"Have you got a location?"
"Not yet, Captain. The signal is very faint, and drops out a lot, but it's modulated like it's got what must be the ship's entire reactor driving it." The comms officer has drafted the astrogator and his assistant, and the three of them are tapping feverishly at their consoles as they try to find the signal's source.
"Can you give me a rough estimate in terms of maximum distance?"
"We've got the specs for that class of miner, Captain. Some of them are still in active service, they're almost indestructible. I'd say, if they're using the factory fusion plant or something close, they can't be more than a tenth of an AU away from us, or they'd be too faint to pick up."
"General bearing?"
"They have to be a little further out from us, sir, and they're almost certainly still in the orbital plane. I can give you about a forty degree arc with eighty percent certainty."
The captain nods to the pilot. "Get that information and coordinate with the Chief. I want us pointed in the general direction immediately." He reaches down and keys the console in the arm of the command chair.
"Chief, we've got a distress signal. Comms is working on a precise fix, we have a general bearing, and I want a one G burn as soon as the pilot tells you she's ready for it."
"
Understood, Captain.
"
His fingers tap as he brings up a different department. "Medical, start bringing the full crew out of stasis, with priority on your own personnel. We have a distress signal from a ship that's been out here a few decades. Crew status unknown, but prepare for possible cases of stasis entropy."
"
Yes captain. Do you know the ship's crew complement?
"
The captain raises his eyes to his first officer, who glances at her own screen and says, "They had four registered when they took the contract. Ship specs call for not less than three and not more than fifteen."
The captain speaks to his console, "Prepare for a dozen possibles. Likely fewer, according to the ship's registration, but I want your entire staff off ice before we find out."
"
Yes, sir.
"
The astrogator speaks up. "Captain, I think we know why we're losing the signal. The ship must be on a rock with a fair amount of spin, and it's blocking the transmission about half the time."
With a nod, he points to the sensor tech and says, "Start plotting every chunk of ice or iron you can find within the search arc."
"Yes, Captain."
"Let's find them and bring them home, people."
-
Fleet Admiral Clarke observes the flurry of activity passively, content that the captain is competent to run his ship. Her memories drift back over the decades, to the night she met Nomara Sor. She can admit, now, that she'd had a crush on Commander Grubenski, and she'd been prepared to dislike the captain of the mining ship with whom he was involved.
The woman had possessed an overwhelming presence, though, in addition to her exotic beauty, and she'd been kind to a young ensign sent to escort her to the
Kracken
. Emily had quickly gone from a sort of anonymous jealousy to near hero worship.
She'd left the
Kracken
for another posting before the
Rockhopper
had been due back, but she'd been aware that it hadn't returned. Though she'd never met her former Commander again, she'd heard through the grapevine that his early retirement from active service might have had something to do with the loss of his love. He'd held a professorship at the UNS Naval Academy until his death, almost thirty years ago. She suspects he'd never quite been the same.
Now here she was, an old woman, like a coda on the end of their story. She found her feelings about finding Captain Sor were a little ambiguous. Part of her hopes that the beautiful woman hadn't survived all this time, only to come home and find her love long dead.
She watches the quiet, intense activity on the bridge of this powerful machine of war. Young officers move with alacrity, intent in their professionalism, and it just makes her feel tired. Even the captain of this ship is decades her junior. Rising from her inconspicuous seat at the back of the command module, she quietly leaves to return to her cabin, alone with her thoughts.
-
The
Rockhopper
lies nearly dead in the loose gravel of the planetoid that has become its grave, silent except for the repetitive electromagnetic pulse of the distress beacon and the blinking lights of the few systems still functional. The remaining fusion reactor, unmanned for so long, continues to pump energy into the communications array. It has the means to do so unattended for another three or four centuries, until it, too, succumbs, and the ship finally becomes as inert as the rock upon which it rests.
The enormous rail, girdling a large fraction of Sleepy's circumference, is also quiet, having sent its last iron bullet to the inner system hours before the
Rockhopper's
brief, final flight. Here and there, dotting the surface of the planetoid near the rail, hundreds of tiny spiderbots rest, folded in on themselves. Most are dead beyond redemption, but a few dozen that managed to locate themselves close to the ship and the spigots leading to its last reactor have managed to weather the intervening decades with self-maintenance routines and luck.
The mortal remains of the
Rockhopper's
captain remain on the bridge, seated in the command chair, where her body had died. It had not long survived the lethal pulse of radiation that had attended the evisceration of the ship's engines.
The crypt, now owning that name in fact as well as form, houses its own share of the former crew, two long irretrievable, and one locked in stasis. The readouts on the last occupied coffin still work, though the system is long past the point of being able to revive anyone.
Faith herself waits, a radioactive diamond tucked away from the world, heedless of time or the loss of her fellows. The structure of her cells perfectly preserved, though the cells themselves were bathed in the same radiation that killed the body of her former captain.
Beyond these, the Rockhopper is empty, derelict. Nothing living remains, the corridors long exposed to the vacuum of space. On the rock Faith had once whimsically named Sleepy, sleep had come forever.
-
While he waits for the command to ignite the hellish fury of the antimatter drives once more, Chief Engineer Carlos Zink uses his senior officer clearance to watch the data pour in as the bridge officers try to get a precise fix on the signal. He's been perusing the data for half an hour before he notices the registration of the ship everyone is trying to locate.
He's suddenly transported back to his first months as a member of the UNS, and a wonderful few days he'd spent on Galileo with a pair of young women. One of them had later become his wife, and the other was a timid, smart, and beautiful young woman named Faith. He'd thought of her over the years, although he'd never tried to catch up.
Now, going over the history in the
Widdershin's
archive, he realizes there is a chance that same young woman, barely older subjectively than she had been in his youth, is one of the people trapped on that miner after so long.
His lips fixed in a grim line, he begins barking orders at his newly-decanted staff. Eventually, he turns to the young woman beside him. "I want to be able to light the torch the moment the squints get a bearing, Millie!"
Sensing his mood, the junior engineer doesn't reply, just sets to work.
-
"Captain, one of the researchers thinks she found it!"
The captain walks over to the large screen indicated by the excited ensign and addresses the grey haired woman on the display. She's one of the non-military scientists along to study the effects of the antimatter drive experiment. "Have you got something for us?"
"I believe so. We brought up our optical array. I hadn't planned to use it this trip, as we didn't intend any astronomy, but it's optimized to detect minute movements at much larger distances than your search arc. We've located a planetoid with a rotational period that appears to line up with the signal dropouts. With your permission, I'll forward the navigational information to the bridge personnel."
"Please, Professor. And thank you."
"I just hope some of those poor people are still alive."
"As do we all."
