Ion Trail 6: Hard Choices

This was bad. This was really, really bad. Everyone aboard and everyone at Proxima Tau were in grave danger. Even if the attacker had just the one ship I’d seen, they easily had the firepower to destroy Proxima Tau Station as well as inflicting immeasurable damage on the moon colony itself. Maybe they’d leave it alone if we never showed up, but if they’d gone to the trouble of getting a transponder onto my ship, they probably weren’t interested in allowing survivors to talk about the attack on Kestrel. Showing up to Proxima Tau would be a death sentence.

All of this went through my head while the two men stood there, watching me. I don’t know if their thoughts had progressed that far, but as I looked each of them in the eyes, I could see the worry written plain on their faces. Clinton was shorter than me, handsome and built like a wrestler, with callouses and scars visible on his face and large hands. Kyle was taller, slender and well-dressed, even after days in the same clothes, with clean hands and long fingers. They were a study in contrasts, but these two men had probably just saved the lives of everyone aboard. Again.

“Do you know what this means?” I asked them, quietly. Kyle shook his head, but Clinton paused for a moment before nodding slowly. He’d been out there scratching through the wreckage of ships and he’d probably seen things like this before. For Kyle’s benefit, I went ahead and spoke it out loud. “We’re probably dealing with a hyperspace transponder. I don’t know how they got it aboard my ship, but if I’m right, we’re all in very serious trouble.” Kyle’s eyes widened as the implications struck him, and he leaned back against the instrument panel to stabilize himself.

“What are we going to do?” he asked. Shit. Just like that, it was all back on my shoulders. I guess it always had been, but I’d been able to relax a little bit over the last day or two. Now I felt it settling back in, along with the telltale signs of a fresh migraine. Perfect.

“You two need to get me more information,” I said. “You have my permission to dig in as much as you need to. Find me that transponder, or whatever it is. We can’t do anything else until it’s been found and dealt with.” My words left room for doubt, but in my head, I knew that’s exactly what it was. It was the only thing that made sense, and to assume anything less was to risk everything. Until we could put our hands on it, we had to assume the worst. “Say nothing to anyone else. I’ll decide what, and when, to tell the others.” I turned to go, but looked back over my shoulder before I left. “Ping me the instant you find something.” I didn’t wait for an acknowledgement.

I walked down the corridor, my mind going down the list of things I’d need to do. I should tell Harper; if we weren’t going to make Proxima Tau, she’d have to do whatever she could with the resources we had on hand. Melva and June? They’d been doing a marvelous job of stretching the food, but no, that wasn’t a priority. There wasn’t much else we could do to tighten our belts further, anyway. I needed to focus on the more immediate threats.

There was nothing I could do for Proxima Tau at this point. A hyperspace transponder would allow them to calculate our destination within minutes after we’d initiated the jump. If they were inclined to attack the system, there was nothing we could do except die with them. We couldn’t even warn them. There was only one option: we would have to drop out of hyperspace, no matter the risks. Of course it’d have to wait until after we’d found and disabled the transponder, but even then it’d be incredibly dangerous.

Hyperspace wasn’t a wormhole like you sometimes read about in old theoretical treatises, but neither was it within normal space. A hyperspace envelope’s path corresponded to the space between the endpoints, but it wasn’t fully linear travel. While you could predict with a high degree of accuracy when you’d arrive at the other end, you couldn’t predict with any degree of accuracy where your normal space location was by how far along your jump you were; That is to say, if you drop out of hyperspace you will be somewhere along the path between the two points, but it was impossible to predict where.

Of course, that was only half the problem. Hyperspace didn’t concern itself with objects in normal space, so the pathway in normal space might take you straight through planets, stars or nebulae, but objects in hyperspace weren’t affected by these things. The only thing in normal space which seemed to affect hyperspace travel was a black hole, but even that was largely hypothetical; Hyperspace jumps which took them too close to black holes simply never arrived, and current science couldn’t explain why. This was the reason that most space travel stayed in thoroughly vetted star lanes. You could plot a course from anywhere to anywhere else, but the less traveled the space between, the more likely your calculations would fail to account for a black hole somewhere along your path.

So I could drop us out of hyperspace right into the center of a star or a planet. If I was marginally luckier, it would be an ion storm or a dense asteroid cluster; that would only probably kill us. The possibility of dropping into open, safe space was also fairly likely; space was a big place, after all, and most of it was empty, but there’d been too many reported instances of problems with dropping out for any pilot to be sanguine; it was a risk you simply didn’t take unless you absolutely had to. Sister Estrada might have her Jesus to pray to, but I didn’t believe that Someone was out there looking out for this tiny ship in all the vastness of the universe. Once we identified the transponder and disabled it, I’d just have to roll the dice, and hope that maybe someone was looking out for us, after all.

My thoughts carried me to the cockpit, where I dropped into my seat with a heavy sigh. There wasn’t much I could do right now, but I went ahead and initiated an automated self-diagnostic; Maybe it’d pick up something Clinton and Kyle missed and it gave me an excuse to sit there for a minute. I stared at the hyperdrive emergency disengage switch, safely tucked away under its plasteel cover. I’d only ever pulled it once, during a simulation. I’d found myself within the corona of a star, and all my training and frantic reactions hadn’t been enough to save my ship. They’d deactivated several of the safety features for the simulation, and when the trainees had exchanged stories about that scenario, we’d learned that several people had suffered minor but very real injuries, and that absolutely no one had ever survived the Drop-Out. The lesson had been simple and effective: Don’t flip the switch. Never flip the switch. No, not even then.

But I was going to flip the switch.

A part of me wanted to do it. I surprised myself when I realized the urge I was feeling; just do it, right now. I’d felt something similar then too, during training, and I realized I felt that same crazy grin twitching at my lips. It had been exciting, even as it ended in failure. Of all the disaster scenarios we’d gone through during training that one was the most memorable. There was a part of me that had wanted to do it again, and again, until I finally got it right. I felt my hand twitching as I stared at the switch.

Nope, I thought, standing up so quickly that I nearly bumped my head trying to duck out of the cockpit. Nope, can’t be doing this right now. I needed to talk to people, to prepare, to plan. All the same, I still felt that grin playing across my face as I walked away from the cockpit, rubbing my hands on my shipsuit compulsively. I went to the med bay and went in without knocking, expecting to see the medic in there with her patient, but it was quiet and the lights were down. I took a moment to let my eyes adjust, and confirm that Harper wasn’t there and that Shanna was sleeping restlessly. I quietly let myself back out and tried the medic’s cabin. No one answered so I reluctantly turned my steps toward the cargo bay.

“Why did they blow it up?” Craig, the black man who spent so much of his time in med bay with Ms. Brennan, was asking a question when I entered the cargo bay and I paused to listen to the answer.

“It was a grand gesture,” answered Carla, “a message to the people of Earth that they weren’t coming back. When they overloaded the reactor on their own orbital habitat and let the pieces rain fiery destruction down on their city below, the Transhuman League was cutting their ties with the rest of humanity by destroying the only place that was fully theirs.”

“So then they just, what, left?” this voice was a younger girl, late teens; I still hadn’t gotten her name. No one really seemed to know her, and she kept to herself. It was a surprise to see her here, let alone asking a question. When I saw that she wore an improvised sling, I realized she was the one who’d broken her arm during the escape.

“Yes,” confirmed the librarian. “They’d finished their colony ship, equipped with one of the first experimental hyperdrives, and they just left. Of course, they’d left the keys to reproduce the technology with us, along with the invitation to join them if humanity ever wanted to live up to their potential.”

“Did we? Did we ever meet up with them again?” the girl’s voice was taut, her body language was intense, almost as though she were on the verge of fleeing. For whatever reason, this question was important enough to her to bring her out of her solitude.

“Unfortunately, no,” Carla said sadly. “We did find the remnants of their colony ship about seventy years later, when our own diaspora had well and truly begun, shredded to pieces in the Oort cloud of what is now Gianotti’s Star. I’ve always lamented how much knowledge was lost with them.” She lapsed into a pensive silence and no questions followed, which seemed to signal the informal end of today’s presentation. I pushed myself away from where I’d been leaning in the doorway, and stepped forward into the cargo bay. No one did more than glance at me as they moved back to their individual spaces and for a moment I was at a loss for words. I hadn’t thought this through, instead just fleeing my strange self-destructive impulse in the cockpit and coming here unprepared. Then I saw Harper and decided I’d stick to my original plan; Talk to her first, then maybe June and Melva, and proceed from there. I walked over to where she was trying to convince the girl to let her take another look at her arm; when the girl saw me, she made a quick excuse and moved away so quickly that the medic stared after her, mouth still open to protest.

“Well, that was abrupt,” I said as I reached her, feeling vaguely offended by the girl’s hasty retreat. The medic turned toward me and smiled. “So, uh, Harper, can we talk?”

“Why don’t you call me Lorna?” the older woman asked me. “I’ve told you enough times that I doubt you’ve forgotten.” I blinked at her, but honestly didn’t have an answer. I just thought of her as ‘Harper’.

“Uh, I don’t know, I guess,” I mumbled. “But listen, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Can we go back to my cabin?” She lifted an eyebrow at that, but gestured for me to lead the way. I saw Diaz talking to the librarian, so I caught his eye, and gestured for him to follow. When we got to my cabin, I closed the door behind us, and took a deep breath. “We’ve got a problem, a big one. Bottom line up front, we’re going to have to drop out of hyperspace.” Harper quirked her brow again, and Diaz blinked at me.

“Didn’t you say that was a really bad idea?” she asked.

“Super bad idea,” I agreed. “Nonetheless, it’s the least bad of several bad options.” Another deep breath and I forced my eyes up to look at both of them in turn before I spoke again. “I have reason to believe that we’re being tracked, most likely by the black ship; I can’t imagine who else would bother.” That bit of news hit them hard, as I expected it to, but I used their responses as a gauge to guess how the rest of the passengers would react. Harper just stood silently, digesting it, but Diaz’s expression shifted from surprise through puzzlement to fear, and I watched him do his best to swallow it. My respect for him went up another notch. He’d lose his shirt at poker with the way he wore his emotions so openly, but he had guts.

“Who else knows?” Harper again, calm as ever, no hint to her emotions.

“Clinton and Kyle brought the anomaly to my attention, and they’re trying to locate and verify the problem, before we do anything else.”

“What are you going to tell everyone?” Diaz found his voice now, and used it, as he often did, to show his concern for others. “This is going to freak them out.” I didn’t answer, because I didn’t have an answer yet, and he filled the silence with a stream of words. “Just when everyone was beginning to think we’re safe, this isn’t going to go over well. And what about food? We’re running down fast as it is. Where are we going to resupply? I should tell June and Melva. Wait, maybe you should do that, you’re the captain after all. Oh, man, what about-?” he finally stopped and looked at Harper, who nodded wearily. Of course her thoughts had probably gone to her patient immediately.

“I’m probably going to need to do something I haven’t done since my six-month stint on Praxis, during the civil war.” She didn’t elaborate further, and it didn’t look like Diaz wanted to know the details any more than I did. The woman was a decade older than me, but in this moment she looked far older than her years. I didn’t envy her at all.

“Whatever we can do to assist,” I said, leaning forward to place my hand on her arm. “Just ask. Anything.” She smiled gratefully, but she also knew how little my offer really meant. I patted her arm awkwardly, and pulled my hand away. I looked back at Diaz, trying to remember the highlights of his rapid-fire stream of questions.

“I don’t know what I’m going to tell everyone, yet. The truth, eventually, but you’re right, this won’t go over well. I’d rather have a solid plan before I announce anything. Melva and June will be among the first to know, but I don’t really know how we can stretch the food to last any longer. I’ll be able to say more once we’re out of hyperspace, in regards to resupply; until then, I really don’t know.” I was saying ‘I don’t know’ a lot. I felt a sudden pang of petulance. I didn’t ask for any of this! I don’t want to be the one who has to make all the decisions! I didn’t say any of this of course, because there was no one else to do it for me. It was my ship.

With very little else to say, we broke up our little meeting. Harper said something about more research as she left, but I held Diaz back for a second after she’d gone, to tell him that I was going to lie down for a while, and not to disturb me for anything less than an emergency. He gave me a skeptical look, and I tried not to look guilty; it was coming up on meal time, and this wasn’t the first time I’d pulled this. After a minute, he reluctantly agreed and left me to my thoughts. I lay down on the bunk and laced my fingers behind my head, staring at the ceiling. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to sleep ever again, especially as the migraine really took hold. But it looked like my fatigue had decided to team up with the quiet and relative comfort. I didn’t even remember closing my eyes, but a sharp rapping woke me from a deep, dreamless sleep some time later.

“Captain?” called a voice from the other side that I recognized, after several seconds of disoriented blinking, as Kyle. I stumbled out of bed and pulled open the door.

“What is it?” I asked, expectantly.

“Well, we, uh, we found something. It’s… I think you need to come take a look.”