Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

As the shuttle swept lower, she saw the shadows of the excavations along the eastern bank of the Despair River, between the stream and the caldera, and that inner shiver turned into an arctic chill. The archaeologists working the site didn’t even look up as her shuttle passed overhead. Their attention was on something that had happened long, long ago.

On the reason that river was called Despair.

“God, what must it have been like?” she wondered out loud.

“I doubt anyone who wasn’t here could even imagine,” Theisman said softly from the seat beside hers. “And, frankly, I’m glad I can’t.”

“I think I agree with you.” Pritchart leaned her forehead against the viewport, gazing aft to keep the excavations in sight as the shuttle’s flight path straightened and it began to climb once more. They were still a thirty-minute flight from Mountain Fort, the planetary capital. Or administrative center, at least. But as sobering as she’d found the overflight, she’d insisted on making it before they landed.

“I think I agree,” she repeated, sitting back in her seat. “Especially if Baranav was right when he dated Anderson.” She shook her head. “How could anyone find the will to go on after two disasters like that?”

“We’ll never know,” Theisman replied. “Not for sure. But I think Anderson probably got it pretty close to right. Parents don’t lie down and die when their kids’ lives are on the line. And most of the people with any quit in them were probably dead even before it happened, given everything they’d already been through. They had to’ve been tougher than nails to get as far as Sanctuary in the first place.”

Pritchart nodded soberly as her mind ran back over the incredible cascade of coincidences, unlikelihoods, and outright impossible accomplishments that had brought her and Theisman to this planet at this moment.

From their perspective, that cascade began only forty T-years ago, when Admiral Laforge had handed the assignment to find a use for the Calvin Terminus off to one of her underlings with instructions to Do Something and keep the damned politicians off her back.

The “something” turned out to be a follow-up expedition charged with evaluating the system’s possible military utility and what it would take to capitalize upon it. Everyone involved had understood it was basically make work to keep the politicians happy, but they’d been told to spend long enough to make it look good and to produce a comprehensive report demonstrating how earnestly the Navy had complied with its orders. In the event, Captain Braun the expedition’s commander had decided that since the Calvin itself was obviously unsuitable as a site for any planetary installations, to survey the closest half-dozen or so neighboring star systems for possible alternate bases.

One of those star systems had been KCR-126-06, a multiple-star system consisting of KCR-125-06-A, an A-class giant with no less than three companions: two red dwarfs—KCR-125-06-B and KCR-125-06-C—in relatively tight orbits and a distant, almost equally dim K8, which had apparently been captured only a few hundred million years ago. The likelihood of a habitable world in a system like that was minute, given what was likely to happen to any planetary orbits. For that matter, A-class stars didn’t produce many planets in the first place, and they usually didn’t last long enough for any planets they did form to evolve into something suitable to maintain complex life forms. Even if that hadn’t been true, the red dwarfs were close enough to have precluded any planet formation in KCR-125-06-A’s liquid-water zone.

Not only that, KCR-126-06 had actually been looked at—sort of—by astronomers over a thousand T-years ago. There wasn’t much to see—the giant and its red dwarf companions had no planets at all, and KCR-125-06-D was so close to a red dwarf itself that the chance of a planet in its liquid-water zone not being tide-locked to it was unlikely in the extreme. In addition, the K8 star was surrounded by an extraordinarily dense interplanetary dust cloud. That cloud had precluded any close look at the inner system, and coupled with the rest of the entire KCR-125-06 System’s unprepossessing astrography and the general lack of worthwhile real estate in the region, no one had seen any reason to look any closer. The chance that there might, possibly, be a marginally habitable planet hidden inside all that dust did , however exist—theoretically, at least—and looking for one should certainly convince the Navy’s political masters of how thoroughly it had applied itself to carrying out its vital mission.

What Braun had never even imagined he might discover in the process was the answer to what had become of Calvin’s Hope .

No one knew how she’d come to her final resting place, 9.7 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of KCR-126-06-D and its very large, solitary moon, but they did know it must have been the stuff of legends.

It was amazing enough that Calvin’s Hope still existed, but she was only a bare hull, stripped to the bone by her passengers and crew before they’d left her forever for the planet they’d named Sanctuary. Not even the Legislaturalists had been prepared to disturb—desecrate—her after all these centuries, and the subsequent development of Sanctuary’s orbital industry had been kept scrupulously clear of her final resting place.

How she’d crossed the almost ten light-years from her original destination to the feeble warmth of the K8v star her passengers had renamed Refuge was one of the things no one would ever know, however. Simply finding Sanctuary in Refuge’s narrow habitable zone in a system where interplanetary dust was so dense even ships with military-great particle screening dared not attain velocities much in excess of 0.5 cee must have been a monumental task—after all, no one else had found it since, although, to be fair, no one had looked all that closely with so much other, more desirable stellar real estate available to anyone with a hyper-generator. But the KCR-126-06 System had been the only haven the Calvin Expedition could possibly have reached before their vessel’s internal systems failed.

Calvin’s Hope ’s specifications were readily available, given that it was one of the most famous Dutchmen in galactic history. And from those specifications, she couldn’t possibly have had more than a century or so of reserve endurance. With that limitation, she couldn’t have accelerated to her designed cruising velocity and stayed there long enough for her scoop field to replenish her reaction mass. That limited her to a maximum velocity of no more than ten percent of light-speed, if she meant to decelerate at the end of her voyage.

And KCR-126-0 6 was the only star system which lay within less than a century’s travel—at 0.1 cee—of Calvin’s Star.

That meant they’d had no choice but to look at it far more closely than any less desperate astronomer ever had since. And then—somehow—they’d had to actually make the ninety-eight-year voyage. The story of how they’d done that must have been in Calvin’s Hope ’s computers once upon a time, but her computer cores had been stripped along with everything else that could possibly be taken down to Sanctuary, and so no one would ever be able to celebrate her epic achievement as it properly deserved.

Yet she’d done her job. Somehow, she’d gotten her people to a new home after all. She delivered her cargo of fragile human beings to a habitable planet—quite a lovely one, actually—despite the fact that it really shouldn’t have existed and that she’d never been intended for the additional voyage, and the colonists must have heaved an enormous sigh of relief.