Prison Cargo

09:06 [Earth Time] – Five Hours Until Turnaround

“This is Captain Clara Peruzzi of the Prison Ship HMP Europa. Due to causes unknown, our navigation controls have been unresponsive since 09:00 Earth time this morning. Our engineers are addressing the problem and I hope to report good news shortly but any diagnostics you can run from Earth and advice you can provide would be extremely helpful. As you will be aware today is Turnaround and we have five hours until the window closes. Please treat this as the highest priority. Captain Peruzzi out.”

Clara stomped out of her office and into the bridge, five sets of eyes watching her wearily.

It was the pilot that cleared his throat and asked the obvious: “So what do we do?”

“We wait,” Clara huffed, flopping in her chair and immediately drumming her fingers against the arm. “Sparky is checking the electronics, I’ve got David going through the engine drives in case there’s something having a knock on effect. And now Earth will be helping us out with remote diagnostics; they have better equipment and highly trained specialists that will know what to do.”

The beefy head of security grunted. “I hate doing nothing.”

“Then go take a walk. Check on the prisoners. Anything to keep your mind busy,” Clara said. “We can’t do anything right now, there’s no use getting worked up.”

The pilot tapped his fingers across the controls in front of him, locking the panel. He sighed and stood up, stretching out his long, lanky limbs. “Well, I’m gonna go grab some coffee and stare into the void of space. Not much point in a pilot flying a lump of metal that can’t be controlled. Call me if you need me.”

“Mmm,” Clara hummed, staring out of the view screen to the gigantic sandy planet looming in front of her.

Five hours was plenty of time to figure this out. But why, after three years, did the malfunction have to happen today?

10:27 [Earth Time] – Three and a Half Hours Until Turnaround

“Sparky? Sparky?” Clara hissed.

A grizzled man with a silver ponytail stepped out of what looked like the inside of a computer. He pushed wire-rimmed glasses up his nose and leaned against the casing. “Hello captain.”

“Report? Did you forget how to check in? We’re kind of on a deadline today.”

“Uh-huh. Thing is, I fix things, Clara. I’m maintenance. I know my fancy job title says Chief Engineer but I’m a handman. This ship weren’t meant to be tinkered with. I managed to get this panel off eventually but I have no idea what I’m looking at here.”

“What do you mean?” Clara asked, storming past him, looking at the multicoloured wires and circuit boards that meant nothing to her but should mean everything to the man behind her. “What do you mean?” she repeated, louder in case he hadn’t heard.

“Clara – Captain. I was hired to put in new lightbulbs and oil the hinges of the jail cells. Not to fix programming issues or console malfunctions.”

Clara looked at the wires again, then back at the engineer. “You weren’t? But what if something went wrong?”

The engineer shrugged and wiped his hands on his overalls. “They fix it remotely from Earth.”

“And if they can’t? Surely lots of fixes require manual intervention. What if something went wrong that they couldn’t fix from Earth?”

A snort of laughter, the Engineer suddenly looked every bit of his seventy-two years but his eyes were warm like a grandfather regarding his favourite granddaughter. “Clara, why do you think they pay us so well?”

11:00 [Earth Time] – Three Hours Until Turnaround

“Control? This is Captain Clara Peruzzi of the Prison Ship HMP Europa. Again. I don’t seem to have had a response to my original communication of nine-oh-six this morning. Please respond urgently. Our Turnaround window elapses in three hours and if we don’t make it our trajectory will carry us on past Jupiter and out further into space. We do not have the fuel for this and a one-hundred-eighty degree turn would be near impossible at our speeds without the use of Jupiter’s gravitation. Please advise.”

Clara waited in her office for thirty minutes with no reply from Earth. Each second that ticked by was counted by a tap of her fingernail against the shiny fake wooden desk she sat behind. The fake plant watched her mournfully from the corner and the fake coffee went cold in her fake china mug.

Letting out a hiss of frustration she jabbed her finger down on ‘transmit’ again.

“Control. Captain Peruzzi. Still waiting on your support. In two and half hours we will have missed Jupiter’s orbit and my entire crew will be sailing into space with no way home. Really need an update ASAP.”

With a groan of exhaustion she depressed the button and sank back in her soft fake leather chair, staring up at the ivory tiles on the ceiling.

She wondered if they were fake something too.

She wondered if this mission was fake.

12:00 [Earth Time] – Two Hours Until Turnaround

“I told you, Clara – captain. I don’t know what I’m looking at,” the old engineer said, scratching the thin crop of hair on his head so that his rats tail ponytail bobbed up and down. “I could really break something.”

“We have two hours to go, Control is not responding. I don’t know, perhaps our communications are damaged too? If we don’t fix this we’re not going home, you understand that? So I don’t care if you accidentally blow the damn ship up, do something. Play around, move wires, go nuts. But we have less than two hours to do something.”

The engineer shrugged his thin shoulders and reached for his toolbox. “Lemme see what I can do. Gimme an hour and check back.”

“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” Clara said, storming off.

12:25 [Earth Time] – Just over an Hour and a Half Until Turnaround

“That wasn’t thirty minutes,” the engineer grumbled.

“What have you got for me?” Clara asked.

The engineer leaned against the wall, shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, this stuff isn’t meant to be played with. It’s remote controlled, remote fixed.”

“And I told you, Control can’t hear us,” Clara said through gritted teeth. “So what are our options?”

“Manual reset,” the engineer said. “I can reset the ship but it’ll take time to re-establish connections to Earth. During that time everything will be one hundred percent manual. That’s everything, Clara. Life support, steering, everything will need to be micromanaged by us and we’re a skeleton team.”

Clara’s face had lit up. “We won’t have to do it for long, just until we’ve turned around.”

“Whoa there, easier said than done,” the engineer said. “Listen I’m no pilot but I’m guessing there’s a reason this hunk of junk has remote access. We have two pilots, because most of the time they’re just there making sure the autopilot does its job. But a slingshot around Jupiter is complex stuff. If we go fully manual our guys are going to be on their own doing the maths for that. You really want to mess with Jupiter’s gravity? Cause I know who’d win that fight.”

Clara’s teeth worried her lower lip for a moment. “How long would the reset take?”

“About an hour.”

Clara nodded slowly, checking her watch. “Do it now. I’ll prep the pilots.”

“Clara, this is crazy-”

“If we miss this Turnaround we’re dead,” she yelled. “I am not killing this crew.”

“Control could still get back to us. There could be some delay in the messaging system or something?”

“No, they can’t hear us. Help isn’t coming. We need to figure this out ourselves. Do it now.”

13:30 [Earth Time] – 30 Minutes Until Turnaround

The ship was dark. On the bridge, the small crew huddled in coats and wrapped themselves in blankets while they waited out the hour while the ship restarted.

Everything was strangely quiet. The background noises of calming steady beeps and gently electronic hums were gone and now it felt as if they were truly floating alone in space. Clara hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come.

Suddenly everything sprang back to life.

The harshness of the lights, the loudness of the noises. Everything that had seemed so normal an hour ago now felt like an intrusion to the senses.

Clara leaped from her seat and strode to the command panel where both pilots sat, ready to take control.

“Okay, how are we looking?” Clara asked.

The lights began to blink and the pilot ran his hands deftly over the touchscreen.

“We have manual control. I can input our course trajectory and get us ready to turn into the gravitational pull at the right moment.”

“Are you sure you can do this?” Clara asked.

The pilot glanced up, his forehead damp with sweat. “Please don’t ask me that. You told me I had to and I’ll give it my best shot.”

Clara nodded. “That’s all I ask. Okay, we have thirty minutes. You know the drill, we’ve been preparing for this for three years. Only difference is we don’t have Earth Control in our ears guiding us with the trajectory angles. But I trust you. Both of you. You’re good pilots. You’ll get us home.”

That neither pilot confirmed or denied her words was equally comforting and terrifying.

13:55 [Earth Time] – 5 Minutes Until Turnaround

There wasn’t a relaxed body on the bridge. Clara had taken to pacing and checking her watch every few seconds. Others gripped the arms of their chairs, or performed repetitive tasks like twirling a pen in their fingers or turning their chair back and forth on the swivel.

Nobody spoke. Nobody voiced the fear in their mind that they would miss the Turnaround and end up lost in space, drifting until something ran out; fuel, food, water, oxygen. What would be first? What would they eventually die of?

“Nearly time, Captain,” said the main pilot. He was poised over the workstation, his hands ready to type.

His co-pilot had sheets of notepaper in his hands, the back of the fag packet maths they had done to project the angle of interception and speed that they needed to skim Jupiter’s gravity field.

On the viewscreen, Jupiter took up over half of the screen. Large and orangey-yellow, the planet was awe-inspiring. The shifting surface was alive with activity, storms raging below, solar winds pushing about the dust. But up here, the team couldn’t appreciate its beauty. Not yet. Not until they had done this one act.

“Two minutes,” said the co-pilot.

Sweat trickled down Clara’s back. She didn’t realise she was holding her breath until she started to feel light headed, then she drank in oxygen greedily, watching the planet as they inched towards it, closer and closer.

“Time, Here we go, Twenty-three point seven two degrees, mark 5, Keep it steady for eight seconds,” the co-pilot read from his notes.

“Inputting…wait. What the?” the pilot stammered.

“What’s wrong?” Clara asked, the words tumbling out of her mouth and smashing together in incoherence.

“The panel’s moving,” the main pilot said, jabbing erratically. “I’m not doing anything, it won’t accept my figures. Someone is…it’s Earth. They’ve taken back control!”

Clara’s pounding heart lightened. “They heard us, Sparky must have been right, must have been a delay. This is good, they have the calculations, they know what to input. I’ll go check in with them, see if they need us to do anything,” Clara said, the stress melting from her shoulders as she turned to head into her office.

“Uh, Captain? These aren’t the right calculations. They’re taking us away from Jupiter. They’re making sure we miss the gravity field entirely. And we’re speeding up! We’ll miss the window at this rate!”

Suddenly her heart dropped. The elation she had felt for only seconds was washed away as she ran to the panel to see for herself. The pilot was right; the course correction took them away from Jupiter, out into open space. Within a minute they would be too far gone.

“Type over them!” she screamed.

“I can’t I’m locked out!” the pilot panicked, slamming his palms against the touchscreen.

“Sparky? Sparky can you hear us?” Clara yelled, hoping the comms system would reach the engineer. “Can you do another reset? We’re locked out of the control panel. We need it now!”

There was a moment of silence.

“Sorry Clara, no can do. Takes an hour. I could start but-”

“Oh forget it!”

Her mind raced, her heart raced. She sank into her chair. The crew watched as they flew on, as Jupiter passed them on the left and disappeared slowly from the view screen.

“They always meant for this,” Clara said softly, the reality sinking in. “This was a one way mission. The prisoners were meant to die…and the crew is expendable. It’s why we got paid so much.”

For a long time nobody spoke. There was nothing to say.

The doors swished open and Sparky appeared on deck. He heaved a sigh and joined the rest of the crew watching the now vast expanse of empty space. In the distance, a small silver sphere loomed.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Europa. A moon,” Clara mumbled. She still sat on her captain’s chair but she had drawn up her legs and was hugging them to her chest.

“Like our ship?” Sparky said.

“Yeah, like our ship,” Clara said. "A big dumb rock, just like our ship.”

"A big dumb rock…with a gravitational field?” Sparky asked.

Suddenly the mood on the bridge lifted.