Cold Black

Quiet, too quiet. The engines were never audible from the bridge. The low vibrating hum that travels through the decks, up one’s bones and into the back of the subconscious, though, was painfully obvious in its absence.

If the missing vibration didn’t make the situation clear, the sudden drop out of super-C combined with the loss of artificial gravity and all sources of light did. The Tahiti Sunset was dead, adrift. The cockpit canopy was darkened. Without power to force a state change it would be as long as an hour before it would become translucent and stars would be visible. Her eyes ached, pupils trying to dilate further than possible.

Anj felt along the control panel in front of her, counting the switches right to left. When her hand reached the fourth she raised the cover and flipped the switch beneath it. Nothing happened. "No, no. Come on, baby, give mama something." She flipped the switch off and back on, to no effect. She counted the switches by feel again. It was the correct switch.

Careful to keep a firm grip on her seat, she released the belts holding her in place. Sudden movements in microgravity were dangerous, especially when one is effectively blind. She felt her way along the bulkhead to the vac suit storage. Reaching in she felt her suit, hanging so she could back in and suit up in seconds. It was the one place in the ship where she was confident to let muscle memory take over and ignore the darkness. Eyes closed she scrambled into her suit as in a drill.

As she lowered the helmet the suit's heads-up display popped to life. In most situations it was easy to ignore the display, but in the total lack of light it was excruciating, a searing stab of blinding light into her over-taxed eyes.

She closed her eyes, waiting for the spots to go away, and for the light she could still see through her eyelids to mellow out. When she could look at the HUD without pain she tried looking around the ship. The HUD provided no illumination outside her helmet, so she turned on the headlamp, on its lowest setting.

Looking at the control panel she could see that she had, indeed turned on the emergency battery power. "Oh, baby, what happened? I hope it's just a loose connection." She ran a gloved hand along the bulkhead next to her. It's not that she believed that the ship itself could feel and hear her, but she had grown attached. It helped that the navigation AI had been upgraded with a basic personality, friendly, casual, and optimistic without being too chirpy.

Anj kicked off from the bulkhead, floating toward the hatch to the battery compartment, and the tool kit strapped to the deck next to it. She opened the compartment and checked all the connections she could reach by grabbing them and trying to move them. All were secure. She removed her right glove and ran her hand along the batteries. Cold. If the batteries were cold it meant they hadn't been charging for a while. "Why didn't you tell me, sweetie?"

She unstrapped the tool box and kicked herself toward the cargo bay. "Tahi, remind me to check the power warning circuit." She said it before she realized that the ship's AI was unable to respond, or even hear her. "Never mind, I'll do it as soon as we get back up."

In the cargo bay she opened the deck hatch into the engine room. The fusion reactor sat dark near the forward bulkhead. She approached and set the magnetized tool box on the floor near the main panel. She pulled out the tester and connected the leads to the port on the panel. The tester blinked to life, sending power and signals to the circuits in the panel. Lines of red text began scrolling up the tester. When the output stopped scrolling she scrolled back to the first line. FAULT K93-19747.

She pulled a small notebook out of the tool box. It was beyond old-fashioned, but at least the thin plastic pages didn't require any power to work. When she was unable to find any notes about that specific fault she moved on to the next. By the time she'd tried to find the fifth fault she was beginning to think that she wasn't going to solve it, and would likely die of asphyxiation eventually.

Still, she pressed on. By the time she reached the eighth error she found a note in her notebook. It was related to containment failure; specifically that one of the electromagnet's output was unstable. It was as good a place to start as any. She removed the outer housing to get to the ring of electromagnets. She noticed a discoloration of the housing directly over one of the electromagnets, as though the metal had been heated beyond its rated capacity.

After checking the suit’s power was sufficient she turned on recording and slowly scrolled through the error messages on the tester. Picking up the housing and scanning the suit camera over it slowly she said “Looks like one of the e-mags overheated.” She pulled herself around to the back of the reactor to look at the component. Sitting close to where the housing had been was a junction box, also discolored. “This junction will need to be checked out as well,” she said, pointing to the burn mark.

Still recording, she grabbed the needed wrench and removed the questionable electromagnet, careful to stick each bolt to the magnet on her left suit sleeve. Once it was free there was no doubt. The connections beneath were loose and coated in carbon. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I should’ve checked everything after the reactor overhaul. They weren’t careful putting you back together.” She placed the component in a bag and clipped it to the tool box, then swapped out the wrench for a driver.

“Checking the junction.” Anj removed the junction cover plate and found two of the fine sensor wires fused to the housing. “Seems the heat killed the sensors before they could report, and shorted out the charging circuit.” She removed the entire board from the junction, checking the plugs as she removed them and deciding that aside from the sensor wires and the battery level return wire they were serviceable.

“Steps to correct: first, replace the e-mag. Second, replace the battery level return wire. Third, replace the sensor wires. Finally, re-run diagnostics.” She turned off recording, and the suit light, and let herself float aimlessly for a bit while trying to figure out how to make all those things happen. As her eyes adjusted she noticed faint light in the cockpit. The canopy must have gone translucent finally.

Unsure what parts she still had in the cargo hold from the overhaul she pushed back into the hold and opened the crate. “Please tell me they left the e-mags.” On top was the old main control board, not needed, thankfully. Beneath that was the ring, the frame on which the electromagnets mounted. Under the ring were the hydrogen injectors, the helium collector for when the reactor was cycled, and sure enough, the electromagnets.

She picked one up and compared it to the one she had removed. It looked similar enough, but she wanted to be sure. Turning her suit light back on she compared the markings and mounting holes. The manufacturer was different, but the two had the same ratings, and the mounting points matched exactly. “Let’s put this in and mark item one off the list.”

Anj placed the burned out electromagnet in the crate with the other scrap and closed it back up, after retrieving the main control board that had drifted lazily across half the cargo bay. The markings on the battery level return wire, which also acted as a ground, showed it as 0.3 ohm at 100 meters. “At least you’re not a superconductor. I think I can work with this.”

She looked around the cargo bay. There were no wires she could salvage. She thought about the wiring in the ship itself. Maybe the wiring to the recycler? That wouldn’t work, she realized, unless she had a dozen or so to weave together. She needed a beefy wire, about a meter long. She couldn’t pull any from the battery bay, where more of that same wire was installed. Taking it from the battery bay to the cockpit was non-starter as well.

Based on a hunch she opened another hatch in the cargo bay deck. The connections to the artificial gravity. The wires were slightly smaller, but there was enough to double them up. “Sorry, baby. This is gonna cost in repairs, but I do what I have to.” Anj pulled wire cutters from the tool box and measured out a one meter section in two of the wires before cutting. She placed insulating boots over the cut ends of the wires in the deck to avoid shorts, and replaced the deck hatch.

After getting the wires doubled and firmly connected she pondered the next problem. The sensor wires were hair-thin, and made of a special alloy. She returned to the crate of used parts. There was no old junction board in the crate, as the original was deemed in good enough condition to leave. There were only two sources of fine enough wire she had access to, her suit, and the old main control panel. Problem was, neither of them were of the right alloy.

She returned to the cockpit with her notebook, strapped herself in the pilot’s seat, and began slowly leafing through the pages, looking for anything she might have written in the past 12 years about those wires. There was a full page with the wiring diagram for the sensor wires, the type of wire they used, a site on the weave where they could be purchased at wholesale cost, and a note that said: “Buy some spares!”

“Why didn’t I listen to myself?” She thought about the state of the Tahiti when she bought it. The sensors had originally been shorted out with small pieces of plain copper wire. That’s why she needed all the details of how it was meant to go together. “I won’t like it, but I’ll do it. You hear me, Tahi? I’m doing this under duress.”

She left the cockpit and returned to the trunk in the cargo bay. A few quick snips on the back of the old main control panel and she had two copper jumpers to short out the sensors. After putting the jumpers in place on the board and replacing the board in the junction she started recording again.

“I don’t have replacements for the sensors in the junction, so for now I’ve shorted the sensors with copper jumpers. I’m about to re-run diagnostics.” And plugged the tester back in. A series of green messages scrolled by, followed by three yellow warnings and a message that the reactor was in need of service. “You think I don’t know that?”

She replaced the junction cover and the housing around the electromagnets. Now all she needed was enough power to start up the reactor. This would normally happen from the batteries when a restart was needed in space, or from ground power when docked. She had been drifting for more than three hours, and there was no way to determine her location or even send out a distress call without power.

Returning to the pilot’s chair and strapping herself in again, she began leafing through her notebook. Somewhere in there was a “recipe” for jump-starting the reactor. It was in a section marked by a red page that said “Last Ditch Only” with a skull and crossbones crudely drawn on it. It contained things she had learned mostly from other pilots, most of it questionable at best. She leafed through the few pages there. How to use a CO2 scrubber filter and charcoal to make urine drinkable. How to attach a vac suit’s ion drive and battery pack to a crate to send it on a one-way trip. Or, how to send off contraband toward your target before you dock, she thought. How to charge the ship’s batteries using a ground vehicle in the cargo bay. That would be handy, if I had one.

Finally she found it. A page full of notes and diagrams on how to jump-start a fusion reactor with dead batteries. In large print at the top of the page the pilot she’d gotten this from had written “Do not try this! Ever!” At the bottom he had signed it “Best, Kai.”

“Well, Kai,” Anj said, “I didn’t listen to me, not like I’ll listen to you now.” The instructions called for at least two vac suit batteries. She had the one in the suit she was wearing and one spare. A quick look at the HUD showed the vac suit battery at just over 65% charge. She checked the cabin oxygen levels. Since she’d been in the vac suit the whole time the oxygen in the cabin was still at a reasonable 18.4 percent.

Another trip to the crate netted her the burnt battery cable, from which she cut three pieces of usable wire. She grabbed the spare battery, stripped out of the suit, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the faint starlight that reached the reactor room. She could see her breath in the growing cold. 

After removing the main control panel bolts and lifting it up she had access to the wiring underneath. Using the light from the tester she identified the connection points in the instructions. After wiring the batteries in sequence she turned the main power switch on the control panel to the “start” position and touched the wires to the points indicated. She flinched as she was blinded by a bright flash and the smell of ozone. The reactor whined and sputtered, then stopped.

“Come on, baby. You can do it for mama.” She waited for what seemed like hours for her eyes to readjust, then touched the wires again. Knowing what to expect she shut one eye tight, and forced herself not to flinch. The reactor whined, then pop-pop-popped a few times before the turbine began turning. The instructions had clearly stated not to remove the wires until the turbine was at full speed or they were completely depleted. She held the wires steady, the heat building up in them burning her hands as the turbine sped up bit by bit.

Finally the sound she was used to, the turbine running at full power, was her cue to move the wires and close the main control panel. The batteries were hot, and the overload indicator on both had popped. She dropped them in the suit locker on her way back to the pilot’s chair. “I hope I don’t need to make a space walk now. It’ll be the shortest one ever.”

“I’m sorry, Anj.” The ship’s AI had a feminine voice, and did a good job of emulating emotive speech. “I seem to have been offline for the past four hours and sixteen minutes. We are no longer traveling super-C, has there been a problem?”

“Yes, there has. But first, three things. One, figure out where we are. Two, make a note to pick up spare sensor wires and e-mags when we get you in for repair. Three, remind me to add another warning on the page about how to jump-start a reactor. Oh, and remind me to demand a refund from the shop that did the reactor overhaul. Their shoddy work caused the failure.”

“That was four things,” the AI said. “The last three have been noted. I’ve just calculated the first. Based on the location beacons from the nearest and next nearest gate we are in this sector.” A star map hologram appeared over the pilots console. “We are about 83 light hours from the nearest gate, and 312 from the next. Based on our current trajectory and drift rate of just over 1286 kilometers per second we are somewhere in this band.” A donut shaped highlight appeared, growing slowly as they continued to drift.

“Bring us on-course to the nearest gate, and send out a distress call.” Anj strapped herself in her chair. “I hope there’s an escort cruiser nearby to give us a warp bubble.”

“Anj, artificial gravity seems to be malfunctioning.”

“I know, Tahi. I’m sorry. Had to pull some wires from the grav generator to get the reactor working again.”

“Oh dear. I’ll keep all acceleration to one gee or less, then.”

“Sounds like a plan.” The return of the feeling of gravity was welcome.

“Do you think naming you after a place that sank beneath the ocean was bad luck?” Anj patted the console.

“Of course not.” The AI paused. “There is no such thing as luck. Besides, the old pictures you showed me were very aesthetically pleasing. I believe ‘magical’ may be an appropriate adjective.”

“It may very well be.” Anj chuckled. “And since we have some time, how about a game of poker?”

“You know I still can’t bluff,” the AI said. “But no one said I could never learn it, right?”

“That’s right,” Anj said, glad to hear her friend's optimism again. “We’ve got a few days right now, might as well try again.”