by M. D. Cooper
“There was a lot of scuttlebutt, especially with the Scattered Worlds representatives talking separation in the SolGov congress. Some were also worried that we were on an Outsystem trajectory to Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti, though anyone who could look out a window at the stars could tell that we weren’t headed there. The captain and the XO weren’t talking but I figured we were on our way to the disk somewhere. I didn’t expect us to be going to the capital, but rather Eris or New Sedna.”
“Ballsy to go right for Makemake,” Tanis commented.
“It was. I still don’t know if that was the order or if the captain was given some leeway. I don’t think she’d churn and burn on a capital world without being explicitly told to.
“Either way, we went dark at our apex and took several months to drop back down the solar plane. When we were approaching Makemake we were still going damn fast. The Normandy did the burn and made for a pretty rude awakening.”
“I can imagine, I saw the vids of the Normandy braking over Makemake, it was brighter than their little pseudo sun,” Tanis nodded.
“We ended up engaging the SW fleet and even did a few strafes of their capital before they capitulated and stopped their separatist movement. There weren’t a lot of casualties, but I felt pretty damn dirty shooting down pilots of a sovereign nation because they wanted to leave the union.”
“Wait a second,” Tanis double-checked a reference she remembered seeing once, “your mother was living on Makemake at the time!”
Joe nodded slowly. “She was—I had a lot of family down there…I almost killed my sister in that engagement.”
His voice caught and he looked down at the table, fiddling with the handle of his cup as he regained his composure.
Tanis reached across the table and took Joe’s hand. “I can’t imagine how that would have felt.”
He looked at her for a moment and then over her shoulder at some personal memory.
“Pretty shitty, I can tell you that much,” Joe replied. “I put in for colony the day after I found out she was there. Sol is just too messy. Everyone knows that SolGov is falling apart. The Jovians want to separate too—only the million TSF ships running around the system keep it from happening.”
Joe looked Tanis in the eyes. “You know it’s going to happen eventually. The system is going to have an all-out civil war. There are just too many people who are too balkanized. I don’t know if there should be one central government. Not when it sends sons to shoot at their mothers.”
Joe’s voice had risen and his eyes flashed with anger. Tanis laid a hand on his and nodded. “I know what you mean; I had a similar thought process. Why would I lay down my life to maintain a system that made monsters like Cardid only to throw me under the bus for killing them?”
“If a civil war had erupted, I don’t even know which side I would have chosen,” Joe said. “Do you?”
“Stars above…I have no idea.” Tanis shook her head. “I guess I’d pick the one that was the least evil and would win the war the fastest. Honestly, though? I’d rather be out here falling into a star than having to make that choice.”
“That’s for sure,” Joe agreed.
“I feel like it was easy for me,” Tanis said. “I have nothing in Sol, just a sister who I hadn’t spoken to long before Toro, let alone after. You—you have your mother and her whole brood.”
Joe nodded slowly. “It was rough, but my mom understood a lot more than I thought. She’s getting on, closing in on five-hundred. She told me that I should find what makes me happy—she was also glad that I wasn’t going to stick with an outfit that had me strafing the city she was in,” Joe chuckled.
“My older brother is hundreds of years older than me; I barely know him and didn’t bother to tell him I was leaving. My younger brother took it pretty hard. He’s practically a sanctity activist and told me I was abandoning my people by leaving. He also had some choice words about me going off to help defile another system. He and I didn’t part ways on the best of terms.”
“I don’t get how people think taking lifeless worlds and terraforming them is defiling them,” Tanis said, shaking her head.
“No argument here,” Joe said. “This is a colony mission after all.”
In the three hours before the next hard burn, Tanis shared stories of her childhood on Mars and he of his youth on Vespa. He fell out of his chair laughing when she told her story of stealing a maglev train to impress a boy in college and he regaled her with stories of his flights in the TSF stunt squadron.
For a time, they completely forgot the struggle that still lay ahead and the real danger that the Intrepid would never make it to its destination.
SUBTERFUGE
STELLAR DATE: 3241792 / 08.17.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Excelsior
REGION: LHS 1565, 27.1 AU from stellar primary
The figure slipped through the corridors of the Intrepid, its shimmersuit masking its presence from all sensors. Only the movement of air would give it away, but that would take a nano-cloud to detect and its own cloud showed that it was alone.
With the rewrite of the servitor code and its loss of the AI in node eleven, it could not directly control enough systems to cause serious trouble, but it had learned that certain members of the command crew were uneasy with the ship’s secret cargo.
A less technological route would need to be employed to stop the Intrepid from continuing its trip to New Eden.
The first person on the list to visit was Hilda Orion; she had posted a few plans on the solution boards, which suggested she was not happy about the direction the trip was taking.
The figure was not pleased either.
The threat of falling into LHS 1565 was intended to force the crew to stop in the red dwarf’s star system, consume colony supplies, and then divert to an inhabited system. It should have worked—would have worked if Joe hadn’t figured out a solution that allowed the Intrepid to keep on course to New Eden.
The figure considered that perhaps Joe should have been dispatched some time ago. He bolstered Tanis too much, made her hard to deal with.
Still, there were contingency plans and all it would take was a nudge here and a poke there and the crew would do exactly what was necessary.
Now that the ship was past the star, much of the crew was off-shift, getting some shut-eye before the Excelsior returned with its fuel rock.
Hilda was in her quarters and the figure stopped before her cabin’s door. A small swarm of nano slipped around the portal’s edges and reported that the woman inside was sleeping.
The figure may have lost its root access to core systems, but its public position on the Intrepid granted it enough access to open any cabin door. A few auth codes later and the door slid aside. The record would show that Hilda left for several minutes before re-entering her cabin.
No log would show the invisible figure visiting her in the night.
FISHING FOR ROCKS
STELLAR DATE: 3241791 / 08.17.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Excelsior
REGION: LHS 1565, 27.1 AU from stellar primary
Joe and Troy altered the vector, increasing burn to an uncomfortable 3.2g. As a result, when braking occurred it would be even higher at just under 5g. It was a bit of a gamble because calculations showed that if they couldn’t get enough mass knocked off Fuel Dump—the name Tanis had given their target—then there wouldn’t be enough antimatter left to rendezvous with the Intrepid on its new vector.
Over the next nineteen hours they slept, ate, watched scan, and sent a few messages back and forth to the Intrepid. A few of the colonists’ stasis pods had been disrupted by the gamma radiation and colonists were found wandering the stasis chambers, trying to figure out what was going on. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the flare hadn’t knocked out certain sections, cutting those portions of the stasis chambers off from communication.
The colonists were being treated for radiation poisoning and the engineers were work
ing on getting the engines repaired to course correct once the lithium was extracted from Fuel Dump and brought onboard.
Bob was regaining control of the ship, though there were entire sections with nothing functioning other than the rogue machines that prowled the halls. Before the enemy AI had been destroyed, it had left final commands for all of the equipment it had subverted. Ouri had teams working through the ship and hoped to have things under control soon. Not unexpectedly, Abby had begun registering formal complaints about the damage to her ship.
Due, in part, to the heavy gravity, the tub became a favorite place to spend time, the buoyancy easing the high-g strain. Unfortunately, the increased weight from the thrust made any more interesting activities impossible, or, at the very least, undesirably exhausting.
Tanis also found it difficult to sleep in the high gravity. Blankets felt untenably heavy and every pressure point on her body was aggravated from the weight. They took to sleeping in the acceleration couches on the bridge, shipsuits set to maximum cushioning. When the ship reversed and began breaking at 4.8g, it only got worse. Both Joe and Tanis grew testy and had to take care not to snap at one another.
Finally their target came into view, a slightly oblong rock, a kilometer wide and slightly more than that in length. It spun slowly as it orbited its star, which at this distance was dimmer than many of the other stars in the stellar neighborhood.
“Damn, it’s got a little moon,” Joe said as he pointed at a small hundred meter companion.
“We’ll have to blow that away, won’t we?”
“I believe so,” Joe said. “Then we have to use our thumpers to knock that dust off. We’ll have to do the first one on the northeastern side then send a booster over to push it away and ensure the dust doesn’t settle, or form another moon. Then we do the other when it’s at the right point in its rotation. Boost some more then use the grapple.”
“How do you propose we take out the moon?”
Joe examined the display. “Troy and I agree. Use some of the smaller explosive projectiles on it every time it is moving directly away from us. That’ll accelerate it and cause it to break away.”
“Ok, I’ll take care of that.”
Joe prepared the thumpers and programmed in the precise coordinates, getting them checked and triple checked by Troy and Angela. Tanis played target practice with the moon, and in three orbits had it increasing its speed and pulling away from Fuel Dump. Two more orbits and the hundred-meter lump of aggregate went spinning off into space.
“Little moon all gone,” Tanis reported.
“Good, I’m launching the first thumper now. Check Troy’s calculations on the booster so that we can launch it as soon as the thumper does its thing.”
Tanis ran through the math, checking distances, rotations, impact velocities, and gave second confirmation on the numbers. Angela rang in with a triple check moments later.
Tanis was surprised.
Angela didn’t deign to reply.
“First thumper away.” Joe manually flipped the release switch and then the holo counterpart.
They watched as the thumper launched from the Excelsior, a slight shudder running through the ship as the thrusters compensated for the motion. The thumper flew across the intervening distance and split into twenty-eight separate pieces before diving into the dust and aggregate on the northeast face of Fuel Dump.
They waited a breathless moment, and then the kilometer long rock appeared to jerk violently, a massive plume of dust and debris spraying out of the thumpers’ insertion point. Fuel Dump’s rotation began to wobble and the booster launched from the Excelsior, moving on the carefully planned route, which allowed it to avoid the wobble and dust.
It planted precisely where the calculations had indicated it should and the display dimmed as the fusion torch ignited on the rock, pulsing on every rotation to move Fuel Dump further from the coalescing aggregate cloud.
“So far, so good,” Joe said as he began plotting the path for the second thumper.
While Tanis was aware of the processes used to move asteroids and even small worlds, it was really something else to be actively involved in it. Most people never moved anything much larger than a small people transport; here they were at the edge of an uninhabited stellar system, hijacking an asteroid.
More impressive was that they would boost it up to 0.10c and deliver it to the Intrepid.
The thought reminded Tanis to send her update letting the colony ship know they were currently on schedule.
Joe got triple check from Troy and Angela and sent the second thumper. Its twenty-two separate units sunk beneath the dust on the western side of the rock and moments later an eruption of debris plumed.
“Appears to be.” Joe scrutinized the scan of the rock, looking for any signs of fracture. Scan had showed that, aside from the aggregate and dust, the core was a solid chunk, split off from whatever was out there that broke apart to form the asteroid ring.
The booster was set to fire in ten seconds and Tanis mentally counted it down. In the brief time between one and zero, Joe’s hand flew out and pointed at something on the holo display.
It was too late. The booster fired and a fracture appeared in Fuel Dump.
With exquisite grace for a lump of rock, the asteroid split apart along its axis, one piece sliding to the side while the portion with the booster attached picked up speed and began to move away from the ship.
Tanis quickly killed the booster and glanced over at Joe.
“Well that makes things a bit harder.”
Joe scrubbed his face. “You’re telling me. The booster has small jets for maneuvering. As gently as possible, see if you can rotate it and gently slow it down.”
“Got it, gently,” Tanis said.
Joe, Troy, and Angela had screens filled with vector calculations racing back and forth across the main display as they determined the best way to catch both portions of the rock.
The Excelsior’s main grapple system was a set of stasis emitter arms and a carbon tube net. The arms would emit a field that kept its payload from fracturing, and the net would wrap around the field to pull it behind the ship. While the ship could haul multiple items, it was a delicate dance to get more than one thing in the net, and they were short on time.
“It’s gotta be the one without the booster first.” Joe pointed at the calculation that favored that approach. “We can use the booster to get the other piece moving on our rendezvous trajectory and then simply scoop it up on our way.”
The plot appeared on the display and Tanis started running the computations to make her piece line up.
“Stellar north or south of our plot?”
Joe examined the convoluted acrobatics the Excelsior would be going through. “North, we can tweak a few degrees either way to sync up. Just be gentle with that thing. The booster is nowhere near centered.”
“This ain’t my first rodeo.” Tanis grinned at Joe.
“Yeah, you’re not bad for a MICI girl,” Joe placed a hand on her leg and gave it a squeeze before turning back to his screen.
The next half hour was full of running calculations, checking other crewmembers’ math, and then running more calculations. Through it all, Joe was deftly maneuvering the ship to match the slow tumble of Fuel Dump B.
The Excelsior was rotating and shifting in a pattern that would make a bat puke, and yet Joe was completely unfazed.
Tanis never ceased to be amazed at how good a pilot he was. His flight records could only tell so much. She had seen him in combat, adrenaline rushing, but this was something else—long, grueling work, matching wits against an asteroid the size of a small space station. She harbored no
illusions that she could do it even half as deftly as he did.
Troy said.
Tanis laughed. “Damn, sorry about that. Would have been one hell of a mess.”
At long last, the two stasis arms extended and—with the net ready to snap out—emitted their field. Visually nothing changed, then, as Joe manipulated the field, the rock stopped tumbling and aligned with the ship. Once the ship and rock were relatively stationary, the net shot out on either side of Fuel Dump B, meeting on the far end, secured to the rock by thousands of spikes.
“Latched on,” Joe said. “Plotting intercept course with the second piece.”
The burn was gentle and Tanis couldn’t help but run the calculations on their fuel levels over and over again. Whether they would have enough antimatter to accelerate and then match vectors with the Intrepid was now within the margin of error. She ran it again. And again.
Joe was right. Being in a situation where there was nothing you could do about the outcome really did suck.
As luck would have it, picking up the second piece went smoothly. The Excelsior began its final burn to meet up with the colony ship.
* * * * *
“Good news and bad news, sir,” Hilda said as she stood and turned to Captain Andrews.
“I imagine it’s the same piece of news.” The way this day was going, it was the norm. Only it wasn’t just a day, it had been several. He hadn’t slept the entire time, only retreating to his ready room periodically to catch a short nap on his couch.
“Colonel Richards’ latest update indicates that they got the rock—they named it Fuel Dump—and though it split into two pieces when they shed mass, they are on their way.”
“I can imagine what the bad news is.”
“They aren’t certain they have enough antimatter to make it here, or, if they do, to maneuver and match our vector.”
