LJIdol 9.30 - Critical Hit
There was a failure. A flaw. Something they'd missed.
Something they should have caught that they didn't.
Captain Andrea Washington couldn't put her finger on it, but it was there.
Her ship, the Ascension and the dozen souls onboard were in danger. They all of them knew it. There was something in the recycled air from the hydroponics bay which had started smelling... not wrong, exactly, nor "off" in any way that was definable but there was a flaw in it. The plants themselves were free from any mold or contaminants and the frequent, almost obsessive scanning that Commander Panerjee subjected them to proved it. No mold, no foreign substances, nothing that would explain what was wrong with the air.
Nobody could explain it. Ventilation ducts were checked and re-checked, personal hygiene grew almost violent, freeze-dried food checked for spoilage and every other possible source for the smell was given at least a sniff-test if it wasn't just tossed in the airlock.
They didn't dare jetison it. Not out there. The airlocks were made to let people in and out of normalspace.
Nobody'd quite figured out how they were supposed to toss things out into the betweenspace.
The Ascension was given its ironic name a few weeks before its completion, under the belief that the name would help see them through because it really was only the superstitions around the magic of names that would help them.
Two things had happened leading up to the ship's creation:
The first was that a new theory of dimensionality explained the ways it would be possible to delve, for a frighteningly low cost, into the spaces between the so-called "layers" of reality. This was met with a lot of adulation from the scientific community but in the end, little was done about it. Resources were scarce and literally dropping them down a hole seemed a waste of everyone's time.
Until the second thing happened: a swarm of credible theories began to circulate--particularly to private industry--that there was no reason that there couldn't be some kind of collectible resources in there; things with unique properties which could be quite valuable, indeed, were they brought back into normal space.
Volunteers were collected and a ship was made. The ship was frightfully easy for, while humanity had stopped caring so much about launching themselves into a largely-uncaring field of stars, they'd gotten quite good at making ships to get them there. The problem was, as ever, that the amount of energy expended getting a ship out of orbit was just too much when you considered what was needed back on Earth.
But dropping one on the end of a lifeline into a hole in space? Oh, certainly a risk but it was nowhere near as risky, which had to count for something. No thrust great enough to escape an atmosphere, just enough to maneuver in zero-g and possibly lift off from something smaller than the moon. It was a risk, certainly. If there was nothing there? You lose just enough to haul the thing back into normalspace by its lifeline and break it back down for scrap with the knowledge that if there was anything in the betweenspace, it wasn't worth the effort to get it.
But if something was down there? Haul it back out, turn it into something salable, lather, rinse, repeat.
There had been something in the betweenspace.
The ship's robotic collection apparatus had crossed more than a few asteroids with compounds on them generally corresponding to understandable patterns of matter behaviour (and more than a few which had substances on them which emphatically did not). Nobody had had to leave the ship. The mechanical arms and digging machines had scooped ton after ton into the magnetic cage in the bowels of the ship, wrapping the stuff--whatever it was--in the prescribed layer after layer of vacuum-sustaining systems. Magnets, Faraday cages, impregnable ceramics, everything they could think of to keep the material uncontaminated by normalspace.
And vice-versa.
Nobody wanted to leave because the betweenspace was frightening and made no damn sense to eyes used to normalspace. Perhaps the weird silvry thrum was what space looked like without dark matter, perhaps that was just how their eyes dealt with there being nothing out there at all, just a weird, bubbling, roiling nothingness which left them anchored in place by their lifeline and the rest of the betweenspace slowly twisting around them. Nobody wanted to go out into it. Nobody trusted it.
Lieutenant Kham joked that it was like being a fishing lure.
Nobody laughed and Captain Washington put her great, callused shovel of a hand on Kham's shoulder and suggested she lay off the jokes for a while.
But it had been said.
In spite of the malaise which had afflicted the crew and the maddening sense that something somewhere was wrong, the hold was filled with samples which roughly correlated to normalspace ideas of "stone", "metal" and "combustible liquid". They were all vaccuum-treated and the sanitation fields through which they passed were believed to scrape any extraneous matter from them; just hone in on the molecular structure you like and shave off the rest.
They didn't quite understand the science of that but they all wanted the promised bonuses for finding something in there.
And once they made it home, they would all be very rich, indeed, judging by everything in the hold.
Only, once when Captain Washington put her hand to the comms to let the company know they were on their way, she got no reply.
Not even static came back.
A quick check on the external cameras showed that the lifeline was still sticking straight up but they couldn't see the other end of it, couldn't find the hole in space that was supposed to be keeping them anchored to normalspace.
There were a lot of things that could mean. Mostly it meant that before the Ascension went back out, they'd have a word or two with the designers about the cameras and what kinds of adjustability they'd need.
Understandably, the crew began to become anxious at this sudden complication. They'd contacted home base at least once a day by burst communication up the lifeline and received no end of effusive praise from the people back at corporate. "How much? That's great!" "Absolutely, we'll be ready whenever you're ready!" "Do you need us to send down more food?" "Are you sure? Our calculations-- Well, you know best."
The something in the air intensified as the other crewmembers all found their own ways of coping. Mostly it involved hyperventilating or weeping. But Andrea felt herself shutting down those parts of her head. She hadn't become head of the crew by giving in to panic. It was a stranger situation than she'd ever been in but if something was wrong and nobody else was in a shape to go out there to find out what was wrong. She wasn't great at electronics but at least if she put eyes to whatever the problem was, there'd be a way to solve it.
She squeezed into her spacesuit and stood in the airlock. The others had been given strict instructions for what they should do if she didn't come back: do their best to navigate the Ascension up along the lifeline and hope they could poke something through the hole in betweenspace back into the normal world where, ideally, someone would be on-hand to start reeling them in.
They didn't ask what would happen if they didn't find the hole, if the lifeline was severed, if worse came to worse.
They didn't ask because there was no answer.
The airlock vented the strange-tasting air back into the ship before the outer door slowly opened up. Andrea turned on her magnetic boots and made her way out onto the hull.
The air in the suit smelled weird, too. It was hard not to notice when you were breathing that hard. Space suits made her nervous. Or maybe it was being the first person to walk through the betweenspace with only (top of the line, specially-designed, completely impregnable) cloth between herself and whatever the drifting silvry stuff was that this place had instead of dark matter.
She made her way up the hull of the Ascension and as she crested the first curve up toward the "top" of the ship, her heart sank into her stomach. The lifeline was still stretching out as far as she could see but at the very end of her vision, she could see that there was nothing on the other end, no crackling pulse of whatever energy it was that held the "fishing hole" open. She just stared at the line, as straight as when they'd flown down it and wasn't sure what to feel. There were no solar winds to make it move, no debris traveling at subluminal speeds to snap it. They'd cut anchor.
How was she going to tell the rest of them?
What would they do with no hope of rescue?
She knelt on the hull and screamed into her helmet until her ears hurt.
And when she stopped, the scream kept going. There wasn't any air to scream in, nothing from normalspace for the vibration to move.
But it kept going. The silvry stuff wavered in front of her and she saw it rippling outward like a rock dropped into water, out and around her. But instead of bouncing off the ship, she saw it sink through the hull, the ripples making the whole hull shudder momentarily before it was still again.
There hadn't, she realized, been a moment where they weren't just swimming in the stuff. Breathing it, eating it, everything.
How had they not seen--?
She reached up to the top of her helmet and flipped a switch, activating the external light on her helmet, the same kind of light as the ones inside and the silver stuff just vanished.
More, she saw the long deposits of something sitting in the hull--growing out of it. Things like the metal they'd sighted with the ship's external lamps. It was growing.
She turned off the external light and brought the polarized shield down on her faceplate. There was enough of the betweenspace's ambient light to possibly--probably--catch sight of herself in its reflective surface.
It's later now.
If there is such a thing.
The computer's clocks say it's much, much later now but Captain Washington is still alive.
The food is becoming something else inside its plastic. Just like the rest of the crew is and, indeed, has been becoming something else.
When she came back in from outside (as if there was any meaningful difference; the background radiation of the betweenspace was a very different thing than that of normalspace), she went back to the computer and replayed the last messages they'd sent back home. Saw the silver veins tracing up her neck that the light hid from her eyes. They'd never thought to look at themselves, just happy to know that they would all soon be rich.
The rest of the crew rioted. It wasn't so bad, there were only a dozen of them. They mostly just fought, scrambled for the remaining food, set up camp by the water dispenser or the bathroom. Normal stuff. Crisis stuff.
The Captain just went to her quarters, sat down on her bed and waited.
They were a natural resource now with a cargo bay filled with even more rarified stuff, stuff so potent it didn't disappear when the lights were on.
Maybe they wouldn't come today, but they were desperate up there. Low on resources and eventually, they'd be curious enough to check.
The others stopped banging at her door ages ago. They want some kind of revenge, she imagines. But she is the captain. She goes down with the ship.
She keeps the lights off and the window closed.
She doesn't know what she'll be when they come to pick her up.
She thinks she'll let it be a surprise.
Something they should have caught that they didn't.
Captain Andrea Washington couldn't put her finger on it, but it was there.
Her ship, the Ascension and the dozen souls onboard were in danger. They all of them knew it. There was something in the recycled air from the hydroponics bay which had started smelling... not wrong, exactly, nor "off" in any way that was definable but there was a flaw in it. The plants themselves were free from any mold or contaminants and the frequent, almost obsessive scanning that Commander Panerjee subjected them to proved it. No mold, no foreign substances, nothing that would explain what was wrong with the air.
Nobody could explain it. Ventilation ducts were checked and re-checked, personal hygiene grew almost violent, freeze-dried food checked for spoilage and every other possible source for the smell was given at least a sniff-test if it wasn't just tossed in the airlock.
They didn't dare jetison it. Not out there. The airlocks were made to let people in and out of normalspace.
Nobody'd quite figured out how they were supposed to toss things out into the betweenspace.
The Ascension was given its ironic name a few weeks before its completion, under the belief that the name would help see them through because it really was only the superstitions around the magic of names that would help them.
Two things had happened leading up to the ship's creation:
The first was that a new theory of dimensionality explained the ways it would be possible to delve, for a frighteningly low cost, into the spaces between the so-called "layers" of reality. This was met with a lot of adulation from the scientific community but in the end, little was done about it. Resources were scarce and literally dropping them down a hole seemed a waste of everyone's time.
Until the second thing happened: a swarm of credible theories began to circulate--particularly to private industry--that there was no reason that there couldn't be some kind of collectible resources in there; things with unique properties which could be quite valuable, indeed, were they brought back into normal space.
Volunteers were collected and a ship was made. The ship was frightfully easy for, while humanity had stopped caring so much about launching themselves into a largely-uncaring field of stars, they'd gotten quite good at making ships to get them there. The problem was, as ever, that the amount of energy expended getting a ship out of orbit was just too much when you considered what was needed back on Earth.
But dropping one on the end of a lifeline into a hole in space? Oh, certainly a risk but it was nowhere near as risky, which had to count for something. No thrust great enough to escape an atmosphere, just enough to maneuver in zero-g and possibly lift off from something smaller than the moon. It was a risk, certainly. If there was nothing there? You lose just enough to haul the thing back into normalspace by its lifeline and break it back down for scrap with the knowledge that if there was anything in the betweenspace, it wasn't worth the effort to get it.
But if something was down there? Haul it back out, turn it into something salable, lather, rinse, repeat.
There had been something in the betweenspace.
The ship's robotic collection apparatus had crossed more than a few asteroids with compounds on them generally corresponding to understandable patterns of matter behaviour (and more than a few which had substances on them which emphatically did not). Nobody had had to leave the ship. The mechanical arms and digging machines had scooped ton after ton into the magnetic cage in the bowels of the ship, wrapping the stuff--whatever it was--in the prescribed layer after layer of vacuum-sustaining systems. Magnets, Faraday cages, impregnable ceramics, everything they could think of to keep the material uncontaminated by normalspace.
And vice-versa.
Nobody wanted to leave because the betweenspace was frightening and made no damn sense to eyes used to normalspace. Perhaps the weird silvry thrum was what space looked like without dark matter, perhaps that was just how their eyes dealt with there being nothing out there at all, just a weird, bubbling, roiling nothingness which left them anchored in place by their lifeline and the rest of the betweenspace slowly twisting around them. Nobody wanted to go out into it. Nobody trusted it.
Lieutenant Kham joked that it was like being a fishing lure.
Nobody laughed and Captain Washington put her great, callused shovel of a hand on Kham's shoulder and suggested she lay off the jokes for a while.
But it had been said.
In spite of the malaise which had afflicted the crew and the maddening sense that something somewhere was wrong, the hold was filled with samples which roughly correlated to normalspace ideas of "stone", "metal" and "combustible liquid". They were all vaccuum-treated and the sanitation fields through which they passed were believed to scrape any extraneous matter from them; just hone in on the molecular structure you like and shave off the rest.
They didn't quite understand the science of that but they all wanted the promised bonuses for finding something in there.
And once they made it home, they would all be very rich, indeed, judging by everything in the hold.
Only, once when Captain Washington put her hand to the comms to let the company know they were on their way, she got no reply.
Not even static came back.
A quick check on the external cameras showed that the lifeline was still sticking straight up but they couldn't see the other end of it, couldn't find the hole in space that was supposed to be keeping them anchored to normalspace.
There were a lot of things that could mean. Mostly it meant that before the Ascension went back out, they'd have a word or two with the designers about the cameras and what kinds of adjustability they'd need.
Understandably, the crew began to become anxious at this sudden complication. They'd contacted home base at least once a day by burst communication up the lifeline and received no end of effusive praise from the people back at corporate. "How much? That's great!" "Absolutely, we'll be ready whenever you're ready!" "Do you need us to send down more food?" "Are you sure? Our calculations-- Well, you know best."
The something in the air intensified as the other crewmembers all found their own ways of coping. Mostly it involved hyperventilating or weeping. But Andrea felt herself shutting down those parts of her head. She hadn't become head of the crew by giving in to panic. It was a stranger situation than she'd ever been in but if something was wrong and nobody else was in a shape to go out there to find out what was wrong. She wasn't great at electronics but at least if she put eyes to whatever the problem was, there'd be a way to solve it.
She squeezed into her spacesuit and stood in the airlock. The others had been given strict instructions for what they should do if she didn't come back: do their best to navigate the Ascension up along the lifeline and hope they could poke something through the hole in betweenspace back into the normal world where, ideally, someone would be on-hand to start reeling them in.
They didn't ask what would happen if they didn't find the hole, if the lifeline was severed, if worse came to worse.
They didn't ask because there was no answer.
The airlock vented the strange-tasting air back into the ship before the outer door slowly opened up. Andrea turned on her magnetic boots and made her way out onto the hull.
The air in the suit smelled weird, too. It was hard not to notice when you were breathing that hard. Space suits made her nervous. Or maybe it was being the first person to walk through the betweenspace with only (top of the line, specially-designed, completely impregnable) cloth between herself and whatever the drifting silvry stuff was that this place had instead of dark matter.
She made her way up the hull of the Ascension and as she crested the first curve up toward the "top" of the ship, her heart sank into her stomach. The lifeline was still stretching out as far as she could see but at the very end of her vision, she could see that there was nothing on the other end, no crackling pulse of whatever energy it was that held the "fishing hole" open. She just stared at the line, as straight as when they'd flown down it and wasn't sure what to feel. There were no solar winds to make it move, no debris traveling at subluminal speeds to snap it. They'd cut anchor.
How was she going to tell the rest of them?
What would they do with no hope of rescue?
She knelt on the hull and screamed into her helmet until her ears hurt.
And when she stopped, the scream kept going. There wasn't any air to scream in, nothing from normalspace for the vibration to move.
But it kept going. The silvry stuff wavered in front of her and she saw it rippling outward like a rock dropped into water, out and around her. But instead of bouncing off the ship, she saw it sink through the hull, the ripples making the whole hull shudder momentarily before it was still again.
There hadn't, she realized, been a moment where they weren't just swimming in the stuff. Breathing it, eating it, everything.
How had they not seen--?
She reached up to the top of her helmet and flipped a switch, activating the external light on her helmet, the same kind of light as the ones inside and the silver stuff just vanished.
More, she saw the long deposits of something sitting in the hull--growing out of it. Things like the metal they'd sighted with the ship's external lamps. It was growing.
She turned off the external light and brought the polarized shield down on her faceplate. There was enough of the betweenspace's ambient light to possibly--probably--catch sight of herself in its reflective surface.
It's later now.
If there is such a thing.
The computer's clocks say it's much, much later now but Captain Washington is still alive.
The food is becoming something else inside its plastic. Just like the rest of the crew is and, indeed, has been becoming something else.
When she came back in from outside (as if there was any meaningful difference; the background radiation of the betweenspace was a very different thing than that of normalspace), she went back to the computer and replayed the last messages they'd sent back home. Saw the silver veins tracing up her neck that the light hid from her eyes. They'd never thought to look at themselves, just happy to know that they would all soon be rich.
The rest of the crew rioted. It wasn't so bad, there were only a dozen of them. They mostly just fought, scrambled for the remaining food, set up camp by the water dispenser or the bathroom. Normal stuff. Crisis stuff.
The Captain just went to her quarters, sat down on her bed and waited.
They were a natural resource now with a cargo bay filled with even more rarified stuff, stuff so potent it didn't disappear when the lights were on.
Maybe they wouldn't come today, but they were desperate up there. Low on resources and eventually, they'd be curious enough to check.
The others stopped banging at her door ages ago. They want some kind of revenge, she imagines. But she is the captain. She goes down with the ship.
She keeps the lights off and the window closed.
She doesn't know what she'll be when they come to pick her up.
She thinks she'll let it be a surprise.