Misjump Read online

  Misjump, copyright Mark Long, 2019

  First edition, August 2019.

  Published by Orchid Imprint. See www.orchidimprint.com for details.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Contact [email protected] for reprint of any content.

  For more information about this book, please see www.MisjumpBook.com

  For more information about the author, please see www.MarkLongAuthor.co.uk

  The characters in this book are fictional and are not intended to represent any real-world person. The planets and star systems depicted are also fictional.

  ISBN: 978-1-9993044

  Chapter 1

  Gregor opened his eyes to absolute darkness and groaned. He wondered if he had been blinded, struggling to think through the pain. His head ached worse than any hangover that he had ever had.

  He ran his hands over his chest, looking for an injury and felt the rough texture of the straps holding him in the pilot’s chair and the smoother cloth of his jumpsuit. The sound of his skin on the fabric was quiet, but it was the only sound apart from the odd ping of cooling metal. That wasn’t good. He was in the cockpit of a Camel II class trader and there should have been displays and audio feeds in pretty much every direction. At the very least, there should have been red emergency lights running off their own batteries. Okay, he thought, even if those were out, he should still be able to hear the hiss of life support and the other subtle sounds of the ship.

  He reached down and unclipped the harness, the noise strangely loud in the silence. He floated up as the tension was removed and drifted forwards. A couple of seconds later, he floated into the viewscreen and scrabbled for its edges. One hand found a straight line and that was enough to anchor him while he looked for the latches. In flight, the screen gave an outside view with tactical information about objects and ship’s systems, but it was placed in front of an actual transparent screen built into the hull. Gregor found the catches and unclipped them, drifting away still holding the screen. He managed to swing himself and the screen around to look through the armoured glass set into the hull.

  Stars wheeled in front of him and Gregor felt nausea as his eyes and body disagreed about how he was moving. He tried to focus through the motion sickness and decided that the ship was in an off-centre spin. The walls were merely suggested by the starlight, but that was a slight improvement. It was all about choosing a frame of reference. He pushed himself towards the emergency box on the wall and opened it, the contents held in place with Velcro straps. More by touch than sight, he located the smooth plastic cylinder of the chemical light and bent it to break the inner capsule. It started to glow with a pale green light, and he could see his surroundings more fully. Everything looked intact which was a good sign for the rest of the ship.

  He shouted “Hello?” and then felt foolish. The rest of the crew had been in cold sleep for days, but he thought there could be someone else aboard like a salvage crew. Clearly, something was very wrong with the Sarafina. Whatever flatlanders thought, pirates were not a real risk. Well-travelled routes typically had a Peacekeeper presence and seldom-travelled routes didn't provide enough traffic to support piracy. Most of the journey was in jump space anyway. Where the hell was he? He tried to remember laying in the course, an activity that seemed remote now. This was just a routine jump between an industrial planet and a tourist/farming world in well-travelled space. He should be able to call for help from a Peacekeeper as soon as he had comms up and running. Something nagged at his mind, something urgent that he had forgotten. He tried to focus and form a checklist.

  No power and so no gravity or heat or life support, but the air seemed fine, and he would be okay for a while. The others would not need air because … ah, damn! That was it — there was no power for the cold sleep capsules. That couldn’t wait unless the rest of the crew were already dead. He remembered something that he had been told during basic training: you are not dead until you are warm and dead.

  He clipped the light to his belt and pulled the door open, bracing against the bulkhead with one hand. He didn't like working in null G, but he knew how and had to pass tests every couple of years to prove that he could still do it. At least he no longer had to do combat drills while floating around. He pushed off the wall and headed down the corridor, nearly grazing the wall. He needed to get to the cargo deck as quickly as he could. He kept himself aligned with what would be down had there had been gravity available and pushed off again. He brushed the corridor wall with his left shoulder and started to spin and his gut clenched. Vomiting in null G was never good, always messy and often dangerous. It was all too easy to slam your head into a bulkhead or damage irreplaceable equipment. He squeezed his eyes shut and made a starfish shape in the air. His arms snagged on the walls and he stopped rotating at the cost of a few bruises. Gregor visualised the layout of the ship, placing himself on his mental map of the ship. The crew deck was over the top of the cargo and passenger deck. The passenger cabins were to the side, in the “wings” of the ship with the cargo bay in the centre so that most of the mass was furthest from the edges. He opened his eyes again and proceeded with a little more caution.

  There was a large hatchway in the floor that led down, far bigger than he would need since it was designed to allow crates and ship components to be brought onto the crew deck. It was usually operated by electric motors, but he would need to use the hand crank built into a recess in what would normally be the floor. It was difficult to turn without anything to anchor him, and he had to wedge himself awkwardly. At least he didn’t need to open it all the way. The hatch took him into the internal airlock that allowed the lower deck to be opened to space. The lower door was equally massive, but at least there were handholds here.

  Leaving both locks open at the same time was a breach of at least three regulations and would have had him up on a charge if he were still in the navy, but there was no-one to see, and there wouldn’t be anyone to complain unless he could get power to the cold sleep capsules. He pushed down through the partially open lock, feet first. It was only as he did so that he remembered that he had not checked for an atmosphere on the other side of the airlock and he could have easily been squirted through a five-centimetre gap between the door and the jamb. He reasoned that it was too late to worry now.

  The hold was filled with crates in three sizes, the standard shipping containers used in every port. The smaller freighters like this could only handle the smaller sizes, but they went up to five metres on a side. They were all strapped down to prevent movement in flight. Not every ship followed the rules about strapping down cargo as the artificial gravity did a perfectly good job of keeping a container where it was left, but port inspectors could be sticky about it, so this crew made at least a token attempt to use the straps and hardpoints. Judging by how little disturbance there had been to the crates, they had done a decent job of it … and there had definitely not been pirates in here. The green chem-light tethered to his belt did not go far with the stacked boxes blocking the light in every direction, but he found the floor plate that he needed fairly quickly by its yellow border, a pale green in this illumination. It was held in place by two grip locks, the type where a hand could reach in and twist, even in a bulky vacuum suit. A poorly placed crate was blocking one of the grips and Gregor had to unclip the ties and gently push the high mass container out of the way. They were weightless, of course, but they still had inertia and required effort to move. They
would hit the walls hard if pushed with more force than was strictly needed. The job of freeing and moving the crate seemed to take long minutes, and he was sweating and swearing freely before the plate was uncovered. He reached down, twisted (different directions for each hand since this area was designed to be used in different gravitational conditions) and lifted the panel without problems, letting it drift away. It was neither delicate nor massive enough to cause a problem. The battery lay underneath, fully a meter long and half a meter across. It couldn’t be used in position, and so Gregor started it moving slowly away from the pocket that it rested in. He guided and nursed the tombstone shaped object up into the airlock and along the corridor.

  The doors on the upper level were nominally airtight even during explosive decompression, but they were light enough to open by hand. Gregor had to dart ahead of the drifting power cell to open the door and then double back to guide it through the opening. The cold-sleep capsules were to the rear of the ship, above the engines, since they did not usually need to be accessed except at the beginning and end of a journey. That meant that Gregor had to get the awkward load past the crew and passenger berths. He finally reached the room at the stern end and the stacked coffin-like capsules.

  He secured the slab to the floor with a couple of large slap patches that were, in theory, to be used in the case of a hull breach to temporarily plug a hole between the inside and the vacuum of space. In practice, anything moving fast enough to get through the hull would trash the entire room beyond recognition and possibly the whole deck. He pulled the circuit breakers to isolate the pods from the main ship’s power and started to run cable to the pods’ shared power bus. Finally, he pulled an orange-coloured bar that was on one end of the power slab. It pulled away with difficulty, trailing a flexible trail of semi-translucent sheets. The chemicals in the battery began to mix, and the voltage regulator built into the business end of the battery converted the generated power to the ship’s voltage. The cold sleep capsules started winking to life, the small embedded screens showing boot sequences that changed to a status screen after a few seconds. The lights were mostly amber with a few greens and a scattering of sullen reds. None of the red alerts were blinking, which would indicate a critical problem with the capsule or the state of the occupant. The units recognised that they had an occupant from their internal logs. All in all, mostly amber was a better result than Gregor had expected, and the power could not have been out for long. The pods should be able to bring the environment for each of the crew members back under control. Barring bad luck, the rest of the crew of the Sarafina were safe for now. The battery would last for a couple of days, and that gave Gregor some options and a chance to get the ship functional again. It didn’t give him nearly enough of either, but he would take anything that he could get. However, for now, he was content to just hang in the air and gather his breath. He still had no idea how they had gotten into this situation.

  Chapter 2

  Gregor relaxed as he floated, drifting slowly in the still air. Without the airflow from life support, there was very little to move him, but it is hard to be still when you are floating. He wondered vaguely about convection currents, but he wasn’t sure how they would work without gravity. The sweat on him seemed to take an age to dry. Slowly, the monitors on the cold sleep capsules changed from ambers and reds to greens and ambers except for one stubborn red. He wasn’t sure what to do about that capsule, the one that contained Fumi, but there was very little that you could do to help someone in cold sleep except for maintaining their environment. The ship’s medic was Lori, and her capsule was still showing quite a few ambers. It would be dangerous to start her revival until the cold sleep module had stabilised. He hoped that Fumi would not get worse; at least things tended to happen very slowly to people in the capsules or “low berths” as they were known. They were used to carry passengers cheaply or to skip weeks of travel and save on life support costs. The pilot/engineer needed to stay active, but the others could check out for a while if they wanted to, depending on what jobs needed to be done. This was a long-haul cargo run with a double jump so only Gregor had been needed this time.

  He needed to get life support and power back — or more accurately, power back, and then life support since the heaters and O2 reprocessors were just lumps of machinery without an electrical feed. That meant getting the reactor back online, but without having any clue what had happened to the ship, he didn’t know what damage there was. He should probably do an inspection first, he decided. The lack of gravity and light would not help there, but there was not a lot that he could do about that. The battery could handle the load from the low berths for a while, but it couldn’t power the whole ship and would be drained quickly if he used it to power up even minimal systems. He could run a line to the comms, but until he knew what state that was in, he had no idea if the dish was still on the ship or whether the comms hardware was a fried mess. He could use a hand with all of these jobs and could wake Ivo, who was cross-trained in engineering, but that would mean two sets of lungs working in a ship without life support. It looked like he was going to be working solo for a while longer. He thought for a minute or two more just in case he had missed an easy win but didn’t come up with anything new. There was the beacon, of course, but he didn’t hold out much hope for that. Still, it would be the right place to start. It was on the outside of the hull, and he would need to go out to check for gross physical damage in any case. He sighed to himself. He hated EVAs.

  The first snag proved to be that all of the suits were dead. They seemed undamaged, but the batteries were completely drained. That didn’t make a lot of sense. They were isolated from everything else, and they should have been good in standby for a couple of years, at least. They were seriously overrated for the job, and that was intentional. You didn’t want a suit dying on you in a hostile environment. He took two batteries from a pair of suits and charged them from the main battery pack. He knew that it wouldn’t have that much of an effect on the larger battery and he didn’t want to go outside with a possibly bad pack. His suit seemed to check out okay with the charged pack, and the magnetic boots clung to the airlock floor when he moved his feet down. The trick was to glide your feet over the surface, barely lifting one then the other. There were few tethers on the hull since the ship was capable of atmospheric landings and so needed to be streamlined. EVAs were supposed to be two-person operations with someone inside monitoring at all times, but that would have required more people and power than he had. The safe options were all off the table. Gregor would have liked to have saved the atmosphere in the airlock as he might need that air for breathing later but that would mean running the pumps, and he didn’t have a way to do that. Instead, he used the smallest airlock and slowly bled the atmosphere off into space. It would affect the tumble and vector of the ship. There was not much that he could do about that, and he had no idea what vector the ship was on in any case. He wasn’t worried about hitting anything though. Space was pretty damn empty for the most part. He cranked open the outer door and looked out at the whirling stars for a moment before remembering to look down. The hull was beneath him and unmoving. The stars were just a light show and he was stationary. It wasn’t true, but it helped if you believed it anyway.

  He shuffled out of the airlock and onto the hull, his neck bent uncomfortably as he looked down at his feet. The scuffed hull reflected a little of the starlight giving a vague impression of movement, but he tried to ignore it. He slid slowly over to the beacon. It had not been launched and the hull plates were still in place over it. The idea was that the ship’s computer would jettison it, blowing the explosive bolts that held the hull plates on, if it detected system damage that would threaten the safety of the ship or crew. The beacon would then drift from the ship for a few seconds, fire a gas canister that would more or less stop it relative to the ship and then start broadcasting on multiple bands that assistance was required. Any Peacekeeper ship would respond as would pretty much all privately own
ed ships; there was a bounty for offering assistance and most captains wanted to help as they knew that they could be the ones in trouble next time. Anyway, this beacon had not launched. Either there had not been enough damage to justify launching it or the computer had failed before it could launch. Given that the ship was dead in space, the former didn’t seem likely. Gregor knelt down carefully and took the socket wrench off his belt. The explosive bolts were recessed and had electrical tags on them to allow them to be fired remotely. There should be no way for them to fire without a signal, but he found himself sweating as he removed first the tag and then the bolt. He heard the suit step up the airflow in an attempt to keep him comfortable.

  He put each bolt in a pouch at his waist and tried not to think that he was stowing explosive charges on his body. He wasn’t a fan of anything that could explode, but there was nowhere else to put them where they wouldn’t drift off. The hull plate stayed in place after the bolts were removed and he took a sticky tether off his EVA suit and attached the plate to a surrounding chunk of the hull. He didn’t want to go chasing it if it drifted off. He had enough gas in his suit to manoeuvre a little, but chasing a hull plate while the universe spun around you with no tether and no-one looking out for you was a good way to get killed. He didn’t fancy the idea. He popped the plate up from the magnets that held it to its frame and let it hang on its tether.

  The beacon sat in its socket inside the hull, dark except where his suit lights were reflected. Normally, it would be taking power from the ship and keeping its batteries topped up, but there was no sign of life. He reached out and pressed the large self-test button just to be sure. The controls were all simple and designed to be used with gauntlets on. The beacon didn’t react in any way. Gregor put the panel back in place, turning the bolts back in but not connecting them to the wires that would trigger the explosives. He left the tether as it would burn off if they ever made it to an atmosphere again. He had not held out much hope for the beacon in any case, as physics was working against it. It broadcast in all directions because it had no way of knowing where help might come from and so the power of its broadcasts diminished as a function of the square of the distance to anyone who might get the signal. The odds of any other ship being within a thousand KM were barely above zero. The beacons were great if you were near a planet or a busy shipping lane but not much use when you were out in the black. Gregor was not sure where they were, but it was a long way from any primary. Nothing was showing a visible disk. Even if it were detected, the signal travelled at the same speed as any radio signal and, at interstellar distances, it could take years to reach anything that could detect it. There would only be bones and the ship itself to salvage by the time anyone came out to check. So much for that idea, he thought. They would be better off trying to get the main comms array back up. He started sliding his feet in that direction.