Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (6 page)

They entered the control deck, the big windows were open over a view of Mars, casting a ruddy light into the room over the bright orange of the evening deck lighting. The crew were at their stations working in a hushed silence. They’d all heard the transmission already and were worried. Mancuso could feel it in the air.

“Send Calypso a standby. Ortega, what have you got for me?”

Commander Mancuso was going over the final telemetry data from Pandora for the tenth time when the broadcast came in. “… Making Time to Mars Control. There has been a possible explosion near the likely position of MSS13 Pandora…”

Mancuso cracked a knuckle. “Comms, put that attachment up on the main screen. Loop it. Open a channel, send: Mars Control to MSS27. Message received. Stand by.”

The telemetries were replaced by a scene from space. Mars, easily identifiable in the right of the wide field display of stars. Then a flash. Static on audio. Full spectrum scan played afterwards. Bright flash across the range. White hot.

Jesus Christ.

A murmur started in the command deck as people took in the video and looked at one another. Pandora had… has three on board. Captain Bruno.

Mancuso felt the vodka disappear from his body, replaced by adrenaline. “I need a science team on that recording on the double. Comms, open a channel. Mars Control to MSS27. Analyzing attachment. Please send any additional details. Instructions will follow. Over.”

Sunil Pradeep banged that into his comms console. “Sending.”

“Ortega, do we have any video of the event from our telescopes?”

Ortega was already searching. “Olympus was in the sun at the time. Watchtower has radio and video.”

“Well, why the hell hadn’t we gotten an alert? Put it up, please, main screen. Move Making Time’s video to screen two”. The screens shuffled their contents as Ortega put a new recording up.

Watchtower was a million and a half kilometers away, orbiting at Mars’ L2 Lagrange point. It’s optical array covered a hemisphere of sky facing away from Mars’ dark side pointing away from the Sun. It used a wide-angle lens with a super-high resolution gigapixel sensor to capture space and catalog the asteroid belt beyond. It also served as a communications relay beaming Mars’ network into space.

Pradeep, monitoring his board, “Sir, I have another broadcast from Making Time.” He put it on speakers. “All ships. Possible incident involving Pandora. Please exercise caution…”

Ortega narrowed the view to the region of space Pandora was in, scrubbed the timescale back twenty minutes and set it in motion. The big flash filled the screen with white light. He set a marker, rewound and zoomed in again. This time he slowed down the recording. There was a tiny light on the screen and then the brighter flash that obscured everything else. Then it faded slowly. Some small light sources visible flying away from the origin.

The deck was dead quiet.

Mancuso gripped his nose. Eyes closed. The silence dragged on. The video repeated. The pain in his chest returned as the adrenaline faded from his system. A headache began to form around the remnants of his vodka. Shouldn’t have had those drinks.

“Comms, open a channel, system-wide. This is Mars Control. We have lost contact with Pandora. Advising all ships take caution. We will update with new information as available. Control out. Comms, please rebroadcast in text.”

Mancuso sat heavily in his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him. The videos kept repeating on screen. Tiny pin point of light. Big flash.

“Ortega, put that video on number three and bring our telemetry display back up on one. I want you to tell me everything you can about that explosion. Let’s bring our ships home.”

“Yes, sir.” Ortega shuffled the screens around from his desk in the science and nav station. He set to work on the images scrubbing them through their imaging computers.

Mancuso tapped a message into his tablet addressed to Greta Patrick requesting an engineering team get sent up to Watchtower. They’d have to do a full work-over on it when they got a chance. He asked her to run some remote diagnostics in the meantime. What else was he forgetting?

Bryce leaned over him, put a hand on his shoulder, speaking quietly. “Sir, we should probably send a note to the Council. Much as I hate to suggest it.”

Mancuso nodded. He was right, damn it. “I don’t want to stir them up just yet until we know more. I’ll get Grayson on the screen in my boardroom.” He stood up and straightened his jacket. “You have the deck, Mister Nolan.”
 

013

New Providence: Nicola Tesla University.

Tadeuz Powell was still in his office, about to close up. He had some messages from the station to get back to but hadn’t had a chance yet. The students were keen today.

He would have liked to have a nap. He practically dozed off when one of his students was bugging him about some particular problem about orbital mechanics for a project he’d assigned him. Just look it up. He stared into the light on his desk for a moment, imagining it was the Sun.

He looked back at his screen, eyes adjusting slowly to the different brightness and skimmed his inbox. Faculty meetings. A council meeting agenda. Students asking for passing grades they didn’t deserve. A light knock and his office door swung open and three students stuck their heads in. Miss Franklin, Miss Wheeler, and Mister… Pohl?

“Didn’t I just see two of you? Come in.” He drawled as the three huffed in, the two ladies taking the chairs they had before. Greg closed the door behind him and leaned on it. He appeared to be out of breath. “I was just about to close…”

Emma plowed ahead, interrupting him. “Dr. Powell. Sorry to bother you again, but we have some new information.” Emma motioned for Greg who dutifully produced his tablet from his pack.

Greg walked to the side of Powell’s desk opened up the navigation display on his tablet. “I was looking at the object Tam and Em found and did some plotting.” Powell watched, still half reading his email, something from Mancuso aboard the station about missing information from Watchtower had been forwarded to him.

Greg pushed on. “I plotted out a course for this thing and overlaid it on our ship’s navigation curves. It looks like whatever this thing is it’s heading straight for them.”

This got Powell’s attention. One of his mandates as the chief astronomer of Mars colony was to keep an eye on potential threats to their ships, whether in the form of solar activity or inbound objects floating around the asteroid belt. But he was a second line of defense. Most of the heavy analysis happened up on Lighthouse with data from the imaging arrays on board Watchtower and their ground-based telescopes. If those were malfunctioning…

He started wheezing through his moustache as he studied the plots. “Slim chance it could get near enough to any of them to pose a threat. But just in case, you’d better leave this with me. I’ll make sure Control gets it.”

Tamra sniffled and wiped her nose. She was feeling worse by the minute. She wondered if she was coming down with something.

Powell looked at the names of the blobs on the navigational screen then back at the students sitting and standing anxiously in front of him. It took him a moment to make the connection.

He hadn’t been following the operations of the mining fleet closely for some time. All three of these kids had parents on those ships.

“Oh my. I’ll send this up right away.”
 

014

Calypso.

Captain Edson Franklin read the incoming transmission from Control on his console aboard the Calypso. He read it again.

… lost contact with Pandora. All ships take caution…

“No shit.”

Carl looked up from his book. “What is it, Skip?” Feet resting on his console, seat reclined.

“We’ve lost contact with Pandora. Three days ahead.” Edson rubbed his goatee. They’d seen the flash. He and Carl were sitting in the cockpit on watch when it happened. The light shining bright enough to light up the cockpit through the glass overhead.

Edson turned in his seat and faced Carl, flicked on the intercom for Ben’s benefit, still down in his bunk. “I need everything on this ship secured and locked down in case we need maneuvers. We are on alert.”

He returned to his screen, began checking through the ship’s systems, everything was running well. They were hauling twenty seven and a half tonnes of iron, nickel and trace metals from their asteroid claim and the ship was heavy. From below he could hear Ben cursing as he hauled himself out of his bunk and heaved around the cramped ship.

Carl yelled down at him through the hatch, “Look lively down there, Trig!”

Ben shouted back “Go to hell, man! This is not a good time for me.”

Carl chuckled and put his book in the webbing beside his console. “I guess I better go help Grumpy Gus. Holler if you need us.” He hoisted himself up and down the hatch.

Carl and Ben were both young. Early twenties. Tough. Built like miners. Edson had picked his crew for muscle, but space took its toll on that. It was hard to stay big in zero gravity and on these return flights, it was even harder to get used to gravity again. They were all sore. Edson wasn’t exactly a small man either.

He tapped out a message.

Julie,

We just got word that we’ve lost link with Pandora. She’s three days ahead of us. No word yet on what happened to her. I’m hoping it’s just a problem with their antenna or something. You should check in on Bruno’s family. See how they’re doing. I hope they know already, if not, you might be delivering the bad news.

How’s Emma? Make sure she does her math assignments. Last I heard she was slacking off and she’s too good to let slip. She’s going to make a great captain one day.

I love you, Jules. Tell Em I love her too and give her a big hug for me.

Be home soon,

Edson

He sent the message. Thirteen minutes. One hundred and thirty million kilometers. The ship was humming like a bass string in space.
 

015

Jerem slipped across Making Time’s outer skin to the supports connecting the habitat and cargo modules to the shield. Through the struts he could see the cargo module hanging below. Beside him the two huge fuel pods bulged blotting out the stars.

Music droned in his headphones. A long-dead singer screeching about explosions in the sky as he traversed the surface of the shield. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“I’m crossing the lip of the shield. Radiation check.” He extended a rod with a radiation sensor on the end of it, his helmet display read: 0.02 mSv. “Engine’s reading clean enough from out here. Going over. Over.”

Jerem retracted his sensor rod and stowed it on his hip. He boosted over the lip of the shield on his suit’s thrusters to the usually-unseen second half of the ship.

The engine module was a large, bulging cylinder covered in a mass of exposed tubing and heat sinks. Hidden in the middle of the thick metal housing, the spherical reaction core was inactive. A number of protuberances along the surface of the engine hinted at some of the internal machinery and power sources needed to drive the fusion reaction. Large twisted metal piping ran across the surface carrying recycled coolant and large exhausts should they need to vent off into space. The cooling lines ran up and around the underside of the large shield dome covered in stacks of thin metal blades acting as radiators, shedding heat before the coolant made the return trip back to the engine. The end of the ship finished in a long spike sticking out of the main exhaust nozzle.

Jerem attached the tether from his belt line to a ring on the lip of the shield, adjusted his thrust and floated inward, the gigantic shield blocking out the sunlight above him. He could feel the heat dissipating out of his suit while inside the shadow, and his suit’s heaters kicked in to compensate. He aimed towards the heavy twisted metal tubing of the fuel delivery systems ahead of the engine housing.

He approached the near end of the cylinder and the two heavy lines that snaked in from the fuel pods above. He was recording the trip via his helmet camera. “Exterior looks good. Nothing visible on the surface. Approaching line two.”

“Roger that.” His headset crackled with his father’s voice over the ship’s local radio system. They used an analog band for local transmissions instead of the system-wide digital network. The Future Sound of London was replaced by The Sisters of Mercy on his headset.

Jerem approached the line. Meter-thick silver shielding covered the cable he was following. He traced it into a connector above a panel labeled Injector 02 and surrounded by yellow and black hash marks on the sealed compartment of the reactor.

“Opening the maintenance hatch.” Jerem reached out and grabbed the chunky handle inset above the panel and braced his feet on the hull. The handle was hard to turn, but he managed to get it into the open position and haul it up.

The heavy hatch lid slid in and down revealing the machinery inside responsible for pulling the heavy liquid hydrogen from the fuel pod into the fusion reactor below.

Jerem peered inside. Reached in with one bulky glove and moved one of the wiring bundles aside. There was a small black scorch mark on the top of one of the injector housings near the power coupling.