Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (9 page)

Ben took a different tack. “What about the feeder? Small reactor. Plasma…”

“Same as the engine, you’d have to power it.” Carl chewed a finger nail. “They’re secured in the cargo module. No way to turn one on and you still need some sort of reaction mass to ignite the thing. I don’t even know if you’d be able to turn one of them into a bomb.” He trailed off. He had a new problem to figure out. “It’s not like one of them would just suddenly turn itself on either. You think one of the crew did something?”

Edson. “We can’t know what happened inside. Hopefully there was some kind of broadcast before they went up, but we haven’t heard anything yet.” Mutiny? That’d never happen aboard Mike Bruno’s ship. He ran a tight crew. Good people. In the eighty years these ships had been running there’d never been a case of mutiny on board. He looked back and forth at his crewmen and nodded. “Keep working on it, but right now, I’m not hearing anything that sounds likely. I think the most realistic accident scenario I can come up with is some fissile metal residue gunking-up the engine core. Could’ve been a dirty build-up of something unstable. If that went critical it could power a runaway fusion reaction if the H2 kept getting pumped in. But that’s crazy. We haven’t had a failure like that in forty years. Probably more.” How long had it been since they installed the shields on these ships?

Edson took a sip of water from his bottle and waited for the return signal from Mars. “Why don’t you guys run some engine diagnostics while we’re sitting here. Check for any residual build-ups. Who knows? Maybe the engineering crews have gotten lazy on our refits.” Carl and Trigger unbuckled from their seats and floated up.

Ben squeezed through the hatch and headed down towards the equipment bay below. Carl turned and looked at his captain. “This is crazy, isn’t it? Like, what if it’s something else?”

Edson raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

Carl leaned over, conspiratorially. “Like, what if it’s aliens?”

“That’d be a problem, wouldn’t it?”

Carl laughed and backed up. “Just sayin’!” He went to the hatch and pushed himself down. Nervous laughter drifted up as he slipped between the decks. That laugh made Edson uneasy.

“MSS18 this is Control.” It was Nolan. “Glad to hear your voice, Edson. We want you to know we’re all working hard trying to figure out what happened up there.” Pause. “Find data attached. Watchtower visuals show the Pandora event but not at much resolution. Ortega and team currently think Pandora might have come into contact with a high speed extra solar body moving in system. Over.”

Edson flipped his communications on. “Control, Calypso. We thank you for your update. Will analyze and report back. Calypso out.”

Incoming messages on his console now that the ship’s data feed was active. Two, three, ten, twenty messages. He scanned the headers looking for the data blob from Control. And found a message from Emma. He opened it first.

Hi Dad,

Tam and I think we know something about what happened to the Pandora. We found something moving through the belt from Olympus’ recordings. It seems to be fast moving on a trajectory headed for our ships. Including yours.

We need to get messages to all the inbound ships. Consider altering your course to avoid this object as much as possible. Use whatever fuel you have to move outside your current trajectory.

I’m beginning to think it’s a ship of some kind. Only thing that makes sense to me, but take a look. See what you think. Find our data attached below.

Love you Dad. Please be careful. Please please please come home safe. Mom’s been going crazy in the kitchen.

XOXO

em

That kid. Damn. He opened up the attachment and took a look at the grainy video. A blinker. Didn’t look like much. Flipping through he found Greg’s trajectory predictions.

Some clanking and swearing drifted up from below decks. “Damnit Carl, secure those tools. I don’t want to go outside with a fucking screwdriver floating around in my suit!”

Edson ignored it for the time being. He’d deal later.

He opened the attachment from control and watched the video of Pandora. He didn’t blink during the entire twenty second playback. He played it again.

Flash, was that a smaller flash? Bloom. Then something drifting out. Piece of the ship? Piece of whatever hit it? Not enough resolution at this distance to make anything out beyond a pixel. Why two flashes? Why different sizes? He squinted and ran it again.

How could he use this?

“Control, this is Calypso. What is your science team saying about those flashes? Over.”

Edson hollered down the tube, “Carl, come up here please”. More clanking below.

Carl re-emerged through the hatch, muttering, “can’t do two things at once.”

Edson put the Watchtower video up again. “Hey, focus on this for a minute. What do you see here.” He played the video.

While he watched it, he had an idea, and put up Em’s orbital data beside it.

Carl watched, gnawing on a stubby fingernail.

Edson put the video from Olympus at the beginning of the Watchtower video and played them both in sequence.

Carl had to ask. “Ok, what’s this other data? This doesn’t look like Control telemetry.”

Edson watched Carl studying the screen. He tapped on the grainy footage from Emma now occupying the display. “This is from a project my daughter and her friend put together. Data from Olympus Mons’ big ‘scope and some ballistic projections.”

Carl watched. Edson tried to coach him through this, hoping he’d come to the same questions he had. “Just ignore the telemetry for a second. Look at this.” He pointed at Emma’s repeater. “That’s happening really regularly, sped up in the video. And the intensity’s the same each time.” The replay cut to the Watchtower scene. “Here, there’s one flash, and then a smaller flash. Why two? Why are they different intensities all of a sudden?”

Carl squinted and leaned in closer. “Are there two flashes?”

Edson shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m asking Lighthouse.”

“Control, this is Calypso. We have some questions: We want to know what the two flashes are in the Watchtower video. The repeating flashes in the Olympus footage are all a single intensity. The secondary flash in the Watchtower video is smaller. Please report. Over.”

From below a voice wafted through the hatch. “You can’t leave me down here with all these tools, bitch!”

Carl spit out a piece of fingernail and it floated in front of his face. He watched it tumbling there. “I better go help Trig before he pops a vein.” He took one last look at the screen over Edson’s shoulder and stared at it for a good long moment before turning back to the hatch. “Gots to be aliens.”
 

021

Making Time was drifting through the inner belt. Dead calm. One hundred and fifty million kilometers from Mars. They’d been adrift for a day now.

Jerem was in his bunk with messages from Tam and Emma.

Em wrote telling him about her discovery of the repeating object. Describing the fast transit across the inner asteroid belt towards their ship. She was sure that was what happened to Pandora. She speculated the object was some kind of ship.

Remember our last night together? You and me alone in your apartment. I don’t want that to be my last memory of you.
please come home safe. We miss you. I miss you. We need you. I love you. xxooxx em

Tam’s message was less affectionate.

Damn, this was serious.

He pulled up the videos and telemetry on his tablet as the intercom fizzled in. “Burn in twenty minutes. Come up to the cockpit, please.”

Jerem pushed the button on his intercom. “Be right up.” He slid out of his bunk with his tablet into the access-way. Then swung up through the hatch into the dim red cockpit. He was hungry but it was too late to do anything about that.

“Dad, did you see these? I got messages from Tamra and Em.”

Hal was going over his calculations. “Yep. What do you make of it?”

Jerem buckled into his seat and stuck his tablet onto the console. He felt his face flush thinking about Emma’s mail reminding him of their last night together. “I really don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to look at the data and videos yet. They seem pretty … serious.” He made some adjustments to his seat. “Any word from Control?”

“Yeah. We got some visuals from Watchtower.” He ran the video. It made Jerem feel sick even without any detail. “It’s… hard to watch.” There were humans in that explosion.

“Yeah. It is. Mike was a good captain… Good friend.” They were silent for a moment, Jerem remembering the party at the Brunos. Mike’s copilot Vern got drunk and spilled punch all over the wall. Jerem’s mom helped clean up the mess while the men carried Vern out to his apartment where there was presumably more drinking taking place. Then he and Emma snuck off together and made out in the park under the willow tree. It’s a small group of people in the space program. Everybody knew everybody.

Jerem brought up the videos Emma sent him on his tablet. He’d watch those once they were underway. “Have we heard from Calypso?”

“We just got an updated flight plan from them. They’re going to take a wider burn. Go high and back in. It’s a lot of fuel, but they’re planning on getting well around anything that might be intersecting our trajectories.” Hal was getting the ship ready for power. “We’re going to take the opposite route.”

Jerem considered this. Loaded up his preflight checklist.

“Uhh. What if there’s a problem and they need help? Shouldn’t we be following them?”

“Too risky. If the option’s losing two ships versus one, we have to save one of them.”

“But, Dad… That’s Emma’s father on that ship.”

“I know, son.” Hal set his jaw. “Pre-burn check.”

They ran through the checklist. Green across the board. Jerem had a knot in his gut. His hands were shaking. He made a fist to stop it.

Hal opened the comms channel. “Mars Control this is MSS27, Making Time. Updated plan filed. Commencing Burn. Over and out.” He clicked off. “You have the honors, kid. Light it up.”

Jerem hit the autopilot switch and the engines kicked them into their seats. In a moment, the acceleration smoothed out and the shaking stopped. The ship easing into its new power-curve. “Engine’s reading stable power. 10%. Gravity’s at 0.2G.”

“Roger. Looks good.”

Jerem picked up his tablet and started flipping through it. He was looking for a game to play back in his bunk. Something to fill the time while they waited. “Dad? Why are we even out here?”

Hal looked up from the engine readouts to his son. “What do you mean? We’re in the space program. This is what we do. The colony needs metal to grow. The station needs water and materials…”

“Yeah, I know that, but we used to have robots. On Earth. Why are they sending people up into space?”

Hal thought for a second. “You know why. We put a ban on autonomous robotics. It’s in our constitution.”

“But wouldn’t it be safer? And we could leave them out for longer periods. They could replicate and mine the whole belt for us, then fire packages back to us to pick us up. We wouldn’t even need these ships.”

“Sure. And then we lose our ability to operate in space and have an army of robots out here in the belt with unlimited resources. Look, we don’t know what happened on Earth, but if it was … an intelligence – like we think it was – if it’s still alive or if it returns, we can’t afford to have anything out here that isn’t under our direct control. That’s the thinking, anyway.”

Jerem looked back at his tablet. “Oh.”

“C’mon, kid. Let’s get some beans.”
 

022

New Providence: Nicola Tesla University.

Greg, Tamra and Emma were being led through the halls of the university by Chief Administrator Walter Brennan.

“Commander Mancuso requested you three personally by way of Doctor Powell. He says you have some idea what happened to Pandora?” He had an urgent walk at the best of times. His mostly bald head turned half around on his stocky neck to address them as he walked.

Emma answered for them. “Maybe.”

Tamra coughed again with a hacking wheeze. She was becoming increasingly miserable.

Greg gave her a squeeze. “You should go back home. You’re sick.”

Administrator Brennan plowed on. “Time for that later. We’re setup in the main conference room.”

“We’re here.” He opened the door and gestured inside for them to enter the long room, dark in conference mode. Doctor Powell was sitting at the head of the table, bathed in low yellow light. He nodded at them as they came in.

The face of Commander Mancuso centred on screen, looking serious but tired. Dark bags under his eyes. Two others sat at the table on either side of him.

Brennan took a seat next to Powell at the table and motioned for the three to sit down and they took their chairs. Greg hesitated, but sat down at the far end of the table next to Tamra, self-conscious that he was closest to the camera.