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CHAPTER 17

August 22, 2089

“We’ve been at this for hours and nothing seems to work right,” Cindy Mastrano complained to Roy.

“Well, we need about ten graduate students in here running through every single line of code in this system to see what is going on. I have never seen anything like this at all!” Roy was flummoxed, exasperated, and a bit on edge. He was supposed to have finished the fix on the PINS hours ago. The cruise ship, and his wife, had already undocked with the Samaritan and were heading off toward a safe distance from the ship before it was ready to ignite the Samara Drive. A military cruiser was on its way out to take him as soon as he was finished. What that meant was, much to his chagrin, his wife, Chloe, was going to finish the last half of the cruise without him. That was going to take a lot of flowers to fix.

“Okay, we’ve reloaded the database twice and each time we still get the same issue.” Roy scratched his head. “No matter that we know the datafile isn’t corrupt and the pulsars are all in the right locations with the right frequency spectra, the PINS system is randomizing that data in such a way as to give the vehicle a correct current position, but no matter where we point the trajectory it will not reach that position.”

“What does that mean physically?” Cindy looked up from her datapad and sighed. “I mean, I know what it means, but let’s look at it from a very fundamental explanation or description. If we go back to the basics, then maybe we can figure out what is going on.”

“Sure, that’s exactly what we did in the test phase. Good idea,” Roy agreed and paused long enough to think about the problem. The two of them were sitting in the Navigation Suite just off the engine room, a bit forward and beneath the main Samara Drive chamber.

The Nav Suite had several multimeter-wide transparent domes with optical telescopes viewing in every possible direction. There were other telescopes connected on the other side of the ship and ones on the forward and aft sections to give full optical imagery of the sky around them. There were several radio and microwave antenna feeds that were connected into the Nav Suite as well. In the center of the room was an instrument box that housed a gamma ray telescope and spectrum analyzer. There were clear polycarbonate walls around it and an air handler continuously keeping an overpressure in the small enclosure to keep any extraneous particulates, dust, or other contaminants out of the instrument. Electrical lines fed through a manifold in the polycarbonate to stations set up on all four walls surrounding the PINS instrument inside.

“You want to start?” Cindy asked.

“Uhm, okay, I guess.” Roy turned and looked out the telescope dome nearest him and then back at the PINS. “We’re in a spaceship in space. We’re moving with a speed of roughly one AU per month, right now. We can use standard interplanetary navigation beacons, the sun, the planets, radar data from those planets and beacons to get our position and velocity vector precise to within a billionth of a meter and within a millionth of a meter per second, respectively. Using the PINS system, we should be at least that precise but we’re not.”

“Well, our current PINS position is accurate until the PINS operates on it with our velocity vector,” Cindy added. “That means that the instruments are feeding the right position into the device. But the trajectory prediction filter is doing something with it to mess that up.”

“Look at this graph here of our position state vector at time zero. It matches exactly to within instrument errors of the in-system position calibration. Then one calculation epoch away, we’re still fine. But at about a hundred thousand or so calculation epochs, boom! We’re off by thousands of kilometers in our position. By the time you do a few billion epochs we’re off by light-years.” Roy was frustrated with this. Trajectory calculation was simple state vectors, ephemeris data updates from sensors, and then injection of those updates into the trajectory prediction filter algorithms. It should be simple stuff.

“I’m about ready to pull my hair out on this.” Cindy grunted. “If we don’t get to the bottom of this, there’s no way we can fire up the Samara Drive. This mission is over in four days if we don’t figure this out.”

“Are you going tell the captain that?” Roy asked.

“Are you gonna tell your boss that?” Cindy replied with the equally daunting question.

“Come on, Cindy. We’re smarter than this. Could it be in the hardware somewhere?” Roy was grasping for straws. He felt like he was in a dark room playing darts and he had no clue which wall the dartboard was on.

“We’ve reinstalled the flight software for the PINS unit twice now. We’ve run all the diagnostics for the observation instruments. It’s as if there’s something in the computer system that clicks on after a thousand epochs.” Cindy repeated again what they’d gone over and over for the past couple of days.

“Well, maybe it’s in the computer system and not the PINS.” Roy threw up his hands. “Who knows? Got an extra computer system lying around we could load all this up on?”

“Seriously?” Cindy asked. “That could take days to test.”

“No. We don’t build a new system for a flight unit. Let’s just run the system with the hardware in the loop connected to the PINS software running on a different machine. Might run a bit slower, but so what?” Roy looked as though he was thinking about what he’d just said and then snapped his fingers. “We can use the environment control systems computer. It’s powerful enough. We use a wireless input/output connection between the sensors and we’ll run the software on that computer.”

“How long will that take to set up?” Cindy asked herself out loud. “Hmm, a couple hours to rig the comm setup. I can do that while you load the software on a second terminal. We could try that in a few hours maybe?”

“Sounds like a plan. I think we should pull whatever techs you have in on this,” Roy suggested.

“We have a small crew and there are only two techs, besides me.” Cindy laughed. “We could get the scientists in the crew if you want, but I doubt they’d be up to speed enough to help much in short order. But if we’re doing this, I’ll have to run it by the captain first.”

“Okay. Go run it by the captain.” Roy yawned and stretched. “You, your two techs, and me. Let’s get to work.”

* * *

It took most of the rest of the afternoon. Connecting the environment systems computer to the PINS instrument suite required more troubleshooting than Cindy had expected. But in the end, she managed to make it happen. Roy had done his part and the PINS software was loaded, prepped, and ready to go. The plan was to run the PINS on the new computer system for the next four hours and determine if there were any mismatches in the trajectory measurements and predictions. At their current rate of speed, they would notice a position and velocity drift in that amount of time.

“We’re all good on my end,” Cindy said.

“Here goes nothing.” Roy hit the execute command on his datapad interface and the PINS went to work. “Nothing to do now but to wait awhile.”

* * *

“The PINS computer is bad. No doubt about it,” Cindy agreed with Roy. After a few hours it was becoming clear that the PINS equipment being controlled via a different computer was functioning properly. “But what does that even mean?”

“This makes no sense. We tested and tested that thing. Computers don’t just go ‘bad.’” Roy was already pulling the covers off the panels on the computer rack. “Something doesn’t pass the smell test here.”

“I agree.” Cindy looked at him shaking her head. “What are you going to do?”

“I built this goddamned thing. I’ve seen and still have images of every card, chip, board, wire, nut, bolt, and nook or cranny. If there’s something broken or not supposed to be there, I’ll find it.”

“I’ll go get some more coffee and send the techs for some flashlights,” Cindy replied.



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