CHAPTER 27
April 15, 2090 (Earth timeline)
February 23, 2090 (Ship timeline)
“XO, we have a message on the boards from the Space Force Command HQ. It says, ‘Captain’s Eyes Only.’ You want to wake him up early?” Bob Roca stuck his head in the captain’s mess where Artur, the current acting captain, was looking for the artificial sweetener that he’d squirreled away months back. He had his head almost all the way inside the dull gray metal cabinet and one arm reaching in all the way to the back, contorting him like an acrobat.
“Aha, there it is. Now who would have moved that damned package?” Artur Clemons retracted himself from within the cabinet and pulled out the container. At eighty-five percent of Earth’s gravity, it poured almost as expected. After pouring the syrupy-looking clear liquid into his coffee cup he stirred it gently with a straw, only half listening to Roca. “From the damned Space Force? What’s it say?”
“Uh, it says, ‘Captain’s Eyes Only.’” Roca repeated.
“Hell, I guess I’m the acting captain of this here ship and I ain’t about to go wake up Crosby six months early on his rotation for just a message.” Artur sipped the coffee and screwed up his face. “I hope they have better coffee on Proxima or I’m just going to give this shit up.”
“So, um, what then?” Roca continued. “Send it to you?”
“Hell yes, send it to me, Bob. I’ll read it and decide if it’s worth waking the captain up or not.” Artur he realized he sounded irritated and immediately regretted it. He wasn’t really irritated at Bob, or even the coffee. He knew that he was just getting stir crazy a bit and needed to keep an eye on that. Trying to change his tone, he chortled, “It’s probably just that Space Force captain, what’s-his-name, Jacobs, forgot his hat or something.”
“Alright, then.” Roca laughed. “You know, the machine will add sweetener to it for you, right?”
“Nobody likes a smart-ass, Bob.”
* * *
“ . . . and as of yet, nobody has been able to ascertain the whereabouts of Dr. Burbank. His wife has been calling the State Department, her congresspeople, the HR and Union reps for Interstellara, the company that employs Dr. Burbank. This is a strange situation, Captain Crosby, but we’d really like you to do a walkthrough of your ship and personnel just so we can appease Mrs. Burbank and the politicians . . . ”
Artur shut off the feed. That was the fourth time he’d watched the message and was astounded by it even more each time he watched it. Burbank’s wife was several months pregnant and now her husband was missing. To top that off he’d never returned home after being on the Samaritan. In fact, the Samaritan was the last place that any person who actually knew him could corroborate his whereabouts. Enrico Vulpetti had worked with him for years and knew him. But one thing was for certain: this wasn’t something he needed to wake up Crosby for. Artur and the other two who were awake could handle this. Artur was a thousand percent certain that Burbank wasn’t on the ship. If he were on the ship, then the mass-balance calculations would have been off by the mass of a person. Everything on the ship was measured and calculated down to a few kilograms.
“Well, even though he can’t be here, I guess it will give the lady some peace of mind.” Artur felt bad for Burbank’s wife although he’d never met her. But from all that Artur had seen while he was on the ship, Burbank was a hard worker and appeared to be a good man. He hated the thought that something could have happened to him. But what? Artur had been a space jockey long enough to know that, every now and then, when a man hit the frontier and realized there were ways to disappear and start over, they sometimes did just that. They’d probably find him at a brothel or casino at Olympus Mons or somewhere similar, he thought.
* * *
“The mass balance checks out, boss.” Bob Roca had gone through the calculations multiple times on his data screen. The bridge of the Samaritan was typical of any spaceship—meaning it was nowhere near big enough for all the things crammed into it. Bob sat in his station chair, tapping away at virtual icons and adjusting various real ones on the touchscreen in front of him. Artur’s face was on the screen next to the spreadsheet and graphs showing the ship’s mass. Another face appeared below his: Yoko Pearl, the other crew member whose time it was to be awake.
“I’ve gone through every cubbyhole in Engineering and the PINS rooms and there’s nobody there,” Artur said. “Dr. Pearl, you find anything?”
“I’ve gone through the galley, all the quarters, and nothing out of the ordinary there,” Yoko replied.
“Anything on any of the historical security feeds, Bob?” Artur asked him. “I mean, anyone coming into or out of this ship is recorded on video.”
“I’m pulling those files now, XO,” Bob said. “I’ll let you know if I see anything unusual.”
“This is a damn snipe hunt,” Artur added.
“What’s a snipe hunt?” Yoko Pearl asked.
* * *
“What do you mean there’s no video of Burbank leaving the ship?” Artur grunted. The three of them had met in the galley for lunch and just to have exposure to other humans. Having the task of looking for Burbank had actually taken their minds off how isolated from the rest of humanity they were. Artur was happy to have something to do even if it was just a snipe hunt.
“Well, I’ve scanned through every camera for every second that Burbank was on this ship. There is no video of him leaving his quarters after this moment . . . here . . . when he goes into it the night before the Space Force arrived,” Bob Roca explained. “He never came out of his quarters.”
“That can’t be,” Artur looked over at Dr. Pearl and noted that she was being noticeably quiet. But she wasn’t a big talker to start with. “Yoko, what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. This sounds like something out of a spy novel,” she said softly over her bowl of ramen noodles. “I like spy novels. But I’m a biologist not an engineer. It seems to me like we need the CHENG or one of the techs.”
“Well, I’m an engineer. Second CHENG to be exact.” Roca sounded bemusedly hurt.
“I know, Bob. I mean, like, a systems tech or something,” Yoko replied carefully.
“Oh hell, Yoko, quit worrying about hurting Bob’s baby feelings and tell us what you’re getting at.” Artur didn’t care for beating around the bush. Years in space took that ability right out of a person. Beating around the bush while in a spaceship might give some incident just enough time to get you killed dead.
“Uh, well, I mean, couldn’t we look at some logs or something about when the mass changed on the ship, or doors that were given signals to open, or any other system that might have been turned on or off that wasn’t typically supposed to be turned on or off? I mean, are there other records on the ship that might show an anomaly?” Yoko shrugged and went back to playing with the ramen noodles in her bowl as if she either was no longer hungry or didn’t like them. Artur raised an eyebrow at her.
“Well, that isn’t a bad idea.” He turned to Roca. “Bob, we don’t have records on hatch openings unless we’re in an emergency status, so that wouldn’t do it. But what about other systems like maybe the PINS, or the CO2 scrubbers, or maybe the environmental controls?”
“Hmmm, well, let’s see.” Bob tapped at some virtual icons in front of him with his left hand and then shifted the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his right to his mouth for a second so he could use both hands—after he’d taken the time to lick some grape jelly from his right thumb. He said muffled through the sandwich pursed between his lips, “Ffwwe might fe able foo . . . ”
“For God’s sake, Bob!” Artur growled at him. Bob spat the sandwich on a napkin.
“ . . . take the data from the scrubbers and see which ones kicked on when. We have detailed records on those because we have to change the sofnalime matrix for recycling every so often.” Bob then picked his sandwich back up and continued one-handing the icons.
“You’re going to get jelly on the screen,” Yoko laughed. “Can I help somehow?”
“You are damn right you can help him, Yoko.” Artur grinned. “You can teach Bob some damned table manners.”
“Here it is!” Bob finished off the last bite of the sandwich and made a face like his mouth was stuck together. He swigged at whatever was in the big blue mug he kept that claimed he was “The Greatest” and continued. “Look at this. Here’s the video feed from Roy walking from the captain’s office to his quarters the last time we saw him. It’s actually kind of funny because he gets lost and wanders down the wrong corridor, ending up in the cryosleep room.”
“Yeah, so? We saw that video already.” Artur was getting impatient.
“It is funny, though, you have to admit it.” Yoko nodded in agreement with Bob. “I’ve gotten turned around before, especially when the gravity was low.”
“So what, Bob? The point, please.”
“Watch this bar chart here. Each of these bars represent the CO2 scrubbers’ current draw and you can see them wiggle upward a bit by a few milliamps as Burbank passes through the ship, gets turned around, then makes his way back to his quarters, and it matches the video just fine.” Bob pointed at each of the respective bar graphs as they grew slightly.
“Hey, a personnel tracker.” Artur laughed and slapped the table. “Okay, good. Now what?”
“Well, so watch the video feed of the quarters corridor. The next morning at about nine fourteen, while we were all in engineering or dealing with the Space Force folks, Burbank was in bed, right?” Bob pointed at the CO2 scrubber electrical current bars for that area of the ship. “But look here. The video doesn’t change at all, but the scrubber starts wiggling upward here, then this one here, then this one here.”
“Wait! He left the room but he’s not in the video?” Yoko asked.
“I don’t know. But the CO2 scrubbers started working harder along this path here.” Bob moved some icons about and then overlayed the path on the ship’s interior map. A lime green highlighter line followed through the three-dimensional ship’s map. “Looks like he ended up here in the PINS sensor room. Wait, now that’s odd.”
“What’s odd?” Artur asked.
“The CO2 scrubber was acting like it was working to support a person in that room already, but there’s nobody in the video. Then it looks like two people must be in there,” Bob explained. “They stayed there for a while, maybe. Then they moved next door to the sleep room.”
“What the hell?” Artur watched the bars as they moved but no video showed any change. All the rooms looked unoccupied. “Can this be right?”
“Well, the scrubbers are closely monitored, boss, so they’re right.” Bob continued to look and scan forward for changes. “Looks like several minutes go by with no change.”
“Look what a spike!” Yoko pointed.
“Now there’re three people in that room, it would appear.” Bob looked perplexed. Artur was confused and he was getting a very bad feeling tingling up his neck.
“How long are there three people?” Artur watched. “Keep scrubbing forward.”
“There! Look, it dropped,” Yoko said.
“Two people in there now.” Bob nodded. “Good eye.”
“Wait a minute.” Artur was working on something in the recesses of his mind that was dark or sinister or maybe both and he didn’t like where it was going. “Why do the people in sleep beds not tax the scrubbers?”
“Oh, that’s an easy one . . . You don’t think . . . ?” Artur could tell by the look on Bob’s face that he was suddenly having the same bad thoughts he was.
“Think what?” Yoko asked. She’d yet to figure it out.
“The beds are enclosed systems with their own environment controls and conditioning units. They don’t affect the scrubbers external to them. But if somebody were to be awakened, well, that’s a different story.” Bob began swiping at virtual icons wildly.
“Check the beds, Bob!” Artur ordered him.
“Ahead of you, boss.”
“No records show a bed was activated or deactivated.” Bob continued to swipe away in the air at the virtual icons.
“So, we’re stumped?”
“Nope!” Bob smiled. “The beds pull from the main liquid coolant supply in Engineering. There are valves and flow meters along the flow route. And . . . wait for it . . . boom! Gotcha!”
“Got what?” Artur was almost ready to just get up and head down to the cryosleep room as it was.
“A bed was deactivated and then reactivated,” Bob said.
“Which one?” Artur and Yoko exclaimed simultaneously.
“Bed twenty-eight. Dr. Thomas Pinkersly.” Bob hadn’t even finished the statement before the three of them were already on their feet and on their way out of the galley.
* * *
“Dr. Burbank, can you hear me?” Artur gently slapped both sides of Burbank’s face while shining a light in his eyes. He was responding sluggishly, but coming around.
“My head hurts . . . I’m thirsty . . . ” Burbank whispered.
“Here, drink this.” Yoko handed him an electrolyte cup that was part of the rehydration and waking process. “Maybe we should wake up one of the doctors.”
“There was someone else . . . I knew him . . . ” Burbank continued to mutter incoherently.
“Roy, just relax and let the meds kick in,” Artur said.
“I have . . . to catch my ride . . . Space Force . . . ”
“We’ll take care of all that, Roy.” Artur’s heart sank for the man. It was too soon to tell him where he was and what was going on. Besides, Artur wanted an untainted recount of what happened. “Just relax and we’ll talk in a few minutes.”
“Jesus.” Bob shook his head and looked at Yoko and the XO.
“Later, Bob. Yoko, just get him stable and awake.” Artur stood up from the cryobed. “Bob, let’s wake up Crosby and the doctor.”