Chapter 27
The very first order of business was to turn loose the crew back in the tail section. We called, but they refused to answer. RJ and the Security officer volunteered to make the trip if I promised to return to sickbay.
So I did not see the exodus from the weightless section of the tail by more than one hundred angry, crying, injured, sick, indignant, and grateful crew members, but I was told it was a sight that could never be aptly described by any poet, past or present. The Security guys who coordinated the disembarkment described the cursing, howling, laughing, crying, belligerent, prayerful, cooperative, and enthusiastic group as being a runaway steamroller of disenchanted humans.
As the disbursement throughout the ship began, we sent out a global directive for damage assessment, and the policing of all areas, as personnel became available.
Sickbay quickly became overcrowded. It forced the Doctor to let me go. He needed every bed and every bit of space he could get his hands on. I thought of using Tolson’s quarters, but the idea gave me the creeps. My own, humble quarters once again became more inviting than one would think metal and composite walls could ever be.
I made my way through the disorganized hallways, now busy with people, and escaped to my small quarters. I set my terminal to wake me under all the appropriate conditions, and gently lowered myself face first into the bed. Falling into to it would have been too painful.
The computer’s bleeping seemed to go off a minute or two later. I looked up and squinted at the screen. Five hours. It made me certain time travel was actually possible.
To my surprise and delight, Ann-Marie was at her desk in Security’s front office. She looked tired but collected. She smiled as I entered.
“Adrian, it is more than good to see you.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting some rest?”
“I’ve had all I can stand. I never thought I’d be this glad to be back at work.”
“I’m sure you know I‘m glad you’re here.”
“They're calling in from all over. It’s too much. I’ve made them all go back and put their updates in print so you can pick and choose from the reports.”
“Must I?”
She laughed. “From what I’ve seen so far, going through systems reports will be the least of your worries.”
There was a touch of gravity in her statement. I could only guess at the mess we were in. As I sat down at Tolson’s desk, my disdain for desk work waved a scolding finger. I promised myself it would only be temporary.
Ann-Marie’s reports were already listed on the screen. I started with propulsion and worked my way down through Nav, Life Support, Communications, Networking, and all that followed. The reports were substantial. The motivation of the crew was beyond what anyone could have expected. They must have barely left the aft section when they reported for duty.
The problem was it was seriously bad. The aliens had attacked the hard wiring that ran from the various control rooms to the peripheral devices at the other end. These were the lines that ran through all the most difficult and remote areas of the ship. The wire-type connections had been fried, the cabling no longer any good. Even worse, the fiber cables had somehow been overheated so that the glass in the lines was distorted and unusable. We had communications within the ship, but all lines leading to dishes or antennae were destroyed. We could eventually repair and reboot the necessary computer systems, but we could not communicate with the equipment they controlled.
It was the end result of what the aliens had first begun. We had been forced to control our gravity manually. We had planned to start our engines manually. They had been destroying our interfacing before we even knew they were there. Had that been the worst of it, we would have had a chance. Unfortunately, looming beyond those problems was the loss of air and water. We knew more than half of both had been taken. The final inventory had not been completed yet, mainly because many of the sensor lines were no longer working. When the reports came in, the air and water levels would tell us how long we had to live.
Replacement department heads for those missing needed to be appointed, and then a staff meeting scheduled to reconstitute upper management. The captain had said distress beacons were already sent out, but the chances they were blocked were great. We could not pop out in the escape pods. We were too far from anything, and it was doubtful anyone was coming for us.
I put my elbow on the desk and rubbed my forehead. We needed to go home. To do that, we needed to go to light. Somehow, we had to go to light.
I pushed back in my chair and took a deep breath. At the door, I asked Ann-Marie to arrange a departmental flow chart for me with all the missing or out of action people notated. She gave me the ‘already done’ reply, and pointed me back to my desk.
In a way, filling the missing positions wasn’t too difficult. Since I did not know many of them, I had to take the highest available name on each chart and bump them up. In cases where I could, I used the people who had been so proactive in our recovery from the unthinkable. In one of life’s many ironies, Maureen Brandon had survived the ordeal.
I had Ann-Marie schedule a staff meeting. The only minor item still needed was a plan.
They arrived at least forty-five minutes early. We squeezed everyone in and let the doors shut. I did not have to ask for silence. It was already there.
“So, I’ve gone over your status reports. Great job, by the way. I don’t quite know how all of you managed to do that much so quickly, but thank you. Obviously we need to address the most pressing issues beginning with Life Support. Mr. Leaman, are there any further updates on critical expendables?”
“We know it’s less than three months' worth of air and water. We began the trip with roughly twelve months of supplies, twice what we needed, so they transferred a hell of a lot before they were stopped. We probably should expect no more than two months of normal use expendables, so rationing should begin immediately.”
“When do you expect the final figures?”
“Sometime in the next four hours. The crews have some climbing around to do.”
“Please let me know as soon as that comes in.”
“Doctor, your current status?”
Doctor Pacell looked exhausted. Clearly he hadn’t got the same break I had. He straightened up and tried to appear composed. “The victims of the alien assaults are being kept in suspension in a storage compartment we’ve converted for that purpose. I am monitoring that area continuously. Otherwise, we have no critical cases. Perk Holloway is stable and doing very well. I see no medical reasons he won’t recover fully after a long internment period. Our other cases range from miscellaneous injuries to psychological stress. All of those are in treatment and controlled.”
“Do you have everything you need, Doctor?”
“Considering how many people have been variously affected, we are doing okay supply wise. I’ll let you know if that changes.”
“Okay. Propulsion, we’re ready for the bad news.”
Paul Kusama stood up and leaned forward on the table. “Our Tachyon drives are perfectly healthy. Our Amplights are perfectly healthy. Our interface from main control is damaged beyond repair. We can still only give you manual control of both engine sets. It’s a shipyard type of job to fix this.” He sat back down and folded his arms with an expression suggesting it was not his fault.
“Well, getting right to the point, has a manual jump to light ever actually been done?”
Without looking up, he shook his head. “Not to my knowledge.”
“I know the basics of it, but give us a rundown on the problems.”
Leaman took the question. “There’s a shock wave going into light, and it’s not just a sonic boom type of thing. It’s more like a long corridor. There’s an extremely complex computer-generated algorithm that’s used within the gravity matrix to compensate for it. So, besides controlling grav
ity up to the engine exchange, the time-space warp corridor is an entirely separate habitat transition.”
“Is there any chance we can we re-interface to the gravity field generators?”
“It’s five hundred thousand fiber lines, along with some huge power cables.”
I paused and looked around for additional input. Everyone looked back at me worriedly.
I gently put one hand on the table. “We can easily break this down to the choices available. As I see it, we can wait here until life support runs out, hoping someone will come and help, or we can attempt a jump to light using manual control along with whatever automated systems we can get up and running. Does anyone have a third alternative?”
The atmosphere around the table was intense, the silence heavy. One of the gravity field technicians who had been forced up to management level spoke nervously. “We have cut, polished, and put connectors on fiber lines in the past.”
Silence.
I helped him. “You mean to repair fiber lines that weren’t working?”
He looked around nervously. “There was an upgrade and we came out with too much light coming through some of the feeds. The lines were shorter than expected, so too much laser was saturating the receptors. We cut the fiber and put in attenuators to reduce the amount of light. The fiber from our gravity field distributors could be cut, spliced and connected to new computer cards at the site.”
I looked at the new head of Life Support, Barbara Deyo. “What do you think?”
She nodded. “All of that is true, of course, but you’re talking about one bundle of fiber at a time, out of half a million lines. Then half a million wireless transmission channels from the main control system to the new cards. Sending control signals to the gravity field generator matrix by wireless feed is another thing that’s never been done.”
RJ’s eyes lit up. “We only need to keep people alive. We don’t need regulated gravity all over the ship. Could we pick the easiest area to do this, regulate just that area, and have everyone ride out the jump there?”
More silence with a subtle touch of hope behind it. People began looking around instead of holding their breath.
Deyo nodded again. “Commander, I should head down to the Engineering group right now and lay this out and run some numbers. I’ll call in as soon as we have something for you.” Without waiting for a response she stood, waved the former technician to follow, and squeezed her way out of the room.
The secondary items were easy, shift schedules, food dispensary, and power generation. They all seemed more a distraction than anything else after the problem of getting home. I held off on rationing consumables until the final resource numbers came in. People needed a chance to get at least a little bit normalized. We closed by planning to network the next meeting.
When the meeting room doors slid open I shouldn't have been surprised by the crowd of fifty-plus people gathered outside. The meeting participants merged into the sea of onlookers, who stared with questioning eyes. There are no other doors adjoining the main meeting room, so RJ and I were forced to go out into the middle of them. I was taken back when, as I approached, a pathway opened up and continued to open as I walked through. They were silent except for a few murmurs here and there, back dropped by some low-level conversations. I knew not what to do, so I gave my best imitation of a dutiful expression and headed calmly in the direction of Security. The crowd began to quietly disperse as we disappeared around the first corner.
Without looking at RJ, I asked, “What the hell was that about?”
He smirked. “I think they like you.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“You’re lucky nobody asked for an autograph.”
“Oh my God.”
“Don’t worry. At least I know you’re only human.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Nothing. It’s a very good thing. If there was ever a time people needed someone or something to believe in, it’s now. You know what they’ve been through, and what they’re up against. Now all you have to do is go around looking confident and everyone will figure you have it under control.”
“Oh my God.”
“You said that already.”