I guess we were lucky; we were still alive. Of course, we could have been luckier. The ‘roids took out two water lines—costing us more than a thousand liters sucked into the void before the auto-shutoffs kicked in—not to mention most of our free-flowing air. Normally, water and oxygen aren’t a problem. The starflight drive powers the life support systems that purify and recycle the air and water, extracting oxygen from the carbon dioxide we exhale. Unfortunately, the ‘roids took care of that, too. Two different bits of cosmic rubble smashed different parts of the drive, as if to guarantee they got the job done.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” Guido asked softly from his bunk.
“Yeah,” Sparks replied.
We’d been working feverishly since the ‘roid hit, but it probably wouldn’t matter in the end. The engine wasn’t a total loss, but the damage was so severe, so comprehensive, that we didn’t have the spare parts to repair the damage. We had the equipment to manufacture any parts we didn’t have in stock, but not the time.
“What are the odds we can jury-rig something before we run out of oxygen?” Guido asked.
Silence was his answer.
It was ironic. On my last shore leave, a friend’s little boy, Jimmy, bombarded me with questions about living and working in space. One of them had to do with how long we could stay out before having to return. I told him most missions last three to five months but we always carry enough food and fuel for six months, just in case, and that the water and air can be recycled indefinitely.
But, as they say, the universe has a perverse sense of humor.
Had we lost only the starflight drive, we had enough of the other stuff to survive until we got the drive repaired. On the other hand, had we lost just the air and water it also wouldn’t have been catastrophic. Our life support system could have kept purifying and recycling the air and water we had left in the ship’s reserve tanks. It also could have extracted some extra water from the humidity in the air. We could have gotten by until we made it home.
Of course, the ‘roids knocked those options for a loop. Not only didn’t we have enough oxygen or water to last until we reached Earth, we had no way to actually get there.
“It’s too bad we can’t send out a mayday and get some help,” Guido mumbled.
“Yeah, and if wishes were horses, we could gallop home,” Sparks countered.
A faster-than-light mayday to Earth and any nearby ships would have been great. However, there were two problems with that idea. First, we knew there were no other ships in that part of the galaxy. Space is vast, and Earth had barely a hundred tesserene-powered ships of all sorts in its fleet, and none of them out in our direction. Second, and more importantly: There’s no such thing as faster-than-light communications.
Yes, the starflight drive lets us travel “faster than light” by slipping through folds in space, but that only works within the energy field the engine projects around a ship. It can’t fold space outside of the energy field; therefore any radio transmissions leaving the field were limited by the speed of light. It would have taken seventy years for a mayday to reach Earth. We were on our own the moment we left the solar system.
Guido’s question, “We’re screwed, aren’t we?” kept echoing in my mind.
We were six hundred and seventy trillion kilometers from home, with a dead starflight drive, little water, and less than three days of air. We needed a miracle and there was no cavalry out there to come to our rescue.
It was all up to us.
CHAPTER 4
Cap called a meeting in the Commons. The utter lack of ornamentation in the room presumably was intended to make it seem larger, but at the moment the walls felt like they were closing in on us. We hadn’t eaten in hours, so I prepared a light meal of sandwiches. Not surprisingly, no one seemed hungry.
Cap brought us up to date on our situation. Most alarming to me were the creases beneath Cap’s receding hairline. They were deeper than I’d ever seen them.
“Here’s how things stand: if we don’t replenish our oxygen supply somehow, we’ll be dead in less than seventy hours.”
His words hit me like a sucker punch, taking my breath away. The blood drained from Tom's and Sparks’ faces, as I’m sure it did from mine. It’s one thing to hear that you’re going to die “soon.” It’s quite another to have someone timestamp it for you.
“We lost some food in the galley strike, but not more than a couple of weeks’ supply. We still have months worth, and plenty of fuel,” Cap continued, “but none of that matters if we can’t get the engine working again to purify the air and water. Carbon dioxide levels are rising to the point where CO2 poisoning will probably kill us before the lack of oxygen does. We have to figure out a way to scrub the air we have now, and we need to find a new source of oxygen—which doesn’t seem bloody likely out here. The maneuvering thrusters can’t take us far. Consequently, we can rule out reaching a planet with an oxygen atmosphere. Any suggestions?”
Guido went first. “Could we use the pods as tugboats? You know, tow Shamu to a planet?”
This time I was the one to break the bad news. I shook my head. “Won’t work. They’re too flimsy to take the strain of towing something as massive as Shamu. Imagine two fleas trying to drag a Great Dane across a room by his whiskers.”
A heavy silence settled over the cabin.
“How fast can we peddle?” Sparks asked.
The jest earned him only a few grunts, but it lightened the mood a bit. Sparks has a knack for defusing a tense situation. This time, though, the usual twinkle was missing from his eyes. That told me better than words how worried he was. Although we’d survived the initial crisis, our prospects for continued survival looked grim.
“Not fast enough to get us home in time, I’m afraid,” Cap replied. He managed a tight smile for his old friend. “Any useful suggestions?” He looked at each of us in turn.
Silence. And then more silence. The air was heavy, and the lack of noise from the now-silent life support system made my heartbeat throb in my ears.
Finally, Guido spoke up again. “Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why can’t we just use the refinery to recycle the air? You know, pump the CO2-contaminated air into it and let it separate the air into carbon and O2? Isn’t that essentially what it does? Or maybe crack some of our water into hydrogen and oxygen?”
I responded. “It’s not a stupid question at all. Unfortunately the equipment doesn’t work that way. Believe me, I wish it was that simple.”
Then I went into lecture mode. The other guys knew how to operate the equipment, but not necessarily the fine points of how it all worked. “The refinery can only take crushed ore from a conveyor belt as input, not liquids or gasses. Waste gases produced as byproducts are sucked out of the chamber, separated into their base elements and stored for future use. Right? But there’s no way for me to pump the ship’s atmosphere directly into the chamber—which is deep in the guts of the equipment. It has to be produced by the refining process itself in order to end up in the right place at the right time. With enough time, I could probably dismantle the refinery and modify it to take a gaseous or liquid feed, but we don’t have that kind of time.”
“Oh.” Guido looked crestfallen.
The cabin was silent for several minutes. Then Guido turned to Cap. “We’re not getting home this time, are we?” Guido’s normal youthful exuberance had been dampened by the grim reality of our situation. His eyes begged the captain to disagree.
Cap grimaced. “It doesn’t look good.” He took a deep breath. “But we’ll figure something out!” he finished with determination. “Won’t we lads?”
The cabin resounded with the ring of “Aye!” from four sets of lips.
It was bravado, sure, but at the moment, that was all we had. We were all seasoned spacers—a ship with a crew as small as ours can’t afford the luxury of bringing along a rookie. Each of us had served aboard deepspace vessels for years before joining Shamu. We weren’t prone to p
anic, and we weren’t quitters, but sometimes reality doesn’t offer many options.
Other than having a knot above his right temple, just where the red hair faded into gray, Tom appeared recovered from his forceful introduction to the bulkhead earlier. I was dejectedly contemplating a discolored spot on the deck when he said, “Wouldn’t you know it? Right before this mess, I was analyzing the sensor data from one of the nearby asteroids and spotted one that looks like it might be a rich source of iron.”
“That’s great,” I said, dripping sarcasm. “At least we’ll all die with fat wallets.” I knew I was being unfair, but I was scared and frustrated. At the moment I wasn’t particularly worried about hurting his feelings.
A strained silence followed my words.
It was too bad that we wouldn’t be able to take advantage of Tom’s find, because it would have fetched us a nice bonus from the Company. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like we’d get to claim our bonuses.
Wait a minute—iron?
My head snapped up in time to see Tom’s eyes widen in realization. “Iron?” I saw that everyone else had twigged to the implications at the same time I had—including our now-sheepish geologist.
“¡Jesús Cristo! How did I miss that?”
“Don’t worry about it, Tom,” Cap said. There was a renewed fire in his eyes. “You just may have saved us all! I’ll get us to that asteroid if I have to get out and push!
“Sparks, Tom—verify the data and find us a likely extraction site! Guido, build us a working air scrubber—we’re going to need it! And it looks like we’ll have to fix at least one of the pods, too. Damn.” He shook his head in frustration. “Swede, get ready!”
* * * *
What Cap meant was for me to get the extraction and refining equipment working. Here we were on the verge of dying from lack of oxygen, and worrying about mining iron. No, we hadn’t lost our minds; our interest had nothing to do with the bonus that awaited us for the iron. In fact, we weren’t really interested in the iron itself—it’s what tends to be found with iron that had us all excited.
Asteroids rich in metals don’t form that way. They start out as rocky planets, later destroyed in some sort of cataclysm. If the planet this asteroid came from once had an oxygen-rich atmosphere, there might be hematite, magnetite, or some other form of iron oxide in the vicinity of the iron deposits. The “oxide” in iron oxide means oxygen, and for us oxygen meant survival.
We couldn’t breathe iron oxide, naturally, but it could be processed and returned to its constituent components. If we succeeded in limping over to the asteroid on maneuvering thrusters, and located enough iron oxide to do us any good, and had the time to repair one of the EVA pods to get us down onto the asteroid, and had the time to extract and process the ore, then maybe we had a chance.
Of course, without our starflight drive the refinery wasn’t presently capable of refining anything. That’s what Cap was really telling me. Somehow I had to figure out a way—before we reached the asteroid—to jury-rig the refinery to process iron oxide while running on emergency backup power. To complicate matters, whatever work-around I came up with had to be a process that wouldn’t consume the oxygen as it was released. That eliminated anything along the lines of a blast furnace.
Another problem was that normally the life support system kept the refinery from fouling the breathable air. The unit was supposed to be self-contained, but in practice it wasn’t quite. Even as we released pure oxygen into the ship’s air, we’d be polluting it somewhat. Guido had to find a way to scrub the air so we wouldn’t succumb—either to the refinery byproducts or to our own exhaled carbon dioxide—before we extracted enough oxygen.
According to Guido, in the early days of spaceflight it was common to use disposable canisters of lithium hydroxide to draw CO2 from the ship’s atmosphere. But with the advent of sophisticated regenerative life support systems, no one had used LiOH in starships for over a century. Guido was going to have to find another way, using what we had on board.
At least there was some good news in all this. The main thing was the flexibility of the refinery. It was designed to handle a wide variety of ores, using an array of techniques from electrolytic and electrochemical to high-temp furnace. Different ores have to be processed by different means, and our refinery was capable of handling most of them.
At least, once the refinery separated the O2 from the iron, it would be child’s play to divert the oxygen directly to the ventilation system.
The emergency generator automatically kicked in when the starflight drive went offline, to provide electricity to power the lights, computers, sensors, communications gear, and the like. It couldn’t supply enough power for the big stuff, though, like space folding, life support, the refinery, or full gravity and shielding. We had minimal shielding only, which wouldn’t stop meteoroids, but it would protect us from normal background radiation. We also had a tenth of a gee gravity—just enough to keep us from floating around while we made repairs to the ship.
That was the good news.
The bad news was really bad. Although the life support system cleansed the air and water, the generator could only power the water and air pumps for circulation. It was really only intended to run for a few hours at a time while the starflight drive underwent minor repairs. We had to hope it wouldn’t fail from extended use. Furthermore, what water and air we had left still circulated, but we had no way to purify them. Every time we showered or flushed a toilet, there went our drinking water. And we didn’t have much to spare.
Making matters worse was what powered the generator: thruster fuel and oxygen. As this was still early in the mission, we had plenty of fuel. The problem, naturally, was oxygen. The longer we ran the generator, the less oxygen we had to breathe. But, without the generator we had no electricity, and therefore no lights, no computers, no pumps, and so on. It was a classic screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don’t situation.
I couldn’t run the refinery at full production levels without the starflight drive, but I hoped to rig up some limited capability using the generator. The big trick was going to be getting to the asteroid in time using only maneuvering thrusters. At least we still had those. The thrusters used cheap, reliable, time-tested conventional liquid-fuel rocket technology, so they weren’t affected by the damage to the starflight drive.
They’re great for short-distance, low-speed travel—mainly for docking and maneuvering close-in around asteroids. But they’re not designed for the kind of extended use we were going to subject them to. There was a risk that one or both thrusters would fail, or that we wouldn’t be able to achieve sufficient speed to get to the asteroid in time. But we were dead anyway if we didn’t at least try. What did we have to lose?
* * * *
“Cap? I just had a thought,” Tom said. “Why don’t we take a pod over to the asteroid, extract some ore and fly back and process it while we’re fixing the starflight drive? The pods are plenty fast enough for that. That’ll save us a lot of time. We could be producing oxygen while we’re working.”
Cap shook his head. “Good thought, but I already checked the pod bay. Both pods took direct hits from several small rocks. The engine in Pod 1 is a mess, and the control panel in Pod 2 is little more than splinters. And, naturally, we can’t just put the panel from Pod 1 into Pod 2. You remember the stink I raised with the Company when they replaced our old Pod 2 with this newer model? I complained that the parts weren’t compatible with Pod 1, but.…” He shrugged. “I don’t think we can get either of them repaired soon enough to make your idea feasible. It looks like we’re stuck with Plan A.
“Keep thinking, though. Perhaps there’s a better answer that we haven’t thought of yet.”
Cap continued giving orders. “This may be putting the cart before the horse, but we also need to conserve water. So until we get the starflight drive working again, I’m canceling all showers and other nonessential water use.” We all groaned, even though we knew it was necessary.
“No fair, Cap,” said Sparks. “My bunk is right below Guido’s, and you know as well as I do, when he sweats he smells like a horse that’s ‘rode hard and put away wet!’” That got Guido a good-natured slap on the back from Tom, and chuckles or groans from the rest of us. Leave it to Sparks. He was raised on a ranch not far from Calgary, Alberta in the North American Federation; that is, before the ranch was plowed under to build high-rise housing. So I guess he knows whereof he speaks when it comes to horse sweat.
“Let’s get started, men,” Cap said softly. “There must be a way to reach that rock in time. It’s up to us to find it.”
CHAPTER 5
“I’ve pinpointed a nice concentration of hematite on A11,” Tom reported. “Now all we have to do is get it.”
Cap, Tom, and I stood hunched over an instrument console in Engineering, looking for a solution to the problem of how to limp over to the asteroid on nothing but thrusters. We’d been at it only twenty minutes, and already the stench of stale sweat permeated the room. To make matters worse, I was developing a throbbing headache from the glare of the overhead lights on the console.
“Easier said than done, mate,” Cap replied. “Right, then. We’re only 6,458 klicks from salvation. There has to be a way to get from here to there.” He idly scratched his cheek. “We’ve got…what?…maybe sixty-four hours of breathable air left in the ship, and another five in our suit tanks. Call it sixty-nine hours in all. We’ll need a couple of hours to set up the extractor, and several hours more to extract and process enough ore to produce the oxygen we need. That takes us back down to sixty-four hours or so to reach the asteroid.”
I nodded in agreement. “Sounds about right.”
The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative Page 37
