The captain sat in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. “Do.” Commander O’Connell’s presence and manner bemused him. He watched as she motioned the doctor in the door. He caught her reassuring smile and the return frown from the doctor. Clearly something was bothering both of them.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Ruger. Please have a seat.” He waited until she complied. “How can I help you today?”
The captain’s gaze didn’t miss a single nervous gesture or grimace from the doctor. He watched her fingers clench on the arms of her chair. He saw her eyes flick towards O’Connell. She licked her lips and prepared to speak, then frowned again. He waited.
“Captain, I’m afraid I have some unsettling news.” Cassie waited for the captain to prompt her further. She found his motionless features and ramrod straight posture to be even more intimidating than usual. When he didn’t even blink in acknowledgement of her statement, she pressed on. “There is a colonist who has fallen pregnant.”
O’Connell watched the captain become even more motionless, something she hadn’t thought possible. He seemed to shrink inward, trying to contain his shock. When he spoke it was in a soft tone that betrayed nothing but professional curiosity.
“Fallen, Doctor? An odd choice of words.”
Cassie laughed nervously. “Yes, sorry. She has become pregnant.”
“How?”
Dr. Ruger blushed. O’Connell blinked several times in mild dismay.
“Uh, well, the usual way, I’m sure.”
He leaned forward in his chair, placing his crossed hands on the desk. “You did not ask?”
“It wasn’t entirely necessary, sir. The colonist in question was not surprised, or, more importantly, dismayed at the news. I believe this was a planned pregnancy.”
Captain Hill sat back to think for a few moments. The idea that a woman would purposely put her health, and that of an innocent unborn child, at risk was almost unthinkable. Yet, some colonist had stopped taking her birth control and convinced her partner to stop taking his medication as well. On top of that, they had purposely planned the pregnancy. It was galling.
“Who is this colonist?”
Cassie swallowed twice. She licked her lips again and blurted out, “Marissa Hill.”
O’Connell watched her captain’s hands, folded in front of him, turn white at the knuckles as they clenched. She saw his jaw flex and for just a moment she was sure he was going to yell, or swear, or show some bit of emotion. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cassie shift in her seat. Maggie smiled down at her, trying to reassure her that the worst was over. When she turned her attention back to the captain, he’d resumed his veneer of quiet calm.
“She was not surprised by the news?”
Dr. Ruger shook her head. “No, she seemed to be expecting the news.”
He continued to ask questions in the same calm tone. “She is healthy? The baby is ok?” When he heard the doctor’s answers, he sat staring at the women, but not seeing them.
“Sir?” O’Connell’s soft question interrupted his thoughts. He frowned slightly at her. “If you are done with the doctor, sir? Her staff is paging her.”
Dr. Ruger’s alerter was beeping softly. She rose and nervously tugged at the pleat in her trousers. “My apologies sir, but I really must be going.”
“Absolutely, please don’t let me keep you. You’ll let me know if there are any further developments?”
“Not if, Captain Hill, but when.” She smiled to try to lighten the mood, but when the captain did not smile back, she hurried out the door. It clicked close behind her and the captain went back to staring off into space.
“By your leave, sir.” O’Connell said the words softly as she did an about face and moved towards the door.
“No, Commander, a word, if you please.” His eyes focused on her now. She turned back to face him. “Dr. Ruger felt uncomfortable coming to me with this news. Why is that?”
Maggie nibbled her lip for a moment before answering. “You intimidate her, sir. She was afraid of some emotional outburst.”
“Excuse me?” His tone was sharp and his look, accusatory.
“It is a delicate subject sir, under any circumstances. When your own family is involved…”
He waited for her to finish. When she stood there staring back at him, obviously fighting to find the right words, he grunted in annoyance. “I simply cannot understand how she would think I would hold her personally responsible for doing her job. All I ever ask of this crew, and of our colonists, is professionalism.” O’Connell did not respond. He stood and came around the desk. “She really finds me intimidating?”
O’Connell nodded. “Yes sir, she does.”
“Does everyone?”
She tilted her head back to look him in the eyes. “Does it matter?” She asked the question with an expression and frankness that belied her subordinate status. “I should think you would welcome the attitude.”
He said nothing. After looking down at her for a moment longer, he moved past her to the door. She turned to follow him and watched as he walked, with grim purpose, towards the lift leading to the colonists’ quarters.
***
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Brett’s opening salvo of words echoed off the walls of his brother’s quarters
Ryan sat his teacup down. “There is no need to shout, and I find your tone offensive.”
Brett’s color rose even more. “You find my tone offensive? Of all the gall, Ryan!” He stood glaring down at his younger brother, every muscle in his body twitching with tension.
Ryan’s cool demeanor only served to infuriate Brett further. With a sly grin, Ryan asked, “So, are you offended that I impregnated my wife, or are you more upset that you found out about it from the good doctor? Oh, and we will be filing a formal complaint about the violation of doctor-patient privilege.”
The captain took a deep breath and spoke in a more even tone. “Your rights to confidentiality ended the moment you violated your contract. The terms for colonists are crystal clear. Damn it, Ryan! There is a reason we forbade pregnancies and the presence of children. We don’t know what the journey or the Dremikian atmosphere will do to a developing child.”
“Has it occurred to you that this pregnancy might not have been planned?” The younger Hill brother picked up his teacup again and started sipping from it.
“Oh shut up, Ryan.” Brett straightened his jacket. “You and that cold hearted bitch planned this from the start. God knows what you’re up to, but this time you’ve gone too far.”
Ryan jumped up at the insult to his wife. He crossed the room in two strides and punched his brother in the jaw. Brett’s head snapped back. His fists clenched again and for a moment his rage boiled. Then he swallowed his anger and spoke in clipped syllables.
“Hopefully, you won’t regret this.”
Rubbing his knuckles as he walked away, Ryan turned. “I doubt I will. Please remember, you have no jurisdiction to punish me or my wife. I’m not one of your little toy soldiers.”
“You’ve punished yourself, Ryan.” Captain Hill shook his head in defeat. “You’ve done worse to yourself than any man could do to you. The upshot of it all? You have no idea of the enormity of your sin.” He left without looking at his brother.
***
Lieutenant Guttmann rounded the corner on his way to engineering. He rolled his shoulder and grimaced at the slight pulling in his side. During their boxing match earlier in the day, the captain had landed a particularly nasty left hook against his ribs. The bruise stung. He pulled up short to avoid running down the captain, who had just stepped out of the vacuum tube in front of him.
“My apologies, sir”
Captain Hill waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “My fault, I wasn’t watching where I was going. Where are you off to, Lieutenant?”
Swede motioned toward engineering. He tried not to stare at the rising bruise on his captain’s face. He couldn’t recall landing a punch ther
e. “I have a few hours still before the next jump. I thought I’d try to recalibrate the outboard sensors.”
The captain resisted the urge to rub his aching jaw. Ryan’s punch had connected solidly. “These calibrations are within specified fleet parameters?”
“Yes sir. The manual leaves me some leeway based on the conditions we encounter out here.”
“Write up a full report for me when you are finished. I’ll be in the mess until the jump.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Guttmann watched the captain walk away. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to operate strictly by the book, in accordance with the captain’s wishes, when the book didn’t cover half the contingencies they encountered on their journey. As an engineer he could appreciate the need for rules and guidelines, but as an officer in the ISA, Swede lived with daily exceptions to the “laws” of the universe.
The engineering bay was filled with the usual low hum of voices and the occasional beeping of a system alarm. Two senior enlisted personnel were removing a section of a systems display panel. Pieces of the display littered the floor around them. Lieutenant Guttmann stood over them for a minute to check their progress then moved over to the panel that controlled the outboard sensor arrays. He pulled up his notes on a tablet and then gently removed the control panel cover. The calibrations involved pieces and gears so miniscule that Guttmann could not see them without the aid of a high powered microscope.
He pulled the microscope glasses from their protective case and slid them on. Specially made to fit his skull and line up with his eye sockets, the glasses fit like a second pair of eyes. He adjusted the magnification with a sliding touch-scale on the side of the frames. It took a minute for him to bring the sensor components into focus. Satisfied that he could see clearly, he reached for his tools.
Swede immersed himself in his work. All of his thoughts were focused on the intricate pieces before him. While he was happy to direct the various enlisted personnel in his department, he found the constant divergent demands of command to be distracting. He was happiest tinkering with the computers and engines that ran the Hudson. Engines did not have egos to bruise and careers to worry about.
It was beginning to be a nagging, constant, concern to Swede how cheaply the Hudson had been built. He’d worked on the technology in regular Martian shuttles that was more reliable and more technologically advanced than the instruments he struggled with daily on the Hudson. The great legacy of the ISA was supposed to be how all the countries of the world contributed to build man’s first extra-solar, manned, craft. However, it was becoming clear, to Swede at least, that the cooperation had been more ceremonial than productive. Even the components produced by the supposedly rich and advanced nations of the world seemed cheap and hurriedly made. Despite her high billing, the Hudson was certainly not the shining pinnacle of mankind’s achievements in engineering.
The sensors took longer to calibrate than Swede had expected. By the time he finished his work and returned all the displays to their proper working order, he had only forty-five minutes to prepare for the next jump. He groaned when he remembered that he still had a lengthy report to compose for the captain regarding his new adjustments. His entire day would be spent on the reports regarding the sensors and the report regarding the impending jump and its conclusion. Swede whispered a silent prayer, hoping that God was beneficent enough to grant him an uneventful jump and, thus, a relatively short report.
***
Dr. Ruger was back in her medical lab, working on her own reports, when the enunciator came on and announced their impending jump. She saved her data and started her pre-jump checklist. Their previous jumps through null space had been uneventful and precisely as expected, but she was too much of a scientist to presume that their luck would hold. Eventually something would go wrong. In that event, she wanted to make sure all of her medical equipment was secured.
She was kneeling on the deck plating trying to tighten the clasp that secured the genome sequencer when her alerter beeped. The doctor rocked back on her haunches and tapped her wrist to activate the intercom.
“Doctor? We’re awaiting your affirmation of jump status.” O’Connell’s voice sounded slightly peeved.
“Sorry, Maggie. This latch is stuck and I can’t give my ok until this thing is secured to the deck plating.”
“Doctor, Captain Hill here. Please have someone help you fix that latch.”
Doctor Ruger rolled her eyes. “Yes sir. We’ll have it ready in a minute.” One of her male assistants tinkered with the offending part. He whipped out a small screwdriver and adjusted one of the screws. Satisfied that the sequencer was not going to hurtle across the deck, Dr. Ruger moved to her seat and strapped herself in. She hit a button on her indicator to show that the medical bay was ready for the jump. Almost immediately, the ship-wide enunciator announced the jump count-down.
Cassie checked her lap strap again and shot a glance at Fortunas. He was leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed. She knew from experience that he took cat naps during short periods of inactivity. He would respond if she spoke to him, but otherwise he was in a resting state. When she had asked him about his cat naps, he had given her a lengthy discussion of how the human brain was like an advanced battery that needed short periods of recharging in order to operate at max efficiency. While her medical training indicated that he had a point, her common sense told her that his five minutes naps weren’t as refreshing as he thought. Arguing with Ben Fortunas, however, wasn’t as simple as just letting him nap during jumps.
The bell gonged loudly throughout the ship, and there was a brief moment of seeming weightlessness. Cassie closed her eyes, since the momentary loss of gravity and the feeling that the entire ship was spinning on its own axis was enough to make her queasy. She still had her eyes closed when a horrific clattering and the feel of the deck plating shuddering beneath her feet indicated that something had gone horribly wrong.
Chapter 8
On the bridge, everything was chaos. The Hudson rolled and spun wildly out of control. Engines screaming, the ship lurched out of the jump conduit of twisted space and spiraled in an unknown sector toward unknown dangers. The captain shouted for status updates. Ensign Robertson frantically tried to pinpoint their location in the jump process. In the nose of the craft, O’Connell and Price fought to keep the ship from breaking apart.
“No! Shut it down completely! Hard shutdown sequence, it’s overcorrecting! Aft thruster full and pull back on the starboard stabilizers!” Maggie snapped the orders. Her arms were tense and her knuckles white as she fought to control the x-axis roll of the ship. “There, cut that and power back on my mark or we’ll lose that engine strutting!” She yanked on the control stick with both hands, leaving the keypad work to Price. They were both jamming on the port stabilizer with all their might. The nose of the Hudson dipped precipitously and a horrible creaking sounded on every deck as a long wave vibration moved down the horizontal beam of the ship.
Then, everything was still. The engines flared briefly before losing all power. Only the insistent whine of several status alarms broke the stunned silence on the bridge. O’Connell and Price still clutched the controls, too shocked to realize that they no longer had to fight for mastery of the ship.
The captain broke the silence. “Give me a location fix as soon as you can, Robertson. Ensign Chi, you will please coordinate damage control efforts here on the bridge. Commander, do we have steerage?”
The commander sat staring at the screens, trying to calm her racing pulse. She didn’t initially hear the captain’s question. Her head jerked when he, sharply, repeated the query.
“We have no steerage power at all, sir. The guidance and flight controls are shut down. I cannot determine the status of steerage until we have engine power back and run some tests. Inertia has us moving pretty fast. At this point, I think I can keep us from rolling until gravity has been stabilized.”
“You have the bridge. I’m going to engineering.” He stalked ac
ross the bridge and slapped at the control panel that operated the vacuum tube. As the hatch slid shut, he could hear the intercom buzzing with numerous reports of injuries and damage.
Dr. Ruger gingerly probed the base of her skull and winced at the lump she found. Her head had snapped backwards into the metal support beam of her chair when the ship lurched. Her alerter was beeping constantly now, and the intercom system in the medical bay was overloaded with requests for medical assistance on multiple decks of the ship. She stood and felt the room sway.
Fortunas turned when he heard her stifled gasp. He caught her arm and led her to a chair. Picking a light scope from a nearby desk, he flicked it across her pupils.
“Nauseated?”
“No, just dizzy for a moment. The gravity isn’t quite right, is it?”
He grunted. “It’s not, but a concussion isn’t helping your perception. Sit at your workstation, and let your team move around. I don’t need to spend my time worrying over you as well.”
“I’ll thank you to leave the medical advice to me, doctor.” She winced again as he helped her move to her desk. “All the same, I think I will sit here. Until you get the gravity fixed, that is.”
He cocked a bushy grey brow at her and patted her cheek in a fatherly gesture before returning to his side of the bay. Cassie turned her head, slowly, to her monitors and began to prioritize the injury reports that were flooding in. She quickly isolated the most serious reports and sent her two best assistants running to the correct locations. A crewman in the aft engineering spaces reported severe burns to his left arm. On one of the lower decks, a colonist had apparently not been seated during the jump. Her leg was badly broken. The rest of the injuries, one hundred-fifteen all told, were very similar to her own—neck pain, bruises, and mild concussions. She was going to have a very busy evening.
Lieutenant Guttmann had just seen his very busy day turn into a catastrophic nightmare. The engines automatically shut down when their energy output exceeded all safety parameters. He was sincerely glad that the safety shut offs worked. When the captain stalked onto the engineering deck five minutes after the incident, Guttmann made sure to emphasize that the safety checks had all operated as planned. He thought it best to mollify the captain with good news, before sharing the stark facts of what had gone wrong.
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