“So it appears,” Ebbie said. “I am receiving incomplete information. Three of my antennas were damaged.”
I pulled myself out of my sleep sack. Regardless of what you may have seen in adventure vids, we do not have artificial gravity, except what we get from acceleration, and Ebbie was just creeping along now with her damaged pipes.
“You do have a good lock on the beacon at the shipwreck station, don’t you?”
“Yes, I have a double lock. I will get us there safely.”
One of the staples of adventure fiction when I was a kid was the spaceship stranded in the unknown reaches of space, with some vital commodity in too short supply for the protagonist to reach safety. Then the author pulls some cute little trick out of a bag, the protagonist fixes the whoozis with a wad of chewing gum or something, and everyone gets home safe and sound.
Bull. All of the cute little gimmicks get engineered into spaceships as soon as the engineers think of them and find a cost-effective way to include them. You don’t leave things to the dire-straits inventiveness of Wally Wizard and his electronic penknife. Things can still go wrong though. You can still get potted like the eight ball in the corner pocket. First in the asteroid belt, and later on when we started venturing out to the edges of the Oort Cloud, the engineers took a cue from Earth.
Back when sailors got their feet wet and the southern oceans were vast tracts that needed weeks or months to cross, some maritime powers established shipwreck stations on remote islands, refuges with stocks of food and other necessities and (once they had been invented) radios to let marooned sailors call for help.
In the same way, shipwreck stations were put in space. Theoretically, there was always supposed to be one within reach of a candle, even one left with only maneuvering thrusters, quickly enough to keep a miner from asphyxiating or dehydrating first. They had been mass produced and sprinkled all along the inner edge of the cloud, as deep as miners normally ventured.
“Will there be room for us to dock for repairs?” I asked.
“We will be the second ship in,” Ebbie said. “At least one other candle will follow. Another might need to.”
The shipwreck stations were not crewed. They were just temporary refuges available to anyone who needed them—small gastight habitats with fuel, food, water, oxygen, and the most basic repair facilities. If a ship needed more repairs than her pilot could manage with the available resources, they would have to wait for a ride and a tow—expensive, time-consuming, and very high on any pilot’s list of least-favorite things.
“I have been able to dampen the vibrations in one of the maneuvering thrusters,” Ebbie reported. “That has allowed me to boost our acceleration by zero-point-eight percent.”
Which would get us to the shipwreck station just a little faster. “As long as you’re certain that it’s safe, Ebbie.” That was unnecessary. Ebbie’s independent decision parameters are more closely circumscribed than mine.
“It is safe,” she assured me.
I chatted with the two other pilots who were heading toward the same shipwreck station, and with the maybe—who decided that she could make it home without a repair stop. Angie McBroom was nearest docking. Her candle ship was also apparently in the worst condition. It probably would not be possible to repair the candle to make the trip back under its own power. But Angie wouldn’t concede that until she could get out and make sure for herself. Clayton Reid was farther out, but not in much worse shape than I was. We both anticipated being able to boost for home, even if we might not be able to risk picking up another berg to push in.
“If it’s at all possible,” I told Ebbie after signing off from my second conversation with Clay, “I want to take something home. It might yet be possible to earn retirement on this trip.” But not if Ebbie deadheaded back to Mars.
“Too soon to tell,” Ebbie said. “Repairing the main exhaust might be tricky. I anticipate that we can do a good enough job to get us home, without much loss of time over a normal return, but I cannot tell if we will be sound enough for a tow.”
While the shipwreck stations were being planted on bergs in relatively stable orbits, it was a matter of intelligent self-interest for miners to clear away the bits of rock and ice that might pose dangers to those stations. It’s an ongoing process though, since there is an almost Brownian motion within the cloud, new material moving toward the verge of the shell almost constantly. Whenever a new object is detected moving into an orbit hazardous to a shipwreck station, there is a small bounty added to the miner’s normal take for the claim.
A major event like the chain reaction that was moving three ships toward the same station, could rearrange the entire neighborhood. It would probably move more rocks and bergs into position to qualify for bounties. A major event could also damage or destroy a shipwreck station. We didn’t know until Angie reached our common goal that 117+9 had also been hit.
“The station remains habitable,” Ebbie said. “Its orbit has been affected though, and one supply cache was destroyed. The change in orbit will move it toward the inner Solar System, making it a long-period comet.”
Which would make it useless as a shipwreck station. It would have to be boosted back into its previous orbit or replaced. That wasn’t our problem. Ebbie assured me that the deviation was too slight to have any immediate impact.
“Will the destroyed cache leave the station short with three of us docked?” I asked. The pause before Ebbie replied this time was her way of letting me know that she had already computed the data out to more decimal points than I could grasp, not because she was processing information.
“No foreseeable shortages. Repair facilities will be marginal. Six percent of the cometary body was destroyed.”
“Will we be able to make our repairs?”
“Most likely,” Ebbie said. “If you want the percentages, over 92. Bartholomew’s Candle will not be so fortunate.” That was Angie McBroom’s ship. “Before, she had no more than a 5 percent chance of making repairs sufficient to reach Mars. This has erased that hope. She will have to wait for a ride home.”
I had spent a lot of time alone with Ebbie, over three tours out to the cloud. There have been months at a time when she was my only “human” contact. I knew her patterns.
“Even if the station’s orbit does not degrade enough to be dangerous by then, there won’t be enough supplies to hold Angie until a relief ship arrives,” I said.
“Zero chance,” Ebbie said. “Barta could sustain her that long, but Barta is so crippled that the risk is unacceptable.”
And Angie would never willingly abandon Barta, even though the ship could be retrieved later. I couldn’t entirely fault Angie for that. I’d be as hard to separate from Ebbie, out in the cloud. A pilot who comes home without his or her ship doesn’t have much future in the business.
“I guess that means that one of us will have to give Angie a tow,” I said. Either Clayton or me.
“That would seem to be the logical solution,” Ebbie said.
I growled at the way she used the word logical. It was a code to tell me that after all, Ebbie was the computer and had the massive brain and faster thinking than I could dream of, and when she said something was right, logical, that was that.
“Maybe Clay will volunteer,” I suggested after frowning at the nearest monitor.
“I suspect that that is slightly less probable than our claiming an asteroid that turns out to contain ten thousand tonnes of gold,” Ebbie said.