Stiles turned to Henrietta, “And no doctor’s orders will stop me this time.”
* * *
Everyone went to bed without saying much for the rest of the evening; the entire crew by now was as crabby as a roomful of ornery cats. The next day they wandered into the galley for breakfast in dribs and drabs but Ali did not even bother showing up.
By 0930, the others made it to the bridge, while Ali closed himself off in his office in engineering, having arrived there directly from his room.
“Are sensors at maximum?” Stiles asked.
“Yeah,” Henrietta replied. “I was gonna send out carrier pigeons, but figured you’d rather want to get the results quicker.”
“Carrier pigeons would require independent life support systems, if they were to leave the ship,” Perry pointed out. “And that is even considering if we had any onboard.”
“Gee,” Henrietta replied, “I guess I’m glad I didn’t send them out, then.”
“What’s our range to Xi-Antares-A?” Stiles asked.
Perry hummed, “Xi-Antares-A is forty–five minutes away, at our projected rate of deceleration, Captain Essen. We are currently in-line for orbital insertion, but can alter course for fly-by up until fifteen minutes prior to orbital capture.”
“So we have a half-hour to decide how best to proceed,” Stiles summarized.
“And he can subtract, too,” Henrietta noted.
Stiles ignored her comment. “Can’t see anything through that planet’s thick cloud layer …. Any planetary biomarkers yet?”
There were several atmospheric gases that could be used to indicate the presence of life conducive to human physiology. Other forms of life were possible, but unless they were based on carbon they would be of little food use to humans. To find useable sources of food, conditions mimicking Old Earth would be needed.
“We are picking up strong CO-2 and methane readings,” Jimmy replied, “but no ozone yet. Nothing else of interest.”
“Thermographic and LiDAR scanning likewise does not suggest the presence of large bodies of water, nor does the planet’s rotational rate,” Perry observed. “Other than the carbon dioxide, as Jimmy suggests, the spectra is relatively flat-lined, very suggestive of a Venus-type environment.”
“But not as hot,” Stiles added.
“Obviously,” Perry replied.
“That doesn’t look too good,” Peter stated. “I think it’s sterile.”
“Agreed,” Perry confirmed. “There is still a potential for an exotic form of life down there, but no possibility of finding sources of food that would provide human nutrients.”
The crew remained silent as they approached Planet Xi. Finally, Henrietta broke the silence, opening the ship’s PA, “Ali; thought I’d fill you in on our progress ….”
“No need. I’ve been following your scans. Ain’t no steaks on hooves down there for us carnivores, right?”
“Nope,” Henrietta replied. She closed the PA with a slow, deliberate click.
Stiles looked around at his small command, glancing at Peter. “Thanks for not telling me ‘I told you so.’ ”
Peter shrugged noncommittally, “No big thing. At least we know now.”
“Captain Essen,” Perry reported, “global LiDAR scans are now one hundred percent complete. Out of curiosity, I completed a specialized search. Planet Xi-Antares-A appears to have another monolith plateau. It is also 17.63 miles to a side, and is also at latitude plus forty, just as it was at Nu-Antares-A. It appears that our Monolith Builders have been busy in this system.”
Stiles perked up at the news and retrieved Perry’s topographical data. “Should we go down?”
“I would advise against it,” Perry suggested. “Assuming these devices are meant as a monitoring system, providing the builders with two points along our travel path will inform them of our current route. At this point, we can only assume they have one data point on us. By tripping two consecutive markers, we not only would allow them to determine our course, but our relative rate of speed. Many inferences could be drawn from such data.”
Stiles rubbed his chin, lost in thought. “You’re probably right. My curiosity tells me to go down, but as a strategist, I am not ready to relinquish that much intelligence to an unknown entity. Let’s stay away from that planet, and move on.”
“Very well, Captain Essen. The course is being adjusted for a high altitude fly-by.”
Stiles nodded. “Seeing we’re still in the neighborhood, though,” he continued. “Let’s move on to that terrestrial moon at Omicron.”
“As you wish,” Perry answered. “We will arrive there in nineteen hours and twenty–two minutes.”
“Putting us there around oh-five-thirty tomorrow morning,” Stiles calculated. “Well, that’ll give us something to wake up to. Nav, check Perry’s plot to 4-Omicron-Antares-A. I’m going to take a nap.” Stiles got up from his chair and disappeared into his cabin, not even bothering to assign anyone the conn.
“Must be nice being the boss,” Jimmy observed.
“Not if it also means being Stiles,” Henrietta corrected.
Peter laughed. “Aw, he’s welcome to it. It’s not as much fun as it looks, Jimmy.”
“Maybe not,” Jimmy replied, “but it beats taking orders from him.”
Henrietta input the last of her calculations into the nav computer. She allowed it to run and watched the results with mild interest. “Well, Perry, you did another fine job plotting an efficient course. Can’t find anything wrong with what you’ve done.”
“I appreciate that, Henrietta.”
She switched off her display and closed her station. Stretching her back, she got up and dialed in a juice bulb. “Anyone?” she asked looking around and holding it up.
Jimmy nodded and Henrietta gave him the untouched one, replacing it with a fresh bulb for herself. Jimmy sucked the juice down and closed his com station. “Well, if the boss can leave early, so can I.” He stood up and rambled off the bridge.
Henrietta took a sip and strolled over to Peter at com-2. She offered him a sip. At first he declined, but Henrietta insisted.
“Thanks,” Peter said. He pulled a mouthful and handed the bulb back to her.
She noticed something on Peter’s arm as she took the bulb back. “What’s that?” she asked turning his arm up.
“Oh, just a spot or two …. Musta got bruised last night.”
Henrietta studied his arm more carefully. He had several light-yellow bruises on his bicep and tiny red pimply dots covering his forearm. “How long have you had these?”
“I can’t remember; couple days? Not sure when I first saw ’em.” He looked more carefully at the arm resting in Henrietta’s hands. “What are they?”
“They’re called petechiae—pinprick bleeds.” She saw the confused look on his face, so she went on to explain. “When bone marrow is damaged, immature white blood cells begin displacing normal bone marrow cells. What happens is that you are not producing enough blood platelets, which affects your ability to clot blood. How are you feeling otherwise?” she asked.
“Better actually, but not quite back to normal. I still don’t have much of an appetite. Other than the headaches, not too bad.”
Henrietta finished her juice and sat down at the adjacent station. She did not like the idea of headaches. That could mean the leukemic cells were starting to invade the central nervous system—or, that he was just getting headaches.
“Any other neurological signs?”
Peter just shook his head.
“Well, you’ll finish your last session tomorrow evening.” She tried to look occupied and unconcerned at the closed station. “You should have been fully recovered by now.”
“It’s not your fault,” Peter replied eagerly.
“Then who’s fault is it?” she asked.
They could not look at each other, so they concentrated on the blank screens to their fronts. “Nature’s, I guess,” Peter answered. “Sometimes a body just fights
against the odds. I’m hoping to be better by tomorrow.”
“You’d better be. I won’t be able to stomach Stiles in that command chair for one more day,” she joked.
“He’s not so bad, Arietta. We’re actually pretty lucky he was able to take over for me while I’m sick. Let’s just see what tomorrow brings. Who knows, maybe we’ll find a planet full of cotton candy.”
* * *
Henrietta was in medical working out the finer details of a new treatment for Peter. She was just cross checking additional sources to be sure she made the best decision. Having no real background for this stuff was not making her job any easier, and it was all so confusing.
Before she even started the nanotherapy, Peter displayed no outward signs of his cancer, or even of being ill, but after starting the injections, he went downhill almost overnight. That rate of symptom development just did not make sense. “Do no harm” was one of the main tenants of medicine, and “harm” was all she was doing. She reread the manuals a thousand times. She double-checked the formula she was using every time she drew it up each afternoon. She was meticulous with her methods, and what did it get her? A sick patient was what.
Peter was slowly improving over the last couple days, but all the literature indicated he should be perfectly fine by now. One more treatment just to be sure all the bad cells were excised from his body; that’s all she should be doing now.
Reading about it sounded so simple. He just has to get better, she convinced herself.
“Perry?”
“Yes, Henrietta?”
“Who do you think is the better captain: Peter or Stiles?”
“I am not sure I am qualified to make that determination. The actions humans take almost always baffle me. You see, the proper course in many situations is not always the most logical one—as I originally speculated—and humans seem to have an innate ability of knowing that fact. You are asking me to comment on a subject I have very little experience with.”
“Like me being a doctor.” Henrietta stared blankly at her screen. “I wish Peter would get better. I want him back to normal. I want him back in command.” She stopped to think it through some more. “Yeah, I prefer Peter on the bridge.”
“What would you do to put him back in command?”
She thought for a moment. “There’s nothing I can do, really. Other than cure his illness.”
“I tend to agree with you. Peter may be the better choice, but we must support Stiles until Peter improves. Stiles is the oldest onboard.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, the oldest is the one in charge, you know.”
“That’s ridiculous, Perry. Who told you that?”
“Stiles did.”
Henrietta laughed. “That figures. Look it up, Perry; you’ll never find that in the regulations. In fact, search your Colonial Academy history. You’ll find many examples of captains of ships younger than other crewmen onboard.”
Perry hummed for several minutes as he checked his records. “Why would Stiles tell me that?”
“Probably because he wanted to be in command, and who better to solicit help than the one he’s commanding.”
Perry thought about what he was hearing for a moment. “In that case, I also have a question about something called the ‘Commanders Prerogative’—”
* * *
“There’s your last dose; congratulations. You can snap up now.” Henrietta switched off the injector module. “How do you feel?”
Peter dodged the overhead medical unit and sat upright. He felt a little dizzy and his abdomen was bathed from inside with the usual hot solution. “Well … the same as the other times, so I guess it went okay.”
“No unusual side effects?”
“What am I to know what’s unusual? Like I said, it felt no different, so … nothing unusual.”
“That’s good, I guess.” Henrietta placed the vial in the medical ’cycler where it was immediately incinerated and ejected out of the ship to avoid cross-contamination. “Let’s see how you feel tomorrow. If you’re still sick, I have another treatment option we can try. We still have a few days to help you improve before we jump.”
“You found something else to try?” Peter asked.
“I think so. I’ve been staying up most nights reading about this stuff. What I think is happening is that the radiation was eating away at your bone marrow. So I’ll be giving you cytokines. They stimulate the growth of mature white blood cells, so that should help in the recovery of your marrow. For some reason, the first treatment seemed to be attacking the bone marrow instead of replacing the affected cells. I think we’ve eliminated the source of the cancer, but now we just need to get your system back the way it was.”
“What do you think I got, anyway?”
Henrietta scrunched her face in uncertainty. “See, that’s the weird thing. You shouldn’t have anything yet. Before your symptoms got worse, there was just simple cell damage Perry uncovered. The early treatment was just meant to be a ‘find and replace’ type thing to stop it before it really began metastasizing. But that seems to have changed. My diagnosis now is acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It seems like it accelerated much faster than normal. One to twenty years to onset of your current symptoms is much more common.
“Anyway, the marrow cells that normally produce lymphocytes—I’m guessing B-cells—which fight infections, are being changed in your body. So all these immature blood cells are crowding out the healthy ones, and if enough accumulate, they start to spill over into the bloodstream and enter more organs. That’s what the radioactive nanocytes were for. They should be replacing the damaged cells with artificial lymphocytes; enough, at least, until your body can start producing them on its own. It’s like a bone marrow transplant, except the nano-machines do all the work for us completely inside your system. Understand?”
“Yeah, I guess.” It sounded pretty serious to Peter. He wondered what else Henrietta was not telling him, but he was too afraid to ask. He was never sick before in his life, and now here he was, fighting for his life. Every time he thought about it, he felt a twinge in his bones, like that spongy stuff was draining out and taking his life away. He could not help but wonder if the sensations he imagined were serious symptoms or just his imagination running wild.
“So if we need to continue more options, I’ll introduce medications which are more like an actual cancer treatment. Right now, I’m exploring purine analogues, whatever those do.”
“I’m glad you sound so confident.”
“Hey, we’re all learning around here, so shut up.” Henrietta offered Peter a weak smile.
“Yes, doctor.”
Henrietta shut down her computer. “I just want you to get better, so I can sign you off again as captain. We need someone steady at the helm.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice.” Not only to be back in command—not that he necessarily wanted it back, he realized—but to be healthy enough to earn it.
* * *
Omicron-Antares-A, Antares’ fifteenth and final major planet, was a lovely canary-yellow gas giant, with a radius of 16,000 miles. Rich green and brown clouds radiated through the planet’s atmosphere like a huge cat’s-eye marble suspended in space. Each cloud layer was a different color, and from where the ship was from this breathtaking world the subtle depth differences were apparent, with delicate shadows highlighting the layer-cake atmosphere.
Planet Omicron contained no rings, but the thick nebula surrounding Antares was sucked into the gas giant’s gravity well as she revolved around the central red star. The swirling wisps of nebular gas skirting the planet took on the appearance of a gigantic pinwheel as the rotational energy of the gas giant attracted the space molecules into ephemeral, highly elliptical orbits. The Omicron system looked more like a kaleidoscopic galaxy in miniature than the majestic planet it really was.
The fourth moon out from Planet Omicron was currently occluded by the large planet as though it were a frightened chil
d hiding beneath his mother’s skirts. His numerous siblings were not so timid, and all but a few were in full sight of the visiting ship. The closer Perry got to the Omicron system, the more minor satellites they discovered. In addition to the five major moons in orbit around the planet, there were currently twenty–three other moons with diameters under five hundred miles. And the count kept mounting as they continued the search.
The ship was now at closest approach to the main planet, and in a few seconds—after they arched around Planet Omicron—they would get their first detailed look of the large target moon.
“Distance to 4-Omicron-Antares-A is six million miles,” Henrietta reported. “Current speed is 0.006 lights, and decreasing. Hard break maneuvers initiating now.”
The crew felt the ship jolt several times in succession as Perry fought his forward momentum. Before they could establish an orbit around the moon, they would need to shed most of their forward velocity so that the weak pull of the moon could capture them. And using the backward pull of the gas giant they just passed would help make that happen. “Orbital insertion maneuvers can begin in ninety–two minutes … mark.”
“Thank you Nav,” Stiles replied. It was now 0400 hours, and the crew awakened early to be on-station for the conclusion of their trip to the second, and final, potentially habitable planetary body at Antares-A.
“4-Omicron is coming up on visual now,” Jimmy reported. “Switching to main view.”
A delicate azure moon appeared on screen. Jimmy passed his hand over the external sensor screen at his com station, “Switching to mag-4.” The image expanded and took a moment to refocus. Once it did, thin, wispy, white clouds were visible gliding across the light blue globe.
“The average radius is 3,540 miles,” Henrietta said. “Average density is approximately 330 pounds per cubic foot, giving it an Earth-gravity equivalent of 0.92. That’s just about the same characteristics as Venus. Equatorial temperatures are near the freezing point of water—slightly above.”
“I have surface water,” Jimmy proclaimed, “lots of it!”
“Why is it so warm down there?” Henrietta asked.
“It might be coming from tidal friction from the gas giant,” Peter replied.
“Spectral analysis?” Stiles asked anxiously, not much caring where the heat came from.