Open Writing

Dennis stirred in his seat and looked around. “Are you guys all right?” he asked.

Julia, her face was pale and her tunic bloody, sat unmoving in her acceleration chair, and Jonathan was bending over her. Arnold opened his eyes and blinked to clear his vision, then turned to his wife. With a cry, he fumbled off his safety harness and went to her.

“Dennis, Julia’s hurt!”

Struggling with the shuttle’s controls, Dennis replied, “Do what you can for her, Arnie, I’m a little busy right now.”

As Dennis fought to stop the ship’s tumbling, Arnie and Jonathan examined Julia’s wounds, then straightened and stood beside her, obviously relieved. The injury was a gunshot to her left shoulder. There was an entry and exit wound, and the bleeding was stopping on its own. Arnold recalled that he had killed the creature that had shot Julia, and felt vindicated.

Leaving Julia safely harnessed in her chair, Arnold got the first aid kit and began cleaning and dressing Julia’s wounds. After he took care of the shoulder wound, he saw to the cuts and scrapes on her arms.

Meanwhile, Jonathan sat in one of the two forward chairs and watched Dennis at the controls. “Anything I can do to help, Dennis?”

Dennis smiled grimly. “You bet, thanks. I’ve got us under control, but we’ve got to find out where we are, and how we’re going to get back to the ship.” He smiled self-consciously. “I’m no great shakes at astrogation; that’s going to be your baby.”

“I’ll get right on to it,” Jonathan nodded.

“Good enough. Come sit here next to me and bring up the star charts on your screen. We’ve got to find out where we are. One thing, though.” He said apologetically. “I think the radio’s busted.”

Jonathan took a deep breath. “Oh, dear. We’re not going to have much luck contacting the ship without a radio. Have we any form of communications at all?”

Dennis shook his head, and Arnold sighed in exasperation. “Well, we’ll have to do it by dead reckoning, and I have to warn you, it was already going to be hard when we had all the equipment working. With no radio…well, all we can do is try.”

“Hey! What are we worrying about? The Hermes will find us soon. All we have to really do is wait. Right?” Dennis said.

Jonathan shrugged, “I don’t know. If we had communications, I agree there’d be no problem. Without it, well, for all we know, we’re getting farther and farther away from the Hermes all the time. So let’s find out just where we are and then we’ll take it from there. All right?”

Dennis nodded.

Arnold had finished taking care of Julia’s injuries, said, “I’ll help as soon as I figure out what do do with Julia. I can’t leave her sitting here.”

“Maybe we ought to put her in one of the sleep modules. Those things have some kind of medical system, don’t they?” Jonathan said.

“Yes, that’s it! The autodoc! We can put her in there and it’ll take care of her until we can get some help. Good thinking, Jonathan. Give me a hand with her, will you?”

Together, they lifted the unconscious Julia out of the chair and carried her to the rear of the shuttle, where the five sleep modules were. Jonathan touched the control on one of them, and the transparent cover rose. They laid Julia in it and set the controls to monitor her, and backed away as the cover closed. Then they returned to their seats at the front of the shuttle and began work on the calculations that would tell them where they were. And, they hoped, where the Hermes was.

They worked in silence, trying to ignore the thought of not finding the ship. The shuttle was only meant for short runs; the sleep chambers had been installed by ’tau’s people to provide more room for them should they have to travel a long distance, but the shuttle was always meant to remain on board the ship. Its engines were conventional thrusters, and they wouldn’t take them anywhere near Earth, some 900 light-years away.

With a growing sense of desperation, the three men bent to their tasks.

* * * *

Two hours later, Dennis sat back and stretched, then turned and the three men just looked at each other, their anxiety obvious.

Arnold broke the silence. “Well, Dennis, old friend. It would seem that we’re…um…”

“Buggered?”

Arnold laughed shortly. “Crude, but accurate.”

They sat looking silently at the stars. “What do you suggest we do, Jonathan? Any ideas?” Arnold asked.

“Well, I can only see one course of action open to us, but let’s go over our situation.” Jonathan paused, and began again. “Our best efforts at fixing our position put us several thousand kilometers from the planet. I can’t find any sign or sight of the Hermes; perhaps the planet’s got between them and us, I don’t know. There’s some sort of corona around it; Lord knows what happened. It appears the entire planet may have exploded.”

“That would have solved the problem of what to do about those creatures,” Arnold said.

Dennis grunted. “Good riddance. I just hope all of our people got off before it went bang.”

They pondered that thought, then Jonathan continued, “As I see it, there’s no point in us wasting fuel trying to find them. It’s a big universe; we could search the rest of our lives and not find them. Which brings me to another point. This shuttle was never meant for sustained space travel, and has rations only for a couple of days; that alone pretty much defines our options.” He took a deep breath, and looked at Arnold. “We have no choice; we have to set the shuttle on a course for Earth, get into the sleep modules, and trust to the cryosleep units to keep us safe until someone picks us up.”

Arnold and Dennis looked at him glumly for a moment, then nodded. “I agree,” Arnold said, “it’s our only option.”

Dennis nodded, and they sat searching their minds for another option, but found none. Finally, Dennis reached for the shuttle’s controls.

“Well, if we’re going to do this, we might as well do it now.”

Arnold nodded, and began to assist him. “‘If ’tis to be done, t’were well it were done quickly’,” he murmured.

“Shakespeare,” Jonathan nodded, and smiled slightly. “Sort of.”

Arnold smiled back. “Close enough.”

They set to work plotting a course back to the vicinity of their home planet. When they were done, they would set the engines to run at full power to reach their maximum speed. Then, when the fuel ran out, they would coast through the airless vacuum of space until they were picked up…or not.
Meanwhile, they would enter three of the remaining four sleep modules and set the cryosleep units for indefinite sleep. At conventional speeds, the time to travel 900 light years was almost impossible to comprehend. By the time they arrived, if they ever did, humans might not even exist. But they had to try. As Jonathan had said, there was no other option.

Course plotted and drive engaged, they set Julia’s unit to cryosleep, then entered their own units, lay back and got comfortable. The built-in anti-grav system in the module took over, rendering them weightless, and they felt the numbing effect of cryosleep beginning.

Jonathan had time for one last thought, and it was of his comrades. Then he surrendered to the unit’s embrace, and the shuttle accelerated away from the Rigel system, on course for earth 900 light-years away.

* * * *

“Any sign of them, ’tau?”

Cal stood behind the alien, scanning surrounding space for the shuttle, with Karen watching anxiously.

After a moment, ‘tau looked up at Cal, [I fear not, friend Cal. It is possible that they have somehow got over to the other side of the planet. Putting it between them and us would effectively mask any signal the shuttle might give off.]

Cal frowned. “But we should still be able to find them, shouldn’t we?”

‘tau just looked at Cal. It was the first time Cal had seen him look helpless and at a loss, and it worried him almost as much as the fact that some of their best friends in the world were missing. He turned from the viewport. “What are our options? Is there any point in staying here, or should we head for Earth? Can they get there in the shuttle?”

[No, friend Cal. The shuttle is only designed as a short-haul vehicle. It does not have the engine capacity to reach lightspeed. If they have survived the blast from the planet, then they might be anywhere in the vicinity. I fear we could search for them for a very long time, and still be unsuccessful.]

Karen turned from the viewport. “We can’t just give up on them! This is Jonathan! And Arnold and Dennis and Julia! They are our closest friends! We can’t give up!”

* * * *

After an hour’s searching, it was evident that, whatever had become of the shuttle, it was beyond their help. Reluctantly, and with a terrible feeling of helplessness, Cal asked ’tau to set the Hermes on the path to Earth. They could only hope that, somehow, their dearest friend would survive.

With heavy hearts, they left the running of the ship to ’tau and his people, and retired to their cabins. The trip to Earth would take only five days; when they arrived, they would alert the Earth authorities and organize a search for their friends. Cal did his best to keep everyone’s spirits up, but they knew that searching for them would be looking for the universe’s smallest needle in its largest haystack. Still, they would try.