002: DUTY

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Okay. I can deal with this.

Where’s the crew?

– The crew of the Courageous are in Network And Engineering Ring 1. –

Where is NAER 1, in relation to me?

– You are currently in NAER 1. –

I glance around the ring. It isn’t a wide one, so far as javelin rings go (javelins have a truly unnecessary amount of space for their crew size), and contains wide, flat paths between blocks of little partitioned off areas, like office cubicles. I glance in one; as expected, there’s a personal computing space in there, with a little desk and a chair with a pivot seat but bolted to the floor. No crew member, of course. The lights had been off when I’d come in; there was nobody in this ring but me.

List the current active crew of the Courageous.

– Courageous active crew :– –

– Captain: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Logistics officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Psychologist: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Assistant Psychologist: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Navigator and Astroanalyst: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Computer Technician: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Secondary Analyst and Computer Technician: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Medical Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Secondary Medical Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Engineer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Primary Assistant Engineer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Secondary Assistant Engineer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Gardener: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Assistant Gardener: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Science Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Primary Assistant Science Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Secondary Assistant Science Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Senior Maintenance Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Primary Assistant Maintenance Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Secondary Assistant Maintenance Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

– Tertiary Assistant Maintenance Officer: Doctor Aspen Greaves –

I stare at the list, trying not to panic. There’s no reason to panic. It makes no sense to panic. Just because I’m completely alone operating a ship full of static colonists to some location that could be years, even decades away, doing a job I’m not remotely trained for with no idea what happened to the two crews before me that were trained for it, is absolutely no reason to panic.

I’m perfectly safe, physically. The computer would have warned me if I wasn’t. Meaning that adrenaline is not helping my situation.

Okay. Okay. First things first, find out what happened to –

– Would you like to see a list of pending tasks? –

Actually, yeah. That first, probably.

Yes.

– Several critical errors exist in Greenhouse Ring 1 and Greenhouse Ring 2. Viability of living plants at 10% variety 80% volume. Details for repair available upon request. –

– Several mild engineering problems exist in air filtration, water cycling, electronic and mechanical systems. One critical error exists in main aft engines; previously tagged by Senior Engineer Ovlo Astur “Unrepairable, disregard ticket”. Details for repair upon request. –

– Several mild and moderate quality of life systems problems exist in cleaning, food availability, temperature and air regulation, health and hygiene quality. Details for maintenance upon request. –

– Chronostasis Ring 1 has suffered an irreparable error and requires ejection. Automated ejection systems are functional. Ejection requires captain’s authorisation. –

– Fore end of the ship is uncontactable by computer systems due to mechanical and electrical problems. Navigation is unavailable; time and flight path predictions indicate that fore main engines should be activated within 48 hours in order to reach destination at planned acceleration. –

– One crew member has recently woken from stasis and requires medical assessment. –

Well. Okay.

Let’s start with the thing on a time limit.

Can you activate the fore main engines?

– No. Fore end of the ship is uncontactable by computer systems due to mechanical and electrical problems in Chronostasis Ring 1. –

How can they be activated?

– The fore main engines can be activated by the computer system if the mechanical and electrical connections are repaired. Alternately, they can be manually activated from the fore HabitationRing. –

Which way is the fore HR?

– The fore HR is at the front of the ship. –

Yes, I know what ‘fore’ means. Which way is the front of the ship? Do I need to go back through the stasis ring I came out of, or away from it?

– To get to the fore of the ship, head away from Chronostasis Ring 2. –

Okay, great. At some point I’ll have to ask the computer for a map of the ship. That will probably save a lot of time.

I head across the ring, towards the front of the ship. Walking through the Courageous is… odd. I’m walking in a straight line, but there’s a noticeable curvature to the floor on either side of me. It’s like I’m walking along the bottom of a quite shallow valley, but if I move to the side in either direction, I’m still at the bottom.

I move through the airlock into the next ring. It’s a greenhouse, and taproot and stars, it’s in bad shape. Two big lavender bushes grow out into my path, some kind of hardy vine is tangled around absolutely everything, and a hive teeming with bees bulges out of a wall vent. None of this is particularly worrying (although I’m not crazy about the idea of bees building homes in maintenance areas); I’m not allergic to bees and I don’t need this greenhouse, a javelin ship has plenty of stored food. What’s worrying about this ring is what it implies.

If this ship had gardeners, they’d work here. If this ship lost its gardeners and they couldn’t be replaced for some reason, the maintenance staff or scientists or someone else would work here. If this ship’s crew had decided that maintaining a greenhouse wasn’t worth the effort, they would’ve removed the plants and killed the bees so they didn’t have to walk through an unmaintained forest full of feral bees every day. For the ring to be in this state? That meant that nobody has been here to maintain it.

Not only is there no crew on this ship but me, but there hasn’t been any other crew for quite some time. Months? Years? How long does it take a garden to grow out of control like this? I’ll have to ask the computer later.

The next ring is some kind of… communal area? Park? It has wide paths with garden beds and forests of grass that had probably once been lawns, with park benches and even a large pond that had probably housed fish before its current occupancy of thick, slimy algae. Some investigation reveals that only three quarters of the ring is a park, the rest being the medical facility. The space on a javelin ship seems extravagant for such a small crew, but these ships were designed for journeys of ten to thirty years. Chronostasis is unreliable, and extremely dangerous to enter more than once in one’s lifetime, so doing short shifts between bouts of stasis wasn’t an option; crew are expected to take shifts as long as fifteen years for the more long distance trips, completely isolated from all of humanity except for the rest of their crew. Psychological health is a serious concern. Not only are the crews unnecessarily large (a javelin could theoretically be maintained with a crew of four or five, given that in the event of serious problems they could be replaced with reserves in chronostasis), but the environment had to be designed to feel as unrestricted as possible, which is a really hard thing to do on a spaceship (or so Fir liked to tell me, at length, no matter how much I tried to change the subject). Regular contact with plants and animals was vital for psychological health, which was one of the many reasons for the greenhouses, and also why the extravagance of parkland had been included for just twenty one people. Clearly, it had been well used, once upon a time; there are stains and scratches on the picnic table, as well as a small doodle of some colourful flowers in one corner, and someone has used high tensile tethers and a broken chair to hang a swing from the one tree in the ring, despite the lack of any children.

I stare at the swing for a moment, trying to identify the feeling choking me up. This place wasn’t made for me, and the people that it was made for had lived here, built this. And now they’re gone.

I turn away and make a mental note of the location of the medbay. The computer will probably keep bugging me about a post-stasis medical assessment until I give myself one. I’m no doctor, but between the automated onboard systems and the computer’s knowledge, I’m sure I can figure that out.

I head for the next airlock. Go to open it.

It refuses to open. I pull hard on the mechanical latch, but it seems to be locked? Hmm. Okay.

I walk around the ring until I reach another airlock (there are four in each wall, evenly spaced). Walking around the ring is more unsettling than walking across it, from one side to the other; walking across it is like walking at the bottom of a very shallow valley, but walking around it means that the noticeable curvature of the floor is under my feet. It looks like I’m walking uphill, but as the false gravity is pushing out from the centre of the ship, it feels like walking straight, so every step is kind of like misjudging the height of a stair. I stumble a fair bit until I get used to it. Imagining I’m in a really giant hamster wheel seems to help.

The next airlock is also locked. And the next. I check the fourth and final airlock… yep. Locked.

Hmm.

The park area doesn’t have any computer terminals in it, but the medbay does, nestled amongst a bunch of electronic medical devices I don’t recognise. I boot it up.

Why are the airlocks on the wall closest to me locked?

– Chronostasis Ring 1 has suffered an irreparable error and requires ejection. Automated ejection systems are functional. Ejection requires captain’s authorisation. –

CR1 is the ring to the fore of this ring?

– Yes. –

And I can’t pass through it?

– Correct. –

Why not?

– CR1 has compromised hull integrity. The shielding of the Courageous is intact but CR1 is deemed unsafe. It does not contain a breathable atmosphere, safe pressure or temperature regulation. Airlocks are autolocked for crew safety until ejection procedures are complete. –

– Automated ejection systems are functional. Ejection requires captain’s authorisation. –

How long does the ejection of a ring take?

– Automated ejection takes approximately six hours. Procedures can be rushed to two hours in a critical emergency, but a rushed ejection compromises the safety of the ship. –

And after we eject CR1, I’ll be able to proceed to the fore engines and turn them on?

– Current knowledge suggests that this is correct, but the computer does not have information on the condition of the front section of the ship. –

Right. Of course. I chew my lip. The computer had said that the atmosphere and pressure in the ring were unstable, but the colonists were suspended in fluid. If the chronostasis fields were still intact…

How many living colonists are in stasis in CR1?

– CR1 contains 879 living colonists. –

121 deaths, then. That’s a pretty high fatality rate, but being neither a doctor nor an engineer there probably isn’t anything I can do about it. What matters is that 879 people are still alive in there. And to advance to the front of the ship, and turn on the engines so we could start to decelerate towards our destination, I’m going to have to kill them.

In the part of the ship that I can access, are there any space suits in my size?

– Storage Ring 3, Storage Ring 4, Storage Ring 5, Pod Launch Ring 2 and Pod Launch Ring 3 all contain space suits in your size. Would you like a full manifest of the items in Storage Ring 3, Storage Ring 4, Storage Ring 5, Pod Launch Ring 2 and Pod Launch Ring 3? –

No. Which of those locations is closest to me?

– Storage Ring 3 is the closest. –

Okay. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put a space suit on, have you override the locks on the airlocks, and travel through the damaged ring in the suit, go and turn on the engines, and then come back. Do you see any flaws in this plan?

– The autolock safety feature cannot be overridden. –

I’m the captain!

– The captain does not have authority to override the autolock safety feature. –

I can authorise ejecting a ring but I can’t get into it?

– Correct. –

Well, I sure as rootstock won’t be killing nearly nine hundred people to get through a door.

Please show me a map of the Courageous.

The computer does so. I study it carefully. I read some attached basic system information. I chew my lip again.

I’m going to have to do this the hard way.

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