The chime of the datapad grew in intensity. It began as a faint sound, a gentle nudge in the darkness of Lochlain’s bedroom, but before long it was a blaring claxon. He slapped at the datapad several times before his hand made contact with its surface.
“Captain, I need you up here!” It was Truesworth and his voice was very insistent.
Lochlain lifted his head and squinted at the datapad. His mouth moved but no sound came out. It was 00:33 and he had been asleep for less than three hours since completing his last shift. He swallowed again and croaked out, “What broke this time, Jack?”
For the first hours inside the nebula, the freighter had traveled seemingly without concern. Lochlain thanked providence for Brooke’s improvised navigation shield circuit and simple, pure luck. During those opening hours, Zanshin had glided, impervious to the massive radiation she traveled through. However, at the thirtieth hour, on the second day into the tunnel dive, Brooke’s circuit had failed spectacularly, burning a nine-meter dark, hideous scar into the bulkhead of the ship. The damage was purely cosmetic but the scorched interior wall had been a harbinger of things to come.
Zanshin’s first, real failure manifested two hours later. Four hours into Lochlain’s shift, the ship had flashed a security error code on the bow airlock door. The malfunction was insignificant in tunnel space, not even worth fixing. After all, there was no guarantee that a repaired airlock door would not malfunction a second time before reaching Carinae. Brooke decided that it would be more efficient to repair the defunct portal during their approach in-system to the Carinae orbital rather than dedicate resources now that would be better spent fortifying Zanshin’s critical systems.
As the journey progressed, the freighter continued to rack up a litany of broken or breaking items through the evening although one of the cruelest had occurred roughly one hour after the airlock door seized. Lochlain discovered the ship’s coffee maker had died after he took a sip of gritty sludge meant to see him through the evening. This repair was deemed essential and both engineers had dedicated nearly an hour to its resolution.
Truesworth’s voice matched the gloom inside Lochlain’s bedroom. “I don’t know what broke but it’s something major. Bring an engineer with you, Captain.”
The sensorman’s response vaulted Lochlain back to the present. He slid his feet to the floor and threw back the sheets. Since entering the nebula, the entire crew had taken to wearing shipsuits to bed. The jumpsuits had a tendency to bunch uncomfortably but most sleep patterns were already interrupted by the anti-rad therapy every ten hours and the ever-growing list of action items on Zanshin. He reached out and shook Brooke next to him. “Mercer, wake up.” He walked around the bed. “Mercer, we’re needed on the bridge.”
Brooke mumbled a reply. “I don’t want to go to school today.” She pulled the covers over her head.
Lochlain shook her harder. “Mercer, wake up!” He grabbed the edge of the sheets and ripped them off her.
The woman groaned loudly but begrudgingly began to move. “You’re so mean.”
“Something’s wrong on the bridge,” Lochlain repeated. “We need to get up there.”
The pair stood behind Truesworth less than two minutes later. The Brevic sat at the navigator’s console and worked furiously to clear the page full of flashing errors before him. Lochlain glanced at the bridge’s wall screen and saw the lengthy list replicated over the navigation plot. Zanshin was in the middle of her thirty-eighth hour of the trip. His eyes refocused on the errors and he realized he did not recognize most of the blinking codes. “What happened, Jack?”
Truesworth helplessly lifted his hands from the console. “I have no idea. One minute we’re sailing right along, the next all hell breaks loose.” He pointed at the screen. “I’ve never even seen half of these codes before.”
Lochlain pecked at the panel to eliminate one of the faults. The error message disappeared but returned an instant later with a harsh buzz. “What?” he muttered in confusion.
“Yeah, it’s seriously broken,” Truesworth agreed.
“Mercer, what’s Error Code 3634EN-43F?” Lochlain asked.
She consulted her datapad. “It’s some kind of translation error between the Encountrix sensing array and the navigation computer.” She pointed at the code under it and recited from memory, “That’s a navigation calculation failure, right there.” Her eyes read onward before again referring to her datapad. “The one after that is a Failure to Find error for a navigation table. The whole nav system isn’t receiving data from our sensors.”
“What’s that mean?” Lochlain and Truesworth asked in unison.
Brooke pursed her lips as she looked at the two men. “It means we’re sailing blind.”
* * *
Ten minutes after Brooke’s declaration, the entire crew gathered on the bridge. Truesworth described the events leading up to the freighter’s latest malfunction and then Lochlain summarized the effects of the failures. “Essentially, what started in the primary navigation array buffers cascaded into a general systems failure inside the entire navigation database. Not only did a lot of hardware fry but it also corrupted most of the software that interfaces with the sensing equipment.”
Lingenfelter, seated at the sensor console, simply stared at the captain with her mouth covered.
Naslund timidly raised a hand. “Does this mean we can’t see outside or steer the ship?”
Lochlain looked to Brooke for an answer. Her head was down, attention consumed by her datapad. When he grew tired of waiting, he shook his head. “No, the sensors are back online and the helm is functional. Thrusters remain operational and both our tunnel and conventional drives are unaffected. However, the navigation suite is fried. Sensors and navigation won’t talk to each other. What this means is that even though we can steer, we can’t navigate. We have no idea where to steer.”
Naslund’s mouth twisted slightly. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Casper,” Lingenfelter said, “think of it as flying an aircar with paint covering the wall screen. The aircar works just fine but you have no idea where you are and no idea where you’re going.”
“Okay,” he replied, “but we’re in a tunnel. There’s only one direction.”
“Yes and no,” Lingenfelter equivocated.
Lochlain pressed the fingers of each hand together to form a large circle. “This is the tunnel we’re in, Casper. Yes it goes one direction but there’s a lot of space inside the tunnel.” He held up the circle so he was looking at Naslund through it. “Now, somewhere at the end of the tunnel, inside this vast circle, is a tiny dot that is our exit point into Carinae. We have to fly through that dot at the same time we activate our tunnel drive to generate an effect that will drop us into normal space.”
“Dives are a matter of timing and location,” Lingenfelter stated as she nodded at Lochlain’s explanation. “Just like how we have to be at a tunnel point in normal space when we activate the tunnel drive, we have to be at one inside tunnel space to get out.”
“I think I get it,” Naslund answered. “That’s what the professors meant by the four possible outcomes of a dive, right?”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “The first possibility is you activate your tunnel drive not only at the wrong time, that is before you reach or after you pass through a tunnel point, but also activate the drive at the wrong location, say nine light-seconds to port or eight light-seconds starboard of the tunnel point. Either way, the drive generates the effect but it’s not close enough to open up an exit.”
“The second outcome,” Lochlain described further, “is you activate at the right time but the wrong location in the plane of the tunnel point perpendicular to your approach, resulting in no exit dive. The third is activating while properly lined up with a tunnel point as you approach but at the wrong time and you end up generating a tunnel effect either too far ahead or too far behind the tunnel point. Again, no exit dive.”
“And finally,” Truesworth finished, “the last outcome is that you activate precisely while lined up with the tunnel point and right at the moment you’re sailing through it which results in a successful dive out of tunnel space.”
“And right now,” Lochlain said grimly, “without navigation, we have no way of knowing where we are in the tunnel.”
Naslund looked down briefly at his chronometer. “We know when, don’t we? We’re thirty-nine hours and six minutes into the tunnel. We dive at hour one hundred, right?”
Lochlain glanced again to Brooke for help. She was still focused on her datapad, but offered an answer. “Approximately, but that’s not nearly accurate enough. Over the duration of the entire 100-hour trip, t-space’s properties combine with navigational drift to create errors such that we can’t just set a clock at the start of a long trip and have the right timing at the end. When we sail through the exit point at a tenth the speed of light, we’ll have about a two-second margin of error or risk activating too late or too early.”
Naslund deflated as full understanding of Zanshin’s predicament took hold.
“Plus,” Brooke reminded them as she tore her eyes away from her datapad, “we only have enough charge in the fuel cells to power the tunnel drive once. If we miss, we won’t have the fuel to power a second attempt.”
Lingenfelter looked horrified at the revelation. “Why did we cut our power so close?”
“Ships do it all the time, Elease,” Truesworth explained gently. “If we missed our tunnel point on the first attempt, we’d sail past the exit before we could generate a second effect anyway and there’s never been an instance of a ship missing a tunnel exit and coming about to find it a second time.”
“Oh.” Lingenfelter slumped and she cast her gaze downward. Her voice was barely audible. “Is it wrong to say I’m relieved this didn’t happen on my watch?”
Brooke chuckled slightly. “This wasn’t anyone’s fault. We were just extremely unlucky.”
“Fatally unlucky,” Naslund corrected sullenly.
“No,” Lochlain insisted. “We’ve been extraordinarily lucky.”
As one, Zanshin’s crew looked at him cynically.
His response was pure optimism. “This malfunction happened at hour thirty-eight. As Casper has so ably pointed out, this gives us sixty-two hours to come up with a solution.” He pushed off the captain’s console, strode confidently to the center of the small bridge and looked expectantly at his deck officers. “On duty or off duty, we’re all going to work tirelessly until we come up with an idea that saves our ship.” He lifted his hand and flashed two fingers in sequence. “When do we activate our tunnel drive and where do we need to be inside the tunnel when we trigger it? When and where. That’s all we need to solve.”
“But we’re blind,” Naslund protested lightly.
“Technically not blind,” Truesworth said with a smile. “The sensors work just fine. We just can’t marry what they see to navigation.”
“Exactly,” Lochlain said, eyeing each of his crew in turn. He bolstered his voice with an unshakeable confidence. “We’re going to come up with a solution. I know we will. We’re going to work harder than we ever have before and solve this problem because all of our lives depend upon it.” He nodded a final affirmation. “Give it some thought. Stick to our established duty schedule until we have ideas to act on. You’re dismissed until our next anti-rad dose which is in…” He glanced to the compartment’s chronometer. “It’s in a little over five hours from now. I’ll see everyone inside the mess at 06:00.”
The group broke apart. Truesworth remained on the bridge but the rest of the crew returned to their quarters to search for solutions or what little sleep they could. When Lochlain entered his quarters behind Brooke, she turned to him with a dismal expression. “Reece, Zanshin suffered another malfunction during the night.”
“What else?” he asked in a dire tone. “Isn’t having the entire nav system die enough?”
She inhaled deeply before continuing. “The radiation is not only wearing down our navigation shield but it’s also degrading the shielding around the power core.”
Lochlain’s eyes bulged. “Are we going to lose containment?”
“No, at least we won’t before we hit the exit point. The power core shield is too compact and too robust to die that quickly. But with every passing second, Zanshin is losing her top end power potential.”
Lochlain entered their bedroom as he asked, “Can you say that in non-engineer speak, Mercer?”
She paced after him. “With a fully capable power core and core shield, I could generate one hundred percent power. Of course, Zanshin’s power core is already old and I’d be wary of pushing it over ninety-five percent anyway. If I push the core past that, I risk letting the reaction escape the core’s shield and we lose containment and lots of other things happen, ending with us blowing up.”
“I understand that much.” Lochlain moved to the bed and collapsed wearily onto the mattress.
Brooke treaded lightly around the bed to join him. “What’s happening now is that the nebula is not only assaulting our normal navigation shield but the shield holding the power core reaction together. Slowly but surely, it’s chipping away at that shield and killing it right along with the nav shield. For now, it’s just degrading a potential we couldn’t realize because of our ninety-five percent practical cap but it’s going to get worse and eventually drop us below that limit.”
“How bad will it get by the time we reach the exit?” Lochlain asked. He let a long sigh escape his lips. “If we can even tell when we’re at the exit.”
Brooke grimaced. “If it’s a steady decline, I’ll be limited to about sixty-four percent of maximum power.” Her frown twisted as she delivered her prediction. “It’s not going to remain a stable drop though. It could stop entirely and be fine or it could drop more rapidly. This is one of the reasons why nobody wants to be in t-space inside this nebula.”
Lochlain placed his forearm over his face to cover his eyes. “I made a terrible mistake,” he admitted.
She reached out to him and wrapped long fingers around his hand. “No,” she said softly, “you were faced with a terrible choice. You made the best decision you could.”
He turned his head to face her. “How can I possibly tell them I’m sorry?” he asked miserably. “How do you apologize for killing your own crew?”
Brooke pulled his hand to her lips and kissed it tenderly. “Oh, love, don’t think like that. We all knew what we were getting into and we all had a say in the matter. Any one of us could’ve walked right off the ship if we’d wanted.”
“They should have.”
“They made their own decisions just like I did.” She squeezed her eyes shut and gently shook her head. “I’m not letting you do this alone.”
“But they trusted me and their reward is going to be an eternal trip in tunnel space.”
Brooke’s shoulders began to shudder lightly. Her hazel eyes lit up and the corners of her lips turned upward behind the intertwined hands pressed to her mouth. Her whole body shook as she started to giggle and she let her hand drop to the bed. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said, “it won’t be eternal because we’ll be dead as soon as we run out of anti-rad.” Her tittering morphed into real laughter.
Lochlain felt his spirits lift despite the situation. He was facing death but at least she was at his side. “Oh, well, in that case…” He felt his heart swell as he looked at the remarkable woman beside him. “I love you, Mercer.”
Her lips pressed to his mouth mere moments after her own reply.