“You’re just upset because you didn’t get the chance.”
David said nothing.
“Oh, yes. I know you think this is all your fault. If only you’d taken care of sweet Carla when you had the chance, eh? But no. You had to show everyone how fair and evenhanded you are. You let her manipulate you into admitting you were no better than her! Then you refused to make a decision, instead leaving it to your precious people to decide. Of course they didn’t convict you of murder! What did you think would happen?”
David had no words.
Franz did. “So they let you go free, but the price was Carla’s freedom too, and look what she did! And you blame yourself for that, don’t you?”
David stood still, fists clenched at his sides. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t respond to Franz flaying his soul bare.
“Don’t you?”
David’s face rippled as he fought to say it. “Yes.”
“David, no! Don’t listen to him!” Nathalie said.
David whirled to face her, to face John and Ernie and Heidi. “He’s right. It is my fault, all of it. I knew what she was like, but I let her go free.” He dropped his head. “It’s all true.”
Franz’s laughter echoed from the speaker. “You see? We’re alike, you and I. I blame myself, you blame yourself. We can’t both be right.”
David looked up at the view of the Dragonfly drifting toward Opportunity.
“It’s coming,” Franz said. “The big fissure in the middle. I’ve been watching it, calculating when it would be oriented vertically. It’s a repeating sequence, you see. It’s just a matter of predicting when it comes and getting the acceleration exactly right. So much easier than flying around and around trying to match the spin. I told you I had it covered.”
“Don’t do it,” David said.
Franz laughed again. “This is the part when I tell you not to blame yourself, right? Be the noble hero? Well, screw that. Blame yourself as much as you want. That’s the price you pay to be a leader. Grow some balls and deal with it.”
David noticed a shadow at the top left of the asteroid. The fissure, just as Franz said. Opportunity’s rotation would bring it right in front of him, traversing the Dragonfly from top to bottom. He couldn’t miss.
“Don’t come looking for me,” Franz said. “If you think you owe me anything, at least spare me that.”
The tail of the Dragonfly flared and it darted straight toward the asteroid. David watched, transfixed, as the fissure came into view and rotated down, right in front of the Dragonfly. The Dragonfly overshot a little, striking the fissure about two-thirds of the way up. It disappeared in a splash of ice.
The carrier signal from the Dragonfly cut out, leaving nothing but a background hiss on the radio.
David’s shoulders dropped. He could only hope now that Franz had succeeded.
“Well, shit,” John said, as they stared at the screen. The only sign of Franz was a drifting cloud of ice crystals sparkling in the light of the Tau Ceti sun. The fissure he’d plunged into had rotated out of view.
David shook his head, as if trying to understand. He felt a profound sense of loss, mixed with guilt. He mourned less for Franz than for the lost opportunity to do as he had done. Do I have a death wish too?
“Why did he do that?” Ernie said. “I mean, he definitely screwed up by teaming up with Carla, but he’s not crazy, is he? He’d never have been selected as a starship captain otherwise, would he?”
David slumped into a chair, staring into space as he replied. “Franz was a proud man. Never underestimate what wounded pride will make a man do.” He looked up, his eyes haunted. “I should’ve known.”
“Bullshit!” John said. He stood in front of David. “You can’t read minds. Asking him to help was a logical, reasonable thing to do. Hell, it was my idea! Blame me if you want to, but enough of beating yourself up.”
David stared at him.
“Yeah,” Ernie said. “Not your fault. Let’s be grateful for what he did. He got something out of it too, don’t forget. He’ll be remembered as a hero now, instead of a villain. That’s something.”
David stood and straightened his shoulders. Nathalie and then Heidi hugged him, and whispered words of encouragement.
“Thanks,” he said. “That helps, but I’m not letting myself off the hook just yet.” He turned and looked at the screen. “For one thing, we don’t know if what he did worked. Maybe when he crashed, the starter packages got damaged.”
“They’re designed to detach automatically,” Ernie said. “And the first thing they’re supposed to do is contact us, so we’ll soon know.”
He walked over to the console and fired up the package control app, putting it on screen next to the view of the asteroid.
They waited in silence as Opportunity turned, waiting for Franz’s last resting place to come back into view. The minutes ticked by with painful slowness until at last it reappeared at the top of the asteroid, moving left to right this time. The control app chimed and flashed a green light. Lines of status information scrolled down the screen.
Ernie grinned, the relief in his eyes obvious. “There’s your answer. Everything is nominal – they’re up and running.”
Franz’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain.
David worried that Franz might have survived, and wanted to mount a rescue mission, but Ernie put paid to that. Once Ernie had control of the bots on the asteroid, he had one crawl over to the remains of the Dragonfly. They had to wait another five rotations of Opportunity for an image, as the fissure blocked the signal. But at last they received the gory evidence that showed Franz was beyond rescue.
After that, David had felt numb. Released tension and regret over Franz’s demise combined to drain him of all feeling and energy. He spent long hours in the observation dome, staring at the source of their problems as it continued on its silent journey. If he turned his head, he could also see with his naked eye a bright blue dot. Serendipity, right in the crosshairs.
It seemed as if Franz had given them a shot at salvation.
Spidery bots crawled out of their cargo holds and through the fissure they had landed in. They found metals – lots of them – including the ship they’d arrived on. Together they mined the metals and brought them to the fabricators, which made the component parts of small rocket engines. The bots brought these to the surface, emerging from the fissure like crabs from a sea cave. They dug through the snow cover and anchored them to the bedrock, connecting pipes to carry fuel. They added fuel tanks and connected them to the network of pipes and set up a simple plant to crack ice into oxygen and hydrogen.
Only two days after Franz had landed, the first rocket engine fired. Then two, then five, then ten. None of them by themselves made much difference. But together, they could move a mountain.
By the fourth day, Opportunity’s tumble had slowed. By the sixth it had stopped tumbling and only spun on one axis.
That’s when Ernie broke the news. “We’ve got a problem.”
“We have?” David asked. “Everything seems to be going well.”
“It is, but not well enough. It looks like their power supply got damaged in the crash. There’s insufficient power to continue generating fuel for the engines at the rate we need to. We can’t move it fast enough.”
David pinched his lips together. So, it was too good to be true. “What happened?”
“Each Dragonfly had two power plants,” Ernie said. “Mini-nukes of a sort, what we call an STG or Stirling Radioisotope Generator, coupled with a big battery pack. They don’t generate much power, only a couple of kilowatts, but they’re real simple. We charge the batteries beforehand and rely on them to have enough juice to do a lot of the work. The nukes just trickle in enough that we don’t go flat before the job’s done.”
“Uh huh. So the nukes aren’t working?”
“One of them isn’t. We’re detecting high levels of radioactivity from the crash site so we think one must have failed.”
David nodded, understanding what he needed to do.
“If I land Dragonfly One there, can they use its power packs?”
Ernie looked at John. “That’s the thing. We can think of two options, and neither of them are good ones.” He pulled up an image of Opportunity, showing the network of pipes and engines snaking around the middle of the asteroid.
“If you try to land near the fabrication plants, there’s a good chance you’ll damage something. It looks solid enough from here, but all the stuff the bots have built is fragile.” He looked up. “We’re building for speed, not longevity. The other choice is to land here,” he pointed to the “south” pole, the one facing toward them. “Because it’s only turning on one axis now, it’ll be easy to dock there. All you need to do is rotate the Dragonfly to match speeds, and touch down. Then, we release the starter packages and start from scratch. We can fire thrusters from the pole to push it out of the way even while it’s still spinning.”
“But it won’t be enough.”
“The drawback of this option is it’ll take days to build useful thrust levels. Days we don’t have.”
“So we have a choice of a risky option that might work or a safe one that won’t.”
“When you put it like that … yes.”
“What if I land at the pole and carry the power packs to the crash site?”
“Easier said than done. There’s no gravity to speak of and it’s still turning. To move that kind of mass in those conditions … it’d take time.”
“Which we don’t have.”
David stroked his chin as he watched the asteroid turning, shadows drawing geometric shapes on its surface. “How long do we have?”
“Eight days.”
“To get the thrusters firing?”
“Until impact.”
David nodded, knowing what the answer would be but needing to hear it. He’d always known it might come to this, despite their best efforts. He looked up to the bridge screens. “Hope, send a message to Haven. Tell them to execute safe plan one.”
The others looked down. Nathalie shivered. Safe plan one was the code to send the largest remaining group down into the bolt hole.
“Message sent, David.”
David looked at the others and forced a smile. “That’s just a precaution. It’ll take time to get down there and sealed in.”
No one said anything, although John managed a weak smile in return. They all understood David wouldn’t have sent the command if he hadn’t thought there was a real risk of failing.
“Come on, keep moving.” Kevin urged his little group into the mine.
The wind whistled through the abandoned machinery at Broken Hill. They’d shut everything down the previous day, preparing for disaster. They even shut down their fusion power plant as a precaution, the first time since it had landed on Serendipity.
The previous day they’d moved the prisoners down into the stasis chambers they’d prepared for them. The fusion plant’s last act had been to provide the kick start to put them back into stasis. The prisoners would never know if they failed. Veronika made sure none of them woke from their drug-induced sleep during the relocation.
Fifty-five. Kevin counted heads as they headed down, the adults somber, the children excited at their adventure. The last one passed by and he turned to Simon, who waited with Sabine and Elizabeth.
“This is it, then,” he said, holding out his hand. “We’ll see you in a couple of weeks.” He kept his voice light, but inside he felt hollow.
Simon gripped his hand. “Count on it.”
Kevin hugged Sabine, then Elizabeth. Tears welled in Sabine’s eyes, but Elizabeth’s remained their usual steady gray.
He drew back and looked at them as if trying to fix their faces in his mind, then turned and walked into the mine entrance. Simon, Sabine, and Elizabeth watched him go until they heard the ominous rumble of the blast doors closing. Then they turned and walked to where Jill waited to take them back to Haven, to complete their own preparations.
“Let me get this straight,” David said. “The problem is we can’t get power to the thrusters we already have, and we can’t get enough thrust at the pole fast enough?”
Ernie and John both nodded.
“Yep, that about sums it up.”
“What if we found another way to apply thrust?”
Ernie and John looked at each other. “How?”
David pulled up a familiar image. “Jack.”
“You mean –”
“Think about it,” David said. “Opportunity isn’t that big. If we move Jack to the pole and match his spin to the asteroid’s, we can nudge him into it. Opportunity has almost no gravity, so there’s only a small risk of damage. Then we fire his main engine at low thrust until he’s out of fuel. If that’s not enough, then we could land the starter package.”
John raised his eyebrows and whipped out his phone, Ernie likewise turning to his data pad. “You know, that’s so crazy it might even work.”
They both tapped away as they ran the math. When Ernie looked up, David read the answer in his eyes. “It’s not enough. Jack’s a powerful shuttle, but Opportunity just has too much mass.”
“Even if we land the starter package?”
“Even then.”
John nodded, confirming Ernie’s diagnosis.
“Hmmm. I hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
“What?” John asked.
“There’s one other option,” David replied, looking at John. “One you won’t be happy about.”
John’s eyes widened. “You mean …”
David nodded. “Hope,” he asked. “Did you hear what we just said?”
“Yes, David,” came the reply. “I know what you want to ask me.”
“David!” John said. “Your idea with Jack – that might’ve worked without damaging him, at least not much. But Hope –”
“It’s OK, Papa. I understand,” Hope said, cutting him off. “If I do this, it will cause significant damage to my forward fuel tank and perhaps other parts of my structure.”
“No, it’s too risky,” John said. “Your core structure isn’t designed to take that kind of load. It could cause a catastrophic collapse and destroy you.”
Silence fell. John looked at David, his eyes conveying a mixture of anger and pain.
David returned his gaze, then looked up.
“Hope.”
“Yes, David.”
“I won’t command you. I ask you, will you do this?”
Hope said nothing for a heartbeat and David thought she would refuse. Then they all detected the unmistakable rumble of the main engine start sequence, and they knew.
“I’ve plotted an intercept vector. You have thirty minutes to leave.”
David felt the familiar stab of guilt. Did that ever go away? Would it ever become easy, making decisions that might mean the life or death of people you know and love?
He looked at John and saw hurt in his eyes. He hoped not. Choices like this should always be hard.
“Élise, Kurt. Go set the livestock free. Kevin, Amber, and Yana – check all the houses have their windows and doors shut.”
Nigel commanded Haven in David’s absence and made sure all the older children kept busy. Twenty-four people were left in Haven – four adults and twenty children, although the older children were adults now. Teenagers perhaps in age, but their recent experiences meant they had grown up fast.
He stood, hands on hips, watching the controlled chaos around them. He had come to love this place, their haven and their home. The thought of losing it was almost too painful to bear, although not as painful as losing the people, the heart and soul of Haven.
Simon clapped a hand on his shoulder. “The shuttle’s all loaded. Elizabeth’s waiting.”
Nigel turned to look at him. He and Simon, Sabine, Joyce, and Elizabeth had twenty children in their care. They would take them into orbit, safe from the asteroid strike. He wasn’t sure if they were the lucky ones or not, but on
balance he thought he’d rather be in space than under the ground.
“I guess we’d better get to it, then,” he said. He put two fingers into his mouth and blew a piercing whistle that had Simon reaching for his ears. Moments later the children all came running, and he led them out to the airlock like a space-age Pied Piper, Simon bringing up the rear.
He didn’t look back.
“Non! You cannot do this!” Nathalie was beside herself when she discovered just why they had to leave. “You will kill her.”
“There’s a risk,” David said. “Hope knows what’s at stake. She volunteered, no one’s forcing her.”
“Of course she volunteered, you oaf! She loves us! She would do anything to save us! And you, you are taking advantage!”
David stopped. He tried to take Nathalie’s hand, but she would have none of it. “Non! No! You cannot convince me this is right!”
John stood by, looking uncomfortable. He wasn’t happy about it either, but he understood the logic, the age-old ethical problem of whether it was moral to sacrifice the one to save the many. He’d never thought he’d face this himself, but here he was, unable to do anything about it. Or could he? Could he stop this? Should he?
He looked at Nathalie, almost hysterical. His wife, his love. The mother of his children. He put a hand on a wall, feeling the connection to his newest child, albeit the strangest parent-child relationship in the history of mankind. Was this right?
“I’m staying,” he said, cutting through the argument between David and Nathalie.
“What?” Nathalie said, whirling to face him. “What did you say?”
“I said, I’m staying.” He took Nathalie’s hands in his own. She struggled a moment but let him hold them.
“We must let her do this, love. David’s right, it’s the best way for all us. It’s not a death sentence, but it’s dangerous. She might get hurt, so I’ll stay in case I’m needed.”
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