Misjump Read online

  Checking the comms array proved to be more of a problem than expected. Gregor got there without problems, taking it slowly and carefully. Looking up at the comms dish immediately sent Gregor into nausea and vertigo as the universe spun around him. He fell to his knees, one boot becoming detached from the hull and he started retching into his helmet. Globules of saliva and vomit began to bounce around his face. The inside of the visor had a hydrophobic coating as this was a problem that had been anticipated but the foul mixture coated his face, and there was no way to wipe it in a suit. His eyes stung, and he reached down to the environmental controls on his hip to set the suit to flush the air. That drew the fluid down from the helmet, and it soaked the front of his flight suit, but at least he could see again even if the tears made things blurry. He took some time to let the tears wash his eyes as clean as possible and to recover his nerve. On the second attempt, he turned his face up but kept his eyes screwed shut. He triggered the camera with his chin and took several shots at different angles that he could look at later. That would have to do. He would send one of the rovers to check the rest of the ship, but they couldn’t have accessed the beacon. Gregor made his way back to the airlock, trying not to gag at the smell inside his suit.

  He changed into a fresh flight suit and sealed the old one in a disposal bag. They were washable, but he wasn’t going to attempt that without gravity. At least the bag would contain the smell. He took the rover out of storage and was unsurprised when the battery was flat. He charged it and sent it on a low energy orbit around the ship. That cost a little more of the dwindling supply of power and another airlock full of air, but there was no help for that. He found a drink bulb and made himself a lukewarm coffee using a chemical heater pack. They carried them for use on cold worlds, and they were not intended for cooking, but bad coffee was better than no coffee he reasoned. The ship was still radiating heat into space, and it would get pretty chilly in a day or two. While he waited for the rover to complete its survey, he thought about the situation with the batteries. The emergency lights each had their own power cells and he had not seen a live one yet. They were probably all dead since the suits, the beacon, and the rover had all been flat. The beacon would have been drawing power from the ship right up until the juice went off and that was certain since there was an alarm system designed to monitor the beacon for any problems. The lights would use up the batteries in a couple of days, but the rovers were supposed to be able to sit idle for months at a time as were the suits. The emergency battery didn’t carry power and only became a battery when the internal baffles were removed and that had still been fine. It looked like all electrical energy had been lost, but heat, chemical and kinetic energy had been unaffected. He was not aware of anything that could have that effect, although his grasp of physics was limited to what he needed to know to pilot a ship and keep it running.

  It couldn’t have been days in any case, as the rest of the crew would have been long dead if their capsules had been deprived of power for that long. Also, the ship would have been colder and there had to be other signs. He felt his face and there was a little roughness there, but no more than he would expect after a few hours without a shave. He was one of those men who always looked slightly unkempt even on his best days. He didn’t feel hungry and his bladder had not been especially full. He had taken advantage of the environment suit’s features rather than try to pee in null G. It was possible using plastic bags, but it was neither fun nor pleasant. In any case, he was sure that no more than a day had elapsed since they had lost power. They had been coasting to the jump point at Neuholme last he remembered. All the systems were nominal and the course was laid in for a deep space jump. They would pump across the reserve fuel and make a second jump as soon as that evened itself out. It was unsafe to jump straight away as the centre of mass was critical to the calculation, and so a rest for a day or so was usually taken after re-entering normal space. He was strapped in and listening to some music. There was nothing at all out of the ordinary except that he was the only one awake and even that wasn’t too unusual. He was pretty sure that they had not jumped. He didn’t remember initiating the jump and you were stuck in Tau space for six to eight days once you entered it. There was no way that they could have been out of commission for that long. After some more thought, he decided that he had no idea what had happened and went to check on the rover.

  The rover was floating in the airlock close to one wall, one of its legs bent at an odd angle. It probably bashed against a wall when Gregor was letting the air in from the ship but it would be an easy repair, and they had multiple rovers. They were spindly little robots with insect-like legs and small solar panels that resembled wings. They were not unfurled at the moment which was no great surprise. Wherever here was, it was a long way from the star that Neuholme orbited and it would not have been worth deploying them. There was a small screen on the rover that allowed him to review the footage. Normally, he would have transferred the data to the central computer systems and viewed it there, but this would do. He watched the footage and was pleased to see that the drifting stars were merely irritating on the smaller screen. The rover had taken the ship to be its frame of reference, and so the video was quite stable except for the background. He ran the recording twice and couldn’t see any damage to the exterior of the ship at all. It was probably safe to assume that hull integrity was good since even a small hole would have left evidence that it was there. He also didn’t see any clouds of escaping air or water, so everything looked good from a purely mechanical perspective. The ship was still dead in space, but that was one less problem to worry about. He reran the video and this time focused on the wheeling stars. It was hard to make out shapes with the off-centre spin, but he should be able to see the primary of the Neuholme system as a visible disk even this far out. It worried him that he could not. Maybe he was just unlucky with angles and the camera had not been pointing in the right direction at the right time. It didn’t seem very likely though.

  He went to check on the cold sleep capsules again. They had all settled down except for Fumi’s. She was still showing one of the diagnostics as red. He had no idea of how serious that was and the manual was in the ship’s computer and inaccessible for the foreseeable future. There was nothing that he could do. Instead, he thought about what could be done.

  He could and would do an inspection of the inside of the ship even though he was pretty sure that he would not find anything out of the ordinary. They had been coasting with the N-space drive idle and the jump drive inactive. The ship had been doing nothing much at the point where they lost power and so the systems should have survived well. That didn’t explain their crazy spin though. If they had been holed and atmosphere escaped or if they had collided with something, that would have made more sense, but there was no damage to the hull that he could see. The engines could have fired if the power failure had occurred in some areas before others, but they were supposed to be proof against that sort of malfunction. It would have to go on the list of unexplained things. Gregor decided that the most productive thing that he could to at that point was to inspect the inside of the ship for damage and see if that held answers.

  Three hours later, he was hanging in the same spot in the cold sleep bay, and he knew little more than he had before the inspection. Everything was still and quiet with no mechanical damage. The parts of the ship nearest the hull seemed colder to him, but he had no way to measure that with any accuracy. The ship seemed to be completely dead except for the cold sleep chamber which gave a comforting illusion of normalcy with its lights and soft mechanical sounds. He mentally wrote a list, wishing for once that he had some paper and a pen. He would normally have used his PDA for this and he was feeling its lack keenly. He could:

  a. Activate the beacon and hope for rescue.

  b. Run power to the comms array and send a mayday.

  c. Wake one or more of the crew and see if they had any better ideas or could help.

  d. Try to restart the
reactor.

  All of these had problems with it. Activating the beacon was doing it by the book, specifically section eight of the flight guide. His instructors at college had drilled the emergency procedures into the class, and that section had always come up in pop quizzes so he had studied it often. The problem was that it was highly doubtful that anyone would receive the signal, and they would not know the position and vector of the ship without at least three separate readings. This far out, that would require more luck than Gregor felt that he had any reason to expect. He could trigger it and then use one of the cold sleep capsules to prolong the time that he could wait for rescue, but he didn’t like the idea. The comms array could punch out a directed signal and would generally give them a much better chance of being heard, but with the ship tumbling, it could not be aimed even if Gregor had any idea where to point it. Stopping the tumble would take more power than the battery could possibly supply. Waking one of the crew would need more power and use up the air faster. Ivo would be potentially useful as he had cross-trained in engineering (being an enviromentals specialist as well as purser), but none of the jobs that needed to be done would require a second person. Also, if they were going to die out here, Gregor saw no reason why anyone else should have to be awake and aware during the process. That left only one real option. Gregor would have to try to get the reactor back online. He was tired, but he could make a start on the preparations and check them after some sleep. He shrugged on a jacket and headed to engineering.

  Gregor woke when his hand drifted into his face. He was floating with his head pointing roughly towards one corner of the room and the wall with his knees tucked in. He felt cold despite his jacket. He reached out clumsily with one arm and anchored himself to an equipment support that allowed him to turn right side up again. There was no true up or down at the moment, but the room was designed to be used in a particular orientation, and it was easier to use it that way. He rubbed a bit more life into his arms and legs and checked over the work that he had done before falling asleep. He felt like he had slept for about four hours, so that made it around fourteen hours since they lost power by his reckoning. He would not have expected it to be so cold already. The fusion reactor had been disconnected from as much electrical load as possible with the output going straight back into the ignition and field systems. If he could get it to fire at all, then it should be able to sustain itself and the other systems could be brought back online one at a time. The problem was that the current required to start the system was significantly more than the chemical battery could possibly manage. He had thought about ways around this, but all the good solutions needed equipment that he didn’t have or couldn’t power. He had come up with a jury-rigged design last night and sketched the design on the wall with a lipstick that he had found in Fumi’s cabin. He looked at it again and concluded that it was lousy hack work and no-one in their right mind would consider it worth a try. It was the best idea that he had though. He got to work; it would take most of a day.

  He was tired again when he was done, but he wasn’t in a position to take a rest. He had swallowed a couple of pills from the emergency kit to keep him active. He would have to pay back the sleep if he survived the next few hours, but that seemed a fair price. The last stage of preparations had been the one that he was least happy about. He had charged all the portable batteries he could and taken the charged batteries from the suits and the rovers and wired them into a parallel array. That had required some tinkering without power, but it had not been that challenging. The difficulty was that he would definitely need the chemical battery that was maintaining the cold sleep capsules and that meant that the crew would be relying on what charge the cold sleep pods had managed to soak out of the main battery. That was only supposed to support the capsule while it was being moved between connections and had a minimal capacity, but there was nothing that Gregor could do about that. He wired the big battery in place. It was already down to thirty percent power so it could not have sustained the crew for much longer in any case. In theory, the batteries would provide enough current until they got too hot and the resistance increased. However, he needed to run them at a minimum of six times more than their rated capacity and worse than twice that for the rover batteries. They would reach a high temperature quickly, and the resistance would shoot up in under a second. He couldn’t work the numbers in his head, but he was pretty sure that they would explode quite quickly, maybe after eight to ten seconds. He had put on one of the space suits (without power) and had several fire extinguishers ready. He couldn’t think of a reason to delay further and made the last connection. Nothing happened, and Gregor started checking the connections between the various sized batteries. He was on the fourth battery along when he made a link by accident, and it became clear that his estimate of how long the cells would survive had been optimistic.

  The batteries from the rover and the suits blistered and smoked almost at once, and they started to burn with a sharp orange flame. The confined space began to fill with choking smoke. Gregor fumbled for the fire extinguisher. He squeezed the trigger before bracing himself and slammed headfirst into the ceiling. Blood droplets sprayed in front of him and mixed with the black smoke, but he sprayed the extinguisher until it was empty. The air in the room was choking, and Gregor kicked open the door and dived for the opening, blood coating his face as he pushed away. Without life support recirculating the air, the smoke stayed in the room and the only way that he could think to shift it was to fan the door back and forth. It would foul the air in the rest of the ship, but that couldn’t be helped.

  At last, the air was merely unpleasant and unhealthy rather than actively unbreathable. Gregor wiped the powder from the extinguisher off the reactor instrument panel and saw something beautiful. There was a green light on beside the still partially-covered screen. The reactor was online. Gregor hung in the air, lungs and eyes burning from the fumes and with droplets of blood leaving his scalp when he moved his head quickly. He had never felt so lousy and so good at the same time. He shoved himself over to the power distribution board and connected the cold sleep room to the reactor output. It held, the light not even flickering. He reconnected the life support and heard the fans whir into action, pulling the smoke towards the vents. That would have to do for now.

  Gregor headed off to find a first aid kit. His head was killing him.

  Chapter 3

  Lori became aware that her left ass cheek was freezing while the rest of her was pleasantly warm. She tried to think about that, her thoughts heavy and slow and somehow profound. The one on the right was cosy, but the left one wasn’t. Maybe it had got wet somehow. She thought for a moment but she was pretty sure it hadn’t been that kind of a night. She should do something about it, but the rest of her was so warm and heavy and delicious. Maybe she would just have a few minutes more and then get up and shower. That sounded like a good idea. She snuggled down a little more, not entirely comfortable but so sleepy. She felt the blanket being moved aside and cold fingers being pushed against her neck gently.

  “Get off, I am awake, five minutes,” is what she meant to say. It came out more like “Groff, m’way, fivmints”. She wondered why she was so damn tired. Maybe she had pulled a double shift or something. A voice spoke nonsense to her. She replayed it in her head. Not Spanish. He was speaking Anglic with a strong accent. She switched to Anglic. “Whu?”

  Gregor repeated the words more carefully. “You need to wake up. Come on, I have coffee.”

  What the hell was Gregor doing in her room? She opened her eyes and stared up at the light fixtures. The light was bright but looked a little reddish. That meant that she was in medbay. That was the right place, but she was in the wrong position. Why were the lights so goddamn big? She worked here and shouldn’t be laying down on the job. She blinked and realised that the surface that she was lying on was too hard to be the bed in medbay. She looked to the side with her eyes and saw that she was in a cold sleep capsule that had been moved on top of th
e diagnostic bed. She looked down, her head still heavy, and saw that she had a warming blanket tucked around her. She guessed the Gregor had missed a spot while tucking her in, but he had not bad done a bad job considering. She wriggled against the cover, reintroducing movement to a body that had been still for too long. She cleared her throat and said, “Coffee?” the word less blurred.

  “In a minute, wait,” said Gregor, and he leaned over her, shining a pen torch in her eyes. She didn’t flinch. Her people came from TP, Terra Promitida, and she had grown up with a blue-white star. She found everywhere else to be dimly lit.

  “What is your name?” asked Gregor.

  “I am fine. Give me coffee,” she replied.

  “Name,” said Gregor flatly.

  Lori smiled despite herself. She would have insisted as well, but she was the medic. He was just the pilot. Taking care to enunciate, she said: “My name is Loreta Maria Hernadez, and I am nine years old.”