SAMHAIN ECHO: DAY +6
09 Nov 2020Joey_the_saint
Getting off IC 2944 Sector EL-X e1-4 2 ended up being easier than I thought. The thrusters held, I stood Foxley up on her tail, found the escape vector and boosted away and that was it. She's a reliable old ship, this girl.
Back at the carrier Herb had the crew working on her before I'd even put boots on the deck. HIm and his crew had come highly recommended, though he did have a bit of a checkered past. Background check had shown an outstanding warrant in Tionisla, but it was small time. Bar fight that got out of control. I'd asked Sal about it, since he'd been the one to bring Herb's application to me in the first place, but all Sal would say was that he was on the side of right if not maybe the right side of the law. I thought I could understand that, so we'd brought him and his whole crew on as a group. I don't believe in trying to make a quilt if you've already got a perfectly good blanket.
Herb didn't have time for me at all, but he did give me a look that said was going to have words for me later on whether I liked it or not. It's strange how quickly these people have started to feel like some weird, extended family.
Word travels fast, even on a ship this size, so I wasn't all that surprised to find Sal waiting for me at the door to my bunk when I got there. I told him I was exhausted and that whatever it was could wait until I'd had some shut-eye. We weren't due to jump for another twenty hours, almost, but the look on his face drew me up short. "Sir," he'd said, "we need to talk about the drive."
The way he's said the drive left me feeling cold. Just about 6000 light-years from Sol. If we had to call for help -- or worse, abandon the ship -- that'd be a long, slow trip in economy cabins for the crew. And the news from back in the Bubble was sounding like those ships may be tagged for refugees soon enough.
"Come on inside, Sal, let's have a drink," I'd said.
I'd poured us each an ounce of that Lavian Brandy I had left over from the Duval funeral. He took the glass but I noticed he just held it. Might be he liked it about as well as I did -- not at all -- but now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've ever even heard of him drinking anything stronger than the coffee in the mess. Something to follow up on later.
"Out with it, Sal, what's wrong?" I'd asked.
He looked irritated and concerned in about equal measure. "I don't know, sir--"
"Joe," I corrected him.
"-- Commander. Do you remember the third last jump we made before we came here?" I did. The charts were wrong. Really wrong. The course Sal's team had plotted had shown the jump to Col 240 Sector LK-T b18-4 would be just over 498 light-years. At the limits of our capability, but still comfortably within reach. When we went to plot the jump, though, it was nearly 515 light-years. We readjusted quickly and ended up in the Statue of Liberty sector only a half hour later than planned. But at the same time, Sal had started his people on re-checking the route, the charts and the calculations. We'd made a detour early on, which Sal had warned me against, but we'd compensated for that. We'd redone everything, the whole course. And it all checked out. Except it was wrong and there was no way that jump was ever possible, even if we didn't have a hold full of spare fuel and a third of our capacity loaded with services.
He went on. "Everything checked out, Commander. We still can't find the cause of the problem. These new carriers, sir -- commander -- you know that they have the same basic drives as the Farragut-class cruisers?" I told him I did. "But Brewer, they've added in safeguards and limiters so the Federation'll let them into civilian hands." I was starting to see where he was going with this. "The drives aren't significantly different, though. I think the problem may've been with the course planning software. One of the restrictions the Federation insisted on, I hear, was that they have all advanced route-plotting capabilities removed." I'd heard that as well, damned annoying, too. "I think we may have found a bug in the software caused by removing those capabilities."
I turned this over in my head for a long while before I asked him, "How sure are you it's software and not something actually wrong with the drive?"
He thought about that a lot longer than I would've liked before, "Sure, commander. Very."
That was that, then. I told him if he was sure I was satisfied and as long as Venus said we still had plenty of buffer to make a few extra jumps here and there if we needed to, I was fine with that. Sal left and I poured two ounces of Lavian brandy down the drain. That was fine by me, I still had most of the bottle and to me it tastes like battery acid cut with corn syrup.
* * *
The next planned stop was a reported green gas giant at Pru Thae BF-C c27-1. The reports were recent, June 3306, and as-yet unconfirmed, but the data looked solid. Our plan was to do the confirmation ourselves. We would leave the Statue of Liberty nebula, do seven jumps in quick succession then take three shifts for maintenance and when the fourth shift came back on we would finish up. I was ranging ahead for the first part, honking and scanning but staying in contact with Cape Traverse while they managed the jumps. At the fifth jump I decided to wait around for them. It'd been a long day and I was looking forward to stretching out in the mess with a coffee and a book for the last hour or so. I found the destination marker and parked myself about four kilometres off it.
That's when I noticed it. As the black cloud that proceeded the opening of the hyperspace corridor exit began to appear I could've sworn I saw something in it. Another pattern. It almost looked like another star system. Like a mirage or something. That's impossible, obviously, hyperspace corridors are only ever one direction. The math says it's not possible for information to travel through them in multiple directions and there's for sure no way for someone on this side of the corridor to see through to the other side. Leaving aside I knew for certain what I was seeing wasn't the side where the carrier was coming from, this mirage looked much, much closer to the core than we were from the stars in the background.
Then it was gone. Everything was black clouds and blue lightning just like any capital class ship entering a system, and I'd convinced myself I'd just been too long in the cockpit on too little proper sleep. I touched down, cleared my landing pad and was only a little disappointed when I didn't get a call from Sal up on the bridge when I got to my bunk.
* * *
I had breakfast with Sal the next day as we were preparing the carrier for the final stage of the trip to the green gas giant. I asked him about the jumps, especially the last three, from the day before but he told me everything had been running fine, nothing to be concerned about. But for some reason I didn't believe him. I couldn't say why, not even now as I write all this down, knowing what I know now, I still couldn't say why I didn't quite believe he was telling me everything, but I didn't. Something was off. On this ship and in his response.
"You'll be in your Diamondback, I trust, commander?" he'd asked at the time. Seeming a little anxious. I told him I thought I'd watch from the bridge today if nobody had any objection. I promised I'd stay out of the way, at one of the ATC duty stations that are never manned during our jump days. I could tell he wasn't happy but he didn't object. So when jump time came I was there, two consoles away from Donnovan, with a fresh mug of coffee, watching as we entered our first hyperspace corridor of the day.
* * *
The first jump was entirely by the numbers. I was impressed as hell by the efficiency of the entire bridge crew. Poetry in motion you might say if you were the metaphor-using type. As the cooldown sequence finished and everyone started working on the next jump I picked up on a bit of tension at the nav station. I let them carry on for a few minutes -- a couple of the crew seemed to be arguing about something -- before I stood up. Sal intercepted me and started in with a bunch of procedural questions. By the time I'd managed to satisfy him the navigation officer told us the next jump was successfully plotted and we would be locking down in ten minutes.
The third jump, our last planned for the day, was an entirely different matter.
We seemed to be in witchspace a lot longer this second time than the first and the transition back to normal space too longer and was a lot more rough than any we'd done before. The ops station normally has three crew assigned to it and when I turned to them after we finally returned to normal space they were already dealing with screens full of yellow warning messages.
Sal was in full control, immediately directing the team with admirable calm and authority, but it was obvious that I wasn't the only one rattled by this whole experience. Reports came in and as the yellow warnings at ops were all cleared, the boards gradually returning to green over the next few minutes, I managed to catch Sal's attention. I said nothing but my expression told him I wanted a conference right away. He turned things over to his second, a blonde-haired kid named Grenlee, I think, and we huddled near the hatchway while the nav team plotted our next jump.
He was already trying to explain himself before I'd said anything, "Commander, sir, I can explain." He told me that he'd had a team working on the nav system for a few days now. Even before we'd discussed the problems in my cabin. He had suspected the nav software as soon as we had that first impossible jump plotted for us and while he had some of the team working on rechecking all the data and the route, he'd also put together a programming team to try to tear apart the software itself. Decompile it, learn exactly how it works and try to find the bug he was sure was in there.
The morning we left the Statue of Liberty nebula he'd had the software engineering team, lead by someone named Radue, apply a patch directly to the running system. They were certain they'd found something wrong and that this patch would fix it, but there really was no way to test it all the way out here. And, of course, doing what we were doing was expressly against the terms of usage of our navigation software. Was, in fact, very likely a crime in every system in the Bubble. Definitely a crime in the eyes of the Federation, Alliance and the Empire, and any time those three agree on anything, you know it's serious.
He assured me they could still back out the change and once we were settled for the day they'd do just that. We planned to stop at the giant for four days, plenty of time for them to cleanly extract the change or do a full system restore and be ready to go before we left to meet with the DSSA carrier.
I didn't like it, but I agreed, and we kept the clock running.
* * *
Entering witchspace was again a little rougher than normal, but there wasn't the long, dragging sensation we'd had coming out of the last jump. That time it'd almost felt like the hyperspace tunnel itself were pulling on us, reluctant to let us go. This time entering the corridor was more like pushing a heavy crate across the floor. It wouldn't move at all at first but when it did give it was easy. Coming out . . . coming out was something different. The transition back to normal space was slow, drawn-out and violent. My now-empty coffee cup shattered on the deck, one of the kids working at ops wasn't properly belted in and pitched forward out of her chair and across her duty station. The Cape Traverse itself made a whining, groaning roar like it was dragging against a mooring in drydock. I heard gasps all around as I realized I'd also been thrown to the deck. The bridge was full of this strange blue-red-white light that I recognized even before I'd gotten to my feet.
We weren't at any gas giant and it wasn't green. We were less than a hundred mega-metres from a neutron star.