by Britt Ringel
* * *
Ten minutes after Brooke’s declaration, the entire crew gathered on the bridge. Truesworth described the events leading up to the freighter’s latest malfunction and then Lochlain summarized the effects of the failures. “Essentially, what started in the primary navigation array buffers cascaded into a general systems failure inside the entire navigation database. Not only did a lot of hardware fry but it also corrupted most of the software that interfaces with the sensing equipment.”
Lingenfelter, seated at the sensor console, simply stared at the captain with her mouth covered.
Naslund timidly raised a hand. “Does this mean we can’t see outside or steer the ship?”
Lochlain looked to Brooke for an answer. Her head was down, attention consumed by her datapad. When he grew tired of waiting, he shook his head. “No, the sensors are back online and the helm is functional. Thrusters remain operational and both our tunnel and conventional drives are unaffected. However, the navigation suite is fried. Sensors and navigation won’t talk to each other. What this means is that even though we can steer, we can’t navigate. We have no idea where to steer.”
Naslund’s mouth twisted slightly. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Casper,” Lingenfelter said, “think of it as flying an aircar with paint covering the wall screen. The aircar works just fine but you have no idea where you are and no idea where you’re going.”
“Okay,” he replied, “but we’re in a tunnel. There’s only one direction.”
“Yes and no,” Lingenfelter equivocated.
Lochlain pressed the fingers of each hand together to form a large circle. “This is the tunnel we’re in, Casper. Yes it goes one direction but there’s a lot of space inside the tunnel.” He held up the circle so he was looking at Naslund through it. “Now, somewhere at the end of the tunnel, inside this vast circle, is a tiny dot that is our exit point into Carinae. We have to fly through that dot at the same time we activate our tunnel drive to generate an effect that will drop us into normal space.”
“Dives are a matter of timing and location,” Lingenfelter stated as she nodded at Lochlain’s explanation. “Just like how we have to be at a tunnel point in normal space when we activate the tunnel drive, we have to be at one inside tunnel space to get out.”
“I think I get it,” Naslund answered. “That’s what the professors meant by the four possible outcomes of a dive, right?”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “The first possibility is you activate your tunnel drive not only at the wrong time, that is before you reach or after you pass through a tunnel point, but also activate the drive at the wrong location, say nine light-seconds to port or eight light-seconds starboard of the tunnel point. Either way, the drive generates the effect but it’s not close enough to open up an exit.”
“The second outcome,” Lochlain described further, “is you activate at the right time but the wrong location in the plane of the tunnel point perpendicular to your approach, resulting in no exit dive. The third is activating while properly lined up with a tunnel point as you approach but at the wrong time and you end up generating a tunnel effect either too far ahead or too far behind the tunnel point. Again, no exit dive.”
“And finally,” Truesworth finished, “the last outcome is that you activate precisely while lined up with the tunnel point and right at the moment you’re sailing through it which results in a successful dive out of tunnel space.”
“And right now,” Lochlain said grimly, “without navigation, we have no way of knowing where we are in the tunnel.”
Naslund looked down briefly at his chronometer. “We know when, don’t we? We’re thirty-nine hours and six minutes into the tunnel. We dive at hour one hundred, right?”
Lochlain glanced again to Brooke for help. She was still focused on her datapad, but offered an answer. “Approximately, but that’s not nearly accurate enough. Over the duration of the entire 100-hour trip, t-space’s properties combine with navigational drift to create errors such that we can’t just set a clock at the start of a long trip and have the right timing at the end. When we sail through the exit point at a tenth the speed of light, we’ll have about a two-second margin of error or risk activating too late or too early.”
Naslund deflated as full understanding of Zanshin’s predicament took hold.
“Plus,” Brooke reminded them as she tore her eyes away from her datapad, “we only have enough charge in the fuel cells to power the tunnel drive once. If we miss, we won’t have the fuel to power a second attempt.”
Lingenfelter looked horrified at the revelation. “Why did we cut our power so close?”
“Ships do it all the time, Elease,” Truesworth explained gently. “If we missed our tunnel point on the first attempt, we’d sail past the exit before we could generate a second effect anyway and there’s never been an instance of a ship missing a tunnel exit and coming about to find it a second time.”
“Oh.” Lingenfelter slumped and she cast her gaze downward. Her voice was barely audible. “Is it wrong to say I’m relieved this didn’t happen on my watch?”
Brooke chuckled slightly. “This wasn’t anyone’s fault. We were just extremely unlucky.”
“Fatally unlucky,” Naslund corrected sullenly.
“No,” Lochlain insisted. “We’ve been extraordinarily lucky.”
As one, Zanshin’s crew looked at him cynically.
His response was pure optimism. “This malfunction happened at hour thirty-eight. As Casper has so ably pointed out, this gives us sixty-two hours to come up with a solution.” He pushed off the captain’s console, strode confidently to the center of the small bridge and looked expectantly at his deck officers. “On duty or off duty, we’re all going to work tirelessly until we come up with an idea that saves our ship.” He lifted his hand and flashed two fingers in sequence. “When do we activate our tunnel drive and where do we need to be inside the tunnel when we trigger it? When and where. That’s all we need to solve.”
“But we’re blind,” Naslund protested lightly.
“Technically not blind,” Truesworth said with a smile. “The sensors work just fine. We just can’t marry what they see to navigation.”
“Exactly,” Lochlain said, eyeing each of his crew in turn. He bolstered his voice with an unshakeable confidence. “We’re going to come up with a solution. I know we will. We’re going to work harder than we ever have before and solve this problem because all of our lives depend upon it.” He nodded a final affirmation. “Give it some thought. Stick to our established duty schedule until we have ideas to act on. You’re dismissed until our next anti-rad dose which is in…” He glanced to the compartment’s chronometer. “It’s in a little over five hours from now. I’ll see everyone inside the mess at 06:00.”
The group broke apart. Truesworth remained on the bridge but the rest of the crew returned to their quarters to search for solutions or what little sleep they could. When Lochlain entered his quarters behind Brooke, she turned to him with a dismal expression. “Reece, Zanshin suffered another malfunction during the night.”
“What else?” he asked in a dire tone. “Isn’t having the entire nav system die enough?”
She inhaled deeply before continuing. “The radiation is not only wearing down our navigation shield but it’s also degrading the shielding around the power core.”
Lochlain’s eyes bulged. “Are we going to lose containment?”
“No, at least we won’t before we hit the exit point. The power core shield is too compact and too robust to die that quickly. But with every passing second, Zanshin is losing her top end power potential.”
Lochlain entered their bedroom as he asked, “Can you say that in non-engineer speak, Mercer?”
She paced after him. “With a fully capable power core and core shield, I could generate one hundred percent power. Of course, Zanshin’s power core is already old and I’d be wary of pushing it over ninety-five percent anyway. If I push the core past that,
I risk letting the reaction escape the core’s shield and we lose containment and lots of other things happen, ending with us blowing up.”
“I understand that much.” Lochlain moved to the bed and collapsed wearily onto the mattress.
Brooke treaded lightly around the bed to join him. “What’s happening now is that the nebula is not only assaulting our normal navigation shield but the shield holding the power core reaction together. Slowly but surely, it’s chipping away at that shield and killing it right along with the nav shield. For now, it’s just degrading a potential we couldn’t realize because of our ninety-five percent practical cap but it’s going to get worse and eventually drop us below that limit.”
“How bad will it get by the time we reach the exit?” Lochlain asked. He let a long sigh escape his lips. “If we can even tell when we’re at the exit.”
Brooke grimaced. “If it’s a steady decline, I’ll be limited to about sixty-four percent of maximum power.” Her frown twisted as she delivered her prediction. “It’s not going to remain a stable drop though. It could stop entirely and be fine or it could drop more rapidly. This is one of the reasons why nobody wants to be in t-space inside this nebula.”
Lochlain placed his forearm over his face to cover his eyes. “I made a terrible mistake,” he admitted.
She reached out to him and wrapped long fingers around his hand. “No,” she said softly, “you were faced with a terrible choice. You made the best decision you could.”
He turned his head to face her. “How can I possibly tell them I’m sorry?” he asked miserably. “How do you apologize for killing your own crew?”
Brooke pulled his hand to her lips and kissed it tenderly. “Oh, love, don’t think like that. We all knew what we were getting into and we all had a say in the matter. Any one of us could’ve walked right off the ship if we’d wanted.”
“They should have.”
“They made their own decisions just like I did.” She squeezed her eyes shut and gently shook her head. “I’m not letting you do this alone.”
“But they trusted me and their reward is going to be an eternal trip in tunnel space.”
Brooke’s shoulders began to shudder lightly. Her hazel eyes lit up and the corners of her lips turned upward behind the intertwined hands pressed to her mouth. Her whole body shook as she started to giggle and she let her hand drop to the bed. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said, “it won’t be eternal because we’ll be dead as soon as we run out of anti-rad.” Her tittering morphed into real laughter.
Lochlain felt his spirits lift despite the situation. He was facing death but at least she was at his side. “Oh, well, in that case…” He felt his heart swell as he looked at the remarkable woman beside him. “I love you, Mercer.”
Her lips pressed to his mouth mere moments after her own reply.
Chapter 38
“Skål!” Lingenfelter forced the bitter fluid into her mouth and slammed its polymer bag down on the kitchen island. She pounded her palm against the empty bag twice more while forcing herself to swallow. The Svean finished her ritual by chugging the glass of water next to the bag. “Yuck!” she finally cried out with a smile. “I can’t believe we now have to do this every five hours.”
It was 17:00 and Zanshin was in her fifty-fifth hour inside t-space. The freighter had crested the metaphorical hill and was over halfway through her journey. Since the crew’s last dose of anti-rad, the ship’s hardpoint cameras at the fourth and ninth cargo containers had joined the lengthy list of non-essential repairs needed. Both had perished during the last several hours along with half a dozen other non-vital ship systems. Among them was Zanshin’s water reclamation unit but the system easily held enough potable water to last the remainder of the trip. The hangar containment field generator’s demise had been far more pressing, if only to safeguard the open deck cutout leading to the Engineering Department. Brooke and Naslund had spent most of the afternoon troubleshooting and repairing the generator. Everyone knew the problems would only get more severe. As Zanshin sailed deeper, the nebula’s intensity increased ten-fold in tunnel space.
“Sorry, Elease,” Truesworth said as he watched her shudder. “We’ve entered the second radiation band and the medical protocol calls for halving the time between our doses.”
“I know, Jack,” she sighed. She collected the empty bags from everyone. “But you’d think with us not even knowing if we’re going to find the tunnel exit that we could forgo the ‘torture of many shots’ regimen.”
Naslund chortled. “Hey, I’m still counting on you to come up with some super-solution that saves us.” He patted Truesworth’s shoulder. “Just make sure you keep up on the sensor work so we can tell when we have to start drinking this stuff every two and a half hours.”
Lingenfelter shuddered. “When is that?”
“At hour eighty-two, when we hit the threshold of the final radiation band,” Truesworth answered.
“We’ll have to do that dosage for the last eighteen hours of the trip,” Lochlain added.
Lingenfelter chewed her lower lip as she walked to the recycler. She stuffed the empty bags into the unit. “Eighteen hours… a shot of anti-rad every two and half hours…” she mumbled. “Ugh, that’s eight shots of this crap in less than a day. I may never drink another shot again.”
“Heresy,” Truesworth chided.
* * *
“Skål!” Lingenfelter downed another dose of medicine and slammed its container down on the counter. Her hand went for her water glass.
It was 22:00, the end of Lochlain’s duty shift. Another five hours had expired along with the Number Six hardpoint retention rings and the portal motor for the forward port hold. Both casualties were deemed to be non-essential repairs. When the Number Four Toland propulsion drive failed however, there was a far greater sense of urgency.
“How’s the drive coming?” Lochlain queried from his usual position behind the kitchen island. With the crew on the opposite side of the counter, he could have passed for a bartender.
“We’ve already got it fixed,” Naslund answered proudly and tapped his chest. “I guessed right on the very first troubleshoot attempt.”
“What was it?”
Naslund’s chest deflated somewhat. “It was a problem with the Fergnati shift HIC board. Irreparable. We had to replace the entire circuit board but at least we had the part in inventory.”
“And our navigation shield?” Lochlain asked. “How’s it holding up?”
Brooke pulled out her datapad and showed him the screen. “Degrading at about projected levels. We’re actually a little better than predicted because of the extra shielding we started with two days ago. I’d still recommend that we follow the standard anti-radiation protocol even though we’re a little ahead of the game.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Lochlain agreed. “It’s a good thing we can still tell when we enter the different radiation bands.”
In front of him, Lingenfelter’s face lit up. “Hey!” she cried out excitedly. She smacked the side of her head as her blue eyes widened. “I may have just came up with a way to solve our timing problem!” She bounced as she fished out her datapad and placed it on the kitchen island for all to see. The crew gathered tightly around her as nimble fingers slid gracefully over its surface. She brought up a blank screen and quickly drew a crude tube. “Okay,” she prefaced, “we have no idea exactly where in the tunnel we are or precisely how long we’ve been in it.”
“That accurately summarizes the problem,” Lochlain intoned.
She smiled brightly. “But we do! Thanks to Zanshin’s sensor arrays, we know how much radiation is hitting us and we can compare those levels to the Carinae tunnel charts to determine which radiation band we’re in.”
Truesworth leaned forward and his hand hovered over the datapad. “How does this help us?”
She swatted his hand away and brought up the tunnel chart. “Don’t you get it? Because of your sensors, we know that when we hit ‘X’
level of radiation we’ve entered a new radiation band. And thanks to my nav charts, we know exactly where these bands begin! You said that near the end of the tunnel, we need to switch to a dose every two and a half hours.” She tabbed to a second navigation chart. “But we also know that the third radiation band begins at hour eighty-two.”
Lochlain inhaled sharply. “My God, she’s right.” He quickly consulted his own datapad. “Look. The chart lists the final leg of the trip as eighteen hours, seven minutes and twenty-one seconds long.”
“Captain, that’s only an estimate,” Truesworth cautioned.
“But it’s based on data collected from the Federation pathfinder ships that navigate this tunnel to maintain the charts,” Brooke argued.
“Wait a minute,” Naslund interjected. “Didn’t I basically suggest this approach about twenty hours ago?”
Brooke shook her head. “You suggested basing our estimate from our entrance point. Elease is saying we can fix our location along the tunnel at the last radiation threshold. It’s a much closer starting point than what we have right now.”
Lingenfelter rapidly drew a line on her sketch to split her tunnel into halves. “Here’s the third threshold.” She placed an “X” directly over the line. “So, when we hit the final phase of the anti-rad therapy, we have a known position along the length of the tunnel.” She looked at Lochlain. “How much error do you think will be added over the course of eighteen hours, seven minutes and twenty-one seconds?”
Lochlain hemmed. “Depends on the variability in the tunnel space we sail through but, regardless, it’s a hell of a lot less error than what’s built up over the duration of the entire trip.” He scanned the navigator’s datapad and pressed his finger over the “X.” “Okay, we potentially have our when. Now we need to solve where.” He looked to his crew. “How do we get ourselves centered inside the tunnel so we’re actually passing through the tunnel point when we generate the effect?”
“Can we somehow use the radiation levels again?” Naslund asked feebly. “I mean, the way tunnel space wraps, isn’t the radiation highest near the walls of the tunnel and weakest in the center? Can’t we just compare saturation levels and use it as a guide?”
