FENRIR: Chapter 28

[seawasp]

 
So one test down...

 

Chapter 28: Unpleasant Possibilities

Days to Launch: 296

     "Thanks for coming, everyone. First, congratulations to Dr. Chris Thompson and our Head Researcher Faye Athena Brown for passing their tests and officially joining the crew of Carpathia." There was a clatter of applause and a couple shouts of "Yeah!" from the CENT members present (virtual and physical). Stephanie joined in, glad that some of the first members of her group had made it.

     She glanced to the side, where York was applauding as enthusiastically as anyone. York had made it through the centrifuge tests, which had been his main worry… and then discovered he was part of the small percentage of people who simply couldn't seem to overcome the disorientation of weightlessness. She knew that had hit him hard, and there wasn't much consolation she could offer. Hàorán had been right; she was in fact the one with the least to lose.

     But after a couple of days, she'd risked broaching the subject with York.

*****

     "I just wanted to say how sorry I am you didn't make it," she said quietly.

     He looked at her, closed his eyes, and sighed. "So am I, of course. No doubt about it. So many things to look forward to. Riding an honest-to-God nuclear pulse rocket. Being one of the first people going beyond the Moon's orbit. Meeting aliens, hopefully helping them."

He gave another huge sigh, then shook his head and smiled. "But not your fault, not mine – just a quirk of biology. I'll keep trying to get past it, but the outlook isn't good. Still… I've been a part of it. And can a guy who won a Nobel Prize really complain about what he didn't get?"

He gave a genuine chuckle, then looked back to her. "Really, it's all right. It's not like there isn't plenty to do here, even after you leave."

"I really, really wanted you with us," she said. "I'm going to feel awfully alone without you to back me up."

"Nonsense!" The word was both sharp and firm. "You don't need my backup. You smacked sense into Hàorán and Ben Robinson all on your lonesome – oh, yes, they told me all about how you basically slapped them both down, and you can bet that story's gone around the entire project on the quiet. Did you need my help, well, I think you did. I'd like to think being an older, experienced person gave me some wisdom to pass on. But you're past needing anyone to back you up except yourself.

"Support, now," he smiled and leaned back, "well, we all need that, and I wish I was going to be there. But you just keep your eye on the goals and don't let anyone distract you from what's really important, and that's all you have to do."

"Thanks, York. Thank you so much." She took his hand and squeezed it, and he turned that into a big bear hug she leaned into. "And here's a promise: when we get back, I'm going to introduce you to an alien myself."

His eyes sparkled, with anticipation or a touch of tears she didn't know. Maybe both. "I'll hold you to that."

*****

     York caught her looking at him, leaned over as the applause petered out. "Glad Faye made it. You need support, she's the one to give it to you since I'm not going to be there."

     "Understood, sir," she replied with a grin. It was good that Faye had made the cut; there had been more than one person opining that she was too old to make it through the centrifuge, let alone the multiple vertigo-inducing assaults of the Comet.

     Instead, Faye had come through both on her first try, better than Stephanie had managed; she'd needed a month of practice in the chair before she could make it through a flight of weightless parabolas without losing her lunch. Faye apparently had enjoyed the entire thing.

     "All right, on to business. Francine, update on Fenrir itself?"

     Dr. Everhardt brought up images on the shared screen. "The good news is that we are virtually certain some systems, very likely including life-support, are still active on parts of Fenrir. With months to get every telescope and sensor package we could pointed at it, and analyze it over time, we've actually managed to get a fair outline of Fenrir itself."

     The shape onscreen was noticeably different than early versions of Fenrir (which had, admittedly, been nothing but rough educated guesses). Most striking was the strange spiked front end, making it look like a gigantic metallic star-nosed mole. The main body of Fenrir was still a generally cylindrical object, tapered some both fore and aft. The theorized "ruff" of the retracted radiator sail had been refined and now was shown to be an uneven, clearly damaged skirt that had the look of a plastic ruffle accidentally run past a gas burner; there was the same hint of melting and structural separation, with some parts simply gone.

     Near the worst-damaged parts of the retracted sail, there were blurred but present features that Stephanie's eyes and brain translated to severely scorched, perhaps melted, hull.

     The rearmost portion of Fenrir came to a point, the rearmost part of the point surrounded by a curved, rounded bowl shape.

     "What is that thing on the front?" Faye asked.

     "We can't be absolutely certain," Everhardt responded, "but our current guess is that it is the anchor for the ice shield that Fenrir was carrying during its long journey. Likely has details we cannot see, including sensor masts that would be embedded in the ice to track stresses and impacts and so on. These, however, are the regions of immediate interest."

     Two separate areas of Fenrir, one ahead and one behind the ruff, were shown with mottled patterns of dull red.

     "This is the infrared map we've been able to accumulate of Fenrir," Dr. Everhardt went on. She pointed her cursor at the two red-patterned areas. "Careful modeling and energy radiation analysis gives us a strong indication that there are systems in these areas maintaining an internal temperature of about twenty-seven degrees C, plus or minus three degrees depending on how we change various assumptions about their material characteristics and such. These areas maintain their temperature despite variations in solar luminance, sometimes cooling when simple physical principles would expect them to warm, or remaining warm when cooling would be expected.

     "Given this, we are as certain as we can be that there are living areas, or possibly very delicate equipment bays, that are still operative to some reasonable extent and attempting to keep themselves to some designated temperature." She looked around at the various participants. "We therefore cautiously, but reasonably, postulate that there are, in fact, still survivors on board even now, over a year later. This gives us good reason to believe they may still be there when we arrive."

     A subdued cheer rippled around the room. Time to get the other side, Stephanie thought. "So what's the bad news, Francine?"

     "Well, firstly, Fenrir has shown no sign of changing course or even getting much under control except the rotation we noted earlier. This is very troubling to the entire team, since we have to assume that they would want to come to a safe orbit in this system, rather than run a parabolic course out of our system that cuts dangerously close to our Sun – and in a cosmic sense will almost sideswipe Venus along the way." She looked to York, who grunted and stood up.

     "We have a lot of hypotheses about what could be going on there, but none of them look good. Human beings in similar circumstances generally make tremendous efforts to save themselves, and we have to assume that a strong survival instinct – for oneself or others – must be a part of the makeup of a civilization that's expended so much effort to come here.

     "With well over a year passed, this implies several possibilities. The first is that, somehow, the accident deprived them of everyone with the capacity to perform decent engineering work; the only Fens left on board are those whose knowledge and capabilities simply don't translate to anything useful when it comes to controlling or repairing the ship."

     "If that's true, it implies a level and degree of focused specialization that's very different from human," Chris Thompson said. "Assuming they have an even halfway-decent sized crew, that would imply hundreds if not thousands of people who collectively lack such information; in a random collection of human beings who are not engineers or otherwise technically trained, you would still end up with many people who as a hobby or past profession would have good enough knowledge of the skills needed to at least make a stab at fixing the ship. Not to mention immense reference resources onboard."

     "That's certainly one possibility," York agreed. "There's the side possibility that no one ever had the ability on board – that all technical matters were handled by autonomous systems, that they reached a point where AI was able to address all their needs, and that the accident perhaps caused a widespread EMP that has taken out the ship-maintenance systems."

     "There is another element that's disturbing," Dr. Everhardt said. "Over the months since we began to get decent detail on our mapping, the map has changed." She showed a sequence of images, and Stephanie didn't need to be told what it showed.

     The mottled areas had lost area in those months.

     "This, too, has lots of possible interpretations," York pointed out. "Progressive systems failure, pervasive damage that means that eventually the life support systems give out, for instance. If that's the case and what we see represents an average case, these areas will be about a quarter this size, or less, by the time we arrive. But there are some interesting, perhaps more disturbing, features here. As you can see, in these two images, this area here goes dark."

He brought up another set of images. "But here, a week or so later, much of it is warm again, and this area, on the other side of the retracted sail, has gone dark. There are several examples of this, although as we can see the overall trend is that these sections of the ship are slowly losing functioning volume overall."

     York looked around. "Does anyone else find this suggestive?"

     Peter Flint nodded slowly. "Well, could be that what we're seeing is them working to get the ship going again, but the ship's not cooperating so well."

     "What do you mean?" Stephanie asked. She sort of understood what Peter was getting at, but it didn't hurt to get the detail out in the open.

     "Machine like a starship, we all know that's complicated as all hell," Flint answered. "It's likely that the really important parts that got wrecked aren't simple gadgets. They probably need parts that need half a dozen machines that make the parts for the other parts that get assembled into the parts of the thing you need, if you follow me."

     At her nod, he went on, "But Fenrir's bad hurt and power production's way down, so they probably can't run all the machines at once. And so they make themselves a bunch of Part A on machine one, then have to shut down machine one and go to machine two to make parts B and D, then shut that one to go to machine three, which uses parts A and B to make part F, so they can go back to machine one to make part C… and all the time other things are breakin' down because they've just got to get these parts done first."

     "So they're in a race between fixing the most vital systems and how long it'll take before other systems really crash hard, is what you're saying," Stephanie summarized.

     "That's how I read it. Wouldn't want to be in their shoes, or whatever it is they wear. We need to get out there fast, before it all goes up."

     Stephanie noticed Captain Lín exchange a glance with his First Officer. "That is a good possibility," Lín said, carefully.

     "You have another possibility?" Stephanie asked.

     "Not one either of us likes," Robinson answered. "But it's one I'm afraid we have to consider. Captain?"

"Mutiny," he said quietly. "Sorties into each other's territory, sometimes regaining lost areas, but overall doing more damage as it progresses. Yes?"

     Stephanie winced as she saw York's humorless smile. "I was hoping no one else saw it. Yes, that is one other explanation."

     "But that would be … ridiculous!" Stephanie burst out, and heard similar sentiments echo around the meeting. "They're in an emergency situation, surely they wouldn't waste time on that kind of thing."

     "'Only a fool fights in a burning house,' you mean?" Chris Thompson asked. "Sounds good, but I'm pretty sure there's plenty of examples of human beings doing that same kind of stupid crap in emergencies – burning buildings or lifeboats or whatever."

     Stephanie gritted her teeth and thought a moment. "I hate to think that way," she said finally. "Partly because I'd really prefer to believe aliens who can build that," she pointed to the outline of Fenrir, "are beyond that kind of thing. But… that might also explain why we never got a response to our transmissions."

     "Great minds think alike," York agreed. "That's exactly one of the points we've kept in mind. They refused to respond to our transmissions, and we're pretty much of one mind on whether they received the transmissions. They had to have, and unless they and their AI systems – if any – are dumber than rocks, they must have figured out what they meant and how to respond. We had a few guesses as to why, but this accident rather argues against one of our first guesses – that they thought we were utterly beneath them, ants before gods; godlike aliens don't blow their engines and lose control of their ships.

"So they had to have a more … well, human reason not to talk to us, and having arguing factions is one we thought of. This data starts to make that scenario all too believable."

     The room was silent for a moment. Then Stephanie stood up. "This isn't the news we wanted," she said after all eyes were focused on her. "Either of them, really; Peter's theory makes it look like Fenrir's falling apart around them even faster than we thought, while the Captain's makes them, well, dangerously human. But it doesn't really change anything. We still have to get there for it to matter how or why anything on Fenrir is happening."

     She grimaced. "We just have to be aware that one possibility is we're going to step right into the middle of a civil war."

That wouldn't be fun at all. Except maybe for the readers and the author, but pay no attention to those people behind the curtain.