Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (24 page)

Grayson’s jaw worked as he chewed on this. “Are you kidding me? Need I remind you that your little mining operation with our priceless hardware has been under review? And now this shit is happening? Get our ships back, Commander!”

Mancuso nodded. Alright. “We’re doing all we can from here, sir. I’ve called up the crew of the Happenstance to wait on standby in case we need to run a retrieval operation. And we’ve drafted a new member to help out on our science team and she’s proving very useful.”

Grayson grumbled. “Any perceived threat to the station? To the colony?”

Mancuso shook his head. “We don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.” He’d keep his own personal fears out of this meeting. No point in theorizing without any evidence.

“The ships then, Mancuso. Get the ships back. I don’t care what it takes, but until this thing is taken care of, no ships are to leave dock. Am I clear?”

“What if we have to scramble Happenstance?”

“All further departures are held until further notice. I’m not risking any more ships.”

Mancuso nodded. “Yes sir, understood.”

Grayson leaned forward and killed the channel with a wipe of his hand over the screen.

Mancuso slumped in his chair and stared at the blank screen for a long time. It’s not like they could stop him from scrambling a ship if he needed to.

He hadn’t mentioned The Terror.
 

063

Calypso.

Carl listened to the messages from Control and Making Time on his headset. This was not going well.

Ben was with Edson in his bunk still hoping for some sign of consciousness. Carl was sitting in the cockpit, listening to Ben talking to their Captain in soothing tones.

“Come on, Edson. You’ve got to wake up. Please wake up. We need the unlock codes for the engines. Please, Captain. We need you to wake up…”

Carl quietly beat his fists into his forehead, scrunching up his eyes and mouthing a silent scream. He didn’t want to risk entering a wrong passcode that might lock him out of some other critical system. Like life support.

He flung himself towards the hatch and veered down to the bunks. Pushing Ben aside, he grabbed the Captain’s shirt and started shaking him with as much force as he could in zero gravity.

“Wake up you sonofabitch! Wake up! We need the engine codes! Wake up!” He slapped Edson across the face as hard as he could without leverage, anchored over his chest with his free hand.

Ben put an arm around Carl’s neck and started squeezing. “I will break your neck right here. Let go of him.”

“Trig. We need the unlock codes.” Carl struggled to get the words out through his constricted windpipe but he let go. He didn’t have much choice.

Carl felt Ben’s mouth close to his ear. His breath on the side of his head. “His brain’s swollen. He might be in a coma. You did this.” Ben gave his neck a final squeeze, felt something crunch then let him go.

Carl wheezed for a moment, his face red. He felt his neck with a hand and turned his head from side to side to see if anything was dislocated. He looked up at Ben wearing an expression of disgust.

“Radio Control. Tell them we’re having an emergency and are locked out. You do it or I will. I don’t give a shit if I can’t fly this thing.”

Carl nodded. OK. No sound came out.

Carl pulled himself back into the cockpit and the command chair. He belted in and cleared his throat a couple of times. Then he opened a channel.

“Control.” His voice thin and raspy. “This is MSS18. Calypso. Mayday. The Captain is unconscious. We are locked out of our engines. Require assistance. Over.”
 

064

Lighthouse.

Sunil Pradeep was sitting at his communications station in the command deck when the message came in. He listened to it live first, then turned to address Bryce, the station’s second-in-command.

“Nolan, I have a message from Calypso.”

Nolan looked up from his tablet. “Put it up.” He’d been going through the station’s incident reports and noticed a number of requests from engineering hadn’t been fulfilled. They were getting backlogged.

Emma lifted her head, listening. Calypso! Dad…

The message came through laced with static containing Carl Lambert’s strained voice. “Control. This is MSS18 Calypso. Mayday. The captain is unconscious. We are locked out of our engines. Require assistance. Over.”

Nolan looked at the board showing Calypso drifting closer to the event bubble. The object converging. Where was the Commander? He turned to Sunil. “Open a channel. MSS18, this is Control. Please stand by. Over.” Then. “Can we get someone from engineering up here to help them? I’m going to get the Commander.”

Sunil opened a channel to the docks. “Docks. This is Control. Requesting the presence of a ship’s engineer to control deck, post haste.” He hoped it conveyed polite urgency.

Emma wondered why the transmission from Calypso was so noisy. It’s a digital link, there shouldn’t be any interference unless it was recorded that way at the source. Maybe it was a faulty microphone? She’d ask Sunil if she could go over the file with him when things were quiet.

Sunil looked up from his communications console and Emma Franklin was beside him. He startled.

“Mr. Pradeep? Can I send a message to Calypso?” She looked distraught. “I want to know what happened to my father.”

Sunil regarded her. “I’m sorry Miss… Franklin. Protocol doesn’t allow me to open a channel without express permission from the acting commander on deck.”

Emma was the picture of hurt. She looked at the empty chair recently occupied by Nolan. “Isn’t that you?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t really think…”

And then Ortega walked onto the deck. Emma turned to him.

“Nelson! We just heard from Calypso. My father’s unconscious and the engine’s locked-down. They need an unlock code.”

Ortega processed this as best as he could on the three hours of sleep he’d had in the last two days. He walked to his station and sat down, rubbing his eyes.

Wilkins got up and went to her. “Hey, why don’t we grab some food or something. We need to let these people do their work.”

Emma looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “I’m not going anywhere while my father’s ship is in trouble.”

Wilkins bristled. “People are trying to work and you’re distracting them.”

A range of emotions lit up in Emma and nearly rushed out of her, but she kept a lid on them. She took a breath and went to her seat, reminding herself that she was being evaluated, probably by Wilkins. She sat there worrying about her father, her mind racing through the possibilities.

How had he been injured? He wouldn’t have gone outside as Captain of his ship, his duty was overseeing the operations from the inside. Maybe something came loose during maneuvers? Maybe he fell under high gees? There were so many ways to get hurt on a ship. What was wrong with Carl’s voice?

She looked up, saw Pradeep quietly acknowledge a communication on the station’s line. He seemed satisfied.

Wilkins returned to the science station and bent over Ortega, speaking in a low voice. Emma could make out a few words, like increasing, rate, velocity. Ortega nodded and said, “Uh huh” a few times.

A few more moments passed. The station’s habitat ring wheeling through space. The stars outside shining against the black.

The door slid open and Mancuso entered trailing Nolan.

“We have an engineer coming up to the deck.” Sunil informed them.

Mancuso sat down in his chair, then turned and studied the board. No changes. Just lines drawing closer together.

Two hours until they converged.

“Commander. Incoming message from Calypso.” Sunil played the message for the room. Carl’s strained voice over the speakers.

“Control, this is Calypso. How are those unlock codes coming? Also, can you send up the latest vector from the object? Thanks. Over.”

“On it.” Emma began putting a data package together with their latest data. “Sending.” She reported and opened a message.

Calypso,

Find attached the latest data.

PS, please tell me my father is ok.

Emma Franklin

She flagged it priority and hit send. “Message sent,” she reported.

Mancuso turned back and forth slightly in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of his face. Sunil thought he looked very tired.
 

065

The Terror.

Vanessa squinted into the screen inside her helmet. It looked like a brown wash coloring the dark background over her remote camera. At first she thought the remote’s camera sensor was malfunctioning, but then realized what it was. “Dust cloud!”

The two space walkers grabbed hold and clung to the side of The Terror as the Pup turned away from the cloud, pointing back towards the ship.

Francine turned to Vanessa, speaking through helmet comms. “Are you able to get any directionality on it?”

Vanessa flipped a couple of switches and the Pup flared a high-powered light. “Maybe. I’m shooting a high-speed recording we can correlate with my orientation. Hoping it gives us something. Running it through analysis.” She made a slight orientation shift to add additional reference data, sliding the Pup sideways.

The console in front of them showed a model of the Pup, blue-green tracers lighting up around it in three-dimensional space.

Francine announced over the comms. “I need to make a slight rotation. Hang on out there. Maneuvers in three, two, …”

“Just a sec!” Reggie.

She nudged the ship just as Reggie’s voice broke through her helmet and she cursed. She balanced the ship out again, she’d only needed a couple of degrees to steer them away from the path of the incoming particles and give her crew coverage with the ship’s shield.

“Reggie? Winston? You OK?”

“Yeah. I’m good. But I lost the motor.” Reggie.

Winston. “OK here.”

Francine looked at Vanessa. “Come again, Reggie?”

Crackle. “Motor. MO-TOR! The thing that was supposed to aim this antenna for us. It’s floating away at about 2 meters per second.”

Shit. “Can you reach it?”

Vanessa coasted the Pup closer in, trying to get a bead on it. “Cap’n, I can see it, it’s already outside the shield’s radius. He’d be out in the open.”

A wave of passing dust caught the tiny motor and buffeted it further out and away. A spark lit it up for a split-second as a microscopic particle glanced off it.

“No.” Reggie sounded disappointed. “Maybe?”

“Scratch that. Leave it. Make do with what you’ve got. Just get finished up so we can get out of here.”

Winston reported in. “Almost done here, need any help on your end Reg?”

“Negative.”

Francine slumped inside her suit. With no directional control on the antenna, they’d have to point the thing manually. If it worked at all. That meant turning the whole ship every time they wanted to receive or broadcast.

Vanessa looked at Francine. “Well, look on the bright side. At least we know there’s a debris field here.”

“Yay.”

Winston clicked on. “Ok, I’m heading back to the airlock.”

Vanessa replied. “Roger that. I’ve got my eye on you.” She piloted the Pup in closer, taking advantage of the dome shield and watched him begin the climb up the ladder to the crew section. The Pup itself seemed to be handling alright, but she was worried about the optics and sensor packages getting chewed up by the debris. She adjusted the controls to keep it pointed on the crew.

Reggie. “Gonna need another 15-20 minutes here. Not easy making these connections. Not even sure the receiver’s going to work. Might be fried.”

Francine answered. “Just do what you can and get back inside.”
 

066

Calypso.

Carl studied the navigational data they’d sent up from Control, still stewing over the message from the Captain’s daughter. Why were they letting her talk to him? Did she know what was going on? Were they trying to see if he’d crack up?

He pushed it down and got back to business. If they had the vectors right, they could predict the time to contact with high precision.

Would it be close enough though?

At these distances and given the uncertain pieces in the data, there were a lot of variables.

“Come on Control. Give me those codes.” If we had engines we could at least introduce some unpredictability into the track.

He got up and maneuvered himself down the hatch to the crew section. Ben was still floating beside Edson, pain and concern written all over his face. An edge in Ben’s eyes told Carl not to get too close.

“Ben, how long would it take to get our bomb hooked up to the Pup?”

“Go fuck yourself.” No hesitation.

“Seriously. It may be the only chance we’ve got against this thing.”