The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative

by Mark Terence Chapman

  My external tanks had run dry eight minutes previously. I tossed the EVA pack aside so I’d be more comfortable—not that it mattered much at that point. I was on internal bladder air now. It had a higher concentration of O2 than Earth-normal—nearly forty percent oxygen. Such a high percentage of oxygen extended the breathability of the bladder air by a few minutes. Not enough to help much in this situation. On the other hand, where there’s life there’s still a glimmer of hope.

  * * * *

  00:03:09

  It was clear that we weren’t going to make it. I had another three minutes of air left according to my suit’s heads-up display. I was sure the others were just as low, but I didn’t have the heart to ask. We all sat on the floor facing one another, even though there were perfectly good seats available. The air in my suit was already rank and difficult to breathe. I tried my damnedest to think of something else to do. Unfortunately, I was out of ideas and we were out of options.

  * * * *

  00:00:00

  My suit air was gone. Time was up.

  I opened my faceplate; there was no air left in the suit anyway. The refinery had finally started producing free oxygen, but would it be too late for us? Cap and Sparks appeared to be unconscious already, their facemasks open. The others couldn’t be far behind.

  Goodbye my friends. Goodbye Helga.

  I wasn’t normally a churchgoer; but if ever there was a time to pray, this was it. No second chances, no do-overs, no mulligans. My head throbbed and my chest burned, my vision grayed at the edges.

  It was growing dark, so dark. So….

  CHAPTER 8

  I coughed, choking, and sucked in a chest full of air—still foul, but apparently breathable. Obviously I wasn’t dead. At least, I didn’t think so. Does the hereafter smell like refinery byproducts? If I was dead, why was my head pounding? Why were my lungs burning?

  “Swede! Are you still with us?” Guido stood over me, worry painted on his face.

  I grimaced, my sinuses still stinging from the jolt of wakeup spray he’d hit me with. “Yeah, yeah, I’m still here. How about the others?”

  “They’re all fine. Cap’s the only one still out, but he seems to be breathing normally. I’ll check on him next.”

  “So who woke up first?”

  “Well, I never quite passed out,” Guido had a boyish look of embarrassment. “When the sensors indicated the air was safe to breathe again, I went around reviving everyone else.”

  “Swede, you old dog!” Cap shouted from the other end of Engineering as he stood, “You did it! You really saved our asses!” Evidently he wasn’t going to need Guido’s tender ministrations after all.

  I shook my head and instantly regretted it. “Ow. Not true. Without Guido’s air scrubber and Tom’s quick-connect hardpoint we wouldn’t have survived long enough for me to do anything. And—” I shrugged. “Everyone contributed.”

  Cap nodded. “You’re absolutely right. It most certainly was a team effort.” With that, Cap surveyed the room. “Men, I’m proud of you all. You really pulled through when it counted. I know we still have some housecleaning to do to get everything shipshape, but let’s get the O2 distributed shipwide and then meet in two hours for dinner and a bit of celebration. Drinks are on me!”

  Cap’s announcement drew shouts and applause from the rest of us. As I said, liquor was strictly forbidden aboard a Company ship. I guess they didn’t want drunken crews crashing into supernovas, or something. On the other hand, Cap knew what was best for his crew as well as he knew the regs. And he knew there are times when a crew needs to blow off some steam. Right then certainly qualified. For that reason, he kept a few bottles of Scotch locked in his cabin, along with one magnum of fine French champagne that we used to toast successful missions the last night out.

  Most farming on Earth was limited to only the staples, but somehow luxury items made from farm crops, such as liquor, managed to survive and prosper. Normally, beverages like those in Cap’s cabin would have been beyond the means of a simple EXP-4 captain, but Cap had a brother-in-law in the liquor business who obtained them for Cap through the “dark gray” market, without paying the obscene luxury taxes the Republic of Europe imposed.

  I’d been on seventeen missions with Cap before this one, and we’d polished off seventeen magnums. I was determined to sample the eighteenth.

  I had a feeling this one would taste the sweetest—although not half as sweet as all the fresh O2 that was finally flooding the ship.

  * * * *

  Sparks called from the bridge half an hour later. “Cap, I hate to kill the mood, but we still have a slight air leak from the patch in the galley. It’s no big deal, but someone needs to take care of it. We can’t afford to lose any more air.”

  Cap was with me in Engineering.

  “That was my patch, Sparks,” Cap replied. “I’ll go finish what I started. No rest for the wicked. Come to think of it, we’ve only got seals on the inner hull; we still need to slap patches over the holes on the outer hull. Swede and Tom, can you two take care of them when we’ve got some O2 for the EVA packs?”

  “You got it, Cap!” Tom acknowledged from the bridge.

  I nodded. “Sure thing.”

  * * * *

  Ding-ding-ding

  Cap tapped his stainless steel mug—containing eighteen-year old single-malt Scotch—with a dinner knife for attention. It seems sacrilegious to drink whiskey or champagne from a mug, but fine crystal wouldn’t last long in space.

  Cap paused for a moment as the joking and chattering died down. “Gentlemen, a toast: To the finest crew I have ever had the privilege to serve with!”

  That drew a chorus of “Hear, hear!” from the rest of us.

  “And thanks to Swede for another fine meal.” My world-famous reconstituted dehydrated veal scaloppini earned smiles and raised mugs from the other diners. Of course, as Guido pointed out, it wasn’t like any veal scaloppini his Sicilian mama ever made!

  “I don’t know of another crew that could have accomplished what you four did in such a short time. It’s a tribute to your courage, your intelligence and your downright mule-headedness.” Chuckles all around. “We pulled together and did what we had to do. It appears that between the scrubber and the refinery, our oxygen problems are over, at least for now.

  “However, let’s not forget that we still have other problems. For one thing, we’re critically short on water. That wouldn’t be too serious a problem if we still had a working starflight drive, which is problem number two. We still have no way to get home.”

  The former boisterousness of the room changed to something much more somber as his message sank in.

  “Guido, we need a supply of clean drinking water. See what you can come up with.”

  Guido nodded curtly.

  “While Guido’s doing that, the rest of us will be working on fabricating parts and repairing the damn drive. But that can wait until oh-eight-hundred hours. For now, have another drink, get a good night’s sleep, eat a hearty breakfast, and then get to work!”

  We all cheered again and set about polishing off Cap’s bottle of single-malt.

  * * * *

  Aside from the complete thruster assembly, we also carried mechanical parts, photonic parts, optronic parts, and even electronic parts for some of the older gear. Shamu had been in service for over eighty years, after all, and she contained a hodgepodge of gear dating back almost that far. But there are components that simply never fail, or that are too big to replace by hand, which meant we didn’t carry replacements. It’s simple economics. We couldn’t carry spares for everything. We brought only the essential parts, and we had a small yet efficient machine shop for fabricating whatever else we needed. The computerized machines contained templates that automated the manufacture of all the intricate parts, simplifying the process considerably.

  Of course, no one envisioned having to replace hundreds of parts at one time. Yet, that’s how the micrometeoroid impact left us. Most of the
parts weren’t a big deal to make, because they were fairly standard. It was simply a matter of time for us to create them all from the source materials we carried for that purpose. Some parts take hours to manufacture to extremely fine tolerances. Others require combining exotic materials under specialized conditions of temperature and humidity in a clean-room environment. The fabricator could handle whatever macroscale parts we threw at it, and the nanocompositor could build the smaller parts, but it couldn’t all be done overnight. It was going to take days to dismantle sections of the drive and fabricate every replacement part we needed, and days more to reassemble everything we could manage by hand, then test and test again.

  After all, it wouldn’t do to activate the starflight drive and have it turn us into the galaxy’s newest black hole.

  The good news was that we hadn’t used as much thruster fuel as we were afraid we’d have to. The bad news was that our reserves were down by more than two-thirds. The remainder had to be shared by Shamu’s thrusters, the pods, and the generator. Consequently, we had to be frugal with our thruster usage the rest of the way. The shortage of thruster fuel wouldn’t inhibit our ability to get home or even to dart about the Richelieu system, assuming we ever got the starflight drive working again. On the other hand, it did curb our ability to get in close to asteroids, or to maneuver in orbit around moons.

  Still, there was a universe of minerals to find out there and Earth’s future was riding on its coattails. Besides, our chances at big fat bonuses depended on it!

  * * * *

  “Swede, how are we coming with the oxygen?”

  “Just about done, Cap. We should have the ship’s reserve tanks topped off in another, oh, twenty to thirty minutes. Of course, we don’t have any spare nitrogen, so if we get holed again and have to use our reserves we’ll be breathing almost pure O2 until we can find some nitrogen somewhere.”

  “Good work. I don’t even want to think about running into another swarm! So how much iron do we have so far to take home with us?”

  “Right now…just a sec…448.3 metric tons. We should be near 500 tons by the time we finish filling up on O2. Do you want to keep processing hematite? We still have three empty holds and plenty more room in number one.”

  “Keep processing, but only until we fill up CH1 or exhaust the vein. There may be even more valuable minerals out there to be found. No sense filling up on hamburger until we find out there isn’t any steak in this system. When we’re done working on the starflight drive, we’ll decide what to do next.”

  “You got it, Cap.”

  * * * *

  I may have oversimplified earlier what repairing the drive entailed. It’s true that we had to replace many pieces that were destroyed by the micrometeoroid. What I failed to mention, however, is that there were other parts that we couldn’t replace—or, to be more precise, that we couldn’t replace. Confusing? Okay, here goes:

  As huge as the starflight drive is—larger than forty-five groundcars, stacked three high by three wide by five long—some parts are too massive for one man to remove or replace, while other parts are too small to be seen with the naked eye. In fact, there are subassemblies that are too tiny to see without a high-powered electron microscope. Nanobots, the largest of which are the size of single-cell amoebas, roam about inside the drives like peripatetic mechanics—try to say that three times quickly—doing whatever they’re programmed to do.

  Of course, that’s old news to many people. After all, nanobots have been used in medical science for over a century. It’s their ability to function inside the human body to clear out blocked arteries, repair damaged nerves, excise tumors, remove scar tissue, and create new neuronal pathways around damaged areas of the brain that has allowed people to live longer and healthier lives. And that extended lifetime was largely to blame for Earth’s overpopulation and shortage of raw materials.

  As I said, there are some parts that we couldn’t fix, which is why we had nanobots to help us. The ‘bots used in Engineering were designed to do only one thing—seek out clogged or damaged equipment of a particular type and clean, repair, or replace it. Naturally, that meant there had to be unique custom-designed ‘bots for each type of job. All we had to do was program the nanocompositor to release the correct types of ‘bots into the drive at specific access ports and they’d zero in on whatever needed correcting. They’d take care of the specific problem, and then return to home base for reuse at a later time.

  What complicated our repair was that neither one part, nor even many parts, simply failed. Instead, what happened was the ‘roids smashed through the drive at several hundred kilometers per second. Not only did they destroy hundreds of components, they actually vaporized much of the constituent materials used in the manufacture of those parts—turning metals, composites, superconductors and rare-earth minerals into a superheated plasma that permeated much of the rest of the drive. These vaporized materials then cooled and deposited on other internal parts that were initially undamaged by the impact. The result was shorted connections, clogged microscopic gaps, unwanted friction, and other problems. And because the drive is enormous, we couldn’t simply disassemble it, clean all the parts, and put it all back together again. It would have taken an orbital docking facility to remove and repair the entire engine. Naturally, we didn’t have access to one out in the Richelieu system.

  On the other hand, the nanobots were so small they could roam at will throughout the drive, cleaning up any vaporized material that was where it shouldn’t be. The ‘bots would be done cleaning up the microscopic mess the ‘roids left behind long before we humans were finished replicating all of the macroscopic parts that had to be hand-fitted into the drive.

  * * * *

  “Okay, Tom, I’ve got the next batch of ‘bots ready to go for their LARs. This should be the last of ‘em.”

  LARs were locate-and-repair missions.

  “Thanks, Swede,” Tom replied. Then with his best pseudo upper-crust English accent, “You may release the hounds!” I said his best accent, but a Spaniard speaking Universal and putting on an English accent is still a pretty funny combination.

  “Done!” I keyed the intercom, still chuckling, “Cap, the last ‘bots are away.”

  “Good. How long ‘til the repairs are complete?”

  “Two, maybe three more hours for the ‘bots, depending on how widespread the vaporization effect is. Guido and Sparks are still working on reinstalling the interlink manifold. After that, all that’s left is rebalancing the injector matrix.”

  “So we’re looking at…what?...late tomorrow before the drive’s operational?” Cap asked.

  “Right. Assuming we don’t run into any serious setbacks, we should be ready to run diagnostics in the morning. If the diags don’t find any problems, we move on to testing and fine-tuning. That should take most of the rest of the day.”

  “Good work, lads. Keep me apprised.”

  * * * *

  “Damn it! The simulator says everything should be working at a hundred percent efficiency. So why are we seeing a fourteen percent loss of power on the actual drive? What are we missing, Tom?”

  “I don’t know, Swede. Estoy seguro de que es algo sencillo. Oops! Sorry. I said I’m sure it’s something simple. We’ve been over this six times already and I’ve tried everything I can think of. I can’t figure out what we’re overlooking. Are you sure the ‘bots cleaned up all of the debris in the engine?”

  “You know they did. We’ve triple-checked that. The engine’s clean as a whistle, probably cleaner than when we left Earth. After all, we’ve got a lot of brand new parts we didn’t have before. Besides, the diags say everything is working within specs. We’ve got to be overlooking something—but what?”

  “All right. Let’s step back from it for a minute and analyze the problem. We know the intermix is optimal.”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “And we know the injector flow balance is perfect.”

  “Right again.”


  “The temporal slip rate is nominal.”

  “Correctimundo.”

  “The grid inversion is within specs, the cross-dimensional circuits check out, and the Worovski Junctions are working correctly.” Tom was beginning to drone.

  “Check, check, and check.”

  “Then the drive has to be working at near one hundred percent efficiency.”

  “Absolutely right. But it’s not.” My back was beginning to ache from bending over the damn manifold for the last hour and the acrid smell emanating from the generator was playing havoc with my sinuses. Until we got the drive running again, we had no life support, which meant nothing was cleaning the air, which meant it stank.

  None of this was helping my mood, but I wasn’t about to run the starflight drive at more than idle speed until we got the glitches ironed out. No telling what might fail catastrophically.

  “Then I give up,” Tom said. “How about if I give it a good swift kick?”

  I snorted. “If you think your foot can stand it, go ahead. It’s not going to affect the drive any.”

  Tom flashed a crooked grin. “Well then, what do you say we just try another cold restart, just for the hell of it?”

  “We haven’t changed anything since the last restart, so I don’t see how it’s going to help, but why not? Just a sec.” I tripped the appropriate control on the console and watched the readout. “Okay, restart complete. What’s the reading now?”

  “98.79 percent.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” I keyed the intercom. “Cap?”

  “Go ahead, Swede. You get that power loss rectified yet?”

  “Yeah. Finally. Apparently the galactic gremlins were having a little fun with us.”

  “Ha! It’s not the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”