by M. D. Cooper
It planted precisely where the calculations had indicated it should and the display dimmed as the fusion torch ignited on the rock, pulsing on every rotation to move Fuel Dump further from the coalescing aggregate cloud.
“So far, so good,” Joe said as he began plotting the path for the second thumper.
While Tanis was well aware of the processes used to move asteroids and even small worlds, it was really something else to be actively involved in it. Most people never moved anything much larger than a small people transport; here they were at the edge of an uninhabited stellar system, hijacking an asteroid.
More impressive was that they would boost it up to 0.10c and deliver it to the Intrepid.
The thought reminded Tanis to send her update letting the colony ship know they were currently on schedule.
Joe got triple check from Troy and Angela and sent the second thumper. Its twenty-two separate units sunk beneath the dust on the western side of the rock and moments later an eruption of debris plumed.
“Appears to be.” Joe scrutinized the scan of the rock, looking for any signs of fracture. Scan had showed that, aside from the aggregate and dust, the core was a solid chunk, split off from whatever was out there that broke apart to form the asteroid ring.
The booster was set to fire in ten seconds and Tanis mentally counted it down. In the brief time between one and zero, Joe’s hand flew out and pointed at something on the holo display.
It was too late. The booster fired and a fracture appeared in Fuel Dump.
With exquisite grace for a lump of rock, the asteroid split apart along its axis, one piece sliding to the side while the portion with the booster attached picked up speed and began to move away from the ship.
Tanis quickly killed the booster and glanced over at Joe.
“Well that makes things a bit harder.”
Joe scrubbed his face. “You’re telling me. The booster has small jets for maneuvering. As gently as possible, see if you can rotate it and gently slow it down.”
“Got it, gently,” Tanis said.
Joe, Troy, and Angela had screens of vector math racing back and forth across the main display as they calculated the best ways to catch both portions of the rock.
The Excelsior’s main grapple system was a set of stasis emitter arms and a carbon tube net. The arms would emit a field that kept the object from fracturing, and the net wrapped around the field to pull it behind the ship. While the ship could haul multiple items, it was a delicate dance to get more than one thing in the net, and they were short on time.
“It’s gotta be the one without the booster first.” Joe pointed at the calculation that favored that approach. “We can use the booster to get the other piece moving on our rendezvous trajectory and then simply scoop it up on our way.”
The plot appeared on the display and Tanis started running the computations to make her piece line up.
“Stellar north or south of our plot?”
Joe examined the convoluted acrobatics the Excelsior would be going through. “North, we can tweak a few degrees either way to sync up. Just be gentle with that thing. The booster is nowhere near centered.”
“This ain’t my first rodeo.” Tanis grinned at Joe.
“Yeah, you’re not bad for an MICI girl,” Joe placed a hand on her leg and gave it a squeeze before turning back to his screen.
The next half hour was full of running math, checking other crewmembers’ math, and then running more math. Through it all, Joe was deftly maneuvering the ship to match the slow tumble of Fuel Dump B. The Excelsior was rotating and shifting in a pattern that would make a bat puke and yet Joe was completely unfazed.
Tanis never ceased to be amazed at how good a pilot he was. His flight records could only tell so much. She had seen him in combat, adrenaline rushing, but this was something else—long, grueling work, matching wits against an asteroid the size of a small space station. She harbored no illusions that she could do it even half as deftly as he did.
Troy said.
Tanis laughed. “Damn, sorry about that. Would have been one hell of a mess.”
At long last the two stasis arms extended and—with the net ready to snap out—emitted their field. Visually nothing changed, then, as Joe manipulated the field, the rock stopped tumbling and aligned with the ship. Once the ship and rock were relatively stationary, the net shot out on either side of Fuel Dump B, meeting on the far end, secured to the rock by thousands of spikes.
“Latched on,” Joe said. “Plotting intercept course with the second piece.”
The burn was gentle and Tanis couldn’t help but run the calculations on their fuel levels over and over again. Whether they would have enough antimatter to accelerate and then match vectors with the Intrepid was now within the margin of error. She ran it again. And again.
Joe was right. Being in a situation where there was nothing you could do about the outcome really did suck.
As luck would have it, picking up the second piece went smoothly. The Excelsior began its final burn to meet up with the colony ship.
“Good news and bad news, sir,” Hilda said as she stood and turned to Captain Andrews.
“I imagine it’s the same piece of news.” The way this day was going, it was the norm. Only it wasn’t just a day, it had been several. He hadn’t slept the entire time, only retreating to his ready room periodically to catch a short nap on his couch.
“Colonel Richards’ latest update indicates that they got the rock—they named it Fuel Dump—and though it split into two pieces when they shed mass, they are on their way.”
“I can imagine what the bad news is.”
“They aren’t certain they have enough antimatter to make it here, or, if they do, to maneuver and match our vector.”
The captain nodded and Hilda returned to her station.
She was right, good news and bad news. Still, Tanis Richards was on the Excelsior and in his book that counted as a miracle just waiting to happen.
There was a ghost of a grin and Bob’s presence left the conversation.
Amanda’s avatar shook her head.
“Every time I run the scenarios we’re lower on fuel. We’ve got more drag than anticipated.” Tanis looked up from her console at Joe.
“I’m getting the same thing. I think the stellar medium is thicker than anticipated. Not much, but enough to screw us.”
“Can you come up with anything?”
Joe sighed, gave his console a long, hard look and then turned sorry eyes to Tanis. “I can’t.”
“I refuse to accept that. There is always something you can do. I didn’t survive over a thou
sand engagements to die because a spaceship runs out of fuel.” Her eyes glinted in the dim lights of the bridge, a fire in them refused to be quenched.
“I… I don’t know what to say.”
“Let’s look at our inventory again.”
Joe brought it up on the main holo. There were parts for the relativistic probe, another net, extra cores for the thumpers that hadn’t been used in Joe’s configurations, and several physical probes for examining rocks.
“Nothing much there,” Joe said.
“I wonder.” Tanis brought up the specs on the thumper cores. “I wonder if we can’t make use of these somehow.”
On another section of the display she brought up their route and removed the required fuel for one of the course corrections. It brought the numbers closer, but still within the margin of error. She tried removing a different course correction and got the same result. Then, looking at the fuel computations again, removed the fuel requirement for two course corrections.
The numbers came out of the error margin and showed green. They could rendezvous with the Intrepid and maneuver.
“OK, so if we can use the thumpers in place of fuel, then we’re all set.” Joe scowled at the display.
Tanis brought up a display of the ship’s exterior and pointed at a structural ridge that bisected the hull. “We plant the thumpers along this ridge and then fire them off to adjust our course. These calculations show they have the impact force to do it.”
“You saw what they did to the asteroid, right?” Joe looked incredulous. “They ejected trillions of tons of mass. They’ll tear the ship apart.”
“Oh, I don’t deny that it will be as rough as all get-out, but we don’t fire them all off at once. Stagger them, do it in stages. And the more, the sooner, the better; since it will take less to correct now than later.”
Joe looked her calculations over again. “We’re going to need to do EVA to mount them—the ship has no bots capable of that.”
“So where are the suits?” Tanis asked.
“What are you doing in here?” Priscilla looked up from her holo arrays in consternation. “Can’t you do what you’re supposed to for once?”
Amanda laughed. “When have I ever done what I’m supposed to? Besides, I can’t sit in a med bay while everything is going to shit.”
Priscilla glanced to her right and pulled several holo displays into the foreground. Her fingers raced over the consoles while her mind manipulated a dozen other systems.
“The accelerator is losing containment in the sixth coupling, isn’t it?” Amanda asked.
“Yeah, that coupling has always been a bit twitchy.”
“Let me help,” Amanda walked to Priscilla’s pedestal and pulled a holo display in front of herself. “I can help—you need it.”
“You know you shouldn’t, you’ve been through some ridiculous mental stress—what we do is hard enough under the best of circumstances.”
“I’m not asking to interface with Bob, just let me shunt some tasks. I have to do my part here, don’t you understand?”
Amanda’s unblinking stare bore into Priscilla’s eyes. She didn’t respond for a moment, fingers still dancing across her displays. Slowly she nodded. “I do understand, Bob does too. Here, take this, run the math and update the engineers with the ETA.”
Amanda pulled the data stream to her display and reviewed the information.
“What on Earth? This can’t work!”
Priscilla chuckled. “When has one of Tanis’s crazy ideas looked like it would work?”
“Yeah, but this time she’s crazy, she’ll tear the Excelsior apart and we’ll never get that fuel.
Tanis finished welding the last of her brackets to the ship’s hull. Joe was moving behind her, placing the thumper cores into the brackets, a small hauler bot trundling behind him on its magnetic tracks.
Joe sent the bot ahead to Tanis.
Tanis pulled the thumper core out of the bot’s carriage and slid it into her bracket, sliding the latch into place and then using her welder to tac it in.
Tanis hadn’t seen a single piece of dust impact the ship, but there was no point in testing fate. All it took was a tiny spec at these speeds to punch right through a person.
Minutes later they were back in the airlock, waiting for the inner hatch to cycle open. When it did they stepped through and removed their helmets.
“You’re going to need to go under for this again,” Joe said. “Those impacts are going to be vicious and I can’t worry about you and pilot the ship at the same time.”
Tanis nodded. “I understand. But let me get a BLT in first. I always seem to come out of stasis hungry.”
Joe looked over at Tanis in her stasis pod one last time before he brought up the thumper’s control display.
Joe chuckled and sealed his EVA suit. There was a good chance that even if the maneuver were successful the hull would crack open in one location or another. Emergency systems should be able to seal any leaks in moments, but Joe didn’t want to test out their speed with his life.
The screen showed a countdown to the first thumper firing and Joe had to force himself to relax and unclench his teeth.
The thumper fired on schedule and a deafening clang echoed through the ship. Moments later the second thumper fired and then the third and the forth.
Troy said.
Joe looked down at Tanis. “Hold on, just a few more to go.”
The Intrepid’s bridge erupted with cheers as the data came in showing that the thumper core detonations had achieved their goal. The Excelsior had altered course enough without using antimatter fuel. Calculations put it well within the green and the ship had survived the impacts with its hull intact.
Another round of cheers sounded as Joe’s smooth tenor voice filled the bridge net.
They were within just a few light minutes now and the response didn’t take long.
The response came back.
“Holy shit,” Tanis breathed as she got her first visual glimpse of the damage to the Intrepid.
/> They were approaching on the port side of the colony ship, the same side struck by the edge of the solar flare. At the rear of the ship, the housing had been completely burned off the port engine, exposing portions of its inner workings to space. Several of the gossamer arcs, which provided additional structural integrity to the ship, were gone, and a few more were warped and twisted.
The port cylinder rotated, showing Old Sam covered in large scorch marks. Tanis imagined those would be the areas with the failing stasis pods. Good thing someone had determined to bring an extra hundred thousand.
Several large stasis grapple arms were ready to take the load from the Excelsior and Joe communicated with the engineers, executing the handoff flawlessly.
Even with the thumper core assistance, the fuel situation was as close to the wire as possible. Once the final maneuvers were complete, Joe shut down the antimatter engines entirely and used thrusters to bring them into position for docking.
The Excelsior that landed was a different ship than the one that left a scant week ago. One side was scorched and dented from the cores and the forward shields were pitted and scratched. Upon visual inspection it could be seen that the structural strut the thumper cores had pushed on was cracked in two places. The Excelsior wouldn’t be going anywhere until serious repairs were done.
The ship eased in on the magnetic rails and Tanis pulled up a view of the dock. There had to be at least a hundred people down there, all cheering their lungs out.
“You deserve this as much as we do, Troy,” Tanis said. “You’re one hell of an AI.”
“I know that all too well,” Tanis said.
Tanis and Joe walked out of the ship’s port hatch and down a gantry to the waiting crowd. In the front stood Captain Andrews and Terrance Enfield. Both men were beaming and clapping with the crowd.
“This is getting to be a habit, you saving the Intrepid.” Captain Andrews smiled at the pair.