What the hell is happening.” The control board is lit up like a Christmas tree, warning buzzers, klaxons and every light that blinks is going haywire. “Hey tech, are you seeing this… is this a glitch? This should absolutely not be happening. What is going on out there.” Me and everyone else at Houston Central Control are on our feet, phones are ringing off the hook and support staff are being woken up. The room is in chaos. The Company builds these capsules to ridiculously stringent specifications. Each system built with three redundancies, all on separate breakers, housed in various locations across the bulk of the craft, shielded under plate steel, or lead casings. They recycle them, over and over again because they are so robust. You could plow a five tonne asteroid into the things, and they’d just… bounce. Took some engineering to achieve that feat. The “Non Sequitur“, it really is a remarkable space faring craft. Ugly as sin, spartan in design, but it’s gods be damned sturdy as a mother fucker.
“Can we get all team leads to the tenth floor conference room, repeat, all team leads to the tenth floor conference room, stat!” The voice on the pa system is tense, and the volume has been cranked to ten. No one is going to want to claim they didn’t hear the dispatch from the guys in charge. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Outside the control room, the tone is very somber, punctuated by flurries of activity, followed by countless hours of waiting. The shadows beyond the windows stretch and shrink, stretch and shrink as the hours bleed into days, then into weeks. The once eager faces have grown grey, pale and worn. Five o’clock shadow has become the norm, in what is usually a very rigorous and stringent dress code. Walk down any hall way and you’ll find cots with passed out technicians, scattered across every corner, every nook and cranny crammed with unwashed bodies.
“So you’re telling me… after three weeks…that he’s simply not responding to our calls? Do we know if the radio and antenna array are in working order? What do we know… people! Listen. Shut up. I need you to sound off. NOW.” Bruce is about to snap, we’ve been coming to these meetings since day one of the catastrophic event aboard the Non Sequitur, waiting for something new to emerge from the raw data. He’s worked CapCom control for two decades now, and nothing even remotely eventful has ever happened. Not even a dropped call. His skin has taken on a yellow tinge, and his eyes have sunk deeper into his broad face. He looks as though he hasn’t showered or slept in days. He has picked up smoking again, so much so that his fingers tips are stained a dark mustard yellow. His over grown dirty fingernails are tap, tap, tapping on the conference table impatiently. “Well uh, we know that he’s… um, Todd…, yes sorry, Flight Commander Neil Todd, we know he’s still alive because he’s the only one with the bio-metrics to log in to conduct the scans off of the sensor arrays. The data packets are flooding back in, terabyte by terabyte. It doesn’t make much sense, what we are seeing.” The under staffer is visibly nervous about relaying this information. “What?” Says Bruce “The radios are transmitting to us? But he isn’t responding to our queries? That’s very unlike Cmdr Todd. What the fuck happened up there.” Bruce is not taking this new information well, he and Cmdr Todd go back quite a ways. Their kids were all born at the same time, both of them. “Well, we um… have some strange readings…” Terry, the capsule tech specialist chimes in. “The Co2 scrubbers must be malfunctioning, they are way below where they should be. They should need to be replaced every ten days, but we’re what, twenty one days in, on the same one…” he is pacing around the room, fingers pinched on the bridge of his nose, grimacing over the incomplete data. A sudden bang at the door startles the group in the conference room. Opening the door is dr. Sanjai, the loose bun on her head is dropping strands of hair over her face obscuring her now red rimmed eyes. “I can elaborate on that Terry, we were finally able to scour through enough of the data packets in the information dumps to mine the medical subsets. I’m so sorry Bruce…” she says stepping passed the threshold, and into the room. “Jenny and both the girls were killed in a blast. They were exposed to the vacuum of space while asleep in their bed pods.” Everyone is awestruck, Bruce sits down abruptly in his swivel chair at the head of the table. The crew quarters are the most heavily shielded and armored portion of the capsule. It’s where protocol sends you to ride out a gamma burst, radiation, or an asteroid impact. “From what we can tell Cmdr Todd suffered a blunt force trauma to the head, his brain waves sank to near dead for a period of approximately sixteen hours. I think… I… I… I believe he may have suffered brain damage in the blast. And from our other metrics, probably a good chance of substantial blood loss. If it weren’t for the antenna array logins noted on a daily basis, I would have believed him dead.” She is standing stock still in front of the room, a stunned silence fills the space. A thick cloud of cigarette smoke covers the low hanging ceiling. There are water spots on some of the drop ceiling tiles. The Company likes to see its money go into the program, and not wasted on ground staff creature comforts. Bruce, after a brief pause is up on his feet again, he resumes pacing in front of the dusty blackboards. They are covered with all the minutiae of organized space flight. “What about guidance, navigation, payload, what are his consumables like, what state is he in. Best guesses, any details, no matter how fine, are welcome.” Bruce falls back into his chair, as though the weight of the world is clutching at his shoulders and pulling him backward. A mousy slender wisp of a man steps through the gathered group. “Derick here, hi guys, from what we can tell both the navigation system and the engines themselves are fine. We have evidence that some of the crew quarters emergency lighting panels are sending out rapid fire bursts, must be sparks firing almost constantly, like the tail of a comet down off the back of the capsule. I mean, like, this is crazy, whatever hit them managed to pin point the crew pods, out of ten pods, the only three grouped together that happened to have people occupying them got blasted, gutted, fucking near vaporized. I can’t believe it…” he has his detailed spec print outs nearly crushed in his hands. You can tell he is fighting the urge to gather a consensus among the gathered technicians and scientists, for just how insane the statistical probability of this is. “The math shows him to be heading off course, hard to gauge at this point, he must have caught one hell of a bounce, that’s what I’m thinking, but right now he’s about seventy thousands miles wide of where he should be. By the time he gets out to the elliptical range of Pluto it could be as much a six, maybe seven million miles off course. It’s really worst case scenario at this point.” The life drains out of him, and he staggers backwards, dr. Sanjai points him toward an open chair. Once again Bruce comes alive, leaping up from his leather chair. “But he could course correct right? We’ve heard that navigation and engine control are operational. What’s our protocol on a redirect from here?”. He looks hopefully to Derick. All hopes are dashed as the single main priority of these missions comes crashing back into focus. There can be NO ability to redirect these missions from earth. Tensions are too high, too much is riding on their success to allow subterfuge from an errant tech or saboteur. He’s got enough food and supplies for ten men over a five year journey. It’s all down to Cmdr Todd.
Isolated out in the far reaches of space, humanities success rests entirely upon his beaten, bloody shoulders – alone.
PART II
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