Nodding, Ty looked around at the animated faces of the three scientists. “Let me know as soon as you’re ready to transmit the data. We need to fire the ion drive soon, or we could end up getting a very close and personal look at that black hole ahead of us,” Ty warned.
-
Two hours later, Ty watched as the last of the data was transmitted back to Star One and the Farside array. The data had been transmitted four times to ensure that a complete copy was received back at the receiving stations. Ty knew the information they were transmitting would create quite a stir back home.
“Thirty seconds to drive ignition,” reported Captain Simpson as he watched the countdown timer wind down.
“Ion drive chambers online and ready to fire,” Winston reported from his station as he watched the temperature rise inside the chambers.
“Everything is green on my board,” Karl Velm reported from Engineering, where he was strapped into his acceleration couch in front of the master engineering console.
“Ship systems are good,” reported Lieutenant Strett, tightening her safety harness, making sure it fit comfortably.
“Stand by for ion drive ignition,” Captain Simpson said, pressing the ion drive activation button on his crowded console.
In the ion chambers, the temperature suddenly went up as the drive activated, feeding argon to the hungry drive. The twin rocket tubes lit up brilliantly as the FarQuest was accelerated to one-fifth gravity. Under the power of the ion drive, the ship began its slow course change.
Ty felt the drive come on, and the force of acceleration press him back slightly in his acceleration couch.
A sudden alarm began sounding hauntingly on Winston’s board, drawing his attention. “We have a power surge in the fusion reactor,” Winston reported, his hands flying over his board looking for the problem. Several amber lights were flashing, and then two of them turned a threatening red. “One of the containment fields is becoming unstable!”
“I have red warning lights here also,” reported Karl worriedly from Engineering, where his board was suddenly showing a series of red blinking lights demanding attention. “I’m not sure what is causing the power surge.”
“Do we need to shut the drive down?” Ty asked, alarmed by all the red lights that were now appearing on the consoles. He looked back at Winston, who was intently watching a computer screen.
“Damn energy in the reactor is surging again,” Winston said sharply. “It shouldn’t be doing that. Karl, do you see anything on your console that might explain this?”
“Nothing definite,” replied Karl, quickly. “I am running diagnostics to try to trace the problem. It will take several minutes.”
“I don’t think we have several minutes,” Winston warned as another light turned red. “We need to shut the drive down now!”
Ty felt himself suddenly pressed farther back into his acceleration couch. “Deactivate the reactor!” Ty ordered as the ship began to vibrate. On his console, he saw that the ship was accelerating rapidly, and they were already moving at double the planned rate of acceleration.
It was at that moment that a powerful explosion rocked the ship and the acceleration from the ion drive suddenly increased even more. Ty felt himself pressed firmly back into his acceleration couch as a force of nearly one gravity tried to hold him down. Lieutenant Strett screamed in fear, and Winston cursed as all the lights on his board went out.
“The fusion reactor is overheating! We have had a failure in one of the magnetic containment fields,” Winston warned as he tried to get his console to power back up. “We have to shut the drive down first before we can shut down the reactor or we risk an explosion in the argon tanks from a possible flare back.”
Ty watched as Captain Simpson worked the controls on his board and then turned to Ty with a strained look on his normally calm face. “I can’t shut it down; the system’s not responding! Too much argon is being fed into the drive. The extra argon and the power surge are increasing our acceleration. The drive is not designed for this high rate of acceleration. It could be seriously damaged if we don’t shut it down quickly.”
“Karl,” Ty said into the ship’s com trying to sound calm. “You need to get down to level twenty and manually shut down the drive from the emergency control station. Do it quickly; we are running out of time!”
“On my way, Commander,” replied Karl, unstrapping himself from his acceleration couch and running over to the central hatch, which led down into the lowest levels of the ship.
Tense minutes passed on the Flight Deck as more red and amber lights flared up on the control boards. “Reactor will reach critical temperature in five minutes,” reported Simpson calmly, watching a computer screen that was now set to show the reactor core readings. “The magnetic containment fields will not be able to control the reaction. We will have a containment breach.”
“What will happen if we have a breach?” asked Ty, fearing the worst.
“The high temperatures contained in the magnetic fields will be released, and the ship will melt,” Simpson replied in an anxious voice. “It will be over in an instant.”
Lieutenant Strett closed her eyes with her hand going to her throat. She hadn’t expected to die this way, not due to an accident on the ship. Her breathing quickened. She slowly opened her eyes and looked at the main screen, which was still focused on the black hole.
“I have power back on my console,” Winston yelled as he began quickly typing in commands. “Karl, where are you?” he asked as he tried to find the problem with the drive and the fusion reactor.
“I’ve reached the emergency control console,” responded Karl, breathing hard over the com. “Implementing emergency shutdown of the drive now.”
Seconds later, the ship was rocked by another larger explosion, which caused the FarQuest to shudder and shake noisily. The lights flickered and went out, to come back on seconds later glowing dimly. From one of the twin ion tubes, a huge ball of flame seemed to appear and die out. Then both tubes faded into darkness as the drive shut itself off.
“Shutting down the reactor,” breathed Winston heavily, activating the shutdown program. He saw that it was less than a minute away from a full containment breach. “We’re going to vent a hell of a lot of plasma.”
Seconds later, the ship was in darkness except for the softly glowing emergency lights, which had come on automatically when the ship’s power was cut.
“Activate the fuel cell banks, Lieutenant Strett,” ordered Ty, looking at the powerless control consoles on the Flight Deck. He wondered worriedly what the last explosion had been. Just how badly damaged was the FarQuest?
“Powering up,” Lieutenant Strett said as she flipped several switches and keyed in commands from her touchpad.
The lights gradually brightened and then came back on full. Moments later, the consoles came back on one by one as more power was generated. Numerous red lights still covered the consoles. With a sinking feeling, Ty knew that the FarQuest was badly damaged.
“Karl, what was that last explosion?” Ty asked when the ship’s com system came back online.” Only silence came back as Ty waited for a response.
“He’s not going to respond, Commander,” Lieutenant Strett spoke in a stricken voice. She was looking at a diagnostic of the ship’s environmental system. It showed a vacuum in level twenty.
“What do you mean he is not going to respond?” demanded Ty looking over at Lieutenant Strett.
“I’m showing a hull breach on level twenty,” answered Lieutenant Strett, trying her best to sound calm. “My console is reporting the entire level is in a vacuum and that the pressure hatches have automatically sealed off that section of the ship. Karl never had a chance to get out before that last explosion.”
The four members of the Flight Deck crew stared at one another in shock, feeling numb by the appalling reality of what had just occurred. Karl was dead! Everything had happened so quickly. Ty was finding it hard to grasp that he had just lost a valuable me
mber of his crew.
“Commander,” Simpson said quietly with a pained look on his face. “The ship is tumbling from that last explosion. We need to use the RCS thrusters to reestablish control.”
“Do it,” ordered Ty, moving his gaze back to his console. This was the first time he had ever lost a crewmember. He had watched people die in the Antarctic Police Action, but not like this. “We need to get the ship back under control, see what the damage is, and if it can be repaired.”
Thrusters fired on the FarQuest’s hull and soon the tumbling was slowed, then stopped as the ship resumed a normal state of flight. On the main screen, the black hole loomed ominously dead ahead of the now helpless spacecraft.
-
Six hours later, Ty had the entire crew assembled in the galley sitting at the main table with the screen focused on the black hole.
“The damage report is not good,” began Ty, looking around at each crewmember. “It will take us nearly half a day to repair the damage to the fusion reactor’s magnetic containment field. There is a small hull breach on level twenty and major damage to ion drive chamber number two. Repairs to the drive chamber, as near as we can determine without actually inspecting it, may take up to a week.”
“Can we fire the SRBs to make our course change?” Pierre LaRann asked, calmly cleaning his glasses. He knew that the FarQuest was already deep into the gravity well of the neutron star-black hole binary. It was not a good place to be in their current situation.
Ty looked at Captain Simpson before replying. “The explosion in the ion drive damaged the control connections for the boosters. We believe that we can have those repaired in about eighteen hours. However, we dare not fire them until the hull breach has been repaired. That will require us to do an EVA to weld a patch of Luxen over the hole in our hull.”
“So how long before we can fire the boosters?” Lieutenant Strett asked afraid of the answer.
“At least 30 hours,” replied Ty. “It will be that long before we dare risk firing the boosters.”
“That’s not soon enough is it?” asked Winston softly, looking at the screen and the waiting black hole.
“No, it’s not,” replied Ty with a long sigh. “The explosion and the brief acceleration from the ion drive pushed us more in line with the black hole. We don’t have enough power to avoid it. If the ion drive was still fully functional, we could still pull away. Without it, we will be pulled into it. The closer we get to the black hole, the faster we are being pulled in by its gravity.”
“Then we are going to die,” said Lieutenant Strett with fear in her eyes. She had known this mission was dangerous, but she had expected to make it back home.
“Not necessarily,” Pierre LaRann uttered thoughtfully, his face lined in deep thought, looking at LeAnn Kelly.
“The wormhole at the center of the black hole,” said LeAnn Kelly, looking at the older astronomer. “You want to try to go through it, don’t you!”
“That’s crazy,” objected Winston, raising an eyebrow. “We don’t even know if there is a wormhole at the center. That’s all theory; it’s never been proven.”
“Won’t we be crushed by the intense gravity?” Captain Simpson asked not pleased with the thought. It sounded as if the scientists had given up all hope of being able to make it back to Star One.
“No,” replied Pierre, shaking his head. “The black hole will draw us faster and faster toward the wormhole at its center. I will have to do some calculations to determine our exact trajectory. Can we still use the other ion drive chamber at all?”
Winston Archer looked up from where he had been staring dejectedly at the table. “The other drive chamber is undamaged, and I can rewire the system and change the programs so the remaining chamber could be used. We would have to cut off the flow of argon to the other chamber, but there is a bypass valve, which can be used to do that easily enough. It will take awhile.”
“There’s no way we could use the SRBs and the ion drive together to slingshot us around the black hole is there?” asked Lieutenant Strett, realizing that if they did survive the passage through the black hole they would never see home again. They would be hopelessly lost in space.
“We might be able to achieve a slingshot orbit, but the gravity stresses would tear the ship apart, even with its Luxen coating,” responded Ty, trying to think of some other way out of this situation. Professor LaRann’s solution was radical, but Ty could think of nothing else that might allow them to survive.
He remembered the creaking of the ship when they had done the slingshot maneuver around the Moon. This would be a hundred times worse. The ship would be torn apart. Ty seriously doubted that they would find out what lay on the other side of the wormhole even if they managed to reach it. The gravity inside the black hole would crush the ship.
“Has anyone calculated how much time we have before the black hole pulls us in?” asked Captain Simpson, leaning forward.
“Our speed will continue to increase every second now,” Pierre replied. “We are well into the gravitational field of the black hole. I estimate we have no more than 36 hours before we reach its center.”
The room was silent as each individual thought about the ramifications. Any chance of returning home was gone. Even if there was a wormhole at the center of the black hole, the ship would probably be torn apart by the gravitational stresses. If they did manage to transit the wormhole, they could end up anywhere in time and space. Eventually, their supplies would run out. They would most likely starve to death in the ship somewhere deep in unexplored space.
“Then let’s get busy,” ordered Ty, reaching a decision. A small chance was better than none. “We will do the EVA first and patch the hole in our hull. We have extra plates of Luxen for that purpose.
-
An hour later, Ty floated at the end of a tether secured inside the FarQuest’s main airlock. He was using his small jet pack to maneuver a three-foot wide piece of Luxen over the hole he had found in the hull. The hole itself was on the upper section of the hull above the ion drive chamber. It measured nearly two and a half feet across. Ty had already used a special cutting torch to smooth out the jagged edges a few minutes earlier so the patch could be placed over it. Later he would add a second patch from the inside to cover the interior section of the hole.
As Ty worked, he occasionally glanced up to gaze at the stars around him. From this distance, the neutron star and the black hole were indistinguishable from the other stars that littered the void. Ty spent long minutes welding the Luxen patch securely to the hull, watching as the bright arc from the special welder glared in his visor covered eyes.
Finally, Ty was finished and moved back to look at the job he had just completed. He felt extremely lonely floating by himself in his cumbersome spacesuit outside the FarQuest. The clean, cool air from his suit was continuously recycled for breathing and helped to keep him calm. Using his jet pack, he moved back into the airlock, pulling the tether line inside before shutting the outer hatch.
-
Early the next morning, after a few hours of drug induced sleep, Ty waited for Winston to report from main Engineering. Winston and Captain Simpson were finishing the final adjustments to the magnetic containment field for the fusion reactor. Without power from the fusion plant, they could not send a clear message home through the interference from the neutron star and the now very near black hole.
Back on Star One, no one would be able to guess what had happened. Their original data should have arrived after twelve hours of transit time and now, for nearly eight additional hours, there had been no communication from the FarQuest. Ty could imagine the confusion and concern back on Star One. He knew that Steve would have realized by now that something was terribly wrong.
“Ready to go online, Commander,” Captain Simpson reported from Engineering. “We will run everything from the main engineering console. That way, if there is a problem, we can handle it from here.”
“Let’s do it,” Ty responded. Look
ing back over his shoulder, he saw that Lieutenant Strett was at her console, monitoring the ship’s systems.
“Magnetic containment field established,” stated Simpson over the com as the reactor was brought slowly back to life.
Ty watched closely on the Flight Deck as fusion power was gradually restored, and Lieutenant Strett shut down the fuel cells.
“Everything looks normal,” she commented, checking her systems carefully. “Power levels are in the green, and ship systems are functioning normally.”
“Commander,” Pierre LaRann’s voice came over the com. “I would like to launch two of the ion probes into the black hole as soon as possible.”
Glancing at Lieutenant Strett, who was busily checking her console, Ty replied. “Why launch the probes? What can they tell us that we don’t know already?”
“By launching the probes, one at a time, they will be pulled into the black hole and possibly the wormhole before we are,” LaRann replied.
“What good will that do?” asked Ty, confused.
Ty knew that once the probes got close to the black hole communication would become impossible. The black hole itself would prevent any transmission because of its mass. Once the probes reached the event horizon all telemetry would cease instantly. Nothing could pass through the event horizon; it would capture everything, including light and radio waves.
“The probes can report back on conditions they encounter before we get there. Also, at some point, the gravity from the black hole is going to make communication with the probes and our transmissions back to Star One impossible. We want to transmit data back until the very last possible minute. Furthermore, by monitoring the probes we can better adjust our course for the wormhole.”
“Can you give me the times you need the probes launched and what course trajectory you need them on?” Ty asked. He still didn’t see how this would help.
“We’ll have it to you within ten minutes,” Pierre responded.
Twenty minutes later, Captain Simpson was back at his flight control console, readying the two ion probes for launch. Ty had run a computer study trying to estimate what their current speed was. The numbers didn’t make any sense. Their speed was now increasing dramatically as the intense gravity from the neutron star and the black hole drew them in. At their current rate of increase, they would enter the black hole itself in another 24 hours.
Star One: Dark Star Page 21