“Captain, I’d really like to have engines back sir.”
Jack turned to Nadya who just looked back and shook her head.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. What’s our status?”
“I’m unsure sir. We needed engine thrust to ensure entry into the center of AGC-Beta. Without it I can’t complete the course correction.”
“And?”
“It’s going to be close, we may impact the left edge of the outer ring.”
“Give me specifics,” Jack said with obvious frustration.
“There’s no time sir. Contact with the AGC is in two minutes and four seconds.”
“Shit!” Jack looked at Nadya who just stared back silently. “Palmer,” he called out.
“Here sir,” was the prompt reply.
“Prep for collision. Seal all bulkheads now. Have all departments do what they can to prepare. I’ll get back to the bridge as soon as I can after transit.”
“Understood.”
The engineering compartment bulkhead started to close. He looked to Nadya as he said, “I know the main power feed is gone, but can we use one of the secondary ones to pulse just the port side of the ion grid. It might give us enough of a push to avoid a collision”
She didn’t answer immediately, and Jack said, “Nadya, I need you with me here, right now.”
“Uh…maybe,” was her sluggish reply.
“We’ve got maybe a minute and a half, can you do what I asked?”
“There’s a chance, but it’ll burn that cable out too in the process” she answered. “I’ll need you back by the breakers you threw before. You’re going to have to lock the left one in place.”
“Got it,” Jack said as he pushed back across the room. With the cover still open, it only took a few seconds to throw the switch into position and insert its hook. “It’s ready,” he called to Nadya
Devon’s voice came in over the intercom. “Fifteen seconds.”
“Devon,” Nadya called into the comm, “I’m going to give you a five second engine pulse now. Will that get us clear?”
She didn’t wait for his reply, and Jack felt a sharp quick force pull him to the side. He reflexively grabbed on to a nearby railing to keep from falling as Devon responded, “It looks like that’ll be enough. We’ll just miss the rim of the ring, but we will be going through off-center.”
The engine pulse stopped and Jack briefly thought about getting back to his seat, but there wasn’t time.
“Five seconds,” Devin announced.
Taking a deep breath, he wrapped his fingers tightly around the railing. The ship shook violently, pulling hard to his left. He found himself hanging sideways. Using all his strength, he locked his fingers around the metal bar, but they lost their grip. He was falling and tensed his body in expectation of the sharp pain that would come when he landed.
Chapter 25 – July 27, 2124; 01:15:00
There were voices, but Jack couldn’t tell who was speaking. A sharp stab of pain ran across his right arm and he flinched.
“Hold still,” a voice yelled.
The words were clear, but he still couldn’t tell what was going on. Opening his eyes only brought more pain; the lights were too bright. Someone was leaning over him. The pain shot through his arm again and he moved.
“Devon, hold his arm still! I’ve got to stop the bleeding. Just another minute,” the voice said.
It was a woman’s voice. “Helena?” he managed.
“Doc, he’s coming too.”
That was definitely Devon’s voice. “What’s going on? Where...”
“Jack, give me one more second here and I’ll explain,” Helena said. He felt another jolt of pain, but resisted the impulse to move. “There, done for now.”
Jack opened his eyes and tried focusing on Devon. His vision was blurry and he was dizzy, but at least the pain was receding. “You got banged up pretty good, sir,” Devon said.
“Actually Jack, that’s putting it mildly,” Helena added. “You nearly bled out. The gash in your arm wasn’t necessarily that bad, but between the time we were incapacitated and...”
“Time? How long were we out?” he said and tried to sit up. A jolt of pain ran through his side, convincing him to stay down.
“Most of us were out for three hours.”
“What do you mean most?”
“You and a couple of the others were unconscious a while longer.”
“What’s our status?”
“That’s enough for the moment Jack,” Helena said calmly. “I need to get you moved back to sick bay and do some more work on you.”
“What’re you talking about?” Jack asked as he again tried to sit up. The room began to spin and a wave of numbness swept through his body. He could see that Helena was talking, but couldn’t hear her. He laid back down and her voice made it through the fog that was encompassing him, “...before we continue. Plus, you’re going to need a transfusion of at least two more units of synthetic blood.”
Jack’s mind raced back across the events that led up to the transit. “What about Nadya and Palmer?” he asked. In a near panic, he tried to push them away and get up, but this time blackness engulfed him.
Chapter 26 – July 27, 2124; 11:35:00
The room was quiet; the only sounds Jack could make out were the various tones from some sort of electronic equipment, and the soft clicking of a nearby keyboard. He opened his eyes and worked at focusing on his surroundings. It took only a second to confirm that he was in sick bay. He tried to move, but his arms were restrained. “Helena?” he called.
There was no answer. He looked to his right, but the privacy curtain was drawn around his bed. An IV tube led from his arm to a nearby pump, and several wires ran from his chest to a small computer. Probably for an EKG, he thought. Craning his head back, he saw someone pull the curtain aside: it was Helena.
“Ah, you’re awake. Good,” she said softly. “You were out for a few more hours there. The extra rest probably did you some good.”
Jack watched as she unfastened the straps that ran across him. “Sorry about the restraints, but you know we’re in zero-g so I couldn’t have you drifting about the room. Now sit up slowly.”
Jack obeyed without making any comments.
“Any dizziness?”
“None. What about all of this?” he asked, gesturing at the wires and IV.
“You don’t need that anymore. I finished the transfusion three hours ago, so we can take them off now if you want.”
“If I want?” he asked with a smile. “What I do want is to get back to the bridge and...”
“Slow down, you’re not going anywhere. I said I’d unhook you from the equipment, but considering what you’ve been through, I want you here a little longer for observation.”
“Helena, there’s no time for that.”
She pulled out his IV and said, “Jack, you lost over twenty-five percent of your blood volume. Even though I replaced most of it via transfusion, I’ve only just stabilized your blood chemistry. There’s too big a risk if you jump right back into things this second.”
“Listen,” he said, “We’ve just gone through another of these alien AGCs, and traveled to god knows where. The ship’s taken damage, and we’re running low on supplies. There’s too big a risk if I stay down here any longer.”
“What if you pass out, or go into delayed shock? Or, worse yet, what if there were some internal injuries that I didn’t catch?” she asked and stared straight at him.
“I’ve been here, what, a few hours? If there were any internal injuries, you would’ve found them by now.”
She didn’t answer. Jack gave her a few additional seconds before continuing, “I promise, if I feel anything wrong, I’ll check in with you immediately.”
Helena completely ignored his response. Instead, she picked up a penlight, gestured to her left and said, “Look this way.” After shining the light in each eye, she opened the dressing on his arm and looked over the wou
nd. It was obvious she didn’t want to give in. It was equally obvious she knew she had no leverage over him. She cleaned around the sutures, covered them with a new piece of gauze, and removed the last of the monitoring tabs. “I’m going to enter into the log as an official order from me, that you are to report directly to sick bay should you experience anything unusual.”
“That’s your prerogative.”
“For the next few hours, you should not exert yourself physically in any way. Do you understand? You could do some real damage.”
“Understood.”
She let him get up, and as he made his way to the door, he said, “Thank you.”
Unhappy with his decision, she just nodded in acknowledgement.
Jack took his time going down the corridor, and headed toward his quarters. His mind, however, raced ahead trying to take inventory of what needed to be done. The problem was, he didn’t know where to begin. He had no idea of their status, and more importantly if there was any imminent threat. He quickly entered the small room and shut the door behind him. A wave of frustration swept across him as Kurt’s and Claire’s deaths ate at him again. He was trapped in an inescapable loop. Their deaths made him doubt his decision to turn the IPV. Logic told him it was the right move – he couldn’t risk losing the ship from a single impact. But had he sacrificed them just based on some off-the-cuff calculation of the odds? What if the risk wasn’t as great as he thought? Jack pushed the thoughts from his mind and dug out a new shirt. Reflex kicked in and he tried to put it on quickly, but stopped as pain shot through his arm and shoulder. He finished dressing more cautiously and thought about Don’s resistance to his decisions and Palmer’s open questioning of his orders. He needed to control them better.
That last thought made him acutely aware of the paranoia invading his consciousness. Again, he struggled to purge it all from his mind; he couldn’t afford to be randomly suspicious of everyone around him. They all needed to be focused on the tasks at hand. Taking a slow pace back to the bridge, Jack was thankful the corridors were empty. Especially since the pain had forced him to pause several times and he didn’t need anyone’s pity or concern.
Devon was the first to notice as he entered and said, “Sir, glad to see you’re back.”
“Thanks,” he replied with a small grin.
The others turned to acknowledge his return. “Palmer, Don,” Jack said, nodding to each. “Where is everyone else?”
Palmer replied, “I’ve assigned all available hands to Nadya for repair duty. The engines are a mess, and we just barely grazed the outer ring of AGC-Beta during transit. There’s significant outer hull damage on the starboard side.”
“Casualties?”
“None worse than you, sir,” Palmer replied.
Jack nodded and looked at the main view screen. It held an unfamiliar pattern of stars: no main star, no planets. “What’s our status?”
“Undetermined so far,” Palmer said. “Engines are off line and will remain so for at least another day. Nadya’s got no choice but to do a full repair. Our velocity and position are unknown.”
“Unknown?”
“Correct,” Palmer answered. “We can’t tell yet if we’re even in a star system. Main cameras and telescopes only just came on line, so we haven’t been able to complete a full four-pi, visible-light scan to locate a nearby star. The one navigational camera we have been using hasn’t shown us anything. So, without a reference point, we can’t even determine our velocity.”
Don interrupted, “The only thing I can tell you is our interstellar position relative to Earth. I was able to get the radio telescope on-line an hour ago and locate our reference pulsars. It appears that this transit moved us closer to Earth. That is, we’re at a distance of one-hundred-sixty-four light-years. As before, there appears to be an equivalent time shift. We’ve moved about sixty years closer to our present: Nineteen-sixty-five.
“A hundred-sixty-four years in our past and a hundred-sixty-four light-years from home,” Jack repeated more to himself than to the others. The numbers no longer held any meaning to him as he stared at the star field in silence. Even his subconscious urge to imagine what Earth was like during that time period was gone. He continued staring at the stars, but they told him nothing. The urge to shout in frustration was strong, but that was clearly not an option. Even his persistent optimism and faith in his crew was fading. None of this made any sense.
“Sir?”
Palmer’s voice brought him back to the present. Jack looked at him and said, “There’s no near-by star, right?”
“None that we’ve found yet. I mean the nav-cam should have seen anything sun-like. Like I said, now that the other systems are online, we just started a proper search,” Palmer said.
“What about the AGC? It’s got to be in orbit around something.”
“The problem is – we can’t find it.”
Jack only managed a look of disbelief in response.
Palmer continued, “It’s been nearly twelve hours since our transit. Like I said, we only regained access to telescopes and main sensors an hour ago. At these distances it’ll be very difficult to locate a twenty-kilometer-wide object. Especially if there’s no light from a local sun to illuminate it.”
Before Jack could formulate an answer, Don said, “Think of it Jack, if we carried the velocity with which we entered the AGC to this location, then we should be moving at about fifty thousand kph. That would put us over half a million kilometers from the AGC. It would have an angular diameter of less than one-thousandth of a degree; a bit larger than a thread held at arm’s length. With no light on it, it’ll appear dark against the backdrop of open space.”
Jack shot back quickly, “If we carried that velocity with us through the transit, then we should be moving in the same direction.”
Palmer cut him off, “But sir, we struck the AGC going through. That’s what threw you and several other crewmembers around. It also made us start tumbling. When we came too, it took Devon nearly twenty minutes to stop our uncontrolled rotation. So we have no idea what our original orientation was.”
“And, since there’re no near-by bodies to use as a reference, we have no idea in which direction we’re moving,” Don said, completing their collective thought.
They sat in silence. Anger coursed through him; they sounded defeated. There was no room for that. “What about looking for a residual ion trail like before?”
“It’s been too long – twelve hours since transit. There’s nothing left to see,” Don answered.
“Then what about a Doppler-shift measurement of the surrounding stars?” he offered in vain.
“That’s no good either,” Don replied. “We’re going at a bit under point-zero-one percent the speed of light. That’s roughly the same order of magnitude as some stellar drift velocities, so it won’t give us any real info.
“What about the gyros?” Jack pressed. “They should...”
“They were knocked off of their pre-transit calibration by the impact,” Don answered.
“Let me finish,” he shot back with an edge. “I would assume the calibration was lost. But, we can still use them to detect any dark masses in our vicinity. If we were in an inertial frame, you know, simply coasting without engines and nothing around, then the gyros should show no external torques after Devon stopped our rotation. However, if there were any moderate sized bodies out there, their gravity could be seen via a small precession in the gyros. That precession will tell us the magnitude and direction of the gravitational force on us, and thus where the object is. Then we’d have a reference with which we could find our velocity and the direction in which we’ve been drifting. We could trace our way back to the AGC.
“But Jack, there isn’t even a star around here. What do you expect to find?” Don protested.
“What about sub-stars like brown dwarves, or maybe even a cold stellar remnant?”
“Why the hell would they put an AGC around one of those?”
Jack didn�
�t even try to control his anger. “What? Are you going to pretend to understand what motivates an alien race capable of moving planetary masses? We’re not going to just sit here until we starve.”
Jack turned his back on Don and said, “Devon, can you configure the nav-system to monitor the gyros like I said?”
“Definitely. It shouldn’t take much work at all.”
“Good.” Turning to Palmer, Jack said, “Tell me more about the damage we took from striking the AGC. Was there any loss of atmosphere?”
“None. We got lucky. We grazed it and just did some damage to the outer hull. The aerodynamic surfaces will need repair, and the heat shielding was compromised in several locations. As far as space-worthiness, we’re in relatively good shape. Maneuvering thrusters and nav-systems are operational.”
“We just don’t have main engines,” Jack said.
Turning to Don, Jack continued, “I’m going to need you to help Nadya with the repairs.”
“Help Nadya?” Don responded incredulously. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the chief science officer of this crew. She’s just...”
“There’s no time for this, Don. We’re short-handed…”
“Because your actions killed…”
“Don,” Palmer said calmly as he stepped in front of the scientist, “there’s nothing…”
“I don’t want to hear a word out of you,” Don sneered. Stabbing his finger in Jack’s direction, Don continued, “He’s responsible for the death of three crew; three of the people we’ve lived with for the past ten years. All in the last few days.”
Palmer tried again to intercede, “Don, this is neither the time nor the place for this.”
“When the hell is?” Don pushed by Palmer, pointing his finger directly at Jack’s face as he continued, “You even killed someone you called a friend. This recklessness has to stop now.”
“Watch your tone,” Jack said with complete contempt.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
Jack looked to Palmer and said, “Get him off my bridge. Have him help Nadya with the repairs.”
Prelude to Extinction Page 28
