“It still sucks, Sir.” I winced as I said it.
But Chotek smiled. “What is the saying in your military? ‘Embrace the suck’?”
“That saying is about things you have to get through, in order to accomplish the job. Out here, now, there is no job. There is supposed to be an end to the suck, but we have no mission.”
“Survival is our mission now. We survive, and wait for Skippy to revive. Survive, without risk of exposing our presence out here. Have you selected a destination for us?”
“No, not yet,” I said truthfully. The full truth was, I still had no idea where we could go to both survive and to hide. “I’ll check with the science team again, see if they have a better idea.” So far, the best idea from Friedlander’s team was to put the ship into orbit around an anonymous red dwarf star, and rig up solar panels to power the life support systems after the reactors failed. That idea had the advantage that it didn’t require us to locate and get to a habitable but uninhabited planet. All we needed was to get the ship into orbit around a boring red dwarf star, in a star system where no species had even a single facility. The problem with that idea was, we only had enough solar panels to power a couple of inflatable shelters, and we had no way to manufacture more solar panels. Friedlander had his team working on that problem, I wasn’t hopeful about it. The life support system of a Thuranin ship was energy intensive, basically they cracked breathable oxygen out poisonous carbon dioxide using some high-tech device that drew a lot of power. The backup oxygen system was only designed to work for a few weeks.
We didn’t have any good options.
The first jump was successful, according to our very low standards. The ship did not explode, we did actually jump, and we emerged only nine point two million miles off target. It took Friedlander’s team forty five hours, nearly four days, before we could jump again. Friedlander looked completely exhausted when I talked to him, shortly after he declared the system was physically ready for another jump. “We’re ready?” I asked. “You’re confident about it?”
“I am confident the drive will not explode,” he said while stifling a yawn. “We did discover a potentially serious problem.” I set a fresh cup of coffee on the table in front of him, he shook his head and nodded toward a pile of dirty coffee cups. “Remember I told you that jumping has quantum effects even on inactive coils? They degrade whether we use them or not?”
“Yeah. You said that is why we can’t travel all the way back to Earth.” Since he wasn’t going to drink the coffee, I regretted giving it to him, and wondered if it would be Ok for me to take it back. The past couple days, I hadn’t slept much either.
“We came through that first jump nine million miles off target, not because we programmed the jump incorrectly, but because the active coil package partly failed in mid-jump.”
“What? The coils burned out?” That surprised me. The reason it took so long to replace the coil package is that the coils we had used for the jump still retained a lot of energy, and it was dangerous to handle them.
“No, they didn’t burn out. They failed to work together properly, so some of the coils shut down partway through the jump sequence; that’s why they had so much stored power after the jump,” Friedlander rubbed his tired eyes. “We got over the issue of swapping out coil packages, that’s not the problem now. The problem is that because the coils weren’t working together properly, the jump generated a more powerful quantum resonance that normal. That affected all our jump coils, even the ones we weren’t using.”
“Oh, crap.”
“You see the problem.”
“I think so. Each jump is going to shorten the life of every coil on the ship?”
“Even faster than we expected, yes.”
“How bad is it?” I was glad I had not drunk that coffee, my stomach was already churning with acid.
“I don’t know. We don’t know. Not yet. We don’t have enough data. After the next jump, we’ll have a better idea how bad the damage is.”
“Bottom line, Doctor. What’s the worst case?”
“The worst case? If future jumps are as bad as our first, we will lose jump capability before we reach our destination.” He meant the red dwarf star we had picked almost at random. He picked up the coffee cup, swirled it around, took a sip and set it down. “Do we have an alternate destination?”
“No. No, we don’t. Doctor, we can jump now?”
“As soon as we validate the calculations, yes. A few hours.”
“That’s good enough. I want a twenty four hour stand down for your entire team, once those calculations are complete. That means you sleep, relax, eat, use the gym, do anything other than work or thinking about work. If we have to, we can jump immediately. After a full day, when you are rested and have fresh minds, you need to take another look at the jump drive. See if you can get us to jump with less of a resonance, or whatever it is.”
Friedlander and his team mostly took a day off; I ordered the door to the science lab locked and they took the hint. After a day off, they approached the problem with a fresh set of eyes and after two days, thought they had a solution.
They didn’t. Our second jump was not as bad as the first, it still wasn’t good. The third jump was worse than the first, and our science team didn’t know why. Instead of immediately working to swap the expended coil package for a new one, Friedlander had to sort through packages to find one that wasn’t already so screwed up to be unusable. Alarmingly, there were only three sets of coils still functional. When he finished supervising the installation of the new coils, I met him at the airlock and helped him out of the bulky suit.
“Doctor, can we make it to this red dwarf system?”
“Maybe. Possibly. Colonel, I do not know. We are playing with technology we don’t fully understand. Barely understand. Please don’t ask me to project odds of us holding the jump drive together long enough to get to our destination, we simply don’t have the math. We need two more jumps, at least.” His eyes were bloodshot and there were dark circles under his eyes. Coffee could not cure what ailed him, neither could sleep. He wouldn’t be able to sleep well until we reached our destination and had the solar panels rigged up successfully. “I am not confident about the next jump,” he told me softly. “We don’t know what is wrong, so we can’t fix it. To an engineer, the situation is very frustrating.”
“We’ve jumped three times, and there is no sign of anyone following us. Take your time with the calculations.”
“Calculations are not the problem. With the state of the jump drive, we could input random numbers into the navigation system, and get about the same result,” he said with a weary smile.
“Doctor, you are working with an alien technology, and making the ship jump faster than light. What your team has accomplished already is remarkable.”
“It’s not enough. Colonel, if the next jump isn’t any more successful-”
“I know.”
Seeing Friedlander’s despair pushed me to make a decision. I went back to my office, where Skippy was secured in a box on my desk. Out of habit, I touched him, he was still cold. I called Nagatha.
“Good morning, Joe Bishop.” Her voice lacked a bit of her usual cheeriness. Without Skippy to provide memory and processing power, she had been progressively shutting down parts of herself; her consciousness was too expansive to fit within the Dutchman’s computers.
“Nagatha, I need to ask a favor of you. We have to do something; the jump drive might not hold together long enough for us to get to any place useful.”
“I have been monitoring the situation. Colonel, I have also been listening to communications within the science team. Dr. Friedlander did not tell you that his team recommends against attempting another jump, until they understand the source of the problem. Dr. Friedlander agrees the problem is very serious, he wishes another jump to obtain more data. He also fears that no amount of time will allow his team to understand the drive system. Again, I am sorry that I can’t help with the jump
calculations, or with analyzing the drive coils.”
“Nagatha, you have been doing everything you can. Now I need you to do something that could be dangerous to you.”
“Colonel, I am happy to help any way I can; I know our situation is perilous. If the ship becomes stranded in interstellar space, I will eventually deactivate when the ship runs out of power. What do you need me to do?”
“Well,” I wanted her to fully appreciate the danger. “You are not going to like it.”
THE END
The Expeditionary Force series
Book 1: Columbus Day
Book 2: SpecOps
Book 3: Paradise
Book ‘3.5’: Trouble on Paradise novella
Book 4: Black Ops
Book 5- coming November 2017
Contact the author at [email protected]
https://www.facebook.com/Craig.Alanson.Author/
Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4) Page 52