Bud Sparhawk: Primrose Rescue

Pascal was worried about Rams’ condition. The captain hadn’t taken well to his medication and had remained unconscious most of the time. Could he have calculated a wrong dosage? Suspecting that he had done so, he reduced the dose. As a result Rams stayed awake but was in a constant, low-level of pain. They had to get him to a decent medical facility soon. Without his intervention Thorn might have become a twenty-first century Flying Dutchman, sailing Jupiter’s vast seas with the ghostly crew of Louella and himself. He owed this man a lot for saving him from spending eternity as Louella’s constant companion, and that required far more gratitude than he could ever express.

After carefully reviewing the data bank of possible destinations Pascal selected station CS-17 as their next most likely target. After a few minutes of intense calculation he predicted that they would intersect her track just eight hours ahead of her, five days, fifteen watches, hence.

That meant that, once they got in front of her, all they had to do was simply reduce sail, slow below wind speed, and wait for the station to creep up behind them. It was a simple plan, and one that wouldn’t require special handling.

Twenty hours before they arrived at CS-17’s track the radar alarm hooted loudly, bringing Pascal to high alert and Louella staggering sluggishly from her cabin, her broken arm forcing her to move carefully down the passageway. In the past few days she’d banged it often enough to learn the painful lesson of keeping it held closely to her chest. Even the drugged Rams was awakened by the clamor.

“What the hell is that?” Pascal exclaimed, pointing at an indistinct shadow on the screens. “Louella, see if you can crank up the gain.” He fought to keep the image centered in the screen by manipulating the sail controls and the wheel.

“Don’t touch… gain,” Rams wheezed from his pallet. “Too much noise out here. You’ll wipe out whatever… we have. Try infrared instead. Maybe you can get a better picture with that.”

“Can’t; it’s too far away to use the IR — and the damn sonar doesn’t help either! Oh no, there it goes…”

Louella reached Ram’s side just as the hazy shape disappeared completely into the sparkle of background noise. “What was that — what did we just miss?”

Pascal scowled at her. “You should be sleeping, not up here in the cockpit.”

“Can’t sleep with that stupid alarm clanging,” she shot back, her weariness evident in the lack of conviction in her voice. “What did you see?”

Pascal described the faint image that had raced across the radar screen and his inability to resolve the image into anything he could comprehend. “If we had some decent equipment…” he began.

“ Primrose has… best equipment on… planet,” Rams mumbled from his bunk. “Cost… a bloody damn fortune. But can’t run a tight schedule… without it. Won’t find better gear on any ship on the planet,” he finished in a rush.

“Then why couldn’t we see what that thing was?” Pascal demanded, angry with frustration and the lack of rest that kept him from concentrating.

“Environment’s the problem,” Rams explained. “Old man Jupe puts out… lot of radio noise — magnetic field or something. Too much noise for radar, even with the double encrypted digital radar I use… Best I can ‘see’ is ’bout a klick.”

“Which must have been just about the distance of that thing we passed,” Pascal said, shaking his head to clear it.

Louella was still scowling at the instrument panel. “One kilometer for radar and the double damned infrared’s only good for close range work; about a hundred meters or less. Since the docking sonar is only good for five hundred meters or so its like sailing blind on a dark night in the fog!”

“Gotta depend on your inertial,” Rams said with a whisper of finality.

“You heard the man: Depend on the inertial,” Louella repeated as she staggered back down the passageway. “Wake me when it’s my turn at the wheel.”

“So what was that thing we saw?” Pascal asked doggedly as she left. “Was something really there or was it just a radio ghost?”

“Don’t know,” Rams replied softly, his voice fading as he fell back to his drugged sleep. “Out here you… trust your inertial. You gotta trust… data.”

The next day the inertial indicated that they had arrived on the track of CS-17 and were leading it by nearly six hours.

Louella started sailing a waiting pattern, criss-crossing CS-17’s predicted track while heading the ship in the same direction as the station. Pascal anxiously scanned the three sensor screens for the station’s arrival each time they crossed her predicted track.

After ten hours of anticipation CS-17 still hadn’t arrived. According to the inertial’s readings the station should have been right on top of their position, yet both the radar and sonar showed nothing there except clear seas, roaring winds, and the perpetual hiss and crackle of radio noise at the limits of their range.

“Trust your inertial,” Pascal muttered angrily under his breath each time they crossed the empty track.

“If the station isn’t here then where could it be?” Louella demanded when she took over the watch. She was as frustrated as he at the lack of contact after nearly a day had passed. “Could the station master have altered the station’s course for some reason — to avoid the storm or run a rescue mission?”

Rams grimaced with the pain in his leg. They needed him conscious and alert for this discussion, so Pascal hadn’t administered the scheduled shot of sedative.

“The stations’ positions are the only stability we have down here.” Rams said through clenched teeth. “It’s only the absolute predictability that makes sailing possible. No station master would ever vary his track by a millimeter, even if his life depended on it, because every sailor is dependent on that station being exactly where he is supposed to be at all times. No, the station wouldn’t have deviated from the track for any reason.”

“Then something must have happened to it,” Pascal said slowly. “Maybe the storm moved it to a different track. Hmm, with that much wind force almost anything could be possible.”

Louella snapped her fingers. “That’s it! I’ll just bet that’s the ghost you nearly ran into earlier — we must have passed the station without realizing it.” She turned to Rams. “Is there any possibility that your inertial equipment is out of kilter; that somehow it is giving us the wrong readings?”

Rams shook his head weakly from side to side, obviously trying to clear his head. “Not possible. The inertial has a better pedigree than the king of England. Remember, I’m staking my life on it every time I set sail. I calibrate it with the station’s master system before I leave port. No, it can’t be wrong — just not possible.”

“Then, somehow the damnable storm must have moved the station off course, off track, whatever, and that’s why it isn’t where its supposed to be.”

“Brilliant deduction, Louella,” Pascal injected. “But what can we do about it. Should we try to catch up to it?”

“Can’t do that. Don’t know what track she’s following. Haven’t a prayer of finding her.” Rams took a deep breath before continuing. “If the storm blew the station off her track, then the master’s probably fighting like mad — He has to get her back on track: Probably working the sea anchors, ballast tanks, whatever to move her. Even if we use her last position we can’t predict the line he’ll take. Take more than dumb luck to find her. We’d never know how far below or above her track she’d be.”