Seeing the Dutchman’s thrusters actually popping and exhausting gasses into space was alarming. Thrusters were reserved for emergency use, ordinarily attitude control was accomplished using an exotic reactionless system internal to the ship. The ship’s advanced attitude control system was either offline, or unable to cope with the wildly off-balance structure that remained of the star carrier. “Jinhai,” she used her copilot’s given name after silencing the transmitter. “What are we going to do?” She stared at her, wide-eyed. They were nine thousand lightyears from Earth, in a hostile star system, without a starship.
“Right now?” Wu scowled. “We assess the damage.”
Reed looked at the ship, what was left of the ship. The nose had slowly rotated past, and now the Falcon was on the starboard side, with a good view of the docking platform where the lifeboat was attached. There were no lights on the exterior of the relay station they used as a lifeboat, normally navigation lights blinked slowly fore and aft when they were in deep space and the stealth field was not engaged. Especially when people or dropships were flying around. Those navigation lights operated on backup power, so the entire system must be offline. That was not a good sign. “After that?”
“After that?” Wu zoomed the display for a closer look at the aft end of the Dutchman’s forward hull, which was blackened with scorch marks. “I plan to panic.”
Reed looked at the scorch marks, which extended halfway to the nose of the forward hull section. “You won’t be alone.”
Chapter Eleven
It took four hours to assess just the major damage, and Skippy was still frantically busy trying to find damage that wasn’t immediately evident to the ship’s untrustworthy internal sensors. Desai was back aboard, the other dropship was still hanging out there, acting as a remote sensor platform. A team had donned spacesuits and gone aboard the lifeboat, to check with their own eyes the condition of our backup habitat; they reported the lifeboat was in overall good condition. The lifeboat’s small reactor had automatically shut down after the shock of the Dutchman breaking in two pieces, Skippy thought it would take only minor repairs to restart that reactor, so we did have some good news.
We needed good news.
“How long until emergency power runs out, Skippy?” I asked fearfully. That information was probably available somewhere in some setting on the main bridge display; it was quicker to ask Skippy.
“At current power usage, with gravity shut off and life support confined to the forward section of the Dutchman’s hull, thirty seven hours. Anticipating your next question, yes, that will be sufficient time for my bots to bring the lifeboat reactor back online. The lifeboat’s reactor can power the forward part of the ship’s hull, and life support inside the lifeboat; we can also provide one quarter gravity in the lifeboat. Doing that will exceed the normal operating capacity of the lifeboat reactor, I will need to monitor that reactor closely. It is already overdue for a major overhaul that we don’t have the resources to perform.”
“That’s great, Skippy. Gravity is a good thing.” Thuranin starships had artificial gravity. Their internal systems, the systems designed for the health, safety and comfort of squishy biological organisms, were not designed to operate in sustained zero gravity. Sinks, for example, did not work well without gravity; neither did showers. Or other types of plumbing. Because artificial gravity grids used a lot of power, dropships did operate in zero gravity, even Thuranin dropships. So, we could use the tiny bathrooms aboard our dropships if we had to.
“Artificial gravity takes a lot of power, Joe, it is a luxury that-”
“Skippy, you’re not a biological trashbag like we are. If you were a meatsack, you would understand. Even with gravity at a quarter of Earth normal, water nicely falls normally out of a showerhead. In zero gee, we are restricted to using damp towels. Having a place people can live in partial gravity is going to be important for health and morale long-term. Major Simms?”
“Joe, you don’t-” Skippy interrupted me.
“Just a minute, Skippy,” I cut him off, “this is important. Simms, we can’t afford to supply power to the cargo bays, including the hydroponics labs. Can we move the hydroponics equipment to the lifeboat, part of it anyway? I should have asked first whether the crops will grow in lower gravity. And we’ll need to move supplies to the lifeboat, or to the forward section of the Dutchman’s hull. With power out, the aft section of our hull is going to freeze solid.”
She gave me a wry smile, and I held up my hands in a ‘sorry’ gesture. I asked her too much at one time. She took a deep breath. “I studied whether we could use the lifeboat to house our hydroponics, assuming-”
“You did?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes, Colonel.” She was clearly reminding herself to be patient with me. “I conducted a survey of the relay station shorty after we took it aboard. Since we intend to use it as an emergency shelter, I needed to know how many people we could fit in there, the capacity for oxygen recycling, water supply, storage of supplies. If necessary, half of our crew can live aboard the lifeboat before the oxygen recycling there becomes a problem.”
I nodded sheepishly. Simms had included that info in a status report that I read, but didn’t remember. Now I remembered it. The Thuranin relay station we were using as a lifeboat had originally been a warship, with a maximum crew of thirty five, so the life support systems had been designed to support that many people. That many Thuranin, who were considerably smaller than adult humans, and used less oxygen than humans did. The lifeboat’s oxygen recycling equipment had a safety margin built in, allowing half our crew to live aboard, before the carbon dioxide level soared and free oxygen dropped to dangerous levels. If half our people were aboard the lifeboat, many of them would need to be resting or sleeping, so they would use less oxygen. The most practical use of the lifeboat was for sleeping and meals. The bathrooms aboard the lifeboat had not been modified; they were still the tiny units that were undersized for humans. Regardless, most people would prefer to cram themselves into a Thuranin shower booth aboard the lifeboat, rather than trying to keep clean in zero gee aboard the Flying Dutchman. “Good, Major. We’ll use the lifeboat initially for sleeping quarters.” Spending eight or more hours in one quarter gravity would lessen the muscle-wasting effects of zero gee the rest of the day. We had drugs provided by Doctor Skippy that mitigated some of the damage zero gravity caused to human bodies; I didn’t want to strain our supply of those drugs. “What about the hydroponics?”
“Supposedly all of the plants we have will grow fine in zero gravity; their roots skew properly-” She must have seen the blank look on my face. “The roots grow away from the seed, and branch out properly to find nutrients. NASA tested growing plants aboard the International Space Station; we shouldn’t have any issues out here. One quarter gravity aboard the lifeboat will not present a problem. However, there is space and power in the lifeboat for only twenty percent of our hydroponics gear; much of it is bulky. We will be without fresh food part of the time; we do have a protocol for which stored foods are the most important in terms of nutrition, and morale.”
“Excellent,” I said, pleased that Simms had thought far ahead. Fresh veggies and some fruit were not absolutely essential to our mission, our supplies of canned and irradiated food supplied all the vitamins, minerals and whatever else the human body needed. The hydroponics lab had been an experiment added to the ship for our second mission. Speaking for myself, and I think the crew agreed, having fresh food on my plate was a big boost for my morale. Even a single ripe tomato made a difference when you spent day after day breathing recycled air and drinking recycled water. “You have priority for manpower to move equipment and supplies, Simms.” Major Smythe’s SpecOps people weren’t doing much at the moment. “We don’t know how long we’ll be out-”
“Joe!” Skippy shouted. “Stop talking! I’ve been trying to tell you, the lifeboat is not a long-term solution for us. We don’t have a long-term solution up here.”
“You said the lifeboat’s reactor-”
“The lifeboat's reactor is not the issue, Joe,” frustration was evident in his tone. “That reactor will last long enough so it will not be a limiting factor. The problem is, the ship is on a parabolic course that will drag us dangerously close to the star.”
“What?” I didn’t bother to ask what ‘parabolic’ meant. I could imagine. And I remembered something about artillery. Didn’t artillery shells follow a parabolic arc? Or was that a ballistic arc? Did it matter?
“I said I was trying to tell you,” Skippy was peeved. “We were inbound toward the star when we jumped in, now that we’ve lost the aft part of the ship, the forward section is in a highly elliptical orbit that will bring us so close to the star that the ship will be uninhabitable. At closest approach, we will need the lifeboat reactor’s full output for the shields, and even then the hull will get cooked. The radiation levels inside the ship will be lethal to humans. Also lethal to anything else biological, so we need to pack up all the seeds for the hydroponics. We need to get the crew off the ship.”
“Great! Just freakin’ great, Skippy!” What else could possibly go wrong? “Is there- wait.” My monkey brain had what I hoped was another brilliantly screwball idea. “Propulsion is the problem, right? Can we use the dropships as, like, tugs or something, to push the ship away from the star?”
“The dropships would need to increase the ship’s velocity, not push it away from the star. I’m not going to take the time now to lecture you on orbital mechanics, take my word about it, please. And I am already counting on using dropships to alter the ship’s course, without that the ship would burn up completely. Our Kristang dropships and our smaller Thuranin dropships are useless; the combined mass of the Dutchman and the lifeboat is so great we need to use our three big Condor dropships.”
“They can’t push us-” I knew I was using the wrong terms, “uh, accelerate us enough, so we can remain aboard?”
“No,” Skippy stated flatly, and I knew better than to argue about math with him. “Those three dropships, even combined, can’t give us enough Delta Vee in the time available. As it is, we have to be very careful not to burn out their engines; we don’t have any spares aboard.”
“What do you mean by ‘time available’?”
“We should commence using the dropships within nineteen hours; I estimate it will take fourteen hours to assemble, install and test the brackets we need for attaching the dropships to the Dutchman’s hull. We should begin immediately, Joe. I have established a work schedule-”
“Whoa! Whoa.” Damn it, my head hurt. “All this effort is just to stop the Dutchman from falling into the star?”
“Not exactly, but close enough. At perigee, that’s the closet approach, the Dutchman will be safely above the star’s photosphere. However, it will be close enough that-”
“Yeah, we get the idea. When it’s close to the star, we could call the ship Frying Dutchman. Crap. How long will the ship’s hull be unlivable?”
“Checking on that. My best guess is nine weeks. That is starting when the ship approaches close enough to the star for the hull to be saturated with deadly radiation, until the time it swings past the star and far enough away for my bots to decontaminate the interior and restart life support. Nine weeks is a minimum, Joe, it could easily be longer.”
“Nine weeks?” I whistled in dismay. “I understand we need to get off the ship, but we can’t all live in dropships forever, Skippy.”
“Correct. The Kristang Dragons particularly have an unacceptably limited ability to support a crew. My suggestion is we use the Dragons to transport supplies, and put the crew in the Thuranin dropships.”
“You’re missing my point, Skippy. Do we hang out in dropships just long enough for the Dutchman to swing around the star, then we get back aboard the ship?”
“No. Hmm, I perhaps should have made that clear. Joe, it is not certain the ship will survive. Powering the shields will create a substantial strain on the lifeboat’s reactor; it could fail. Power relays could fail, shield generators could overload. There are a whole lot of critical systems involved; if even one of them fails, we will lose the ship entirely. Getting back aboard the Dutchman after it swings away from the star is not something you should be counting on. You need to plan on the Dutchman being destroyed.”
“Oh. Great. Fantastic! First you break the ship in half, now you tell me the rest of it is going to become a crispy critter in the star. Is there any other good news you have for me?”
“I assume you are being sarcastic there, Joe. I do have additional bad news; the Guardians keep pinging me for authentication codes. Eventually, I am going to run out of excuses and they will stop believing the line of bullshit I am feeding to them.”
“Eventually? Like, when, five minutes?” That thought didn’t panic me, the prospect of our imminent demise was strangely calming. If the Guardians were going to tear the ship apart soon, then there was nothing I could do about it, so I didn’t have to try doing something about it. I could accept the inevitable, and relax. Maybe I had time to float my way to the galley for a cheeseburger. At least I could eat one last bag of potato chips without having to worry about getting greasy fingerprints on my uniform. That thought was strangely liberating.
“No, not five minutes. More like months in meatsack time, maybe?”
Crap, I groaned to myself. Skippy’s bad news didn’t even have the silver lining of getting it over with quickly. Although, hey, perhaps we would get lucky and suffocate to death aboard dropships before the Guardians tore us apart. We had so much to look forward to. Floating in zero gee board overcrowded dropships, with the recycled air growing funky from the unwashed human bodies, eating freeze-dried food, and a team of hyper-competitive SpecOps troops and pilots who had nothing to do. It was going to be great! “Skippy,” I lowered my voice, “what is your plan? We squeeze into dropships, wait and hope the Dutchman survives swinging by the star, and then what? If we’re lucky, we get back aboard a dying ship?”
“No. No, Joe, I should have told you the good news first. Hmm, ‘good’ might not be the exactly accurate description.”
“What is it?” Right then, I was grasping for any good news at all.
“There is a habitable planet in this system. Or, I think it might be habitable.”
“What do you mean, you think it’s habitable?”
“It has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, surface temperatures at parts of the surface are between the freezing point of water and the temperature at which the proteins in human brains begin to debond. Most of the surface has temperatures I think you might even describe as pleasant, Joe.”
“Yeah, but? There’s always a but, Skippy.”
“Well, gravity is two percent greater than Earth normal.”
“Not optimal, but we can live with that.” My mind flashed back to the planet we called ‘Jumbo’, and how even sleeping on that heavy-gravity world had been a strain on human bodies. “What else do you know about this place?”
“That’s the problem, Joe. I don’t know anything about this planet. Not for certain. I am relying on the Dutchman’s long-range sensors, which are not operating at peak performance right now. Even with degraded sensors, almost everything I can detect about the planet looks like good news.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And, I don’t trust anything I’m seeing through the sensors. The problem isn’t on our end; I know how screwed up our sensors are and I’m compensating. The problem is, I think our sensors are receiving unreliable data. My suspicion is the planet is surrounded by a stealth field, and we’re seeing what the Elder systems here want us to see. The only thing I can independently verify is the planet’s mass; I can determine that from its effect on the other planets. Although, hmm-”
“Hmm, what?”
“There are ways to generate artificial gravity waves, so I cannot be a hundred percent certain there is even a planet inside that stealth field.”
“Fantastic! Awe
some. There might be a planet, and we might be able to survive there. That is great news, Skippy.”
“Come on, Joe, it’s not my fault.”
Although I was tempted to point out that, in fact, it was entirely his fault that we were stuck in the situation, I held my tongue. I did not mention that jumping into the Roach Motel was his fault. I also did not say that him getting attacked by the worm was also entirely his fault, because if he hadn’t poked his curious freakin’ nose inside that other AI canister, the worm would not have attacked him in the first place. “Can you-”
“Besides, Joe, it doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Whether this planet is habitable or not. It’s our only option. If there’s a habitable planet inside the stealth field, we’ll know that happy fact when our dropships enter the atmosphere. If there is no planet, or the planet is a lifeless rock or like a thousand degrees at the surface, then we were screwed anyway, so we don’t lose anything by going there, right?”
“You forgot to mention the possibility of our dropships getting blown up as they approach the planet.”
“Why do you always look on the negative side of things, Joe?”
“Because of my experience with you?”
“That is a good point,” he admitted.
“All right, fine. How far away is this planet? Wait! I asked the wrong question. How long will it take us to get there in dropships?” In space, time mattered a lot more than distance.
“That is a complicated question, Joe.”
“You can skip the orbital mechanics math, Skippy. Although I am qualified to fly both Falcon and Dragon dropships.” It was my goal to fly the large Condor type of Thuranin dropship; I hadn’t been able to find time yet to complete the simulator training.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 21
