25
It was nearly four hours later before the control team could relive the experience for themselves. Watching the delayed feed, Owen felt a chill as he saw the telltale signs begin to accumulate.
“Good god,” he said. “They’re starting to pogo.”
“Already did,” Roy muttered. Tension in the room grew as they watched events that had played out nearly four hours ago, fearful that at any second the feed would disappear as the ship tore itself to pieces.
“How’d we miss that in the models?” Owen wondered, angry with himself.
Penny hovered over the consoles behind them. “There’s modeling, and then there’s reality,” she reminded him. “Sometimes we can’t know what’s going to happen until we fly the mission.” She pointed to the data stream from the collection grid. “If they got through this, it does look like Audrey’s ram scoop actually worked.”
Owen looked over the control center, each technician anxiously watching over a dozen different systems. He knew they were all thinking the same thing: Which one would finally give way? After a tense few minutes, he felt a collective sigh of relief wash over the room. On the big wall screen, the arc of Columbus’s orbit had changed to closely match what they’d targeted. Not quite there, but close enough to fix later.
He let out a long breath and ran a hand across his forehead before addressing his team. “Okay, people, they made it. But Traci’s still got her hands full and we need a good picture of vehicle condition. Structural integrity is our first order of business. Let me know if anything got torqued out of tolerance, I don’t care how small it is. Second order of business is propellant load. She’s going to have to make a correction burn before they go into coast, so make sure we give her enough on the back end of the trip.”
“Recommend they shut down the engines, if they haven’t by now,” his flight dynamics controller interjected. “Better for them to save propellant while we work out the new trim angles.”
Owen nodded to his comms officer. “Do it. But I’m guessing they’re way ahead of us.” He felt like a football coach calling plays to a game on tape delay.
The crew shower was a sealed compartment not much larger than a linen closet, lined with suction ports to remove wastewater. Traci was able to stand in the low gravity, luxuriating beneath the slow-motion cascade of deliciously warm water. It would be her last for many months.
A waterproofed comm panel was mounted by the compartment door; there was no place aboard Columbus where one was completely cut off. It chirped to life.
“I apologize for interrupting you, but we have received instructions from Cayman Control. They are recommending we shut down the fusion drive until Flight Dynamics calculates a correction burn.”
She had expected as much, and had held off for as long as she dared. The microgravity routine of wet wipes and dry shampoo was uniquely unsatisfying, and she desperately craved this last indulgence before putting herself down for the long sleep ahead. After piloting them through the flyby and nearly shaking Columbus apart in the process, she felt she deserved it. “Give me two minutes, please. And keep an eye out for their burn data.” Though she had little doubt it would match Bob’s figures precisely.
“Roger that. Two minutes.”
She had spent the intervening hours inspecting every nook and cranny accessible from within the ship, relying on Bob to evaluate the structures she couldn’t get eyes on herself. Outside, service bots moved along rails up and down the ship’s central truss in a search for fractured welds and deformed propellant lines. Once they were in coast, a free-flying drone would be dispatched to inspect the fusion engines. Traci was satisfied for now that Columbus hadn’t been irreparably damaged, but it would be a relief to hear the full assessment from Owen’s team before she surrendered herself to the hibernation pod.
She allowed herself another minute of warm water, then opened the small compartment to reach for a towel just as she felt the engines cut off. She floated out into the crew deck with the towel wrapped tightly around her. She reached for her jumpsuit and paused, laughing at her own modesty. I’ve got the place to myself. Why not? She stuffed the towel into the recycler bin and spent the rest of her time floating buck naked around the crew deck.
The controllers in Grand Cayman had wisely planned the correction burn after allowing plenty of time for the drone to cover every inch of each engine’s exhaust nozzle, injectors, and magnetic coils. The bellows mount and thrust structure had absorbed most of the ship’s violent pogoing, though the team had decided to not press their luck. They’d ordered a twelve-minute burn at fifty percent power, which Traci and Bob had watched closely for any signs of impending structural failure. Finally satisfied that the ship wasn’t going to fold itself in half under power, she had made her way down to the medical bay with silent resignation. As she spent the next year in hibernation, Bob would continue his work with the service bots to ensure Columbus was ready for the months of hard deceleration to come.
Traci looped her feet into a pair of stirrups in front of the medical pod, clad in a formfitting garment sheathed in coolant tubes that snaked around her. “It feels like a full-body condom,” she complained, tugging at an open flap along her forearm.
“You have done this before, have you not?”
“I was unconscious,” she reminded Bob, studying the IV needle protruding from the opening in her sleeve. “And I was attended to by an actual MD.” She’d blown a vein on her first attempt, leaving an angry bruise to bloom on her arm. She finally guided the needle into place as she clenched her teeth. Self-administering intravenous medications was one of many discrete skills they’d had to learn in training; this was the first time she’d had to do it for real.
“I will be monitoring you continuously,” Bob reassured her. “I have been programmed with extensive medical knowledge, including all known case histories of prolonged hibernation. You are in good care.”
The advantage this time was that she wasn’t going under with an acute brain injury, she supposed, though the final step was the most unsettling: allowing Bob to inject nanoprobes behind her ear to create the neurolink lace that would monitor her brain activity and manage her metabolism. It was a singularly skin-crawling experience, having microscopic mechanical insects skittering around inside her head before finding their place. Restarting her normal metabolic cycle would eventually cause them to deactivate and pass through her urine, and she looked forward to that first long trip to the lavatory a year from now.
She took a series of calming breaths to clear her mind and grasped the hibernation pod in silent prayer. This felt awfully close to death, and she wanted one last retreat into a quiet moment with her Creator before submitting herself to what seemed an uncertain fate.
When finished, she straightened up and took one last look around the med bay. Appropriately sterile and organized, she took note of the AI interface that overlooked the pod. Bob would be on the job for her around the clock, and she had come to trust him implicitly with their ship. Now she would be placing that same trust in him for herself. Had Jack felt this way, going under with Daisy watching over him? He’d always had a more innate trust of technology than she, and she wondered if submitting himself to it in this way had given him pause.
She slipped her feet out of the stirrups and tucked them up beneath her, twirling into the waiting pod. There, she connected a single IV line to the port in her forearm, then pulled a pair of restraints across her legs and midsection. “I’m ready. Let’s do this,” she announced with more confidence than she felt.
A plexiglass cover slid into place above her. “Administering the first course of sedatives,” Bob said in a reassuring tone. “You will begin to feel lightheaded.”
The sedative coursed through her. “Feels warm,” she slurred. “Did I ever say how much I appreciate you, Bob? Seriously. You’ve kept me sane.”
“As have you. Thank you for helping me reach my full potential.”
“Keep working on your chess. For a computer, you kind of suck at it.”
“I will make it a point to do so. How do you feel?”
“Sleepy. It’s been a long day. A long trip. Don’t want to . . .”
“I know. You need to rest.” It was about to become a lot longer. “Administering the second course of sedatives now. Begin counting down from ten, please.”
“Ten. Nine. Eight . . .” Her eyes fluttered.
All faded to nothing.