Saving proxima, p.23
Saving Proxima, page 23
“To Roy!” They all clinked their glasses together and took deep draws. Roy drank, but he wasn’t so sure he’d done anything that Cindy or Roca or even Patel wouldn’t have figured out eventually.
“To me, I guess,” Roy said, finishing off his drink. The captain immediately refilled it. Roy held out his hand in protest. “Not sure I should—”
“Roy.” Crosby moved his hand away. “If anybody deserves to tie one on, it’s you. Besides, we can’t do anything but watch how the system works over the next couple of days anyway. Now drink up.”
Roy did. He finished his glass and then another. By the time he started on the fourth one, only Patel and Mastrano were still in the galley with him. There were several half-eaten bags of microwave popcorn spread about the table as well as a nearly empty fifth of scotch. Roy was reaching the point where if he had one more he would either throw up and have a really bad headache in the morning, or he would pass out and have a really bad headache in the morning.
“The ship is quiet, you know?” he said slurring the words a bit. “I mean, it’s quiet.”
“Nah, it ain’t quiet at all, Roy.” Pankish slurred even worse than Roy around a handful of popcorn he was shoving into his mouth. “The damned bulkheads pop and creak with temp changes and every single damned time a scrubber kicks in I can hear my bones rattle.”
“That’s because it is so quiet, Pank.” Roy lightly sipped his drink. He’d made a point to add extra ice and soda this go around. They’d run out of the scotch and were on bourbon. He didn’t feel sacrilegious about mixing that.
“Hell, even in the airlock with all the air gone you could still feel the ship vibrating. Then there is that weird feeling you get as you approach the propulsion system. That ultra-high frequency sound in there makes my skin crawl,” Cindy told them. “I agree with Pank. Not quiet at all.”
“I don’t mean mechanically quiet.” Roy took another sip and debated on eating some of the popcorn. The salt would be nice but then again, there would be food in his stomach that could cause problems later when he expected to start throwing up. He decided against it. “I mean . . . people. There’re not enough people. No background noise of conversations, work going on, media vids, kids jabbering . . . ”
He paused mid-sentence and almost immediately fell off the cliff of his emotional high. He fell a very long way into a pit and tears formed in his eyes.
“There are no kids.” He sat his glass down as tears started running down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t know why I can’t stop this.”
“Stop wha—” Patel had dropped some of the popcorn on the deck and was picking it up with his head below table height. He had been looking away, but when he turned back to face Roy and Cindy he just stopped talking. Roy was embarrassed.
“Roy, there is nothing to be sorry for,” Cindy said softly, at least as softly as her loud demeanor and four very stiff drinks would allow, which wasn’t very soft. “Hell, first, you’re lucky that bastard didn’t kill you outright. Second, you’re lucky that you’ve got to at least have some communications with your family.”
“Doesn’t sound like luck, Cindy.”
“Roy, I don’t know about how lucky you are, but your misfortune has saved our collective asses,” Patel said, slapping the table a little too vigorously.
“How’s that, Pankish?” Roy continued wallow. “I don’t see how.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences or serendipity,” Pankish argued. “I believe that shit happens because it is supposed to happen.”
“Fate?” Roy muttered.
“Call it programming in the Simulation, God’s will, or Fate. I don’t really give a damn. If all the things don’t happen the way they happen then what happens can’t happen.” He stopped himself and repeated what he’d just said under his breath. Roy watched as his lips continued moving. “Yeah, that’s right. What I just said.”
“What in the hell are you babbling about, Pank?” Cindy asked. “That didn’t make one lick of sense.”
“Of course it did!” Pankish sounded hurt and straightened himself up like a defense attorney about to save someone from death row. “We’d be dead if it weren’t for Roy! All of us, D-E-A-D with capital letters, dead!”
“I don’t know, Pank. You folks aren’t total dafties,” Roy said. “In fact, I suspect you all would have figured out the problems along the way and fixed them yourselves. Me being here just sped you along.”
“I don’t know, Roy.” Cindy raised an eyebrow. “You found the original sabotage.”
“Did you ever stop to wonder if maybe you had to be here, Roy?” Pankish kept on with it. “That’s right. You, Dr. Roy Burbank, had to be here. Otherwise, the Samaritan and her crew were toast, and maybe even all of Proxima with it.”
“I don’t see that,” Roy argued, starting to feel a bit dizzy.
“Think it through. Maybe, maybe, just maybe . . . oh hell, not maybe, for damned certain. Had we not called for the expert’s advice on how to test the PINS, and had that expert not just happened to be nearby on a vacation cruise ship, and had that expert not come aboard, and had that expert not stumbled across an asshole attempting to sabotage the ship, that expert would not have been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of us here on the ship would have been asleep and not even realized the PINS had been sabotaged. We would have been long gone and too far off course by the time anyone figured it out and woke somebody up to fix it. We might have come up with a fix like following the interstellar probe or we might not have, but by then it would have been far too late.”
“Damn, Pankish, you might be right there,” Cindy added. “Had your wife not got us looking for you, we wouldn’t have even woken you up until the midpoint med checks. By then we’d have been so far off course . . . ”
“That is absolutely right, CHENG!” Pankish slapped the table again. “You had to be here, Roy. While I’m so sorry for what has happened to your life being upturned and all, and I’m sorry about not getting to be there with your family—that’s awful—but, selfishly, for myself, the crew, and hell, Proxima, I’m damned glad you are here!”
Roy turned and looked Pankish right in the eyes. He wiped the tears from his cheeks. Then he promptly vomited across the table.
CHAPTER 36
January 16, 2091 (Earth timeline)
March 19, 2090 (Ship timeline)
approximately 6 light-months from Earth
3.64 light-years from Proxima
Roy had about the worst hangover he remembered ever having, ever, in his life. Once Cindy and Pankish had dragged him to his room, he was still nauseous. He had kept one leg off the bed touching the floor with the hope that connecting to the floor would help keep the ceiling from spinning. It hadn’t. Finally, Roy had just taken his blanket to the bathroom and slept there. The air toilet looked similar to normal ones, but there was no water flow; instead there was an air-sleeve that activated once the lid was opened. Roy hadn’t been certain how it would respond to projectile vomiting, but after about the third time he realized that the design was quite capable of handling anything he could throw at it—or more to the point, throw up at it.
Midway through the next morning his brain was becoming almost coherent enough to realize that he was curled up into fetal position on the bathroom floor shivering against the cold metal deck plating. His body being in direct contact with the very efficient heat sink was sapping all the heat his body could generate and was bringing him close to hypothermia. The loss of body heat actually had probably helped his hangover, acting somewhat like an icepack on his pounding head. But, in reality, Roy wasn’t sure that anything could help.
Roy wanted to die. Flat out, all he wanted at the moment was for his head to quit throbbing, the uneasiness in his stomach to go away, the scratchy sore throat to heal, and most of all, the lingering depression from the knowledge that he couldn’t go home to fade. Drinking might not have been the best idea as he was already fighting that severe depression as it was. He was on antidepression meds the doctor had given him and then he had mixed them with alcohol, lots of alcohol. The knowledge of being lost in space from his wife and the daughter he’d never meet or even get to speak to in real-time was just too much for him without the added toxins to his brain.
Roy crawled to the bed and pulled the weighted magnetic blanket up over him. He lay shivering for what seemed like an eternity, but the heater coils in the sleep unit, combined with the thermal sensors and the feedback control loop, finally brought his body temperature back to normal. He drifted in and out of sleep. Recurring nightmares of not being there for his family made what sleep he managed to be unrestful. Once, he thought he was going to have to get back up to go to the toilet and heave, but he managed to choke the throat-burning bile back down and mentally force himself to keep his mouth clenched.
A few hours later, he managed to get up and drink some electrolytes and brush his teeth. He thought, very briefly, that a slow walk about the ship might do him some good. Then he thought less of that idea and crawled back into his bunk. After another thirty or forty minutes of lying sleepless in bed, he rolled over and reached out to switch on the light nearest the bed, knocking over the holoprojection of his rapidly growing daughter. He froze motionless and took a deep breath. He picked up the little silver-and-pink cube, rolled up onto his back, placing the cube on his stomach. Roy depressed the on switch and the data cube updated. It seemed to him that his daughter had grown an inch since he’d looked at the cube just hours before.
“Nigel?”
“Yes, Roy?”
“Are there any new letters from home?”
“Not yet, Roy.”
“Damn. Okay. Play the latest one.”
“Okay, Roy.”
* * *
“I think we’re going to have a hard time getting Roy to go to long-term cryo,” Cindy told Captain Crosby. She wasn’t as hungover as Roy and Pankish because she’d more or less sipped at her drinks, knowing that somebody was going to have to make sure they had gotten to bed safely. “He is afraid he’ll miss a video from home, I think.”
“If I have to do something, you’re right. I’ll make it an order. Or I’ll wake up the doctor and let him do it,” Crosby replied. “This is just a damned mess. If we hadn’t already gotten into the no-return level with the Samara Drive, then I would say to hell with the Proximans and turn this ship around.”
“Well, by the time we did that . . . I’m not sure we even could.” Cindy had thought about that already and wasn’t sure about their ability to go anywhere due to the astronavigation problems. “With the PINS being done for, I don’t think we could go full speed home without getting lost.”
“I’ve thought about that too. I think you are right about that. Roca and I talked it through a couple days ago,” Crosby said. “We’d have to go at a slower speed and make nav measurements by hand and do trajectory mods continuously. We’re in one helluva bad spot right now. And poor Roy is just stuck with us.”
“I think it would be better for him to go to cryo as soon as the doc said he could. That’s in a couple weeks, right?”
“Mak said that he wanted him to avoid deep cryo for the first six to eight months. We picked mid-March as a generic time in that window to assess him. I’d say if he’s not showing physical symptoms of his concussion, then we need to talk him into napping as soon as we can.” Crosby spun about in his desk chair so he could look out the forward-view window in the ready room. Cindy followed his gaze and could see him looking for Proxima. It was hard to miss as it was dead center straight ahead. “It is hard to believe it is so difficult to navigate to a bright shiny beacon like that.”
“It is a great deal harder than it looks for sure,” Cindy agreed. “I’ll talk Roy into letting us have the autodoc do a concussion assessment on him and then I’ll try to get him to cryo. I’m pretty sure if the damned thing cleared him for EVA, then it should clear him for cryosleep.”
“Don’t bet it on. I thought so too, but Mak said the system used different protocols and algorithms for the two different things,” Crosby said. “If you need me to come make it an order just let me know, subtly and privately.”
“Yes sir. I’ll get right on that.”
CHAPTER 37
January 16, 2091 (Earth timeline)
March 19, 2090 (Ship timeline)
approximately 6 light-months from Earth
3.64 light-years from Proxima
Chloe juggled the little redheaded infant about in the baby pouch strapped across her chest in order to adjust the backpack she had on her back. She did her best to hold the bottle in place for Samari with her left hand while she opened the glass door to the training building with her right. Once she got the door wedged open with her foot, Chloe kicked it wide enough to slide through and push it the rest of the way open with her backpack by leaning backward into it. Just as it looked like she was going to make it through, one of the straps on the backpack looped around the L-shaped angle aluminum door pull, fixing her to it as it swung wider with the sharp gust of north Alabama winter wind that nearly knocked her off her feet.
It was getting cold and looked like it was going to rain. The last thing Chloe needed at that moment was to have her back stuck to a door while there was a baby on her chest. The only upside to getting caught on the door was that being hung up with it actually kept her from losing her balance, but had she not been hung on the door she would have already been inside and the wind wouldn’t have been an issue.
Then the rain started.
“Shit!” she muttered to herself as she grasped outward for handholds in any direction. The bottle flew from her left hand and Samari promptly let her know by screaming her lungs out. “It’s okay, baby. Mommy will get it together.”
Chloe reached with her left hand for the bottle but was so affixed to the door handle that she couldn’t reach it either. Samari continued to cry for the bottle with her little hands outstretched, reaching, and the fact that she was now being pelted by raindrops didn’t help matters. Chloe was suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that she’d been trying to do everything as a single parent for the last year, while at the same time working mostly around the clock training for her new job. The training was intense and took every waking second of her day. At the same time, taking care of an infant by herself mostly took every waking second of her day as well. Roy’s parents helped as much as they could and she had considered hiring a full-time nanny, but she didn’t want to deprive Samari of both parents.
She was the primary bread winner now, although the company had taken good care of them due to what happened with Roy, but she was not just going to sit idly by on that money. No, Chloe had a plan. She had a plan to fix things as best they could be fixed. But at the moment, that plan was wearing her down. No, it was literally beating her down and she was almost to the breaking point and ready to tap out. She started crying uncontrollably and just couldn’t stop it. Being a medical doctor, she understood that she was having post-partum hormone imbalances. She made a mental note to see an endocrinologist to get that straightened out as soon as possible. She continued to cry but there was just enough rain to cover the tears.
“Here, ma’am, let me help you with that.” A young Space Force major grabbed the bottle from the ground and handed it to her. Chloe accepted it and quickly shoved it in the baby’s mouth. Samari went right to it and stopped crying immediately.
“Thank you.”
“Hold on a minute. You’re really strapped into this thing back here.”
“I can manage . . . ” she started to say through sniffles. She wiped the tears and rain from her eyes as best she could and tried to straighten herself.
“No worries, ma’am. Just one more second—aha! Got it. There you go. All free.” The soldier smiled at her and helped her get her balance. “I’ve seen you around the base a bit. I’m Malcolm Reyes.”
“Thank you, Malcolm.” She continued to cry. “I’m, Chloe, Chloe Burbank. Space medical.”
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the major asked her. Chloe nodded her head in the affirmative even though it was clearly a lie.
“I, uh, well, I am just tired,” Chloe lied verbally to go along with the opposing body language. She was more than tired. She was worn ragged and fighting depression on top of that. But she wasn’t going to quit. “Thanks again . . . but . . . I’ll be fine. I have to get to class.”
“Where’re you headed?”
“Trauma Care in Microgravity. Third floor, um, conference room three-oh-one.” The major looked at her and then the baby. “I know, I know, but I couldn’t get a babysitter because the damned instructor changed the class time on me. And I emailed him to get a VR link but he never responded. And I can’t miss the class or I can’t get into the second part in Boulder next month. And dammit, this is the last time this one is offered in time. I can’t miss these classes. I have to get certified. And I think I’m going to be late.”
“Fancy, that. I’m going to the third floor, also. Let me give you a hand with your bag.” He reached to take the bag but Chloe stopped him.
“No thanks, Malcom. I can handle it.” Chloe straightened her posture and wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket. The Alabama winters got cold every now and then, but it was nothing like Colorado was going to be next month when she got there. Either way, she was glad to get inside and out of the weather. She was sure Samari was too.
“Really, ma’am. No bother.” Major Reyes took her backpack and ushered her toward the elevator. “I’m going that way.”
“Again, thank you.” Chloe had to sometimes just accept help. It was not there often and she needed to force herself to take every little hand-up and break offered. Being the one needing help was atypical for her.
“Yes ma’am. And who’s this little beauty?”
“This is Samari.” Chloe held one of her baby’s hands and waved it at the major. Samari didn’t seem to care. She cooed around the nipple from the bottle in her mouth and swatted her free hand back and forth and then grasped the bottle with both hands. “Say hi, baby.”
