by Chris Hechtl
Chapter 22
Five and a half months after their arrival in Alpha Centauri, Daedalus finished their mission and maneuvered to return to Earth. It was time to go home; just about every crew member was anxious to see their friends and family once more. Morale was high; they'd accomplished their mission. The wistful hope of finding alien life hadn't come to fruition, but perhaps next time some among the crew reasoned. Some of them were looking forward to the attention back home; they could practically write their own ticket. Others like the XO were already looking forward to the next challenge.
Captain Locke was concerned that he'd be left out. That he'd be put up on the talk show circuit, maybe even groomed for office somewhere. He didn't want to be put out to pasture so soon and made preparations to argue his case to remain in command, either on Daedalus if she was kept in commission, or on one of the next generation ships.
Since dropping in and out of hyper ate up so much fuel, they decided to chance a long jump. The navigator was confident they'd get it right this time. They carefully calculated and then simulated the 4.7 light year journey, which meant a bit of maneuvering to get around the red dwarf of Proxima Centauri. The journey would take 11.1 weeks and would be a true test of what they learned and what the ship was capable of. In order to jump beyond the one thousand light year limit imposed by the UN, they'd have to step up their game Ben had argued. It would also give them a small reserve in case they overshot. As long as it was under a light year they would be okay.
However, within a week of entering hyper they began to run into problems. Sylvia didn't act right the crew insisted. Her voice sounded sick and the computer was running sluggishly. That alone alerted the crew to a computer problem. Berny Malone the senior computer tech insisted it was a hanging file, but they couldn't do anything since the ship was in transit. Furthermore, thorough checks yielded nothing, but when Jamey disabled his tablet's Wi-Fi access and then ran a manual scan the virus scan came up with an alert of an unknown threat. Chri'nick'trill and the other dolphins backed him up when they reported something attempting to access their implants through the ship's network.
He alerted the computer techs who, bewildered, looked deeper to find what he had found. Berny thought Jamey was nuts until he spotted something that shouldn't have been there. He ran a comparison with a file his team kept in a protective archive and things didn't match. “It is there. Something …” he muttered.
It took a while, but they finally found it. An insidious virus was detected in the ships systems, bogging them down, overwriting some files, and throwing them off course. “It is a worm. It started as a worm. I'm thinking a series of nanofiles that were self-assembling, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure we'll ever know since it is in there and we're out here. What I do know is it compromised the firewalls and antivirus like they weren't there, which is easy to do from the inside. It is one slippery little devil,” he said, shaking his head in admiration. “My question is, where the hell did it come from?!” Berny said when he finished his report to the senior staff.
“It just appeared?” Andrea asked.
Berny shook his head. “No, someone might have plugged in something infected but I doubt it. The antivirus systems can't see it at all. That alone tells me it's been in the system all along.”
“Right under our nose the entire time?” Ben asked in disgust.
Berny spread his hands apart. “It explains a lot. Why we kept wandering off course; why the sims didn't match up. This thing was giving us false data. Garbage in, garbage out. We're reliant on the computers to tell us the truth. This one was programmed to lie to us. It did a damn good job. Whoever thought this sucker up is a sick genius.”
“You're saying sabotage,” the XO said. The entire compartment seemed to drop ten degrees with that simple statement.
“Of course! Look at the facts,” Berny said, ticking points off on his fingers. “It's affecting ship systems. It's been throwing us off course. Now we're on our way home and it strikes full force. We're off course, by how much we don't know.”
“The hyper odometer and our internal clocks will keep a log. I don't like what the odometer is saying though,” Ben said.
“Unless the damn thing alters our clocks,” Jamey argued.
“How … I think I'd notice a missing day,” Ben said, rounding on him.
“If it shaved a couple minutes here and there, we'd never notice unless we had a time piece that was offline and keeping its own time. Since everything is synched …” Jamey held up his tablet and tapped the digital clock with his fingertip. “We can't know for certain.”
“Unless we do like you did. Take a tablet offline now and see if it keeps good time compared to the ship's clock,” the XO suggested.
The computer tech nodded enthusiastically. “We should definitely do that. And keep a running log offline in a flash drive or something,” he suggested. “I've got my people going through the systems and replacing files with hard copy backups.”
“Which are out of date. We've learned a lot since we left Earth, and the computer's learning algorithms made millions of adjustments since then.”
“We can't win either way. Sometimes you have to go back to square one to win,” Berny said doggedly.
“Will it adversely affect ship's systems?” the captain asked. Berny frowned, unsure. “And your attempts to fix the damage, will it hurt the ship?”
“Will it even work at all? The computer might reject the changes,” Chief Shiku said.
“What is this virus for? Is it supposed to steal our data? Compromise it?”
The captain shook his head. “No. I think it was designed as you said, to throw us off course. To harm the ship. To discredit us or worse.”
“I think it will. I think that was the intent from the beginning,” the chief engineer said quietly.
“We need to isolate the systems one by one and reboot them with backups. Switch them to backup systems that are clean then clean out the primary systems,” Berny said.
“How? Each time we would do that the virus could spread right back into the uninfected systems all over again. Everything is interconnected remember?” the XO asked. The tech's face fell. “Which leads us to you Berny.” She turned to the tech. “Kill this thing. Find it, kill it fast. Before it kills all of us.”
Berny's eyes widened. “Aye aye, ma'am.”
“We need to find out how far off course we are,” the captain said, turning to Ben. “Ben, get with Doctor Castill here and the dolphins. Find out if they kept another independent log. If they did set up an independent simulation and try to get a better understanding of where we are. See if this thing is adaptive or if it is just pushing us in a direction.”
“If it is we can compensate you are saying, sir?” Ben asked. The skipper nodded. He exhaled slowly, nostrils dilating. “Okay, I can do that.”
-*-*-^-*-*-
“We're in a rip current. Have been,” Kaku insisted when the trio got together to process the simulator's findings. What it said scared them. “Can feel it,” the dolphin said, moving his head and fins. “Push ship to side.”
“The hell you say. That's not possible,” Ben said. Jamey looked at the navigator. Ben was scared; he could tell that easily. It was everyone's nightmare to run off course.
“It is true,” the dolphin leader insisted. He pulled up the course on the simulator. “Is pulling us off course,” he said, showing them the direction.
“Are you sure it's not the damn virus?” Ben demanded. His eyes studied the numbers and then he pointed accusingly at the screen. “See? This can't be right! It's saying we're traveling over 42.87 light years a day! That's not even possible!” He shook his head as he glowered at the screen.
“No. I agree. The drive is acting strange, straining, but it's not drawing that much energy. The shields are though,” Jamey replied. He held up a restraining hand to the fin. Now was not the time for Ben and Kaku to rehash old arguments. They needed to focus like they'd never focused before.
“Can we drop out of hyper?” Kaku asked. “Check? See?”
“I'm … not sure,” Ben said, eyes moving back and forth as he wrestled with the numbers mentally. Finally he got out his tablet and checked he frowned. “No,” he said after a long moment. He shook his head again, then ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “If this is right, we won't have the power to get back into hyper once we're out.”
“What about all the fuel reserve we've got left over?” Jamey asked.
“The reactor has been running hot. The force fields have been drawing a lot of power remember?” Ben reminded him, his tone just barely civil. “Whatever the hell is going on, we're screwed,” he said.
“Don't give up the ship just yet,” Kaku said. Jamey nodded, looking from the fin to the chief navigator. He saw the doubt in the navigator's eyes though.
“If we are in a rip current …” Jamey searched his memory before he got it. He'd gone to the ocean once on a trip, he remembered with perfect clarity the life guard’s instructions on dealing with a rip current. “We can't swim against it; it'll just wear us out. All the course changes are doing that to us. We can't sit in it either; it'll keep dragging us along to wherever it's going.”
“If it is even real,” Ben said. “I don't think it is.”
“I … don't know. What bothers me is what to do about it. According to the life guard we were supposed to signal for help if we got weak, which obviously we can't do here,” Jamey mused. “Or we can swim parallel to the shore until we break the grip of the current and then let the waves bring us back in. I'm not sure though if the situation is parallel. I'm not even sure if yeah, you are right or not. Or Ben is,” Jamey said, looking from the fin to Ben.
“He can't be. It has to be a mistake. Something, the virus screwing with us!” Ben insisted, throwing his hands up in despair. “That's what it is! I'm telling you, it's the virus adding wear to the ship's systems, finding ways to fuck them up!”
“If it wanted to kill us outright, why not do so?” Jamey asked himself quietly as he sat back to ponder that question.
“People notice. Can't breathe, fix ship,” the dolphin squawked.
“Not necessarily. But yeah, it's been subtle up until now. The journey home is what triggered this final attack.”
“It'd better be final or we're dead,” Ben said. Kaku thrashed his head. Jamey nodded.
“I can look at the numbers. See what the raw data is showing us, then put it into the simulator through a feed and see if the rip current is really there or not. Just modeling the field interactions of the force emitters might prove or disprove it. If something is hitting us, a wave or something, we'd see its effects in the force emitters …” he frowned thoughtfully.
“If it is a current, and I'm not saying it is … it would block our way home,” Ben said softly. He closed his eyes in pain. “Let's hope and pray it isn't.”
-*-*-^-*-*-
Berny and his crew did their best to isolate the ship's systems. He started with life support; after all, if the thing got in there it could just shut off the air and they'd eventually die. Or shut off the inertial dampeners and they would be squished when the ship moved. The problem with the other ship's systems was that they were all interconnected in a fine mesh. They were dependent on each other, so he had to be careful on how they went about bringing up the secondary systems.
Cleaning the secondaries out was a chore onto itself. They had to isolate each from the main system, reformat the software back to her basic system, then reinstall what information they had. He prayed the damn virus wasn't in the hard copy backups or they'd all be screwed.
When they were ready, Berny made an all-out attempt to kill the virus. The virus sensed it was under attack and went into a final mutual assured destruction rampage. It damaged the computer and systems, over writing files and sending the ship wildly off course.
The ship jolted as if they hit something in hyper that threw them sideways at even higher speed. The ship's inertial dampeners struggled to compensate. The crew was fearful they would fail but fortunately they held. Chief Shiku reported that the reactors were running at 120 percent to keep up with demand, and they were burning through a tremendous amount of fuel.
Eventually the ship faltered as it ran close to her exit time. She was low on power as well and off course, so the Captain ordered they drop out to find their location. When they translated out of hyper, the ship was pitched wildly about, spinning on all three axis as they exited hyper. The dampeners couldn't keep up fully; the crew was slammed about the interior of the ship.
Chri'nick'trill stabilized the ship with the maneuvering thrusters while the human crew went to work assessing the damage and treating the wounded. Doctor Asurabi was so overwhelmed with casualties he bit the bullet and called Kathy in to help. She didn't quibble, just rolled up her sleeves and dug in when the injured started to find their way to her clinic. Fortunately most of the human and dolphin casualties were just bumps, bruises, and sprains. She had to deal with a couple dislocated shoulders and triaged two head wounds, stabilizing them until Doctor Asurabi could take over their care.
The crew knew they were in trouble; they had dropped out of hyper far off course. That much was a given when the sensors reported no star in the area. Ibraham's people searched for Sol. It took days of anxious work to find the tiny G2V star. Many people volunteered to help but it was really up to the computers to find the star. They realized right off that they were so far out there were no radio transmissions, so that was a clue that they'd traveled farther than they had intended. Really far, for mankind had been transmitting for two centuries. When they found Sol, they ran the calculations and found they had overshot Earth by over 500 light years. The nearest star was HD 44402, 20 light years away.
“We picked up something. A rip current I think is the term,” Kaku insisted during the next meeting. The humans were in a state of shock. He wasn't sure he understood why. “It wasn't the computer. Something pulled us,” he squawked. “I tried to tell you. You wouldn't listen as usual,” he said accusingly.
“Okay, not helping,” Ben growled tightly, eyes flashing. He was on the defense, ready to fight.
“No, finger pointing isn't helping,” the captain said mildly as he looked at the image of the fin on the main screen in the wardroom. “Kaku, do you have an idea on when the … tide turned?”
“Will check.”
The captain nodded. “Good and get back to us on that,” he ordered.
The dolphin's image nodded. “Will.”
The captain turned to the navigator. “You could help as well,” he said mildly. The chief navigator flushed but nodded silently in obedience.
“Well! This sucks. Anyone got a deck of cards? We can play some rummy while the bright boys figure out what to do,” the XO cracked with a grim smile.
“We're still getting a feel for the systems. We put a lot of wear on the reactors and EPS conduits. A lot of wear. We're fortunate we didn't have a blow out,” Chief Shiku stated. “I'm still getting a handle on the damage. I've got bots and work parties out on the hull now doing an assessment.”
“I know. Thanks for asking permission,” the captain said. It was the chief's turn to squirm a bit under those eyes. He had done no such thing, breaking protocol in the heat of the moment and he knew it. The bridge crew needed to know when people were outside in case they maneuvered or powered up a system that could threaten the life of the EVA teams. “Do you have a report in?”
“No, sir. We're still getting a handle on the damage. Most of it is wear, but we've got some deformation on the rings. The starboard structural struts have buckled slightly. We'll know more shortly.”
“Good.” The captain turned to the communication's officer. “Have you called home yet, Miss More?” he asked.
Juliana nodded. “Ye …yes, sir,” she stuttered. “The mayday was sent the moment we knew where Sol was.”
“Good.”
“I don't see how good it is. They'll know where we are in
what, five hundred years?” the XO asked, shaking her head. “Too little too late for us,” she said dismally.
“Still, it pays to keep to procedure, even if it is for the historians,” the skipper replied as he turned to the communication's tech. “Transmit the ship's log and a copy of Mister Malone's report of the virus sabotage. Send them everything in fact,” he said. “And keep transmitting,” he ordered.
“Aye, sir.”
The crew realized they would run out of air and resources long before their message got to help and help could arrive. How to deal with it though … “Any ideas on how to get home? Under our own power?”
“There is nothing around for us to use for fuel unfortunately,” Ibraham stated flatly. “Other than that …” he shrugged helplessly.
“Find out. Finish the assessment; get me options people,” the captain ordered. “Dismissed,” he said mildly. The meeting broke up.
-*-*-^-*-*-
Jamey would have investigated the alleged rip current mystery further had he had the time. But his primary focus was on getting the ship home somehow. He dived in with the engineers to do a full assessment of the ship. He knew he … they weren't going to like what they found.
Fortunately the wear was troubling but repairable. The strut and deformed rings were an issue, as was the leak in the liquid nitrogen lines that cooled the superconductors within the rings. The leaks were tracked down and patched. The rings were adjusted. The strut was an issue, but the Chief ran a structural simulation and found it wasn't compromising the ship's drive to the point of failure. Jamey just wished that was all of their problems.
-*-*-^-*-*-
When the initial assessments were done, the captain called a meeting of senior staff and Jamey. The staff was grim. They had all picked up the news on the ship's grapevine; they all knew it wasn't good. “I'm not going to waste words; we're in trouble. This is end game people. Unless our resident miracle workers can pull another one off somehow …” the captain shook his head.
