by David Smith
“We’re doing that just to try and cling on!” complained the Engineer.
“Sorry, Olga, I’ll ask the boys in the lab if they can suggest anything”
The engineers reached the edge of the main deflector and climbed over the lip and onto the face of the array.
“We’ll start clearing from here and work our way to the middle” Romanov decided.
The engineers took out a series of scrapers. There wasn’t much call for such tools amongst the high-tech paraphernalia aboard a starship. They’d had to improvise and had raided the galley for such soft-edged implements as they could find.
Jane Doe had selected a potato masher and was making good progress. Lieutenant Jasmine Sato had a plastic spoon and was struggling. The spoon soon snapped in the cold of deep space and she resorted to her back up tool, a spatula.
The dish of the deflector was nearly twenty meters across, but the soft, dirt like substance proved easy enough to remove and they made good progress. Before long they were working in a fog of thick, black dust.
Romanov noticed visibility was deteriorating and scraped a thin layer of dust off her visor. Looking down she could see that her whole suit was covered with varying thicknesses of black dust. She shivered and checked the display of her environmental suit. Normally kept at an even twenty degrees, the temperature inside her suit was down to seventeen. “Everyone ok? Check in” she said.
“Sato here. Everything’s AOK.”
“Ja e Doe ere. E eryt ing’s A K.”
“Fors ll he e. All AO .”
“Ia u I h e, ev ryt ng K.”
“Who was that?? Come back.”
“ nucc h e. C n u h r me?”
“Say again, I repeat, say again” Romanov.
“Ian re. C n’t h r y ver wel , Co a d .”
“STAY STILL I’M ON MY WAY OVER!!”
Romanov peered through the suddenly apparent gloom and realised she couldn’t even see Ianucci. Walking forward, she passed Sato and immediately noticed that a significant amount of the black dust had gathered on Sato’s suit, particularly at the joints and around the environmental management panel on her back.
As she got closer to Ianucci, the comms reception got better.
“Can you hear me Franco?”
“C n hear you a b t b ter now, C mm nder.”
Romanov found Ianucci just past the middle of the deflector dish. She was horrified to see he was almost completely covered in the black dust and the thin line across the top of his helmet where his comm-set aerial was located had attracted a thick crest of black fluff.
“You ok, Franc?” she said, carefully wiping the black dust from the top of his helmet.
“Yes, ma’am, just damned cold. Thought I’d be sweating buckets, but I’m freezing.”
“I’m not surprised. It seems the LOAVES have taken a liking to you. I think your day is done.”
She looked around her. They’d cleared over half of the dish, but it was getting dangerous now. Almost as if on cue, there was a squeal over the comm-set followed by several shouts. McKay had lost contact with the hull and was drifting away from the ship.
As cool as a cucumber, Forsell, still on the edge of the deflector dish, took aim with his grappler and fired a cable at the flailing McKay. The magnetic dart struck the engineer square in the chest, and Forsell yanked him, pulling him directly towards himself. As soon as he was within reach, Forsell grabbed him, man-handled him the right way around and planted him back on the hull of the ship.
Romanov tapped her comm-set and called Dave on the Bridge.
“It’s getting dangerous out here, sir. We nearly lost McKay and Ianucci is being badly drained by the LOAVES. We’re all pretty covered by them, and the stuff is just floating in a cloud. Visibility is getting worse and comms are breaking down.”
“Hang in there just a while longer Commander, I’ve just had an idea.”
Romanov turned to check on her team and watched as a big pink ball appeared out of nowhere a few seconds later.
“What the …??” She peered closer, it appeared to be a giant …… “Haggis???”
Somewhat lost, she could only watch as the two meter wide ball of offal quickly turned black as the LOAVES were drawn to the heat of the freshly cooked giant delicacy. To her surprise, visibility started to improve as the giant haggis got darker. “Come on team, let’s get done and get gone.”
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The Bridge seemed to have grown even colder in the short time Dave had been waiting for the Engineers to get back inside the ship. He sat in the Captains Chair and felt a need to pull his thick Aran cardigan closer around him, but the Yeoman that arrived on the Bridge shortly after was visibly shaking from the cold.
This was hardly surprising as Dave noticed she was looking very flushed and didn't seem to have any underwear on. He tried hard to ignore her nipples which seemed to be feeling the effects of the cold much worse than any other part of her anatomy. She passed a pad to Dave with shaking hands and stood quivering as he opened the orders.
"It's cold. Wind the temperature up.
Ps. Call me when we reach Arcturus.
Pps. You have the Bridge."
Dave uploaded the weeks status report, and then for good measure, every other status report he'd prepared since being promoted to First Officer, and just for the hell of it, all the reports he'd written whilst still the Ship's Executive Officer. With all of that on there, maybe the Captain might understand he'd missed a few things.
"Thank you Yeoman Trzetrzelewska, could I suggest you report to stores to draw some additional clothing?" Underwear might be nice, but knit-ware was probably more practical, he mused to himself.
The Yeoman nodded mutely, her breath hanging in the air behind her as she turned and left.
"Ok O'Mara, let’s try to find us a star."
Calling the Engineering Deck he said "Ok Romanov, it’s now or never. Power up the deflectors, structural integrity fields and drives."
Dave looked up as the lights dimmed momentarily, and a distinctive background hum filled the Bridge.
"We're all green sir, but Structural integrity is already down to ninety-two percent!" his Engineer told him.
"Ok Crash, hit it before we lose it."
"Aye sir!" said the Helmsman and the ship lurched forward. The ship gathered pace, but more slowly than expected.
“We’re not accelerating as we should be, sir” Crash said and began poring over the figures flowing in from Engineering. “Drive output seems nominal, but we’re losing some energy at the outlets.”
As if on cue, Romanov called from the Engine Room. “We’re operating just fine sir, but the LOAVES are definitely leaching energy from the propulsion system as well. Structural Integrity down to eighty-five percent, heat loss through hull increased to about ten watts per meter square. Drive is operating at ninety-five percent efficiency.”
“Damn that’s dropping off fast! Crash, what’s our velocity?”
“According to the inertial system we’re just coming up to point four of light speed.”
“When we get to ninety percent of light-speed ……. If we get to ninety percent of light-speed …… cut the drive, we’ll coast the rest of the way. I want to save some drive capability for when we get to …… whatever it is.”
They all watched and waited as the speed crept up, and listened nervously as the energy loss crept up too. Dave put the view-screen on an external camera view, looking from the bridge module back across the main hull.
A huge mass of thick black dust was gathering in lumps around the exhaust of the drive system. It seemed to bubble and throb as they watched. Every so often a lump would grow too big and would be swept away by the fury of the mass being ejected at near light-speed by the engines. Dave looked around the Bridge, watching everyone staring aghast at the bizarre almost-life-form that threatened to trap them forever in this universe of dust and darkness.
The incandescently hot exhaust glowed violent blue-white, il
luminating the engine nacelles in their fury. But all around the edges, the black seething mass seemed to swallow up the light, and with it the crew’s dreams of escape.
At the Helm, Crash finally breathed a sigh of relief “Ninety percent of light-speed, sir, cutting drive.” On the view-screen, the blue-white fury faded to white, then yellow, then orange before fading through ever deeper shades of red, until it passed out of the visible spectrum.
Dave slumped back in the Captain’s chair. They were underway, now they just had to reach the source of the heat signature.
Although O'Mara and David had provided a bearing for the heat source, there was no way of estimating the distance to it. A nagging doubt gnawed away at the back of Dave's mind. If it was a really big heat source, they'd be a long way from it, and only travelling at ninety percent of the speed of light, it might take weeks or even months to get there. If it was closer, it must be a smaller heat source, which may not have sufficient energy to kill off the LOAVES that were bleeding Tiger dry. Or more specifically, cold. They were all praying for a convenient "in-between" distance, and all the time the ship was growing colder and colder.
The ship coasted on for the next few days. The hull temperature had plummeted as the sudden release of energy through the drive, deflectors and structural integrity fields had led to a sudden and huge increase of the mass of LOAVES clinging to the hull.
The last of Tiger's external cameras were soon swamped, and Andy Carstairs began fighting an endless battle removing layers of the black energy-vampires from the hull with the Transporter. It was using huge amounts of energy, but wasn't going to use anywhere near as much as letting the LOAVES multiply un-checked.
Once in a while, he'd select an area of the hull surface where a camera was installed and for a few brief hours they'd be able to see something of the outside world, but most of the time he concentrated on keeping the external navigational sensors and the main deflector clear.
O'Mara would quickly take what readings she could from the sensors when they were clean, and by the third day of coasting, she called Dave to the Bridge.
"What's up Aisling?"
"The constituency of the dust-cloud has changed significantly. The number of dust particles is reducing, but the organic content, the LOAVES, is getting noticeably higher. That’s both good news and bad: On the positive side, it hints that we're getting close to the heat source. On the negative side, the heat source clearly hasn't killed them off at this distance. Also on the negative side, there's so much organic matter in our way, we may need to slow down to ensure we don't overload the navigational deflector."
"Oh great. We're already below light speed and now we have to slow down even more??" groaned Dave.
"Better that, than the alternative. If that deflector fails at this speed, any one of those organic molecules has enough mass that it'll punch through fifty millimeters of tritanium hull like a hot knife through butter. The impact will turn both into a stream of hyper hot plasma that will incinerate anything in its path and spread the energy in doing so. It'll blast straight through all the internal compartments in its way, turning each compartment into a furnace in a nano-second as it does so. Oh bugger, my tea's gone cold now" she added nonchalantly.
"Thanks for giving me nightmares. I guess we'd better slow down. Crash, slow us down, no more than ten percent light-speed."
Almost as soon as he said it, a soft beep from one of the science consoles drew their attention. O’Mara cast and eye over the display, and immediately called Chief Andy Carstairs in the Transporter Room. “Chief can you clear the hull in the area of the main forward optical system?”
“Which area is that then? Oh hang on, I see it.” In the background of the comm-link they heard the transporter energise, and a few seconds later, the brash Australian said “Yeah, that oughta do it. Have a crack with the camera now.”
“Thanks Chief” said O’Mara and closing the comm-link, she addressed the ship’s Computer: “Susan, please put forward optical view on Bridge main view-screen.”
The view-screen changed from a flat, two-dimensional display to a view of the dust cloud outside.
“Wow” said Dave.
“Yeah, ditto” added O’Mara.
Dead ahead of them was a brown dwarf-star.
It hung in space, the first thing they’d seen for weeks, other than clouds of dust. Like all brown dwarves, it lacked sufficient mass to begin the fusion process that combined hydrogen atoms to create helium, but was just sufficient to fuse deuterium atoms. As with all brown dwarves, regardless of their mass, the star was of a diameter roughly similar to the planet Jupiter in the Sol system and was cool enough that it barely glowed at all.
The brown dwarf dead ahead of them was glowing magenta and generated just enough light to illuminate the clouds beyond it in layer after layer of reds, greys and blacks.
The silence was only broken when Crash said "Damn! Looks like a number seven pool ball!"
O’Mara tore her gaze away from the view-screen in order to read the useful scientific data the ships sensors were bringing up. She called down to her subordinates in the labs: “Ok guys, heads up, brown dwarf, spectral class T, dead ahead. Approximately forty Jupiter masses, surface temperature seven hundred and fifty Kelvin. I went full spectrography, chromatography, analysis of the local gas cloud and gravimetrics. Top priority goes to mapping any orbital objects large enough to do us some damage. Crack on, and file reports by the hour.”
She killed the comm-link and turned to Dave with a huge grin on her face. “Bingo! We’ve hit the jack-pot!”
“We have?” asked a slightly bemused Dave.
“Yep! It’s exactly what we need. Massive enough to have gravity that’s cleared the space immediately around it, and the surface temperature is cool enough that we can risk a method that’s one hundred percent, absolutely, definitely going to clear the little bleeders off the hull.”
Dave still didn’t have a clue what she meant: “And what method is that?”
“We’re going to fly right through that star!!” she replied.
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“WHAATTTT??!?!?!!” squeaked Dave in alarm and suddenly aware that every face on the bridge was now looking at O’Mara, open-mouthed in astonishment.
O’Mara was still excited fit to burst, but she put her best “serious scientist” face on (ruined by a huge smile she couldn’t suppress) and explained patiently.
“We know very high levels of energy will kill off the LOAVES, but any not subjected to the high energy will thrive off the residual energy and the waste from the destruction of their neighbours. To clear the hull we need to subject them to big levels of energy all at the same time.”
“The brown dwarf ahead is T spectral class with a surface temperature of around seven hundred and fifty Kelvin and a diameter of about seventy thousand kilometers. That’s only one twentieth the size of the sun. Because it’s such a small star, it’s not emitting anything much other than infra-red radiation. As the hull of the ship is back up to standard construction now, and will cope with those temperatures for a short time the quickest and easiest way to ensure we kill off all the LOAVES is to dive straight towards the sun at just above escape velocity and fly through the outer photosphere of the star.”
She could see the fear etched on every face on the Bridge and tried to calm them: “It’s not massive enough to be really dense, so flying through the photosphere won’t be much thicker than flying through the dust cloud. It’ll only take us seconds to clear the star, but that will be enough to fry all the LOAVES and our velocity will throw us clear.”
“Once we’re out of the star, its gravity has cleared a space of about ten AU’s diameter which is too hot for the LOAVES to breed in. It’s a little bubble which we can stay in and they can’t get to us. This really couldn’t have worked out any better at all!” she enthused.
Dave was still aghast “You’re serious aren’t you??! You actually want us to fly through the photosphere of a star??�
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O’Mara looked hurt and defensive “It’s a very small star!”
Dave couldn’t believe it. He’d never heard of anything like it, and it flew in the face of all convention. But he did trust his Science Officer. She was a little scatty at times, but he’d never met anyone sharper than her.
“Oh, HELL!! Ok, I’m sold. Dolplop, you heard the lady, plot us a course. Crash, get everything set.”
“Yes sir” the Helmsman replied, then added “Really??”
“Yep, really.”
“Alrighty then” he whispered, failing to hide the note of panic in his voice.
Dave called the Engineering Deck “Commander Romanov, we’re going to be ….. undertaking an unusual manoeuvre shortly. Prepare to set structural integrity fields to maximum and run up the reaction drive systems and thrusters.”
“Aye sir! Where are we going?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“Sorry sir, I’m just curious. I thought we’d got where we were going.”
“Well we have, we just need to clear the LOAVES now.”
“So how’s that work?”
“Trust me, you won’t like it.”
“How bad can it be?”
“Ok. But don’t panic ok?” said Dave trying his best to sound much more calm and collected than he felt, “It’s all good.”
“I’m a big girl now sir.”
“Ok. You asked.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “We’ve found a brown dwarf-star. We’re going to fly through its photosphere.”
“WHATTT??!?!? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR крихітний траханий MIND???? You must be …… “
Dave cut the comm-link, worried the engineer’s wrath might melt the speakers.
“Took that well, didn’t she?” smirked ASBeau.
Dave thought about it “Could’ve been worse. If she was holding her hammer when I told her, I just hope no-one from her team was too close.”
They waited a few minutes before Dave called back. The line opened but nobody spoke.