CHAPTER 35
January 12, 2091 (Earth timeline)
March 18, 2090 (Ship timeline)
approximately 6 light-months from Earth
3.64 light-years from Proxima
“The FLOTA is just beyond us now,” Pankish told Roy. Roy watched as he scaled the Samaritan like it was El Capitan in California back on Earth. Roy wasn’t much for mountain climbing. In fact, he’d never been mountain climbing, but he had been on the outside of spacecraft before—just not while they were accelerating as fast as this one was. “Once we get there, Roy, we will need to anchor again.”
“Copy that, Pank.” Roy took a short swig of water from the tube in front of his face. For a brief moment his nose started to itch and he wanted to scratch it, but the mood-enhancement patch kicked in and calmed the nerve endings on his skin to reduce that urge. “Everything is dandy back here.”
“Good.” Pankish paused his climb for a second, standing steady on the exterior ladder hooks. Roy could see he was looking back at him. “Need a breather yet?”
“I’m good, Pank. We can keep going if you want,” Roy said, not quite breathing too heavily to carry on a conversation.
“Well, dammit, Roy. You are going to make me look bad.” Pankish stopped, extracted a small half-meter-long tether, and clipped himself onto the ladder. Once he checked that it was good and secure, he let go with his hands and leaned back into his harness, shaking his arms out. “I suggest we take a moment, Roy. Lock in and rest.”
“Hahaha!” Roy laughed at himself and then pulled the safety cable out and clipped it onto the ladder handle. “No problem.”
“Think we can see Proxima, Doc?” Pankish asked.
“I think we’re too far behind the bridge dome. We’d need to be outward radially another couple meters or more.”
“Yeah, what I was thinking too.” Pankish shook his arms out again and then put one hand on the ladder above him. “I’m good to go if you are.”
“Go.”
* * *
It had taken about fifteen minutes for the two of them to reach the spot on the ladder about five meters above the Forward-Looking Optical Telescope. Once they had gotten there the two of them immediately strapped in safety harnesses and did their best to catch their breath. It had been a long forty-meter or so climb. Roy had been telling himself to keep putting hand over hand and foot over foot until they’d reached the peak nearest and just above the telescope.
The five meters laterally from the ladder to the telescope were the more frightening to Roy. They were going to have to strap to the ladder and then descend back down below the telescope level. At that point they would use pendulum motion to swing themselves up to the assembly.
“The next time we design a starship, we need to put magnetic pathways to all the pertinent spots!” Roy grunted sarcastically. “Why we didn’t think that through is beyond me.”
“I know you are saying that with sarcasm right, Doc?” Pankish laughed. “If not, I’m sure the CHENG would love to spend a couple hours lecturing you on the MLIMPRoSS if you want her to. Believe me, I made that mistake once.”
“You two know I’m listening, right?” the CHENG said over the comm channel.
“That will be okay, Cindy. I know all about the Multi-Layer Insulating Metamaterial Particle and Radiation Shielding System. But would it have destroyed the diamagnetism of the metamaterial to put little ferromagnetic walkways about the circumference of the ship here and there?” Roy said. The idle chatting kept his mind from going into the fear zone of what they were about to be doing.
“You volunteered, Roy,” Cindy added. “Having second thoughts? Regrets?”
“Not on your life.” Roy dropped down about two meters behind Pankish to get out of his way. “I’m clear if you are ready, Pank.”
“Affirmative,” Patel said. “Do your best to hold your cable down against the ladder if I don’t catch on the first swing. I don’t want to get tripped up on it.”
“Maybe we should’ve gone up one at a time?” Roy noted. “You can’t get tripped on my wire if my wire isn’t there.”
“That is against regs,” Pankish rebutted. “Have to have a safety backup ready and enabled to take action if something happens to the first jumper.”
“That makes sense. Not sure I’ve read that reg before.” Roy was beginning to wonder if he was qualified for this particular EVA. But he was fairly sure that nobody truly was. He’d have to be careful and absorb as much on-the-job-training as he could manage. “I’m out of your way. Good to go whenever you see fit.”
“Alright, here goes nothing.”
Roy watched closely, just in case he had to act, but more to the point, so he would learn how to do what they were about to do. Pankish placed his feet firmly against the hull of the ship and let slack out on his line until he was standing perpendicular to it. He was in the classic climbing/rappelling position. He tested his balance a couple of times by jumping outward from the ship a few tens of centimeters and then landing in place with his knees bending softly as shock absorbers. Once he appeared to have his balance and bearings, Roy could see him turning his head toward the target.
“Roy, pick yourself a target. Mine is the portside-most handhold. I’m going for that,” Pankish told him. He adjusted the electromagnetic grips on his glove and then started running hard away from the ladder in the direction of the telescope.
Pankish reached the point where the acceleration of the ship, their artificial gravity well, was more of a force pulling at him than the friction of his toe-boots could overcome and his feet slipped free of the hull—but not before he gave one last kick off. He let the pendulum swing carry him through the arch, and as he bounced back toward the hull, he managed to kick once more giving him just enough angular momentum to reach the FLOTA and his targeted handhold. Pankish reached out, grabbed the handhold, and came to a stop. He quickly snapped a cable in place and Roy could hear him sighing in relief.
“Easy as that,” Pankish said. He rested in the rappelling position and turned to Roy. “Alright, now for the easier part.”
“Good job, Pank. CHENG, Patel is in position at the FLOTA.” Roy radioed in. “I’m now making the egress from the ladder to join him.”
As with any such climbing maneuver, Roy and Pankish were not just tethered to the ship’s hull in various places along their path, they were also tethered to each other. Once Pankish had made the leap across to the FLOTA, he merely needed to lock in and then reel Roy over to him.
“Start the line, Pankish,” Roy told him as he worked himself into rappelling position. “I’m ready.”
“Line reel on.”
Roy felt the tug at his waist where the line was snapped to his harness. As it tightened, he was pulled toward Pankish and the FLOTA. He bounced off the hull a few tens of centimeters and was pulled through the pendulum arch. He continued to bounce as the cable tightened each time. He picked a target safety loop on the starboard side of the FLOTA and as he got close enough, bounced himself in that direction, reaching out with his left hand stretching as far as he could.
“Dammit!” he exclaimed, just missing the handhold and falling backward by a couple of meters. His feet slipped out from under him and he fell over sideways, slamming his left shoulder against the hull. “Shit!”
“You alright, Roy?” Pankish asked. “Stopping the line.”
Roy hung upside down about a meter and a half away from the spot he’d targeted. He wasn’t tangled up in the cables and he wasn’t hurt. He just needed to work himself back over to his feet. Struggling to get friction between his knees and the hull he managed to squirm himself to an all-fours posture.
“Reel me in like this,” Roy said. “I’m okay. Just a bit embarrassed.”
“Reeling,” Pankish replied. “There is nothing to be embarrassed about. We’ve all been there and done that.”
“Have you really?”
“Anybody who has done long hauls to the Belt or Mars has absolutely had to go out and do something on a tether that ended up, well, upside down. No shame,” Pankish said. Roy wasn’t sure if was just trying to make him feel better or not. He honestly didn’t care.
“Reeling.”
The cable pulled snug and Roy began crawling with the tether’s tension as best he could. Finally, he reached the handhold and pulled himself up, locking a safety cable into position. He caught his breath briefly and then nodded a thank-you to Patel.
“CHENG, EVA team is in position. We are ready to start with step one of the disassembly,” Patel said. “Roy, let’s get started.”
* * *
“Damned good work, Roy!” Captain Crosby poured some more of the scotch into the glasses around the galley table. “From what the CHENG tells me, it looks like we can lock onto the Interstellarerforscher and stay that way. As long as it goes in the right direction, we’ll be going in the right direction.”
“That’s right, Cap’n!” Bob Roca slapped Roy on the shoulder. “Had you not been here, Roy, we’d all have gotten lost at sea.”
“I don’t know about that, Bob,” Roy responded sheepishly. He was tired, but only physically. Emotionally, he was on a high he hadn’t felt since he was awakened from cryosleep. “But I do agree that this nav system should work. It needs a new snazzy acronym or something.”
“How about the Burbank System. We can call it BS for short?” Patel said, grinning across the top of his snifter full of alcohol. “Nav officer, how do we know where we are?”
“BS, Cap’n!” Bob Roca affirmed.
“What happens at the halfway point, though?” Zhao asked. “I mean, the probe is a flyby probe. It plans to keep on accelerating right on past Proxima and on out into deeper space. We’re going to start slowing down in a few years.”
“We’ll still be able to see the probe just fine. Its exhaust will be visible at quite a distance. We have our very own guide star,” Cindy Mastrano answered as she held up her glass. “To Dr. Roy Burbank, truly a good Samaritan.”
“To Roy!” They all clinked their glasses together and took deep draws. Roy drank, but he wasn’t so sure he’d done anything that Cindy or Roca or even Patel wouldn’t have figured out eventually.
“To me, I guess,” Roy said, finishing off his drink. The captain immediately refilled it. Roy held out his hand in protest. “Not sure I should—”
“Roy.” Crosby moved his hand away. “If anybody deserves to tie one on, it’s you. Besides, we can’t do anything but watch how the system works over the next couple of days anyway. Now drink up.”
Roy did. He finished his glass and then another. By the time he started on the fourth one, only Patel and Mastrano were still in the galley with him. There were several half-eaten bags of microwave popcorn spread about the table as well as a nearly empty fifth of scotch. Roy was reaching the point where if he had one more he would either throw up and have a really bad headache in the morning, or he would pass out and have a really bad headache in the morning.
“The ship is quiet, you know?” he said slurring the words a bit. “I mean, it’s quiet.”
“Nah, it ain’t quiet at all, Roy.” Pankish slurred even worse than Roy around a handful of popcorn he was shoving into his mouth. “The damned bulkheads pop and creak with temp changes and every single damned time a scrubber kicks in I can hear my bones rattle.”
“That’s because it is so quiet, Pank.” Roy lightly sipped his drink. He’d made a point to add extra ice and soda this go around. They’d run out of the scotch and were on bourbon. He didn’t feel sacrilegious about mixing that.
“Hell, even in the airlock with all the air gone you could still feel the ship vibrating. Then there is that weird feeling you get as you approach the propulsion system. That ultra-high frequency sound in there makes my skin crawl,” Cindy told them. “I agree with Pank. Not quiet at all.”
“I don’t mean mechanically quiet.” Roy took another sip and debated on eating some of the popcorn. The salt would be nice but then again, there would be food in his stomach that could cause problems later when he expected to start throwing up. He decided against it. “I mean . . . people. There’re not enough people. No background noise of conversations, work going on, media vids, kids jabbering . . . ”
He paused mid-sentence and almost immediately fell off the cliff of his emotional high. He fell a very long way into a pit and tears formed in his eyes.
“There are no kids.” He sat his glass down as tears started running down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t know why I can’t stop this.”
“Stop wha—” Patel had dropped some of the popcorn on the deck and was picking it up with his head below table height. He had been looking away, but when he turned back to face Roy and Cindy he just stopped talking. Roy was embarrassed.
“Roy, there is nothing to be sorry for,” Cindy said softly, at least as softly as her loud demeanor and four very stiff drinks would allow, which wasn’t very soft. “Hell, first, you’re lucky that bastard didn’t kill you outright. Second, you’re lucky that you’ve got to at least have some communications with your family.”
“Doesn’t sound like luck, Cindy.”
“Roy, I don’t know about how lucky you are, but your misfortune has saved our collective asses,” Patel said, slapping the table a little too vigorously.
“How’s that, Pankish?” Roy continued wallow. “I don’t see how.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences or serendipity,” Pankish argued. “I believe that shit happens because it is supposed to happen.”
“Fate?” Roy muttered.
“Call it programming in the Simulation, God’s will, or Fate. I don’t really give a damn. If all the things don’t happen the way they happen then what happens can’t happen.” He stopped himself and repeated what he’d just said under his breath. Roy watched as his lips continued moving. “Yeah, that’s right. What I just said.”
“What in the hell are you babbling about, Pank?” Cindy asked. “That didn’t make one lick of sense.”
“Of course it did!” Pankish sounded hurt and straightened himself up like a defense attorney about to save someone from death row. “We’d be dead if it weren’t for Roy! All of us, D-E-A-D with capital letters, dead!”
“I don’t know, Pank. You folks aren’t total dafties,” Roy said. “In fact, I suspect you all would have figured out the problems along the way and fixed them yourselves. Me being here just sped you along.”
“I don’t know, Roy.” Cindy raised an eyebrow. “You found the original sabotage.”
“Did you ever stop to wonder if maybe you had to be here, Roy?” Pankish kept on with it. “That’s right. You, Dr. Roy Burbank, had to be here. Otherwise, the Samaritan and her crew were toast, and maybe even all of Proxima with it.”
“I don’t see that,” Roy argued, starting to feel a bit dizzy.
“Think it through. Maybe, maybe, just maybe . . . oh hell, not maybe, for damned certain. Had we not called for the expert’s advice on how to test the PINS, and had that expert not just happened to be nearby on a vacation cruise ship, and had that expert not come aboard, and had that expert not stumbled across an asshole attempting to sabotage the ship, that expert would not have been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of us here on the ship would have been asleep and not even realized the PINS had been sabotaged. We would have been long gone and too far off course by the time anyone figured it out and woke somebody up to fix it. We might have come up with a fix like following the interstellar probe or we might not have, but by then it would have been far too late.”
“Damn, Pankish, you might be right there,” Cindy added. “Had your wife not got us looking for you, we wouldn’t have even woken you up until the midpoint med checks. By then we’d have been so far off course . . . ”
“That is absolutely right, CHENG!” Pankish slapped the table again. “You had to be here, Roy. While I’m so sorry for what has happened to your life being upturned and all, and I’m sorry about not getting to be there with your family—that’s awful—but, selfishly, for myself, the crew, and hell, Proxima, I’m damned glad you are here!”
Roy turned and looked Pankish right in the eyes. He wiped the tears from his cheeks. Then he promptly vomited across the table.