Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

Yerusha landed a punch on his throat, and ran back to her post. The alarms were blaring. Holden was screaming, and the pressure hatch swung shut. The airlock blew out and they never found the body.

Yerusha tried to tell them at trial. But, the cameras had been damaged in the blow out, and it was Kim and Thatcher’s words against her, and they had back-up alibis and she didn’t. She had deserted her post knowingly. She had failed to report in to her superiors. She had failed to assist in efforts to squash the quiet dole. A Freer had died because of her negligence. This was true. This was fact. Holden was dead when he didn’t have to be and it was her fault. She was phenomenally lucky the judges thought something unproven was going on, or her exile would have been permanent.

No, I don’t want to tell Schyler about all that. Nobody needs to know about that.

Yerusha picked herself up off the treadmill and pulled the towel away from the velcro. She could hear the faint buzz of Javerri’s mystery still playing itself out in the booth. She’d never had much use for interactives, but Javerri seemed to like them a lot. Maybe she could recommend a good one. Maybe it would help fill some of the extra hours.

“Intercom to Pilot!”

Yerusha started. The voice belonged to Phillipe Delasandros, Cheney’s relief.

“Pilot here, Del, what’s going on?”

There was a brief pause. “The proximity alarm, actually.”

It’s too soon. Too soon! Yerusha dropped the towel and bolted for the hatch. “I’m there!”

She barrelled out into the corridor, almost straight through Baldassare Sundar. She took the stairs two at a time and dove through the bridge hatch as soon as it opened wide enough for her body. The alarm filled the bridge with its steady, unmistakable wail.

Delasandros, heavily built and heavily freckled, jumped out of the Station One chair a split second before she threw herself into it.

She threw herself into her chair. “Strap in!” she bellowed to Del, who seem to have frozen in place.

The proximity alarm rang for only two reasons. The first was when the ship was in normal space and getting too close to something that might do it some damage, like another ship. The second was when it was close enough to a gravity well that it had to make the jump back into normal space, and nobody had done any of the manual preparations.

Which nobody had, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening for another four hours.

“Intercom to Pasadena !” She hauled her straps around herself. “Strap down! Strap down! We’re jumping in! I repeat…”

A green light in the corner of the board turned red. In the next second, the general security alarms began shrieking. The accumulators had already come to life. Yerusha’s stomach suddenly tried to crawl up her throat. Outside the window, the silver wall burst and she saw darkness.

Fractured, flawed, twisted, splintered… Yerusha stabbed at the keys and raised the cameras. The view screens flickered into life and displayed a meaningless array of stars against the vacuum. In the distance, on the port screen, burned a red cinder the size of her thumbnail. It was not the sun that belonged to the Vicarage’s system. It wasn’t even close.

All sensation left her hands and they slipped off the boards to dangle uselessly at her sides.

“Intercom to Pilot!” Schyler’s voice barked out of the intercom. “Report!”

“We’re lost.” She couldn’t force her voice above a whisper. “We’re lost.”

Schyler paused for a single heartbeat.

“Intercom to Engine!” he bawled. “Shut down acceleration to minimum! Intercom to Pasadena! All hands prepare for free fall!” She could hear the thud of footfalls and realized Schyler was running as he shouted.

The sharp orders gave Yerusha something to focus on. She automatically checked around her station, looking for loose objects that would need securing. She found none. She hit the catch on her chair, locking it into the grooves in the deck. Del had already secured his station and was turning nervous, over-sized eyes towards her.

The hatch cycled open. “Pilot, what the hell happened?” demanded Schyler.

“I don’t know!” Her eye strayed toward the distant red star and she wanted to pound the boards in frustration. Instead, she snatched her pen out of her pocket. Working with both hands she called up the flight program and the execution records. She displayed them side-by-side on the screen and ran her gaze down the patterns. Times, bearings, everything matched exactly. According to the records, everything had gone right.

“Intercom to Watch.” Al Shei’s strained voice rang across the bridge. “We’re going to need a report down here, soon.”

“We’re working on it,” replied Schyler in a flat voice.

“Intercom to Engine and Houston.” Yerusha blanked the records off the board. “I need diagnostics on the engine execution and the timing routines between eleven-twenty and thirteen-twenty.”

“They’re yours,” answered Lipinski. There was closely guarded anger in his voice.

“Transferring.” Al Shei sounded even less pleased than Lipinski.

Yerusha couldn’t blame her. The red star sat square in the middle of the port screen, rebuffing all attempts at denial. Either something had gone wrong with the ship’s systems, or Jemina Yerusha of Free Home Titania who had programmed this jump had committed a capital error.

She felt light-headed. The straps pressed against her chest. Gravity was leaving them. She tried not to let it distract her. The data from Al Shei and Lipinski wrote itself across her memory boards. She pulled up her station data and scanned the stats as fast as she could.

Her heart began to beat heavy and slow.

“Pilot?” Schyler’s voice cut across the bridge. “What’ve you got?”

Yerusha shook herself. “It’s the clocks.” She looked up to see his entire face gathered into his frown. “The internal clocks have been reset so we mistimed the jump. Here.” She wrote the transfer command and shot a copy of her display across to Schyler’s station. “At least a dozen of the internal timers have been reset. Even if we had checked back with The Gate, we wouldn’t have known about it.” Yerusha wasn’t sure why she added that. Maybe to make herself believe it. “It’s all internal.”

The blood drained from Schyler’s face. “What the hell happened to the diagnostics?”

“I don’t know.” Yerusha clenched her fingers around her pen to keep it from floating away. “I don’t know.”

Schyler swallowed a couple of times before he found his voice. “All right, Pilot, you get to work and find out where in all the heavens we are. I’m going to report to Al Shei, and then the crew.” His eyes were hard and focused on her. “We need an answer soon, Pilot.”

She didn’t even bother to reply, she just turned her gaze back down towards her boards and screens.

All right, all right, Yerusha tried to organize her thoughts. Now I know what happened. Now I’ve just got to figure out where it’s left us. She turned her attention to the view screens with their scattering of white stars. To her naked eye, they all looked the same. But they had names and numbers and fixed positions in the sky and each carried its unique spectrum. Spectrum analysis took time, but, some of those stars would be pulsars with their own signatures and their own listing in her database. Distance from pulsars could be easily measured because of the regularity of their signals. If she could find more than one, she could greatly shorten the search by starting a process of triangulation that would eventually narrow down their location to within a few thousand clicks. It would be close enough.