CHAPTER 24
The Pioneer
As the specialized space drone clung to the Pioneer’s hull, Grag and Evonne worked closely together to assess the interstellar spacecraft’s structural integrity. For more than a week, the crews of both ships had been performing extravehicular activities. The Fintidierian had been educated in the cryobed, according to Evonne’s datasheet on him. Evonne lost count of how many EVAs it had taken to repair the damage from the explosion and rupture from the engine room. There had been several parts on that side of the ship that were simply missing. Evonne could imagine them flying along in space at near lightspeed on some random trajectory. When they had been blown out of the ship there were large sections several meters in length and width torn away with them. They had to be replaced. Fortunately, the Samaritan had brought enough raw materials to facilitate the repairs.
Evonne watched the young Fintidierian who had been assigned to her team, as he stood against the metal wall straddling a two-meter-long weld seam. The magnetic boots on his feet held him in place as he placed the X-ray receiver bot into place. She hadn’t been expecting that there would be any Fintidierians to be useful. Evonne had expected that they were so far behind in technology that interactions would be like speaking with first graders. But she had been surprised—alarmingly so. At least this Fintidierian was a competent technician if not an engineer.
“I think it is ready, CHENG Mia,” Grag told her, looking back over his shoulder as the virtual screens in front of them both showed the status of the bot. “I think there is lock with the drone outside. That’s what this icon here means, yes?”
“Looks like it, Grag. And, call me Evonne,” she replied from her vantage point as she floated behind and over his shoulder. Evonne was a ship’s chief engineer through and through—body and soul. While she had always known she was a hardened, maybe tomboyish woman, she liked to think of herself as still being somewhat attractive—not movie star or supermodel attractive, but athletically attractive. Back in the Sol system her bodybuilder frame and chief engineer commanding presence had often scared prospective suitors away. Evonne had chalked it up as a hazard of the job.
Evonne looked at Grag and several thoughts went through her mind at once. The first was obvious: Grag was a young Fintidierian scientist who, thanks to the dearth of females born in his age cohort, clearly hadn’t encountered many women on Proxima b; she could sense how nervous he was. The second came from experience: the young man was smitten by her. He was exceedingly polite, almost annoyingly so. But Evonne, while amused, wasn’t quite ready to jump into a relationship with the first Fintidierian man she met. After all, there was an entire planet full of men there hoping for a relationship with a woman. She guessed that any woman of any body shape and attractiveness level could pretty much take her pick. She’d never been in a position like that before and it would take some time to get used to.
“So, making sure I have this straight,” Grag was saying, perhaps trying to impress her, but she wasn’t certain, “the LIDAR is mapping the exterior hull down to a millionth of a meter of surface irregularities? You know, CHENG Mia—uh, sorry, Evonne, these LIDAR sensors are quite remarkable. My people had yet to invent the laser and here I am in space using one. Out of a billion or so of my people, maybe a hundred have seen a laser, perhaps twenty have been in space. I wonder if I’m the only one to use one in space.”
“That’s got to be an overwhelming thought.” Evonne laughed. “Were you chosen through some sort of lottery or something?”
“Oh, lotter…eem, oh,…random draw…yes, I see.” Grag shook his head in the negative. “No, I was part of the fertility crisis team. A physicist by training, assigned to a Dr. Chris Sentell through the Gwonura Institute. Originally, I was just a, eem, what did Dr. Chris call it, um, yes, a go-far.”
“Go far?”
“Yes, he said I was to go-far things when he needed them,” Grag added, uncertain of the meaning.
“Hahaha! A gofer,” Evonne corrected him through chuckles. “That is what we jokingly call an assistant. Gophers are rodents back on Earth, but it is a play on words. Go for, not go far. Go for this or go for that. Get it?”
“Aha, I see. Dr. Chris is always making jokes I don’t understand.” Grag smiled. “I get it now.”
“But how did they pick you for that job?” Evonne was puzzled. “There had to be millions applying for the job to work with the Terrans from space.”
“Oh, at first, no. Most were afraid of you, and your people were kept, em, quarantined,” Grag replied. “But I volunteered, hoping there was opportunity there. And I so wanted to meet the aliens.”
While Grag was explaining, Evonne pulled up the man’s bio. He was either too humble to admit that he was probably one of the top students in the northern region by the Terran encampment near Gwonura, or he didn’t realize it. From the calluses on his hands and his willingness to do any type of work Evonne had thrown at him for the past week, she was beginning to wonder if life on Proxima b was way different and maybe much harder than she had envisioned. She hadn’t expected to be impressed by the man, but…
“How brave of you, Grag,” Evonne said with a small laugh—an almost flirtatious laugh. “And here you are.”
“Yes. Here I am,” Grag repeated, with a puzzled expression on his face. He was oblivious to female interactions. Evonne let it go as the LIDAR initiation sequence completed and the activate icon appeared.
“Okay, looks like this thing is ready. Hit that icon and the laser will start up and will keep the X-ray cameras aligned.”
“Tap the icon now?” Grag asked, nervously watching her for approval before tapping the virtual icon.
She nodded.
“Done.”
“Good.” Evonne smiled. “Now, while the microfracture scans are running it will feed real-time into the simulator. If any cracks are found that are large enough to allow stresses outside of the tolerance levels, Orion will tell us.”
“Okay. What do we do next?”
“This fracture exam will take ten minutes,” Evonne explained. “Then we pull the sensor, give the drone the next coordinate, and do it again. There are seventeen more weld seams to inspect. But while we have ten minutes to kill, we need to replace these strain gauges here, here, and here that were blown out in the explosion. Simple plug-and-play repair.”
“I see.” Grag released his magnetic boots with a metal clanking sound. He kicked across toward the aft ward bulkhead and then it became clear to Evonne that he didn’t know which way he should be going. The embarrassment on his face was clear. “Em, I guess, you should lead the way?”
“Sure,” she said deadpan, doing her best not to let him see her fighting a laugh. She bit her bottom lip for a second, hoping not to embarrass him too much. “Come on. There’s a lot of work to do.”
* * *
Captain Crosby, XO Artur Clemons, Chief Engineer Roca, Dr. Vulpetti, and the rest of the Samaritan bridge crew were buckled into their seats as the countdown continued, their eyes fixed on the Pioneer, which now loomed large in the viewing port. It was a surreal sight to see the two spacecrafts suspended in the void, connected only by the delicate mooring rig they had painstakingly prepared over the past month. The crews of the two ships had become intermingled and could now traverse to and from in the transit tubes between them. But for the moment, those tubes were empty and every crew member from both ships were buckled in and sitting anxiously in anticipation of firing the Samara Drive.
“Captain Mitchison, my display shows all personnel are in place and accounted for. Our systems indicate the Samara Drive is warming up and our standard countdown procedures are moving normally,” Captain Crosby said. “Can you give me a status report, please?”
“Copy that, Sam.” Mitchison smiled through the comm view. “We’re all strapped in here and nothing to do but wait for you to light us up.”
Crosby chuckled. “I’ve got a full-up view of all critical failure modes possibilities with up to the microsecond sensor updates into each model. If anything goes into the yellow, I’m killing the drive’s acceleration.”
“Understood, Captain. We’re all watching everything down to the nuts and bolts over here.” Mitchison turned and motioned something to someone off screen. “Evonne tells me that her engineering team here is monitoring the mooring rig and the structural integrity of the Pioneer at the micron-per-microsecond vibration level. We should see any anomalies long before they get large enough to be dangerous. Fingers crossed.”
“Alright. We’re three minutes out. Good luck,” Crosby said and then he turned to the XO’s station. “Artur?”
“Nothing to report, Captain. Hell, you can see everything I can,” the XO replied.
“Dr. Vulpetti?”
“Well, nothing to report until the data starts coming in. But now that we’re all connected to the Pioneer all of our known and verified models are out the window. We’ll have to keep them updating as we begin the slow acceleration,” Vulpetti explained. “As we slowly and consistently bring up the thrust, and therefore the load forces on both ships, the sensors will continuously input into the control algorithms and models, and in a minute or two the computer should converge on a verified model. Then we will be able to calculate exactly how much thrust will be needed to change our trajectory and bring the Pioneer back toward the Proxima system. At that point, Roca can take over with his orbital mechanics adjustments.”
“Remind me to discuss the notion of brief updates with you at some later date, Enrico,” Captain Crosby said with a raised eyebrow and the hint of a smile turning up at the corners of his mouth.
“Samara Drive initiation in three, two, one…” the Samaritan’s artificial intelligence announced over the ship-to-ship intercom system Roy Burbank had put together. “Zero-point-one gee acceleration.”
Crosby watched the virtual bar charts and graphs change slightly as he felt a very light push on him forcing him softly into his chair. There was barely enough weight to notice, except that he had been sitting in microgravity for hours.
“CHENG Samaritan report?”
“So far so good, Captain,” Roca replied.
“CHENG Pioneer?”
“All systems in the green so far,” Evonne added.
“Good. Bob, keep us at one tenth gee for the next hour, then bring it down.”
“Yes, Captain,” Roca replied.
* * *
“No, Evonne, I mean here.” Grag was pointing at a virtual image he was sharing with her. “You see the three points here around the docking ring for the transport tube?”
“Yes?” Evonne shrugged.
“Okay, it’s all quiet during the hour-long thrust,” Grag explained. “But watch what happens when the drive is shut down.”
Grag hit a virtual icon running the data display and increased the false color for vibration amplitude. On a 2D graph of frequency versus amplitude beside the 3D image of the ship, a logarithmically scaled curve had a spike in the middle at one thousand and twelve hertz. The amplitude was in microns per second per square root of hertz. As the Samara Drive shut down, the spike moved to the left to a frequency of approximately ninety hertz and the amplitude was several orders of magnitude higher than the vibrations had been before. The false colors showed a red wave of oscillation around the circular ring that held the transport tube in place. Then there was an accordion-like standing wave oscillation along the tube itself.
“Did you see that, Evonne?” Grag asked her.
“Yes, Grag, I saw it.” Evonne played it back and watched it again. “So what? The vibrations are not even large enough to see with the human eye.”
“Yes, that was my original thought as well,” Grag said sheepishly. “But, why there? What is causing this sudden vibration to appear once the thrust is turned off?”
“My guess is that the ships are acting like two springs under a load, and we just removed the load. This is the system ringing down, Grag,” Evonne explained to him.
“Yes, of course, that is happening. That is basic physics even on my world.” Grag wasn’t sure if she was insulting him by explaining such a simple thing or if she was convincing herself that it was a simple thing. “But, noticing that it has a nodal point here with high amplitude at ninety hertz, I got to looking at other spots, like the transport tube docking port.”
“Why?”
“Well, instantly removing a load from a system gives us a transient signal response, right?” Grag asked, rhetorically.
“Umm…”
“So, as big as this amplitude is with such a lightweight connection or mass from the tube, I was worried if it would be worse at the mooring trusses,” Grag explained. “And look at what I found here.”
Grag swiped an icon in front of him and ran a new set of data showing the mooring points where the rigs were attached between the two ships. He fast-forwarded to a few seconds before thrust shut down and then let it play at normal speed. As the drive shut down the false color representing the vibrational wave traveling through the ship grew rapidly and chaotically and the 2D graph showing the amplitude of the ninety-hertz vibration saturated the sensors.
“Now look at this.” Grag zoomed in on one of the welds to near-millimeter resolution. One of the seams had a small hairline crack in it that he was pointing at with his forefinger. “You see that?”
“Oh, that’s not good,” Evonne replied.