My hard science fiction novella, complete, in fifteen chapters.
This is the complete novella. The original lives in a Google Doc; if you have thoughts, I’d love for you to leave a comment there.
“We’re positioning the anchor, please prepare for lift in two minutes.” The autopilot’s voice filled the passenger compartment with calculated calmness.
“First time going to space?” The boy – no, not a boy, a young man – leaned across the aisle. Purple bangs, an inch too long for their own good, slid over mismatched eyes, and an animated butterfly tattoo flitted across his right cheek, circled his ear, and then settled on his jawline, idly flapping its wings that perfectly matched the color of his hair. He brushed the bangs back with a clearly practiced carelessness.
Anya nodded, a lie.
Two rows ahead, a small woman with straight blonde hair cut just above shoulder-length wrestled with a toddler and a harness, cursing in Portuguese. Anya spoke Spanish, not Portuguese, as made sense in Argentina, but it was obvious the woman was lecturing the child about safety. The toddler squealed in delight and struggled harder, until with a series of snaps of the harness buckles she locked him in place.
On the young man’s far side sat a girl – no, not a girl, a young woman – with dark hair that was braided tight, matching her posture. She watched Anya the way a shepherd watches a wolf in the distance, waiting for it to move along.
The remaining twenty-five seats were empty. Not that it mattered much: the drive field was so ridiculously efficient at twisting gravity it would take only a few hundred watts to lift the cradle, so the journey was effectively free.
“You’ve got your harness right,” the young man said in confident approval. “That’s more than most first-timers manage. Not that it matters much in a cradle.” He smiled a grin that came with instructions. “I’m Tom.”
Anya actually had the harness right because she’d lost count of how many times she’d gone up, and had lied to him because she had been lying to boys of all ages since she was twelve. She offered a small, neutral smile back, and looked past him at the large picture window that framed the windswept Río de la Plata beyond Dock Sud.
Tom leaned into her field of view. “Heading to the Moon? G-ball championships? My cousin made regionals last year–”
“No.” She could have let him ramble, let it go, but her voice ran ahead of her brain. “I’m being dropped at a runabout heading for the planet Egeria at Gliese 581.”
Tom’s eyes widened; the young woman’s eyes narrowed, then relaxed somewhat as she realized Anya would be gone in under an hour.
Anya regretted it instantly. Next time, lie twice!
“Wow,” Tom said. “That’s – what – twenty light-years? Six months shipboard?”
“No,” she said, again too quickly. “The ’tross is running a higher multiplier. A few weeks ship’s time.” Anya’s voice trailed up at the end of the sentence. Lie three times. Shut up, shut up! Love the silence.
Tom inhaled for a new volley, but the young woman cut him off without looking at him, eyes focused on Anya. “Leave her alone, Tom.” The words, directed at him but meant for her, were low and resonant, with a tone that would make dogs behave.
Anya met those eyes. “I’m fifteen.”
The woman’s posture didn’t change, but her eyes softened – slightly.
“Yes, Rosa,” Tom said quietly.
The autopilot jumped into the lull. “Anchor is in position. Lift is imminent. Please ensure you are secured.” Everyone already was. The autopilot said it anyway, because why wouldn’t it?
Still, Anya knew “securing” was pointless. Sadly, there would be no rumble, no shaking, no hard press into their seats. The cradle’s drive field would twist the Earth’s gravity back on itself, and the cradle and its contents would launch as smoothly as Wonka’s elevator.
And, almost as if her thought had caused it, Buenos Aires fell away at 10 g’s.
She wished it could be like the old days of Apollo and Soyuz: fire and thunder, as she had seen watching all the launch videos on repeat. To her eternal regret, rockets like that – real rockets – had ended long before her parents were born.
Ahead of the cradle, tethered to it by a short cable, the anchor repelled the cradle and its contents with gravity magnified by a factor of billions… trillions? Anya wasn’t sure. Whatever the multiplier, it was enough that their apparent weight didn’t noticeably change as Earth repelled them.
As the city shrank below them, Tom leaned across Rosa for the viewport. “God, I love this part,” he said. “Falling up.”
Rosa didn’t look at Tom. She was also focusing on the window, her body even stiffer than before, as the sky turned a darker blue, then black. “Your love is loud,” she said, without heat. “Let other people have theirs quiet.”
Tom flushed. “Right,” he said, his smile shrinking a bit.
The Earth displayed its curve. The Albatross was stationed roughly over California, hovering at 400 kilometers, so in less than a minute, when the cradle hit 100 kilometers, effectively clear of the atmosphere, the drive field angled sharply to push against a swath of the Earth South Southeast of them, accelerating the cradle even faster roughly North by Northwest. Anya thought of the time her mother had forced her to watch the Hitchcock movie with her and frowned – unless her mother made the trip to 581 highly unlikely! some forty-two years would pass for her mother before they saw each other again.
Her father had engineered this situation, so he owned the blame for it – but her mother had committed similar violations. Her parents could be such assholes to each other. They had been for at least ten years. She had memories back to when she was five, just before everything had gone completely to shit, but even then she had no memories of her parents ever being kind to each other, or even to anyone in general. Maybe she just didn’t remember a time when they had been kind, or maybe they never had been; she didn’t know which made her sadder.
The toddler two rows up, his mother distracted by the lift, managed to release the harness, giggling, and tore off up the aisle. As the mother unbuckled to chase him, the autopilot returned with the same dry, comforting voice. “We are approaching the Equator. Please remain secured until we dock in approximately five minutes.” The mother spared an angry glance in the general direction of the disembodied voice, then managed to snag a wrist, pull the boy back, and get him into the restraints. The toddler sulked by shedding a shoe and chucking it ahead three rows.
Tom cocked his head at Anya, trying for gallant. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I’ve seen worse,” she said, and let herself have the private joke of telling the truth about a lie.
Rosa turned her eyes to Anya and weighed the words, then filed them without comment and returned her visibly stressed attention back to the window.
A few minutes later, the Stellar Albatross came into view: a flat ship designed for significant acceleration with minimal strain on the hull. It was just over sixty meters in diameter but only ten meters tall – the exact opposite of the rockets in the videos Anya had watched, both factual and fictional. Several kilometers above it – no, not nearly that far, Anya noted with curiosity – was a plate almost seventy meters in diameter, but under a meter thick: the anchor. Anya knew a tether strung between them, but it was invisible at this distance. She also knew the cradle’s anchor was not nearly as far above it; the geometry of the gravitational gradient in the cradle was noticeably curved.
The cradle and the Albatross traded info on their gravity fields, did the necessary math, and there was a perfect overlap of intentions as the fields merged without so much as a slap or a thunk, the two ships hovering in sync above the Earth. A few seconds later the light above the door at the front of the aisle changed from orange to green.
“Docking complete,” the autopilot said, sounding vaguely pleased. “Passenger Anya Morris please make your way to the Stellar Albatross. Be sure to collect all your belongings, and watch the gravity gradient as you approach the door, it will be roughly five degrees off apparent vertical.”
Belts popped. Velcro complained. The toddler whooped and launched over the back of his seat, only to be snagged by the ankle like a fish, to cries of infant outrage.
Anya undid her harness and stood. “Vertical” was indeed off vertical, and it took her a moment to balance. She had no luggage; she never took luggage. It wasn’t her first time on the ship, although it would be her first time outside the solar system. She nodded at Tom and Rosa and made her way forward. As she passed the mother and child, he made one last attempt to undo his harness, but his mother was paying attention only to him, and he managed none of the buckles without her immediately re-closing them.
Anya could feel the increasing tilt as she walked forward. The door swung open as she approached, and a man she didn’t recognize stepped forward. She had checked: she normally flew on the Albatross II, and the crew for this trip was all-new since the last time she had been aboard the Albatross a year earlier. The man wore a medic’s tri-band and a steward’s smile. He appeared to be late twenty-something, with dark wavy hair and a handsome, in a professional way, face. Anya noted that he was leaning backward, away from her and the edge of the Albatross.
“Welcome aboard the Stellar Albatross,” he said. The tag on his chest said BEN CARTER in block font, but he immediately followed with, “I’m Ben Carter. Watch your step as you come aboard, the gravity is significantly tilted.” He looked at the floor past her. “No luggage?”
Anya shook her head. As she stepped forward, she couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder at Tom. She’d chosen shoulder-length dirty blonde hair today, with a slight curl to it, and she brushed it back over her ear with a smile at Tom, but of course she was checking for Rosa’s reaction, and got the look she was hoping for. She had no interest in Tom really, but Rosa deserved at least a little worry for how she had treated him on the lift up.
Then she crossed over into the Albatross’s gravity and nearly fell over backwards. She heard Rosa laugh out loud. Shit! Well, they’ll both be sixty by the time I get back, so what does it matter?
Ben turned and walked down the steel-framed hallway. The walls on either side were covered with hangings depicting various pastoral scenes – Anya remembered when she was twelve and her father had dragged her all over Ares City chasing down particular vendors that claimed to have hand-crafted the hangings. Anya was still unclear on why that mattered, or why Martians making art about scenes on Earth mattered, but she had tagged along behind her father as he secured dozens of them to decorate the Albatross.
Ben talked over his shoulder as he walked. “I’m one of the crew hired by your father to get you to Egeria. I understand the Albatross hasn’t changed much since the last time you were aboard, but I’m your aide-de-camp for the trip, so if you need anything, I’m your guy. If you lose something, tell me and I’ll find it. If you insist on chasing after it, let me know ahead of time who to inform we lost you.”
Behind them there was a slight metallic ping as the cradle separated from the Albatross to head off to the Moon, or perhaps wherever the mother and son were going, if they were going first.
As they walked down the hallway, Anya noticed the smell: the cradle, sterilized between trips, had smelled like new plastic and wiped-down metal and just a bit like nervous people. The Albatross smelled like the mobile home that it was: metal mixed with paper and cloth, a hint of body odor, and lots of coffee and tea. The hangings smelled vaguely like sheep. At least, she guessed so – she didn’t know what sheep smelled like, but she imagined it was like the hangings, only more. Anya remembered the smell from a trip to Saturn the year before; the balance had shifted toward coffee since then.
Ben continued. “I’m also the chief medic on board. We’re doing a high acceleration trip, so I’ll give you a quick once-over before we head out. Nothing too serious, just listen to your heart and lungs, and a quick scan to make sure everything’s in the right place. I assume you’re feeling okay?”
Anya nodded, then realized he wasn’t looking back at her and said, “Yes, fine.” She saw his head nod. “Why the messed-up gravity?”
“I’ll let Kenji explain that.”
The Albatross had a configurable interior, and some things had changed, so despite having been on board many times she studied everything to see what was different. Anya had inherited her interest in historical space travel from her father, and she noted the liberally-distributed handholds they walked past. Dad still pretending the Albatross will ever see zero-g
She followed Ben down the narrow hallway until he turned right into a small room with MEDICAL on the door. He examined her as promised, running several medical devices over her torso in an impersonal but professional way, and pronounced her fit to lift. They left medical and he escorted her further into the ship.
He led her along a slight curve that angled toward the ship’s center. They climbed a set of stairs to the uppermost level of the ship and into a meeting/dining/entertaining room that could seat thirty comfortably. She noted as she walked in that the set of marks of her height over the years were still on the entry door frame, many of them clustered around when she was six, shortly after her parents had broken up and her father had taken her on a tour of the solar system over most of a year, practically holding her hostage away from her mother, who didn’t like space travel one bit.
The tables and other furniture were bolted to the floor and handholds were closely spaced around the room. The ceiling, four meters overhead, was covered with a permanent display, indistinguishable from a window, showing nearly the exact view a window in that location would have. Against the backdrop of stars was the anchor mass: not glossy, not dramatic, its dark texture dully reflecting the Earthlight from below. The tether ran to it and vanished against it like a seam you’d only notice if you’d sewn it yourself.
“That’s the anchor,” Ben said unnecessarily. “Sorry it’s blocking the view. It looks like a mistake, like someone forgot to draw the stars in that section of the sky. But when you learn what it does for us, you might start saying ‘thank you’ when you pass a viewport.”
“What’s it doing for us?” Anya asked, because it was the right line to feed a man who liked knowing and sharing the answer.
“Keeping your world in place,” Ben said. “The gravity drive sets up repulsion between that plate and the ship, all the time. The tether keeps them from parting ways, and we get a constant proper acceleration out of it. One G of ‘down’ for the ship. I can remove it from the display if you like?”
“No, it’s fine,” Anya replied absently. “The ‘Tross has been re-rigged for higher acceleration for this trip, right?” Ben nodded. “Is that why the gravity is torqued?” Ben’s eyebrows raised a bit.
Shit, don’t be smart!
Ben recovered and replied, “Kenji will be delighted to hear you asked. He’s already spent so much time explaining to each of the rest of us, any of us could brief you in depth, but then he wouldn’t get to do it, and he’d be frustrated. It’s just a short detour to starboard, let’s get it out of the way. He’d tell you anyway, so you might as well ask and make him double happy”
He led her out of the meeting room, through a hall, down two sets of stairs, and down another hall to the edge of the ship. They stopped at a hatch with ENGINEERING stenciled on it and a series of stick-on warning triangles mixed with Pokemon and an animated image of Goofy scratching his head in confusion with a wrench in one hand, staring at a leaking pipe. As they walked up Goofy shrugged and banged on the pipe with the wrench, releasing a torrent of water. The hatch swung open on a whisper. Inside was a space about four meters across and six deep that was both chaotic and organized: filled with tools and machine equipment, parts in boxes lining the walls, and various cables and wiring harnesses hanging from the ceiling.
Kenji Tanaka looked up from a diagnostic panel as they entered. His black hair looked like it had dried in zero gravity, and he had the slouched posture of a man who’d fought a chair for a draw. He set down an impossibly small tool, pushed up a specialized set of display glasses and said, “Hi, I’m so glad you’re here. Anya? I’m Kenji.” He talked fast.
Ben nodded at Anya. “Kenji, she asked about the tilted gravity and the increased boost for the trip. I told her she was a fool to bring it up, but she was persistent, so go ahead and claim another victim.”
Kenji clapped his hands. “We’ve got five minutes before the Captain wants you on the bridge, which is eight longer than we need and… many fewer than I want.”
“Five being eight longer than we need implies negative time,” Ben interjected.
Kenji waved a dismissive hand at Ben, who smiled, shook his head and left. When Ben had gone, Kenji turned to Anya. “So, how much do you know about gravity drives?”
“Pretend I know nothing.” Not technically a lie.
“Okay. First, there are three gravity manipulators on board.” He held up three fingers to illustrate, gesturing to each in turn.
Main, gravity, deflector.
“The ship’s drive operates, surprise, surprise, on the whole ship: us, the ship, the anchor mass, all of it. It attracts or repels the ship from whatever we point it at. For this trip that will be the Earth, briefly, then the Sun, and when we arrive at 581 it will point forward at the star to decelerate us.”
Okay, ship, gravity, and deflector. Now tell me about the gravity.
Anya nodded appreciatively.
“The gravity drive you already know repels the ship from the anchor mass to give us onboard gravity.”
But why is the gravity wonky?
“The deflector is the most powerful drive on the ship. It projects the gravity of the entire ship and anchor forward at about 10^24 to one to push interstellar gas and dust out of our way and step down the wavelength of harmful radiation.”
“And the gravity?”
“I’m getting there.” He started talking even faster. “The gravity drive is much weaker than that, but still good to almost a trillion to one, which is way more than the ship’s drive at around a billion to one. Normally for a trip like this we’d hit about 99.97% c, and get to 581 in about six months ship’s time. That’s how your father travelled. Or I should say ‘is traveling’ – he’s not there yet, since he only took off two days ago on the Albatross II.
“The Albatross isn’t prepared for a six-month journey, so the trick I applied here is temporarily swapping the ship drive and the gravity drive.”
Anya’s eyes widened. Mad scientist much? “Doesn’t that mean we’ll have less than one gravity on the ship?”
Kenji nodded quickly. “Gold star for you, except not quite. The anchor is typically about three clicks away. I reeled it in to 95 meters so the effect will be strong enough even based on the weaker drive.” So that explains why the anchor looked so close. “It should be right around one G, but it could be a little variable, since the system isn’t designed to be used like this.”
“And that proximity causes the tilting: the point mass equivalent is at too much of an angle.”
Kenji’s eyes widened a bit. “Exactly! You have the mind of an engineer!”
Learn to be quiet, please!
Kenji picked up a small metal ball from a drawer in his work station. “Anywhere but the center of the ship, vertical is going to be noticeably off.” He set the ball down on the nominally flat surface next to him and it obligingly rolled off and into the back of the room toward the edge of the ship. “But there’s just the five of us for this trip, so staying near the center won’t be much of a challenge, except for fixed locations like engineering here at the edge of the ship. There’s also going to be a gravitational gradient, even across the height of a human. It’ll only be a few percent, and no harm, but you’ll notice it. Along with the boosts we’ll go through as we take off, that and the variability is the reason for the extra medical checks, just to be safe. Also, gravity will be noticeably less on the lower decks, as low as about 8 meters per second squared, but that’s mostly storage anyway, and that’s manageable when we have to go down there.
“Fortunately, your father, because he’s quirky…” Anya’s face darkened and Kenji twitched. “No offense, I like quirky! He had the Albatross designed for weightlessness, so even if we – sorry, I! – make mistakes, we’ll be fine, as long as I err on the side of too-low gravity mistakes rather than too-high.” He smiled at his very-much-not-funny joke. “We’ll hit 99.9991% c, and the twenty and a half light years to 581 will take us just about 32 days ship’s time.”
“Why not swap the repulsion drive in?” Please have a reason!
Kenji’s eyes widened. “I thought about it for a hot second, but there are several reasons not to. First, it’s too powerful and I couldn’t step it down enough to be practical. I could maybe fade it to 10^20 to 1, and the tidal forces would still crush us.”
Okay, that’s new. “Wait, what? Like spaghettification on your way into a black hole?”
Kenji nodded, but before he could reply, the communicator attached to the neck of his shirt said, “Mr. Tanaka, send our guest forward before she thinks Engineering is the whole ship.”
“Captain,” Kenji replied respectfully, “Engineering is the whole ship.”
“Then I will borrow a corner of it,” the voice answered. “Bridge. Now, please.”
Kenji stood and motioned for Anya to follow him, only barely hesitating in his speech as they walked. “Yeah. Falling feet-first into a black hole you get stretched because your feet are closer and get pulled harder than your head, until it literally rips you apart.” Despite how fast he talked, he positively strolled down the hallway. “Pushing off Earth or the Sun, we have the opposite problem. We get compressed because the repulsion from below is stronger the closer you are to the source. Too much multiplier, too close to the Earth or Sun, and we’d be crushed. Call it pizzafication.” Kenji turned left down a hallway Anya was certain wasn’t the shortest route to the bridge. The pace of his speech increased. “That’s why we’ll all be lying down when we leave Earth. That said, the real limiting factor is the Albatross itself and the anchor mass. I’ve done the math so everything mostly balances out, but it’s an unusual rig, to be sure.”
“Why not just build the Albatross to be faster?”
“There are a thousand design features that follow on from the gravity multiplier of a ship’s drive. You can’t just slap on a more powerful drive and call it done.”
“But isn’t that exactly what you’ve done?”
Kenji blinked, one foot on the bottom step of a set of stairs, then blinked again. “Well… yeah, but ships are designed with significant safety margins, and an extra 1000x gravity is well within those limits as long as we watch what we push near Earth. We wouldn’t be able to get the Albatross certified for a 1000x drive permanently, but for a one-off trip like this it’s not a problem. People do it all the time.”
“All the time?”
“Okay, people do it.” Kenji shrugged.
Anya hated saying the phrase, and avoided it whenever she could, but it really seemed appropriate here. “Does my father know you’ve done this?”
Kenji stopped walking, and Anya wished she hadn’t asked, both because she wasn’t going to like the answer, and because of what Kenji now thought of her. “He’s been briefed. The brief was high level. We can cancel the flight if you wish, or simply take the long way, but the Albatross isn’t prepared for a five month trip – we’d need to replan and pack extra supplies.” He started walking again.
Would they actually postpone the flight? Cancel it? Dad would be pissed! He had forced the decision on her; if she chose to stay on Earth, it would be forty years before she would hear him say in that sing-song voice he fell into when he was especially angry, “AN-ya, WHY did you CANCEL the FLIGHT?”
Anya said, “It’s fine. What’s the second reason not to use the deflector drive?”
Kenji tilted his head in apology. “That will have to wait, since we’re at the bridge.”
The Albatross’s bridge was clean and simple. One wall was an edge-to-edge display like the ceiling of the meeting room, the others the plain grey of foam steel, with smaller displays all over them. Despite facing to the side, the display showed the view forward from the ship, or “up” from the perspective of the room. It was unsettling at first, but Anya assumed the crew got used to it.
Even discounting the directional contradiction, there was no question the view was artificial: the anchor was a ghostly outline, with stars and the Moon behind it showing through it.
Six form-fitting chairs were spaced around the periphery of the room, suspended in gimbals that would let them take any orientation. Captain Eva Rostova was seated in the front-left chair, but stood as Anya walked in. She looked to be in her mid-forties, although that meant she could be anything from twenties to nineties anymore. Her red hair was cropped for work, not for style, and she was shorter than Anya.
Jia Li had the pilot’s chair on the front right, and she sat as if a string ran from the back of her neck to the ceiling. A stylus was tucked behind her ear, cutting through her straight black hair like a blade.
“Ms. Anya,” Eva said. “Welcome aboard. Mr. Tanaka, thank you for loaning her to us.” Kenji nodded and dropped into the right rear seat with an awkward thump, one leg hanging over the side.
“Launch plan is prepped for ten minutes from now,” Jia said precisely. Her fingers marked three quick points on the glass, not even looking at them, and a diagram sprang onto the wall display showing the Earth and the Sun, with a faint line going from the Earth to a point near the Sun, and another going from there off-screen. “We’ll do the deep well push off Earth, bounce off Sol…” She touched the controls and the display zoomed out to show the whole solar system in a traditional ‘balls on circles’ format. “… then we’ll touch up using Jupiter and Neptune and coast to 581.”
“How long will we push off the Earth?” Anya asked, no longer feigning ignorance.
Kenji chuckled, but motioned for Jia to answer. “It’s a careful dance because of Kenji’s modification, but: ten seconds, give or take,” the pilot responded. “For the first milliseconds we’ll be accelerating at well under 10^8 meters per second squared because we’re throttling to avoid pizzaing ourselves. That’ll be about 1.0 pizza-force g’s squishing us from all sides, plus 20 g’s tidal across the depth of the ship’s hull, so roughly 6 g’s pressing us into our seats; but that will only last for a couple seconds. We’ll ramp up the multiplier as we gain distance, and within a few seconds we’ll be at the full 9.2*10^11 multiplier.”
“Okay, and I’m sorry, I guess I know much more about how Armstrong walked on the Moon than about how we do it these days: we’re heading for the Sun? Why do we need to do that? Every other trip I’ve taken in the ‘Tross has been in-system and we just pushed off whatever we were near. With Kenji’s modification we’ll hit near-light-speed just pushing off the Earth for a few seconds, right?”
Jia shook her head. “Not the Sun exactly.”
Duh.
“Just a point near it. Inside the orbit of Mercury, anyway, although we’re not aiming along the orbital plane. Gliese 581 is about 10 degrees above the plane, so we’re aiming accordingly. As to why – sure, we’ll top 99% c in a few seconds pushing off Earth, but ‘near-light-speed’ isn’t measured from zero to one – it’s measured in how many ‘9’s you put after the decimal point. With Earth that’s ‘less than one,’ and at that rate the trip to 581 would take years of ship’s time.”
“Couldn’t we push off the Earth longer?”
Jia shook her head. “Not a deep enough well. If pizzafication weren’t an issue we could hit maybe one 9 and a bit, probably pack extra rations and be there in months not years. But since I don’t look good in pepperoni, we have to go easy at the start, when the acceleration is the best. So Earth won’t do. Instead, we aim for a point about 0.13 Astronomical Units – AU – from the Sun. We spend roughly fifteen minutes getting there, and then repel off the Sun, headed for 581.” She gestured and the display zoomed out again, until it showed both the Sun and Gliese 581, with a faint line between them and a small dot traveling along the line. “The Sun’s well is deep enough that we’ll easily hit 0.99999 and a bit c, and get to 581 in a few weeks ship’s time.”
“How long will we push off the Sun?”
Jia tilted her head slightly. “From our perspective? A fraction of a second. And as I said, both Jupiter and Neptune are conveniently near our path on our way out of the system. I’ll take readings as we head out, and if needed we’ll refine our trajectory using them.”
“If they weren’t there, what would we do?”
“We can catch 581 at anything up to 26 AU. As these things go, that’s a ridiculously large margin of error – your father’s ship only has a 22 million kilometer range and they’ll be fine. We’re targeting 1 AU, somewhat ecliptic north so we miss most of what 581 has flying around it. That gives us an easy path to the planet Egeria when we get there, and plenty of margin for error. With the equipment we have, we’d have to actively try to screw it up to be more than a quarter AU off-target. As it is, I’ll hit the mark within a few hundred clicks”
“Are you willing to put money on that, Pilot?” Ben asked from the entryway.
“You’re willing to bet on misfortune?” Eva said, not smiling. “That’s dark.”
Ben held up his hands. “I’m not betting on a miss, just an inaccuracy. It happens, although as you say, being able to correct with both Jupiter and Neptune means it would be a shocking failure…” he glanced significantly, but still with a smile, at Jia, “to stray even, say, 200 kilometers from dead center?”
Jia got up from her seat and walked over to Ben and slapped his face, gently but not softly. “That’s for questioning my navigational skills.” She kissed him, not gently, but softly, and continued, “And that’s for giving me your money. You’re on for twenty.”
Ben turned to Anya and said in a stage whisper, “I never expected her to take the bait at 200km.”
Anya looked around the room. Kenji was wearing a worn t-shirt featuring an anime – Lost Spirit? – Ben wore a dark blue knit sweater. Even Eva was dressed casually, in a simple striped button shirt. Only Jia wore anything remotely like a uniform, a simple black tee with a green jacket over it. She knew this was intentional, for her, the same way she knew the crew on the Albatross II would always be in uniform, and take every opportunity to say “Sir” to her father.
Anya gestured to Jia and said, “Wait, why are we targeting 1 AU away from 581? Surely that complicates the approach?”
Jia was about to respond when a light on the board that Anya had never seen as any color but green turned yellow, and an automated voice rang out throughout the ship – “Two minutes to acceleration, please prepare.”
Jia shrugged and said, “You’ll have to look it up, I gotta get to work taking Ben’s money.”
Eva sat back in her chair, but looked over her shoulder and said, “Kenji, get flat. I heard about the bet, but this is an order.” She looked at Anya while nodding at Ben, who was settling into the second chair on the right, “He bet Kenji he couldn’t stand during the initial acceleration.”
Kenji answered back, “Captain, it’s only 6 g’s.”
Calmly, Eva replied, “I want you flat and strapped in ten seconds or I’m postponing the jump and fining you for the cost to re-book the launch window.”
“Fine.” Kenji secured a belt across his waist as his chair reclined to a very-nearly-flat configuration, supporting him from head to toe.
Eva caught Anya’s eye and motioned to the left-rear seat. Anya took it, and as soon as she settled in, it conformed to her shape and started flattening automatically. A slight beeping came from the five-point harness, which glowed red until she buckled it.
“Ben, give us views of Earth, the Moon, and the Sun please.” Moving his hands across the controls, Ben set up the displays. The center display, the largest by far, showed Earth below them, the summer Sun reflecting off the water surrounding the Yucatan peninsula, with clouds covering the ocean to the east. Seeing the Earth like that, knowing how much time would pass there before she returned, made Anya shiver.
Order them to stop. Kenji said I could cancel. They have to listen, make them stop the launch and take me to… where is mom? She glanced up and to the left and an implanted display jumped into view. Subtle control movements brought up a picture of her mother, her hair long and dark today, having lunch at the Café de Flore in the 6th arrondissement. Disconcertingly, the record was eight hours old. Where was her mother? No matter. Make them go straight to Paris. Dad will be mad, but he won’t find out until I’m 35, and I won’t have to deal with it until I’m 55, older than he’ll be. It won’t even matter anymore!
Going to Gliese 581 meant only having to deal with one parent for roughly a year, until they returned to Earth. Staying meant being free of her parents’ mutual manipulations for forty-one years. She opened her mouth. She hesitated. She said nothing. The crew continued to prepare to lift from Earth.
Anya didn’t expect a countdown like in the days of the Apollo program – no one bothered with that anymore. So even though she had experienced something similar multiple times before, it still caught her off guard when the Earth suddenly jumped away as she was slammed into her seat. She had been to the Moon (many times), Mars, Europa, Titan, and even once to Pluto, and she had never been pressed down like that, nor seen the Earth, nor any object, retreat so quickly. The ship creaked, but was otherwise quiet enough that she could hear the others’ breathing. At the same time as she was pressed into her seat, she felt a strange pressure, pushing in from all sides at once. It was unsettling, but not painful, and all the feelings of acceleration faded in seconds as they gained distance from Earth.
Her home planet went from filling the screen to a small disc in seconds, and on a side display, the quarter-lit Moon grew for about two seconds and then shrank just as quickly.
Jia was already adjusting her seat back to upright, her fingers flying over the controls. Anya suspected most of the calculations were automatic, and the activity mostly for show, but she didn’t begrudge Jia’s effort. Anya found that, just as when it reclined by itself, her seat was now returning to upright on its own, as were all the others.
The Sun didn’t visibly change at first, but as one minute turned into two, it grew noticeably larger. Not brighter – the screen would never reflect the actual intensity of a star – but the room visibly brightened as the Sun filled more and more of the large display.
“We’re on good target,” Jia called out. “To the limits of precision, we’re most likely within 200km at Gliese 581. If nothing changes we’ll just follow the plan: decelerate to 0.5 c on the way in and follow the set program at the Sun. Any correction we attempt now would be as likely to make us worse. We’ll check again after the bounce, and make any corrections off Jupiter.” She turned to Ben and said, “Want to make that five to one I make it within 100km?”
Ben fingered the controls in his armrest, checked the results, then tried another input, checked that, and said, “Sure, why not – I was going to lose at 200, at least I have a shot at 100.”
Jia’s eyes crinkled. “Silly – no you don’t.”
Minutes later, the sun was noticeably large and off-center to the lower left of the display, with three angry sunspots pocking its northeast corner, when the light went red and the automated voice called out, “Two minutes to acceleration, please prepare.”
As everyone buckled in and the seats reclined, Anya asked, “Why the red light this time?”
She could hear a laugh in Eva’s voice as she said, “You’ll note that Kenji isn’t complaining about a bet this time. We’re going pretty deep into the Sun’s gravity well, and we’ll be pushing the drive to maximum, almost ten-to-the-twelfth multiplier. So even lying down we’ll feel a bit over two g’s scrunching us, and standing up would be closer to twelve. It will only be for a fraction of a second, but it’s going to be quite a thump.”
“A fraction of a second?”
Eva raised an eyebrow. “Yep. Ten-to-the-twelfth gets us to 99.999% c in under a second, and ship’s time it will be even less. We could go longer, and theoretically make the trip in a couple days, but the deflector isn’t rated past five nines.”
“Then what was the point of swapping the drives?”
“The difference is a thousand times. With the standard engine we’d be pushing out to Saturn and still in transit for over half a year.”
“Okay – so will we overheat at the Sun?”
“Between proximity and relativistic beaming we’ll be taking almost eight hundred thousand watts per square meter in a minute, several hundred times the energy of the Sun at the Earth, but the anchor has a carbon shield and we’ll be fine. We’ll slow down as we approach – Jia is rotating the ship’s drive to face forward right now – then we’ll flip the ship, rotate the drive to face the Sun, and we’ll be on our way. We’ll only be there for a minute, but the ship will heat up a bit: just the regular radiation from the Sun will be about eighty-five thousand watts per square meter. But we’ll be fine. We’ll actually use some of that warmth as we cruise to Gliese 581. Space is cold.”
The voice broke in. “One minute. All seats flat, all harnesses fastened. Are we a go?” The voice was synthetic and flat, so Anya knew it was her own stress she heard in it.
Anya saw Jia’s hands moving across the controls even as Eva said “Yes, we’re a go.”
“What would happen if we said we weren’t ready?”
“We’d pop back out at a leisurely 0.9c and book another window,” Eva replied.
“After making whatever corrections or repairs were needed,” Kenji piped in.
The bridge was silent as the seconds ticked by. The Sun continued to grow on the screen, and Anya wondered if it would fill it before reversing.
The voice rang out, “Slowing and rotating.” Suddenly the Sun was no longer growing, and Anya felt a slight jar in the ship as the Sun started slipping to the left. Anya called out, “Can you keep it in view? I’ve never been this close.” Jia’s hands flew over the controls, and the Sun snapped back to the center of the screen. It was now impossible to tell that the ship was rotating.
A sudden question occurred to her as she felt the ship’s rotation come to a halt: “Wait, shouldn’t we have seen the Sun blue shift as we headed…” The acceleration hit hard, and at the same time things felt very strange. It was like getting pounded, hard, from all directions. It knocked the wind out of her, and it was difficult to breathe afterward: her ribs didn’t want to expand correctly.
The feeling ceased almost immediately, but the effect of it lingered. The seconds ticked by, but she still thought she heard a note of strain in Captain Rostova’s voice as she said, “Jia, can you remove the normalizing filter on the display?” The Sun, now noticeably smaller, suddenly disappeared.
“What happened to the Sun?” Anya looked at Eva, then Jia; both were smiling, Jia more obviously.
“Jia, put it back.” The Sun appeared again – it continued to shrink and dim as time passed. “The Sun is red-shifted completely out of visibility at this velocity. The whole display is a simulation anyway. We don’t have an actual camera pointed at the Sun now, and we certainly didn’t on our way in – any normal camera would have fried instantly.”
The seats rose back to their normal positions even as Jia called out, “We’re at 210 kilometers from dead center right now.” She glanced at Ben. “You would have won if it weren’t for the correction at Jupiter.”
“And with the correction?”
“Jupiter is 24 degrees from ideal for the correction, so I can’t get it down to dead center, but with an ideal correction I can get us within about 86 clicks.”
“So you’re saying there’s a chance,” Ben laughed.
“Yeah, about one in twenty I don’t make 100.”
“I don’t suppose you want to go twenty to one on 90?”
“Yeah, no, I’m good where we are. I could hit it perfectly off Jupiter and random space dust on the way could add the extra kilometers you need to win.”
After a moment Anya spoke up. “What’s the angle aspect?”
Jia said, “We’re passing Jupiter at roughly twenty light minutes. At that distance it’s only about an arc minute across, and there’s no applying the drive to part of it; the resolution isn’t fine enough. So, just making up directions for this example, suppose we’re coming in low, directly ‘down’ from Gliese 581, and Jupiter is directly to the right, at a right angle to the correction we want to make. Then there’s nothing it can do for us. Push or pull just moves us left or right, farther away from where we want to be. Neither left nor right moves us ‘up,’ the direction we need to go.
“On the other hand, suppose Jupiter is directly in line with us and Gliese 581. Whether it’s above or below, we can push or pull to make exactly the correction we need.
“Now assume it’s not exactly above or below, nor left or right, but somewhere in between. Then we can draw ourselves along the line between us and Jupiter, and the closest that line comes to Gliese 581 is the best we’re able to achieve. Jupiter is 24…” She checked the display. “point 23 degrees from that ideal in-line solution, so the best we can do is the sine of that times the original 210, or a bit over 86 kilometers.
“And of course all of that is complicated by the fact that 581 is moving at roughly 35 kilometers per second across our line of sight. So we can also make adjustments, at least in the direction 581 is moving, by speeding up or slowing down. So the theoretical best we could do off Jupiter is actually better than 86 kilometers, maybe 80 or even a bit less.
“And like I said, a few random ice cubes in the Oort cloud that hit us off center in just the wrong way, or just speed us up or slow us down, could push us off by 10 or 20 kilometers.”
“The chance of even one piece of ice like you’re imagining is exceptionally low.” Ben cut in.
“Yeah, stop trying to teach me physics,” Jia replied. “Don’t forget, I have Neptune in my back pocket. You push me too much and I’ll take the 20 to 1 and make you eat it.”
Ben laughed and looked over at Anya. “She’s the pilot-slash-navigator, but still sensitive that I have more classical astrophysics training.”
Now Jia was smiling, “I can’t help it if you’re an underachiever.”
“How long until Jupiter? And do we need to be flat?”
Jia chuckled. “Jupiter was about ten seconds after we bounced, Neptune was while Ben was trying to talk me into 90 kilometers. We got lucky on Neptune and we’re currently on target to within 56 kilometers. Still want that twenty to one deal, Ben, sweetie?”
“How about thirty to one at 60 clicks?”
“The Oort cloud is still ahead, but fine, you’re on, and when I win I’ll take it out in trade.”
“How long until the Oort cloud?” Anya asked.
“We’ll hit the first wisps of it in under an hour, and be mostly clear of it in a little over two days. Then it’s empty space until we hit 581.”
The next morning Anya woke and looked around her room. It was exactly the same as she had left it a year earlier, the walls covered with posters for bands she no longer followed, their batteries dead, their displays static.
As she flipped through hair colors she noticed Grumpy Bear 2, abandoned in the corner. Grumpy Bear 1 had been a major point of contention when he wasn’t in her luggage on a trip to the gas giants her father had taken her on when she was eight.
Both of them were convinced her mother had held Grumpy Bear back as a way to screw with her father. It had worked: Anya demanded to return to Earth immediately, and her father wasn’t going to give her mother the satisfaction, even if it meant dealing with a crying daughter for two weeks. That was when he got Anya her first space suit, and scheduled classes on the Moon, as a “screw you very much” to her mother.
The lesson her father took from that was to make sure she always had Grumpy Bear – there was Grumpy Bear 2 on the Albatross, Grumpy Bear 3 on the Albatross 2, and additional Grumpy Bears in New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, KL, Luna Main, Ares City, and the cabin on Ceres. No doubt there would be a Grumpy Bear waiting for her at Egeria. She hadn’t cared since she was nine.
The lesson Anya learned from that was to not take luggage anywhere.
In the end she settled on a deep red. Not copying Eva, it’s darker! Okay, that was a lie. But anyway, maybe she’ll have changed today as well.
She opened the closet she knew would be stocked with generic outfits that fit, picked something not horrible, resumed Apollo 13 in the corner of her vision, and headed to the kitchen to grab a bowl of oatmeal.
Twenty minutes later she entered the bridge and blinked off Kevin Bacon in the middle of complaining about driving a toaster through a car wash. She immediately noticed a faint warbling hum coming from the right side of the room. A display near the source of the sound showed a circle in its center, with what looked like tiny ghostly ripples from raindrops occasionally sprouting randomly over it, each accompanied by a soft rising tone.
Only Ben was on deck, sitting in his original seat – Anya knew that each seat was as functional as any other in controlling the ship. Besides, there was nothing to control: as fast as they were traveling, there was literally nothing a human being could do in time to improve or even affect anything that might happen to the ship.
I was cargo from the start, but now everyone is until we get to Gliese 581.
“What’s with the noise?” she asked.
Ben had looked up when she entered. She wasn’t sure he hadn’t been napping. He raised his seat. “That’s the monitor on the deflector. It maps everything on a collision course and logs what it does with anything larger than a microgram as it pushes it out of our way. The logs get shared when we get to 581, so ships know what to expect, at least somewhat. Space is big, mind-bogglingly so, as someone once said; so keeping track of exactly where you are versus everything else is a bit of a challenge. But you know where you aren’t pretty well, so you can say mostly for certain the things you’ll definitely miss. Then it’s just a matter of whether you’ll get unlucky with the things you aren’t certain about.”
Anya rolled her eyes and repeated, “And the noise?”
“Oh, that’s an indicator of the size, proximity, and centered-ness of each object. The volume is the size. Notice how they’re all very quiet, just a few thousand atoms. The vast majority of what we run into – hydrogen atoms – doesn’t register at all.
“The pitch is the proximity. That’s why the sounds mostly start out in the midrange. We’re picking them up anywhere from a few million kilometers to half an AU for the largest objects. Something massive, like five grams or so, and we’d hear it from an AU or a bit more and the pitch would start lower.
“Finally, the sound itself. The closer the object is to dead center, the milder the sound is. Those perfect sine waves that you’re hearing over and over are objects that are sitting right in front of us. When something on a collision course is off to the side, it’s more of a buzzing sound. We’re traveling very, very close to the speed of light, so anything that’s ‘coming from the side’ is still pretty much dead ahead of us, so even though the deflector only spreads about a half of a degree, that’s more than enough: we point it straight ahead and everything just automatically gets shoved away.
“And note how the swoop in pitch takes less than a second. At the rate we’re traveling the time compression” Lorentz factor – don’t say it, no one likes a know-it-all. “is well over 200, so even from half an AU it takes less than two seconds to fully decelerate something and shove it aside, even if it’s dead center in our path.
“There! Did you hear that slight buzz?” Anya nodded. “That one was… 0.0007 degrees from dead center. So that was moving at maybe 0.3% c to the side. But the system saw it, the deflector drive caught it and slowed its approach from 0.99999 c relative to us to a few thousand meters per second and pushed it…” Ben glanced at the display as numbers flashed. “That way.” He pointed to the left. “You know, if you want to learn more about the physics of the gravity drive, you could do worse than set up time with Kenji during the trip. I could give you the basics, but he’s studied quantum spacetime manipulation pretty extensively, despite his general vibe. He’s more than a mechanic.”
Shit, no no no…
“Oh? I was just curious. So tell me, what’s the biggest thing we’ve hit so far on this trip?”
Again Ben looked at his seat’s display, as he idly said, “0 point 0 0 0, 0 0 0, 0 0 3 grams. About an hour ago. It was nearly centered, and made it to within 1.2 million kilometers of us before the drive’s variability happened to increase enough to push it away.”
Dang, he wants to describe high-multiplier drive variability – redirect.
“What’s the biggest thing anyone has run into?”
Ben’s eyebrows raised. “They didn’t run into it exactly, but: Moby Dick.”
“Moby Dick?”
“Yeah – big and made of mostly ice, so: white whale. It was something like thirty years ago. 1300kg, killed their deflector, sent them to the backup and then they had to swap out the primary.”
“So we have a backup deflector?”
“Yeah, everyone does. At the rate we’re traveling, everything appears in front of us, and everything in front of us is trying to kill us. Without the deflector, the interstellar gas would be like a rocket engine, the visible light would x-ray us to death, and even the cosmic background radiation would bake the ship. So yeah, there’s a backup. Two, in fact, because, as Kenji said, your dad is quirky.”
Anya frowned. “Why does that make him quirky?”
“Because other than the white whale, no deflector has ever failed. They have crazy redundancy built-in to each unit. The entire rest of the ship could be destroyed and as long as it had power to operate, the deflector would still protect the hulk for thousands of years through space.”
“Any chance we’ll run into the white whale?”
“Not even a little. First, it was on the other side of the Oort cloud. Second, it got ejected at 0.999… I don’t know how many nines of c. It’s thirty light years away, and no one from Earth will ever catch it. And third, it’s not the white whale anymore.”
“How so?”
“Tidal forces. It got squished something awful by the encounter, and blew up like a nuclear bomb. There’s nothing left of it bigger than dust.”
“Ben, I’m coming to spell you on the bridge,” Jia’s voice came over the communicator. Ben sat up straighter and smoothed his shirt, and turned to the entryway, Anya nearly forgotten. Rude! Not that she had any interest in Ben – Eww! But the fact that he was so taken with Jia was annoying in a way she didn’t quite understand. Anya nodded her thanks, turned, and started Kevin Bacon up again as she left the bridge.
Two hours later Anya entered the bridge again, finding everyone was there. Eva was still a redhead, but a deeper auburn than yesterday, Anya noted with relief. The monitor was showing more circles, and the noises it made were slightly louder. Anya asked, “How loud would Moby Dick have been?”
Jia looked at Ben. “You’ve been filling her head with stories?”
Ben shrugged. “She asked, and it’s not a story, it’s true.”
Jia looked back at Anya. “It may be true, but it’s not honest. That was a freak occurrence, and no one has seen anything even a tenth that size before or since. I assume he told you it’s light years away and not coming back?”
“He told me it’s dust.”
Jia nodded. “Okay, well at least he said that much. To answer your question, it would go off like an alarm, because it would be.”
“What would we do?”
“Strap into the control seats? Hang on? Otherwise, not much. Even something that large we’d only detect at about 5AU, and at the time dilation we’re traveling at it would all be over in…” she thought briefly “…15 seconds or so. Plus, there’s nothing to do. The size of the object doesn’t change what happens to it: it gets repelled the same whether it’s a hydrogen atom or a boulder. It could slow down our arrival at 581 by a bit, or push us off-center if it were moving fast from the side. That’s pretty much the only shot Ben has of winning the bet. If something like a kilogram traveling at a significant fraction of c across us came through, it could push us off center by enough to cost me. If it was big enough to overload the deflector, which, again, has happened exactly once ever, we’d hustle to repair it and calculate how to handle the off-center approach to 581. Other than that, nothing would change.”
No one said anything for a moment, and that’s when the alarm sounded. They had been accurate; it was loud, to the point of being hard to talk over. It was also harsh: a buzz saw of sound. Jia looked at the display and hesitated for a second, then shouted, “Well, shit, Ben jinxed us. Everyone in your seats, flat, NOW!”
Jia’s tone combined with the loudness of the alarm allowed for no hesitation: everyone jumped into their seats and strapped in. Eva checked the display as she got in her seat and said, maybe for Anya’s benefit, maybe just as a reaction: “Good god: 18.5 tons, 12 AU away, 0.019 degrees off-center. That thing is moving! We have less than twenty seconds, take some deep breaths and pray to whatever suits you. The stresses are going to be severe as the anchor tries not to slam into us.”
It was obvious almost immediately that Eva wasn’t kidding: Anya already felt heavy in her seat, and that increased until she couldn’t move, and then leveled off and stayed that way. Seconds passed with no change except the pitch kept rising as the object grew closer.
Then the pitch ceased and everything went crazy. The weight became unbearably greater. The air was forced from Anya’s lungs. The seams of the seat imprinted on her back. The pressure fluctuated as the variability of the gravity drive exposed itself. The ship whined and shuddered as things gave under the strain. The squeezing ramped up until it felt like a giant was crushing her in his hand, and still the forces grew, until it felt close to breaking her ribs and her vision went dark at the edges.
There were several loud crashes and bangs, and then after just a couple seconds had passed, everything went away at once: the noises stopped, the pressure went away, the sense of any gravity at all ended, and the lights went out. That last was hard to tell, because her vision had gone nearly completely dark. But when the pressure eased and the emergency lighting came on, it was obvious both that she could still see, and that there was precious little light in the emergency lighting.
The entire ship lurched with an enormous metallic tearing sound. Eva’s voice rang out in the near darkness, “Kenji, I estimate you have less than forty seconds to get control of the anchor or we’ll all be breathing vacuum.”
Kenji sounded tense as he said, “Already on it – waiting for the control system to reboot… and… configuring the drive… got it. Give me a few seconds… Okay, the anchor is stationary, 14 meters from the ship. The drive is barely functional, but I can start edging the anchor away anytime.”
“Hold for now. We can handle weightlessness while we assess damage. Ben, can you check that we’re still airtight?”
“Yep, pressure is stable for now.”
“Good. Is everyone okay? Anya? Jia?”
“I’m shaken, but okay,” Anya said. Truth? Or just hope?
“My spine tried to leave my body, but otherwise I’m ready to go,” Jia replied.
“Ben, Kenji, I assume you would have said something if you were injured?”
Ben was feeling his face. “I think my nose is pushed in a bit.”
Kenji was paying no attention, staring at a screen to his side. He shouted, “Yes!”
Eva turned to him. “Something you want to share, Kenji?”
“Oh – only that if we’d been running with the normal configuration we’d be dead for sure. With the anchor at three kilometers we would have had to hit something close to a thousand g’s to maintain separation, and even if the gravity drive managed it, which it wouldn’t have, it would have killed us instantly.”
“I’m happy your quasi-legal mod saved us. How’s the deflector?”
Kenji answered. “The main and backup blew, so we’re on the backup to the backup. Looks like it’s underperforming, compromised in some way I’ll have to figure out, so it’s a good thing that monster slowed us down substantially, so things aren’t hitting us.”
“What’s the status on external hardware?”
Kenji flipped through multiple camera feeds from outside the ship and replied, “The tether spool is ripped to pieces, and the attach point to the anchor looks bad as well. The external lens looks mostly okay, but maybe that’s why the deflector is underperforming. You know I’m going to have to go outside to look.”
“Makes sense. Get the hardware and tools you need and take Ben to help. Jia, you and I will work on getting the ship’s power back on, and validating and repairing or replacing hardware inside the ship. Success is getting power and gravity back online and knowing our situation within the hour. Let’s go!”
As everyone unbuckled, Anya called out, “Wait! What can I do?”
What can I do?
Eva stared at her for a moment. “Can you manage in zero-G?” Anya nodded. “Then come with Jia and me, try to stay out of the way, and if we need a third set of hands or think of something for you to do, we’ll let you know.”
Anya unbuckled and followed them off the bridge, silently hoping that the zero-g training her parents had forced on her and the time she spent last summer playing G-ball had prepared her for this. Ben and Kenji turned left immediately, heading toward the main airlock. Anya followed Jia and Eva, noting with guilty pleasure that Jia seemed at least as uncertain in a weightless environment as she felt.
They used the abundant handholds — thanks, dad! — to get back to Kenji’s messy engineering area, where paper, coffee, and various small objects floated randomly. A single screen was lit, with a flashing cursor next to “REBOOT MAIN SYSTEM? Y/N” Jia typed “Y” and pressed return. For a moment everything in the ship stopped, then the lights came on and they heard Ben’s voice faintly from several hallways and maybe a deck away saying “Great, much better.” With the lights on Anya could see everything floating everywhere and a slight crease in the metal wall that definitely hadn’t been there when Kenji was explaining the drives.
Jia immediately opened roughly twenty windows on the main display and started going through them one by one. As she did, Kenji’s voice came over the comm links. “Hey, captain, sorry, we’re going to be a minute getting out – Ben neglected his certification and has forgotten how to get his helmet on.”
“Kenji!”
“What?”
“I asked for your help, not for you to tell the captain… wait, you’re still transmitting!? Gah!”
Jia snickered as she continued to go through the status displays. When the last window was closed, she headed out of the room with Eva and Anya in tow. She said over her shoulder, “Okay, the ship itself is not as bad as it might be. Four generators are shot: the two deflectors and gravity are completely dead, and like Kenji said, the drive is failing, so we’ll need replacement elements for each of them…”
Eva cut in, “Why the drive?”
“It got recruited in keeping the anchor from hitting the ship. I’d guess the sudden strain when the drive-as-gravity generator died damaged it. I don’t know for sure, I just know there are red lights on all of them.”
Eva shrugged and said, “Sorry to interrupt, I was just caught off guard. Go ahead.”
“That’s it, everything else can wait. Just a quick note, though: As Kenji said, we’re significantly slowed as well as skewed. Two of the sensors in the nav system sheared off, so for now all I can say is that we’re at least 0.002, and maybe as much as 0.4, degrees off track for 581, so all of this is pointless since we’re going to miss 581 entirely and die in the void. Once we replace those sensors I can figure out exactly how truly fucked we are.”
As they glided down a hallway lined with images of a Gaucho herding cattle, to a stair leading down to storage and spare parts, Anya asked, “Die in the void?”
Jia looked over her shoulder, missed a handhold, and ran into the wall at the end of the stairs. “Ouch! Damn.” She pulled her way down the hall and said without looking back, “Deflecting that monster shoved us backward and to the side. So forget my bet with Ben – we’re dozens of AUs off track, maybe hundreds. And that means we’re nowhere near being able to decelerate against 581. We’ll wave at it as we pass by, and in the absolute best case scenario there’s something a reasonable distance beyond it that I can course correct us to hit, and we don’t starve before we get there and then back to 581.”
Jia reached a door labeled SUPPLIES and opened it with difficulty, the door slightly warped in the opening, or more likely the opening slightly warped around the door. Anya looked at Eva and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be telling her not to panic the passenger?”
Eva’s lips pursed grimly. “If anything she’s underselling it. We have emergency rations good for a year at least. But our ability to change course is limited to the plane our path makes with 581, since it seems we’re going to be too far away from it to do anything partial, and we’ll pass well outside where 581’s giants live. We can change course using 581, at least a bit, but again, in a plane, and the chance that there’s something we can set course for that will let us get there and back to 581 in a year is near-zero. No, correct that: zero.”
“Well don’t sugar-coat it,” Anya replied.
“Sorry kid, that’s not my style.”
Remember when mom said it was just a trial separation. “I was kidding. I prefer honesty.” She wasn’t sure that was the truth. She knew everything about the accidents and near misses of the early days. Now people traveled in space all the time. The situation couldn’t possibly be that grim. Or could it? She vaguely recalled reading about some accident years before, but some part of her mind refused to recall the details.
Eva scanned the shelves in the storage room, grabbed two small boxes labeled NAVIGATIONAL SENSOR 9301 and shoved them into a bag that had been hanging by the door, then gestured to a row of larger boxes labeled GRAVITY ELEMENT. Each carried a long serial number and a multiplier limit hand-written with a marker. Eva took the largest two, which had a long serial number on them and “10^24,” and pointed Jia and Anya at the others, labeled “10^9” and “10^12,” and said “Turns out we did need a third set of hands.” Jia took the larger 10^12 box, leaving the smallest for Anya despite the fact that Anya had at least two inches on Jia. Anya didn’t complain: she expected maneuvering the boxes through the hallways in zero-g to be challenging.
Eva took them down another stair and through the halls to a door near the back of the ship labeled DRIVES and said, “Leave the elements with me, I’ll swap them in.” She handed Jia the two sensor boxes and continued, “Take these to the airlock and transfer them to Ben and Kenji, then get back to the bridge and survey the rest of the ship’s sensors now that we’re under power again, and see what still needs fixing.” Jia nodded and turned to go. Anya assumed Eva meant for her to follow Jia, so she did.
Jia touched a comm link on her collar and said, “Ben, I have two replacement sensors, can I pass them to you at the airlock?”
“Sure, I’ll be by in a second. After all, as Kenji tattled, we just got out.”
As they continued to the airlock Anya commented, “I should have one of those.”
Jia nodded and said, “I think we have spare comms on the bridge, remind me when we get there.”
It was a measure of how uncomfortable Jia was operating in zero-g, or that Ben really had just exited, that he was waiting for them when they reached the airlock. Anya could see him through the windows in the two doors, his face somewhat visible in the light coming from the ship’s interior.
Jia struggled with the interior door of the airlock, and seemed genuinely grateful when Anya helped rotate the handle to unbolt it. Together they pulled it open, into the ship.
Jia tossed the two boxes into the airlock, not worrying about where they ended up, and pushed the door closed. Again, Anya helped with the door and the lever to seal it. Jia pressed the large red button next to the door, and a countdown timer started from 30 as the air hissed out of the airlock into somewhere in the ship. Toward the end, Anya heard but didn’t notice a very faint second hiss – the slight leak of air past the interior seal, presumably because of the damage caused by the ice chunk that had nearly killed them.
The timer reached 0, and the exterior door opened inward. As it did, the slight hint of air left in the airlock because of the bad seal rushed out, carrying the sensor boxes with it. One hit the door itself, and more or less stayed there as the door continued to swing open. The other hit the edge of the door as it opened, teetered there a moment, and then tumbled slowly out and away from the ship.
Ben held on to an external handhold and awkwardly lunged for the errant box but missed it. He levered his feet under him and jumped after it, his tether trailing behind him.
Jia touched her comm and said, “Ben Carter, that was a foolish thing to do.” Clearly she was right: Ben was tumbling as he went after the box, and he wasn’t even traveling in the right direction.
“I love you, too, Jia,” Ben replied, some level of stress in his voice. The tether stretched out behind him, becoming less and less tangled as he got farther away. Then it went taut… and he didn’t stop. Instead, the tether recoiled toward him, and a second later Anya and Jia could both see the severed end trailing behind him as he continued away from the Albatross.
Jia shouted, “What the HELL, Ben,” and then realized she hadn’t touched her comm. She did, and repeated the phrase.
“I don’t know,” Ben replied. “There were sharp edges where the tether spool was ripped, and there were bits moving around because of the anchor. It must have gotten caught on one of those and cut. What do we do now?”
Jia paused. Anya saw her look up and to the left, then down and to the right, and for a moment she closed her eyes completely. When she opened them she replied, “The ship’s drive. It can step down to a fraction of a g. I can use it on you to get you back. How much air do you have?”
“An hour and forty…seven minutes, but let’s not drag this out, it’s not fun.”
“Agreed.”
“Say, I’m not going to fry out here, am I? How far does the deflector extend?”
“You had something like 10 clicks before, but the deflector isn’t 100%. On the plus side we’ve slowed down. So, anyone’s guess, but my money’s on you suffocating before you fry.”
“Wanna bet?”
“You would, Ben Carter. Just hang tight.”
Jia touched her comm differently and said, “Eva?”
“Yes?”
“Ben’s tether cut on a shard of metal and he’s drifting away. We have an hour and forty five minutes to get the ship’s drive working again so I can bring him back.”
“Good thinking. I had started on the deflector and I’m almost done. I’ll switch to the drive, and it will go faster the second time. I’ll have it for you in fifteen minutes, you get to the bridge and get ready for retrieval.”
“Yep, on it. Ben, good news, I’ll have you in plenty of time.”
“Easy for you to say, you’re not watching the Albatross shrink as it spins by every four seconds or so.”
“Yeah, I know. We’ll have you soon. I can hear your breathing – slow down.”
“The estimate was based on panicked breathing, so I’m just going to continue as I am, thanks.”
“Okay, Ben, you do whatever you need to do, but I will get you back. I’m going to owe you money on that bet, and I always pay my debts. Although – darn, I don’t have any cash on the ship, you’ll have to take it out in trade.”
“I’ll daydream about what I’m going to ask for.”
Anya remembered when she was ten and her mother had raised the stakes, scheduling her for space construction training on Phobos – mother had tried for the asteroid belt, but there was an age requirement for true zero-g training. Hazel Stone, the instructor, had started the second class by taking out a hammer and casually tossing it toward the horizon. The tool kept rising as it faded from view. She had asked, “You’re working in zero-g and you lose a tool. Do you chase after it?” Even without knowing the reasons why, the answer she was looking for was obvious.
That hadn’t stopped one of the older kids (most of them were older than her), from saying, “Of course, why not?” There followed a boring, lengthy lecture about the futility of chasing things in open space: the risks involved, the unlikelihood of success, proper procedure to not fall into that situation in the first place, all wrapped up with her saying, “…and besides, I threw that at about nine meters per second; it’s coming back down.” They had been on the equator, facing toward Mars, bathed in its red glow reflecting the sun. Anya had doubted at the time, and later checked to make sure that the escape velocity on Phobos at the equator was definitely less than nine meters per second. So she had learned two lessons that day: don’t chase after things in zero-g, and don’t trust people in authority to know what they’re doing.
They reached the bridge and Jia got a comm for Anya and affixed it to her collar. Then she stared into the distance and said, “Still holding up Ben?”
“Yeah, I … how I’m doing … okay, but …”
Jia frowned and said mostly to herself, “Maybe there’s a way to reconfigure the ship’s comms to boost the signal,” and she opened several manuals on screen to read about that.
Jia was still reading, and Ben still beyond range, when Eva’s voice came out of both their comms saying, “Drive element is replaced, grab Ben.”
Jia said “On it,” looked at the displays, touched some controls, and muttered, “Damn it, I can barely see him.”
Eva replied, “Why?”
Jia tapped out several commands into the system and then replied, “The side and aft sensors aren’t designed for this use case. They look at the Earth, the Sun, and bodies like that. The forward sensors are designed to detect and log the small stuff we deflect, but the assumption is that small stuff behind us doesn’t matter. I can’t rotate the ship, the deflector is fixed forward, and we can’t live without it, and we don’t have time to replace the aft sensors… I’ve got a rough fix on Ben from the sensors, but it doesn’t agree with where I thought he’d be. I’ll put out a short acceleration and then it’ll take a minute to figure out if I’m right or if the sensors are right, and if I have to I’ll try again in a different direction.”
Jia touched her comm and said, “Ben, I don’t know if you can hear me, but don’t bother to respond, I definitely can’t hear you. I can’t sense you accurately. I repeat: I can’t sense you. I’m going to just try grabbing you at one twentieth of a g for half a second and check the sensors for movement. If I miss you, don’t worry, we’ll try again. You won’t feel it, but brace yourself anyway sweetie.”
Jia’s hands flew over the controls and the ship’s drive audibly positioned itself. It didn’t sound louder, or different, than when they had been plunging toward the sun, but Anya’s imagination worried that it did. The drive reached the specified orientation in a fraction of a second, and Jia ran the acceleration program she had coded into the system.
A second passed, and suddenly Anya saw every muscle in Jia’s face tense. She muttered “Shit,” softly, and her hands flew over the controls. Almost at the same time Ben’s voice suddenly sprang to life over the comm, shouting, “…down, slow me down, slow me down, slow me…” A soft thump came from somewhere far away in the ship, and Jia’s hands spasmed away from the controls.
Eva’s voice came over the comm: “Jia, what was that noise?”
Jia’s head had dropped, and her body was shaking. Anya hesitated, then touched the comm device as Jia had shown her and said slowly, “I think that was Ben.”
Eva didn’t reply, but in less than a minute she pulled her way into the bridge and looked at Jia. Jia’s eyes were filled with zero-g tears; she blinked and then wiped them away, and said quietly, “I forgot. I forgot the drive swap. I coded for the standard engine, and…”
Eva looked stern. “No, it was my fault. There was no reason to keep Kenji’s swap in place, I should have…” Eva stopped talking as she saw Jia’s face, looking if possible even more upset. Eva moved forward and pulled her into a hug.
Kenji appeared in the doorway, his face looking so shaken he almost wasn’t recognizable. He started forward, stopped, and said, “Jia, I’m so sorry, it was my fault.”
Jia said nothing, but Eva looked up and said quietly, “First: it was no one’s fault, it was an accident. We’re moving too fast and we need to be more careful. And second, no one wants to hear you apologize. Just get over here,” and she extended an arm. Kenji piled into the two of them, holding them both.
Anya watched for a moment, then turned away, studying the controls on her chair’s arm, the color of the wall, anything as the seconds dragged on. It was obviously not her moment, and besides, she had her own thoughts. So maybe the situation is that grim. We’re going to die? We’re going to die.
Finally the three released each other. Eva took a deep breath and noticed Anya. “And how are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” Anya said, lying. The only thing holding her together was thinking about what her mother was going to do to her father for sending her on this trip.
Eva nodded. “Okay, the best tribute we can pay to Ben is to not die. Anyone have thoughts on that?”
Jia sniffed and said, “I was thinking about it. We’ll hit our closest approach to Alpha Centauri in a few days. It’s waaaay too far away, but I can at least check the geometry to see if there’s anything we can do there.”
Eva nodded and said, “Sounds good. First, figure out how screwed we really are, then figure out Alpha Centauri and let’s see what we can do. Kenji, any chance we can get in-ship gravity going again?”
Kenji tilted his head to the side. “The spool is torn to shreds. I can probably put the anchor at a set distance and then work based on that. It wouldn’t quite be tying a bowline in the tether, but close. I’d hesitate to strain the system, so I’d run less than a full gee, and put the anchor even closer and live with the gradient.”
It would be more reassuring if he didn’t seem so eager.
“And of course, first… I’ll have to take care of Ben. I assume he’s coming with us?” Jia nodded slowly. “I’ll get him.”
Everyone was silent for several seconds. Finally Eva replied, “Sounds good. How long until the deflector is checked out?”
“Oh, that’s done already. For anything up to a couple grams we’re fine. If we hit another monster it’ll push the anchor into the ship or tear it away, and either way we wouldn’t survive long enough to know which it was.”
“Is there anything significant we can do to improve that?” Kenji hesitated, then shook his head. “Okay, then fingers crossed we don’t see any more anomalies.”
70 minutes later Kenji’s voice came from everyone’s comm, “Okay if I turn the gravity back on?” All answered in the affirmative, and he said, “Okay, ramping up in a few seconds. We’ll peak at about half a gee.”
Eva said, “Let’s meet on the bridge to discuss our status.”
Halfway to the bridge, Anya started drifting toward the floor, landing on her hands and knees. Would have made sense to have my feet under me. As she stood, she heard an ominous creaking, grating sound as the tether settled into holding the anchor and the ship together again, and simultaneously various noises from all over the ship as anything that hadn’t been bolted in place settled back to the floor. Half a gravity felt strange, and she could definitely feel the squeeze as she walked. With each step it felt like there were tiny magnets in her shoes repelling the ship’s deck. It was unsettling until it faded from her notice.
Anya reached the bridge to find Eva and Jia, the latter heads down over her display, focused on the calculations she had programmed. Her face looked noticeably thinner, as if grief had melted her slightly. She looked up shortly after Kenji walked in. Eva nodded at Kenji, who began.
“Okay, so: the ship is still airtight. It’s been almost four hours and we haven’t lost measurable pressure. That said, there are a few doors that don’t want to open, and others that don’t want to close. There are some redundancies against the vacuum that are now… not redundant. We should keep most of the pressure-tight doors closed by default, and there are a couple we should not open except in case of emergency, to keep at least two semi-reliable barriers between us and the outside. We can empty the rooms beyond them before we seal them. Most everything is still where we left it and mostly undamaged. We have food for 18 months, give or take. Everything else will last longer: air and water for years, and power is pretty much indefinite.
“Like I said, we have just over half a gravity. The anchor is only about 30 meters away, so we’re seeing about a 10% gradient from head to toe and the angles at the edge of the ship are going to be severe. I’d avoid going anywhere with greater than a thirty-degree lean unless you have to, and keeping the hand holds close if you do. If you trip and fall in the wrong hallway, even half a g will put a hurt on you. The tether is literally looped through the attach point twice and tied in a knot – and you thought I was joking about the bowline.”
“The deflector is mostly stable, but it’s at about 13% of its rated power because the lens is cracked and we don’t have a replacement. We lost significant velocity as well though, so we should be fine as long as we don’t hit anything over a speck of dust, which is all we should expect. In short, it’ll be fine. It will definitely need service after, though. And of course we can’t take another hit like we just saw, or anything like it. If we run into anything over about a ton, it’ll be the last thing the deflector repels. I checked, and 581 only has a minor ice cloud surrounding it, so we shouldn’t run into anything on the way in – assuming we manage to point ourselves there. That seems like a good time to hand it to Jia.”
Jia nodded at Kenji. “Okay, I’ll start by saying: we’re screwed, there’s no happy ending. Between the slowdown and the sideways bump we took, we’re angled almost 0.1 degrees off where we need to be pointed – or roughly 520 kilometers per second away from our correct course at our velocity.”
Eva leaned forward and said, “That’s in the galactic frame, correct?”
Jia nodded. “In our frame, even with a reduced Lorentz factor of about 152 we’re blowing off course at over 25% of the speed of light. I’ll mostly skip the angle and velocity aspects since it’s confusing and pointless. The key metric is that the farthest out we would even have a chance to latch onto 581 is 26 AU, maybe 26.5 if we were oriented along the orbital plane and the gas giants were in favorable positions. But at this rate, we’ll miss it by over 1980 AU. Oh, and just as a heads up, at a Lorentz of 152 it will take us another 43.25 days to get there and miss it.
“I researched Alpha Centauri as a target for correction. The good news is that it’s pretty well positioned, just 7 degrees off ideal for the correction we need. At our closest approach we’ll be about 3.5 light years away, where it’s putting out about 2.5*10^−13 meters per second squared acceleration. With the gravity element in place as the ship’s drive running at about 8*10^11 and giving us extra magnification…” – she visibly winced, and Kenji’s face tightened – “that’s from 0.1 up to 0.2 meters per second squared. If we could latch onto it, we’d need over ten years to make the necessary correction.”
She hesitated, then added, “Sorry, I’m mixing frames of reference again. Normally we don’t have to bother with this. That’s 24 days for us, too long to correct for 581. On top of that, 7 degrees leaves us about 243 AU off target. And then there’s the fact that no one has ever successfully targeted a gravity drive at something that small at that distance. At 3.5 light years, Alpha Centauri is only about 0.01 arc seconds, and even with specialized hardware that we don’t have, when you focus it down that finely the gravity effect wanders randomly over ten arc minutes. For us it would be a degree or more. We could try for thousands of years and catch the effect for one second, maybe.
“Barnard’s Star is even worse: closest approach is 4 light years, and it’s smaller than Alpha Centauri by 80%.
Anya wasn’t sure she held “join in the conversation” status, but she spoke up anyway. “You said we could latch on to 581 at 26 AU – what if we used the deflector drive?”
“It’s useless for our purposes, because of the variability. At its max it can swing up to 10 to the 27-something’th multiplier. A split second of that any closer than a couple light years and you’re pizza. We could use the deflector a couple light years out, but at that distance we’d never manage to actually target 581: it’s too small. And even if we could catch it, we’d still have to get there. So we’d slow down but not stop, to maybe half c? Then we’d try not to starve on the way there, and our radio is only good out to about a light day, so they’d have about two days to mount a rescue. And then there’s still the fact that we’re not aligned with 581 directly, so they’d have no way to line up with our course. So yeah, zero, zero, and zero chance of any of that.
“There is another option though: the galactic core. Even though it’s 26 thousand light years away, it’s 4-7 degrees across depending on how you measure it – plenty large enough to target, and its gravity at this distance, plus everything in the cone with it that’s either closer or on the far side, is almost five hundred times Alpha Centauri’s: 0.11 nanometers per second squared, although it’s about 40 degrees off from 581, so we get 65% of that in a corrective direction. So we can get a lens on it, and with our current rig…” she barely hesitated this time, “…we’d need over twelve days ship time to correct our problem. At least as well as it can be: within the correction plane, it’s sixty degrees off ideal for us, so the best we could do is still almost 1715 AU off-target; we’d be almost ten light days away as we blew past 581.”
Eva tilted her head. “We could try Andromeda.”
Jia pulled her head back a little, and Kenji’s eyes widened, but Eva just shrugged and looked at Jia.
Jia hesitated, then said, “One second…,” and started working her keyboard. Shortly she said, “Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, but the angular is three degrees and between the core and Andromeda we could target 581 near-perfectly. But the acceleration is only 3.6 x 10^-13 meters per second squared, and because of the angle we only get 74.6% of that. To nail it between the core and Andromeda we’d only need to get 81km/s from the core, and we’d get that in almost exactly 60 hours. Then we’d need 473km/s from Andromeda, and that would take… over eleven years ship’s time.”
Kenji had developed a faraway look in his eye as Jia spoke. Now he snapped into focus and said, “I can fix that!”
Eva raised her left eyebrow, a trick Anya decided she wished she could do. “How do you propose to ‘fix’ that?”
“Well, every drive is capable of more boost than it’s certified for, and they’re rate-limited to the specification. I can remove that restriction and probably get us up to a 10x boost.”
“Okay, that gets us down to a year, give or take.”
“I wasn’t finished. We have spare parts for the drives, including for the deflector. I can swap out a few parts and get us another… I don’t know, a few hundred times the boost.”
The mad scientist is back in the lab!
“Variability?”
“Depends on how much I goose it. More than now, probably not so much that we can’t target 581 successfully.”
“So what’s the catch?”
“Well, the drive is a sealed unit manufactured in a zero-g facility with some sort of dependence on quantum effects. More than that I don’t have the degrees to understand, let alone explain, but by straining the drive, eventually we’ll fry it. The harder we push it, the more likely it is to go up in smoke, the same as the ones we replaced with these. So it’s a trade-off – the more I push it, the likelier it is to die, but the less time it actually has to hold up.”
“Should we swap the drives back before we try this? The plan was to use the stronger gravity drive when we got to 581. If we fry the gravity drive and we get to 581 with only the original drive, even slowed down as we are, could we catch on? How close would we come to 581’s surface?”
Jia said, “One sec, I’ve got that… we’d aim at 2.45 million kilometers above 581. It would be a narrow slice for the deflector to avoid hitting 581 while still covering us up front as we approached from a distance, but we can manage it.”
Kenji leaned forward, “It’s the only way. We’ll only know once I do it, but I can maybe get us four orders of magnitude. I can’t get us seven, which is what we’d need with the standard drive. Even if I could, it would burn out in seconds. We’re going to need it to hold for hours, or maybe days.”
Eva had a look somewhere between sad and stoic. “So: we goose the drive. We hit the galactic core, and probably the drive survives. Then we hit Andromeda, which is likely to kill it, but maybe we get lucky and it holds out long enough to get us close to 581. If it dies, when we get to 581 we put the drive-element-masquerading-as-gravity-element back in as the drive element, go zero-g, and try to catch 581 at a speed the drive was never meant to handle. Does that sound right?”
Jia and Kenji both nodded.
“Okay. Kenji, go see what you can rig up with the drive. Keep Jia informed, and we’ll sync up in an hour to assess the plan.”
An hour later they were sitting in the same seats. Jia nodded at Kenji, who started.
“Just removing the governor got us roughly 9x. I subbed in deflector replacement elements in the cooling system, which lets me push more voltage through the system, and overall I got us 12,600x the rated multiplier: just a hair over 10^16. For the core, that’s relatively little risk to the drive.” He looked over at Jia.
“We need 81k and change meters per second delta-v from the galactic core, and with that multiplier we can get it in just over 15 seconds if we start now-ish.” She looked back at Kenji.
“Like I said, this is fairly low risk – kids do this kind of mod to hoppers around the asteroid belt all the time. It’ll be fine, for fifteen seconds at least. But Andromeda is 640 times weaker than the core at this distance, and we’ll still need over 473 kilometers per second delta-v. We’ll be pushing off Andromeda for six and a half hours. But from what I’ve read, it’s not impossible that the drive lasts that long.”
Eva squinted at Kenji. “You think it will survive?”
Kenji shrugged. “No. But it might.”
“Do we have an alternative?” Eva looked at each of them in turn, and Anya was happy that Eva looked at her, too. “There’s nothing beyond 581 we could warp our course to using less drive time?”
Jia shook her head. “I thought of that. If we correct off the galactic core for 78 seconds, overshooting closest approach by a bit puts us in position to fine tune our course using the core as we come in, and as we fly by 581 we aim for LP 502-56, which is another system almost 8 light years on. But we can’t hit it directly – not quite enough curvature off 581. We miss it by at least 50 AU, depending on how good our aim is.
“So we slingshot from there and aim for TVLM513-46546, which is 35 light years out, or Gamma Serpentis at 36 light years, or Lambda Serpentis at 38 light years, or 44 Boötis at 42 light years, or… you get the idea. Whichever one we pick, we have to use the galactic core to adjust our plane relative to 502-56 in order to target it. The problem is that there are only a handful of options, and at 50 AU out from 502-56 there’s no guarantee we can target any of them successfully. And of course the drive could go at any point and strand us for real. Even if the drive holds, the most likely outcome is that we’re in the right place for none of them, and we cruise in interstellar space until we starve.
“As bad as the odds are that the drive holds out, we’re more likely to survive trying directly for 581 using Andromeda.”
Eva nodded, and sagged a little in her chair. After a moment of thought she looked up and said, “Then it’s settled. How long until we can do it?”
Kenji shrank a little in his seat. “Right now. I couldn’t know what the limits were until I tried them out. We’re set for the core push whenever you give the order.”
Eva tilted her head and visibly sagged a bit. “Okay. Do it.”
Jia hit a control on her seat, and a timer started counting down from 15 seconds on the main display.
As the seconds ticked by, Jia was the first to report. “We’re varying between roughly 8,050 and 8,430 meters per second squared of acceleration, averaging 8,201, 5315 perpendicular to our course – actual correction. That’s almost exactly what we were hoping for.”
Next, Kenji reported on the temperature of several elements of the drive and the pressure of several others, and finally on the resistivity of still others; all were values he seemed happy with. He continued closely monitoring until the timer reached zero.
At the end Jia ran some numbers and reported that they had achieved 81,118.28 meters/second of correction, the desired amount to within 0.01 meters per second, leaving 473,336 meters/second to correct using Andromeda.
Kenji raised his eyebrows and said, “Welp, time to stop fooling around and take the real test.”
Jia took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and hit a control on her arm rest, and the display showed 06:39:11, counting down.
She immediately checked her monitors and said, “Varying between 24 and 30 meters per second acceleration, averaging right at 26.77. That puts us on schedule.”
Kenji reported pressure, temperature, and resistivity, and the numbers were higher than before. He reported them again a minute later, and they had changed only slightly. A minute later again, and some had dropped. After about ten minutes Eva motioned with her hand for Kenji to ease up on the constant reporting.
An hour in, with the display reading 05:21:57, Jia said, “The average acceleration has climbed to 27.1 meters per second squared.”
Kenji frowned and said, “I don’t see any spikes in temperature or pressure. There’s a slight reduction in resistivity across several components, but only slight.”
After a moment Jia said, “It’s back to 26.73. Statistical fluke?”
“Not likely, unfortunately. I’ve been reading up on overclocking since we started this experiment, and increased instability precedes failure.”
“That wasn’t increased instability, the whole range just moved up a little, then back down.”
Kenji shrugged. “All I know is what I read.”
The timer continued to count down.
Just over two hours in, with the timer reading 04:32:14, Jia said, “The average has climbed again, to 30.6 meters per second squared. It’s been there for three minutes straight. And the max and min have expanded: the minimum is actually lower than when we started, 23, and the maximum has climbed to 35.”
Kenji didn’t look up as he said, “I’m still not seeing anything. Maybe there won’t be any indication of failure except for the output.”
“No idea, but now it’s down to 28, with a similar spread.”
Eva said, “Should we shut down for a bit? Give it a rest or a cool down?”
Kenji shook his head. “Everything I’ve read says when it’s the drive’s time to go, it goes. Nothing we do will affect that.”
Eva frowned and nodded.
Over the next half hour the acceleration average wandered, but mostly went up. Kenji monitored temperature and pressure and resistivity, and no one complained that he was doing it too often.
By three hours the average acceleration had climbed to 29 meters per second squared and stayed there. Then 30 meters per second per second at 4 hours.
At four hours forty-three minutes Jia’s eyes widened. Her voice rose as she called out, “Averaging 33. Averaging 34. Averaging 36. 37. 40. 43. 50. 60. 70… 70… 50, 20, zero… zero…”
Kenji cut in. “You can stop. It’s dead.” They sat in silence for several seconds as reality sank in. The timer, not aware of the drive’s deceased state, continued to count down.
After a pause, Jia’s hands flew over the controls, and she said mostly to herself, “We actually came pretty close. Getting a reading.” A few seconds later she continued, “Okay, we’re going to miss by almost 300 AU. Refining our velocity… Checking for sling shot possibilities…” several tense seconds passed. “None. We’re dead.”
The room was silent but for the ventilation system. Anya looked from one of them to the other, but no one said anything. All of them looked deep in thought, but she had no idea if they were thinking about a clever way to survive, or a graceful way to die. Which one was she focusing on?
Again, she didn’t know if she was officially part of the conversation, but she felt like the longer the silence dragged on, the more likely it was everyone was focusing on the wrong plan. If we’re all going to die does deference to the professionals even matter? She hesitated. Polite kids die. “How fast are we moving off course now?”
Jia looked at her for a moment, then reached for the controls. Numbers flashed on the display, and Jia motioned to them wordlessly: 67.68 kilometers per second in the galactic frame, 10,287 kilometers per second in the ship’s frame. Anya waited a moment, then said, “So why don’t we rocket our way to correcting that?”
Eva looked at her blankly. Jia said, “What do you mean? We can’t make gravity out of nothing and we aren’t one of those old rockets that burn fuel to generate thrust. Our drive only changes the gravitational relationship between two objects. We need something massive to push or pull. And besides, the drive is shot, at least until we give up internal gravity.” Kenji frowned with a faraway look in his eye.
Anya persisted, “We don’t need fuel, not in the old rocket sense. And we don’t need something massive. Deflecting something much less massive than the ship pushed us off course. We can do the same in reverse to get back on course.”
Jia frowned. “We can’t just order an ice chunk for delivery though.”
Kenji nodded at Anya and turned to Jia. “We could start with the easy things: chairs, clothing, anything that isn’t bolted down. Call me cautious, but not the food and water. Maybe some spare parts, depending on how critical they are and how likely to fail. But hold on — we should just start with non-pressure wall panels. But the question isn’t so much what we need to throw, it’s how hard we can throw it, and how much we need to throw. Gimme a second…” Kenji entered figures into the armrest of his chair, paused, muttered “wait, what?” and then went back to punching keys.
Finally he looked up and spoke. “Jia, you should check me on this. We’ll need the last spare deflector – with the standard drive we’d need to use well over 90% of the ship’s mass, and that’s not possible. It’ll be some work to set it up to work through the main drive’s emitter, but I can do that.”
“What about the instability?” Jia asked.
“Yeah, I thought about that. Throughout, most of the things we throw won’t matter so much. Randomly we’ll hit very high acceleration, and those are the moments that will count. We’ll need to throw progressively smaller things as we get closer to the mark. By the end we’ll be throwing a gram at a time, even less.”
Eva stared at him. “So you’re proposing to dismantle the ship to save it?” Kenji nodded. “And it will work?” Kenji shrugged but also nodded. Eva turned to Anya. “Well, congratulations for maybe saving our asses with ancient technology.”
Jia had been inputting queries on her own rig and shook her head. “Not so fast. It won’t work – you didn’t think about the tidal forces. Launching even a kilogram with the deflector would crush the ship, and explode whatever we launched, with… whoa, nuclear bomb force. The explosion itself would be pushed away: the gravitational well would be too steep for even a nuclear explosion to reach us, but the radiation from it would cook us. And of course we wouldn’t live long enough to die of radiation because of the ship being crushed.”
“Ah, crap.” Both of them stared blankly as they thought, until Kenji continued. “No, wait, I can rig the main drive to throw from the ship. It’s adjustable, so even if its max is too much we could step it down, then use the deflector once things are far enough away.”
Jia practically attacked her keyboard. “Okay – you won’t need to step down the drive, but you’d have to rig both drives to use the same emitter, could you even swap them over and over like that?”
Kenji nodded absently as he entered figures on his armrest. “Actually doing the math… We couldn’t apply the deflector safely until… “ He looked up at the others. “Agreed that the ship can still take 12 g’s of compressive force across the width?” Jia nodded immediately. Eva thought for a moment, then entered some info on her keyboard, looked at the results, and nodded. Kenji looked back at his display. “Estimating the wall panels each weigh a ton, they’d need to be… wow, eight thousand kilometers away, and that would take… dang, seven hours. The drive would only hit a little over 300 meters per second. So I don’t need to swap multiple times. We launch everything, then wait for it to get far enough away, and hit it with the deflector to finish the job. Or, really, do the job at all, since 300 meters per second only gets us… whoa, a centimeter and a half per second change in velocity for the ship. Each time the deflector hits, we get 0.85 c for the panel, and roughly 22.7 kilometers per second for the ship.”
“What about the variability?”
“That’s the beauty part: it almost doesn’t matter at that distance. The deflector multiplier currently varies randomly from about 10^20.5 up to 10^27.9 at a millisecond frequency give or take. That far away, the dips into low multipliers do almost nothing, and only the kicks into high gear matter. Over a fraction of a second, we’ll see a relatively consistent final velocity and drive for the ship. Which is actually pretty crucial to the whole process, since we won’t be able to apply the deflector to a variable number of them. It’s all or nothing. We’d need… 452 I think. What do you think?”
Anya had been following along with the conversation, and thought there was a problem with Kenji’s approach. She hesitated to speak, and Jia stepped into the silence. She looked pointedly at Kenji and said, “I think if we apply the deflector to all of them at once we die of being crushed. The eight thousand kilometers limit applies to a thousand kilograms, not 452 times a thousand.”
Kenji started to speak, then stopped. Then started again, and stopped again. Finally his eyes widened a bit and he said, “So we change the direction as we send them. The deflector only covers about half a degree, so we can send them out in an array and push them one at a time. We’d have to do it symmetrically, and it would cost us in efficiency, but it would only have to be about eleven degrees across. I get… wow, we’d only need a few more, 467 total. Now can we get started?”
Eva was frowning slightly, but she didn’t look serious as she said, “You’re that eager to dismantle my ship?”
Your ship?! The ‘Tross is mine, hands off!
Kenji started to respond, thought better of it, and finally just said, “The sooner we start, the less we’ll have to throw.”
“True, but I think you’re both forgetting something.”
Jia and Kenji looked at each other, then looked away, thinking. In the end Kenji was less patient and said, “I give up, what?”
Eva looked at Jia, who shrugged. Eva lightly snorted. “I love you both, but you’re moving too fast and not thinking hard enough. What happens to the four hundred fifty one…”
“Four hundred sixty seven,” Kenji interjected.
“Four hundred sixty SIX,” Eva said, emphasizing the six, “remaining wall panels when we push off the first?”
“Nothing?” Kenji said gamely, but his brow was furrowed and Jia was still zoned out, thinking.
“Okay, what happens to the ship, and thus the remaining 466 wall panels in the ship’s frame of reference?”
“In a fraction of a second, the ship starts moving away at 22.7 kilometers per second.”
Jia jumped in. “And each panel takes about a tenth of a second to catch the high gravity multiplier, and pushes us another 22.7 kilometers per second faster. By the time we get to the 466th panel, it would be forty-six-ish seconds later and the ship would be traveling away from it at over ten thousand kilometers per second. It would be almost half a million clicks away, and of no use for propelling the ship.”
“Okay, so… not that solution then,” Kenji said.
After some time Jia said, “We could line up the panels in advance, and then boost off each as we pass by.”
Eva looked up from her own display. “How long to set up the line of panels?”
Jia pursed her lips. “Weeks. Months, if we wanted to be thrifty with the panels. I didn’t say it was a great idea. And maybe one of you has an idea for how to lay out the line faster.”
Anya had a vague memory and had to research it. Once she had she looked up. “Have any of you heard of Project Orion?” She got three blank stares back. “Okay, it was this crazy idea in the nuclear era to launch a ship by tossing small nuclear bombs out the back.”
Everyone’s eyes flew wide. “Okay, slight digression: the idea was that the bombs were so effective/efficient, adding a big plate between the ship and the bombs to take the heat and the force would still leave the ship more efficient by far than the chemical rocket alternatives.”
Her audience did not seem reassured. “They didn’t actually try it! Anyway, couldn’t we do something similar with the panels? All motion is relative, so we’d be able to do the same thing for the 452nd panel as we do for the first.”
Jia frowned. “That would still give us a seven hour cycle time, and we’d have passed 581 long before we made the correction.”
Shut up? Don’t shut up? Again: we’re dead if we don’t solve this, so don’t shut up. “We don’t have to fire one at a time. We can’t send all 452 – or 467 – at once, but we can send five, or even ten at a time. We’ll accelerate by 22.7 km/second for each of them.” She turned to Kenji. “But you said that each panel would accelerate in maybe a tenth of a second. So we can even do twenty at once, and in those two seconds we’d move about 500km farther away from the last one. In any case, we can get the job done in something like 180 hours.”
Eva shook her head. “Longer. We have to sleep.”
Anya shrugged. “We’d sleep in the seven hour intervals.”
Eva gave Anya a stern look. “Somewhat. But we’d still have to budget at least 200 hours, more likely 240.”
Jia looked up from her panel and said, “No, we can go faster than that.” She gestured, and a diagram appeared on the main screen, showing a tiny ship. “We start by sending a panel out using the main drive.” A small dot separated from the ship icon on the display and crawled to the left. “It takes seven hours to reach the safe distance of 8200km. Then we flip the script: we push the next panel away, offset so the deflector won’t hit it.” The first dot was at the left of the display, and a second dot appeared next to the ship icon. “We hit the first panel at 8200km with the deflector, pushing the ship forward at 22.7km per second, and crucially, leaving the new panel behind at that plus the main drive’s 320 meters per second.” A pulse went out from the ship icon to the far left dot, and it flashed to the left, while the dot next to the ship started moving to the left much more rapidly than the first had. “That means the next panel reaches a safe distance in six minutes instead of seven hours. And that means we can finish the whole process in 45 hours.”
Kenji had a distant look for several moments. Then his face brightened and he said, “I’ll see your 45 hours and raise you… most of it, I haven’t done the math yet.”
He gestured, and the display reset, only now there were five dots next the ship, slowly moving to the left. “We merge your idea with Anya’s. We launch five panels using the ship’s drive. They take seven hours to reach 8200 clicks. Then we drop off five more panels“ – five dots appeared next to the ship – “and we fire the deflector off each of the first batch in turn. That takes half a second, give or take, and we lose less than half a percent off the fifth panel.” The five dots on the left flashed out of existence, and the five next to the ship started moving left. “Because we’re doing five at a time, we get almost 114km/s for each cycle, and each cycle takes 72 seconds. So we’re done in 7 hours plus an hour and fifty minutes. So call the whole thing 9 hours.”
Jia had been working through the last half of Kenji’s presentation. A few seconds later she shouted “Two hours!” without even looking up. She then looked up at each in turn and said sheepishly, “…and ten minutes. I can do it in two hours and ten minutes.”
Eva sighed and said, “We definitely can’t pull four hundred-something wall panels in two hours, but go ahead, what’s your plan?”
Jia took back the display. Now there was an array of one hundred even smaller points next to the ship. Jia nodded to herself and said, “We start with 100 bolts. If they each weigh 100 grams, we can fire the deflector when they are 400 kilometers away.”
Anya couldn’t help herself. “400 kilometers? For 100 grams!?”
Jia came close to laughing. “You did hear the max acceleration of 10 to the 27.9, right? That gives each of those bolts the equivalent of the mass of Saturn. So yeah, 400 kilometers.
I should have gotten that.
“It takes the bolts 19 and a half minutes to get that far. We put out 100 five kilogram weights and fire on the bolts. The five kilogram masses have to be at 1500 kilometers to be safe, but the bolts accelerated us by 4.88 km/s, and with the initial push from the drive they hit 5.2 km/second, and we get to 1500 kilometers in just over five minutes. Then we put out five panels and fire on the five kg weights.
“That gets us 66.0 kilometers per second. The five panels hit 8200km in about two minutes, at which point we start Kenji’s cycle and we’re done in just over two hours.”
An edge of irritation in her voice, Eva said, “And as I said earlier, we can maybe barely pull almost five hundred panels in nine hours, but we definitely can’t in two.”
Anya almost raised her hand, then just came out with it. “We can scale how many panels we send based on the backlog. If we need to slow down we can send just one panel at a time, or even hold off on firing until one is twice as far away. That lowers the cadence to roughly one panel every half hour. We wouldn’t want to do that for all of them because it’s inefficient, but if we’re momentarily delayed getting panels it avoids us having to do the bolts thing again.”
Eva shrugged. “Sounds like a plan to me. Great brainstorming everyone. Now are we ready to proceed?” They all nodded. “Okay – Jia, kill the gravity. Kenji, get the drives set up, Then Jia, Anya, you and I are on wall panel duty.”
Jia touched the controls, and Anya felt herself rise in her seat as all gravity went away. Jia took a deep breath and said, “I’d like to take ten minutes to go down to… see Ben.”
Everyone froze for a moment. “Of course,” Eva said.
Kenji headed to engineering for tools, Jia headed to the storage areas on the lower decks, and Anya and Eva went toward the airlock to start taking out panels.
Fortunately the ship was designed for reconfiguration, and the work went quickly. Most panels were merely clipped in place; some, designed to hold pressure, were bolted. As she used a weightless-rated zero-torque power tool to remove the bolts on a panel, Anya thought of the mining classes her father had put her in on Ceres. The tit-for-tat had started when her father sent her to the Moon for space suit training. Her mother had retaliated by sending her to Phobos for an intro to construction. Two years later, when she was twelve, her father had bought the cabin in Ceres, both because it was that much farther from Earth – far enough that her mother was extremely unlikely to venture that far out – and because there were local weightless construction courses. She had been a year too young, but he made friends with the instructor, and/or paid him off.
Roughly an hour later, Kenji announced through the communicators, “Okay, the drives are ready. They’re piggybacking on the drive emitter, and anyone with system control can switch them.”
“Okay, suit up,” Eva replied.
There was a pile of wall panels in the hallway leading to the airlock, and in the hallways and rooms leading to that hallway. In total they had over a hundred panels stacked, along with many of the clips and bolts that had held them, and other bits of hardware they estimated to weigh five kilos each.
They continued to pull and stack panels, and by the time Kenji returned, wearing his suit but carrying his helmet, they had over 120 ready to go. Eva and Anya retreated to the last air-tight door before the hallway to the hatch: the panels were too large to fit in the airlock, so the entire hallway would have to be depressurized and both doors of the airlock opened to get them out.
The system wasn’t designed to depressurize the whole hallway, but did its best. Through the small window in the door they saw a small rush of air as the hallway was opened to space. The heavy panels and the piles of hardware and bolts were hardly affected.
They could hear Kenji and Jia through their communicators as they watched Kenji through the window. “How do I aim the bolts?”
Jia answered, “You don’t, silly. Just huck them out the airlock about one a second. The drive will handle the aiming.” Kenji did as directed, picking up the bolts one after the other and throwing them out the airlock. Sometimes the light from the hallway caught them just right and Anya could see as the drive field snatched them about five meters outside the airlock and disappeared them into the distance.
“How fast are they being accelerated exactly?” she asked.
Jia responded. “About 180 g’s, ending up moving at 323 meters per second. Okay, we have 19 minutes before we hit those, let’s get some more panels ready.”
Kenji just waited in the airless void of the hallway while the others pulled clips and then panels into any space they could near the hallway. It was getting crowded just by the doorway, so they started stacking them in a room that had been a gym. All the equipment was now shoved to the side to make space for the wall panels, and most of the clips were removed from the panels that defined the walls of the gym, ready for removal once the time came.
Fifteen minutes later, Kenji started throwing out the hardware. Some of it looked small to Anya, but that made sense since something under 5kg would just hurt efficiency, while something over might theoretically damage the ship by exceeding their 12g limit on tidal forces. But of course that was just an estimate, so there was no reason to think that overshooting a bit would cause a problem. Still, many of the items were exactly 5kg, and said so right on them, being plates and dumbbells from the gym. Anya had managed to watch one of the plates disappear at almost 1800 meters per second per second acceleration, and she was certain she had seen a flash of reflected light from it several hundred meters away a fraction of a second after it disappeared.
Kenji’s voice came over the communicator. “All the 5kg masses are out, you can push off the bolts whenever you’re ready.”
Jia said, “Okay, everyone brace for a moment of 6 g’s by the airlock. Kenji, clip into the descender. Are you all set?”
Anya and Eva braced by sitting against an internal wall upside down: their backs along the floor pointed up toward the airlock, their butts and feet against the wall away from it. Eva said, “Anya and I are set.”
Kenji said, “One second, I’m looping the rope through this thing now. Okay, ready.”
“Okay, almost there… and go!”
The sensation was unlike anything Anya had felt before. The wall on which she was “sitting” was punching her repeatedly, as if the ship were vibrating in a staccato, irregular rhythm. And not a little. Even as far away from the ship’s edge as they were, the force was in excess of three g’s, albeit for just a microsecond at a time, roughly ten times per second. There was a loud rumbling from the airless hallway Kenji occupied as the panels bounced against the wall. It lasted just ten seconds, and then it was over.
“… And done! Did you manage, Kenji?”
“Yes, but the panels jumped around like crazy and the effect itself was unpleasant.”
“Well, at least you know the five kilogram weights will be worse. Four minutes until we need the panels headed out.”
This time Jia didn’t leave the bridge. Anya and Eva headed out to secure more panels. Once they cleared the next air-tight door, with missing panels there were paths open to them in all directions. Anya scanned for the closest path to a panel, and pulled her way through one of the guest rooms and her own quarters past Grumpy Bear 2 to get to it.
As she did, she heard Kenji and Jia talking about the fate of the panels: they would survive the initial drive largely intact, since 180 g’s wasn’t enough to damage them even end-on. But once they were hit with the deflector drive, they would cease to exist as solid objects. Subjected to up to 40,000 g’s of tidal acceleration depending on their orientation, it would be as if they were blown up with anywhere from fifty to a thousand kilos of TNT, enough to absolutely shred them.
Anya managed to secure another two panels, and Eva three, before they met at the door to watch the first panels go.
Kenji struggled to get each panel moving, his breath loud through the communicators. He shoved, and seemingly nothing happened at first, and then the panels slowly headed out the airlock, one after another. They were moving so slowly that even though there was roughly ten seconds between them, they overlapped as they entered the field, and this time it was easy to see them disappear: the panels being three to seven meters long, it took them a fraction of a second just to be fully drawn into the gravity field, at which point they disappeared much as the bolts and weights had, but since they were so large there was no doubt to Anya she could see them for a fraction of a second after they disappeared.
Jia said, “Everyone brace for the weights. All set?”
Eva answered, “Anya and Eva, ready.”
Kenji replied, “If I have to be. Captain, I’m sorry for that bet about standing during acceleration, and every other bet I made that you didn’t know about.”
“I knew about all of them, Kenji.”
“We have a schedule, people. And I’d rather not think about my… Ben… right now.”
“Sorry, Jia. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Sorry, Jia. Please proceed.”
“And… Go for the 5kgs.”
Jia was right; it was worse. It was still ten pulses per second, but the impulse was roughly three times as much, and it hurt getting punched in the butt by the ship like that.
Kenji yowled at one point.
“And… done. Kenji, are you okay?”
“Yes. One of the panels bounced up and grazed my leg, but it’s fine.”
Eva responded in her “I’m the captain” voice. “Tanaka – are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, captain. It might bruise, but nothing’s broken, I can tell.”
Jia responded, “We’re on track to hit those panels next. Get the next five out please. You have a little more than 60 seconds left.”
“Got it, on it.”
Anya turned to go get more panels.
Launching the panels themselves turned out to be better than the bolts: the impacts were greater, but with only five it was over in well under a second, before it had a chance to feel painful.
She heard Kenji’s breathing get heavier as time wore on. Eventually they cut back to launching four panels per wave, then three, to slow down to Kenji’s pace. The three of them weren’t keeping up either, but the one-hundred-forty-panel head start they had at the beginning meant they were still ahead of Kenji, although they were getting slower as they had to go farther away to get the panels.
She heard Kenji say, “Okay, for this next one I’m just sending one panel, I need to switch air bottles and drink some water.”
She had followed Eva into what she thought of as the staging area, each of them wrangling a panel, when she heard Kenji say, “Bother, one of the panels bounced off the back wall and is making a run for it, hang on.”
Eva was looking through the clear panel and shouted, “Kenji, no, get out of the way!” at the same time as she heard Kenji scream in pain. Eva rushed toward the panel to seal the outside airlock doors and managed to lose her coordination. A handhold slipped through her hand, and in the zero-g environment, she tumbled into the control panel almost sideways. Once she got reoriented she stabbed at the panel. Her face quickly changed from frightened to frustrated and she said, “Kenji, you’re going to have to move your foot, I can’t open this door until both airlock doors are closed.”
Kenji had been moaning in the background, and his voice sounded thin. “You got it, captain, aye aye.” Eva watched the panel, then moved to the window to look at Kenji directly. Her face hardened.
“Move your foot, Tanaka!” Kenji didn’t reply, but Eva moved back to the panel, and this time the door opened. Eva and Anya rushed forward. Once they were by Kenji, Eva shoved the panel to the side without paying attention to where it was headed, so Anya hustled after it to bring it to a halt.
She got back to Kenji in time to hear him saying, “Sorry, cap’n, got in front of it when I shouldn’t. Caught my right arm and ribs.” Eva eased him up, tugging him along gently as they headed for the med center. It took less than thirty seconds to get there, because they cut through the kitchen and the main entertaining room, which would have been impossible before they removed the wall panels.
Once there, Eva loaded him into an automated med system, which scanned him multiple ways and displayed a preliminary diagnosis of four cracked ribs and a fractured arm, but no significant internal bleeding. It applied an IV and a sedative, and started splinting his arm.
Eva turned to Anya and said, “And then there were three. You ready to get to work for real?”
Anya replied, “I thought that’s what I was doing.”
“Yeah, but now if you slack off we all die.”
“Well, since you put it that way…”
“How are you in a space suit?”
“You’d have me wrangle the panel launching?”
“You were good enough at collecting them“ – she gestured down the hallway – “so I figure we’ll try you on getting them out the airlock and into the drive.”
Jia jumped in remotely. “Captain, she’s better at securing panels from the ship than I am. She’s better in zero-g. Sending panels out the airlock is easy by comparison. I should do it.”
Eva hesitated, thinking, then said, “Yeah, but working in a suit in vacuum is also challenging, and as we’ve amply demonstrated, riskier. With Tanaka out of action, you’re the last able-bodied person I have that knows the ship. I can’t risk you.”
Not sure how to feel about that!
“Captain, I’m your cargo. You’d risk me over your crew? I’m not complaining, just asking.”
“I would. You can complain to your father when we get to 581.”
“That’s not fair, I would never complain! And I’ve pitched in like everyone!”
“And now I’m asking you to do it again. Jia, I assume you didn’t fire on the last batch of panels yet, how far away are they?”
“18,000km and retreating. Still close enough to keep the train going, but the delay is greater the longer we wait.”
Eva looked at Anya intensely. “So, what are your skills in a suit – are you up for the task I’m assigning, or not?”
“I’ve been in a suit.” Not technically a lie, but not good enough. Eva was about to respond when Anya raised her hand. “Wait, that’s a lie. Well, not technically a lie, but…” Out with it! “I have a few hundred hours in a late model Rand, and I’m certified in low-G and zero-G for anything up to light mechanical work.”
Eva’s left eyebrow raised slightly. Gotta learn how to do that. “You want to explain that?”
“Not really.”
“Well, your parents prepared you well.”
“Mostly my dad, although the suit was a gift from my mom. They were… trying to piss each other off by preparing me for the trades.”
Eva nodded, but she was definitely looking at Anya differently. “The suits are in that locker, pick one that fits and isn’t labeled Li or Rostova. I’m going to go get another panel while you suit up. Don’t open the airlock until I get back. Move fast, the glitch in the train is only getting worse.”
Anya nodded and made her way to the storage locker and opened it. Half a dozen suits were hanging neatly side by side, including one labeled A. Morris. Sputnik was endlessly circling the helmet, and the Eagle was landing on the beltline in the back, “on the moon” as her younger self had joked. She was at least 10 cm taller than the last time she had used the suit, but it had been roomy then, so maybe it would still fit, and she preferred her own stink to a stranger’s, so she grabbed it and started pulling it on. Multiple air tanks were stacked below and behind the suits.
In the end, Anya got the suit on just as Eva returned with another panel. She eased the panel to a stop – carefully! – and checked out Anya’s suit thoroughly. Her eyes widened slightly. “Your father didn’t buy you that certification.”
Anya pulled back a bit and said tersely, “No, he did not.”
“Okay, show me how it’s done. That panel, out and delivered to the drive.”
“Aye aye, cap’n!” Anya replied.
Eva’s face moved very little as she said, “Don’t do that. Just get the panel where it needs to go, and don’t hurt yourself. I would like to deliver you to Egeria in one piece. Jia? Is the ship’s drive still ready?”
“The whole time.”
Anya nodded soberly and put on her helmet. Eva stepped out of the hall and secured the hatch/door between them, and remained looking through the clear panel as the air cycled out.
The airlock doors opened on the blackness of space. And not the blackness of a starry night on Mauna Kea, or even Ceres. Looking out the side like this, at relativistic speed, there was nothing – literally nothing – visible out the airlock door. There was no sense of distance, just a void, as if the universe had been shut off. Ben had said if she lost anything, he would go find it. Now they had lost Ben, and Kenji sort of. Who would come looking if she got lost in that infinite void?
Ben died out there. Ben. Died. Out. There. Ben…
“Anya?” Eva’s voice cut through the silence.
“Yes. On it.” Anya studied the first panel for a moment. It was three meters long by two hundred twenty centimeters tall, ten centimeters thick, but with significant hollows throughout. It was idly floating in zero-g, but still, it massed almost a thousand kilos, so with Kenji’s scream still on her mind, she carefully started shoving it toward the airlock. It responded like she was coaxing a rhinoceros, and she was very careful when she got it moving slowly to be content and just keep guiding it along.
It was five meters out of the airlock, and she was a few meters inside, when it vanished. The effect wasn’t instant – as before there was a split second as the panel’s leading edge entered the drive’s influence where the panel accelerated, and the acceleration accelerated – but it was so much more profound up close, she was startled even though she knew exactly what was going to happen. At the same time she felt a slight thump front and back. Tidal forces?
The blackness outside swallowed the panel and it was gone… just, completely gone. She shuddered as her eyes searched for anything in the blackness.
Jia’s voice echoed in the helmet and snapped her out of her reverie/horror. “That one’s away. Now secure yourself to the descender we rigged up for Kenji – that’s the rope and clip near the entrance to the airlock. Just clip on to the lower portion, then the rope going through the metal thing is the descender. Take hold of the loose end and keep hold of it lightly. When the acceleration hits it will pull you down toward the panels sharply. Don’t try to hold onto the rope, just keep light tension on it and let it slide through the descender. This one’s going to be lighter because the panels are farther away, so you get a chance to get used to it.
“Eva, Kenji, you ready?”
“Yes.”
“I’m secured in a hospital bed, how could I not be?”
“Whatever, slacker. Anya, are you clipped and ready?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, here goes.”
It wasn’t so bad; roughly what she had experienced before when panels launched, but of course that was because while she was at the edge of the ship, making the effect stronger, the panels were much farther away, making the effect weaker.
Jia filled her helmet. “Now send three more and we’ll let those coast while we wait for the first one to arrive. With the distance to the batch before, the acceleration was low – you’ll have almost twenty minutes to organize the hallway however you like.”
She sent the three, then took advantage of the time to pressurize the hallway and pack it completely full of panels, close to a hundred, now held back with straps to avoid the recoil that had injured Kenji.
When she was done she depressurized the hallway again, and if she had wanted to get to the rest of the ship she would have had to shove panels out of the airlock just to make room to get back to the interior door.
When Jia spoke again, she sounded out of breath, presumably from collecting panels inside the ship. “Okay, everyone brace for the panel. Anya, this will be full force, get clipped in. Everyone ready?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Like I said, hospital bed.”
The force this time was much stronger. Half a meter of rope slipped through the descender, and still it was jarring.
“The one is gone, and the three are properly on their way. You can send another three, and you have about six minutes to do it.”
“Why just three?” A panel disappeared into the distance.
“Ask me about four after you’ve done three a few more times.”
Another panel left. “Okay, but I’m pretty sure I can handle four.” The third panel was on its way.
Six minutes later Jia said, “Everyone brace. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Bed.”
“You’re so lazy, Kenji, do some real work.” Three strong thumps and a meter of rope. “Anya, the three are gone, and the three you just sent are on their way. You have right around two minutes.”
Feeling ornery, Anya hurried and managed to clear three panels in less than thirty seconds. To move that quickly, she overlapped the panels somewhat as they entered the field. The second panel was at a bit of an angle when it was snatched up by the drive, and the rear of it swung left as it departed and clipped the leading edge of the third panel, sending it quickly off to the right.
Fortunately Anya was guiding that panel from the rear, also to the right, so as the panel pivoted violently, the rear of it moved away from her. If she had been on the left, it would have crushed her immediately. As it was, it wrenched out of her hand, twisting her wrist. She thought she was safe, but it rebounded silently from the far side of the airlock.
She was prepared, and had the presence of mind not just to brace against the panel’s impact, but also to pull herself toward the rear of the airlock and out of the way. As the panel hit the right wall of the airlock, the front end of it entered the drive field and the entire thing rocketed forward and away. If she hadn’t gotten out of the way, the panel would have both crushed her and dragged her corpse into the drive field and out into space.
Did Eva hear that?
Eva cut through the silence. “What were those bangs?”
“One of the panels hit the other on its way out and it bounced around the airlock before taking off.”
“Okay. Be careful. Don’t die.”
“Aye aye, cap’n.” She waited. No admonishment this time.
Jia said, “In case it isn’t obvious, anything that enters that field is permanently gone from the ship, regardless of the state it’s in, or what we do after. There is zero chance of recovering it, so give the field the respect it’s due, and don’t poke even a toe outside the airlock, okay?”
“Okay.” She found herself staring out into the utter blackness again. There was zero indication they were even moving, unless you counted the blackness itself. She shuddered and tore her gaze away into the airlock.
The remainder of the two minutes ticked by, and after everyone braced, Jia said, “The previous three are gone, and those three are on their way. You can send four if you like. Two minutes.”
She sent four. Despite being more careful than before, she finished the fourth in just over thirty seconds, giving her over eighty seconds to catch her breath.
“Three away, four on their way. You want to try five?”
“Sure!”
Five took forty seconds, and she thought she could get them going a little faster to give herself a reasonable break with just a 70 second cycle time.
At first she managed it in under forty seconds, for the next batch and the one after that. She started sweating inside the suit; it tickled the small of her back as it inched down. Every seventy seconds she sent five panels out. By the eighth batch she was drenched with sweat, and her suit was warning her about how she was consuming oxygen at an accelerated rate. Two batches later, the first time it took her over a minute to clear five panels out the airlock, she said, “Okay, let’s go back to four.”
Jia, breathing hard herself from retrieving panels inside the ship, just replied, “Sounds good.”
The hallway was mostly cleared when, during the acceleration of the panels 8200 kilometers away, the ship noticeably shuddered. Anya practically shouted in her helmet, “What happened?” as she dodged the remaining twenty or so panels, which were going in every direction against the straps that now were too loose.
There was no reply for five, ten, fifteen seconds. Then Eva’s voice rang in her ears. “Anya, do exactly as I say with no questions. Don’t bother to close the airlock doors. Get to the hatch at the end of the hallway as quickly as you can. Move! Now!”
She pulled herself through the hallway past the remaining panels, which had mostly settled down. Eva continued, “Go through the hatch.”
The air pressure won’t allow that!
She resisted interrupting with a question – barely – and Eva continued. “Get to engineering as quickly as you can. It’s depressurizing and Kenji didn’t make it to a pressure hatch fast enough.”
Well that explains it. The hatch offered no resistance – there was only vacuum on the other side, and she swarmed through.
“Get to Kenji, get him back to medical. You have less than two minutes.”
What was he doing out of medical in the first place?
She took a moment to orient herself on the far side of the hatch. There was debris everywhere, and every surface was covered with a thick white frost. Engineering was on the far side of the ship, and one level forward. The space between was mostly a lattice of girders that had once held wall panels and floors.
She pulled herself forward, careful not to go so quickly she couldn’t stop at the far end. She was focused on her target thirty meters ahead, but she couldn’t help but see that many of the wall panels they had loosened in preparation for removing them had torn free from the ship’s structure.
The door to engineering was hanging open, facing into the room within, but blocked from closing by several loose cables, tools, and a sweater. Goofy and the Pokemon were still there on the door, visible through the sublimating frost, which made Goofy’s leaking pipe look like it was forming a stalagmite.
She opened the door, careful in case Kenji was right behind it, but he was not there. She turned, and immediately saw him floating motionless by a closed hatch that led to the hallway to medical.
He didn’t just clear the door to engineering? Why? Would he even remember the reason if – no, when – they resuscitated him?
She grabbed Kenji and headed back toward medical in the center of the ship. “Depressurize the hall in front of medical,” she called out.
“Already done.”
She tried the hatch, and it opened, with minor resistance. She shoved Kenji’s still form through, went through herself, and sealed the hatch. “Okay, pressurize now!” She grabbed Kenji and pulled him into medical, setting him on the table. A robotic arm offered an oxygen mask, and she pressed it over his face and pulled the straps around the back of his head as tightly as she could. Her suit registered the pressure increasing in the room before she heard it, but before long she heard the hiss of air returning to the room. A few seconds later Jia and Eva entered, both wearing oxygen masks and portable tanks. She stepped back and they took over with Kenji. Within ninety seconds the room was at standard pressure, but they kept the oxygen mask on Kenji as they put drops in his eyes and checked him for other new injuries.
Once certain he wasn’t injured beyond the existing cracked ribs and arm, they started shaking him and massaging his face. Before long he stirred enough to look down at himself and say softly, “You couldn’t have cleaned up the piss, shit and vomit while I was asleep?” Eva smiled, and Jia almost laughed. Anya took in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then slowly let it out.
Twenty minutes later, with Kenji still in medical having his eyes and ears tended to, the three of them met on the bridge. Once it was somewhat repressurized, the ship smelled different. The scent of the wall hangings was diminished, and a vaguely lubricant-based scent had taken its place. As Anya walked in she asked, “So what happened?”
Jia brought up a diagram of the ship on the main display. “The mass sensors out to the side aren’t nearly as good as the ones facing forward. I programmed the side deflector to skip any panels that were too close to hit one at a time reliably, but it looks like that failed. We hit about 23 g’s of compression for a moment and it seems we were right to set the limit at 12 – that was enough that we have ruptures in six locations, five around the middle of the ship, and one right near engineering that got Kenji.” The diagram lit up with multiple sections highlighted in red.
“About half the ship is depressurized. We can get that down to a third by closing the right hatches, but the rest will have to wait until later; or maybe that’s just how we arrive at 581.”
Before Jia could continue, Anya interjected, “And what was Kenji doing in engineering?”
Jia pursed her lips. “Digging out an inertial balance for when we get to the end of the panels and need to fine-tune our velocity.”
Eva raised an eyebrow and said, “We’ll have to discuss that when he’s feeling better.”
Anya managed to twitch her right eyebrow in support. Dang it!
Jia continued, “Unfortunately one of the ruptures was into the main water tank. Good news for us, much of the water flash-froze on its way out, so it’s sitting there on the outside of the ship, a big chunk of ice we’ll want to collect after we get back on course. I just checked, and we have about 87 panels left to go if we get started again in the next few minutes. 88 if we wait half an hour.”
“Look on the bright side,” Anya jumped in. “A bunch of the panels are already detached and ready to go.” She shrugged. “Let’s get started.”
Eva raised a hand. “Just a minute, please. First, no more than three panels at a time. Second, increase the spread on the initial push to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And third:” She turned to Anya and put a hand on her shoulder. “Good job getting Kenji to pressure. You absolutely saved his life; neither of us could have gotten suited up fast enough to retrieve him.”
Anya nodded. “I’m just glad I was in a position to help.”
“Okay, let’s get some panels on the way and load up the hallway.”
The distance to the previous batch was such that they had over half an hour to pack the hallway with panels, again filling it as completely as they could. Once they got the cycle straightened out they were sending three panels every two minutes.
At one point Anya happened to notice the edge of the panel she had in her hands; it was from the main entertainment room, and bore the marks of her height over the years. “One second, not this one,” she said to Jia, and set it aside to grab another.
The work went quickly. Anya was the limiting factor, even though she was sending almost ninety panels per hour. Toward the end of the hour, as the 478th panel winked out of sight, Jia announced, “We’re on track to catch 581, just barely: 2.45 million kilometers, which we will bend to 5.4 million as we decelerate. How much of a cushion do you want, Eva?”
The captain didn’t hesitate. “We don’t want to risk missing it, but the closer we get to the center, the worse the deflector risk is as we approach – so if you’re certain we’re on target, with a 10,000 kilometer buffer, we’re good.”
“I thought you’d say something like that,” Jia replied. “Anya, get out the bolts and that inertial balance, we have some fine-tuning to do.”
They ended up overshooting the mark with the 23rd bolt and had to face the drive the other way and launch screws until they were aimed 10,002 kilometers inside the target.
When they were safely on course, they unpacked the patching materials: a combination of air-tight fabric, adhesive, and fiber-reinforced foam designed to work across anything up to about a meter. After curing it with UV they pressurized each area to a tenth of an atmosphere and waited an hour to see if the patch was holding. In all cases but one it held perfectly, so they fully repressurized, using a significant portion of their reserve atmosphere, leaving the one area isolated and in vacuum, a problem for later. The ship now smelled strongly of adhesive. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was reassuring.
Eva assigned Anya to go out and chip away at the twenty-ton iceberg attached to the outside of the ship. The same logic applied as had before: with Kenji largely out of commission, Jia was too valuable to expose her to even the minor risk of a spacewalk.
Before she headed out, Jia intercepted her in the hall outside the airlock and pulled her to one side, shifting nervously. Looking anywhere but straight at her, Jia said, “I… just wanted to say to stay safe.” Her eyes went down to the left, off to the right, then resolutely focused on Anya’s. “And if something does go wrong, I’ll… I’ll be more careful this…” She froze, her eyes wide, and then she just crumpled in on herself, looking down at her feet, her shoulders shaking. She looked up again and lurched forward to grab Anya in a strong hug. Jia was wearing Ben’s sweater; it was scratchy.
What do I do, what do I do, what do I do…
“Jia, that wasn’t…” No! “You didn’t…” Also no! “I’ll be very careful.”
Jia pulled back and angled her eyes up to Anya’s. “You’d better!” She smiled quickly, and headed back for the bridge.
As it happened, the walk outside was uneventful, and after several trips eventually she recovered just over half of their water reserves.
Anya took off her helmet in the hall, having inspected the outside views of the patches even though the areas they protected were fully pressurized and holding atmosphere securely. She sealed the airlock for hopefully the last time until they reached 581. Stepping through the door at the end of the hallway, the ship was now mostly an empty grid of beams where the walls had been. Below, the storage area stood open, piled boxes of food standing beside containers of water and various replacement equipment and tools. To the left was what was left of engineering. Straight ahead she could see where Ben had examined her for the trip three… no, four days earlier. Kenji was still there, recovering. Above were the underside of the entertainment room and its adjoining rooms, where they had moved their beds and personal belongings for the remainder of the trip, and the bridge. They also had enough food and supplies that if everything else went wrong they wouldn’t need to leave that area except for medical and engineering, which would be extremely difficult to relocate.
They had put the drive engine back on gravity duty, but just at five percent: enough to hold things in place and give everything a “down” to respect, but not enough to walk comfortably, and not enough to cause a problem toward the edges of the ship – so she pulled her way up to the control room where everyone else was. She first went through two air-tight doors, then dropped her spacesuit off in what they had designated as the equipment room. When she reached the bridge Eva and Jia were in their seats; she suspected that was where they’d spend most of the remaining days of the trip. Jia was wearing Ben’s blue sweater again, as she had every day. It softened her a little.
As she pulled herself in, Jia smiled at her and said, “There’s our stoker.”
“Stoker?”
“I looked it up. It’s what they used to call the guy who maintained the fuel supply on a steamship. We’re alive because of your zero-g skills in a space suit, so thanks.”
Thank my parents – their vendettas against each other made me this way.
Anya tilted her head slightly and nodded.
Eva spoke. “We’re going to be late getting to 581. It’ll just be a couple hours —”
Anya jumped in. “Hours? We’re days late, no?”
Eva shook her head. “Relativity is tricky. We’re days late to us because of the slowdown. But regardless, the journey is going to take speed-of-light plus several hours. We would have had to drop our Lorentz down to somewhere in the forties to be days late. Still, the ship will auto-checkin as soon as we’re in proximity, and they’ll know we’re late.”
Anya shrugged. “When they hear the rest of the story the lateness won’t be the issue.”
“I imagine not,” Eva said.
“By the way Jia, I read up on the insertion procedure.”
Jia smiled in amusement. “So you understand why we don’t point straight at the star?”
“Sure – turning off the deflector is a no-go because of the incoming radiation and interstellar hydrogen, and if you’re headed right for the star, there’s no way to approach with the deflector running: you’d bounce away as soon as you were close enough to catch it.”
Jia nodded and said, “That’s the high-level, but there are more subtleties to it if you want to do the reading.”
“But presumably not everyone comes as close as we are?”
“Not generally. We had a large margin before we gave up the gravity drive, and an ordinary ship coming in with our drive wouldn’t be hitting at our speed. With a lower Lorentz they’d also be able to catch 581 at a greater distance.”
“How bad is it going to be?”
“It shouldn’t be too risky.”
“What about the radiation?”
“Radiation?”
“From 581. Since we can’t point the deflector at it, the radiance will be off the charts, right?”
“Oh — no. We can’t point the deflector at where 581 is, but we can point it at where 581 appears to be, we just have to be careful.”
“Okay, you lost me.”
“Right now 581 is almost directly in front of us. As we approach, it will move farther and farther to the side, but it won’t look that way: relativity pushes all light from anywhere ahead of us toward the point directly in front of us, and that includes the light from 581. But relativity doesn’t affect the drive that way — the drive acts on the local gravitational gradient, which shifts to the side with 581. Once we’re within about 500 AU the difference will be great enough that we won’t even need to angle the deflector; we can just point it straight ahead and miss 581. But starting in a couple weeks, and until we hit that 500 AU mark, we’ll need to angle the deflector away and be very careful not to risk hitting 581 with it. And that puts us at a very slight risk if something comes screaming in from that side. But don’t worry.”
“I won’t.” Maybe a little…
Weeks later, Anya and Jia shifted the drive back to being a drive, over Kenji’s protests that he was mostly recovered, and they were operating in a fully weightless environment again.
With just over three hours to go, they met on the bridge for a final debrief. Anya had switched back to blonde, but a somewhat darker shade than before, and a little shorter.
Eva started. “Any update on targeting?”
Jia shook her head. “Same as the last time you asked me, we’re still dead on target.”
She turned to Kenji. “Is the drive prepared?”
“Yep. Triple checked, and then checked again this morning, just because I was bored.”
Anya jumped in, “Easy for you to say, your boredom equals work for me.” Kenji smirked at her.
Eva admonished them both with a look and continued. “The anchor is secured against the ship?”
Kenji nodded. “Yes, same answer: Anya’s quite the spacewalker, and there’s a future waiting for her in construction. The anchor and ship meet cleanly by design, but 2 g’s of tidal force is a lot to put on a metal-to-metal connection.”
Eva nodded. “And that’s why we’ll be suited up, just in case the ‘Tross springs a leak. Anything else?” She looked at each in turn, and Anya was gratified to see Eva’s grey eyes focus on her no differently than the others. “Fine. Then in just over three hours, we’ll meet here to bounce off 581. Then we’ll shed our angular velocity against Consus, and when that’s done we’ll shuttle in to Egeria in a few hours.”
Three hours later Gliese 581 was a tiny dot on the display, dead center. Anya knew that a true-color image would have been black, with all the light from 581 either blue-shifted into UV and soft x-rays without the deflector, or red-shifted into microwaves or radio waves with the deflector. The upper-left corner of the display had a column of numbers:
All were strapped into their seats, in their suits. Extra tanks of air were strapped in a corner, next to a container of water.
For now they were floating, weightless. As the other numbers decreased at varying rates, and the acceleration increased slowly, the Lorentz factor was stubbornly stable at 153, until, as the timer passed 90 seconds, the Lorentz number finally changed: to 152.9. Shedding relativistic speed was slow. They were at 27 AU, and their galactic deceleration had only reached 0.0006 meters per second^2, while their local acceleration was shooting past 250 g’s.
As the seconds ticked down and 581 finally started visibly growing on the display, Jia reported their location in a calm tone. “60 seconds. 20 AU. 50 seconds. 17 AU.” Several loud snaps and bangs echoed through the ship as the tidal forces began to really dig in. Finally the Lorentz number started moving as Jia counted, “40 seconds… 30… headed for closest approach and maximum tidal.” The small red circle on the display continued to grow and brighten.
Over the seconds to closest approach, tidal acceleration pressed them into their seats: not too strongly at first, but rising as their local acceleration shot up. There was a horrible metal-on-metal grinding noise as the shield settled harder on the ship. Anya imagined the ship being injured and tired, working hard to deliver them safely to their destination. I practically grew up in the Albatross, now it’s literally tearing itself apart to keep us alive.
Their galactic acceleration remained stubbornly small, but the Lorentz number finally gave way in the final seconds of approach, ticking down by tenths in a blur.
Still Jia was calm as she said “Tidal at 2.2 g’s.” The red circle grew until it filled the display. At the moment before closest approach the display was filled with red.
At the final instant, their local acceleration flashed into the millions of g’s, while the galactic finally broke into single digits. Then a split second before they passed closest approach to 581, the drive cut and they were weightless. The drive flash-rotated to point behind them to attract the star as it receded, their seats rotated to face the ship’s center, and the tidal acceleration resumed. Now they were being stretched instead of compressed, and the change was disturbing. The anchor and the ship separated with a painfully loud clang that echoed throughout the ship for several seconds.
The timer reset to 5:13 at closest approach and was counting down, now labeled “Orbit” instead of “Periapsis.” The Lorentz factor had paused for a split second at 71 at closest approach; now it was already in the 20s and dropping rapidly. The local acceleration had dropped back into the hundreds of thousands, but in the galactic frame it was climbing rapidly into the hundreds of g’s.
Jia spoke. “We’ll complete the second half of the deceleration profile as planned, stopping just shy of 1 AU. The ship didn’t give anywhere, and we appear to still be air-tight.” She checked a smaller display to the side. “We’ll end up at 7.8 degrees off the 581 ecliptic, almost exactly opposite Egeria. Consus is in a reasonable position for braking, so no special adjustments required there.”
At three minutes to go they dropped below 200,000 g’s of local acceleration, even as the galactic acceleration continued to climb past 4,500 g’s. Kenji spoke. “The drive numbers are holding up fine, although based on our earlier experience, I can’t make any predictions based on that.”
Eva looked at Kenji for a moment, then said, “No quip?”
Kenji shrugged. “Maybe I’ve matured. Or maybe I just won’t trust that we’ve made it until we’re boots-on-the-ground at Egeria.” Anya knew they still weren’t safe, but hearing Kenji say it out loud hit different.
As they approached five minutes into the deceleration Jia started counting down. “20 seconds. 7,700 g’s galactic. 10 seconds. 5… and done. Stepping down the drive, we are orbiting 581.” She exhaled.
“At 93.6% the speed of light,” Kenji added. “We’re not there yet.”
Eva focused on her display and said, “I’m sending a message to Egeria to let them know we’re here and what happened.”
Jia was focused on one of the smaller displays. She gestured a diagram onto the main display and said, “Okay, we’re a little poorly positioned to use Consus for deceleration, it’s going to take some hours to adjust. Once we’re positioned, I’ve set the profile to keep it to 8 g’s tidal compression, since the ship is half duct tape at this point. That means it will take us 196 passes to shed our angular velocity into Consus, but we’ll be orbiting once every 6 seconds at the start from our perspective, so we’ll be done in a little over half an hour. It’s going to be unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant is a funny word to use,” Kenji replied. Jia just stared at him. “More like, ‘Hold onto your butts, this is going to suck.’” He looked at Eva, who was expressionless, and said, “Maybe I’m not fully mature just yet.”
Once it started, Anya decided Kenji’s assessment was far closer to the truth than Jia’s. As they pulled into Consus’s tight orbit, over 2 g’s pulled them into their seats, but it wasn’t stable: every six seconds it went away entirely for roughly a quarter second, and then the gravity slammed back into them. The pause was accompanied by the far-off sound of the drive pivoting from 581 to Consus, applying maximum repulsion there, and then switching back to 581, along with creaks and the occasional bang of the ship trying to hold itself together. It was disturbing and painful, and it went on, minute after minute.
The main display repeatedly showed 581 to their left, and the stars wildly swinging by. Every six seconds Consus swarmed into view, looking like they would hit it, only for it to slide to the side and past them. Eva said blandly, “Jia, that display is unsettling, can you shut it off?” The display switched to a top-down view of the 581 system, with the planets enlarged and labeled, and a dot representing the ship hustling around 581 almost ten times per minute, passing by Consus each time it went around. Knowing the distances involved, that was almost worse.
It went on for over 35 minutes.
Finally, it stopped. Jia said, “We are non-relativistic. We’re safe.”
Not all of us. Anya noticed Eva staring at the empty seat second on the left, where Ben had sat, and knew she wasn’t alone in that thought.
“Can we wait to say that until we’re not all dressed in our suits riding in a ship with the hull integrity of a soap bubble?” Kenji said it like it was a joke, but it was obvious he wasn’t being humorous.
Jia nodded and continued. “Plotting an intercept course for Egeria. We’ll be there shortly.”
Eva looked up from one of the side displays. “Egeria replied. Understandably, there are a bunch of incoming messages because we’re late, even though to them it’s only a few hours.” She squinted at the display. “So many messages!” After a moment she looked up at Anya. “One in particular might interest you: your mother took a high-speed transport slightly before we left. They just completed their deceleration, and she’ll be waiting for you when we get to Egeria.”
“My mother? On a ship?” Anya took a deep breath. “Well that’s just wonderful. And my father too?”
Eva nodded. “There are messages from both of them, actually, along with their lawyers.”
“Of course.” As battered as it was, the Albatross seemed like the better option. “Any chance we can get back on course for LP 502-56, or one of those other stars farther away?” Eva snorted and shook her head. “Back to Earth? I know it sounds dramatic, but truly, one star system isn’t big enough for both my parents. Heck, one planet – Consus is just a terraforming outpost at this point, there will be nowhere to go!” She started planning ways to keep her parents at arm’s length. More construction classes — great!
“Sorry, Anya, I know this must be difficult.”
“I wish they would get over themselves and just leave me out of it. My mother hates space travel. And she definitely isn’t attached to me enough to get her all the way to Egeria. She’s screwing with my father, plain and simple.”
“You don’t know that for sure, maybe she really didn’t want to be without you for all that time.”
“Then she could have booked a flight for the two of us and we could have spent the four weeks together.”
“She only worked up the nerve at the last minute after you were gone?” Eva sounded uncertain.
Anya rolled her eyes. I think the lawyers make it clear neither of them is fighting for me out of affection. You didn’t talk with my father for more than a few minutes setting up this contract, right?
Eva shook her head uncertainly.
“I know you didn’t, because if you talked with him for even ten minutes, my mother would have come up and you’d know exactly how much animosity he holds toward her. And he doesn’t just unload on the people he hires: I hear about it, endlessly. And trust me, it’s mutual: I don’t get a break when I’m with her; if anything it’s worse. I’m not a daughter to them, I’m a bargaining chip!”
Kenji jumped in. “If you stow away on my next ship, I’ll put you to work!”
Eva remained focused on Anya as she said quietly, “Kenji, not now.” Her face softened as she continued. “That sounds terrible, and I’m sorry. With training and time you really could put some distance between you and your parents. In the near term you could definitely get a part-time gig working on Consus. We’d all be happy to recommend you to the guilds.” Jia and Kenji both nodded in agreement.
Say it – say it!
“That’s tempting, but I think I know what I want to do.”
“And what’s that?”
Anya had been staring at the deck. Now she looked up slowly. “I… want to design ships.” After the way this trip went…no, say it out loud. “After the way this trip went I have a ton of ideas.”
Eva smiled. “I can only imagine. It’s not my field, but I have a few thoughts of my own. Oh, there’s one other thing – I sent in a status report and summary of what happened as soon as we were in-system. That’ll take them some time to assess, but there’s going to be an inquiry, of course.
“They’re going to want to interview you. At length. Promoting a passenger to crew”
Crew!
“isn’t exactly standard procedure.” Eva raised one eyebrow. “Fortunately we had an unusually-capable passenger.”
Anya raised an eyebrow back – she had been practicing – and said, “I have no complaints. Thanks for the ride. Five stars, really.”
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment, the original Google Doc is open for comments.