The Founder Effect, page 39
Almost worse, though, was the hydrogen they’d been forced to vent. Victoria’s reserves were running low, and when the last of it was gone, they’d be totally dependent on the solar panels.
As long as they lasted.
Dupree sighed silently and punched up the current bridge log on his personal pad. He tried to ignore the way the display flickered. It wasn’t as if it was the only display that was heading for reclamation. But Victoria’s crew had learned the hard way to use things until they actually stopped working rather than replacing them just because they no longer worked well. That had been Jason Donovan’s entire life, but Dupree remembered other times, other places, when he would have replaced that pad months ago.
He hadn’t, and not just because it still worked. Like everything else aboard Victoria, the reclamation plant was dangerously long in the tooth. Keeping it running—babying it along—was another of Rahaman’s key priorities, and that meant not putting any more load on it than they could help. Because when it went down, the printers went down, and that was the beginning of the end.
Oh, hell, Ed, he thought grumpily, paging through the information on his pad. We passed the “beginning of the end” decades ago! You suspected that back when Roanoke went dark the first time, and you damn well knew it when Zhelan went in. All we’re doing now is spinning it out.
That wasn’t something he would ever, under any circumstances, say out loud, but he didn’t have to. Everyone aboard Victoria knew it. That was probably the real reason no one had been born aboard the ship since Yuan Zhelan and the last shuttle crashed on Trudovik. Dupree didn’t know what had caused the crash, but it could have been almost anything. Unlike Joan Walker’s Whale all those decades ago, Zhelan’s shuttle had been twenty-plus years past its designed lifetime. Rahaman and his people had sweated blood over its maintenance, but after a certain point simple structural fatigue became a dangerous potential failure point.
Whatever the cause, that had been Victoria’s death knell. The remaining survivors stuck on Trudovik were probably doomed, as well, but with the last shuttle gone, Victoria was cut off from Trudovik, Cistercia, or any source of renewable resources, and that made her end certain.
It wouldn’t happen tomorrow. In fact, young Donovan might be into his second century before the ship died. At the moment, the hydroponic sections still produced ample food. The med section was still functional under Doctor MacGrath’s leadership, and it was possible the solar plants could be kept working longer than anyone currently estimated. For that matter, Rahaman and his people were working on the design of a black-body thermal exchange power plant.
But it was going to happen . . . eventually. And there was no way anyone aboard Victoria could leave her. Unless, of course, the colonists on Cistercia miraculously regained the ability to build shuttles of their own before she finally collapsed, and the odds of that were pretty damned slim.
They’d started out with such high hopes, Dupree thought. All shiny and new, with everything careful forethought could provide. He’d read enough history to know careful forethought had failed to prevent disaster on more than one expedition during the early days of the Lunar and Martian colonies, but in those instances, the rest of the human race had been available to at least try to mount a rescue.
Here, they were on their own, and he wondered what had really hurt them the worst. Prometheus’ failure to arrive? Whale’s loss, with the backup terraforming crew? The environmental factors that had wiped out the sheepdogs and decimated the cattle? The New Flu, or the loss of the last remaining tugs at Beaverton? Or had it been whatever the hell had happened to New Virginia/Roanoke?
So many things had gone wrong. No wonder there were already legends about the “TRAPPIST Curse” or the “Ghost Whale” and its eternal Flying Dutchman trek across the stars! He remembered the first time he’d heard a parent telling a child about Commander Walker and her ghost’s endless struggle to reach the planet she’d come so far to colonize.
And yet, in a testament to the truly remarkable fortitude and adaptability of the human species, there were twice as many people on Cistercia today than had been transported to the system in cryostasis. Even after the diseases, the damaged infrastructure, the natural catastrophes Cistercia had thrown at them, the population had grown. Not by much, perhaps, given what sixty or seventy years of natural increase ought to have produced, yet it was still larger than the original ten thousand.
But twenty thousand people weren’t all that many on an entire planet, and especially when the high-tech infrastructure they relied upon to keep them—and their knowledge base—alive was wearing out and failing.
We could’ve done it. We really could have. And I’m not ready to throw in the towel on Cistercia yet. Trudovik? Yeah. Kerenskiy’s gone. They just don’t have enough genetic material to sustain their population even if the environment doesn’t kill them all off first. And so are we. But Cistercia may still make it.
His best estimate gave humanity a thirty-five or forty percent chance of long-term survival on Cistercia. The chance of their hanging onto their technology was one hell of a lot lower, though. They still had power, at least for now, at Beaverton and Antonia, but their fusion plants were starting to wear out, too. If Prometheus had made it, with the heavy industry module built into her hull, they could have fabricated entire replacement reactors in orbit and built the damned shuttles to deliver them planetside! But the terraforming ship hadn’t made it, and the settlers below lacked even Victoria’s limited printing capacity.
Hell, blacksmiths were beginning to reemerge on Cistercia.
At Edward Dupree’s age, transitioning out of a microgravity environment would have been contraindicated, but if it had been possible, he would have moved down to the planet in a heartbeat . . . if he’d only been able to strip Victoria’s hull and move everything aboard it down with him. She hadn’t been designed for that, but if they’d gone ahead and cannibalized her thirty years ago, when they still had shuttles and tugs, that might have made the difference. Now it was too late.
You really are a morose old bastard, aren’t you? He shook his head with a snort of wry amusement. Might be the reason Gajendra calls you the “old fart,” you think? We’ve dodged one hell of a lot of bullets here in TRAPPIST. It’s always possible we can dodge a few more. Or that someone can, anyway, even if you can’t!
Well, of course it was. Theoretically, anything was possible. But—
A musical tone sounded.
Dupree looked up from his pad, forehead furrowed. He didn’t remember hearing that particular alert before. Or, rather, he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before. It almost sounded like—
“Sir, I’ve got something weird over here,” Lieutenant Monika Gulseth said.
“Define ‘weird,’” Dupree replied, turning to look across at the comm officer. Damn it, he did recognize that tone, but where—?
“Sir, I’ve got a message request coming in on the priority channel,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him, and he blinked. That was ridiculous! Although, now that he thought about it, it had sounded like—
“There’s no reason anybody should be using the priority channel,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “Hell, we haven’t even tested it in—what? Fifty years?”
“As far as I know, we’ve never tested it.” Gulseth shook her head.
“Well, who is it? Luttrell or Hampton?” Glynis Luttrell was the mayor of Antonia and Fritz Hampton was the mayor of Beaverton. “Ask them why they’re not using the regular net.”
“I don’t think it’s either of them, sir.”
“It has to be one of them,” Dupree said reasonably.
“Sir, it’s not coming from Molesme . . . or Trudovik.” Gulseth sounded as if what she was saying made sense, Dupree thought. He opened his mouth, but the lieutenant went on before he could speak. “We’re picking it up on the Beta Bird.”
Dupree closed his mouth. The Beta Bird? That was on the far side of the planet from Molesme, and they hadn’t really used the relay satellites since they lost the last shuttle. Victoria’s geosynchronous orbit put her directly above Molesme, with a direct transmission path to both Antonia and Beaverton, and aside from Trudovik, there was no one else in the system to talk to.
“What kind of request are we talking about?” he asked after a moment.
“I’ve never seen it before, sir.” Gulseth was tapping queries into her computers. “I don’t recognize the protocol at all, and it’s encrypted. I’m looking for the decrypt now.”
Dupree nodded. The fact that the signal—whatever it was—was coming in encrypted didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it. It didn’t make any less sense, of course. But unless Victoria could reply with the appropriate decryption code, two-way communication would be impossible.
“Coming up now, sir,” Gulseth told him. “I think—”
She broke off abruptly, staring at her display. Then she typed in another staccato query. A second later, she looked back at the captain, and her eyes were huge.
“Sir,” she said in a very, very careful tone, “the computer says this is the Foundation’s secure encrypt. There’s no ID header, but it’s got the right security codes. And it’s demanding the right security code from us before we can unlock the decrypt.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Sir, I know that. But that’s what the computer says.”
Dupree held very, very still. There was no reason it would have been outright impossible for someone to use the secure protocol, but it had been created to handle the most sensitive of the TRAPPIST-2 Colony Foundation’s comm traffic. Mayor Luttrell or Mayor Hampton could have used it if it had been loaded into each lander’s communications computer—except that, according to what Gulseth had just said, neither of them could be the sender. So, who—?
“I guess you’d better send the code, then,” he said.
“We can’t yet, sir.”
“And why not?” Dupree knew he sounded testy. Under the circumstances, he decided, he was allowed.
“It’s a directional signal, sir, and Beta lost its directional dish last year. It can pick it up, but it can’t send it back. We’ll have to wait until we come around the other side of the planet—or far enough to clear it with the main dish, at least. That will take”—she consulted a time display—“about four more hours.”
“Well, isn’t that just wonderful,” Dupree observed.
“Sir,” Donovan said, “it’s using the Foundation protocols. Is it possible—sir, could this be a . . . I don’t know, a relief expedition?”
Dupree saw sudden hope blossom in Gulseth’s eyes and hated himself when he shook his head.
“I doubt it very much,” he said as gently as he could. “It’s on the wrong side of the primary for a ship coming in from the Solar System. Besides, we would have spotted any relief ship’s deceleration burn months ago. It’s sort of bright for a ship our size.”
Silence enveloped the bridge, ringing and very, very still. It lay heavily for perhaps twenty seconds, and then Donovan cleared his throat.
“But if it’s not that, then what is it?”
“I suppose we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?” Dupree replied.
“We should have a transmission path now, sir,” Monika Gulseth said.
Victoria’s bridge was rather more crowded than usual. It was a spacious compartment, and with fewer than thirty personnel on the entire ship, there was enough room, but Edwin Dupree felt a bit claustrophobic for the first time in a long time.
They’d pulled everything they could out of the signal coming in over the Beta Bird, but it wasn’t much. They did have a bearing to the transmitter, but that was about it. They didn’t have a range, although it was either a very weak signal or its source was one hell of a long way away.
“Do we see anything out there, Benny?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Commander Benjamin Solanki replied. He’d inherited Dupree’s old job as Victoria’s executive officer. “I’ve got the main scope slaved to the dish, but so far—”
He paused, bending a bit closer to the display in front of him.
“I do have something,” he said. “Not much detail, but something’s reflecting sunlight out there. And the computer says it’s moving. Way beyond radar range.”
“Any sort of track projection?”
“Not yet.” Solanki looked up. “We just spotted it, sir. It’s going to be a while before we have enough observations to say anything about it. All I can tell you is that it’s headed pretty much directly towards us, and it’s moving damned fast. If I had to guess, it’s on a cometary orbit and headed back out from the inner system, but don’t hold me to that.”
“Um.” Dupree considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “All right, Monika. Send the code.”
“Sending now, sir.”
Victoria’s enormous parabolic dish had been designed to send and receive signals over as much as ten or twelve light-years. She’d used it to stay in touch with the Solar System, albeit with a certain delay in the communications loop, until they finally passed beyond even its prodigious range. No one had used it—or tested it—in decades, but all of its systems showed green, and it had more than enough power and range to reach anything inside the TRAPPIST-2 system.
The master display on the forward bulkhead changed from its customary visual of the planet to display Victoria’s wallpaper, and Dupree felt every human being in that compartment staring at it, willing it to change.
Thirty seconds ticked past. Then a full minute. Ninety seconds. Two minutes. Three minutes. Four. Five.
Dupree began to question his assumption that all the dish’s systems were green.
Six minutes. Seven. Seven and a half.
The huge display flickered. The wallpaper disappeared, and shock punched Edwin Dupree squarely between the eyes. Of all the possibilities he’d considered—
Impossible, a voice said deep inside him. That’s impossible. It can’t be!
“Hello, Victoria,” the slender, black-haired, green-eyed woman said from the display. “If you’re seeing this message, I guess it’s been a while.”
Dupree expected a babel of shock. Every human being in the star system knew that face, knew the story of the Alpha Lander and its doomed pilot.
Knew Lieutenant Commander Joan Walker had been dead for almost eighty years.
But no one said a single word. And that, he realized after a moment, was because they did recognize her, and the shock had hit all of them exactly the way it had hit him.
No, not the way it hit me, he thought after another moment. The only other person on the bridge who knew her is Gajendra, and he didn’t know her the way I did. He didn’t grow up with her. And he didn’t watch her die.
“I’ve put together as many contingency programs as I could think of,” the dead woman on the display continued. “If this is the one that threw, though, none of the others worked. So, by my calculations, it’s been about seventy-five years. I hope you’re still there. Well, obviously if you’re seeing this, someone is. And if you’re seeing it, then I must have at least gotten into the docking systems.”
Docking systems? What the hell are you talking about, Joanie? Edwin Dupree thought, watching the display waver through his tears.
“I lost my communications module when everything went crazy,” she continued, “but if I’d been able to get into the main system, you’d have heard from me before this. So, this is coming over the directional dish on one of the other landers.”
“Other landers?!” Jesus, did she—?!
“If I managed to do that much, then at least some of Prometheus’ systems are still alive,” she said, and Dupree felt the physical shockwave whiplash around the bridge, “but I must have been locked out of the main com system, assuming it’s still up. I don’t have the command codes to override the lockouts automatically . . . and I won’t have a chance to hack around them.”
Her expression tightened for just a moment, and she inhaled deeply.
“I’m not going to make it to Prometheus,” she said then, softly. “I don’t have the power reserves to keep the enviro systems up long enough. But if anyone is seeing this, then Whale must have made it. And that means Adam and the rest of his crew made it, too.”
She blinked suddenly gleaming green eyes and those firm lips quivered ever so slightly.
“That means it was worth it.” Her voice was hoarser than it had been, but she raised her head high, proudly, those gleaming eyes bright. “It was all worth it—every moment of it.
“But now you have to dig out the Prometheus command codes and unlimber that big-assed dish. We’re coming back at you on a cometary orbit, and you must get into Prometheus’ onboard systems and bring her home. Please, bring her home. Bring Adam and the others home. And if you can, find a place down there beside the Billabong for me, too.
“I . . . came a long way, and I’d like to finish the trip.”
TRAPPIST-2 System
Cistercia Planetary Orbit
October 6, 2422 CE/78 Ad Astra
“Thirty seconds,” Commander Solanki announced.
If there’d ever been a more superfluous announcement, Edwin Dupree couldn’t imagine what it had been.
For thirty-three days, they’d watched the dot of reflected light grow and change as it coasted towards Cistercia at 51 KPS. Joan Walker’s initial transmission had come in at a range of 3.25 light-minutes—58,500,000 kilometers—and that was a hefty distance at that velocity.
The delay had given Dupree and every other man and woman aboard Victoria, or on Cistercia, or on Trudovik, time to realize what it meant. Assuming things went as planned in the next fifteen seconds, at least.
That wasn’t a given.
Additional recorded messages had shared Joan’s conclusion that Whale had been sabotaged. The suggestion had been less surprising to Dupree than he’d have expected, probably because it could explain so much of the “TRAPPIST Curse.” And Victoria’s remote login to Prometheus’ computers had offered plenty of apparent confirmation of her suspicions. The terraforming ship’s central net was a mess. It looked as if both primary AI nets had been as thoroughly wiped as Whale’s, but something had regenerated at least a part of their capabilities. Prometheus had been even more amply equipped with standalone recovery systems than Victoria, in light of its automated status. Apparently one of them had survived the original cyberattack. It looked to have been badly damaged itself, but it had succeeded in weaving together an interface—of sorts—for several of the standalone nets. Including, thankfully, the maneuvering AI.
