The Tempest (First Contact), page 4
“Oh, ah,” he mumbles. “Got it. Wait. This can’t be right.”
“It’s correct,” she says, looking over at his screen.
“Umm, it’s saying there’s a gravitational presence roughly four hundred thousand times the mass of the sun.” Marc scratches at the dried blood above his lip. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
“That’s the technical term,” Emma replies. “If we can’t get that warp bubble active, the Sycorax is going to get awfully toasty when we swing down next to that thing.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“It’s a monster. It has consumed most of its accretion disk but it’s still got a few surprises left. It’s eating itself.”
“And the jet?” Marc asks.
“It’s all that’s left of some star consumed millions of years ago. It got ripped apart as it swung too close. That jet is the bones. It’s the remains of the carcass. It’s the tidally disrupted remnants of a dead star—including the heavy byproducts of fusion in its core. And we flew right through the middle of it.”
Marc clenches his teeth. He pulls the tendons on his neck tight as he says, “Yeah, that doesn’t sound good.”
Emma says, “We got hit by unusually fast particles. The warp bubble should have absorbed them, but it collapsed under the sheer onslaught. Rather than plowing into an asteroid, we got hit by a shotgun blast full of atoms, probably ions like oxygen, carbon and iron. And there would have been hydrogen, lots and lots of fast-moving hydrogen. We were struck by whatever didn’t get drawn down into that monster.”
“I think we’re clear of the stream,” Marc says, bringing up the position of the Sycorax on the graph. “We’re okay. We’re going to be okay.”
“Nope,” Emma says, shaking her head. “We’re not. We’re falling in toward that singularity. We won’t hit. The chances are we’ll swing wide, but without that warp bubble, we’re not getting out of here.”
“But we’ve got time on our side, right?” Marc says. “It’s a monster, but it’s got to have stable orbits. Look at that rogue planet. That’s good news, isn’t it? It means the system has been stable for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years. I say we wake the rest of the crew, ride out the approach, and repair the warp drive.”
“It’s not that simple,” Emma says. “Get too close to that monster and its magnetic field could fry us to a crisp. The tidal forces alone could tear our ship apart. If more matter falls in while we’re nearby, we could get saturated with radiation.”
“Not good,” Marc says.
Emma jokes with him, repeating his point from earlier. “And by not good, I take it you mean, really fucking bad.”
He laughs.
“Tell me about that rogue,” she asks. “It’s big, right?”
“About twice the size of Jupiter,” Marc says. “And glowing in infrared.”
“That’s good.”
“Why?” he asks.
“If it’s got an active core with heavy metals, it’s going to be throwing out a magnetic field. If we can get down there, it’ll provide us shelter from the storm.”
Emma works away on something in a console window. She taps at a virtual keyboard on the glass display. Rather than entering individual commands, Emma sets up a series of pre-existing routines to run in a prescribed order, complete with logic loops. She’s programming a script. It seems she’s trying to coax the Sycorax back to life.
“Find out everything you can about that ice giant,” she says.
“On it.”
It’s another few minutes before Marc speaks again.
“There are a couple of moons. I make five, but there could be dozens of smaller ones down there.”
“Good, good,” she says. “How far is the ice giant from the hole?”
“Just under 20 AU,” Marc replies. “If it were in our solar system, it would be orbiting at the distance of Uranus.”
“Those moons are going to be cold,” Emma says. “But we need raw materials. We should be able to find mineral deposits on at least one of those moons—if they’re not completely buried in ice.”
“One of the moons is big,” Marc says, unsure how much more he should say. He doesn’t want to distract her from whatever she’s coding, but this seems important.
“How big?”
“Ah, it’s hard to say. There’s not much to go on here as the albedo is so low without a nearby star to light things up.”
“Any atmosphere?”
“I’m not sure,” Marc says.
“If there is, we might be able to harvest methane,” Emma says. “Plot a course for that moon. Use the astronav to bring us in with the minimum number of burns. Once I’ve stabilized the craft, we’ll wake Raddison and tell him what’s happened.”
“Working on it,” Marc says, desperately trying to remember his nav course during basic training. It was only ever supposed to be informative. He was never actually supposed to do anything other than watch the computer do its thing. Although the crew was cross-trained in the various disciplines required to fly the Sycorax, no one ever actually thought these skills would be needed. Marc finds himself wishing he’d paid attention to something other than just getting a pass mark on the exam.
He says, “It’s going to be tight, but with four burns we can avoid that outflow and swing into orbit at 20 AU. We can nestle right in beside that ice giant.”
Emma nods.
Her lack of reply is a not-so-subtle hint. The time for talking is over. She needs to focus on restarting the fusion drive at the heart of the Sycorax. For the first time since he was hanging beneath the gantry, Marc doesn’t have to rush anywhere or do anything. He can think rather than react. He looks out into the dark of space, wondering where the invisible monster lies. He has no idea about the orientation of their spacecraft relative to the black hole. He could be staring right at the monster and not know it. The craft has a twist in its motion. They’re tumbling, but only slightly.
He looks at the path the computer has plotted, desperately hoping Emma’s plan is going to work. He’d feel better if she checked his work.
Commander Raddison
Marc is seriously regretting signing up for the interstellar colonial service. What seemed like a grand adventure has turned into a nightmare—and one from which he may not escape.
Marc grew up on the big island of Hawaii. He loved visiting Oahu, but it was the main island that felt like home. Surfing was a religion. He misses sitting out on his board, feeling the swell roll beneath him, looking for a wave to ride in to shore. There’s something spiritual about getting up before dawn and carrying a long board across the sand. It’s the rhythmic sound of the waves crashing on the rocks, the slight hiss of water rushing back across the beach and the call of gulls drifting on the breeze.
Marc was seventeen when he joined the US Interstellar Flight School. The next six years were a blur. His grades weren’t that good. Somehow, he passed the entrance exam, but it seemed to be a fluke as that effort didn’t help him pass any of his flight exams while in college.
Marc threw himself into his ebooks, avoided partying with the rest of his dorm, worked weekends at the local bar, woke early to study before class, and still failed most of his core subjects. Fail is an overly harsh term as the pass mark was 75%. To his horror, he’d hit a consistent 72% to 74% in most units. A mere 76% was cause for celebration. To Marc, it was like hitting a hole in one. A couple of his lecturers took pity on him and gave him extra credit for his papers, allowing him to make up for the deficiency, but he quickly realized he would never command a starship. Emma scored in the mid-eighties. Commander Raddison averaged 97%. Across forty-five modules, he averaged ninety-fucking-seven percent. And he was at every party. What a bastard. But deep down, Marc couldn’t fault him. Raddison was three years ahead of him, but had no ego. He was never anything other than kind.
At the end of his second year, Marc took bio-cultivating as his specialist subject. The supposed transmutation of feces into food wasn’t exactly a popular course, but Marc knew it gave him his best shot at getting onboard a flight. When it came to bio-engineering, he finally hit his stride, lifting his average above seventy-five. He called his results, “the high seventies,” whenever he spoke to his mom and dad as that sounded much better than scraping by with a mere one or two percent above the pass mark. They weren’t happy about seeing their youngest son take off to explore the galaxy, but Marc had a wanderlust that couldn’t be satisfied on Earth. Now, he wonders if he’ll ever see Earth again.
Marc signed on for a twenty-year tour. He’s got six shifts outbound to New Haven. That’s nine years on duty out of the roughly fifty years spent in flight to get to the exoplanet. Suspended animation will halt his aging, but accounting for time dilation, almost sixty years will have passed on Earth by the time the Sycorax reaches New Haven. Unless the long-touted salvation of gene therapy ever works on something larger than a rat, everyone he knew back there will be dead long before he returns in a hundred and twenty years’ time.
When it comes to spaceflight, calculating one’s age is a bitch. If Marc only counts his years on duty, he’ll be thirty-two when he reaches New Haven. If he counts actual Earth years elapsed, he’ll be eighty-nine but he’ll feel as though he’s in his early thirties. On reaching New Haven the crew gets a two-year paid holiday—and he fully intends on using it to surf. The remaining nine years on his contract can be served on a return flight to Earth or by working on in-system cargo runs and mining ships, although most of those won’t have any need for a bio-farm engineer. Maybe he could work as a cook—if he makes it out of this alive.
“We need Raddison,” Emma says, snapping him out of his lethargy.
“Ah, yes. Right.” Marc is flustered. “Ah, how do we raise him?”
Like most of the systems on the Sycorax, the cryo-pods are highly automated and have redundant backup power. It makes sense, as it’s impossible for everyone on the crew to have the specialist skills required to manage the hibernation process themselves. Besides, the maintenance of a pod is impossible beyond star base. The Sycorax is carrying spare pods in case a failure arises, but no one talks about them. If a pod fails, the colonist inside will die within ten minutes, which makes the need for spares redundant. The spare pods are the lifeboats of this particular Titanic. Technically, they’re needed. In reality, they’re for show. They look good in the brochures.
When it comes to a change in the duty shift, the onboard computer automatically wakes the next team. Once they’re up, there are three days allocated for handover, and then the previous team is off to a dreamless sleep. Years pass with a few blinks of cold eyelids.
“Ah, we lost power,” Marc says, pointing at the hatch at the rear of the cockpit leading down to the hibernation chamber. “Is anyone still alive back there?”
Emma pushes herself out of her seat. Marc follows her.
“By my reckoning, we were without main circuit power for about seventeen minutes. Auxiliary was still pulling current. The oxygen feed is under mechanical pressure precisely because the pods are vulnerable without power. They wouldn’t have had meds or waste fluid exchange, but they should still be under. Once the main power came back, the base life support system rebooted. The stasis routines are low-level. They don’t need much beyond a spark. The backup power should have kept them humming. I hope. They should be fine.”
Should—she doesn’t sound convinced. It’s what she wants to be true, but like Marc, doubts are creeping in.
Waking abruptly from cryo-sleep is the stuff of nightmares. It’s like waking in a coffin buried six feet beneath freshly turned dirt. As part of their training, the crew had to go through an uncontrolled wake so they knew what to expect in an emergency. They were given detailed descriptions of every sensation they’d experience—and yet that made absolutely no difference whatsoever. Waking abruptly from cryo-sleep was horrific. The trainers joked about it as hazing the new crews. In Marc’s class, no one laughed.
The lid of the casket—and there’s no other way to describe a pod—sits less than an inch from the tip of the nose. To call it claustrophobic is to undersell the sheer, abject terror of waking in a dark, damp, cold, confined space. The first thing Marc felt was the pain of the IV lines going into the crook of his arm. Although he was sedated when he went under, the trainers cut the meds before waking him. It felt as though rats were gnawing at the crook of his arm. The fluid entering his veins was as cold as ice water. Regardless of everything they told him during his training session, he and everyone else—absolutely everyone else—panicked. It’s a reflex survival instinct. The brain screams fight or die!
Even though Marc knew it was a training run, he freaked out when he woke abruptly. They told him he’d be under for no more than ten minutes but the difference between minutes, hours, days and even years is a blur in cryo-sleep. He felt as if his whole life had been truncated into oblivion. His existence meant nothing. All his memories were a lie. Like someone drowning at sea, he was terrified by the wretched horror of all that was happening to him. He felt helpless, frustrated, defeated. Flexing every muscle in his body was an exercise in futility. There was nothing he could do that would make any difference. He was dying.
The pod was so confined he couldn’t even raise his hands to his chest, let alone his face. The best he could do was bang his knees and the side of his wrists against the cold plastic as he screamed. And oh how he screamed. At that moment, it felt as though he was the only person alive anywhere in the universe. And it felt as though he wouldn’t be alive for long.
When they popped the lid, a rush of warm air swirled around him. Marc was supposed to wait for the hibernation tech to remove his IV line but there was no way he was lying there a moment longer. He was up and out of the pod in a heartbeat. Someone grabbed him. They were trying to stop him from tearing the IV line out of his arm. Marc didn’t care. He was so jacked up that he punched the tech. Blood ran from the tech’s nose as he howled in agony, clutching at his face. Afterward, Marc learned that his was an average response.
Somewhere near a massive black hole, two lone astronauts drift through the darkness down to the medical bay. Emma floats up beside him, holding a needleless injector.
“Nanobots,” she says, seeing the distant look in his eyes. “We took significant cellular damage during the tempest. This is gonna hurt like Mahakali but it’ll repair your fine tissue injuries.”
“Do it,” Marc says.
Emma holds onto the hull of the Sycorax to get some leverage. Marc braces, grabbing a handle by the hatch. He turns his neck sideways, giving her a clear shot. Emma pushes the injector and squeezes. At first, there’s no discomfort, just a rush of cool fluid entering his body. Then the nanobots hit. For a few seconds, his head feels as though it’s going to explode.
“Oh, that stings like a bitch,” he mumbles, squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth. The pain he feels is acute, being confined to various, unrelated parts of his head. It feels like someone just stabbed him with a set of knitting needles. It’s as though several invisible steel rods passed through the top of his skull, down the side of his neck and into his chest, exiting out of his pectoral muscles. He reminds himself this is the repair process. The needles hit him a while ago—it’s just that he never realized how bad those flashes of light were until now.
The nanobots find several other points of deep tissue damage in his buttocks, his thigh and his ankle.
“Do you want some painkillers?” Emma asks. She’s not taking any. Pride gets the better of him. Emma’s already at the med-console bringing up the pod rotation control, using it to resurrect the commander.
“No, I’m good.” Marc rolls his ankle one way and then another, trying to shake off the ache in his bones.
“Suit yourself.”
Damn, she can read him like a book. He should have said yes, and both of them know it, but the moment is gone. Next time, he’ll be honest. Or so he’d like to think. In reality, his pride is a function of his ego—it’s not going anywhere.
“Sweet Shashti,” she says. “This is wrong. This has got to be wrong.”
“What?” Marc asks, floating up beside her. The console in front of them is peppered with dead pixels. Those that are working glitch. They shimmer, struggling to settle. The colors, though, are telling. In among the green heartbeats, there are dozens, no, hundreds—no, thousands of flat red lines. His heart sinks.
Marc’s mind immediately reaches for alternatives to the grim reality facing them. “Sensor failures?”
“Not likely,” Emma replies. “Some of them, maybe. But not all of them.”
Neither of them says anything else. Several thousand colonists have died in their pods. The silence is painful. Neither of them wants to know precisely how many people have died. There will come a time for reckoning. For now, they’re in survival mode. It’s enough to realize the Sycorax has become a morgue.
The cold storage used by the crew is smaller and separate from the main hibernation unit. Six of the eight pods have red lines running through their metrics. Raddison, though, is alive. Marc desperately wants to say, “Bring him up,” but telling Emma how to do her job when she’s already working at the console would be equal parts annoying and redundant. As the youngest and least experienced member of the crew, he keeps his mouth shut.
Normally, resurrections unfold slowly over the course of several hours as the patient’s meds are lowered and their body temperature is raised. Emma looks calm, but she has to be rattled. She’s skipping a lot of the prompts displayed by the computer, rushing to wake the commander.
Marc is still trying to grasp just how fucked they are. They might have restored basic functions, but there’s no reason to rejoice. The Sycorax is a long way from nowhere with a crippled warp drive. It’ll take years for a rescue craft to reach them. Hell, it’ll take years for anyone to even realize they’re in need of being rescued. Emma’s right about the ice giant. They need a safe harbor in the storm. Unless Raddison can work magic on the warp drive, they’re going to be stuck out here for a long time.
