The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7) Read online

  Mentally, he was stunned. He’d had more time than he’d ever dreamed. Some bad guy was stunningly incompetent!

  The two latest slop buckets from the habitat were still docked when it ended. He knew the signs; multiple unknowns arriving on the same tick. “Emergency acceleration warning! You have, tops, one minute!”

  It was clear over the next few minutes the bad guys didn’t know his ship was alive. His fans were up and running, but not even on low fan. The bad guys started shooting up the system in their usual fashion.

  “All pax, buckle up! We will go to High Fan with little or no warning in the next few seconds or minutes!”

  He laughed at that. There would be no warning. He sat with his finger on the button that would take them away from the system at multiples of the speed of light. None of the aliens even seemed to look at his habitat. He watched the planet die, he watched the habitats die, even the one who’d been his particular benefactor.

  It was one of the last shuttles who nearly killed them. A voice suddenly screamed on the comm circuits, “You’re just going to sit here? You’re not going to do anything? Bastard coward! Bastard! Bastard!”

  Then the slop bucket went to low fan, heading towards the nearest alien at high gravities. That instantly drew a half dozen missiles -- but more importantly, two had been targeted at his asteroid.

  Trevor said quietly, “Fifteen seconds to High Fan. Be sure to have your seat backs and tray tables in the correct position. I forget whatever the hell that was.”

  He depressed the switch and the habitat went to High Fan without further ado.

  He had fast reactions; bitter experience had taught him that. Fans started to blow, shattering their confinement. He hit cancel after just a few seconds. Even before he hit cancel the universe changed.

  He wasn’t sure what happened. One second he’d been headed out on High Fan, and then they were tumbling wildly, High Fan a lost ability. He had no idea of the forces that could torque a half dozen cubic kilometers of asteroid.

  First things first: kill the tumble.

  Check his six for the aliens. There was nothing close. There had been ships close before; now there was nothing. His threat detections were blessedly silent and he drew a breath. He hit the “Where am I?” button.

  He was unprepared for the message “Data indeterminate.”

  He tried a couple more times, but the response was always the same.

  He sat back and took stock. There was nothing on the threat board. There weren’t any familiar stars on the screens.

  He decided that he wasn’t the sole source of knowledge in the universe. “I want everyone what holds the rank of ‘Cadet of the Fleet’ or higher and anyone who holds an Advanced Flight certificate to assemble on the command deck. This includes you, slop bucket. Your compatriot nearly got us killed.”

  He contemplated some more things. Should he attend in person? He was a hermit; he had a certified excuse why not. There were a million reasons why he should stand aloof. Good God! He wanted a hug! How much he needed someone whispering in his ear that he was doing the right thing! Hell of a thing, he thought, for a hermit!

  He spoke to the couple of hundred mostly young people who assembled. “I am willing to share the logs with any who request it. Our home system was destroyed. A slop bucket went to fans and left us, headed for the aliens. The aliens started shooting at it and us. I went to High Fan after the planet was destroyed, after the habitats were destroyed and by then, all the shipping I could detect.

  “Damned if I know what happened then. We started losing fans instantly. We lost six in four seconds; that’s when I shut them down. We have twenty-two fans left; plenty if everything works right.

  “This habitat doesn’t sport top-of-the-line Fleet equipment. Nonetheless, fifteen years ago it was top of the line. The threat screens are empty; so far as I can detect, there are no enemy vessels in range.

  “I guess you can call that the butter-side. ‘Where am I?’ has no idea where we are. It’s still sifting lesser possibilities. When you contemplate how many that might be -- it doesn’t sound good.”

  “We lost six fans?” the Port commander asked.

  “Yes. I shut them all down at that point. All six fans lost containment, but the event didn’t extend beyond the fan chamber. Because of the nature of things, the fan chamber was untenanted.”

  Cadet Barnes spoke up. “It’s been a while -- is ‘Where am I?’ still working?”

  He checked, frowned and then checked again. “The program says that it can’t find any nearby reference points, and is currently analyzing the external globular clusters and dwarf galaxies. The good news is that we are someplace in the Milky Way, the analysis of the nearby galaxies has confirmed that. But the error bar of our position estimate is about six hundred light years in diameter.” He looked over the conference table. “If the preliminary estimate is correct, the estimated position of this ship doesn’t overlap the Federation at any point.”

  The computer began to chirp insistently and he turned to it. “Tell me we’re found,” the commander said.

  “It’s an engineering alert. The computer has found a similar fan malf in the past. A very long time ago in the past. That ship went to High Fan and her fans started exploding like popcorn, just like we experienced. One of the explosions was heavy enough to shake the entire vessel, causing the nuclear reactor to scram.”

  Cadet Barnes stared at him. “A nuclear reactor? Scram? There haven’t been any reactors like that for hundreds of years.”

  “It was the first French starship built, lost in 2020, after a brain-dead response to the initial malf.”

  “Define brain-dead?” the surviving habitat shuttle pilot asked.

  “They survived the original malf. They patched together a working fission power plant and attempted to return to Earth on High Fan. No trace of the ship was ever found. That brain-dead.”

  “That’s pretty brain-dead,” the pilot agreed. “Evidently we broke the speed limit of Benko-Chang.”

  A new computer tone started -- it was “Ode to Joy.”

  “Well, we’re not as lost as we were a while ago. We traveled about 375 light years, at a 70-degree angle up from the galactic plane. We’re about sixteen months from home. Of course, we don’t have the consumables for more than a couple of months... so we’re still not out of the woods.

  “And we didn’t just break the Benko-Chang rules, we shattered them. We couldn’t have been running on the fans for more than a few seconds. This is major, absolutely major.”

  “How are we fixed for consumables?” the shuttle pilot asked. “I heard things weren’t great.”

  “We got a couple of slop buckets up from your habitat -- and some more passengers. Commander Robinson, I’m appointing you the acting Exec. Form a couple of teams of officers; one to inventory consumables, the other to inventory our pax manifest. I want everyone with an ID card swiped into the system. Anyone without an ID -- a third team for records adjudication. That team can be relatively small. Start with the oldest without records, working to the youngest. I have the full certification suite aboard -- and the forms to fill out for the practicals. I hope we don’t have many of those because there aren’t going to be but two or three exams we can give.

  “I don’t think any of you understood me a minute ago. We just traveled for about four or five seconds at a velocity a couple of hundred thousand times faster than we normally would be able to. The computer tells me that at that velocity we are closer to the Andromeda galaxy that we were to Earth when we started -- less than two weeks.”

  The shuttle pilot laughed. “And you what, lost a couple of fans every second? More that that? You’ll need a mind-boggling number of fans just to get home -- much less twelve or thirteen days to Andromeda.”

  “All of that is secondary. In a few minutes I’ll bring the fans up again, safely on low fan, and we’ll figure out to do after we get those inventories done.”

  “And that’s safe?” the pilot quer
ied.

  “I ran the fans in the low fan mode to reach my orbit when I first moved in; there were no problems. I had the fans idling before we went to High Fan just now -- that’s not indicative, but it’s a good sign.”

  “And consumables?”

  “I had 450k ration days, which I thought would be plenty for five thousand pax... that’s three months for a two month trip. Except we are now up to nearly 15k pax, and that’s not enough -- more so given our current location. It’s going to depend in large part how much the slop buckets brought. We had six from planet-side, eight from the habitat. There was some additional other consumables as well. Water is reading 27 million liters, which is sufficient. Oxygen tankage is enough for 105 days consumption; CO2 scrubbers are more than adequate for the task. This habitat was originally designed for twice this many people.

  “The critical thing is going to be food,” Trevor told them. “It would have been food anyway, as we can recycle virtually everything else. Food -- we can provide that but it will take some time. We can’t get much in thirty days, ninety is a minimum and one twenty will see us able to recycle food as well. This habitat was designed to be consumables self-sufficient for thirty thousand people.

  “So it is going to depend on how many ration days the slop buckets brought. A million ration days in addition to what I had originally and we’ll all survive. We all will be a lot skinnier than we are now. A million six hundred thousand ration days and we’ll have a couple of weeks of short rations, but after that we’ll be fine. We need to get working on that inventory soonest, Commander Robinson.”

  “Roger that, Colonel,” she replied.

  “One last thing to think about. There are fifteen thousand passengers aboard -- thirteen thousand five hundred of them women, fifteen hundred young men. We have two adult men and three adult women. We are going to be living in interesting times! Commander Robinson, cogitate on the situation. Everyone else should think about it, too. We are a minimum of fifteen months from home. That’s a little on the long side to expect fifteen thousand young people of various ages not to fool around.

  “And fifteen months is a minimum. I haven’t talked fuel, because it is something we can’t recycle -- but relatively easy to obtain. However, for a vehicle like this one, a fueling stop is going to take a minimum of a month... and we need to fuel every seven to eight months. And that assumes I can figure out how to fix the fans so they don’t go ka-boom when they are turned on.

  “Anyone with any engineering or Benko-Chang certificates needs to review the data from the earlier malf and ours. Just ask a ship’s computer to bring up the data on the malfs... it will know what you mean. Now we need to get to work.” He grinned. “Starting now.”

  He sat down at the command desk and sifted through data while thinking about what had happened. It had been fast, no doubt about it. He’d had a number of years to get used to the death of his family -- for these people it was little more than an hour before -- they were in shock, and not thinking straight.

  As if to make a mockery of his thoughts, Cadet Barnes appeared.

  “Colonel, may we speak, sir?”

  “Granted, Cadet. Proceed.”

  “Two things, sir. I never liked my father either; he blamed you for the deaths of my mother and younger sisters in what was demonstrably an accident,” Robin’s voice was level and controlled.

  “A miscalculation on my part. I didn’t take into the account the thrust generated by a laser of that size. The aiming mechanism deformed; a possibility I hadn’t taken into account. I cut the beam a fraction of second after the damage had been done. I’m terribly sorry, Cadet Barnes.”

  “You didn’t walk away from the accident unharmed, Colonel. I looked at the data, I reviewed the Board of Inquiry hearing records -- they are a far tougher judge of what’s a malf and what’s a screw up than the rest of us. I miss my mother; my older little sister was at the ‘pain in the ass’ stage of her life. I went through it; most of us do. She never got a chance to be something else -- so I treasure her memory more than anyone else’s. My other sister was a source of dirty diapers.

  “That’s neither here nor there; it’s not important at the moment. The first is that this was abrupt and horrible. In spite of the fact that I thought I was ready for anything, my thought processes are like thick goo.

  “Did the ‘Where am I?’ program show anything close by?”

  “Define ‘close by?’ There is an F3 star about six light years off. There is a small cluster of G stars about ten light years off, averaging about four light years apart. They haven’t been surveyed, needless to say, and we don’t have the instrumentation to detect planets even from the closest star.

  “However, F stars average three out of four having planets, and half of those having something in the habitable zone. G stars are four out of five, and 75% having planets in the habitable zone.

  “G stars are mostly older than Fs. However, there is a blue giant star cutting through the area. By definition, it’s younger than the others, but it’s about eight light years now from the nearest G star and about twenty from the F star. It’s already close enough to be having some effect on the closest G star’s planetary orbits. How its radiation is affecting them is indeterminate. The odds with the F are a little worse than a single G star, way worse than a cluster of G stars -- but way better considering the blue.”

  “And while we need fuel, fueling can be accomplished most everywhere,” she observed.

  “Indeed. However there is the little matter of the fan issue. If we have sufficient food, I can train up enough of you to stand bridge watches. If I can’t fix the fans, we’ll have to go the old fashioned way -- slow boat. I can kick us up to about a third of the speed of light and slow us back down when we arrive -- eighteen years from now. We will spend most of that time in free fall.”

  “We need to fix the fans, obviously,” the cadet told him.

  “You will find, Cadet, that preparing for the worst makes better outcomes far more palatable. We are still a while from having to make that choice. There was something else?”

  “Colonel, I don’t want to be impertinent, but there are fifteen thousand young people out there. Half are crying their eyes out, the rest of them are trying to keep a stiff upper lip -- and all of them, including me, are handling this badly.

  “You need to speak to us, sir. Something rousing, cheering -- and if you can’t promise a quick return home, at least an optimistic outlook for the possibility of our return,” she concluded.

  “Cadet Barnes, I’ve read through the regulations several times. I don’t remember which one it is anymore; it has been a while. But it says a Fleet officer can promote a junior as the situation requires in an emergency, so long as the promotion is two less than his rank. I could, thus, promote you to lieutenant commander, if I so desired. Lucky you, I don’t desire to do that. In a few moments though, I’m going to log your promotion to junior lieutenant -- as soon as I can find that regulation’s number.

  “Is there any particular duty you’d prefer to be assigned to, Lieutenant?”

  She didn’t hesitate. She snapped to attention and saluted, “I think I’d do just dandy in charge of the coffee service on the bridge, sir.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. “Thanks,” he said, “I needed that. I only pretend to be handling this better than the rest of you. I’ve had more practice.

  “Do you understand the regulations about billets?” he asked her.

  “They told us that you couldn’t be assigned into a billet you weren’t qualified for in advance, and that wasn’t at least your rank or higher.”

  “And do you see how it applies here?”

  “That, sir, I don’t know.”

  “It’s not commonly known -- too many would try to take advantage of it. But, for historical reasons, they left the senior rank that could hold the billet of bridge coffee service the way it started: rear admiral.”

  “I didn’t know that, sir. I swear, I have no desire to achi
eve that rank, except in the normal course of things.”

  “I’m afraid, Lieutenant, that we’ll be forgoing the ‘normal course of things’ for the foreseeable future. Now, I need to compose some poetry for everyone else.”

  “Poetry, sir?”

  “Did you ever hear of Dr. Colinda Drake?” The lieutenant shook her head. “She and her father developed the Sky Masters AI that is used aboard virtually every starship, including this one. Including all of the ships in the Fleet. Fifteen years ago I was a fresh-out-of-the-box captain when my colonel picked me to be the Marine representative on a Board of Inquiry. Hah! I was just a Marine in those days! What did I know about AIs?

  “Yet the charge was a serious one and the Port Admiral commanding had commanded my boss to supply him with a very junior captain. I guess the admiral expected I’d never stand up to authority -- Marines rarely do. But I didn’t really see that rendering a correct judgment as anything other than my duty.

  “That Port Admiral’s brother had commanded a Fleet cruiser and the aforesaid cruiser had made a premature landing, just a little short of the base. The telemetry clearly showed that the AI had relieved the Xerxes’ captain, and then made the course correction that brought that ship and five hundred and eleven souls down -- at thirty-five kilometers per second, twelve hundred kilometers short of the port.”

  She choked. “How fast?”

  “Thirty-five KPS, the AI accelerated at a little over three gravities -- increasing the velocity all the way down. For the sixty-two seconds they had to live.

  “Xerxes impacted on a small island that had one tourist hotel, fortunately a small one. The total casualty count was less than a thousand.”

  “Good grief! How could that happen?”

  “The captain of the Xerxes had been carried by his brother’s influence. He’d been at an inner system planet -- inwards of New Cairo. He declared an exercise malf, declared his navigators dead, the AI and navigation computers casualties -- and accelerated half the way home, before turning over. The dim bulb didn’t know you have to slow down going out from a star.” Trevor shook his head.