Twin Paradox_Book Two

by Purple Hazel

  There was simply no way to know how far away Nautilus was! Was she already approaching them? According to the mission plan for the eventual link-up, that would surely be the case, depending on when she’d departed Kapteyn B. But Steinhart had been chosen captain for a damn good reason. He’d proven time and again that he could think fast when under pressure or faced with a crisis. Speed was therefore of the essence, and the only factor he could still control was in getting a message pod fitted out and logged with details of what had happened. It needed to be sent as quickly as possible. It needed to warn the relief ship that the pod line had been disrupted. What’s more it needed to reveal to them in clear, precise, and brutally honest language, that the whole mission had been sidetracked.

  Wherever they got the message—whenever they got the message—they’d have to be told the awful truth. Their trip home was going to be much longer and there was nothing they could do about it but soldier on, using their intelligence, fortitude, and courage. No time for remorse or sadness. This was something no one could have foreseen or would have expected. If folks on both ships hoped to be able to see their homes again, they’d have to marshal all their resources and wherewithal to achieve their goal.

  This was no longer an “intercept and retrieve” mission. This was a life or death rescue operation; and for Santa Maria to arrive back on Earth, she could only keep hurtling through space toward their home planet. Stopping the ship to wait for Nautilus was quite auβer Frage. They’d never find them. The only option was to try and communicate with them and, at best, direct them to a new rendezvous point further out in space.

  Yet everyone pretty much knew the score at that point. If there was a second pod out of place—or even destroyed—Nautilus would be out there chugging along at one tenth light speed for many years before reacquiring their intended path home. That would mean a link up with Santa Maria was quite unrealistic. Steinhart realized this and told them so in no uncertain terms.

  “So that’s it then, my friends. I’m sorry. All we can do is launch a message pod when we get to the next matter device location. Meanwhile, we’ll send several more in the most likely directions the missing pod might have been diverted. Can we deduce this with our ship’s computers?”

  B.J. nodded emphatically, “Yes, Captain, most definitely. We’ve got the personnel to figure it out somewhere on this ‘ole crate I’m sure of it. Give me an hour ’r two and I’ll get you who we need.” In response to this, he gestured with his head for her to go make it happen.

  His eyes burned with intensity. She’d never seen the man this way! Not exactly like this anyway. Close to it of course, but not nearly this fearsome. She saluted quickly and scurried away, walking fast but not running, taking the time to think of just who she needed. Who was good at math like she was—and especially who was damn good at astronomy?

  Steinhart continued, still panting but remarkably cool and calm, “Next...we need to send a message to Space Programme Command Central back on the Moon. Tell them everything. Give them a new possible rendezvous point for Nautilus to intercept us if at all possible, just in case they can still communicate with them. Do we have enough pods for this?” Ozzie nodded, “Yes, Captain. We have five left, I believe—but I’ll confirm this.”

  To this Steinhart sighed and replied, “Good. Recruit everyone you need for this task, and report back to me on the command bridge. I’ll record my transmission for the message pod and have it ready in one hour.”

  At that, Lieutenant Guerrero snapped to attention and saluted before sprinting away at full gallop. He knew just who he needed, and ironically enough, the man he would be looking for was back in the Hydroponic Garden Center.

  “Now...as for you Lieutenant Jo...my deepest thanks for your diligence and dedication,” said Captain Stehter, “If there remains any way to save Nautilus—and ourselves—the only way we could have done so was due to your attentiveness. I can’t begin to think what would have happened if you hadn’t detected this when you did.” At that point, he gave Young-Min an assuring nod of confidence. It was as close to a smile as he could manage under the circumstances.

  “Now if you please, Lieutenant, kindly return to your post and await Lieutenant Ariel. She’ll be bringing a team of astronomers and mathematicians to aid you. Your station is the best location to begin testing for trails of space debris. Likely it was simply a space anamoly moving through and we can track its path with our computers. That is all, Lieutenant. Carry on.” Young-Min saluted and then trotted off down the corridor back to his station, returning to his now-petrified teammates awaiting him there. He couldn’t begin to picture how he was going to explain this to them.

  Only Captain Stehter remained after that, standing there alone, sulking in the middle of that massive cargo bay, muttering a short prayer under his breath. Instinctively, he looked up at the ceiling, as though it was heaven above, and sighed deeply. The weight of the universe was suddenly thrust upon his shoulders. Just how he’d break this to the crew, he hadn’t the foggiest idea.

  “Gegrüßet seist du Maria, voll der Gnade. Der Herr ist mit Dir...Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes, bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde unseres Todes. Amen.”

  * * * *

  Ensign Gary Orem had once been a fine young mechanical engineer, straight out of college at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Halfway between New Los Angeles and San Jose, it was just the right location for a youngster like Gary who had the brains to get a valuable degree, and an affinity for the beaches nearby, where he’d spend many a lost weekend in between exams and projects or right after “mid-terms”.

  He would have been an excellent choice for Matter Pod Launch team during the Away Team’s mission, but he’d been edged out during selection by a few candidates that Tommy Berwick expressed a preference for.

  He’d certainly gone astray since those exciting days before launch, no doubt about that. But deep within his almost permanently stoned mind was still a man of, technically, forty-one whose body was still that of a thirty-one-year old. He’d always been one to have a thing going with the ladies back during college. Had decent looks and a generous endowment—which he was quick to make full use of.

  On the Santa Maria though, as much as he tried adjusting to the reanimation process, and getting his body ready for the surface, he was overwhelmed. Seemed he could never quite acclimate to it, and he was not alone in that regard either.

  Instead, he joined up with friends and colleagues who partook of the THC-hybrid plants available in the Hydroponic Garden Center. Didn’t mess around with the food distribution system really. Just went right to the source. And when he was finally able to join the rest of the crew on the Return Team as they prepared to blast off from the surface, he was already a regular user and occasional abuser of cannabis laced foods—especially bell peppers and tomatillos—all grafted together in their root systems by Young-Min Jo and his fellow scientists.

  But now, three years later, Ozzie had to look past all that. At the end of the day, he knew Gary Orem was a top notch engineer, when properly motivated, and though he’d watched the young man’s deterioration he realized he simply had to have him back.

  Young-Min Jo had certainly been smart enough—and alert enough—to detect the missing matter pod. No question, he’d been the right man for the job and saved their asses from a horrible disaster. If it had been Gary—the old Gary that is—before his conversion to full-time Garden Geek—the breach might not have been detected. Ensign Orem was notorious among the team there for being a distraction; and usually wasted most of his time on duty whenever Ozzie wasn’t around. Sometimes even when he was—it just depended on when there was a new “harvest”.

  In this situation however, Ozzie realized he needed him back. Sober him up, tell him what was at stake. “Get in his face” and give him a good talking to—like some angry coach getting nose-to-nose with an errant player who’d committed a personal foul and cost his team field position. He knew the man would co
me around quickly and take things seriously if he did that. Best of all, Gary was a whizz at programming matter pods and had very nearly made the cut for Away Team. However now the situation was critical. Ozzie went straight to Garden Center to recruit him…

  * * * *

  B.J. meanwhile went looking for astronomers. Oh, how she wished she could awaken Kelvin! He had gone to MIT and that was the best astronomy school in the world—outside of maybe England. But she also knew there were a couple of Brits she could go see. Cambridge grads. Very savvy. Almost impossible to communicate with at times, but damn good at mapping the stars. She knew one in particular who’d work well with everyone on the team and one other gal from Switzerland’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She was a bookworm type of gal who largely kept to herself onboard, but B.J. knew she wanted her.

  They’d have only a few months to reach the next matter pod’s anticipated location, and those ladies had the best known abilities to try and project the path of any interstellar object that might have collided with their missing device. In truth, both girls had been saved for the return mission in part for just this type of task. They’d each been prepared all these years to be called upon in case something unusual did happen in space that Santa Maria would have to maneuver around.

  One was already performing tasks similar to this on the command bridge (the Brit) and the other was working on the other side of the ship in “Cartography”. That was a solo position with no other staff, which worked on mapping the galaxy as they travelled through it, creating accurate charts of the stars, asteroid belts, and comets that Santa Maria had been passing during its long flight. She was the shy, mousy type...sort of like a bespectacled librarian one might find in the Old Stacks section of a city library.

  But she knew her stuff and the combination of the two gals would make for a solid team in tracking down the possible location of the missing matter pod. Adding in B.J.’s instinctive skills with mathematics, and they’d solve this mystery for sure.

  Chapter 22

  Star Babes

  Ultimately three pods would be sent out, each with the same or similar message. The team of astronomers working with B.J. projected the possible flight path of any interstellar object flying through the matter device line, then pods were loaded up and prepared for launch, with Ensign Gary Orem programming them. This was his specialty during training and the opportunity to finally serve the mission’s vital objectives was just the beginning of what seemed to be the man’s dramatic moral turnaround.

  He proved to be quite dedicated and reliable once given an important task to perform. Ozzie noted this in his personnel file. He also flat out told him so.

  “Fine job, Ensign. Couldn’t have pulled it off without you,” he said to the big fellow—one of the few who stood almost eye-to-eye with him. Gary nodded and grinned with satisfaction, then actually saluted Lieutenant Guerrero properly. That was also a first. Usually he’d been a sloppy, unkempt “fuck-up” in the past. Now he was for the first time a real asset. Ozzie found he never had to “bitch him out” either—not once during the whole process.

  Meanwhile, B.J. and her squad of experts were just as dedicated and determined right from the get-go. It was in a sense what they lived for; and they rose to the occasion splendidly. Deducing a suitable suspect in the disappearance of the matter device was for a time, almost like a true crime thriller. One by one they examined each of the available options.

  Elena Durrer, the bookish young Swiss gal from Cartography, had already been studying information from her predecessor on the Away Team and advanced several different theories. Could it be something that no one could see? Like a black hole for instance?

  “Black holes can indeed move through space,” she pointed out. “The really massive black holes at the centers of galaxies will remain in place unless something cataclysmic occurs, but much smaller black holes...created from the collapse of dying stars...they can move fairly quickly. Basically, this is due to them being propelled by their own original explosions. Collision with another galaxy, in the case of CID-42...that’s one in particular that we already know of.”

  B.J. knew immediately she’d recruited the best possible prospects for her little team. Ensign Durrer was like an encyclopedia on celestial events. Natural phenomena that might have seemed unexplainable or impossible to grasp fazed her not in the least. She could answer the most difficult questions; and with a little patience on B.J.’s part, she, too, could understand the woman’s replies. It certainly was fascinating listening to her.

  “No need to worry about a wandering black hole heading through the area according to my research,” she concluded. “This form of space anomaly should be eliminated as a potential cause.”

  The British astronomy whiz she’d recruited, Margo Ebunoluwa, thought similarly. “I tend to agree with my colleague...no chance of meeting up with one of those, Lieutenant. They don’t go flying across space eating up planets and solar systems,” she observed. “And let’s not eliminate asteroids—perhaps even a very small one—as the culprit in this, either.” She pointed out that asteroids move due to the forces of gravity. In fact, they move through space and continue to move until acted upon by a competing force—mainly gravity.

  “They’re formed from something really, really big...like an imploding star, as in the case of a supernova,” she added. “Dust clouds from the explosion collect...combine...stick together, and as they move through space in most any direction, essentially nothing can stop them.” She further explained, “The only force that can commonly affect them is gravity, which pulls on them, you see?” When she said that part, she pressed her fingers together with her thumbs and yanked them downward to demonstrate her meaning. “So they generally move in orbits. That’s essentially their m.o.”

  So, were there other options to consider? B.J. figured they might as well rule nothing out. For example, how about meteoroids?

  “I don’t see that as a possibility, do you?” asked Margo. B.J. shrugged her shoulders with her eyebrows raised as if to say, “don’t look at me, honey.” But Elena was already shaking her head.

  “Nein,” she replied. “Meteoroids move within solar systems...they don’t typically hurtle across galaxies. Most are simply debris from an asteroid belt that breaks off and penetrates a planet’s atmosphere.” This didn’t necessarily rule out meteoroids as a potential cause of the breach, but both felt it certainly wasn’t the prime suspect.

  That only left comets as a possible answer to their dilemma—that and possibly a solar flare from the nearby Kapteyn sun. Solar flares were not completely ruled out...but the likelihood of one reaching the location of the missing matter pod was a tiny one at best. “Can’t see it happening—not with what I’ve studied, anyway. Nothing’s ever been confirmed in space that would lend to that conclusion,” commented Ensign Durrer.

  B.J. held back an insolent smirk from forming on her face. Elena suddenly sounded like a typical astronomer fielding a naïve question from some uninformed reporter on a news broadcast. Just like when they’d bring on some nerdy scientist to explain a concept that common folk wouldn’t be able to digest anyway and the poor journalist would be overwhelmed trying not to seem equally baffled.

  Nevertheless, comets were the best of those two options, and B.J. soon learned why. Comets can on occasion be ejected with enough speed to escape a sun’s gravitational pull. Thus, that same comet will continue to fly across interstellar space until it is pulled into the gravitational “well” of yet another star.

  “Say for example Machholz 1,” opined Ensign Ebunoluwa, as she sipped from a bottle of converted drinking water generated by the electrolysis system of the Santa Maria. “If it were travelling at forty-three kilometers per second, leaving Alpha Centauri system which is the closest star to our own,” she continued, “it would take about nineteen thousand years to get to us, but it could eventually move into our solar system and become captured in our sun
’s gravitational well.”

  B.J. sighed. “God these bitches can talk,” she mused. And Margo wasn’t done, either. “Unless it collided with something or broke apart due to a collision of some sort...debris from it could indeed spread across our system and particles might enter our Earth’s atmosphere. That might be our pincher right there. Might have been nothing more than a ten-meter wide object—might be even smaller, like your typical garden-variety type, but it most likely hit our matter pod and obliterated it. I shan’t worry that it attached to the device and carried it away. The force against it would shatter the shell and smash it to bits. After that, there’s little chance it would still function.”

  Elena Durrer agreed. “Ja, that’s likely what occurred, I’d wager. Chances are our poor matter pod device is no more.”

  To be safe however, as they eventually identified and tracked the debris trail that seemed to reveal the possible direction in which the matter pod had been taken, a message pod was quickly launched toward that general location. If the message canister did reach it (or somewhere near it) Captain Stehter could only hope that his counterpart in command of the Nautilus might intercept it, and with that information plot a course to locate the next position in the remaining pod line.

  Once they’d triangulated a course for it again that is. Once they’d even figured out what the hell had happened to them! Assuming those things was at best a shot in the dark, but they had to at least try. Steinhart could only imagine the turmoil that might occur onboard Nautilus when her captain and his crew discovered the mess they were in…