Apollo was dying. And it came a little closer to death every forty-one seconds.
On the bridge, the pulse was impossible to miss. The lights were dim anyway — the ship was still on emergency power, and the darkness only made the regular drop in voltage all the more obvious. Most of the bridge crew had taken to using laptops and PDAs, rather than Apollo’s instruments. At least that way they could keep working for longer than forty-one seconds at a time.
Sharpe had two laptops taped to her control board, and was using them to constantly monitor the ship’s position. It was a complex job; juggling the navigation computer’s wildly inaccurate timings, trying to manually recalibrate them between each pulse, resetting the readings on the two laptops against each other and the board continuously. Ellis wondered how she’d managed to keep it up for so long.
Still, it was time for another status report. “Sharpe?”
“A moment, sir.” Her fingers rattled over the keys, hands dodging between laptop and control board and back. Ellis saw her pause, look up slightly, and as she did the lights dipped. The hum of the aircon stuttered, then picked up again as the lights brightened. She knew when it was going to happen on reflex now.
They all did. It was like a water-torture, a continuous drip that wore into the senses, hour after hour…
Ellis forced the thought away. “What have you got?”
“We’ve dropped another two hundred meters, drifted six hundred bearing zero niner four. There’s a current close by, sir. We’re going to need a correction burn within the next twenty minutes.”
“Okay, set it up.” The burn, a series of thruster bursts intended to keep the ship safely in the water layer and away from any convection cells or storm currents, would have to be carefully timed. When Apollo had first entered the jovian a burn had been allowed to carry on through one of the power drains, and the results had almost been disastrous. A thruster had jammed on during the pulse, and almost sent the ship spiraling into the hydrogen layer. “Meyers? Any visitors?”
“Nothing on passive, sir.” Meyers was using a PDA to keep her data calibrated, but even with that help she had only the most limited access to the ship’s sensor suite. Much of it had been damaged or completely misaligned by the breakout, and those segments that still functioned could barely be trusted. It was all Meyers and Sharpe could do to keep the ship in place, let alone track what was going on above the ammonia clouds.
Ellis nodded, then closed his eyes briefly as the power dipped. When it was over he got up. “Anyone got any good news?”
“Maybe, Colonel.” That was Copper, the tech who had opened his scalp on a panel when the ship had broken out. He’d been patched up by a medic a few hours ago, but the bandage taped to his head had spots of crimson soaking through, and he was pale in the dim light. Ellis hoped he’d be able to deliver his good news before he collapsed.
He crossed the bridge to join Copper and the rest of the tech team, behind the tactical map. “Okay, what have we got?”
“Compression, sir.” Copper had a laptop open on one of the systems boards, and he swung it around to show Ellis what was on the screen. “These are the recorded data files from all the onboard systems — security, sensor logs, pretty much everything.”
Ellis bent to look more closely at the screen. “All this stops at the breakout?”
“Yes sir. We got jolted so hard that we lost most of the recording systems, but auto-recalibration should have set them back up before there’d been any loss.” He reached up to touch the bandage lightly, and winced. “Of course, we know that —”
The lights dimmed. Ellis sighed, waiting until the pulse was over. That, of course, was the reason Apollo was still crippled after all this time. All the systems needed for tracking down the ship’s multiple faults had not only been hammered out of true by the violence of its return to realspace, but any attempt to recalibrate them had been rendered futile by the constant pulses. Every forty-one seconds, many of Apollo’s systems returned to their factory default settings.
So far, all attempts to track the source of the pulse down had failed for that precise reason. Gross physical searches could only achieve so much. The ship’s technicians needed accurate data.
As the lights came back up, Ellis straightened. “But you think there’s something you can do about this?”
“I think so. Mischa’s been working on a compression routine that will break the recorded data into small chunks, and I’ve been programming a worm to get the routine into the data core between pulses.”
“Hold on, a worm? Like a computer virus?”
Copper tilted his head. “Not exactly. They’re synonymous with malware now, sure, but the first worm was developed to find idle processors on a network and give them jobs to do. It was a legitimate software tool.”
Ellis frowned. He didn’t really like the idea of rogue autonomous programs being given free reign in Apollo’s data core, but this was the first piece of hopeful news he’d heard in a long time. “So can this work?”
“I think so. I’ve got a copy of the worm on this laptop, off-network, and I’ve assigned it Mischa’s compression routine as a payload. We’re about to try it on a non-essential file, something that we won’t miss if it hits a pulse and goes AWOL. We just need you to give the word.”
“It’s given. Let me know as soon as you have any results.”
Copper saluted briskly, and Ellis saw his pallor deepen suddenly as the sudden movement jarred his injured head. He reached out to steady the man as he swayed. “Maybe we’ll go easy on the protocol for a while, yeah?”
“That sounds like a good idea, sir.”
Ellis left the technician to his programs, and headed back towards the command throne. As he passed the tactical map he saw Meyers look up and beckon him over, and continued past the map to join her.
Meyers half-turned in her seat. “Colonel, I think we’ve got a problem.”
Her voice was low, little more than a whisper. Ellis leaned closer to her and responded in kind. “Another one?”
“Sorry. I know it’s the last thing you wanted to hear, but…” She lowered her voice still further. “I can’t be sure right now, not a hundred percent. But some of the sensor readings I’ve been able to get have shown something coming towards us. I’m picking up energy spikes like you’d not believe…”
“Wraith?”
She shook her head. “Sir, I think it’s a storm front.”
“How bad can that be?”
“Bad. The way the convection cells are starting to bunch up, the level of the spikes… We’re probably talking about a wavefront of twisters about as wide as Mars, traveling at several hundred kilometers an hour and causing lightning strikes a thousand times bigger than anything we get at home. If we get hit by that, it’ll shred us.”
“Dammit. Sharpe, are you hearing this?”
“Yes sir. And before you ask, no, we can’t get out of the way in time, not in the shape we’re in now. The pulse is getting worse — at this rate it’ll be impossible to make correction burns within eight hours, and with the main drives offline…”
“So unless we can fix the pulse before the storm hits, we’re done for.”
Sharpe nodded. “Our only alternative would be to go up and over it. We might just about be able to manage that, but we’d break cover. If any Wraith were looking in this direction…”
“Let’s keep that as Plan B for now.” He stepped back. Neither Meyers or Sharpe needed to be told to keep the information to themselves; they were quite aware of when such things should be spoken of in hushed tones and when they should be broadcast. Right now, there were only a few people that needed to know, and a lot more who would find the prospect of a ticking clock dangerously distracting.