CHAPTER 32:
Shepard’s Flock
USSF Office of Scientific Integration
@OSIGenBoatright
Mission Control has received several reports of illness on Percheron. The Bat experimental cargo ship, piloted by Colonel Glenn Shepard, has delivered essential medical supplies to the ship to assist in diagnosis and treatment. At this time, we do not know the full nature of the illness. We cannot comment on who is affected, nor the severity of effects until we receive the results of Colonel Shepard’s analysis.
Richmond Times Features @JenButler
My readers may recall that in addition to his other qualifications, Colonel Shepard is a USSF flight surgeon who has served on Earth and the Moon, and trained with the Mars Three crew. I have full faith and confidence in Colonel Shepard’s ability to figure out what is wrong and bring our people home safely.
ChirpChat, October 2043
The next order of business was to ensure that he had a place to sleep where he could isolate from the rest of the crew. While going back to Bat was an option, it wouldn’t be very comfortable since he would have to either rearrange the tiny cockpit or sleep in the MILES. On the other hand, Percheron’s remaining ground-to-orbit shuttle had bunks for the pilots as well as a hygiene closet and small galley.
The shuttle was everything the specs said it would be. It was attached at two points to the bigger ship. An airlock transfer hatch connected to the pilot and passenger compartment, while a cargo hatch mated directly to Percheron’s Cargo Bay Three. The latter was a three-way connector which allowed access to Bay Three, the shuttle’s cargo hold, or the outside of both ships to facilitate transfers in air or vacuum. The personnel airlock meant that the shuttle’s habitable compartments always stayed pressurized.
The shuttle rode on the outside of Percheron. It would have been unwieldy in atmosphere, but the Earth to Mars transfer ship was never meant to operate anywhere except interplanetary space. The shuttle, on the other hand, had a smooth, aerodynamic shape similar to an arrowhead. It had large fuel tanks, heat-distributing coating, and engines that could operate in vacuum or the thin atmosphere of Mars. In normal operation, it could make the round-trip from Percheron to the Mars surface, and back—twice—in one fueling. It could also land on Earth, but would require a booster stage to return to orbit.
The shuttles were intended to be a workhorse for Mars or the new asteroid bases that NASA and Space Force planned to start establishing in the next five years. They would pick up two additional shuttles prior to returning to Mars, leave both, and bring home the one that had stayed behind on the previous trip.
That all presupposed that Percheron returned to Earth, let alone Mars.
So far, during this trip, the shuttle had been unused. It meant that air, food, and water stored on the shuttle had not been accessed or mixed with anything on Percheron. Since the shuttle had been assembled on Earth and flown up to the final ship’s assembly at O’Neill Station, there was an extremely low risk that it had experienced the same contamination. Glenn could always discard it all and replace with supplies he’d brought with him on Bat, just to be safe.
The risk was low enough that Glenn decided to chance it. The crew compartment was smaller than a cabin on Percheron, but larger than Bat’s cockpit. Most important, it gave him a space where he could get out of his skinsuit and use the hygiene facilities away from the crew.
This would do.
Having addressed the question of where he would rest and sleep, Glenn sent a message off to Mission Medical to officially request updated crew medical records. To avoid the question of why he couldn’t just get them from Yvette now that he was onboard Percheron, he cited the internal comm issues he’d encountered on arrival. The fact that he’d fixed the comm didn’t need to be mentioned, but if queried, he could also claim he was testing whether the automatic backup of the mission records was reactivated once the comm was restored. That, of course, raised an issue of whether the backup was working, but he did still have direct access in the med bay.
It would take time for the transmission to get to Earth, work its way through MMC bureaucracy, and get the data sent back. He could deal with the contingencies of whether the data was accurate later. Now it was time to work on transferring food, water, and medicine from Bat to Percheron.
He still wanted to keep Bat isolated, which meant keeping the argon atmosphere in Cargo Bay One. He would use the cargo hatch on the outward facing side of Bat, and spacewalk items from there to Bay Two.
This was actually a good opportunity for Glenn to fulfill a secondary objective. He’d been told by George Mellies to make every effort to retain Bat’s drive section. At the very least, the Helicity2 Drive would be recycled onto a new spacecraft at Earth. There was even a chance it would be needed to send items back at a faster rate than Percheron’s Hohmann orbit. For that reason, Glenn had attached tethers between Percheron, the cargo module, and Bat’s drive. If he added guide lines from the drive section to Cargo Bay Two, as well as tethers to fore and aft attachment points on Percheron, he’d have a network to automate transfer of cargo from Bat to Bay Two.
Glenn went back to Bay One, reentered the MILES and returned to Bat. From there, he passed through to the other side, exited, and began placing tethers and transfer cables.
NASA preferred to keep extravehicular activity to approximately two hours at a time. Glenn had already exceeded that limit on the two previous EVAs—and he knew that construction crews at O’Neill regularly spent four to six hours in the Black at a time. With the previous hours sealed up in his suit, he needed to ensure that he had plenty of air, water, and food for the next step . . . and it was a good thing, too.
Placing the additional tethers and making sure that they were tight without introducing any additional motion to Bat’s cargo module or drive section took him another four hours. Upon completion, he had all components secure, plus transfer cables in place to allow him to transfer cargo from Bat to Percheron by remotely operated cargo drones.
He went back inside by way of the shuttle, so that he could leave the MILES suit in a place where he would not need to pass through either Bat or Percheron to get to it. He donned a thermal insulating garment, went to Cargo Bay Two, pumped it down, opened the outer door, and began commanding the cargo drones to pull pallets from Bat, across the cable network to Bay Two, and stack the food and water containers inside the bay. When he’d transferred about one-fourth of Bat’s cargo, he shut down the transfer, sent the drones back to Bat and repressurized the bay.
Percheron now had about a month-and-a-half of uncontaminated food and water in Bay Two, plus medicines and hygiene supplies. There was still more on Bat; he’d brought enough to provide a twenty-five percent margin for what was required to get back to Earth since they couldn’t count on ship’s stores being usable. He hoped it was enough.
Next, Glenn needed to start talking to the crew. He found Dvorak’s quarters and touched the annunciator pad next to the door. It slid open to reveal the man standing inside with an open book in his hand. He was surprised to see a physical book printed on paper pages—but then again, Glenn also kept a few favored novels in physical form. Officially, books were discouraged in spaceflight due to weight and fire hazard, but a few prized personal possessions were allowed.
“Have you read this?” Dvorak asked Glenn, holding up the book so that the title could be seen clearly—Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “It’s fascinating. There’s a lot of stuff in here about making the first move, getting in the first strike, holding the high ground, and fighting back when cornered. You should read it; you might need it.”
Glenn took the book and looked at it, then back at Dvorak. “What are you saying, sir? Do you think there’s going to be a fight?”
“I’m just saying that Barbier is going to give you trouble. She’s been a thorn in my side the entire trip and she locked us all in our quarters when this whole thing started. She claimed medical authority and she outranks me. Everyone else went along with her. I’m damned glad you’re here. I don’t trust her, and if you need to lock her up to keep her from doing anything more to injure us, I’ll have your back.”
What? Dvorak thought Yvette caused the trouble on Percheron? This was almost as disturbing as her paranoia. While he would ordinarily be happy to have Major Dvorak’s support, he wasn’t sure how much to believe. He’d seen Yvette’s capacity for anger, but the attack earlier had to be the disease, not her. “Sir, if you thought that Doctor Barbier was responsible, why haven’t you said anything?”
“Because she’s listening to us—she’s listening to all of us. She made us get shots and I know she implanted tracking chips and listening devices in each person. I’ve seen that display in her medical bay, it tracks everybody on this ship. She knows where we are, everything we say, and is listening in on whatever we’re thinking.”
It was true that the medical bay had a tracking system, but it was tied to the wristcomms and proximity sensors throughout the ship. It was essential to know the location of all personnel so that they could be found and contacted in an emergency.
Glenn decided not to respond to the latter comment. Let the man think he was taking seriously the implication that Yvette was eavesdropping on them. They spoke a few more minutes about the supplies Glenn had deposited in Bay Two, and Dvorak showed him the collection of “ponies” he’d mentioned earlier—several toy horses with brightly colored bodies, hair, and little marks such as hearts or flowers on the sides. The contrast between the Sun Tzu book and the children’s toys was jarring, and Dvorak’s manner as he showed off each toy was disturbing. Glenn disengaged as quickly as he dared, thanked Dvorak, and said he needed to go find Tech Sergeant Philips to inform him that supplies had been transferred.
The engineer didn’t answer the door at his quarters, so Glenn left the habitat ring and headed for the aft engineering office. When he couldn’t find Philips there, either, he decided to simply use the ship’s internal comm to send an alert to everyone aboard regarding the fresh supplies of food and water in Cargo Bay Two.
He could have sent the message directly via his heads-up display, but elected to use the comm panel in Engineering. Something about Dvorak’s comment made him think about keeping some of his abilities to himself for now. The personnel display he’d seen in the med bay showed that most of the people onboard were in fixed positions, with hardly any movement about the ship. Using the comm or activating controls would be logged, so if he was going to keep his built-in comm to himself, he needed to be seen using a comm panel.
There was something else nagging at him as well. Dvorak had mentioned Yvette locking him in his quarters, and Philips said he “didn’t get out much.” The crew—especially the Marsbase personnel—were acting strangely. The first new person aboard in over a month, and no one was interested in seeing who it was? People he’d trained with for the Mars Three mission weren’t interested in seeing him?
He expected to have seen nearly everyone aboard by now, and yet he’d only seen Yvette, Dvorak, and Philips, plus Bialik on the diagnostic bed. He needed to conduct his own medical examinations of everyone aboard—not to mention a post-mortem on LeBlanc, presuming her body had been appropriately stored for return to her family. The big question was whether he would have Yvette’s cooperation or if he would have to do exactly as Major Dvorak said and push her aside.
This was his flock, he was the shepherd, and no one was going to block him from doing his job!