The Far Shore

by Glenn Damato

  Ryder jerks his head. He blurts, “I know what that is!” He spins around and his head smacks against something hard. He winces in pain, then lets out two quick breaths.

  “Get out of my way,” he snarls at me. This is not Ryder. He grabs the two red airlock levers and rotates both ninety degrees.

  I ask him, “Why turn those—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” he snaps. “Don’t you hear? Don’t you know what that is?”

  Ryder twists the latches on the outer airlock hatch. His body shakes. He twists his head left and right, spraying droplets in all directions. Some of them hit my lips and nose; blood.

  Shuko calls from the control center, “What’s going on?”

  Ryder yanks the airlock hatch open. The cold metal knocks me against an equipment rack. The tiny space is too small to move. Ryder squirms through the hatch and into the airlock.

  “Ryder! Get out of there and focus on the procedure!”

  Shuko pulls Paige from the access opening. He looks at me, then the open airlock hatch.

  “Ignore the hiss,” I call into the dark airlock. “We need to get power restored.”

  “What the fuck do you know?” Ryder yells. I scarcely recognize his voice. “You know nothing. Shut your fucking mouth. Can you hear that? That’s our oxygen leaking away!” He rotates another lever.

  The hiss is maddening—is it growing louder?

  I lock eyes with Shuko. The hiss is an unknown entity, maybe some sort of relief valve in the TMI. Whatever Ryder is trying to do will may make matters worse.

  Shuko barks, “Ryder! Stop what you are doing!”

  Ryder shoots from the airlock like a charging bull. He grips Shuko’s throat. “Don’t tell me what to do! You want to suffocate?”

  I wrap both arms around Ryder and use my right leg as leverage to break his grip on Shuko. He thrashes and smashes my hip against something hard. He screams, “Get off me!” The top of my head hits a valve handle.

  Shuko’s fumbling with a package. He bends over and strikes Ryder in the thigh with his fist. Ryder quits struggling.

  Shuko whispers, “Sedated.”

  Power. We need to get it back.

  I catch my breath. “I closed the master and it didn’t do anything.” One of my fingers hurts like hell but it’s probably not broken. No matter. There’s no power. No lights, no air, no way to communicate with Eric. And the hiss is still going strong.

  Is it our oxygen?

  Be calm and think.

  Shuko pulls Ryder into the control center. Paige is curled up next to a window staring outward at the receding Earth.

  Try again? I open and re-shut the master breaker. Nothing. Does Eric know if it’s even possible to do this with the primary CCU breaker left open?

  I close the primary CCU breaker and then the master. Several loud clicks and the lights come on and the fans hum to life. The panels glow with beautiful yellow numbers. The hiss dwindles away. The moving air chills my damp skin.

  The GNC announces, “Maneuvering in three, two, one.”

  Mikki yells, “Shut that damn thing off!”

  I brace against the access hatch as the spacecraft rotates several degrees. Eric’s voice comes over the com. “Liberty, what’s your status? Why the delay? Is your TMP sequencer started?”

  I answer, “Shutting the master breaker with the number one CCU breaker open didn’t work.” His idea may not be wrong; it can’t be tried.

  “So you left your prime CCU up?”

  “No choice. Power wouldn’t come back otherwise.”

  The GNC calls out, “Thrusters on.”

  A brief push from behind, followed by a warning chime. “Thrusters off.”

  ERROR 062: THRUSTER STARTUP FAILURE.

  TMP SEQUENCER ABORT

  SEVENTEEN

  Despite the burning fatigue, sleep is impossible. Enterprise exploding, the launch, the failure, then the problem with Ryder. I’m too wound up. So I search the knowledge base and learn about thrusters.

  It’s complicated stuff. The TMI stage has a set of sixteen magnetoplasma rockets that generate intense electromagnetic fields to ionize argon propellant into plasma, a super-hot electrically charged particle beam over ten-thousand degrees Kelvin. Nothing burns, so it’s far more efficient than chemically-powered rockets. The thrust is low, 4717 Newtons per thruster, about 480 kilos, so we needed high-thrust methane engines to boost us out into space. Now that we’re here, we need a lot more velocity to reach Mars on the programmed trajectory, the only possible trajectory given the relative positions of both planets.

  Each thruster has an independent, computer-controlled starting system linked to the GNC. With five spacecraft, that’s eighty thrusters. How could they all be broken at once?

  It’s after three already. No word from Eric, no word from Jürgen.

  My nausea intensifies despite staying in my seat for almost three hours. And I need to pee. The round hatch to the hygiene compartment is less than two meters away, but moving that far might make me puke. One nice thing so far: not puking.

  Eventually I’ll need to acquaint myself with the female urine receptacle device David described. But not now. I release my bladder. The absorbency thing does work; hardly any sensation of wetness. But what am I supposed to do with it?

  At some point in the future—hours? days?—there won’t be enough thruster propellant to reach Mars even if the problem is solved. Did they determine how much time we have? Would it be better not to know?

  The others stay in their seats too. The three narrow doors to the sleeper compartments go untouched. Maybe we all feel better within sight of other people. The nav display shows Earth distance 157,320-something kilometers, the last digit increasing too fast to read. Over one third of the distance to the moon. The Earth is a thin crescent.

  I go on the com. “Eric? Constitution? Can you hear me?”

  A voice with an Asian inflection responds, “This is Indra on the Constitution.”

  “Indra, we’d like to know the progress on the thruster problem.”

  A long pause. “Working on it.”

  Some kind of frenzied breathing in the background. Then Eric, words taut. “I need to consult with Ryder Lawson.”

  “Ryder’s recovering from an injury.”

  His breath huffs twice. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “Eric, go on private vid with me.”

  “Who else is an engineer? You got at least three. What’s her name, Michaela? And the other girl?”

  Mikki is asleep, sedated with a pill from Shuko.

  “I’m a chemical engineer,” Paige calls from her seat. “I know absolutely nothing about these systems.”

  “Eric, can you come on private vid?”

  “With you? Too busy right now.”

  His face is beaded with sweat, his eyes bloodshot as if he’s been crying. I make my words gentle. “Let’s talk, just the two of us.”

  Eric sniffs. “In your sleeper. Channel two.”

  The door to the sleeper compartment I’m supposed to share with Alison is a couple of meters from my feet. Just turning my head causes fluid to collect under my tongue. I touch the sickness bags in my pocket, close my eyes, and push off toward the door. I open it by feel and enter head first. Soft red lighting shows two bunks with wide body restraints, plus a com display.

  Eric stares back at me. “Go ahead, talk.”

  “You said you had other ideas. Ideas, as in more than one. What are they?”

  “I can’t explain anything to you. You’re not an engineer.”

  “Try anyhow.”

  He blows out a long breath. “The TMP sequencer runs thirty-five checks after it reads the signal to start the thrusters. Every check passes. The thrusters start! We know this because we detect thrust. But the sequencer generates an error code and initiates thruster shutdown.”

  “TMP sequencer, what’s that?”

  “The master program that flies us to Mars, that’s all.”

  “Is there any
way to fool it into believing the checks passed?”

  “What did I just tell you?” he snarls. “The checks pass, but the sequencer ignores the thrust. Which is bogus, because we can feel the thrust, so it’s getting the signal, so it’s above the threshold.”

  “Can we somehow bypass it, lower the threshold, fool the sequencer into believing the thrusters are running?”

  “What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” He looks off-screen. “You’re not an engineer. You can’t begin to understand the procedural-level details unless you’ve built these systems from the ground up. I still don’t understand all of it.”

  “You’re the expert, the best chance we have.”

  “I’m the surviving expert. Shani was aboard Enterprise.”

  “These thrusters and the sequencer were tested?”

  “Of course they were tested, right after the printers finished the main assemblies. Was less than a week ago.”

  “And the thrusters started and remained started?”

  “Take a guess.” He rubs his hand across his face.

  “What’s our next move?”

  He blinks his eyes. “Are you listening? There is no next move. Everything works. What am I supposed to do? There’s nothing to solve, nothing to fix, everything works!” He punches the side of his sleeper, making the vid jump. “What am I supposed to troubleshoot? Everything is working as designed! The son of a bitch shuts down for not working, while fully fucking working!”

  He doesn’t have any other ideas, not really.

  “There’s always a next move.”

  Eric shakes his head and sniffs. “Do you realize these ships and every piece of equipment except the reactors were printed just last week? A lot of it hand-assembled, so we didn’t have time for system testing and damn little unit testing. System tests supposed to be this week, never got the chance. I can’t do this. Never should have come out here.”

  He needs rest. But is there time?

  “Eric, you said Indra was calculating how long—”

  “She put our GNC in simulation mode and incrementally advanced the clock. When we simulate more than thirty hours in the future, it throws a landing unavailable error. Twenty-eight hours left, max.”

  I push my feet against the side of the sleeper. Less nausea in this tiny box. Would be tragic to vomit in this clean place.

  Eric’s frustration is contagious. What am I going to do after this conversation? Go back to reading technical descriptions? He’s right, I don’t understand it. If he can’t figure out the answer, what chance do I have alone?

  None whatsoever.

  So we’re dead.

  Shut it out.

  Eric needs rest, but even more than that, he needs peace. Peace so he can think. Relentless focus on this one problem takes him away from any chance or peace. Or perspective.

  “Why are you here, Eric?”

  He sniffs. Closes his eyes.

  “You were in this from the start, five months ago, right? You told me you’d be here with me, trying. And here we are, trying. So you can tell me this little bit. What drove you here?”

  “Same as you.”

  “Tell me in your words.”

  His face vanishes from the screen. I pushed him too far. No, he’s back, maybe just wiped his eyes so I couldn’t see. Tears don’t flow without gravity.

  “Haven’t seen my mother and father since I was twelve, Cristina. Senior physicists with TKP, and when their project failed they disappeared. I think they wanted it to fail. It was something bad. I don’t know. My counselors always told me I had a clean slate. Maybe I did. Anyhow, made a few mistake of my own. Put into what they call a glass box.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “Do you know what that means? I sat at a desk and did nothing for ten hours a day.”

  “And you couldn’t refuse?”

  “Not unless I wanted to disappear too. Mandated to some hole. I want a challenge, a life not wasted.”

  “You got one.”

  He’s thinking.

  “Question. Eighty thrusters all fail the same way. Is that right?”

  “That’s essentially what we’re looking at.”

  “What are the odds they all just happened to break?”

  “It’s not a unit failure, that’s clear,” Eric says. “Unit failures we can handle. The working thrusters would just run for a longer duration.”

  “The common thread is the GNC that sends the signal to start.”

  “No, the GNC tells the embedded control system on each thruster to initiate the sequencer program. And they were tested as a system.”

  “What we need to do is consider the difference between the test and the result we see now. There has to be a difference.”

  “There is no difference.”

  “How does the sequencer decide if the thrusters are running?”

  “The most direct way possible. The actual measured thrust. And there is thrust!”

  “You accounted for the effect of weightlessness? And vacuum?”

  Another snort. “Do I look that stupid?”

  “What’s the difference, Eric? What’s the difference between then and now? You’re right, I’m no engineer. But you are. You didn’t want the glass box. But accepting that nothing can be done is like putting yourself back in that glass box, isn’t it? You didn’t want them to do that to you, so why do it to yourself?”

  ◆◆◆

  The sun shifts to the left side and a yellow beam shimmers across a storage locker. The spacecraft isn’t holding a specific orientation with respect to the universe. We’re leisurely turning end over end, fifteen or twenty minutes per rotation.

  Back to waiting. The absorbency thing burns, smells too. Shuko is the only other person awake. He studies his panel as if striving to find something else wrong. Like me, trying to fix things everything by himself. His face is empty; he’s angry, afraid, and exhausted, all at the same time.

  I doze.

  Five quick pops jerk my seat to the right. I whip off my mask. The sunbeam is gone and the control center is darker than I’ve ever seen it.

  That GNC voice again. “Maneuvering in three, two, one.”

  Eric running a test?

  “Thrusters on.”

  A faraway buzz. The gentle push, but this time it doesn’t stop. The seat exerts gentle pressure against my back.

  Shuko blurts, “Is this good?”

  “It’s good!” I answer. The nav panel shows a steady 0.05 G force. “Very good!”

  I squeeze the bump from my rosies, then my electrolyte drink in my thigh pocket. Suddenly my arms are weak and my fingers tremble. Time to drink. Sleep, too. And something to eat, anything at all. Then pee. So much to do. I let out a short, pointless laugh and touch the rosies again.

  Mikki’s awake. “They fixed it? What took so long?”

  Eric sounds like a different man. “All spacecraft, listen up. Your local sequencer will be running your thrusters for approximately ten hours. There’s some weight returned due to the acceleration. Be careful when you move around because it will take practice.”

  That’s it? Did the problem just go away on its own?

  Indra announces, “Eric found the solution, but he’s too modest to brag.”

  “For the curious,” Eric continues, “I’ll explain the snag with the thrusters. Your nav panel displays the local time at our landing site. The seconds, minutes, and hours look like Earth time, but they’re not Earth time. One solar day on Earth lasts exactly twenty-four hours, because an hour is defined as exactly one twenty-fourth of a solar day.”

  Paige mutters, “The thrusters failed because they couldn’t tell the time?”

  “One solar day on Mars lasts twenty-four Earth hours plus thirty-nine minutes and several seconds. A day on Mars is about three percent longer than an Earth day. We can’t use Earth hours on Mars or we’ll slip behind and after a couple of weeks the sun would be setting at five in the morning. Therefore, those seconds you see on your panel are Mars seconds, each imper
ceptibly longer than an Earth second.”

  Shuko asks, “That almost killed us?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that,” replies Eric. “It just presented an unexpected challenge. The TMI thrusters are from a fifteen-year-old Chinese design. They work exceptionally well. Trouble is, their control system uses Earth seconds. Our GNC uses Mars seconds. When the thrusters fired, the acceleration fell behind the required curve by just a hair, generating a false misfire inference.”

  Shuko lets out a long sigh.

  “I edited the TMI kernel to run on Mars-length seconds and mirrored the changes to the other four spacecraft. Your trans-Mars stage is on Mars time and synced with your GNC.”

  Shouts, hoots, and applause come over the speaker. “Terrific job, Eric,” I tell him, partly to remind him of my existence. Do I get any credit?

  Apparently, no.

  With the thrusters running, the control center acquires a definite up and down direction. The seats are horizontal and the access hatch to the hygiene compartment is on the floor. My body weighs only a couple of kilos so it’s simple to drop straight down.

  The principle is self-explanatory, at least for the liquid event. There’s a soft rubber receptacle for each person, the female devices shaped like a curved oblong cup. It has to be pushed into the end of a flexible hose. A gentle suction makes the activity reasonably clean. I use the hose to vacuum the inner layer of my absorbency pants. Disgusting, but dry enough for now.

  Paige finds food. One of the lockers holds an assortment of pre-packaged meals. Regular hot meals will be printed, but the equipment has to be unpacked and set up.

  Ryder is still unconscious. Mikki strokes the square bandage on his head. Those two knew each other before the hospital, they had to. Alison is awake but groggy. I give her a fruit bar and guide her to her bunk. The com is alive with people exchanging names, places of origin, academic backgrounds. We set up a mini-table, maybe a meter square, by clipping it into place between the nav and warning panels.

  I’m learning the names of the other spacecraft and who’s where. Independence. Constitution. Resolute. Endurance. Jessica Eagan on Resolute announces it’s possible to see Mars if we look almost directly upwards against the direction of thrust.