Ion Trail 8: The Drop Out

The previous day hadn’t ended after my private session with Sister Estrada, and by the time the chronometer had woken me in the morning any tension I’d lost was back, with reinforcements. We’d discovered that Barry Savage, a guy who’d done a lot of different odd jobs over his life, had some space-walking experience, so he’d been assigned to help Clinton scrub off the nanites. I’d helped them rig up some of the spare nitrogen bottles into something to help, and we’d made our plans. Kyle would be patched in to the commlink from the engine room, where he’d be monitoring their progress on removing the nanites.

Meanwhile I would be in the cockpit, trying to determine our location and trying to figure out where we were going from there. If we were lucky, I’d be able to get a positive ID on a nearby celestial body, otherwise I’d have to triangulate from whatever stations or colonies that were in range. With subspace transponders we could get near real-time location data from incredible distances, but it took longer that way, and increased the chance that they’d discover us before we could get away; it was impossible to say how long it would take to scrub all of the nanites off the hull of the ship.

“Alright, people,” I announced over the intercom. “Find a good place to be, because there’s no telling what we’ll be coming into once we drop out of hyperspace. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be nice, clear space, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.” I unkeyed the intercom for a moment, trying to think if there was anything else. After a moment, I keyed it up again. “Diaz, double check the cargo bay and make sure everything is secure. Give me an up when it’s done.” Then I leaned back in my seat, waiting.

I flexed my fingers and rolled my neck. Loose. Alert. I’d taken a full measure of coffee this morning, even though they usually served it very diluted; Coffee wasn’t going to be filling any bellies, so I didn’t even feel guilty. Anything that gave me the slightest edge was a plus. I checked over every display on the console, like I’d already done twice since I sat down. The tension of waiting was going to kill me, if Diaz didn’t get back to me soon. It’ll be someone else’s problem then, I thought with a morbid grin. I stared at the switch, feeling the itch, but knowing that it’d be satisfied soon enough. You’ve got this, I told myself. You’re alert, you’re ready. You’re competent, you were near the top of your-

“Captain,” Diaz’s voice on the intercom cut across my pep talk and made me jump. “Everything, and everyone, is secure. Medic Harper has also given me an up for the med bay.”

“Ack,” I replied briefly, feeling my nerves begin to buzz a little bit more. “Standby for Drop Out.” This was it. I checked that polarization was active for the forward viewscreen and opened the cover; Normally, I’d do this after we’d dropped out of hyperspace, but given the circumstances, I didn’t know if I’d have that much time; every second could count. Even with polarization on, the light from outside was nearly blinding. Squinting against the light, I reached up, flicked up the plasteel cover, and flipped the switch.

It took a second that seemed longer, given how keyed up I was, but then the blinding light seemed melt through in the center, slipping rapidly past the ship on either side as the darkness of real space reasserted itself. Immediately proximity sensors began screaming, and I gripped the yoke, straining through the afterimages to see what lay ahead. Then I realized the blank space in front of me, devoid of stars, was rapidly growing to fill my whole view. I jerked hard to starboard instinctively, where the barely visible obstacle seemed more tenuous. The dark blotch slid left, ever so slowly, as the proximity sensors blared ever louder, signaling impending collision until I could actually make out the crags and crannies of a massive asteroid barely a few kilometers ahead.

“Come on, come on!” I growled, holding the yoke hard to the right, watching as the rugged surface slid to the left, far too slowly. At what seemed like the last possible second, starry blackness dominated right side of the viewscreen, and the mass started to slip by on the port side of the ship. I couldn’t relax yet, though, as the enormous chunk of rock had a sufficient gravity to draw a dense debris field in around it, consisting of chunks of ice, smaller asteroids, and the wreckage of countless impacts filling much of the space between. I did my best to maneuver my ship through the field, hearing as well as feeling the thousands of small impacts on the deflection shield from all of the smaller bits I couldn’t hope to avoid. I could feel my lips peeling back, baring my teeth in concentration as I peered into the darkness, trying to discern the chunks large enough to do damage to my ship.

Almost as quickly as we’d come out into the drifting wake of the asteroid, it was gone, falling behind us as I put the colossus to our aft. Silence filled the cockpit as the proximity sensors finally quieted, and the loudest sound was my own breath hissing through my teeth. I quickly scanned forward again, alert to any other obstacles; as close as that had been, I couldn’t afford to let my guard down yet. Had I reacted even a few seconds later, we probably would have plowed into it no matter what I tried.

But there was nothing. I loosened the death grip I had on the yoke, frantically scanning the proximity display for anything nearby, before I finally realized that we were in the clear. The ship had come out in a densely packed belt, but ‘densely packed’ meant something very different in the vastness of space. We were safe, for now. I brought the ship slowly to a halt, using the asteroid behind us as a point of reference.

“We’re good,” I announced over the intercom, and heard a tinny cheer, picked up by the cargo bay’s intercom. “Anything to report?”

“We had some personal effects get tossed around in cargo bay.” Diaz’ tone seemed slightly embarrassed. “The majority of the cargo is still solid, though.”

“Good to hear it,” I answered. “Are Clinton and Barry ready to go?”

“Captain, we’re standing by,” said Clinton’s voice. “Just say when.”

“When,” I replied. “Get out there and get started. I’ll be monitoring on the commlink. Kyle?”

“Here, Captain.”

“Good. Keep me apprised of their progress, as well. I’m going to get started figuring out where we are.” With that, I turned off the intercom, and flipped on my commlink. I could hear Clinton and Barry exchanging comments as they cycled the port airlock, readying to go out, while Kyle instructed them as to where they’d need to start working. I left my mic unkeyed for the moment, letting their conversation be background as I swiveled to the navconsole.

My first order of business was figuring out where we were. Luckily, there was a great big greenish star off to the starboard side, around which our asteroid belt was wrapped. It always seemed that Drop Outs ended up in the vicinity of some star or other celestial body, often dangerously so. As big as space was, it seemed like an awfully big coincidence, but at the moment it was a convenient one; I probably wouldn’t need to triangulate from the nearest transponders, so long as this star had been surveyed.  I tapped a few keys on the navconsole, and it began running a search on the particulars of this star; spectra, surface temperature, radius, satellites, and so on. As it did, it also constructed a three-dimensional model of the star system. There wasn’t much here, just a few dwarf planets littering the single asteroid belt and not much else. Some enterprising mining operation could make some money out there, but without any sort of infrastructure or support it’d be a lonely station with only the mining robots to keep you company; I highly doubted there was anyone else in system.

It could take up to an hour to determine if this star was in the catalog, so I studied the telemetry and listened as Kyle, Clinton and Barry worked. Scrubbing alone was ineffective; the mechanical mites just clung to the surface of the ship and no amount of scraping or scrubbing seemed to dislodge them. The nitrogen was more effective; they could be removed then, but it made for a lot of tedious, repetitive work. We’d need to come up with a faster way to do this, if we ever had to deal with it again. After about thirty minutes of listening to them, and worrying that I’d been wasting time on looking for the star, a result pinged up.

This was an unnamed star, identified only by its survey number, but it was in the catalog. Position data came with it, and it didn’t take me long to figure out where we were. It turned out that we were only a short distance, relatively speaking, from Proxima Tau; over three-quarters of the real space distance had been covered in the four days in hyperspace. This was worrisome, because if they’d gone to Proxima Tau ahead of us, it wouldn’t take them long to reach here; A day, maybe less, unless they were a lot slower than I expected them to be, and it would be stupid to assume that.

“Kyle,” I said, keying my mic on the commlink. “What’s your best estimate on our timeline?”

“Um, I’m not sure,” he said. “They’ve got a solid process now, but they’ve barely started. We’re probably not going to be able to do this all in one go.”

“We’re probably going to need a few more canisters of nitrogen, too,” Clinton interjected.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Okay. The nitrogen we can do, but I’d like to see if we can, uh, maybe rotate some other folks through, to spell you guys. I’m worried that we’re going to have to jump again before you’re through, so I’d rather not stop working any longer than we have to.”

“Copy,” replied Clinton. “We’ll do our best, and here in a couple hours I’ll send Barry back, so I can train someone else, and we’ll figure out a rotation.”

“How’s nav coming?” asked Barry. He didn’t talk nearly as much as Clinton and Kyle, but he seemed a solid sort.

“Got our loc,” I answered. “Which is why I’m worried. We’re a lot closer to Proxima Tau than I was hoping we’d be. I’m going back to radio silence while I look at options.”

“Copy.”

I turned back to the navconsole and brought up a star map, with our location marked by a bright flashing green dot, and considered our options. Obviously Proxima Tau, close as it was, was out. I scanned the nearby star systems, looking for something occupied. After a moment, I remembered the filters, and a lot of stars flickered out of sight, leaving a relatively small number of occupied star systems remaining. Bekter’s Rim was a good option, as Alan Hamilton-Gonzalez had pointed out during our first meeting, but it was in the opposite direction, out past where Kestrel Station had been. It’d take over a week to get there, and we were so low on supplies that June no longer badgered me when I skipped meals. As I sat there staring at dots that represented whole stars and hundreds of thousands if not billions of lives, the door to the cockpit slid open, and I turned to see Diaz poke his head in.

“How’s it going, Captain?” He asked. I gestured at the star charts, feeling very disgruntled. He leaned in and studied it for a moment. “We the green dot?” I nodded in confirmation. “That other dot there’s much closer than the one you’re looking at,” he said. “Can’t we just go there?”

“That’s Proxima Tau,” I said dryly.

“Oh. Guess we can’t go there, huh?”

“No, probably not,” I sighed. “Bekter’s Rim is probably our best bet, but that’s over a week away.”

“Too bad we couldn’t just sneak past them at PT,” he said. “The small mining station could probably supply our needs, and it’s usually only got a skeleton crew.” I raised my eyebrow at his assessment. “My cousin’s a robo-jockey. He did a year at PT.”

“Huh.” I considered what he’d said, and looked back at the star charts. My eyes drifted from Bekter’s Rim, back to our present location, and over to Proxima Tau. “Hmm.” I murmured thoughtfully. I clicked over to Proxima Tau, loaded the most recent system report and watched as the screen switched over to a 3D display of the system, much like the one it’d shown for the star we now orbited, but with various satellites labeled. Proxima Tau orbited a moon around a gas giant, the sixth planet in the system. I projected the revolutions of the various planets and stations to present day, then walked it forward by three days.

“What’re you thinkin’?” Diaz asked, leaning in close enough that I could feel his body heat on my shoulder. I tried to ignore it as I thought about how to answer his question. Our arrival in-system would put us…

“Here,” I said, poking my finger at the map. “We’d be out of alignment for a direct shot to the mining station, but if we slingshot the fifth planet, we could probably avoid getting too close to Proxima Tau station.”

“Wait, wait. Are you thinking about actually going to PT?” he asked, his voice incredulous.

“You suggested it.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty, not smart,” he replied so defensively that I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Julio, you might actually be a genius.”

=+=

I ended up entering navdata for both Bekter’s Rim and Proxima Tau. Even as the Captain, this was a decision I didn’t think I should be making alone. By the time I’d done both sets of calculations and then double-checked them, Clinton and Barry were both back onboard, taking a break, while Craig and Alan were outside. The constant repetitive chatter over the commlink had almost become meaningless, and served mostly to exacerbate the headache I’d had by the time I was done. I let them know I was going off comms for a while, and promptly sat Diaz down in my spot, with a stern admonition to touch nothing, but to keep an ear on the commlink.

I poked my head first into the improvised med bay, hoping to talk to Harper. Instead I found her there with Carla, and the contents of the ship’s med kit spread out on my desk with a few knives from the galley as well. I waved off her questioning look; it seemed that she was getting ready for the surgery and what I wanted to ask her would wait. I went to the galley next, but only found June re-inventorying the food stocks. She smoothed the worried expression away when she saw me enter.

“Hey, wanted to run something past you. Well, all of you, you who’ve been helping out so much on this trip. Where’s Melva?” I thought of her mostly as ‘Sister Estrada’, but everyone called her Melva, so I just went with the flow.

“She’s in the cargo bay. Some of the others were nervous, so she went to do what she could to calm them.”

“Are you busy here, or can you step away? I’d like to talk to all of you at once.”

“Oh, it’s nothing that can’t wait. I’ll come with you.” With that, she closed the cabinets, remembering to latch them, and stepped around the counter. We went to the cargo bay to collect Sister Estrada, who departed with just a few murmured words of comfort, along with Clinton and went to the engine room where Kyle was still working with the space-walking team on the hull.

I looked around at everyone, these strangers whose lives had become so entwined with my own. Aside from Diaz and Harper, who were otherwise occupied, these were the ones I’d started to think of as “my crew.” They were the people I trusted most to help me make this decision that would affect everyone. I realized, as I readied myself to speak, that I trusted these people more than I think I’d ever trusted anyone in my life. The thought made me smile, but before anyone could ask why, I began my spiel.

“Okay,” I said, “So, I think I’ve got a plan.”