Misjump Read online

  Gregor grunted. “The hell you are.”

  “Coffee. Not my fault if you use standard years. Help me out of the goddamn coffin too.” Gregor winced as he got an arm under her shoulders and she got her first decent look at him. He looked like crap. “You look like crap,” she said.

  “Da. Your bedside manner is back already, I see. Not so much weight on my left, if you please!” Together, they got her sat up with a mug of strong black coffee in her hands.

  She drank the coffee, savouring the bitterness while looking at Gregor. “So, laceration of the scalp, bruising of the cheek and shoulders, and your eyes look like you have been on a three-day drunk. Spill it. Bar fight?” Most of the work that she did on the crew was patching up injuries and making sure that their shots covered them for where they were going. She was mainly there for any passengers. Gregor twisted one of his arms towards her awkwardly. “And those look like burns. What the hell happened to you?”

  Gregor started to explain what had happened over the last couple of days, ending with his concerns over Fumi’s capsule. Lori wasn’t best pleased to learn that she had been left in a dead-cold sleep capsule but did see his point. It had worked out well for most of the crew and Fumi probably wasn’t that bad. She would check up on her as soon as the coffee had done its magic. It should be possible to query the capsule from the screen in medbay, but it was showing itself as being in standalone mode. It should have been linked to the ship’s AI, but clearly Gregor still had some work to do. Maybe she would check him out first. She would also explain correct blanket placement while she was about it. No-one likes waking up with a cold ass.

  #

  Gregor sat in the pilot’s chair and went through the computer logs again. The central AI system was offline, and he had no idea why. The engineering screens were partially available, but he wasn’t sure that the information that they were giving him was correct. He sighed and started again from the top. This really wasn’t his area, and he could use a hand from Meilin, but she was fairly low down the list for revival. It would be a good start if he could get the diagnostics back, but the system seemed to be in an inconsistent state after a sudden shutdown. What he could say with some certainty was that the power went just around the time that they would have been in position for the jump. Maybe some insulation broke down when the drive started to charge for the field projection, but that wouldn’t explain why every battery was flatter than a blini, and yet no wiring seemed to have got cooked. The power had to have gone somewhere and a power loss that sudden should have fried half of the cable looms. It just didn’t make any sense. He went back to trying to get the diagnostics to work out why they were not working. If he didn’t make some progress soon then he would leave it for Meilin and go back to working out why the fuel gauge was showing about half of what it should. He hoped it was a glitch. If it wasn’t then they might struggle to get back to anywhere that could give them a refill.

  Two days later, the crew sat around the table in the mess room. There was an empty seat where Fumi would have sat. Lori had judged that it was unsafe to try to revive Fumi anywhere other than a hospital and even then, there were risks. The best that could be done out here was to take her down to the lowest possible temperature and hope for the best. At least the others had been easy enough to revive with no mishaps. She had woken Jax last as he wasn’t needed here, but he deserved to know what was happening. He was sitting at the far end of the table and glowering at no-one in particular. He always claimed that cold sleep gave him a headache, but it was hard to tell the difference in his demeanour. His roles were security and cargo handling, and the first made him bored and the second made him irritated. Next was Ivo, a very different figure and person when compared to Jax. Rather than the heavy-worlder build of the security specialist, Ivo looked more like a clerk with a bald spot that had spread over the years and a somewhat pinched face. He was actually the steward/purser and a fair jack-leg mechanic when needed. He had been needed a great deal in the past forty-eight hours, and he looked worn.

  Gregor sat next to him, slumped in a chair, a bear of a man with coarse dark stubble and a buzz cut. If Ivo looked tired, Gregor looked finished. The seat next to him was empty and would be where Fumi sat if she were not in the freezer. Fumi was the admin and legal specialist and wouldn’t have been able to add much here in any case. The next seat along was also empty, but Meilin was coming from the galley area with a tray of coffee. She looked remarkably chipper all things considered. She had been working flat out pretty much since being revived. When Lori tasted the coffee that Meilin provided, she winced. Even by her standards, the coffee was powerful stuff and bitter. That would explain the wakefulness. What was it with IT specialists and coffee? They seemed to live on the stuff.

  Gregor cleared his throat. By long tradition, the pilot was in charge when they were underway, and even if they were becalmed at present, the tradition held. “So,” he said, his Anglic heavy with the accent of his home world, “is not all bad. We have a ship, and it has power and air and fuel. We are all alive. Da, we had a problem, but we are smart people. We figure it out.” He paused, looking around at the group. Most of them would know some of this already; Jax was only just awake and Lori had been busy with the revivals and checking Fumi’s condition. As he looked at her, she nodded very slightly, the light catching on her bald head. He carried on. “We don’t know how we got to here, but we have figured out where we are is about one point two light-years from Neuholme. We have more than enough fuel to get there or to Jindo, and that is all good.”

  There was a pause while no-one asked the questions that they were thinking. Jax was the one who spoke first, his accent flat and nasal. “Okay, so why are we sitting here rather than getting on with it? What are you not telling us?” A number of the people in the room breathed out, glad that the question had been asked but not pleased by the bluntness of the delivery.

  Gregor looked Jax square in the face. “We don’t know how we got here or what will happen if … when we try to get back. Maybe is getting interesting.”

  Meilin decided that some diplomacy might be a helpful addition to the conversation. “Greg, I think that Jax was still in cold sleep when we started looking into this. Perhaps you could explain whether we have misjumped or not?”

  Gregor was not aware that he had explained it as such, but it was possible that he had. The last couple of days had been incredibly busy. “We didn’t misjump, but we didn’t not misjump. We may have bounced.” From the expressions in the room, this explanation was not helping. “We can’t have entered Tau space because we were not in there for a week and it always takes about that long. We can’t have not entered because there isn’t another way to get a light-year from where we were in a couple of hours.”

  Ivo injected with “And there is no way to have travelled a light-year in couple of hours in Tau space either, come to that.”

  Jax paused for a moment. A lot of people assumed that he was stupid because of his looks and job, but he knew that he was intelligent, just not fast. “That sounds like BS. If we can’t get that distance in that time in normal space or in jump, we can’t have travelled that far. How sure are you that we are where you say?”

  Gregor grimaced. “Damn sure. We had some problems with the AI, but I have nav systems working pretty good. We know where we are.” He decided not to mention the margin of uncertainty. “We are where we are. We don’t know how we are here, which not so good. More bad, we don’t know what will happen if we jump again.”

  “In as much as we did jump last time,” chipped in Meilin. Gregor grimaced but nodded. It was a fair point.

  The people around the table fidgeted or looked down at their hands. Lori was the first to ask the question. “If this happens again, what can we do to get things back on track?”

  “Not much” replied Gregor. “I had to use what drive spares we had to get the jump drive back, and it is not done yet. Maybe one of the parts I replaced caused original fault and maybe not but no way to k
now. It might work. I don’t like betting on ‘might’. We don’t have a spare chemical battery. We were not supposed to need one and so we don’t have two.”

  “The hell with that,” Jax rumbled. “I want to live. How about we call for help?”

  Gregor paused. He knew the answer but wanted to be sure to present it as well as he could. “Couple of options, yes? We could call for help and wait. If they hear us, they come in a bit over four years. If they don’t, well, we would be waiting for a lot longer. At full thrust, we could be at edge of system in three years standard, more or less. We could do both, call for help and head back anyhow. Harder for them to find us but we set up beacon, all good.”

  Jax swore in a language that no-one else at the table spoke. “That is too damn long. The hell with that. The boredom would drive me nuts. I say we jump and hope for the best.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Lori. “You wouldn’t get bored. We would all be in cold sleep. I checked already, and we have enough life support for about four weeks before the air quality goes to hell. We would need to put everyone except Gregor down as soon as we can, and he would stay up to get us moving and make sure that we were in the groove. He would be able to survive for a couple of months on the same amount of air as the rest of us would need.”

  Gregor spoke again. “Of course, if power goes while we are cold sleep capsule then we all die. If there is any problem with ship, again, we all die. If ship works great and we get unlucky and hit a rock at near light speed, we don’t so much die as vaporise. None of these options is safe.” He let that sink in for a few moments. “Best option, I think, is to send distress signal now explaining that we plan to jump. If jump goes well, we get there before signal and tell them not to worry. If jump goes badly but we still have power, we climb into cold sleep and hope that they heard us. If jump goes badly and we have no power then it doesn’t make a difference what we do because we all die. Not so good. So, question is whether anyone has a better idea and if not, which risk you like best. Is not democracy but many heads better than one, ne tak? I make more coffee, you think.” He busied himself with the coffee, trying not to let anyone see how nervous he was. There were far too many unknowns for him to be happy with this.

  Meilin took the coffee although her back teeth were already swimming in the stuff. “If we detach the beacon and have it scream for help while we sit here in cold sleep, it will be less stress on the ship and we are not going to hit a rock.”

  Gregor nodded. That was an option, but it relied on someone hearing them. This far from a system, no-one was looking for a signal, and there were a lot of ships and radio noise around Neuholme. He didn’t think that it was likely that a distress call would be picked up. “If the failure related to load then yes, sure, good idea. If random, then waiting is dangerous and no guarantee that anyone would hear. A sensible idea but also not safe. Thank you though. Will consider it. Anyone else?”

  No-one had any other suggestions, so Gregor ended the meeting. He was so tired that he almost dismissed them. Old naval habits died hard. He would sleep on the problem and see if the answers were clearer in the morning. The others might not like his decision, but they would abide by it without an issue, he knew. He sent instructions to Meilin to work on getting the AI back online and to Ivo to get him to clean the filters. The whole ship still smelled of smoke.

  Gregor headed to his cabin but spent a long time staring at the ceiling, thinking the options through. After a while, his thoughts stopped making sense, and he drifted into strange dreams.

  Chapter 4

  Gregor wrote down his notes on paper with a pen. He had managed to locate some and he had decided to record how they got into this situation and how they were trying to get out of it in a form that would survive another loss of power. It would have been helpful, he thought, if they had any real idea of what had happened to kill every power source while leaving the crew alive. He took a bite of his breakfast burrito. He would brief the crew as soon as everyone was awake. Because they had all come out of cold sleep at different times, the crew’s body clocks were badly out of sync with the ship’s official time. Gregor felt a little uneasy about this since the ship’s official time was based on a guess that felt like nine in the morning and that only a single day had gone by before power was restored. Gregor decided to hold the meeting when he had seen everyone. It was not as if it would take people long to get there. You couldn’t get more than two minutes away from the rec room and still be on the ship.

  A few hours later, Gregor addressed the crew. “So, plan is a compromise. We leave the beacon with a recorded message saying what happened and written notes, in case things go not so good. We say that we are going to try jumping to Neuholme and that is what we do. If it goes bad, then it goes bad, and we do what we can. If all is good, we land at spaceport and have specialist look at every system we have. So, you have questions? Go ahead.”

  To Gregor’s surprise, Ivo was the first to speak. “To save anyone else asking, why haven’t we taken a look at every system that we have already? Isn’t that what we are supposed to have the skills for?”

  Gregor smiled. Ivo had done most of the checks with Gregor and already knew the answers. He accepted the softball question as an attempt to defuse Jax who could be a little volatile. “We have, of course, done all checks that can be done outside of dock and without a working AI. Ship’s AI is still offline and Meilin says it could be weeks. Apparently, it crashed hard. Also, some high power components impossible to test except under load and we have limited fuel. Is test or jump, not both. If they fail then we are screwed hard, but nothing that we can do about that. Same systems power deflector shields and if they failed while we were travelling at big fraction of speed of light, well, would be bad. This as safe as we will get and quickest.” Gregor nodded to Lori.

  “Fumi probably wouldn’t survive a year or more additional cold sleep. I am not saying that we should take unnecessary risks for her sake, but there is going to be a risk in whatever we do here. Overall, an attempt to jump seems to be the safest option to me,” said Lori.

  They sat without talking for a full half minute before Jax asked, “So if we hit something and the shield failed, you said it would be bad. How bad is bad? Are we talking about something that we can repair here? I don’t like the idea of jumping with an untested drive.”

  Gregor nodded. “Da, also not keen on that, but so many choices we don’t have. If we hit a gravel-sized rock at much less than light speed then maybe the ship would survive and just maybe it could be repaired if we had parts and survived, but we don’t have parts and probably wouldn’t survive. However, maybe shield would hold for that. If we hit a pebble at half light speed, the shield wouldn’t hold even if it were in top condition and we would be vapour. Only good point is that it would be quick.”

  Jax nodded without speaking. Gregor looked around at the crew. “We stay here and wait for help then maybe help comes, and maybe not. Fumi probably dies either way. If it doesn’t come then we all die, sooner if power goes, later if it holds up. I do not like odds. At least if we jump, we are making decision. Now, anyone have a problem with this?” He made eye contact with each of the crew in turn. Jax looked away but didn’t speak. Lori looked him straight in the eye and quirked a tiny smile. He let the room be silent for a moment longer before continuing. “Okay, settled then. We jump at eighteen hundred ship time, in sixty-nine minutes. Ivo, Meilin, let us do final check of everything we can check. Lori, can you be in sickbay for jump? Jax, cargo bay for jump, please. Let us go.”

  At 17:55, Gregor was in the pilot’s chair, the monitors displaying ship’s status and astronomical data that was probably accurate to within a tiny fraction of a percent, which would have been reassuring to anyone who wasn’t a pilot. When you were talking about stellar distances, a fraction of a percent could be several light seconds. He was still in his environment suit but had the helmet faceplate open. He had needed to manually launch the beacon since he had not reattached the explosive bo
lts, but that had gone smoothly, and he had the plate back in place, which would make re-entry a lot easier.

  He rechecked the course plan and it still seemed okay. He had to guess relative motion from the parallax movement of the stars, but he was confident that it was not large. He pressed the button for the ship-wide address. “Five minutes to jump. All systems nominal except AI.” Jumping without the AI wasn’t all that risky if you knew what you were doing; it was standard practice in the navy. He would have liked a second opinion on the course, but he had what he had. He pressed a different button that put him in contact with engineering. Compared to the big naval ships that Gregor had piloted, the name seemed overly grand. Ivo was crammed in between big lumps of machinery with minimal room. The air was hot and metallic despite the best efforts of life support. Jumps used a lot of power. Ivo didn’t hear the click as the speaker went live, but he was expecting the call. Gregor had gone over the protocol. Usually, the AI acted as a safeguard but Ivo was covering the duty, his speciality being closest.

  “Ivo, do you copy?” asked Gregor.

  “Yes, of course, I can hear you, it is what, thirty metres? All is nominal here, software reporting greens across the board. How are things your end?” Ivo was cross-trained but this would be his first actual jump in charge of engineering. He was glad that these smaller ships were designed to be as foolproof as possible.

  Gregor’s accent was always a little reduced when he was using the ship’s comms. “Actual jump time will be eighteen hundred, four seconds. Confirm you are good to go.”

  “Confirm, good to go,” replied Ivo. “Energy at ninety-nine point seven of nominal and climbing. Should be no problem. Repeat, good to go.”

  “Okay,” said Gregor. “Next check, two minutes to jump. Out.”