Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (18 page)

Greg got up and left the room. He felt guilty leaving her earlier, but he wasn’t doing much good here. She didn’t really want him making a fuss either. Or did she? It was hard to tell.

Greg took out his tablet and turned it on. He re-read the message from the work assignment people asking him to report in. He wished he had more vodka.
 

046

Lighthouse, 19:00. The boardroom.

Mancuso winced as he lowered himself into the chair at the head of the table. The room was lit up by screens showing various orbital plots and mathematical equations – lots of differential calculus, transform matrices and greek letters.

“Ok, tell me what you’ve got.” It had been only an hour and a half since Ortega and Franklin started breaking down the object’s path. It looked like they’d been busy. Wilkins joined them with Mancuso and sat at the far end of the table, his back to them reading the math on the board.

Dr. Ortega blinked. He seemed to be collecting himself.

Emma broke the silence. “Commander, we’ve been working on calculating the trajectory of the object and have come up with some new data as a result. The data suggests certain physical parameters.”

Mancuso nodded. “Do we have an accurate trajectory for it yet?”

The chief of science almost smiled. “Oh, yes. That’s the easy part, but given the object’s capabilities it seems like that could change dramatically.” He and Emma had spent the last hour going through their findings. He was reasonably confident what they had was accurate now. He liked being accurate.

“I see.” Mancuso gripped the arms of his chair. “Broadcast that telemetry out to our ships right away. Send them your calculations so they can verify. Ms. Franklin, I’ll let you have the honors of sending the message.”

“Ok, but… don’t you want to hear the rest of it?” Emma was having a hard time containing her enthusiasm. Oh, to be young again. Mancuso was having a hard time just staying awake.

“Sure. Give me the executive summary.”

Emma smiled. “Based on the motion of the object, we know a couple of things: Velocity and position. Velocity we have to infer based on known coordinates…”

Mancuso held up a hand. “I said ‘executive’ summary. That means short and sweet, Ms. Franklin.”

Wilkins snorted, lounging in his seat at the end of the table.

Emma ignored it. “Uh… Right. So, after Pandora, we saw the object make a really rapid course adjustment and then it shot off in a different direction. If the flashes we’re seeing are burns, and Nelson seems to think so,” she indicated Ortega with a brief glance, “then we’re able to make some guesses about the object’s mass. And it’s thrust capabilities.”

Mancuso raised an eyebrow. “OK, you got my attention. What are we looking at?”

Ortega pointed at one of the screens covered in force calculations. “We think it’s around one to ten cubic meters in volume, mass is less than a tonne. Anything larger than that would require more thrust to create the motion we’re seeing. It’d be producing more light when it flashed.”

Mancuso digested that for a moment. “But… that’s tiny. We’re talking about something the size of this table.” He pounded it lightly with his fist for emphasis.

“I know, right?” Emma reined in her excitement. Reminded herself that this object was chasing down her father’s ship. She continued more soberly. “There’s more.” She began typing on her tablet and brought up the video of the Pandora’s last moments.

“I hadn’t been thinking too much about this until today. I didn’t get much time to really spend with it before the flight. There are two flashes. Bright, normal flash, then a smaller one.” She looked back at Mancuso. “I think it fired a projectile. Maybe a missile.”

Wilkins sat up and leaned forward on the table. “That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?”

Emma paused the looped video at the first flash. “This first flash is out of sequence with its normal blinking. This happened a few milliseconds before…” She advanced the frame, “the next, smaller flash. I believe that this smaller flash is a weapon boosting towards Pandora.” Emma looked between Mancuso and Wilkins.

Mancuso took in this new information like he’d been given a piece of mould and told to eat it.

“There’s more too. The next flash from the object didn’t happen until after Calypso’s next burn and course correction. Roughly 312 seconds later.”

“Roughly.” Mancuso smiled.

“The object’s next boost was almost ten arc-seconds higher than its previous track. It’s burn right before Pandora was nearly straight up.”

Ortega was nodding.

“It boosted away from the missile and Pandora. Got out of the blast before it happened.”

“This thing’s a goddamned acrobat.” Mancuso banged on the table with an open hand. “Ok, send out the current telemetry to our ships. Then I want you both to get this data into a separate info package and broadcast it out. They need that telemetry first.”

Emma nodded making a note on her tablet.

Mancuso continued, “I don’t want any of this information outside of the command deck. This is classified. If anybody on Mars asks about it, you are to say nothing and direct them to me. Is that clear?”

Emma looked at Ortega and they both nodded. Wilkins made a sour face.

“Alright. Get that data out there.” Mancuso got up slowly, knees cracking, and added, “Nice work.” He limped back to the deck.
 

047

The Terror.

Francine and Vanessa were in the cockpit going over the latest telemetry from Control. The ship cruising on autopilot at a comfortable 0.2G.

Vanessa wolf-whistled, “Edson’s trying to set some kind of record.”

Francine grimaced. “Not a good one.”

The latest data showed Calypso’s expected route extend out conically from its last known position with a spherical destination around the expected rendezvous point with the object.

The sphere represented a volume of space roughly half a million kilometers in diameter. Nearly half the distance from Mars to Watchtower at the L2 Lagrange point.

“That’s a pretty big playground he’s building.” Vanessa munched on a carrot.

“Let’s hope its big enough, but not too big.” Francine looked at the remaining distance to Mars. It was already beginning to move away from them and she wondered if Edson could get his ship back into safe orbit. It was a tight window and they had a lot of velocity behind them. The Terror’s trajectory was relaxed by comparison.

More crunching.

Winston’s head popped up into the cockpit. “Hey ladies.”

Vanessa inclined her head at him slightly, the stub of her carrot in her teeth.

Francine turned to look at him. “Hey. I’m showing a slight imbalance from our cargo. Wondering if it’s shifted. Can you check it out? I’m having to compensate more than we did yesterday and it’s throwing us off course.”

“A’right, skip. I got it.” Winston slid back down the ladder and into the equipment bay.

He radioed back up, “Hey skip? I think I see the problem.”

Francine was surprised. “That was quick. What is it?”

“We sprung a leak.”

Through the porthole in the equipment bay, Winston could see a stream of shiny water crystals spraying out from the cargo pod underneath them.

They were losing their cargo.

Reggie dropped into the equipment bay and peered through the porthole beside Winston. “Holy shit!”

“Looks like a slow leak, at least, but it’s near the aft end of the pod. Means it’ll keep leaking if we don’t seal that up.” Reggie nodded.

Winston frowned. “Slow or not, we’ll lose a good chunk of that H2O before we get home.” He clicked his intercom back on. “Captain, we should cut the engines and fix this.”

Francine radioed down on the ship’s intercom. “Let’s meet in the galley and talk it out.”

The crew rattled up and down the ladders and met in the middle section. Reggie filled the kettle and put it on to boil while everybody else took their seat at the small table bolted into the floor.

Francine hung onto the ladder, keeping close to the hatch in case she had to climb back up to the cockpit. “How much have we lost?”

Winston shrugged. “We don’t know yet. Fact that it showed up on your instruments makes me think we’ve lost a lot. Maybe a ton?” They had no real instruments in the pod itself. It was just a dumb can they could fill up via an assortment of hatches and valves.

Vanessa. “How’d we get a hole back there, anyway? You said it’s aft. If we hit something it’d be at the front.”

Reggie’s kettle started boiling and beeped at him. “Not necessarily. Could have been a fast-mover hit it going sideways.” He poured some of the boiling water into bulbs, micro crystals of coffee foamed inside. He passed them around and took a seat.

Vanessa took hers. “Lucky shot. Lucky for us.” She shuddered and put her hands around the bulb for warmth.

A loud ping rang through the ship.

Everyone’s eyes widened and Francine bolted up the ladder, jumping up past the bunks and into the cockpit. She yelled down on her way up, “Get me eyes outside! Now!”

The crew scrambled. Untouched bulbs of coffee sitting on the table. One rolled off the edge and bounced off the floor, spilling.
 

048

Calypso.

“Engine shutdown in thirty seconds.” Edson called out over the intercom. Straining against the gravities. Several warning lights were flashing on his console.

Calypso shut down her engines and slid into a drift. The tail section glowing from the intense heat. The gimbals turning a slow rotation as the ship tumbled forward. Edson gave a shot of orientation thrust to level them out.

Edson scanned the console. Radiation. Temperature. Fuel imbalance. The ship needed a break. They all did.

“Engines will be offline for three hours. Get some rest.” Edson slid the controls to the sides and locked his console. He released the belts from his seat and drifted up over the controls. He stretched out and rotated his head about his neck trying to loosen his stiff muscles. He was sore. Feeling old.

Messages started coming in from Control as the wide-band radio locked onto Mars.

Carl floated into the cockpit and pushed over to the console. “Jesus, Edson. Are you trying to kill the ship yourself?”

Edson heaved himself back down to the deck from a wall panel and grabbed onto his seat. “As opposed to what? Letting something else do it for us?”

Carl grimaced. “The reactor’s way too hot. You’re gonna melt it down. If something fails back there we won’t be able to get near it to fix it because of all the radiation.”

Edson looked at Carl, could see the anxiety on his face. “The ship’ll hold.”

Edson flipped through the messages and put up the latest batch of telemetry data on the big screen. He compared their version with his own inertial data. They were spot on. He considered altering his flight plans further to add some additional variability.

Carl looked at the rendezvous estimation. “Skip, I know you made your call earlier today. When I was talking about starting deceleration burns. I wanna ask you to reconsider. We should start braking now.”

Edson gritted his teeth. He didn’t like it when his crew questioned his decisions. It was his ship.

Carl could see Edson’s jaw clenching, the muscles around his temples pulsed, his goatee jutting out like a spike. He pushed on undeterred, “It’s just that… Look at the rendezvous point.” He pointed at the ball in space. “If we start braking now we can maybe stay outside of it. That thing’ll blow right past us.”

Edson studied the map again. “And we’ll be blind.” If they flipped over, they’d be pointing their engines towards Mars. A good chunk of the ship would be in the way of their antenna array. They wouldn’t even be able to get low bandwidth telemetry from Control.

Carl nodded. “I know. I thought of that. We can still do temporary flips to grab some data.”

Edson floated around and looked at his crewman. “What’s Ben say?”

Carl shrugged, floating off the deck plate. “I dunno. I didn’t want to ask him about it without getting your say-so first.”

Edson exhaled and called down over the intercom. “Trig, can you come up to the cockpit?” Carl had done the right thing bringing it him first. He was glad for that kindness.

A few seconds later Ben floated into the control room, hung from the ladder by the hatch. “Hey. What’s up?”

“Hey. You get to play tie-breaker.” Edson looked down at his hands gripping the back of his chair, forced himself to relax. “Two options: First, we keep doing periodic heavy burns towards Mars. We flip once we’re past the rendezvous point with the object.” He nodded at the screen showing their flight path.

“Second option: We start braking now. Decelerate, try to avoid the rendezvous completely and let the object fly past us. We’ll be in the dark while we’re braking.”

Ben looked back and forth between Edson and Carl. Trying to read them. He realized he was now in the middle of some sort of power-play Carl had started and didn’t want anything to do with it. “Shit, I dunno, man. I break rocks for a living.” He grabbed some of the webbing above the co-pilot’s seat and hung from it. “What’s the best option to get me home to my lady?”