CHAPTER 21
Proxima b
The dim red glow of Proxima Centauri cast long shadows across the landscape outside the window of the main communications ground station conference room. The aurora was very active, creating beautiful violets, indigos, and greens. Roy noted how pretty the view was as he adjusted the connection to the Samaritan, circling above them in high geostationary orbit, by moving some icons about in his virtual screens. The dish was pointed in the right direction, but the filters had been set for a low-orbit transit Doppler shift. He adjusted the filters and the image on the screen went from displaying that there was no signal to an image of the inside of the captain’s ready room on the starship.
“There we go. We have you clearly now, Captain. Sorry about that.” Roy smiled as he leaned back in his chair, nodding toward Ambassador Jesus to his left and Polkingham to his right.
“No worries, Roy. How are the wife and kids?” Crosby asked as he looked up from something he had been scribbling on a tablet with a stylus.
“They are great, Captain. Thanks for asking,” Roy replied. “I’m glad you could pull the bridge crew together with such short notice.”
“Well, being in between excursions to the outer planets right now, we really are just hanging out. In fact, I plan to start a rotation of the crew planetside for extended leave. We really only need a skeleton crew here otherwise.”
“You might want to hold off on that a bit,” Roy added sheepishly.
“Why is that, Roy?” Crosby looked up, giving them his full attention at that statement.
“We’ve received a message from the Pioneer. They’re in deep trouble, Captain.” Roy frowned as he played the recorded message from the Pioneer. The strained faces of Captain Mitchison and her crew appeared on the screen in front of them as she explained their catastrophic engine failure, the loss of control, and their current trajectory that would send them into deep space, missing Proxima b with no way to slow down. In order to save on supplies, Captain Mitchison ended with the note that she would be ordering all but a handful of crew back into cryobeds very soon. The message ended with a detailed download of all systems’ status and ship damage.
XO Artur Clemons, CHENG Bob Roca, Xi Lin, and other senior members of the Samaritan crew floated in the background behind where Crosby was belted into his chair. The message painted a bleak picture of the Pioneer’s predicament. Without some sort of intervention, the ship and its entire crew complement would be lost to space.
“That is a situation no captain ever wants to have to face. You can tell by her expression and body language that she and her crew know they are done for.” Captain Crosby ran a hand through his grizzled beard. Since they had been on a low duty cycle for the past year or more, he had been less by-the-book about his appearance. While he had maintained professionalism and wasn’t really violating any codes of the space guild, he had relaxed the protocols he had paid close adherence to earlier in his career. “What’s the timestamp on this signal, Proxima relative?”
“With their velocity and trajectory information, and the clock information in the message, we calculate it to be nearly five weeks ago,” Roy answered.
“Damn.” Crosby rubbed at this beard some more unconsciously. “We can’t leave them out there to die. Bob, can we fire up the Samara Drive and rendezvous with them? We could at least rescue them, right?”
“Well, I’d have to do some math here,” said Roca, the skilled astronav pilot of the Samaritan, and its recently promoted CHENG. He scratched his head as he contemplated the possibilities and then opened a virtual screen in front him to share with the group. There was a brief delay from the data latency from geostationary orbit to planetside, but then the screens filled in with data, trajectories, and calculations. Bob tapped the Samaritan icon to center it on the screen and then collapsed his hands together, zooming out on a not-to-scale view where he then overlaid the trajectory data from the Pioneer onto it. After a moment of conversation with his and the ship’s AI, several energy curves appeared in real time as he adjusted parameters and added data from navigation instruments. After a couple of minutes, there were several solutions converging.
“Captain, as you can see here, we can fire up the Samara Drive, match velocities, and at the very least rescue the crew and their equipment. In order to rendezvous with them before they get too far outside of the system, we should be getting underway as soon as possible—I would say in less than two months from now at most. But if we want to catch the ship and slow them down to bring them into orbit around Proxima b, that’s a little harder.”
“Why harder?” Jesus asked.
“Well, Mr. Ambassador,” Roca explained, “you see, we’d need mooring hardware to attach the two ships safely, and that would require serious engineering analysis, maybe even modifications to both ships.”
“If I may, sir,” Xi Lin, the chief tech for interior systems, interjected. “We have some gridwork we had been working on to dock-direct to the Emissary, but we stopped the project once she left Proxima. It might be retrofitted for the purpose of mooring to the Pioneer.”
“How far along was that? I seem to recall we were barely getting started when we called it off,” Crosby asked.
“We had designs completed and we had gathered all the raw materials. Some of the structure has been fabricated, but at this point, it’s just gridwork stored in the aft shuttle bay,” Lin explained. “We’d need to do some quick modifications to make it work. And we’d really need some engineering specs from the Pioneer.”
“Specs seemed to be on the way, Xi,” Roy interrupted. “The message is a continuous download of ship’s status and specs. Their CHENG is pretty thorough and apparently good, or at least hopeful, at anticipating data we’d need. There’s a bow-to-stern model two thirds the way through on download now.”
“Lin, get that data download direct from Dr. Burbank as soon as he gets it,” Captain Crosby ordered. “Enrico, what are the risks involved in this operation?”
Vulpetti, the Samaritan design engineer with a knack for troubleshooting, pondered the question. Roy had known CHENG Mastrano well and worked closely with her. He missed her—and Rain—the most. He had never really spent much time with Enrico.
“Firing up the Samara Drive comes with its own set of risks, of course, but the Samaritan has a long, stable track record in that regard. But as far as slowing down another ship, well, we’re talking about a tremendous amount of energy and stress on the ship for which it wasn’t designed. But if we are careful, and if we take the right amount of time to make course corrections, then I believe we should be able to do this safely within the engineering limits of whatever makeshift moors we come up with. It may be a long mission.”
“Explain,” Crosby said.
“Okay.” Vulpetti shrugged. “Simply put, if we try to slow down too fast, we will likely rip apart our mooring points and damage both ships. But with slow, calculated adjustment thrust vectors we can manage. Slow course changes mean more eccentric elliptical orbits. So—”
“Following Kepler’s Laws,” Roca interrupted since he was the navigation expert, “the period of the orbit will be longer. Meaning, it will take us longer to get that ship to Proxima b safely than it would with just the Samaritan.”
“We should also consider the Pioneer’s life-support and resource situation. They have six months of supplies at starvation rations according to their message,” Polkingham chimed in from beside Roy planetside. Roy nodded in agreement with him as he continued to speak. “We definitely need to factor in the time it takes to rescue and slow them down. If we’re looking at more than six months, then they are going to need additional supplies.”
“We should, perhaps, run all of the numbers through the rest of the science and engineering complement here and on the Samaritan for other possibilities,” Captain Crosby said. “Enrico, you and Bob work on that for some optimized solutions. Reach out to every member of the science teams planetside, every one of them; hell, even the economist might think of something we haven’t.”
“Right away, Captain,” they responded in unison.
“We’ll need launch windows and trajectories sooner rather than later,” Crosby added. “Charles, what about diplomacy? If we take the ship out of orbit and leave you folks stranded here for a year or more, how does that play with the Fintidierians?”
“That is a good question, Captain,” the ambassador said. “We might want to ask if the Fintidierian astronaut trainees want to go along. It would be good training for them and good diplomacy for us. I will get a meeting with the secretary general immediately.”
“There is the matter of the quarantine,” Polkingham added. “I mean, now that we know we are all infected with an engineered bacteriophage, we will have to warn them before exposing them.”
“They all volunteered to come here, Dr. Polkingham,” Crosby replied. “I doubt they would turn down a rescue over not having female offspring without nanobot intervention.”
“Yes, of course,” Polkingham agreed.
“Captain, Ambassador.” Roy looked at Crosby through the screen first and then turned to Charles. “This might actually help the diplomatic situation.”
“How so, Roy?” Jesus asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Before, it was another Terran ship coming without being asked,” Roy explained. He was very personally aware of the thin balance of Fintidierian and Terran cultures. He had personally been held captive during some of the diplomatic turmoil. “But now, well, now it is a Terran ship in distress that could use the Fintidierians’ help.”
“Well, I’m not so sure what the Fintidierians can do to help that we cannot manage on the Samaritan,” Clemons added.
“That isn’t the point, Artur,” Roy told the XO. “The point is to let the Fintidierians get to help, and feel as though the Terrans are doomed without them.”
“Brilliant, Roy!” Jesus slapped the table. “Of course. Captain, our engineers will determine something that the Fintidierians must supply or build in order for us to save the Pioneer. This will go a very long way in making relations between us better. This will be like kids gathering aluminum during World War Two. Everybody can do their part! Up to this point we have been like gods from the stars, coming and going as we please with little need for help from the primitives of Fintidier. Showing them that we need their help to save our people puts them on more of an equal footing. It gives them skin in the game.”
“Those were my thoughts exactly,” Roy agreed. “But I think we need more, to do more.”
“Such as…?” Jesus asked.
“We now have data describing the ship’s crew,” Roy said. “Let’s put their images and stories up all over Fintidier so that everyone on the planet knows all of them by name. Saving those poor Terrans from that doomed ship should be on every news broadcast, spoken about on the radio programs. We should have images of them on posters: ‘Save the Pioneer.’”
“I’ll have people in my office start on that,” Jesus said as he smiled in agreement. “Wonderful idea.”
“Very well,” Crosby agreed. “CHENG, keep the use of Fintidierian materials and personnel in mind as you work out solutions. And Charles, Roy, all of you down there, work on this too. I suspect we don’t have a lot of time to dilly-dally if we plan on saving these people.”
“Copy that, Captain.” Jesus nodded. “We’ll talk soon.”
“Samaritan out.” Crosby waved and cut the feed. Roy reached over and toggled the monitor to the home screen.
“How about that?” Roy said to nobody in particular.
“How about that indeed, Roy.” Jesus looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“What?” Roy shrugged.
“Roy, you have to go with them,” Jesus added with a frown. “I know you don’t want to hear that, but…”
“Hell no, Jesus! I was gone from my family for too long on the ride out here, against my will, if you don’t recall…”
“Roy, Roy,” Jesus held up his hands. “I know. But, you are also well known to the Fintidierians, and you are the best fix-it man we brought from Earth, on purpose or not.”
“Nooooo.”
“Yes, Roy. You know this,” Jesus said. “But look, this isn’t a dangerous ride. Not any more than any other. It’s time you take your family for a vacation.”
“Take my family? I don’t know…” replied Roy.
“Seriously, it will give the kids something they can brag about when they get back. They will have been on the ship that rescued the doomed people from Earth. They’re old enough to remember this the rest of their lives.”
Roy considered the idea and replied, “We will discuss it as a family, and I will let you know.”