Second Chance (5 page)

The problem
had
to be on our end.

But then, after another fruitless day—another day of trying to solve a problem that, from all I could tell, didn’t actually exist—I awoke from three hours of sleep with a key realization. Stark naked, I logged into the database from the screen in my room.

Cassiopeia
’s five modules had all been built from the same designs at the same time by the same contractors. It wasn’t completely astonishing that a subsystem had failed in the same way on all three surviving modules. But I hadn’t seen that kind of triple failure in any other subsystem. For that matter, I hadn’t seen even one other failure big enough to take out an entire critical subsystem on even one module, and the long-range receiver was certainly a critical subsystem.

I’d inspected all the pieces and they were all working. The only thing that could have caused the same failure in all three modules was a systemic integration or design problem, but I couldn’t imagine how a problem that widespread could leave no other symptoms.

So I looked to see if there were any other differences in the three databases that might tell me what had gone wrong. But I soon discovered that
Cassie
’s merged database didn’t record the source of each individual record—I had no way to tell whether any given piece of data had been recorded by Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, or a mix of the three. There was a field for that information, but it was inexplicably blank in every relevant record. And when I went to check the original, separate databases...

They weren’t there.

I ground my teeth in frustration.
Cassiopeia
had capacity for at least thirty years of data—there was absolutely no reason to have deleted those databases after the merge, no matter how redundant they may have seemed. But they weren’t in the primary store, they weren’t in the backup, they weren’t in the archive, and they weren’t in the redundant array.

And we sure as heck didn’t have any off-site backups.

I floated, staring at the screen, feeling the sweat cooling on my flat belly and worrying at the things I wasn’t seeing. The missing data indicated a serious problem—I wasn’t yet sure if it was software, hardware, or human error. The word “sabotage” tickled at the back of my head, but I brushed it away. No need to be paranoid. Yet.

I threw on a coverall and headed off to Bobb’s room, in Gamma module.

We didn’t all keep the same schedule, but there was a rough consensus ship’s “day” and “night,” and this was the deepest part of the night. Most of the lights were off, and I drifted past static monitors and stowed equipment that loomed like reefs in a darkened ocean. My sleep-deprived brain saw movement in corners where no movement should be.

I paused at Bobb’s door. No light was visible behind it, and I heard a faint rumbling snore. I asked myself if this problem was really urgent enough to justify waking him.

But just as I raised my hand to knock, a raucous klaxon sounded throughout the ship. At the same moment the emergency lights slammed on, blinding me with harsh flat whiteness.

Impact alarm.

I spun in place, blinking in the sudden light and momentarily disoriented. Where was the nearest brace point? The nearest vacuum shelter? The nearest hull repair kit? Before I could regain my bearings, a hammer blow of sound punched my ears, followed by a harsh, high-pitched whistle.

That wasn’t good.

Bobb’s door burst open, seemingly silent against the whistle of air and the klaxon’s repeated blasts, and Bobb tumbled out, struggling into his coverall.

Matt followed him out, buck naked and holding his coverall in one hand.

As I hung slack-jawed at this development, Bobb zipped up his coverall and moved to a wall panel, where he stilled the klaxon. In the ear-ringing silence that followed, the whistling hiss of escaping air was very loud. Bobb cocked his head, listening, then kicked off from the airlock door and shot through the port into the work bay above. Matt and I followed.

The hiss was coming from behind a monitor at the gamma ray spectroscopy station. The monitor itself was black, its screen cracked in a jagged Y, and there was an acrid smell. I popped open the access panel at the base of the station and flipped circuit breakers—a fire now would only make things worse. As I worked, I prayed hard, over and over: “Lord Jesus preserve us, Lord Jesus preserve us...”

Bobb and Matt, meanwhile, were trying to remove the monitor from the wall, so they could repair the hull breach behind it. But though Bobb strained at the wrench handle, it wouldn’t budge. “We’ll have to saw it loose.”

“Too slow,” said Matt, and pulled a heavy prybar from the tool box. The tool’s momentum made his free-fall movements awkward, but he tucked his legs into the work station’s restraint and smashed the prybar repeatedly against the broken monitor’s casing. But the casing was made of the same tough plastic as the hull, and apart from sending a few additional glass fragments sailing into the air, this had no effect.

By now Nuru and Mari had appeared from their rooms in Gamma hab, and Bobb had briefly explained the situation to them. “You’re just wasting time with that,” Nuru said to Matt. “We’ve already lost almost fifty pascals of pressure. I want you and Chaz to prep for EVA.”

Matt and I exchanged a glance of deep concern. But Nuru was right, as usual—it was beginning to look as though we might not be able to even see the hull breach, never mind repair it, from inside any time soon.

We pulled the emergency air barrier across the port between Gamma work and habitation bays as we passed through it. The barrier’s translucent plastic bellied taut as soon as it was sealed, pointing out the seriousness of the leak. Then, after crossing the habitation bay and entering the airlock, we closed and dogged the inner airlock door behind us. The latches snicked into place with disturbing finality.

I called up the decompression checklist on the airlock’s little monitor. It had one hundred and ninety-seven steps and, even under emergency conditions, took a minimum of two hours and twenty minutes. While Matt unshipped the lock’s two exercise bicycles, I pulled two oxygen masks from their sterile wrappers.

As I inserted the oxygen hose connectors into the socket on the wall, I was uncomfortably reminded of the situation I’d encountered just before the impact alarm. Matt and Bobb had both been in Bobb’s room. In the middle of the night. With the lights off. Naked.

What had they been doing in there?

I had some idea—I wasn’t naïve. But the very thought made me queasy.

I shook the image out of my head and fastened one of the masks over my nose and mouth, then handed the other mask to Matt. Once he’d donned his mask, I programmed the airlock for EVA stepdown, then fitted my feet into the bike’s pedals and began to pump.

It seemed insane that, with the ship losing air and an emergency spacewalk on the agenda, the first thing we had to do was work up a sweat. But our EVA suits were run at a fraction of the ship’s air pressure—it made it possible for them to be much lighter and more flexible—and if we subjected ourselves to that lower pressure too quickly we’d get the bends. Nitrogen bubbles expanding in our bloodstreams could cause severe pain, neurological disorders, and even death. So we had to get all the nitrogen out of our blood before decompressing, and the fastest way to do that was to exercise vigorously while breathing pure oxygen.

We pedaled together for a few minutes in silence, side by side, the masks’ straps waving around our faces like kelp in the sea as we strained at the pedals. We’d alternate pedaling and resting for the next couple of hours, while the airlock ramped slowly down to suit pressure. Then we’d help each other don our suits.

As I mentally reviewed the suit-up process, I became keenly aware of how intimate it was. The liquid-cooled undergarment had to be smoothed over each limb, with no wrinkling or bunching at the armpits or crotch. Fastening the lower torso unit involved a very close embrace around the waist and hips. And fitting the urine collector...

I thought back to one of the last psych interviews I’d endured before the final selection was announced. “We’re a little concerned about some of your sensitivity scores,” the young white psychologist had said. Two cameras and a large one-way mirror peered over his shoulders. “You show a forty-three percent tendency to homophobia.”

“I was raised in a pretty traditional family,” I’d replied carefully, knowing that my selection for the Tau Ceti mission was on the line and that any attempt to BS a professional psychologist would only make things worse. “I won’t deny that my parents taught me there are absolutes of right and wrong, especially when it comes to sexual behavior. But at the same time they taught me to respect everyone, no matter what their lifestyle or beliefs. Check my record and talk with my colleagues. I think you’ll find that, whatever my personal opinions, I’ve worked cordially with people of all orientations and gender expressions.”

“We have already done so, or you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. But some of your prospective crewmates are faggots and dykes.” He was a professional; he spoke the words without any trace of emotional content. I was being tested. “You will be trapped in a small spacecraft with them for the rest of your life. How does this make you feel?”

I swallowed, tried to slow my heart rate. “I’m... conflicted. My father would have me hate the sin and love the sinner. But I know there’s no room for any kind of hatred on board
Cassiopeia
. And I know that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality.” I sat forward in my chair. “What He did say was that there are no greater Commandments than these: ‘love thy God with all thy heart’ and ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’” My hands clenched together under the table. “I try every day to express that love. Sometimes it’s hard. But we’re all God’s children, so I keep trying.”

The psychologist hadn’t even blinked. But I must have convinced someone, because the issue had never been raised again.

After we’d been pedaling for half an hour in silence, Matt suddenly spoke up, interrupting my uncomfortable thoughts. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, his voice ringing hollow in the oxygen mask. “Me and Bobb, I mean. I know how much it upsets you.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been surprised by another member of the crew seeming to read my mind. “Am I that transparent?”

Matt shrugged, but said nothing. His facial expression was obscured by the mask.

“I mean...” I said, after a long uncomfortable moment of silence, then trailed off, not sure what I did mean. I tried again: “I mean... aren’t you
married
?”

“That was someone else. A man with a goldfish tattooed on his arm.” He indicated the shamrock tattoo, still angry red around the edges, with his chin. “This whole expedition is a new adventure... a new life. What better time to try something different?”

My mouth must have gaped open at that, because the mask lost its seal and started whistling around the edges, reminding me of the air leak we were going outside to patch. I closed my mouth and the whistling stopped. “I can’t believe anyone could be so flippant about something so serious.”

“Why does everything have to be
serious
with you, Chaz? Can’t you just accept a little fun as something worthwhile in itself?”

Fun?
I noticed I was pedaling harder, as though I were trying to get away. I brought my speed back down with an effort. Love thy neighbor as thyself. “I’m sorry. It’s just... it’s not...”

“Not what? Natural? Neither is wearing clothes. Not to mention cloning, synaptic recording, and interstellar travel.” He shook his head. “Look, neither of us is going to get pregnant, there are no sexually-transmitted diseases in this entire solar system, and no one’s cheating on their spouse... the old ‘until death do us part’ clause has been invoked. The worst that could happen is that someone gets hurt emotionally. And that could happen even without the sex. So where’s the harm?”

“But...
Bobb?
”

“Why not? He’s a real sweetheart. And, to tell you the truth, I felt a little sorry for him. How’d
you
like to be the only gay man for twelve light years?”

“Bobb?” But even as I said it, I knew it was true.

“Gay as a happy day. I still can’t believe you never twigged to it.”

Desperate for something to take my mind off this conversation, I reached out and flipped the wall monitor from the EVA checklist to an air pressure graph for Gamma work bay. Still falling steadily. At this rate we had about five hours before we’d have to seal off and abandon that bay. Given that it was the central point of our truncated ship—everything connected to everything else through that bay—losing it would be a major disaster. “We need to discuss strategy for the repair. We’ll only get one shot at it.”

For the next hour we talked through the agenda and procedures for our upcoming spacewalk, while we alternated pedaling and resting and the air pressure in the lock slowly dropped. Every minute or so I had to swallow to make my ears pop.

Our biggest problem was the swarm of asteroid fragments traveling with the ship in orbit around Tau Ceti. For the last couple of decades,
Cassiopeia
had been intercepting asteroids whenever they came near its path. Those whose spectrum indicated useful materials, such as water, oxygen, or the carbonaceous chondrites that could be processed into plastic, were captured and mined by
Cassie
’s fabricators, and the unusable rock and metal ores discarded—smelting the metal was beyond the ship’s capabilities. But it’s difficult and expensive to throw anything away in space—unless we wanted to fit each piece of trash rock with an engine, it would move in the same orbit as
Cassie
until our next course change. So anyone on EVA ran the risk of cracking open his helmet on a heavy, jagged rock.

Given the current configuration of the swarm, visible on the same radar that had sounded the warning for the meteoroid that had hit us, I proposed that we leave the thruster packs in the airlock and go handhold-to-handhold across the hull. But Matt gestured at the air pressure graph, rubbing his shoulder with the other hand. “We don’t have enough time. The last time I did something like this in the tank, it took me over an hour to crawl half-way down the ship. No, we have to take the thrusters... we’ll just keep a sharp eye out for flying rocks.” He rubbed his shoulder again.