To Touch the Stars (Founding of the Federation Book 2)

by Chris Hechtl

  But Nike had other ideas on where they were. The ship's AI identified their location as out in the outer arm of the galaxy, 15,000 light years from Sol. Stunned, Brock sat there staring at the screen for a long moment. “That can't be right,” he murmured, resetting the system and starting over from scratch. He had to have done something wrong. Entered a variable wrong … yeah, that was it.

  He checked it three times, each time growing more anxious. He shot Wally an email with his results but the other man wasn't just off duty, he was probably racked out like the skipper. He dithered about what to do until he got the nerve up to do what needed to be done. He quietly reported he had something to discuss with Magnus who was the officer on duty.

  “What gives?” Magnus asked, raising a bushy black eyebrow as he came over to stand near Brock. He like the computer geek had black hair and black eyes, a throwback to his Eastern European ancestry. He also had shaggy black brows and a lot of body fur all over his squat stocky body. He had broad shoulders, so broad he had to turn sideways to get through the hatches.

  The sensor officer stuttered out his findings. Magnus stared at him in consternation for a long minute, long enough for Brock to feel uncomfortable. The red face on the XO made him want to bolt from the compartment. He was pretty sure that steam was going to come out of the officer's ears shortly, or he'd drop from a stroke or heart attack.

  “Are you sure about this? This isn't some sort of joke?” Magnus demanded, voice dropping into cool tones of warning. He didn't like pranks; he hated them. Minor horse shit was one thing, but this would freak just about anyone out. He shook his head. A few of the bridge watch looked up, ears perking to find out what was going on.

  “I've checked. I've rechecked the findings, sir,” the frustrated sensor officer replied, practically in tears. He waved to the computer screen. “It's legit.”

  “Recheck it. Run the numbers again,” Magnus ordered.

  “I did, sir. Three times because I thought I'd entered something in wrong. It's …” Brock waved a helpless hand. “What are we going to do?”

  “Check. Again.” Magnus ordered him tightly.

  “I did sir!”

  “Well go back and do it again!” The XO snarled. That alerted the rest of the watch crew something was wrong. Shaken Brock nodded and went back to work.

  Magnus stood over his shoulder as he checked the local star for its spectral class, then the brightest stars in the space around them. Each spectral class was mapped, then her location in relation to the star they were near. Then Nike compared the swatch of sky until she got a match. The view of the expected section of sky near the Gum nebula blanked. She put an overlay over the map of the Milky Way, blinking the stars that matched their location. After a moment she zoomed in and showed them the more detailed image.

  “Find other stars,” Magnus ordered tightly. “This has to be a mistake. Some sort of sick joke.”

  “Sir, we use a point program. It's like running a finger print; we plot out points and then compare them. I can do that with outer stars but we're going to get the same results,” Brock warned.

  “Do. It. Again.” the XO snarled, making the sensor officer wince and hunch his shoulders as a heavy hand gripped his left shoulder.

  “Yes sir. I'll do it again. With more points,” Brock replied, now more worried about being the bearer of bad news than the situation they were in.

  “Why did you initially say we were where we needed to be?” The XO demanded as he worked.

  “Um,” the sensor tech's fingers flew as he typed. He pulled up the feeds from the telescopes and picked out another series of stars around them. This time he shot for a thirty-two point match instead of the sixteen he'd run before. “The spectral class of the star matches one near the Gum galaxy. So, since we were headed that way,” he paused as his hand switched to the scroll pad to move a mouse pointer to select a series of more stars then hit execute. “ …we assumed we were where we set out for. I had no idea we would overshoot, and hell sir, is it even possible to go this far out?”

  “You think it's a computer glitch?” Magnus asked, remembering the two maxims about assumptions. Right now the second applied, assumptions were the mother of all fuck ups.

  “God I hope so,” the sensor officer replied fervently as the computer worked. But Nike's dispassionate analysis came back with the same answer. “Oh my god,” Brock said, staring at the results.

  “We are so fucked,” the XO said softly. He looked up for a moment, blowing his cheeks in and out to regain his composure then back down. “Paige the skipper,” he said, turning back to the hot seat.

  “He's sleeping, sir,” the ops tech warned from behind them.

  “Then wake him!” the XO ordered, turning to scowl blackly at the tech. “And get Wally up here to … to confirm this!” he said, throwing his hands up in despair.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  “Is this confirmed?” the captain demanded, looking tired. He was in his T-shirt and shorts, the anxious tone had made him jog to the bridge. His face was drawn and pale as he digested the report. His wasn't the only one. The three other men around the table were in various states of shock. Brock had come to grips with the situation and had accepted it, but the others were still coming to grips with it. For that matter, so was their half-awake skipper.

  He looked at the XO, then to the Brock and then finally Wally their navigator. Both of the latter men looked glum. They nodded in unison.

  “Shit. I was afraid of that,” the XO muttered looking away. He ran frustrated hands through his hair, practically yanking some out. “We're so jugged,” he muttered softly.

  “We checked and rechecked. We even had Nike do a random comparison,” Wally said quietly. “It's legit. I looked for the Gum nebula, it's not where it should be. Nothing is where it should be,” he said, clearly confused and frustrated. “We can get Shannon to do a computer check, but I'm pretty sure we overshot by quite a bit,” he said.

  “And you didn't notice before because …?” Magnus asked darkly.

  The captain sighed as the XO's nostrils flared. He couldn't blame Magnus; he wanted someone to blame. But playing the blame game wasn't going to help them get out of the situation. Nor was it the fault of either of them or the fins. “Enough,” he said before Wally could reply. “The question we have to ask ourselves now is where do we go from here?”

  He looked around the room. None of the other men had an answer to that question. His shoulders slumped slightly then he straightened. “I was afraid of that. I want answers people. For now, try to keep it to yourselves and work on some answers for us. We need to figure out how we got here and more importantly, how we get home,” he said. The men nodded.

  “In the meantime, yes, have Shannon run a full computer diagnostic. If you have to get outside the hull with a sextant so be it. I want this locked down. And start working on a way to get us home,” the captain ordered. Again the group of men nodded. “Dismissed,” he murmured softly, leaving the compartment.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  Word spread throughout the ship that something seriously bad was up. The captain finally got on the PA after the navigator had confirmed their location for the tenth time. He was satisfied but unhappy with the results; no one could dispute them. He laid the situation out to the crew. The news horrified the crew, they stared dumbstruck at each other or the speakers.

  They had assumed they'd ended up in the neighborhood of the Gum Nebula based on the initial spectral analysis of the local massive O class star. Instead they were fifteen times further out. That was a horrendous distance, mind boggling. If they traveled back to Sol at their best speed, it would take them 481 years to return, not including stops along the way to refuel. That was impossible, and everyone knew it. The ship and crew would never hold up under that length of transit time; it would be two life times to get home.

  Recriminations over the journey flew for some time during the senior staff meeting. Wally and Brock hunched their shoulders, silently taking it. “W
hat bugs me is, why the hell didn't you say something?” Doctor McReese demanded. “You knew the hyper odometer was …” she threw her hands up in despair as she glared at Wally.

  “We knew it couldn't be right,” Wally said. “It … there was no way, NO way we could have been going that fast!” he replied, shaking his head vehemently no.

  “Felt wrong,” Click'ck'a said from her screen. The scientist's eyes cut to the tired looking fin and then back to Wally.

  “No one has ever been in a hyperbridge, Doctor,” Brock said imploringly, spreading his hands as wide as he could. He bumped Wally and shot him a brief apologetic look. “We had no meter stick to compare it too. And you know we tried to figure a way out. Had we tried to cross the outer wall of the bridge it would have torn the ship apart!” he said.

  “True,” the fin said, backing him up.

  “Covering for each other,” Doctor McReese snarled, fists clenching in front of her.

  “Finger pointing isn't getting us anywhere,” the navigator said.

  “That is true. But we do need to analyze the situation and make sure we learn from it,” Chief Roak said. “What a ride!” she said, shaking her head. She was just getting up to speed on all the crap. Her people had been neck deep in repairs and maintenance until the scuttlebutt had made the rounds. She had even missed the skipper's address until someone had filled her in. She shook her head. “Now I know what the crew of Voyager felt like,” she said half jokingly.

  “Voyager?” Doctor McReese asked, wrinkling her nose.

  “Old show. Ancient. Sci-Fi, about a ship that gets yanked to the other side of the galaxy and then has to find its way home,” the chief engineer explained. “My dad had it in his film library,” she explained.

  “So? What does that have to do with us?”

  “Personally I'm glad we're not in the Stargate Universe boat,” Wally said before a glare from the chief scientist shut him up with a clop of his mouth.

  “Morale is in the crapper,” the COB said, shaking her head. Chief Heart was a small woman with a heart-shaped face but a can-do attitude. No one tangled with her; they knew better. One lesson in the dojo left a miscreant sorry and sore … or worse. “The idea that we're marooned far from home, without any way of getting back is spooking some people,” she reported. “We've had a couple minor incidents,” she warned quietly. “It's only going to get worse.”

  “I don't know why. We all knew this was a possibility,” Brock said. He received dagger looks from a few people around the table, enough to make him squirm.

  “There is a difference in accepting a possible risk and actually facing it, Mister Thompson,” the skipper rumbled. “What do we know about where we are?” he asked, looking at the sensor officer.

  “Well, sir,” Brock looked down at the tablet in front of him and tapped a control. “As you all know we are in subspace one light year out from an O class star. It is designated Beta 92c in our catalog. Actually, it has a much longer designation, but …” he shrugged.

  “As you know we are approximately 14,900 light years from Sol give or take a light year. We are in the Rho sector of the galaxy, in the outer arm.”

  “Nice recap. Now tell us some good news,” Doctor McReese interjected.

  “I was getting to that,” Brock said to her. He turned back to the expectant audience. “Fortunately, the stellar area we are have jumped into or been dumped into depending on your choice of adjective,” he said with a wan smile, “is in a popular location, rich with star systems with potential planets,” the sensor officer reported.

  “So …”

  “So it …” he frowned and tapped at his tablet. After a moment the main view screen split. “Sorry Click,” he told the fin, moving her image to a small window as he took over the majority of the screen. “It has a lot of Earth potential worlds in the area. The best in our catalogs is in a system less than forty-five light years away,” Brock reported. “That's another year in the highest octave of Alpha band skipper,” he warned.

  “What about these?” Doctor McReese argued, pointing to systems closer.

  “Those we don't have a lot of data on, or we know they have exomoons not full planets,” Brock explained. He opened a window and wrote a quick script then executed it. After a moment some of the icons highlighting stars changed color. “The green ones are the best and then it ranges downward from there,” he said. “Take your pick.” He shrugged.

  “So, we're just going to stick around here? Stay on mission?” Magnus asked carefully.

  “Why not? We're going to need a place to end up eventually,” the COB said. The others looked to her. She shrugged. “I for one don't want to end up like Daedalus,” she said.

  Doctor McDaniel winced. She'd known Kathy but not very well. She didn't know how the other crew had died … if they had died. The odds were that they had though.

  “We will go there,” the Captain said. “I officially rename it Pyrax, Fools Gold,” he said. He had a half smile of bitter irony over their situation. “Now I need options people before we work out the details of the mission plan.” Consternation met him as the officers around the table stared at him, taken aback by his determination.

  “So, we are going to stay on mission?” the XO asked carefully. The captain nodded. “Terraform and map the sector? Even though it might be futile?”

  “One never knows what the future may bring. We can always take the bridge back home,” the Captain said.

  “Why not do that now?” Doctor McDaniel demanded, eyes flashing. “Why wait?”

  “Why waste the opportunity here? Besides, we need the downtime to make repairs,” the Captain said, nodding to the COB and chief engineer. Both of the ladies nodded grimly back.

  “Why terraform though? It will be years before … centuries! Maybe never! Who would want to come here??” Doctor McReese demanded.

  “With that bridge being just a jump away?” Wally asked. She turned on him. He shrugged. “Think about it professor; if we send ships here, they won't be in competition with anyone closer to Sol. We'll have the place to ourselves,” he said.

  She cocked her head, not quite buying the argument. “You are assuming we will get back,” she said. “With your navigating and her driving,” she waved a hand to the fin on the screen. “I find that highly doubtful,” she said scornfully.

  “I am as well,” the captain said, cutting off Wally's retort. “But, we may need it. We may need a place to stay,” he explained to them patiently.

  “Wise, skipper,” Chief Roak said with a nod of approval. “But let's hope it doesn't come to that. Maybe we can find that hyperbridge back?” She turned expectant eyes to Wally and Brock. She frowned when neither man had a ready reply.

  “How? Stick our thumb out and see if something comes along so we can hitch a ride?” Sandra McDaniel, the ship's doctor said caustically. Both men winced.

  “I want positive thoughts folks. We are a bit further out than expected but we are years ahead of schedule. Decades. Let's take advantage of that,” the captain insisted.

  Magnus Templeton, the XO nodded, eying the other senior officers. “The skipper is right. We can do this,” he rumbled. “We need to keep telling our people that,” he said, eying each of the junior officers.

  “It's going to take time for us to figure the bridge out anyway,” the navigator told them quietly. They turned to him. He spread his hands in appeal. “I don't know about you but I'd prefer understanding how it worked before we try it again. I'd like to make sure we know where we are going and don't end up oh, outside the galaxy say,” he said. There was a startled indrawn breath from the CMO. Wally nodded emphatically as others reacted in various small signs of distress. “The more we know about it the safer we will be. But that takes time,” he explained.

  “Why?” The doctor demanded.

  “Because the computers are busy running the ship,” the navigator patiently explained. Shannon Norton, their computer expert nodded wryly in agreement. “And I'm not up to speed, pardon
the pun,” he said with a half-smile, “on hyperbridges. It was barely a hypothesis back home. I need to read up on it some more. I am doing it now, but I'm barely past the precept and summary.” He shook his head. “We have mountains of data to process. Petabytes to go over. That will take time when the ship is idle and not in hyper.”

  “Heaven forbid we bog the computer down with calculations while we're in hyper? Is that it?” Magnus asked.

  Shannon grimaced and then nodded. “Nike can handle a lot but …” she shrugged. “I'd rather not take the chance and addle her,” she warned. Grimly the navigator nodded.

  “Why go to this … this Pyrax though? What about this other system closer? Senka?” Doctor McReese asked plaintively.

  “According to our records it only has an exomoon that might be suited for us,” the sensor officer replied. “It has plenty of gas giants and a nice pair of asteroid belts, but we're here to terraform first,” he said. “That takes time, the sooner we get the process started the sooner we can move on to exploring other systems,” he explained.

  He pulled up a star chart. “This sector is rich in habitable systems, even better than the one we had set course for,” he explained. Systems with habitable potential planets were highlighted. They popped up, dozens and dozens of them until they nearly covered the screen. “I think we can do very well here,” he explained.

  “Definitely a busy business in terraforming,” the captain mused, rubbing his chin with one hand. “We'll run out of material long before we can do many of those worlds,” he warned.

  “We have enough to do about a dozen. We can regenerate the algae and bacteria in the vats and recover and refurbish some of the hardware,” Chief Roak said. She glanced at the lead scientist. She nodded confirmation. “As long as nothing comes a cropper we'll do just fine. We might even push that a bit if we get lucky. Or just move rocks in some systems,” she said with a diffident shrug.

  “We'll put it on the suggestion list,” the skipper replied with a half-smile.

  “What about … you know,” Doctor McDaniel waved a helpless hand. “Starting back now? We can terraform along the way, right?” she asked, looking petulant. “We can then catch the bridge and go home right?”