Voyage to Enlil: Log 8

Geosynchronous Orbit over Delta Vulpes III
Delta Vulpes System

We made the jump back to Delta Vulpes without incident, arriving on a good track to enter orbit over our helium extractor station. A remote inquiry to the station showed that it had accumulated another 68 kilograms of helium-3 since we left for Enlil. Jasmine’s calculations showed that we’d need about another 130 kg to make it back to Narion, especially if we wanted to avoid Jaffa just to play things safe.

However, she somewhat grudgingly proposed an alternative: by cutting through the Kryx system, we could reach Cheyenne on just slightly more fuel than we already had available to us. One day more in Delta Vulpes, and then we could make our way home. I understood Jazz’s reluctance to travel through her old home system – and the system that later became her prison – and I appreciate her coming forward with the suggestion in spite of that.

Captain’s Log, July 6th, 2330. While we wait for our helium extractor station to produce enough fuel for our return journey, Intrepid will investigate a faint anomalous reading detected from the moon Delta Vulpes IV-a. The long interplanetary journey will allow the crew time to relax and review the data and samples we’ve recovered thus far, as well as to consider opportunities we might explore on our return voyage.

Heller had one such idea for our return. When we’d jumped to Copernicus Minor during our strike against Ecliptic, we’d rode out our drive recharge over the outer moon of the system’s large ice giant. We only got fleeting scans of the inner moon, which quickly receded below the horizon of the iceball, but he detected some readings that hinted at life signs. After consulting with the rest of the team, he suggested to me that emerge from our grav jump at this inner moon and make at least a short excursion to document the creatures that might exist there.

I had slightly mixed feelings about this idea. While the most efficient path to Cheyenne would require a stopover in Copernicus Minor, I was also mindful of Jasmine’s warnings about the water purifier, and I didn’t want to unnecessarily add more days to our journey. But I also recognized that this is exactly the sort of side trip that Intrepid was designed to support… and at the end of the day, if we had an equipment failure this late in our travels we could at least make our way to the UC SYSDEF base in Kryx for emergency repairs – no matter how much Jasmine would hate the idea.

So I approved the plan and tasked Cora to help Heller develop a mission plan for a one day excursion to the surface. I left them to it, retiring to the observation deck for a while to process my own thoughts.

If my goal in this life had been to hide my Starborn talents and avoid getting pulled into their great game of chasing artifacts and temples, I wasn’t doing a very good job so far. I’d let two people know the truth, and I’d promised to go to Procyon with the Dauntless when she was ready. I knew that would lead to Constellation discovering one of the temples, and that event always started the great race. It meant that sooner or later – probably sooner – the Hunter would come calling on the Lodge, and someone I cared about would die.

That wasn’t what I wanted from this life, but it seemed that no mater how hard I fought against the currents of fate, I could only bend the outcome so far. I wondered if there was a lesson in that – and with this life in particular. So much was different this time, and even then these patterns of behavior and consequence still played out. Intellectually, I understood that these events were the product of an infinite number of variables that remained largely unchanged regardless of what actions I took; on the other hand, I wasn’t willing to just give up and let the riptide push me back to the Unity and rebirth once again. Not this time.

I still had time. A lot of time perhaps. Dauntless wouldn’t be built overnight. I wouldn’t sabotage the process – that would be a betrayal of my promise to Jasmine – but it did give me time. The next question for me was… what to do with that time.

Cora Coe interrupted my reveille as she ascended the stairs into the observation deck.

“Oh, Captain,” she said, “I didn’t know you were up here.”

I waved away the apology, “I was just taking in the stars. How are you doing?”

“I’m good… well, it’s complicated. Have you ever been… happy to have some time off, but antsy to do something?”

I nodded in assent. “Too many times. And you’re feeling it now?”

“Mr. Heller asked me to help him plan the mission on Copernicus Minor I-a, but the scans he’s talking about… the data’s all disorganized and the computer’s parsing the logs, but it’s taking a while. And there isn’t much else for me to do. I feel like I should just sit down with a book but I can’t relax enough to get into it.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes,” I commiserated. “Maybe get in some time on the treadmill, work off some of that nervous energy.”

We chatted a bit longer, and I was happy to know that Cora’s training was going well and she was happy in this new, more formal relationship. Cora had been only 12 years old in my first three lives, and even this time when I’d first met her she’d been 16 and while mature for her age still very much a child. The adult she’d grown into was fast transitioning from a person who I didn’t mind having around to a person who I valued having on my crew. I wondered if the Cora of my first life would have been the same if I’d waited a decade before going through the Unity, or if this incarnation of her – a woman who grew to adulthood before Sam and his ex got some closure on the events that set them apart – was fundamentally unique.

That brought my thoughts full circle back to how I would break free of Victor’s perpetual game. Twice I’d convinced him and the Keeper at least to walk away from their final, deadly confrontation, but that hadn’t prevented all the bloodshed leading up to the standoff under Masada III. Perhaps if I could identify the Keeper earlier, I thought, maybe that would make a difference. But how to accomplish that feat was an entirely different question.

I descended from the observation deck feeling more conflicted and frustrated than I had when I went up there. At length I took some of my own advice and got some workout time before settling into my cabin to work on the first draft of my report to Walter. Dauntless would need more fuel tankage than we originally planned, even accounting for the allowances we made for her greater mass and inherent lower engine efficiency. And she’d need dedicated water tankage to reduce the surge demand on the purifier systems. I knew from my past experience on the Kepler project in my second life that this kind of scope creep is how design work spirals out of control, but I also recognized that this mission had revealed the water purifier as a potential single point of failure for Intrepid. We couldn’t afford for Dauntless to have such a flaw.

We pulled into orbit of the distant moon at about 0230 hours on July 6th. Orbital scans didn’t show much of interest – lots of water ice and nickel, which might have had some value if we were setting up a long term habitat – but other than that and the pesky sensor anomaly that we still couldn’t pin down, it was barren. Sam was off shift when we pulled in, so I asked Lin and Heller to identify an optimal landing zone and then I set her down myself.

Based on our past experience with Delta Vulpes’ solar radiation levels and the moon’s lack of a magnetosphere, we landed on the night side, but the darkness wasn’t enough to fully hide the barren landscape. I hoped at least that this would make it easier to locate the source of the sensor anomaly, but I decided to wait until the start of the next shift so I could take Sam out with me.

Almost as soon as we pulled the buggy out of the garage, Sam pointed to a rocky ridge in the distance.

“There it is, swing your scanner onto that heading.”

I did as he said, noticing the immediate – if faint – return.

“Biological, huh?” I asked. “Not what I expected for a place this desolate.”

Sam shrugged. “Life finds a way. Let’s get rolling – it’s cold out here.”

We didn’t need to ride out all the way to the ridge. Instead, the terrain slumped down into a small valley, full of shapes that felt very out of place within this environment.

“Looks like coral,” Sam said.

I nodded in agreement, waving a hand across the frozen landscape that stretched out past us. “I wonder how much more is buried under all this ice.”

Sam pointed down towards the base of the valley. “These crystaline minerals – tetrabutylammonium, dithiolene, toluene… these might be remains of a metabolic process. Do you think you can get down into the crevice to pull some close-range scans?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but spot me in case there are thin spots in the surface ice. Let’s take it slow and steady.”

The calculated risk of descending into the valley paid off – we got some very good scans that all but confirmed the metabolic cycle of these long dead life forms. After taking some surface scrapes and drilling out a couple core samples, we headed south to check another anomaly, quickly confirming that it was indeed another upthrust of fossilized coral.

As we headed back for Intrepid, Sam asked, “do you think this moon used to have liquid water?”

“The evidence kind of suggests it, though I’m not sure how. The whole system is an icebox.”

“Yeah, that’s what I kept getting stuck on, too. Hopefully someone with more specialized equipment and resources can take our data and do a deeper investigation. This seems like a mystery worth solving.”

“Agreed,” I said. “That’s the one thing about being an explorer I don’t like – there’s a lot of mysteries that we just don’t have the time or the specialized equipment to solve. We have to leave that to the researchers.”

I suppose that’s our real legacy – the trailblazing that we do paves the way for decades of focused scientific inquiry. The entity that inhabits the Unity has told me several times that my work – that Constellation’s work – paves the way for a golden age of inquiry, though so far I’ve never lingered to see it come to pass. Perhaps in this life, it’ll be different.

On our return to Delta Vulpes III, we discovered that the helium extractor had collected another 30 kilograms of fuel. This was sufficient to get us back to Cheyenne where we could refuel at a commercial port, but it was less than we had anticipated. Up until that point, I’d been seriously considering leaving the extractor in place to serve as a pit stop we could use during future expeditions, but I was concerned the deposit we were tapping was already becoming exhausted and that we’d just be leaving behind junk.

I asked Lin and Heller to examine the extractor and give me their opinion. Lin confirmed that extractor efficiency had dropped off considerably since we first set up the fuel station, but that it seemed to be plateauing at a sustainable rate. Moreover, she pointed out that the time to dismantle the station would further delay our return to the Settled Systems and increase the strain on our ailing water purifier.

Based on that recommendation, I asked my two old colleagues to do a final round of maintenance on the extractor so that we could leave it behind. If we came out this way again in the future, we’d hopefully find the tank farm fully stocked and ready to extend our journey – or speed our return home.

With our internal tanks showing 186 kilograms of fuel, I ordered Intrepid back to orbit and made final preparations for the jump to Copernicus Minor. We burned almost half our fuel on that jump, but that was the one big expenditure we needed to make. While not quite in the Settled Systems yet, we were right on the periphery.

While the grav drive recharged, we made a brief excursion to look for signs of life on the ice moon of Copernicus Minor I-a. Our initial scans confirmed the faint biomarkers we’d detected earlier, as well as some other anomalous readings. Interestingly, we also detected large swathes of relatively pure water ice, though most of the deposits were contaminated with chlorine and lithium salts.

Considering the weak magnetosphere, we set down on the night side of the moon. Heller and I took out the rover and went looking for any unusual sensor readings. It didn’t take long before we found animal life – little creepy crawly scorpion things that we observed scraping exposed rock to feed on microscope life.

These hard-shelled critters turned out to be the exception rather than the rule, however. Most of the creatures we observed on our excursion were rubbery, soft-bodied crawlers. They appeared to primarily be scavengers, digging down into the ice searching for prey that we weren’t able to observe directly.

Broadly speaking, we catalogued three different families of life forms on the moon – the exoskeletal rock-scrapers, large soft-bodied scavengers who seemed to dig down fairly deep into the ice in search of prey, and much smaller scavengers who seemed to subsist on nutrients closer to the surface. That last group was somewhat noteworthy because its tissue appeared to be chemically compatible with human metabolism. Between the areas of safe water and the digestible proteins in some of the animal life, a stranded crew might be able to survive here for a long time as long as they could maintain shelter and air supply.

The plan was that after a break for lunch, Heller and I would take a second trip towards one of the sensor anomalies we’d detected during the orbital scan. But while I sipped the last of my tea, I noticed that something tasted a little off. After taking a little sip herself, Jasmine agreed that the chemical taste I’d detected was not supposed to be there. While we didn’t scrub the second stage of the excursion, Jazz pulled all the qualified engineering personnel off their other tasks to check on the water purifier again.

What we’d picked up on sensors was a cavern – or rather, a void in the ice. It much have been entirely submerged at one point but over time the shifting surface geography had exposed it. My hand scanner picked up some minerals such as vanadium that we hadn’t detected on the surface, and Heller and I descended into the void to get more complete readings.

Unfortunately, we had to cut our visit short as the outside temperature dropped suddenly and rapidly. I was shivering badly by the time we got back to Intrepid despite the best efforts of my suit heaters, and I got the pleasure of listening to Jasmine report on the water purifier while Doctor Tannehill applied medicated ointments to a number of spots where I’d started to develop frostbite.

“Ouch,” she said, “that looks painful. Cold planets and you just don’t get along, do they?”

I winced a little as Tannehill jabbed me with an injector. “You should start feeling better soon,” she explained, “that injection will help normalize your body temperature and promote healing of the frostbite areas. Hopefully we won’t have to debride too much tissue, and I’m confident you’ll keep all your fingers.”

“Great,” I muttered, “no seriously, thank you Doctor. I appreciate it. Jazz, what’s the prognosis on the water purifier?”

She shook her head. “Not good. The filtration membranes have failed and when we replaced them they failed again almost immediately. We need to do a forensic teardown of the whole system when we get back to Narion, because there’s obviously a critical failure somewhere in the engineering.”

“And until then, what do we do?”

“The crew is off ship’s water effective immediately. They can still use it for showering and cleaning, but no consumption. I’ve inventoried our remaining supply of packaged drinks and set up a rationing schedule for them, and Barrett is working on boiling the alcohol out of the beer and liquor supply to build out our emergency supply. I’m confident we can make it back to Cheyenne, but no more diversions or field trips.”

“OK,” I said. “Let me ask the question you don’t want me to ask. Should we jump to the Key and ask UC SYSDEF for help?”

“Not if you don’t want to have to go looking for a new chief engineer,” she said. “If it were really the only way I’d say so, but unless there’s no other alternative I don’t want to ever be in weapons range of the Key or Vigilance ever again. We can make it to Cheyenne, I guarantee it.”

I took that in slowly, before nodding. “I trust you, we’ll jump to the outer moon of Suvorov as planned and avoid contact with UC SYSDEF. And then straight on to Cheyenne.”

“Thank you,” Jazz said quietly before adding, “and remember, no field trips. My guarantee’s only good if you don’t get distracted chasing after sensor traces.”

We lifted from Copernicus Minor I-a without any further incident and didn’t waste any time spooling up the grav drive. The Suvorov system, better known these days as Kryx, had once been the headquarters of the Crimson Fleet pirates. I’d gone undercover with them some time back as part of a joint UC SYSDEF/UC Vanguard operation to disrupt the Fleet’s operations, and ever since that time Kryx has been crawling with UC SYSDEF presence. Given her history with the Fleet, I completely understand why Jasmine didn’t want to go anywhere near the Fleet’s former space station, and so we plotted our jump to emerge at Ice, Suvorov’s outermost moon.

Back when I’d been regularly coming and going through Kryx, I’d taken long-range scans of all the moons – scans thar were still in Intrepid‘s memory banks. It was probably fair for Jazz to warn me off the temptation of making a landing, because Ice had a few characteristics I wouldn’t have minded investigating – notably evidence of vast subsurface oceans – but I had to make do with observing the moon from orbit this time.

True to her word, Jazz got us to Ice with plenty of fuel to space for the last leg of our trip back to Cheyenne. We had a couple hours to kill while we waited for the grav drive to fully recharge, and I pulled the crew together in the ops center for a final briefing before we officially reentered the Settled Systems. We walked through how each functional area had performed and went over opportunities for improvement on subsequent voyages; everyone got a chance to weight in but most of the discussion was with Jasmine and Heller.

The water purifier issue that haunted the last stages of the voyage was a major concern for Jazz that needed attention before we took Intrepid on any more long expeditions. We all agreed that after handing over our contraband to the TMD based on Mars, we’d be taking Intrepid back to Narion for a full diagnostic and refit pass, as well as revising some of the requirements for Dauntless to ensure it had better resilience against this kind of single point failure.

Heller had some concerns of his own. Based on his analysis our survey results, he’d identified a number of commercially viable resource sites and he was confident Constellation could obtain a good financial return from selling the data. On the other hand, compared to some of the operations we’d run with Argos Extractors, Constellation was still behind the curve in terms of our ground operations capabilities. He noted in particular how several times we’d run into trouble because we weren’t equipped to set up emergency shelters to ride out inclement weather – something my still-healing frostbite loudly confirmed.

I agreed with Heller’s assessment, and he and Lin suggested a few vendors who could supply us with prefabs and materials for better ground mission support. With some help from Sarah and Sam, and with Cora looking over my shoulder for most of the session, we put together a preliminary requirements package that I’d hand off to Walter once we returned to Narion. I trusted him to handle the procurement, though I recommended the Neon Mining League as a possible contractor. Saburo Okadigbo was an old friend, not just in this life but in all my prior ones, and I was sure he could use the business.

The rest of the crew seemed generally happy with our accomplishments. Everyone was disappointed that we hadn’t been able to secure a large Vytinium supply for the Dauntless project, but we’d gone in knowing that was a possibility and we’d made so many other fascinating discoveries that the sting had mostly passed by now. We agreed, however, that future expeditions needed to have more concrete goals or at least a guaranteed return on the investment.

Then it was just one last jump and we were at Cheyenne, capital of the Freestar Collective. We set down without any issues and let the ground crew get to work refueling our helium tanks. At the same time, Jazz headed into the city to procure some repair parts as well as a supply of drinkable water for our trip to Mars and Narion. Intrepid‘s first official voyage had been a little rocky, but we’d made it home.

Captain Log, July 8th 2330. Intrepid has returned to the Settled Systems. While the Vytinium lead proved disappointing, we’ve brought back extensive scientific and survey data – to say nothing of a large volume of material confiscated from the Ecliptic mercenary group – and our crew has gained valuable expertise. Once Intrepid has undergone maintenance and refit, I eagerly look forward to her next voyage.

End mission log.