Chapter 10 – Riding with Murphy
Elapsed time on board (ETOB): LD Plus 22 days 12 hours. Elapsed time at origin (ETAO): LD Plus 26 days 2 hours
The sound that no-one wanted or expected to hear on this voyage had woken Sonja Meyer abruptly from her deep sleep. The insistent, piercing, pulsating, raucous tone that emanated from every loudspeaker on board the Bio-pod was by its very nature designed to irritate and force everyone to act. Despite having to disentangle herself from her sleeping sack, she was the first to make it to the communications console to kill the noise. From the corner of her eye she saw Jack and Celia enter as quickly as they could through the entry door from the growing decks, their faces flushed – obviously from the effort of hurrying to get here, she thought.
Sonja killed the noise of the emergency signal with the push of a button and scanned the main monitor for signs of any red flashing warnings on the schematic of the Bio-pod's hull integrity and life-support systems, which had automatically appeared as soon as the alarm had sounded.
"Not us." she said tersely, simultaneously opening the radio link to the mother ship. "Prometheus, come in."
There was a hiss of static on the speaker, unusual in itself. "Come in, Prometheus. What's happening?" she continued, waiting anxiously for a response.
A smaller monitor screen to her right flickered into life to reveal Mohammad's face. His gaze snapped back to the camera. "Sonja! Round up the others and get back here! We have an emergency – well, two, in fact."
"Mohammad!" said Sonja sharply. "Be specific. What is happening?"
Their companion's head snapped back to the camera. He took a deep breath to steady himself and said more calmly, "There's been some kind of feedback pulse from the naquadria generator when Jos and Vittorio ran the diagnostic self-test routine. Power output is fluctuating and hasn't yet steadied. But that may not be the worst of it. Sensors in the engine room detected that it gave out a minor alpha and gamma-ray burst during the latest cycle."
"But the shielding in the engine bay would contain that." Sonja retorted. "There should be no danger to..... Oh no! Nein! Tell me that......"
"Vittorio was in the bay when it happened." said Mohammad sombrely. "He's sealed himself in there to stop anyone trying to get in to rescue him. He's probably received a lethal dose, I'm afraid, and the residual levels of radiation in there are still too high for safe access."
"And Jos?" asked Sonja, aware of her companions' closeness behind her as they too strained to catch every word from the Prometheus.
"She's at the pilot's console, communicating with Vittorio to see if we can still get the engines working for the next jump." Mohammad explained, his voice steady now. "He's got maybe as much as a few hours left, maybe less, before he loses control of his motor functions completely and internal haemorrhaging becomes too severe. We can see him on the monitor and his hands are already beginning to shake slightly. Either way, as soon as we fire the engines he's dead anyway if he's still in that location. It's outside the life-support containment field."
The three of them sat for a moment in stunned silence, before Jack cut in. "Mohammad, has Jos said whether the engines are still likely to fire?"
"She says it's more likely than not, Jack." replied their friend. "But whether we have control of where we end up or what speed we'll be doing when we exit the next wormhole is less certain than it was before."
"OK, I got you." said Jack. "We'll start the firing sequence to kill the rotation around Prometheus. Celia will fly it at this end." He glanced at her and saw her nod of affirmation. "I guess you'll be doing the same at your end?" Again he saw a nod from the face on the monitor. "Then we'll suit up and make the transfer as soon as possible."
But Mohammad hadn't finished. "I said there were two emergencies." They looked back suddenly at his screen image. "The ultra-low-frequency radar scope is returning a faint trace of interstellar gas or particles starting at around one half to one billion kilometres ahead, we can't be more definite than that. Now the chances are that we'll never know it as we pass through as the density is incredibly low. But if we were operating normally, it's the kind of hazard that we would avoid, or at the very least minimise crew exposure by letting the nose cones take all the impacts. Unfortunately, it looks like you'll be making your EVA transit when we will have already crossed the threshold of the field."
"But still low risk, right?" asked Jack.
"Considering everything else that's happening right now, yes, it's relatively low risk." replied Mohammad.
"Yeah, well let's hope that Murphy isn't riding with us all today." sighed Jack as Mohammad signed off.
"Murphy?" asked Sonja, her eyebrows raised. Celia too looked puzzled.
"Yup. He of The Law." At their continued stares, he added "Expressed in a form that you scientists like, Murphy's Law states that 'Desirability is inversely proportional to probability'." Still no understanding was visible, so he added "If something can possibly go wrong, it will. Seriously though, let's be careful to do everything to get through this in one piece. We owe that much to Vittorio."
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Jocelyn Stevens had never before felt the weight of a leader's role more than she did right now: deeply moved and upset by Vittorio's impossible situation, yet needing to show calm, strong leadership to maximise their chances of making it through the next wormhole jump. For that is what she now believed: that they needed to calculate the probabilities of the outcomes of different actions and act only on those that would give them the best chance: there were no more certainties. Looking back at the monitor screen, she saw Vittorio checking the gauges in the engine room just as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening to him. It reminded her of past television images of houses and offices around the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island nuclear plants: seeming normality bathed in deadly, invisible radiation. Civilisation destroyed by the civilised, leaving no marks.
For all his annoying traits as a womaniser, Stevens now regarded Vittorio as a truly honourable man – no, a crewmate – demonstrating either amazing sang froid or a great acting ability, against the sure knowledge that he would not live for more than a few more hours. She touched a button on the console and the engine room camera zoomed in on him. Closer up, she couldn't miss his hand trembling slightly as he reached up to press a readout button, nor the pallor of his features and the redness around his eyes. She closed her own eyes momentarily, but blinked them open suddenly when she realised that Mohammad was standing close at hand. He said nothing as he too stared at the screen, but simply squeezed her shoulder gently, signifying his understanding and sadness.
Suddenly Vittorio's voice cut in on the speaker. "Dio mio! Jos! It's going on another temperature excursion! Cut the main bus circuit breaker and go to emergency power until I......."
Lights, fans, pumps and the constant background sounds that they no longer noticed all died together on the bridge before Mohammad could turn to the emergency switches. After a second or two the secondary lighting came on, dim and sparse in comparison with the brightness of before. It took him only another two seconds to kill the shrill alarm that had also started up. Jos reached under the console and unclipped the captain's backup communicator – a simple battery-powered two-way radio that could contact others of its kind around the ship in circumstances such as these.
"Vittorio!" she almost shouted into the instrument before collecting her wits. "Vittorio!" she continued in a calmer voice. "Come in, Vittorio. Talk to me, man. Report your status." She paused for what seemed like half a minute, but there was only the hiss of static.
Of course, the emergency radios on the Bio-pod had also picked up her call. "Jos, what's happening?" she heard Celia enquire.
"Main power's down. We're looking into it. Await my instructions." Jos replied curtly.
She looked round. "Mohammad, I'll help you suit up so that you can go to the engine room door and see if you can detect any sounds coming from inside. That hiss on the radio probably means Vittorio's communicator has been fucked by another radiation burst. If he's still alive, he may have had the chance to re-set the circuits for the main bus power supply. If he's not, well..... Just do it, OK?"
"Yes, of course." Mohammad murmured without hesitation and they loped out the room in the low gravity to the suit lockers. Working together, it took only seven minutes before he was ready with his helmet was under his arm. Jos told him to wait and left as fast as she could, heading for an equipment locker and returning only moments later to press a small Geiger counter into his gloved hand. She switched it on for him and they both listened intently to a slow series of clicking noises.
"Good! Rad levels here are acceptable. Get as near as you can to the engine room, but if this thing goes wild before then, don't be a hero, OK?" she urged him, and he nodded as he turned away. "Call me on your suit radio when you get there. I'm going to re-set the main power anyway if I don't hear from you within ten minutes."
Sitting in the captain's chair in the dim light, Jos could feel her heart pounding, and the real or imagined sound of blood pumping in her ears was as loud as her breathing when she was in a space suit. To break the tension before Mohammad's ten minutes were up, she thought to make contact with the other three crew members on the Bio-pod. "Celia?" she rasped into the radio.
A loud click announced the reply. "What's happening, Jos?"
"The reactor temperature spiked again." she replied. "Vittorio has shut himself in the engine room after the initial radiation burst and now he's probably taken a second dose. The first was due to be fatal within hours, and we don't know yet whether he's still alive and capable after this one. Main power tripped out again and it would be really great if he can re-set the circuit breakers a second time from inside the engine room. Mohammad's gone to the engine room outer door to see what he can find out."
"Understood." came the swift response. "Do you want us to head over there straight away?"
"Negative." replied Jos without hesitation. "If we can't get power on line, there's no point. If we can, we still need to stop the co-rotation before we steady up for the wormhole jump. So stay where you are and I'll let you know."
"Jos?" said Celia in a small voice. "If you can, tell Vittorio that we are all hoping and praying for him."
"Roger that." said Jos. "Jack, you there? Do you agree with all that?"
"You're on the button, Jos. Keep going." came his calm, steady response.
Just as suddenly as they had gone out, the main lights came back on, and Jos slumped forward in sheer relief as the pumps and fans started up again.
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Despite the practice of the previous times they had carried out the manoeuvre, it still took nearly three hours to stop the rotation of the two craft around each other. While Celia Chen concentrated on piloting the Bio- pod throughout this procedure, Sonja and Jack collected and packed all the data discs of the observations and experiments that they had carried out, placing them in containers by the air-lock for transport home.
With time on their hands while Celia was busy, Jack took a last look around the growing decks, picking the choicest fruits and vegetables to fill one small container, while Sonja began the preparations for shutting down the Bio-pod's miniature uranium-235 reactor – a reduced version of those found in nuclear submarines. They had watched it closely once the problems with the much more energetic naquadria reactor on Prometheus had started to demonstrate its fateful unreliability, but the lower-energy element had shown only steady behaviour. At higher speeds approaching that of light, it too would surely have gone critical, but now they would never know its limits.
The normal banter was absent as Vittorio's fate hung over them all. At one point, Sonja had asked for an update on his condition over the comms link to the mother ship. "Jos, Sonja. How's Vittorio doing?"
There was a long silence before she got a reply. "It's, er, not looking good." replied Jos, her voice breaking up slightly. "We can see him on the engine room camera. He hasn't moved for a while now and we can't raise him on the intercom any more. He started vomiting blood a while back. He got the generator re-booted a second time and it's been running steadily since. Mohammad reported a rise in radiation levels from just outside the engine room, but we're OK here on the bridge."
At last the two ships were steady, a state noticeable to all by return of zero-gravity. Jack and Celia suited each other up while Sonja went to switch off all the remaining live equipment and to power down the nuclear reactor, and helped her into her gear when she returned. Celia entered the air-lock, squeezing in beside the containers placed there already, and cycled the controls to exhaust the air within and open the outer lock where the mini-pod was docked. With the sound of her own breathing drowning out all else, she concentrated on transferring the containers to the locations where they clipped on to the outer hull of the mini-pod, finally opening its hatch and performing the slow zero-g somersault that was necessary for a space-suited figure to enter the small transfer craft and end up facing the right way to slide into the pilot's seat. She sealed the hatch again and pressurised the cabin, only raising her helmet visor when she was satisfied that everything was running normally.
"Time to go, guys." she announced, receiving brief affirmations from Sonja and Jack. She fired the thrusters briefly to move away a short distance from the air-lock, and came to a stop, turning the mini-pod at the same time so that she could see her companions emerge and lock onto the extended 'claws' at the ends of the now-outspread arms. She felt sad not only because of Vittorio's demise on the Prometheus, but also because this would be the last time she would pilot the small craft in deep space. She loved the way the mini-pod 'flew', so sensitive to her every touch on the controls, and had described the sensation of isolation in mid-flight of "the pleasance of drowning in eternal nothing." Her comrades knew just what she meant.
Presently the Bio-pod outer air-lock opened and Sonja and Jack floated soundlessly towards her, easily reaching and clipping themselves onto the claws, and then turning round so that they too could each make the most of the unrivalled vista during this final transfer in deep space. She slowly rotated the craft again, this time to follow the line of the tether that connected them to Prometheus, and gently accelerated away.
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Interstellar space is not empty. There are 'intervals' between the all- pervading atoms that dance around each other, whether these atoms are in a rarefied gas – like the twin atoms that comprise the tiniest molecules of hydrogen, the most abundant substance in the Universe – or in more massive close cohesion, like the mineral particles of dust, asteroids and comets. Not to mention the mysterious 'dark matter' that you need to believe in to understand how the Cosmos holds itself together. Larger intervals exist in rarefied gases, reducing to smaller intervals anywhere near to a star or a planet. The ability to travel at enormous speeds through the larger intervals whilst avoiding impacts depends on skill and luck, mostly the latter.
Although over two hours had passed since the ships had entered the beginnings of the region of interstellar gas indicated by radar, nothing different was visible to the astronauts. Space looked as empty as ever, as it should. But travelling at seventy percent of c, it took only a single particle on a collision course to strike something more solid than another gas field to produce an enormous energy exchange, with dire consequences for anything less resilient than atoms themselves.
The energy exchange induced by a single solid particle impacting the ice nose cone of the Bio-pod at a slight angle to the direction of travel instantly liquefied and vaporised the surface it struck. As water and steam flew off in a cone-shaped spray pattern, the absolute cold of interstellar space caused the molecules to solidify again almost immediately. Steam condensed into a fine mist, only fleetingly visible to the naked eye before the minute particles vanished from view again. The larger water droplets behaved differently, forming more massive crystals, still microscopic in size but having just enough momentum to act like bullets as they sped towards anything in their paths.
Jack thought afterwards that he might have noticed the glitter of the impact on the nose cone when it happened, but his immediate sensation was of an immense sharp pain in his left arm. He looked down in confusion and tried to grab at his left upper arm with his right, but this manoeuvre is impossible in an EVA suit. What he did notice however was the vapour trail of moist air escaping from both sides of his suit arm.
Before his vocal cords could react, he saw Sonja's helmeted head jerk back and another puff of vapour appear from the neck ring where her helmet was attached. She slammed back against the mini-pod's claw and his ears were filled with the sound of her scream as she flailed around.
Inside the pod, Celia too was taken by surprise as a loud, sharp sound startled her, and she watched in dumb amazement as crack lines radiated like a spider's web from a tiny impact crater in the forward view port's multilayer window, and an alarm in the cabin tripped, flooding her cabin with the same kind of warning sound that she had heard earlier on the Bio- pod. Without further hesitation she snapped her helmet visor shut, at the same time becoming aware that Sonja was screaming in the earpiece of her suit radio and Jack had just uttered the an expletive a few times over.
Jack's voice steadied and she heard his urgent "Get us back to the air- lock, now!". She immediately fired the thrusters and swivelled the craft to head back to their departure point, now some few hundred metres distant. She breathed deeply to stay calm, using all her skills to line up as quick an approach as possible, but not so fast as to cause further injury. She listened to Jack trying to calm Sonja but didn't interrupt, except to say "Hold on!" as she fired the thrusters to halt them right in front of the air-lock. They all ignored the frantic questions over the comms link from Prometheus, and both Jos and Mohammad realised after a brief moment that their crewmates would call back when they could.
Celia held the mini-pod steady with micro-bursts on the thrusters to compensate for Jack moving around to free himself and then over to repeat the procedure for Sonja, who was by now moaning and making jerky movements with her arms, as if trying to push her helmet more firmly onto her shoulders. Jack held her by the arms to stop her doing this and quickly jetted the pair of them of to the air-lock, pushing her inside before following her in and closing the door behind them. Celia noticed that the crack lines in the mini-pod window had stopped propagating, and fumbled for the emergency sealing kit kept in its usual place to her left. She pulled the large tab on the tape dispenser, and it came out easily as it had been designed to do when wearing suit gloves. She slapped a large piece of tape across the impact point and noticed with satisfaction that the vapour jet outside stopped. With any luck, the cracks were only present in one layer of the armoured multilayer glass, but she couldn't take chances and kept her helmet sealed.
Presently she heard Jack telling her to come back inside as well, and set about her own transfer back to the Bio-pod.
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Jos and Mohammad were so relieved to hear from their colleagues. "What happened?" she asked when Jack eventually called her.
"We're all still here. We believe we were struck by ice chips following an impact event on the nose cone." said Jack calmly. "The mini-pod screen is damaged and leaking slowly, and the pilot will have to stay sealed in her suit during transit. Meyer's helmet is damaged and unusable. She's OK, but shaken by losing a lot of pressure in her suit before we got back through the air-lock."
"What about you, Jack?" asked Jos.
"Feels like a hot needle passed right through my left arm." he replied. "The suit is holed but repairable. I lost some blood but it doesn't feel like any bones are broken. Nurse Chen has patched me up anyway."
"Can you get back here asap?" asked Stevens. "We think that the generator's going to spike again soon. We gotta move now or never,"
There was a silence before Jack spoke again. "Meyer and Chen will set out to return within a few minutes." he said in a low voice. "Meyer can have my helmet: it fits her suit neck ring and is good for the journey. Chen will pilot the craft."
"Jack?" queried Stevens, the beginnings of an awful suspicion forming.
"If you get time, you can come back for me." said Jack.
Stevens heard Celia's frantic cry of "No!" over the intercom, and then the sounds of a brief argument – no, a plea to stay with him, followed by his most commanding tone of voice before Jack returned to the microphone. "That's how it is. Now get moving, you two. Do this for Vittorio."
As she switched off the comms link, Jos closed her eyes at Mohammad's words from beside her seat on the bridge. "We've barely got time to wait for those two before we have to put the generator under load and make the jump." he practically whispered. She was dreading sending the last sub- space message to Earth before they tried for the wormhole.
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Sam exhaled with relief when Jos' voice penetrated the crackling background of the sub-space communicator. "What's happening, Prometheus? Are you OK?"
"Partly." came the reply. "We must jump immediately after this message exchange before the generator spikes again. We reckon that putting it under high load should stabilise it until we can get back to lower speeds."
"That agrees with our assessment." said Sam, on tenterhooks to learn more.
"We have casualties." said Jos, and the atmosphere in the room chilled for everyone there, especially Sam. "Vittorio is dead. He was in the engine room when the reactor went wild and received a fatal radiation dose. However he spent his last moments re-setting it so that we could carry on. Sonja has severe neck strain and is suffering from the effects of sudden pressure loss in her suit, but she will recover. Mohammad and Celia are OK."
"What about Jack?" Sam couldn't stop herself asking, her heart pounding.
There was a short silence. "He's trapped on the Bio-pod. He gave up his helmet so that Sonja could get back after they suffered impact damage. He plans to try to survive as long as possible but he won't be coming back with us. I'm sorry, Sam, but we have to go right now. If we don't make it back, there's not a one of us would have refused the chance of this trip. Tell our folks we love them. Stevens out."
Sam sat still, not hearing a word of the hubbub that had broken out in the crowd around her. What did they know about love anyway?
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Elapsed time on board (ETOB): LD Plus 22 days 12 hours. Elapsed time at origin (ETAO): LD Plus 26 days 2 hours
The sound that no-one wanted or expected to hear on this voyage had woken Sonja Meyer abruptly from her deep sleep. The insistent, piercing, pulsating, raucous tone that emanated from every loudspeaker on board the Bio-pod was by its very nature designed to irritate and force everyone to act. Despite having to disentangle herself from her sleeping sack, she was the first to make it to the communications console to kill the noise. From the corner of her eye she saw Jack and Celia enter as quickly as they could through the entry door from the growing decks, their faces flushed – obviously from the effort of hurrying to get here, she thought.
Sonja killed the noise of the emergency signal with the push of a button and scanned the main monitor for signs of any red flashing warnings on the schematic of the Bio-pod's hull integrity and life-support systems, which had automatically appeared as soon as the alarm had sounded.
"Not us." she said tersely, simultaneously opening the radio link to the mother ship. "Prometheus, come in."
There was a hiss of static on the speaker, unusual in itself. "Come in, Prometheus. What's happening?" she continued, waiting anxiously for a response.
A smaller monitor screen to her right flickered into life to reveal Mohammad's face. His gaze snapped back to the camera. "Sonja! Round up the others and get back here! We have an emergency – well, two, in fact."
"Mohammad!" said Sonja sharply. "Be specific. What is happening?"
Their companion's head snapped back to the camera. He took a deep breath to steady himself and said more calmly, "There's been some kind of feedback pulse from the naquadria generator when Jos and Vittorio ran the diagnostic self-test routine. Power output is fluctuating and hasn't yet steadied. But that may not be the worst of it. Sensors in the engine room detected that it gave out a minor alpha and gamma-ray burst during the latest cycle."
"But the shielding in the engine bay would contain that." Sonja retorted. "There should be no danger to..... Oh no! Nein! Tell me that......"
"Vittorio was in the bay when it happened." said Mohammad sombrely. "He's sealed himself in there to stop anyone trying to get in to rescue him. He's probably received a lethal dose, I'm afraid, and the residual levels of radiation in there are still too high for safe access."
"And Jos?" asked Sonja, aware of her companions' closeness behind her as they too strained to catch every word from the Prometheus.
"She's at the pilot's console, communicating with Vittorio to see if we can still get the engines working for the next jump." Mohammad explained, his voice steady now. "He's got maybe as much as a few hours left, maybe less, before he loses control of his motor functions completely and internal haemorrhaging becomes too severe. We can see him on the monitor and his hands are already beginning to shake slightly. Either way, as soon as we fire the engines he's dead anyway if he's still in that location. It's outside the life-support containment field."
The three of them sat for a moment in stunned silence, before Jack cut in. "Mohammad, has Jos said whether the engines are still likely to fire?"
"She says it's more likely than not, Jack." replied their friend. "But whether we have control of where we end up or what speed we'll be doing when we exit the next wormhole is less certain than it was before."
"OK, I got you." said Jack. "We'll start the firing sequence to kill the rotation around Prometheus. Celia will fly it at this end." He glanced at her and saw her nod of affirmation. "I guess you'll be doing the same at your end?" Again he saw a nod from the face on the monitor. "Then we'll suit up and make the transfer as soon as possible."
But Mohammad hadn't finished. "I said there were two emergencies." They looked back suddenly at his screen image. "The ultra-low-frequency radar scope is returning a faint trace of interstellar gas or particles starting at around one half to one billion kilometres ahead, we can't be more definite than that. Now the chances are that we'll never know it as we pass through as the density is incredibly low. But if we were operating normally, it's the kind of hazard that we would avoid, or at the very least minimise crew exposure by letting the nose cones take all the impacts. Unfortunately, it looks like you'll be making your EVA transit when we will have already crossed the threshold of the field."
"But still low risk, right?" asked Jack.
"Considering everything else that's happening right now, yes, it's relatively low risk." replied Mohammad.
"Yeah, well let's hope that Murphy isn't riding with us all today." sighed Jack as Mohammad signed off.
"Murphy?" asked Sonja, her eyebrows raised. Celia too looked puzzled.
"Yup. He of The Law." At their continued stares, he added "Expressed in a form that you scientists like, Murphy's Law states that 'Desirability is inversely proportional to probability'." Still no understanding was visible, so he added "If something can possibly go wrong, it will. Seriously though, let's be careful to do everything to get through this in one piece. We owe that much to Vittorio."
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Jocelyn Stevens had never before felt the weight of a leader's role more than she did right now: deeply moved and upset by Vittorio's impossible situation, yet needing to show calm, strong leadership to maximise their chances of making it through the next wormhole jump. For that is what she now believed: that they needed to calculate the probabilities of the outcomes of different actions and act only on those that would give them the best chance: there were no more certainties. Looking back at the monitor screen, she saw Vittorio checking the gauges in the engine room just as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening to him. It reminded her of past television images of houses and offices around the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island nuclear plants: seeming normality bathed in deadly, invisible radiation. Civilisation destroyed by the civilised, leaving no marks.
For all his annoying traits as a womaniser, Stevens now regarded Vittorio as a truly honourable man – no, a crewmate – demonstrating either amazing sang froid or a great acting ability, against the sure knowledge that he would not live for more than a few more hours. She touched a button on the console and the engine room camera zoomed in on him. Closer up, she couldn't miss his hand trembling slightly as he reached up to press a readout button, nor the pallor of his features and the redness around his eyes. She closed her own eyes momentarily, but blinked them open suddenly when she realised that Mohammad was standing close at hand. He said nothing as he too stared at the screen, but simply squeezed her shoulder gently, signifying his understanding and sadness.
Suddenly Vittorio's voice cut in on the speaker. "Dio mio! Jos! It's going on another temperature excursion! Cut the main bus circuit breaker and go to emergency power until I......."
Lights, fans, pumps and the constant background sounds that they no longer noticed all died together on the bridge before Mohammad could turn to the emergency switches. After a second or two the secondary lighting came on, dim and sparse in comparison with the brightness of before. It took him only another two seconds to kill the shrill alarm that had also started up. Jos reached under the console and unclipped the captain's backup communicator – a simple battery-powered two-way radio that could contact others of its kind around the ship in circumstances such as these.
"Vittorio!" she almost shouted into the instrument before collecting her wits. "Vittorio!" she continued in a calmer voice. "Come in, Vittorio. Talk to me, man. Report your status." She paused for what seemed like half a minute, but there was only the hiss of static.
Of course, the emergency radios on the Bio-pod had also picked up her call. "Jos, what's happening?" she heard Celia enquire.
"Main power's down. We're looking into it. Await my instructions." Jos replied curtly.
She looked round. "Mohammad, I'll help you suit up so that you can go to the engine room door and see if you can detect any sounds coming from inside. That hiss on the radio probably means Vittorio's communicator has been fucked by another radiation burst. If he's still alive, he may have had the chance to re-set the circuits for the main bus power supply. If he's not, well..... Just do it, OK?"
"Yes, of course." Mohammad murmured without hesitation and they loped out the room in the low gravity to the suit lockers. Working together, it took only seven minutes before he was ready with his helmet was under his arm. Jos told him to wait and left as fast as she could, heading for an equipment locker and returning only moments later to press a small Geiger counter into his gloved hand. She switched it on for him and they both listened intently to a slow series of clicking noises.
"Good! Rad levels here are acceptable. Get as near as you can to the engine room, but if this thing goes wild before then, don't be a hero, OK?" she urged him, and he nodded as he turned away. "Call me on your suit radio when you get there. I'm going to re-set the main power anyway if I don't hear from you within ten minutes."
Sitting in the captain's chair in the dim light, Jos could feel her heart pounding, and the real or imagined sound of blood pumping in her ears was as loud as her breathing when she was in a space suit. To break the tension before Mohammad's ten minutes were up, she thought to make contact with the other three crew members on the Bio-pod. "Celia?" she rasped into the radio.
A loud click announced the reply. "What's happening, Jos?"
"The reactor temperature spiked again." she replied. "Vittorio has shut himself in the engine room after the initial radiation burst and now he's probably taken a second dose. The first was due to be fatal within hours, and we don't know yet whether he's still alive and capable after this one. Main power tripped out again and it would be really great if he can re-set the circuit breakers a second time from inside the engine room. Mohammad's gone to the engine room outer door to see what he can find out."
"Understood." came the swift response. "Do you want us to head over there straight away?"
"Negative." replied Jos without hesitation. "If we can't get power on line, there's no point. If we can, we still need to stop the co-rotation before we steady up for the wormhole jump. So stay where you are and I'll let you know."
"Jos?" said Celia in a small voice. "If you can, tell Vittorio that we are all hoping and praying for him."
"Roger that." said Jos. "Jack, you there? Do you agree with all that?"
"You're on the button, Jos. Keep going." came his calm, steady response.
Just as suddenly as they had gone out, the main lights came back on, and Jos slumped forward in sheer relief as the pumps and fans started up again.
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Despite the practice of the previous times they had carried out the manoeuvre, it still took nearly three hours to stop the rotation of the two craft around each other. While Celia Chen concentrated on piloting the Bio- pod throughout this procedure, Sonja and Jack collected and packed all the data discs of the observations and experiments that they had carried out, placing them in containers by the air-lock for transport home.
With time on their hands while Celia was busy, Jack took a last look around the growing decks, picking the choicest fruits and vegetables to fill one small container, while Sonja began the preparations for shutting down the Bio-pod's miniature uranium-235 reactor – a reduced version of those found in nuclear submarines. They had watched it closely once the problems with the much more energetic naquadria reactor on Prometheus had started to demonstrate its fateful unreliability, but the lower-energy element had shown only steady behaviour. At higher speeds approaching that of light, it too would surely have gone critical, but now they would never know its limits.
The normal banter was absent as Vittorio's fate hung over them all. At one point, Sonja had asked for an update on his condition over the comms link to the mother ship. "Jos, Sonja. How's Vittorio doing?"
There was a long silence before she got a reply. "It's, er, not looking good." replied Jos, her voice breaking up slightly. "We can see him on the engine room camera. He hasn't moved for a while now and we can't raise him on the intercom any more. He started vomiting blood a while back. He got the generator re-booted a second time and it's been running steadily since. Mohammad reported a rise in radiation levels from just outside the engine room, but we're OK here on the bridge."
At last the two ships were steady, a state noticeable to all by return of zero-gravity. Jack and Celia suited each other up while Sonja went to switch off all the remaining live equipment and to power down the nuclear reactor, and helped her into her gear when she returned. Celia entered the air-lock, squeezing in beside the containers placed there already, and cycled the controls to exhaust the air within and open the outer lock where the mini-pod was docked. With the sound of her own breathing drowning out all else, she concentrated on transferring the containers to the locations where they clipped on to the outer hull of the mini-pod, finally opening its hatch and performing the slow zero-g somersault that was necessary for a space-suited figure to enter the small transfer craft and end up facing the right way to slide into the pilot's seat. She sealed the hatch again and pressurised the cabin, only raising her helmet visor when she was satisfied that everything was running normally.
"Time to go, guys." she announced, receiving brief affirmations from Sonja and Jack. She fired the thrusters briefly to move away a short distance from the air-lock, and came to a stop, turning the mini-pod at the same time so that she could see her companions emerge and lock onto the extended 'claws' at the ends of the now-outspread arms. She felt sad not only because of Vittorio's demise on the Prometheus, but also because this would be the last time she would pilot the small craft in deep space. She loved the way the mini-pod 'flew', so sensitive to her every touch on the controls, and had described the sensation of isolation in mid-flight of "the pleasance of drowning in eternal nothing." Her comrades knew just what she meant.
Presently the Bio-pod outer air-lock opened and Sonja and Jack floated soundlessly towards her, easily reaching and clipping themselves onto the claws, and then turning round so that they too could each make the most of the unrivalled vista during this final transfer in deep space. She slowly rotated the craft again, this time to follow the line of the tether that connected them to Prometheus, and gently accelerated away.
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Interstellar space is not empty. There are 'intervals' between the all- pervading atoms that dance around each other, whether these atoms are in a rarefied gas – like the twin atoms that comprise the tiniest molecules of hydrogen, the most abundant substance in the Universe – or in more massive close cohesion, like the mineral particles of dust, asteroids and comets. Not to mention the mysterious 'dark matter' that you need to believe in to understand how the Cosmos holds itself together. Larger intervals exist in rarefied gases, reducing to smaller intervals anywhere near to a star or a planet. The ability to travel at enormous speeds through the larger intervals whilst avoiding impacts depends on skill and luck, mostly the latter.
Although over two hours had passed since the ships had entered the beginnings of the region of interstellar gas indicated by radar, nothing different was visible to the astronauts. Space looked as empty as ever, as it should. But travelling at seventy percent of c, it took only a single particle on a collision course to strike something more solid than another gas field to produce an enormous energy exchange, with dire consequences for anything less resilient than atoms themselves.
The energy exchange induced by a single solid particle impacting the ice nose cone of the Bio-pod at a slight angle to the direction of travel instantly liquefied and vaporised the surface it struck. As water and steam flew off in a cone-shaped spray pattern, the absolute cold of interstellar space caused the molecules to solidify again almost immediately. Steam condensed into a fine mist, only fleetingly visible to the naked eye before the minute particles vanished from view again. The larger water droplets behaved differently, forming more massive crystals, still microscopic in size but having just enough momentum to act like bullets as they sped towards anything in their paths.
Jack thought afterwards that he might have noticed the glitter of the impact on the nose cone when it happened, but his immediate sensation was of an immense sharp pain in his left arm. He looked down in confusion and tried to grab at his left upper arm with his right, but this manoeuvre is impossible in an EVA suit. What he did notice however was the vapour trail of moist air escaping from both sides of his suit arm.
Before his vocal cords could react, he saw Sonja's helmeted head jerk back and another puff of vapour appear from the neck ring where her helmet was attached. She slammed back against the mini-pod's claw and his ears were filled with the sound of her scream as she flailed around.
Inside the pod, Celia too was taken by surprise as a loud, sharp sound startled her, and she watched in dumb amazement as crack lines radiated like a spider's web from a tiny impact crater in the forward view port's multilayer window, and an alarm in the cabin tripped, flooding her cabin with the same kind of warning sound that she had heard earlier on the Bio- pod. Without further hesitation she snapped her helmet visor shut, at the same time becoming aware that Sonja was screaming in the earpiece of her suit radio and Jack had just uttered the an expletive a few times over.
Jack's voice steadied and she heard his urgent "Get us back to the air- lock, now!". She immediately fired the thrusters and swivelled the craft to head back to their departure point, now some few hundred metres distant. She breathed deeply to stay calm, using all her skills to line up as quick an approach as possible, but not so fast as to cause further injury. She listened to Jack trying to calm Sonja but didn't interrupt, except to say "Hold on!" as she fired the thrusters to halt them right in front of the air-lock. They all ignored the frantic questions over the comms link from Prometheus, and both Jos and Mohammad realised after a brief moment that their crewmates would call back when they could.
Celia held the mini-pod steady with micro-bursts on the thrusters to compensate for Jack moving around to free himself and then over to repeat the procedure for Sonja, who was by now moaning and making jerky movements with her arms, as if trying to push her helmet more firmly onto her shoulders. Jack held her by the arms to stop her doing this and quickly jetted the pair of them of to the air-lock, pushing her inside before following her in and closing the door behind them. Celia noticed that the crack lines in the mini-pod window had stopped propagating, and fumbled for the emergency sealing kit kept in its usual place to her left. She pulled the large tab on the tape dispenser, and it came out easily as it had been designed to do when wearing suit gloves. She slapped a large piece of tape across the impact point and noticed with satisfaction that the vapour jet outside stopped. With any luck, the cracks were only present in one layer of the armoured multilayer glass, but she couldn't take chances and kept her helmet sealed.
Presently she heard Jack telling her to come back inside as well, and set about her own transfer back to the Bio-pod.
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Jos and Mohammad were so relieved to hear from their colleagues. "What happened?" she asked when Jack eventually called her.
"We're all still here. We believe we were struck by ice chips following an impact event on the nose cone." said Jack calmly. "The mini-pod screen is damaged and leaking slowly, and the pilot will have to stay sealed in her suit during transit. Meyer's helmet is damaged and unusable. She's OK, but shaken by losing a lot of pressure in her suit before we got back through the air-lock."
"What about you, Jack?" asked Jos.
"Feels like a hot needle passed right through my left arm." he replied. "The suit is holed but repairable. I lost some blood but it doesn't feel like any bones are broken. Nurse Chen has patched me up anyway."
"Can you get back here asap?" asked Stevens. "We think that the generator's going to spike again soon. We gotta move now or never,"
There was a silence before Jack spoke again. "Meyer and Chen will set out to return within a few minutes." he said in a low voice. "Meyer can have my helmet: it fits her suit neck ring and is good for the journey. Chen will pilot the craft."
"Jack?" queried Stevens, the beginnings of an awful suspicion forming.
"If you get time, you can come back for me." said Jack.
Stevens heard Celia's frantic cry of "No!" over the intercom, and then the sounds of a brief argument – no, a plea to stay with him, followed by his most commanding tone of voice before Jack returned to the microphone. "That's how it is. Now get moving, you two. Do this for Vittorio."
As she switched off the comms link, Jos closed her eyes at Mohammad's words from beside her seat on the bridge. "We've barely got time to wait for those two before we have to put the generator under load and make the jump." he practically whispered. She was dreading sending the last sub- space message to Earth before they tried for the wormhole.
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Sam exhaled with relief when Jos' voice penetrated the crackling background of the sub-space communicator. "What's happening, Prometheus? Are you OK?"
"Partly." came the reply. "We must jump immediately after this message exchange before the generator spikes again. We reckon that putting it under high load should stabilise it until we can get back to lower speeds."
"That agrees with our assessment." said Sam, on tenterhooks to learn more.
"We have casualties." said Jos, and the atmosphere in the room chilled for everyone there, especially Sam. "Vittorio is dead. He was in the engine room when the reactor went wild and received a fatal radiation dose. However he spent his last moments re-setting it so that we could carry on. Sonja has severe neck strain and is suffering from the effects of sudden pressure loss in her suit, but she will recover. Mohammad and Celia are OK."
"What about Jack?" Sam couldn't stop herself asking, her heart pounding.
There was a short silence. "He's trapped on the Bio-pod. He gave up his helmet so that Sonja could get back after they suffered impact damage. He plans to try to survive as long as possible but he won't be coming back with us. I'm sorry, Sam, but we have to go right now. If we don't make it back, there's not a one of us would have refused the chance of this trip. Tell our folks we love them. Stevens out."
Sam sat still, not hearing a word of the hubbub that had broken out in the crowd around her. What did they know about love anyway?
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