Steve’s shorts: A Long Way From Home (Part Two)…
A Long Way from Home
Copyright 2018, Steven M. Moore
Part Two
“Not a bad little planet,” said Geoff Rivera, the security team’s head.
Kris was studying the screen in the ops tent that showed a view of a vast, grassy plain. “Looks like Kansas,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Center of the North American continent on Earth. It was a state in the United States of America before the Chaos.”
Geoff shrugged. “You know more history than I do. But why do you bother?”
“Because I can trace my roots all the way back to there. Topeka, Kansas, to be precise. And to the first starship that colonized New Haven in the 82 Eridani system. Two of my ancestors were scientists, professors from Kansas State University who migrated to the East Coast, or they probably wouldn’t have survived the Chaos.”
“Interesting. That’s a few centuries ago.”
“A few millennia, you mean. Kerouac could help you discover your ancestry if you asked for it.”
“I don’t like chatting with Kerouac. He’s a know-it-all.”
Kris laughed. “That’s a fair description—and accurate. In his databanks one can find most of Human knowledge. He even needs time to dig through it.”
“OK, so this is like Kansas. So what?”
Kris had piloted the shuttle down to the surface. She had picked the landing spot because, unlike some other parts of the planet’s land mass, it was flat. “We’ll need to break out the tricopters for surveillance. We need to find fresh water and biomass for our hydroponics. That’s the first order of business.”
Geoff nodded. “Just like a regular planetary survey.”
“Only this one is key for our future survival.”
***
There were a few crewmembers who wanted to stay on the planet. Captain Halbek paid no attention to them. He needed the full crew. Besides, the majority wanted to make the attempt to go home.
Kris admitted that the minority had a point. When they tried to cross the gap, there would be no more stars with friendly planets. But she also had to admit she wanted to be on the first ship that made the crossing. Once there was one, others would follow.
Of course, there were many unexplored regions in the Milky Way. The Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets, or ITUIP, was a loose union of planetary systems, a small number in near-Earth space. Citizens from ITUIP had spread beyond its frontiers to colonize new worlds; exploratory ships like Alcibiades added to the increasing list of planets available for colonization (there were plenty of “illegal colonies” too whose colonists had used that data) and sometimes ran across new civilizations, some friendly, others hostile. But Kris would rather return to the home galaxy and all its unexplored regions than stay in a completely strange place so far from ITUIP that the name would soon be forgotten.
Jose Vargas, their resident astrobiologist, also pointed out that they hardly had viable gene pools in the species aboard Alcibiades; future generations would be doomed. Kerouac calculated how long that would take. The results depended on a species’ natural longevity, but corrected for that, they weren’t encouraging.
After three months on the planet that had no name besides its number as the only E-type planet in the Cloud that was included in Kerouac’s catalog, the starship left orbit. Three jumps took it to the rim of the Cloud where they waited for the AI to finish its calculations.
***
“I will program seven jumps,” said Kerouac. “After each one, we need to spend some time in normal space so I can recalculate.”
The small group of section heads in the ready room studied the path on the screen that summarized their predicament.
“I don’t suppose you have an estimate for the subjective time it will take,” said the captain.
“I do. The error bars are large, though. If you will all pardon my historical reference, it’s a bit like predicting the path of a hurricane on Earth. The farther we go, the smaller the error bars will become. There’s no precedent for what we’re attempting.”
“And probably others have tried to do something similar and failed,” said Halbek with a growl. His rust-colored ears were twitching, but he was probably just reflecting the nervousness of the entire crew. “Give us what you have.”
“Almost six years, with almost a two-year error-bar width.”
“That’s not bad,” Kris said, “but do we have enough supplies for the worst case of eight years? There’s not exactly a stopover place en route to the Milky Way.”
“First, the error-bar width is only one standard deviation. The error could be larger. Second, I calculate that with reasonable rationing, we can go fifteen years thanks to that stopover on that friendly planet.”
“We’re already suffering ‘reasonable space problems,’” said Halbek, “sharing quarters and so forth so we had more room for supplies. Let’s hope we don’t end up at each other’s throats. I want it known throughout the crew that I will not tolerate any disputes. We all have to get along.”
Kris nodded. But she knew ordering it and having it happen weren’t the same thing.
***
The first incident occurred after the second jump and just before the third, two years into the journey. One Tali crewmember called a Ranger crewmember an “ugly bug,” and the battle escalated from there with the Tali ending up in the porta-doc and the Ranger dead.
When the section heads met to discuss the instigator’s fate, Kris said to Halbek, “Tarbok committed murder. He needs to be punished.”
The Tali captain glared at her. “I know that. What do you propose?”
“Right now, nothing. When he’s well, something must be done just to stop any further turmoil.”
Halbek nodded. “Tarbok is certainly expecting as much. And you didn’t answer my question.”
His XO looked around the group and then back at her captain. “You’re the captain, sir.”
There was an awkward pause, but then Vargas expressed his opinion with yet another question. “What would local Tali law do in this case?”
“Out of the question,” said Halbek. “First, local Tali law is harsh. Not as harsh as it used to be, and what Tarbok did wouldn’t even be a crime in the old days because every lifeform not originating from our home world was considered chasa, or vermin. We now follow ITUIP law at the intergalactic level and a much less harsh Tali law locally, as befits our membership in ITUIP.” He too looked around the table and saw some heads nodding.
But not Vargas’s. “You’ve made only one point,” he said. “What’s the second?”
“The second is that the recommended punishment even at the ITUIP level is mindwipe, forced retraining, and banishment outside of ITUIP. We’re already outside ITUIP, so effectively we’re all banished at the moment. And we don’t have the equipment to perform a mindwipe.”
Kris shuddered. “Or the personnel to retrain Tarbok after the mindwipe,” she said. “Being on a ship and not a planet complicates things.”
“Just space the bastard,” said Konbi, one of the Usks on board who led the engineering section. “Seems simple enough to me.”
“I’ll think about it while he’s in the porta-doc,” said Halbek. “Kerouac, when will we be ready for another jump?”
“I’m refining our course as we speak. In an hour or so, we should be ready to leave this emptiness for yet another empty region of intergalactic space.”
***
Comments are welcome.
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In libris libertas!
