“I am. And I will get you that help. Also, I’ll have Comm patch my command channel into your egg so you can talk to him.” She clicked off: “Comm: patch my command channel through to Mr. Martinez. Also, order Mr. Crow, Dr. Ang, and Ms. Fiorella to report to my quarters, immediately. If I’m not there when they arrive, I will be shortly.”
She went to Engineering: “Dr. Greenberg? Where are we?”
“Off-line and shutting down. We’re shutting down everything as fast as we safely can.”
“Inform me if you start seeing more anomalies.”
“Yes, ma’am. We need to talk to Becca as soon as she can get back online, this is a rather complicated situation.”
“Do everything you can, Dr. Greenberg. Consider yourself in charge until I tell you otherwise.”
“Oh, no . . . oh no.”
Greenberg was no dummy.
With the situation stabilized, Fang-Castro turned the bridge over to the second officer, told him to get the off-watch executive officer up to the bridge as fast as he could be roused from his sleep time. “I will be in my quarters for a few minutes, but available at a second’s notice. Comm, keep me active all the time. And get me Joe Martinez right now.”
Martinez came in over her implants as she walked down to her quarters. “What’s your status, Joe?”
“I’m grappling onto Sandy’s egg. Man, the kid’s got some reflexes: he flipped the egg over when the radiator blew and took most of the damage on the corner of the undercarriage. I’ll have him back in half an hour. We’re gonna have to take this slow, the whole hookup’s pretty unstable. But I’m talking to him on the command channel and I think this is gonna work. He’s leaking air, but he should have plenty to get him inside.”
“Good. We’ll see you there.”
The second officer: “Ma’am, we’re getting a flood of inquiries about the shudder that went through the ship.”
Shit and double-shit. “Tell Comm to put me on the ship-wide.”
“Comm: you’re on, Captain.”
Fang-Castro said, “Your attention, please. This is Captain Fang-Castro. We experienced a difficulty on engine restart. This was the shudder some of you may have felt. The ship is in no danger whatsoever. Please continue with your normal operations. Engineering is shutting down the engines while they analyze the difficulty, so the ship will be in free fall for a while longer. I’ll inform you of our status further when we’ve fully evaluated the situation. Captain out.”
Crow, Fiorella, and Ang were waiting at her cabin door. Crow asked for them all, “What just happened?”
“Come inside,” Fang-Castro said.
She shut the door behind them. They all remained standing as she told them about the accident, and Fiorella buried her face in her hands and Ang said, “Oh my God.”
Crow shook his head.
Fang-Castro: “I want you all to come with me down to the egg section, to meet Mr. Darlington. I suspect you’re all aware of his relationship with Becca. We’re not sure how he’ll handle it. He’s a young man . . .”
Crow put up a finger.
“Mr. Crow, you have something to tell us?”
“Sandy’s not exactly what he appears to be, or rather, he is, but he’s also quite a bit more. We’ve held it close, but he’s actually one of my people. I expect all of you to hold this confidentially, but Sandy was an army officer in the Tri-Border fight, and not just an officer, but in a rather . . . extreme . . . or elite . . . outfit. He saw quite a few of his comrades killed. His friends. He suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, which accounts for his somewhat . . . lackadaisical . . . attitude. From which he has been recovering, as you may have noticed. He’s been extremely effective in his job—in all his jobs. But: what this will do to him, I have no idea.”
“I do,” Ang said. “I will meet you down at the eggs. I need to run get my bag.”
Fiorella was speechless. For almost the first time in her life.
Fang-Castro asked her, “Are you all right?”
“No. Yes. I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean. Let’s get down there.”
—
Martinez maneuvered Sandy’s egg up to the garage, and two space-suited techs hooked up the egg and pulled it inside. The air lock was resealed, and the interior atmosphere checked for any toxic emissions from the egg. There were none; if there had been anything coming out, it had been harmlessly outgassed into space.
The lock was pressurized and the rear garage doors opened. Sandy had no power in the egg and the techs didn’t want to power it up, should there be some problem, so they opened his access hatch with a hand crank.
He was met by Fang-Castro and the others. Sandy eased out, looked at their faces: “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Fang-Castro said, “She was killed instantly.”
“Are you going after her egg?”
“No,” Fang-Castro said. “We need to concentrate our resources on the crisis here. Going after her would present an unnecessary risk.”
“Then don’t do it,” Sandy said. “Dead is dead. No point in throwing good bodies after a dead one.”
Ang muttered, “Oh, boy.”
Sandy gave him a toothy grin: “Dr. Feelgood. I hope you know what I need.”
“I do. Where are you at?”
“About a five and going down. I was at a nine when the metal hit the fan.”
“Are you using any drugs?”
“Stims, from time to time. Not for several days.”
“No street drugs?”
“No.”
“Adrenal implants?”
“They’ve been pulled.” Sandy looked at Crow. “You told them.”
Crow nodded: “Had to.”
Ang said, “Roll up your sleeve. I’m going to get you started.”
Sandy nodded and smiled and pulled his sleeve up. Ang pushed the pressure injector against his arm and said, “Here it comes.”
Tears started running down Sandy’s face and Fiorella put an arm around his waist and said, “We’ll walk you back,” and Crow patted his shoulder and said, “Captain Darlington. I just . . . I just . . .”
Sandy thought through the drugs, So that’s what Crow looks like when he’s sad . . .
Later that evening, Sandy was lying on his bunk, watching an incoming episode of Celebrity Awards, with Kilimanjaro Kossoff—KayKay—in a stunning red half dress taking a golden trophy for her sponsorship of a massive troop of penguins being relocated in Antarctica, away from their particular melting ice shelf. “When I saw those birds . . . penguins are actually flightless birds, which a lot of people don’t realize . . . when I saw those poor birds, I just knew in my heart . . .”
His door buzzed, and though he didn’t feel like talking to anyone, he said, “Come in,” and the door unlatched and Crow came through and tossed him a can of beer. He had another for himself, and dropped onto Sandy’s chair.
“How you doing?”
“About as well as usual.”
“I don’t know quite what it’s like—the drugs.”
“It’s like somebody removed a couple of cc’s of your brain,” Sandy said. “I don’t feel much concern for anything, or anybody. I really don’t. Ang will start pulling the drug levels down in a week or so, and if he does it right, I’ll be all smoothed out by the time we reach Saturn. Crazier than a fuckin’ bedbug, but smoothed out.”
Crow stared at him for a minute, then said, “Really?”
Sandy popped the top off the beer: “Really. I’m surprised you haven’t done this.”
“I’ve lost a couple friends,” Crow said. “But when we lost them, we didn’t know it. We kept hoping. We only knew they were lost when they never came back. That takes the edge off. We’re still kind of hoping, you know? Like maybe they bailed out and are living in Istanbul or something. The ot
her time . . . You know I was married?”
Sandy smiled at him: “That seems uncharacteristically optimistic of you.”
Crow hunched forward in his chair. “Yeah. She was the daughter of a Marine Corps general. A flier. In his spare time, he liked to go up in those little stunt jets, fuck around. He’d take her up with him—she liked it—and one day, something broke and he stuck the goddamn jet right into a goddamn mountain. The last thing he said before they hit was, ‘I’m sorry.’ He was talking to her.”
“Ah, boy.”
“Didn’t do the drugs,” Crow said. “I wanted to feel it. I think if anything like that ever happened again, I’d do the drugs.”
“Which is why I’m sitting here watching this moronic vid with a smile on my face,” Sandy said. “They got good drugs now, man. You’re still all fucked up, but it doesn’t hurt as much.”
“Huh.” Crow looked at the screen and asked, “You mind if I watch for a while?”
36.
Fang-Castro was entirely certain she was the unhappiest ship’s captain in the universe, or maybe just the galaxy. The radiator blowout had been about as bad a disaster as one can have in space and still live to regret it.
The blowout had left the Nixon adrift, though it was still tearing along at over a hundred and seventy kilometers per second. They had no propulsion. The VASIMRs were cold and useless contraptions without the necessary gigawatts of power.
There was plenty of electricity from the auxiliary power plants to run all the onboard functions. Life support, computing, communications, none of those were in any danger. They could survive just fine, for a few years.
But they weren’t decelerating and they should be. If that didn’t change, they were on a one-way trip out of the solar system. A year would see them passing the orbit of Pluto. Two and they’d be through the Kuiper belt. A century would pass before the Nixon would reach the Oort cloud as a lifeless tomb carrying the corpses of ninety people who’d died long, long before. The stars were millennia beyond that.
But the aliens . . .
What kind of civilization had built something that could traverse those distances? She couldn’t imagine. And why had they come, stopped at Saturn, and then left again? Even less fathomable. Her mission was supposed to bring back answers to those questions. Now she wasn’t absolutely sure she’d be able to bring back her crew.
Fang-Castro looked around the table. Crow looked impassive, as usual. No, more like implacable. The man was not happy. She didn’t blame him in the least. Bad enough having an accident that killed someone, bad enough for it to be their chief engineer. Bad enough that it left them adrift, at least temporarily, without propulsion.
Worse that it was Becca Johansson. Fang-Castro had come to genuinely like her. Totally different cultures, totally different upbringings, but they’d both grown up to take no nonsense from anybody, to follow the facts where they led, and to never, ever yield unless they had to.
Martinez—the chief of operations, or head handyman, take your pick—Francisco, the exec, and Darlington rounded out the group in the room. Darlington was not involved in the discussion, but was recording it: he’d insisted on carrying through with it, and Crow had asked Fang-Castro to allow him to do it.
They all turned as Wendy Greenberg walked into the room. She looked flustered. “I’m sorry I’m late, we wanted to pull the latest out of the engines and out of Nav.”
She took the empty chair and Fang-Castro nodded and said, “All right, let’s begin. It’s oh-nine-hundred, October 28, 2067. It’s one day after midcourse flip-over and the heat exchanger accident that shut down our propulsion system and killed Chief Engineer Dr. Rebecca Johansson. A full report on that death will be filed later. I’ve instructed Mr. Sanders Darlington to fully document this meeting.”
She looked around at everybody, then continued, “Dr. Greenberg . . . Wendy . . . I do appreciate the situation you’ve found yourself in. I understand your people have been working nonstop to understand the situation and figure out what we’re going to do about it, and you may not have reached any final conclusions, yet. Tell us what you know, because we are looking at a number of critical decisions that need to be made very soon.”
“Let me start with a quick review,” Greenberg said. She touched her slate and looked at it. “Yesterday, when we had Reactor 1 up to eighty percent output, we suffered a side blowout in Heat Exchanger 1 below the slot nozzle about three-quarters of the way outward on the nozzle boom. We’re still investigating the cause of the blowout, but we registered a control anomaly in one of the heaters in the vicinity of the blowout before it occurred. We were in communication with Dr. Johansson over how to deal with the anomaly when the blowout occurred.
“At 1:17 P.M., ship’s time, Dr. Johansson’s service egg was struck directly by a large slug of radiator melt, several hundred kilograms, traveling at tens of meters per second. Essentially all onboard systems—power, propulsion, communication, life support—were instantly disabled or destroyed. The impact threw the egg away from the ship at substantial velocity. Mr. Darlington’s egg was also struck by escaping melt, but the damage was less severe and Mr. Martinez brought him safely into the hangar bay.”
She touched her slate again, scrolling. Greenberg had had a taste of the same drugs that were smoothing out Darlington.
Greenberg continued. “As soon as Engineering registered the blowout, we initiated an emergency full shutdown. We dropped partitioning baffles into HE1’s melt reservoir, which were successful in slowing and eventually stopping the hemorrhaging of radiator melt into space. We were able to recover much of the melt using the procedures we developed after the first radiator test in Earth’s orbit. We still lost a few tons of metal, but that’s well within our reserve allowance for the heat exchanger system, especially in our new situation. Which brings me to the measures we are currently recommending.”
Fang-Castro said, “Excuse me, but for the purposes of this record I would like to insert that all evidence shows that Dr. Johansson was killed instantly upon impact. Accordingly, we concentrated our efforts on containing the damage to the ship rather than recovering her damaged egg. A trajectory for that egg has been calculated and has been entered into our ship’s records, as a contingency in the unlikely event that there should someday be the possibility of a recovery.” To Greenberg, she said, “Go ahead, Wendy.”
“Yes. At this time we don’t think we can repair the breach in the heat exchanger wall. It’s right below the slot nozzle, which is a very precisely designed and controlled assembly. We can’t patch the hole without altering the behavior of the nozzle in that area and, as we’ve seen previously, the radiator ribbon system is challenging to control and even more difficult to model. We don’t feel comfortable that we can repair this section without risking a major failure on start-up.”
She looked around the table, and then spoke directly to Fang-Castro: “Fortunately, this should not be necessary. With only one functional reactor, we do not need the entire capacity of the heat exchanger-radiator system. We think we can wall off the heat exchanger and terminate the slot nozzle just inboard of the damaged section, which will still leave us with seventy percent capacity on that side. We plan to make the same modification to the undamaged HE2 system to keep performance symmetric. That still leaves us with the capability to dissipate a hundred and forty percent of the entire output of Reactor 1. That’s pretty much it for the moment.”
“So we won’t be going out to the Horsehead, or wherever,” Fang-Castro said. “How long before we’re up and running again?”
“I can’t give you a good estimate, yet,” Greenberg said. “I don’t think a week. The heat exchangers need to cool down enough that we can work on them. While we’re equipped to make these kind of modifications, it’s not something we ever had to do in the field.”
Fang-Castro turned to the exec: “Mr. Francisco, what does Navigation tell us?”
“And the bad news?”
“The bad news is that we’re still outward bound at full velocity, so we’re going to overshoot Saturn’s orbit. Every day without propulsion adds fifteen million klicks to our overshoot. We won’t be able to make a direct rendezvous with Saturn. We’ll fly on past, bring the ship to a full halt, and then fly back to Saturn.”
“And we have the reaction mass for that.”
“Yes, but we don’t have unlimited amounts. Flying that second leg from beyond Saturn back in, the maximum velocity we can achieve is around twenty-five kilometers per second and still stay within our mass budget. The way Nav figures it, every day of overshoot costs us nearly a week on the trip back in. What it comes down to is that we’ve already lost almost two weeks on our arrival time and every additional day that we’re in free fall delays our arrival at Saturn by another week.”
Fang-Castro nodded. “Our ETA was February 15. Another week’s downtime, Dr. Greenberg, moves that out to, hmmm, April, days after the Chinese are projected to arrive. That’s not really acceptable.”
Martinez asked, “Wendy, why can’t we shut down Exchanger 1 and run all the waste heat from Power System 1 through Exchanger 2? That would be a quicker fix.”
Greenberg looked worried. “That’s a really asymmetric situation. Especially since we’d be running Exchanger 2 at full load. We’re talking about nearly five gigawatts of heat. It’s not just a matter of opening a couple of valves. Plus, we’ve never fully simulated that scenario, let alone tested it in the field. You’ve seen how unstable the system can be. I can’t say it won’t work, but I think we’re more likely to break something badly trying.”
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