Building New Canaan - The Complete Series - A Colonization and Exploration Space Adventure
Page 28
The most logical explanation was that either the survey data was wrong, or the uraninite contained more uranium-235 than expected. Unlike uranium-238—which was far more common in nature—235 was a fissile element and could initiate a chain reaction.
Preliminary scan data was inconclusive, largely because of all the radioactive dust that was on and around the Euphemia. Direct samples would yield more information—and Erin had also sent messages to the teams who managed the sensor webs being set up at the edge of the system to let her know if they’d had anything pointed toward Irridia when the explosions had occurred.
The two women’s accounts corresponded very well with the information Erin had from the ship’s sensors. As she listened to them relate their procedures, precautions, and decision making, Erin doubted that she would have operated any differently.
So what caused the disaster?
She was wrapping up her interview with Pippa when a man burst into the room.
“Are you the investigator they sent from Carthage?” he demanded, glaring at Erin.
He was lanky and dark-haired, and his eyes held a stark intensity that immediately set her on edge.
“Max, what are you doing here?” Pippa said crossly. “Why aren’t you managing the clean-up crew?”
“I want to speak to you,” he demanded of Erin, ignoring Pippa. “They wouldn’t let me. No one even told me you’d arrived.”
Erin checked the staff list and found the name Max Rasner. He was a pilot supervisor. “I do want to hear what you have to say, but I’ll call you in when I’m ready. Please wait outside.”
The man hesitated as if about to give an angry retort, but then he spun on his heel and stomped out.
“We didn’t tell him he couldn’t see you.” Pippa’s eyes grew worried and her tone apologetic as the door closed. “I only told him that securing the site was the first priority. His team’s not done, but I guess he flew back anyway.”
“He seems quite a character,” Erin remarked.
“Max isn’t the easiest person to work with.” Pippa’s lips drew into a thin line, as though she were forcing herself to leave it at that.
“Okay,” Erin said. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Do you have any ideas about what might have caused the accident?”
“There isn’t a lot more to tell,” said Pippa. “Everything was progressing normally. We’d extracted most of the uraninite in that seam, and only a final few detonations were required to loosen up and pull out the remainder. The next shift’s handlers were moving into position, and the explosions went off as planned, but it was far more energetic than it should have been. Then the fractures started to form and… Stars…we were all caught entirely unawares. The only explanation I can think of is that there must have been concentrations of uranium that were more pure than we anticipated. Either that or more U235, but I think undetected faults are more likely. Maybe we should have rescanned or double-checked the readings….”
“Sometimes we do our very best and accidents still happen,” Erin said. “That’s where I’m leaning as well, but I want a full report from you on every detail leading up to the accident, no matter how insignificant it might seem. Anwen is doing the same. You have different areas of responsibility, and I want everything covered. I’ll speak to the shift supervisor now. Please tell him he can come in.”
Erin caught a glimpse of Max Rasner as Pippa left. He was leaning against the bulkhead, picking his teeth with a fingernail. As Pippa went out, he pushed himself upright. A second later, the door flew open, and he rushed into the room.
“What did they say?” he demanded.
“That’s none of your concern,” Erin said. “Sit down.”
He gave her a surly look and threw himself into a seat.
“You were supervising the team when the accident happened,” Erin said. “What did you see?”
“What did I see? Billions of tons of rock flying through space. A man dying. But that isn’t what I’m here to talk to you about.”
Erin cocked an eyebrow and leaned back in her chair. “Is that so? What are you here to talk to me about? Is it related to the accident?”
“Those two,” Max jabbed a thumb toward the bridge, “are incompetent. They’re not up to the task. They should never have been put in charge.”
“Really.” Erin folded her arms and tilted her head.
“Yeah. If it weren’t for that pair of idiots, the accident would never have happened.”
The supervisor launched into a tirade about how Pippa and Anwen were far too inexperienced to be leading the project, how they didn’t know anything about mining objects as large as Irridia, and how they’d made error after error, clearly only having received the leadership position because they were from Sol, when just about any Sirian-born Noctus knew far more than they did.
Erin let him rant, reading through his file as he carried on. Max Rasner had risen from the lowest entry position to supervisor while working at Victoria, but he hadn’t managed to rise any higher. He’d applied for numerous lead positions, both before and after arriving at New Canaan, and had been turned down for every one. It wasn’t hard for Erin to see why.
When he’d finally run out of criticisms for his managers, Erin said, “And the person who should have been running this operation is…. Let me guess—you?”
“I was ready for it,” Max barked. “I’ve been tearing down asteroids since before those two were decanted from their multi-womb—or whatever they did back in Sol. I could have done the job blind. Why they put those bitches—”
“That’s enough,” Erin exclaimed, leaning forward and hitting the table with a fist. “Another word, and I’ll have a conversation with Abby Redding about you.” She quickly checked the supervisor’s file again. “Which, it turns out, will probably be the final straw.”
The man teetered on the edge of answering back. Finally, he spat, “Huh. You people from Sol are all the same.”
Erin pressed her lips into a thin line for several long seconds before she said, “Tell me what you did in the hours preceding the accident.”
Max gave a brief account. When he’d finished, Erin asked, “Do you have anything to tell me about what might have caused the disaster?”
“What difference would it make if I did? Would you take my word over theirs?”
“What are you talking about?” She resisted the urge to throw her hands into the air. “This isn’t a popularity contest. I’m not taking anyone’s word about anything. I’m trying to find out what the hell happened that resulted in a man losing his life. Now, do you have something to tell me or not?”
“I guess I don’t. Can I leave now?”
“Yes. I want your full report in three hours,” Erin said as Max marched out.
The man didn’t acknowledge her request. She made a mental note to check that his report arrived before the deadline she’d set. If it didn’t, he would be out of a job. As it was, she marked him down for retraining. The poor attitude and insubordination he’d displayed wasn’t only unacceptable for someone in his position, it was dangerous. The tension and animosity he undoubtedly created could result in his crew making mistakes. Perhaps she didn’t have to look much farther to find the cause of the accident.
Pippa returned, poking her head through the doorway. “Has Max gone? I didn’t want to intrude on your conversation with him.”
“He has. Our discussion was brief and painful.”
Pippa gave a short laugh. “I’m not surprised. I hope he wasn’t too trying.”
“I don’t like to talk about staff behind their backs,” Erin said, “but, wow. You two drew the short straw with that one.”
“You can say that again. I wanted to ask you if you’ll be staying on the ship or returning to Carthage on the next shuttle out?”
“I’ll be staying here until I’ve completed the investigation—and that’s going to take a while. I want to inspect the initial explosion’s site—as much as I can—and take some readings. I—”
Erin had been about to say she didn’t think Pippa’s explanation answered all the questions she had, but she didn’t want to influence what the engineer might put in her report.
“Yes?” Pippa asked.
“I only need a small cabin. There’s no need to put me anywhere special.”
“That’s lucky,” said Pippa. “Plain and simple is all we’ve got. Oh, and…the funeral for Jacob is about to go ahead.”
“Okay. Lead the way.”
Erin followed Pippa through the Euphemia to one of its vast, echoing interior holds, where what remained of Jacob Cimorelli lay enclosed in a body bag outside of an ore discharger. The device was normally used to launch ore out of the hold toward receiving nets at the refineries.
The discharger seemed like overkill to send the deceased out to his final resting place, but Erin could see the sense in the choice. They couldn’t simply push the body out of an airlock, because a frozen corpse floating around the system would be a navigation hazard. The discharger would set Jacob Cimorelli on a trajectory that would eventually take him to Canaan Prime. There, he would be reduced to atoms that would ultimately wander the galaxy for eternity. Erin hadn’t often considered the prospect of her own death, but she decided that if it came to it, Jacob’s final fate wasn’t a bad way to go.
The hold was full of pilots, surface miners, and ship’s crew paying their respects. As she drew closer to the body bag, Erin saw that it was covered in notes that had been printed out and stuck to it. They were messages from Jacob’s co-workers and friends aboard the ship. The man had clearly been popular.
Anwen was already present, but Max didn’t seem to be anywhere in the crowd, from what Erin could tell. The place was somber and silent except for the shuffling of feet.
“Are you going to say something?” Erin whispered to Pippa, wondering if she should take on the role as the person with the highest seniority.
“No,” Pippa replied. “The pilots asked if they could conduct the ceremony. We didn’t object. They knew Jacob better than us.”
When no one else had arrived for a few minutes, one of the pilots stepped forward and began to speak. She told the crowd about Jacob’s life, how he was a Marsian who had applied to join the Intrepid in its earliest days, and about how he’d been dedicated to his work and well-liked.
“We do a hard job,” said the pilot, “one that’s more dangerous than most, though it’s rare that one of us ends up like poor Jacob.” She looked down and shook her head. “It isn’t right that he died. We came here for a better life. A long, happy, and fruitful life. Let’s hope that whatever went wrong, it never happens again.”
The allusion to her investigation didn’t go unnoticed by Erin. But if the pilots thought she might not take it as seriously as she should, they were wrong.
The woman continued. “Goodbye, Jacob, from all of us. We won’t forget you.” She stepped backward, and four more pilots moved forward.
“Oh, wait a moment,” said Anwen. “I have something for him.” She took a small, portable media player from a pocket, sniffed, and said, “I heard Jacob liked to listen to this.” She turned the player on, and music filled the space. It was an opera. Anwen gave the device to one of the pilots.
The man bent down to the bag, pulled down a short length of the zipper, and slipped the device inside. He closed the bag, muffling the music. The pilots carried the remains into the discharger. When they’d placed the bag down on the metal floor and returned to the hold, the discharger’s doors ground heavily together.
A few moments later, after a roar and a shudder, Jacob Cimorelli began his final journey.
The pilots, miners, and crew began to file out of the hold. As they left, Erin was already going over the fresh readings that the clean-up teams had gathered. She couldn’t shake her impression that something wasn’t right.
Pippa’s explanation that undetected uranium-235 added to the explosion that fractured undetected fault lines seemed to be the only plausible one, but that would have required the survey teams to have made two significant mistakes, and from what she could see, they’d been very thorough.
After her encounter with Hart trying to steal the picotech last year—combined with the trouble that had plagued projects back on Victoria—her encounter with Max was causing Erin to consider sabotage. It wouldn’t greatly surprise her if the supervisor had done something like this to try to discredit Pippa and Anwen. Had he thought that when they were removed from their positions, he would be the obvious choice to take over for them?
If she was right, Max was a danger to anyone he worked with. Still, she couldn’t do anything based on simple suspicion. She needed proof.
Erin began to check the survey data again. Whatever had happened, she would get to the bottom of it. Jacob Cimorelli deserved justice.
REPORTING IN
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.8937 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Parliamentary Buildings, Landfall, Knossos Island
REGION: Carthage, New Canaan System
Tanis rose from her desk as Erin appeared at the entrance to her office, a tired smile on her lips.
“Erin, you didn’t have to stop by in person. I’ve taken up enough of your time with this—hopefully your vacation partners are still available.”
“Well, I came down the elevator,” Erin replied with a shrug as she entered. “It’s only a few klicks from here, and I thought it would be easier to give you the update in person.”
Having met with Tanis in her offices many times before, Erin moved to the couches near the tall windows and sat heavily. Tanis followed, and sat across from her.
“I get the feeling you’re not satisfied with your findings,” she said.
“You’d be right,” Erin heaved a sigh and leant forward to pour herself a glass of water. “There’s something there that I’ve not been able to put my finger on. The twins—Pippa and Anwen—did everything right, the survey teams didn’t make any mistake that Walter and I can discern, and the detonations were dialed in correctly.”
“Are you sure of that?” Tanis asked. “I can’t imagine that there’s anything left of the actual explosives.”
Erin’s shoulders heaved as she gave a rueful laugh. “Well, you’re right about that. When you have several successive nuclear blasts go off, it tends to mess with the evidence. On top of that, the rotation supervisor, a real…well…touchy guy named Max, had the clean-up crews push a lot of the ejecta right back onto the asteroid, burying the location of the initial explosions.”
“I can imagine that makes it hard to piece together what went on.” Tanis gave an understanding nod, feeling that it had been unfair to saddle Erin with such a mystery after the woman had worked nonstop for years to get the Gamma Sites—not to mention important parts of Carthage’s infrastructure—up and running.
“More than a little,” Erin replied. “They were hauling so much uraninite around, the whole area was suffused with radioactive isotopes—which played havoc with all the local ships’ scan. If I had solid readings on the alpha, beta, and gamma particles that came off the explosions, I’d have a much clearer picture.”
The fact that it seemed almost impossible for Erin to know exactly what had gone on—in part because of the method used to clean up the site—got Tanis wondering if there was something suspicious at play. She saw the same concern in Erin’s eyes.
“You suspect this Max, don’t you?” Tanis asked.
Erin nodded slowly. “I do, but I feel a bit guilty about it. The guy’s an ass, and he seems to have always been. Either this is his magnum opus, or I’m just feeling inclined to pin it on him because of how big of a…well, you get the p
icture.”
Tanis couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I think I do.” She rose and walked to the window, gazing out over the ever-growing city of Landfall.
“You know, Erin…when we offered colony slots to any Noctus who wanted to come along back at The Kap, I thought we’d get mostly people who really wanted to be a part of this colony. I thought the types who resented us would stay behind, but we seem to have brought a fair number of them along.”
“Oh?” Erin asked. “Is Max not atypical?”
“Well…to be fair, he still is, but given the fact that here at New Canaan everyone is on an equal footing, you’d think that they’d have no reason to complain—but complain they do.”
Tanis knew what Angela meant—and could see that knowledge mirrored on Erin’s face. Not only had Kapteyn’s Streamer pushed them forward in time nearly five thousand years, but those five thousand years had been some of the most war-torn in humanity’s history.
Everyone felt some amount of guilt, knowing that the colony they’d built at Kapteyn’s Star was gone, destroyed by the Sirians.
What was even harder to deal with was the loss of Earth and Mars; fully one quarter of the people in the colony had grown up on those planets. The knowledge that the Jovians had razed those worlds was not easy to deal with.
Tanis often wondered if that was why colonists like Erin threw themselves into their work, to give all their focus to building this new home and making it as safe as possible so that what had happened back in the Sol System and then at Kapteyn’s Star could never be repeated in New Canaan.
“So what’s next?” Tanis asked. “With the investigation—not malcontents. That’s more my issue to deal with.”
Erin took a sip of her water before setting her glass down and walking toward the windows.
“Well, I have the folks managing the heliopause sensors running through their data to see if they picked up anything from the blast, but so far nothing. They look outward a lot more than inward. In a week or so, they’ll have pulled all the debris back off Irridia and they can take radiological samples from the body of the asteroid, not the ejecta that suffered subsequent blasts. That should give a much clearer picture of what the original explosion looked like.”