Portal-eARC (5 page)

“I know everyone’s been waiting for a real announcement and some details, but I hope you understand it’s been a very trying time for us all and we didn’t want to make any announcements until we were absolutely positive of our findings.”

That
last bit was a deliberately ambiguous statement, and Nicholas thought he saw the slightest twitch of concern on the face of Giliam Maes, the E.U. representative from Belgium.
He probably doesn’t know much, but there
has
to be some sense of worry pervading the E.U. space community right now. They’ve lost the most expensive ship every built, at least by some measures, and it was at least to a great extent their own fault.

But the idea of this conference wasn’t to cause trouble, so he went on with a sudden broadening of his smile. “And the first thing I want to tell you…should be said by someone else.”

On cue the display behind Nicholas lit up with Madeline Fathom’s face; behind her could be seen a number of other people from both the Ares and the E.U. expedition. Madeline smiled and repeated the line she’d said first to him some days before. “A warm hello to all of you from all of us, here on sunny Europa.”

It was amazing how a mere ten people then managed to sound like three times that many, and it took a few moments for him to get them to quiet down. “Please, everyone, I’ll answer questions in a little bit, but let me get through my announcement; I’ll undoubtedly be covering many of your questions as I do so.

“As you can see, by both tremendous luck and some absolutely heroic and inventive actions on the part of the crews of both
Nebula Storm
and
Odin
, there are some survivors of this double tragedy, and they are—at the moment—healthy and safe. They made a spectacular landing on the sixth moon of Jupiter, Europa; for those interested, the Institute will be releasing the footage of that landing as taken by the survivors themselves.”
As if anyone in this group
wouldn’t
be interested. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that video clip becomes the most-viewed in the history of mankind.

“Unfortunately, while—at the moment—all of the
Nebula Storm
’s six crew have survived, there are only six survivors of the
Odin
. In addition, these twelve people are currently marooned on a moon whose environment makes Mars look like an Earthly island paradise.”

He paused for a moment, taking a sip of water from the glass on the lectern. The ten faces in front of him, five men and five women, waited tensely. “I know all of you want to know what happened—how we came to this point. The preliminary events are already known and I think we all want to put those behind us.” He was referring, of course, to the fact that the E.U. had taken the information on Enceladus’ possible Bemmie base and run with it, while concealing that information from the Ares-IRI consortium on Ceres.
No point rehashing it, either.
“I’m sorry to say that at this point we still only have partial information as to what happened in those crucial hours as both
Odin
and
Nebula Storm
prepared for their final maneuvers in preparation for heading to the Saturnian system, but I will tell you what we know at this point.

“As both vessels prepared for what is called an ‘Oberth maneuver,’ a method of using a combination of the interaction of the gravity well of a large planet with a ship’s reaction drive to greatly change the speed and direction of your vessel, something went wrong with the automatic systems of
Odin
. Instead of firing her systems to accelerate out of the Jovian system, the ship swung effectively opposite the intended vector and fired to
slow down
the vessel. Subsequently there was a large explosion on
Odin
.”
So far, I’m telling the truth—just leaving out a few details and confusing the timeline a bit. Now I have to add some bald-faced lies, however.
“Upon detecting this event,
Nebula Storm
changed her own maneuver to try to match up with
Odin
. This attempt was not entirely successful but did at least allow the two vessels to remain near each other.”

He could see that Mr. Maes wasn’t sure whether he should relax or not.
Don’t worry. We’ve reached an agreement on how to handle this, and you’ll be able to relax soon enough.
“We still have no evidence as to what caused this explosion.” Strictly speaking one
might
be able to argue that this was true; he had some hearsay about what happened but no direct testimony by
Odin
’s personnel—yet—and he hadn’t gotten copies of the sensor records from A.J. which would undoubtedly have demonstrated just what happened.

“What we do know is that it was violent enough to shatter at least one of
Odin
’s mass-driver spines and send shrapnel through most of the entire vessel. Most of the
Odin
’s crew, I am afraid, died within minutes of the explosion, as the shrapnel penetrated most of the living quarters in the ‘hab ring’ around the vessel. The damage also severely impacted the radiation shielding which led to further casualties. Intra-ship communications were almost completely wiped out, and even in the areas of the vessel that remained liveable immediately afterwards there was little to no way to communicate with other components, nor to reach them unless the people in question were fortunate enough to have their EVA suits with them. The vessel’s magnetorquers apparently malfunctioned along with some of the other systems, and this caused a spin in the ship; this eventually revealed that serious structural damage must have been done, because in the end
Odin
broke up into two separate pieces.”

“My God. How did
any
of them survive?” The involuntary question came from Diane Sodher, once a NASA information specialist on the
Nike
project, now main IT for Phobos Station and freelance ‘stringer’ for CNN.

The question fit into his narrative, so he went with it. “Fortunately, on the far side of
Odin
from the explosion was the bay with its remaining landing craft,
Munin
. Even more fortunately, General Alberich Hohenheim had directed that
Munin
be kept prepared for use at all times, even though arrival at Enceladus was not projected for many months to come. Because of this, the few survivors who were able to make it to
Munin
found themselves with an excellent and well-supplied ‘lifeboat.’”

“Excuse me, Dr. Glendale,” Giliam Maes said, “but…was the General one of the survivors?”

“I am afraid not,” Glendale answered regretfully. “According to the survivors, he was still alive but remained onboard to make sure that, in fact, the
Munin
could launch successfully.”
And that much is, in fact, true.

The two successive questions had succeeded in breaking the briefing into a question and answer session, but that didn’t bother Nicholas; he’d gotten the main introduction out of the way and the rest could be presented in this format as well as any other. “Nick,” Glenn said, “I’m confused by this. The
Nebula Storm
’s dusty-plasma drive isn’t really limited by mass as such, and even if we assume that
Munin
, fully loaded, was maybe a thousand tons—I think it’s considerably less—there’s no reason for them to have
landed
anywhere. If the two ships could rendezvous at all they should have just made sure they were secured together and then headed home. It might have taken a little longer but…?”

“That would indeed have been the plan,” Nicholas said, acknowledging Glenn’s question with a nod, “but apparently fate was not quite through with our friends yet.” Time for the next part of the big lie. “As they had slowed down to match with
Odin
and—later—with
Munin
, something struck
Nebula Storm
and penetrated the hull It’s possible that this was purely coincidence, or it may be that one of the fragments from
Odin
managed to take
Nebula Storm
with it. Be that as it may, whatever it was managed to damage the ship’s reactor core.”

“Christ Almighty,” Glenn muttered, and similar sentiments rippled around the attending group.

“I see you understand. Without an operating reactor the
Nebula Storm
could not continue operation of the dusty-plasma drive, especially at full size and with full control.”

“Dr. Glendale,” Yoko Hyashibara, the Japanese representative, spoke up with an apologetic tone. “Forgive me for bringing this up…but as I understand it, the
Nebula Storm
and the
Odin
were, in truth, the only vessels currently capable of outer-system travel—even if, for instance, the
Nike
or
Nobel
could be spared from their current support duties. Does this mean that we are only going to witness another tragedy as the survivors starve or freeze to death?”

“I believe not,” he said with another smile. “We are already working on plans which—with, I hope, the assistance of the E.U. and others—will allow us to get a new outer system vessel constructed in the next year or so. But more importantly…” he activated the second clip from the interplanetary castaways.

“We’re not just sitting on our asses here waiting to be rescued,” Jackie Secord said from the display, smiling confidently at the assembly. She stood on the surface of Europa, the immense banded gibbous disc of Jupiter touching the horizon behind her, the black of space faintly pearlescent with some strange mist. “We have engineers. We have tools. We have food, air, and a whole
planet
of water, and we’ve got the Nebula Drive working some as a shield so that we can live and work right here on Europa.

“So you go right ahead and build a rescue ship—we need all the ships we can get anyway. But don’t be surprised if we meet that ship halfway, because we’re going to
fix
the
Nebula Storm
, and fly her and
Munin
all the way back home!”

Chapter 6.

“I’m not seeing much of a lightshow,” Joe observed as he watched A.J. hard at work. Of course the “hard at work” was more conceptual than actual; much of A.J.’s work looked more like a man reclining in one of
Munin
’s pilot chairs, wearing a pair of reflective sunglasses and waving his gloved hands semi-aimlessly in the air in front of him.

“Give this iceball a decent atmosphere and you’d be seeing a pretty good one,” A.J. retorted. “I’ve just finished re-tuning
Munin
’s topside comm lasers and we’d already figured out the tweaks for those we put on
Nebula Storm
. They’re all running now.”

“Maddie mentioned you were working with the lasers, but she didn’t say for what. So, for what?”

“We need all the resources we can get, right? Well, the most versatile single resource we have is, of course, Faerie Dust. I can’t get any more of
mine
delivered here, but—”

Joe laughed. “You’ve still got it, I see. Of course, there’s just
tons
of the
Odin
’s drive-dust floating around out there. And the more of it we get, the better off we are.”

“Right in one. Oh, it’s practically chipped-flint level compared to my babies here,” he patted the sealed bag he carried practically everywhere, “but even that stuff can do a LOT for monitoring activities, basic PHM/CBM over every millimeter of both ships, be a sensor net over a wide area…and let us save the fancy stuff for when it’s needed. Like if the Doc needs some very detailed imagery of someone.”

“I thought you said your Faerie Dust wouldn’t survive long in a human body. You know, when you went all Mad Science on Modofori.” Joe was speaking of the not-so-distant time when some of Fitzgerald’s agents (actually more unwitting pawns) had made the extremely bad mistake of kidnapping and threatening Helen.

“And that’s true, but if one of us is hurt or sick, I’m not going to whine about sacrificing some of my toys to get our medical officer the best data she can use. At that point the very minor risk from the dust will hopefully be a lot less than whatever’s threatening our crewmates.” Another lazy set of gestures with a
glissando
ripple of the fingers. “Shouldn’t
you
be working?”

“Break time. Those of us doing outdoor work—”

“—do pretty short shifts to prevent any chance of getting bored, overstraining the suits, and such. So do we need heaters?”

“Not so far. As you so aptly observed, Europa only has an atmosphere in the very technical sense that astronomers use—basically that it has a higher density of gas around it than the surrounding medium. So it’s not conducting or convecting any heat from us, and only direct contact with the surface poses any kind of threat there. We’re still trying to dump heat, not trying to keep it.”

“That’s good. I’m not sure how we’d retrofit some of these suits for heating.”

A.J. suddenly sat bolt-upright, the motion bouncing him almost a meter into the air; whatever he was looking at in the VRD had captivated him so completely that he seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that he somersaulted halfway around and came down nearly on his face, breaking his fall with an instinctive and unconscious movement of one arm. “Holy flying
wrecks
, Batman!” he said.

“What?”

“The
Odin!
She’s still flying!”

“No way. Show me! I thought we’d calculated that she was headed for a hard landing on Io.”

The forward screen lit, to show a terribly mangled yet still somehow recognizable shape. “Damn. She looks even worse than the last time we saw her,” Joe said slowly.

“A
lot
worse,” A.J. muttered, his voice abstracted. “She’s lost her entire forward half. More than half, if you’re counting by mass—everything very far forward of the main engines and drive spines is
gone
.”

“Could she have had a one-in-a-billion grazing collision?” Joe remembered an old video he’d seen of a huge meteoroid that had passed through earth’s atmosphere and then headed back out into space without actually hitting the ground.

“Umm…” More waving of the hands. “Not with the orbit we left her in. Something had to have shifted her orbit a bit. Not much, or maybe quite a bit, depending on
when
…” Some more motion indicated A.J. was trying to figure out how much change would be needed at what point in the orbit.