J Mauldin - Final Solution

“No time,” I growled.

With a flash of blinding light the torch crackled to life. I sliced into the panel around the switch, leaving a jagged line where the old torch made contact, yanked the wires free and peeled back their insulation with my front teeth. I spat plastic tubing into the air and tied the ends together with thumb and forefinger, receiving a tiny jolt of electricity for my trouble.

Green lights appeared on the check board before us. Go time.

“Ready?” Navigation called back.

“Ready,” I shouted, palm over the emergency burn safety release. “César, strap in.”

“On my mark,” Navigation said. “Three, two…”

“We will show the Axis the resolve of the Brethren, offering them our final solution! Remember Ceres!”

“One! Mark! Mark! Burn! Burn!”

I pressed the big-red-button and the boosters roared, belching fire silently into the void and hurling us forward. Momentum threw me against the back wall.

Through a small display on my right I watched in silence as the familiar view fell gently away, our ship steadily careening off into the deep. The rings of Saturn, bisecting the horizon of its brightest moon, would eventually shrink to a pixel thin line and wink out.

I knew I’d miss this place on some level, but then again I was overjoyed to leave. Either we’d succeed in our mission and I could go home to Mars, or we’d fail and I’d never know it. At least on Mars when people treated you like scum you could run away and hide someplace secret, but locked in here, in this tube, this pressurized can floating through a sea of nothing, all you could do was run in circles. Run in fucking circles.

The emergency burn two days earlier had lasted nearly an hour. After cutting the boosters off, we began to ramp up speed with our ion thrusters, leaving the Saturn system turning orbits like a corkscrew. It would have been great if we could’ve accelerated the entire trip on liquid fuel alone, but the Vindicator only carried enough juice to burn for a total of six hours. With the next gas station being over a hundred million miles away, well, that made fuel more precious than gold.

Now that action was over for the moment, it was time to get to work. This, is what I was paid for.

I spent countless hours inspecting every inch of our primary conveyance, sixteen Third Generation Hi-Pep ion thrusters, ensuring their unflappable service was at damn near one hundred percent efficiency. We didn’t need any xenon leaks or inefficiently utilized reaction mass, busted grids or faulty electron guns. These sixteen babies strapped to our ass had to get us past Mars and to our target before the Razor could scorch our home. They would burn twenty-four hours a day, weeks on end, accelerating us constantly by tiny, tiny increments. At full acceleration they would add only about three one hundredths of a meter per second, but that added up. We were a snowball tumbling downhill being pushed by a gentle breeze. Our trajectory was correct, though as I poured over the numbers and conferred with Rosaleigh, the time-table was too tight.

We weren’t accelerating fast enough. If we had to make too many course corrections for defensive maneuvers we’d fail. This was a big problem.

I sat in my quarters and flipped through my tablet, trying to focus my mind on numbers and not the new crew additions. I sipped on what passed for coffee, only raising my head when someone passed through the module. A few waves, the occasional nod. If I was back in training on Mars, I’d have been sipping gin at the pub down the corridor while calculating engine outputs on the back of packing paper. There was not a drink to be had here.

No matter how many times I ran the numbers, no matter how many cups of coffee I downed, the answer was the same. Not enough kilowatts to achieve proper acceleration.

The Vindicator had many advantages and disadvantages in design. The most notable disadvantage, was that the further it traveled from the sun, the less effective it became. We were still near Saturn, and Saturn was a long way from the sun. Levels of light here were less than one percent of what Earth receives. This is a big challenge on a solar powered vehicle. Ninety nine percent of our power was collected by the origamic solar arrays, or to be technical, the MBTC PVAs (Multi-band tandem cell photovoltaic arrays), that spread out from the aft end of our craft. They were a collection of honeycomb cells laid out much like an RGB pixel matrix, each cell capable of capturing different wave lengths of light. Unlike the cheap photovoltaics used on the surface of Mars or back on Earth, which made use of around fifty percent of available sunlight, these could turn ninety percent of what reached them into usable energy.

The Razor , on the other hand, did not have this issue. The Axis’s aerospace engineers and rocket scientist had decided on using an on demand source of power and propulsion, which attributes to their ship’s greater mass. Equipped with a VASSIMR engine powered by nuclear fission and cooled by a molten sodium heatsink, the could travel in the dark with ease. It was a much more costly and volatile means of getting around, but distance from the sun did not diminish it’s vigor.

The Brethren scientist, however, were no idiots. We had a way around our handicap, a means of remote power generation. Currently, a good portion of our kilowatts were being supplied via nuclear reactors in orbit around Saturn, transmitted to us through the void to our array by a dense stream of photons. It was a huge boon in our dark position, but calculation after calculation showed it was not enough. We would need to requisition “use time” from civilian Photon Focusers located in the asteroid belt closer to the sun. It might cost us millions of credits to do this, but Military matters took precedence.

I factored the power deficiency, made a note of what we needed, and went to check the propulsion system. After I was satisfied we were at ninety-eight percent efficiency or higher, I left César to keep watch. I knew we could set alarms to trigger our wrist watches or belt tablets in case of trouble, but it just wasn’t the same. It felt right to have a person watching over it, not just another smart machine. That, and César felt important doing it. That twitchy little kid needed something to make him feel that way. I got the feeling he’d never felt that way before, either by circumstance or family; he’d never been allowed.

Despite all the frenzied action during and after the hard burn—the Captain’s zealous war speech over the intercom and subsequent angry discussions all over the ship—the Vindicator was mostly quiet. Security was unusually absent. The doors to the bridge were closed and locked, but the windows weren’t dimmed. Liberty was in there most of the time talking to XO or Navigation. Not a peep from anyone.

The ship’s doctor ordered that all those not up to date on PT had best get on it or be cited. I, for once, was about the only crewmember in good enough shape not to be scolded. Hell, I even saw Captain Fryatt, as a result, sweating his ass off a half hour a day in Forward Observation. The Doc must have really lit a fire under our collective asses to get the Cap up there so often. The Cap might have been a hard ass in attitude, but that certainly didn’t translate to his physical assets, unlike his daughter’s.

With the ship’s affairs in order there was nothing else to do but think. Think of home, think of the war, think of mistakes, and of course, think of Liberty.