Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (26 page)

Sal giggled in his weird, high-pitched voice from across the aisle.

Cary was sitting in the front of the car, facing back towards them. “Knock it off, Price. Everybody, helmets on. We’re coming up on the end of the line.”

Greg wondered if they were all crazy. Maybe they had to be to come down into these tunnels this far. Or maybe they started out like him. Normal, but broken. He put on his helmet and locked it in. He had no idea how long he’d be in the suit and hadn’t been drinking any water. He was hungry and thirsty. He took a sip from his suit’s water tube as his stomach grumbled.

The train lurched and started slowing down. Cary clicked in on her headset, “Radio check. Sound off.”

“Here.” James.

“Present.” Sal.

“Here.” Greg.

Dante gave a thumbs up accompanied by a beep from his suit radio.

Cary nodded and looked at her crew. “Good. When the train stops, everybody get to the bus. Greg, James is your buddy. Stay close to him. Got it?”

James made a face. “Shouldn’t you carry him, Cary?”

She looked at James and held up her glove’s index finger. The train bumped to a stop and she made one last check that everybody was sealed up before hitting the door on the front and pushing the first two diggers inside. James and Greg.

While the air cycled back into the cabin, Greg looked out the tiny thick glass window, unable to see much beyond the front of the train.

The light cycled red and James opened the outer door and bounced out. Greg followed into a harsh light beaming down from somewhere high above. The platform was well lit, but there was nobody else around.

The train had come to a stop inside a massive cavern. At one time, it had probably been filled with magma until some adjacent pressure event sucked the molten rock back into the mantle or out the volcano. Or maybe it had been a subterranean lake. In either case, it was empty now except for their train and themselves.

Greg looked around the cavern, the distant ceiling barely illuminated by the flood lights pointing down at the tracks and make-shift buildings of the outpost. He thought he could make out rock formations hanging from the ceiling like an upside-down city. He thought that might mean something, but couldn’t remember the section from his geology class that might have covered it. He’d look it up later.

A spare rail car had been pulled off the tracks and became a make-shift terminal building. Lights installed on either side of it made the dark car appear at least somewhat inviting.

It was uninhabited.

James bounced ahead in his suit. “Foller me, buddy.” He called back over the radio to Greg.

It didn’t take long for Greg to spot the bus’ massive steel construction. It was an industrial hauling machine.

James climbed halfway up the ladder and opened the door on the side of the front cabin. Then he made space for Greg to climb inside. Greg pulled himself up into the cabin, two rows of seats ran along the length of the interior mounted sideways. One seat up front was positioned behind the hulking control console.

Greg found a seat in the back corner and wedged himself into it.

James followed and sat across from him.

“Know any good jokes?”

Greg thought for a second. He remembered a funny meme from one of the school’s message groups. He considered telling it then wondered if it would be considered funny without the accompanying sad doctor graphic. Or if it would offend. Maybe it wasn’t that funny after all.

“No.”

This was going to suck.
 

070

Lighthouse.

“MSS18 Calypso, this is Control. Chief Engineer Greta Patrick here. Broadcasting unlock codes on secure side-channel. Please prep for reception. Over.”

Emma watched as the engineer entered the sequence into the comm station beside Pradeep, copying it from her tablet, verifying before relinquishing the terminal. Pradeep looked up the frequency and keys for Calypso and sent the message out over their reserved narrow band channel. Calypso was still drifting into the edge of the event bubble. The clock below the nav screen read 17:22.

Greta Patrick was wearing overalls and looked as if she’d just come from the inside of a ship’s engine. She wore a bandana around her shaved head and had multiple piercings in her nose and ears. Her stocky frame standing steady by the comm station, boots planted into the deck.

Mancuso was pacing. His face had a grey pallor to it. Nolan was still on deck looking exhausted in his seat near the comms station. Ortega and Wilkins had stopped crunching data and were watching the screens. There’d been no change to the object’s blink-rate of eight minutes.

Emma was in agony not knowing what had happened to her father. That no one was in control of the ship was unimaginable. They were just drifting into whatever fate had in mind for them. All she could do was watch it unfold around her. She noticed she’d been chewing her nails and pushed her hands into her lap, willing herself to keep them there.

The minutes passed. Eyes on Pradeep waiting for the transmission to come in. The channels were open, no time or need to mediate them. A rare burst of static as the radios detected some interstellar emission broke the hushed silence.

The radio crackled to life as a new voice came through over the speakers. “Control? This is Calypso. Ben Jordan here. We. uh. We have no pilot. Please advise. Over.”

Shocked looks shot across the deck. Emma felt the room collapse around her, shrink to a tunnel and zoom in on the activity around the comm station.

Mancuso walked over to the Patrick, her head sagging. “Can you walk him through this?”

Patrick lifted her head to look at him and shrugged. “First, I’m not a pilot. I don’t even know what we’re dealing with up there. I have no idea what level of ability this man has or what shape the ship is in. It’d be tough even if we didn’t have a five minute comm delay.”

Mancuso nodded. He turned to Pradeep. “Open a channel please and broadcast: Calypso, this is Lighthouse Actual. We need to know what happened. Can you fly that ship if we give you detailed instructions? Over.”

Pradeep cut the transmission and Mancuso resumed his walk. He turned to Nolan, “Get Greta details on their orientation and position.” He turned to the science station. “Wilkins, I want a best guess vector on the object and rendezvous timing down to the millisecond.”

Both of them turned to their stations. Nolan showed Patrick the current direction and orientation of the ship. Wilkins and Ortega were calculating furiously, checking their ongoing real-time track of the object.

Emma watched through a haze.

Greta stopped Mancuso mid-turn and grabbed his shoulder. “There’s another option.”

Mancuso winced and she withdrew her hand, surprised. “I hope it’s a good one.”

“We can remote pilot the ship. We’ll be on a delay so we’ll have to automate it somewhat. But I have the command and control codes here. We can bring it home by radio.”

Mancuso considered this. “How much time do you need to make that happen? Anything they have to do on the ship to enable it?”

Greta nodded, put her hands on her hips. “Yeah, there’s a command sequence they’ll need to enter into their flight console. They’ll put her into receive mode and then I batch up some instructions.”

“Ok, I want you to work with Nolan and the science team to come up with a set of instructions for that ship.” He turned. “Wilkins, how much time have they got?”

Wilkins put some finishing touches on his work, did one last scan. “Forty-three minutes, eight seconds. Vectoring from three-one-five degrees slash two-six-zero at one hundred and thirteen kilometers per second. We’ll feed the data back into nav.”

Mancuso turned back to Pradeep and signaled for him to open a channel. “Calypso, Control. We have another option for you. We can remote pilot the ship. Please acknowledge. Over.”

More radio noise. “Control, this is Calypso. I think I can, but I need some help. I have some engineering and minimal pilot training. Over.”

Mancuso ignored this transmission and waited for the response to his second.

He rubbed his chest. His arm was numb and aching.
 

071

Calypso.

Ben was at the controls in the cockpit. The radio lit up with another incoming transmission from Mancuso. “We have another option for you. We can remote pilot the ship.”

Now they were talking.

It had been over an hour since Carl had gone outside the ship. He couldn’t hear him anymore and he was thankful for that. No longer a speck on the ship’s outboard camera.

He shivered.

“Roger that Control. Awaiting instructions. Over.”

Carl had pleaded with him for the first thirty minutes or so. Ben could see the jets from Carl’s suit on video from the external camera as Carl tried to correct his tumble, but he couldn’t regain control of it. He begged him to come out and get him. He made deals. He promised all kinds of ridiculous favors and payments.

Free use of his apartment. All of his food rations. He’d look after his kids anytime he wanted. Take care of all of his ship’s duties. On and on.

Then he started apologizing. And crying.

Ben couldn’t help him out there. If he went out, they’d both be stranded in space. Away from the ship.

It had taken everything for Ben not to answer him. Until the end when he did.

“Trig?”

Ben held his head in his hands.

“Ben? Can you still hear me?”

“Yes Carl.”

Hiss of noise over the line. “You know I was trying to save us, right? I don’t think the Captain knew what he was doing. He wasn’t in his right mind.”

Silence.

Radio noise. Clicks. Like someone pressing the transmit button repeatedly. “He would’ve killed us all and you wouldn’t see your wife and kids again.” More clicks. “If you come get me, I can get us out of this.”

Ben wept into his hands. He could picture his wife and his two boys. He could remember them clearly from the day he left home. The breakfast they’d eaten together around the table. His youngest, Sam asking him questions about the asteroid they were going to mine. His brother telling him to stop bugging his father. The looks of adoration on their faces. The awe of their father, the space miner.

“Trig?” clicks. “You want to see them again, right?”

Another transmission. “Calypso, Control. Greta here. We have some instructions for you. Please find the command sequence in the attachment. Please follow it very carefully. We are awaiting your ship’s control carrier and will take it from there. Over.”

Ben wiped his face and flicked the radio on. “Control. Calypso. I got your message. Will commit. Over.”

Another message came in over Carl’s clicking. “Calypso, Mancuso here. Science team recommends putting on your suits. Also, you’re going to be on automatic when you enter those codes. There’ll be a readout on your screen and a countdown, but you won’t have any audible warnings when the ship’s about to turn and burn. Lock yourselves in. Over.”

Suits. Goddamnit. He shook his head. There was no way he was going to be able to get the Captain into his suit. If he was still alive.

He floated down to the crew section and checked in on Edson. His face a blue swollen bruise over his cheek where he’d struck the console. “Edson? You awake?” The Captain didn’t move. Was he breathing? “We have to put our suits on now. They’re going to put the ship on automatic for us and bring us home. Home to your girls. Emma says she misses you.”

Edson didn’t move.

He patted the Captain on his shoulder and continued down to the equipment locker.
 

072

Making Time.

Hal and Jerem watched the screen intently from the cockpit.

They were still drifting. Gradually sliding further below the ecliptic on their course. They were just over a day from their turn-around point where they would begin deceleration burns, easing their fall through the solar system and returning back to the plane of planetary orbit. They were still inside the ring of the asteroid belt nearly three hundred and thirty million kilometers from the Sun.

Their excursion had cost them a lot of fuel.

“You ever remote pilot a ship, Dad?”

“Nope. Don’t want to, neither.” Hal was belted into his seat, thumbs looped through the shoulder straps.

“Do all our ships have these remote controls in ‘em?”

“Yep. Mandatory equipment. Have to unlock it to enable them though.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Greta came back over the radio, “… We are awaiting your ship’s control carrier and will take it from there. Over.”

They waited. Calypso would have already received this message three minutes ago and were probably enabling the auto pilot. Mancuso cut in. “Science team recommends putting on your suits.”

Hal grunted. No shit, he thought to himself. The thought of remote pilot on his ship filled him with dread. He didn’t like giving up control of his ship to anything. Worse, a space ship in the hands of a remote pilot could do unpredictable things. A ship could kill its crew if it was given the wrong maneuvers. Even belted in, they were susceptible to the massive G-forces these ships could produce.