Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 36

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 13

They'd found a planet...

 

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Chapter 13.

     "Listen up, people. We are about to attempt a landing on a planet no one has ever landed on before. That means we're going in cold, no survey, no beacons, nothing. With the way we lost most of our instruments, we can't even do much of a once-over from orbit, basically just get a glimpse of the land that's not cloud-covered and pick the best-looking landing spots."

The huge curve of Emerald cut across the forward port, softened by the presence of atmosphere, white and green and brown. "Tavana, is the Nebula Drive retracting?"

The French-Polynesian boy nodded. "The dust is going into the containers we set up for it, yes. The gas, however – we will lose most of it."

"No biggie. It's done its job."

It had taken a day or two to deploy the Nebula Drive dusty-plasma sail, and several more days to use the controlled nebula to get them into orbit around Emerald. Other than being slow, however, the Drive had performed flawlessly, something that had made the trip something of a mini-vacation. They weren't worrying about improvised coils or wondering where they were going, and Emerald had always been there, reassuring them that they weren't just drifting through empty space any more. Just hope that's not a false promise.

Getting the dust – programmable nanotech motes descended from the original designs by the European Union for the famous Odin – was important. No telling when we might need a bunch of nanodust, even simple stuff like that. And we sure ain't making it ourselves.

"Right. Francisco, Maddox, I want you two to go through the cargo area from all the way at the back to the front, and secure anything that might be loose. If you find something, like a big piece of machinery, that you don't think you can secure right, mark it in your omnis."

He pushed himself over to where he'd hung his EVA suit. "I got myself one more job, but it's a quickie."

"What is it, sir?" asked Xander.

"You can help, actually. While I'm getting suited up and checking out all telltales, go get me those SC 178s, would you?"

"SC-178s?"

Campbell snorted at himself. You think these kids live and breathe acronyms and designations? "Those things I called commsats for idiots. In the crate marked ICS-GIS-S-C-178. Crate that size probably holds ten of them. Just drag the crate up – remember that –"

"I know, Sergeant, it's still just as massy even if it's weightless, don't crush myself or anyone else by getting cocky with it."

"That's sounding almost cocky, kid. Just be careful."

By the time he was satisfied that the suit was operating perfectly, Xander had arrived with the crate. "Now what, sir?"

"Now I basically dump these things out the airlock. Once they go into vacuum they wake right up. I can give 'em the update on the diameter of the planet and things like that from my Omni. Then they'll use their built-in micro-ion drives to work their way into a reasonable-coverage set of orbits over time, and deploy their solar recharge sails which they can also use for a little boost. Once on-station, the sails reconfigure to standard power-gathering panels. Guaranteed to last at least seventy-five years on-station."

"What will we get out of them, with what we don't have in infrastructure?"

"Don't sell these things short. They've got a lot of standard commo packages, software update services, and more importantly great GIS/GPS capability, which will come in handy if we end up having to navigate around this globe. Good remote storage servers, and – not least – they can use their power to send distress pings out regularly. Not very often, but there's ten of them."

"Distress pings?" Xander looked skeptical, and Campbell couldn't blame him. "That's a ten-year delay on reception, Sergeant, if we're looking at Orado."

"If it's Orado, yeah," Campbell agreed, opening the lock and cramming the crate inside; he would just barely be able to fit in with it. "But no one on Orado would notice it, anyway, unless they had a radio telescope pointed in this direction for no particular reason. No, this is just in case anyone comes looking. It wouldn't take much brainpower to say "hey, here's a star right near where the disaster happened, maybe survivors went there", after all. And if we have constant distress beacons, they might be readable from billions of miles away by a search vessel."

He clambered in and made sure all of him was clear of the hatch. "All right, close her up and put us in vacuum."

Pressure dropped swiftly, and once it hit less than one millibar – less than a thousandth of Earth-normal atmospheric pressure – he saw activation signals coming up on his omni. "There you are," he muttered. Opening the crate, he could see each of the SC-178s with its two indicator lights – one for drives, one for electronics – glowing a comforting green. "What do you know, ten for ten. Will miracles never cease."

A few minutes sufficed to update the satellites with their meager store of information, and then – as he'd told Xander he would – he simply opened the outer hatch and started throwing the soccer-ball sized spheres with their strangely seamed sides out the airlock. Once clear, the greenish-painted satellites opened two small hatches and began preparing for orbital modification; Campbell couldn't help but grin faintly, because every time he saw an SC-178 deploy it looked like they'd suddenly grown little circular wings or flappy round ears, at least before the solar panels started to deploy; the lines and indicator LEDs gave the rest of the sphere a vaguely cheerful face between those ears. Then he shook his head, closed the exterior door, and waited for the airlock to repressurize.

"Mostly secure, Sergeant!" Maddox said as he re-entered the cabin. "We marked a few things that we couldn't be sure of."

"Outstanding. Xander, you come with me. Tavana, make sure all ten of our little satellites get clear of our position. Francisco, Maddox – use the head and then get yourselves strapped in." He accessed Maddox' and Francisco's omnis; there were five questionable areas marked, all of them – as he had expected – associated with the larger pieces of machinery. He and Xander got all of those tended to.

"So now I guess I'd better strap in too?" Xander asked.

"Not yet, son. Now the two of us go front-to-back, inch by inch, and make damn sure there isn't a single loose object, not so much as a bolt. We're about to do re-entry at orbital velocity, and anything not strapped down could kill someone."

Xander nodded, and the two men began a careful survey of the large cargo hold. Sure enough, they found several loose objects that had been hidden behind or under others, including one TechTool that Samuel Campbell had been sure would turn up in exactly this situation. "Tav, found your missing tool. Locking it into a crate back here for now."

"Merci, Sergeant! I was worried about it not being found."

"No more than I was. How're those satellites doing?"

"All have cleared our immediate vicinity; there is nothing within several kilometers now."

"Good. Then get to your own couch and strap in; we're just about ready to go."

Campbell settled himself behind the controls, made sure the restraining harness was secure. Then he checked telemetry on all the others. "Tav, you're a little loose. So are you, Francisco. Strap in. This ain't going to be a picnic, and when we land at first we'll all think we're in hell, because we aren't used to weight any more. But we're going to land, at last, on solid ground."

All four of his passengers gave a cheer at that, and he grinned back before turning his attention to the controls. "All right, now. You can read, or play your Jewelbug, or whatever, but keep it quiet and do not distract me. I have to do this on manual, and that's dangerous as hell."

That was something of an exaggeration, he admitted to himself, but he really didn't want to be disturbed. Yeah, he'd done quite a few hands-on de-orbits in his time, but every one was a little different, and even after a couple centuries of space travel, the friction of re-entry was still one of the things that could kill a spaceship faster than you could say "oops".

And, of course, every other time he'd either had expert help, or at least a serious survey, to help him out. This time… this time, it was all seat-of-the-pants and gut instinct.

First he tested the manual reconfiguration. With the automatics out, they'd had to use two of the five omnis to provide processing power to direct the metamaterial that made up a large portion of the shuttle's exterior. The hookups all still worked, fortunately, otherwise he didn't know how he'd be able to land this thing; its default shape wasn't all that different from the "brick airplane" first made famous by the American Space Shuttle back in the 20th century, which meant that it was great for re-entry and absolutely abominable for anything else, like actually flying, let alone landing on anything that wasn't a gargantuan salt flat or immense tailored runway.

But the reconfiguration did work. It was slower than the original systems would have been, but it did the job, and he was pretty sure he could handle the rough moments while it was between modes. "All configurations check out. Starting first de-orbit burn."

He was doing a series of burns to slowly lower the altitude until he started getting evidence of atmosphere. He wasn't sure of the scale height for Emerald, and even if he was, their altitude wasn't absolutely precisely known, and just how high or low he'd have to be before noticeable drag set in would also depend on a lot of other factors, ranging from just how much atmosphere Emerald had to how active Emerald's sun had been lately.

It was after the third burn that he felt an infinitesimal quiver. That's got it. "We are about to start re-entry," he announced. "Stay calm; this will be rough."

There wasn't much way to avoid some battering, at pretty nasty levels, on a re-entry. And here, he was having to wing it. On the positive side, if you get the angle wrong, you'll not have too much time to worry about it.

The vibration grew, became a faint singing hum, getting louder, louder, dropping in pitch while rising in volume. LS-88 was starting to shake slightly now. "We are in the soup. Starting to see heating. Boys, we are about to do a good job at emulating a meteor." Or of being a meteor.

The shuttle was shuddering now, violent shakes as pressure of deceleration mounted inexorably, crushing down onto Campbell like a load of wet sand slithering down out of a dumptruck. He heard Francisco whimper. "Only… about four G's," Campbell managed to say, trying to make it sound casual. "Just a few seconds, kids… keep calm… breathe slow and deep."

The forward viewport was black, closed against the heat, but Campbell could see the telltales, temperature climbing. There was one spot that heat was going up faster than anywhere else. He stared at that indication, willing it to slow down, to hold out.

Then the rise did slow down. He glanced at the others, saw that a similar slowdown was starting. Slowly, the massive weight lifted from him, and the temperature telltales began to drop rather than climb. Made it! God-damn but we made it through the re-entry!

The forward port showed a gleam and then lit up as the Thermal Protection System retracted, showing blue-black sky above and fluffy clouds far below, green ocean dotted with islands. "Reconfiguring for supersonic flight in three… two… one…"

The manual transition was a pain in the rear. For a few seconds he almost bobbled it, the LS-88 swaying dangerously through the air like a drunk trying to drive home on icy roads. But he finally got it under control, and now the much more streamlined aircraft screamed its way through the sky with nuclear jets driving it forward.

"All right, people, we are now flying, not falling, and not drifting in space. That heaviness you feel is real honest gravity, and we'll have to get used to it again. But believe me, I'm damn glad to feel it."

"This world has worse gravity than Earth!" Tavana said. "Will it be dangerous?"

While his limbs were trying to present the same argument as Francisco, his trained reflexes told him something else. "Hate to tell you, son, but if anything it's a little lighter on the gravity here. I've been to a dozen worlds, maybe more; believe me, I know what high gravity feels like."

"Where are we going to land, sir?"

"Spotted a couple candidates on our orbits, and figured our re-entry to… yep, that should be it ahead."

A large island was coming into view; it took several minutes at their supersonic speed to draw near enough to appreciate its size. "An island?" Maddox asked. "Why not a continent?"

"Well, son, we can always move somewhere else if we want. But an island will tend to have a more limited population, especially of hostile predators, since any predator has to rely only on what's on the island; he can't trot off to the mainland and get himself food like we'd order takeout, after all. And this island's plenty big enough for four people."

He was puzzled by the lack of real mountains; from orbit he had seen things that looked, visually, like mountain ranges, but now that he was closer he didn't think any of the peaks he had seen topped three hundred meters, and that was really rare. No plate tectonics? Something wearing them down fast?

Still, everything was reasonably promising. The way LS-88 was responding, the atmosphere was similar to Earth's in density at this altitude, anyway. Shame there wasn't any atmospheric sensor functioning so he could tell if the chemistry was like Earth's. If LS-88's jets had been powered by chemical fuel, like old-style airplanes, he'd have had his answer already; without oxygen they'd have stalled instantly. But this baby used nuclear jets, driving the turbines through sheer nuclear heat. No answers there.

One thing at a time, he reminded himself. First they had to get down.

He triggered the second transition, slowing to subsonic speed, watching flight conditions narrowly. No rain, skies are clear, winds aren't terribly strong. Hard to tell direction right now. When I get closer, the trees and such will give me an indication, as will wave movement.

LS-88 swept in over the shore of the island, and he began a leisurely survey of his selected target. The island was about seventy kilometers long by thirty-five wide, a ridge of low hills or tiny mountains running down the center from each end and meeting in the middle. The middle ridge extended to the shoreline on each side, and bowed outward in the center of the island, where clear water showed.

He took LS-88 on a high inspection. A circular area in the center, a lot of water in a ring around a central island. Caldera or impact crater, I'm guessing. But that was only a guess. If a couple centuries of space exploration had taught the human race anything, it was that alien worlds were full of surprises, even the ones without anything living on them, and any assumptions you made might get shattered at any moment.

Still, the important thing was that it looked big enough to support them, and there was a larger landmass, maybe a continent, not all that far away if they wanted to move. The question now was, where to land?

"Okay, crew, I'm thinking we want to be pretty close to the shore; fishing and such will be a good way of catching food."

"Sounds reasonable to me, Sergeant," Xander said.

"Look for a river," Francisco said unexpectedly. When they glanced at him, he smiled – a pained smile still, with the pressure of gravity weighing on him, but a smile. "My mama was reading a book to me about old civilizations and said all of them started near rivers."

A genuine contribution. Not that I wasn't thinking along those lines myself, but it'll be good for Francisco to know he was right. "Very good. We'll want fresh water to drink, and streams are good for fishing too. If it's big enough, might even be useful for moving stuff on."

From the high vantage point, it wasn't hard to spot streams. One looked particularly prominent, gathering several tributary creeks into a respectable flow. Elevation difference isn't very large, so we're not going to get too many whitewater rapids or anything. Without a discontinuity like a small cascade, though, tides might make it brackish quite a ways up. Solar tides only; moons aren't big enough to worry about that way. So, about half the tides we see on Earth. Dunno what the slightly different gravity and such will mean for that.

The large stream also had a somewhat clear region near it, standing out from the surrounding forest, surrounding a small lake maybe half a kilometer across; the stream went into the lake and went out the other side to the sea.

"Got our landing spot picked out, boys." He flashed it onto their retinals. "Look good?"

There was a chorus of enthusiastic yeses; of course, a lot of that was just the excitement of actually landing; they'd probably have agreed to anything that looked halfway decent.

"All right, descending to five hundred meters. Hold on; I'm about to convert us to VTOL."

"VTOL?" repeated Francisco.

"Vertical Takeoff and Landing; basically means we can land and take off straight up and down, which lets me put her down on any space she'll fit, instead of needing a runway. Now pipe down, everyone, this is gonna be tricky."

It was tricky. The slower-than-design conversion induced turbulence and threw off the aerodynamics drastically. LS-88 almost tumbled, spun once completely around the ship's central axis as Campbell fought to regain control. He heard a frightened curse from Tavana, a gasp from Xander, and a squeak of fear from Francisco; Maddox was silent, but his hands were gripping the armrests so tightly that his knuckles were white.

But in a few moments the ship steadied, and Campbell began to breathe easier. "We're okay now, kids. Just hold on a few more minutes."

He dipped the nose once more, circled his chosen landing spot. He could see somethings flying away from the area. Well, now I know there's life beyond plants here. Probably a good thing. And the air looks clear. The green color's from the seawater, somehow. Maybe, just maybe, this is a livable place.

Now came the trickiest part of all. He had no operating radar, no spotters, just 3-D images he'd recorded and that his omni was now overlaying on what he could see through the forward port, showing its best calculation of his current height above the target ground. He let the ship drop to what he guessed was thirty meters, and then reduced his descent to the most exquisitely slow progress he could manage, measured in centimeters per second. Slowly, very slowly, the trees rose up, the horizon began to vanish, the waving grasses gradually became visible at the lower edge of the forward port.

LS-88 vibrated slightly in an unexpected wind, but he didn't let her sway more than a few centimeters. Now he could see dust and debris flying, and knew he had to be close. Keep it slow, keep it steady, no need to hurry. Slow as you can get it –

The thud of the forward strut striking something transmitted itself throughout the cabin, and was followed almost instantly by smaller thumps from the side struts landing. Tense, Sergeant Campbell started stepping the power down. Moment of truth; I find out if what I landed us on is solid and stable, or if I've chosen a pile of quicksand.

But as the vibrations of the engines diminished, LS-88 remained immobile, steady as solid stone, and finally the whine of the turbines faded to nothing. A wide smile spreading across his face, Campbell spun his chair to face the others.

"Gentlemen, we have landed."

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 12

 

They had one more roll of the dice to throw...

 

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Chapter 12

     Tavana gazed at the brilliant disc of the star – filtered, of course – that was the center of their hopes. "Program concluded, Sergeant. We made it; I think we must be, um, what, something like a hundred eighty million kilometers from the star right now. What now?"

"Now we have to look for a planet we can land on," Campbell said easily. Tavana knew he was putting up a front, mostly for Maddox and Francisco. There was no guarantee of a planet at all, let alone one worth landing on. "Tav, what I'd like to do is use the Trapdoor to do really short jumps around the system, do a survey. I can pilot like that – I did a stint with a survey team some years back. But I know that takes some tricks with the coils to let you do that any shorter than four hundred million miles, and precision's not the Trapdoor's strong point."

Tav found himself rubbing his chin. "I hadn't thought about that, sir. Too busy just hoping they didn't give out on the way here."

"Well, we're here, so I'm not so worried. You boys figured out the solution for the Nebula Drive, right?"

Xander laughed. "Brute-force solution, yes, sir. We manually operate the dispensers. The autodispensers got fried pretty completely, according to Tav, so we just made some we can control from inside the cabin. The control field extensions for the Nebula Drive seemed okay."

"So," the Sergeant said, "that means that worst comes to worst and the Trapdoor coils go down, we just use the Nebula Drive. Right?"

"Right," agreed Tav. There wasn't much point in disagreeing; the Sergeant was basically right, though the Nebula Drive – or "dusty-plasma containment sail", as his professors preferred – was a lot slower.

"Then what about it? Can you give me short-jump capability, or not?"

"Um… let me check some things."

"Take your time, son. Don't do it fast, do it right."

"Yessir."

Tavana accessed his notes and references. He hadn't gotten to the classes that covered short-jump approaches, but he had actually read ahead; that was an interesting part of the Trapdoor engineering, pushing its limits, and he'd had some discussions with his teachers on it. The keys were synchronization and field control and dissipation.

Let's see… one nice thing is that all those jumps from where we were marooned to here have given me a lot of data on the regular coils and the ones we had to rewind. I can nail down their resonances and quirks pretty well. If my omni can crunch all that data…

It turned out that the omni could crunch that data pretty well. Looking at the plots, it was easy to see the hand-wound ones; they had a lot of anomalies. But none of them seemed fatal to Sergeant Campbell's idea. There was one limitation, though…

"Sergeant, I think we could. But it would need you to go out and add a couple components to each drive coil circuit. We have the components, and they're not hard to install I don't think, but to control the timing and dissipation of the field well enough, we need to install these networked synchronizers."

"In each bay? So about a day, a day and a half of work to save us weeks of cruising? Let me suit up while you get the components together, son."

It actually only took Campbell most of a day to do the work, with Tavana guiding him through the first couple and then just watching as the Sergeant carefully and precisely installed the components, verified function with Tavana, and then moved to the next.

The next ship-morning (Tav doubted they were still synchronized with any clock in the Galaxy, but still, they needed some kind of schedule), Campbell had them strap back in, settled back, and gripped the controls. "All right. So I should be able to do a short-jump now?"

"Should, yes, Sergeant. I'm not an expert, though, so –"

"Tavana, it's all right. I'm the only expert here right now, and I'm not an expert in most of the things we need. You did your best and that's all I'm ever gonna ask of you." The Sergeant strapped in. "All right, let's test this bad boy. All set, Francisco?"

"Yes, sir, Sergeant!" Francisco had been showing extreme mood swings during the journey here, but right now he sounded cheerful. Well, we've gotten where we were going and we're talking about finding a planet. He's feeling hopeful.

"Then let's go!"

Sergeant Campbell first tumbled the ship carefully on two axes; Tavana knew that this gave a full view of the entire sky around them. "Okay, here goes nothing."

The port went black, and then stars flashed out, after a pause that Tavana thought was no more than ten seconds. It worked!

"Nice jump, Sergeant."

"Thank you kindly, son."

"So where did you jump us to?"

"Didn't really matter; not towards the star, not away from it really, just a sort of lateral line. That should give us a chance to locate planets, by checking any parallax from the motion. Let me tumble her again, and then we can start looking."

"I think I've got an automatic comparison set up in my omni," Maddox said. "Not too hard, right?"

"Shouldn't be," Tav agreed.

The stars spun by once more, and Tavana looked over at Maddox. For a moment everything was quiet, and then Maddox shouted, "Yes… yes! There's planets, sir! And maybe… um, a couple other things?"

"A couple other 'things'? What kind of things? Let me see what you've got."

Maddox broadcast the detected targets – objects that had changed their relative position due to the microjump. Ignoring the central star, there were no fewer than nine targets.

"Well, now, I see what you mean. We've got a couple comets, good-sized ones. And that's a Jupiter-type gas giant. Maybe another one there. Rocky planet, way too close in, you can tell that by relative position…"

A few more minutes went by; Tavana did some calculations on some of the targets that had a questionable relative position, but his spirits were falling. None of them are in the right location.

He looked at the older man and at Xander, and saw the grim reflection of his own fears. "Sergeant –"

"We ain't giving up yet!" Campbell said quickly. "See, from these measurements, it turned out we were actually pretty close to the ecliptic before we jumped. There's a whole swath of the sky over here that we couldn't see clearly enough to get a match on. What we're looking for could be right there."

Tavana didn't argue, but the "swath" wasn't very large; it was just the relatively tiny angle where the central star's glare had made it impossible to resolve – basically little more than the star's apparent diameter at their prior distance. "Doing another microjump, sir?"

"You got it. Everyone locked in?"

Assured that they were, Campbell triggered another short jump; this one lasted about the same length of time, and the stars shimmered back into existence. After the obligatory tumble, Maddox ran his comparison again.

"Sir, there's one new target!"

"What's the location, Tavana?"

Tavana triangulated from the two observations and compared it with the prior results. A trickle of hope started, a painful trickle because there were so many things that could dash that hope. "It's at… about one hundred twenty million kilometers from the primary, maybe just a little less. That's well inside the Goldilocks Zone!"

"Well, now, that's looking up. Can we get a good look at it from here?"

"If you can point us directly at it."

"I will most surely do that, then."

A few moments passed and Tav finally got the newly-discovered planet centered, then triggered the telescopic function of the viewport camera.

The enigmatic dot of light brightened, then expanded, becoming a tiny but distinct crescent… a crescent of brilliant green and white.

"Looks like atmosphere. And something else, but I'm damned if I can tell what," the Sergeant said after a pause. "But if it's got an atmosphere, our odds just shot way up. Strap in, I'm getting us closer."

"But, sir," Tav said, "it's not at the right distance for a microjump –"

"No, son, but if you're really good at feeling these things out, just about everything's at the right distance for two microjumps."

Tavana thought for a moment, then wanted to smack himself. "Triangulation!"

"Exactly right, son. Once you get close enough, find the direction and distance that will put you a minimum jump away, then jump to that point. Hold on, we're doing it now."

Another ten seconds of blackness, a moment of the ship turning, realigning, and then another few seconds.

The screen cleared, and before them was a small globe, but still far larger than the magnified image they'd seen before. Tavana triggered the telescopic magnification again, and the new world swelled hugely; from their new vantage point, slightly to starward of the planet, the surface was more complex; swirls of white cloud contrasted with brilliant green and darker green and brown and buff-colored areas. Seas and continents!

"Sure does look promising. Shame I ain't got a spectrometer, but it looks good. Except that green color's funky."

"Algae bloom?"

"Over the whole planet? Well, if so, that'd be good news for us; that looks like chlorophyll green to me. Let's check out her vitals, shall we?"

The view from the other microjumps helped refine the size of the new planet – slightly larger than Earth – and Tavana spotted a couple small satellites of the planet which helped pin down the gravity and thus mass of the target. "It's a little bigger than earth, but surface gravity's going to be just a little less."

"Is it… is it going to be safe?" Francisco asked. "I mean… will we be able to go there? It looks very pretty!"

"Does, doesn't it? Sure a lot better than just black space and stars, I gotta say. But honestly, son, the only way we'll know if it's safe is to go there. All the survey software that might've been on this tub is gone, and all I've got to go on is my gut."

"So what does your gut say, Sergeant?"

Campbell got up and stretched. "It says that tomorrow's another day. We've been busy today and I'm not going to think about doing a landing until I've gotten some rest."

"We should name the planet first!" Francisco was emphatic.

"I am tempted to call it 'Hope'," Tavana admitted.

"Too obvious. Xander?"

"Looks like it has a lot of water, and looks sort of tropical. Call it Lagoon?"

"Hm. I could live with that, I suppose. Maddox?"

"Oh, I don't know. It looks like a gem to me. We could call it Gem?"

"I say we call it Esmeralda – Emerald, to you."

The Sergeant chuckled. "You know, I think the kid's got it. Emerald it is."

Francisco beamed, overjoyed at being the one to name the planet they had found. Tavana wanted to object, but he suddenly realized that the Sergeant probably would have approved any suggestion by Francisco; the boy needed things to make him feel better, and Tavana was old enough not to need that kind of help, right?

So he shoved the petty disappointment back and clapped; the others joined in. "To Emerald, then – tomorrow!"

"Tomorrow," Sergeant Campbell said. "By this time tomorrow, we'll be landing!"

Tavana knew that landing wouldn't mean anything if it turned out that Emerald's atmosphere was toxic, the green color caused by something lethal and alien… but in his heart, he didn't believe that the universe would be that cruel. Looking at the brilliant green sphere, he closed his eyes and said a silent prayer. Please… be a place that we can live.

     Please.

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 11

It's when you're sleeping that questions occur...

 

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Chapter 11.

     "Sergeant?" Xander whispered.

He saw the eyes snap open, look around, registering where the Sergeant was, the person speaking to him, the fact that everything else seemed normal, in the time it took a normal person to blink. He's always ready for everything.

"Sorry to wake you, sir," he said.

Campbell sat up slowly. "I figure you must have something you want to say that the others shouldn't hear. If I agree with you, then there's no problem. Go on, son."

"The chances of finding a habitable planet… what are they?"

Campbell pursed his lips. "Well… understand that odds make no real difference here. But anyway… I'm pretty damn sure that's a G-type star. I was able to do a little trigonometry from our first little jump and the way the star shifted, and that tells me the star's distance, which ain't far away at all, and the apparent brightness combined with distance really helps nail that down. So, that said… G-type stars in this neighborhood tend to have planets, but only one in ten's got an Earth-type planet in the habitable zone, and of those, only one in two's compatible with our kind of life. So… one in twenty."

"And if this doesn't work out… we're dead, right?"

Campbell looked as though he wanted to argue that, then bowed his head. "Yeah, that's about the size of it; it's why I said we got no other options. We have to make a go of it here, because there's nowhere else to go."

"Then… look, the main reason we can't go where we want to, to Orado, is that the supplies won't hold out, right?"

"Right. Though from what Tavana said, I'm not sure I'd bet on those cobbled-together coils holding out for a ten-lightyear journey. He had to think about it making what turns out to be about a fortieth of that."

"Still, why can't you just put all or most of us under, like the Lieutenant? If only one of us – you – is up, or maybe not even you most of the time, we won't need much food or water."

The Sergeant was shaking his head even before Xander finished. "It's a good idea, son, but I already thought of it. Fact is, I only know how to do that using military nano setups. Civilian nanos, like yours? Different setup, different protocols for operation. I don't have authority to modify them the same way I did for Lieutenant Haley, and none of us know how to reprogram nanos for that kind of stuff. I could dump the procedure to hers easy, but yours? That'd take a nanoprogrammer with a medical bent, or a doctor with the right programming experience, like Dr. Kimei. She'd be able to do that, no problem."

"You knew her, sir? I didn't … interact with them much." He remembered Dr. Kimei well – an attractive blonde woman, friendly and competent… but she usually wasn't alone, because she tended both species on the ship.

His expression must have given him away, because the Sergeant gave a wry grin. "Not comfortable around Bemmies, eh?" Sergeant Campbell made a face. "I don't have anything against 'em, myself, but for a colony? They're experiments, a few generations old. Some were unstable, mentally. They say that's all cleared up, but dammmit, you don't want to rely on someone's well-meaning experiment on a colony world." He sighed. "Anyway, yeah, I know her. Or knew her, if she got killed in that mess. Nice lady, and her girl Sakura's a born pilot."

Xander felt a tiny grin on his face. "I heard Tav mention Sakura a couple of times. Think he likes her."

"Lot to like about the girl. Little late for that now; if she's still alive, she and her family are on Orado by now, maybe getting on another colony ship for Tantalus."

Xander looked out the port as the pitch-black of the Trapdoor space transitioned to the star-scattered darkness of normal space, the mysterious star now blazing brilliantly directly before them. "One chance in twenty. Sergeant… what do we do if …?"

"Honestly, son… I don't want to think about that much. But … I'll want to do what I can to make the end easy. We'll live as long as we can, though. Always a chance someone will find you, no matter how slim. And then, well…" He shrugged. "You understand?"

The thought of having to 'make the end easy' made Xander shudder inside. But at the same time, he knew the Sergeant was right. Death by slow starvation or suffocation was something he wanted to spare Maddox, Tavana, and Francisco. "Yes, sir."

"But let's keep our fingers crossed. I've beaten worse odds more'n once in my life, Xander. Hell, I think we beat odds at least that bad surviving that disaster; that field instability could've just cut straight through LS-88. We're still alive, we've fixed all the problems we ran into, and we're moving. Don't think I'd have given odds on us doing that well if someone asked me before the fact."

Xander thought about it. What would have happened if Sergeant Campbell hadn't happened to be on board? What if Lieutenant Haley hadn't been caught in the boarding tunnel and able to release the remains of the tunnel? What if they hadn't had enough food on board, or no heavy equipment with the right kind of wiring? "You're right, Sergeant. We've been beating odds all along."

"Damn straight we have. I'm betting we're gonna beat them once more."

"So will I, Sergeant," he said. "After all, it's the only bet left worth taking."

"Good man. Now," the Sergeant said, letting the straps pull him gently back into his chair, "let me get some more shuteye."

Xander grinned, and nodded. His mind more at ease than it had been before, he found it wasn't long before sleep came for him.

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 10

Our adventurers had finally fixed the stardrive...

 

------

 

Chapter 10.

     Samuel Campbell went into the cargo hold once he was sure that Tavana and Maddox were securing themselves. He still felt shaky inside; the relief that – once more – the suspension procedure had worked warred with his worry that Pearce still might not make it. It wasn't a good place for his head to be in, but he accepted that it would take a bit to drive the personal turmoil out. These ain't the best circumstances for keeping my distance, either.

"Hey, Xander. How's it going?"

"Just about done, Sergeant," the older Bird answered. "There's a few more boxes we have to unseal and sort, but I don't think they have rations or anything like that in them."

"Nevermind, then. Francisco, go up front and strap in. We're getting ready to start moving."

"Yes, sir!" Francisco looked excited as he bounced towards the front of the shuttle. Kid still probably doesn't grasp that even once we start moving, it's gonna be a long time before we get to civilization.

That did, however, leave him alone with Xander, which was what he'd intended. "So, son… what's the final word?"

Xander looked serious, then suddenly broke into a broad smile. "It'll be a little tight, sir… but we've got enough to last us the full six months, maybe a little more if we tighten our belts."

Campbell felt a huge knot loosening in his gut. He'd been even more worried than he'd realized that the long time spent rigging repairs to the little ship would have taken their chance to live long enough to reach the colony of Orado, which was the only one within any reasonable range – ten light-years off. "Well, now, that's just great. Let's get up to the front and strap in. I'm going to get us set for the long trip right away, then."

Once Xander was in place, Campbell strapped into the pilot's chair and then spun to face the little group. Kids all of them, except Pearce, who's out and not waking up. "All right, crew. We've finished our repairs, we've retrieved our castaway. Now we've got one more long trek to make – so we can go home."

There was a ragged cheer.

"Thank you, but thank yourselves. I couldn't have done this all alone. All of you should be proud of the work we've all done." He waited a moment, then said, "and now let's get going!"

He spun back to the main console and locked the chair in position. Everything by the numbers. He checked every system, calling them off, the reds, the yellows, and the now far-more-numerous greens – enough green and yellow to get them home, anyway. "Destination, Orado colony. Distance, best as I can guess it, ten point zero five lightyears. That'll be a haul – about six months – but we've got what we need to make it there. Air purifiers and oxygen reclaiming facilities show green. Water reclamation, green. We've got enough food. We have power. Setting course and maximum jump sequence."

LS-88 reoriented itself, pointing now in the direction of the moderately bright K-class star that was Orado's primary. With even the reduced velocity of their Trapdoor drive, the motion of stars was effectively zero over human timescales, so he just needed to point and drive, adjusting some when they got closer, but if he could see and line up on his target, they'd get there.

"Trapdoor drive… engaging!"

The stars wavered and vanished, the perfect blackness of the Trapdoor space replacing them, and Campbell found himself joining in the near-deafening cheer that erupted from behind. "It WORKS!" he heard Tavana shout gleefully. "Mon Dieu, it works!"

"It does indeed," Campbell said, "And another round of applause to Xander, Tavana, and Maddox, who figured out how to rewind the darn coils." He unstrapped. "We'll be doing about four-hour jumps before the coils need to be recharged, which will take about eight hours. In the meantime… it's almost dinnertime, and in honor of our successful jump back to violating the speed of light, I've got a little surprise."

"A surprise?"

"When I was digging around back in storage, I found a little box that looks to me like it was a special present for someone at our destination, probably one of Tantalus' top admins. Turns out it's a box of Buckleys."

"Buckleys?" Xander blinked, then suddenly his eyes lit up. "You mean, Buckley's Space Gourmet Dinners?"

"The very same, yes."

"Wow," Francisco breathed. "I've had some of those; they're even better than what they served at Captain's Table."

"That's why Buckley retired richer than anyone else in the Europa crew, 'cept for Baker," Campbell agreed. "And we've got enough for a few special feasts. Figure this is the right time, especially since we've spent a couple months eating regular rations."

The others enthusiastically agreed, and Campbell went into the cargo area and extracted five dinners from the box he'd hidden inside one of the construction machines' casings. He shared them out and the group let the dinners' built-in superconductor batteries warm the meals to the proper temperature.

As he was taking his third bite of buttered garlic asparagus, there was a loud ping! from the front console, and the starfield appeared again.

He barely restrained himself from swearing; instead, he locked his dinner down and started checking the board.

"What's wrong?" Xander asked tensely.

"Don't know. Tav, you're the closest we've got to an expert. What's going on?"

Tavana gestured for him to move out of the control seat, which he did. He continued eating, but the Buckley Dinner didn't seem nearly as good as it had been a few minutes ago.

A few moments later, he heard a phrase in Tahitian which he knew was not something you'd say in polite company. He also knew that Tavana never swore in that language. "What is it, son?"

"It's the windings, Sergeant." Tavana's voice was rough, filled with anger and at the same time on the edge of tears. "They're not perfect, we knew that, but I thought it might be good enough… but…"

"But what, son? Are they… ruined again?" It was hard to ask; even assuming they had enough wire to re-wind the coils, the amount of time needed would be almost fatal; it would be fatal if they had to do it more than once.

"No, not ruined; the failsafes cut in. What's happening is that the field resonance through the coils that aren't perfectly aligned makes them heat up slowly, so eventually they get too close to the transition temperature."

The transition temperature, of course, was the point at which a superconductor stopped being a superconductor. When that happened, all the energy stored in the superconductor was liberated pretty much instantly – an explosion, in other words. Thus, any superconductor that carried or stored significant power was monitored for temperature. "Does that mean that when it cools down, we can start it up again?"

Tavana looked a little less angry. "Well, yes, sir. But…"

"I can guess. That takes a while."

"The coils are sealed up in enclosed, insulated spaces. Normally they don't heat up appreciably. But now, they have to radiate the energy away, and there's no good way to do that. We can't take the covers off; they're designed as part of the field resonation circuits. So… I guess I'll have to model it and see what the optimum duty cycle is. I know it'll take a lot longer to radiate this away than it did to build up, and it was only twenty minutes to build up."

"Get to it, then."

The cabin was deathly quiet as Tavana worked. Campbell wished he could think of some way to break the tension, but in all honesty, there wasn't any way he could imagine. This was a potential death sentence, and Tavana was going to tell them when the execution would occur.

Finally, after what was probably only a few minutes but felt like forever, Tavana turned slowly to face them. From his expression, Campbell knew it was bad.

"Sir…"

"We're all here, son. Give it to us straight."

Tavana swallowed, then sat up. "Best case, modeling heat buildup and … well, never mind. We can run them for about five minutes every two hours."

The words hit him like a blow. "That's one part in twenty-four, Tavana. You sure?"

Tavana looked down, miserable. "Yes, sir. Other scenarios take longer for various reasons. It's going to be almost ten hours before we want to start that cycle, because we want the coils to drop to as low a temperature as we can get them, and they're hot right now." He looked up with a slightly less miserable expression. "On the positive side… we will have plenty of time to recharge, so we gain that time back. Recharging won't heat the superconductor, so it won't hurt us."

Campbell gritted his teeth, tried to relax. "Still, If I get you right… that means it'll take eight times as long to get anywhere as we thought before."

Tavana nodded.

From two weeks per light year, they'd now gone to four months. Forty months to Orado. Even starvation rations would never get them that far.

For a moment he was overwhelmed with a sad, sick fury. No. It's not fair, it's just not acceptable that we could have done so much, come this far, and just end up crippled in space. These kids have worked so hard, hardly complained – shoot, I've had squads of recruits who were more of a pain in the ass.

But he got a grip on himself. There has to be an answer. I won't let there be no answer to this.

Even as he thought it, he suddenly knew the only possible way out.

"All right, son. Then we've only got one choice left."

He took the controls, spun LS-88 slowly around, and then steadied the little ship, now pointing at a brilliantly blazing point of light.

"That's the only star near enough. Just comparing its position in the sky with our little jump, I can tell it's less than a light-year off – a lot less, maybe a little more than a quarter light-year. It's also probably a G-class star. It might just be a barren system, nothing there for us.

"But maybe… just maybe… there's a planet we can live on there. It's a damn sight better chance than drifting here praying for a miracle. So what do you say?"

Xander stared at the star. "That's the star that shouldn't be there."

"Right, son."

Tavana nodded. "Like it was waiting for us."

"I'm scared," Francisco announced suddenly.

"So am I, son," Campbell said quietly. "So am I. But I'm not giving up yet, and that looks like our last throw of the dice to me. If you're sure the coils will last that long, Tav?"

Tavana bit his lip, then straightened and nodded. "If we don't push them… yes, Sergeant. They'll last that long."

"Then set up the program, Tavana. Like it or not, we're about to become explorers."

He looked at the enigmatic point of light, blazing in the dark. You damn well better have something for us when we get there, because I'll be damned if I'm leading these kids to their deaths.

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 9

Well, they'd retrieved Lieutenant Haley...

 

 

-----

 

 

Chapter 9.

  "Do you think we have enough, sir?"

Sergeant Campbell didn't answer at once; Tavana could see he was still carefully transferring the contents of injector after injector into a treatment pack. Finally he looked up and Tavana was startled to see the lines on the Sergeant's face; they seemed far more pronounced now than they'd been when they were first marooned. "I wish to God I knew, son. To be dead honest with you… if it were just me and her, I'd use 'em all. But I can't do that. There's four more to worry about, and I'm responsible for all of you. I have to leave some in case something else happens."

"Sir, if it'll help, you can use any you're saving for me –"

"Not one chance in hell, Arronax." The gentle smile took the sting from the sharp words. "I appreciate the gesture, but I am not reducing your safety margin – or honestly, even mine. I have to assume I have as much chance to get hurt or sick as any of you, and if I'm responsible… I have to be ready and willing to treat myself."

"So," Maddox said quietly, floating over Tavana's shoulder, "how many are you using?"

"Half of our supply, one hundred treatment injections' worth."

"A hundred injections?" Xander looked at Campbell with his eyebrow raised. "I would think that's enough to almost raise the dead."

Campbell didn't smile. "That's about the size of it, son. The dose she got? It's already killed her, her body just hasn't admitted it yet. The nanos are going to have to work through her body and fix stuff before it collapses, and damnation I don't know if it can. This stuff's customized for trauma treatment, though it has anti-rad properties too. But hell, I'm no doctor. If I was I could customize this stuff, program it specifically to fix radiation damage. Then I'd be pretty sure she'd survive. Right now… I just don't know."

Francisco, who was sitting next to Pearce, suddenly stiffened. "Sergeant! She opened her eyes!"

All of them immediately floated themselves to the other spacesuit, currently locked down to one of the conformal seats. The Sergeant's grin was broad and reassuring. "Hey there, Lieutenant."

"Chief Master Sergeant," she said, with a slow, surprised grin; her voice was sluggish, sleepy. "So you came back for me."

"Promised I would. Now, you're not better yet, Pearce. Think you can help us get you outta that suit and lying down here for treatment?"

"Sure."

Lieutenant Haley's suit seam unlocked and split open, and she sat up. "Oh, ouch ouch ouch ouch!!"

The Sergeant looked torn between anger and laughter. "Dammit, Haley! You've been a popsicle for a couple months now! You can't just sit up like that."

Her face was pale and sweat was starting out on her forehead. Tavana realized that what she'd felt must go way beyond "ouch". "Yeah," she said in a whisper. "Kinda figured that out."

"Okay, then, just let me get your back…" Tavana watched the Sergeant ease his arms around to support her in position. "We'll have to try to move you as little as possible. Tav, unlock her suit from the seat and then with me holding her you and Maddox should be able to slide it off all the way."

Tavana nodded and released the seat restraints; Maddox followed him to the Lieutenant's feet, each of them taking one of the boots. "Now, Sergeant?"

"Hold on. Give her a few minutes to recover." Haley was still pale as a cloud.

"Okay." Tavana looked to the rear door, where he could vaguely hear sounds of Xander and Francisco moving around, digging into the last sections of cargo they hadn't touched, performing a current inventory. It had been months they'd been in LS-88 and the Sergeant had said it was time to reassess their situation. Tavana, having noted the glances between Campbell and Xander, guessed that he wanted Francisco well out of the way when they were tending to Lieutenant Haley, just in case.

"I'm okay now," Pearce Haley said after a moment. There was some slight color back in her cheeks, so Tavana figured she wasn't entirely lying.

"No, you ain't, but you're better than you were. Right, then, kids, remember to brace yourselves properly, and pull steady and slow. I don't want you flying off and bouncing into the walls if the suit comes off all of a sudden. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," Tavana said. Xander nodded, taking a firmer grip on the Lieutenant's right boot and settling his feet against the base of the seat. Tavana did the same.

"All right, I got her. Together now… three… two… one… pull!"

The suit, already instructed by Haley to be in release mode, slid free with startling ease; even with the Sergeant's warning, the two boys found themselves drifting backwards with the suit and bumping gently into one of the other seats. An unpleasant odor filled the cabin.

"Ugh," said Haley. "Sorry, Sergeant."

"Don't worry, we'll take a few minutes to get you cleaned up before we have to put you back under, Pearce."

She looked around, not moving her neck or body much. That sudden movement sure gave her a warning. "You said a couple months… no rescue, huh?"

The Sergeant looked grim. "None, Pearce. Not likely to be, either." He cradled her and started towards the tiny free-fall shower. "I'll fill you in while we get you clean. Tavana, son, you and Maddox have got a not very fun job: clean out her suit, and that means empty all the reservoirs and make sure they're one hundred percent clean. Then restock everything."

Tavana winced, but nodded. "Yessir."

Maddox wrinkled his nose. "He means –"

"Yeah, everything. Even in suspension she must've made some waste, and maybe she did when the disaster hit." I would have wet myself at least if I was standing in a boarding tunnel and it was suddenly chopped off and I was spinning through space. Maybe Lieutenant Haley didn't though, she's tough.

But not so tough that he couldn't hear cries of pain, and an occasional sob. Tavana tried to ignore it, but he could see Maddox' shoulders tighten. "Tav… why does she hurt so much? Is it… the radiation?"

Tav tried to grin, couldn't quite manage it, settled for a tiny smile. "No, no. She was in suspension, yes?"

Maddox nodded, wiping out part of the interior of the suit. "Yes. And?"

"Then you know she was not moving for months. Even with nanotech maintaining you, things get stiff. Ever sat in one position for too long, then tried to get up and found it was stiff, maybe sore? Now imagine that after two months without moving even the tiniest bit. Plus she was more than asleep. She was almost dead. Shut down. So it's like when your foot falls asleep, yes? Slowly feeling comes back, but it tingles and hurts sometimes. Make that a thousand times worse."

Maddox' eyes were wide, looking back at the tiny enclosure. "She's… really tough, then."

"Oui."

A little while later the Sergeant came over to them and inspected the suit. "Good work. We'll get her back into it as soon as we give her the nano doses."

"Um… Sergeant, sir?" Maddox said hesitantly.

"Oh, for the love of… Maddox, you can call me Sergeant, or if you people insist you can call me 'sir', but in the name of all that's holy don't do both!"

For the first time that day, Tav found himself giggling, as Maddox said in a slightly panicky voice, "Sorry, Sir… Sergeant… I mean…"

Campbell cracked a smile too. "Oh, never mind. What is it, son?"

"Well, I know that Lieutenant Haley's … well, dying, like you said, even though she looks okay, so why didn't you just give her the treatment and leave her under?"

"Now that is an excellent question, Maddox. Good thinking. Two reasons, really. First is purely personal; last we left off, she was drifting by herself, alone in space. Some of the eggheads think that once you go all the way into suspension you don't dream, don't think at all, but I don't believe that, so I wasn't gonna leave Pearce thinking she might just be going to her death in the black, maybe dreaming a slow dream about it for months as she died." The older man's face was somber as he said that; Tavana realized how far ahead someone like Campbell must think, and it made him wonder if maybe he shouldn't start doing that too. "As for the other reason… why don't the two of you think about it while I go get her dressed and bring her back out?"

It took a few minutes, so Tavana did. Why would the Sergeant risk taking her out of suspension, speed up the deterioration of Lieutenant Haley's body, rather than leave her in the suspension that would keep her alive as long as possible and give her the treatment that way?

After a few minutes, he thought he understood, and looked over to Maddox, whose frown of concentration had suddenly smoothed out in an expression of surprise. "You got it?"

"Yeah… yeah, I think so. Sergeant?"

"Hold on, hold on… here we come."

Lieutenant Pearce Greene Haley looked a lot better, with color back in her face, the sweat gone, and less lines of pain written on her face, as the Sergeant carried her back. She was even moving slightly without wincing much, and was dressed in one of the one-piece coveralls that they'd found a small stash of in the cargo; the coveralls were big enough for most adults and could be adjusted to just about Tavana's size, but they'd had to do some clumsy cut-down work to get one to fit Francisco. Still, it gave them some extra clothes. Tavana suspected that the Sergeant had used the free-fall shower to also clean and dry the Lieutenant's underclothes; there weren't any of those in storage, not that they'd found yet, anyway.

"So," Sergeant Campbell said as he deposited Haley on the seat and they strapped her in, "you got an answer for me, Maddox?"

"I think we do, sir. You're going to inject all those nanos into her as quick as you can, right?"

"Quick as possible, yes."

"Well, if she's awake, her blood's circulating faster, her whole body's going to help with transport better, right? So you'll be able to inject it faster safely, and it'll be distributed through her whole body a lot more efficiently." Maddox looked up questioningly at Campbell, who glanced at Tavana.

Tavana gave an emphatic nod. "That's my guess, Sergeant."

"One hundred percent right," Lieutenant Haley said with a wan smile. "Sam thought all that out before he even put me under, I bet. It's what I would do, too."

"You're a surgical tech, aren't you, Pearce? Don't suppose you know how to reprogram these nanos to be pure anti-rad repair units?"

She shook her head reluctantly. "Not really. If you've made sure the standard options are all active, that's about all I could do, at least without a full medical setup, which we don't have."

"Worth asking. Okay, hold out your arm."

The infusion of even that many nanos didn't take very long; ten minutes later, the Sergeant withdrew the injector and replaced it in the kit. "Okay, Pearce… that's all I can do. I'm gonna have to put you back to sleep now. You okay with that?"

"Better now than I was. At least let me get myself back into my suit."

"You sure? I don't want you to –"

"For goodness' sake, Sam, I'm not a china doll. I may be dying, but I'm not shattered. Let me do something before I have to go back to being a human freeze-pop." She unfastened herself slowly, and drifted over to the newly-cleaned suit. With stiff, cautious motions, she donned the suit, sealed it, and checked the telltales. "Good work, boys. Everything checks out, and boy, does it smell better in here."

Sergeant Campbell smiled, though Tavana could see a glitter at the corner of his eyes that said he might rather be crying. "Yeah, well, it'll be back to stinking by the time we open it again."

"Sergeant? Does she have to be in the suit?"

"You mean couldn't I just have the nanos suspend her right here in the cabin? Sure I could, son, but the suit can keep her temperature as low as possible – down to around ten Celsius – which keeps the degeneration as slow as possible. The nanos can continue operating more efficiently even at that temperature than her cells can, so it's a net gain for them, even though some will have to spend their time preventing the damage of extreme hypothermia, like thrombosis. Plus, if and when we land anywhere, she'd damn well better be in a suit."

Sergeant Campbell helped the now-suited Haley to the seat he'd chosen for her. "Okay, Haley. Time to go back to sleep." He gave her a quick hug, which she returned. "See you later."

Her smile was bright, even through the filmy helmet that was now deployed. "Later, Sam."

Her eyes closed, and a few moments later she looked almost dead, just as she had when they first brought her in. Tavana shivered; it was an eerie thing to see, even knowing that it was just a trick of modern technology. Campbell stood immobile, holding her hand, staring down at her until the last trace of consciousness had departed. Then he put her hand down gently, bent and locked all the restraints in place, and stood again.

"All right, Tav," he said. "It's time we got everyone home."

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 8

They were doing repairs...

 

-----

 

Chapter 8.

Xander watched the installation of the precious coil in his VRD, one of the gloved hands gripping the coil and the other tightening part of a not-quite visible fixture.

 

"There, that's got it!" the Sergeant said. "Check the connectivity, would you?"

 

"Connection shows good, sir!" Tavana answered from the pilot's seat. "We just had the Trapdoor status light go green!"

 

"Well, now, that's a relief and a half."

 

A tiny glint in another part of his VRD caused Xander to straighten. He murmured and gestured directions, and the remaining camera on LS-88 shifted its focus and resolution to maximum in the indicated area. Something was there, ahead and (in a relative sense) above them, tumbling slowly, showing a reflection of dim, dim starlight on something shiny.

 

"Sergeant, I think I've just spotted the Lieutenant's piece of the wreck."

 

"You have? How far off?"

 

"If it is her… three to five kilometers, I think, ahead, starboard one and a half degrees, azimuth two point oh-five degrees."

 

"I'm on my way in, then. Get everyone strapped in, we'll be doing some maneuvering to match up with her."

 

"Yes, sir!" Xander raised his voice. "Okay, everyone, strap in again. Francisco, you can play one of your games if you want while we're maneuvering. Maddox –"

 

Francisco suddenly let loose with a torrent of Spanish which, roughly translated, said how much he hated the little cabin of the shuttle, he wanted to go home, Mommy should be here, he didn't want to play any games, and he wasn't going to be strapped in, no!

 

As the tantrum gained momentum, Xander looked helplessly at Maddox and Tavana. The little boy's voice was cracking as he spoke faster and faster, tears starting to form and break off to float like tiny glimmering diamonds through the air.

 

Maddox launched himself slowly towards Francisco. "Hey, Francisco, it's okay. None of us are happy about –"

 

"No!" Francisco's flailing arm took Maddox by surprise, sending the older boy spinning end-over-end in one direction and shoving an also-spinning Francisco into the back of one of the chairs face-first. The impact was a dull thud that Xander could hear several feet away, even as he sprang to intercept the stunned but still-crying boy. "Francisco! Are you okay?"

 

The red-haired boy had one hand clamped over his mouth, the other now gripping Xander, keeping Francisco from floating away again. The tears looked like they were also tears of pain now, and with a pang somewhere near his own heart Xander found himself reminded of Maddox, looking up at him with the same expression of pain and loss after a similar tantrum.

 

He reached out a little farther, hugged Francisco to him. "I'm sorry, Francisco. I really am. If we could wave our hands and fix everything, believe me, we would. Can I see your face, please? Come on, let me take a look."

 

Francisco swallowed audibly, then nodded and slowly took his other hand down.

 

Blood dotted the boy's hand and his lip. "Okay, Francisco, I need to take a closer look at your lip. Hold still, okay?"

 

"O… okay." He winced as Xander gently pulled the lip out and examined it. Xander relaxed slightly.

 

"You'll be all right," he said, and gave the smaller boy a hug. "You know… Maddox had almost the same thing happen to him when he was a kid."

 

"Oh, Xander, you're not gonna –" Maddox caught himself, then nodded. "Y… yeah. I did. We were left on Earth with our uncle, and then Unc got sick…"

 

"And he threw a tantrum about pretty much everything, tried to run away, slipped, and smacked his face on the stairs," finished Xander. "Scared me half to death when he got up crying with blood all down his face. Worse than yours; his front teeth almost went through his upper lip, had to get stitches. You've just got a little cut. It'll hurt for a while – Maddox, can you see if you can get us a cold pack, get the swelling down until his nanos can get to it?"

 

"Sure."

 

Francisco was silent for a moment, then said. "I'm sorry."

 

"It's okay. We all feel the same way."

 

"But you didn't act all stupid and cry and yell like a baby," Francisco said, now angry with himself.

 

"That," said the Sergeant, coming in from the airlock, "is because we had plenty of years to have all our tantrums before you ever met us. Once Maddox gets that pack on, Francisco, can you get strapped in?"

 

Francisco nodded. "Yes, sir."

 

"Good man." Xander gave their smallest crewmember one more hug and let Maddox take over. I'm lucky I've got a brother like him.

 

As he helped the Sergeant get the gear stowed back in place, Campbell murmured, "Good work, Xander. You handled that just right – probably better than my reflexes would have."

 

"Oh, they'll listen to you a lot better than me."

 

"Maybe, but partly because they're scared of the old guy with the scars. You, it's because you understand how to talk with 'em. Just wanted you to know I appreciate it. It's a good thing you were on board."

 

"Hey, it was our shuttle. It was a good thing you were on board."

 

"Okay, good thing both of us were. Now, you get yourself strapped in; we've got one more castaway to bring home."

 

By now, the glint was visible through the forward port without any assistance. "Gettin' close now. Everyone strapped in?"

 

Securing his last strap, Xander reported, "Xander, all secure."

 

"Tavana, all secure, Sergeant."

 

"Maddox, all secure."

 

"Francisco, all secure."

 

"All right, then. Here we go!"

 

Xander tied into the navigation systems so he could really watch what the Chief Master Sergeant did; he could tell that Tavana was doing the same thing. Maddox and Francisco just watched the forward port.

 

Two quick hissing rumbles echoed through LS-88, and the little ship rotated slightly. Suddenly the tumbling, glinting object was centered in the viewport, perfectly centered and unmoving, merely growing larger. Xander was startled. The Sergeant wasn't calculating anything; he had just adjusted their vector and alignment on the fly, and made it so they were heading directly towards the wreckage.

 

Now he could see clearly that it was, in fact, the broken boarding tube that they'd left the Lieutenant in, somersaulting lazily through the endless black, growing swiftly larger in the port. The forward rockets fired once, and now the approach was slow, leisurely, down from a speedy bicycle to a casual walk, the tube a hundred meters away… fifty… twenty-five…

 

A rippling flash of thrusters activating in a sequence too fast to follow, and abruptly the tube seemed frozen in space, neither approaching nor receding, simply rotating slowly like a model in a 3-D projection.

 

"C'est magnifique," Tavana murmured. "Sergeant, you can fly."

 

Campbell leaned back, a pleased grin on his face. "Guess I haven't lost my touch quite yet. All right, I've got one more spacewalk to do now. For this, I do need someone else. Xander, you're coming with me. I'm gonna have to float myself over there, unsecure her from whatever she locked herself onto, and come back. It'll be easiest if you can haul us in at my direction."

 

"Yes, sir."

 

"That means that while we're both out there, Tavana's in charge. You two younger ones got that?"

 

"Yes, Sergeant!" said Maddox.

 

"Yes, Sergeant," agreed Francisco.

 

"Okay."

 

Xander felt his heart beating faster. I took all the classes, but… I've never actually done a spacewalk on the outside of a ship.

 

Suiting up and preparing was quick enough; old-style suits and EVA approaches, in the dawn of the space age, used to take a lot of time because the suits would run at much lower pressure for ease of physical motion and other issues, but modern skintight EVA suits maintained full pressure while allowing full range of motion, and were far more resilient than old-fashioned spacesuits. That suited Xander just fine; waiting hours slowly decompressing just to go outside would have driven him nuts.

 

The external door opened, and Xander looked out into pure darkness with scattered gems of unwinking light. Sergeant Campbell was ahead of him, blocking most of the view. "Now listen carefully, son. You will follow me out. You will lock on to each and every holdfast, guardrail, or anything else that I do, and you will do it in the exact same sequence I do. If I tell you to stop, you will stop immediately. If I tell you to go back, you will do so – in order, as carefully as we came out."

 

"Yes, sir."

 

"All right. When we get to the right position, I'll tell you how we'll handle the retrieval."

 

The Sergeant clipped onto a guardrail just at the edge of the airlock, swung himself carefully out, keeping a grip on the rail, and lowered his boots to the surface. Once the older man had moved out of the way, Xander locked his suit onto the same guardrail and tried to maneuver himself out of the airlock with the same ease and grace; instead he ended up failing to stand, twisting his hand free, and bouncing off the hull and outward. Fortunately, the resilient energy absorption of his tether slowed and stopped him, so he could pull himself back down with care.

 

"Not as easy as it looks, is it, son?"

 

"Not nearly as easy as you make it look, sir."

 

"You've learned your first lesson on real spacewalks, then: don't try to pretend you're the guy who's done it all when you haven't done any of it."

 

"Yes, sir."

 

Xander looked up and around. "Wow."

 

He'd seen thousands of views of the stars – through ports, simulations, and the night sky on Earth. But there was nothing to compare with this.

 

The pure, unadulterated darkness that surrounded them made the darkest black he had ever seen look gray. Yet at the same time there was no sense of the dark that one had on earth, because everywhere were stars – not the blurred, dimmed, washed-out wavering pinpricks of light seen on Earth, but an innumerable set of intense, blazing points set against darkness, or shining brightly out within a glowing band of light and dark that he could see – really see – was a section of the Milky Way Galaxy itself, mottled with black banding of gas and dust, glowing with the light of not hundreds but hundreds of millions, billions of stars. Thousands of suns illuminated the darkness all around him – not dispelling it, or even reducing its absolute pitch-blackness in the least, but instead making it not an oppressive, threatening presence, but a backdrop of beauty.

 

"Yeah, I get the same reaction every time I come out. Doesn't ever get old. Especially here, between the stars." Sergeant Campbell was silent a moment, letting him admire the view. "All right, son, let's move along. Follow my every move, right?"

 

"Right."

 

They made it to the forward portion of LS-88 easily enough; the Sergeant had been out twice before, so he knew where everything was already and could make sure that Xander took the right path the first time.

 

"Okay, listen up, son," he said finally. "This part of the ship we're standing on, it's magnetic. Stay here; nothing better than having more than one thing keeping you in place.

 

"Now, this here is going to be tricky. We don't have any attitude jets to adjust the spin of that piece of junk out there. She's only rotating at about one and a half RPM, luckily, or it'd be even tougher. If she was spinning at say five or ten RPM, we'd have to figure out a way to slow her down, and I honestly haven't a clue as to how we'd manage that without risking LS-88. But at forty seconds per rev, we can pull this off without having to do that."

 

Xander stared… up? Out? Directions were odd when there was no gravity. He decided on "up" since they were on the top surface of LS-88. He stared up at the slowly-turning tube; inside, he could make out a shape that had to be Pearce Haley's suit. "So what do we do, Sergeant?"

 

"Mostly what do I do, son. You're here to back me up. I'm going to jump across, timing it so I end up inside and stop myself around the middle. Problem is that with it rotating, I can't have a tether on me; snap right off as it rotated, or drag me out. Other problem is that these suits don't have real maneuver jets on 'em, just some dinky anti-spin thrusters with real, real limited delta-V, so if I make a bad mistake, I might be haring off into the black without a way to turn around."

 

"But then, Sergeant…" He swallowed, then continued, "Sergeant, I hate to say it, but shouldn't we…"

 

Campbell waited.

 

Xander felt his grip on the nearby rail tighten, but forced himself to finish, "… shouldn't we think about, well… whether we can afford to rescue her?"

 

When Campbell didn't immediately answer, he felt a spurt of shame. "I'm sorry, Sergeant, I –"

 

"Don't apologize, son. You asked the hardest question there is, and it's the right question. The question she'd want us to ask." Campbell looked up. "Is it worth risking me – when I'm pretty inarguably invaluable for you boys' chances of getting home – to bring her in when she might already be a goner?" He turned back to Xander, and Xander's retinals showed Campbell's serious expression inside the helmet. "What do you think?"

 

"Me? Sergeant, I –"

 

"Don't back out on me now, son. You asked the question, now answer it."

 

Xander felt shaky just contemplating the idea of turning away, but he made himself think about it. "Well… Sergeant, given what you see up there, and what you know about your own skills… what's the chances that you won't have something happen that's so bad we can't get you back?"

 

A soft chuckle. "I'd say about ninety-five percent. I'd have to screw up pretty damn bad for us to get to the point that either I couldn't rescue myself or you manage to catch up with me somehow. I've done zero-G work a lot over the years. I ain't saying this one isn't one hell of a tricky maneuver, but no part of it's really ridiculous for someone with the experience. It's just not gonna be following the best practices manual."

 

"And… again, from what you know… what's our chances of getting back home without you?"

 

"That's a harder question, Xander… but we're close to finishing the coil replacement. If that doesn't work, none of us are getting home anyway, so let's say it works. If it does… I'd say even without me you boys have at least an eighty-five percent chance of getting home now, since you've got power and ship's key systems up. With the Trapdoor at this distance, you can see the star you're goin' towards, and you have to drop out of Trapdoor periodically anyways, so if you just keep heading towards that star," he indicated the star that Xander already knew was the one for Orado, "you'll get there. And you're pretty levelheaded; I think you'd keep 'em together until you got there."

 

Xander felt a huge sense of relief. "Then I say we don't leave anyone behind, Sergeant!"

 

"That's the way to talk, son! But you asked the right questions. Now let's cross our fingers that we stay just a little lucky today."

 

"So after you get across, Sergeant, then what?"

 

"Then I go and unsnap Lieutenant Haley from where she's locked herself down. Once I've got her hooked to me securely, then I move to one end of the thing and use my omni to time my jump back so I head back here at reasonable speed. You throw me a lifeline as soon as I get clear; I'll probably be headed close enough to reach some part of LS-88, but a lifeline locked down to the hull will really help make sure."

 

"Got it, Sergeant."

 

"You understand how to throw one of these lifelines?"

 

"We did study that, yes, Sergeant. Throw underhanded, not too fast, and use your fingers to slow it gradually down. If you do it perfectly, the line will stop and not bounce back."

 

"That's the classroom method, but it's like how we teach kids to do multiplication longhand when they'll pretty much never be without an omni in real life. There's a lot better way to do it if you know how those lines work. See, they're wrapped in a jacket of electrorigid polymer; zap it with electricity and it stiffens, like a hose with water running through it. So what you do is throw it out in the general direction you want, and then stiffen it up so you can point it at your target. Once you've got it set where you want it, you turn off the juice."

 

Xander looked at the shiny, looped cable. "Really? That's a lot easier. But how do I get the electricity through it?"

 

"Check your settings for your gloves. The menu will give you an active option. Set the glove holding the lifeline to active and that'll do the trick – electrify all the part of it extending away from you, as long as the other end's clipped to your suit. It's low voltage so there's no danger."

 

Xander drew about a meter of the line out and activated the gloves; the line swiftly straightened itself out, feeling something like a very flexible fishing rod. "Got it!"

 

"All right, then." Sergeant Campbell unsnapped his short tether and wrapped it safely around him, locking it securely to his suit. "Here goes nothing."

 

With a single jump, Campbell broke the connection between LS-88 and himself and floated away, directly for the remains of the boarding tube. At first Xander thought he'd badly mistimed the jump, because the entrance to the tube wasn't even visible; but as Campbell gradually approached the rotating wreckage, the tube opening appeared and Campbell travelled straight into the ten-meter-long piece of boarding tube. "Bullseye!" he heard Campbell announce cheerily. "All right, I am now clipping myself to a holdfast and making my way up to Pearce. She's about two meters from me now."

 

A short time later, Xander could see Campbell next to Pearce's suit. "I have reached her and… secured. Checking Lieutenant Haley now."

 

A few more minutes elapsed, then his cheerful voice returned. "She's in full suspension, suit systems maintaining her at minimum temperature. Everything looks good. She's locked down at two holdfasts. Clipping myself to her now." A pause. "All right, releasing first holdfast. Releasing second holdfast. Verifying secure to carry. I am secure to carry. Now heading for the end of the tube. Xander, verify you have the lifeline ready."

 

"Ready, Sergeant."

 

"Good. Watch the rotating end. Get a feel for where its maximum silhouette is against the stars. That's probably where I let go. I probably don't even have to jump; the rotation will allow it to pitch me straight at LS-88 at less than a meter per second. So before I jump, see if you can get that lifeline out there."

 

Xander nodded. "Got it, Sergeant."

 

He took the lightly weighted line in his fingers, remembering the simulations he'd gone through. The peak of it seems to pass just underneath those two stars, so I'll aim there.

 

The throw was a little off, but as he'd thrown the line gently he had plenty of time to wait and very carefully slow it down with his fingers. When it seemed almost stopped, he activated the gloves.

 

The line straightened out, feeling almost like a skinny snake lazily trying to wriggle out of his grasp. He stood as still as he could, waiting for the rippling movements to fade away. Then he very, very slowly moved it to point straight at the rotating cylinder, where he could now see the Sergeant, with Lieutenant Haley in his arms, waiting. "All right, Sergeant. I've got it set, I think."

 

"Looks good from here, son. Now just let it go inactive; unless you pull on it, it should stay right where it is, and I want it real flexible for me to catch."

 

"It's inactive." Xander could feel the line go the tiniest bit loose in his hand, but kept stock-still.

 

"All right, I have moved to a nonmagnetic part of the tube, and letting my omni time my release… countown to release in three, two, one, release!"

 

As the rotating part reached its apex, the Sergeant let go and was flung slowly outward like a ball released by a pitcher. Xander could immediately see that the Sergeant's timing must have been not quite perfect because he started drifting very slowly to one side. However, he was very near to the end of the lifeline, and managed to snag it with his left hand. "Clipped to lifeline," he announced as he slowly approached. Xander noticed the line stiffening and relaxing several times in succession; the stress in the line as it curved seemed to pull just enough on the Sergeant to reduce his drift.

 

"On my way in, son. Just step back and give me a little room. Remember no magnetics back behind you there."

 

"Understood."

 

He edged back, watching the incoming suits. Leaving the magnetic area caused him to bobble slightly, but he kept himself mostly under control and didn't say anything.

 

Moments later, Sergeant Campbell rotated himself and came to a perfect landing on the magnetic section of the nose of LS-88. Xander could see Pearce Haley's face now through the helmet, looking as though she were sleeping peacefully.

 

"Retrieval accomplished. Good work, Xander. Now let's keep focused for a few more minutes – by the numbers, back to the airlock, and then we can breathe a little easier!"

 

Xander allowed himself to relax – just a little bit – as they made their way back. Now we just have to get home!

 

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 7

They had repairs to do...

 

-----

 

 

Chapter 7.

Campbell activated the shaped pad inside his suit; the sweat on his forehead and eyebrows was quickly wiped away. "All right, Tavana. I'm out."

He stood on the dimly-visible hull of LS-88, the innumerable stars of the galaxy sprinkled across the utter darkness like frozen sparks embedded in obsidian. Low down and towards the rear of the landing shuttle, he could see the enigmatic nearby star – one he was pretty sure was less than a light-year off – gleaming steadily. He still wondered where in the name of God that star came from. It wasn't possible for stars to materialize out of nothing.

"All right, Sergeant. The first broken Trapdoor coil is … three meters forward from your current position and, um, two point two meters clockwise around from that point – clockwise from your point of view facing the front of the ship."

He made his way cautiously across the shining surface of the shuttle. You couldn't rely on magnetic boots when so much of a modern vehicle was nonferrous, nonmagnetic material; you had to walk carefully, make sure you were always clipped onto a safety eyelet, and so on. In a few minutes he was floating at the described location. "I see a dark indentation; is that the right target?"

"Umm… yes, sir. That should be the only depression near you."

People need to work on these. Where's the handrail and lockdowns?

He muttered to his omni, which shifted spectra slightly and enhanced the view. "Ah, there we go."

Clipping onto the now-easily-visible handrails, Campbell was now secured near the Trapdoor field coil. "Right, now display me the release sequence."

Unlocking and removing the field coil from its proper place in the hull was a five-step process that had to be followed in precise order. Naturally the first step involved getting a specialized tool into the least-accessible spot just under the forward portion of the coil. Even with a modern flexible carbonan suit, that took some bending. "I am getting too old for this s… er, crap."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like one of us to do that, Sergeant?" asked Xander in a concerned voice.

"Absolutely not." With the tension of a spacewalk and the situation weighing on him, that came out sharper and louder than he intended. "Sorry, son. I appreciate the offer. But my job's to keep you kids safe, and I've spent more time in spacesuits than Francisco's been alive. I know what I'm doing here."

Which of course is the signal for me to screw up bigtime with some rookie mistake. Dammit, Campbell, you know better than to wave a red flag at Murphy that way!

"It's okay, Sergeant," answered Tavana. "It's just… we worry about you too, scary man."

He couldn't keep from chuckling. "Well, thank you for that, anyway. And I'll try to be a little less scary, okay, Francisco?"

"O… okay." The youngest of his impromptu crew sounded like he wasn't sure whether he could laugh, but wanted to.

He felt the first locking clamp move. "Got that part. Moving on."

It took about fifteen more minutes to finish removing the coil, following the procedure carefully, by the numbers, one step at a time followed by rigorous double-checking. Finally he opened the case at his waist, and very carefully stowed the coil inside. "One down," he said, and heard a subdued cheer over the comms. "How's Operation Unwind going?"

"It is actually doing well!" Tavana's voice held both surprise and pride. "Two motor's windings are now unwound and we're working on the next one."

"What I see of this coil… it looks pretty fancy. Can we adapt something to wind it?"

"We think so," Maddox said cheerfully. "Tav found the winding patterns in his reference books, and if we can salvage the armatures in the originals, we'll have the right core configuration already." A note of concern crept into his voice. "But boy, between the motors we're taking the wire from and the ones we're using to make the winding machine… there's not going to be much left in the cargo."

"Don't exaggerate, Maddox," his older brother admonished. "You mean there won't be many small motors left. The main motors and drives on the machinery, we haven't touched those."

"That package of additional TechTools sure helped," Tavana noted.

"Sounds great. You boys keep at it while I finish this work."

He moved to the next location with Xander verifying his movements, then settled down to remove the second coil. Good kids. I know this is wearing on them, but they're keeping it together so far.

The success at a coil-winding (well, currently unwinding) machine was gratifying. Unlike the others, he'd seen failures of jury-rigged repairs in the field, and they couldn't afford failure here. The Trapdoor coils depended on some pretty demanding precision – way beyond what he thought hand-winding could ever accomplish, and even if it could, the thought of winding hundreds, maybe thousands, of turns of wire by hand onto a complex armature, then doing it twice more? His hands ached just at the thought of it.

But modern controllable motors, programmable omnis, simple actuators – Tavana, Xander, and even Maddox had figured out how they could be combined and mounted on one of the excavator machine's supports to make a winding device.

The second coil was out. He rested for a moment, watching the unmoving stars. "Hopefully we can make 'em move soon enough," he muttered to himself, and then went to remove the third coil. "Last one, then I can get back inside."

Then he mentally kicked himself again. What the heck was wrong with him? Never, ever start looking forward to the end, or you start rushing! Campbell made himself go over the steps extra-carefully on the third one. He was not going to make a mistake on this last coil.

He didn't. Finally he was done, and made his way – with exquisite caution – to the airlock. He didn't let himself relax until he entered the main cabin and swung the lock door shut.

"Whew!" he said, letting his helmet retract. "That was a long bit of work."

"You got them all, Sergeant?"

"All three, Tav. Guess we'll have to cut away the old wire, then you'll be ready to wind again?"

"Well, soon, yes. First we must finish the unwinding of all the motor wires, you know."

"I'll leave it to you. I've got just one more thing to do today before I take a break." He moved to the pilot's console and strapped in.

Xander looked puzzled. "What are you going to do, sir?"

"We've got a friend to pick up, son. Now that we're working on what we hope is the last repair we need in order to get somewhere, it's time we started heading towards her."

"But… how can we find her out there?" Francisco sounded a little scared as he gestured towards the star-spattered endless dark, and Campbell couldn't blame him.

He gestured for Francisco to come join him. Once the little boy reached him, Campbell pulled Francisco gently over to sit in his lap, and strapped him down. "Here, lemme show you. You know that in space, if you were to throw something, it'd just keep on going forever. Right?"

Francisco nodded. "Si. I mean yes, I know that, Sergeant."

"But it's more than that. If you throw something on Earth, or any planet, gravity accelerates it, changes its direction. Air can slow it down. Other things that it hits will change direction. But that's not true in space. There's no gravity to speak of out this far, a light year or more from any star; there's nothing to hit for millions, billions, of kilometers, more – practically forever. Space is big. And there's no air." He looked at Francisco expectantly.

The boy wrinkled his forehead, obviously thinking hard. Campbell knew Francisco wasn't a tech-head like the others – more an artist, from what he'd heard – but he wasn't stupid. "So… the Lieutenant, she will keep going and going just like she was?"

"Exactly like she was. More, we know exactly how fast – and in what direction, from our point of view – she went. We were all watching, and the cameras were watching. I've had my omni keep the numbers current; if I'm right, she's about fifteen thousand kilometers that way," he made his omni generate an arrow in Francisco's field of view. "Been drifting that direction at about eight meters per second ever since we separated."

"That's a long way away."

He couldn't keep from laughing. "Sorry, son – but for a spaceship, that's like a baby step. If we had all our sensors running, we could still probably detect her on radar. Not like there's anything else out here to look for. So right now, I'm going to start us back towards her. We've got reaction jets – the basic rockets work fine. They won't get us home, or even let us cruise fast around a solar system, but for landing – or a slow chase – they're just fine."

Francisco sat still in his lap as Samuel reached for the controls. "Now, I have to turn us just like this – so we're centered on her vector." He triggered another program and routed it to the boy's omni. "Watch that green dot and blue circle on your retinal display, Francisco. You see 'em?"

Francisco gave a quick nod. "Yes, Sergeant!"

"Now, you let me know when the dot's getting close to the circle." He could see the same display of course – and a lot more detail – but Francisco had been feeling left out of a lot of things, and he needed things to do.

"Okay, Sergeant!"

Campbell slowly started adjusting LS-88's orientation.

"Getting closer, Sergeant… closer… it's heading high, should it be doing that?"

"No, it shouldn't. Good catch." The boy did have a good eye, and he recognized when things didn't look right. "That better?"

"Much better. Do we want the green dot right in the middle of the circle?"

"We do indeed."

"It's really near the circle now… touching… a little low… it's gone past the middle!"

He slowly reversed the rotation the tiniest bit.

"Right in the middle!"

He was actually surprised. The kid's eyes were good. His own instruments couldn't find significant error. "Very, very good, Francisco! Thank you!"

"Now what?"

"Now we go catch her, that's what. She's goin' away from us at about eight meters a second, and it's going to take a while for us to take apart the coils and rewind 'em and put 'em back, so… I'd like to start closing with her a little faster than we separated. Stay, start getting closer to her at about ten meters a second."

"So we need to accelerate by ten…" the boy hesitated. "No, we're going away right now, right?"

"Right."

His face lit up. "So we need to stop, and then accelerate by ten meters a second!"

He chuckled. "It's all the same acceleration, but yes. So about eighteen meters per second all told." He looked back. "You boys lock down everything for a few seconds – including yourselves. I'm going to start us after Lieutenant Haley."

"Yes, sir! Hold on, I'll let you know when we're secure." After a few moments, Xander said, "I think it's all secure here. Tavana?"

"Secure, check. Maddox?"

"Let me look… yep, I check you! All secure back here!"

Campbell nodded. Good procedure, there; they hadn't relied on one person to make sure nothing was loose. "All right, then, come up and strap in. This won't be much of a burn, but still, best to be safe."

Once they were all strapped in, he continued, "I'm just going to run her for nine seconds at a two-meters per second burn. That'll still feel pretty massive to you, after all this time in microgravity, so be warned."

If it weren't for modern medical nanos, he'd be really worried about the effects of microgravity on health, but that should be okay, at least for now. He hoped.

True to his warning, the sudden force of acceleration came like a ton of lead weights dropped across his chest. He had to verify the thrust twice before he relaxed. After exactly nine seconds, it cut off.

Pearce, we're on our way. And just maybe with the stuff you need. But in any case… you're not going to drift away alone.

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 6

Well, they had power, but they were still stranded in the vast dark...

 

------

 

Chapter 6.

Xander blinked himself awake and stretched, letting the tensing of his muscles start the blood pumping. The interior of LS-88 was quiet except for the faint hum of various pieces of equipment and the murmur of the environmental systems.

It should also have been pretty dark, but there was a glow from the pilot's seat. Probably what woke me up. He glanced around. To his surprise, not only were Francisco and Maddox asleep, but the Sergeant hadn't woken up. Well, he had been doing an awful lot of work before we all turned in.

That plus the nearby empty seat/couch told him who was at the controls.

"What's up, Tav?" he asked quietly, once he'd gotten close.

Tavana twitched but didn't jump – not that his restraints would have let him jump far anyway. "Don't do that."

"I tried not to startle you."

"Sorry." As Tavana turned to face him, Xander suddenly realized how worried the other boy looked. There were dark circles under the eyes, the usually smiling mouth was drawn tight. "What's wrong?"

Tavana muttered something in a language that wasn't in Xander's translation protocols; probably Tahitian, given Tav's ancestry. Then the younger boy sighed. "The drives… they're not in good shape."

That was not something Xander had wanted to hear. "What do you mean by that?"

"What do you think? I mean that neither the Trapdoor or the Nebula Drive are working, and I am thinking that it's going to take a long time to get them working."

A long time… Xander couldn't help but glance back at the cargo area. There was food there… but it wouldn't last forever. And if any other systems were damaged…

"Do you think we can get them working?"

Tav gave an elaborate shrug that was partly restrained by his harness. "I am trying to figure that out now. Maybe."

Then his fist clenched and he shook his head. "No. Not maybe. Yes. Because we have to. The Sergeant… he told us that we have to rescue ourselves."

Xander grinned. "That's the way to talk!" Inside, he wasn't fooling himself; all their dedication wouldn't make a difference if the ship was too damaged. But thinking positive was better than getting discouraged right away. "So… can you tell what's wrong?"

"Well…" Tavana rubbed his broad chin and paused for a moment. "What do you know about the Trapdoor Drive?"

"Not much, really. It lets us go up to about seventy times lightspeed, it still has a lot of physicists arguing about it, and when it's running we're in some kind of warpspace, right?"

To his credit, Tav kept himself from sneering or rolling his eyes, though Xander could tell that he'd nearly done both. Instead, the French Polynesian simply shook his head. "Not really. A 'warpspace', if we actually could make such a thing, would be a distortion, a bubble in our own spacetime. The Trapdoor Drive drops us into a sort of parallel space to our own where we effectively travel much faster; that's why the old Bemmies called it the Trapdoor Drive – you'd open a sort of door and drop out of sight."

Xander nodded. "Okay, that makes sense. You're saying it's sort of like dropping into a lower floor and running along until you decide to go back upstairs, except that somehow you run faster on the lower floor?"

Tavana nodded. "Though my professors would hate that analogy. Or those words, really. They didn't like the word "faster" used that way because velocity's still supposed to be relative. Anyway, the mechanism that does this, the Trapdoor Drive, it has to be very precisely balanced and tuned to the vessel, sort of the way a good resonant antenna has to be properly tuned."

"And something's screwed up the tuning?"

"Worse than that." Tavana gestured, linking their omnis. "See that? That's a scan image of one of the main Trapdoor field coils."

The strange-shaped coil at first looked reasonably all right to Xander, but as he studied the rotating image, he noticed what looked like small spots, asymmetries on the delicately wound wire. "There. Those –"

"Right." Tavana stared at the image as though willing it to change. "See, the field coils have to be located in niches outside the hull; I think the rad pulse generated enough fluctuating current that parts of the coils melted."

While mechanical engineering was his specialty, Xander didn't need any explanation for that. If elements of a coil melted, that amounted to multiple short circuits in the actual material of the coil. "So they won't work."

"Not unless I can fix them."

"But you can't just cut out the defective parts. That would leave cuts –"

"I know," Tav said, cutting him off. "I think … if we don't have spares, I think we'll have to re-wind the coils."

Xander swallowed, looking at the gleaming shape with the multiplicity of faint lines across its surface. "That… that could take a long time."

"Like I said. Yeah. Especially since you gotta do it right. The coil geometry's crucial. You can do some compensating in software, but only so much."

"What about the Nebula Drive?"

"Well… first off, even if it was running, it'd be useless for us right now. We're in interstellar space. Theoretically the dusty-plasma sail could eventually get up near lightspeed, but out here there's pretty much not enough light to push us. Even if there was, we'd take years getting anywhere, and I'm pretty sure our supplies won't last years."

"No, I don't think so."

"Anyway… I think the main problem there is the dust dispensers. They're on the outside too, so the pulse probably fried them. Those should be easier to fix, though."

"But that won't matter if we can't get the Trapdoor running again."

Tavana nodded. "Yeah."

"Did it fry all the coils?"

"No. Two seem untouched. But you need all five running to close the field. Believe me when I say you do not want an incomplete field. On Outward Initiative, they had twenty-five, and we still saw instability, did we not?"

Xander didn't even want to contemplate what would happen if they turned the Trapdoor on without everything working right. They'd all seen what happened when the Trapdoor field intersected matter. "We did, and I understand. So we should go see if we have the stuff to replace the wire with, right?"

"I… yes, of course. I hadn't thought that far yet. But I guess it wouldn't hurt to find out if we've got stuff we can use first."

"Exactly right, son," said a rough voice from behind Xander.

"Sergeant! When did you wake up?"

"Few seconds ago; combination of light and you talking. No," Sergeant Campbell raised his hand, "don't go apologizing. You were quiet, I just spent a lotta years in places where you wake up and check every sound you didn't expect. Now," he looked at Tavana, "what kinda wire do we need?"

"Two kinds, really. RTSC-B7 in gauge one-two-five, preferably, plus E-M structured alloy in the same gauge."

"A little under old-style 36-gauge. Pretty skinny stuff to work with by hand, but if that's what we gotta do, that's what we do. But we might be in luck. I'm sure some of the smaller motors in the equipment back in storage use thin RTSC, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's B-7." He gestured. "Since you're both up, why don't we just take a look now?"

Tavana unstrapped, looking a lot less unhappy than he had a few minutes ago. "Lead on, Sergeant."

Xander followed them both, and felt some of his tension turning to hope.

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 5

The biggest problem they faced right now was power...

 

-----

 

 

Chapter 5.

     "You sure it's safe there, Sergeant?"

"Sure I'm sure," he answered, focusing again at the indicator in his retinal display. "The 300M's got real good shielding. Barely above background levels outside the shell, even when operating. Right now she's down, so the only way it'd be dangerous is if I cracked the shell open and she was still hot inside. I only see about twenty-five service hours indicated on the system, so the lining's probably still safe enough to use as dinnerware. Stop worrying."

He was, of course, exaggerating a tad. After twenty-five hours of operating fusion under the Cavan-Ares design – derived from the original units found on Ceres, way back when – the interior of the fusion reactor was not going to be something you wanted to spend much time with, even with supposedly-aneutronic fusion going on. But the exterior was, indeed, just about stone-cold dead.

Tavana's head appeared in the hatch above him. "You've got data from the system?"

"Don't get excited yet, Tav. The exterior indicators and tracking recorders are about as dead-simple as anything gets. It's the complex stuff we need to worry about."

"And the simple things like the harvest-fusion loops."

"And those, yeah, but I'm pretty hopeful they're okay."

He managed to keep from muttering "they'd better be", but he was thinking it. The keys to the modern fusion reactor were the resonant magnetic loops that first generated a fusion reaction that then triggered a powerful magnetic surge that could be harvested as power – power sufficient to maintain the reaction AND provide external energy.

It was in a vague way analogous to the way an old diesel engine worked – mechanical movement compressing air-fuel mixture to explosive levels, causing the same mechanical components to move along constrained paths which allowed part of that mechanical energy to be sent off to do more useful work while the rest of it was devoted to triggering another explosion. Except that it was a lot more complicated than that, of course, and involved magnetic fields, electromagnetic power generation, and a hell of a lot of energy with very specific timing and conditions required.

Still, he was pretty sure the coils themselves should be okay. They were made to carry massive energies, so even the rad pulse shouldn't have caused significant EMP from their point of view, and the shielding around the reactor should have minimized any chance for radiation of significant levels to reach the more delicate interior components.

That leaves the exterior control components. Sergeant Campbell inverted his body and managed, just barely, to squeeze in past a narrow-clearance bulkhead. The space beyond was none too large, but at least he could turn around in it. Set at the base of the large, steel-gray fluted sphere was a small, solid console. "Tavana, I'm at the built-in calibration and test panel."

"Good. Any lights?"

"All red or dead black."

"Merde." That seemed to be the boy's favorite curse; he figured there could be worse.

"Don't get discouraged yet. Lemme think a minute." He went back through his memories to his prior work on the 300M. "Right, as I recall, this thing's going to be pretty much dark unless it's getting control signals from the outside, or unless I override it; this panel's not supposed to be operational when the reactor's installed."

"So there's a gap in the control signals from the main console or central computer to here?"

"Given that we haven't managed to get the main systems back up yet, I'd say there's a gap. But that means that this thing's having something like the problem the airlock had; something didn't shut down like normal, so the local panel still thinks it's under shuttle control."

"How's the reserve restart coils, Sergeant?" asked Xander from somewhere up above.

"Can't check that yet."

"Without them we're screwed, though." Tavana's voice was grim.

"Don't go borrowing trouble from the future, son; it'll get here on its own. Tavana, how the heck do I disconnect this bad boy? This thing's linkages don't look anything like the ones they used for the colony 300M I maintained."

Tavana projected an animation of the disassembly. Oh, that's gonna be fun. Here we are sailing the stars, and engineers still gotta put connectors where they're gonna bash my knuckles trying to turn them. "How's the inventory check goin'?" he asked as he got his Shapetool to configure into the right wrench design.

"Pretty good, Sergeant. The heavy equipment isn't very exciting for us, but we've got a couple cases of field rations in assorted types, spare power packs in about five standard sizes, crates of hand tools – mostly for field work, not electronics or anything like that, though – those medical supplies that were part of Dr. Kimei's shipment, hunting supplies, some camping or survival gear of assorted types, three big crates that I don't recognize – they're stamped ICS-GIS-S-C-178, though."

Campbell managed to get the first connector turning, then felt a faint grin on his face. "Well, a lot of stuff Tantalus is gonna miss if we don't get there, that's for sure. Don't know how much of it's that useful for us sitting here in interstellar space. Those three crates… ow! Blasted stupid f…" he cut himself off before he started swearing, "f…reaking idiot designers… as I was saying, those three crates are comm satellites for idiots, so to speak – basically just kick 'em out the door and they do the rest, work with almost all omnis on the ground. Low orbit stuff, but still good. I'm most interested in the food and medical supplies. That's what makes me happy."

Xander pinged him privately. "Thinking of the Lieutenant, sir?"

He saw no reason to deny it. "I told her we'd pick her up if we could. Of course, first we gotta get this tub moving again."

One off. Four more to go. The name "Kimei" reminded him of his youngest pupil; he wondered if Sakura was all right. He hoped so, but he remembered the flashes of light as the field instability had chewed up Outward Initiative's hab ring, and he thought the first loss might have been awfully close to LS-5, the Kimei's assigned boat. God help them if they're in the same fix we are. "Any electronics or optronics components?"

"None in the cargo, sir," Maddox said cheerfully, "at least nothing marked that way. But I did get the rear service closet open and there's a bunch of spare modules for various systems in there."

"Excellent. Maybe we'll be able to get through this after all." It was going easier now that he'd figured out the technique; fasteners two and three were loose. "Well, I'm almost set with this interface. What's the deal with the actual power junctions?"

"Standard, Sergeant," Tav answered. "You're not touching any major power stuff there, it's all going out from the top or bottom of the main casing."

"Good. While I'm doing these last couple, I want you and Franky –" a sound of protest from above. "Francisco to go pull every breaker unit you can. If we get a restart, we don't know how the systems are going to react, and the last thing we need is something screwing up because it wasn't ready for the power."

"On it, Sergeant!"

Good kids. He could've gotten stuck with far worse, he mused as he managed to finally get the last fastener to let go. He checked the diagram again, undid the latches, then pulled.

The short cable slid out of its slot and away from the base of the console. Instantly Samuel Campbell saw several lights turn green. "That's got it!"

"Can you restart?" Tavana's voice was tense, and he could sense the others hanging on his words.

"Hold your horses, kids. First I want confirmation you've pulled all the breakers."

"Almost done. The one for the pilot's panel was hard to reach, but we're… all right, that one's up and locked."

"Is everyone clear? I don't expect any stupid Hollywood spark effects or anything, but I want you all clear of those areas anyway."

"Hold on… come on, Francisco, over here… Yes, we're all clear."

He looked down at the panel. Under the circumstances, there wasn't much to do. The bottom green light showed that the integrity of the restart coils was good and they were still holding the charge; to continue the shaky analogy, that meant that the starter motor was still there and hooked to the battery. The second green light showed that the fuel supply – purified boron-11 and pure hydrogen – was intact and ready.

The third indicated readiness for start; all of the internal circuitry, then, was okay – or thought it was okay. Given the way things had happened, he wasn't sure he trusted that cheerful green glow, but on the other hand, what choice did he have? None of the heavy equipment stored in the hold was going to be running on a reactor – almost certainly all of it on superconductor storage batteries – and there weren't any other alternative power sources.

"All right, everyone… cross everything you've got two of, I'm about to initiate restart."

He unlocked the manual start control, poised his finger over it, and said a little prayer to whoever might be listening. Then his finger stabbed down.

Almost instantly a throbbing hum came from the casing – faint, almost subliminal, but definitely there – and the panel's lights all came on. Two showed red – the external control connection and the disconnection through the breakers of all external systems – but everything else was a wonderful, wonderful green. "Restart successful! We have power, kids!"

The cheer that followed sounded like a lot more than just four boys, and he joined in. "Now no one touch the breakers yet. I want to do that in order. Tav, what do you think would happen if I hooked up the control harness now?"

Tav was silent for several minutes, but Campbell was patient. There was no reason to pressure anyone here and now.

"After looking at the manuals, I think the worst that would happen is that the reactor would think it still wasn't connected – if none of the systems outside make contact. The control linkages don't carry dangerous voltages so there shouldn't be any major consequences even if the whole set of linkages is messed up."

"All right, then, I'm going to hook that up first. If we can establish control or – if we're lucky – trigger a restart in the core systems, we'll be in a lot better condition."

After a few minutes jockeying it back into its tight position, the control harness linkage slid suddenly into place and locked. "Okay, Tav, throw the connecting breaker for the controls up there at the pilot's position. Let's see what we've got."

Lights suddenly appeared, not on the console, but in the air, projected by his omni through his retinal display. They weren't all green – far, far from it – but they were status lights showing that the controls weren't all dead. "We're on!" he heard Francisco shout excitedly.

"Looks like we are, at that." He put away his Shapetool. "Okay, kids, I'm getting out of this box and stretching for a few minutes. Then we'll see if we can't get everything else running and start heading for home!"

 

 

Castaway Odyssey: Chapter 4

 

Well, it was time for our heroes to start fixing things...

-------

 

 

 

Chapter 4.

     "What next, Sergeant?" Xander asked as they put the wrappers from the ration packs into the disposal.

 

"Yeah, that's the question, isn't it?" Sergeant Campbell glanced around the shuttle's cabin. "What do you think, son?"

 

"I think you're probably better qualified to answer –"

 

"Damned right I am, son, but in this situation we all need to learn to be qualified. We're in an emergency like none of us ever expected to deal with, and something could happen to me any time, or to any of you. So I ask you, what do you think is next?"

 

Xander understood now. He doesn't want us just letting him boss us around; he wants us doing the thinking with him. "Well… I think there's at least two things we could work on right now. Technically… even if all the other systems were working, the vital ones – the drives – need reliable power. That means the first thing we have to do there is get the reactor back online."

 

Samuel Campbell nodded slowly. "Sounds reasonable to me. What's the other thing?"

 

"Find out where we are – if there's an inhabited star anywhere near us. If we get the drives working, we'll need somewhere to go."

 

"Spot-on, son."

 

The approval in the older man's voice warmed Xander, and he saw Maddox grin. "But… where's access to the reactor?"

 

Tavana gestured to the back. "Through the main cargo hold and down. So first we have to get the cargo hold door unlocked."

 

"We can do that together," Maddox said confidently. "Right, Sergeant?"

 

"Sounds good to me," the Sergeant said.

 

"Which is good," Xander said slowly, "because I think you're probably the only one of us who might be able to tell us where we are. You're not just a pilot, you're trained as a navigator, right?"

 

"Spot-on. I've done a lot of things in my time, but yes indeed, flying things both fast and slow, that's what I do best. I've got the star maps stored in my omni; I think I can get us at least a reasonable guess, since I know where we should have been when we were dumped off."

 

"Okay, then, Sergeant, I say you work on finding our position, Maddox and Tavana work on getting the cargo door open, and me and Frank… Francisco will check out the other systems that I can access and see if we can get some more details on what LS-88 has for us."

 

"As the old-timers sometimes say, make it so," the Sergeant said, and moved over to the pilot's seat.

 

Francisco came to join Xander; the startlingly red-headed, dark-skinned Mexican boy looked up at him with a worried expression. "You're just pretending I can help," he said bluntly.

 

Xander remembered similar situations with Maddox and how he'd handled them – or not. Try to learn from the right and wrong I did with him. He grinned down at Francisco. "Well, not pretending, no. I know what you're good at is more the artistic stuff. But like the Sergeant says, we've all got to learn, and I know you can learn whatever you need to. So we're going to check out all the systems that I know anything about while they do the top priority work."

 

"Do… do you think… we'll ever get home?"

 

The little boy's tone sounded even more lonely and scared in the original Spanish, which Xander could hear under the running translation from his omni. He reached out and hugged the little boy to him. "I won't lie and say I know we will. But I know we'll do our best, and Sergeant Campbell's best is damn scary good."

 

Francisco managed a giggle. "He's a scary man."

 

"But a good one. Look, Francisco, I'm almost as much a fish out of water as you are here. I'm a mechanical engineer, and honestly, if we had major mechanical problems on LS-88, we'd be screwed. So we're both just doing some makework right now while the others get stuff done. But that's better than doing nothing."

 

"Okay."

 

He moved over near the pilot's console, which with its deployed manual controls and displays was the only one with useful data; careful not to get in the Sergeant's way, he studied the indicators he could. "Okay, let's go look at the airlock," he said to Francisco. "If anyone has to go in or out, we'll need that working."

 

"Sounds good to me," the Sergeant said. "Be warned, everyone; I'm gonna tumble this bird – slowly – a few times over the next hour or so. I'll warn you with each burn, of course. I'm doing this to get a good look in all directions of the stars."

 

"Understood, Sergeant. C'mon, Francisco."

 

The little boy made his way over to the airlock panel. "How's it supposed to work?"

 

Xander made sure they were both clipped on. "Pretty simple, really. The thing that keeps that door tight closed is the pressure inside here compared to the pressure outside. If we could flood that little room – the airlock – with air of the same pressure, we could open this door, and go into the airlock. Then with the door closed, you pump the air out again and then you can open the second door and be outside in space."

 

"Hold on," came the Sergeant's voice. "Rotation burn in three, two, one… now!"

 

The two of them gripped and held, but the rotation was very slow; with their anti-vertigo settings still active in their nanos, it didn't bother anyone.

 

"Air pressure?" Francisco said, puzzled. "The air doesn't push on me when it's still."

 

"Actually, it does, so evenly across every square centimeter of your body that you don't feel it; your body's pushing out with exactly the same force – about a hundred kilopascals, roughly, or a little less here – so your body doesn't squish in or out. But on the other side of that door, there's basically nothing, so there's literally tons of pressure holding that door shut. You could get a crowbar and have all of us try to pry that door open and all we'd do is bend the crowbar. But equalize the pressure and it'd open just as easy as anything."

 

"So why wouldn't it work before?"

 

"Radiation pulse disrupted the circuits that control most of our systems. Plus the tube being connected made some of the sensors think we were still docked, which cut in other safety interlocks."

 

"So the only way to open the airlock is if the circuits are working?"

 

"Well, no, there's a set of manual controls." He indicated a couple of buttons and a wheel set into the wall, then they both held on as the Sergeant tumbled LS-88 again. He pushed the green – which was the "flood" control actuator – but it felt flat and inactive. "But they're not active, and I don't know why, at least not yet."

 

The little boy floated up and looked into the little airlock. "That's a small room."

 

"Smaller the better for getting in and out. You can't recover a hundred percent of the air you put in, so you're always losing some, so the smaller the room, the less you lose."

 

Xander studied the controls, wishing he had been an electrical engineer instead. "Hey, Tavana, how're you guys coming?"

 

"This door, it is not as easy to trick as the air circulation," Tavana answered. "Everyone has reason to want to keep the environmentals running, but going to the cargo, not everyone is supposed to go there."

 

"I got a kinda stupid idea here and I wanted to run it by you."

 

"Okay, let me hear it while I think about how to get the cargo door open."

 

"Electronic controls are the default even for the airlock, right?"

 

"Oui. We have manual backups, but the electronics and photonics run everything normally."

 

"Well, we never really lost power, even though the reactor went down, and the sensing and analysis circuits got kinda fried, right, which is why I can't just toggle the manual on and off?"

 

"Right. What are you asking?"

 

"I guess… look, is there a way I could cut the power to the airlock? Make it think the whole ship lost power? Maybe that would trigger the interlocks and let me use the manual controls?"

 

Tavana paused for a minute, during which Sergeant Campbell sent LS-88 on another leisurely spin; then Xander heard a chuckle. "The brute force approach, eh? It might work. Hey, Maddox, see if you can get my TechTool to extrude the control contacts for these parts here, while I look at the circuits to the airlock?"

 

"Sure!"

 

A few minutes later, Xander saw areas of the wall highlighted in red in his omni display. "See that, Xander?"

 

"Yeah!"

 

"See if you can get any of those three panels unlocked and open."

 

He sent Francisco to work on the closest indicated area while he moved to the other two. In a minute, Francisco gave a triumphant yell as he got the recessed panel to slide open.

 

"Good work, Franky!"

 

Francisco was so proud of his success that he didn't object to the use of the nickname. "So what do we do in here?"

 

"See those cables? I'm highlighting one. If you pull that cable out of its connectors, you should cut power to the airlock controls. If your idea works, it'll unlock the manuals. It's a SSJ standard connector."

 

"SSJ?"

 

Tavana audibly restrained a sigh. "Secure Superconducting Junction connector. Like old-style BNC, it's a push and twist to unlock."

 

"Got it." He looked at Francisco. "Wanna be the one to try?"

 

"Can I?"

 

"Just be careful. Grab that part, push it toward the other part as hard as you can, and then turn it towards you like unscrewing a jar top."

 

Francisco reached in and managed, with difficulty, to grasp the connector. His fingers weren't quite strong enough to manipulate the cable end himself, so Xander ended up helping him a little.

 

Even from where they were, Xander heard a sharp clack! from near the airlock. Tense but hopeful, he floated himself up to the manual controls and pushed in the green button; this time the button sank in and clicked satisfyingly, engaging a physical relay. Feeling hope rising, he turned the wheel slowly.

 

The sound of air flooding the compartment became swiftly audible. "Yes!"

 

"Great, son. Can you reverse it?"

 

"Umm… I don't think so. The manual system assumes that you've got minimal power, so it's not trying for recovery; it'll dump the flooded atmosphere out through the valves."

 

"You didn't let it flood all the way, did you?"

 

"No, sir."

 

"Good for now. I think we can reasonably assume it'll work now, and no point in wasting the air we put into it. Leave it that way, in case we have to use it. Later we'll see if we can get the powered systems working so it's not going to waste our atmosphere. Tavana, when you got the environmentals tripped, did you get a look at our reserves?"

 

"We're good, sir. None of them got released in the accident, and we were fully supplied, so we've got months of air, at least, even if the recyclers don't do so well."

 

"Good."

 

"How about you, Sergeant? Any luck?"

 

"Wouldn't say it's so much luck as good preparation, son, but yes, I know where we are. And I've got myself quite a puzzle, too."

 

The others turned to look at Campbell. "What sort of puzzle, sir?"

 

"Take a look here."

 

A starfield shimmered into view in front of them, scattered pinpoints of brilliance dusted across the blackness of space. "See, that's the projected perspective view for the area of space I thought we were in, taken from the files I've got onboard."

 

"Doesn't it fit?"

 

"Fits perfectly… with one little exception."

 

The starfield blinked, and a brilliant point of light blazed out in the middle of the darkness. The point faded, then reappeared. "I'm toggling back and forth between the projection and what I actually got from scanning the starfield."

 

"There's… another star there."

 

"Which shouldn't be there at all, yes. And judging by the brightness and all, I'd guess it's the closest star to us. Not in the catalogs, and there shouldn't be anything this close to Earth that isn't in the catalogs. Last I knew they were done even with the brown dwarfs and well into categorizing the rogue planets in the region."

 

"How close do you think it is?"

 

Sergeant Campbell shrugged, running a hand through his graying hair. "Hard to say for certain, son; don't know what the spectral type is, and that makes a huge difference. But if I had to guess, it's less than a light-year off. If I get the color right, it's possibly a G-type star. Nearest colony, though, is Orado – and that's about ten lightyears off."

 

Xander nodded. "Well, that's not TOO bad, if we can get the Trapdoor running. That'd be, what, about two months, maybe?"

 

Samuel Campbell's face looked a lot more grim all of a sudden, and Xander felt a chill. "Not quite, son. That'd be true for Outward Initiative, probably a bit less than two months, but these lifeboats can't keep the Trapdoor running all-out constantly; figure it's about a third the speed of a regular Trapdoor, on average, so you're looking more at six months. If everything works perfectly, and honestly, I'm not sure it will. But that'll be more on Tavana and me later on, once we get power up and running."

 

Six months. That was a long time to live in this little shuttle… and it was six months added on to the time it would take to repair things. "But we can't just go to some other star, sir."

 

Sergeant Campbell grunted. "Not unless we have no choice, no. We don't know there's anything livable there, even if it is a G-type star. But I'll tell you, it's a mystery… and mysteries make me uncomfortable until I get answers to them."

 

Maddox was looking at the Sergeant wide-eyed. "Sergeant… you don't think… something from that star caused our accident?"

 

Campbell stared at Maddox a moment, then burst out laughing. After a moment, he got himself under control. "Sorry, Maddox. No, no, I don't think that. Sorry if I sounded too melodramatic there. I think what happened to Outward Initiative was just an accident, field instability that rippled around the outside of the hab ring. I doubt that star had anything to do with it. I'm just saying that stars don't just appear out of nothing, and so I really, really want to know how this one managed that trick."

 

He looked back at the front screen. "But that'll be a question for someone else to answer, I'm afraid. We have to get ourselves somewhere safe first; Outward Initiative will probably already have gotten there, since it's the closest colony, and I'll bet the answer will already be obvious." He leaned back. "But no point in even worrying about it until we get the reactor back, eh?"

 

"Yes, Sergeant," Tavana said. "And I think I'm going to need your help just to get through this door. What was your clearance on Outward Initiative?"

 

"Full security clearance, secondary command clearance. You need my biometrics?"

 

"Yes, sir. I hope it's still got all the data loaded in the onboard memory, so it'll recognize you. Maddox and I, we've got the TechTool configured to act as a simple security gateway but we can't fake the door out."

 

"No, they definitely did not want the average Joe being able to walk into the cargo holds. Lot of stuff in there that's very valuable… and some of it's real delicate." Campbell levered himself out of the pilot seat and pushed off to come to a quick rest near the rear door. "All right, let's give it a try."

 

"Hold it here – careful, the probes are very thin, do not break or bend them! Then look directly into the flat surface there."

 

The TechTool blinked swiftly, projecting a faint laser beam against Sergeant Campbell's face.

 

Abruptly the door swung outward.

 

"YES!"

 

"Well, now, good work there, all of you!" Campbell was grinning like the rest of them. "Now we can get to the cargo… and find the access to the reactor. Let's get a move on!"