by Ginger Booth
What kind of sorry excuse for a life support engineer are you? Idiot! His self-harangue didn’t end until he found a real problem to chew on. That didn’t take long.
Ben aimed the shuttle’s powerful headlights at the broken wreckage that was the skiff. The skeleton of the crappy little eggshell was all too apparent now, a flimsy cage. One loop of steel – an elongated egg shape, squared at the engine end – ran around the craft’s mid-line. A similar loop, but narrower, ran along belly and top. Only four flattened barrel hoops fitted over them along the way. They held the broken pieces together.
Ben recognized the black coating the metal, spreading from aft, not quite reaching the front. Something caught fire.
“Chief,” he hailed his ship. “I could broadcast back what I’m seeing. But the world would see it. Get me a tight beam?”
“Tight beam…now, captain,” Cope replied. “I suggest you give the world a quick look-see, then cut over.”
In thoughtful slow motion, Ben did so, but only for 10 seconds. Judge might still be alive in there.
Grapples, he thought, trying to figure out how to pick up this broken egg without squirting its guts out. He nudged the shuttle, already close to zero relative velocity, to peek at the bottom more closely. Yes, that cross beam appeared to be glued on a little better than most. It was also directly beneath the star drive and warp device, probably the most crucial piece of this ruin to retrieve.
He reached for the grappler, hung poised with his fingers over the control, then decided against it. “Zan, hold our position. Keep a light on the subject. Wilder, we’re going over there.”
“Aye, cap,” they acknowledged thoughtfully.
No need to play pressure games. All three remained suited from when they dove out the trapdoor. Which seemed like an eternity ago – probably under 30 minutes.
Wilder opened the airlock, both doors, and hurled a couple magnet lines across to the skiff’s hull. On a test yank, one piece of hull flew back at them. It missed Ben in the airlock door by centimeters. The other line seemed sound.
“Go,” Ben directed, latching on to both the shuttle and their one line. With fluent ease, first Wilder, then Ben landed on their bit of sound hull. Finding the airlock would be redundant. Careful of sharp edges, Ben grasped a barrel hoop rib and slipped inside.
“Captain,” Cope murmured. “Request helmet video feed, you and Wilder.”
Ben complied without comment, making room for Wilder to swing in. He pointed out several jagged hazards to beware. But the truth was, in the sharp black shadows cast by the shuttle’s headlamp filtering through broken hull, it was hard to interpret anything. Their headlamps cast too narrow a beam, the two roving spots of illumination tending to inspire motion sickness.
He hunted through his tool belt, with no real recall of what he’d last stowed in it. Wilder found a flare first and stuck it on a beam above. That helped enormously, although its cherry-red interacted with the white beams in a weird plaid effect.
“Judge first.” Ben drifted forward to the tiny bridge. He had to pause a couple times to un-foul his line. Strangely the bridge window was intact. In a couple meters, the clawing fingers of fire black turned to gray and disappeared.
He reached the chair, and swallowed saliva, dreading to look. In ultra-slow motion, he flipped above Judge to brake himself delicately on the console.
Wow, that’s one cooked human, he thought as he peered into the helmet. Judge’s skin had practically melted off, and no maybe about the eyes. He looked away and breathed through his mouth a moment to keep from vomiting. “I don’t recommend looking at his face,” he quipped, then swallowed more saliva gagging him.
There were procedures, forms to be obeyed. That’s the only reason he checked the life signs readout. “Cryo! He’s alive!”
Of course he was. That automatic cryo on the p-suit was a miner’s best hope. Judge Frampton was a skiff boss. The man invested in his suit.
“I could kill him for you,” Wilder offered.
Ben shot him a glare. “We transfer this man to the shuttle, sergeant. We revive him. He has Yang-Yangs, same as us.”
“Sar,” the security chief granted reluctantly. “You realize that’s a pain in the ass.”
“Next target,” Ben growled. “There was a box, sergeant. Galley.”
Cope murmured, “Captain, Spaceways would be grateful if you put a high priority on our device.”
“I intend high priority on the device and the star drive, chief. Top priority is living things before they’re dead.” Ben blew out again, then softened his approach. “Cope, my problem is how to grapple this thing without collapsing it. Are you bringing Prosper around?”
“Not at the moment, cap. Issues.”
Ben froze to inquire, “Issues?”
“Propulsion is offline. Working on it.”
“Outstanding. Keep me apprised, chief.” Ben thoughtfully snagged a couple of the air bottles drifting around, and snapped them onto the rack on his back.
The ‘galley’ was notional at this point, its aft bulkhead caved into it. Ben selected a bit of broken door frame and wrenched it free. This served as a crowbar to pry the bent bulkhead out of his way. Eli’s test module was remarkably scorched, more so than its surroundings. But aside from one caved-in corner, it remained about the same shape as when last they met. The light button didn’t work. He tucked his chin to aim his headlamp and peer into its little window. The interior was full of floating globules. Then he saw one droplet float away from its broken corner. He slapped a patch on to seal the whole, but didn’t have high hopes. Seeds were tough, at least. He imagined the frog embryos and mustard plant were goners.
“What are you up to, sergeant?” he asked.
“Figuring out how to lug an asshole across to the shuttle, cap.”
“Excellent, keep it up. I have this box. Would attaching the box to Judge be convenient?”
After a pause, Wilder said, “Not really.”
“OK. Careful of the box.” He left that hanging in the hallway behind him. Crowbar in hand, Ben drifted back to the engine…space. The engine nozzles were simply gone, leaving the aft wall wide open. Stars and the alarming face of the gas giant winked at him through fractures in the hull. This provided good light, since they were on the sunny side of golden Pono at the moment.
He checked radiation readings from his suit, but they were typical of this region of space – extremely unhealthy without Yang-Yangs to busily repair his DNA. Normal.
He checked the star drive first. It seemed intact. He found the fuel cutoff, but it crumbled in his hand, along with the fuel pipe. “I found the fire,” he noted in passing. And the micro warp…there. Its cage was still pretty well married to the same bunch of steel he was thinking of grabbing with the grapplers.
“Chief, I’d like a second opinion please,” Ben requested, casting his helmet camera around slowly. “I could grapple on by the floor plating under the star drive. Looks better from the inside. Still afraid this will collapse, though.”
After a few moments, Cope sighed. “I don’t know, Ben. I’d trust your feel over mine. But you could try a tow line.”
“Thank you.” Ben hadn’t considered that, and liked the idea. “Wilder, we take Judge and the box back to Prosper. Come back with a cable.”
“Aye, cap.”
“What a mess.” This skiff was shooting at his ship in their first encounter. He’d gutted its fittings to prepare it as a disposable experiment. Even so, it pained Ben to see any ship destroyed like this. They had so few ships left, and he’d made them his life’s work. He grieved for the crappy little boat, expended in the line of duty. He gave it a pat on the way out with Eli’s experiment.
If the frog module failed, at least they had a live human to inspect. “Kassidy, Eli, we’re coming in with a cryo resuscitation. Looks like burns. Prepare the med bay.”
Elise Pointreau surprised him by interrupting. “Captain, I ask the pressure suit for autopsy. Also, please bring me so
me steel? I can begin study.”
Ben turned and collected the impromptu crowbar he’d left floating by the exit.
88
“Propulsion, you said,” Ben quipped, joining his ex in the engine room, surrounded by Quire’s exuberant vegetable patch. The breathing green kept it warm and humid in here. The scents were primordial, like they hit all the pleasure centers in his reptile brain. At the moment, its central star slumbered. Dim emergency lights twinkled through the foliage like midnight in the Garden of Eden.
Cope flinched in surprised, too focused to hear the captain’s approach. “You were kinda busy, cap.”
“Priorities, chief. Without propulsion, we gradually fall into a gas giant. ETA on that?”
Cope huffed a laugh. “Hell if I know, Ben. A blue frond of micro warp light show tickled the ship. And now the star drive is offline. Couple other systems, too, but they can wait. Priorities.” He lowered his tablet, struggling to break out of his focus. “Oh, how’s Judge?”
“Do you care?”
“I’m not a monster,” the engineer growled back. “Space is dangerous. He was warned.”
Ben relented, and belatedly ducked in to kiss his cheek. “Judge is cooked, really revolting. I didn’t dare to see him out of his p-suit. Eli and Kassidy think his Yang-Yangs and the auto-doc will revive him even if they do nothing. Not sure that includes the brain.”
“Sorry. I know you liked him. Sucks to be betrayed by a friend.”
Was that directed at him? Ben stiffened, then decided he was overtired. “So what are we doing about…blue frond damage? You got a read on this blue frond?”
Cope rummaged for details, and handed him the tablet. “The drive won’t restart. I’m not qualified to open it up. Trying to take a page from you, what you did with Gorky’s inertial dampeners. Characterize the problem as best I can, narrow the questions, then call in Teke. Seitz and Arbus at Hell’s Bells if Teke can’t figure it out. Not easy to get Teke’s mind off the micro warp.”
“We need Teke’s mind on the experiment,” Ben pointed out. “Characterize it, huh?” He’d studied a lot more university math and physics than the engineer. Cope relied on a computer to meet his calculus needs. That didn’t stretch well to handle a novel situation. But Ben’s math was woefully rusty. “What else for our status here, chief?”
“Grapplers back online. Yeah, he unplugged the control circuits near the podium and the bridge. The grapplers themselves were fine. Other systems down are food recycling and the main fan. We had a weird gravity fluctuation for a few seconds, and maybe the inertia dampeners, but that cured itself, I guess.”
“When did the star drive blink out?” Ben asked.
Cope took the tablet back. “Oh. Yeah, same time as the grav plating.” He rubbed his eyes.
“Are you alert enough to bring the skiff home safely, Cope?” Ben asked gently. “Swap jobs for a bit.”
Cope hung his head. “Yeah, maybe more my speed.”
“Cope, you’re amazing. The micro warp is as much yours as Teke’s. He had ideas. You brought them into reality. We all helped.” He laid his forearm on the chief’s shoulder and cupped the back of his neck with a tender hand. “I am amazed and proud of you.” He pulled Cope’s forehead down to rest on his own. “Congratulations, buddy. You did it.”
Cope swallowed. “Thank you. For everything.”
“You’re welcome, always. Cope, we need to publish now.”
“We don’t have it written up. We should do a followup test –”
“No, this isn’t about science, buddy. It’s about establishing ownership before Rego Vultures and Lavelle get here. Intellectual property. Nobody dies. Gorky and Lavelle don’t steal my ship. Retrieve the equipment. Don’t fall into Pono. Fine academic writing is not our concern at,” he checked the tablet, “03:17.”
“Got it, cap.”
“Glad you agree, prez. See, doesn’t it feel good to obey orders sometimes?”
Cope chuckled. “Feels good to have you take some of the load.”
“Always an option,” Ben encouraged. “Love you, bye. Go retrieve that skiff. You take Wilder and Hunter. I’ll keep Willow and Zan.”
Cope stepped back. Ben snagged him back to claim a kiss on the lips. “You play safe out there. That’s an order, prez.”
“Aye, cap.”
As Cope left, Ben chose to scrape a few other details off his plate. Kassidy he ordered to ‘publicize’ Teke’s work, details omitted. Eli needed to characterize cellular damage, on his module and on Judge. He needed a simple go or no-go on the risk to a human being inside the new micro warp. From Teke and Elise, he wanted to know what went wrong with the experiment, and how tough a vessel they needed to repeat the experiment. Or, whether they were done out here.
By then, Willow and Zan arrived. He hunkered down to characterize blue frond damage, starting with what exactly a blue frond was.
“First, Scholar Teke, congratulations on a world-changing experiment!” Kassidy beamed at the tired and squirming Denali. None of them caught any sleep that night. The beautiful middle-aged Sagamore metallurgist Elise cozied up on his arm to lend scholarly and moral support. “An Aloha-changing experiment, even! And a joint effort between some of the finest minds of Denali, Sagamore, and Mahina!”
Teke nodded. “My engineering collaborator, John Copeland and the Thrive Spaceways company, made all this possible. And the enormous help from Captain Acosta and his crew on the Prosper. And Elise Pointreau and others on Mahina Orbital and Hell’s Bells.”
Kassidy deemed that enough spreading of the thank yous. “But what did we achieve today? Here, first let me play a clip of that amazing light show.” They watched that through in slow motion. She explained the milestone, the instantaneous warp of a skiff over a thousand kilometers, inside the solar system. She reminded her listeners of the warp drive that brought them here. That technology required three years travel outside the original system and back in toward the destination star. However many light years the systems were apart, were lost in an instant. That’s why Sass and the Thrive would be gone 20 years before they could expect word of her trip to Sanctuary.
Only then did Kassidy dare to ask a scientist a question again. “Scholar Teke, explain for us, how does your new invention work? In layman’s terms.”
Teke raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Well, if you understand quantum physics and string theory –”
Kassidy laughed and touched his arm. “Assume we don’t. More like an eighth grade explanation.” Teke should have a feel for that. Cope’s son Nico graduated eighth grade a couple years ago.
Judging by the aghast look on Teke’s face, he too was recalling Schuyler’s excuse for eighth grade science. “Ah…”
“Nothingness,” Elise prompted him.
“Yeah,” Teke allowed. “OK. There’s a whole lot of…something…in the universe, right? Moons, planets, stars, matter, energy.”
“I’m with you so far!” Kassidy encouraged.
“Less obvious, there’s dark matter,” Teke continued. “We know from universal gravitation that there is more matter than we can see. So all the missing mass we call dark matter.”
“Now you’re losing me,” Kassidy confessed.
“That’s fine,” Teke allowed. “Because there’s another ‘thing’ – nothing. The absence of matter, dark matter, anti-matter, energy that is equivalent to matter. Just nothing at all.”
“Nothing,” Kassidy parroted. “Yeah, I think I understand nothing.”
“OK, it turns out that ‘nothing’ has interesting properties,” Teke attempted. “All of nothing is a single nothing.”
“OK.”
“That’s the principle that permits faster-than-light travel and communications. We nudge into nothing, and emerge from nothing in a different place.”
“Warp, in other words,” Kassidy summarized.
“Yes, but no time elapses. A different kind of warp.”
Elise gushed, “Mm, he is so brilliant! A genius, is he n
ot?”
“Yes! Fascinating,” Kassidy claimed. She decided it was anything but. Time to change the subject. “The ramifications of this are astounding. You’ve already spoken to Denali in real time.”
“Right,” Teke agreed. “Communication may be the main breakthrough. For the first time since we left Earth, all of mankind might be able to keep in touch. Remember, for each of our colonies, what a huge leap forward it brought to re-enter trade in ideas. And commerce, trade here around Pono. But even improved communications with Denali brought huge benefits. Scientists and technicians collaborating, able to specialize and confer. We have so few people. We desperately need each other’s expertise.”
“Exactly! But you can’t call another star system without sending someone there first.”
Teke shook his head. “Some thing, not someone. A quantum transceiver. I didn’t invent that. Sanctuary did. We used it to verify that my physical micro warp would work. Or at least confirm it was probable enough that Thrive Spaceways would risk the materials. This experiment was vastly expensive. And recent government policies on Mahina have left Spaceways nearly bankrupt. A crime in my opinion.”
Kassidy rocked her head judiciously. “Some would say improving lives on Mahina takes precedence. Space technology is expensive.”
Teke shrugged. “We need both. Do you ask if you need air or water? It’s a false choice. You’ll die faster without air. But you’ll die in a couple days from lack of water. Both are necessary. Space mastery is likewise less urgent, but crucial. Our colonies are still falling in population.”
Kassidy already agreed, and always had. She deemed the chances minimal that this argument would persuade the space disbelievers. “Back to brass tacks, scholar. We need to send one of these transceivers to another world before we can benefit. Is that right?”
“No, because Sanctuary already sent two of them to us. One is here on Prosper, the other on Denali. We haven’t tried calling Sanctuary yet.”
“Aha!” Kassidy feigned surprise. “So it might even be possible for us to contact our Aloha envoy in the Sanctuary system, Sass Collier on the Thrive.”