Taking Joy for a Spin
by Rado Dyne
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Table of Contents, Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
Chapter 6: No Place Like Home
conclusion
Once we were back on Lariat, Elom had to treat Cap’s leg while she was sitting on the bridge. While everyone focused on getting us out of the cluster around the Lagrange point, I headed to maintenance to check my hunch about the remaining harness. It had been shut off during “the event,” which is what I was mentally calling the time when all our harnesses failed simultaneously.
They had all failed together, by the way; I checked, first thing. Everyone had lost their G-field at the same time, to the microsecond. I’m not a physicist, or a specialist in G-field dynamics, but I know the fundamentals enough to do practical things with the technology and service it. That’s just the thing. For a relatively new branch of physics, the science and the implementation is solid.
Ever since the technology was first discovered on Avalon, and they made the choice to share it with everyone, development has moved quickly. When a field fails, it happens gradually, and safeguards let the operator know long before anything catastrophic occurs. People use them to fly around on planets, in gravity wells that kill if you suddenly lose the ability to resist them. Unless someone is keeping it secret, I don’t think there has been a disastrous failure, not outside of a lab environment where it was being forced to happen. The electronics can fail, but the field shutdown is gradual.
I put on the harness. For safety reasons, they have to be worn by someone in order to switch them on. I hit the switch. It indicated ready. I pressed the actuator. I moved. That means something external hit us. Whatever it was, it had killed all the active harnesses, while doing nothing to the electronics or anything else. So not an electromagnetic pulse; that would have destroyed the electronics. A graviton pulse maybe, or a wave. Particles are waves and all that. It was at this time that Cap summoned everyone to the bridge. I went up wearing my harness.
It turned out that something had happened to the system, the whole system around Proxima Centauri. Atlantis was simply not there. The watery jewel that we called home. The only really inhabitable planet in the system. Gone. Krishnan and Merick had worked out that there was something there, in the place where Atlantis should be. It was far too small though, it was definitely not a planet, and it did not broadcast in the radio spectrum.
I showed my mates the still functional harness. Back in maintenance, I had been relieved that the failures were not my fault, that they had been caused by something external. I didn’t care about redemption for a mistake anymore, but I had to share the relevant information. Everyone did. Our best guess was that what I had been calling “the event” was really a gravity-related event.
Star-field mapping seemed to show that everything else in the system around Proxima was still there, but that they had all moved a bit wrongly. Something had happened to Atlantis, and it affected the gravity of everything nearby. Something had displaced Atlantis, or replaced it, but the salient fact was we had no home to go back to.
We all reported our findings, but gradually we all fell silent. After a while Cap rubbed her brow and told Maxim to set a course to the O’Neill cylinder. It was under construction, but there was nowhere else to go. Then she dismissed everyone and most of us went back to quarters, save those with critical duties.
I caught Maxim on his way to the bridge and pressed Trish’s oxy bottle into his hand. He nodded slightly but neither of us spoke.
Later, I was in my cabin staring at the ceiling. The Lariat had been constructed prior to G-fields, which meant that, under acceleration, there were a number of surfaces that acted as “down” when our main drive was fired up. We had some semblance of gravity from acceleration once we were underway, so I had been trying to rest, but failing.
My door chimed. I made my way to it and told it to open. There stood Cap, a stasis boot on her right foot, looking more downtrodden than anyone should. She said nothing, but then I remembered myself.
“Would you like to come in?”
She trundled forward in response. I stepped to the side and then closed the door as she passed. I gestured to the bed and she sat. After a moment I sat opposite her. For a long while we both remained silent.
“I’m sorry I never answered your question,” she began in a more subtle voice than I’ve ever heard her use.
“You did.”
“I... I—”
“No, you did. Why do you think I let it rest? I know where your focus lies, and I know why you don’t make use of the ship’s joy. I—”
She leaned forward suddenly, and wrapped both her arms around me. I’m trained to read people, but she did take me by surprise. I recovered quickly, which was good, because she basically slumped into me then. At first I used my arms to support her, but her weight bore us both backwards. I could feel small tremors and convulsions in her shoulders, and then I softened.
“Relax into me,” I whispered slowly. I shifted slightly, making us both more comfortable. “Relax into me.”
Copyright © 2022 by Rado Dyne
