A sleeper vessel would keep the crew in a near-suspended-animation state, which had a survival rate of ninety-nine percent, instead of true suspended animation that had a survival rate of only eighty percent. They would age only one year for every five that passed. But they would be able to reach another star in their lifetimes.
However, the Rift Contingent would pave the way before any attempt would be made. This could take a few generations of brave Contingent Rangers to accomplish and map out all the rifts between Earth and their destination. I smiled at that thought. The brave men and women who are rift sensitive would reach a new world before any of those pioneers. Those people are my heroes, risking everything to keep space-faring humanity safe.
It will be another four years before we have determined and mapped out a safe route to even the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, from “the fringe.” The fringe is the edge of the sphere of mapped rift space thus far. But there are no habitable planets in that system, just over four light years away. Lots of deep space mining companies are drooling over the prospects, though, and keep pushing the Rift Contingent to work faster.
I took the Dauntless out with my tiny group of researchers to start testing alternative ways to travel in rift-infested space or inside of a rift itself. It took us almost three years to get out to the fringe, two light years from Earth, to conduct our experiments. We have been mapping a minor rift branch just off the main Sol-Proxima Centauri rift trunk so that we could begin our testing.
We dropped our second-to-last buoy just a few days ago and we were moving into position to reach its projected terminus, or rift tail, to drop the last one when we came across this unexpected branch. The hair on the back of my arms had started to stand on end and the queasy feeling that a person sensitive to rifts has, had overcome me just before I dove on the abort. I had to rub my eyes now that we were drifting un-powered across the rift except for our reaction engines. I swear I was seeing a purplish blue haze in space along the axis of the rift. I have been experiencing this visual aberration more and more frequently. I knew Dr. Case would just say I was getting space sickness, but I don't think that is what it is. I swear I am starting to be able to see as well as feel rifts. I know it sounds crazy but as soon as we were clear of the rift the queasiness left me and my vision cleared.
The slightly less sick look on Trinn's features cleared up in time with mine and she grinned. We spent the next week on reaction thrusters, sneaking back up on the rift. When we were just fifty thousand kilometers away, we came to a full stop and Trinn jettisoned our final buoy and checked its telemetry. A satisfactory ping came from it. She shot me an apologetic smile, “Sorry Commander, with that buoy, this is as far as we go.” I nodded. We couldn't finish mapping the branch due to the appearance of this unexpected rift. I'm sure our engineer could fabricate another buoy, but using our limited shipboard resources for that would cause us to have to start back to Earth weeks earlier than we would like, cutting short our research.
I grinned at her, “Trinn, for the thousandth time, call me Jane! We aren't in the service nor the Contingent. We are just researchers here.”
She sighed in defeat with a mischievous smile. “Sorry, Jane. Old habits die hard.” Damn that smile of hers always made me want to bite my lower lip in want. Hey, it gets lonely on a six-year mission. Of course the five of us have coupled up from time to time, I was just the lucky one who caught Trinn's eye.
I smiled at the memory of interviewing her for the navigator position. To my embarrassment, she had noticed my distraction. Her intelligence and her exotic looks, coupled with her wry humor, had me already deciding I would pass on her even though she was immensely qualified for the position. I couldn't afford the distraction of my attraction to her.
She was in mid-sentence when she saw it, “I was the youngest officer to qualify for fringe mining with...” She had smirked sexily at that point and I almost lost it.
I tried to tell her that we would call her when we decided and she got me all tongue tied by arching an eyebrow in a cute manner. It came out something like, “You... I'll call... we... umm decision.”
She chuckled and said, “You can use my personal number any time you want, Commander.” Then she gave me a little wink. Good god! I was blushing down to my core; I mean, holy bejesus that office was getting hot! The little minx had taken control of the meeting and by the time it was over I had my new navigator.
I'm quite proud of myself, I had resisted her suggestive smile, the rich timbre of her voice, and her swaying hips for four entire weeks into our mission before she lured me into her bed. I'm pretty sure I'm not the commander in her quarters.
I grinned over at Trinn then moved back over to my station while she spun the Dauntless on her axis in our arresting roll and waited a few minutes to be sure the singularity we projected one hundred kilometers in front of us cleared the rift by a few hundred kilometers, then she “bumped” the ship. The action quickly decelerated us to a standstill in a few short hours. I could feel the familiar tugging sensation I got from the inertial dampener system fighting against our internal gravity.
I did a quick calculation of the vector I saw in my hazy vision and tried to figure out which one the new rift seemed to be on. The computer dutifully spit out the only nearby mass large enough to stress the fabric of space in that direction. Thalius Prime? But that was over six hundred light years away. Then it hit me. I blurted, “Bejesus Trinn! We found a nexus!” In the history of the Rift Contingent explorations, only two nexuses have been found. A nexus is where two different rift systems cross. Computer models show this rare event would generally happen at the weakest end of a rift as it crossed an area dominated by a rift between two closer masses.
Computer models only show them extending three hundred or possibly four hundred light years. So this was unprecedented. But I thought of Dr. Kevin Lee. He had been ridiculed when he suggested that rifts were actually expanding and new rifts were forming. But most of the researchers think that is preposterous because almost every computer model shows them contracting. Almost every one…
I shook my head, we still know so little about rifts. I raised an imaginary glass of champagne to Dr. Lee. With this discovery, he was going to be taken a little more seriously now.
I paused to think again, maybe this is why we were taken by surprise, and were almost smeared across space in a spectacular death. Was this a new rift just forming? It was so weak I had almost missed it, just like Trinn. Hmmm... I'll have to look at Dr. Lee's work a little more thoroughly when I get back to my quarters tonight.
Trinn and I looked at each other and smiled. We knew what this meant, since we had used our last location buoy, we would use the tail of this new rift branch for our experiments. This was good, as it was barely a hundred million kilometers wide. I said quietly to her, in case the universe was listening, “Let’s break out the toys.”
She was already on the line down to our engineer with that wild gleam of a gravity wave researcher in her eye. “Yo, Sparky, wind up the Honey Bee! We're going off ship at...” She shot me a questioning look and I held up three fingers. She finished, “Fifteen hundred hours.”
His booming voice replied over the speakers in his heavy Australian accent, “On it!” His voice was tinged with excitement as well.
Chapter 2 – Bat Out of Hell
Trinn and I were gearing up excitedly. We briefed Sparky—Joe Montoya, our engineer slash mission specialist. I found him on one of the old, class six, orbiting ore extraction stations between Mars and Jupiter. He had a reputation for being able to fix just about anything and kept the old rundown station running against all odds.
I hear the place went to hell just months after I stole him away for my team. I swear the tough, grouchy and blocky guy, who wore nothing but t-shirts and the bottom half of an EVA suit, had a tear welling in one eye when he first saw the Dauntless. She is the sleekest and most advanced ship riding the heavens, and he treats her like his daughter now. I have a sneaking suspicion
that he and our ship's doctor, Emily Brand, or Doc, are sharing their quarters as regularly as Trinn and I do.
I did the pre-flight check of the Honey Bee with Trinn and checked the precious cargo—the two experimental probe prototypes—as Sparky left toward the bridge to monitor our telemetry with the last researcher on our crew, Dr. Gordon Zeffer, our sensor and communications specialist. The big blocky cargo vessel powered up. These utilitarian crafts earned the nickname “Honey Bees” from their bright, safety yellow paint and the buzzing sound their anti-gravity engines make when moving around inside of a hanger bay. Sparky called this one “Bertha” for some odd reason.
We strapped into our chairs and checked our EVA suits, then put our helmets on and checked each other’s helmet seals. The familiar buzz of the anti-grav engines filled the cabin as we brought the systems up and the ship slowly rose in the air. I keyed my suit’s communication circuit, “Gear up.”
Sparky's voice responded, “Roger, gear up. Decompression.”
I replied, “Roger, decompression.”
We heard the warning klaxons sounding and saw the yellow flashing lights of decompression in the cargo bay. The alarms faded to silence as the bay equalized with the vacuum of space outside the Dauntless. The yellow flashing strobes changed to red. I said, “Go for bay door.”
Sparky replied, “Go for bay door, Roger.”
Then the large doors at the aft of the ship parted, showing us the blackness of space with the laser sharp pinpricks of light as the galaxy unfolded in front of us. I took in the majesty of Creation then glanced over at the awed face of Trinn Makalia. I reached over and laid a hand on her arm. She turned to me with a smile and I mouthed, “Ready?” She nodded excitedly. I grinned when she shot me a seductive look.
I said, “Egress” as I nudged the Honey Bee forward.
The quick replay came, “Roger, egress.” The ship smoothly cleared the doors and Sparky said, “Clear.”
I nodded to myself, and repeated “Roger, clear.” Then brought us around to fifty yards in front of the bridge and did a three-sixty roll on our Z axis then repeated it on our X axis, giving the forward cameras and sensors a three hundred and sixty degree view of the entire vessel so they could check for damage or leaks.
We hovered in silence for almost ten minutes before Spaky's voice crackled to life, “Five by five.”
I grinned, and responded, “Roger, five by five!” All of that procedure may sound tedious and monotonous, but space is the most hostile environment imaginable. There are no second chances in the vacuum of space. One accident, one little mistake, and you are dead. So we take all of these procedures and checklists extremely seriously.
Well, mostly seriously, I chuckled to myself, as I yelled, “Yeeeehaaaaaw!” and fired all the aft reaction thrusters, sending us careening away from the ship toward the rift.
I actually snorted when Sparky's voice came over my speakers in a professional tone, “Bat out of hell, Roger.”
Trinn had the same smile plastered on her face that I did. Any outing from the ship was welcomed. You can only stare at the same walls, the same corridors for years at a time for so long before going stir crazy. I called out our progress ten thousand kilometers at a time. I performed an arresting roll at the half-way point, fired the thrusters, and brought us to a zero-zero intercept with our target a short time later.
I was feeling nauseous as we approached the edge of the rift. When we were almost on top of it, I could again see a purplish blue haze stretching out to the left and right as far as the eye could see, like a highway in space.
We checked our ship telemetry and Doc checked our vitals telemetry with our suits and we were green lit to proceed with the mission. I transferred ship control to Sparky and said, “Dauntless has stick.”
The crackling response from Sparky was, “Roger, Dauntless has stick.” I watched the ship's navigation panels as they all went to grey except the manual override sections.
We unstrapped and floated back to the airlock between the bridge and the cargo bay. Pulling ourselves along using the hand rails mounted on just about every surface. I loved zero G. I flipped in the air as I moved into the airlock, causing Trinn to giggle at my antics but then perform a weightless somersault herself.
This got us a “Giggle, Roger.”
I shot across to him, “Smartass.”
Just to get a “Smartass, Roger.”
I snorted a little at that as we closed the airlock door. I grabbed Trinn and floated her in front of me then I leaned in to touch our faceplates together and I waggled my eyebrows at her. Then I said to Sparky, “Decompressing” as I opened the plastic cover with the yellow and black warning paint and smacked the big red button.
That garnered a more professional, “Decompressing, Roger” in response. Once the lights turned red, I opened the airlock door to the cargo bay and we floated out.
Then, just like we had practiced hundreds of times over our three-year journey to get out here, Trinn and I deftly activated one of the prototype probes. After clipping in our tethers and getting the green light from the Dauntless, I requested, “Bay door.”
The door started dropping away as the response came over the speakers, “Bay door, Roger.” Then Trinn and I grabbed the control handles on either side of the four-meter diameter, gumdrop-shaped probe, fired our EVA thrusters and slowly made our way out of the cargo hold and into space. We each took turns releasing the probe and flying around the other to check for suit leaks or damage, then we proceeded to the ends of our half-kilometer tethers with the probe.
Then we activated the miniaturized matter-antimatter collider that would power the probe by each manually flipping the large breakers which were big handles painted safety yellow. That is why we had to leave the ship to do this. We couldn't activate the power plant inside the vessel for safety reasons nor do it by remote, in case some random cosmic radiation activated the circuit.
Now the bugger was live. I just hoped that the magnetic containment vessels were as high quality as we were assured. In the case that they weren't, we had just activated a bomb instead of a power plant. Trinn and I made like the bat out of hell that Sparky had invoked earlier and made our way back into Bertha as fast as our suit's thrusters could carry us.
Once we were back safely in the ship and strapped into our seats on the bridge, I pulled us back forty kilometers or so... hmmm... ten more. I grinned to myself. I didn't come all this way just to blow up.
It was silent for a few long minutes as the crew of the Dauntless, including Trinn and I, just looked at the probe controls. Everything was green across the board. I said, “Ok. Here it goes.”
Gordon interrupted, “Commander, shouldn't you say something? I mean this is a historic event.”
I thought about it and said in a regal voice, “Let's not fuck this up.”
Trinn smiled warmly and rolled her eyes, “How poetic, people will be quoting those words of inspiration for centuries if this works.”
I waggled my eyebrows at her again and said, “Systems up" as I activated the probe.
The echo from the Dauntless came with every system I brought up. Then I took a deep breath and almost whispered, “Charging capacitor.”
The final, “Charging capacitor, Roger” came with a tinge of anticipation in Sparky's voice.
Then the waiting. It would take over five hours to spin up the capacitors on the probe for it to project the gravity spike needed to cut through to subspace. We spent the time refining all the sensor readings from the prototype. Damn, I was proud of my designs. These were some of the most detailed readings I have seen, they eclipsed even the Dauntless' main sensors.
I was brought out of my thoughts as Trinn spoke. “Capacitors charged. I have stick.”
Gordon replied this time, it was all science now so Sparky would take a back seat until we started our return to the Dauntless, “Capacitors charged, you have stick, Roger.”
Trinn took a deep breath and deftly moved the joystick on the arm o
f her chair. I watched the probe pivot on the sensors. Then she lined up the desired trajectory and closed her eyes, taking another deep breath. I swear I wasn't breathing at all. She flipped open the plastic case below the joystick and flipped the switch inside. “Jump drive armed.”
The response of “Jump drive armed, Roger” was almost drowned out by the sound of my own pulse pounding in my ears. This was it! The culmination of my life's work! This would either vindicate my theories or secure my place in the annuls of space engineering history as an interstellar joke.
She looked over at me with questioning eyes and I nodded. My heart was in my throat. She said, “Initiating jump” as she hit the red button at the top of the stick.
I swear I could feel it all happening, we were so close as the probe first wrapped itself in a gravity bubble, then extended that bubble in a spike in the direction we wanted the probe to travel in the rift. This was my solution to the problem of the point singularity of a gravity drive entering a rift but leaving the ship in normal space. By wrapping the vessel in that gravity spike, making the vessel part of it, it was theoretically possible to transfer the ship’s mass into the rift with the spike. So for all practical purposes, the ship really never moves since all points inside the rift touch each other. We would just trade one location in normal space with another that is touching that same rift.
Even from this distance, there was a huge purplish blue flash of light and then we lost all telemetry with the probe.
I hissed into my mic, “Dauntless?”
There was an immediate response, “Scanning for debris.” Then a minute later. “Debris negative.”
I closed my eyes and took another deep breath then responded, “Debris negative, Roger.” That meant one of two things. Either the matter-antimatter collider blew and vaporized the probe or... I knew the dangers of optimism so I didn’t voice the alternative until just four minutes and thirty seconds later. We started receiving telemetry from the probe, four and a half light minutes, or one hundred million kilometers away! It was healthy and squawking its transponders at us!
Fixit Adventures Anthology Page 27
