The Loneliness of Stars
Page 16
~Methuselah of Enoch, in his personal diary
Spaceships move very quickly. Everyone knows this – they have to, to cover the vast distances between stars and planets. They move even faster when they alternate between real space and the Ethyr – something about momentum in real space transferring to the Ethyr and vice-versa. I don’t really understand it – that’s what physicists are for. Anyway, our ship was doing precisely that when the engines were taken out. Apparently the device that switches us between the two – states of reality I guess? – is located in the engines, and the engines can modify the time spent in each one. I learned that the panel Korzos and Mather had been messing around with was the way to manually adjust that mechanism, when the helmsman wasn’t doing it remotely from the navigation room. I wondered why the panel hadn’t been better protected – it seemed rather important.
Vincent was positive that Ivor hadn’t been lying about placing the vanishing charges. I asked someone – I believe it was Rafael – what they were, and he said they were a relatively new development, a kind of bomb that you could program to send very specific things to another dimension. I asked him then how Crydgar’s body had vanished in the charge, and he have me some half-hearted explanation involving cracking open reality and some sort of force like a black hole, but I didn’t really get it. He didn’t know much else about it – apparently no one did. I found Vincent later and apologized to him for not reporting Ivor’s activities to him sooner. He told me not to be silly; I had been watching him for less than a day, and it wasn’t my fault that Ivor had acted so quickly.
It is rather difficult for a ship to keep going for any length of time without engines. Which brings me back to my original point: spaceships move very quickly. As such, we would be able to coast for quite a while. We still had another three or so days until we reached the next star system, Antarct. Or would have, if we still had engines. Fortunately, space doesn’t have enough particles in it to slow you down significantly, so we would still coast very quickly. The Ethyr, however, is filled with things that slow you down, which is the main reason for the engines in the first place. So, essentially, by losing our engines, we lost our ability to jump between the two states of reality, and so travelled much more slowly (we were lucky that the engines weren’t destroyed during the nanoseconds in which we were in the Ethyr). Vincent said that it would take two to three weeks to arrive at Antarct. And if there were no habitable planets there, we were doomed. Of course, I thought we were doomed anyway.
There wasn’t much we could do in that time. Without the engines, Fineas was in charge of practically everything, and he never emerged from his room. The only time I had ever seen him in person was before the ship took off. A pilot has a strange relationship with his ship, often preferring their company to that of real people, and sometimes viewing them as their children – or spouses.
Losing the engines must have hit Fineas hard. The engines are like the heart of the ship; they keep the blood flowing and the fluids circulating – and the ship moving. Even the crew could feel the loss of the engines. There was a background hum that we had all grown accustomed to that was no longer there.
There were still things to do. I helped Joseph make meals, although they were much more conservative than his previous ones. We didn’t know how long we would be adrift, or even if there would be a planet we could inhabit in the next system. It seemed unlikely. We did have terraforming equipment and could set up a small life-dome on the planet’s surface, but we probably wouldn’t last long. I didn’t really see the point of conserving all of the food because we would probably just all die anyway, but Joseph was my boss, and his boss was Vincent, so I didn’t question him.
Due to the smaller amounts of food we needed to prepare, Joseph and I both had more time off. He, for the most part, retired to his room to pray, or went to talk to the priest (they were the two single most religious men on the ship), while I wandered around. I often played spissyx with Michaela and Rafael. We were sometimes joined by Nemhet, who always handily defeated all of us.
I hadn’t realized up until this point how much the engines were responsible for the mess of the ship. Or maybe it was only the dead people who had cluttered it up. The ship was almost always immaculate, and I never really had to clean during our weeks of coasting. I even had less time to spend in the observatory, as now most people were free for more and longer periods of time, so the shifts were split up more often. Sometimes there were two people up there at once.
When I wasn’t performing my duties or playing spissyx, I went to Rafael for my combat training. He had said that we would begin when Vincent assigned him to me, but he had never gotten around to actually doing it – probably because neither of us had really had time. Now, however, we had all the time we needed. I think I became decent during those two weeks –certainly not nearly as good as Rafael, who was a former professional martial artist, but still good enough for me to be able to defend myself well enough.
I didn’t really see Vincent at all during those days except in passing. He seemed to have lost all interest in me, focusing instead on the crisis in the ship. I couldn’t say I blamed him – he had more than just me to worry about. I had heard mutterings among much of the crew about a possible mutiny. It had come up in conversation many times. I asked Michaela about it during a game of spissyx, and she laughed at me. “They won’t do anything. They might not be happy, but they know we’re screwed. What’s the point of replacing the captain if they know no good will come of it? Sure, they’ll be less angry, but it will serve no practical purpose. It would probably hurt more than help. ‘Sides, we all know there was no real way Vincent could have stopped it. They don’t hate him – just the situation we’re in.”
Adam, the only surviving conspirator of the crime that had gotten us into this mess, was in the hospital wing. For whatever reason, our ship didn’t have much of one. It seemed rather foolish to me, as this was a mission of indeterminate length, and people were bound to get hurt. The doctor was an older man named Gerald Forgeson. He had no assistance at all, except a few volunteers every once in a while. Most of the serious medical work was done by a machine. Adam was the first real test of the machine’s abilities. Considering the fact that he was still alive after standing almost directly next to a bomb (of sorts), I had to say that I was impressed with the machine’s abilities.
He wasn’t able to be questioned yet – he had slipped into unconsciousness shortly after he arrived. Maybe he did so on purpose, knowing that he would be in for a lot of abuse when he woke up – even though he had been trying to save the mission. Most of the crew didn’t know that Adam had been trying to stop the sabotage; Vincent hadn’t explained much about what had happened that night. Part of this was that he didn’t know much himself, and part was that he just didn’t tell the crew anything – and the crew didn’t like being out of the loop. That probably didn’t help his popularity. Of course, having been paid a lot of attention by Vincent earlier, I was hurt a lot by no longer having his trust.
And so it went for two weeks and three days. Two days before that, we reached the Antarct system. The two engineers frantically looked over the scientists’ instruments to determine if there were any planets capable of supporting us, abandoning all pretense of the mission to find the source of the signal. The sensor was broken, anyway – probably Ivor’s work again. After only several hours, they found a planet – the fourth most distant from the star. From here, it looked as if the atmosphere was relatively earth-like – they weren’t sure if it could support us without suits, but it looked relatively hospitable. We were all asked to check our suits again. I had been issued one that kind of fit me – I didn’t know which dead man it had belonged to, and didn’t want to.
Then we waited as we approached the planet.
15
“When crash-landing a ship, it is important to keep one thing in mind – it isn’t going to be a perfect landing.”