by Eric Flint
The normally bright surfaces of the shuttle were dimmed, scummed over with thin but definite traces of mold or some other growth. The air in here feels humid; that must have promoted the growth. Water reclamation falling behind? Sue’s analytical, professional brain was assessing the situation, even while the remainder of her was screaming in sympathetic revulsion.
Doctor Ghasia stepped in behind her; his low voice murmured something she thought sounded like “Besime’ābi!”—almost certainly a prayer or expression of shock.
At the pilot’s position, one figure turned its head. Long hair straggled, brittle and dull, around the woman’s skull-like face.
But then the eyes widened and the faintest smile appeared on the cracked lips. “Oh, thank God. You’re here. You’re real, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we’re real.” The faces she could see were vastly distorted from those on file, but she thought she could make out key features. “Josephine Buckley?”
“That’s…my sister.” It was clear even this much conversation was exhausting. “Jo…Jo died last week.”
One week too late. And that would make her…“I’m sorry. Jennifer Buckley, then. How many…?”
“My omni…says five of the nine of us are still alive.”
I wouldn’t have bet on one. “All right. Just…relax, as much as you can. This is Doctor Buriji Ghasia. He’s a fully qualified surgeon, general practitioner, and nanomedical technician. He’s going to take care of you all.”
Sue keyed up the system overrides they’d established in the rescue of Outward Initiative and managed to link up with the badly-damaged shuttle, as well as the local nano-net, and hook that into her own and that of the doctor.
“Well, now…astonishing. This is some kind of nanosuspension. But…it appears to be a sort of ad hoc design,” Dr. Ghasia said after a moment, frown lines appearing on his ebony brow. “Nothing standard at all.”
“No one…had any suspension applications available,” Jennifer said.
“No need to talk,” Ghasia said quickly. “There’s nothing wrong here, though obviously it’s not an ideal solution in many ways. But…I think we have a good chance of saving the rest of you.”
“I could get back to Orado Port in a few hours,” Sue said. “Should I take one or two of these people with me?”
“Give me a few minutes to do an actual evaluation?” the doctor said, a testy edge to his accented voice. “It is possible that will be necessary, yes, but for now begin bringing in the supplies. The most important thing to do is to get proper nutrition started, and to improve the conditions in this cabin.”
“Got you.” Sue sprang back easily through the airlock back to Raijin—whose air-recycling systems were already noting the offensive material from LS-42 and responding with nanoelectronic speed—and grabbed the nutritional nanomedical packs in one hand and her engineering troubleshooting kit in the other. Another quick bound brought her into LS-42’s cabin, where she locked the case of nanomedical packs to the chair nearest Dr. Ghasia, and turned to the main control panel.
As they’d deduced would be the case, the board had switched over to almost entirely manual systems, and was showing vastly more red and yellow than functional green. Her access codes allowed her to query the systems that remained at all operational.
Jesus. Reactor’s working, but only on low-power mode…why would that be? It seemed obvious that the passengers had no reason to throttle the power down, so some aspect of the disaster must have caused it. That partly explained the condition of LS-42 right there; virtually all of the reactor’s low-power mode would have gone to recharging the Trapdoor drive for the allowable periodic jumps. In fact…Sue nodded, feeling her lips tight with empathic understanding. The low-power mode wasn’t even quite enough to maintain the jumps. They’d have had to stretch out the recharge interval. No wonder it had taken so long; not only had these people had to—somehow—get the landing shuttle working after the Trapdoor pulse shut down multiple shipboard systems, but also they’d had to make the Trapdoor drive take far longer to get them anywhere.
She shook her head slowly as the data from the shuttle and her own engineering diagnostics built up the whole picture. No, it wasn’t surprising it had taken this long. What was surprising was that they’d gotten here at all. Multiple system failures, several of which could have—should have—proven fatal, and none of the crew were on record as having any of the relevant skills needed to diagnose and repair those failures.
But the fact that this shuttle, with apparently no trained engineers or medical people aboard, had somehow ended up here did add a new mystery, a mystery she’d thought of as solved by default months ago:
Where are LS-5 and LS-88?
Chapter 20
“Jennifer?” Sue said softly.
The young woman’s eyes opened and looked around; for at least the third time, Sue watched the tension in Jen Buckley’s face ease into relief as she took in the clean brightness of Orado Port’s main medical facility. “I still keep thinking I’m going to wake up on LS-42.”
“I can’t blame you. You spent a bit over a year on that ship. But you’re safe now.”
“How are the others?”
“All five of you are making a good recovery, Doctor Ghasia assures me. The four who…didn’t make it have been preserved for whatever their next-of-kin want done.”
Jen’s brown eyes closed, a flash of pain. “Jo…”
“I’m sorry.” Sue reached out and touched the too-skinny shoulder. At least now there was starting to be a feel of some muscle underneath, a living tension in the skin instead of the horrific half-deadness of the people they’d found on the shuttle. “The doctor says you’re well enough to talk for a while, and as the Emergency Watch Officer responsible for addressing this situation, I need to start getting to the bottom of what happened. We can’t just drag people’s private data out of their omnis without permission, so that means we need personal consent, at the least.”
“Oh.” Jen Buckley got a distant expression on her face, then laughed. “God, where do I start? None of us ever had any idea we’d be…” She trailed off.
“I know. Let me give you a starting point. We know what happened to Outward Initiative—and why. We know—”
“You know why?”
“Yes.” She outlined the solution she and Numbers had come up with in those days following Outward Initiative’s arrival.
A hollow chuckle from Jen. “Well, I guess we can’t sue them for negligence. They were so careful that they almost killed us all. Without knowing it.”
“Basically, yes. I don’t know it if helps, but because the crew did get Outward Initiative back to us reasonably intact, we were able to make this discovery and by now most of humanity’s faster-than-light fleets know about it. With luck, this won’t ever happen to anyone again.”
“I hope to God not,” Jennifer said. “Sorry I interrupted you.”
“No, its fine; you’ve got far more to bother you than I have. Are you ready to talk?”
“I…guess. Yeah, I suppose. The others aren’t ready?”
“Your father and mother are still in serious recovery. That level of starvation causes biochemical changes that nanos aren’t programmed well for, so getting them back in functional shape is taking time. Barbara Caffrey should be well enough soon, although she was also in pretty bad shape. William Fields seems okay, but he, well, clams up and seems nervous about saying anything to us about what happened.”
“Bill? Not talking?” For a moment, Jen looked puzzled. Then a look of comprehension spread across her face. “Oooohhh, I get it. He’s afraid that he might be held responsible.”
“What? Why?”
“Umm…Okay, so if you know about the disaster, I guess you know that when we got cut away from Outward Initiative, just about everything shut down hard?”
“Yes. Primarily caused by the Trapdoor radiation pulse.”
“So, yeah. Everything shut down and we were all freaking out and I was
screaming and I think my sis…Jo was too.”
“Were you the pilot?” Neither of the Buckley sisters seemed old enough, but she had ended up in that chair.
She shook her head. The dead-dry hair had been cut off; the new fuzz starting to replace it was a glossy brown, the best sign of returning health Sue had yet seen. “No, I…well, I sort of was later but that was because our real pilot, Mr. Costigan…”
“He didn’t die en route?” The detailed examination of the bodies had taken a back seat to the care of the living, and the forensic specialists from Orado itself had just arrived.
“No. He seemed okay for the first few days, then he got really sick.” Her quick description of the symptoms confirmed Sue’s immediate guess.
“Was he out of his chair when the accident happened?”
“How did you know? Yes, he was in the airlock, trying to check on a warning light, when it happened.”
Sue nodded. None of the actual acceleration berths were in line with the airlock, which meant they were all more-or-less shielded from the radiation pulse that would have come straight down the access tube. “That makes sense. Trapdoor radiation pulse. The rest of you didn’t get enough of a dose.” She brought up visuals of parts of LS-42 in her omni, linked it to Jen’s. “What I’m interested in, really, is how you got here. For instance, do you know why the reactor was in forced low-power mode? What about these indications that the Trapdoor coils here and here,” she pointed to one section towards the front end of the shuttle, and another underneath, about halfway back, “were accessed? The coils obviously worked to get you here.”
“Well, they weren’t at first,” Jen said. “Bill said they’d, um, microwelded themselves together at points around the windings. So we had to take them out and make new ones.”
Sue blinked. “How did you know how?”
“Well, Barb—Barbara Caffrey? She’s a research information specialist. She was bringing a whole technical library with her, and once Bill figured out how to trick the rear door seal to open, she was able to get it activated.”
“Mr. Fields did that? He’s listed here as a minimum-technology mechanical specialist—the kind of person who does things like simple plumbing, non-autoassisted electrical wiring, and so on.”
Jen grinned; that still looked unfortunately skull-like in her current condition. “Well, yeah, but he tinkers, you know? He did a lot of stuff in his spare time—he talked a lot about it while he was showing us what to do. He’d ask Barb about something and she’d look it up, like the manual for the reactor, and then he’d dig into the diagrams and logic and figure out something. The low-power mode was because we couldn’t operate the reactor on full power anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because we needed to take out some of the coils for the wire, to replace the wire on the old Trapdoor coils.”
Sue blinked at that. “Wait. You mean Mr. Fields disassembled some of the harvesting coils in the reactor and then started it up again? And it worked?”
Jen nodded. “Is that hard to do?”
Sue bit her lip. “In theory…well, you’d have to remove just the right coils. In just the right positions. Or you’d end up with an imbalance in the fields keeping the fusion reaction stable and the whole thing would shut down.” No wonder they were kept on low-power mode. “And your research specialist Caffrey and Mr. Fields did the other repairs?”
“With the rest of us helping.” She took a deep breath, and the reason for her nervousness was suddenly obvious with her next words. “Um…I did a lot of the coding for them.”
“You coded the suspension app?”
“Well, with help from the database. Yeah.”
“So you’re an application oversight specialist? That wasn’t on your file.”
“I just did it as a hobby. I didn’t mess it up, did I?” she asked, and swallowed. “I mean…people died.”
Sue considered the answer carefully. Technically…yes, of course Jen had messed up parts of that design. Even with the best database to help, suspending the function of the supremely complex machine that was the human body—and especially the brain—was one of the most delicate and difficult tasks known to humankind.
But that wasn’t the right answer. “You did an astounding job, Jen. It took you…months, I guess, to do the repairs, and by then, even with rationing, you knew there wasn’t enough food. All of you would have died—all of you, Jen, without question—if you hadn’t done what you did. The fact that more than half of you got here alive tells me that you may not have done something perfect, but you did something more than good enough.”
Jen’s eyes were haunted. “But…I lost Jo. And Zahir and Alia.”
“Even professional doctors don’t save everyone, Jen. And there are trained doctors who wouldn’t have tried making suspension code like that—and they’d have lost everyone.” Sue made sure Jen’s eyes focused on her. “Be proud of what you accomplished. You’re not going to be in trouble over this, and neither is Bill Fields.”
“You can’t know that.”
Sue grinned herself at that. “Oh, yes I can. Because it is my job to decide where the blame goes, and I’m not dropping any on people who managed to pull off a miracle. How did you navigate home?”
“Oh,” Jen said, “that was the easiest part. Once we made sure we were going towards the right star, it was just sleep a long time, wake up and check that Orado’s star was still pretty much in the centerline of our course, and sleep again.” She looked sad for a moment. “The only person worried about it was Alia.”
Alia Manji had been an astronomer, one of the few pure science types headed for Tantalus (although she had a number of more practical skills that made her a good candidate). “Why was she worried?”
“Because of the extra star. Said it shouldn’t be there. But that wasn’t a problem, if you just ignored it you could tell that all the other stars were just where the databases said they should be.”
“Wait,” Sue said. “What do you mean, extra star?”
Chapter 21
“No offense,” a sleepy-eyed Portmaster Ventrella said, cradling his coffee in his hands like a precious jewel, “but this had better be very good, Sue.”
“You know I wouldn’t drag you out of bed for anything that wasn’t,” Sue said. Then her conscience poked her, and she said reluctantly, “Well, it’s not life-or-death…not directly now, I think, but…”
The Portmaster sighed and gave a weary grin. “Ehh. You’ve got me up, let’s talk about it. I’ll decide whether I’m docking your pay or something later. Has to do with our most recent survivors of shipwreck, eh?”
“Indirectly. It started with Jennifer Buckley mentioning something that sounded very odd, and so I went to check it out. She said that their onboard astronomer was concerned about an ‘extra star.’”
“What did she mean by that?” Ventrella took a sip of coffee, looking slightly more awake and certainly intrigued.
“Literally that—a star in the sky they could see that wasn’t on the charts.”
He frowned. “Well…we’re fifty light-years from Earth, and the charts are almost entirely put together based on Earth data. Surely there must be some stars in our skies that aren’t visible from Earth.”
Sue shook her head. “Not…really. Modern telescopes, especially the wide-baseline scopes that turn large chunks of a solar system into a telescope with an effective mirror diameter of millions upon millions of kilometers, can spot even brown dwarfs at ridiculous distances. Oh, there are stars we humans see in the sky that we wouldn’t be able to see with our naked eyes from Earth, but there’s pretty much nothing in our sky that some Earth-system telescope didn’t spot decades back.”
Portmaster Ventrella scratched his beard and then nodded. “And this star…?”
“…would be a problem even from the naked eye point of view. They said it was the brightest thing in the sky, and that Alia estimated it was a fraction of a light-year away from them. A G-type star like the Sun, or
Orado’s own star.”
“Oh. Oh, my. We can spot the Sun—not easily, but with good viewing—with the naked eye from here. And you say this mystery star is, what, about ten light-years from here?” He obviously remembered the distance that Outward Initiative had been when disaster struck. “So it should be easily visible to us, then.”
“Once I looked, yes. It’s about a magnitude 2.26, but mostly visible from the non-settled hemisphere of Orado. Nothing extraordinary about it—there’s plenty brighter—so it didn’t really call attention to itself. I’m still surprised it didn’t get flagged by any astronomers, but that’s a mystery for later.”
“But that means that Earth should have seen it easily. It should have been in the naked-eye catalogs. Yes?”
“It should. But it wasn’t. And I’ve checked actual images of that area of the sky from Earth. This star does not show up.”
There was no trace of sleepiness in Michael Ventrella’s eyes now. “But we can see it.”
“Yes.”
He regarded her for a moment. “All right, give me the rest.”
Sue laughed with an embarrassed edge. “You do know me, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t have come here with just that, strange though it is. So…?”
“So I slightly abused my authority and hijacked a few minutes from the Orado Wide Baseline to take a quick survey of that star and surroundings.” She triggered her omni to dump the key images to a display.
The Portmaster stood slowly, gaze riveted on the brilliant green-white-brown marble in front of him. “My…God. Is that…”
“A planet. In the Goldilocks Zone. Spectroscopy says positive for free oxygen in an oxy-nitro atmosphere, water, and chlorophyll.”
“My God,” he said again. “So this sometimes-invisible star has a habitable world around it?” He gave a grin that was filled with a tense disbelief. “Isn’t this the kind of thing that should have ominous background music as an accompaniment?”
