by David Smith
Wisps of vapour and dust drifted slowly across the view-screen adding ghostly ephemeral movement to the vista.
Waiting patiently for the probes to return, Dave found himself spending hours staring at the clouds, changing the camera angle occasionally and examining each vista individually. He had to tear himself away sometimes as he was almost hypnotized by the view. He’d take a break and wander the passageways of the main hull, visiting the recreation spaces just to gain some human companionship after losing himself in the stark, lifeless beauty of the cloud. As he wandered, he found that almost every space that afforded a view outside the ship was now taken by members of the crew, all lost in the majesty of the natural spectacle.
Anything that kept the crew from self-destructing was worthwhile, so Dave got Crash to blip the manoeuvering thrusters, slowly rotating the ship to produce an ever-changing vista. Dave almost lost track of the days, still waiting and waiting.
He didn’t have a clue what day or even what time it was when a soft beep from the arm of the comm-set on the Captain’s chair snapped him out of a daze. It was the first time in days he’d had a call from the Engineering Deck.
He checked the ship’s clock. “Good afternoon, Commander, what’s up?”
“Just thought I’d let you know we’ve got a bit of an anomaly sir. We’re losing power somehow.”
“Sorry?”
“For some reason, the structural integrity fields are down on power by two percent.”
“How is that possible? We’re not moving, so there shouldn’t be any strain on the structure at all?” asked Dave.
“Don’t know sir. We only noticed it yesterday. We thought it may be a glitch in the software, but we’ve run diagnostics and done a few field tests, both of which indicate we’ve got a power drain somewhere. I’ve got a team trying to work out what’s going on, but they’re at the early stages of their investigation at the moment.”
“Ok, thanks Commander. Keep me posted.”
“Will do sir.” She hesitated. “One other thing sir.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re also losing heat” she said, sounding confused.
Dave thought about this “I did think the Bridge was a little cooler today, but I just put that down to my imagination.”
“No, it’s real” she sighed “We’ve actually wound the heating system up a couple of notches over the last few days, but we’re still showing a larger net heat-loss than we can account for. Again, we don’t know why and are investigating.”
“Thanks Commander. Try speaking to Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara, maybe she can throw some light on the matter.”
“Aye, sir. Romanov out.”
Dave had a nagging uneasiness in the back of his mind and mused that the probes couldn’t come back soon enough.
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After three weeks of waiting for the probes to return, Dave’s over-active and under-employed imagination was running rampant. Perhaps this was some kind of sinister experiment to test the reactions of humans to boredom. Or an alien species had destroyed the probes and was now waiting to attack the Tiger. Or perhaps there was a union sponsored conspiracy amongst the probes, intending to drive the gooeys to the edge of madness …….
Or they were stuck in a really, really big cloud.
The Jarvis – Esposito grudge match had turned out to be something of a dud. Despite intense coaching from Chief Money and his team, neither pugilist really had the stomach for the fight and they’d spent the first round warily circling each other, throwing and missing with occasional jabs.
It became farcical when both men (Dave suspected) attempted to throw the fight in the second round. Both dropped their guard in order to throw a haymaker, both apparently landing a decent punch on the other and both collapsing to the floor and taking the count.
As the match had gone a full round and a half, it was declared a drawn contest, which caused uproar and kept every talking about a fix or (weirdly) even a possible rematch. Oddly, the only person on the entire ship who’d put money on a drawn contest was Chief Money. When questioned on the matter he declared that as he was managing both fighters, it seemed unfair to favour one over the other ….
Dave was even getting bored of cloud watching and found it increasingly difficult to sleep. He took to prowling the passageways of the main hull at night, regularly bumping into the like of Crewman Crystal Waters, a beautiful, athletic Californian body-obsessive, who seemed to spend every off-duty hour running endless laps of Deck 6. There seemed to be a particular breed of personnel aboard who found it increasingly difficult to sleep in this endless limbo.
On odd occasions he’d run into other lost souls, like the night he ran into Chief Gordon Burns, the Head Chef of Tiger’s Galley at 0400.
The huge burly cook was plodding around on Deck 4 when Dave bumped into him. “Evening Chief. We don’t often see you at the heady heights of Deck Four! Where are you going?”
“Are you talking philosophically, psychologically or geographically?” growled the huge ginger Scot.
Dave was completely taken aback. It had never occurred to him that the bad-tempered Glaswegian would know such words, much less be able to employ them usefully in small talk.
“Uh ….. well ….. “ replied Dave eloquently.
“Philosophically,” interrupted the Chief, “I’m on a journey of self-discovery that hasn’t made it out of the frickin’ car park yet. Psychologically, I’m going out of my head with sheer bloody boredom, and geographically, I’m off to Counselor Ozawa’s Quarters.
More surprises! Was the hard-faced Chef admitting that he needed help?
Before Dave could say anything, the Chef saw the surprise on his face and explained “I’ve run out of whiskey and he owes me a bottle of sake for a favour I did for him last year. And yes, the drinking of the sake is a direct consequence of lack of progress philosophically and psychologically.”
Dave smiled “That’s very funny, Chief!”
The Chief fixed Dave with a beady-eyed stare and scowled. “I …. “ he said, pausing for effect “…. NEVER ….. joke where alcohol is concerned.” He stomped off down the passageway, checking door numbers as he went.
Seeing even Chief Burns resort to such desperate measures was a clear sign that things were reaching breaking point.
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Back on the Bridge the next morning, Dave took a call from Commander Romanov.
“Morning Commander, how’s it all going?”
“Not good. The power drain is getting worse sir. Structural integrity field is now down to ninety-two percent of normal output, and the heat loss through the hull is increasing too.”
“Any idea what’s causing it yet?” he asked.
The engineer answered his question with one of her own. “Have you checked your view-screen in the last couple of days?”
Dave thought about it. “No, I don’t think so?”
“Try it.”
He tapped a button on the arm of the Captain’s chair to call up an external camera angle on the Bridge’s main view-screen. To his surprise the clouds were barely visible at all, with the shapes and the bands of colour muted to the point where he struggled to make them out at all.
He checked to see that the external lighting was still working and found that their power output was one-hundred and three percent of the nominal value. A diagnostic programme run on the camera circuits showed no obvious problem either.
He called over to the Science Officer who was also on the Bridge. “Hey O’Mara, is the dust cloud getting thicker?”
She took readings, and like Dave, checked to see if her equipment was working properly and tried again. “Hard to tell sir, sensors don’t seem to be malfunctioning, but they’re clearly impaired somehow.”
Romanov was listening on the still open comm-link “Your sensors are probably fine. We think there’s something physically covering them.”
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Two minutes
later Dave and O’Mara were on the Engineering Deck looking at the display of the ship’s power relay system. The display’s main feature was a schematic diagram of the ship’s major systems, which showed that, oddly, many systems were using more power than would normally be expected. The warp core was producing a significant amount of power that was being distributed throughout the ship, but simply disappearing for no-obvious reason.
Romanov was explaining her latest findings.
“We’re still working on trying to fit the warp-coils Chief Deng recovered from the Tana battleship. They’re a different shape to our coils and after much mucking around we decided the only way we could physically fit them within the engine nacelles was to alter the outer casing of the nacelle and add a couple of structural members. We had a couple of crewmen outside the ship making alterations when they started complaining that the environmental controls on the suits weren’t working. We were monitoring them, and even though they were physically working hard, their core-body temperatures were dropping off alarmingly.”
“We didn’t know why, so we played safe and pulled them back in. When we did we found their environmental suits had a thin layer of grey-black dust on them. Normally there’s a slight static charge on the outer skin of the suits that will repel any space-borne particulates. For some reason whatever it is we found on the suits clings on anyway. We sent samples to the chem lab for analysis straight away.”
O’Mara chipped in at this point “The Chem lab found it’s some kind of complex organic matter so they’ve sent it on to the bio-labs for further examination. They’ve been working on it for quite a while now, but they haven’t called back to tell us what they’ve got so far.”
Romanov continued “When the crewmen came back in they told us the whole of the hull is coated in the same stuff. They didn’t think anything of it, because we’re in a dust cloud, and they assumed it was just a natural gathering of particulates. When they thought about it, they realised that it has been getting thicker and darker over the past few days now, and there are some places where the hull is almost completely covered. I assume that explains why the cameras and sensors aren’t working as well as they should.”
“We’re so busy trying to repair the engines, I didn’t think anything more of it and just left it to the lab crew to tell me what the black stuff was and if it’s of any consequence. In the meantime, just as a precaution, we took the two dust-covered suits, put them in a decontam unit and gave them the full deep clean. The decontam unit saturates the suits with various nasty forms of radiation to kill off all organic substances. It takes twenty-four hours but we didn’t check when it was finished. I went back just now and ….. well ….. come and take a look.”
She led them to an air-lock at the side of the deck, and opened the inner door leading them through into the air-lock itself. Immediately inside the outer door was a second door which was marked “Suit Decontam”.
They gathered around it, and as Romanov asked the computer to turn on the lights inside the decontam unit they peered through the thick glass.
The glass appeared to have black dust gathering on it, and beyond this they could just barely make out the shape of the two environmental suits hanging from over-head hooks. Each was completely covered head-to-toe with sooty-black, mould like dust, inches thick in places.
“O’Mara,” said Dave quietly “I think you’d better get your team to make this their top priority.”
Chapter 14
An hour later they were in the Biology Lab on Deck 2.
“Damndest thing I ever seen” said Chief Michele Alvari, the senior biologist. “I’ve been in this business all my life, and I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this before.”
“So what are we dealing with here?”
“I believe we may have just discovered an entirely new form of life” said the Chief uncertainly. “The black dust is a colony of tiny micro-organic structures. Their structure is even simpler than the RNA found in viruses, but is complex enough to enable the life-form to move, feed, grow and multiply.”
He pulled up a simulation of a complex strand of molecules on a 3D display. Dave immediately thought of DNA, but this was clearly something simpler.
Alvari continued. “I presume that the lack of opportunities to build a biologically based ecology in a place as cold and dark as this dust-cloud has forced these complex organic molecules to come up with alternative strategies for survival. It seems they survive by absorbing energy directly. There’s no kind of digestive tract, no circulatory system or anything. These molecules appear to simply absorb energy of almost any sort, and when they reach a certain level, they use that energy to undergo a form of mitosis to reproduce. To move, they simply eject unwanted atoms in the opposite direction they wish to move. This may be the most basic form of life ever discovered.”
Romanov scratched her head “Well I guess that explains the power loss we’ve been experiencing. How do we go about stopping it?”
Alvari shifted uncomfortably “Ah, well, therein lies a question. Watch this.” He held up a small petrie dish the bottom of which was covered with a thin coat of the black organism. Taking a small wire from a power supply he touched the black dust. There was a spark and the black dust bloomed and swelled to twice its previous size, forming a noticeable bulge in the centre of the dish. He then took a laser scalpel, and carefully incised the centre of the bulge.
Where the laser touched, the black dust seemed to melt and fuse into a glassy substance, but the areas around it seemed to grow larger even as they watched.
Alvari explained “These organisms are so damned good at absorbing energy, even if you blast some of them with enough energy to kill them off, the organisms next to it seem to be able to use the excess energy and possibly even the energy from the dead cells. If the ship’s coated in them we’ll need to kill them all off at the same time or they’ll just grow back.”
Dave was getting more and more uncomfortable as the discussion progressed. “So they’re absorbing energy from the ship, they’re happily reproducing on the hull and we’ll struggle to kill them off. That infers that the energy drain will get worse.”
O’Mara sighed “Yeah, that’s what we figured too. The mathematicians have been doing some research and crunching the numbers. When we checked back, the energy drain started as soon as we arrived, just on a microscopic scale. It’s increasing exponentially, and at the current rate of progression, the little buggers will be able to consume the entire output of the warp-core in about two weeks.”
“WHAT?!?” yelled Dave.
“It’s only preliminary calcs as we don’t know much about them yet. We have to work in life spans, how they absorb energy as they get thicker on the hull and the effects of different types of energy. In any event, we need to work quickly” the Science Officer confirmed.
“Romanov, how soon can we get the warp-drive back on line?”
“Not inside two weeks, sir! It’ll take us at least that to manoeuvre the coils into place and get them connected up. Then we’ll have to retune the injectors and drive systems to accommodate them, which is another two or three weeks. I’m not going to suggest getting the bloody computer to do it again” she grumbled.
Oh Crap, thought Dave. “Well, we can’t afford to wait. We have to either find a way out of here, find a way of getting the black stuff off the hull or find a way of stopping or reducing the energy loss. I want Senior staff in the Officer’s Mess in two hours time with suggestions.”
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They gathered in the Officer’s Mess at the appointed hour, and Dave sat them down for a quick re-cap.
“We’re in trouble. We’re still lost, and as yet none of the probes have returned. If they do come back they’ve so far travelled a distance that indicates the nearest edge to this cloud is sixty light-years away. That’s at least three weeks travel at maximum warp assuming we can get the replacement drive coils working at the same efficiency as the Fleet issue coils. Or even that we can
get the drive working at all.”
“We’re losing power to a newly discovered life-form that seems to be seeing us as the feast of a life-time and unless we do something about that, they’ll effectively eat us within two weeks.”
“All the time in Sector 244, things are deteriorating. It’s vital that we get out of here for the sake of our people and the Sha T’Al as much as it is for ourselves.”
“So what have we got?” he said opening the discussion up.
O’Mara spoke first. “We’ve done a little spit-balling about the black-stuff in the lab sir. We figure we can reduce the energy loss by minimising the energy level in the outer hull. If we kill the structural integrity fields and reduce the temperature of the hull, it’ll slow down the rate at which they can absorb and multiply. Downside is that because of big open spaces like the Engineering Deck, the ship will get cold real quick.”
She smiled and continued “More positively, Ensign David has had some luck narrowing the band-width on the infra-red telescope systems. There’s a significant heat signature not far from here. We’re not sure what it is yet, but if we can get to it, it might at least give the black thingies something else to munch on.”
“Have you got any idea about distance?” asked Crash.
“No, not really. All we can say is that the wavelength we pick up is about seven hundred degrees, and to get any reading from a low-grade heat source like that through this muck, it’s not a light-year away. We should consider heading for it on reaction drive, as soon as we get the probes back.”
“Well that’s this first good news we’ve had in while. Thanks O’Mara” said Dave. “Anyone else?”
Olga Romanov spoke next “I’ve been discussing the warp-drive with Deng and Jonsen. We think we can get more or less everything else done from inside the ship, but it might take a little longer. On the positive side, Deng has come up with some ideas to speed up the physical installation.”
ASBeau interrupted “And as I’m at a loose end, I’ve been talking to Susan. With her guidance, myself, Dolplop and Crash can do some of the preliminary calcs to try and get ahead of the game in that respect too. The most important thing we can do is run simulations of the warp-field with the new coils and prioritise the order in which we trial the drive settings based on probability of success. Could knock a week or so off the tuning time.”
