Frontiers 07 - The Expanse (24 page)

“Yeah, but we’re only a few days from Earth. Why would they bother?”

“At which point the Earth Defense Force will take possession of the Aurora and probably all of the spacecraft aboard. In a few days, we might very well be out of a job, my friend.”

“The captain will look out for us,” Josh said.

“I think you’re placing too much faith in his power, Josh. He may be the captain now, but once we get back to Earth, he has to answer to Fleet Command.”

Josh was beginning to become concerned. The thought of what would happen to them when they arrived at Earth had crossed his mind, but the scenarios that played out in his mind were far more favorable than those Loki was painting. “So what do you think they’ll do with us? I mean, all of us as in those of us that are
not
from Earth.”

“Best case, maybe they’ll put us up until they get another jump-enabled ship built that can take us home. But that could take years.”

“And the worst case?” Josh asked.

“They treat us with distrust and suspicion, detaining us and subjecting us to endless interrogations to learn as much as possible about the Pentaurus cluster.”

“You’re just being paranoid,” Josh protested. “They ain’t gonna lock us up and interrogate us.”

“I admit it sounds paranoid,” Loki agreed, “but people facing imminent invasion tend to be that way, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, you could be right.” Josh pondered the situation a moment. “Wait, isn’t the captain connected or something? Isn’t his father the president of something?”

“He was a senator for a very powerful continent. He was running for president when the Aurora left Earth.”

“Well, maybe he got elected,” Josh postulated. “That would be good for us, right?”

“Probably, yes,” Loki agreed. “I’m sending you a course plot.”

Josh looked down at his center console, examining the plot. “That’s cutting it pretty close, isn’t it?”

“If we’re going to get close enough to get good images of the planet’s surface, we need to get close.”

“Yeah, but that’s between the planet and her moons.”

“If we come in on that trajectory, the sun will be on our backside from the planet, so we’ll stay cold.”

“How come we never had to pass this close before?”

“It’s because of the planet’s position on its orbit of the star,” Loki explained, “that, and the position of the other planets. It’s either that course, or we have to wait a few more hours to start.”

“If we do that, we might miss our rendezvous with the Aurora, and I do not want to go jumping across the core sector all alone.”

“Didn’t you once talk about stealing this ship and going off to points unknown?”

“That was just talk, Loki, and I was talking about jumping around the Pentaurus sector, not someplace completely unfamiliar.” Josh altered the interceptor’s course, bringing it to the heading indicated on the course plot. “Coming on to course heading. Let’s get this over with.”

“Transferring flight control to auto-nav system,” Loki announced. “Jumping in three seconds.”

* * *

“Captain?” Jessica called from the hatch to the ready room.

“Yes?”

“I’ve pretty much finished up with the Jasper’s logs,” she told him as she entered the compartment, closing the hatch behind her.

“And?”

“It’s not pretty, just as we suspected.”

“Let’s hear it,” Nathan said, gesturing for her to take a seat. For once, Jessica sat in one of the chairs instead of making herself comfortable on his couch. That’s when Nathan realized she wasn’t kidding.

“To be honest, it seems like this expedition was doomed from the start. First, the ship wasn’t really designed for this long of a haul. They outfitted her with additional propellant and such, and set up a rotation schedule for the crew to come out of stasis less often to conserve resources, all the standard stuff that you would expect them to do to stretch their range. But the plain fact of the matter was that the ship was already old and worn out when Dubnyk bought her on the black market. If the expedition had actually applied for a permit, they would have been denied solely on the inadequacies of the Jasper as the transport vehicle. Even the cargo containers they used were not rated for transporting consumables. They didn’t have enough radiation shielding. The only new component on that whole ship was her fusion reactor. Luckily for the passengers, the stasis containers were properly rated. But none of that is what caused the expedition to fail.”

“What was?”

“The first problem was their cargo shuttles. They weren’t stored inside. They were docked outside the ship.”

“For the entire journey?”

“All fifty-two years.”

“I thought she had a top speed of two point five?” Nathan wondered.

“She was so heavily loaded that they decided to run at half speed to increase their range and still have enough propellant to decelerate and make orbit at the end of the journey. By the time they arrived, one shuttle was inoperable and the other one had some damage as well. They were able to scavenge parts from one to repair the other, but that left them with only one shuttle to move all the cargo and passengers to the surface.”

“Well, it would take a lot longer, but one shuttle would still do the trick,” Nathan said.

“Unless your one shuttle crashes before you’ve off-loaded even half your cargo,” Jessica told him.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Like I said, doomed from the start. But wait, it gets worse. By that time, they had about two hundred people on the surface, and at least some of their equipment. The plan was for them to make do with what they had and try to repair the crashed shuttle. They realized that if given a few years, they might be able to get the shuttle flying again. But with winter approaching, they needed to concentrate on survival. Captain Dubnyk and his remaining crew went back into stasis to conserve consumables aboard the Jasper, with the system set to wake the captain in one year to check on the colonists. It would also wake him if something on the ship needed attention.”

“So there were three hundred colonists, half their gear, and the Jasper’s crew, all waiting in stasis in orbit,” Nathan said.

“Yes, sir. The first winter was rough, far colder than they had expected based on the planetary survey performed a hundred years earlier by some corporate probe. About twenty people died. When the captain woke up a year later, he realized that it might take them longer than expected to repair the shuttle. He continued putting himself in stasis for a year at a time. This went on for about ten years. Every winter was brutal, but the colony survived. Birth rates were poor, and the colony was barely able to maintain their population, but they had managed to develop some basic refining and fabrication capabilities and were actually making some progress with the shuttle repairs. Then one year, Dubnyk came out of stasis, and nobody answered. He used the optical sensors to scan for the colony, but it was gone, wiped out by a massive lava flow. He found a message in the ship’s comm logs from the colony. A massive volcano had erupted, forcing them to abandon their camp and move farther north. They promised to re-contact him once they established a new settlement.”

“What about the shuttle? They couldn’t have moved it?” Nathan asked.

“No, it was lost in the lava flows. They scavenged what they could, like sensors, a fusion reactor, and comm gear. But the shuttle itself was gone.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Dubnyk and the rest of them were stuck on the Jasper with no way down and not enough propellant to go anywhere else.”

“So what happened to the colonists?”

“Dubnyk made contact with them the next time he came out of stasis, but the news was grim. They had moved as far north as they dared, but all the ash the volcano dumped into the atmosphere was changing the climate, making it colder.”

“They were going into an ice age?” Nathan wondered.

“That’s what Dubnyk thought. One of the colonists also thought that the planet might have already been on its way to a cold cycle, and the volcano just made matters worse. They built some pretty hefty shelters and survived for another decade. Dubnyk came out of stasis every year to check in on them, but he could see that their numbers were dwindling and their spirits were fading. Eventually, no one answered his calls. He could still see the energy of their fusion reactor at their northern colony site even though it was buried in the snow. So he switched to five-year cycles, hoping their comm-unit had simply broken. But every time he woke up and checked, it was the same thing: no messages, no signs of life. Only more snow. Once the fusion reactor’s signal disappeared, he simply gave up. He activated the emergency beacon and put himself under indefinitely, to be awakened only when the ship needed his attention. Eventually, the ship lost pressure and the onboard systems refused to awaken anyone into a vacuum.”

“Yeah, that would suck.”

“Literally.” Jessica sighed. “Like I said, doomed from the get-go.”

“That must have been hard to watch, Jess. I’m sorry.”

“Actually, there wasn’t any video. The captain converted all his earlier videos to text reports once he realized he could be stuck there a long time, I guess to save storage space and power. All I did was read a bunch of short log entries. Depressing as all hell, but at least I didn’t have to watch anyone freak out on video.”

“So Percival knows nothing about this,” Nathan commented.

“No, sir. As far as I can tell, he and the rest of the colonists were in stasis the entire time. The only contradictory information is the backup time log on Mister Percival’s stasis pod, and that could just be a system failure. I mean, it was in operation for a thousand years. I’m pretty sure the warranty expired on it a long time ago.”

“I’ve got Vlad looking into that, seeing if there’s a way to make it drop a chunk of time or run more slowly—anything that would explain the two-hundred year discrepancy.”

“Would you like me to tell him?” Jessica asked.

“That’s okay. I should be the one to tell him,” Nathan insisted.

“If there’s nothing else, I’m going to take a shower and get some rack time. I’ve been staring at the damned data pad for so long I’m getting cross-eyed.”

“Thanks, Jess.” Nathan watched her exit, wondering how any one expedition could be so unfortunate. Many times he had thought their own string of events to be unfortunate, but they were still alive. They were also nearly home.

* * *

“Uh, Josh, we have a little problem,” Loki reported. After a few moments, he reached forward over his console and tapped Josh’s helmet. “Josh!”

“What?”

“We have a problem.”

“What? I’m awake. What is it?”

“There are five moons orbiting the target world, not four.”

“Wow, Loki, that is bad. What are we to do?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Loki chided. “There must of have been a fifth moon hidden behind the planet. It’s my fault. We should have waited longer before plotting a course.”

“So it’s a fifth moon; big deal,” Josh said. “Are we going to crash into it?”

“No,” Loki admitted, “but we’re going to fly uncomfortably close to it.”

“How big is it? Is it going to pull us in?”

“It’s pretty small, actually. It’s probably an asteroid that was either trapped in orbit, or they parked it there.”

“Like the Corinairans did?” Josh wondered.

“It’s possible, but it seems a little big for that.”

“The Corinairans hollowed them out before they parked them in orbit, right?”

“Yeah, so?” Loki wondered.

“If these guys do the same, then it won’t have much mass. Maybe it won’t pull us in.”

“But if it does, we’re going to need to do a burn to keep our distance. That close to the planet, someone is bound to notice the sudden thermal signature,” Loki warned.

“Can we do a burn now and change course to stay away from it?”

“No way, we’re still too close to that third ship, the one that is moving out of the system. They’d see us for sure.”

“If they’re even looking.”

“Good point, but now that we’re close enough to use opticals on her, I’m pretty sure she’s a warship, just like the two we passed on the way in.”

Josh studied the plots on his display. “Okay, if we burn now we’re screwed for sure. We’d have to make a run for it and try to duck behind something to jump away unseen.”

“And we don’t know what their maximum acceleration is or if they have fighters and what
their
maximum acceleration is,” Loki reminded him.

“Yeah, so we don’t even know if we can outrun them,” Josh said. “So better we wait and do the burn at the last minute. Then if they do come after us, we’re already in position to quickly put either the moon or the planet itself between us and them and jump away before they can catch up to us. Fast or not, it has got to take them some time to get up to speed, and we’re already doing point three. Can you run that, Loki?”

“I’m doing it now,” Loki announced as he keyed variables into his navigation computer. “The captain never has us going more than a quarter of our maximum sub-light speed through a system under normal conditions, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So I’ll assume those ships do the same.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s all I’ve got to go on, Josh. You got any better ideas?”

“Nope.”

“They’re doing about point one right now. So let’s assume they can go point four light. Fighters are usually faster, so we’ll say twice that, or point eight.”

“About the same as us,” Josh commented. “Works for me. So how’s it look?”

“Just a minute.” Loki ran the numbers for both scenarios, double-checking each time. “If we burn now and my assumptions are correct, and assuming they react the moment our burn signature reaches their sensors, they could catch us. If we wait and burn later, they’d have to go FTL to reach us before we ducked behind the moon and jumped.”

“Which they might,” Josh said. “Either way, our chances seem better burning later, wouldn’t you say?”

“Agreed. We burn as we approach,” Loki said. “We might even be able to use the fifth moon’s gravity to whip us around, which would require less of a burn.”

“Making us less obvious on their sensors.”

“Not really less, just for a shorter duration.”

“Hey, less is less,” Josh said, “and less is good.”

“In this case, yes. In how long you collect data before you start a recon run, no.”

“Don’t worry about it, Loki,” Josh told him. “At least, for once, it wasn’t me that got us into trouble.”

“Thanks, Josh, really. I feel so much better.”

“How long until the burn?”

“Another eighty-seven minutes,” Loki answered. “At least I’ll have time to get a proper mass reading on that fifth moon.”

“And a real good look at the planet,” Josh added. “The CAG’s gonna think we were in orbit.”

“We practically will be, Josh.”

* * *

“Jump sixty-one in one minute,” Mister Riley announced. “Switching to auto-nav.”

Cameron entered the bridge and made her way down to stand beside Nathan.