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CHAPTER 16

August 20, 2089

“What do you mean the PINS is showing something odd?” Crosby listened to the design engineer on the other end of the video feed repeating what he’d just told him.

“Dr. Burbank, if I knew that I wouldn’t be calling for you while you’re on vacation,” Crosby replied. “Cindy, you want to explain it?”

“Sure.” Dr. Cindy Mastrano, the chief engineer of the Samaritan, nodded from across the ready-room table. “Let me pull up the slides I just sent you, Captain.”

“My chief engineer will explain.” Crosby motioned to her while giving her the datapad he was looking at. Mastrano fiddled with the device for a brief moment and then nodded to herself with a smile.

“Yes. Here it is,” she said. “Well, Dr. Burbank, several of the reference pulsars are in the wrong places. I mean, there are stars there but they are the wrong ones according to what the PINS is measuring. We did a routine precheck yesterday and for whatever reason, for example, while our closest pulsar, Geminga, is right where it is supposed to be and is pulsing at the right frequency, PSR J1748-2446ad isn’t.”

“What do you mean it isn’t?” Burbank sounded sleepy as if he’d just been gotten out of bed for the video conference. Of course, that was exactly what had happened and exactly why he appeared that way.

“Well, the pulsar should be spinning at about seven hundred sixteen times per second, right? But according to the PINS measurements we are detecting, it isn’t doing that. In fact, it looks more like the pulsar B1919+21. At least it is according to the frequency and periodicity. It’s like the database is right but the pulsars have been moved around.”

“Wait, have you run the Doppler correction calibration sequence?” Roy rubbed at his eyes. “It might just be that the ship’s acceleration has thrown the calibration off. The gamma ray spectrum analyzer we used in the original tests had an issue with that. That could cause some sort of seemingly random shuffling in the pulsar spectrum autorecognition software.”

“That was the first thing we tried, Dr. Burbank. We have all of your design, build, and test notes with us and I’ve gone through them word for word, graphic by graphic. There’s not a single byte of data in your files on this ship I haven’t searched through ten times here. I think this is something new—that is, er, unless I misunderstood your notes.” Mastrano paused and looked up from her pad. “That is very possible, this ship is very complex as you well know.”

“Yeah, I don’t envy you in your job at all. Tell you what, send me the diagnostics file and I’ll dig into it right away.” Roy groaned through the video monitor.

“We’ve sent it to you already. We really need you to look at it now,” Dr. Mastrano told him.

“Alright, alright. I’m up now anyway. Let me look at it for about thirty minutes and then just call me back.”

* * *

“Cindy, I’m not sure what to tell you. Something has corrupted the file addresses between the sensor data and the target recognition database. If you look here at the source files for the PINS reference coordinates stored on the backups back at the Luna shipyard and compare it to this, damn . . . they’re like completely different files.” Roy took a swig from a soft drink he’d taken from the minibar and was doing his best to keep his voice down so as to not awaken his wife. He waited as the drink slowly drained in the ship’s low gravity, pausing long enough to take in the view through the porthole of an ever-increasing-in-size Mars. It no longer looked like a red dot in the sky. It actually was starting to look like a ball with a horizon.

“I was wondering about that,” Cindy replied.

Roy turned his chair back from the window, swallowed down the caffeinated drink, and bumped his knee on the small desk muttering a profanity through his clenched teeth. “Shit!” He hoped he hadn’t disturbed his wife. While the “estate room” on the cruise ship was the second from the largest offered, they were still smaller than a low-budget hotel room. He’d pulled the curtain between the bed and the “living area” but a mere few millimeters of polycarbonate material was truly all that separated them.

“I can’t for the life of me figure out how that could happen. I mean, I’ve been playing it over and over in my head and I can’t reproduce that. Weird data corruption.” Roy shrugged.

“So, what, we reload and reboot?” the Samaritan’s chief engineer asked him through the small vid screen on his pad that he’d stuck to the magnetic device holder/charger above the tiny desk.

“Yes. I’ve already sent you a fresh set of nav database files that I want you to compare against the hard drive’s files. I’d like to know how they were corrupted.” Roy shrugged. “Like I said, I can’t imagine how this happened. But at least you’ll have the initial file system. You should take that and store it someplace safe.”

“And you think this is the only issue here?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure about it, no. Because I am not there to run a diagnostic.” Roy could see the chief engineer’s face light up suddenly and Roy would soon be sorry he’d ever let those words slip through his lips.

* * *

“What do you mean I’ll have to make it home without you?” Roy’s wife wasn’t quite shouting, but she certainly wasn’t whispering sweet nothings in his ear.

“Chloe, listen, my bosses said I have to go, so, I have to go!” His emphatic statement came across less as a direct statement and more as if he were pleading with her for forgiveness. “And I can’t let all those people head off into interstellar space with a broken navigation system. They would be going to their doom for certain.”

“Why you?” This time it was almost a shout. Chloe seldom raised her voice at him, but when she did, he knew she was angry. “We haven’t had a vacation in . . . well, I don’t remember the last one.”

“Well, I’m the expert—wait, no, I’m the only expert on the Pulsar Interstellar Navigation System.” He continued pleading his case. “There isn’t really somebody else to send. Look at it this way: The cruise ship is altering its course to meet up with the Samaritan tomorrow. I’ll go onboard and fix things there and then get on a transport that is already on a rendezvous trajectory for the day after tomorrow. You’ll at least get to see the Samaritan up really close like not many people ever have or will. And we will both still likely be in great viewing distance of her when she lights up the interstellar drive.”

“I’d rather see you. Here, with me.” Roy knew when to just shrug and accept a battle once it was won, or lost, depending upon the point of view.

“Sorry, honey.” He didn’t know what else to say. “I have to go.”



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