Chapter Two- Where the reader gets a better idea of what a mess the crew is in, and the really, really unlikely solution that, on the surface, looks quite simple, but inevitably isn’t.

Someone had named it the Sage Room long before Captain Haigh had inherited the ship, and the captain didn’t see any compelling reason to change it. He still thought it was a silly name for a conference room on a starship; it would have made more sense, at least style-wise, to name the conference rooms after things one might encounter on a voyage through space. Why not the Nebula Room, or the “White Dwarf Conference Center?” At least the self-illuminated walls glowed with a pale green hue, which made sage a reasonable, if somewhat strange, choice.

Captain Haigh was wearing his Situation Report Receiving Face, which meant that no matter what sort of bad news Chance and the others gave him, he would simply nod, as if he was expecting to hear exactly what they told them. He had done quite a bit of nodding in the last ten minutes. He was tired of nodding, and especially tired of Chance peering at him over the table with that hawkish Montalban head and the faintest touch of a grin.

As Chance had explained, with what the captain imagined was a slight Mexican accent, the Explorer suffered from two very serious problems. The first was fuel. It was possible, but not completely certain, that the ship had enough fuel to get the big Heisenburg drive to turn over one more time, hopefully long enough to land them in some area of known space, which led very nicely into the second problem. No one on the ship had any idea where “known space” had gone. It was probably exactly where they left it, but they had to figure out where they were presently located before they could go back and figure out where they had been. Being lost in space isn’t like being lost in County Cork; you can’t simply follow the road and get stuck in a roundabout for a half an hour until some kindly Irish motorist backs off enough to let you get back on the N20. The N20 is largely stationary, so if you lose it, you have at least a fifty-fifty chance of running into it again. In space, everything is busy making its way through an expanding universe, which makes choosing a direction risky even at the best of times.

“So that’s the bad news,” said the captain. “What are our options?” He hoped that the answer didn’t involve supplications to beings of supernatural might, even though Captain Haigh was certain they’d given him help in the past.

“Well,” said Chance. “It seems that we are in luck. We are not the only humans to have crossed paths with this world.”

“Go on,” said the captain, nodding.

“Our scanners have picked up the unmistakable shape of an Aramis Class Colonial Transport, embedded in the crust at around 30 degrees north latitude, 44 degrees west longitude. From the mineral signatures our probes picked up, it seems that it has been here for quite some time. Also, there is atmospheric evidence of human activity.”

The phrase, Thank God, We’ve Stumbled Across A Fuel Station flitted through the captain’s mind, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

“However, we haven’t picked up any radio traffic, so it’s possible that all hands died when the ship made planetfall. But even if there are no survivors down there, I think the ship itself could hold the solution to both our problems. As everyone knows, Aramis class ships ran on fuel cells very similar to our own. If I could get my hands on some, I think Papa Bantan could modify them so that they’d power up the Heisenburg, at least temporarily. Also, if we could get to the ship’s Navigational computer, we could pull the logs and find out where the ship was when it last jumped.

Captain Haigh nodded, hoping that, contrary to what Chance had said, everyone didn’t know about Aramis-Class fuel cells. Captain Haigh wasn’t entirely sure about the fuel cells on his own ship. But nodding seemed to make the whole thing palatable, even if he had no idea how one would go about extracting a fuel cell from a partially buried hulk, and then returning said fuel cell to a ship in orbit, and then somehow changing that ancient chunk of metal and-well, whatever Aramis-Class fuel cells were made of-into something usable in the Explorer.

“I take it we can’t access the Aramis’s jump log from orbit?” asked Shatman.

“No, Chance replied. There’s no indication of a functioning power source near the crash site. It looks like we’ll have to send down a crew.”

Captain Haigh nodded. His first inclination was to roll his eyes and say, “Good luck with that,” but he kept silent.It wouldn’t do anyone any good to make a remark like that; it was his ship, and he would ultimately have to be the one to decide who to take on the landing team. Or rather, who would be the least able to resist being dragged bodily aboard the shuttle craft, drugged, strapped in, and then launched into space knowing that the only thing that was absolutely certain to happen was being trapped inside a fireball for several terrifying minutes before the air pressure became strong enough to turn the Eustachian Tubes into searing tendrils of liquid agony, which was the cue to begin praying for a landing they could all walk away from.

And that was what awaited the few unlucky souls who weren’t completely agoraphobic.

Spacers are an odd lot. They’re perfectly content to gaze out of a starship viewing platform at the utter, black emptiness of space, with nothing to see for billions of light-years in every direction except the vast array of impossibly distant stars. They think nothing of hitting a button on a console that will actually grab the fabric of the universe and crumple it like a fistful of aluminum foil. They could whistle a happy tune when the universe sprang back into its old shape, taking them with it, most of the time somewhere near their intended destination, in the blink of an eye. But these same hardy folk are, more often than not, reduced to the fetal position by the mere notion of clouds drifting lazily in the open atmosphere above their heads. A somewhat ironic result of humanity’s expansion into space was a pervasive rise of spacer-specific mood disorders.. The Interplanetary Manual of Mental Diseases and Disorders refers to the one in question as Extraterranic Agoraphobia. In some studies, nearly three out of four starship workers suffered from the disorder.

The Captain rarely asked anyone on his ship to board a planetbound shuttle. However, this qualified as a bona fide emergency, one that could strand them in orbit around this uncharted planet for the conceivable future, and so some people would have to be pressed into service, whether they liked it or not.

“How many people are we going to need on this landing team?” asked the captain.

“Well, it depends on whether or not we find usable fuel cells in the wreck,” said Chance. “I recommend at least eight, just to be on the safe side.”

Captain Haigh reflected for a moment on just how ludicrous it was to describe anything the crew of the Explorer did as “safe.” He was about to mention as much to Chance, but one look at Chance’s sly, yet hawkish Montalban grin and the thick, expressive eyebrows, slightly raised as if the two of them were enjoying some private joke, and he decided to nod instead.

‘Well, we need eight people. I’ll take volunteers first, but if that doesn’t work we’ll use Natural Selection.”

“I’ll see to the volunteers,” said Shatman. “I know of an Actuator’s Mate down in Deck 23 that would jump at the chance to get his feet dirty.”

“See to it, Mr. Shatman,” said Captain Haigh. As much as he hated ceremony, even he had to admit that handing out formal orders saved a lot of effort haggling over who was to do what. He also got a perverse thrill out ordering people around, and finding to his own complete surprise that everyone did at least a close approximation of what he told them to do. After ten years of flitting about space, that part of being a starship captain remained as fresh and enjoyable as ever.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3