“Yeah, okay,” Rovayo doing a little partner support of her own. Sevgi caught herself in sudden sympathy. It was like passing an unexpected mirror. “So what about this other system? The spaceflight guys. They’re wired to wake up, right?”
“They can wake up.” Norton picked up again. “Under certain circumstances. If there’s a navigational emergency. The trajectory fails or you get unscheduled activity from the drive datahead maybe. Then the ship brings those two capsules up. Your spaceflight guys fix the problem, or call in the recovery if they can’t.”
That’s spaceflight guy, singular, people. The sour voice in her head would not shut up. Because—you taxpayers don’t need to know this, of course—for about a decade now we’ve been cutting back on emergency personnel by 50 percent. It’s just so fucking expensive, you see, wasting a perfectly good cryocap berth like that, after all this stuff almost never happens, right, and even if it does who needs two pilots to fix it when one can manage. That’s just overmanning, right?
“Right,” said Coyle. “And these guys got to eat and drink, right?”
“Yes, of course.” Norton gestured. Sevgi let him get on with it. Maybe from the long stay in virtual, her head was starting to hurt. “There’s tanked water anyway, for fusion mass, for radiation shielding, for the coolant systems. Even in the backup tanks, there’s more than two guys could drink even if they stayed out there for a couple of years. And obviously there’s food. But the supplies are calculated on the assumption that these two guys aren’t going to be up and about for very long. If it’s a simple problem, they fix it and then go back to sleep. If it’s not, they’ll send an SOS and then go back to sleep until the rescue ship gets there.”
“What if the system won’t let them refreeze?” Coyle wasn’t going to be shaken loose of what was apparently an endemic lack of faith in technology. Maybe, Sevgi thought sourly, he’d grown up in Jesusland and immigrated to the Rim.
Norton hesitated. “Statistically, that’s so close to impossible that—”
“Not impossible,” said Rovayo lazily. “Because, my memory serves me right, that happened to some poor motherfucker about seven, eight years back. Exactly that. Woke up and couldn’t get refrozen, had to sit out the whole voyage.”
“Yes, I remember that, too.” Norton nodded. “The cryocap spat him out and wouldn’t reset, some kind of systems glitch. Guy had to sit out the trajectory until the recovery crew got to him. See, if the transport is close enough to point of origin, emergency systems turn it around and send it back to meet the rescue ship, which cuts the retrieval time right down. If they’re closer to the end of the journey, they burn emergency fuel to speed up. However you cut it, you don’t need that much food to keep someone alive until they’re recovered.”
Well, Sevgi parenthesized to herself, not if you luck out and get a friendly orbital configuration anyway. But we don’t like to talk about that, guys. That’s what we in the trade like to call a Quiet Fact. Sort of thing even accredited COLIN staff won’t necessarily have pointed out to them. Sort of thing you might have to dig a little for.
But as Horkan’s Pride fell silently, implacably homeward, Sevgi had done that digging. Detective Ertekin has a sound analytical approach to casework, her first-year homicide report had come back one time, and shows energy and enthusiasm in absorbing fresh background detail. She has a talent for adjusting rapidly to new circumstances. She did her homework, they were trying to say, and here, nearly a decade later in the heart of COLIN, she did it again. Did her homework and found that the distance between Earth and Mars could vary by up to a factor of six. Mars, it seemed, orbited elliptically, and that plus the different orbital velocities of the two planets meant that they could be anything between about sixty and about four hundred million kilometers apart, depending on when you chose to span the gap. Even oppositions—Mars and Earth catching up to each other, running temporarily neck and neck, so to speak—could vary by a million or more klicks. COLIN transit launches took some account of these variations, but since the cycle worked itself out over several years, you couldn’t just wait around and send all your traffic at the short end. That semi-famous unscheduled wake-up guy eight or so years back had gotten lucky, hit somewhere near an opposition with the trajectory down well under the hundred million klicks.
This time around, their homecoming guy hadn’t been so lucky. Horkan’s Pride ate the thick end of the cycle, was coming home across more than three hundred million kilometers of cold, empty space.
And no lunch stops.
“Okay,” said Rovayo. “So there’s no SOS because the n-djinn is down. But there’s got to be provision for a manual backup, right?”
Norton nodded. “Yes. It isn’t difficult to do. There are step-by-step instructions nailed up in the coms nest.”
“And our guy chose to ignore them.”
“So it appears, yes. He ran silent all the way home, and presumably from somewhere close to the Mars end. There’s not enough food on board to do that, not even for one person. You want to sit in silence and wait out the whole trajectory, you’ve got to find something else to eat.”
“So the guy is fucking cracked.” The tinge of told-you-so in Rovayo’s voice. Bending back to her original assumptions. Okay, so she’d let this be a man, but she wasn’t going to believe he could be sane. “Got to be. He didn’t need—”
“Yeah, he did,” Sevgi said it to the air, detachedly. Time to run this for everybody’s benefit. “He did need to run silent. He couldn’t call in the rescue ship, and he couldn’t get back in the cryocap, assuming that it would have let him, because both those options would have defeated his whole purpose.”
A flicker of quiet. She saw Rovayo shoot an exasperated glance at Coyle. The big cop spread his hands.
“The purpose being?”
“To get home free.”
“Seems a little extreme,” said Rovayo sardonically. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“No, it’s not extreme.” Sevgi could hear herself talking, but the words seemed suddenly heavy, hard to get out. The syn was deserting her, retreating from her speech centers, leaving her with the fading light of the inspiration but no clear way to get it across. She fumbled for clarity. “Look, spaceflight’s a closed system. You dock in orbit, that’s quarantine control, post-cryocap medical checks, ID download. A week, usually, before they let you down the nanorack elevator and out. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t want to go through all that. He couldn’t afford to arrive cryocapped with the others, and he certainly couldn’t afford to be rescued. Both those options end at the nanorack. He needed to walk away unseen, unregistered. And this was the only way he could do it.”
“Yeah, but why?” Coyle wanted to know. “Six or seven months of cannibalism, isolation, probable insanity. Risking a splashdown at the end of it all. Plus hotwiring the crycocap, that’s got to carry some attendant risk, right? I mean, come on. How badly could you want to get home free?”
A wry grin from Norton, but he said nothing. Not for public consumption. Sevgi waved the diplomacy away.
“That’s missing the point. It’s no secret that there are people on Mars who wish they’d never signed up, who’d like to come home. But they’re the grunts, the cheap labor end of the Colony effort. This man was not a grunt. We’re talking about someone who’s at ease manipulating cryogen and medical datasystems, who’s able to operate the onboard emergency landing protocols—”
“Yeah, that’s something else I don’t get,” Rovayo said, frowning. “The whole trip, this guy’s taking the passengers in and out of the cryocaps to feed off. Why not just kill one of them and stick himself in the empty freezer in their place.”