by Ginger Booth
This warp technology was cruel.
She hailed her engineer, Darren Markley, once mentor to her old crew’s Copeland. “Good to go, chief. I’ll be with you shortly.”
She and Clay clambered out of their seats into the cramped rear of the bridge, and Clay folded her into his arms for a hug. She clutched him hard and fierce, then let go with a sharp nod. “You’re right. Let’s get on with it.”
Clay at her heels, she headed for the galley, where the crew awaited. Despite 18 months together now, she didn’t know them well. Most were spending the trip in cold sleep. Given the utter tedium of three years transit planet-to-planet, subjective, in a modest asteroid-hopper built to sleep 15, they weren’t missing much. A few even asked to skip this momentous turning point, to be roused only if and when their skills were needed.
Sass didn’t like them the way she loved her original crew. She selected those friends one by one, and treasured them closer than brothers and sisters, their years of shared experience rich in trauma and triumph. Clay recruited the new candidates, mostly older, seasoned, pragmatic types for her to choose between. Boring.
She smiled confidently and waved. Then she placed views from external cameras onto the big display above the dining table. One of them included the Aloha star, blue-white and noticeably dimmer than the view from home, but still clearly their sun and not a distant star.
“I’ll join Mr. Markley in the hold. One of these displays should show Sanctuary’s star real soon now!”
The crew cheered. She touched Clay’s hand and left them to him.
Outside the galley, she swung under the railing and hopped down from the catwalk. She automatically flicked her personal gravity for a gentle landing five meters below. Their express slide stayed behind on Mahina with Jules, along with the gaudy mushroom-shaped produce stand. Copeland’s son was old enough to play with them now. The tidy hold felt a bit barren without their bulk.
“We’re ready when you are.” She joined the engineer at the warp drive. The device stood on a tool bench, looking like a toaster oven. Its power cables were intimidating, plus its hard data line to the ship’s computer. Navigation and the engines already contributed for 18 months to position Thrive for this next trick. The warp box didn’t use them.
As Sass understood it – which is to say, not at all – the warp drive turned on and suddenly translated them to an analogous location relative to Sanctuary. Then they’d unplug the device and stow it in a closet until it was needed again. According to the tentative plan, that would be four years from now, allowing for three more years of travel, inbound and outbound, plus one year at their destination. They’d jump right back here, relative to Mahina. Warp travel had nothing to do with the ship’s propulsion.
Except that it would devour their maximum star drive output, plus drain their capacitors. Sass trusted their time without power would be brief. Darren didn’t seem concerned.
Perhaps that point was worth checking. Engineers could be a bit tunnel-visioned. “How long will this drain our power?”
Darren, a mild and plain brown-haired geek, looked up from his wiggle-scope grinning like a kid in a candy store. “Instantaneous!”
He reminded her of Clark Kent, Superman in his 1950’s mild-mannered guise, complete with button-down khaki Oxford shirt with pocket protector, dark grey slacks, short tidy hair, and black plastic-rimmed glasses. Darren’s superpower was to maintain a crappy eight-decade-old asteroid hopper masquerading as a starship, with spit and baling wire. Or in this case, printer steel and ingenuity. Losing his glasses and morphing into tights would be his Kryptonite, from technical genius to simply silly.
“I’ll rephrase,” Sass said. “After this thing wipes our capacitors, how long till the lights come back on?”
“Ah! I rigged a backup battery. The emergency lights should stay on.” No longer interested in this pedestrian diversion, he tested the wiggling waveform emitted by another power conduit. He shook his head in awe. “I’ve never played with this much power!”
In misgiving, Sass asked, “You used to do power plants, right?”
“Yes! Oh, nothing like this, though!”
“Darren, this little box hasn’t been used in what, twenty-five years? Then it spent a couple decades in an over-pressured argon atmosphere on the Denali sea bed. It’s not going to like, short out or something, is it?” Sass’s understanding of electricity was sketchy. Unlike him, though, she grew up with lightning. And the ship surrounding her was metal.
“That’s what this is for!” Darren replied in glee. “Could you help lift it? Wait!” He quickly tested two more leads, to his vast satisfaction. Then she helped him lift a box into place over the warp drive. “Sorry about the weight. Lead-lined steel.”
Sass tipped the box this way and that as Darren lovingly snugged his cables into their guide slots, then sealed them with foil and duct tape. “Isn’t the ‘on’ switch trapped inside?”
Darren tapped a little box like an archaic computer mouse. Its tail was bound to the data feed line to run into the cage.
He stood back at last with a slow smile. He met her eye. “Tell me you aren’t excited.”
“Terrified,” she assured him. There was no way to test this damned thing in advance. Oh, there was a ‘self-test’ button. But the only way to really activate it was, step one, travel 1.5 years north from the system ecliptic. Step two, feed it as much power as she used to escape Denali’s gravity well. Step three, turn it on.
No, step three was to pray. Or worry and annoy the engineer with final misgivings as she did now, sort of like a captain’s prayer.
His finger hovered over the button, his eyebrows lifted.
“Engage,” Sass agreed.
He pressed the button. And nothing happened.
“That was smooth,” she acknowledged uneasily.
Darren studied his tablet. “Computer, activate warp drive.”
“Signal sent,” the computer agreed.
Darren pursed his lips. “It didn’t engage. Hm.”
Sass stepped over to the bigger screen at the engineering console instead of using her small pocket tablet. “No power consumption.”
“I saw that,” Darren noted calmly. Doubtless the chief engineer was way ahead of her.
Unlike most of the crew, Sass knew Darren well. Dot Vrooman, his wife, popped into cryo every other week. The nurse practitioner was exploring how to improve on the cryo drugs, and experimented on herself. But Darren was happy as a clam staying awake for three years to keep Sass and Clay company. He seized the precious bounty of free time to study nanite engineering. The Markleys were both 72, creche-mate childhood sweethearts, apparent age arrested at 25 by nanites. This was standard in the urb city of Mahina Actual. The new Yang-Yang advanced nanites were only beginning to make this blessing available to the masses back home.
“There isn’t supposed to be an extra box,” Darren suggested warily, considering his shielding.
Sass helped him remove the cage, and test each connection again. Nothing loose.
Darren opened the toaster-oven-style door and peered within. Sass soothed herself that this was perfectly reasonable. A corner of her mind dwelt on how humiliating it would be to fail at this juncture. Just turn around and go home, having wasted three long years with nothing to show for it.
Make that four or five long years. By the time they could reverse their velocity and reach it, Pono would be on the far side of the sun.
Darren closed the device again. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, lost in thought. He then attached his meter to a cable with alligator clips, and handed it to her to hold. He held up a wait finger as he visited an engineering cabinet. He returned with a second meter and clipped it to the opposite power cable.
“What we’re looking for is any power drop between your meter and mine when we turn this on.” He drew next to her to hold the scopes together. Then he threw the switch.
With a blinding arc of blue-white light, and a sinus-searing whi
ff of ozone, Sass was instantly electrocuted. She flew backward a meter across the hold, the meter dropping from her hand.
96
After delivering their refugees, the Colony Corps rendezvoused in the Sanctuary star system, a secret location reserved for settlers from the Luna, Mars, and Ganymede colonies. – Quasar Shibuya, The Early Diaspora.
Electrocuted, Sass lay on the hold decking unable to breathe, her heart not beating, brain not firing, for some unknown moments. Then her nanites kick-started her heart back into operation. She raggedly gasped for air redolent with the reek of ozone and melted insulators.
Cheering erupted from the galley upstairs. She ignored that for now. In a few more moments, her limbs regained the willingness to obey instructions. She sat bolt upright, and her eyes crossed. The hold swum around her, lit in a dim lurid red glow. Emergency lights. Applause.
Nope, still not her priority. There was something else.
Her vision settled, and she spotted Darren. She tried to rise and toppled forward to the deck. Instead she crawled on hands and knees. She reached the engineer, lying inert, eyes and mouth wide in astonishment.
“Help!” Sass attempted. The word came out a raspy squeak. She tried her comm tablet and found it dead. “Computer, get Clay.” No, her voice was too soft to attract the computer’s attention, either.
But her nanites made rapid progress toward restoring her senses. She tried to open Darren’s shirt, but the buttons required fine motor skills. She didn’t have any. Screw the shirt.
She started pounding on his clothed chest and applying mouth-to-mouth.
“Sass?” Clay called down. “Congratu – what?”
He vaulted down, yelling for Dot.
Upon arrival, he thrust Sass out of the way. Her balance still lagged, so she tipped over to land on her face. “Ow.” She managed to plant her palms to either side of her head and shift her nose out from under her. At that point she resolved to rest for a minute while Clay, then Dot, performed far more effectively at reviving Darren.
She commiserated with his whole-body jerk as his heart restarted, and his gasping breath. Whether his brain was fried was another question. Judging from her own pose, perched on hands and cheek and knees, butt in the air, his wits might take time to catch up.
“Where are we?” Sass inquired.
Her pose muffled her voice, but she spoke loud enough to catch Clay’s attention. He considerately peeled her off the floor to sit upright in his lap.
“We’re in the Sanctuary system,” he replied. “I assume. There’s an orange sun. Did we expect the power to go out? Or was that, um…”
Sass summoned the rags of her dignity about her. “We anti-ci-pated that.” She’d never noticed before how difficult that word was. “The capa-ci-tors are recharging. If the engine is on.” She paused. “Is the engine on?”
“I believe so,” her first mate offered. He picked up a tablet from the deck and found it fried. Instead he asked, “Computer, is the engine on? And the capacitors recharging?”
“Yes, estimated 33 minutes for life support to resume.”
“Thaz good,” Sass slurred.
Clay inquired, “Life support is out for half an hour, and that’s good? How long would be bad?”
Sass conceded that was a good question. “Um.”
Clay pressed, “Why do we still have full gravity? Computer, prioritize life support over the grav plating.”
“Unable to comply,” the computer replied primly.
Sass already knew that one – the grav capacitors couldn’t feed any other system in the ship. With her brain moving like congealed engine grease on a cold dark Mahina Monday, she puzzled out how to express this.
Mercifully, Dot interrupted. “Clay, help me get Darren to med-bay.”
“Stay here and rest, Sass.” Her partner dumped her flat on the cold deck again.
She gazed at her crew arrayed along the catwalk above, gawking down at her, not a one of them jumping to help. Her original first mate Abel would have hollered at them for being useless clods. Though Clay had this under control. He probably didn’t want them in the hold until he was sure the electrocution segment of today’s show was over.
Was it? Sass had an assistant engineer upstairs. But she judged it safer to wait for Darren’s brain to come back online.
She closed her eyes to let her nanites perform their magic.
The following afternoon in her cramped office, Sass finally found time for what she intended to do immediately upon entering the Sanctuary system – assess the place and hail the locals. She was tempted to record the greeting first and send it off, since the round trip lag time would take over an hour.
But ex-cops remained paranoid forever. And if her own instincts for self-preservation didn’t suffice, Clay served as a reliable bucket of ice water. “We’re not calling anyone until we check for defenses.”
Spoilsport. “Fine.” Sass brought up the external camera feeds which observed the system ecliptic, and laid them on her desk.
The strange physics of this warp drive decreed that one exited a system ‘above’ or ‘north’ of the planetary ecliptic, and arrived from ‘below,’ carrying the same velocity inward to the new star system as outward before the warp jump. Location and direction were pre-programmed into the jump.
The warp drive and news of Sanctuary’s existence came to them courtesy of the abandoned courier starship Nanomage, found on Denali. Its database provided the details to program their jump, to 18 months travel below where the colonized Sanctuary planet would be by the time they reached it. That was 2.12 local orbits of the sun from now, so the planet should be about 1/8th of its orbit behind them. Less than half of its disk was visible.
Sass zoomed in on the expected neighborhood and ordered the computer to find Sanctuary. Orbital mechanics being predictable, the computer took less than a minute to identify their prey and zoom in the desktop view, at truly lousy resolution. Clay and Darren joined her in leaning over the image to scrutinize it.
This scrap of real estate appeared far from gorgeous. The colors reminded Sass of a yellow-gray pile carpet stippled by mixed yarns. Lighter bands hinted at a thin cloud cover. Mostly ugly desert, but with more water than Mahina, and no biosphere.
“What latitude is the colony?” Sass inquired.
Clay opened a window on his end of the table to query the database. “The colony is 32 degrees North. Axial tilt 11 degrees.” The first mate was a wizard with data. Visualizing celestial geometry, not so much.
Darren Markley suffered no such limitations. “Should be visible, barely, a few hours of the day.”
“Nice,” Sass acknowledged. “How big is this sea?” The planet offered a single brackish sea for water, and the Colony Corps settled by its shores.
Clay retrieved a schematic of the planet, north pole up, to display next to the real article as viewed from its south pole. “Similar to Lake Superior, 500 by 250 kilometers, max 350 meters deep.”
Darren winced. “That’ll be hard to see.”
Sass frowned. “What is our…pixel size?”
“That’s not the issue,” Darren explained. “Computer, draw the 32 North parallel on the planet.” A green arc appeared to trace the top of the fuzzy carpet ball. “And draw a 500 by 250 kilometer rectangle on that line.”
The edges of the box curved to match the latitude arc, marking more of a crescent than a rectangle. At this zoom level, it was a couple centimeters across – visible. But the resolution was terrible at the top of the half-disk, colors simply blurred to light grey instead of the mottling visible to the south.
“Explain?” Sass invited.
Darren cast his eyes around the office and wriggled his fingers. He found the hard copy reboot manual for the computer system. He opened this to a page of text, and held it up, edge-on to Sass’s eyes. “Try reading it at this angle.”
“Oh.” Sass considered. “Would a better camera help?”
“Better optics,” Darren considered. “Help,
yes. Let you see anything?” He demonstrated his edge-on text again to captain and first mate. “No. It would give us a better view of the southern hemisphere.”
“Any other ideas? Or do we give up until we’re closer?”
Clay mused, “Do we want to talk to them so far ahead of time? What’s the decision point?”
Sass outlined, “Three possibilities. They welcome us with open arms. Or they’re hostile. Or the colony collapsed, no one answers. But regardless, we still visit that planet. We want to look around.”
“I’m not sure that makes sense if they’re hostile,” Clay argued.
“We need fuel,” Darren pointed out. “Water too. That’s a big sea, and a small community. Unless they’ve grown faster than a human colony ought to.”
“They started with 8,000,” Sass reasoned, “fifty years ago. I think the largest population possible is 50,000.”
“But more likely 4,000, based on experience in Aloha,” Clay suggested. “They have better real estate. But not by much.”
Sass quit musing, and sat up in decision. “I’ll tell them we’re coming. It’s the cordial thing to do.”
“Tell them what, exactly?” Clay countered.
“Why we’re here, of course. We bring greetings from the Aloha system. News of Belker and his ship the Nanomage. We hope to reconnect to a greater human community. Improve our ability to thrive in artificial environments. Trade in technological advances for the betterment of Sanctuary and Aloha.”
“And to time travel,” Darren teased her. “Skip ahead and make sure Mahina stays on track.”
Sass pursed her lips repressively.
Clay wasn’t playing. “Veto. Advance notice gives them time to get nervous and rig defenses. With 18 months, they could do some real damage when we arrive. Call them two months out, max.”