“Something’s going on out here that they didn’t give us the squirrels to follow,” he said. “If that does turn out to be a beacon, then they know more than they’ve decided to tell us.”
“Maybe that’s true,” she said. “But are you willing to bet on that?”
“Sitting here doing nothing guarantees we will get nothing for results,” he said. “For twenty years FleetCom proved that they don’t give two squirts about what’s in our best interests, but I don’t think they’d risk the Waltz if they didn’t think we were tooled for this.”
“Do you realize how many negatives you just said in two breaths? Think about that,” she said. “Don’t do this because it’s the least negative path you can see.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but didn’t know where to begin. “In command school, they teach something that I never understood before. But this might be one of those moments when the least bad alternative, is all you have.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
Jeph pulled himself over the railing and anchoring his feet on the deck grabbed his thermocup. He shot himself a hardball, then added a double stim. Obviously if Anju thought he was ready for her vicious alcohol, he’d be fine with the extra kick it gave him. Plus she wasn’t around to stop him anyway.
“There is no doubt, in either of your minds, that it’s a beacon that Seva detected?” he asked.
“None,” Kiro said.
Rocky spun in her seat and nodded.
“There’s a cyclic Doppler shift on the signal frequency that indicates the source is in orbit above L-4 Prime,” the pilot said.
Jeph raised an eyebrow at the designation they’d given the object and said, “That’s as good a name for it as any.”
“Is also two-minute drop-out every thirty-six minutes,” the engineer added. “Is absolutely coming from something in orbit.”
“I’m tired of sitting around and waiting,” the commander said.
“Nojo,” Kiro said. “But there’s nothing else to do.”
“Why don’t we change that?” he said. “I think it’s time to go get some answers.”
“Wait,” Kiro said, his eyes opening as wide as Jeph had ever seen them. “Boss, are you suggesting we go toward the ... the whatever it is?”
“No,” Jeph said. “I’m not making a suggestion.” He turned and looked at the engineer, mainly so he didn’t laugh out loud at the sheer disbelief on his pilot’s face, but also so Rocky understood he was talking to her. “I want you and Seva to get out there and clear the sensor antenna off the nose. It’s junk now, so scrap and strap it. Most of it should fit into the empty hardware racks.”
“Da,” she said. “If is no concern about repairing hardware, should take six to eight hours.”
He glanced at the chrono. “You’ve got eight hours and twenty minutes until the next cycle of shockwaves. Cando?”
“Da, cando.” Pushing away from her console and launching herself toward the chute, she tapped her comlink. “Crewman Johansen, report to OpsDeck for EVA.”
As she disappeared from view, he turned back to Kiro.
“We’ve got no navigator,” the pilot said. “And sensors are offline.”
“So that makes it tough, but not impossible,” Jeph said.
Kiro shook his head. “Shona could do it, but unless something’s changed, that’s not going to happen.”
“I can do it,” Shona said, appearing at the railing and pulling herself slowly onto the deck.
Jeph knew she was waking up, but he expected she’d be in MedBay for another shift or two, minimum. When he spun to face her, he almost gasped. She looked like an apparition. Even in her exosuit, she was more fragile looking than he would have imagined possible. It didn’t help that Anju loomed behind her looking like an avenging angel. He expected to see lightning erupt from the doctor’s fingers even as daggers shot out of her eyes and bit into his gut.
“I heard you needed me around here,” Shona said, trying to smile as she struggled to walk to her seat. Pulling her maglocks loose for each step looked like it took all the strength she was able to muster. Her face was drawn and slightly green from bruising that hadn’t yet healed.
Kiro jumped out of his chair and almost threw himself at her, but her physical appearance stopped him in mid-launch. “Uhm, welcome back,” he said, trying to hide his shock.
“Are you up to it?” Jeph asked.
“No, she’s not,” Anju said, her voice adding acid to the arsenal she flung in his direction. “But she heard us talking in my office and she’s more stubborn than you are. She knew you wanted her here, so she ignored my orders and did it anyway.”
“I’ll be alright,” the navigator said. “All you need me for is calculations, isn’t it?”
“With Dutch down—”
“Dutch is down?” she asked, wrinkling her brow.
Jeph nodded, pulling himself into a seat beside her. “That’s why we haven’t been able to do much. Along with him, we’ve lost sensors and most of our com. Without you, we’re not going anywhere,” he said.
“I understand,” she said, closing her eyes and biting her lip. “Let’s figure this out then.” When she opened her eyes, he could see the raw pain she held barely contained behind them.
When Jeph glanced at where the doctor was floating, she’d vanished. He was going to ask her to bring some neuroblock in case Shona got worse, but he decided that if she needed it he’d get it for her himself.
The pilot settled into the seat on the opposite side of her. “We should set a maximum velocity limit before we do any of the hard stuff,” he said. “With no long-range sensors, the proximity radar can’t guarantee a clear flight path for much past two-thousand klick.”
She nodded and Jeph remembered how it felt every time he moved his head right after he woke up. “Don’t do that,” he whispered, reaching out to touch her hand and feeling a sympathetic stabbing in his brain in response. She rolled a stink-eye in his direction.
“That means, in order to maintain a one-minute safety margin, we can’t exceed thirty-six KPS above the local region,” Kiro said.
“If we burn at a quarter-g for four hours, that would give us about that,” Shona said. “Are we still the same distance from it?”
“That hasn’t changed,” Kiro said. “That would give us a flight time of about sixteen days. With Dutch down, we’ve got no pilot automation. We’ll have to watch the screen physically at all times.”
He and Kiro were the only D-class pilots, so one of them would have to man the pilot station continuously. “That’s going to be brutal,” the commander said.
“What’s going to be brutal?” Danel asked, rolling over the railing and landing on the deck.
“Sixteen days glued to a chair while we make our approach to L-4 Prime,” Kiro said. “Head down against the hammer blows, I might add.”
“L-4 Prime? Sounds less scary than the quantum pit of doom,” Danel said, shrugging. “I assume this means that Anju wasn’t flinging fiction?”
“I don’t know what she said, but if it included that we’d be making a run at this, then no she wasn’t flinging anything,” Jeph said, bracing himself. He could feel another argument coming and wanted nothing to do with it.
Instead, Danel nodded. “You need to think about one thing though. We’ve got no firm evidence that this quantum quicksand has a preference in which way we try to push. Nothing other than that gradient effect says it will let us go toward the center any more than it will let us move away.”
“Shut up, Danel,” Jeph said, shaking his head. “You damn science types really know how to ruin a good plan, don’t you?”
“We sure do,” he said, reaching out to grab the thermocup of hardball out of Jeph’s hand. “Reality sucks that way sometimes.”
“Not this time,” he said, spinning and flashing an obscene gesture at the scientist. “Make sure we’re stowed and tight for maneuvering, we’ve got eight hours unti
l the next cycle and I want to make way as soon as it passes.”
“If it lets us,” Danel added, glancing at Kiro and shrugging.
Non-Commercial Carrier 1701: Approaching Tsiolkovskiy Fleet Training Center:
Katryna Roja enjoyed riding in the pilot cabin of the shuttle. She joined Fleet because she loved spaceflight, not because she liked riding in the back of the bus. She’d rather face forward than be surprised by things. When the shuttle that Nakamiru sent to bring her to Tsiolkovskiy turned out to be a utility crew hauler, she took an empty engineer seat behind the pilot and copilot.
She watched the crater rims screaming past as they skimmed low and fast over the lunar surface, taking the shortest route over the southern pole. It wasn’t the normal approach used by the commercial shuttles but she knew Nakamiru told the crew to get her back as quickly and quietly as possible.
They were traveling stern forward so the primary engines were available for braking. An optic image superimposed on the main window showed the domes of Tsiolkovskiy Freeport clustered around the base of the mountains where the FleetCom landing pads sat. The main control towers stood on the top of Konstantin peak.
“Tsiolkovskiy Approach, are we coming in hot?” the pilot asked as the dark basaltic mare slid below them. The outer approach markers flashed past.
“Negative, 1701, we show you five-by solid, and on the beam for a standard soft landing at pad seven-north,” the approach control officer said.
“Negative, Approach. We’re coming in fast,” the pilot said. The secondary marker beacons blinked against the dark landscape and the copilot nodded in agreement.
“You are on Automated Landing Control. You are on track.” This time the voice on the com carried annoyance in its tone.
“ALC status is locked, but we’re not braking and we’re fast. Confirm?”
“Stand by 1701 … ALC shows compliance. You are on the mark,” the controller confirmed.
He turned to his copilot. “Manually disengage auto-approach.”
The copilot slapped his hand on the icon repeatedly and swore. “Negative. They’ve got the stick.”
“Listen, we’re not braking,” the pilot growled into his com. “I’m looking at a hard down in sixty-five seconds. Release ALC and let me drive.”
“1701, are you declaring an engine failure?” the controller asked.
“Negative Approach, our engines are armed and ready, but we’ve received no retrofire command from ALC. I need control. Release the damned automated system.”
“Negative 1701, you are not authorized for manual approach.”
“Fragging listen to me you wire-jockey bastard. If you don’t give me override on this, we will be a new lunar crater in one minute. Send somebody out to look through a window if you don’t believe me, but do it fast. I need to drive.”
Chancellor Roja grabbed her personal comlink and flipped it on, thumbing the screen for the Admiral. As soon as his face appeared she asked, “Where are you?”
“At the terminal connect waiting for you, why?”
“Get someone to shoot the deck officer in Approach Control. Our ALC is locked up and we’re coming in hot. They won’t give us manual control. And we’re under a minute from hard down.”
“On it,” he said, disappearing.
“Watch the ALC link,” she said to the pilot, cinching her belts up a notch and taking a deep breath. “Nakamiru is—”
The ALC lock light cut out and the pilot yanked back hard on the yoke as the main engine roared to life and he rotated the shuttle to get the nose up and slow their descent. She blew out an explosion of air as the fist of acceleration slammed down on her chest like a hammer.
Their trajectory flattened out as they deflected over the landing complex to get some room. The pads were on a ridge several hundred meters above the crater floor. If they could get past the rise, they’d have more room to recover. Every meter he could gain by deflecting toward the lower valley beyond, gave them extra distance to brake.
“Towers,” the copilot said, pointing at the image on the window and slightly to port.
“I see them,” the pilot said, grunting as he added another ten percent to the thrust and rolled abruptly to knife between the structures. They shot through the forest of thin framework close enough that Roja expected to hear the sound of scraping metal, but the pilot piled on the power mercilessly.
It had been a while since she sat in the jump seat on a shuttle, but she recognized the fire of yellow and red warning indicators that sprang up on the instrument screens.
“Nine-fifty. Down seventy-five,” the copilot said, calmly watching the readouts and reporting their position and velocity while the pilot fought the controls. “Groundtrack is six-fifty-five. Number-two O2 pump is at temp safety cutoff.”
“Override it,” the pilot said. “I need another ten seconds.”
“You’re at 140 percent. It’s going to be close.” He said, glancing out the window, then back at the display. “Eight hundred. Down fifty. Groundtrack is six-twenty-five.”
She looked out the window and saw the Main Dome of Tsiolkovskiy Freeport South sliding by just below them. The upper promenade observation lounge windows were close enough that she could make out people watching them streak by at better than a half KPS. They were still way hot and not out of danger yet.
“Seven hundred. Down forty. Groundtrack is six hundred,” the copilot said. “Five seconds and we’re in the clear and in the open.”
They lurched suddenly sidewise and she felt the floor drop out from under her as the acceleration cut abruptly to less than half. A siren screamed. “Oxidizer pump failure.”
They completed a full end-over before the remaining pump picked up the slack and gave the pilot enough power to stabilize their tumble. They were running on a single engine and he had to keep the nose thrusters pitched all the way to the side to keep from spinning. He balanced the remaining engine against the holding power of the steering jets, but at least they wouldn’t corkscrew into the ground. If they came in hard, it would be ass first.
“Six fifty. Down thirty,” the copilot said. “Terrain ahead. We need some altitude.”
“Working on it,” the pilot snarled, staring at the oncoming mountain. There was a dark slit in the upper edge of the ridge and they rolled slightly toward it.
“You’re not—”
“If I can get the line, we’re clear?”
“There’s no line there,” the copilot said. “It’s only fifty meters wide,”
“Plenty,” the pilot said, pitching the ship nose forward and hitting the throttle on the one remaining engine full on. They started to tumble again but this time the spin carried them upward as they accelerated toward the gap. They dropped into darkness and shot into the small crack in the boulder-strewn face.
Several seconds later, sunlight exploded through the windows as they rocketed out into the open space beyond the ridge.
The pilot cut the engine back to almost nothing and turned loose of the yoke to shake the tension out of both hands.
“That was fragging insane,” the copilot roared, pumping his fist in the air and then looking embarrassed at his outburst.
“How you doing back there, Madam Chancellor?” the pilot asked.
“Would have been better in an exosuit,” she grunted. “Been a while, but the beer’s on me when we get down.”
“What the hell happened?” the copilot said. “I’ve never seen ALC fail like that.”
“It wasn’t failure,” the pilot said.
“Why do you say that?” Katryna asked.
“It can’t be,” the pilot explained. “Approach didn’t know we weren’t on the beam and then it was a complete lockout of control. If the ALC goes down, it’s designed to turn loose of systems, not hold on.”
“It was driving us into the ground,” the copilot said. “And the idiot supervisor couldn’t see it, so he didn’t know to kill the link from their end.”
“Good thing the Admiral ju
mped him,” the pilot said. “Thank you for that ma’am.”
“I’ve met Nakamiru,” the copilot said. “I’ll bet the poor bastard’s a shit crater right about now.”
She nodded.
So is whoever’s responsible for hacking the ALC. This sure as hell wasn’t an accident.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
The last of the micro-shockwaves passed. Ninety-seven distinct pulses of two one-hundredths of a second spread out over three and a half seconds. They were so small and fast that other than by instruments, all any of them could feel was a nauseating vibration that shook their inner ear enough to make them cross-eyed.
It made things rattle and clatter, but not like the first waves in the cycle that, even when strapped into an acceleration couch, made Jeph’s bones creak with each blow. He watched Shona endure the hits with her eyes closed. They rigged a flat acceleration couch on the ConDeck for her, so she could take the impacts with the least physiological trauma, but he knew from experience that her first cycle awake was almost unendurable.
“That’s it,” Kiro said as he watched the accelerometers.
Jeph leaned toward Shona and whispered, “Are you still with us?”
Her breathing hissed in and out, but she nodded her head.
“Do you need a minute or are you ready?”
She drew in another deep breath and nodded again. “Do it.”
Jeph tapped into the com system. “Prepare for maneuvers,” he said more as a formality than a necessity. Everyone was on the ConDeck except the doctor.
“Yes sir,” Anju replied. She was at her desk in MedBay keeping an eye on Alyx. Her voice was flat and he knew she probably was still swearing at his insistence that they head toward the source of the anomaly. But she held her tone to just this side of acid wash.
He nodded at Kiro. “Bring us around whenever you’re ready.”
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