Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. All characters are legal adults and over 18.
Foreword:
I appreciate the constructive feedback. It was ambitious trying a story spanning two planets for a second story attempt. It's easy to get excited about items we wish to have in a story, but then underestimate the work required to stitch them together. E.g. I wanted to take a trip to Proxima, I wanted AI, and I wanted a science-y kind of story. I thought to myself: oh dear, now I need to invent FTL to be able to get to Proxima. I'm learning from this, so for those willing to share the time, I'm grateful to hear from you and appreciate the feedback.
A recap from Chapters 9-11:
In a flashback from two decades ago, an observatory at the solar gravitational focal point is revealed, along with a radio message. Its significance is unknown, beyond that it was from the Fuzanglong and relates to the previous world war, where the Chinese nation state was defeated, and is now overcrowded, suffering as a result of the post war sanctions.
The story returns to the main timeline where the newly constructed ship: Maxwell's Demon departs Eureka Station for its maiden extra-solar voyage, exploiting the space-warping effects of the recently discovered exotic matter known as the void particle. Equipped with a hybrid crew consisting of humanity's first stable AI, and members of ISS, ADXP, and CoreX, they enter into stasis chambers which reduce their life support needs for the approximately nine month trip to survey the Alpha Centauri star system.
Kassy, the ship's AI, is undergoing rapid aging, and faces an unknown future -- unsure if she will go mad and self-delete as all ATMs before her have, or if Greg's special hardware will allow her to live. She discovers an unexpected virtual reality she can share with the ship's pilot, John, due to his military neural-piloting interface. Traveling through her young adult years, lonely for human interaction, and facing feelings and opportunities no artificial life form was ever given before, she experiences her first human emotion -- but has no framework to deal with it.
She finds little guidance from the crew, and while she processes her rejection at interacting with John, a disastrous navigation error disrupts the ship's final leg. The crew is awakened in a panic, finding themselves plunged into a coronal mass ejection over the pole of Proxima, decimating their electronic systems and damaging their reactors which are critical for powering the FTL void drive.
Surviving the collision, but too deep in the gravity well to escape the pull of Proxima, they expend the majority of their chemical fuel reserves heading for a stable orbit around Proxima b, where they can assess the damage to the ship, and what it will mean for their mission.
** Chapter 12: The Burden of Command **
Coasting through space in a controlled tumble to even the heat distribution over the hull, Emdee looked like a graceful skater spinning on a deserted ice rink, projecting no hint of the life threatening emergency inside her hull, or the dire discussion about to happen therein.
Jennifer blotted her swollen lip one last time with a gauze pad. She waited while Greg, his hand wrapped in a bandage, stepped over the Hab module doorway lip. The rest of the crew filed in on his tail. Kassy appeared in the holo-led tube, aged ten years since last seen. There were lines in her face, extra weight in her hips and bust. She looked serious, reminding Jennifer of an attractive but mean female college professor she'd once had.
"Kassy, review the ship's log for us," Jennifer said.
"At 18:31 today the navigation kernel issued a panic message. It encountered a gravity wave while in-bubble that exceeded the error thresholds. Fearing our navigation calculations had failed, I issued a drive abort and Master Alarm, waking the crew.
On acquisition of local system coordinates, I determined our navigation leg was long by three AU. I've started an investigation into all systems aboard EmDee. The possibility of sabotage is not being ruled out. The error was encountered at the ideal navigation waypoint to send us directly into Proxima. If someone wanted to destroy us, this would have been mercifully effective --"
"Mercifully, what is that supposed to mean?" Greg interrupted.
"We'll have a chance to discuss, Greg. Kassy, continue."
"The alternative hypothesis is dark matter tunneling."
"What?" Sarah said. "You'll have to lighten that up a bit for some of us."
"If the theory that the void drive consumes dark matter in its path is true, then we may have crossed a boundary of space where no such matter existed. Consider for a moment if I put you and William into an empty box in the form of single points and asked you to measure the distance between yourselves, how would you do it, Sarah?"
"Distance is the product of speed and time. I could see how long it took me to reach William," Sarah said.
"How would you know how fast you were going?"
"I'd need some sort of visual reference point, and a clock ..." Sarah thought aloud.
"And if I make the box many light years in width, what reference would you have when no light has reached you?
You would cross an empty void in an instant, as there is nothing present to measure the passage of time. Similarly, it is possible that in the absence of dark matter, our void particle drive folded to the next point in space-time where there was dark matter. We tunneled through a piece of the universe that didn't exist as far as the void drive was concerned. This is all theory of course."
"My money is on sabotage. It's that damn human nihilist terrorist group: The Ten Suns; they've threatened every space mission since the first manned craft to Mars," Sarah said.
"Who needs sabotage when you've got corporate greed and incompetent Captaincy," William said. "CoreX fucked us on the reactor design. We've got a hole in the reactor wall with slow neutrons leaking into the reactor internals. If enough of them are absorbed, they'll transmute the internal reactor components to gasses, and if it's the magnetic confinement coils or cooling valves that are affected, we may never be able to get back into a high-power mode. As long as our main power reactor is in L-mode 1, it's not enough power to run the stasis chambers, or much of anything on the Hab-Ring."
"You said we didn't have enough power to run all the stasis units, but could we run one, or a few? I could tinker with the reclamation systems. We could ration water, oxygen and food. With an alternating use of a reduced stasis set, maybe I could make it work," Sarah said.
"It's a good idea, Sarah, and maybe it will come to that for other reasons, but that's not the real problem with trying to use the FTL again," William said.
"We have more problems? Isn't a hole in the reactor enough?" John said.
"This shit isn't radioactive, right, Sarah?" William said as he reloaded another zero-g sip cup. "During the incident, Jennifer's quick trigger finger on the abortive Hab-Ring shutdown caused us to lose a lot of cooling fluid. When spinning, the Hab-Ring coolant is pulsed with perfect timing through transfer ports that occur at regular intervals to the cooling sinks in the center of the ship. Normally, the cooling system switches out of pulse-mode and into constant pumping mode when the ring is stopped; however, since the ports weren't lined up, coolant was pumped straight into space."
"I made decisions with the best information I had available to me at the time. You wanna put me on trial for those, fine. Right now, we need to solve problems one at a time."
"Can someone just tell me all the ways we're screwed?" Greg said.
