The hatch cycled open. “Pilot, what the hell happened?” demanded Schyler.
“I don’t know!” Her eye strayed toward the distant red star and she wanted to pound the boards in frustration. Instead, she snatched her pen out of her pocket. Working with both hands she called up the flight program and the execution records. She displayed them side-by-side on the screen and ran her gaze down the patterns. Times, bearings, everything matched exactly. According to the records, everything had gone right.
“Intercom to Watch.” Al Shei’s strained voice rang across the bridge. “We’re going to need a report down here, soon.”
“We’re working on it,” replied Schyler in a flat voice.
“Intercom to Engine and Houston.” Yerusha blanked the records off the board. “I need diagnostics on the engine execution and the timing routines between eleven-twenty and thirteen-twenty.”
“They’re yours,” answered Lipinski. There was closely guarded anger in his voice.
“Transferring.” Al Shei sounded even less pleased than Lipinski.
Yerusha couldn’t blame her. The red star sat square in the middle of the port screen, rebuffing all attempts at denial. Either something had gone wrong with the ship’s systems, or Jemina Yerusha of Free Home Titania who had programmed this jump had committed a capital error.
She felt light-headed. The straps pressed against her chest. Gravity was leaving them. She tried not to let it distract her. The data from Al Shei and Lipinski wrote itself across her memory boards. She pulled up her station data and scanned the stats as fast as she could.
Her heart began to beat heavy and slow.
“Pilot?” Schyler’s voice cut across the bridge. “What’ve you got?”
Yerusha shook herself. “It’s the clocks.” She looked up to see his entire face gathered into his frown. “The internal clocks have been reset so we mistimed the jump. Here.” She wrote the transfer command and shot a copy of her display across to Schyler’s station. “At least a dozen of the internal timers have been reset. Even if we had checked back with The Gate, we wouldn’t have known about it.” Yerusha wasn’t sure why she added that. Maybe to make herself believe it. “It’s all internal.”
The blood drained from Schyler’s face. “What the hell happened to the diagnostics?”
“I don’t know.” Yerusha clenched her fingers around her pen to keep it from floating away. “I don’t know.”
Schyler swallowed a couple of times before he found his voice. “All right, Pilot, you get to work and find out where in all the heavens we are. I’m going to report to Al Shei, and then the crew.” His eyes were hard and focused on her. “We need an answer soon, Pilot.”
She didn’t even bother to reply, she just turned her gaze back down towards her boards and screens.
All right, all right, Yerusha tried to organize her thoughts. Now I know what happened. Now I’ve just got to figure out where it’s left us. She turned her attention to the view screens with their scattering of white stars. To her naked eye, they all looked the same. But they had names and numbers and fixed positions in the sky and each carried its unique spectrum. Spectrum analysis took time, but, some of those stars would be pulsars with their own signatures and their own listing in her database. Distance from pulsars could be easily measured because of the regularity of their signals. If she could find more than one, she could greatly shorten the search by starting a process of triangulation that would eventually narrow down their location to within a few thousand clicks. It would be close enough.
Holding her pen tightly in her aching fingers, Yerusha began to write up a search program for the cameras. “All right, Del. Let’s find out how far it is to home.”
“… she’s working as fast as she can, but she can’t give me an estimate on how long it’ll take to track down a set of pulsars we can use as position markers.” Even through the intercom, Al Shei could hear Schyler’s deep breath. “Do you want me to get Lipinski going on the clocks, or finding the bank lines?”
Al Shei took her own deep breath and felt her chest press against the free-fall straps that held her in her chair. She forced her hands to uncurl from the fists she had clenched them into. The familiar walls of Main Engineering seemed to be leaning in on her, waiting to hear what she was going to do about this one. Her ship had been taken from her, again. It was being turned against her and her people, again.
“Find the bank lines. We may need to send out a distress signal.” She didn’t say what Schyler already knew. They had enough fuel and reaction mass for one more jump, and it had to be a short one, or the life support systems would start eating into the fuel they needed for the accumulators to get back into normal space. If there was no place they could reach, they would have to send out a distress call. The chances of anyone being willing to answer a distress signal without claiming the Pasadena as salvage were very, very small. There was no equivalent of a navy or a coast guard for Settled Space, never mind the middle of nowhere. They might, however, get lucky. They might not be too far from help. There might still be something they could do.
“Get the third shift into action, Watch. Get everybody operational and see that the section heads are briefed. You’ll have to brief my people as well. I’ve got Ianiai and Javerri down in the engines now, checking for additional problems. They’ll have to work with Lipinski’s people to get those clocks in order.” She tried to sound brisk, but she had very little strength for it. The part of her that was not fighting down panic was seething with rage. They were lost. Lost and low on their primary resources. If Yerusha took too long finding out where they were, if they were too far from a settlement… there would be nothing to do but get as close to home as they could, and then admit they were stranded. The Pasadena could then be claimed as salvage by whoever came out and got them, even if they were still living to greet them. It was an ancient law from the days when ships just sailed on the ocean, and everybody liked it, so it got honored across Settled Space.
Maybe the Pasadena could get a little farther on a deuterium-tritium reaction, but the fast neutrinos the reaction produced would pulverize the engine ceramics. It would also expose the crew to levels of radiation that the Sundars’ sick bay had no way of coping with.
There could be only one cause for this. Only one person who could make an answer.
“Intercom to Al Shei.” It was Lipinski. “What’s the status on…”
“I’m about to find out,” she told him. “Intercom to Dobbs.”
There was no answer.
“Intercom to Dobbs,” she repeated, but there was still no answer.
Al Shei undid her straps and pushed herself off from her station. She twisted in mid-air and kicked off the chair’s back, pushing herself toward the hatch. She grabbed the hand-hold next to the threshold to hold herself in place so the reader could register her and cycle back the hatch.
In the drop shaft, Al Shei took a quick sighting up its length to make sure she was the only person there. She swam over to the cargo lift and balanced on the rail, pulling herself down until she crouched there like some strange bird.
Gathering all her strength, she jumped.
The force of her movement shot her straight up to the ship’s main section before she even slowed down. She grabbed the stairway railing as she passed, using it to pull herself up to the berthing deck.
She pushed herself through the hatch as it opened and kicked off the threshold to send herself coasting through the corridor. She narrowly avoided a head-on collision with Odel who was bouncing off the curving walls trying to get back to the hatch. Their shoulders grazed against each other, sending them drifting toward opposite walls. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were full of silent fears. Al Shei made herself look away, concentrating on keeping herself going in the right direction.