Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) Page 4

  “Thank you, thank you everyone.” Mancuso grinned and nodded at them. And damned if he didn’t tear up. I knew this was coming and they’re still getting to me. Damnit. “Where can I get a drink?”

  “Over here, sir!” Dan Wilkins yelled over from behind the bar. Mancuso passed through the room of faces, shaking hands, saying thank yous, getting claps on the shoulder. Mancuso noticed the balloons and streamers decorating the mezzanine.

  Wilkins cleared his throat, and projected himself louder than it was strictly required for Mancuso to hear him. “Before we get into what you’ll be drinking, we have a small presentation for you.”

  Sunil Pradeep, his comms officer winked at him and raised a half-full glass of something that looked like orange juice towards him. Mancuso nodded back and tried not to look too sour.

  The room quieted down around him, heads turning to listen in. “For your many years of service… decades, really.” Wilkins was warming up and Mancuso felt a roast coming on. “We have uncovered a gift befitting a man of your considerable age.” Some whooping from the crowd. “It wasn’t easy. There aren’t many things around here that old that aren’t considered vital equipment, but we dug deep and came up with this!” A flourish produced a brightly-colored wrapped box.

  “It was found in the belly of the old Exodus ship that brought our first colonists here. Somehow missed during the disassembly and hidden deep in the first Commander’s quarters on Mars. We believe he might have been sleeping with it, but we don’t think he’ll mind if we pass her on to you, sir.” Some polite laughter.

  “From us to you, many thanks, and happy birthday!” Wilkins handed the box to Mancuso and shook his hand. Cheers. Applause. Calls to open it. Inevitably, calls for a speech.

  Mancuso did his best to try to calm the people. “I still don’t have a drink.” Laughter. Wilkins poured him a healthy glass of vodka. “I really (really!) don’t know what to say.” He paused and looked around at the faces around him. Most of them half his age. Or younger. All smiling. “I guess I’d better open this.”

  Commander Mancuso did his best to carefully untie the bow, unstuck the paper and unwrapped the package. An ornate, brown and gold decorated box with antique gilt lettering proclaimed Single Malt, Glenmorangie 21. No one living now had ever tasted scotch before.

  Wilkins enthused, almost reverently, “It’s the last bottle of scotch in the universe, sir. Open sometime, preferably with a friend.” He raised his own glass. “Cheers, sir. Happy birthday. And many more.”

  Mancuso, visibly touched, took the bottle out of the box and marveled at the brown liquor before raising it so people around him could see. He clinked his vodka glass with everyone around him. “Thank you so much, everyone. Wilkins, stop staring at my scotch.” And then he drained the vodka eliciting more cheers and laughter.

  The crew, families and officers started to break up into groups. Somewhere, some music started playing and the lights dimmed fractionally. The Commander asked Wilkins to stow his present and got another drink to prepare for some mingling.

  Captain Zhang was talking to one of his crew mates and a few other people. He smiled and welcomed him over. “I was just telling my crewmate here that it was always good knowing you were watching over us while we’re out there. Thanks for running the Lighthouse, Commander.”

  “You do all the dangerous work, Captain. It’s an honor to serve.”

  Mancuso continued exchanging pleasantries with the captain when a purposeful Bryce Nolan strode through the crowd towards him. He politely deflected offers of food and drink, patted one of the pilots on his shoulder.

  “Good to see you here, though I think you’re supposed to be on watch.”

  Nolan leaned in and whispered, “Commander, you need to come to the deck. We’ve lost telemetry on one of our ships.”

  Mancuso felt the air drain out of the room.

  011

  Making Time.

  Jerem was on watch in the cockpit, his father getting some rest in his bunk when he saw the flash. A light fluttered into existence, bright at first then slowly fading out. He checked the logs and pulled up a recording of the event.

  “Dad, you awake?” He clicked off his intercom and checked the boards. They had lost telemetry from Mars Control for nearly 2 minutes, the signal was reacquiring.

  “Dad, you should get up here.” He just hollered down this time, not bothering with the intercom.

  Jerem checked the data plots from his instruments alongside the video of the event. Big, full-spectrum spike. All the way to gamma ray. A big wall of noise on the graph.

  Hal pulled himself into the cockpit, looking every bit the grizzled space captain, bearded, hair askew, eyes still rimmed with sleep but alert. He’d been sleeping in his flight suit.

  “Looks like an explosion, bearing… 292. Full spectrum. We lost telemetry for about two minutes…” Jerem trailed off.

  “Lemme take a look,” Hal exchanged places with his son, Jerem walking him through the displays.

  “Event started here.” Pointing at the screen. “20:16:23, lasted for two seconds, still trailing off. Emissions were big. Right on the mark for…”

  Hal looked at the readouts. They were both thinking the same thing but didn’t want to say it out loud yet.

  “Pandora.” Mike Bruno’s ship. Crew of three. They haven’t come back on the board. The curved line Pandora left on the nav screen came to a dot, then stopped.

  “What do we do?” Jerem took his seat in the co-pilot’s station giving up the captain’s chair for his father. The Pandora was a week ahead of them. It would take them off-course if they investigated, but they could make up the time. They had enough fuel.

  “Let’s get some more data from Control. Shut down main engines and bring up the link.” Hal started making some notes on the navigation console.

  “Aye, sir. Is the ship secure?” Jerem switched into protocol mode. He was still a first mate in training on this vessel and would be graded on his performance. He thought about the stuff he had scattered about his bunk and winced.

  Hal checked a few displays. “Ship is secure.”

  “Shutting down main engine in 3… 2…” A loud clunk rolled through the ship. “Main engine shutdown.”

  The shift to weightlessness was abrupt. The noise on board suddenly shifted from a dull rumble to a long, low whine as the engines and fuel systems wound down. Jerem drifted out of his seat fractionally before belting in. A water bottle floated up in front of him.

  Jerem tapped a few commands into his console. “Network should be coming back up.”

  “Alright. In the meantime, let’s put our good eye on this thing. Is the Pup ready to go?”

  Jerem checked the status of the unmanned sensor and reconnaissance probe, saw green. “Yessir.”

  “Get him out there.”

  Jerem pulled out his visor from the bag beside his seat and put it on. He slid the controls for the remote out from the console in front of him and powered up the drone mounted on the back of the ship. The image in his goggles replaced his view of the cockpit with the black sky of space, the Sun shining off their port bow, the antenna array on the front of the ship glinting in the sunlight. A bump from inside the cabin as the Pup was released and guided up above the ship.

  The carrier light lit up on the pilot’s console indicating a solid connection from Mars. Hal got on the radio, opened a channel. “This is MSS27 Making Time to Mars Control. We’ve detected a possible explosion near the likely position of MSS13 Pandora. Data attached. We are powered down and awaiting further instruction. Our flight plan is changing. Please advise. Will repeat in five minutes. Over.” Hal switched off the comms channel and turned around to Jerem.

  “Do you have anything, yet?”

  Jerem zoomed in with his helmet display and worked the controls in front of him on his console. “Not really. Just a faint glow ahead of us. Hard to see with the Sun in our face.” He swept the drone left and took in a quick view of Mars, itself a tiny black d
ot with a thin crescent of brownish red floating ahead of them.

  “Take a full-spectrum scan and bring the pup back in.”

  “Roger.” Jerem worked the controls.

  Hal checked the clock, another couple minutes until his next broadcast. It would be nearly twenty minutes before he could expect a reply from Control. While they were adrift, Mars continued to speed along on its orbit. Since they’d stayed until the latest possible around Kleopatra, they had a limited amount of drift time built into their schedule. For every minute they stayed at rest, they would have to make up for it in acceleration. The longer they waited, the trickier and more violent the transit to stay on track to reach Mars.

  He flipped the transmitter on, flagged his message for all ships. “All vessels. This is MSS27 Making Time. This is a system-wide broadcast. All ships. Possible incident involving Pandora. Please exercise caution. Coordinates attached. MSS27 out.” He repeated the message in text only. The other ships in the system should receive it over their telemetry links at least and hopefully take heed.

  Five minutes were up. “Mars Control this is MSS27 Making Time…” He ran the message again.

  A distant thump. “Pup’s aboard, sir.” Jerem reported.

  Hal nodded, “Thanks. Send out your data to Control, please.” He scrubbed through the recording on his console, but there wasn’t much to see. Just space. The high resolution optics on board the Pup couldn’t resolve something that small, that distant. He could see the bright point of the Calypso burning ahead of them on the video. They were returning three days earlier than they were.

  The Calypso was four days behind Pandora.

  “Jer, I want to do a diagnostic on that fuel line while we’re here. Go check it out.”

  Jerem stowed his remote goggles back in their bag. “Aye-aye, cap’n.” He unbuckled his harness and floated out and down the hatch to the lockers.

  012

  Lighthouse.

  Bryce Nolan had briefed Mancuso on the way back to the deck about a text transmission from Calypso. They’d seen a light and were asking if it was Pandora. For some reason Watchtower hadn’t alerted them first. Mancuso wondered if one of its systems was on the fritz and he hadn’t gotten an incident report about it. Or worse, what if he’d just missed it?

  They entered the control deck, the big windows were open over a view of Mars, casting a ruddy light into the room over the bright orange of the evening deck lighting. The crew were at their stations working in a hushed silence. They’d all heard the transmission already and were worried. Mancuso could feel it in the air.

  “Send Calypso a standby. Ortega, what have you got for me?”

  Commander Mancuso was going over the final telemetry data from Pandora for the tenth time when the broadcast came in. “… Making Time to Mars Control. There has been a possible explosion near the likely position of MSS13 Pandora…”

  Mancuso cracked a knuckle. “Comms, put that attachment up on the main screen. Loop it. Open a channel, send: Mars Control to MSS27. Message received. Stand by.”

  The telemetries were replaced by a scene from space. Mars, easily identifiable in the right of the wide field display of stars. Then a flash. Static on audio. Full spectrum scan played afterwards. Bright flash across the range. White hot.

  Jesus Christ.

  A murmur started in the command deck as people took in the video and looked at one another. Pandora had… has three on board. Captain Bruno.

  Mancuso felt the vodka disappear from his body, replaced by adrenaline. “I need a science team on that recording on the double. Comms, open a channel. Mars Control to MSS27. Analyzing attachment. Please send any additional details. Instructions will follow. Over.”

  Sunil Pradeep banged that into his comms console. “Sending.”

  “Ortega, do we have any video of the event from our telescopes?”

  Ortega was already searching. “Olympus was in the sun at the time. Watchtower has radio and video.”

  “Well, why the hell hadn’t we gotten an alert? Put it up, please, main screen. Move Making Time’s video to screen two”. The screens shuffled their contents as Ortega put a new recording up.

  Watchtower was a million and a half kilometers away, orbiting at Mars’ L2 Lagrange point. It’s optical array covered a hemisphere of sky facing away from Mars’ dark side pointing away from the Sun. It used a wide-angle lens with a super-high resolution gigapixel sensor to capture space and catalog the asteroid belt beyond. It also served as a communications relay beaming Mars’ network into space.

  Pradeep, monitoring his board, “Sir, I have another broadcast from Making Time.” He put it on speakers. “All ships. Possible incident involving Pandora. Please exercise caution…”

  Ortega narrowed the view to the region of space Pandora was in, scrubbed the timescale back twenty minutes and set it in motion. The big flash filled the screen with white light. He set a marker, rewound and zoomed in again. This time he slowed down the recording. There was a tiny light on the screen and then the brighter flash that obscured everything else. Then it faded slowly. Some small light sources visible flying away from the origin.

  The deck was dead quiet.

  Mancuso gripped his nose. Eyes closed. The silence dragged on. The video repeated. The pain in his chest returned as the adrenaline faded from his system. A headache began to form around the remnants of his vodka. Shouldn’t have had those drinks.

  “Comms, open a channel, system-wide. This is Mars Control. We have lost contact with Pandora. Advising all ships take caution. We will update with new information as available. Control out. Comms, please rebroadcast in text.”

  Mancuso sat heavily in his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him. The videos kept repeating on screen. Tiny pin point of light. Big flash.

  “Ortega, put that video on number three and bring our telemetry display back up on one. I want you to tell me everything you can about that explosion. Let’s bring our ships home.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ortega shuffled the screens around from his desk in the science and nav station. He set to work on the images scrubbing them through their imaging computers.

  Mancuso tapped a message into his tablet addressed to Greta Patrick requesting an engineering team get sent up to Watchtower. They’d have to do a full work-over on it when they got a chance. He asked her to run some remote diagnostics in the meantime. What else was he forgetting?

  Bryce leaned over him, put a hand on his shoulder, speaking quietly. “Sir, we should probably send a note to the Council. Much as I hate to suggest it.”

  Mancuso nodded. He was right, damn it. “I don’t want to stir them up just yet until we know more. I’ll get Grayson on the screen in my boardroom.” He stood up and straightened his jacket. “You have the deck, Mister Nolan.”

  013

  New Providence: Nicola Tesla University.

  Tadeuz Powell was still in his office, about to close up. He had some messages from the station to get back to but hadn’t had a chance yet. The students were keen today.

  He would have liked to have a nap. He practically dozed off when one of his students was bugging him about some particular problem about orbital mechanics for a project he’d assigned him. Just look it up. He stared into the light on his desk for a moment, imagining it was the Sun.

  He looked back at his screen, eyes adjusting slowly to the different brightness and skimmed his inbox. Faculty meetings. A council meeting agenda. Students asking for passing grades they didn’t deserve. A light knock and his office door swung open and three students stuck their heads in. Miss Franklin, Miss Wheeler, and Mister… Pohl?

  “Didn’t I just see two of you? Come in.” He drawled as the three huffed in, the two ladies taking the chairs they had before. Greg closed the door behind him and leaned on it. He appeared to be out of breath. “I was just about to close…”

  Emma plowed ahead, interrupting him. “Dr. Powell. Sorry to bother you again, but we have some new information.” Emma motioned for Greg w
ho dutifully produced his tablet from his pack.

  Greg walked to the side of Powell’s desk opened up the navigation display on his tablet. “I was looking at the object Tam and Em found and did some plotting.” Powell watched, still half reading his email, something from Mancuso aboard the station about missing information from Watchtower had been forwarded to him.

  Greg pushed on. “I plotted out a course for this thing and overlaid it on our ship’s navigation curves. It looks like whatever this thing is it’s heading straight for them.”

  This got Powell’s attention. One of his mandates as the chief astronomer of Mars colony was to keep an eye on potential threats to their ships, whether in the form of solar activity or inbound objects floating around the asteroid belt. But he was a second line of defense. Most of the heavy analysis happened up on Lighthouse with data from the imaging arrays on board Watchtower and their ground-based telescopes. If those were malfunctioning…

  He started wheezing through his moustache as he studied the plots. “Slim chance it could get near enough to any of them to pose a threat. But just in case, you’d better leave this with me. I’ll make sure Control gets it.”

  Tamra sniffled and wiped her nose. She was feeling worse by the minute. She wondered if she was coming down with something.

  Powell looked at the names of the blobs on the navigational screen then back at the students sitting and standing anxiously in front of him. It took him a moment to make the connection.

  He hadn’t been following the operations of the mining fleet closely for some time. All three of these kids had parents on those ships.

  “Oh my. I’ll send this up right away.”

  014

  Calypso.

  Captain Edson Franklin read the incoming transmission from Control on his console aboard the Calypso. He read it again.

  … lost contact with Pandora. All ships take caution…

  “No shit.”