The Tempest (First Contact), page 7
Emma floats over by one of the medical cabinets, saying, “At the moment, the difference between a slow, lingering death and surviving is a pretty damn thin line. Regardless of what happens next, we’re on our own for the best part of two decades. It’s gonna be a long time until help arrives.”
She pulls out an injector-less plunger and primes it with a sedative.
“What are you doing?”
“Preparing to put him back under.”
“But you don’t know what’s possible. Adrian’s an engineer. He might be able to fix stuff.”
Emma fights back tears. Marc can see them welling up in the corner of her eyes, near the bridge of her nose. She wipes them with the back of her hand, saying, “It has to be this way.”
“Why?” Marc says, challenging her. “I don’t understand.”
Emma swings around to face him, saying, “Because he outranks me. Okay?”
“You’re afraid,” Marc says as the hibernation pod rises from the storage rack.
“We’re alive,” she says. “We’ve got a viable strategy. I don’t want to risk that.”
“But he might be able to help us repair the Sycorax.”
“Help?” she says. “I know Adrian. I’ve worked with him for years. I know what he’s like. He’ll second-guess everything. He’ll revisit every step I’ve taken.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Marc asks.
“It wastes time. It wastes resources. Right now, we’ve got a narrow flight window. We’ve got the fuel and the opportunity to drop down into that gravity well and settle into a stable orbit around the ice giant. Down there, we’ve got options. We’ve got flexibility. We can mine the moons. We can shelter in the shadow of the ice giant out at L2. You heard the commander. We need to take this shot while we can.”
“But?” Marc asks.
“But Adrian will want to drive us out toward the space lanes. He’ll burn through our fuel reserves trying to escape this gravitational well. He’ll be so damn confident. He’ll swear he can repair the warp core. He can’t.”
“Maybe he can.”
Emma raises an eyebrow. “And maybe Santa’s gonna bring me a new fusion containment vessel for Christmas.”
The thumping continues from within the pod but it’s changed to three quick hits followed by three slow thumps. Adrian must know he’s been heard. He wouldn’t be able to hear them talking, though. If anything, they’d sound muffled and muted. He must have felt the change in orientation as the pod was raised. He’s sending out an SOS, knowing someone’s bringing him up.
Emma sniffs. “We get one shot, Marc. Just one. We have to make a decision and stick to it. This isn’t a sim. We won’t get the luxury of a do-over.”
“We need help,” Marc says.
“No,” Emma says. “We don’t. We need to take shelter and wait out the storm.”
“Another set of hands, another mind, another perspective.”
Emma is blunt. “I don’t want to follow Adrian to my death.”
“You won’t.”
“No offense, Marc, but while you’ve been scrubbing shit off the inside of holding tanks, I’ve been working in his team. He’s not a leader. He’s a greaser. And he’s got an ego to rival Julius Caesar.”
Marc says, “Maybe he’ll see something different. Maybe there are other options, things we’ve missed.”
“I’ve done the math. I’ve run the calcs,” Emma replies. “You need to trust me on this. We can’t make the space lanes. And even if we could, they’re useless to us.”
“Why?” Marc asks, wanting to understand her logic even though he only knows the basics of astronavigation.
“There are no straight lines in space. When it comes to interstellar travel, everything’s a brachistochrone.”
“A what?” he asks as she relents, giving in to him. She presses the injector against a velcro strap on the hull, leaving it there.
“A curve,” Emma replies, working with the controls on the hibernation pod to bring up Adrian. “In space, the shortest route between any two points is always a curve—only you can curve in a lot of different directions and still reach the same point. Imagine a skipping rope swinging around between two people. You can take any of the paths along the rope—down below, up over the top, out in front—it doesn’t matter. All the paths are equal. They all lead to the same place.”
“And we’re on one of those paths,” Marc says.
“Were,” she says as vapor drifts from the lid of the pod. “We were on one of thousands. If we go back into the space lanes, we could be stuck out there for years waiting for someone to come along. And when they do, they could be on any of those other paths. They could still be up to half a light-year away from us at their closest approach.”
“So what difference does it make?” Marc asks as the hydraulic motors on the pod whine. “Whether we’re out there or down around that ice giant?”
Emma points at the hull. He gets it. She wants him to think about what lies beyond a couple of layers of insulation and a few thin metal panels. She says, “In deep space, we have no resources beyond what we’re carrying. In orbit around that ice giant, we can mine the basics: oxygen, water, carbon dioxide and methane. Down there, we stand a chance.”
The pod cracks open. Light spills out from the inside.
“We need to be careful,” Emma says, looking at a readout on the medical monitor. “He’s jacked up. His hormone levels are all over the place. His adrenaline is off the charts.”
Marc peers into the pod. He’s expecting to see another crew member ravaged by high-energy particles. Commander Raddison was barely able to move. Marc floats closer, ready to help Adrian out of the electronic coffin. As he approaches, the lid flies open.
Adrian springs out of the pod. As Marc is closest, Adrian launches himself at him, screaming in rage.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill all of you, you assholes!”
Marc is taken by surprise. Spindly hands grab his throat. Fingers dig into his neck. He chokes, gagging as he tries to speak. The two of them soar across medical. The back of Marc’s head strikes the hull.
“Adrian, please!” Emma yells, but he ignores her. His eyes are wide with anger. His pupils are dilated.
Marc grabs Adrian’s hands, trying to pry them from his neck.
“Let him go!” Emma yells, grabbing the first officer and pushing him to one side.
The three astronauts roll through the air, tumbling into medical equipment.
Adrian yells, “You left me in there to die, you bastard!”
“No one left you,” Emma says, trying to pull the two of them apart. “We got you out as soon as we knew you were awake.”
Behind them, an IV line floats free from the pod. Blobs of deep red blood drift through the air like tiny planets.
Marc gets his leg up and pushes against Adrian, catching him on the edge of his hip. He shoves him away.
“Calm—the—fuck—down,” Emma says, holding her hand between the two of them.
Adrian has bloodshot eyes. Burst capillaries beneath his skin stain his cheeks with thin red lines. His face is swollen. Dried blood has crusted around his nostrils.
Marc coughs, trying to clear his throat and breathe properly.
“Straight away,” Adrian yells at her. “You should have got me out of there as soon as I woke! Not four-fucking-hours later”
“We—didn’t—know,” Marc says, still struggling to breathe and fighting against a bruised windpipe to speak properly. “No—power.”
“What?” Adrian says, finally calming down. He looks around medical. There are dozens of screens that, ordinarily, would be pulsating with metrics. They’re all black. The overhead lights are on but the only active system is the hibernation retrieval control.
“We’re running cold,” Emma says. “We dropped out of warp.”
“Why have you brought us out of warp?” Adrian asks, turning his ire on Emma.
“Not us,” Marc says. “We ran into a storm—a tempest.”
“What is this nonsense?” he asks, shoving Emma to one side. Adrian thumps her, hitting her chest with both palms and sending her soaring across medical. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Stop it,” Marc says.
Adrian ignores him. “What fucking storm? There’s no such thing as a storm in space.”
“Adrian, please,” Emma says. “You need to listen to us.”
“Listen to you?” Adrian says. “You’re a goddamn Q4 on the night watch. What the hell have you done to the Sycorax?”
“There’s been an accident,” Marc says. “You, the ship, the commander, the colonists. You’ve been exposed to near-lethal doses of radiation. It’s—It’s crippled our controls. It’s affecting your thinking.”
“Where is the commander?”
“He’s dead.”
“Who’s in charge?”
Emma raises her hand.
“Not anymore.” Adrian sticks his head out into the darkened corridor. The lack of power seems to convince him things are bad. He pushes off, leaving them and heading for the bridge.
Emma and Marc follow along behind him. A single glowing LED provides the only form of illumination on the command deck. One navigation panel is active along with the backup flight controls. Lights blink on the redundant testbed controls.
Adrian says, “We need to deploy a distress buoy with a backup of the flight recorder on auto-broadcast.”
“I’ve already deployed one,” Emma replies.
“Then deploy another.”
“They have to be manually—”
Adrian snaps at her, “I don’t want excuses. I want you to do your goddamn job!”
“Yes, sir,” Emma says, lowering her head.
He looks at the navigation screen. “Why have we deviated from our original course?”
Emma says, “Commander Raddison, sir. He said we should take shelter around a nearby ice giant while we wait for rescue.”
“No,” Adrian says. “We need to stay in the space lanes. That’s where they’ll be looking for us.”
“No one’s going to be looking for us,” Emma says. “Not for years to come.”
“Bullshit!”
“Don’t you want to know?” Marc asks, interrupting the argument. He’s still rubbing his sore neck.
“Know what?” Adrian replies.
“What happened?”
Adrian looks confused. “You lost power. You lost the core.”
“No, sir,” he replies. “That’s a symptom, not the cause. The Sycorax passed through a plasma stream. We were peppered with high-energy ions. It was a tempest! It was like flying through a particle beam—flying through hundreds of particle beams all at once.”
“Never have I heard of such a ridiculous notion,” Adrian says. “Not in thirty years of service. There’s no such thing as a tempest. I want to see a full log of events leading up to the power outage.”
Emma says, “I haven’t been able to get the main computer online. We’ve got partial—”
“I want those goddamn logs!” Adrian yells at her.
Marc blurts out, “There’s a black hole!”
“A what?” Adrian says, turning to face him. “That’s absurd. There are no black holes within a hundred parsecs of this run. We’ve never observed anything even remotely like that in this region. No gamma-ray bursts. No gravitational wave fluctuations. No accretion disk. No relativistic jets.”
“There is, sir,” Emma says, supporting Marc. “We flew through its jet.”
“Stop lying to me,” Adrian says, gritting his teeth and growling at her. “You’re only making this worse for yourselves. I don’t know what went wrong or what the hell you did, but I will get to the bottom of it. And you will face a full tribunal for endangering this flight. For now, we need to get the Sycorax back on course.”
Adrian turns his back on Marc. He shouts at Emma. “Where’s that goddamn distress beacon? I want it prepped now!”
Marc reaches around from behind Adrian, grabbing his head and yanking it to one side. He pushes the injector with the sedative against the man’s jugular, saying, “I’m sorry, sir.”
Adrian wrestles to get free, but as they’re both floating in weightlessness, Marc has the advantage. He wraps his legs around the officer’s waist, holding himself on the man’s back as he empties the plunger into Adrian’s neck.
“This is mutiny,” Adrian says. His words become less pronounced and more slurred the longer he talks. “You’ll fry for this. By god, I’ll make sure you fry!”
Emma is as white as a ghost.
Long Haul
As the hibernation pod disappears into the floor of the medical bay, Marc says, “I’m fucked, ain’t I?”
Emma is calm. “You did the right thing.”
“But he’s right. They’ll burn me alive for this.”
“It’s our word against his,” Emma says. “There are no logs from the cockpit. No audio or video evidence. The black box is in emergency mode. It’s only recording flight metrics at the moment.”
Marc clenches his teeth. What’s done is done. There’s no going back. He’s committed now. He only hopes Emma’s right.
“Hey, look on the bright side,” she says.
“There’s a bright side?” he asks, surprised by the notion.
“Sure. You have to live long enough for them to kill you.”
“Not funny.”
“Relax,” she says. “We’ll truncate the story. We’ll tell them our version of what happened. He was jacked up when he woke and he assaulted you. We had no choice. We had to sedate him. We had to put him back under. It’s the truth—kind of.”
Marc nods.
“Hell,” Emma says. “That was an intramuscular sedative. It’s supposed to be a gentle descent administered through the shoulder muscle. You pumped that junk right into his carotid artery. From there, it went straight to his brain. He’s so doped up right now that I doubt he’ll remember anything when he wakes.” She laughs, adding, “He probably won’t even remember his own name.”
Marc’s not convinced. “I hope you’re right.”
Emma taps on a touchscreen interface.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I’m bringing up two of the crew pods. We’re going to have to clean them out.”
“Clean them?”
“We need to go under,” Emma says.
“Hang on,” Marc says, realizing what she means. Clean, in this context, is a euphemism for disposing of bodies.
“We’ll flush them out an airlock,” she says, seeing the look of horror on his face.
“I love how you think that somehow makes it better,” he says. “These are our crew mates, our friends.”
“And they’re dead,” she replies. “There’s nothing more we can do for them.”
“Can’t we leave them down there?” he asks. “I mean, we could bring a couple of spare pods online.”
“Spares?” she asks, looking at him as though he’s joking. “There are no spares.”
“But—”
“That’s just what they say in the brochures. In reality, we’re always two pods short as there are supposed to be two of the crew awake at any one time.”
Marc says, “You want me to go into a dead man’s pod?”
“It’s just a pod,” she says.
A casket rises from the floor—there’s no other way Marc can think of it. Vapor slips from beneath its lid as the hydraulics kick into action.
Marc points. “I—I can’t go in one of those things, not after someone died in there.”
“We have to,” Emma says. “We have no choice. We don’t have enough consumables to survive the five months until we reach that ice giant.”
“And what if the autopilot fails?” he asks as the lid of the metallic coffin opens.
“Then we’ll never know,” she says. “We’ll simply go to sleep and we won’t wake.”
“Jesus!” he says. “Do you know how fucked up that is?”
“I know. By all that Chandra sees, I know, but we’re out of options. Every breath we take, every amp we use, every moment we waste up here is one less we’ll have in orbit down there.”
Marc asks, “What about the fuel reserves on the scouts?”
“No. If we use them, we’re dead in the water. We need to conserve our resources. I have no idea what we’ll find on those moons, but if we can harvest oxygen and snag some ice, we stand a fighting chance. If we can find some methane, we’ll be able to run the turbo pump on the main engine and charge the batteries. It’ll be a waste of propellant, but it’ll keep us alive. If we’re lucky, we may even be able to extract residual energy from the fusion core. There won’t be enough for warp, but it’ll keep us warm. As it is, our internal reserves aren’t going to last much longer. If I shut down everything other than nav and hibernation, I can stretch the batteries to about eight months, but that’s it.”
“And we can’t stay awake?” Marc says.
“If both of us are awake, we last two months. With one of us, we last three. The only way we’re reaching that ice giant is if we both go under.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Marc says, holding onto a handle on the bulkhead.
“If it’s any consolation, Adrian would have run us out of consumables in about three weeks. As it is, we’ll only have enough fuel for a handful of recon flights in a scout.”
Marc mumbles, “We’re shooting craps in Vegas.”
“Yep.”
Emma opens the lid of the pod. Deep red blood has soaked into the white cloth lining on the inside of the casket. Ensign Philippa Davis looks peaceful enough. Her eyes are shut. She has a neutral expression on her face. At the very least, she didn’t feel any pain. Her body, though, is a mess. Thousands of pinpricks of blood stain her tunic. Each one is as fine as the point of a needle. Her waist is soaked. Frost has formed on her trousers. Although her clothing is intact, thick, stringy blood vessels have ruptured from her stomach. In the weightless environment, they’ve slipped from beneath the waistband of her top. At first glance, it looks as though she’s been hit from behind by a blaster.
