Midway: Chapter 18

  Anaru Tynes sat in his command chair on the bridge, going through his daily checklists.  With rare exception, every point on his checklist was always nominal, and nobody would ever notice if he occasionally paid less than full attention.  Anaru Tynes took his duties very seriously though.  When something didn’t check out it usually meant that some burned out component needed replacing, and the longer such things were left uncorrected after such a failure, the greater the chance of bigger problems occurring before the fault was repaired.  

  This command centre was buried deep in the habitat ring and was as shielded as possible from radiation and any other potential threats.  Appropriately enough, since this was by design the safest section of the ship, adjacent to the bridge was the biolab where all of the ship’s genetic samples were stored.  With his security clearance Anaru could remotely access any of the ship’s systems from anywhere on the ship, but the bridge was the only place where there were hard lines to everywhere else; physical data cables running to every system on the ship in case the remote access system failed for some reason.  

  There were three daily shifts on the bridge, and three people on duty during each shift, at all times, on any given day.  Nothing much ever happened here, but protocols written by Wiremu Tynes nonetheless required that the bridge be minimally staffed at all times.   Certainly when the ship was in the middle of some operation such as somebody qualifying for their shuttle pilot certification or when the New Horizon was maneuvering in a solar system, the bridge was more heavily staffed and things could get very exciting, but those times were relatively few and far between.  More specifically, either long behind them, or well ahead of them.   Anaru always loved hearing his grandfather tell him stories about what it was like in the Sol Trade Corps, gallivanting around the Solar System on one adventure after another, on one ship after another… it always sounded to him like there was always something new and different in his life to see and experience.

  There would have been a lot of tension and focus when they were originally leaving their home star system, endless comets, asteroids, and close encounters with planets, each of which had the potential to undo in an instant, all of the sacrifice and hard work which had resulted in the construction and launch of the New Horizon in the first place.  In about eighty years of course, there would be a whole new run of excitement as they approached the Haven star system and their new home, once again having to dodge planets and asteroids to find their perfect approach to an orbit around Haven.   This would certainly be after Anaru’s time though, and he sometimes lamented this fact.  It was a disappointment for him, but he wasn’t the kind of man to dwell on disappointing things which he couldn’t change.

  The only significant ship maneuver he would get to command, if he lived that long, would be turning the ship around in sixty years or so, and initiating the long twenty year deceleration which would allow them to actually arrive at their new home, instead of simply blowing through the star system as they would if they failed to decelerate and continued on at their current velocity.  They probably could have accelerated for longer than the twenty years they had if they’d brought more fuel with them for the ion engines as well as the fusion core, but as it was at thirteen percent of the speed of light they were already travelling faster than any humans ever had before.  Beyond the unknowable risks of travelling even faster, there were physical limits to how much they could accommodate the sanding off of the hull by the sparse dust of the interstellar medium.  So, once up to speed it was a long hundred and twenty five years in the cruise phase of the mission where all there was for them to do was wait, just be born, grow old, die, and wait.

  For most of Anaru’s shifts on the bridge there was very little for him to get excited about.   He and his two crewmates would spend the first hour of their shifts going through checklists with diligent precision, double checking every system on the ship and running every possible diagnostic.  The high level of professionalism Anaru insisted upon was not critical, and the other shifts might get away with less attention to detail, but not on his watch.   

  The original Captain Tynes had left detailed training recordings for his successors to review and study.  His wealth of experience was based on a lifetime of working on and commanding, far less sophisticated ships which were far less pristine and maintained.  He’d done his best to document all the advice and wisdom he could think of, especially the idea that a gram of prevention was worth a kilogram of cure and that in space it was essential, that it meant life itself, to become aware of any problem as early as possible.  

  Once the checklists and diagnostics were done however, the rest of the shift was essentially free time; most of it was spent reading or playing games, watching recordings, or however else it suited one to pass the time.  About a third of the way into today’s shift though, the monotony was breached by Tycho stopping by the bridge to say hello to his friend the captain.   “Hey there Tycho, what can I do for you?”

  “Oh nothing in particular… just done classes for the day and I wanted to drop in and see what’s new,” Tycho offered.

  “Are you kidding?” Anaru chuckled, “there hasn’t been anything new going on around here in sixty years!”

  Tycho smiled openly, a rarity.  “Tell me about it…”  Tycho’s face returned to its usual look of concern.  “And how are you two doing today?” Tycho asked the other two members of the bridge crew.   He pulled up a loose chair beside the captain and leaned back with his legs crossed and his fingers laced behind his head, his shoulders out to his sides.

  “I’m good Tycho, thanks for asking,” answered K'uuna as he swiveled his chair around, and stretched his legs, “Bao says that she’s really enjoying your current focus on Earth’s social and political history.  In fact, she’s already talking about taking up history for her tertiary education.”   K’uuna had a somewhat roundish face and high cheekbones with brown skin and black hair.  One side of his American genetic heritage was from the Haida people of the American continent’s Pacific Northwest.

  “I’m glad to hear she’s liking it, I really enjoy having her in my class.  She’s a very bright young girl K'uuna, I have every confidence that she’ll excel in whatever field she decides to pursue.”

  “It’s funny to think about,” Anaru offered, “All the people who were on the ship when it launched are all dead and the generation we’re raising now, kids like Bao and your sister’s kids are people who might actually get to see Haven.  Sure they’ll be old and won’t be the ones doing any of the heavy lifting,” Anaru chuckled over a mental image of a ninety year old carrying a comically large package on their back, “but they’ll actually get to see it, and to land on it if they really want to.  It’s pretty wild to imagine what it’ll be like for them.”

  K'uuna added, “I guess we need to be really conscious about that, it won’t be enough for them just to be smart, they’ll need to know how to do stuff, our grandchildren will need to be able to land in a wilderness and know how to carve a civilization out of it.”

  Tycho nodded.   “And the stakes just got so much higher…”

  “How’s that?” K’uuna asked.  Tycho seemed to pretend he hadn’t heard the question.

  “Alright Tycho, out with it.  Something’s on your mind, spill it.” Anaru demanded.  “Is it your shuttle qualifications?  Don’t worry about it, you’ll do great!  I should know, I’ve been training you myself!”

  “Oh no no, it’s not that… thank you though” he chuckled a bit, “but no, no it isn’t that, it’s… it’s Earth.  I can’t stop thinking about the missing transmission.”

  “Ahh…” Anaru nodded his head acknowledgingly.   “Not knowing is the worst, isn’t it?   It’s a mystery without any kind of clues or hints…  Could be nothing, could be everything… could be anything!”

  “Sure, but… well, something tells me it’s the very worst thing,” he stated grimly.  “I think that Earth has died somehow or, or that its civilization collapsed somehow and that they no longer have the ability to transmit any message to us.  I just can’t believe that they simply didn’t aim it right; I also can’t believe that they could just forget to send any message, or not care enough to.  No, no… I’m sorry to say, but I suspect something has gone very, very wrong with Earth.”

  Anaru shook his head.  “You’re always so negative Tycho; it could be any one of those things.”

  “I’m just saying that of all the possibilities I can imagine; catastrophe seems the most probable, regardless of my mood.  It’s best not to forget that Earth was still vulnerable and that they still hadn’t established any fully self-sustaining off world colonies.  I mean, that’s why we’re here…  If Earth was somehow taken out by a… a global pandemic, or a lucky shot from a rogue asteroid, or planet, or black hole, or any other stellar body just happening to pass through the solar system… a well-aimed gamma ray burst, or the final nuclear war they all knew was still possible… hell for all we know, maybe all of the sims finally reached a critical number and revolted, or maybe Earth was attacked and conquered by aliens!”  All four had a good chuckle at these last two prospects; they were considered to be equally and comically unlikely.

  “Look Anaru, I know that these are all kind of out there scenarios… especially the last one,” they both had a final bit of amusement at the fanciful thought of an alien invasion of Earth, “but I think that taken all together their probabilities add up, and against the other more hopeful probabilities… they probably even come out ahead!”  Anaru shook his head, he wasn’t buying it.

  “Hey, I’m not trying to convince you of anything… you asked me what was on my mind.  I’m just saying that the way I calculate the odds…”

  “It may be,” Anaru finished, “that we may have made it off world just in time; our mission may now be more important than we ever thought it was… or could be.”

  “We may never know what happened to Earth… they could be dark to us forever.  We also have no way of knowing how the Catholic or Mormon missions are doing.”

  “Wouldn’t that be awful,” K’uuna added, “imagine if Earth and the New Horizon were taken out?   What a miserable legacy for the human species to leave the galaxy hunh?  If they were the only remaining representatives of everything we are and have ever been as a species?  Our entire history, all of our triumphs and failures, our entire legacy left entirely in their hands?”

  There was silence as they all quietly considered this bitter prospect and experienced a cold shiver up their spine at the thought.  Having finally been broken from her concentration on her work, Tasanee piped up, “I hope you’re wrong about Earth Tycho, but just in case, well… we simply have to make it.  That’s just all there is to it.  This mission must succeed.”  

  The other three solemnly nodded their agreement.