Vagabond, page 9
part #1 of Guild Series
His tapping slowed as he entered the final keystrokes, and hovered over the button that would initiate the program.
“Goodbye, Aurora.”
The button was pressed, and the code flew through the fiber optic cable to spread throughout the ship’s systems in a fraction of a second. Droplets of moisture fell from his face to the screen he was hunched over, tears mixed with the sweat. The ship’s alarm system sounded insistently around him, and the light that filtered through the strands of cabling had a red hue.
Erik, Tuya and Fynn met in the corridor outside the technical room. They banged on the door and called out for Isaac, trying unsuccessfully to open the door. The seconds seemed like hours as they waited for a response, and they jumped with surprise as the door finally slid open to reveal a bedraggled tech with sweat pouring down his body and a quivering mouth.
“It’s done,” Isaac told them, and then closed the door again.
Seven
Erik knew they would need Isaac’s help to fully restore the ship’s systems, but also respected the man’s need to handle the loss of something that had been his life for so many years. He sent Fynn and Tuya off to the engine room to pull up old programs they could initiate to bring the main systems back into operation. The life support systems were the biggest priority since the air and heat inside the ship would be exhausted in less than an hour.
Meanwhile, he headed back to the control center to ascertain the position of the ship and the trajectory they were on. The last thing he needed at that moment was to hit random space debris because no one was at the helm. The holo displays were inactive, so he sat at the pilot’s station and enabled the terminals there, functioning in low power mode. The sensor suite and exterior cameras were down until those systems could be restored, so he pulled up the logs and tried to find information there. Aurora had been under directives to keep all information about the destination from the crew, so he wasn’t hopeful that he could find anything helpful.
Paging through thousands of log entries was mind numbing work. Ninety nine out of a hundred entries were irrelevancies like Port 937f30ex-16 has been opened, or Program 3028wdw-as9372ld has completed successfully. Erik knew that Isaac would know what some of this meant and be able to look up the others to decipher them, but the strings of numbers and letters could be the meaning of life for as much as he understood them.
After almost an hour, he had managed to find four entries that he could decipher, and they all related to minor course adjustments made by the AI over the last half day. Unfortunately, they seemed to be commands routing the ship around the paths of two obstacles and then moving back to the original unknown destination.
Erik pushed away from the terminal in frustration, racking his brain for other ways he could discern the ship’s course. A handful of essential systems had come back online while he was working, but nothing that would help him in his task. He felt useless after fruitlessly spending so much time in the control room, and walked across the corridor to check on Isaac. The door to the technical room was open, and he could hear the noise of someone working inside. He craned his head around the hatchway, and was grateful to see a jumpsuit-encased rear end pointing at him from under the terminal.
“Hey, Isaac. Everything going okay in here?”
A startled yelp and the sound of a head hitting the bottom of the terminal housing were followed by colorful curses. “I’m good, captain,” the tech called out. “I’m trying to reroute all the systems back through the ship’s computer now that Aurora is completely shut down, but this isn’t going to be a quick fix.”
“Anything I can help with? I’d love to get the exterior cameras and sensors working so that we can see where we are.”
“This space is too tight for one person, much less two. If I end up having to pull and re-splice wiring at every access point in the ship, I will definitely give you a shout.”
“Sounds good.” Erik paused, and considered his next words. He didn’t want to intrude on the tech’s personal feelings, but also had to have a feel for his crew to make sure everyone was operating efficiently. “I know it was hard to shut down Aurora, but it was the right thing to do. I’m almost certain it saved all of our lives.”
There was silence from under the terminal for half a minute before a quiet response. “It had to be done, and I know that. It’s just going to take some time for me to work through. She was my only child.”
“Well, if you need anything let one of us know. We’re all here for you, Isaac.”
“Thank you, Erik.”
He grunted in surprise at what he was positive was the first instance of the technician using his first name. That worried him more than if the man had been wailing and carrying on about the loss of the AI. With a mental note to check in on Isaac again soon, Erik continued down the corridor to the engine room where he found Fynn and Tuya hard at work installing software on the ship’s computer from a stack of memory sticks that looked to have been pulled out of a dust pile.
“What’s all this?”
“Not what I’m getting paid for,” Tuya muttered, yanking a memory stick out of an exposed slot below the terminal screen and tossing it to the floor to join a half dozen others. She pulled another one from the stack sitting on her console and pushed it into the slot.
“Isaac is too busy getting all the wiring routed back to the original configuration,” Fynn said from his central seat. “We can’t work on anything else until the systems are functional, so he gave us the most boring task on the ship. Manually loading a couple of hundred programs one by bloody one.”
Erik laughed at that. “If you want boring, pull up the computer logs and look through those for a second or two. I would rather be tethered to the hull during a thirty G thrust than have to do that for one more minute.”
“Good, you’re free then.” Tuya shoved a dozen of the memory sticks into the captain’s hands and waved him towards the unused terminal. “Get jumping, Frost.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Erik replied happily, glad to have a useful task again. Installing software before this had always been a task that required nothing more than tapping a button that simply said Install, so it took him a few trial-and-error attempts and a lot of coaching from the others before he could work through the many manual steps and complete the first program on the memory stick. It wasn’t as tedious as his last task, but not far off.
“I can’t believe that program was only two gigabytes,” he grumbled to the others. “Why are there seven separate programs on this stick to install when it could all be a single package?”
“That sounds like something you can bring up with Isaac when we’re fully functional again,” Fynn told him. “I don’t think having an AI turn against a crew and seemingly want them dead is a contingency that was planned for. These old programs were more of a backup in case the software got garbled and couldn’t be restored from the internal servers.”
“I guess this is a bit of an unusual situation,” Erik conceded.
“A teeny tiny bit,” Tuya teased. “If we survive this mess, I’m betting it will be one of those things every trainee has to learn about. They’ll come up with quick and easy solutions, I’m sure.”
“Every problem is easier to handle when you’re not living it.”
Three quarters of an hour later they had half of the ship’s essential systems up and running again, though most were operating at a diminished capacity. The last program Erik had installed activated the ship’s sensors and he let loose a cry of exultation. Gleefully exercising his executive privilege, he left the others to complete the software installs and retreated to the control room.
At the pilot’s station, he activated a standard sensor sweep of the immediate area and waited for the results. Similar to the old radar systems used throughout the first half of the century, the sensor suite on the Vagabond sent out pulses of energy that returned to the ship if they impacted anything. The pulses also gathered a small amount of information about any object they hit, which would be automatically compared to a large database of past sensor pings to quickly respond with the most likely material of the object. Unfortunately for Erik, that database was one of the many things still offline. As the sensor data started to appear on the screen, he could only see the locations where the energy pulses were bounced back to the ship. The closest object was more than a thousand kilometers to starboard, and he set up a continuous sweep that would send out pulses every few seconds so that he could see if the ship was getting closer or farther away from the discovered objects.
While he awaited the results of the sweep, Erik composed a message that would be sent to Luna as soon as the ship’s communications systems were restored. He had to settle for an audio message since the video recorders were still down. The message was sent to the attention of Dex, and he detailed the events that had occurred since Interamnia with the AI taking over the ship and disregarding crew safety. It set his mind at ease to know that at least one other person in the system would know what had happened on the Vagabond in case they didn’t make it back.
“Dex,” he recorded, wrapping up the message, “I’ve been an idiot these last four years and I never had the courage to do what I always wanted to do. So, if we manage to get back to Luna at the end of this madness, I’m going to ask you out for a drink. I really hope I get the chance to do that, and I really hope you say yes.”
Erik tapped the button to end the message and put it in the queue for transmission. The sensor results had been scrolling in while he was talking, and he turned back to them to scan the changes. Luckily, the largest sensor shadow objects were sliding by far to the sides of the ship. The direction they seemed to be traveling was clear in all the sweeps. He set up an automated alert for the sensor system in case any objects were detected in a wide cone of space in their path.
He had hoped that seeing the objects around the ship might give him an indication of location or direction, but all he could determine was that they were still in the asteroid belt. The belt was so wide, however, that they could be days inside or right on the outer edges and he would have no way of determining which. Even with the insanely strong acceleration burn Aurora had put them through, they could be on the most direct path out of the belt and still be inside of it. There were millions of asteroids, but they were spread out over such an unimaginably vast distance that the trip between two neighboring rocks could be tens of thousands of kilometers.
As uneventful hours passed, Erik returned to the engine room to help the others finish installing the multitude of programs. With all the basic functions restored, everyone breathed a bit easier and felt more secure about their chances of survival. Feeling the fatigue of almost two full days of stress and tedious tasks, Erik forced everyone to meet in the galley. He brewed coffee for all of them while Tuya passed out protein bars for everyone to munch on while they talked.
“Isaac, how are things progressing? Are we close to getting all the systems reconnected to the ship’s computer?”
“I’ve managed to reroute about ten percent of everything so far, captain.” The technician paused and ran a hand through a beard snarled up from heat and sweat. “With that and all the software you guys got reinstalled, we have the most critical functions back under our control. We’re not going to run out of air, we’re not going to freeze to death as the cold of space creeps in, and as you’ve seen the rudimentary sensors are back online.”
“My engines were built for redundancy,” Fynn added with pride. “I can manually control the thrusters as needed, but it’s not going to be anything close to as responsive or useful as we’re used to.”
“That keeps us safe from running into anything that stumbles into our path.” Erik paused to take another bite of the bland bar. He was so hungry that it tasted wonderful. “Can you believe that the earliest ships to explore Luna and Mars operated at about this level of technology? How did they not all die fiery deaths?”
“Never underestimate the tenacity and adaptability of humanity,” Tuya said. “There are always men and women who will do the most dangerous things just because they are there to be done.”
Erik shook his head in wonder, thinking of all the historical events he had learned about in his early years. The hot-air balloon aeronauts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the airplane builders and testers of the first decades of the twentieth century, the test pilots of the mid-century who flew newer and ever faster aircraft, the astronauts of the nascent American and Russian space programs, and the first manned mission to Mars with a multi-national crew that was nearly lost during landing on the red planet.
“I am just really glad to have such a great crew working beside me. I miss John and Sally, but without any one of the three of you I don’t know if we could have made it this far.”
“Hard to believe it’s been less than two days,” the engineer mused. “It seems a week since the burn, and another week since we left Interamnia.”
“Speaking of weeks,” Isaac said hesitantly. “There is a lot of work ahead before we get the ship close to normal computer functions. And that is still not going to be enough for us, since normal functionality includes a standard AI handling hundreds of processes and tasks every hour.”
“Can we limp back to the mining colony with what we’ll be able to get running?” Erik asked, mind racing as he considered all the possible options.
“Aye, we might be able to do that,” Fynn conceded. “It would take us months at best, though, since we’re going to have to manually control the ion thrusters and only be able to fire them for short bursts to make sure we don’t go off on a random trajectory. Those bursts will be a mere fraction of our normal burns, too, so we’ll be limping along.”
“We’re cruising along pretty fast right now with the engines completely off,” Tuya interjected. “Why couldn’t we just loop around at this speed and get back to the colony in a week or so?”
“Once we’re able to know where the colony is,” Erik added quietly.
Fynn scratched his head before answering, clearly not liking what he had to say. “If we looped around in a curving path, we would just shoot right by whatever destination we chose. With only manual controls, it’s going to take weeks to bleed off the speed the Vagabond has built up. We don’t have a planet nearby with atmosphere that we could skim to slow us down quickly.”
“So, at this point we can survive, but we have little control over where we go,” Erik summed up. “It sounds like our best option might be to just continue on to the destination Aurora was heading for. There has to be some kind of presence there for this container we’re supposed to deliver.”
Tuya laughed and shrugged. “Unless the drop-off point is some unmanned asteroid, and that container has the supplies and shelter needed for the construction of a new base or colony that they don’t want anyone to know about yet.”
“That wouldn’t be good.” Erik looked around the table, and sipped at the warm coffee that was making him feel more alert. “Any chance we’ll be able to dig out any details of our course from the AI memory banks?”
“I’ll poke through and see what I can find,” Isaac responded. “But it will be days, if not weeks, before I have time to do anything like that. We’ll arrive before I get to a point where I can look for the data.”
“What about the sensor databases? Can we get those online so I can try to pinpoint our location and work out a heading from that? Getting the exterior vid feeds working would be great, too.”
“The databases would already be online and accessible, but that was one of the many systems we routed through Aurora years ago.” Isaac sighed and rubbed at his beard. “It will probably take a full operating system wipe and reload before we get a lot of things like that back up and running. When I shut down Aurora, I had to do it quick and dirty. Her memory banks will be completely fragmented, and there is a possibility that she could have initiated a wipe herself in the nanoseconds between knowing I’d shut her down and it actually happening.”
The crew members sat in stunned silence, each imagining a worst-case scenario of losing decades of stored data and system configurations. Along with all the functions normally performed by the AI, their personal logs and files were stored on the same server partitions and would be affected by the fragmentation and potential wipe.
“You know,” Erik mused aloud, “we may be the first ship in almost thirty years to be operating without an AI.”
Isaac nodded. “The early AI’s were primitive and couldn’t manage many of the ship’s systems, but they allowed ships to run on smaller crews and increased safety. Within a few years of that first AI, it was a standard feature. The earliest of the independent freighters had cheap AI systems, but they still had them.”
“We’ll just have to do the best that we can,” Erik told the others. “No one be afraid of asking for help, or jumping in wherever you can to get something done. The most important thing is to get rest when it’s needed. We all function better when our brains aren’t foggy with exhaustion. Isaac and Tuya, you two hit your bunks now. I know you’ve both been awake longer than Fynn and I, so I don’t want to see you out of your cabins again for at least six hours.”
Isaac tried to protest that there was too much to be done, but Tuya was clearly grateful for the opportunity to sleep. Erik returned to the control center where he could keep an eye on reports coming in from across the ship’s systems, and Fynn retreated to his engine room to start a long series of low thrust manual braking burns that would slow the ship to a safe speed for approaching any destination over a period of weeks.
A week after they had abruptly left the colony at Interamnia, the four crew members were still hard at work on the ship. Vagabond had cruised along blissfully on a course that was never threatened by interloping asteroids. The forward cameras had been restored halfway through the week, and Erik could finally see the stars around the ship. He had worked with star charts for hours, all the while swearing at the archaic paper rolls that were kept for emergencies, and missing the ease with which the AI had been able to place a position within moments. The tedious effort paid off when he could circle a small portion of the asteroid belt as their location. That circle had a diameter of several thousand kilometers, but it felt good to know his approximate place in the solar system again. Several times a day he would repeat the process with increasing speed as he became accustomed to the charts, and by the end of that week the circles had shown the ship moving in a specific direction.
