Henrietta glanced up from her desk. “Here, let me help you.” She rushed up and took an arm on the other side of Ali. Peter did his best to shuffle between them. “Have you eaten anything this evening?” she asked.
Peter tried to smile. “No, the thought makes me sick. Besides, my tonsils are sore.”
“Peter, you need to keep up your strength. If you can’t keep anything down, I’ll need to administer an IV. Now’s not the time for your system to go into standby mode.”
They made it to the diagnostic bench and Ali helped him climb up. With a grunt, Peter settled down.
“Ali, I have a vial in the refrigerator; it’s on the right. Would you get it for me please?” She pointed to the unit behind her desk. As Ali looked inside, Henrietta placed the injector unit in the correct location.
“There’s a small jar on the left,” Ali replied, “but nothing at all to the right. Is this it?” he asked holding up the vial.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Henrietta replied. “I must have been confused. It’s labeled ‘three of eight’ with Peter’s name on it, right?”
“Yeppers ….” Ali brought it to Henrietta with a lively step. “Here it is, Peter. This’ll make you better.”
“Thanks,” Peter replied weakly.
Henrietta noticed the worried look on Ali’s face. “Tell him about the spacewalk,” Henrietta suggested while she set up the treatment.
“Oh yeah, right,” Ali responded. “We got the Wasatti back. Scared the livin’ daylights outta me, though. I thought it was attacking me.”
Peter looked up in alarm, “How come?” he asked feebly.
Ali laughed dryly. “I hit some actuator-thingy and the bug’s arm took a swing at me. Good thing our suits have waste elimination units in them. I sure needed it then.”
Peter laughed thinly. “That must have been something. Jimmy go out with you?”
“No, Stiles did. Might’s well not have, for all the help he did.”
“Huh. No surprise there,” Peter replied. “So where’d you put our visitors?”
“Cold storage, in the back; we’re keeping ’em in vacuum. So, you’re only 240 feet from two fierce Wasatti Marines right now. How does that grab you?”
“Not too reassuring,” Peter answered. “They are dead ….”
“As two doornails, yeah,” Ali replied. “I made sure of that. We kept them in their suits, but I got all the other hardware off their belts. They got some interesting guns, I’ll tell ya.”
“Oh, yeah?” Peter seemed interested in something for the first time in a day and a half.
“You bet. Soon as you get better, I’ll show you the best rifle. Haven’t shot one yet, though; probably not a good idea to shoot one off in a ship when you don’t know how much they’ll kick.”
Peter looked like he was falling asleep. “Prob’ly blow a hole in the ship, if you did ….” He started to fade out.
“Peter?” Ali asked.
Henrietta worked quickly to finish the daily injection. “That’s it,” Henrietta said. “This session’s done.” She turned off the unit and swung it aside. “Okay, Peter, you’re done,” she stated, just a little loud.
Peter nodded faintly. “You don’t need to shout. I’m not hard of hearing.”
She stroked Peter’s forehead. “Sorry. Do you want to sleep here tonight?”
Peter smiled and nodded.
“She didn’t mean with her, knucklehead,” Ali joked.
Henrietta swatted at him. “Ali!”
“What?” he asked innocently.
“Help me get him to the beds,” she replied. They guided Peter to his feet and half-dragged him to the nearest cot. Settling him in, Peter fell asleep almost immediately. Henrietta gently placed a blanket over him, carefully tucking in the sides.
“Is he going to be all right?” Ali asked.
“I hope so. He should have been doing better by now. I’ve been searching the records, but there’s not much precedent for how he’s responding. Very few cases have these effects; none at all, really.”
“What are you gonna do?”
Henrietta shrugged. “There are more radical treatments, but then again, we don’t have much time with the food shortage and all. If I can’t make him better in four days, the jump will leave him sick for months of recovery time while he’s jacked-in. A lot could happen in that time. I got to get him on the road to recovery before then.”
“Can you do it?”
Henrietta remained silent far too long, staring at her helpless patient. “Pray that I do,” she whispered.
* * *
Stiles took no time at all moving his stuff into the spacious captain’s cabin behind the bridge. He studied his room for the tenth time tonight. He figured it gave his position the authority it deserved, thinking it was a tad small even though it was larger than six of the officer’s cabins put together. Well, with a little remodeling it’ll be much better, he thought. I wish I had my dad’s desk in here. Oh well ….
Making the best he could of the situation, he settled in behind his desk and opened his PAD.
PERSONAL LOG, Day 12, Year 500, 2100 hours: Peter is out for the count. He’s so bad now he’s staying in medical all the time. No way was he ready for command; that was a laugh. So much for the Reign of Sir Peter.
I oversaw the retrieval of the Wasatti warriors today. For our first spacewalk ever, we did okay, but that clumsy Hamadi almost turned the excursion into disaster when he nearly floated away. If it hadn’t been for me, I’m not sure we would have recovered him. That would have been a real disaster!
Not that he doesn’t pull his weight around here (which is huge), but we’re too short-handed as it is. But the crew had better get used to increased hours. It’s the only way we can get back home successfully.
Now my next job is finding food.
-Captain Stiles F. Essen, UCSA Sampson K. Perry, Middle System, Antares Space.
CHAPTER 14
Antares Star System – Middle System
“Nav ….”
“Yes, Stiles,” Henrietta answered without making it sound like a question.
“Check Perry’s plot, please.”
Henrietta sat at her bridge station, staring somewhat dumbfounded at the nav screen. What she saw looking back were dots, undecipherable sequences of numbers, and partial hyperbolic curves in various shades of yellow-on-black. “I’m not sure what you expect me to find that Perry doesn’t already know by heart, Stiles,” she snapped.
Stiles kept his gaze centered firmly on the forward view screen as if deep in thought and not wishing to be disturbed. The fact was that the ship was gliding smoothly through the gas clouds of Antares under Perry’s competent control, yet Stiles sat watch over his ship looking for any fault from his ship or crew. He squeezed the arms of his command chair, trying to maintain the decorum of a proper captain. “Protocol,” Stiles replied imperiously, “protocol.” He steepled his fingers under his chin as if deep in thought. “You seem quite good at quoting it when the situation suits you.”
Henrietta shook away her confusion. “Stiles, are you still concerned about my intervention of Jimmy’s punishment?” He remained silent, staring forward with a purpose. “’Cause if you are, you should get over it,” she concluded with scorn.
Stiles turned his head a fraction of an inch but refused to make eye contact. His knuckles turned white, suspended in air before him. Before he could reply, the door to the bridge swished open, announcing Ali’s arrival.
“Hey guys, wassup?”
Stiles tore his concentration from the screen and regained his composure. “Our navigator was just displaying her incompetence.”
Taking Stiles’ response as a joke, Ali replied, “Ah, she’ll catch on quick. She’s a fast learner. Say, speaking of which, I saw some conditional numbers kicking around the engineering queue. What’re you up to, messing with the plots?”
“That’s exactly what I wanted our navigator to look into; if she has the ability that is.”
“Gee, Stiles,” Henrietta replied tartly, “if you’re so darned worried about them, maybe you should run the numbers yourself.”
Stiles slowly rose from his command chair. “Why would I bother doing that?” Stiles glared her way one last time. He started a slow walk to the rear of the bridge, pausing momentarily before leaving. “Run those numbers, Nav. I want to see an independent confirmation within the hour. That should give you enough time. I’ll be in my cabin.” Stiles continued on without turning his head like he was leading a somber parade. “And by the way, it’s ‘Captain’ if you please.” He disappeared from the bridge.
Ali threw himself into the large command chair just vacated by Stiles. “Hey, this is comfortable.” He looked around the bridge for something to do. Instead, he busied himself by rotating around in the oversized chair. “So what’s got his underwear all bunched up?”
Henrietta sneered. “He wants to be called Captain Essen. It’s either that, or Sir. And I won’t stoop that low. I’ll die before I defer to His Majesty’s Royal Ego.”
Ali laughed. “Well, at least the position’s not going to his head.”
“Hah!” she replied hoarsely. “Now I know why Jimmy never lets up on him. I always thought Jimmy was muito estupido, just asking for it with all those snide remarks. But now I can’t blame him for always pushing Stiles’ buttons. Every time I open my mouth now, I find myself trying to pick a fight with that … that idiota!” Henrietta was so angry, she shook.
“Wow, you and Jimmy; two of a kind. Who’d’a thought?” Ali increased his rate of spin.
“Ah, shut up, would ya?” Henrietta threw a tablet at Ali, purposely missing him by a mile. “So what am I going to do with this stuff?”
“Are those the conditionals I’ve been seeing on nav?”
“Yeah, King Stupid wants me to confirm Perry’s plot to Xi-Antares-A. He wants us to change our course at oh-nine-thirty this morning.”
Perry hummed, “Henrietta, I can assure you that my plot to Xi-Antares-A is quite accurate, and has been calculated to the second. However, it is proper Colonial Academy procedure to provide independent confirmation of all navigational plots prior to execution.”
Ali threw his foot out to stop his rotation. “What the heck are we doing, going to …” he thought for a moment, needing to run the Greek alphabet over his fingers, “… the fourteenth planet in this Godforsaken system?”
Henrietta shook her head in dismissal. “Stiles got it in his head that Xi is smack in the middle of Antares’ habitable zone. Where he got that idea ….”
“What?” he asked in amazement. He stood up to walk to the nav station, but momentarily lost his balance. Ali shook it off and rested his hand precariously on the back of Henrietta’s chair. “Show me.”
Henrietta brought up the schematic. It displayed Antares and the fifteen planets.
Ali stared at the system map, running his finger along the screen, as if touching the symbols themselves would provide some hidden insight. “Stiles thinks something can thrive out there? That’s half way to the B star. Surely, it has interfered with Xi’s orbit somewhere along the line. And those gas clouds are interfering with radiant energy at totally unpredictable rates. You know that’s not good for life sustainability. What gives?”
Even though Ali was talking to Henrietta, it sounded like Perry was trying to defend himself and interjected himself into the conversation. “I never inferred that we would find life there,” Perry demurred, “but I did confirm the presence of the theoretical HZ to Captain Essen. Primitive life is theoretically possible, although highly improbable.”
“Yeah, like zero,” Ali remarked.
“The probability is actually three to the negative sixth power,” Perry corrected.
“Chasing after three millionths of a percent …. Gee, Doc, that sounds real logical to me. You too?”
Henrietta remained silent. Instead, she brought up information about zones of habitability. Everything in the literature pointed away from any possibilities of life in this system. Whatever conditions conducive to life that may have once existed at one location in the system were likely to have radically changed. Even if life did form, it was probably long dead by now.
After Henrietta finished reviewing the exobiology entries, Ali reached around and set up the navigation function. “Let me look at this,” Ali suggested.
She moved aside. He showed her how to calculate the plot, inputting an average ship velocity of 0.3 c. “We could go faster in-system, but that speed is usually reserved for strategic bursts during battles. I wouldn’t recommend it for long.”
Ali next input all the planetary orbital parameters between their current location and Xi, finding the most economic path they could take to reach their target. Finally, he set the vector change to begin at 0930, less than an hour away. He allowed the test program to run. “See how this works? Pretty easy, really.”
“Yeah,” Henrietta replied. “I can do that. Now I can tell that dumb know-it-all I did it. Bet he couldn’t even have tried that in a million years.”
The numbers ran their course, indicating they would arrive at Xi in three days, including the remainder of today.
“OMG, that’s forever!” Ali shouted.
“Really?” Henrietta asked.
“I mean, c’mon, here we are, four days away from the exit point, and now we’re adding three or four more days to in-system travel—without food! For what?”
“We still got food,” Henrietta argued.
“For you, maybe.”
Henrietta felt sorry for him. It must be tough, she realized. Food means so much to him.
Henrietta tried to rationalize what was going through her mind. On their original schedule, they would have forty–six days’ worth of food at half rations by the time they were ready to jump away. Stiles’ worthless diversion would cut that reserve down to forty–three. And that did not account for time in helpless stasis during whatever jump interval they needed. That was cutting it pretty close. On the other hand, today was the half-way point of Peter’s eight-day therapy, which was not going as well as she expected. It was scheduled to end a day after they arrived at the exit point and they all previously agreed to wait it out that one extra day for Peter’s sake. Henrietta wondered if Peter would be cured even by then. Those three extra days might really come in handy, she rationalized.
“So, are you with me?” Ali asked, breaking her concentration. “Sounded earlier like you were ready to commence a little mutiny.”
She stared blankly at the numbers, afraid to reply.
“Henrietta? Geez; don’t just sit there. As chief medical officer, what’s your opinion of Stiles’ worthless fiasco?”
It took her a long time to reply. Finally, the words tumbled out of her mouth, “I think Stiles is right.”
“What? What are you thinking?”
Henrietta was too embarrassed to admit she was unsure how best to continue Peter’s therapy. They were all counting on her to come up with some miraculous cure, and she was not even close to being a real doctor. She needed more time to think this through and research the problem. “It’s worth a shot, I guess,” she replied meekly.
“A shot! A shot in the dark, you mean. Is all this time with Stiles turning you stupid?”
She looked up at Ali, not sure what to say.
After a moment Ali said, “I guess it is. I expected something like this from Stiles, but never from you. I think Jimmy was right.”
Henrietta came out of her daze. “About what?”
“You are a traitor!” Ali stormed out of the bridge, leaving Henrietta alone with her thoughts.
* * *
They were on their second day of the new course, and planet Xi was still a couple days away, at fifty–one AU. Peter was having one of his better days and was on the bridge with the rest of the crew, trying to stave off the boredom of his recent sick leave. He was sitting with Jimmy at the useless com station, wondering if this was any more exciting than his cot i
n medical. Ali was taking readings of the target planet off in the distance while Henrietta sulked at the nav station. Stiles was assuming his usual pompous posture of authority at the center of the bridge.
“Nav,” Stiles commanded, “confirm the relative gravity of planet Nu.” They lined up with Nu-Antares-A, the thirteenth planet from the red supergiant, for a gravitational boost and were rapidly approaching it.
Henrietta directed her sensors at the planet and reported back. “I am confirming our estimates of Nu’s radius as 2,140 miles. Average density is approximately 230 pounds per cubic foot, giving it an Earth-gravity equivalent of 0.63. That’s just about the same as Ice House.”
“Very well,” Stiles acknowledged. “Perry, establish low orbit over Nu.”
“Complying, Captain Essen. Orbital insertion will begin in two hours and forty–two minutes.”
“Why are we stopping here?” Peter asked.
It took Stiles several awkward seconds before he deemed it worthy to answer Peter’s question. When he did, it turned out to be no answer at all. “Peter, you are currently on sick leave and are on the bridge only at my pleasure.”
“Then I’ll ask,” Henrietta snapped. “Why are we stopping?”
Stiles stared at her. “We are stopping here because it will be easier to maneuver around this planet than at Xi.” Stiles input some parameters into his PAD, hoping that would end the inquisition, but he saw that Henrietta was still looking at him. Reluctantly, he continued. “The escape velocity here is 3.13 miles per second, which is less than half of what it is at Xi. I need some experience with the shuttle and this is as good a place as any to hone my skills.”
“What skills?” Jimmy asked.
“Stiles, you don’t need to hone anything yet,” Ali added, “at least for awhile. Far-sensor readings of Xi are still confirming the absence of ozone. I doubt we’ll be making any planetfalls soon.”
“But you did find nitrogen yesterday, which two days ago you promised you’d never see there.” Stiles smirked. “Wrong about one; wrong about all, right Mr. Hamadi? And what is the average equatorial temperature of Xi again?”