by Scott Rhine
“Family meal?” asked Yuki, dubious.
“Yeah. Our team celebrates every Sunday dinner and holiday together, ever since Red arrived at the Academy.” Gesturing to the two women, he said, “You’re part of the team now.”
Yuki put the meal tube back, seal unbroken, and left for the room where the cooking supplies were stored.
Sojiro repeated, “Unstrap and on your belly.”
As he worked her over, Mercy asked about his comic strip and sky cities. She snuck in the important question. “Who’s my character?”
“Do you remember the daughters of the wind in the Odyssey? You’re one of those, and you help the travelers on their journey.”
“Sort of honoring my father and sisters. I suppose he could be considered a Lord of the Aerospace.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I picked the north wind because of the whole snowflake theme.”
“What’s my character’s motivation?”
“Oh. Your father forced you to become a nun to protect you, and you want to escape to have an adventure. You’ll still wear the habit for the first few episodes.”
“What?”
“It’s a joke. In your Catholic school yearbook, you were voted most likely to become a nun. I think your sister Mary was the one who nominated you.”
Mercy couldn’t respond. She hadn’t even read her yearbook.
Sojiro continued. “I meant it as a compliment. You take care of everyone, and you’re very . . . spiritual.”
She felt better after the massage, but the nun comment still rankled. Was that her fate?
When they entered the dining hall, breakfast was in full swing—omelets, toast with squeeze jam, and native oranges. Lou proclaimed the punch line to an off-color joke, “You want beef with broccoli?” and everyone laughed but Mercy.
Red told the newcomers, “I’m abstaining from the local food because I tend to react to substances the worst, but the other team says the fruit is safe. Half of us are trying the oranges to build up the intestinal flora, as Toby puts it.”
Sojiro grabbed one. “It can’t be worse for me than raw fish, or as bad as Mercy falling asleep in her suit.”
“Helmet hair!” Red joked.
Mercy growled. “I’ve been trying to solve your problem—how to get to relativistic velocities without pancaking the crew or the ecosystem.”
“How did you do?”
“Not so well. I can keep the interior gravity all around the sphere bearable, but with all the constraints, I can’t find a way to accelerate faster than one g.”
Positioned so he could see the lens view from his seat, Zeiss blotted his mouth with a napkin and launched past Mercy into the control center for a better look. “Trouble,” he announced. “One of the shuttles is following us.”
“Cherub,” said Mercy, recognizing subtle differences in the design instantly. “They’re stripped down to just the cockpit and an oversized water tank.”
“Could someone have modified a captured shuttle to become a weapon?”
“Or message torpedo,” she suggested.
“As long as we can see them, they can theoretically hurt us,” Zeiss stated. “We need to find out who they are and why they’re after us.”
“Ever use TiVo?” asked Sojiro, sliding into the snowflake in his customary slot. He snapped his prosthetic fingers with a regular beat. “Snowflake, measure the time between these pulses. Until further calibrated, we’ll call their average duration one second. We will call sixty seconds a minute and sixty minutes an hour. Confirm.” A chime sounded. “Show me the lens view eight hours ago.”
The view of the moon during the last assault appeared. “Forward to a view one minute later.” The picture changed. “Continue to do so, holding each image for one second before advancing.”
After a minute, Zeiss said, “The attack is over by this timestamp. This shows the shuttle leaving lunar orbit.”
“Snowflake, stop,” Mercy commanded, and the error chime sounded.
“Override permission granted for Mercy for all operations,” Sojiro said.
“Go back five minutes and advance in real time.” When the drive flare of the shuttle appeared, everyone recognized it. She pointed with her nanochipped finger. “Halt. Center on the energy signature of that drive unit, add green coloring for contrast, usual hue. Continue to advance as Sojiro requested, with this center point and coloring.”
They watched the fast-forward movie of the shuttle as it flew to L1, rescued more marooned astronauts, and ferried them to a space station. “Freeze. Zoom by factor of ten.”
“They took the survivors to the Chinese space station, probably so Cherub could go back for more survivors sooner,” Zeiss guessed.
“Advance in real time,” Sojiro requested. They all watched as astronauts in strange suits swapped the cargo section for fuel pods, and the shuttle accelerated directly toward the lens. Recently, the shuttle passed the midpoint of its voyage and began braking.
“The bloody Chinese have captured the shuttle,” Lou deduced. “Killing our friends and family isn’t enough for them. The nuke-happy bastards want us, too.”
“We can’t be certain it’s an invasion force or a bomb. Estimated minutes till intersection?” asked Zeiss. The number seventy-eight appeared on the bubble.
“We can’t let them land in our dock. Even if that’s not an invasion force, Sensei could end our test if they break the charter. Let me arm Ascension’s COIL gun; I can blow them out of the sky.”
“No unnecessary deaths.” Over the radio, Zeiss warned Herk, “Prepare for evasive maneuvers.”
Frustrated, Lou raised his voice to the commander. “To spur this horse to a gallop, we need a direction, Z. Where’s the weak point, the nexus? Unless you find that, we have no choice but to shoot that shuttle down.”
Yuki wrinkled her forehead. “What’s the big deal? Ask Snowflake.”
“I tried,” Sojiro replied.
“Did he say he already taught you with the pages?”
“No, just that it was our test.”
“But you can access any image the lens has captured in our system?”
“Yes.”
“How about the first picture? You can use the star pattern and date to tell you where Sanctuary came in. We should be able go out the same way.”
The room went silent. Auckland was the first to thaw. “She shoots; she scores!”
Zeiss nodded. “Way to pull it out in the clinch.”
“Valued team member,” Mercy said, hugging her new friend.
Sojiro didn’t congratulate her because he was too busy tracking the hole, and overlaying the solar system from that time. The hole on the screen hovered directly over Saturn. “I guess that explains the hexagon pattern at the planet’s north pole.”
“I’ll find us the best way there,” Zeiss said, sliding under the control dome. “Red, you stall.”
The couple was so in-tune that she didn’t acknowledge the order. Red crawled into the command cradle as her husband asked, “At our maximum safe thrust, keeping ahead of this shuttle, how long will our trip take?”
“If we didn’t have to worry about braking, we could get there in 156 hours.”
Zeiss shook his head. “We can’t decelerate because both vehicles will be traveling about the same rate by then. Mercy modeled the acceleration curves for Sanctuary on our shuttle fleet. If we brake, they’ll catch us.”
“Could we make the jump to subspace while moving 2 percent the speed of light?” Red asked.
“No reason not to, as long as we stop accelerating for the jump,” the mission commander replied. “Aim for this intercept point.”
“6.5 days till winter,” Mercy whispered. “I suppose if God could create the whole world in that amount of time, we can cobble together a base camp.”
The ship started moving almost immediately.
The manga artist floated out of the harness soon after, massaging his temples and complaining, “I can’t watch this, or I won’t be able
to eat breakfast.”
“That was fast,” said Yuki.
“It’s just a first-order approximation of our path,” Sojiro explained. “Mainly, she wanted to tack at a ninety-degree angle from the pursuer, forcing them to waste fuel decelerating while we build up velocity.”
Yuki asked, “So how far away is Saturn?”
“About 1.4 billion kilometers from here,” Mercy replied.
“How do you remember this junk?”
“I memorized the distance in AUs and convert to all the other units—90 light minutes.”
Zeiss laid out a more exact path on the screen and then ordered, “Mercy, punch in the gravity compensation model you worked up last night, and help me to make the adjustments. Lou, warn the campers in the hollow to gather all the food they can and put it into storage this week.”
“This could be bumpy,” warned Mercy.
“Just keep the water in the riverbed, not the Hollow,” Zeiss requested. “The minute you finish, the rest of us need as much time as possible to plan the first leg through subspace.”
“As if I didn’t have enough pressure,” Mercy moaned. “I don’t like life-or-death experiments. Didn’t I quit that job?”
Yuki asked, “What would your father tell you, Mercy?”
She held her Susan B coin and said, “Astronauts don’t whine.”
Chapter 15 – Mapping the Universe
Yuki felt like an eighth wheel when Zeiss slipped into quantum-computing mode, firing a stream of questions at every other planning team member. Auckland monitored their vitals constantly. After a morning of brute-force calculation, Zeiss decided that mapping the entire subspace route at once was beyond them. Both he and his wife were exhausted from using their talents. Sojiro was tired from operating the maps.
Lou couldn’t spend any quality time with Yuki because he lost most of the afternoon playing stand-in commander and talking to the campers. She couldn’t care less about insects from the swamp having bright shells indicative of specific metal and minerals extracted from the silt of the creek. Of slightly more interest, the searchers found caves that seemed custom-made for food storage. With the perfect storehouses, Herkemer’s team gathered fruit and nuts from the lensward orchards while Pratibha planned colony-building strategy with Lou.
The second day, Red isolated a stable point on their journey where they could rest in safety while they computed the next leg. Zeiss threw himself at the reduced problem, frustrated at how fluid the paths were. “Without a Probability Mechanics expert, we’re trying to sculpt a Jell-O swan with a hammer.”
Pushing the limits of his medically allowed time, Zeiss said, “I think I see a pattern. If I can have a few more minutes—”
Mercy laid a hand on his shoulder and said softly, “Z, it looks familiar because this is today’s data. You need what subspace is going to look like 120 hours from now.”
Head aching, their commander grumbled something in German and quit.
Red hugged him when he sat up. “You’ll beat it tomorrow, babe,” she encouraged.
Yuki said, “In college I remember mapping the best way through traffic lights. We made one axis time and the other distance along the street. A green light appears as a window of time on the graph time. To compute the ideal speed, we found the straight line that would pass through the most open windows.”
That evening, Sojiro changed the map, showing eighteen years’ worth of data in the same 3-D display, circling the beginning and end points in white. Starting at the edges of the map, he pruned all paths that didn’t lead where they wanted.
“Why eighteen years?” asked Mercy.
“We’re not sure how fast we’ll travel under the sheet. Just because you have a light-powered sail doesn’t mean you go the speed of light.”
Mercy shook her head when she examined his progress. “You can’t cut those threads as dead ends. We could exit a nexus and come back in through normal space at roughly the same spot minutes or days later. The nexus looks like a piece of spaghetti wandering through time and space—like the way Vonnegut’s aliens saw stars.”
Going back to the original plot, Mercy spent the next shift connecting nexus locations in space with green time lines. Auckland wanted her to stop when her time slot was over, but she replied, “This operation is as detail-oriented as microsurgery to attach a limb. If I stop, someone else will have to start from scratch.”
The doctor let her continue until she slid out from under the snowflake helmet. “Thanks, Doc. Do you have anything to stop my ears from ringing?”
Lou climbed in for his session while the other two chatted. They were all trying their hardest to make some progress by Zeiss’ time slot the next morning.
“How long have your ears been bothering you?” Auckland asked.
Mercy shrugged. “Maybe fifteen minutes or so.”
“You’re banned from interface duty for the next twenty-four hours,” Auckland said, with no trace of humor.
“You can’t do that. You let me go over, and my contract doesn’t say anything about—”
“I can and will. Argue, and I’ll make it two. Tell her, Lou.”
When Mercy turned to look at the control bubble to see if it was safe to interrupt Lou, she saw him systematically erasing or redrawing every one of her connections. “What are you doing?” she bellowed. When Lou didn’t answer, she started to shake, which worried the doctor a bit. Rather than shout louder like Red might, Mercy effectively pulled the power cord. “Snowflake, disregard Lou’s input.”
That grabbed his attention. The pilot shot out from under the helmet so fast that Yuki had to catch him on the way by to avoid a fist fight. “Who the hell do you think you are, you crazy b—”
Yuki put a hand over his mouth, making him even angrier. He removed the hand and tried to flip her. However, she was anchored with straps, and he wasn’t. She pinned him soon after and whispered, “Calm down. Mercy’s caution has saved my life repeatedly. Listen to her before you take her head off.”
Everyone except Zeiss was peeking out their doors at the confrontation.
Lou looked at the Asian woman pressed against him and tried unsuccessfully to stay mad. “My bad. Okay, crazy lady, why did you scrub my mission?”
“Did you save my progress?” Mercy asked.
“No. It wasn’t progress; it was all wrong,” Lou said matter-of-factly.
Sojiro winced. “Dude, some words should be avoided around women. Would you have saved Z’s work?”
“Of course.”
Mercy crossed her arms and glowered, waiting for the man to dig himself deeper.
Lou said, “Because he knows how to navigate. Miss Magic Fingers doesn’t.”
Mercy raised a finger and sucked in a mighty breath to blast him with both barrels; however, Auckland intervened. “Easy, girl. We all know you constructed the fastest ship in the solar system. Lou, why don’t you explain the problem in a way I could understand?”
The pilot pointed to a straight, green line on the bubble overhead. “When we pop out of subspace, we keep the same velocity and bearing exiting as when we went in. To reenter, we need to loop around and approach from the proper angle. It took us six days to build up this much juice. We can’t turn on a dime to change tracks. I’m adjusting each approach vector and chopping the windows we can’t meet.”
“For the first hop only?” Red asked softly, stepping into the zero-g room and closing the bedroom door behind her.
“Why only the first one?” asked Lou, suddenly wary.
Red whispered, “Because depending on the course you choose for reentry, we’ll have a whole different set of criteria for the next exit. The same three points could work differently depending on order.”
“Crap,” Lou said, feeling like a heel. “This problem is impossible.”
Vindicated, Mercy said, “Snowflake, can you undo the last couple minutes of Lou’s changes to the green lines?” Fainter green lines appeared where changes had been made. “Excellent. Save this ima
ge as Mercy 3.”
“Let’s get Mercy to bed,” Auckland insisted. To Yuki, he said, “Keep her there for at least eight hours, and no space-helmet screen time.”
“You’re not my dad,” Mercy said, slurring her words a little.
“Two days,” Auckland said.
Yuki steered her friend toward their room. After Mercy was strapped in, Lou tapped on the door. Yuki turned to her recent boyfriend and asked, “Come to apologize?”
“Um . . . I came to ask for my command-chair privileges back. She locked me out.”
Holding back a smile, Yuki said, “So you came to apologize before asking a favor?”
Red snickered from the other room. Lou wasn’t accustomed to dealing with women outside the bedroom. Like a four year old, Lou rolled his eyes and mumbled, “Sorry for the b-word.”
“And?” Yuki pressed.
“I will endeavor to show you the same respect I show to any man on the team.”
Mercy didn’t have to say a word; she wiggled her fingers like a TV witch, hitting the invisible return key with a flourish. “Apology accepted. Next time you use that word against me or any of my friends, I’ll switch your interface so you have to say something embarrassing before every command.”
Lou opened his mouth to argue, but Yuki ushered him out before he could incur the wrath of the geek goddess. When her roommate came back in, Mercy admitted, “Okay, he’s not as bad at math as I thought.”
Yuki shrugged. “I’m not dating him for his mind, or his singing talent. But the fact that he’s trainable is a plus.”
“Singing?”
“He’s an encyclopedia of drinking songs and dirty limericks. The funniest song today was one called ‘the King of the Cannibal Islands.’”
“I can’t believe he’s cheating on his fiancée so soon.”
Yuki leaned beside Mercy and whispered, “Lou feels terrible about her death, but he’d already broken off the relationship. He knew we wouldn’t be back for years and set her free.”
“Then why was she at Alcantara?”
“So people wouldn’t get suspicious. I told you; Lou needs people, and he’s very loyal. When his old crew washed out at Sirius Academy, do you know why he joined Red’s team?”
