Frontiers 07 - The Expanse

by Ryk Brown

  “What was?”

  “The first problem was their cargo shuttles. They weren’t stored inside. They were docked outside the ship.”

  “For the entire journey?”

  “All fifty-two years.”

  “I thought she had a top speed of two point five?” Nathan wondered.

  “She was so heavily loaded that they decided to run at half speed to increase their range and still have enough propellant to decelerate and make orbit at the end of the journey. By the time they arrived, one shuttle was inoperable and the other one had some damage as well. They were able to scavenge parts from one to repair the other, but that left them with only one shuttle to move all the cargo and passengers to the surface.”

  “Well, it would take a lot longer, but one shuttle would still do the trick,” Nathan said.

  “Unless your one shuttle crashes before you’ve off-loaded even half your cargo,” Jessica told him.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Like I said, doomed from the start. But wait, it gets worse. By that time, they had about two hundred people on the surface, and at least some of their equipment. The plan was for them to make do with what they had and try to repair the crashed shuttle. They realized that if given a few years, they might be able to get the shuttle flying again. But with winter approaching, they needed to concentrate on survival. Captain Dubnyk and his remaining crew went back into stasis to conserve consumables aboard the Jasper, with the system set to wake the captain in one year to check on the colonists. It would also wake him if something on the ship needed attention.”

  “So there were three hundred colonists, half their gear, and the Jasper’s crew, all waiting in stasis in orbit,” Nathan said.

  “Yes, sir. The first winter was rough, far colder than they had expected based on the planetary survey performed a hundred years earlier by some corporate probe. About twenty people died. When the captain woke up a year later, he realized that it might take them longer than expected to repair the shuttle. He continued putting himself in stasis for a year at a time. This went on for about ten years. Every winter was brutal, but the colony survived. Birth rates were poor, and the colony was barely able to maintain their population, but they had managed to develop some basic refining and fabrication capabilities and were actually making some progress with the shuttle repairs. Then one year, Dubnyk came out of stasis, and nobody answered. He used the optical sensors to scan for the colony, but it was gone, wiped out by a massive lava flow. He found a message in the ship’s comm logs from the colony. A massive volcano had erupted, forcing them to abandon their camp and move farther north. They promised to re-contact him once they established a new settlement.”

  “What about the shuttle? They couldn’t have moved it?” Nathan asked.

  “No, it was lost in the lava flows. They scavenged what they could, like sensors, a fusion reactor, and comm gear. But the shuttle itself was gone.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Dubnyk and the rest of them were stuck on the Jasper with no way down and not enough propellant to go anywhere else.”

  “So what happened to the colonists?”

  “Dubnyk made contact with them the next time he came out of stasis, but the news was grim. They had moved as far north as they dared, but all the ash the volcano dumped into the atmosphere was changing the climate, making it colder.”

  “They were going into an ice age?” Nathan wondered.

  “That’s what Dubnyk thought. One of the colonists also thought that the planet might have already been on its way to a cold cycle, and the volcano just made matters worse. They built some pretty hefty shelters and survived for another decade. Dubnyk came out of stasis every year to check in on them, but he could see that their numbers were dwindling and their spirits were fading. Eventually, no one answered his calls. He could still see the energy of their fusion reactor at their northern colony site even though it was buried in the snow. So he switched to five-year cycles, hoping their comm-unit had simply broken. But every time he woke up and checked, it was the same thing: no messages, no signs of life. Only more snow. Once the fusion reactor’s signal disappeared, he simply gave up. He activated the emergency beacon and put himself under indefinitely, to be awakened only when the ship needed his attention. Eventually, the ship lost pressure and the onboard systems refused to awaken anyone into a vacuum.”

  “Yeah, that would suck.”

  “Literally.” Jessica sighed. “Like I said, doomed from the get-go.”

  “That must have been hard to watch, Jess. I’m sorry.”

  “Actually, there wasn’t any video. The captain converted all his earlier videos to text reports once he realized he could be stuck there a long time, I guess to save storage space and power. All I did was read a bunch of short log entries. Depressing as all hell, but at least I didn’t have to watch anyone freak out on video.”

  “So Percival knows nothing about this,” Nathan commented.

  “No, sir. As far as I can tell, he and the rest of the colonists were in stasis the entire time. The only contradictory information is the backup time log on Mister Percival’s stasis pod, and that could just be a system failure. I mean, it was in operation for a thousand years. I’m pretty sure the warranty expired on it a long time ago.”

  “I’ve got Vlad looking into that, seeing if there’s a way to make it drop a chunk of time or run more slowly—anything that would explain the two-hundred year discrepancy.”

  “Would you like me to tell him?” Jessica asked.

  “That’s okay. I should be the one to tell him,” Nathan insisted.

  “If there’s nothing else, I’m going to take a shower and get some rack time. I’ve been staring at the damned data pad for so long I’m getting cross-eyed.”

  “Thanks, Jess.” Nathan watched her exit, wondering how any one expedition could be so unfortunate. Many times he had thought their own string of events to be unfortunate, but they were still alive. They were also nearly home.

  * * *

  “Uh, Josh, we have a little problem,” Loki reported. After a few moments, he reached forward over his console and tapped Josh’s helmet. “Josh!”

  “What?”

  “We have a problem.”

  “What? I’m awake. What is it?”

  “There are five moons orbiting the target world, not four.”

  “Wow, Loki, that is bad. What are we to do?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Loki chided. “There must of have been a fifth moon hidden behind the planet. It’s my fault. We should have waited longer before plotting a course.”

  “So it’s a fifth moon; big deal,” Josh said. “Are we going to crash into it?”

  “No,” Loki admitted, “but we’re going to fly uncomfortably close to it.”

  “How big is it? Is it going to pull us in?”

  “It’s pretty small, actually. It’s probably an asteroid that was either trapped in orbit, or they parked it there.”

  “Like the Corinairans did?” Josh wondered.

  “It’s possible, but it seems a little big for that.”

  “The Corinairans hollowed them out before they parked them in orbit, right?”

  “Yeah, so?” Loki wondered.

  “If these guys do the same, then it won’t have much mass. Maybe it won’t pull us in.”

  “But if it does, we’re going to need to do a burn to keep our distance. That close to the planet, someone is bound to notice the sudden thermal signature,” Loki warned.

  “Can we do a burn now and change course to stay away from it?”

  “No way, we’re still too close to that third ship, the one that is moving out of the system. They’d see us for sure.”

  “If they’re even looking.”

  “Good point, but now that we’re close enough to use opticals on her, I’m pretty sure she’s a warship, just like the two we passed on the way in.”

  Josh studied the plots on his display. “Okay, if we burn now we’re screwed for s
ure. We’d have to make a run for it and try to duck behind something to jump away unseen.”

  “And we don’t know what their maximum acceleration is or if they have fighters and what their maximum acceleration is,” Loki reminded him.

  “Yeah, so we don’t even know if we can outrun them,” Josh said. “So better we wait and do the burn at the last minute. Then if they do come after us, we’re already in position to quickly put either the moon or the planet itself between us and them and jump away before they can catch up to us. Fast or not, it has got to take them some time to get up to speed, and we’re already doing point three. Can you run that, Loki?”

  “I’m doing it now,” Loki announced as he keyed variables into his navigation computer. “The captain never has us going more than a quarter of our maximum sub-light speed through a system under normal conditions, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I’ll assume those ships do the same.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s all I’ve got to go on, Josh. You got any better ideas?”

  “Nope.”

  “They’re doing about point one right now. So let’s assume they can go point four light. Fighters are usually faster, so we’ll say twice that, or point eight.”

  “About the same as us,” Josh commented. “Works for me. So how’s it look?”

  “Just a minute.” Loki ran the numbers for both scenarios, double-checking each time. “If we burn now and my assumptions are correct, and assuming they react the moment our burn signature reaches their sensors, they could catch us. If we wait and burn later, they’d have to go FTL to reach us before we ducked behind the moon and jumped.”

  “Which they might,” Josh said. “Either way, our chances seem better burning later, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Agreed. We burn as we approach,” Loki said. “We might even be able to use the fifth moon’s gravity to whip us around, which would require less of a burn.”

  “Making us less obvious on their sensors.”

  “Not really less, just for a shorter duration.”

  “Hey, less is less,” Josh said, “and less is good.”

  “In this case, yes. In how long you collect data before you start a recon run, no.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Loki,” Josh told him. “At least, for once, it wasn’t me that got us into trouble.”

  “Thanks, Josh, really. I feel so much better.”

  “How long until the burn?”

  “Another eighty-seven minutes,” Loki answered. “At least I’ll have time to get a proper mass reading on that fifth moon.”

  “And a real good look at the planet,” Josh added. “The CAG’s gonna think we were in orbit.”

  “We practically will be, Josh.”

  * * *

  “Jump sixty-one in one minute,” Mister Riley announced. “Switching to auto-nav.”

  Cameron entered the bridge and made her way down to stand beside Nathan.

  “You’re early,” Nathan commented, noting the shipboard time.

  “Always,” she answered, noticing the worried look on his face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just hate jumping away without everyone on board.”

  “We’ve done it before.”

  “The battle of Takara?” Nathan asked. “That was different, and you know it.”

  “They’ll be fine. They know where to meet us. It’s not like they’ve never flown around deep space in that thing by themselves before.”

  “Yeah, but that was back in the Pentaurus cluster. That was familiar space to them. This is not. They can’t even ID contacts out here.”

  “They have our charts for the core and all the same ships in their database that we have.”

  “We both know that the more times we jump without them, the less the chances are they’ll successfully find us again.”

  “Captain, they could jump all the way back to Earth even faster than we could,” Cameron reminded him.

  “Through a sector full of Jung warships.”

  “Spread light years apart,” she added. “You worry too much. You do realize that the two of them have more stick time than either of us. They even have combat stick time.”

  Nathan looked at Cameron, a little shocked by her defense of Josh’s piloting skills. “That’s Josh you’re talking about, remember?”

  “I still have my reservations about him flying this ship, but he is the perfect pilot for the Falcon. That much I will admit.” Cameron looked at Nathan. “To you, not to him,” she warned.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Thirty seconds to jump,” Mister Riley reported.

  “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to jump around the stars in a ship like that? No crew to worry about, no responsibilities, just jumping about to whatever systems you felt like visiting.”

  “Seems like a boring existence,” Cameron said. “Not to mention dangerous.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s still an interesting thought.”

  “You’re over-romanticizing it, sir.”

  “So you’re telling me that you wouldn’t want to do it?”

  “No, I’m telling you it probably wouldn’t be as much fun as you think.”

  “Really?”

  “Look at that screen.” She pointed to the view screen. “It’s black, with a lot of little white dots. Most of those dots are galaxies, all of which are far too distant to explore. Of those that are stars, only ten percent of them have worlds orbiting them that are even remotely habitable, let alone hospitable. And as far as we know, only a couple hundred or so have been colonized. That makes for fairly bleak prospects as far as excitement and adventure go.”

  “Executing jump sixty-one in three……”

  “Well, when you put it that way…” Nathan said.

  “Two……”

  “Like I said, you’re over-romanticizing it.”

  “One……”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Jump.”

  The bridge filled momentarily with the blue-white flash of the Aurora’s jump drive as they instantly moved another ten light years closer to Earth.

  “Jump sixty-one complete,” Mister Riley reported.

  “Verifying position,” Mister Navashee announced.

  “I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic at heart,” Nathan admitted. “Isn’t everyone?”

  Cameron slowly turned her head toward Nathan, cocking her head down slightly and casting a questionable gaze his way. “Seriously?”

  “Position verified,” Mister Navashee reported. “We are now thirty-seven light years from Sol.”

  “Beginning layover sixty-two,” Mister Riley reported. “Time to next jump: seven hours, eighteen minutes.”

  Nathan rose from his chair. “Very well, Commander, you have the bridge.”

  * * *

  “Okay, this is just plain creepy,” Josh declared as he watched the small, irregularly shaped moon pass on their starboard side. “Not only is that thing all shadowy and scary looking, but it’s coming right at us.”

  “That’s why we have to do a burn, Josh,” Loki reminded him from his seat in the rear of the Falcon’s cockpit, “to get out of its way.”

  “How long of a burn?”

  “Fifteen seconds at ten percent on the mains is all we need.”

  “During which any half-assed sensor, telescope, or thermal goggles looking up at that moon will see us and go, ‘Whoa, what the fuck is that?’”

  “Probably, but even if they launched interceptors from the planet the moment they saw our engines light up, we’d still be able to whip around the moon and jump away on her far side long before they reached us.”

  “It just occurred to me, Loki; this is exactly what we are not supposed to do during a coast-through recon flight.”

  “That just occurred to you, did it?”

  “Actually, it occurred to me a long time ago,” Josh said. “I was just reminding myself.”

  “Twenty sec
onds to burn,” Loki reported.

  “Spinning up the reactors,” Josh answered.

  “Don’t worry, Josh; in ten minutes, we’ll be on the far side of that moon, jumping away to safety.”

  “That easy, huh?” Josh said. “Hey, since when are you Mister Calm?”

  “Trust me; I’m not. This is just my new, more confident exterior,” Loki told him. “What do you think?”

  “I liked you better when you freaked out.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Reactors online and running at twenty percent. Spinning up the mains.” Josh watched his systems display as the interceptor’s main drive came to life. He looked outside again at the hunk of rock they were calling a moon as it moved closer to them with each passing second. “Yup, creepy.”

  “Five seconds.”

  “Mains armed,” Josh reported. “Throttles at ten percent.”

  “Three……two……one……burn,” Loki ordered.

  Josh pressed the ignition button. The interceptor’s main engines instantly came to life at a low rumble. Even though they were only at ten percent of their maximum output, without the inertial dampeners online, the sudden application of forward thrust pushed them back in their seats rather forcefully.

  “Jeez!” Josh declared. “Maybe we should have brought the inertial dampeners online first.” He felt as if someone rather large were sitting on his chest, making it difficult to breath. He remembered the times as a child when Marcus, who couldn’t stand to smack a child, would simply sit on him until he agreed to behave.