Saving proxima, p.14
Saving Proxima, page 14
The radio telemetry from Interstellarerforscher took fourteen minutes to reach Oberpfaffenhofen. The light from the exploding Matador took the same amount of time to reach Earth-based and near-Earth space-based telescopes. It took almost a full twenty-four hours for the astronomers to see the explosion, understand it for what it was, notify the International Space Traffic Control Authority, and for them to then put two and two together to figure out that the unknown ship’s demise was almost certainly linked to the departure of the Interstellarerforscher and its lethal ultraviolet exhaust.
For the scientists, engineers, and politicians, the danger posed by the Samara Drive suddenly moved from the theoretical to the real. For another group, or perhaps groups, it was merely a confirmation of what they already knew: The Samara Drive, what it enabled and how it was going to be used to contact aliens, was dangerous. Dangerous enough that someone had to do something about it.
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.”
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.
CHAPTER 18
August 24, 2089
“You found it where?” Captain Crosby looked at the little disk-shaped device in his hand. It was about the size of the button on a dress shirt with an adhesive backing on one side. As far as he could tell there were no other signs of electronics or microprocessors or anything. It was just a small, solid, and smooth gray disk.
“Well, that one and these two.” Roy held up two more of the disks. “They were stuck right on top of the atomic clock circuits in the temporal calibration unit or TCU. I found them pretty quickly. Whoever put ’em in knew exactly where to place them to create the most havoc on our navigation system. And, by the way, the location was pretty easy to access without affecting anything else that would have alerted us to them being there.”
“Three of them,” Cindy added. “They must have even known the precise design of the clock system.”
“You’re right about that, Cindy.” Roy sat slumped in the chair in front of the captain’s desk. He turned and nodded to Cindy, who was standing against the door. “Cindy probably wouldn’t have found it as quickly just because she didn’t build the thing. Not her fault at all. As soon as I saw that first one, well, it stuck out like a sore thumb as they say. Then I certainly knew there would be two more.”
“Wait a minute, Dr. Burbank.” Crosby held up a hand to slow him down. “What does it do?”
“Oh, very simple, what you have in your hand right there is a little chunk of Cesium-137. It tosses out gamma rays very regularly at six hundred and sixty-two kiloelectron volts. It was about a centimeter, give or take a millimeter or so, from one of the atomic clock axes inside the PINS. The others were aligned with the other two axes. Guess what each of those clocks uses as an atomic radioactive decay source?” Roy smiled.
“Let me guess. Cesium-137?” Captain Crosby frowned.
“Bingo! Give the captain a prize!” Roy leaned in closer and straightened himself in the chair a bit. “It was aligned just right by each of the clock axes that, as it decayed, the gamma rays from this little bugger injected spurious random clock pulses to the onboard clocks. Once the clocks were confused, the calculation epochs became damned near randomized.”
“Wait, isn’t there software or something to account for random gamma rays on a thing like that? I mean, we’re in space. Gamma rays zip through all the time.” Crosby was clearly puzzled and the look on his face showed it.
