Episode 604: Search For Closure, Part Four
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Sunday, 15 Nov 2522
Orbiting Puck
Boston wanders into the engine room. He immediately gets to work on the Chief Engineer.
Boston: Since we’re really not using our maneuver thrusters very much except to change orbital attitude a little bit, what say that we take the primes off and muck about in there and see if we can clean off some of that gunk.
Rina: (sweetly) No thank you.
Boston: Oh, no, I think it’s a good idea.
Rina: No thank you.
Boston: Why don’t you start … (looks around) … by removing the primary manifold …
All reasonable requests, or so she’d promised to Nika. But … this? Is this reasonable? Rina counts silently to ten and Boston notices her pause.
Boston: Would you rather that Mr. Shea help me with this?
Rina: Permission to speak freely?
Boston: Did I not give you permission to speak? Speak as much as you like.
Rina: I confess some trepidation to taking our primaries offline, sir, because if we need to fire them up to rescue your family and our primaries are offline, we don’t want to put them in further danger while they wait. Do we?
Boston: Permission to speak freely, Ms. Sebastien. (a beat) You went to some kind of engineering school, right?
Rina: Yes.
Boston: They taught you some basic statistics, right? What do you think the odds are that the moment we arrive, eight to ten years after they got here, that there would be an emergency right now that requires us to make an emergency use of the primaries? It’s infinitesimal. We’re off charted space. There’s not likely to be any ships out here. we’ve been running sensors all day, we haven’t spotted a single energy trace. What better time is there? And, being in space we have the benefits of zero gravity in those sections. It’s perfectly safe. And it’s the recommended course.
Rina: You said it yourself, sir. We have not found any energy traces on the planet. There is no one for miles and miles around and if there was any trouble that required us to have help, there’s no one here to help us if we need to get our engines back online and we can’t.
Boston: Are you saying that you cannot disassemble and reassemble the primaries?
Rina: I—
Boston: I bet you could do it one hand tied behind your back. And Beggar’s back.
Rina: I’m saying I’d rather be safe than sorry, sir.
Boston: Hmm.
Rina: I am not the fancy engineer like you.
Boston: Why, you should take the rare opportunity to take advantage of where you have a fancy engineer like me with you.
Rina: Rare is the word, sir, yes.
Boston: Yes. Why, here I’m thinking of getting some plastic surgery.
Rina: Now would be good, sir. She’s right down the hall.
Boston: But! I’m interested in these engines. C’mon … Haven’t you ever been in there? Have you ever been in the primaries? It doesn’t look like it. They’ve got some corrosion.
He holds up a spanner. It’s her best left-handed spanner. If he puts so much as one nick on it …
Boston: You probably have a hammer and a wrench in here somewhere, right?
Rina’s torn. He’s right about the primaries. She’d been meaning to get to them but … Her paranoia battles with her curiosity. Curiosity wins. Besides, she consoles herself as she gets to work. She can always say I told you so to Boston if anything does go wrong.
She and Boston take off the primary manifold and from the way it sticks, Rina can tell it’s been on there for quite a while. For herself, she hasn’t been into a ship’s primaries since Summer’s Gift. Eyeballing Equinox’s primaries, she reckons that they could use some work. Boston’s muttering over her shoulder.
Boston: What we really need is some stiff wire brushes … (louder) Are you a risk-taker? Here’s what I’m thinking. We could poke around in there, swab it with some carburetor cleaner, but honestly I find in a case like this is to leave it open, leave the room, and somehow expose the engine room to the vacuum of space. Let the vacuum of space suck it out. Do you have a way to vent to space in here? I think this is a good idea, give us a chance to do this. The search is taking forever anyway.
Seriously? Rina just stares at him. On chertovski uma? She runs the problem through her head. In the normal course of maintenance, she’d need special tools to do the job. Tools she doesn’t have so the work has gone undone, but since the primaries were constantly sealed up, the amount of foreign matter that could get inside them was minimal save for what got inside before the primaries were sealed. And looking at what’s there, the simple suction of vacuum won’t be enough to dislodge the crap that needs to be removed. Someone would have to go in there with a brush and abrade it off. Which would be impossible while the engine room was vented to space, unless someone got into a suit and … Furthermore, there is no way to vent the engine room directly to space anyway. Which means they’d have to make an airtight path through the ship to the nearest venting hatch or airlock and that would make an unconscionable amount of the ship dangerous and inaccessible.
No. The man must be insane.
Rina: No. No, I don’t think that is a very good idea. Maybe later.
Boston: You seem to know what you’re talking about.
Rina grabs one of the wire brushes and start scrubbing. She puts a bit more force into it, supremely frustrated.
Boston: Your fuel mixture’s off, by the way.
Rina: My what?
Boston: Your fuel mixture’s off. I’ll work on that while you scrub. These ships always err too much on the side of caution. You can really enhance it quite a bit and get a way more—
Rina extricates herself from the innards of the primary and gets to her feet, worried he’ll touch something else and ruin it.
Rina: That’s very interesting. Can you show me?
Boston: Keep scrubbing.
Rina: What are you doing?
She manages to give him the brush and gets him to scrubbing. When he’s got his back turned, she tweaks the fuel mixture to her old settings. And so it goes. It’s obvious that Boston is accustomed to carrying out experimental but untried methods and Rina is tied in knots as she tries to keep him from tearing the ship apart. It’s like trying to nail jello to a tree—the man never stops moving from one task to another, leaving things undone as his wandering eye catches something else of interest.
Boston: So here’s the thing. You probably don’t want to leave your primaries open like that for very long because you’re going to get oxidation on them.
Rina: Well, yes, why don’t we get out of the primaries and—
Boston: Tell you what. I’ll work on this. You work on the primaries and that way we won’t be wasting time with all this—You probably have, like, body oils and stuff like that are getting down in there as well. They really shouldn’t be exposed to normal—this is why you suck this stuff out in space dock.
The man is stomping on her last freakin’ nerve. Rina closes up the primary access panel with a snap and pastes a smile on her face and motions him back to his current tweak-of-the-moment.
Rina: I’ll help you with this.
Boston: You’re not going to clean them at all after seeing all that?
Rina: Now that I know what’s there, I can get at it at my leisure. And my leisure is not now. So. Why don’t I help you with this? Since you’re the expert, I can learn from you. (feigning interest) So what are you doing?
Boston: I’m not sure you’re taking me seriously.
Rina: Oh, I’m taking you very seriously, sir.
Boston: All right. Let’s go to your video monitor.
Rina: Wait. Before you do that, are you sure you’re done doing what you were doing just now?
Boston: No, I haven’t even begun.
He goes over to one of the engineering monitors and before she can stop him, he takes the graphics offline and reduces the information to plain text.
Rina: Why did you do that?
Boston: I’m typing in some equations. H2 + H—
He’s tweaking with our hydro mix, typing in equations to get a greater energy level in our reactor.
Rina: Here’s the thing. Metallurgically speaking, can our equipment take that kind of heat?
Boston: I suppose so. It wasn’t tested for it. It should have …
Rina: Can I quote you on that? When we burn up and die?
Boston: Who, me?
Rina: Um-hm.
Boston: Oh, I see. You’re making a joke. Well, okay. Let’s cut it down. We don’t have to go this high.
Rina: Thank you.
Boston: Does that really—what is this ship made out of?
Rina: (accent evident) Is standard Durance class. Is not experimental ship.
Boston: Oh, well, it’s probably—it’s well within tolerances, I’m sure.
Rina: Hmmm. Can you quote me the tolerances?
Boston: I don’t know. Nobody told me the scale of the—
Rina: If you don’t know the tolerances, how do you know if you’re falling inside them?
Boston: They’re the standards of the industry.
Rina: And this ship is old and has been fixed with non-standard parts. Can you find every single one of these non-standard parts and then coordinate with the standard parts and then work out the stresses and the allowances and the strengths of the materials down to the last bolt?
Boston: So what you’re saying is that rather than—
Rina: Because you don’t want to have the ship blow up because we had one non-standard part installed by previous owner who I do not know!
Boston: Wouldn’t it be sad if this whole time you could be getting better fuel mileage and greater power—
Rina: I can live with the disappointment. Because I will live.
Boston: But what if you don’t live? Because you don’t have that extra burst of power?
Rina: Quite frankly sir, we’ve been doing very well so far.
Boston: I saw the damage. You can’t lie about that. I’ve seen bullet marks on this ship.
Rina: That damage was not from engine failure.
Boston: Right. Then you admit the engines couldn’t get you far away fast enough. If you could outrun the bullets, you wouldn’t need to worry about the bullets.
Right now, outrunning bullets isn’t Rina’s problem. Staying ahead of her temper is. She manages. But only just. The hours pass and we fly on. Soon after starting his shift on the sensors, Joshua starts tinkering with them. He decides to narrow the bandwidth. Five and a half hours later, he regrets that decision. Five and a half hours of nothing happening. Just as he’s about to give up he sees a blip on the scopes. It’s a sparkle. Maybe from metal. He’s not sure. He tries to readjust the gain and accidentally hits the reset button. Damn. Now he has to wait while the sensors reboot and reacquire the settings.
We break for dinner and we orbit on, scanning Puck through the night.
Monday, 16 Nov 2522
Joshua’s stayed all night on the sensors and morning dawns when he sees the blip again. Nika and Boston are on the bridge this time and he waves them over to the sensors.
Joshua: Right there!
Nika: What?
Joshua: It was there.
Nika: What was there?
Joshua: It was a flash. Like a brief—it was on the sensor. I know it was there.
Boston: Hm. Albedo shift. Yes.
Joshua: I know it was there. I know it was there but I can’t pick it up again. I’m not good enough on these sensors to pick it up again. I need Rina or somebody to come up here. Mr. Boston? Is Rina busy?
Boston: Oh, she’s not doing even doing any work on repairs. You could probably get her up here.
Nika adjusts our course and has us pass closer to the area where Joshua saw the blip. We see it again.
Joshua: See!
Nika: I just got up. And he says, ‘Right there! Look!’ I gotta get in the right spot. Let me get my coffee. I’ll be right back.
Joshua: (apologetically) It was a very long night. I’m very sorry.
Nika: How many times have we gone over that spot?
Joshua: 157 maybe? But I may be wrong. I track somewhere in the middle and I had to start over. It was a lot.
Nika: Why didn’t you—never mind. I don’t wanna know.
Joshua: Cuz the last time I woke you up, you yelled at me. So I made sure I waited til you woke up and you found it for me. (with feeling) You’re the best Captain ever.
Nika: Are you drunk again?
Joshua: No. I am a little tired. But you are the best Captain ever.
Nika: Um-hm.
Joshua: You totally rock. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
Nika: Not according to Arden.
Joshua: Arden thinks you’re an awesome Captain.
Nika: No he doesn’t.
Joshua: Yeah he does.
Nika: No he doesn’t.
Joshua: Okay, let’s put this way. See, Arden feels that all Captains, on a scale of one to five, are ones. But you are a two. Which means you are twice as good as everyone else.
Nika gets her coffee, wakes up, and takes us down to the surface of Puck. There’s no beacon, there isn’t much light. There’s a rather heavy cloud cover that seems impervious to signals. We’re going straight off the coordinates we can transpose from our sensors.
Yay.
As we descend, Joshua gets on the PA.
Joshua: Dear Crew, I don’t hear any alarms so I think everything’s good. But we’re preparing to land. So you may want to buckle yourselves in.
Arden: (over the intercom) Why are we landing?
Nika: (taking over PA) Ladies and Gentlemen of the crew and assorted others … We believe we may have located the landing site of at least one of the vessels. We’re going to take a closer look. The sensors are not acute enough to give us a good view.
We make it through atmo without mishap and find that there are seven Bumblebee class ships on the ground in a roughly circular formation. Rather like the way the pioneer Conestoga wagons of Old Earth would circle up when they made camp for the night. Two of the Bumblebees have been joined by a line of cargo containers running in a curving covered walkway suspended above the ground, connecting two of the hatches on the ships. All but one of the ships has the space between them spanned by rope bridges.
There are seven ships when we were expecting six. Huh. Perhaps one of them landed afterward? Some of them have taken damage but we won’t know how bad it is until we actually go out and investigate. There are no signals emanating from the ships, nothing to tell us if there are people still there. There is an obvious landing pad to one side, close to one of the Bumblebees, but Nika makes another pass over the ships.
Sensors tell us that the outside atmo is not too healthy to breathe, it being high in fluorine. We’ll have to wear vac suits if we’re going outside. Luckily, there are enough for everyone. Nika calls Boston to the bridge.
Nika: Mr. Boston. We’re on approach. And it appears there is a landing berm with a docking port but I’m not getting any readings off these vessels.
Boston: Can you get us close to them?
Nika: I can get us to the landing pad.
Boston: That sounds like a plan. Let’s do that.
Nika lands us nice as you please. The ship closest to the landing pad has an extendable arm reaching over the pad. It leads to the bridge and bow airlock of the Bumblebee. During flight it’s on the bow of the ship just before the heat shield, but as this would not benefit from the heat shield, it can move up and behind it for atmo burn. Then when landed, it moves into position as a main gantry into the ship. Nika lines up our starboard airlock to it. It’s not a hard seal—it’ll take someone in a vac suit 20 minutes to manually hard seal it.
All through our orbit and landing, Rina’s been keeping a close eye on the engines, anticipating trouble from the tweaks made en-route. She gets some unusual readings, things aren’t 100% normal. Things are running a little hotter than they should be. Having exposed the innards of the engines to air during one of the tweaks, it’s possible that the engines are now burning off the oxy still trapped inside. There’s a smoky smell from the carbon burning off too. Great. Still, nothing blows up or breaks down, and we land in one piece.
Looking out the bridge windows on approach, we see that there’s been some activity to make a habitable settlement with the Bumblebees. Each come equipped with four containers attached to the fuselage of the ship and some have been removed and reconfigured on the ground and elsewhere, as they were designed to be. Those ships look skinnier in profile than the others, whose containers have remained in place. The rope bridges are obviously there to make travel between ships easier, sparing people from negotiating the rocky ground on foot. Domed greenhouses are here and there. Some of the domes show greenery inside. There’s definitely some signs of habitation going on here. Will Boston’s family be among those inhabiting the settlement?
Still, you’d think our fly-overs and landing would have attracted some attention, but no one comes out to meet us. Joshua picks up the handset on the bridge:
Joshua: I’ve always wanted to do this. (flicks on the PA) Will all important crew please report for vac suit duty.
Back in the engine room, Rina looks over at Beglan.
Rina: You wanna go?
Beglan: I might want to take a look.
We all gather on the bridge and look out the windows.
Beglan: I did a bit of astronomy and part of that was the history of terraforming and such. So I am interested. The physics of it all, it’s a pretty interesting subject. (looks over the sensor readings) We’re reading pretty close to standard gravity. Gravity’s 1.02. We got slightly above sea level atmospheric pressure. So you won’t need to wear a vac suit. You’ll just need a rebreather.
We see that there is a creeping purple fog hugging the ground. It’s patchy and it rises and falls with some irregularity. It’s fluorine, a poison gas capable of burning without much oxygen. We’ll need something to protect us from it and since we don’t have rebreathers, we’ll have to suit up when we go outside.
Joshua: Why the rope bridges?
Beglan: Perhaps they’ve been living here for a while. Or perhaps not wanting to touch the ground for some reason?
Arden: Didn’t the original terraforming report mention an unstable crust? Maybe they used the bridges to get from ship to ship rather than walk across the ground.
Rina: Like that game, Don’t Touch The Floor.
Joshua: That, I understand.
We suit up. The suits are going to make us clumsier but the additional safety is a plus. We debate the best point of ingress and decide to stick close together going through the first two ships before splitting up. Getting over the first ship to the right of the landing pad we see that despite the fluorine hugging the ground there is plant life growing underfoot. There are some plants that naturally soak up fluorine. Perhaps the plant life here is an adaptation of those.
Joshua: Life’s totally awesome. Life’s always adapting.
Kiera: Okay, maybe I should stay on the ship.
Joshua: Are you really that worried about leaving the ship?
Kiera: Well, Beggar said he wanted to go.
Yes he did but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to stay. And in case anyone’s worried about having our ship stolen, we’re pretty certain that there aren’t any other habitations around. It’s highly unlikely there any other settlements nearby. We were barely able to pick up the signal from this place as it is. And that’s because the ships we’re going to investigate have no power. If Kiera’s really all that worried, we’ll just lock the car doors when we leave.
Beglan is struggling to put on his suit, being more book familiar with the process than from any practical experience and he catches that comment about locking the car doors as Nika’s helping him suit up. When she moves on to Boston next to help him don his suit, Beglan points out that maybe locking the doors wouldn’t be a good idea—our suit gloves will make our fingers clumsy keying in the unlock code and they would also prevent us from using the Smartship biometrics. What if we needed to get back aboard in a hurry?
Joshua: It was more an expression, but yes, thank you for pointing that out to us.
Beggar: Maybe I should stay aboard the ship.
Kiera: Beggar, I thought you wanted to go.
Beggar: I do. I just don’t want to be locked out.
Joshua: We don’t have to lock the doors. I’ll stay.
Nika: (annoyed) Let’s go.
Oh geez, people. We’ll all go. There’s not a single one of us who isn’t itching to go see what’s out there. Rina adjusts the docking clamps first, just to secure that avenue of ingress/egress from Equinox. We’ll be able to use our ship’s power to power the lights on the other ship if we do that. Rina does that voodoo she does so well, she secures the clamps, and the other ship powers up.
We open the other ship’s airlock and find a dead body waiting for us. It’s male and desiccated, rather like the corpses we saw on Miranda. There are no signs of wounds or burns or fractures.
Nika opens a channel to Rina’s suit. The engineer is still outside, double checking the clamps and the power hook-ups.
Nika: Rina?
Rina: Ma’am?
Nika: When you come in, can you bring a databook with you?
Rina: Yes, ma’am.
Rina makes a final adjustment and reboards Equinox and grabs her databook from her quarters. In a matter of minutes, she’s joined her crew and blinks at the body lying at their feet. She takes an air reading of the Bumblebee. It’s stale, but doable. If we opened the airlocks between our ship and it, the atmo aboard Equinox could fill and freshen the atmo on the Bumblebee without straining our ship’s supply. Assuming there aren’t any breaches in the Bumblebee. Or pathogens. Nika orders against opening the two ships to each other until we rule out nasty bugs and germs. For now, we’ll keep them separate and keep our suits on.
Arden and Kiera look the body over and judge that the man died of asphyxiation.
Arden: He couldn’t breathe.
Kiera: (eyeroll) Wow.
Nika: Arden.
Arden: What?
Nika: Never mind.
We’re near the bridge of the Bumblebee and Nika tells Rina to hook the databook up to the logs there, the better to download and read the last entries on it. Maybe we can find out what happened to the ships and the settlers. Because really, we’ve been here long enough that anyone living in this settlement would have come and greeted us by now. Or warned off. So … where is everybody. The settlement is like a ghost town.
Joshua takes readings via his suit sensors. The atmo is oxy/nitro, breathable but kinda low, like we’re at 8,000 feet. It’s produced via two systems—the plants in the biodomes and the algae tanks in sewage reclamation. Having gone without power for so long, however, neither system had created as much oxy as would make venting our suits wise. Best we keep them on.
Once on the bridge, Rina hands Nika a pen to type with. The suit gloves make it virtually impossible to type on the keyboards. Joshua gets permission to explore the ship and Nika orders him to take someone with him. Arden pairs up with Joshua and they leave the bridge.
Nika types with the pen and though the going is slow, she opens the logs and discovers that they are empty. The last computer operation was the command to wipe everything clean. As the crew fans out to explore the ship, Nika informs them of this latest news over the suit comms.
Arden: Why would someone do that?
Joshua: Why would we destroy the mule the last time we took it out?
Arden: That’s because someone was chasing us.
Joshua: Maybe somebody was chasing their computer.
Nika: Boys and girls, let’s not speculate until we get a chance to look around.
Joshua: Aww….
Rina offers to go to engineering to see if she can’t get the power back online. Boston seems nervous and Nika asks him:
Nika: Do you want to accompany Rina toward engineering or do you want to stay here?
Behind Boston, Rina’s making the classic hand-waving/mouth-moving silent NO! NO! NO! gesture. Nika deliberately ignores it.
Boston: Are we going to be searching the whole ship?
Nika: Yes, we’re going to be taking a walk through the whole ship to see what we can find. We may have to cross over to the other vessels to see what’s going on. They’ve erased every log I can get ahold of here. When Arden comes up, he might be able to recover some of it. But we should walk through and at least make sure we’re alone on this ship.
Moving through the ship, we can see it’s pretty much the standard colony ship. The four main rooms on the ship are fitted out with all the usual suspects, everything’s built-in and efficient. In addition to the standard compartments, there are four inflatable chambers made to detach and deploy off-ship as start-up shelters. There is also a geodesic dome near the top of the ship and there are some plants that have survived, though they aren’t looking too happy to have done it. Walking into the kitchen/galley, Joshua sees evidence of a fire having occurred here at one point. It was fairly significant, burning out the cabinetry and fixtures. It was extinguished but the compartment is pretty much ruined. The origin of the fire appears to have been near the stove. Not surprising, since a lot of kitchen fires are set off by stoves. This one spread pretty quickly. Looking it over, Rina surmises that the intensity and the area of the fire was helped along by fluorine from the outside mixing in with the fire on the inside, allowing it to burn hotter and faster and farther. It could burn without oxy and be difficult to extinguish. It was possibly set off by the burners on the stove itself and ignited the free-floating fluorine in the compartment’s atmo.
So how did the fluorine get inside the compartment? Looking around, they find an open gap in the bulkhead that vents right through to the outside. Hull breach.
Beglan: If the cloud that we saw earlier was at least partially fluorine gas, maybe it was a relatively isolated event. Perhaps small pockets of it float around and …
Rina: So … someone forgot to shut the front door and it just wandered on in?
Beglan: Probably when they had the door open it came in, yeah.
Great. Why can’t we find a deserted planet that doesn’t try to kill us when we visit?
We continue our search of the ship. At the airlock chamber beyond the engine room, at the very top of the ship, we find two more people. Like the body in the airlock, they are male, dead of asphyxiation, and have been for years. Unlike the body in the airlock, their remains are lying in an attitude like sleep, peacefully stretched out on the floor. The first body we’d found had been in a crumpled heap, making it hard to determine if the man had died in convulsions or had simply crumpled when his air gave out. Nika thinks and turns to Arden and Kiera.
Nika: Would a fire create enough of an oxygen suck to be able to do something like this to three people in a ship this size?
Arden: I …. suppose it’s possible but I don’t see any evidence to support it.
Kiera: That’s a lot of oxygen burned.
Nika: But the fire in the kitchen. If there’s a fluorine fire—
It would burn hotter and longer. Surely it would have burned off the oxy, right? Even though it wouldn’t need the oxy itself to burn, the oxy would still burn off once the temps from the fire got high enough.
Right?
Or maybe the oxy leaked out the hull breach, slowly enough that no one noticed? At this date and in the absence of any records, there is no telling. Not with what we know so far.
We push on, getting through three more ships via the rope bridges and the container tunnel. By the time we’ve reached the third ship, we find more bodies but not enough to account for the numbers of people that would have been required to fly the ships here, much less account for the passenger-settlers the ships were carrying. So … where is everyone? If they died, where are their remains? If they packed up and moved, where did they go? We still have two more ships linked by rope bridges to go, and a seventh ship to one side accessible only by crossing over on the ground on foot. Perhaps those ships hold the answers we’re looking for.
Before we can push on for the last three ships, we find Basil Boston’s family. We’re too late. They are quite dead.
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