by Marti Ward
“I had not reviewed your messages, and had not noted these possibilities in the AGG and cavum technology updates. I am examining them now…”
“Thanks Al, all I ask is that you do the best you can to get MD15 home… That is the present priority. We need EMP-G here, and its EmDrive will provide some shielding. It will just have to be enough. See if you can come up with a way of improving the odds for EMP-G and EMP-NE”
Simba
26 July 2077 11:30
Simba thought that gray’n’gold seemed rather upset today.
And now the cold one is here, with nets. But they are sure that he is only doing what his captain has ordered, and they have come to trust gray’n’gold. They can still feel gray’n’gold’s sadness and awareness, so Simba puts up only a token swipe of disapproval as the cold one transfers them to the domebox for another one of those strange disorienting sleep experiences.
Why isn’t he here? As the hiss of ill wind entered the domebox, Simba could still feel gray’n’gold, could sense him looking out at the stars, could sense him looking at her in their domebox, could sense him caring, could sense the shared empathy of Samba/Simba/Jerome… sensed that he would look after their kittens too.
Chapter Thirteen
NE–Acerba L2 – mid-shockwave
Sideris
29 July 2077 11:00
The three days had passed very slowly, lonely without the cats as they waited for the ion storm to pass, although Sideris still visited Simba and Samba for morning and afternoon tea. He could scarcely make them out through the misted covers of the cryobeds, but wiping off the condensation did help. The indicators showed that all was well…
But he’d talk to them as usual, as he had for two years now. And he’d talk to himself – sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. The main giveaway was starting with “Well, Jerome …” Of course, he only had to change that to “Well, Al …” and Al would hold the other side of the conversation – but sometimes a conversation with himself was more productive.
It was lonely without the chess games with Al. But he and Al, in their own different and separate ways, had been devoting every available resource to the problem of the asteroids, while Acerba dragged Casindra slowly along in its orbit around New Eden, protecting them for now from the waves of nuclear particles.
The proton and neutron wave had passed, and the heavier but less energetic alpha particles were not expected to be a problem – but there would be a delay and they wouldn’t be so well sheltered by Acerba.
They had rendezvoused successfully with the EmProbe from Tenebra, which had also found enough shelter from New Eden and Acerba to survive. So now he could start to worry about more mundane problems – such as food. He shouldn’t have been awake this long – he had been expected to spend some time in cryosuspension – so food would be less palatable for the rest of the journey as he moved onto actualized nutrition, but at least the air, water and waste recycling meant that they weren’t in a critical condition.
But thoughts of synthesized food didn’t dampen his feeling of vindication. Simba’s apparent suggestion of hiding behind the dark moon had been a success, and the time he’d put into the asteroid problem, in friendly competition with Al, had paid off. Al hadn’t found the answers, he had – and Al had verified them. Human intuition and understanding still had its place alongside the sheer power of the quantum computer.
Their data on the PTL3 asteroids had been collected right up to the beta front arrival, and even as the 3-day storm passed they had worked on the problem, eventually figuring out a way of deflecting the asteroids. Until now, even in the best scenarios, no matter what they and the four EmProbes did, or even four more LETOs, the cluster would still close on New Eden in 637 days, and two or more asteroids would strip off much of the atmosphere, plow into the ground and raise a worldwide dust cloud, or vaporize a tranche of ocean. One way or another, the planet would be unfit for human occupation for centuries!
But Al had kept challenging him to look for an ‘illogical unexpected solution’. Al was pursuing all the ‘logical’ courses of action, examining every point where one of the half dozen ‘rogue’ asteroids passed a singular point where it could be deviated at low cost, but there weren’t any planets that could provide the necessary pull before it encountered New Eden, and the interactions with minor asteroids didn’t provide sufficient leverage. Al’s successive potential solutions had proven less and less feasible as he took into account less and less massive objects.
Sideris would send a report in by message drone once he’d established enough of the EmProbes had survived to put together an ad hoc mirror array and open a wormhole. But depending on who survived where, that could be months away – and they didn’t have any safe and timely way of sending a message right now, and the message drones could take a long time to get to Sol.
Suddenly he had it… The ‘illogical unexpected solution’ was really quite simple, based on three illogical and risky propositions: first, they could use Ardesco and New Eden themselves as the targets that pulled in the asteroids and induced the singular tipping point; second, rather than trying to divert the four closest moderate-sized rogue asteroids, they would seek to tip the heaviest and furthest asteroid onto a new trajectory; and third, rather than trying to push it further away from New Eden they would direct it towards New Eden!
The asteroid cluster was loosely orbiting near the unstable PTL3 Lagrange Point, in complex Lissajous orbits. The heaviest asteroid was similar in composition to Petra and Acerba, and like them was thought to be part of the core of what had once been the innermost planet, and still left a residue of lighter asteroids in its original orbit. Sideris called this superheavyweight asteroid ‘Pacman’ after a similarly shaped character in one of the earliest computer games. Ironically, their job was somewhat like the original players’ job in the game – to direct Pacman where it could gobble up lots of small dots, without getting hit by the ghostly New Eden or its lunatic partners.
Pacman sometimes led the chase, was sometimes the pursuer, as the cluster raced along on the opposite side of Tenebra’s orbit. As Ardesco and New Eden, with their shorter years, caught up with it, Pacman would be behind, but will have been pulled out beyond the Tenebra orbit by Praelium, with its host of pursuing asteroids chasing him but spread out behind and mostly inside Tenebra’s orbit. As Pacman and its brethren approached New Eden it would be pulled down below Tenebra’s orbit near a tipping point of its own, but would safely pass by, this time, and eventually Praelium would tug them all back into a more outlying orbit. But it would drag its followers down with it, including the five that were currently heading for tipping into trajectories towards New Eden.
What they had to do was push Pacman so that it took the New Eden path at its tipping point, so that it edged towards the four rogues near the New Eden orbit and stopped them tipping into it. It would pull its brethren faster towards New Eden, pulling them straight for where New Eden was, except that New Eden wouldn’t be there when they got there. Pacman would speed up its orbit around the cluster center, speed up as it did a slingshot behind New Eden towards Ardesco’s orbit. The small extra pull on the rogues would be enough for them to be a near miss, this time.
That was the theory – there was only one problem… He couldn’t quite make it work in practice with just the resources he had!
Many of the asteroids, including two of the rogues, would continue with Pacman, others would be consumed by it on its new trajectory as it became the core of a family of comets on an elliptic that would take them out of the solar system, and bring them back – every couple of centuries. A few of the smaller asteroids would enter New Eden’s atmosphere. Many others would become even more unstable clusters than would drift around until they hit one planet or another. The remaining two rogues would continue to be a problem for New Eden, although on this pass one of them would just skim off a bit of atmosphere and cause a bit of nasty weather – but the other would hit somewhere near those channel isla
nds he was so fond of, and potentially introduce an ice age.
All they needed was a single additional LETO and they’d be able to push Rogue One aside, two extra LETOs and they could even prevent the atmospheric skimming by Rogue Two. There were two in preparation for Paradisi, and many more on a variety of jobs. He hoped they’d send three or four. But even two should be enough to push the remaining two rogues to join their confederates in pursuit of Pacman. But unless they picked up the asteroids from the original data, and did their own simulations… Surely they’d look at the data in time, even though the logs with their identification and markup had been corrupted.
“Captain Sideris, please report to the bridge on the double!” Al knew he was here with the cats, where he always was at this time of day. What could be so important?
Then the radiation alarms went off just as the sliders closed behind him and he turned to stride up the passageway to the bridge. He’d hardly gone ten steps when he found himself picked up bodily and flung through the portal to the bridge, hearing the whispers as the sliders closed behind him in an instant, as they sealed off completely with nanosilc and the hard radiation shields slipped into place – and he slipped into blackness…
Simba
29 July 2077 13:40
Simba became aware that she and Samba were awake, and that the lid of the domebox was lifting. It was cold, but the cold one was not there, and nor was gray’n’gold. They sprang in sync to the floor, but with her cold stiff limbs Simba landed harder than she should have.
She rolled onto her side and started to groom herself. She noted that Samba had begun to clean his toenails. He must have landed hard too and snubbed his paw. They both took some time to regain their equanimity before starting to explore.
Samba wandered over to sniff their cage, while Simba explored around the domebox, wrinkling her nose as she stepped back quickly from a branching trunk that was far colder than it had any right to be.
Catching each other’s eyes, with common thought and intention, they crept close to the door. They were a little surprised when the sliders whispered open – they had a ship to explore.
The cold one was standing in the passage, or sitting there, it was hard to tell. They both froze, not wanting to be seen and placed back in their cage – or worse still, the domebox. They waited a heartbeat, two beats, before stealthily moving up the passage, Simba on the left and Samba on the right. They paused in front of some closed sliders, and sniffed. No human had passed that way recently… They glanced at each other and continued on – same here! They could see the cold one was sitting outside another pair of sliders, and again glanced at each other before approaching.
Next they got to the sliders into the spaces that white’n’gold most often went into, but the fresh trail went forward, past the cold one… Simba wandered over to Samba to confirm his report with her own nose, and they nuzzled each other for mutual support before slinking one after another to the final set of sliders that blocked the corridor.
These sliders opened too, and another barrier moved aside beyond that. And white’n’gold was lying there, unconscious, on the ground – the captain, in his white protective coat. Simba raced over, unheeding of possible dangers, pushing her head under white’n’gold’s chin, trying to raise his head, wake him up.
Finally she sat still and observed for a moment. Then she carefully walked around to the other side of his head, and back. He was barely alive… His breathing was shallow and irregular. There was blood from a wound on his head. But his body was at least in good enough shape to have vomited. She could barely sense his presence, and his smell was wrong – a sick smell beyond the vomit.
The windows were there in the background – closed airless windows as the humans preferred, but they looked out onto a starry sky blacker but brighter than anything Simba had seen anywhere else. And in one window, there was shadow, the now not so little brother, the moon that had grown to protect them as they hid behind it.
Simba and Samba looked at each other. Samba wanted to stay there and protect white’n’gold and keep him warm. She, Simba, should explore – all three of them needed food and water.
There was food and water back at their cage. Hopefully she’d be able to get in – why some sliders would sometimes open and sometimes not, she couldn’t say.
Simba looked through the opening into the passage, where the cold one was looking blankly at her. She looked around the space where she was, and spotted a solid structure that looked like it could serve a useful purpose. She raced over to it and gave herself a good dose of courage, as she gave it a thorough scratching and sharpened her claws. Samba watched her in bemusement before moving over to white’n’gold, sniffing then wrinkling his nose as he avoided a patch of vomit and pushed his head into white’n’gold’s hands and face. Diagnosis complete, he met Simba’s eyes, then cuddled in beneath Sideris’s arms to share warmth.
Maybe we do need some help, cold one’s help, Simba thought, as her new-found courage burned within her. She walked deliberately over to cold one, holding his eyes. And then she sat, curling her tail over her toes, and waited for him to notice her.
Al
29 July 2077 14:00
Al was confused!
He had all these sensor messages logging in his primary and secondary stores. There was ‘radiation alarm’, ‘bridge hard seal engaged’, ‘cryobed failure’, ‘quantum processor failure’, ‘emergency security override’, ‘subject containment failure’, ‘emergency bridge access’, …
He had routinely routed these to associative memory, information retrieval and data mining, but all he kept getting back were more meaningless words.
He also had all sorts of scientific, audio and visual sensors that were overflowing their cache and being buffered into long term memory as part of ‘emergency full sensor logging protocol’, and he saw storage usage tick from 6% to 7% to 8% as he watched.
There was something he could do. He sensed one of the experimental feline subjects sitting right in front of his quadlift servo, he saw the closed slider to the cryolab where it belonged, where it needed to go. The association between the cameras, the quadlift, the lab and the doors only need a slight weight adjustment to trigger the turning of the quadlift towards the lab, and the opening of the lab and cage doors.
The multicolored feline sprang up at the movement, seemed to give a brief nod at the quadlift camera, and sprinted down through the open lab door.
There was another subject loose, and again a slight rebalancing of weights turned the quadlift camera to view the second subject, an orange feline, nestled against…
Face and pose detection triggered – human subject lying on his side on the floor. Gender recognition triggered – male subject. Facial recognition triggered – Jerome Sideris. Crew manifest search – authorized crewmember and Captain. Medical diagnosis subroutine – subject pale and unconscious: move subject to medical bay and connect monitors, drip and catheter. Emergency log access and symptom cross-reference – suspected exposure to external neutron radiation – shipsuit-protected residual body exposure estimated at 10 Gray – unprotected head exposure estimated at 20 Gray – short term treatment: personalized transfusion matrix with hematopoietic growth factors and macrophage colony stimulation factor – medical test required for bone marrow hypoplasia, anemia, neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, demyelination, stem cell and progenitor cell damage, including cytogenetic analysis – prognosis: probability of surviving 60 days is less than 50%, if crewmember survives 60 days, return to duty may or may not be possible, and will not be assessable for 8 to 15 months, depending on the results of the tests and the response to treatment and rehabilitation.
The sensory-motor subsumption lattice required little tweaking to get the quadlift to enter the bridge, pick up the Captain (complete with feline subject), and move down towards the medbay at the opposite end of the passage. It did seem to require an unanticipated boost of association weights to ensure the medbay door opened as they arrived. But t
hereafter, the automated medbay systems seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
Chapter Fourteen
NE–Acerba L2 – post-shockwave
Simba
1 August 2077 11:00
It was three days now since Simba and Samba had managed to get gray’n’gold to medbay with the help of cold’n’senseless, who was now also essentially motionless and voiceless – it took a great deal of effort to get responses now. The kits still hadn’t woken, but Samba would check on them regularly, sniffing at the cold domebox in the kits’ room, and using their facilities while he was there.
Their cage had been open when Simba got there, but rather than going in she’d gone over to the levers the humans had used to provide them with water and food pellets. In this room, they had seemed to operate by themselves at regular times first thing in the morning and last thing at night, just like the toilet tray would clean itself after each use. Lucky she’d picked up on how the humans did this by paw using the levers, because the automatic dispensing and cleaning methods were not working.
She’d been getting good exercise jumping up and trapping the lever with her paws, but the cage was getting a bit smelly – and there wasn’t any clean sand to cover things up with. So she’d got into the habit of pulling the lever, having a quick drink, taking a mouthful of food, and moving to the nearby space where Jerome was being treated – that was the name that kept coming to mind every time she thought about gray’n’gold as she settled down to sleep next to him on his bed covered with wires and tubes. It was hard for her to pronounce, but in her head she knew what it sounded like, and it was pleasant lying there sharing his dreams. Of course, she and Samba were both very careful not disturb those wires and tubes – they seemed to be important.