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Memories: The Proposal


“I have some news which you may find troubling.”

“We can’t make it home, can we?” After hours of poring over the ship’s inventory himself, Jack had been anticipating this.

“Not entirely.”

“You’re an amazing creation but you’ve never been good at subtleties, Daisy. You mean the machine can finish the trip, but I can’t.”

“That is correct. I am sorry.”

Was she? That was a concept he’d wanted to explore, just not in this context. “I’ve come to the same conclusion. The spacecraft has the endurance. I don’t.”

“Again, you are correct. Our remaining reaction mass is enough to insert Magellan into a hyperbolic escape orbit with Earth capture. However, end-state vehicle integrity will be marginal and there are not enough calories left in stores if you are brought out of torpor.”

“What about the hydroponic garden?”

“While it was sufficient to extend your crew’s food stock during the original mission, it is questionable whether it could be relied on as a primary source. I did not consider it in my estimates.”

“Then we’ll have to take another look, use the available growing area and figure out which of the seedlings we have left can produce the most calories.” He had known heading out here was going to be a gamble, though he hadn’t counted on the game changing so drastically while he was in stasis. Surviving off IV nutrients in hibernation wouldn’t close the gap, and the gravitational torquing they’d experienced had stressed the superstructure and load-bearing joints to their limits. “Ship’s condition is about what I expected—she’ll hold up if we’re gentle with her. What did you come up with for propellant? How much is left in the tanks?”

“98,200 meters per second.”

“Can I assume you accounted for outgassing loss?”

“You assume correctly. Based on operating history the cryogenic tanks will lose thirty-two grams of molecular hydrogen over each seven-day interval.”

“You can say ‘week.’ I get it.” He had a gut sense of the answer to his next question. “What’s our transit time to Earth?”

“Eight years, three months and—”

“A long damned time. Got it.” It was about what he expected, and still Daisy had more bad news.

“We will also need to keep reaction mass in reserve for course corrections and deceleration. Earth’s gravity will not be enough to capture us into orbit.”

“We’ll worry about that when we get there. Be creative.” He’d already been thinking along these lines and shared his ideas with Daisy. “There are planets we can use for gravity assists along the way, right? Neptune’s in a favorable position.”

“Yes, but it does not address the question of deceleration.”

“Remember I said to get creative. What other resources do the folks back home have that we could use?”

“At the present time there are none at our disposal.”

He was beginning to see the limits of Daisy’s otherwise impressive intelligence. “You’re familiar with Columbus, right?”

“Given the context, I presume you are not talking about the Italian explorer or the various cities named for him.”

For Daisy, that constituted a bit of wry humor. “Yeah, no. He’s kind of fallen out of favor lately. I’m talking about our sister ship.”

“Construction was paused after the exploration budget was eliminated.”

“True, but the structure’s still in orbit. It could conceivably be loaded out for a mission with the modules they’ve already assembled. They could finish it up with a few heavy lifters to transfer propellant and supplies, then phht . . . off to meet us.”

“Your vocalizations are unusual. Regardless, there would be severe constraints. They would have to outfit the ship and perform on-orbit checkouts in time to meet a short departure window.”

“Yeah, they’d have to skip a few steps, but they’ll have full tanks and less distance to cover. We, on the other hand . . .”

“Have much less of one and much more of the other.”

Jack wanted to compliment Daisy on experimenting with new idioms, but he was too preoccupied with making the return trip work on their remaining propellant. He was left to resolve these questions the old-fashioned way, with limited fuel, time, and endurance. “Humor me. Can you generate a delta-v plot for transfers from here to Neptune?”

“Stand by . . . plots are loaded in the navigation folder.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised at Daisy’s speed, nor with her conclusions. “Even accounting for minimal deceleration to a loosely bound orbit, we will require three years and eleven months. This will exceed your remaining nutrients.”

“Thanks for trying, I guess.” He’d been grasping at straws, and he knew it. Neptune was in essence their halfway point; he shouldn’t have expected to get there any faster. “The folks back home are going to have to hurry up.”

“There is something I still find puzzling. Perhaps you can help me understand. It would seem that your present condition should be enough to provoke them to action. Why do you remain circumspect?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I figure that out for myself. I’m just not sure how much to tell them without everyone thinking I’ve gone space-crazy. In the meantime, we keep taking pictures and collecting data. If this is the end of the road for me, then it’s got to be worth the price of the trip.”

“That is wise, as we have yet to fully comprehend the Anomaly ourselves.”

He was amused by the irony. Once again, her capacity for understatement surprised him.


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Framed