Friday became unreasonably busy for me, so here's my catch-up post! And yes, let's just leave that cliff hanging while we go to a completely different point of view!
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Part 3: POSSIBILITIES
Chapter 18.
Sue Fisher leaned back in the bath, luxuriating in the hot, soapy water and the fact that after tomorrow she'd have seven glorious days off. Orado Station had gone back to the old routine in the months since Outward Initiative had staggered its way into the system, and she happily embraced routine after that disaster.
Seven days would be more than enough to go planetside, visit Mom and Dad and maybe her brother if he wasn't somewhere on the other side of the world by then, and hit the beaches before going inland. She'd already talked with her friend Kate about doing some mountain-climbing in the middle of the week. And some night-life afterwards sounded real fun.
She chuckled to herself. "Boy, sounds like I've planned a lot of work for my vacation," she admitted, and stretched a bit in the water—that stayed in place courtesy of the carefully-controlled spin of the station providing a good ersatz version of gravity.
There were, of course, fun things to be had in her job, besides the long slack periods that let her catch up on all the reading and viewing she might want—fun things like the letter she was reading through her retinal display. One of the fast couriers had brought back the latest edition of The Journal of Interstellar Spaceflight, which featured the final version of Analysis of an in-flight malfunction of a Trapdoor drive system: implications for the structure of Trapdoor space and the potential for self-reinforcing resonant field disturbances, which was the long-winded title of the article she had authored with Numbers.
The letter was from Dr. Helen Glendale, current Director of the Board for the Interstellar Flight Foundation, which published the JISF. Dr. Glendale—a sidewise descendant of the Dr. Glendale who had been instrumental in the initial colonization of Earth system way back when—expressed her reaction to the paper:
". . . a startling set of claims bolstered by some solid theoretical and practical research. The Kryndomerr Resonance is an invaluable discovery in the purely scientific sense; all the reviewers agree that this discovery is almost certain to provide us with insights into the actual nature of Trapdoor space and, perhaps, higher-order spaces beyond it.
"In a more practical vein, of course, this discovery will undoubtedly save countless lives. On the basis of this paper a detailed Industry Safety Bulletin was prepared and immediately dispatched to all colonies and relevant organizations. We already –"
ERRRT! ERRRT! ERRRT! ERRRT!
Sue froze; reminiscing about the prior disaster and involved as she was with the letter, she thought for a moment she was flashing back to the earlier alarm.
Then it penetrated. Another emergency alert?
She lunged to a stand in the tub, comfort forgotten as she hit the drain and dry control. Hot air blasted from the side vents, scouring the water from her body and her hair; she ran her fingers through the shoulder-length brown waves and they dried swiftly, even as she triggered the connection to Orado Port's AI control.
A shiver of déjà-vu sent goosebumps chasing themselves across her body even in the hot-air blast, hearing the received transmission.
"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday," it began—and like that other time, the words were not those of a controlled automated system or the self-assured confidence of the command crew of a vessel, but the exhausted, frightened, but somehow victorious sounds of an living human at the end of their endurance but not of their hope. "Orado Port, this is LS-42, lifeboat off of Outward Initiative, out of Earth. If anyone can hear this. . . please send help. We are out of food. Multiple systems failed. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. . ."
LS-42? One of the lifeboats arriving now? It should have arrived months ago, if it was going to come at all! "Orado Port, what resources do we have in that area?"
"The nearest vessel to LS-42 is a manned construction and mining vessel, the Bill Williams. The nearest official Orado vessel is the OIS Zenigata."
"Do either of them have a good intercept vector for LS-42, and if so, how long until they can reach the lifeboat? Or would I be better off taking Raijin?"
Orado Port could calculate all the variables involved faster, really, than Sue could possibly have spoken the question; it was more programmed courtesy than anything else that made the system wait for her to finish the query before answering it. "If you pilot Raijin with your customary skill, you would arrive with emergency supplies approximately thirty-one hours before Zenigata could intercept and forty-seven hours before a best-case maneuver by the Bill Williams could bring them in range."
So much for the vacation, she thought with a touch of ruefulness—but only a touch. This was what she was employed for, and no one would kick about her having to reschedule in this situation. "Transmit to LS-42: Mayday received, LS-42. Help is on the way. Emergency Watch Officer Susan Fisher, Orado Port. Repeat message until you get an acknowledgement or I have arrived at LS-42, whichever comes first. Who's the medical officer on watch?"
"Doctor Haven, but he is not cleared for emergency flights at this time. Doctor Ghasia has been alerted."
She nodded. Buriji Ghasia. . . he's good enough. And almost as small as Carolyn Pearce, so that would help in the transport area. "I'm getting ready. Can you make sure Raijin is loaded with food, clean water, and medical supplies, as well as basic repair materials?"
"Already underway," Orado Port replied. "Do you intend to undertake a tow?"
"Advice? You can run the numbers a billion times faster than I can."
"Bill Williams will bring them in faster than you could manage the tow. Raijin could be used to transport critically ill patients if it was necessary to do so faster than the tow could manage, but the OIS vessel has a good infirmary on board so this may not be necessary."
She grimaced, looking at a secondary display of data she hadn't read in months. "But it might be, at that. Given the passenger and crew complement and the known supplies on that ship, they should all have starved to death at least two months ago." She stared at the faint moving dot in another display. "I don't know how any of those people could be alive now."
Chapter 19.
The stench was the first thing that struck Sue as the airlock door finally opened, a smell that combined the worst features of sweat, bad breath, mildew, and rot. She coughed, almost gagged before her nanos cut in and damped the reaction, and hesitated for a moment at the threshold. Modern ships and space stations had highly advanced filtration and atmosphere reclamation systems which were designed to remove even the worst odors from the air and leave it with only the faint background scents that had been determined to make air smell "fresh". Even Outward Initiative, cut to pieces by its own Trapdoor field, multiple systems failing, had mostly cleansed the stench of smoldering insulation and other damage by the time it had arrived in Orado.
What that implied about the conditions in LS-42 was horrific.
"Hello?" she said.
The interior lights of LS-42 came on, low, and Sue sucked in her breath, even in that miasma.
In some ways, it wasn't as bad as she had feared. Despite the smell, the cabin wasn't strewn with rotting litter. But what was there was still heart-wrenchingly, nauseatingly bad.
The majority of the acceleration seats were occupied, by what looked like half-mummified corpses. Dressed mostly in the simple two-piece ship undergarments, ribs and hips and shoulder bones jutted out under skin somehow both slack and taut. Most of them had their eyes closed, but though they seemed either unconscious or dead, there was no sign of relaxation; the faces were lined, even with the skin tighter against the bones, with fear and exhaustion.
The normally bright surfaces of the shuttle were dimmed, scummed over with thin but definite traces of mold or some other growth. The air in here feels humid; that must have promoted the growth. Water reclamation falling behind? Sue's analytical, professional brain was assessing the situation, even while the remainder of her was screaming in sympathetic revulsion.
Doctor Ghasia stepped in behind her; his low voice murmured something she thought sounded like "Besime’ābi!", almost certainly a prayer or expression of shock.
At the pilot's position, one figure turned its head. Long hair straggled, brittle and dull, around the woman's skull-like face.
But then the eyes widened and the faintest smile appeared on the cracked lips. "Oh, thank God. You're here. You're real, aren't you?"
"Yes, we're real." The faces she could see were vastly distorted from those on file, but she thought she could make out key features. "Josephine Buckley?"
"That's. . . my sister." It was clear even this much conversation was exhausting. "Jo. . . Jo died last week."
One week too late. And that would make her... "I'm sorry. Jennifer Buckley, then. How many. . .?"
"My omni. . . says five of the nine of us are still alive."
I wouldn't have bet on one. "All right. Just. . . relax, as much as you can. This is Doctor Buriji Ghasia. He's a fully qualified surgeon, general practitioner, and nanomedical technician. He's going to take care of you all."
Sue keyed up the system overrides they'd established in the rescue of Outward Initiative and managed to link up with the badly-damaged shuttle, as well as the local nano-net, and hook that into her own and that of the doctor.
"Well, now. . . astonishing. This is some kind of nanosuspension. But. . . it appears to be a sort of ad hoc design," Dr. Ghasia said after a moment, frown lines appearing on his ebony brow. "Nothing standard at all."
"No one. . . had any suspension applications available," Jennifer said."
"No need to talk," Ghasia said quickly. "There's nothing wrong here, though obviously it's not an ideal solution in many ways. But. . . I think we have a good chance of saving the rest of you."
"I could get back to Orado Port in a few hours," Sue said. "Should I take one or two of these people with me?"
"Give me a few minutes to do an actual evaluation?" the doctor said, a testy edge to his accented voice. "It is possible that will be necessary, yes, but for now begin bringing in the supplies. The most important thing to do now is to get proper nutrition started, and to improve the conditions in this cabin."
"Got you." Sue sprang back easily through the airlock back to Raijin—whose air-recycling systems were already noting the offensive material from LS-42 and responding with nanoelectronic speed—and grabbed the nutritional nanomedical packs in one hand and her engineering troubleshooting kit in the other. Another quick bound brought her into LS-42's cabin, where she locked the case of nanomedical packs to the chair nearest Dr. Ghasia, and turned to the main control panel.
As they'd deduced would be the case, the board had switched over to almost entirely manual systems, and was showing vastly more red and yellow than functional green. Her access codes allowed her to query the systems that remained at all operational.
Jesus. Reactor's working, but only on low-power mode. . . why would that be? It seemed obvious that the passengers had no reason to throttle the power down, so some aspect of the disaster must have caused it. That partly explained the condition of LS-42 right there; virtually all of the reactor's low-power mode would have gone to recharging the Trapdoor drive for the allowable periodic jumps. In fact. . . Sue nodded, feeling her lips tight with empathic understanding. The low power mode wasn't even quite enough to maintain the jumps. They'd have had to stretch out the recharge interval. No wonder it had taken so long; not only had these people had to—somehow—get the landing shuttle working after the Trapdoor pulse shut down multiple shipboard systems, but also they'd had to make the Trapdoor drive take far longer to get them anywhere.
She shook her head slowly as the data from the shuttle and her own engineering diagnostics built up the whole picture. No, it wasn't surprising it had taken this long. What was surprising was that they'd gotten here at all. Multiple system failures, several of which could have—should have—proven fatal, and none of the crew on record as having any of the relevant skills needed to diagnose and repair those failures.
But the fact that this shuttle, with apparently no trained engineers or medical people aboard, had somehow ended up here did add a new mystery, a mystery she'd thought of as solved by default months ago:
Where are LS-5 and LS-88?
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