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CHAPTER 23

The Samaritan and the Pioneer

After weeks of meticulous planning and calculations, three weeks of acceleration to a safe location for operating the Samara Drive at full power, two months in cryosleep for the Samaritan’s crew and nearly four months for the Pioneer’s crew, the Samaritan had reached the designated rendezvous point in deep space, approximately forty thousand Terran astronomical units (AU) or a bit more than half a light-year from the Proxima system. The ship had successfully initiated the Samara Drive and matched velocities with the Pioneer, bringing them side by side in the vast cosmic expanse. The two ships were so far from the parent star that it was little more than the brightest object in the sky at this point—not much brighter than the gas giants as viewed from Proxima b, or Jupiter from Earth.

The ships’ artificial intelligences had triggered the cryo shutdown and both crews had been brought back to consciousness. The long, perilous journey into the void for the Pioneer had hopefully been averted. There was great hope that the previously doomed humanitarian mission could be put back on course. While there was hope, though, there was still a lot of work to be done.

“Captain Mitchison, this is Captain Crosby of the Samaritan. Do you copy?” Crosby floated slightly above the command chair on the bridge, looking at the comms officer on duty as he swigged liquid electrolytes through the straw of a squeeze bottle. “Comms? Anything?”

“Coming through now, Captain,” the comms officer replied as the forward viewscreen filled with an interior view of the Pioneer’s bridge.

“Hello, Captain Crosby! Hello, Samaritan!” Captain Mitchison looked the worse for wear if you asked Crosby, but they had been through a lot over the past six months or so.

“While I would like to spend a moment or two making small talk, it doesn’t seem appropriate given the dire premise of your current situation, Captain. So, pleasantries aside, we sent you details of the ancient alien virus that we have now detected on Proxima b. And you must understand that as far as we can tell, all the members of my crew, and of course everyone on Proxima b, are infected with it. The only effect of the disease, as far as we can tell, is to stop males from producing female chromosome carrying sperm that can swim. Our scientists have developed a work-around, but there is no cure. Please advise that you and your crew are fully aware of this,” Crosby said.

“Yes, Captain Crosby, every person on this ship is aware of this virus problem,” Captain Mitchison replied. “And to be honest, none of us give a flying damn.”

“Well, then, permission to send relief and rescue boarding parties from the Samaritan to the Pioneer, Captain?” Crosby asked.

“By all means! By all means! We are all in desperate need of food and heat, Captain. Anything you can do to help with that would be much appreciated.”

Crosby turned and made a gesture to XO Roca, telling him to get on with it. They had just been waiting for the Pioneer crew to wake and respond affirmatively to being boarded.

“Captain, we have both of our shuttles on the way now to your fore and aft docking ports. We will then start working on a more permanent docking situation. The shuttles are loaded with temporary power units, supplies, rations, and general rescue equipment. If you can get me a list, we will do the best we can to accommodate any needs you might have. Until that time, might I suggest we off-load your nonessential crew here to the Samaritan as our engineering teams go there? We have plenty of spare room, food, and heat over here.”

“Everyone but myself, the XO, the CHENG, and a handful of others that you will need here to help figure out the ship’s current configuration are free to join you. I’ll make an announcement for them to be prepared to disembark at your first convenience. Have your chief of the away team connect with my XO and start prioritizing and scheduling that. Or I can tell them to go wait in line,” Mitchison replied.

“I’ll have our AI contact yours and send alerts to your crew when to queue up. That way, we will not have too many clogging up the docking rings. Have your AI remove from the lists whomever will be staying there.”

“Okay, will do. Captain, I have to warn you that we’ve, uh, modified the ship a tremendous amount over the past six months. There’s a lot of spit, duct tape, and prayers holding her together right now. We’ve had to take shifts in the cryobeds to keep a vigil out for malfunctioning beds. We lost eight already. My God, Captain. Thank you for coming to us.”

“Understood Captain. Teams are on their way now. We will tend to immediate needs first. Then we have to figure out a more permanent solution so we can get your crew and your ship to Proxima b. We may have to have the majority of your crew cryosleep over here. We have plenty of spare beds, though, as we’re on approximately a forty percent crew presently.”

* * *

Grag volunteered for the first away-team missions. He hadn’t come all that way to be like most of the other Fintidierians and simply watch and claim they were part of the mission, fulfilling some political purpose for the secretary general. No, Grag had been part of the team that had discovered the temporary fix to the female birth rate problem. In a sense, it had been his idea to use nanomachines to make female babies. It had also been his ideas that had led Sentell to discover the bacteriophage microvirus device that was the culprit for the fertility infection. While they hadn’t found a cure for it yet, they had found the cause. And he had been an integral part of the process.

Grag had become somewhat famous amongst the Fintidierians, and not only did he have a reputation to live up to, he had a general drive and curiosity to learn and do what he could to help his people. And saving these women who had traveled the stars to hopefully mate with aliens from another world to help save their race, well, Grag had never heard of anything more heroic, selfless, and plain amazing, and he couldn’t wait to meet such amazing people—such amazing women. And if there was something he could do to help, then help is what he would do.

Grag had studied more and learned more in the past several years since the Terrans had arrived than he had in his entire lifetime. He had become a sponge, or at least he had tried to be. For a long time, he had maintained his undergraduate and then graduate studies in physics at the Fintidierian level at the Gwonura Institute for Learning, while simultaneously following around Dr. Sentell and the others on the fertility crisis team. He had also volunteered for the mission to save the Pioneer, which had led to an intensive two months of around-the-clock crash courses in all things spacecraft, space travel, and modern Terran engineering concepts. And then, after the secretary general and the fertility crisis team (mostly Dr. Chris) had insisted, Grag had been fitted for artificial intelligence contact lenses. He was still getting used to having a voice in his head as well as seeing things in front of him that weren’t there. But he was catching on quickly.

Atop all that, Grag had also volunteered for the cryosleep training regimen. For the past two months while he had been in cryosleep, the superconducting quantum interference transceivers in the bed had been playing on a continuous never-ending loop four graduate-level courses (by Terran standards) directly into his unconscious mind. The first was “Modern Physics and Engineering for Interstellar Travel.” The second course was “The Engineer’s Guide to the Pioneer,” which had been sent months prior. It was effectively the ship’s user’s manual and it covered everything from astronavigation, the Samara Drive basics, ship structures and structural integrity, all Engineering systems, and life-support systems. The third course was called “Physics and Engineering of Materials, Composites, and Metamaterials.”

The fourth course Grag had chosen was based more on the virus problem than anything else. Something that Dr. Chris had said somewhere along the way had triggered in his mind as he had scrolled through the available courses. There had been so many, but Grag had been limited to four, based on the time he would be in cryosleep. When he saw “Quantum Physics of Biological Systems” he knew he had to take that one, even though he really didn’t have all the prerequisite courses behind him.

All of the courses were Terran training courses at advanced collegiate levels, and it required approval from the Terran ambassador and ship’s Captain Crosby before Grag was allowed to take the sleep training. According to the Terrans, cryosleep training for two full months would be the equivalent of a full semester of undergraduate-to-entry-graduate college level in each course. When he had been awakened from the cryosleep, he was amazed at the things he knew and understood that he never had before. He couldn’t wait to pick classes to take for the nearly yearlong trip back home.

After several hours of unloading the shuttles through the docking bays and then loading them with the off-loading Pioneer crew members, and then repeating the process until the crew exchange was complete, the repair crew were finally all called to muster at the bridge in the rotational ring. The engineering teams of the Samaritan, Grag and six other Fintidierians, and eight crew members from the Pioneer were present.

The Samaritan CHENG/pilot, Bob Roca; Dr. Vulpetti, the aerospace engineer; Dr. Ming Zao, a pilot and manufacturing engineer; Dr. Roy Burbank; and Dr. Carol Ash, a power expert Grag didn’t know, were all there.

But Grag was more interested in the Pioneer’s crew. Captain Penelope Mitchison was clearly a force to be reckoned with. Grag could tell the woman was intensely intelligent and a person to whom most deferred. She was average in height for the Terrans and perhaps a little older than most of her crew, but not by much. She appeared a bit malnourished but still stronger than Fintidierian women and even most men. There were six other women and two men. It had taken Grag a minute or so to recall that his contact lenses could give him virtual bios of each of the people he didn’t know. He waved his hands around in front of him, clumsily at first, moving icons around and pulling down menus to find the right software. Once he reconfigured his view, callout bubbles appeared over everyone’s head. He turned and looked at the women in front of him.

“We lost the main power completely and there was no repairing it,” Chief Engineer Evonne Mia was explaining to the CHENG of the Samaritan around bites of a protein bar she was devouring. Grag made note that the others from the Pioneer were pretty much doing the same. These poor people had been starving to death for months because much of their food stores had been destroyed in a fire, and they had been in space six months longer than planned. Grag choked down the lump in his throat at how difficult that must have been and how courageous these people were, and did his best to pay attention.

“I did all I could to replicate the missing components but we didn’t have the materials on board to replace the power conditioning unit,” the CHENG continued. “The spare went out the hole and is somewhere back there about a light-year or so.”

“Well, we can’t exactly replace yours from the specs we received, but we brought what I think will fill the same function,” Bob Roca, the CHENG from the Samaritan, replied. “I can send a couple of folks here with you to help you replace it and get it functioning.”

“Good. They should go with Jenna,” CHENG Mia said. She adjusted some virtual thing in front of her with her left hand. Grag watched and listened to her every word. He only slightly noted that “Jenna” was Dr. Jenna Rees, an electrical engineer. And he barely noted the CHENG from the Samaritan waving his hands in front of him and clearly making duty roster assignments. They hadn’t included him or there would have been an alert in his virtual view. None of that really mattered to Grag at the moment. No, there was something about Evonne that Grag couldn’t put his finger on.

The woman was big and muscular, even for the Terran women—he thought she must have been a bodybuilder or some sort of athlete before becoming an astronaut. As strong and powerful as the captain looked, the CHENG was far stronger in appearance and probably had ten or fifteen kilos on her. Grag could only imagine how big she must have been before being on starvation rations and in cryosleep for six months. She was dirty from head to toe and her hair was tangled and shoulder length. It was the color of the muddy, loamy sand near the banks of Gwonura Reservoir. She seemed as intense as the captain. She frightened Grag a bit, but she also fascinated him.

“What else, Evonne?” Captain Mitchison asked her.

“The main comms relays burned out. We’re on backups,” she said. “But if we could hardline or WiFi to the Samaritan we could piggyback on your bandwidth.”

“Roy?” CHENG Roca turned to Dr. Burbank.

“Got it. I’ll start putting something together. I’ll need three or four extra sets of hands and someone from the Pioneer with access to the main systems,” Burbank suggested.

“Better than that,” Evonne interrupted. “Orion?”

“Yes, Evonne?” The booming male voice startled Grag. 

“Give Dr. Burbank and CHENG Roca full ship’s access, authority CHENG Mia, Evonne, seven seven alpha pi.”

“Understood, Evonne. Permission is granted to Dr. Roy Burbank and Chief Engineer Roca,” Orion replied.

“There. If you guys have any questions about the ship and can’t find me, or better yet, can do without me, ask Orion,” Evonne told them. “If he had hands and could move around, I’m not sure they’d need me on this damn ship.”

“Is that it?” Vulpetti asked.

“Not by a long shot,” Evonne replied. “But the next prioritized item would have to be repairs to the exterior structure supports where the hull was breeched during the explosion. If we’re ever going to turn some sort of engine on, we better check on that or the ship is going to collapse like a beer can from axial stresses.”



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Framed