Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence)

  On the navigational screen, Calypso crossed over the 1.9AU boundary, two hundred and eighty-five million kilometers from the Sun. Inside the belt radius, inclined at twenty arc minutes above the ecliptic and falling through space towards them. At her current speed she’d blow past Mars ahead of its orbit and continue falling and accelerating towards the Sun. Projections weren’t clear if it would sling past the yellow star or fall into it. That depended on how much influence Mars gravity had on the falling ship. Their trajectory past Mars orbit was a dashed arc on the screen.

  Greta looked up from the communications stations. “We have a carrier signal. Awaiting input.” Her sturdy frame lit up briefly in red as Mars wheeled past the window.

  Mancuso took a pained, shaky breath. “Ok, send Calypso the program.” He felt like he might throw up. He just needed to get through this. He needed a doctor now, he was sure of it. He felt clammy.

  Emma squeezed her hand into a ball then raised her fingers to her mouth and bit into the already short fingernail on her middle finger. She worried at it, unaware that she was doing it.

  Greta sent the commands to the comm station from her tablet. She stood there for a moment, looking through them, double, triple checking her entries. She folded her arms over her chest as she read through the sequence. Rotate, pitch, roll, engine start, engine power, thrust angle, … She stood there for what felt like ten minutes, just staring at the screen. One of the crewmen at station ops cleared his throat and spoke into his headset quietly, advising thruster control of an upcoming planned altitude adjustment. Greta unfolded her arms and nodded to Pradeep to send up the commands.

  “Sending.” Sunil pulled the bundle into the sideband comm stream on the communications console and shipped the control codes to Watchtower for broadcast.

  Nolan, leaning over the back of his chair beside the comm station whispered to himself. “Here we go.”

  074

  Calypso.

  Ben Jordan was strapped into the command chair in Calypso’s cockpit. He was wearing his full suit, hooked into the ship’s lifelines for water and air. The Captain was still sleeping in his bunk.

  He felt bad about not being able to get Edson into a suit but he didn’t think he had time. He just hoped they’d be able to get the ship moving and stable, then he could deal with him.

  He entered the command codes carefully into the pilot’s console. A difficult task through the bulky gloves of the suit. The touch screen reacted to his gloved fingers but he couldn’t feel the contact so he had to be deliberate about it. One finger at a time.

  He verified the sequence once more before hitting Enter. He opened the comms channel. “Control, Calypso. Command sequence entered. Awaiting program. Over.”

  He checked his straps again. He’d checked the Captain’s bunk straps on his way up and made sure he was secure but he still felt like he should do it again.

  Crackle on his headset. “Trig?” It was Carl. He ignored him. Looked up above to the window overhead, the Sun shining brightly.

  A one second, high pitched beep came in over the comm systems. Ben winced at the sound. Had Carl done that?

  “What the hell was that?” Carl asked over the radio, his voice agitated to his own ears.

  Was that the Station? The ship? Maybe the ship was emitting a warning that they were on automatic. Might be wired to the suits to advise any extra-vehiculars that they were on remote control. This was all new to him but he didn’t like surprises out here. He wished he knew more about the details of the ship’s command systems.

  The console was flashing a message.

  AWAITING COMMAND

  Click. Click. “What’s going on in there, Trig?”

  Two minutes until the instructions came back. Then he’d start moving. The object was closing fast. None of the cameras could see anything outside the ship. Even Carl was no longer registering.

  He looked around the cockpit. The little LED strips around his console illuminating the captain’s old yellowed and wrinkled photograph of some island beach on Earth. The blue ocean waves under a setting sun. A palm tree. A world they’d never set foot on.

  One minute.

  Click. “Ben? You leavin’ me?” Click. Click. “Don’t leave me out here, Ben.”

  Click.

  The console flashed. Warning beeps.

  INSTRUCTIONS RECEIVED. ROTATION IN…

  Ben shifted in his seat. Cinched the straps holding him in place tighter, waiting for the ship to begin its automated maneuvers. The clicking continued over his headset. Was that Carl still? We’re leaving. His wife’s face came to him then. He pictured her smiling at him, her hair in her eyes. “I’m coming home.”

  A loud keening filled the speakers in the cockpit. Ben’s eyes widened as he lifted his gloved hands to his helmet, pressing them into it, the metallic screech blasting his ears.

  NEW INSTRUCTIONS… PURGE.

  In his bunk, Captain Edson Franklin was lit up in red. His eyes opened, the pressure in his head pounding in his ears. Red blood vessels popping in his eyes and tears of blood streaming down his face as he joined the screams on the radio. He screamed until the air drained out of him and his ship.

  The high-pitched radio shriek drowned out the screams of the men in suits. The lights flickered and cycled through their programming. Strobing. Rainbows at sixty frames per second.

  The console shone blue in the flickering light of the cockpit. Ben tried to cover his ears to no avail through his suit. So he just yelled to drown it out, adding to the din.

  The shriek intensified, wobbled in pitch.

  NEW INSTRUCTIONS… FUSION DETONATION.

  The ship’s engine powered on and heavy hydrogen fuel pumped into the reactor core. Superconducting magnets compressed it to a million atmospheres turning it to metal. High-powered lasers heated the core to the internal temperature of the Sun and the fusion reaction took over. The fuel dump grew the reaction until it blazed like a star, grew outside of the confines of the core, through the walls of the engine and continued until it engulfed the ship, eating through the fuel containers and consuming all of it from within.

  Carl witnessed the nova from fourteen kilometers away blazing outward like a growing sun, a frozen after-impression in his brain. The pulse fried all of the electronics in his suit. The burst of gamma radiation warmed his face as he wheeled away from the ship.

  The last thought that flickered through Carl’s brain as his optic nerves melted was, “It’s so beautiful.”

  075

  Lighthouse.

  A loud screech shrieked over the control deck’s speakers before Sunil Pradeep killed the signal with a stab of his fingers. He threw his headphones off his head and leapt up like he’d been bitten by a snake.

  The control deck on Lighthouse station was stunned quiet by the light from the explosion on screen. Some junior station crew were gathered by the window watching the light from the dead ship fade. It was easily visible from here, 0.9AU away.

  Mancuso broke the silence. “What… What just happened?”

  Ortega and Wilkins were hunched over the science station poring through the reams of data gathered by Watchtower. Ortega answered. “We recorded a burst of broad spectrum radio interference before the explosion.”

  Greta Patrick rushed over to their console. “Let’s see it.” Ortega and Wilkins had the burst displayed in a staggered set of squiggly line graphs on their screen rolling past, showing the amplitudes across the recorded spectra one frame at a time.

  Pradeep was scrambling to recover his headset and regain control of the communications channel.

  Nolan noticed Emma Franklin was still standing rigid near her station, tears streaming down her cheeks. He got up and went to her. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry.” He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, but she nodded her head and sat down. He patted her shoulder and gave it a squeeze feeling foolish and stupid and useless.

  Mancuso walked out of the control room. They were going to need time to process t
he data. Time they didn’t have. He passed the boardroom and kept walking.

  And Emma. She’d just had to watch that whole thing from the command deck. Terrible decision bringing her up here. What was he thinking?

  He passed a couple of shuttle pilots wearing suits and nodded at them. Had a shuttle just come in? He’d normally be aware of any craft arrivals and departures on the station but this crisis had eaten up all of his attention.

  He wasn’t relishing his next conversation with the Chairman. They were probably going to remove him from command. Replace him. They’d get to do that anyway.

  Mancuso plodded on through the station, to his stateroom. He took a look around, then pulled out his tablet and wrote a message. He left the tablet on his desk and then, noticing the box on his desk, the bow still on it, placed it near the tablet.

  Thirty five years he’d served on this station. He’d seen it nearly double in size since then. Made entirely possible because of the mining efforts of his ships. The colony’s ships, he corrected himself. The orbiting assembly facility and ship docks were possible because of the raw materials these ships brought in. Some of the materials made their way to the surface too, though less and less as the years had passed and the colony had become more self-sufficient.

  They were increasingly expendable up here in orbit.

  He took one last look around then shut the lights off and closed up his quarters. He walked back to the lockers near the second spoke and went to his suit.

  Back on the control deck, Patrick conferred with Ortega and Wilkins. She turned to Nolan who was still close by. “I think we’ve got something.”

  Nolan looked to her and inclined his head.

  “There’s a line on the frequency we use for our ship control channel. It spiked shortly after we broadcast the instructions to Calypso.” She let that sit there for a second. “I think… this sounds crazy.”

  “Come on, what is it?” Nolan didn’t have time for doubt and they were clearly dealing with something beyond the comforts of familiarity.

  “I think the object reprogrammed the ship to explode.” Greta paused. It had taken some effort to get that out. “It hijacked our command and control protocol and overrode our signal.”

  Nolan pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus.” He looked around. “Where’s the Commander?”

  He stood up and turned around the room. A feeling of unease in his gut. “Uh. Greta, what do we do about this?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Tell the ships to not activate remote control, for one thing. Hell, I’d probably rip that circuit right out if I were on one of those ships.”

  Nolan nodded. “Pradeep, send a message, all stations.” He hesitated realizing they only had two left out there. “Deactivate remote control circuits from control systems.”

  Pradeep acknowledged and sent the message.

  Samantha Davies, a junior crew specialist in the docking section spoke up. “Mister Nolan. Something’s happening in the Hub.”

  “Just a second.” He held up a finger as he turned back to Greta. “Does the station have anything like that on-board? Do we need to worry about that happening to us? Take a look and let us know.” He turned back to the junior specialist who was bent over her screen. What now, Bryce thought to himself as he walked over. He looked on the screen the specialist was pointing at, her face ashen.

  Grainy security camera view of airlock two in the shuttle deck, red light flashing above the door. Cut to the view inside.

  Man in a space suit. Standing there waiting for the air to cycle out of the lock.

  Mancuso.

  Emma watched the chaos unfolding in front of her, like she was in a dream. The visual from Watchtower was looping on the screen above them. Ortega had recorded the explosion from Calypso and was attempting to analyze it despite the room around her devolving into disarray. He was reading numbers out loud from the sensor blobs he was sifting through.

  Nolan sprinted as best he could in the low spin-induced gravity of the station to the anti-spinward exit. Another of the junior crew members shouted, “He’s not wearing a harness!” as Mancuso floated out onto the empty shuttle platform. Mars rolling beneath him, the giant hab ring spinning above as he held onto the railing of the shuttle dock. He seemed to be looking up into the stars above him.

  Emma watched the screen in horror. What was he doing out there? No. No.

  Pradeep was yelling after Nolan but the words didn’t register with her. Time slowed down for the second time in less than an hour as adrenaline pumped into her system.

  She felt the room spin around her.

  She grabbed the back of her seat and somehow managed to sit down in it. Her father… She looked up at the screen again. The brilliant flash that overwhelmed the optics on the Watchtower for a brief instant and then nothing.

  She turned back to the screen showing the docking bay. Mancuso was gone.

  Blurry lights. Tears.

  Jerem was still out there.

  “Jerem is still out there.”

  She looked around. Nobody was at their stations. Except Ortega. Pradeep was standing near the door, apparently unable to follow Nolan out of the room. His headset still in his hand.

  Emma got up and went over to him, wiping her cheeks.

  “Sunil. We still have ships out there.” She touched his hand still holding the headset and he looked down at her. He was wide-eyed. In shock. They all were.

  Through tears, Emma spoke up. “Everyone! We still have ships out there! We still need to get them home.” A couple of people stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Ortega turned in his seat and blinked. Where the hell had Nolan gone? She knew; she understood even though she was mad he left them here. Mancuso had held the station together himself for thirty years.

  Later. She’d process this all later. Put it in a box. A calmness came over her, numbing her. Her scalp tingling.

  Pradeep nodded. “Yes. You’re right.” He moved back to his station and plugged in his headset. He sat down.

  “Ortega, let’s go over that footage in the boardroom. We need to see if there’s anything we can use in it.” She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She looked up. “Would someone put the nav board back on screen?”

  The screen flashed and then the familiar black and red nav board replaced the looping video. Dashed lines for The Terror and Making Time now. Calypso ended in a dot. They’d lost contact with everybody?

  Ortega grabbed his tablet and stood up.

  Outside, Mars fell past the windows. The dark lowlands rolling below.

  “I’ll join you in a second, Nelson. I have to call my mother first and…” Her voice cracked.

  Emma got up and left the deck.

  She trudged through the curving hall of the ring section past the mess hall. Lights fading to orange as the day came to an end. People running past her in both directions as she trod on.

  What was she going to say? All she could think of was, Mom. I’m sorry. She held back more tears as she approached her room and opened the door. She slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

  Waves of tears and wracking sobs washed over her. She knelt on the floor and stayed there for a long time.

  076

  Making Time.

  A loud screech emanated from the cockpit’s speakers. Hal Wheeler killed the transmission and looked at his son.

  Jerem’s face was scrunched up, his hands halfway to his head. “What was…”

  He was cut off by a bright white light casting a second shadow in the close confines of the cockpit. The flare only lasted for a fraction of a second but left an impression floating on his retinas.

  “… that?” He looked at his father whose expression cycled from annoyance to bewilderment to shock.

  “I think that was Calypso.”

  They both knew it was. The station’s attempts to bring them home hadn’t worked. But what had happened? Jerem looked at his tablet, dumbfounded.

  Em. He couldn’t imagine w
hat she was going through right now. What was happening on the station?

  “Belt up, I’m starting the reactor.” Hal began making some adjustments to their course and without a countdown, started the engine. The ship hummed and vibrated through their seats as he adjusted the power.

  “Wait. Shouldn’t we wait to hear what Control says? They might have some instructions for us. Or something.”

  Hal turned the ship slightly before increasing the acceleration to Mars gravity, then doubled it. He was flying on stick, no autopilot. The acceleration continued mounting as he pushed the throttle forward. Earth gravity, then one and a half gees. A full two minutes before he said a word. The ship rattled as unsecured bits of equipment fell to the floor from the work benches.

  “There’s nothing they can do for us now. We’re on our own.”

  Jerem felt the increasing pressure wedge him further into his seat as the ship piled on the velocity.

  “We filing plans at least?”

  Hal didn’t answer, but continued checking his coordinates and adjusting their trim.

  A light flashed on the console and Jerem struggled to look forward at the message on his screen. All ships. Control advising removal of remote control systems from ships. Bypass all remote mechanisms.

  Jerem sat there, pinned by the acceleration. He looked over at his father.

  Hal killed the radios shutting down their telemetry link. There was nothing the station could do for them now. He turned the lights down in the cabin and let the acceleration push him back in his seat. He didn’t want his son to see him.

  … to be continued in TRAJECTORY BOOK 2.

  Acknowledgements

  It’s not easy reading a book by someone you know. It’s weird and awkward. I get that.

  I want to thank Ron for giving it a go even though he is “not a sci-fi kind of guy” despite his deep love of comics and graphic novels. He helped make the first fifty pages a little bit more tolerable.