CHAPTER 18
August 24, 2089
“You found it where?” Captain Crosby looked at the little disk-shaped device in his hand. It was about the size of the button on a dress shirt with an adhesive backing on one side. As far as he could tell there were no other signs of electronics or microprocessors or anything. It was just a small, solid, and smooth gray disk.
“Well, that one and these two.” Roy held up two more of the disks. “They were stuck right on top of the atomic clock circuits in the temporal calibration unit or TCU. I found them pretty quickly. Whoever put ’em in knew exactly where to place them to create the most havoc on our navigation system. And, by the way, the location was pretty easy to access without affecting anything else that would have alerted us to them being there.”
“Three of them,” Cindy added. “They must have even known the precise design of the clock system.”
“You’re right about that, Cindy.” Roy sat slumped in the chair in front of the captain’s desk. He turned and nodded to Cindy, who was standing against the door. “Cindy probably wouldn’t have found it as quickly just because she didn’t build the thing. Not her fault at all. As soon as I saw that first one, well, it stuck out like a sore thumb as they say. Then I certainly knew there would be two more.”
“Wait a minute, Dr. Burbank.” Crosby held up a hand to slow him down. “What does it do?”
“Oh, very simple, what you have in your hand right there is a little chunk of Cesium-137. It tosses out gamma rays very regularly at six hundred and sixty-two kiloelectron volts. It was about a centimeter, give or take a millimeter or so, from one of the atomic clock axes inside the PINS. The others were aligned with the other two axes. Guess what each of those clocks uses as an atomic radioactive decay source?” Roy smiled.
“Let me guess. Cesium-137?” Captain Crosby frowned.
“Bingo! Give the captain a prize!” Roy leaned in closer and straightened himself in the chair a bit. “It was aligned just right by each of the clock axes that, as it decayed, the gamma rays from this little bugger injected spurious random clock pulses to the onboard clocks. Once the clocks were confused, the calculation epochs became damned near randomized.”
“Wait, isn’t there software or something to account for random gamma rays on a thing like that? I mean, we’re in space. Gamma rays zip through all the time.” Crosby was clearly puzzled and the look on his face showed it.
“You’d think so, but there are two safeguards against that,” Cindy said while tapping at her datapad. She pulled up a three-dimensional schematic and projected it onto the screen in the captain’s office. “See, here is the TCU. The first safeguard is this box. It’s a combination of tungsten, silicone, bismuth, lead, and iron sintered as a ceramic. This is the best, most modern gamma ray shield known to man, but still some gamma rays get through it from time to time. So, note here how there is a one-centimeter polycarbonate cube with these chips connected on either side of the cube. These are chip-based atomic clocks and you have one on top and bottom for the y-axis, front and back for the z-axis, and either side for the x-axis. Roy, do you want to take it from here?”
“You were doing great, Cindy. But, uh, sure.” He cleared his throat a bit. “The clocks on the same axis are synchronized with each other and if there is a spurious event in one x clock, for example say the one on the left that the one on the right doesn’t see, then that means the gamma came from outside the clock and is likewise thrown out. The active area of each of the chip clocks is about a millimeter square. The odds of a gamma from space coming through this millimeter-square detector on this side and then traveling perfectly in line with the other is excruciatingly small.”
“Okay, I understand that. You’re talking about coincidence detection, right?” Crosby asked.
“Right again, Captain.” Roy smiled at him while clapping his hands proudly. “But our saboteur was smart. He placed a fairly significant little gamma ray source right on top of one detector on each axis. Many times the gamma rays passed through both gamma detectors on the same axis creating a false time pulse. But not so many as to be obvious.”
“Clever SOB, whoever did this,” Cindy agreed with Roy. “And, as you can guess by now, the bottom line is devastatingly simple. When the clocks get screwed up, Captain, we have no idea what time the sensors made a measurement, or when our next data input was correlated, or even how long between calculations has passed. Early on the errors are small, but after tens of thousands of runs the big errors start to show up.”
“How hard was this to do? I mean, did they need to be a PhD in interstellar navigation systems, atomic clocks, and such? Or could a clever person with some training do it?”
“Captain, that is not a part of the system that is just sticking out in the open for everyone to put their fingers on. At least four bolts on the outer instrument rack cover have to be removed, a handful of wiring harnesses unsnapped, and then the shielding plates have to be popped loose with a specific little tool in order to get access to this circuit board. There is no doubt that this was sabotage. But, if they had the design drawings and some time to practice, it could be done by a tech-savvy person in short order.” Roy exhaled. “I put it all back together and had Cindy time me. I needed eleven minutes and thirty-one seconds to install the buttons and then close the PINS back up. I might could do it faster with practice.”
“Somebody that knew what they were doing had access to the PINS for some period of time longer than that, maybe,” Cindy agreed. “But, with all the visitors coming and going for the past few months, access to the PINS for an hour or two without being noticed might have been possible. I don’t think we prepared for this kind of sabotage while in space dock around the Moon.”
“There was security, but not extremely tight security. It takes a bit of resources to afford a trip to the Moon, then to the orbiting shipyard, and then atop that to get on board a ship without being noticed. But in the last months of final prep there were hundreds of people coming and going.” Captain Crosby shook his head in wonder. “While we know who has been on this ship, we might never figure out specifically who did this. We’ll start an investigation.” Captain Crosby leaned back, nodding his head approvingly. “Great work, you two. So, am I to assume that the PINS is functional now?”
“Yes sir,” Cindy answered. “There is no reason to scuttle the mission because of the PINS, Captain.”
“I’ll have to ask Mission Control about that. They’re still in charge until we’re out of the system,” Crosby replied.
“While I am enjoying my stay and all, Captain, if you don’t mind, I’ll be ready to get off this thing as soon as possible,” Roy said eagerly while trying his best to stifle a yawn.
“The Space Force cruiser from the US is on its way. I will ask the ship to be here first thing in the morning. It will stay long enough for a security detail to sweep the ship for other surprises. We need to think about what that might be. They are set to disembark no later than fifteen hundred ship normal tomorrow afternoon. Until then, Dr. Burbank, get yourself something to eat, maybe get cleaned up, and get some rest.”
“Sure thing.” Roy stood as the captain did, holding out a hand.
“Thank you, Roy.” Crosby shook his hand. “I mean it. You probably just saved the mission and our lives. Great work. I wish you could come along with us.”
“You’re welcome, Captain, but there is no chance of that. I’m perfectly happy right here in the good ol’ Sol system. And, if it’s not too much of a burden, would you mind telling my wife about the ‘saving the mission’ part?” He laughed.
“I’d be happy to!” Crosby grinned back at him. “And I’m sure your bosses wouldn’t mind hearing it from me either.”
“Couldn’t hurt.”
“I’ll see that Artur writes up some sort of commendation or whatever the protocol is for a non-crew member. Get some rest.” Crosby waited for Roy to get to the door. “CHENG, would you mind staying with me for a few more minutes? I’d like to get your take on something.”
“Yes, Captain.” Cindy slapped Roy on the shoulder as he passed her at the door. “No rest for the wicked.”
* * *
Roy sleepily wandered back toward his quarters hoping he’d make it there before he fell asleep while walking. Well, he didn’t really consider it walking. The gee load was less than one fifth that of Earth gravity and it made walking more of a shuffle while trying to maintain your balance. The magnetic shoes helped with that a little. After several minutes of walking down the corridor, Roy realized that he must have taken a wrong turn because he was somewhere he hadn’t yet been on the ship. There were only really three main corridors through the ship. He must have gotten on the wrong one somehow when he climbed down the stairwell from the captain’s quarters.
He looked about, trying to get his bearings, but he was so tired he couldn’t think straight. He shook his head, which then almost threw him off his feet. The nearest hatch was in front of him, opening toward what he thought was in the ship’s inward direction. He turned there and was shocked at how confused his sense of direction must have been.
The hatch had clearly led him to an outer part of the ship. He was turned around a complete one hundred eighty degrees. He knew he was near the ship’s exterior from the view through the windows in the large, long room. He could see one of the PINS gamma ray telescopes looming just outside the window to the aft of where he was. He was totally lost.
The room wasn’t very deep, only five to seven meters or so. But it stretched out along the ship’s travel axis in tens of meters both fore and aft. Along the exterior wall were rows and rows of dull gray metamaterial cylinders, each with multiple tubes and cables connecting them to various instrument panels on the bulkhead. Roy shuffled closer to the cylinder closest to him and suddenly realized where he was.
“Nigel?” he said to his data assistant sleepily. “Am I in the cryobed chamber?”
“Yes, Roy, you are. Can I help you?” the AI tattooed on his wrist asked him in a thick Scottish accent.
“Yes, give me a direction arrow back to my quarters, please. Somehow, I got lost.”
“Right away, Roy.”
A green arrow appeared in his lenses, showing him which direction to go in order to reach his quarters. He looked and realized the arrow was pointing directly through a bulkhead. That was no good.
“Nigel, I need actual directions not just a direction,” Roy said as he fingered the screen on the cryobed he was standing next to.
“Aye, here you go, Roy.”
“Great, thanks.” He read the name on the screen to himself. “Thomas Pinkersly, Geneticist.”
“Are ya okay, auld boy?” Nigel asked him.
“Just tired. Thanks for the map.” Roy checked the map and backtracked it. He groaned once he realized where he’d made his wrong turn. He must have been completely sleepwalking to have missed his corridor. There were only three doors! “I am spent.”
“Roy? Your wife has sent you several messages that just came in off the latest download. You want to hear them?” Nigel asked.
“Later. If I listen now, I will forget what she says. I don’t know how she does it,” he said.
“She’s a lot younger than you, auld boy!” Nigel pointed out.
“Shut it, Nigel. How about some traveling music?” Roy shuffled himself out of the cryobay and down the corridor as very old classic rock sounded in his ears. It was a ballad about sailing by a famous Scottish rock star from, literally, a century past.