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CHAPTER 20

The Pioneer

“Let that sink in a minute,” Captain Mitchison paused doing her best to keep tears from her eyes. “Eight souls lost.”

“How did we not know that was happening?” The ship’s XO, Thomas Vetcha, slammed a fist against his console in the makeshift bridge as he scrolled through the list of names that were now marked as “died in service.” “CHENG, what do you know?”

“I, uh, there was no warning,” Evonne replied with a devastated look on her face, palms facing upward. “We should have had alerts that the cryobeds were failing. The diagnostics I ran this morning show that the power surge blew out those lines to the eight beds. The backup systems were cycled off to replace the damaged power lines and the battery backups didn’t last long enough for the warming and waking sequence. Had they been sleeping, the batteries would have lasted for days, but not for the warming sequence. The alert switched the heaters and reverse cryo units on. The power drained and…”

“Orion, why was there no warning of this?” Zambia Carter, the ship’s chief medical officer, asked.

“The sensor inputs for all those beds were showing normal sequencing. As the batteries drained, the alert sensors were immediately shifted to the backup power network. Once that was shut down, there was no power to the beds on the affected circuit. Therefore, no sensor data to alert me. I am truly sorry for this loss.”

“That is the goddamned dumbest design I’ve ever heard of!” Jenna Rees exclaimed, clearly fighting back tears herself.

The captain didn’t want this turning into a blame game or a situation that was more emotionally charged than it already was. She held up her hand to calm everyone down.

“Alright.” Penelope made eye contact with all of the senior crew members she had assembled on the bridge. “The ship has some design flaws. It is the first of its kind and this type of thing, unfortunately, happens on spaceships from time to time. It happened to us. We can’t undo it. We can learn from it and prevent it from happening again.”

Penelope paused and looked at each of them one at a time, again making sure to make eye contact. There were tears filling most of their eyes. Anger filled their faces. And for the crew members who were actually close to the ones lost, there was shock. Worst of all, Penelope saw fear in all of their eyes. While she was doing her level best to hide the fear she was feeling, she knew that it must be written all over her body language, all over her face. She did her best to remain calm and hold her emotions in check.

“Doc, store the bodies for burial. They wanted to go to Proxima b, so that’s where we’re taking them.” She looked into the CMO’s eyes for reassurance. Carter nodded in the affirmative and made no sound. Penelope gave her a quick single nod in reply. “XO, give us the summary.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vetcha said stiffly and then cleared his throat to quiet the bridge. “As more and more of the ship’s crew have been awakened from cryo, they are working diligently to restore power to all systems and repair the damaged sections now that the CHENG has managed to successfully extinguish the fires and plug the leaks. The damage assessment is becoming more and more dire with every report, Captain. All of the repair teams know that time is of the essence and are working tirelessly in the microgravity. For the moment, it would appear that the immediate life-threatening challenges have been addressed. That said, our worries are from over. I think Nav and the CHENG can give you a better assessment, but we are drifting too fast and are way off course. Without a miracle, we will miss Proxima b by a very long way.”

“Thank you, Tom.” Penelope didn’t respond to the XO’s summary more than that. She understood what he had said and what it meant. They were all dead. Maybe not at the moment, or tomorrow, or a month from now, but they were lost in space. At some point they would run out of critical materials—food, water, air; something that would end it for them. The fate of the Pioneer and its crew hung in the balance and as they battled against the harsh reality of their predicament, Captain Penelope Anne Mitchison had little she could offer in regard to a rescue or even solace.

She looked around the backup bridge they were using on the rotation ring. It was small, cramped, and the dizzying artificial gravity was uncomfortable. She thought about moving to the actual bridge of the ship, but wasn’t sure she wanted to sit that long in microgravity either. Everything was a mess.

At this point in the mission, they should be waking up, entering the Proximan system with hopes of soon being in orbit and making it to the surface of the alien world they had come to help rescue, to make a new life on, and to have hope of making things in the universe better. But now, well, Penelope had to come to grips with the fact that there might not be a happy ending to this mission. But she wasn’t going to give in yet. She was the captain. She had traveled across the stars with a purpose. There had to be a way to achieve that purpose.

“Evonne?” Penelope turned to the chief engineer and shrugged.

“Once we got the fires out and were able to get into the engine room, what we found wasn’t good. The reaction system feeding the Samara Drive is done, so that means main power from the fusion reactor is out until such time as that system can be rebuilt. The input nozzles were melted together from the power surge. That means we have to build all new injector blocks and we don’t have the material for that.” The CHENG shook her head back and forth in defeat.

“I see.” She started to say something more, but the CHENG continued.

“And that ain’t even the worst of it,” she stated. “The force chamber, the large conductive Frustrum, well, there’s a hole in it the size of a two-person hatchway with jagged shards bent outward through the bulkhead into the adjacent corridor. That did two things. One, it is what started the fires. And two, the most important, it generated a huge propulsive force vector for the two hundred and thirty-three microseconds it took for the drive to fail. Nav can tell you why that is so important in a second.”

Penelope looked back and forth between Evonne and Dr. Kimberly Jones, the astrometrics and navigation expert. Jones was shaking her head in defeat almost in unison with the CHENG.

“The bottom line, though…” Evonne continued. “Well, main power is out for good, or at least any foreseeable future. Propulsion is done without new materials and major repair. On the upside, the secondary power fission reactor is running fine, and we’ll have ten kilowatts for a century or so. That’s enough for life support and critical ship systems, but that’s it. It’s gonna start getting really cold in here soon, though. I had to shut the heaters down. Fortunately, it takes a pretty good while for radiative cooling on a vessel this big. We’re not turning that thing back on anytime soon.”

“Is that the extent of it?” Captain Mitchison ran a hand through her disheveled hair, her expression a mix still of sadness for her lost crew, frustration with the situation, and determination that they would somehow find a way out of this mess with no further loss of life. She wasn’t prepared to give up. There had to be a way to complete the mission and deliver them all to safety at Proxima b.

“Not really,” the CHENG answered with a sigh. “There are a thousand minor things to deal with. We’re dealing with them in order of priority. But…”

“I don’t like the sound of that ‘but,’ CHENG.” The XO scowled a bit.

“…But there’s one more soon-to-be major problem,” the CHENG announced. “The rotation ring uses electric thrusters to spin up. As friction continues to work against the rotation, it will continue to decelerate and eventually stop without maintenance burns. Those thrusters use a lot of power. If we want to continue to have artificial gravity, we’ll need to find a work-around.”

“Aux thrusters?” Vetcha inquired, his voice tinged with a glimmer of hope. “Can we at least steer the ship any?”

“Sure, we have them to some extent,” Evonne replied, projecting diagrams of the auxiliary thrusters on the holographic display and sharing the virtual screens. “I just…well, I’m really not sure what good they do us. They sure as hell can’t slow us down from forty percent the speed of light.”

“Damn.” The XO frowned and then followed with a heavy sigh. “So, we’re hurtling through space at a velocity that won’t let us stop, and we can’t even really steer. How long until we reach Proxima?”

“Nav?” Penelope turned to Kimberly.

“Well, it took me a good while to figure out where we are now and then to realign the telescopes and comm systems, but we are right here moving on this trajectory as best I can tell.” Dr. Kimberly Jones had spent her entire career on ships in the Sol system working in astrometrics and navigation. She had calculated orbits and trajectories and determined ship positions for more than twenty years.

Pushing forty-two, the captain thought of her as one of the older and wiser members of her crew, the majority of which was under thirty Earth years old. A handful of more seasoned experts were between forty and fifty. Penelope noted that the woman still looked very healthy and had many good years ahead of her. Well, she would if they managed to find a way out of their current situation.

Kimberly shared her virtual screens with the bridge crew as she explained the trajectory data. She displayed their approach to the Proxima system on the big screen at the front of the makeshift bridge where the orbits of the system’s planets were displayed along with the trajectory, the original one and the current one, of the Pioneer overlaid on it.

“At our current velocity, we’ll pass through the Proxima system in approximately three months, but we’ll be roughly twenty astronomical units off course, and we won’t be able to slow down or make any course corrections. Well, at least not any course corrections that would matter,” she told them all.

Silence swept over them, and Captain Mitchison made note of the crew’s faces. Most were stoic but a few were distraught with defeat. The weight of their situation pressed down on them. They were all smart, capable space travelers. The were all well trained. Captain Mitchison knew that they all understood exactly what the navigation expert and the CHENG had told them. They were in really deep shit.

The gravity of their helplessness was more profound and unsettling than the queasiness generated by the artificial forces of the rotational ring. The realization that they were adrift, unable to reach their destination, and facing an uncertain fate settled in with all of them. With a deep inhale and then a long slow exhale, Captain Mitchison broke the silence, her voice unwavering as she addressed her team.

“Alright, we need to constantly update the assessment of the ship’s systems. Kimberly, keep monitoring our trajectory and alert us if anything changes. Evonne, what’s the status of our main CO2 scrubber?”

“Right, Captain. That was one of the lower-priority jobs I mentioned earlier. Uh, let me see here…” Evonne moved some virtual icons around in front of her and then responded. “The main CO2 scrubber was damaged during the power surge, but the backups are holding. We might be able to retrofit the main scrubber with some three-D-printed components and restore it fully, or uh, close to fully anyways. That is, when I get time to do it or can delegate the task.”

“A positive, I guess. Work with the XO to find crew to delegate as much as you can.” Captain Mitchison nodded in approval. “Do it. We can’t afford to run out of breathable air. How about life-support and environmental controls? You said the leaks are stopped? Are there any chances of further leaks?”

“Yes, Captain. Pressure is holding fine,” Evonne replied. “I don’t see any future issues with cabin pressure.”

“I think we could survive for a very long time on the air and scrubbers functional now, Captain.” Dr. Carter added, “Life-support systems are operational. As the temperature starts dropping, we can pull all personnel into one or two chambers to conserve body heat and perhaps run heaters in those locations. No need to heat the entire ship, I suspect. But, soon, we will need to ration our supplies carefully. We have enough food and water to last six months or so on starvation rations. Since we don’t really know what our plans are for deceleration and disembarkation, we need to start planning for the long haul.”

The gravity of their predicament shadowed the conversation as the crew continued to absorb the reality of it. They were stranded in the cold vacuum of space, racing toward an unknown fate in the wrong direction, with limited resources, and no means of control. The Pioneer, once a happy vessel of exploration and pledged to salvation, or at least aid, for the Proximans, had become the crew’s solitary lifeline in the vast cosmos. Penelope prayed it wouldn’t become their mass coffin as well.

“We’re not giving up,” Penelope stated through a clinched jaw. “We’re a resilient crew, and we’ll find a way to survive this. But for now, let’s focus on stabilizing our ship and extending our resources as much as possible. We’ll face the challenges ahead together, as a team. Kimberly, can you get a good enough fix on our position to point the comms dishes at Proxima b?”

“Already done, Captain,” Dr. Jones answered. “We’re currently receiving their streaming signals. We can send them a message whenever you like.”

“Well, at least that’s working,” Penelope said. “I’ll record a message ASAP.”



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