Oort Rising

by Magnus Victor

  Oort Rising

  by Magnus Victor

  Oort Rising

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is coincidental.

  Copyright ©2015 by Magnus Victor

  All rights reserved worldwide, including the right to store or reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Published by Stonehenge Circle Press

  Cover art by Emmanuel Ernel C Sapinoso

  First printing, December 2015

  ISBN 978-1-68012-040-0

  Kindle Edition

  US $2.99

  Acknowledgements:

  To my Family:

  For your inspiration, your ideas and your encouragement

  To my friends at Stonehenge:

  For your patience, your feedback, and your support

  Chapter 1: Ad Astra

  “Klaus! Could you give me a hand with this?”

  Klaus Ericsson sighed in irritation. As chief engineer of the freighter Ad Astra, he had no time to waste on baby-sitting. Unfortunately, that was exactly what he was doing. Klaus shook his head. Why had Antoniy even signed aboard as a machinist's mate? He had no real ability or experience in any of the ship's equipment.

  That would have been all right by itself — Klaus didn't need an assistant, and he hadn't asked for one. However, Captain Sidonia had insisted that Klaus bring the green 'crewman' — and that was being generous — up to speed.

  “What is it, Antoniy?” Klaus glided over to where the Russian crewman floated in front of a control panel. With the ship's aft reactor down for maintenance, the artificial gravity had been disabled to save power. The long, cylindrical ship's other reactor, located in the bow, couldn't produce enough power to both maintain artificial gravity and the ship's propulsion.

  “I can't bring this thing's controls online.”

  Klaus tapped the screen, which lit up. “This reactor's an RC-37. It doesn't have built-in controls, you need the access device that I gave you earlier.” Klaus gestured to where the small, box-shaped tool hung from Antoniy's toolbelt. “That one, there.” He showed Antoniy how to plug it into the console, and glanced sideways at his assistant. “Where'd you say you used to work?”

  Antoniy waved his arm. An unwise move – it sent him rotating away from the console. But he did grab one of the handholds quickly enough. “Oh, I shipped on my uncle's old freighter after getting my Bachelor's.”

  “Really? Why'd you leave? Being the Captain's brat is generally a cushy job.” It would certainly explain why he didn't seem to know much about actual work.

  “Well, he's getting the ship overhauled at Europa station, said it'd take a year and a half. I decided to go back to Earth for a few more classes in the meantime. You guys were the only ship leaving soon enough to get me there in time.”

  “You sure?” Klaus gestured at the unpainted steel walls around them. The panels were rough-made, strong and functional. It was his home, but he knew that it was far from conventional standards of beauty. “We're not exactly a fast or comfortable ride. I thought I saw a personnel carrier at the station when we were fueling up. Wouldn't they have been faster?”

  Antoniy shrugged, this time holding on. “They didn't have any open spots. Luckily I convinced your captain to let me tag along as an extra hand.”

  Lucky for Antoniy, maybe. “That reminds me, your uncle's ship didn't have these?” Klaus nodded to the control panel. “Rockman's pretty much the only reactor supplier this far from the inner System, and I've never seen one of their models with built-in controls. No civilian model, at least.”

  “Well, the Breitenfeld was a decommissioned warship, I think.”

  That struck Klaus as odd – the Thirty Years War-class were interceptor torpedo boats. ITBs were small and fast, hardly an ideal class for conversion into a 'freighter.'

  “How about that.” Klaus shrugged. Half the crew on the Ad Astra came from odd backgrounds. That was simply what life was like on an old tramp freighter. “At any rate, here's the controls. Call me again when you've run the diagnostics.”

  Klaus floated back across the compartment. The ship's ventral power conduit was giving him nothing but problems. It kept shorting out into the ship's keel. Not often enough to be truly useless, but enough to be a nuisance for Klaus. With the amounts of power produced by the reactor, those “shorts” amounted to melting parts of the ship's structure. An absolute pain to repair, expensive both in materials and time. Thank goodness the keel was electrically isolated, or there would have been even more damage throughout the ship's systems.

  More to the point, if Klaus didn't fix the conduit before re-activating the reactor, any damages would come out of his paycheck.

  Klaus opened up the circuit-breaker box on the reactor's power-distribution node. A cloud of ozone-tinged smoke wafted out. Completely non-functional, and the only spare high-voltage breakers are back in the spare-parts bay.

  “I'm heading out, should be back in less than five minutes.”

  “All right. I think I've found how to get the diagnostics started.”

  “Gotcha.” He grabbed a handhold on the wall, preparing to impel himself to the aft hatch on the other side of the compartment.

  But the hull bucked, throwing his hand free. The bulkhead rushed to meet his face. What the hell—

  Everything went dark.

  *^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

  The pain in Klaus' eyes woke him up.

  Training kicked in. 'If one experiences pain (eyes or ears), dizziness, nausea, don emergency survival gear. When in doubt, don emergency survival gear.' Basic Extra-Atmospheric training manual, chapter one, paragraph one. Easy.

  Squinting against the pain, Klaus groped for his helmet attached to his belt, slid it over his head, twisted it into place, and locked it closed. His eyes snapped automatically to the external pressure indicator, which, as he had guessed, showed a rapid loss of atmosphere. By the rate of depressurization, he couldn't have been out for more than ten seconds or so.

  Klaus looked around, hoping that nothing important had been damaged. Antoniy drifted in the middle of the compartment, frantically waving his arms around. Was he completely disoriented, or just trying to find something to grab hold of?

  He had to secure Antoniy before the kid damaged something expensive.

  Either way, the kid had lost hold of his helmet, which had been launched into the other end of the compartment. No time to retrieve it.

  Grabbing a spare helmet from the storage rack, Klaus pushed off from the floor and intercepted Antoniy. As they drifted, together, toward the far wall, he warded off the man's flailing arms with one hand, while quickly attaching the helmet with the other. Little time to waste, as the air in the compartment was too thin to convey sound now, so verbal communication would be difficult.

  Klaus thudded his helmet against Antoniy's. The solid contact would easily convey sound, but Klaus shouted anyways. “What the hell did you do to my ship?” As soon as he said it, he realized he was just venting his own anger. Antoniy could not possibly have caused all this: the console only controlled the reactor. If it had been the three-point-five terawatt reactor which had exploded, they wouldn't even be here. He added, more quietly. “Ach. Never mind.”

  Antoniy's reply came over Klaus' radio. “I didn't do anything.”

  Klaus raised an eyebrow in surprise. Maybe the kid wasn't quite as inexperienced as he had thought. He pushed off to the reactor control panel. The diagnostic program was still running, nothing reported as wrong yet. Whatever happened, it wasn't this reactor. “So I see.”

  Unfortunately, the specialized panel could only tell him about the reactor. It could not tell him what had happened. Klaus unplugged the c
ontrol device from the panel, and clipped it onto his suit. He could use it to interface with the ship-wide network.

  That is, if the network was available. The thing was down half the time, it seemed. No matter how many signal repeaters Klaus installed, it never seemed to work when he needed it. A blinking red 'X' on the panel confirmed his fears. “Damn.” Klaus thought for a moment, mentally reviewing the ship's schematics. They would have to move.

  He motioned for Antoniy to follow him, and kicked towards the forward bulkhead of the reactor compartment. “This way. There's a spinal access node a few compartments over.” The way he saw it, since the ship's spine was a hardened tube running through the center of the long ship, it was less likely to be damaged. Better bring Antoniy along, so Klaus could keep an eye on the kid. The last thing he needed was a green crewman throwing a monkey wrench into the repairs.

  Antoniy's voice came shakily over the comm. “Klaus, any idea what that could have been?”

  “Whatever it was, it was really big. After all, this rust-bucket masses around five hundred megatons, depending on the cargo. It must have jerked the entire ship and something broke. Explains the depressurization.”

  Klaus pointed to the ceiling. The unpainted steel panels hung in complete disarray. Most of the bolts which were supposed to hold them in place had sheared off completely. “An old tub like this would've blown more than a few seals from the shock.” That fit most of the available evidence. “Shouldn't have killed the comms network, though...” Klaus' voice trailed off as the two men reached the hatch to the next compartment.

  He hit the button to cycle the hatch open. It stayed closed, and the red 'warning' light lit: The compartment on the other side read as zero pressure. Klaus peered through the small viewport built into the hatch, but saw only black.

  “Damn. Power's out ahead.”

  “More work, I assume?”

  “Never ends on a ship like this.” Klaus triggered the manual override, but only one of the two halves of the hatch slid aside, and with a loud grinding noise that set his teeth on edge. Still, it was enough to poke his head through.

  For a moment, he was perplexed. Where were the emergency lights? They should have come on. Yet the supplies hold beyond was still pitch-black, broken only by small speckles of light. It was a huge compartment, yes, two hundred meters in radius, but it should be brighter than that. He couldn't even make out the hulking masses of the engineering spare parts which he knew lurked along the forward bulkhead.

  Then his vision adjusted.

  He blinked, staring wide-eyed. The forward hull of the Ad Astra floated in space, hundreds of meters from where Klaus stood. The lights he had seen were the stars, a sight so unexpected that it had taken him a moment to recognize them.

  Antoniy seemed to come to the same realization only a second after. “Oh, hell.”

  “Yeah. There's the problem.”

  Antoniy's voice was surprisingly calm.“Now what?”

  Just then, an explosion erupted out of the severed forward half — eerily silent in the vacuum — briefly illuminating the scene. Klaus drew in a sharp breath as he saw the rough outline of the outer hull, which had been shattered along a jagged break. He looked at Antoniy, shaking his head. “Now? We find the survivors, if any.”

  He pinged his suit's radio communications suite. An automated response request to any other suits in range. All that came back was Antoniy's suit.

  There should have been four more — three other crewmen and the Captain. The suit transponders had the range to reach across the gap, so at the very least their suits were crippled. And unless the forward half was still pressurized, that was a death sentence. Judging by the explosions sporadically ripping through it, any atmosphere that remained was only fueling further explosions and fire. The rest of the crew were dead already, if they were lucky.

  Klaus' eyes stung, but at least he could hold back the nascent tears. He fought down his emotions; they wouldn't help him now. He'd have time to grieve later. For now, he had to determine what had caused the damage, especially in case the rest of the aft part of the ship might be in danger.

  The Ad Astra was a hodgepodge of hull sections from different classes of ship, with different design philosophies. Unfortunately, that meant that the crew sections were in the box of the ship, along with the forward reactor. While that had made Klaus' life easier for maintenance access, it also meant that the reactor was immediately adjacent to where the rest of the crew would have been.

  Judging by the total power loss in the forward section, and the elevated temperature readings that his suit's sensors were taking from the forward bulkhead, the forward reactor must have gone super-critical. That would have melted the containment chamber, and then vented plasma into the rest of the ship.

  But that couldn't have started on its own, and it wouldn't explain why the supplies hold was where the ship was broken apart. There were all sorts of fail-safes to keep the reactor running smoothly, ones that Klaus had personally checked.

  Yet if the ship had been split into two pieces by something else, that could have caused the reactor to lose control. The Ad Astra's computer systems were as mismatched as the rest of the ship, and would have crashed when the forward half of the ship was separated. That would also explain why the communications system was down.

  “Reactor must have blown. Crew quarters were right next to it.” Klaus sent out another ping. Still no response. “Survivors...may not be as likely as I'd hoped.”

  “Shit.” breathed Antoniy. “Now what?”

  Klaus' mind raced. The Ad Astra's long-range communications array was also located on the disabled forward section. And the ship's transponder, a fragile piece of long-distance communications equipment, probably cut off when the power grid went down. It might take days for anybody to even notice that the Ad Astra had disappeared. Worse, the black-box's own transponder signal was lower-power, with a much shorter range. Rescuers would take weeks to find them.

  They didn't have weeks. Looked like he'd have to attract attention using some more active method.

  But there was something he could use in the section of the ship available to them. “C'mon, follow me. We can send an SOS with the LIDAR gear.” Klaus cycled the hatch closed, shutting off the view of space outside. He pushed off toward the aft end of their chamber, but Antoniy stayed floating by the now-sealed hatch. Probably in shock at the loss of the crew. Klaus could empathize with that, but emotions were only a hindrance right now. “They're dead. Come along — we need to make sure we don't join them.”

  Klaus floated through a door into the ship's central passageway, checking that Antoniy followed him. They approached the next hatch, a massively heavy blast door embedded in a thick, steel bulkhead. The long access corridor beyond it would take them straight to the controls he needed. Finally, he would be able to do something useful, and launched himself towards the opening.

  Suddenly, the alarms mounted on the hatch opening blared, and it began to close. He would never be able to clear the hatch in time. He flailed around for something to grab, and locked onto a protruding pipe along the wall. The hatch snapped shut with a clang he felt through his hands, bare centimeters from his helmet.

  Klaus looked over his shoulder. Antoniy had barely managed to arrest his motion.

  "Why'd it shut?" panted Antoniy.

  "Dunno." He quickly read off the indicator lights next to the firmly-sealed hatch. "The passageway on the other side has been hit by something - probably debris from the rest of the ship. Set off the impact triggers. The system still thinks there's air to protect.” There was an emergency mechanism to crank the blast door open manually, but a few minutes of futile effort showed him that the door was jammed shut.

  Klaus mentally reviewed the Ad Astra's interior schematics. “From here, the passageway goes between fuel tanks. That means there's no other way through. We'll have to go EVA, get back inside further aft." He pushed off from the bulkhead, floating towards the closest external airlock.
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  "EVA? In these suits?" Antoniy's voice shook a bit. Klaus couldn't blame him. They were only wearing interior-service suits. They would serve to keep them alive in a vacuum, sure, but they had no thruster packs or tether lines for EVA maneuvering. If either of the two crewmen floated off from the ship, well, they'd keep floating forever.

  But there was no choice. The key would be to make not a single mistake, and that meant that he needed to steady the kid's nerves. "Look, it won't be that hard - I'll go and find the next airlock down the hull, and string a tether from here to there.” Klaus held up one of the lengths of high-strength carbon monofilament, part of the maintenance kit in his service suit. “Just hold on to it and you'll be fine." As long as the kid kept his protective gloves on, he'd be able to grasp the hair-thin cable without harm.

  Antoniy made no reply, but just stared at the filament.

  Klaus shrugged, cycled the outer airlock open, and stepped through. He gave himself a mental pat on the back for insisting on replacing the old, burnt-out airlock batteries, even though the captain had complained at the cost. The original white paint of the outer hull could still be seen in a few places, if he looked carefully. But the hull was showing its age, scratched and pitted from micrometeorite strikes.

  Klaus tied one end of the wire to his belt, and the other end to the tie-off by the airlock. “Stay here. I'll call you when I get to the next airlock.”

  Now safely secured, Klaus pushed off along the side of the ship's hull, floating carefully down towards the next airlock, half a kilometer distant. He used the widely-spaced handholds to correct his course, his tension mounting with each one he passed. They were installed more as an afterthought than anything else, never really intended to be used. The suit itched, and he fought to keep his hands steady, each adjustment in his trajectory on course. Sweating heavily, and with the beginnings of a splitting headache behind his eyes, he arrived.