Lochlain subconsciously leaned forward while staring at the bridge wall screen, enraptured by the tiny numbers. Only when his eyes stung did he remember to blink. In front of him, his deck officers executed their tasks with the intensity of a starving man stalking his prey. All the while, Zanshin bucked slightly in the eddies of the increased compression waves of tunnel space. Her unsolicited movement made her navigator’s task that much harder.
“Uh, it’s rising!” Truesworth alerted loudly while focusing on his sensor panel. “Up to forty-four point four-three… point four-six…”
“Dammit!” Lingenfelter cursed. Her hands balled into frustrated fists. “She won’t stop drifting!” She repositioned her hands to the thruster controls and tightened her face with renewed effort to maintain her course.
“Point four-nine now.” Truesworth’s voice had lost its edge as the ship continued to swerve. He groaned. “We’re well over point five.”
“And away from the center,” Lingenfelter responded dejectedly. “Again.” Nervous eyes stole glances at the main wall screen while sweaty hands wiped a wet brow. “We’re running out of time.” She settled her hands at the controls once more. “I’m reversing our drift,” she muttered with renewed concentration.
Lochlain knew better than to disturb the duo. For the last twenty minutes, the pair had coaxed Zanshin toward the proper sailing lane inside the tunnel. Every time Lingenfelter had declared what she thought was a stable course down the center, Truesworth dashed her hopes with sensor readings to the contrary. Lochlain had wanted to center Zanshin before encountering the third radiation band and hoped that they could maintain the ship’s course as they broke through it. After twenty minutes of failure, he now prayed that Zanshin could simply find the tunnel’s center for even a split second.
“Forty-four point four-eight,” Truesworth recited from the readings of his sensor array. Both of his hands were running down separate charts to assist his interpretation. “Okay, point four-six… keep doing what you’re doing.”
The decreasing numbers indicated Zanshin’s movement toward the least irradiated line of tunnel space: the tunnel’s center. Lochlain deduced by their reactions that readings below 44.20 meant his ship was lined up adequately. He shook himself from the mesmerizing cadence of Truesworth’s counting and rechecked his status screen with particular emphasis on Zanshin’s lifepod. It remained an island of green in an ocean of yellow and red.
“It’s still coming down... point four-two, Elease!” Truesworth cried excitedly. He raised a clenched fist upward. “Hold it steady now!”
Lochlain held his breath. His finger hovered over the command that would launch Zanshin’s lifepod.
Behind the helm, Lingenfelter gave just a whisper of effort on her thruster controls, little more than the suggestion of movement. “Shhhhh,” she whispered soothingly. “Settle down, honey,” she murmured quietly to the ship.
“Point four-two and holding. Steady…”
Lingenfelter growled quietly. “She’s drifting up.” Her hands trembled. “I swear I can feel it.”
Lochlain watched her nudge her thruster controls.
“It’s down to point one, Elease!” Truesworth declared breathlessly. “Good correction, you’ve got her centered… Background intensity is jumping!” he announced. “We’re almost there. Keep her steady!” He continued to shake his raised fist.
Zanshin sailed smartly down the tunnel’s center. Lochlain was again locked onto the bridge’s wall screen. The information it provided was sparse but it served as a focus for his concentration. Any diversion was welcome to prevent him from asking Truesworth how much longer until the ship reached the threshold.
“Wait! Point four-two! It’s rising!”
“Stay put, you bitch,” Lingenfelter commanded as her hands added input to her controls. She violently shook her head and sweat sprayed from her brow. Her hairline was several shades darker than the rest of her hair.
“That did it. It’s leveling off…” Truesworth’s fingers on his upraised hand unfurled between heartbeats. “Huge spike in intensity! We’ve hit the third threshold, Captain! Drop the lifepod!”
Lochlain pressed down hard on his controls. His status panel updated instantly. “Deployed.” He immediately activated the pod’s thrusters to rush it to relative rest.
Lingenfelter lifted her hands from the controls and jumped out of her seat. She danced in a circle while howling like a banshee. “Did you see that?” she cried out triumphantly while pointing at her navigation console. “We nailed it! Point four-two when we launched the lifepod! That’s an error of less than one light-second!”
Truesworth, also grinning from ear to ear, stood from his seat. He raised his hands to high-five his counterpart. Instead, Lingenfelter wrapped her arms tightly around the Brevic and planted her lips squarely onto his.
When the pair separated, Lingenfelter beamed openly and declared, “Holy crap that was nice!” She locked eyes with him without a hint of shame.
Truesworth, a deep shade of red, met her gaze before quickly looking back to his panel. “Um, yeah,” he stuttered, “that was, um, pretty good.” He peeked again at Lingenfelter with a growing smile before turning to Lochlain. He cleared his throat and recovered his bearing. “Sorry, Captain.”
Lochlain laughed with profound relief. “Forget it, Jack. We aren’t in the military and I’d say that Elease earned that.” The voltage of Lingenfelter’s smile threatened to overload the power core from the bridge.
Truesworth reseated himself and scrolled through the data on his console with the flick of a finger. “Captain, when you dropped the lifepod, we were at forty-four point four-two.” He swiped aside the information and consulted a different screen on the panel. “The lifepod is currently at relative rest. Its distance is point-four light-seconds and growing. The beacon signal is strong.” He rapidly drew a circle on the screen with his index finger and tapped the corner. “Also, Zanshin is well out of center now,” he noted with a broad grin.
“How long until you complete your analysis on the beacon’s location, Jack?” Lochlain asked.
Truesworth brought both hands up to wipe his face. Afterwards, he swept back the long hair from his eyes. “Give me twenty more minutes to run the data and double-check it.”
“Triple-check it if you have to,” Lochlain encouraged. “The last thing I want to do is maneuver it out of the center by accident.” He called down to Engineering.
“How’d it go?” Brooke asked without preamble.
“Jack and Elease did great. The beacon is deployed and we think it’s in the center,” Lochlain summarized. He thought he heard distant clapping.
“Well, I guess that means I have to keep building this supercapacitor then,” Brooke complained light-heartedly.
“Nope, we just crossed into the final radiation belt and all of us have a date in the ship’s mess.”
Brooke’s sigh carried through the speaker. “Fantastic,” she said flatly.
Lingenfelter’s grin reduced by an order of magnitude. “Oh, joy. More shots.”
* * *
“Skål.” The Svean tipped her head to drink the medicine before slapping the polymer bag down on the kitchen island. She grimaced and shuddered as the anti-rad cocktail slid down her throat. The glass of water came next, chugged in one long pull. After finishing it, she wiped her mouth and gasped for breath. “Only three more times,” she announced listlessly.
Zanshin had reached the ninety-first hour of her trip. Lochlain felt as if his ship were sailing headlong toward a coast in a dense fog that would lift to reveal either a safe harbor or a rocky cliff. The destination depended on Zanshin’s crew finishing the tasks that would offer the ship its best hope to escape tunnel space.
Down in Engineering, the newly built supercapacitor had been charging for almost three hours. Although the build had lagged severely behind schedule, Brooke and Naslund beat their deadline by concentrating solely on the device’s completion and its connection to the power core. By temporarily abandoning the time-consuming work of wiring the supercapacitor to the tunnel drive and working continuously through the small hours of the night, the engineers completed enough of their project to begin the charge on time. With that immutable milestone achieved, the pair dedicated the next hours to rigging the final connection from the operating supercapacitor to the Deltic tunnel drive.
Although successfully completed, the scramble to solve the power problem had pushed back the work on the second navigation “buoy.” Truesworth had removed Zanshin’s beacon with Lochlain’s assistance but the installation process confounded them both. The circuit designed for the shuttle’s meager navigation beacon was simply not robust enough to support one designed for a 150,000-tonne freighter. The pair had committed to painstakingly building their own circuit using only Brooke’s verbal guidance and trial and error. When she finally stepped aboard the shuttle at 04:00, she was forced to spend the next hour fixing their mistakes, stopping only at the next round of anti-rad protocol.
Lochlain looked around the kitchen island and assessed the condition of his crew. Dark crescents resided under every bloodshot eye and heads hung low. Worse than the physical effects of exhaustion were its mental impairments. Tasks that normally took five minutes to perform now took seven. Lochlain had once read that after twenty-four hours without sleep, cognitive performance matched that of a person with five alcoholic drinks in his system. The errors he and Truesworth had committed while routing their beacon circuit in the shuttle were testament to their waning mental faculties. He resolved that each crewmember would get at least a couple hours rest before Zanshin reached the tunnel point. He deemed it vital for the ship’s survival.
Lochlain inhaled slowly and gathered his thoughts. His crew seemed content to stand around the island and wait for him.
“We’re near the finish line,” he began. “We’ll have enough power to activate our tunnel drive when we need it.” He looked emphatically at Brooke.
She nodded wearily.
“Our first navigation point is set and broadcasting.” His eyes traversed the island to Truesworth.
“It’s loud and clear,” the Brevic assured sedately.
“And our navigator has been keeping meticulous track of time and speed since we entered the final portion of the tunnel.”
Lingenfelter stretched her arms languidly over her head but answered, “It’s not been easy given Zanshin’s chronometer issue but I have the time on the nav computer and a backup on my datapad. We have a little under nine hours left.”
“Lastly,” Lochlain continued through his mental checklist, “the ship’s beacon is almost up and running on the shuttle. Once that happens, all we need to do is to rig up some kind of a remote pilot, uh….” His clouded mind groped for the right word. “Thingy.”
“It’s not going to be simple,” Brooke said. “Unlike the lifepod, there’s nothing built into the shuttle that permits remote piloting. I’m not a programmer. I don’t even know where to begin in writing a program that would allow it.” She dropped her elbows to the countertop and put her head in her hands. Her eyes closed briefly.
“Does anyone have any ideas at all?” Lochlain asked the room.
Naslund sniffed loudly. Not only was the man sleep-deprived, he appeared to be coming down with a sinus infection. “Can we bring the ship to relative rest and push the shuttle out of the hangar?”
Lingenfelter mechanically pulled out her datapad and pushed it toward him. “Coming to relative rest adds too many unknowns to the ‘when’ part of our nav problem, Casper. We don’t decelerate and accelerate at a constant rate inside t-space and without a working navigation panel I can’t tell how much time to add onto our trip so we know when we’ve reached the tunnel point exit.” She pointed lethargically at the screen and said flatly, “As it is, I’m not even entirely sure if we’re calculating things correctly. If we tack on a full stop to what we have now, we could possibly be adding anywhere from one to three seconds of error.”
“There’s got to be a better answer,” Brooke insisted. Her eyes fluttered open and she swept back stray locks of hair. “Jack, I don’t suppose you ever had to do something like this as a privateer?”
Truesworth’s head moved back and forth regretfully. “Not really. I think the answer would’ve been to splice a probe’s guidance package into the shuttle’s autopilot but I’m guessing that Zanshin didn’t come stocked with probes.”
“No,” Brooke replied listlessly.
The crew was silent for what felt like minutes. Lochlain resisted the temptation to close his eyes. He looked around the island and found that most of his crew had lost that battle. Brooke may have been sleeping while standing up. “Well,” he said loud enough to gain even her attention, “we still have a couple hours of work to get the beacon operational on the shuttle. In the meantime, I want everyone thinking about how we’re going to remotely pilot this shuttle out of Zanshin and align it on course.”
“Somebody better think of something,” Lingenfelter muttered while stifling back another yawn.
* * *
“Reece.”
A voice from the mist called out to him. He was sitting on a beach somewhere, possibly Svea judging by the black sand. The ocean waves were gently rolling ashore with the breeze. The temperature was balmy, almost hot. Lochlain immediately discounted Svea due to the heat.
“Reece.”
He looked down at himself and saw he was wearing his orange jumpsuit from the correctional facility. He shuddered at the sight of it. His convulsions intensified. He could not stop himself from shaking.
“Reece, wake up!”
Lochlain opened his eyes to find Brooke preparing to slap his face. “I’m awake,” he answered before she could deliver the blow.
“It’s one fifteen, baby,” she informed him. “Time for our last dose of anti-rad.”
“It’s thirteen fifteen!” he exclaimed and bolted upright on his bed. “You let me sleep for over an hour, Mercer. I told you to wake me up in twenty minutes! We’re diving in forty-five!”
Brooke looked down at him and frowned. “Everyone got at least two hours of rest but you. We need you coherent for this, dammit,” she scolded.
“But I should’ve been working on the shuttle,” he protested weakly. “We still haven’t got the remote system running.”
She waved him off, irritated. “Jack and I wasted hours on it before we both admitted that it just wasn’t going to work.” Her head shook angrily. “Trying to marry the autopilot to the comms system is a good idea but we simply don’t have the expertise or time to pull it off.” Hazel eyes returned to him. A shoulder rose and fell. “Sorry but that’s the reality.”
Lochlain touched his brow to shield his eyes from the bedroom’s light. “We’ve run out of time. What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to pilot the shuttle.”
His hand dropped and he stared blankly at her.
“It’s the easiest way and it’s practically foolproof,” she explained. “I fire up the shuttle and hover inside the hangar. Elease works her magic and gets us centered. When that happens, I quickly fly out and bring the shuttle to relative rest.” Her mouth tightened into a pained smile. “Easy.”
“How do you get back?” Lochlain asked. His head began shaking forcefully. “I’m not letting you sacrifice yourself, Mercer.”
Brooke clucked and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not letting me sacrifice myself either.” A genuine, if tired, smile formed on her lips. “Once I’ve piloted the shuttle clear of Zanshin, I’ll activate the autopilot that will bring the craft to relative rest without me. The autopilot already has a timer feature and it’s more than capable of stopping the shuttle. I’ll be in a pressure suit and spacewalk back to Zanshin.”
Lochlain’s jaw dropped open in disbelief. “You’re going to attempt an untethered spacewalk… in tunnel space… a distance of… Wait? How far will the shuttle be from Zanshin?”
Brooke breathed out slowly. “I don’t know. I’m hoping I can keep it to a few hundred meters.”
Lochlain rose from the bed and let the volume of his voice surge. “If Elease has to change course even a fraction, Zanshin’s thrusters will push the ship thousands, maybe tens of thousands of kilometers away from you!” Expecting a fight, he let his voice boom with finality, “You are not going.”
Brooke merely appraised him with sad eyes. Her voice was but a whisper compared to his fury. “If we want to save the crew, there’s no other way.”
The couple stared at each other, neither willing to back down.
“Fine,” Lochlain relented. “But I’m going.” He nodded firmly to signal he would harbor no argument. “I’m the captain. I’m accountable for my crew. I’m making this decision and I won’t skirt my responsibilities. I’ll die before I let my crew become trapped in tunnel space.” His mouth immediately dropped open in astonishment and his eyes went wide at his declarations. “My God, did you just hear me? Who the hell am I?”
Brooke continued to gaze upon him with miserable, hazel eyes. “The man I’ve always seen.”