Eden, but guilt is like deathweed. You may only see one plant, but its roots are all attached and tangled up in other plants. This whole… incident … made me think about parts of myself I don’t like to think about.”

  Jones sighed. She hated this beastshit, but she also knew the whole self-pitying, “I’m such a complex individual” speech would be over much more quickly if she kept her mouth shut.

  “So, if you’re asking if this trip is a Vision Quest, you are partly right. By the time we get back, I expect to have the rest of this all sorted o
ut.” And it would only have taken you six months of our lives together that we will never get back, she thought. “You might have at least picked a ship from the Burning Skies.”

  “Flight Commander Collins picked the ships. The only one I requested was Prudence. Matt Driver is a damb good pilot. I’ve worked with Partridge and Ng before, too. I didn’t want to have to break in anyone knew given the nature of this mission.”

  “Hmmm…” her arms were threading around his waist. He felt suddenly awkward. This was an adolescent posture. He felt like they were acting out a scene from some Hootch Grabr teenage romance. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead.

  “Have you forgiven yourself?” she asked.

  “Mostly.” He took her in his arms and she kissed him. He whispered to her. “Provided there really is a colony up ahead, and provided I don’t get eaten or blow-up by an evil green-skinned alien, let’s take some mutual shore leave and you can take me the rest of the way to redemption.”

  “I’d like that,” she whispered back.

  “It would be good for both our souls.”

  “Flight Core reporting Recce One Aves ships in position for launch.” Specialist Shayne American reported.

  “Wrecky One?” Keeler asked.

  “The Reconnaissance Mission to the Trailing Object,” American clarified. “Before they can launch, Pegasus has to re-orient 180 degrees.”

  Keeler remembered being briefed about this. The Aves could be launched from the back of the ship, but to receive maximum velocity, they had to be fired off the ‘railguns’ – the electromagnetic launchers, which only launched from the bow of the ship forward. In order to launch them at the object behind them, the ship would have to be turned completely around. However, Pegasus’s own velocity would be unaffected. The ship would continue on course for 10 655 Vulpecula and Esmerelda colony, traveling backwards for the length of time necessary to launch Recce One.

  It made him dizzy to think about it, although he was assured nothing would happen. “Go to,” Keeler ordered.

  Specialist Navigator Kedar Looks Twice was at primary helm control. “Commencing Starboard Thruster fire for y-axis re-orientation,” he said in a baritone that reverberated throughout the bridge.

  “Proceed,” Keeler said in acknowledgement.

  American reported. “Flight Core is releasing control to on-board systems. Railguns are charged and ready.”

  “Give me a comm link to all ships,” Keeler ordered. The ship provided it for him. “Keeler to Recce One, good luck to all of you. We’ll leave a light on for you.” Phil Miller answered him. “Thank you, commander. Try to stay out of trouble until we get back.”

  “Define trouble,” Keeler answered. “PC1 out.”

  The re-orientation took only twenty-seconds. In an emergency, the ship could pivot in .2

  seconds without causing damage. There was no need to push the envelope to launch Recce One, and the pivot in space was almost leisurely. When it ended, Pegasus was hurtling through space at half the speed of light, ass-end first.

  Prudence shot out from the front of the ship, closely tailed by Xerxes and Hector. The three small ships hit their gravity engines as soon as they were clear, and sped off into the night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Days went by.

  Technically, hours went by in sufficient numbers to add up to days. Pegasus was far beyond sunlight, and did not revolve. Furthermore, a day was a period of twenty-eight hours for half of her crew, and forty-four hours for the other half. Officially, the ship kept a twenty-eight cycle (because the Sapphireans won two out of three rounds of asteroid-plane -

  calipers.)

  In any case, a lot of time was passing by. The 6,961 people on Pegasus went through the rhythms of duty, recreation, and personal interaction as the star cruiser bore down on 10 655

  Vulpeculus.

  Virtual simulations continued to run and kept the pilots and Marines performing at maximum efficiency.

  The UnderDecks underwent several additional security sweeps and “Intruder Simulations.”

  Sensor data was provided to the Navigation Core, which made incremental adjustments to Pegasus’s course.

  Hourly communications with Recce One were sent, received, and logged.

  A gray tabby cat was ordered removed from PC-1 by an unamused Executive Commander.

  A Water-Polo competition between the Burning Skies and the Quicksilver Angels was won by the Burning Skies, who would take on the Tactical Core in the semi-finals. An intermediate-school Biathlon was won soundly by the Sapphirean children, while Republic prevailed in a zero-g gymnastics competition among the Higher Schoolers. A quoits tournament was held on one of the Athletic decks, and the Commander came in second.

  Goneril Lear celebrated a rather complicated birthday that was either her 48th or her 76th, depending on whether you were counting “ship-time” or “world-time.” In any case, it was an occasion for three score sycophants and well-wishers to gather in her quarters, sip wine, munch on honey cake and preserved sea cucumber, and drink toast to the health of the ship’s first officer.

  A band, calling itself Billy and the Boingers gave its first performance in a recently established recreational facility in the UnderDecks, to uniformly awful reviews. A technician in Environmental Core wrote a very long, very bad poem called “Who Mourns For Medea?” but never showed it to anyone.

  Caliph, the entity that resided within Pegasus’s central braincore, described several improvements to the mindware that maintained the ship’s trim, which were evaluated by a team of technicians for the possible implementation. Whether Caliph considered this duty, recreation, or personal interaction was subject to interpretation.

  The ship’s ventral sensor array registered the passing of trillions of neutrinos, and billions times more photons (unable to make up their mindlessness whether they were particles or waves), a few million degrees of gravitational flux, waves of cosmic rays and gamma radiation, the complete unabridged electromagnetic spectrum, and the occasional stray hydrogen atom. From such data, the ship’s geophysical survey team was building a fuzzy map of system 10 655 Vulpeculus.

  There were between nine and thirteen planets, four large gaseous ones and between five and nine little rocky ones, orbiting a large yellow star. The fourth, fifth, and sixth planet’s appeared to lie in the zone most likely to provide just enough, but not too much warmth, for human-friendly ecosystems to thrive. Probes were prepared for launch, and a standard friendship message directed at these worlds. “Greetings from the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus. We come from the human colonies of Republic and Sapphire on a mission of Peace and Friendship. Please respond on the frequency of this message.” No response was received, but the ship bore onward.

  Keeler came down to the Geophysical Survey laboratory alone. There was no call to have a meeting at this point. Information on the system was trickling in and the laboratory had assembled a pretty good model of the system, which Lt. Kennecott had offered to show him at his leisure.

  “This … looks like the money planet. 10 655 Vulpecula Five,” he activated the projectors. A one-meter sphere appeared. It was a blurred and fuzzy image, like a video receiver with very bad reception, but with enough squinting and imagination, one could make out a world of gold island-continents, pleasantly ragged around the margins with fjords and inlets, set on an emerald sea. The two largest continents faced off against each other like gigantic crabs, their outstretched claws embracing a squarish sea dotted with islands.

  “Looks nice,” Keeler said, squinting hard. It still looked to him like a bowl of soup made with unhealthy ingredients.

  “It is nice. Oxygen-rich atmosphere, slightly denser than Sapphire’s. Complete absence of polar climate, a few minor deserts, but overall, a near paradise.”

  “Great, I can hardly wait to see what’s wrong with it.”

  She shrugged. “Very slow orbital period, if you can call that a problem. It takes more than twice as long as Sapphire to go around its sun. ”<
br />
  That didn’t really sound like a problem, but Keeler wouldn’t say so. “Any life signs yet?”

  “We have only been able to get a resolution of one kilometer, and that’s only on four per cent of the planet. Most of the rest is 10 kilometers or worse. Give us another 56 hours, and we should have some candidates, if they have cities larger than a million people we should be able to pick up some indication.”

  Please be a good planet, Keeler found himself thinking. Please be a good planet. Please be a good planet.

  “Any communication signals?”

  “None in the high power range, and the low power signals are indistinguishable from natural EM at this distance.” She dimmed the hologram of 10 655 Vulpeculus V.

  “Now, take a look at the seventh planet,” Kennecott said, bringing up a big icy sphere, shot through with speckles of black and blue. “Its surface contains water ice, frozen carbon dioxide, and very high concentrations of tritium, deuterium, liquid oxygen and and nitrogen.” Keeler nodded, with his hand under his chin. “I bet if you pick up that planet and shake it, you’ll find a little representation of a Borealan Village inside.” Kennecott blinked at him. Like most of the others on the ship, not just because she was from Republic, she didn’t get it. “Environmental Core thinks this might be a good opportunity to refresh some of the ship’s air and water.”

  “And one unforgettable snowball fight.”

  “There may literally be pools of tritium on the surface. I check with Flight Core and Logistics Core. They say a few Aves retrofitted with external tanks could begin harvesting off the surface. The tanks are then mated to refinery inlets on the aft section of the UnderDecks.”

  “Do we need to exchange our water and atmosphere?”

  “It is recommended that the ship’s resources be regularly purged and replenished. About ten percent per year is sufficient. We do lose a small amount of air and water to space in the course of our operations. And finding raw tritium and deuterium is an incredible discovery. I think we should put a refining unit on the seventh planet as soon as possible.”