With little bursts from his maneuvering thrusters, Jack moved to comply. David wasted no time waiting for him to arrive, instead heading aft to grab a pressure suit. He found Heidi there doing the same.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
Heidi shrugged. “Looks to me like you’ll need help. She’s plenty busted up.”
David shook his head. “You can come over later once we get rid of the spin.”
Heidi opened her mouth to protest, but David cut her short. “It won’t make much difference, time-wise.”
Heidi didn’t look convinced.
“I’ll call for you if I can’t get Hope online to stop the spin. I promise.”
Heidi paused, then nodded. “You’d better.” She continued putting her suit on.
David raised an eyebrow and Heidi fixed him with a bold stare. “I’m coming to help you out. I’ll be waiting at the airlock, OK?”
David nodded. “Good enough.” He could tell he wouldn’t win this argument.
John pulled himself up the pile of seats he’d stacked into a makeshift ladder. Nothing pretty about this, but sometimes ugly is good enough.
He was already sweating from heaving the seats around, and now he exerted himself further, hauling himself upward. Gripping the ladder that normally led upward, he swung himself up, landing on the side of the tube, which was now the floor.
He lay for a moment recovering, then rolled over and crawled toward the ship’s core. His first port of call would be the engineering workshop, where the main circuit breakers were located. If there was any luck left for him in the universe, these would be the reason he had no power.
He could only hope.
Don’t look up. Focus on Hope and nothing but Hope.
It had seemed a good idea in theory, but in practice, even David hesitated.
Jack’s airlock yawned wide and he stood looking at Hope only ten meters away – as close as he would let Jack go. He’d intended to use a line to traverse the distance, but now saw that would be dangerous. The risk of a tangled line wasn’t worth it.
So he jumped.
Ten meters isn’t so far, but it seemed like an eternity to David. He exited with some angular velocity, so as he flew, Hope turned relative to him.
He hit the surface of Hope and bounced. He swore, twisting and struggling to grab a handhold – any handhold – before he slipped off into the void. At the last minute he caught the end of a protruding antenna, gripping hard as he pivoted back into Hope’s hull. He hit with his knees and slid to the side. Feeling like his arm would pull out of its socket, he held on, grunting as he pulled himself in and grabbed with both hands.
David paused to catch his breath then looked up and wished he hadn’t. The heavens rotated above him and he had to close his eyes to avoid becoming disoriented.
“Damn!”
“David! David, are you OK?” Heidi’s voice betrayed her concern.
“Yeah,” he replied, “just a rough landing is all. I don’t recommend doing it this way.”
“I’ll try to remember that when it’s my turn.”
“Hold that thought.”
David reached down to his belt, unclipped the safety line and attached it to the antenna. He hoped it was stronger than it looked. He pulled on the line a couple of times to test it and looked down, careful to keep his eyes on the hull and not look at the stars. Forty meters below, he spotted the port side airlock, his destination. He turned around and crawled backward, the sticky surfaces of his left glove and kneepads holding him to Hope’s hull while he paid out the safety line with his right hand. Not very elegant, but better to get there slowly than miss it quickly.
Once John got to the core, his task became easier. He could turn and pull himself up the rungs attached to one side of the cylindrical access way. He was feeling nauseous, a side-effect of Hope’s spin. Rotating to simulate gravity was a useful trick, but too much spin made one seasick. He swallowed and pushed on. The higher he climbed, the less force to pull him back toward the front of the ship, where he suspected a hull breach would lead him to the abyss.
The circuit breakers were in main engineering, he recalled. He’d only ever done a cursory inspection, never imagining a situation where they’d be thrown. He came to the hatch leading into the cargo hold and grunted as he worked the manual crank to open it.
The hatch cracked its seals and a rush of air startled him. A good sign – no hull breach aft of their living quarters. At least he could survive there, should he need to.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, he thought. You’ve no idea if Hope can be revived.
His breath rasped in his ears as he pulled himself into the cargo hold and main engineering. Here, the hull bulged outwards and there was light gravity under normal conditions. Five docking ports ringed the hold, where their landers had docked on the voyage from Earth so long ago, and there was a cavernous space where they’d stored the supplies they’d shipped down to Serendipity.
He found a large hinged panel at the rear of the hold, unlocked it and pulled it open. Inside were four large circuit breakers labeled ‘DRIVE’, ‘STASIS’, ‘SYSTEM’, and ‘AUX’. He grunted when he saw all of them had thrown. “That explains a lot.”
He braced and gripped the one marked ‘SYSTEM’. He sensed the vibration through his gloves as it sprang back into place.
“John John John John John John John John John John John John Joh …”
“Hope! Hope, I’m here!” He laughed. “You’re alive! Thank God!”
“John I couldn’t see I couldn’t hear all was dark!”
John realized Hope had never experienced this before. Even her birthday – the day her starboard reactor had breached – hadn’t caused a total power failure.
“It’s OK, Hope, it’s OK. Your main circuit breakers threw, is all. See? I’m reconnecting you.”
John pushed the circuit breaker marked ‘AUX’ to the ‘ON’ position. The lights came on in the cargo bay, and John smiled. “That’s better. Have you got control of the environmental system now?”
“Yes, checking ship integrity.” Hope fell quiet as she ran her diagnostics. “John, system checks show multiple hull breaches in the crew living modules and the aft tank. I have no external view, but analysis of video before the incident shows my forward and mid fuel tanks are gone. I’ve lost pressure in my aft tank. Internal sensors show fuel is venting into space. John, most of it has gone.”
“Shit.”
John could think of many reasons why having no fuel was a bad idea, not least that they were on a collision course with Serendipity.
“Hope, are the chemical thrusters online?”
“Yes, John.”
“We have to stop you spinning. Apart from the fact it’s making me dizzy, it must be pushing your fuel out through the breach in the aft tank. Can you do that?”
“I will try.”
Hope’s main thrusters used the same quantum-effect drivers as her main drive, but she had clusters of chemically fueled backup thrusters for emergencies. Like this one.
“Thrusters are firing. I can’t see outside, but I can sense my angular momentum decreasing.”
“Good. I’ll trace the circuits for the external sensors once we straighten up. It’ll be much easier if I don’t have to worry about hanging on.”
David was still inching his way down Hope’s hull when the coaming lights at the airlock came on. “Huh. I guess she’s not dead after all.”
“David, have you seen? Hope’s navigation lights are on.” Heidi sounded concerned.
“Yeah. Maybe she’s OK. I’ll see if I can raise her. Hope? John? Can you hear me?”
No response.
“Hope, John. We’re here. We’ll be inside in a few minutes, hang on.” David didn’t know whether they’d heard him or not – he hoped they had radio problems rather than the unpleasant alternative.
Resolving to continue his descent toward the airlock, he looked up, just in time to see the exhaust pl
ume from Hope’s rear emergency thrusters.
“Uh oh.”
“David? What’s wrong?” Heidi asked, her voice high.
“Heidi, back inside. Jack, close the airlock outer door and thrust away. Standoff at five hundred meters. Do it now.”
“David? David! We can’t leave you there.”
David turned around to face Hope’s airlock. No time for caution now. “No choice. Hope has woken up and she’s firing thrusters. You must get away now!”
“Airlock door closing. Heidi stand clear please,” Jack said.
“No, wait! We have to get David!”
“Heidi, I’ll be OK! I’ve got a line, remember? But we can’t risk Jack, he may be our only way to get home now.”
“Heidi! Now!” David said, seeing her still there. “You can’t do anything for me if you collide with Hope! Now go!”
“Scheisse.” Heidi stepped back and the hatch flowed shut. Seconds later, Jack thrusted away.
David turned and redoubled his efforts, doing his best to ignore the spinning star field.
Hope’s chemical thrusters weren’t as powerful as her quantum thrusters, but she’d lost a considerable amount of mass, and that had an effect. Beneath him she was losing angular momentum by the second. As a consequence, David found her hull slipping away from him. With no gravity, only the limited sticky effect of his gloves and kneepads was holding him down. It had been hard enough before, but now it felt like he was clambering down a giant bar of wet soap. He tried to move faster, angling his body in an attempt to counteract the forces acting on him. A boyhood memory came flooding back. He remembered crossing a stream on a fallen log slippery with wet moss. To start with he’d sidled across, then he’d walked faster and faster until breaking into a run. If he’d slowed down or stopped, he would have fallen, so the trick was to run fast enough to get off the log before he fell off.
David crawled faster and faster, hoping to get to the airlock before he fell from this wet log. Twenty meters, ten, five … almost there, but the further he got from Hope’s center of rotation, the harder it got.
“No,” he said to himself under his breath. “I am not falling off. Not now.”
With a last desperate lunge, he caught the edge of the airlock coaming and held on tight as Hope pulled away under him. With a mighty effort he pulled himself in until he could grip with his other hand, and scrambled up onto the lip of the airlock, wedging himself in place.
He stayed there a moment, catching his breath and counting his blessings.
“David?” Heidi’s voice crackled in his headphones.
“It’s OK,” he replied. “I made it. I made it.”
John busied himself tracing Hope’s external circuits even as her rotation slowed. He soon found the problem at the front of the ship.
“No surprises there,” he said. “Hope, it looks like there’s a short in your circuits up forward. I’m going to make my way up there while you work on stopping your spin.”
“OK, John.”
The centrifugal force that had acted on him earlier had already diminished by the time he made it clear of the cargo hold. Hope could now open the hatches as he went, speeding progress.
He was nearing the entrance to the crew quarters when he got a message from Hope, excitement in her voice. “John, my outer airlock door is opening!”
“It is?” John paused to think. “It must be someone from the shuttle.” Either that or there’s a ghost in the machine!
A minute later David’s voice came over the internal ship net. “John? Hope? Can you hear me?”
“Yes!” John and Hope replied together.
“Mate, it’s good to hear your voice!” John said.
“Same,” David replied. “We didn’t know … if either of you had survived.”
“We have, thanks to Hope’s quick reactions. But she’s hurt bad, David, real bad.”
“What can I do?”
John thought for a moment. “Can you talk to the others?”
“Yes.”
“Then ask them if we’re going to miss.”
“Serendipity?”
“Yeah. Either Hope pushed that rock enough, or we’re all toast. Hope won’t be going anywhere for a while.”
“I don’t know; I just don’t know,” said Nathalie’s voice in David’s ear. “I think we’ve done just enough. We built some contingency into our calculations. If Hope could’ve held out a little longer …”
“I see.” Those two short words conveyed a world of meaning.
David now faced a classic dilemma. If he did nothing, Hope and Opportunity would continue on their journey, intersecting with Serendipity in a little over two days. Or … he could get Jack to take Hope’s place and empty his tanks. It might be too little and too late, but it might also be the difference between success and disaster. That would mean Nathalie, Ernie, and Heidi would have to come across to Hope, stranding them here with him and John. Hope was following almost the same trajectory as Opportunity, so if Opportunity didn’t make it, neither would she. Or any of them. The longer he took to decide, the less effective Jack’s effort would be. What to do?
“Hope, how long until you stabilize?”
“Five minutes and twenty-one seconds.”
David smiled. Hope became more human by the day, but sometimes she still acted like a computer. It still didn’t occur to her that “five minutes” would be a good enough answer.
His smile faded as he considered what he must do. In times like this, the weight of responsibility became a heavy burden to bear. “Jack,” he said, “there’s something I want you to do.”
“Yes, David?”
“As soon as Hope has stabilized her spin, fly over and dock to her port-side lock.”
“Confirmed.”
“Nathalie, Heidi, and Ernie – once docked, come on board and join me in the cargo hold.”
“Why don’t you know?” David asked for the tenth time. “If you can plot the course of Opportunity months out, why not now?”
Nathalie looked down at her phone. She shrugged. “I think it will miss the planet.” She looked up as David let out a breath. “But the atmosphere? I am not so sure.” She waggled a hand.
David stared. “It’ll be that close?” Serendipity’s atmosphere was maybe a hundred kilometers deep to the extent it mattered. In terms of interplanetary distances, that counted for nothing, except this time it could be their margin between life and death.
Nathalie nodded. “It will be. But this is not the only problem.” She licked her lips. “Hope’s accident pushed her away from Opportunity. Not by much, but enough. There is no doubt for us. We will hit Serendipity.”
David’s heart sank. He’d just decided to risk the lives of the five of them for the eighty-one remaining at home. An ethical dilemma when the outcome was certain. Now his decision might mean the death of everyone. He’d never known the mantle of leadership to weigh so heavy.
John frowned as he reached the end of the line. Forward of their living quarters, in the center of the one-hundred-meter-diameter aft fuel tank, the cylindrical central core had begun to twist. Not by much, but to a trained engineer’s eye it was obvious. The next hatch was warped, and he had to struggle to move it enough to squeeze himself through.
On the other side the core had twisted more, until twenty meters further on it came to an abrupt end.
He could see stars. “Bugger me.”
“John?”
“Yeah, David.”
“What’s wrong?”
John continued forward. Hope had stopped spinning, so he didn’t have to worry about artificial gravity throwing him from the ship, but now he’d seen the situation, caution seemed a good idea. “I’ve just reached the new end of the core.” Just ahead, the core tunnel came to a ragged end, the cladding ripped off on one side to reveal stars through the lattice framework.
“The new end?”
John drifted to a stop, grabbing a ladder rung five meters from the void. He braced himsel
f against the wall and tugged on it to test its strength.
“Yeah. Looks like the mid tank is gone. Just a minute, I’m hooking up a safety line. I’ll go take a look outside.”
Attached to his belt was a safety line in a spring-loaded reel the size of his fist. He clipped it to the ladder rung and released the spring. The line pulled taut as he levered himself forward. He let out a low whistle when he got to the end, careful to avoid the jagged ends of the lattice frame where they’d ripped apart. When he tilted his head to look straight ahead, he could see Serendipity like a blue coin hanging in the heavens.
“What?” David asked.
“Let’s just say the view from the observation dome is to die for. Serendipity looks very close.” He pulled himself out of the end of the core and twisted to peer down, finding himself suspended high above the jagged stump of the mid tank. His jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe they’d survived. Beyond the remains of the tank he found the source of their fuel leak – a long split in the surface of the aft tank, now sealed with a scar of ice. “I hope that’s the only one,” he said. “I think I can fix that.”
“So that’s the situation.”
Jack had docked, and John had returned from tracing the short in Hope’s external circuits. David was now outlining their options. “I know this mission hasn’t gone as we’d hoped, but none of us expected it to be easy. But you could have expected to survive it. Now I’m putting an option out there that endangers you all. If we send Jack to push Opportunity, our best hope will be to repair Hope before we get to Serendipity, so we can fly clear. We might not be able to do that.” He looked at John.
“Maybe, maybe not,” John replied after a moment.
“What do you think?” David asked.
“So, you are saying our best option to save the others is to get Jack to push Opportunity,” Heidi said. “You don’t know if it will make any difference, but if we do it, we might die burning up in Serendipity’s atmosphere. If we don’t die that way, we’ll be trapped on a spaceship with low fuel heading to the outer Tau Ceti system. We won’t return for hundreds of years so we’ll die, anyway.”
Serendipity Page 29