Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe) Read online

  Malcolm laughed and hefted a yellow instrument. “What he’s saying is the compartment no longer glows brightly enough in the dark to read by. Wear a suit, Lieutenant.”

  There were French suits; Becky wasn’t impressed. Still Malcolm donned one and she followed suit -- Captain Reynard didn’t bother with a suit.

  Becky took one look at the two banks of four fans each and blinked in surprise. What had happened here? The fans were arranged in four pairs of fans -- that made them easy to tune, it had been learned. On the left side, facing forward, the three fans closest to aft end of the ship were obviously destroyed.

  Malcolm was right -- the fan containment hadn’t shattered into little pieces -- great huge holes had been battered into the titanium enclosures.

  She went and looked at one of the fan rotors -- one that had obviously come through the containment casing and created a huge ding in the compartment wall.

  It was melted! Something had melted it so fast, that the extraordinary high quality steel of the rotor had run like wax. A little. How fast had the turbine been spinning? If it had been at speed, upwards of 120,000 RPM. The melting must have been extremely sudden and of extremely short duration.

  No wonder it had come flying out of the containment! A gram change over a centimeter would have been enough to unbalance the turbine. A whole lot more than a gram had melted, and it had moved several centimeters!

  She took pictures of the damage and turned to Malcolm and Captain Reynard. “There are no clues on the telemetry? These fans look like they shorted to ground. You should have seen a voltage drop or something with a load like that.”

  “There is a second or so where the instruments pegged,” Malcolm told her. “Everything. According to some of them, they experienced a two hundred gravity acceleration transient. That would have knocked everyone on their ass, at the very least. More than likely it would have killed everyone. The men in the fan room died from mechanical trauma -- the flying debris. The reactor crew fried when the radiation and temperature spiked. There were no injuries that you’d expect from an acceleration transient of that magnitude. I conclude that the telemetry was fubar as well.”

  “It sure sounds like it. Can I get more recordings?”

  Captain Reynard said something, but Malcolm nodded assent. “I have a copy,” he told Becky, “but get whatever else you can.”

  An hour later Becky made her way to their shuttle, her first visit since their arrival. Malcolm and his wife were playing gin on the bridge.

  “Mr. Malcolm, I have a favor to ask,” she asked.

  “Of course, Lieutenant.”

  “A friend -- I think you know her -- Anna Sanchez -- is on a habitat at asteroid 16 Psyche. I have a message for her.”

  “Official?” he asked.

  “Pretty much,” Becky replied.

  He laughed. “I’m pretty informal; that works for me. And yeah, Anna is a friend. She flew Ad Astra before I got my hands on her -- Ad Astra that is.” He said the last few words hastily as his wife started to frown. Malcolm patted his wife’s hand. “Anna would be the first to admit it, I didn’t meet her expectations of a big-balled test pilot. ‘Puny’ was the word she used once.”

  “And just how did she come to know how big your balls are, dear?” his wife said acidly. Becky wanted to laugh.

  “They’re not that small,” Malcolm said defensively. “That, and the first time we flew Ad Astra, permission came down unexpectedly to make the flight. Admiral Kinsella said we had to fly in pressure suits. Both of us stripped on the bridge and put ours on. We wanted to go, dear.” He grinned at his wife. “I told you a long time ago, my first love is pushing the limits. You said you could live with that -- as long as I wasn’t talking about another woman.”

  “Don’t you go forgetting.”

  “Never, dear. Dear, I’m pretty sure this is a copy of Lieutenant Cooper’s report on the fan malf. We need to get it out.”

  He turned to Becky, his fingers dancing on a computer. “Bad news, Lieutenant, she’s about as far away as she can get. We’re about 11 AUs out from the Sun here, Psyche is 4 AUs out, but we’re on the other side of the sun -- about 165 degrees. Call it two and a quarter billion kilometers. We’re looking at a message turn around time of about two hours each way.”

  “Please, that’s not important.”

  “One last question. I don’t know what the local time is on Psyche -- it’s 1400 GMT here, this is going to get there at 1600 GMT. No sweat, if that’s what they’re using -- the French as using GMT - 1, so that wouldn’t be a problem either. On the other hand, it could be the middle of her night. Do you want to wake her up?”

  Becky contemplated the question. The accident had occurred more than a week before. All that Anna could do was comment. On the other hand -- she might be awake and be interested.

  “Wake her if she’s alone,” Becky said suddenly.

  “Oh, I’m just going to love sending this!” Malcolm said. “On the other hand, I know Anna. You are playing it safe!”

  Becky was disappointed when there was no immediate reply, but thinking about it made her wonder. What if the shoe had been on the other foot? Wouldn’t she have shown the message to others and asked for their opinions? Wouldn’t she have run the telemetry several times as slowly as possible for any clues? She wouldn’t have responded quickly.

  The reply came the next morning as she sat down to breakfast in the wardroom. She started to get up when Malcolm told her that the message was arriving, but he waved her back. “The header says it’s forty-nine minutes. Take your time.”

  She bolted her food anyway, while Captain Gilly pretended indifference. She smiled when she saw Anna again, looking fit, if a little pale. “Greetings from Psyche. I’ve got a good crew working on a nice vehicle. I tell you, this experience is going to set the pattern for future new construction. We built a vehicle half the size of Ad Astra in the ocean off Taiwan and then we moved it out to the main belt to install power and advanced flight systems, and make it a slightly larger.

  “That ship took us six months on the ground, and now eight months aloft -- and we’re nearly done -- this ship is nearly four times the size of Ad Astra now and is intended to carry about six times the passengers. Unlike the French ship which was a poor design from the outset.

  “I called in my engineers and we looked over the data you sent.” She then launched into their analysis. It was more detailed than Becky’s, but in the end reached the same conclusion.

  “There are hints here, broad hints, that something fundamental failed. The good news on that front is that Steph is due back from vacation any day now. She’s going to want to look at this, I’m sure. If anyone can figure it out, it’ll be her. I tell you this, I’m glad we’re using Rolls Royce fans, not GE, and I sure as heck would never buy fans that hadn’t been completely tested. Nor would I have departed Earth, without exercising the vehicle fully. Yeah, you’d think that if you can run on low fan, High Fan would be simple -- but while the power curves and all that look simple, they mask a state change of enormous impact. To summarize: we have no idea. The telemetry data was at a data rate only a little slower than our own... yet it’s clear that the events occurred much faster. We’re going back to see what we can do to raise our data rate, and on what.

  “Glad to hear from you, keep in touch, and for God’s sake, if you figure it out, let us know.”

  Becky sighed. She’d had few friends in her life. Why was it that among those she worked with she felt like they were dead ends? But those who’d commanded her -- Anna, Captain Gilly, Admiral Kinsella, and others -- were people she really wanted to know better?

  She listened to the message again, just to see if there was anything she missed. She’d finished and was still thinking about the problem when Captain Gilly floated into the bridge and took up position near her. “Malcolm, you’ll want to hear this too.”

  Both Malcolm and his wife joined them. A moment later, Chief Pettigrew joined them as well.

  �
��We’ve been officially disinvited,” Captain Gilly reported. “They want us off the ship in two hours. They were not amused at Eagle’s attempt to claim salvage. The last of the colonists are on the way to the Trojans. They say they can take it from here. They think we’re all part of a plot to steal their ship.”

  Malcolm laughed. “They can keep it. I told Eagle a couple of days ago, he was barking up the wrong tree. This ship is badly designed, badly engineered and poorly constructed. It’s a death trap, even without the fan problems. They would have been lucky to get half of the colonists alive to their first stop. They made no attempt to control consumable consumption -- they had some theoretical estimates and when reality didn’t match the estimates -- they disregarded the observed numbers.”

  “Lieutenant Cooper and I will return to our quarters aboard Miracle, pack our things and return to the shuttle,” Captain Gilly said. “We’ll go to the Trojans first, and discuss what went right and wrong with Eagle, then tomorrow, first thing, report back to Space Service headquarters for a more extensive debrief there.”

  “And the reactor, sir?” Chief Pettigrew asked.

  “The Space Service, by direction of the President, gave it to the French. We have no intentions of taking it back. Lieutenant Cooper, as well as senior engineers back on Earth who have reviewed the data, and inspected the progress of the installation to date, believe it is safe for them to return to Earth on low fan, once they get the power up.”

  “Captain, sir, with respect, Lieutenant Cooper, with even more respect, these people are clowns. The crew they’ve got working down there is adequate to weld supports. I would not trust any piping, cabling or integration work they do,” the chief told them.

  “I agree with the Chief,” Becky said. “None of them had been in space before this flight. There have been a couple of fatal accidents and dozens of minor ones since the original malf -- it’s been luck that more haven’t been killed. They have no qualified engineers aboard the ship. Their one surviving engineer absented himself from his post and evidently hid among the colonists being repatriated back to Earth.”

  Captain Gilly nodded in assent. “The French say they’ve leased a shuttle from the British, and have a crew of twenty-five ‘experienced’ engineers coming up, arriving this afternoon, ship time. I realize that a commander should never show his personal doubts to his subordinates, but I agree with Malcolm. Getting off Miracle alive is a miracle, and I’m only too happy to be going.

  “Pack as fast as you can and repair aboard forthwith. Prepare to undock, Malcolm, as soon as you determine we are secure.”

  “What little we’ve had to do to occupy ourselves, has been making sure everything is secure, Captain. We’ll check your baggage, and be out of here as quickly as possible.”

  The High Fan component of their flight to the Trojans wasn’t very long, about two-thirds of a minute. Becky found it marginally less uncomfortable than the first time.

  She’d briefly met Eagle before. He didn’t look extraordinary but everyone agreed he was the person most at home in space. She met his wife, Kat, the woman who’d spaced someone so dramatically. She was a little shorter than her husband, but also didn’t look like someone you’d expect to put a man’s eyes out with a screwdriver, throw him naked into an air lock and dump the air.

  If the two adults didn’t look remarkable, the same wasn’t true of their kids. The oldest was less than two, the younger about six months. On Earth, the older would have learned to walk, and gotten a start of learning to talk. She talked, albeit she had a ways to go before she could carry on much of a conversation. She made her mother look like a fish out of water in microgravity.

  Just before they left, Captain Gilly asked how Eagle was doing on consumable replacement. “We’re back up to nominal, Captain, except methane tankage. Shuttles use it for fuel, and we use it as a fuel stock -- we used a fair amount with the French. The rock we orbit has a few thousand cubic kilometers of methane ice; we’re gaining ground on the shortage far faster than we consume it. In a few weeks or so, we’ll be back to a huge surplus.”

  “If you need anything, anything at all, the Space Service will be there for you.”

  Eagle laughed. “I sent the French government an official message as head of government of our sovereignty, that the next time we go to succor a French-flagged vessel, we’ll require payment in advance. They have refused to honor any of our charges.”

  “I heard about that,” Captain Gilly agreed. “Admiral Delgado sent a pointed reminder to them that had this accident occurred two months from now, the Miracle at Orleans does not meet certification requirements -- and that while we would have done our best to rescue the colonists, we’d have offered no assistance to the crew or vehicle.”

  “Have they offered any payment?”

  “No. Admiral Delgado talked with President. Even though the Space Service, including the Rescue Branch, is due to be transferred to the Federation at the end of the year, it is, as of now, a branch of the US military. We sent them a bill for the reactor -- as that was over and above the rescue. They claim it’s part of ‘rescue services.’ The admiral filed a mechanic’s lien against the French government, then copied them my official report about the vehicle’s inadequacies -- and released them from the lien, saying the vehicle would cost more to fix than it would cost to build another one.”

  “Hah! Good! Say, you guys are building another one, right?”

  Captain Gilly sighed. “Yes and no. Admiral Kinsella’s first task on her return to duty was to design another ship, using the knowledge she’s learned from the first two expeditions. Her chief engineer on the two missions, Commander Jacobsen, has been promoted to captain, and will be assigned to build Admiral Kinsella’s next design. We’ve been staging materials out at Grissom Station... we’re hoping to have the next ship working up a year and a half from now. As soon as it’s accepted, we’ll start on a third and fourth.”

  “You have wasted a lot of time.”

  “We did. However Miracle at Orleans is going to be the counter argument to that.”

  “You still wasted a lot of time,” Eagle repeated.

  “We did. I’m not proud of it -- no one is proud of it. But the dinosaurs from the Air Force and NASA have been permanently discredited. God only knows what damage they might have caused if they’d been allowed to continue.”

  “Anna Sanchez says they are being ultra careful out on Psyche,” Becky noted.

  Captain Gilly nodded. “Taiwanese and Israeli engineers -- about as good quality of talent as you can find, anywhere.”

  Then it was back down to Earth. Becky was now a formal member of the Space Rescue Branch and she participated in all the debriefs and reviews. A week after they got back, Admiral Kinsella returned from vacation looking tanned and fit and had a sparkle in her eye that hadn’t been there before.

  Things were looking better and Becky wasn’t surprised to be summoned to another review of the Miracle at Orleans rescue -- this time an engineering review with Admiral Kinsella participating.

  The meeting was intensive -- going through everything, although Admiral Kinsella offered only questions.

  At the end, Admiral Kinsella stood. “Lieutenant Cooper, you and Malcolm did fine work investigating the accident. I’ve read the official French report and if I’d had a student turn in a report of that quality when I was a professor, the student would have failed my class.

  “There are a number of suggestive things, but nothing we can be certain of, beyond the grossest physical details. The fans did blow, one after another. It is suggestive that the failures are all on one side of the ship, from the rear towards the front, moving towards the generated gravity well. It is suggestive that the observed melting is in one quadrant of the fans and appears to have been catastrophic in extent, even if of short duration. It is suggestive that the containment ruptures were all in the direction of rotation -- but confined to one quadrant of the fan enclosures. The direction isn’t so much suggestive, it would have
been surprising if it had been otherwise, but what is suggestive is that the ruptures occurred in the same quadrant of the fans. What happened, happened very quickly. Not even Ad Astra has telemetry that would have been able to catch the glitch. Thus I concur...”

  She stopped when the President of the United States entered the conference room. The officers popped to attention as the President walked to stand next to Admiral Delgado.

  “I am,” he said, his face clearly contorted in anger, “going to be candid. I’m taking a time out as the President and reverting for a few seconds to my status as ‘outraged member of the human race.’” He made air quotes. “If I ever see a hint of my candid, personal, private and off-the-record remarks, I’ll crucify the lot of you.

  “Those stupid fucking French!” With that, he handed Admiral Delgado a message form. The admiral shook his head in disbelief after reading it, and handed the message to Admiral Kinsella.

  “I concur heartily, sir. And it won’t be me. I join you fully in your sentiments,” Admiral Delgado told him.

  Admiral Kinsella read it and shook her head in disbelief as well. “I shall spare the rest of you the wait. I’m a lady, as well as an admiral, so I can handle this adequately. While Admiral Delgado and the President no doubt think that I’m theirs to command, I have a senior commander -- my mother -- who I obey first of all.”

  She lifted the message form. “At 1735 Zulu the French government notified the Space Rescue Branch that their vessel, Miracle at Orleans, was overdue and presumed lost. The vehicle had reported at 1510 Zulu that they were about to return to Earth vicinity under High Fan. There has been no further contact with the vessel.”

  Admiral Kinsella drew herself up. “I’m partly to blame myself. I helped convince President Sarkozy to join the Federation. He promptly lost a vote of confidence and the French elected instead one of the most inept females on the planet to govern them.

  ”They have been continuously trying to contact the vehicle, which hereafter I will call ‘Orleans’ -- since there is no ‘Miracle’ there at all. The French President called Eagle at the Aft Trojans and asked him to send a rescue vessel to their assistance. In his way, Eagle’s reply was more pungent than the President’s: he demanded a billion Euro deposit to their bank account in Beijing before they would budge. The French told him to... well, in short, they said no.” She looked around the room.