Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (16 page)

“Thank you, sir. Er. Mister Mancuso…” Emma faltered. Frowned.

Nolan smiled beside her. “I usually just call him, ‘Commander’. He’s stopped correcting me.”

“He does indeed.” Mancuso gestured for her to follow him and he walked over to a console. “This is your science station. Get comfortable and Nelson will give you the tour.”

Ortega and Emma followed. Emma wobbled and swayed trying to maintain her footing. Wilkins’ head popped up behind a low dividing wall on the other side of her new station.

“Feeling OK, Ms. Franklin?” Mancuso reached out as if to catch her. She didn’t notice his grimace as he extended his weak arm to her back.

“Just a bit off-balance, er, sir. Still getting used to the transition from zero-G.” She gripped the back of the chair and almost fell over. “First time on station. Inner ear’s messed-up.” She held onto the chair and eased herself into it.

Wilkins nodded. “You’ll get used to it. Took me a few days to get comfortable up here. And every time I come back.” He came around the divider and looked at her sitting in her new jumpsuit. No name patch yet. Newbie. “You might find standing better at first. Less likely to trigger nausea. Also, try to avoid making any sudden movements for a day or two. And, uh, avoid looking out the windows at first.” He pointed at the floor to ceiling windows behind her as she stood up from her chair and the room reeled around her again. She stayed up thanks to the back of her chair but didn’t try looking out the windows again.

“Emma Franklin, this is Dan Wilkins. He works with Ortega on the science team.” Mancuso introduced them. “He is… helpful to a fault.”

More shaking of hands.

Mancuso nodded. “Ok, let’s start getting back to work. Mr. Pradeep is in charge of communications,” he indicated him sitting off to her far right. Anti-spinward, she corrected herself. “Could you open Calypso’s current telemetry on the nav board?”

“OK.” She looked at her terminal and the blocks arranged inside larger rectangles corresponding to the big screens above. She started dragging icons around and the screens’ contents shuffled above her. A red line appeared falling towards Mars. A callout read MSS18, 0.68AU.

Mancuso was walking back to his chair. “Mr. Pradeep, please open a channel to the Calypso.”

Sunil Pradeep, sitting across the room in the communications station, acknowledged the request and opened a comm stream. “Channel’s opened, sir.”

Mancuso spoke up, “This is Mars Control to MSS18 Calypso. Captain Franklin, please be advised, we have your daughter on the station.” He looked at Emma, “Go on, say hello.”

Emma blinked. “Hi Dad.” She felt her face get hot as she spoke up in the big room, guessing there were microphones planted nearby to relay what she said. Everyone in the control deck was watching her. Wilkins smirked.

Mancuso turned back to the comm station, “I guess that’s it then. Be careful out there. We’re not entirely sure about your current flight plan. You appear to be burning pretty aggressively. Try to keep it under the speed limit. Control out. Close channel.”

Pradeep acknowledged him with a wave and killed the channel.

“Ok, Mr. Ortega, you can take it from here. Why don’t you take Ms. Franklin to the boardroom and start going over everything. I want projections in the hour.”

Ortega nodded. “This way, please.”

He led Emma out the spinward exit.
 

041

New Providence.

Greg Pohl was sitting in Tamra’s living room poking at his tablet aimlessly. Emma was gone. His mom was still inbound and he hadn’t heard from her since the event with Pandora.

He’d already been through the colony’s news. The flu was starting to affect the city’s production of supplies and equipment. The efforts to make more vaccines had impacted the availability of eggs in the colony cutting off a valuable source of protein. There wasn’t enough to vaccinate everyone let alone the birds.

Their annual flu vaccine had missed the target. The flu strain was a variant of avian flu, H5N1. It had mutated rapidly in the chicken coops and the farmers had to destroy a couple hundred chickens to prevent it spreading further, putting extra strain on their egg supply.

The news feed he was watching had a doctor being interviewed by their roving reporter. He was advising people to avoid contact with the sick and if they encountered any respiratory problems or fever to drink plenty of liquids and stay at home. They were still monitoring the outbreak but so far no deaths had occurred within the colony that they knew of.

The doctor on the news leaned in and grabbed the reporter’s microphone. “You know, if we had gene sequencers none of this would be a problem. Nano-machinery and gene sequencing could very effectively curb these outbreaks. The viruses could be used as payloads for fixing our own DNA–” The feed cut quickly back to the anchor who thanked the reporter for that and moved onto the next news item about a baby who’d learned to calculate square roots without a computer.

Greg killed the newsfeed and skimmed his inbox. He skipped over another message from the city requesting he report to a work assignment site. He might get drafted for work detail soon if he didn’t show up. This wasn’t the first message he’d received from the city asking him to report for duty. He didn’t want to give up on the space program, but he wasn’t sure what he should do. He might have to repeat a couple of classes this year and finishing it now seemed sort of pointless.

He got up and opened the door to check on Tam. She was still asleep, her room dark, bottle of water beside her on the nightstand. He could hear her breathing roughly, but deeply. She must be exhausted.

He slid the door mostly shut again and went back to his tablet and wrote her a message.
Going out to get some stuff. Be back soon. Message if you need me.
He put the tablet in his bag and put that over his shoulder. He dimmed the lights and walked out. It was past dinner time and he realized he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.

Greg walked through the halls of the apartments, his boots echoing off the metal walls of the hollow hallway. He clattered down the stairs to the exit and opened the door to Moffett Boulevard, walking away from the modular apartment buildings stacked like metal boxes against the hollowed-out rock walls of the city. He passed some of his neighbors coming home from work in the shuttle station and waved to them.

Most of the inhabitants living in this quarter worked in the space program in some way or related to someone who did. The ship and shuttle crews all lived there with their families.

Prime real-estate.

The last rays of orange daylight filtered in from the domes high above, piped down to the city through glass tubes in the rock. LED street lamps illuminated the grey buildings and black streets in blue-white pools. Greg stomped down the steps onto the hard stone, his boots crunching on the rocks.

A man in a long shabby coat shambled up to him as he left the walkway. “The Machines will end us! The Machines are coming to devour all of us! They haven’t forgotten–” His prophesying was interrupted by loud wet coughing and Greg backed away, trying to move around him.

“Hey!” Greg looked around, people at the cafe were watching, seeing someone who didn’t belong accosting one of their own. One man stood up, apparently contemplating if this was serious enough to intervene.

The shabby man, one of the Witnesses of the Automata identifiable by his coat festooned with reclaimed microcircuitry and scrap metal continued coughing. Lank hair hung around his face in greasy strands as he reached towards Greg with a grubby hand. “They will return to us and bring us all–” More coughing. “Bring us all into the Great Machine!” Phlegmy coughing.

“Leave that man alone!” A pair of Safety and Security personnel dressed in black plastic put on their helmets and ran forward from the cafe across the street.

The Witness realized he was in trouble and started shuffling away into the street, waving his arms at the small crowd of people watching in an attempt at menace. One woman gathered her child close to her legs.

The Security team grabbed the man by his arms and dragged him to the ground. He struggled, trying to get away, his cries of doom turning to a stream of expletives. One of the officers hit him with his baton and he dropped to the ground in an electrical seizure.

Some evening commuters on their way home stopped their bikes and stood watching. Others came out of the cafe and asked if they could help.

“Keep clear. Flu outbreak. This man needs to be quarantined. Back away.” Arms out. Stun baton in one hand like a barricade while his partner called for an ambulance.

Greg continued walking towards the dispensary on Main. The restaurants and small shops along Moffett returned to their usual business now that the crowd was moving on. Some were shutting down for the night, closing their shop fronts, while others were opening up for dinner. He had time for a quick detour. He ducked off of Moffett onto Kennedy and stopped at the Reef, its darkened front entrance not exactly inviting. An up-ended steel box dropped in amongst the more deliberately raised buildings with a door cut into the wall. The interior wasn’t much better.

He wandered into the dim, misty bar past the broken pool table and an older spacer having a quiet drink while vaping something noxious. The sparse LEDs decorating the ceiling illuminated the dark rocky floor like star light. The bar a neon glowing oasis in the dim room.

The bartender looked up from her book as he walked over. “Hi Greg. Little early for you today. Drink?”

“Hey Mandy. The usual, please.” He pulled up a stool and sat down at the edge of the metal bar, hooked his foot on the railing.

She poured him a glass of vodka and lime over ice and set it in front of him. The room was mostly empty except for a couple of grizzled regulars sitting at the bar sipping drinks and sneaking glances at the bartender. An older woman sat backlit against the video machines playing one of the games.

“What brings you in this hour?” Mandy sat on her behind the bar stool and crossed her legs, leaning towards Greg. She’d been running this place for a couple of years. She was a couple of years older than he was, and not hard to look at. One of the regulars grunted from down the bar.

“Oh, just a drink.” He took a swig and slid his ID card to her.

“Aw, you mean you didn’t come here to see me?” Mandy winked at him and smiled. She picked the card up and swiped it over the terminal.

“Well, sure.” He took another swig. “My girlfriend’s sick with the flu so I thought I’d get some air.”

“Ick. Don’t breathe on me.” She frowned at the machine, tapped the card on it again.

Greg smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep my distance.”

“Uh, machine says your ID card’s flagged.” She looked at him, passed it back to him.

“Can’t be.”

She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. This one’s on me.”

Greg frowned. “Thanks.” He sipped his drink and wondered why his card wasn’t working.
 

042

Calypso.

Edson Franklin was in his bunk resting. They’d been drifting, traveling at two hundred and twenty kilometers per second on their headlong descent into the system, racing towards Mars. He was targeting two hundred and seventy in one more day to speed their descent, then hard deceleration burns into high Mars orbit. They’d be bingo fuel, but he couldn’t shorten their trip any further. This was the fast track home.

Edson brought a bulb of tea from the galley up into the cockpit and found Carl sitting at the command console. He nodded to the captain and popped his belts, floating up out of the chair.

“All yours.” Carl had been doing some heavy plotting on their navigational computer during his shift. He was tired, edgy, but felt like he had a good plan ready.

Edson lifted his bulb in greeting. “Morning, Carl. Any news from Lighthouse?”

“Not much. Latest telemetries from Control up on screen. They’re predicting rendezvous with the object in one day.” Carl scratched his chest through his thread-bare t-shirt. “Uh, skip?” No time like the present to fill the captain in on his thinking. They didn’t have a lot of time left.

Edson sipped his tea, staring at the nav screen, watching the dots from the object getting closer to their position every hour. They could still out-run it. “Yes?”

“I’ve been running some alternate scenarios. What if we flipped it around? Slowed our descent and coasted into Mars orbit. I know we’re trying to get home quick, but I’m thinkin’ that might be the wrong tack.” Carl had gotten into the habit of using old nautical terminology when talking to the Captain. Maybe it helped his case. He didn’t know. He just knew Edson liked the idea of sailing. “We’ve already got a lot of full sail behind us, if we spent five days decelerating we’d be home a few days later and this thing could just blow right by us.”

Edson pulled on his goatee. “Why do you think this is a better idea than powering past it?”

Carl shrugged. “I don’t know. I have no idea what’s out there. What that thing is. What I do know is that we’re stressing the engines with this heavy burn pattern. If we start our decel now we can cruise in under lighter gees and take it easy.” Carl caught the arm of his seat with a foot and pulled himself down. “And hopefully whatever’s trying to catch us has already built up enough speed that they can’t slow down in time to meet us.”