The founder effect, p.10
The Founder Effect, page 10
A tone sounded in Joan Walker’s earphones as Whale’s AI warned her it was about time, and she closed the diary entry she’d been working on.
In many ways, she was just a passenger. Whale would undoubtedly land herself just fine without human intervention, but it was more of that belt-and-suspenders philosophy. If something went wrong with the central AI—and its standalone backup—it was unlikely a mere human could avert catastrophe, but “unlikely” wasn’t the same thing as “no chance in hell.” Not that she’d minded drawing the short straw. In fact, she’d fought hard for this assignment from the beginning, because Adam had been slated to head the Lander Alpha crew in light of the twenty years he’d spent on a working Australian cattle ranch. Her own childhood had gifted her with minimal experience at the bottom of a gravity well, but she was damn well the best pilot assigned to Victoria, and she’d made that stand up.
She did wish the two of them had been awake together for her final crew shift aboard Victoria, but like all of his crew, Adam had been loaded aboard in his cryostasis pod, along with the rest of the cargo. That was why she’d been keeping her diary for the last year or so, to share the excitement of arrival—and the bitter disappointment of the non-arrival of Prometheus—with him when he woke up.
Now she adjusted position, right hand resting lightly on the hands-on-throttle-and-stick joystick while the time display ticked steadily downward, and she smiled.
I’m not one bit nervous, she told herself. Not one. Shut up, stomach!
“She should start her de-orbit burn in about forty seconds, sir,” Chief Ottweiler said, and Dupree nodded.
The main engines’ de-orbit burn would slow Whale to align her on the desired entry path, then the maneuvering thrusters would adjust her attitude before she hit air nose-first, behind her ablative heat shield. It was a throwback to the design of humanity’s very first reentry vehicles, predating even the original shuttle, because, despite her enormous engine power, something five times as long (and eighteen times as wide) as an old wet-navy aircraft carrier was simply too massive to brake any other way.
“Three minutes to direct signal reacquisition,” Ottweiler added, and Dupree nodded again. The pair of relay satellites deployed equidistantly around the planet from Victoria gave them continuous communications with Whale, but Dupree was old school. He wanted a direct transmission path whenever he could get one, just in case they lost a satellite at exactly the wrong moment. He’d had that happen, once, and the results had been . . . not good.
Not that anything’s going wrong this time, he thought very, very firmly.
The countdown clock reached thirty seconds . . . and the universe went insane.
Joan Walker’s eyes flared wide as the attitude thrusters fired early. On her main display, the reentry profile tracked on undisturbed—perfect. But she felt the vibration, and Whale’s maneuvering thrusters were as powerful as Victoria’s shuttles’ main engines. They had to be, given her bulk, and the starscape beyond Walker’s canopy high atop the lander’s hull rolled crazily as it rotated around its axis. She twisted the joystick to override whatever the hell had gone wrong, but nothing happened. Whale should have reverted to manual control the instant she hit the “ENABLE” button, but it didn’t. In fact, the entire stick refused to move at all!
She wrenched at it in disbelief, fingers flying through alternate sequences on the HOTAS buttons, trying to find a way in as Whale rolled fully inverted . . . and then the main thrusters lit off.
Not with the incremental thrust that had been programmed. It was a full-power burn, and not just by the pair of engines she’d selected, either. Five and a half gravities of totally unexpected acceleration slammed her back in her tilted couch, and horror filled her as she realized exactly how Whale’s attitude had changed. The thundering engines weren’t simply killing orbital speed; they were driving her vertically downward, straight toward catastrophic atmospheric entry!
That was impossible. All of this was impossible, but that impossibility was about to kill her—and Adam and everyone else aboard Whale! Unless—
She tightened her abdominal muscles, fighting the gray-out, and her left hand fought its way across her flight console against five and a half times its normal weight. It reached the button she’d never expected to use, and she punched it, but nothing happened, and she swore savagely inside her mind. That should have overridden the AI, kicked it completely out of the system and killed the main thrusters whatever the computers were telling them.
It hadn’t.
She closed her eyes, her hand continuing to move, until it found a second button. It pressed, and she sobbed in gratitude as the attitude control AI powered down and the maneuvering thrusters, at least, stopped firing. A green light indicated manual control had been enabled, the joystick came alive in her hand, and she felt a fierce flare of relief. She might not be able to shut down the main engines, but she could at least control Whale’s attitude while they fired!
She rolled the ship frantically, fighting to bring it back to its proper attitude. For a moment, she thought she had it. But then the green light blinked out again and the thrusters went dead. The joystick still moved in her hand, but it had no effect at all.
She glared at the blandly lying plot. It showed her on exactly the correct entry trajectory, despite how sharply she’d diverged from it. At least she’d managed to shift her attitude away from that suicidal dive into atmosphere, but that might not be a whole lot better, if she couldn’t regain control of the engines. Instead of driving straight down into atmosphere, she was driving straight up, away from the atmosphere on a heading that took her directly away from Victoria—and rescue—as well.
Nothing lay on her current heading but interstellar space. But at least she’d bought a little time.
“Flight, we have a problem,” she heard her acceleration-hoarse voice say with far greater calm than she felt. “Whale is declaring an emergency. Multiple control system fails. I can’t get into the system. Request immediate remote override.”
Her earphones were silent.
“Flight, this is Jonah! I need a remote override! Do you copy?”
“What the hell?!” Chief Ottweiler blurted.
Commander Dupree’s head snapped around, and the chief pointed at one of his displays.
“She’s way the hell off profile, sir! Look at that!”
Dupree looked, and his blood ran cold as he saw Whale accelerating fiercely away from the planet.
“Jonah!” he barked into his mic. “Jonah, advise your condition!”
“Nothing, sir,” Ottweiler said tautly.
“Jonah!” Dupree repeated. “Joanie, talk to me!”
Silence answered.
“Enable remote access!” he barked at Ottweiler. “We need to get in there.”
“Can’t, sir.” Dupree twisted around, glaring at the chief over his shoulder, and Ottweiler shrugged. “Already tried, sir,” he said heavily. “She’s comm-silent. Down on all her links, even the telemetry.”
Joan Walker fought desperately to hang onto awareness, but the merciless acceleration went on and on, and despite her G-suit, despite all clenched muscles could do, despite all her endless hours of flight training and experience, it drove the blood steadily away from her brain. That unremitting fist of acceleration drove her down, down the beckoning slope, and she slid into unconsciousness.
“What the hell could have gone wrong?” Nikolina Perić’s voice was harsh, and Edwin Dupree looked at her. Both of them knew the question was rhetorical—at the moment, at least—because the captain knew everything Dupree knew.
They floated side by side in Flight Control, watching the radar plot, as Whale continued her headlong charge into the endless depths.
Watching was all they could do.
Victoria’s tugs could have matched Whale’s acceleration, but until she exhausted her fuel, her head start would have continued to open the gap no matter what they did. None of them had the acceleration advantage—or fuel—to overtake her, decelerate, and then return to Victoria, and none of the shuttles possessed even the tugs’ fuel capacity. Which meant nothing in Victoria’s equipment list could possibly reach and recover the lander.
If her trajectory had brought her closer to Victoria, if any of the tugs had been online, or even on standby, they might have reached her before she passed the point of no return. But it hadn’t, and they couldn’t, and so fifty-one of Edwin Dupree’s personal friends had been sentenced to death, and all he could do was watch the execution.
“I doubt we’ll ever know what happened,” he said bleakly, after a moment. “The telemetry feeds were all green, right up to the instant they just stopped. Same thing with Joanie’s—Commander Walker’s—comm. No signs of trouble at all. Everything was perfect! And then this.”
He twitched his head at the plot, holding the back of a flight couch to stabilize himself.
“Whatever it was, I think it must have taken out the entire flight deck,” he continued, his tone bleaker than ever as he acknowledged the death of one of those friends. “How the hell she got onto that heading in the first place is more than I can guess, but if Joanie was alive, she could have at least killed the main engines. And we couldn’t remote in, either, so it had to be something catastrophic. Something nasty enough—violent enough—to send Whale’s flight computers crazy, take out her comm systems completely . . . and kill Joanie, too.”
“But what could do that?” Perić demanded. “You and I both know our landers’ design forward and backward, Ed. There’s nothing in it that could do all that without blowing up two-thirds of the entire lander!”
“I know that!” Dupree managed at the last second to not snap his response. He drew a deep breath, instead, and shook his head. “Trust me, we’re going to model everything we can think of that might have accounted for it. Ottweiler’s already started on that, in fact. But I think you’re right. Nothing in the design could’ve done it.”
“So you’re saying it was some freak external factor?”
“At the moment, I think that’s more likely than anything else,” Dupree agreed. “But I don’t plan on making any assumptions. We’re going all the way down to the base computer codes and every single control system aboard that lander. Hell, if it had rivets, we’d be looking at them! But even if we can’t isolate a design fault, that won’t prove there isn’t one. And we can’t afford to lose any more landers.”
Perić nodded somberly. With Whale gone, they were reduced to the minimal terraforming capability built into the other landers, and the entire colony’s margin for survival had just been pared dangerously thin.
“If you can’t isolate a cause, what then?” she asked. “We’ve got to put the others down eventually, Ed.”
“Agreed,” he sighed. He watched the death beacon of the lander still accelerating away from them. Waiting.
“There,” he said softly, as the icon suddenly stopped accelerating. “Fuel exhaustion.” He drew a deep breath and turned away as Whale coasted onward, onward, into the endless deeps.
“If we can’t isolate a cause, then the only solution I see is redundancy,” he told the captain after a moment. “They’re all designed to land under computer control. The human flight crew’s basically an afterthought . . . which obviously didn’t work this time.” His mouth tightened, then he shook his head. “So I think we have to rework the other landers. We’ve got the volume aboard them and the resources aboard Victoria to build an entire secondary, human-crewed flight deck with standalone computers that don’t rely on the central AIs. I think that’s what we’ll have to do.”
“That’s going to delay us,” Perić observed.
“Well, we weren’t supposed to land any of the others until Joanie and Adam had had ten years to get the central hub up and running,” he said bitterly. “I suppose that leaves us with a little time in hand.”
TRAPPIST-2 Star System
Lander Whale
April 2347 CE/03 Ad Astra
“Left flank! Watch your left, Joanie!”
The voice crackled in her earphones, and she flung herself prone in the deep snow barely in time. Livid tracers were a solid, unbroken bar overhead, like a pre-space movie’s death ray, and the cacophony of a mini-gun chainsawed on its heels. She rolled up on her right shoulder and hip, craning her neck to look back along the line of fire, and saw the automated ground mount she’d missed on the way in. It was a good thing it had been programmed to wait until she was fully into its field of fire before opening up. And thank goodness for the handy hollow she’d tumbled into! At the moment, the weapon couldn’t depress far enough to reach her, but if Adam hadn’t warned her . . .
Her left hand rose cautiously, careful to stay below the mini-gun’s searching fire, and tapped a button on the side of her visor. A sighting caret appeared, and she turned her head until it lay precisely on the gun mount. Then she tapped the button again, a tone sounded, and she hugged the ground as the overhead drone tasked to her tactical computer confirmed its targeting. A fraction of a second later, the KEW came sizzling down from above. It struck the mount center of mass, and its own energy—plus the satisfying secondaries as several thousand rounds of ammunition exploded—turned the weapon into flying pieces of scrap.
She was close enough two or three of those pieces thudded down on her. Fortunately, they were very small ones, and she shook her head. That one had made her ears ring even inside her helmet!
“Well?” Adam demanded, a laugh in his voice. “You gonna just lie around all day, or should we get on with the mission?”
“Easy for you to say!” she shot back, rising cautiously to a knee and pulling her rifle back into the ready position against the tension of its powered sling. “You’re the one sitting back there in overwatch while I take all the lumps!”
“Of course I am. I leave all that sweaty grunt work to you. Now, about that mission. If you check your profile, you’ll—”
Bong.
The chime echoed through her, and her face tightened as the snowy landscape grayed into transparency. One hand flexed, almost reaching for the override, but she made it stop. She wasn’t really sure why. It wasn’t like she had anything else to do. But—
But if—when—you fall down this rabbit hole, you’ll never crawl back out of it, and it’s not time for that. Not yet.
Her nostrils flared and she finished the sign-out procedure. The ghostly snowbanks disappeared entirely, and she reached up to strip off the virtual reality headset and opened her eyes.
Nothing had changed.
She floated in what would have been the colony’s rec room if Whale had ever made it to Cistercia’s surface. Because the planners had recognized the need to make communal relaxation available early on, the rec room and adjoining kitchenette had been spared the “pack-stuff-everywhere-until-the-bulkheads-bulge-and-we’ll-unload-it-when-we-need-it” which had turned the majority of the lander’s compartments into tightly crammed closets. She’d had to tug a few crates out of her way—she’d piled them in the passageway outside the main vehicle bay—but that hadn’t been much of a problem in microgravity. And moving them had given her access to the VR systems.
Operation Arctic Avalanche had been one of her and Adam’s favorite modules, long before they ever boarded Victoria. She had literally years of their previous adventures—in half a dozen modules, not just Arctic Avalanche—in memory.
They were available for replay whenever she wanted them. And she wanted them a lot.
God, how she wanted them!
She smiled wanly at the thought, racked the headset, sent herself floating through the rec room door, and began pulling herself along the endless spinal corridor toward the flight deck. She didn’t hurry. There wasn’t much point. In fact, there wasn’t any point. There wasn’t any point to anything, and she found herself wondering how long it would take her to admit that.
Never was much quit in you, Joanie, Adam’s voice said in the back of her mind, and she snorted harshly.
No, there wasn’t. But this time there was no winning scenario, even for her. She knew that, yet she hadn’t accepted it yet, because on the day she did that, she would quit and that was . . . well, it was unacceptable. A violation of her personal code, everything she’d ever believed in. You didn’t quit. You kept moving forward, you kept fighting, you kept trying until the dark came down, because if you didn’t you were a coward. If you didn’t, you let the other people who lived in that habitat with you down. Because if you quit, why shouldn’t everyone else?
But this time . . .
She reached the hatch, floated across to her flight couch, and strapped in to keep herself from drifting away. Technically, she should have suited up. The vast lander’s internal spaces were protected by automated pressure doors, but the overhead canopy was the only thing between the flight deck and vacuum, and the last thing Whale could afford—once upon a time, anyway—was to lose her sole crewwoman to explosive decompression. She’d come to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter if that happened now, though, and shorts and a T-shirt were a hell of a lot more comfortable.
Her lips quirked and she flipped the end of her sable braid around behind her. Her hair was growing longer, and she was loath to cut it. Adam had always loved her hair long, but that was a problem for any pilot, and they’d had to compromise on something that would fit whenever she helmeted up.
That was another thing that was no longer an issue.
“Record diary,” she said, and waited for the chime that indicated a live mike.
“Day . . . Fifty-seven,” she said then, glancing at the calendar display. “Nothing new. I guess I’m only making entries to have something to do. Sooner or later, I’ll have to admit that, but I can’t quite seem to do it yet.”
