“Qualified is debatable, Joe. What I meant was, the issue is complicated, because our three types of dropships travel at different speeds. We would need to fill the Kristang Dragons with supplies and launch them first, like, soon. The Falcons can follow, but to carry the whole crew, we need the Condors. We also need the Condors here to push the Dutchman away from the star. The longer the Condors remain here pushing, the better the odds of the Dutchman surviving its swing past the star. But the longer the Condors remain here, the voyage to the planet gets longer, and that strains the life support systems aboard the Condors. I can show you the math, but-”
“Yeah, I get it. Ultimately, it’s a judgment call. Crap.” I rubbed my eyes. Somewhere on the ship there had to be a giant bottle of aspirin, I needed it right then. “If we don’t use the three Condors to alter the Dutchman’s course, what are the odds the ship will survive passing by the star?”
“Twenty percent, maybe less? Joe, that’s assuming nothing goes wrong. That the lifeboat’s reactor never has a decrease in output, the shields never experience a glitch, no power relay blows from the strain, there isn’t a solar flare when the ships is passing by. If any one of a hundred critical systems go wrong, the ship’s odds of surviving are zero.”
“Ok, so we do need some math. I’m not going to bother asking how we can be certain the Dutchman will survive, so what will it take to give the ship an eighty percent chance of being intact after passing by the star?”
“Define ‘intact’, Joe,” he responded maddeningly. Unfortunately for me, he was correct; I hadn’t defined the problem properly.
“Intact means the ship will be capable of supporting the crew. If the inner pressure vessel of the hull can’t hold air, or the oxygen recyclers burn out or the lifeboat reactor dies, there is no point to caring whether the ship is in one piece.”
“Very well. Keeping the three Condors here long enough to give the Flying Dutchman an eighty percent chance of surviving its passage near the star is problematic. First, using the dropships to push that hard would risk burning out their engines. Our Condors are large and powerful for dropships, but the Dutchman is massive, Joe. Even without the aft engineering section, trying to significantly move this ship with dropships is like three mice pushing a car.”
“Ok, but we can monitor the strain on the dropship engines. If the engines are getting too hot, we can shut them down and try again after they cool down.”
“Come on, Joe. You know that isn’t the only problem. Straining the Condor engines to push the Dutchman risks their engines failing later, when the Condors are trying to fly the crew to the planet. That isn’t even the big problem.”
While I thought I knew what he considered the real problem, I asked anyway. “What is the big problem?”
“Keeping the Condors here long enough for the ship to have an eighty percent chance of survival, means it will be a very long flight to the planet. Even if the dropships all left right now, it will take forty three days to reach the planet. We are badly out of position for an intercept course, that is simply bad luck. I was able to correctly guess the plane of this system’s ecliptic,” he meant the disc which the planets orbited the star, “but we’re headed at a right angle to the planet’s orbit right now. The dropships need to cancel that velocity, then accelerate to catch the planet, then decelerate into orbit when we get there. Plus, we need fuel to fly down to the surface and probably to fly around once we’re there. Plus, fuel for the return journey. That takes a lot of fuel, and we need to bring it all with us. I recommend we devote one Condor to carry fuel and nothing else.”
“That’s not good-” I started to say, but Chotek had come into my office and interrupted me. He must have been listening to the discussion for a while.
“Why are we considering fuel for a return journey from the planet to the Dutchman?” He asked with a furrowed brow.
“Well,” I opened my mouth before I could think of a good answer. “Assuming the ship survives passing by the star, we will need to get back aboard-”
“Why?” Chotek asked in that annoying tone that he used when he knew he was right about something. He wasn’t being nasty or condescending, he was only asking a very good question. “Mister Skippy, let us assume the Dutchman’s course is altered so that its chance to survive passing close to the star is eighty percent. Where will the ship be going after it swings by the star?”
“Into deep space,” Skippy answered. “Slightly out of the ecliptic. Unless we use the dropships again to significantly alter the ship’s course, it will head out past the outer planets of this system. Then it will approach the star again, not as closely, twenty eight years from now.”
“Twenty eight years,” Chotek raised an eyebrow and looked at me. “Colonel, I do not see the point of bringing the crew back aboard this hulk, only for us to coast through deep space until the relay station’s reactor fails and life support systems shut down. I also do not understand why we would risk our flightworthy dropships, just to increase the odds of the Dutchman surviving. In the end, the Dutchman is headed out into deep space, and the relay station reactor will eventually fail. Colonel, you are still thinking as captain of a ship. This,” he pointed at the deck and lowered his voice to a gentler tone, “is no longer a ship. It is less of a ship than the relay station is; the relay station is at least capable of generating power. The Dutchman can only consume power, and for little purpose. I do not mean to be harsh; I appreciate how much the Flying Dutchman means to the crew, and perhaps to you especially. But we must deal with the new reality that we no longer have a starship.”
“Sir,” I took a moment to consider my words carefully. Hans Chotek was a diplomat; words were his weapon of choice. I am a grunt who barely got through high school English classes. “True, the Dutchman isn’t capable of flight right now. But her pressure vessel holds air,” I pointed to the far bulkhead. “Her life support only needs power to function. This hull,” I pointed to the deck as Chotek had done, but with a different meaning, “is the only place within many lightyears that we know is capable of supporting human life. Maybe there’s a planet out there, maybe it’s as nice as our bogus sensor readings say it is. Maybe it’s a rock, maybe it’s a trap. Sir, on our last mission, you told me to expect the unexpected out here,” I reminded him of what he had told me, but I didn’t need a necktie-wearing desk jockey to tell me to be wary of the unexpected. Seriously, who wears a necktie in zero gravity? He had the tie pinned to his shirt, but it looked ridiculous. “We don’t know what will happen next. In combat, you don’t give up an asset you might need, unless you don’t have any other choice,” I explained to our civilian leader. “We need to get the crew to that planet as our first priority, and I am not willing to take on significant risk to that mission just to save the Dutchman for possible use later. What I want to investigate is whether we can save the Dutchman with minimal additional risk to the dropships. If the answer is no, then trust me,” I held up my hands and forced a grin, “this captain is not going down with the ship just for nostalgia.”
Chotek nodded gravely. In the zero gee, his face was slightly puffy because blood that normally pooled in the legs was distributed more evenly. His puffiness plus the end of his necktie flapping around lessened the authority he projected. “Mister Skippy, the time required to attach the dropships to the Dutchman, will that significantly risk our ability to reach the planet?”
“No. The timing does not become critical for another thirteen days,” Skippy answered without adding any snarky comment.
“Very well, Colonel Bishop,” Chotek did not look any more happy than when he had first spoken. “Present your findings to me. This evening?”
“We should have options within the hour,” I replied. “Right, Skippy?”
“Uh huh, Joe. I have all the math. As you said, it is a judgment call.”
The answer from Skippy was yes, we could use our three big Thuranin dropships to nudge the Dutchman away from the star, with minimal risk to the dropship engines. The
brackets Skippy designed to attach a trio of Condors to the Dutchman were way over-engineered, even our rocket scientist Dr. Friedlander agreed. Skippy had designed the damned things so a single bracket could take the stress of three dropships pushing on it, which I told him was not necessary. Cutting back the strength of the brackets meant we had the brackets manufactured and installed within seven hours rather than fourteen. That was good news in terms of buying us seven more hours to nudge the ship away from the star. It was bad because it shaved the time I needed to persuade Hans Chotek to approve putting our three largest, most capable dropships at risk to increase the Dutchman’s odds of surviving being cooked by the star.
Before preparing my argument for Chotek, I wanted to gather all the facts. Chotek thought our best, most realistic option was to plan for being stranded on the planet for, basically, forever. He assumed the Dutchman either would not survive swinging past the star, or would essentially be lost to us for twenty eight years, until its highly elliptical orbit brought it back into the inner part of the star system like a comet. Twenty eight years might as well be forever, because even the Dutchman’s cavernous cargo holds did not contain enough food to keep the pirates alive for twenty eight years. We would need to grow our own food on the planet, and to answer the question of whether we could plant enough potatoes to feed the entire crew, I asked out expert, Major Simms.
“I have no idea,” she told me, appearing irritated that I had asked her.
“But-”
“Skippy already asked me the same question, Sir,” she cocked her head, which had a different look in zero gravity.
“Oh.” I forgot that Skippy constantly talked with the entire crew. While I was the prime target for his asshole remarks, he picked on all the monkeys. To make our conversation less awkward, I swung my feet up until my boots stuck to the ceiling, because Simms was hanging from the ceiling over a hydroponics tank and it threw me off to see her upside down. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him the same thing I just told, you, Colonel; I do not know. Skippy can’t provide any information about conditions on that planet, if there even is a planet inside that stealth field!”
“Ok,” I ran a hand through my sweat-stained hair. “Got it. Let’s approach the problem this way: assume the planet’s atmosphere has enough oxygen to support us. The plants,” I pointed to the hydroponics tank just below her head, where green beans were swaying gently in the air. Lack of gravity had not visibly affected the plants yet. “They can grow under greenhouses if the surface temperature is too low, right?”
“We would need to bring greenhouse material with us,” Simms replied thoughtfully. “According to Skippy, the planet is in the Goldilocks zone, so unless the place is locked in a severe ice age, surface temperatures should be livable. He thinks the stealth field allows normal sunlight levels to reach the planet; the field distorts the images we can see out here.” She tilted her head again. “He does not know why the Elders would hide a planet inside a stealth field, and I don’t like that. Whatever the reason, it can’t be good news for us.”
“I don’t like it either,” I assured her, then steered the conversation back to the subject. “Ok, assume temperatures are good for growing plants, or that we can set up greenhouses. Oxygen in the air, that means carbon dioxide also. Is the color of the star a problem?”
“Orange light rather than yellow?” She shook her head. “No, we have seeds bioengineered for a variety of solar spectrums. That is the one thing the lizards helped human scientists with.”
“Yeah, because they wanted their human slaves to feed themselves no matter which planet they dumped us on.” I remembered that when I was a newly-minted colonel planting potatoes on Paradise, we had experimented with several types of seeds shipped from Earth, seeds the Kristang assured us had been optimized for the growing conditions on Paradise. That, at least, was one thing the lizards had not lied about; those seeds rapidly grew strong, healthy crops with impressive yields. “Great. Then, assuming all the stuff we can’t control is in our favor; oxygen, temperature, sunlight, what about the stuff we can control?”
She brushed her own wild hair out of her eyes. Simms had thick hair that was just short enough she couldn’t tie it back in a bun or ponytail, and in zero gee it was unmanageable. “Short answer is yes. We have enough seeds, nutrients, and we can bring part of the hydroponics gear with us in dropships. Eventually we will need to start growing plants in soil down there; we can sterilize the native soil and use our own soil conditioner, like we did on Paradise. Even if we have to put the conditioned soil in raised containers, that will work to supply the crew. At our current population level, that is.”
“Current?”
“Colonel, I heard Mr. Chotek wants us to plan for being stranded on this planet permanently.”
“That is a worst-case scenario,” I hastened to explain.
“Worst case is permanent, and best case is the Dutchman returns in twenty eight years and we somehow find a way to fix her?” She rapped her knuckles on the adjacent bulkhead. “To us, Sir, that’s effectively the same. After a year or two being stuck here in the Roach Motel,” she smiled and I regretted choosing that nickname for the star system, “without realistic hope of ever getting back to Earth, the crew is going to start doing what humans have done as a survival strategy for a very long time.” She paused, and I figured she was not talking about hibernation. “Making babies.”
Damn. She was right. Oh, hell, that was a complication I did not need. “Oh, damn it,” I groaned and my shoulders somehow sagged even upside down in zero gee.
“It’s inevitable, Sir.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. That means we will need to plan for an increasing population,” or, I thought, Hans Chotek would need to plan for it. If we were truly stranded in the Roach Motel permanently, my position as captain of a nonexistent ship would be meaningless. That meant I could pass the problem onto someone else. “Ok, Ok, can we worry about that later?” Crap, I already had enough headaches to deal with. “We’ve been using the hydroponics to supplement our food stores. Can we survive on nothing but the plants we can grow?”
From a holster on her belt, Simms pulled what looked like a handheld supermarket scanner. She walked along the ceiling, the bottom of her boots breaking loose then adhering as the gecko-feet like material allowed her to walk almost normally upside down. Except without gravity, there was no upside down, or rightside up. She stopped above a tank containing strawberries, which was a relatively recent experiment. I had strawberries for breakfast a month ago, and they had been decent if not great. The previous week, I had a different batch of strawberries that were delicious. Before Skippy broke the ship, Simms had been talking about making strawberry ice cream, which got me excited. She selected a ripe strawberry, pointed the scanner-gun thing at it, and popped the fruit in her mouth. The next one she picked and scanned, she handed to me. “Try it. This one fits your flavor profile.”
“My what?” I sniffed the berry suspiciously, then bit into it. “Mmm,” I spoke with my mouth full, “this is delicious.”
“Flavor profile. You like strawberries slightly on the tart side, not overly sweet. This scanner,” she waved the gun, “tells me the juice content, sugars, ripeness, age and nutritional value. Everything I need to know to determine if the food is health and nutritious for the crew. We use these scanners when we take food out of storage, to see if it has spoiled, changed flavor profile or lost too many nutrients since we left Earth.”
“Huh,” I commented intelligently, looking at the scanner-gun thing in her hand. “Is that a fancy Thuranin doodad that Skippy reprogrammed for you?”
“No,” she laughed. “We brought this from Earth. It’s uh,” she looked at the logo on the side of the scanner. “This one is made by Teak Origin. It’s a technology used in food distribution centers. Pretty soon, you will be able to use the camera of your smartphone to check produce in a retail market.”
“Really?” I said that dumb thing
guys blurt out when they’re not thinking. Did I think our logistics office Major Jennifer Simms was lying to me? No I did not. So why did I say ‘really’? The most popular theory is that I am an idiot.
“Really, Sir.”
“I will have to scan every piece of fruit I buy?”
“You won’t have to, and you shouldn’t have to. Supermarkets use this technology to prevent substandard produce from reaching their stores, because they know people don’t like to buy it. Have you ever bought an apple in June?”
“Uh, maybe?” I could not remember. “Probably, yeah.”
“Apples are picked from August through October, unless you’re getting them from someplace like Chile. When you see an apple from a US grower in June, that apple could be ten months old. It was picked green ten months ago, put into cold storage, then the supplier used a gas like ethylene to force it to ripen. It may look ripe and it might not even be mushy, but after ten months, most of its nutritional value is gone. That’s why we haven’t had apples since the first two months after we left Earth. That is also why we grow spinach here. Spinach loses over ninety percent of its nutrients after seven days.”
“And you can tell all that with a handheld scanner?”
“Exactly. I mention that because we’ve been testing the nutrients of crops grown in the hydroponics, and we’ve been varying the light spectrum, the gravity levels in here, types of fertilizer. It’s all data NASA, the ESA and the Japanese want us to report on, in exchange for providing this hydroponics gear. The answer is, yes, with the types of seeds we have aboard, we should be able to grow a completely nutritious diet on any planet that can support human life.” Her eyes narrowed. “And, I see you are not happy about that?” She expressed surprise.
“I’m not unhappy with you. Or your team. Or about,” I pointed to the hydroponics tank, “all this stuff. The problem is, if we could not survive long-term on the planet, then Chotek would be forced to consider other options.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 22
