Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 6
“OK,” I said in a commanding voice that left no doubt who was in charge. “Gather round. Our first priority is always fire control. For the moment we have that handled. Our next priority is getting power systems back on so we can bring up life support.”
“Don’t we need to know where we are and if somebody is about to shoot at us?” Janice asked.
I shook my head. “Wouldn’t help us either way.”
“It’s not like one can just peek out a window,” Max added. He had been complaining about the lack of this particular amenity since the moment he had set foot on my ship.
You need to understand. The Edmund Fitzgerald was not some imaginary ship in a holo-drama where a rough-and-tumble captain, with a blaster on his belt and a wild streak, just looks out a transparent aluminum viewport and says, ‘Oh look, there’s Rigel IV.’ Fitz was a working ship. That meant our view of the outside world was either a quantum dot, flat panel display or a floating hologram. Oh, there were ships out there with real, honest to God windows, but they were luxury liners or pleasure yachts.
My point was, we couldn’t just look out the window and know where we were or what was going on around us. Without power, we were utterly and completely blind.
Colonel Dekker explained the situation to the others. “Even if we were about to fall into a black hole, which is certainly possible, or if our friend out there, whoever that is, is lining up a coup de grâce, which is also a possibility, there’s nothing we can do about it. We have no power. No sensors. No engines. No attitude control thrusters. We might as well be a rock floating in space at this point.”
“Correct,” I confirmed.
That doesn’t mean we’re out of options, I thought to myself before speaking out loud.
“But what we can do is something about our power systems. The only power source we have right now are the batteries built into our gravity plating. Those won’t last long, so we need to turn most of them off. To be clear, we likely will need those batteries to bring our reactor back online.”
No one mentioned the fact that, in normal circumstances, it would have been the engineer who organized the recovery and repair operations. His untimely death eliminated that option. Fortunately for us, I knew every nut and bolt on this ship… or I did, up until the point where DeAndre’s people had come in and done their magic.
DeAndre, who had been quiet up to his point, raised his hand. I nodded.
“I notice, Captain, that all the control systems in engineering seem to be dead. Are the ones on the bridge operational?”
“Negative,” I confirmed with a shake of my head.
“How do we tell the gravity plating to power down?”
I grinned. “The good old-fashioned way. We unplug them.”
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, we had disabled all the plating except for one panel each in engineering, the medical bay, and the bridge. Magnetic soles sewn into our ship sneakers kept us grounded in those areas currently without gravity.
We left limited gravity on the bridge and in engineering so we could work more easily in those areas restoring power and control. The one plate left active in the med bay was for a somber practical reason. The doctor had argued that even minor medical emergencies in weightlessness could be a death sentence. I didn’t know it at the time, but her forethought and insistence would be a lifesaver.
I had the team meet in the galley. There was no gravity there, but it was the one place on the ship that everybody associated with rest and relaxation. It may seem counterintuitive, but working in near weightlessness is exhausting. The fact that things have no weight can be deceptive, and they continue to have mass. Muscles easily get strained, and often even simple actions require multiple attempts before you adapt.
The colonel and I had extensive experience in zero-G environments, but the same could not be said for the others. Based on the amount of swearing I was hearing, I knew it was time for all to take a break.
The emergency locker in the galley was stocked with food bars, meals-ready-to-eat (MREs), and bottled electrolyte-enriched water. The MREs, sometimes called an MRS for meals-ready-to-squeeze, had been a Marine Space Force staple for hundreds of years. Some claimed, rightly I expect, that that was also their approximate shelf life.
It was amazing that with all the technology that allowed the human race to travel to the stars for over a millennium, we still couldn’t make emergency rations that would both taste good and survive storage for years. It seemed the universe, in one of those little ironies it was fond of, saw fit to allow us one or the other. But not both.
“Who wants a tofu curry?” I asked as I held up the first MRE I had pulled out of storage. Shockingly, there were no takers. Fortunately, there were other options available. These included mac and mystery meat, roast beast, chicken-catch-all-gory, and my personal favorite, spaghetti and you really don’t want to know.
After everyone had picked one, we sat down and enjoyed (and I use the term loosely) our lunch.
The air from the various areas of the ship had mixed enough that, by this point, we could breathe without choking when we took our masks off for a few minutes. The good news was the acrid smell complimented the taste of the various MREs we were enjoying (again, I use the word loosely).
“How long will the air last?” Janice asked as she took her final squeeze of barbeque beef with honey glaze.
I looked at the tofu curry I had taken so others wouldn’t have to. I suffered through half of it. I was trying to decide if I would force myself to finish the rest when the doctor asked her question. It would be rude not to answer her, so I flipped the cap back on the tube to seal it.
“We have chemical oxygen candles that will give us about forty-eight hours. They have CO2 sinks built into them, so CO2 build-up won’t be an issue. Of course, our masks will help with that as well. If we need to, there are eight EVA suits with their own O2 and power cells. We probably have three or four days before we run out of breathable air.
“The suits may become necessary for heat before we run out of O2. Of course, both will be a moot point long before then. We need to get the ship’s systems back online, and relatively soon.”
Max looked up from his spaghetti. Unlike the rest of us, he seemed to enjoy his tube of paste. Seems like, in any group, there is always someone who relishes survival food. In our group, that was my Uncle Max. Must have been the defective genes.
“Is there something you know that we don’t?”
By way of answer, I held up my half-eaten tube of mush. I released it. Instead of floating still, it drifted ever so slowly toward the interior wall of the galley.
7
FROG SOUP AND TOASTED BREAD
Colonel Matt Dekker was the first to realize the significance of what he was seeing.
“Frog soup?”
I nodded and pointed with my chin to the various MRS wrappers that were collecting on the wall.
“How long do we have?” Matt asked.
“Hard to say. We’ve got to operate on the assumption that fixing sooner is better than later.”
DeAndre looked at the same wall. His brow wrinkled in confusion.
“Frog soup? What am I missing?”
“We’ve entered a gravity well and are experiencing some acceleration. The reason we didn’t notice is because the acceleration is very slow at the moment and the ship is likely tumbling,” I answered.
“Why the toads?” Max looked confused.
“Actually frogs, but toads would work equally well,” Matt answered. “If you place a frog in cold water, then slowly raise the temperature, the frog will never notice. At some point, you end up with frog soup.”
“That’s disgusting,” Janice, Max, and DeAndre moaned as one.
I shrugged. I didn’t disagree with them.
“Who the hell would do that?” the doctor added.
I smiled. “Probably the same people who make MREs.”
“The point is,” Matt continued, “the G forces we’re experiencing are so slight at this point that our bodies don’t notice. Unlike the frog though, we will notice soon enough.”
“Colonel, I need the men to start pulling cable. I don’t care where you get it, but I need every power cell connected to a gravity plate wired up and routed down to engineering. You should be able to use the existing power bus once we disconnect the main breaker.”
“On it, Captain. Doctor Spratt, Mister President… you just became power system linemen. Let’s go.”
I put my mask back on and turned to Janice. “Ok, Doctor Chapel. Let’s go save the day.”
* * *
Two hours later, the good doctor and I were still trying to make heads or tails of the reactor situation. The problem was, I had no idea why it had gone offline. I couldn’t run any of our limited battery power into the system to get it to self-diagnose its problems because I needed every bit of that juice to do a cold restart. Even then, we might not have enough in the batteries we were hot-wiring together to get the job done.
What that meant was that the doctor and I were going to have to operate, taking apart each accessible system and visually inspecting it. It was slow work made more difficult by several factors.
First, we had limited lighting. Second, gravity was wonky and getting wonkier by the minute. Yes, wonky is a valid technical term. The captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald had added it to the standard operating procedures manual for that ship. I knew that captain very well and, despite being warned by numerous individuals that knew her also, I trusted her… every time I looked in the mirror.
The issue was this. The single gravity plate we had left active in engineering gave us one tenth of a G in a three-meter by three-meter area. In addition, whatever gravity well was accelerating the ship was getting noticeably stronger. So much for boiling frogs.
Finally, I was not an engineer, and I had an extremely limited understanding of how these systems worked. Normally, I’d have my very annoying ship’s AI at my beck and call to walk me through any system maintenance that required direct meat-sack intervention.
No power… no AI… no step-by-step walk through. Because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, I just assumed everything that I could easily replace was broken. That meant I’d pull a board and have the doctor pull a replacement from the repair locker. That locker had replacements for most of the more important circuits, as well as the most common ones. A signal demodulator is a signal demodulator, whether it’s used in a control interface for a plasma injector or a microwave oven. That was the advantage of standardized component design.
We were working on the last section of the control interface when our luck went south for the winter. I had saved that interface for last, because it was tricky to get to and I didn’t have a clue as to how to disassemble it to get to the boards I wanted to replace.
Matt had the power routed down to engineering. All we needed to do was replace these last boards and throw the power breaker. While the colonel was tightening down the junction box, I was swearing up a storm, trying to get a final protective shield off the interface.
As a curious side note, one of the advantages to having a doctorate in xenoarchaeology was I had the academic background to swear in multiple languages, across multiple species and time periods. I was pissed. Because I was pissed, I wasn’t careful. I knew the exact tool that I needed to get the job done, but alas, none of us knew where to find the bloody thing.
Sometimes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I had a hammer and, by gosh, that latch on the panel I was trying to open looked just like a nail. I hit it hard. I mean, I leaned into it and whacked it a good one. I used my legs to brace against a section of wall and pushed so the hammer blow wouldn’t send me flying.
That’s the moment our luck took that hiatus I talked about earlier.
Matt’s hand was on the circuit breaker, tightening down that last connection. My hammer hit the panel, which finally popped open to expose a number of high-voltage lines, as well as the circuit boards I was trying to get to.
Suddenly, the entire ship lurched. I would learn later that we had been hit by an asteroid that was being sucked into the same gravity well we were.
Matt slipped, and his screwdriver bridged the gap between the breaker terminals. The sudden surge of power spot welded the metal shaft in place. At the same time, I fell into the now exposed, fully energized panel. I remembered screaming, and then, nothing.
* * *
I dreamt that I was being eaten alive by ants. Let me state for the record, it’s not a pleasant way to die. The “How did I get inundated by ants on a starship in the middle of nowhere?” question was beyond my current cognitive capabilities. I suspect I was only running on half thrusters. There was also a thin transparent snake biting my arm. I tried to pull it away.
Immediately, strong arms grabbed me and held me down so the snake could kill me. The “Why would a snake want to kill me when the ants already had a handle on the job?” was again a question beyond my current cognitive capabilities. That whole “half thrusters” thing, don’t ya know.
I felt an insect sting me in the neck…
* * *
I heard voices. Familiar voices.
“She’s awake.”
I looked up at Doctor Chapel, who was wearing her best “I’m a concerned doctor, so I’m going to give you a fake smile in the hopes you don’t see past it” look.
I peeked at my arm. There was a bandage where the IV had been removed.
“Well, now I know what the bread feels like.”
Uncle Max shuffled next to my bed in the medical bay. I knew where I was. I think more of my thrusters had come online.
“Is she still loopy?” he asked. “What’s this about bread?”
I smiled. “Now I know what the bread feels like in the toaster.”
“She’s back,” Colonel Dekker chuckled from the other side of the bed.
“Ship’s status?” I had noticed the lighting was, unfortunately, still being supplied by portable emergency lamps. There was also an oxygen candle burning in the corner. That would explain the freshness of the air. The CO2 sink built into the chemical device would have removed the excess CO2 generated by the various fires that had occurred as a result of our abortive jump.
Matt walked around my bed so I wouldn’t have to strain my neck trying to see the people who were talking to me.
“You’ve been unconscious for about four hours. The doc,” he nodded toward Janice, “gave you a dose of nanites to fix you up. As far as the ship goes… it’s anybody’s guess. As best we can tell, the reactor is ready for a restart,” the colonel answered.
I looked back at the emergency lights. That wasn’t a good sign. The fact that the reactor had not been restarted meant that there was a big “but” I suspected the colonel was getting ready to share.
“But” he continued…
See. I told you—big “but.” For the record, I hate being right sometimes.
“But we no longer have sufficient power to carry out the restart.”
“Let me guess, electrocuting the ship’s captain drained our available reserves.”
“Got it in one,” Matt agreed. “I’m not sure what our remaining options are.”
“There are always options.” I deliberately made my voice encouraging. “I notice we seem to be accelerating faster and the ship is not spinning any more. There’s a good chance we’ve entered the outer fringes of an atmosphere.”
“That was the conclusion the colonel and I came to earlier,” DeAndre added from the shadows. He stepped forward. “The thinking is atmospheric drag, or something like it, might be stabilizing the ship… or, at least, our rotation.
“As far as our speed, or acceleration, or whatever you want to call it technically, that’s got us baffled. None of us are pilots or science types. We think we may be traveling through gravity waves or something.” It was Matt who spoke. He was right. None of them were science types… but I was.
They must have seen my puzzled expression. Gravity waves weren’t something Mark One meat sacks like us could detect using the five senses God gave us.
“The apparent gravity seems to get stronger and weaker on a regular time interval… like we’re traveling through waves. Is it possible a black hole can do that?”
“It’s possible, but not likely,” I answered. I was feeling optimistic for the first time in a long time.
I swung my feet over the side of the bed, intending to get up. It was only after the men suddenly turned away that I realized I was dressed the way my mother had brought me into the world… butt naked… well, technically not, because, at the last moment, I had managed to pull the sheet up to protect my honor. Still, it was close. I’m not sure who was redder. Me, or the men who had turned away.
“My apologies, gentlemen.” I wrapped the sheet around myself. “I should have realized I was in my birthday suit. It’s safe to turn around. I promise I won’t be flashing you again today.”
I notice that the colonel was the last to turn back around and, even then, he kept his eyes averted. Interesting.
“You said ‘possible, but not probable,’” Max continued, in an obvious effort to get us past that awkward moment.
“Actually, I said ‘possible, but not likely,’ but it amounts to the same thing. I think what we’re experiencing is a parabolic orbit around an object with a well-defined atmosphere. The orbit is decaying, which will eventually dip us deep enough into the atmosphere that we will hopefully fall out of orbit.”
Now it was the others turn to look at me… confused.
“During the apogee,” I explained, “when we are farthest from whatever it is, we are orbiting, and we experience no acceleration G forces. During perigee, when we are closest, and likely in the atmospheric envelop of whatever it is, then we experience the greatest acceleration G forces.
