“Mister Blake,” Captain Durand said as she sat down in her command chair, “how are we looking?” Clinton stood to her left. He had a seat of his own, but he preferred to stand. Besides, it gave him a clearer view of the console in front of him. It could be moved to accommodate a seated position -- the Sollipsis was fully designed with mobility and accessibility in mind -- but he liked being able to move it and himself around. The diagrams shown on the main screen were also reflected on a large holographic table in front of the captain’s chair, but it was his duty as first officer to interpret the information. There was a lot of it, but this was what he was good at.
“Everything is in order, Captain. We can leave when you’re ready.” He looked at the console. The mooring clamps were disconnected on the side of the station; the only thing keeping them in place was the ship’s own magnetized hull. Without it, they’d slowly start drifting around the hangar. The Captain looked at him, and he was half expecting another speech, but this was, all things considered, just a test run. Sure, normally a jaunt to the edge of the Kuiper Belt could take days or even weeks, but the Sollipsis should take only hours. Using the SA-Drive within the solar system was dangerous, but hypothetically, it could reduce travel time to mere seconds. Which was why they were sticking with impulse.
“Helm?”
“Ready,” Alex Nguyen piped up, a little quietly, “uh… Ready, Captain.” They weren’t much older than Clinton, and were, apparently, a gifted pilot, but without the expected cockiness that came with being an ace pilot. Still, Clinton -- and, he had to assume, Captain Durand as well -- had gone over her file with a fine-tooth comb and he’d rarely seen someone so qualified to fly a top-of-the-line ship like this.
“Navigation?”
“Aye, Captain,” Jackson said with his trademark husky voice. There was a moment of quiet as everyone on the bridge held their breath. Then Captain Durand looked at Clinton.
“On your command, Mister Blake,” she said, and Clinton couldn’t help but feel like he was being tested. He got the distinct sense that this was going to be a recurring theme. Well, if that was how it was going to be, he fully intended to rise to the challenge.
“Mooring lines disengaged,” he said, and there was a very soft shudder throughout the hull as the magnetic clamps were released. “All systems nominal. All crew is at the ready. Mx. Nguyen, you may ignite primary impulse… now.” There was no feeling of acceleration, not really, but there was a distinct sense that, for just a second, the ship was tilting backwards. It immediately went away. And nobody really paid attention to it, because, for the first time since the plans for it had been drafted up, the SS Sollipsis flew. Not very fast, mind, but it flew nonetheless. The walls of the gargantuan hangar slowly drifted past them on the front viewscreen, and the world opened up to an infinity of stars. As they distanced themselves from the light-pollution of the ISS, more and more of the tiny pinpricks became visible. The breath collectively held by the crew on the bridge was released as all of them realized what was happening. Sure, everyone had seen space from a portcullis or a shuttle window, but this was different. This was space, as seen from the window of the youngest starship ever made, and it was beautiful. “Mister Manderley, please set a course for the following coordinates,” Clinton said, and he felt a little guilty for breaking the reverent silence.
“Aye, sir,” Jackson said, receiving the coordinates and entering them into his own console. They were headed to the edge of the Kuiper belt to deposit a beacon, part of a network that existed within the solar system and without, that was, hypothetically, capable of quantum communication. The communication was instant and, in theory, flawless and would never suffer from static or interference. However, the various buoys that ships would transmit to if they didn’t have a functioning Quantum Communication system had a tendency to break down, a result of a manufacturing contract with the lowest bidder. New buoys had been constructed, of course, but they needed to be seeded ‘manually’, and the materials for communication systems like this were expensive. For its first journey, the Sollipsis had been asked, politely, if it could bury the replacement one on a large asteroid in the Kuiper belt.
“Switching to thrusters,” Clinton said. “Full power.” This time, there was a jolt, and the stars became vague streaks. The maiden voyage of the Sollipsis had begun, and even though it was within their own backyard, it still felt significant, somehow. The first leg of their journey would only take a few hours, but nobody on the bridge even considered leaving their station for longer than a few minutes. Not much would be required of anyone, but there were plenty of diagnostics to do, and first-time flight problems to overcome. Nothing major, but every single console would have a little design quirk that took a moment to work their way around.
Jackson, as it turned out, was left-handed, something the designers of his console hadn’t considered. Hasan, who had nothing to do until they arrived, well, anywhere, was on his back underneath Jackson’s station for forty-five minutes, softly chuckling to himself, as he rewired the system with a tablet on his lap. Jackson, sheepishly, tried to stand at attention, until Hasan asked him for the third time to read something from the tablet, and he sat down. The atmosphere on the bridge slowly shifted from tense and excited to something more relaxed as everyone realized that nothing was going to go wrong -- nothing big, anyway -- and that nothing spectacular was going to happen. One by one, crew got up to stretch their legs for a moment, and even Captain Durand went to make herself a cup of coffee. She sat cross-legged in the Captain’s chair again, her shoes neatly on the ground in front of it, reading up on the majority of her crew. It seemed to Clinton like she was trying to memorize every single name of every single member of her crew, including resident families, something he himself hadn’t attempted yet. He wondered if she’d already come to him and Andy, if the Captain had memorized her name and what she’d thought of her file.
There was a soft ping as Jackson, who was now working at what was basically a jailbroken console, sent out the signal that they were on approach to their first destination. Clinton was about to give the command to slow down, waiting for confirmation from the Captain, who gave him a slight nod. The Kuiper Belt came into view. Against his better knowledge, Clinton had expected something more… dense. He knew, consciously, that in a ring like this, objects would be too far apart to discern with the naked eye, but popular media had ruined his perception there somewhat. Still, drifting quietly off the starboard bow, was their destination, a large (ish) asteroid in a stable orbit with just the right density to allow for good signal transmission.
The Sollipsis matched the object’s velocity a kilometer out. Hasan, happy to have something to do again after hacking into Jackson’s terminal, volunteered to head out with a happy smile, and he took several of the research staff with him. They watched the little shuttle on the main screen. For clarity’s sake, the system automatically highlighted it with a little circle, though Clinton preferred to follow their trajectory on the holo-display instead. He didn’t notice the Captain had gotten out of her seat until she stood right next to him. She watched their flight path intently.
“Velocity and rotation matched,” Hasan’s voice said clearly through Clinton’s terminal’s internal speakers. “Touching down now.”
“Confirmed,” Clinton said softly, switching his viewscreen to show the shuttle’s exterior cameras. The stars were spinning lazily above as the craft connected with the small planetoid. It wasn’t more than a few miles across, but still big enough to turn the landing craft into a bug on a windshield if something went wrong. After a few seconds, the camera showed the external hatch opening. Prakoso, in full EVA-suit, stepped out with several other crewmen, all carrying the large beacon, and he waved at the camera. The suit’s little display showed his name and rank, but Clinton could have picked him out from a lineup by his behaviour alone. Captain Durand’s smile told him that she probably could have, too.
“How’s the weather down there, Mister Prakoso?” she asked. On the screen, Hasan jumped up and down for a moment, easily a foot higher than he probably anticipated, and when he came down, he sank into the soil halfway to his knees.
“Light and crunchy, over,” he said. Clinton shook his head. “Drill set, all systems nominal. We’re going to install a small sensor while we’re digging. Can’t hurt to have a little camera on the edge, right?” There was a pause as Prakoso stood up and looked at something off-screen. “Hell of a view down here, Captain. You should throw on a jacket, come and have a look.”
“I think I’ll pass, Mister Prakoso, but thank you for the invitation.”
“Your loss, ma’am.” Clinton heard the smile in his voice, and it was hard not to mirror it. Hasan’s enthusiastic, playful tone was infectious. The science crew were busy working the drill while Hasan was seen touching data into the beacon. “Connection seems to be stable,” Hasan said. “We won’t know until it’s in place, of course.” Finally, they lifted the whole thing into the drill, which fired it down into the heart of the asteroid. “Testing final connection.” There was a silence on the other side of the line as Hasan seemed to stare at the display on his arm far longer than Clinton expected.
“Prakoso, is everything in order?” Captain Durand asked. Hasan turned to the ship, gave a command to the rest of the crew, then activated his comms.
“The beacon is in working order, Captain. In fact, it seems to be blowing up with communication. It… seems to be an all-channel broadcast. For help. It’s a mess, hard to make out.”
“Patch it through to the bridge,” Captain Durand said, her voice suddenly steely and determined. “Back to the ship on the double, Prakoso.”
“Aye, Captain,” he said, and closed the line. Behind Clinton, the Communications Officer, a woman by the name of Maria Holloway, seemed to be a little nervous. She had been a civilian, an expert on linguistics, communication management and an amateur cryptographer. She’d been working on the Moon, but this was her first station on something like a starship, and it was clear that, now that she actually had to decipher something in the moment, she was clearly a little overwhelmed. From what Clinton could tell, the signals coming in were overlapping. Clearly, a lot of people were cross-communicating. He stepped away from his post over to her, and put his hand on her shoulder. She nearly jumped out of her chair when she noticed him. He nodded softly.
“Isolate the signal, Officer,” he said, his voice calm and reassuring, “and patch it through to the Captain’s terminal.” Then, he hushed his voice to a whisper, so only she could hear it. “Take your time. The Captain trusts you. I trust you. You can do this.” Maria swallowed, nodded. She seemed to calm down a little bit. After a moment, the signal piped up from Captain Durand’s terminal.
“This is Director Eman from the Europa research center. We are adrift, I repeat, adrift, and need immediate evacuation. Can anyone hear us? This is Direct--”
“It’s on a loop from there, Captain,” Maria said.
“Is anyone close enough to help them?” Cathérine asked.
“That’s what the other traffic is,” Maria replied. Now that the nervousness had ebbed away, her hands flew across her console, isolating individual signals as she strengthened and weakened them, listening to sometimes two or even three at once in a way Clinton knew would give him a headache. “It seems the closest ship is a few days out.”
“How fast can we get there, Mx. Nguyen, Mister Manderley?”
“Three hours at full thrust, Captain,” Alex Nguyen said. They looked sideways at Jackson, and then at the captain. “Half that if we push the engines.”
“Very well,” the Captain said as Clinton returned to his station. “Let’s see what the Sollipsis can do. Miss Holloway, notify the Admiralty and the Europa station that we’re on our way. Mister Manderley, set a course for Europa. It looks like our little test cruise is going to be a little more exciting than we thought.”
The console being designed with the assumption that the person using it is right handed may be the single most realistic and relatable moment I've ever seen in scifi
Sollipsis to the rescue!
Wee Woo Wee Woo ♪♫
And naturally, they're the only ship in range.
Ngl for a second there I thought the drive tore up the solar system in its wake, and everyone was sending distress signals bc their planet just shattered. This is probably for the better though...
This reminds me of a scene in one of the 1950s Tom Swift books: when they first used a repulsorlift drive, it accidentally smashed up a bunch of stuff on the ground from the repulsion effect.
A slight nitpick but there shouldn't be light polution without an atmosphere to defuse the light
Wouldn't bright objects still wash out fainter ones, due to interfering with dark adaptation? Granted, that couldn't be happening here because the ship's interior lighting would have the same effect.