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17
Hysterics
Peter rubbed his temples. “We’re doing what we can.”
“What about what they are doing? Whatever it is, it’s not enough. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.” Penelope squealed, her voice rising in pitch and volume as her outrage surged. She gesticulated wildly, shaking her hands aft, in the general direction of the Stalingrad and the two engineers who had just left on a spacewalk with armloads of printed components.
“Yes, it’s unfortunate that these problems happen. We’re going to get through it, remember that awkwardness with pulling out of the dry dock?”
“That doesn’t matter, is shouldn’t have happened in the first place!” She chirped.
Peter looked up from his terminal, keeping his expression blank as his wife Penelope was shaking, nearly vibrating with outrage. “This is the first time anyone has tried to launch a colony like this, something unusual was bound to happen.”
“We don’t have time for this! It’s not in the schedule, no one planned for this, and now we’re spending all that filament to print mounts and sheathing for cables? That is that much more construction material we won’t have once we make it to our destination. We could have made how many cubic meters of insulation with that?”
Peter drummed his fingers on his desk, unsure of how to answer her without upsetting her more. His wife continued. “We’re spending resources fixing problems. Imagine how much farther ahead we could be, if we were building new things with those rather than recovering from failures? What about everyone else? What about all the other souls onboard the station, not just you, or me, or Spring and Kirkland we sent out there? There’s three hundred forty-seven more people on board. What are we going to tell them?”
“Do we have to tell them anything?”
Flabbergasted, she spun to face him, flipping her amber hair over her shoulder indignantly. “Not tell them?! They have a right to know!”
Peter shrugged, trying to keep his nonchalant cool. “A right sure, but a need? But I mean, no one has come to ask us if anything was amiss.”
She squeaked at him indignantly. “Wouldn’t you want to be told of the situation?”
Peter sighed. “How would telling them help? It’ll just get people all stirred up about a situation they can’t do anything about. There’s no need to cause a panic.”
“They can’t do anything about? Someone might have a brilliant idea, could help us, save us all.”
“It’ll take more than just good ideas…” he trailed off, she was already on her way out the door. He flipped through the menus to find the external camera feeds. He watched the small dots of the four crewmen on the umbilical stretched between the space station and the spaceship as they worked down it’s length. They had been at it for hours, and weren’t even halfway done yet. Already Spring and Kirk had made a trip back for more supplies. He leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. Without the extra sensory input, he could almost feel the space station’s sleepy three revolutions per minute rotational speed. “Good ideas indeed,” he muttered to himself, and the empty room. “What can I do? What can anyone do besides what we’re already doing to help this?”
His terminal beeped with a notification. Peter opened his eyes and stifled a yawn as he switched menus to get to the messenger. But before he could read the message, a second notification popped up, obscuring the display, then a third. He stood up sharply, his gut fell, sliding down his leg to pool inside his shoes. “Penelope, you didn’t,” he shouted as he sprinted from the room.
Peter ran against the direction of rotation, following the squeaky voice of his wife. He didn’t have to go far, a small crowd was coming to find him. Several colonists’ faces wearing different flavors of fear, outrage, or disgust.
They all tried to speak at once. “What do you mean there’s a problem? Why didn’t you tell us? We could have helped. Why did you hide this from us? Is this your fault? is that why you’re hiding it? Why hasn’t it been fixed already? I can’t believe they elected you to be in charge.”
Peter held up his hands to stop the crowd as the half a dozen colonists engulfed him. Penelope trailed not far behind the crowd. He made eye contact with her over the heads of the crowd. She held his gaze flatly. Someone tugged at his collar, drawing his focus as his brain started processing the rushed and overlapping words of the colonists again. “…think we could handle it? How can we trust you when you don’t tell us these things? How can we work on problems if we don’t know about them?Why didn’t the Stalingrad’s crew fix it for us, can we count on them?”
“This isn’t just an us problem. It’s the Stalingrad too. And this isn’t their fault, or our fault, stuff happens. We’re attached, we’re in this together. I won’t have any of us versus them creeping into your minds. There’s a mechanical problem with their primary reactor, and they can’t power it up right now. But they need more power to jump us back out of the transit dimension. We’ve got a team on the outside, doing a spacewalk already, running extra cables. So we can feed the Stalingrad extra power from our reactor, combined with their secondary reactor, we’ll be able to make the jump back to normal space.”
“They can’t even keep their reactor running? This is not a good omen.” someone barked.
“I don’t know the details of it. From what I understand, the main reactor is fine, but there’s something out of alignment.”
“So align it!” came a woman’s shrill voice.
“They’re working on that too, but it’s delicate and takes a lot of measurements. It won’t be done before we have to meet our jump window.”
“We’re going to miss our jump window?”
“That’s not what I said.” Peter snapped, his thinning patience letting an edge creep into his voice. “We’ll hit our jump window just fine because we’re already working on the problem. It’s just that their main reactor won’t be realigned in time to make the jump. That’s why we’re running cables and going to feed them extra wattage for the jump.”
“You mean the Stalingrad’s working on the problem.” a tall man stated. “For some reason that doesn’t make me feel warm and snuggly. Isn’t this problem their fault in the first place?”
“And that’s why they’re leading the effort to fix it, but the malfunction affects all of us, so we’re helping too.”
“Helping how?” the high-pitched woman spoke up again.
“Spring and Kirk are outside on a spacewalk right now, with both hands and hardware to help the repair go faster. Gotta make sure we’re on time and keep as much margin for error as we can. Now, everyone calm down, there’s already a plan, and it’s already in progress. There’s no reason to get excited over this. It’s already being handled.”
“Being handled?” the woman’s shrill voice stabbed deep into Peter’s eardrums. He winced, looking over her head to Penelope, still standing at the back of the small crowd. “That’s not good enough. Just being handled, that’s what you do with a paper jam or a missing manifest. This isn’t just a spaceship or our colony. It’s getting the whole mess to the right place at the right time. We’ve more than a half a thousand lives riding on this, and they have to be accurate down to the millimeter per microsecond. This isn’t time to play fast and loose with things like those corporate cowboys.”
“No cowboys. The Stalingrad has their best engineers on it. I spent hours in talks with Captain Mironova and her chief engineer, Konstantin. It’s being handled, don’t worry, and don’t go blabbing about this to anyone else. No point in causing a panic, is there?” Peter looked from face to face of the half-dozen people arrayed before him, standing in a semicircle on the inside of a spinning ring at the end of the small colony cylinder.
Penelope giggled, a small hand covering little mouth. “What?” He said firmly, his mood souring, as if he didn’t have enough to deal with already. In the silence between questions, a steady beep pricked his ear. A glance over his shoulder lead him back down the hall to the governor’s office. The crowd following after him, pressing against the hatch as they all crowded the opening. His terminal was so overwhelmed with notifications, the ping noise had become a steady wailing beep. He winced as he realized Penelope had forwarded the message to everyone in the colony, all three hundred and fifty-one people, and now they were all replying.
“This isn’t helping the problem,” he growled, indicating the terminal with a sharp knife hand thrust at the display. “Now We gotta spin this, figure out how to keep morale under control. We don’t need a panic, that really won’t help the situation, will it?” He might have been speaking generally, but he glared at Penelope as he spoke. She looked away, shrinking behind the crowd.
Peter’s stern voice made the crowd understand his concern finally. They exchanged glances. “Yeah. A panic isn’t going to help this. Remember the screening process to get put on this expedition? How selective it was? The crew of the Stalingrad went through a similar process. They’re good people, a hand-picked crew, not just some random people off the streets of Moscow, Dublin or Rome.”
The silence grew heavier, one of the men in the back turned and left without another word. “What should we do? What can we do?” Asked the lady with the shrill voice.
With his hands on his hips, Peter stood behind his desk for a long moment, glaring at the display, as if the steady stream of messages would tell him what to do, as if it was a codex that contained answers, rather than everyone’s spammed replies. His glare drifted up to the now sheepish looking crowd. Everyone knew now, which meant everyone would be concerned. The idea hit him so hard he struggled not to have an outward reaction. They just had to give everyone something to do so they could all feel like they were helping. Let everyone make a difference.
“Well… since Penelope decided to involve everyone, it looks like we’re going to have to involve everyone. And since you’re here with me, you get to help me figure out how to say this.”
Peter unlocked the terminal, cleared the notifications, and opened a new message with the Reply All button. The people arrayed before his desk exchanged surprised glances. “US?”
“Yes,” he waved at them as he sat down. “We’re all involved, and you’re all so concerned. You want to help, help me figure out what everyone can do to help with this problem, to ease their fears and not cause a panic, even if it just is busy work.” No one answered Peter. He started typing, not looking at his hands or the display, but staring down the people before him, trying to demand answers.
He told them what he was typing, as his fingers danced over the keys. The problem is that Stalingrad’s main reactor was having fluctuations and has been shut down. There’s just not enough watts of power available to make the jump back to heavy space. What we need is for everyone to power down non critical systems and reduce power usage as much as reasonable from now until after the jump. With less strain on our power system, we’ll have a larger on demand surplus of electrical power to turn over to the Stalingrad. We already have a team on a spacewalk to run extra power cables back to them. There is no need to be concerned, there is a misalignment with the reactor’s internal shield plates. This is not an uncommon or unheard of problem, especially after the jolt of inter-dimensional jumps. It’s not a problem to realign this shielding, but it is time consuming, and it won’t be completed before our jump window. We need to save, and store every possible watt we can for the next thirty-two hours, while also reducing the load on our own reactor to prepare for the jump back.
He sent the message and looked up at the still looming half-dozen people, spending the time to more positively identify them and their role in the colony. With only three hundred and fifty other people aboard the Langok colony station, everyone knew everyone else. After all, they were going to live with each other for the rest of their lives.
Peter collapsed with relief into his chair behind his desk. That would work, it had to. He thought to himself. The crisis hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve diverted it. Peter pointed first to the tallest man, with dusty blond hair, who went by the nickname Hawk. He was in charge of the hydroponics systems onboard Langok station. “I know we can cut back on lights and pumps. It won’t hurt the plants to have what, fifteen percent less of both for a couple of days?” Hawk shrugged and turned, leaving the office without another word.
Peter addressed a short, but broad shouldered, powerful man. “Mr. Coleman, take a patrol, and make the rounds around the station, check in on people, make sure all is well.” Concerned his deep voice came slow and measured as he replied. “Are you sure a show of force is the right thing at this time?”
“You’re the chief of police, is it? It doesn’t have to be a show of force, just check in on people. What do you call that? Community outreach? A wellness check?” Mr. Coleman dipped his head in acquiescence and left, following Hawk out the hatch past Penelope who still lingered in the hall outside.
Peter glanced back and forth between a tall, lean woman, Hailey, and a thin man with spectacles, Kelly. “You get my point? We can all do something to consume less electrical power, ease the pain, smooth the transition. Kelly, head on down to the reactor compartment and make sure everything is good down there, tell them to make whatever, if any, preparations they need to, for sustained one hundred percent operation. They both nodded and left too, his eyes followed them out of the office to where Penelope waited, hands on her hips a renewed fierceness on her face. “See, don’t you feel better airing it all out? We’re taking the problem head on, and doing something about it instead of hiding it under the rug and hoping it goes away.” Shaking his head, he looked away from his wife. “We’ll talk about this later.”
NSC has acquired the cover art from the artist for book III Knowledge of Gods. In the next issue of tight beam we hope to do a cover reveal and roll out an exciting new page for the third instalment of The Descendant Saga. The final touch ups are going into the manuscript now, the last beta reader is less than a week away from offering feedback before we go into formatting. Release is soon. Fate has been a fickle mistress and taught us here at NSC not to commit to a release date but we’re hoping to put out Knowledge of Gods the first week of October.
Also coming in our next newsletter will be a new, extra nerdy deep dive segment from our lead author Chace. He’s going to be covering a range of topics, mostly from the cold war time frame. Ships, Aircraft, tanks, space ships and what ever other areas of hyper focus he has, things from the 1930s through 1980s time period. This will really letting us get down into the gritty nerdy details we all love, and help us nerd out even harder than just drooling over classic sci-fi. We’ve seen his list of topics, obviously we had him send it to use before we greenlit the idea, and a lot of these things he’s already covered briefly, in video form. If you want a teaser to see the kind of conversations we’re going to be having in the future, here’s a few playlists of the videos, so you’ll know what’s in store for discussion in text format.
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