Saving proxima, p.19
Saving Proxima, page 19
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“Artur, wake up the CHENG, and all the flight crew, including the political officer. Plus, I want Vulpetti, the computer guy, um, Dr. Renaud, and that cyber-warfare Russian guy from the UN Landing Party team. Get them awake, alert, and in the galley by oh-nine-hundred,” Crosby ordered his XO.
“Aye, Captain. To what end, if you don’t mind me asking?” the XO asked cautiously.
“No, I don’t mind, Artur. We’re going to sweep this ship from bow to stern, top to bottom, and port to starboard. Every system. Whoever this Gaines or O’Hearn character was understood the ship’s design and was here for some reason.” Crosby opened a drawer in his desk and depressed a thumbprint reader mechanism. A panel opened, revealing two 9mm semiautomatic pistols and multiple magazines. He looked at them briefly and thought that it was too late for that. He reached to the side of the pistols and pulled out a bottle of bourbon that he kept hidden there. There were two small unbreakable tumblers stacked together as well. He sat them on his desk and pulled them apart. “As soon as Burbank is able, I’m ordering him to have a snort. In the meantime, fancy one?”
“Helluva mess, Cap’n.” Artur sat down and nodded in the affirmative.
CHAPTER 29
August 16, 2090 (Earth timeline)
April 30, 2090 (Ship timeline)
“Your daughter is beautiful. Roy, you should be here. She looks like you.” Chloe’s face was streaming with tears. She held their little girl up, completely naked except for a newborn diaper and a pink-and-blue-striped baby toboggan so he could get a full view of her. Roy was amazed at how beautiful she was with the little bits of bright red hair sticking out underneath the little hat. “She’s three full days old today! Her birthday was June thirteenth, 2090. There were zero complications. Your mother was a nervous wreck the entire time, but your father, he held my hand and took all the verbal abuse I could muster . . . ”
Roy always laughed at that part. Then cried some more. Chloe kissed the baby on top of a full head of red hair. The little girl just looked indifferent to the world, but then she started to cry a little.
“I wish my parents could have seen her . . . I wish you could be here, Roy . . . There, there, Sammie, it will be okay.” Chloe held the infant to her breast and let her start breastfeeding. She quit crying and took to the breastfeeding quickly. “Oh my God, Roy, what are we going to do?”
Chloe continued to cry. Roy continued to cry.
“I don’t know, baby . . . ” he whispered to himself as he cried along. “She’s beautiful, like her mother.”
“I wish you could be here. I miss you so much,” Chloe continued. “I named her Samaritan Ro Burbank. Thought we could call her Samari or Sammie. I want her to always know who her father was . . . I just wanted her to . . . Oh God, Roy!”
They both wept so hard . . .
Roy had played the video over and over and over and over. Had it been possible to wear out a digital file, he was doing his best to do so. And he had cried every single time. He couldn’t just call back or talk to her on the comm feeds or over the internet—there was just no technology that allowed that. The Samaritan was about three light-months away from Earth and the signal he’d gotten from Chloe had been three months old. His daughter was probably now sleeping through the night and cooing. She might even be starting to eat soft baby food. Roy didn’t know for sure. He’d never had a child. And now he had one, but he couldn’t do a damned thing to help raise her—little Samari. He thought he’d call her Samari using the second A and R in the long sense like in the word “are” or “Sam-R-ee.” That way, he thought, it wouldn’t just sound like the ship’s name. He wanted off the godforsaken vessel. He wanted to find Patrick O’Hearn or Ray Gaines or whatever that asshole’s name was and dump him out an airlock. Roy just wanted to go home. He wanted to hug his wife and hold his little girl next to him.
But that just wasn’t going to happen. Ever.
Roy had to come to grips with the fact that he was never going to hold his daughter in his arms and kiss her head. He was never going to help her learn to walk or to ride a bicycle. He’d never get to fix the scrapes on her knees with a dermasealer. Roy was not going to see her first day of school or her last day of school. He’d never get to see her find someone and fall in love. He’d never see his grandchildren.
And on top of all that, he was never going to get to hold his wife again and tell her that everything was going to be okay. Roy felt like dying. There was nothing else for him to do. He’d found the woman he loved. He’d started a family—albeit a bit late in life—but that was quite common in modern times. People from Earth often didn’t have children up into their late forties or fifties, or sometimes even up into their late seventies. Folks from the Moon and Mars sometimes had children even later than that.
Roy had been set to retire in a few years and he’d planned to do nothing but play with his wife and hopefully children from then on. Now, well, that just wasn’t going to happen. But he was getting videos from his wife almost every day by Earth standards. From his standpoint, he received them in a constant stream of many per day. The time dilation was odd and would get even more odd the faster they traveled. The current projections had them hitting about zero point eight five times the speed of light or eight-five percent. At that speed, time crawled at about half the pace it would on Earth. To Roy, the trip would last just under seven years.
To Chloe and Samari it would take about ten. Roy couldn’t fathom how complex the data compression schemes must be to allow for special relativistic red shifting of the comm signals to and from Earth. He let his mind wander from thoughts of walking out an airlock briefly to think on the technical problem. Technology was always a good distraction. Finally, his drifting mind was prodded by a buzzing at his door. He paid it little attention at first. Then . . .
There was a buzz at Roy’s door again. Then again. Roy snapped himself out of his trance long enough to realize that the buzzing wasn’t going to stop. Whoever was at the door was very persistent.
“Just a sec.” He paused the video and wiped at his eyes and cheeks. He gave himself a second or two to gain his composure. And then in a rough hoarse voice said, “Come in.”
“Hello, Roy.” Dr. Maksim Kopylova’s large, almost two-meter-tall Russian frame was silhouetted in the hatchway as it opened. The man had all the typical features of the big “Russian Bear” of stereotypical descriptions. He had dark graying black hair accentuated by his dark eyes and burly goatee. It wasn’t an unruly beard; on the contrary, it was quite well kept. The ship’s doctor, while a large man, wasn’t overbearing in personality. In fact, Roy found something soothing and even comforting about the man. He was like a big Russian teddy bear.
“Doc. What can I do for you?” Roy asked.
“Nothing, really. I just wanted to stop by and check on you,” the doctor said softly in his deep voice. “Are you doing okay?”
“Um, I don’t know. I—I mean, my life is over . . . I’m done with it . . . I, uh, I dunno, you know?” Roy had trouble stringing his thoughts together into a coherent statement. He unconsciously wiped more tears from his face and sniffled a bit.
“Sorry, Roy, I can’t imagine how you must feel.” The doctor came in and sat beside him. “I brought you this.” He handed Roy a dermapatch that had a microcircuit pattern printed on it.
“What is that?” Roy asked.
“It is a mood stabilizer.” Dr. Kopylova explained. He peeled the backing off the centimeter square patch and depressed it to Roy’s inner wrist. Roy felt it burn for a brief second and then it was on him like a tattoo. “I want you to wear this until we get you straightened out from all this. Something like this . . . well, it can make a man start thinking really dangerous things. Like giving up. Like stepping out an airlock while in deep space. All of these things are no good for you. No good for your wife and daughter. And they are no good for us or the Proximans.”
“I don’t give two shits about the damned Proximans! I want to go home,” Roy spat angrily.
“Yes, I understand.” Maksim sighed. “Are you religious, Roy?”
“No. Not really.” Roy thought about it briefly. He wasn’t even sure what he’d say his religion was. Maybe some version of Christianity. His grandparents were and he could recall going to church with them when he was a child. He and Chloe had gotten married in a secular Christian church in Maryland where they had lived at the time. “I don’t know. Not much.”
“Me neither. But, as the ship’s doctor, I’m sort of the only spiritual aid we have here. Maybe you could talk to one of the science team when they wake up. There are two that are metaphysics and/or theology experts among them. But, for now, I’m all you’ve got.” Kopylova half smiled at him.
“No offense, Doc, but I don’t really care to hear any sermons right now.”
“Great! Because I don’t know any, uh, sermons as you say,” he replied. “What I do know is that you are here with us. While you are still alive, your family must know it, feel it. They are a part of you and you are a part of them. From a quantum mechanical standpoint, you are most certainly entangled with their reality.”
“So what?”
“Well, hang on to that. That is ‘what.’ As long as you are alive, they will feel it too. You will at least be a part of them in that regard.” Kopylova paused and then slapped Roy on the shoulder. Roy was almost startled by the contact, but it felt good to have some contact with a human, even if it was just a slap on the shoulder.
“Uh, okay. I’ll try that.”
“I’d like you do something else for me, too,” Kopylova said. “Three things, actually.”
“Okay,” Roy said hesitantly.
“Number one, you are an expert engineer. Be one! Become part of this crew. There’s a Russian proverb that goes something like, ‘Work is afraid of a master.’ It means tasks come easy to experts or something similar.”
“Hmmm, never heard that.”
“Well, you are a master. Be one. It will give you daily purpose and distraction. I don’t want you going back into cryo for the next two months at least. You need something to do.” Maksim ticked off with his left pointer finger and then ticked his middle one. “Two, I want you to make a video to your wife and daughter once per day, every day, at the end of each day. No more and no less. This will give you a daily connection with them and it will give you a time to reflect on your day. And, only once per day will keep you from consuming yourself with it.”
“Can I only watch the videos from home once a day, too?” Roy didn’t like that thought.
“Oh no. Do that as often as you like as long as you do your other things. I have a picture of my long-dead wife that I see many times a day. Makes me feel her still.” Kopylova stammered slightly and Roy could see that there was some pain there. Then the man pointed at his heart. “In here.”
“Okay. What’s number three? You said three things.”
“Yes, I did.” He grinned a bit and the goatee accentuated his features as he did so. Roy was a bit amused by it. He had never been able to grow a beard. He’d tried once before but with little luck. It had grown in patchy, red, and had gray splotches throughout it.
“One and two are easy enough, I guess.” Roy nodded.
“Finally, three, I want you to read a story from the Bible.”
“Thought you weren’t going to give me a sermon, Doc,” Roy protested.
“No sermon. Well, um, other than saying another Russian proverb, ‘ . . . from mangy sheep at least take lock of wool.’ And tell you to read the story of Job.”
“A mangy sheep? What the hell does that have to do with jack?” Roy asked.
“I don’t know Jack,” Maksim looked puzzled.
“Just an expression, as in, jack shit.”
“Aha, yes, I’ve heard this before. Often wondered if it was connected to the jackass.” Maksim chuckled. “Just think of the proverb. Read the book of Job for entertainment.”
“I have never have much enjoyed reading the Bible.”
“Me neither. It puts me to sleep with all the prose, but it sometimes gives profound insight into the human condition. If you’d rather, there was an old novel that retold the book of Job from a science fiction perspective. I forget the title, but I’m sure you could look it up.”
“Are these doctor’s orders, Doc?” Roy wasn’t sure he wanted to read anything. And what the hell did that have to do with a “mangy sheep”?
“I guess they are, Roy. Doctor’s orders. And come see me anytime you like if I’m awake. Or just go be with other people. Make some friends here.” Maksim stood and slapped his shoulder again. Roy was wondering if that was a Russian thing or just a Dr. Kopylova thing.
“Okay, Doc. Whatever you say.”
CHAPTER 30
August 26, 2090 (Earth timeline)
May 3, 2090 (Ship timeline)
“We’ve searched this ship from top to bottom, Captain, and found nothing out of the ordinary.” Cindy Mastrano rubbed at a scrape on her forearm she’d gotten while crawling in one of the equipment tubes in the engine room. She needed to clean the cut and put some dermaseal on it before it got infected. “Whatever Gaines was doing, we can’t put a finger on it.”
“He was in the PINS sensor room,” Roy added. “I finally figured it out once I realized that the testing we’d done back at lunar dock was using simulated sensor data because it wouldn’t be red or blue shifted from acceleration as we were effectively sitting still. I had gotten out of bed to go check the path between the PINS and the telescopes when . . . ”
“So, we tore everything apart in there between the telescopes and the main PINS boxes and found nothing out of the ordinary,” Cindy interrupted, so Roy wouldn’t have to go into his traumatic experience. Roy was trying, she could tell. But the poor guy was just a shell of the man he was when she’d first met him. Right now, he acted as if he were running on fumes. She was concerned what would happen when he ran out of those fumes.
“Dr. Renaud has gone over all the code and found nothing?” Bob Roca asked her.
“As far as we can tell, all the flight software seems normal, Bob,” Roy added. “At least down here it does. Have you found anything anomalous on the bridge?”
“Not yet. Zhao and Mr. Tarasenko have looked for any signs of hacks and we’ve yet to find anything from top down. Whoever the Gaines guy was, he was good,” Roca said. “Or at least he was better than us.”
The flight crew, Roy, Dr. Renaud, and the cyber-warfare expert, Victor Tarasenko, had been taking the ship apart and putting it back together one piece at a time looking for signs of intrusion, hacking, malicious or nefarious intent, but they had found nothing. Captain Crosby had called the senior flight team and Roy into his ready room to discuss the possible scenarios. Cindy had been working herself ragged to find what Gaines had done, while at the same time she was handholding Roy, trying to get him back into the game. Roy just looked checked out. Currently, he looked like he was paying attention, but she could see he was millions of miles, almost a light-year, away.
“CHENG, are you telling me that nothing was done? Maybe Roy interrupted him before he could finish or even get started? Or are you telling me you just can’t find it?” the captain asked. “We need to know either way.”
“There is just no way to tell, Captain. At least, not until we see some type of perturbation in our navigation or something. We’ve checked, and right now as far as we can tell we’re on trajectory for Proxima. But a tiny error right now might not show up for a year or more in our flight data. It could be just like with the atomic clock chips that Roy discovered back before we left Sol,” Cindy explained. “I suggest we increase our verification testing rate on our navigation.”
“So, you want eyeball and hand calculations? How often?” Roca whistled. “That’s going to be hairy math.”
“Not really,” Roy nonchalantly replied. “Take the images from the six telescopes with the atomic clock timestamps on each measurement. We correlate those with a stand-alone computer and compare it to the PINS output two-line-element arrays. We could actually set them up to compare to each other regularly, but I’m not sure connecting them to each other is smart from a hacking standpoint. Hacking isn’t my expertise.”
“Right.” Roca nodded his head in agreement. “I see that. The computer does most of the work. We’d need to pick a computer and strip it down from any outside software and connectivity to other ship’s systems so we know it isn’t hacked or compromised in any way. Maybe we even shut off the wireless just in case Gaines left some sort of malware floating about that we’ve yet to find.”
“Get on that, Bob,” Crosby ordered. “XO, once we have decided that the ship is in order, we need to get our sleep schedules realigned. I want to make certain that there is always somebody up that has knowledge and is trained on the stand-alone nav system.”
“I’m on it, Captain,” Artur replied. “Maybe we should start training the other awake parties during their awakened cycle as well?”
“Good idea. Do that, Artur. Dr. Burbank, I have one more request, if you would oblige?” Crosby asked.
“Certainly, Captain.” Roy shrugged uncaringly.
“We’ve all heard the great news. And we want to see some pictures of this pretty girl of yours.” Captain Crosby turned and looked knowingly to Cindy.
“Aha! Yes, we also have something for you.” Cindy clapped her hands eagerly and then pulled something from her backpack that was typically filled with data pads, tools, and various CHENG things. She intentionally fumbled a bit as if she couldn’t quite find what it was she was looking for, and then finally, she sat a small package on the conference table in front of Roy. She smiled at him with a large toothy grin.
“What’s this?” Roy asked uncomfortably.
“It’s a little something from all of us,” Cindy answered. “Go on. Open it.”
Cindy watched as Roy looked at the little package in front of him. It was a small box about six to eight centimeters on a side. It was in pink wrapping paper with a rose-colored ribbon holding it together. Roy rolled it over in his hands several times. Cindy grew impatient.
