Misjump Read online

  Gregor pinged the beacon and it responded that it was ready. He sent the order to start broadcasting. Immediately, the comms array began reporting a distress beacon being picked up. At least he could be sure that the comms array was working. He muted the alarm within the cockpit. He stood up and reached back to the door, dogging it closed. It was a pressure door. It shouldn’t be needed, but he was going to take every precaution that he could. He started the air flow on his suit and closed the helmet when he saw that the light was green. So far, so good. He fumbled the lead from the small drawer built into the console and plugged the jack lead into the body of his suit. The mic in his suit would override the one on the desk. He pressed the ship-wide comms channel again. “Three minutes to jump on my mark … Mark! Standby for jump.” They didn’t normally bother with more than a five- and one-minute warning. He sat and watched the timer tick down. At seventeen fifty-eight and four seconds, he opened the channel to engineering. “Ivo, report.”

  “Greens across the board except for AI. Power at ninety-nine point nine seven and holding. That is okay, yes?” replied Ivo.

  “Da, is good,” replied Gregor. Anything over ninety-nine point nine four was within specification, and the sensors tended to self-calibrate low in his experience. “Keeping channel open.” Ivo did not reply, but the background sounds of engineering were clear in the suit. He called out the minute mark and Ivo confirmed they were still green. At thirty seconds, Gregor dimmed the lights across the ship. It was not necessary with modern power systems, but it was a tradition and acted as a final reminder to all crew that they were about to jump. He started the count, aware that his breathing was a little quicker than it should be. He tried to calm down and keep the cadence. The ship would jump on schedule unless he stopped it. His finger hovered above the abort button.

  “To be ready on abort,yes?” said Gregor, breaking the count before resuming.

  “I am! Was that an abort order?” asked Ivo, his voice loud.

  Gregor broke the count again. “Negative! We are go! Repeat, we are go! Four, three, two, one, jump—”

  There is no known physiological reason why the human body should be able to feel a jump, but it can. Nothing moves, no temperature changes occur, but there is a something and the body notices. The ship hammered its way into Tau space and ceased existing in what most people considered to be the universe. The view screen blanked to a featureless grey and the cockpit and engineering screens reconfigured themselves for warp mode.

  Ivo called out, “Systems report jump entry nominal. Systems appear nominal to the eye as well. Can you confirm?”

  Gregor sighed into his helmet mic. “Confirm, engineering. Entry is nominal and we are underway. Good job.” Gregor decided that he had earned a drink and it would be the good vodka today. Sometimes life was too short for the cheap stuff. He opened his visor and let the crew know that the jump seemed good. He was going to be glad to hit dirtside.

  Chapter 5

  Lori knocked on the door of Gregor’s cabin and waited. She knew that he would still be awake. Sure enough, she heard him call “Da, come!” She opened the door and walked in. He was on the bed, a glass in his hand with the bottle on the bedside. She walked over to the chair beside his bed. The room seemed dimly lit compared to her cabin, but that was hardly unusual.

  “As your doctor, I have a problem with you drinking all that vodka,” she told him. Gregor raised an eyebrow but didn’t answer. “Specifically, I have a problem with you drinking it alone. It is very bad for you but don’t worry. I brought my own glass.” She had also brought a small flask of pure spirit in case she had been wrong, but she hadn’t been. The crew had all learned to rub along with each other to a greater or lesser extent. She liked Gregor. He didn’t pretend to be or want to be what he wasn’t. She slipped the shot glass out of the pocket of her jumpsuit and handed it to him for filling.

  “To good piloting and to luck,” she toasted, and they both tossed back their drinks. Lori didn’t much care for raw spirits, but she knew that he did and she would put up with it. Sometimes being the ship’s doctor was about more than patching up wounds. After a decent pause, she looked him square in the eye. “So, how are you doing, tovarish?”

  He chuckled at the obsolete term. “Well, solnyshko, tired. Worried too. Relieved that we made the jump. Also, slightly drunk.”

  “That all seems normal enough to me. You would be crazy if you were not all of those things. I am too. Well, all but one.” Lori held her glass out for a refill. Gregor refilled it without complaint. “Do you think that we will make it to Neuholme?” she asked. She knew that Gregor would be honest with her. That was how he showed respect.

  “Da, should be fine. Transition was smoother than most. Well, no gravity well so space flat as the batteries were. We got into Tau space and as long as power holds, we will fall out when we get there.” He paused to think for a moment. “Probably still get there even if it fails but we would be dead, of course.” He took a pull of his drink. “How is Fumi really?”

  Lori looked into her glass, at the way the oily liquor coated the sides. “Not so good. She probably needs intensive therapy to repair cells that partially thawed and refroze. We can’t do that here, but some worlds have it. Neuholme probably doesn’t, being so far from the core, but we might get lucky. If we don’t, then I will keep her cold and we will keep looking. You know what they say. You are not dead until you are warm and dead.”

  Gregor nodded. “I did my best. I have been over it, replayed it in head, you understand. I couldn’t have done anything differently.” He poured another drink for them both.

  Lori nodded. “You could have and it would have been worse. You did everything right. We would all have been dead if you hadn’t. The others may not feel it, but it is true. Thank you.” She looked down at her hands.

  Gregor grunted. “Nichevo… no problem, I mean. You would have done the same.”

  Lori nodded. “I would. But you did. You are a good man, Gregor.”

  Gregor smiled crookedly. “And you are a reprobate and a scoundrel. Why else would you be on ship of fools?”

  Lori laughed although the exchange was an old one for them. “Who else would look after you lot if I wasn’t here? I don’t think that this is part of San Cristóbal’s patch.” She looked up at him, tilting her head. “Would you like some company tonight?” They had been lovers in the past, but it had been too intense on so small a ship.

  “Am dead tired tonight. I need a shower and sleep. You don’t have to …” Gregor trailed off at her expression.

  Lori didn’t break eye contact, but there was nothing hostile in her gaze. “Cuddling doesn’t need you to be awake, Gregor. I need the company and I think that you do too.”

  Gregor nodded. It had been a very long few days.

  #

  Gregor woke before the alarm and opened his eyes. The cabin, like every other room in the ship, had a set of dim lights set into the floor showing the way to the door. They were not enough to keep a person awake but allowed the passengers (when there were any) and crew to see well enough once their eyes adjusted. The back of Lori’s head was in his face, her blue-black skin smooth and hairless. He knew that some men found that unattractive but he had served on a mixed crew and everyone there had a buzz cut or shaved bald in case of sudden loss of gravity and for a better fit into environment suits. He liked Lori just fine and he thought that they might have worked as a couple if the ship had allowed them space to be a couple. He carefully worked his arm out from under Lori without waking her and slipped out of his bunk. He always liked to sleep on the side nearest the door in case he needed to get to the cockpit in a hurry. He used the fresher in Fumi’s cabin next door to avoid waking Lori and came back with an insulated jug of coffee. The entire crew knew what Lori was like without coffee. He left it on the side for when she woke up.

  Twenty minutes later, he was in the cockpit with a small cargo container full of faulty components. When he and Ivo had been getting ship’s system
s back online, they had not tried to diagnose faults in detail. If a component was obviously damaged or did not pass self-test, it got swapped out if there was a spare on board. They didn’t and couldn’t carry replacements for all of the ship’s systems since that would require almost as much space as the ship and not much less mass, but they had replacements for things essential to maintaining life support and as much of a backup jump system as was practical. All of the faulty components had been tossed into the container for later analysis and this was the first opportunity that Gregor had to look at them. During a Tau space jump, there was nothing for a pilot to do. If the AI had been operational, there would have been even less. He looked at the pile of components and took a deep sniff. There was a definite smell of charred circuitry, some of which had come from his desperate attempt to restart the fusion generator. He adjusted the life support to cycle the air faster. It would use up the filters quicker but he had spares and would change them out when needed. He reached for the first of the broken bits and tried to remember where it was from. It looked like a logic board. He typed the board number into the maintenance app on the console and started reading the datasheet.

  Several hours later, Gregor straightened up, his hands in the small of his back, wincing. He had taken a considerable battering lately. The components had fallen into three basic categories: fried power distribution systems that were scrap now, logic boards that might be serviceable again after they had been reflashed, and the other one. That last category concerned him. It was technically a power distribution component, but a very specialised one. It split the power between the matrices that punched the ship into Tau space. It took a lot of energy to enter Tau but none to keep you there.

  After the jump started, the main power draw was to the shielding that kept normal space inside the ship and Tau space outside it, but initiating the jump required a huge surge. The ship effectively coasted through Tau space until the pressure of the surrounding dimensions pushed it back into the rational universe. Gregor only had a hazy understanding of how that worked and had once asked his trainer at flight school for details. The answer that he had received was long, complicated, and full of unsubstantiated theory. In the end, it didn’t matter. You did things a certain way and they worked. The component in question, referred to only by a long part number, would only be used during a jump and could handle a lot of power during the induction spike. It would have taken a lot to melt it, but the critical components on this assembly weren’t melted. They had vaporised. That meant that the jump drive must have fired, but they couldn’t have successfully shifted into jump space or they would still be there. Still, he now knew where half the fuel had gone. It wasn’t so clear why the damage had been so limited.

  Lori did not join Gregor that night and neither of them mentioned it, but he was grateful that he had not had to spend the night alone. The Camel-class ship slowly slipped into its normal routine of a jump except for the absence of Fumi. People slowly adjusted their sleep cycles to share the same waking hours, and chores about the ship were done on a rota when they didn’t need specific skills. In a way, life aboard a ship was a lot like being in the military: there were long periods of boredom and, if you were unlucky, occasional moments of terror. The crew felt that they had used up their share of the latter for a considerable time. Gregor watched the ship’s systems for anything out of the ordinary, but apart from the usual issues with the heads and the coffee maker, everything seemed to be fine. Emergence from Tau space was normally handled by the AI, but it remained offline despite Meilin’s efforts, in part because she was reluctant to restart systems while in the middle of a jump. She could do more back in Neuholme. Gregor settled in for a long shift waiting for the ship to re-enter normal space. He watched the monitors and fidgeted, at once nervous and bored.

  Emergence was unremarkable in every way when it occurred at forty-three minutes early. The screen flashed from grey to a starfield gently turning. Gregor corrected the spin and started taking sightings of stars for the navigation system. After five fixes, it was reporting a ninety-eight percent probability that they were on the outskirts of the Neuholme system, and a sixth confirmed it. He took a deep breath and checked the tables for the location of Neuholme. While it was visible, it was only a star-like point at this distance. The process was ordinarily automatic on a trader like this, but navy ships always did a manual check to confirm. It was only as he was entering the plotted course that he realised that he had not been hailed by th.e system defence boats that normally hung around the jump point. He checked the comms panel; he had shut down the comms after releasing the beacon, but he had remembered to re-enable it. Gregor rechecked the channel and it was correct for hailing. The protocol was standard across systems. Initial contact would be made on channel sixteen and then control (or in this case, the system navy) would specify a new channel for the conversation. It was possible that they had not noticed the Sarafina entering the system, so he sent out a greeting.

  “Sarafina to control, CQ. Repeat, Sarafina to control, CQ. We are free trader and we are entering system for repairs. Looking for permission to proceed. Control, CQ, over.”

  There was no response. Gregor repeated the call without any reply. He moved to channel two, which would be the beacon, a simple high-powered signal that consisted of a series of tones that would identify the system and allow triangulation in the event of a navigation failure. All he heard was the soft hiss of white noise. He wondered if they could have missed a radio fault when they were checking the systems before the jump. The beacon had been so close that a massive loss in sensitivity would still have given a good signal. A beacon like that was intentionally massively loud. He opened a channel to the engineering section.

  “Ivo? You hear me, da?” Gregor asked.

  “Loud and clear. Everything okay? The re-entry looked fine from here,” said Ivo.

  “Da, yes, smooth transition. I am A number one pilot, yes? I need you to check something. Grab vacsuit and try calling on channel four. We may have radio trouble and want to check,” said Gregor.

  The signal came in under a minute later. “Suit two to Sarafina, acknowledge please!” Ivo’s voice was clear. The suit radios were not especially powerful, and if the ship were picking one up perfectly, the planetary beacon and system defence boats should be obvious. Gregor acked the call and thought for a few minutes. As a trade ship, the Sarafina didn’t have an impressive array of sensors, but it did have external cameras that could operate in infrared. If there were anything hot in nearby space, it should be obvious as long as it was fairly close. He cycled through the cameras with the filter applied and came up with nothing, but that wasn’t proof that they were alone.

  The hull of a ship that was not using its drive would not be especially hot and system defence boats carried good insulation. Gregor reached for the overhead panel and turned all the external lights off and then on, repeating the process until he was sure that was that anyone watching would have seen. He then waited twenty minutes, but there was no change. It looked like there were no other ships close by. He considered calling the crew together to let them know that something was very much not right with the situation but decided against it. He was sure that they would have a lot of questions that didn’t have any answers at the moment. If anything was happening here, it was not around the jump point, so he engaged the in-system drive to push them on towards Neuholme. He watched the screens for a while and then went to get a coffee. It was going to be a very long day. He passed the time checking star sightings against the database. They all matched.

  Chapter 6

  “You should have told us as soon as you knew that there was a problem,” insisted Jax, his voice loud in the small canteen.

  Gregor made what he hoped was a placating gesture. “And tell you what? I needed to know what was happening before I could tell you, yes? And problems we have had for over a week already.”

  Meilin asked, “And do you know what is happening?”

  Gregor rubbed
the back of his neck, still sore from his injuries. “No,” he admitted. “We are in Neuholme system, no mistake. Database all matches. Fixed stars, spectrum of star, all that stuff. Is Neuholme that we are at. Question is, where the hell is everyone else at? You have ideas, happy to hear them.” His accent always became stronger when he was stressed.

  Lori’s voice was calmer. “Can you tell us what you have seen, please, Gregor? I think that would help us to understand what may have happened.”

  Gregor thought for a second before answering. “No system defence boats at jump point. No beacon from planet. No response to light signals. No radio traffic, no other ships approaching or coming from jump point. What I have found is nothing where I should have found something. Have checked radio and is A-OK. Even if radio was bad, there should be SDBs and other ships.”

  Lori asked, “Is there any possibility that we misjumped to a different system?”

  Gregor took a pull at his coffee, buying himself a moment. “No,” he said after a pause. “Jump looked smooth to me and to Ivo. Systems confirm all nominal. Exit was normal. No misjump. Distant stars match expected locations. Spectrum of primary exact and location of planets in system good if our clocks were off by three hours and about twelve minutes, which makes sense. I don’t know where problem is, but problem is not with us. Everything else is wrong.”

  The rest of the crew thought about this for a few seconds. Meilin was the first to speak. “That doesn’t make any sense, Gregor.”

  Gregor threw up his hands in an imploring shrug. “I know. You have answers, am all ears.”

  Meilin shook her head. “No idea at all. Of course, I always thought that everyone else was kind of messed up. So, whatever the situation is, what are we going to do about it?”

  Gregor put down his arms. “Nothing that we can do until we get fuel. Best place to get air filters and deuterium is Neuholme. Best place to get answers is same place. We will be there in ten hours. We get some sleep before then, yes? Nothing else to be done.