Chapter Four:

That night, Valentina did not sleep well. She had a dream she was back on Earth, driving an eighteen-wheeler through a blizzard. Despite the storm, there were quite a few cars still on the road with her. Her headlamps reflected off the curtain of snow. She could hardly see the lines in the road. The cars around her were nothing more than spots of light she occasionally caught glimpses of.

She kept seeing road signs with warnings on them, but could never quite make out their meaning. Either too covered in snow to be properly reflective, or she barreled by too quickly to make out their meaning. She felt blind, knowing that at any second, she could slam into the back of a car, or slide off the road, or barrel off the side of the mountain, all because she’d missed some sign warning her of what lay ahead.

When she awoke, she was shivering so hard her teeth were chattering. She groaned, frustrated with herself for failing to retire to her quarters, instead, she'd fallen asleep strapped to her pilot's seat in the command module. The constant airflow from the environmental controls meant any warmth her body generated was zipped into the system before it could do her any good. It had been foolish of her not to go to her quarters and get the rest she needed.

FORBIN would have prompted her to go to bed, had it still been online. But no, Finn was completely isolated, running a diagnostic to ensure it hadn’t been infected by a viral attack from JMTEP. She thought about how the last thing she’d said to the computer was to leave her alone. The grim irony wasn’t lost on her. And she did feel guilty, even if she was certain FORBIN would probably remind her not to let her personification of its programming make her feel guilty—or something like that.

The stress of the nightmare had settled into a knot in her gut. Val tried to eat the synthesized eggs that made up her breakfast, but the smell made her nauseous. She was emotionally exhausted and wasn’t sure what to do next. What she did know was this was no time for wallowing. There was still another forty-eight hours before the captain would be woken from her hibernation cycle. Plenty of time for Val to make herself useful and prepare for what lay ahead.

The ship itself was doing fine with FORBIN isolated. Each of the ship’s core systems had no immediate threats or issues without Finn watching over them. She’d needed to make a few adjustments, but the ship was on course, with hibernation and life support systems working properly. She didn’t need to prepare for orbital injection—she could do it in her sleep. But outside of her pilot’s duties, the big question hanging over her head was how to prolong their survival in a ship that was meant to land, not stay in orbit indefinitely.

Valentina now knew that they couldn’t land. With all the classified information she now had executive access to about the adaptive virus from JMTEP, even if they tried to quarantine, it was inevitable that some device would connect and the virus would destroy their computer systems as well. That meant figuring out how to prolong life support on a ship with fifty people awake at once. The ship simply wasn’t designed for that. If the mission had gone normally, the bulk of the crew wouldn’t wake from hibernation until they had already landed. With the planet’s breathable air, they wouldn’t need life support. But if all were awake at once in this ship? The sheer volume of carbon dioxide that would be breathed out by that many people at once would overwhelm their life support systems.

Val couldn’t get over how close she’d come to accepting the comms request from JMTEP. Even after she’d decided the colonists were advising her to quarantine the ship, if the colonists hadn’t sent the error code message when they had, Finn likely would have eventually worn her down. She hoped Asclepius V and VI, the two trailing ships still en route to the TRAPPIST system, would fare better than her. At the very least she hoped they wouldn’t lose their FORBIN like she had.

Valentina sipped cool water from a pouch, then pulled up the flight plans of both ships on her wristpad. The first would begin to decelerate and enter the TRAPPIST system three months from now, the second, three months after that. Would they figure out what they needed to in time to enact their own ship’s quarantine and not accept any comms attempts from JMTEP? She overlaid their flight paths over a map of the TRAPPIST system.

“Goddamn it,” she muttered. The planet’s orbits around the TRAPPIST star were against them. By the time the other two ships entered the TRAPPIST system, JMTEP’s planet would be even closer to them relative to their destination—Firenze. Which meant both of these ships would enter JMTEP’s comms range long before they’d enter comms range with their own planet. Val had been lucky that they’d been able to receive those images from the planet’s surface when they had. Asclepius V and VI wouldn’t have that luxury.

She wondered if she would have made the same decisions if her history with JMTEP hadn’t made her assume the worst about their intentions. But NASA tended to attract idealistic people. All it took was one person fancying themselves a trailblazer for peace in the TRAPPIST system and they'd be toast.

“Dammit,” Val said. They couldn’t afford to take that chance. The trailing ships had to be warned. She thought about waiting for the captain to wake and come up with a solution together. But waiting felt unacceptable to her. She had narrowly avoided catastrophe only because the colonists had succeeded in relaying their warnings when they had—delay would have been fatal. Now, it was up to her to do the same for the ships behind.

Valentina couldn’t see any other way.

If only it were as simple as just sending them a message. But even if they were somehow in range—they weren’t—Valentina was wary of exchanging data. She was hopeful they hadn’t been infected by JMTEP’s virus, figuring that other systems on the ship would have started showing issues if they had been. But she wouldn’t be certain until after FORBIN completed its diagnostic. Best to play it safe until then.

So how else could she warn the ships?

And how would she do so without alerting JMTEP? Val wondered. If this virus’s existence was secret intelligence that NASA had gathered, it might be a good idea to not let on to them that she’d figured out their game. She wasn’t sure how much merit there was to that. But it seemed like a prudent strategy given the circumstances.

If only she could get them something physical. The equivalent of a message in a bottle. But one that would be impossible to miss. Maybe a probe?

It would need to be a probe stripped of all electronics. But how would one use a probe to communicate her message without any electronics? The obvious answer was to have the message physically present inside the probe itself—truly a message in a bottle. But then there was the much bigger problem of getting a ship to not only notice this probe but know to pick it up. That meant she needed a way to get more than just the ship’s LIDAR to notice it, or risk being classified as debris.

She wasn’t sure how she’d tackle that particular problem. But sending a probe with no electronics to get from point A to point B? Well, that was just Lambert’s problem—or rather, orbital mechanics, Val’s comfort zone. Unlike all the decisions that would need to be made when the captain woke, this one was a pilot’s problem, something she could solve.

What Valentina needed to calculate was the equivalent of how a quarterback would throw a football with the exact right amount of force and velocity to arrive at a point in time and space, just as the receiver is arriving in that space to catch it. The human brain is elegant and can do that sort of calculation automatically with muscle memory and an inherent understanding of gravity’s effect on the throw. But she would need to do this for a probe that would cross millions of kilometers to get from her ship to theirs, all while considering the TRAPPIST star’s influence. Everything from the star’s gravity to how its radiation would impact the probe’s trajectory.

Valentina smiled. It was a complex problem, but the pieces were coming together in her mind. What had seemed like an impossible task an hour ago was starting to feel doable. Even if she still needed to figure out the not-so-small-task of how the trailing ships would recognize her probe as a message in a bottle, not just passing debris to be ignored.

Still exhausted from her poor night of sleep, but now feeling exhilarated, Val unstrapped herself from her seat in the command module and pushed off to the corridor, grabbing a handrail and pulling herself toward the cargo hold.

When she entered the hold, the ship wasn’t happy, sending her all sorts of alerts. Apparently, there was no reason for someone to enter the hold at this stage of the mission. Lucky for her, executive access meant she could dismiss the alerts and pull up the ship manifest.

It took some doing, but she was able to access the probes on board. Each probe was a small rocket, about a meter in length with fins all along the sides. Inside of each probe was a small circular satellite with cat eye retroreflectors along the circumference. These satellites were planned to be released high in orbit around their planet for atmospheric composition studies. This would help them to start building an understanding of their planet’s weather patterns. She planned on removing the satellites from each probe and replacing them with a message laser-etched into titanium with all the information they needed, warning them of the situation they were in and to not accept any comms requests from JMTEP or risk infecting their computer. She would also warn them about the error message hidden in the satellite imagery that could trigger their computer going into quarantine, just for good measure.

Since there were four probes, Val decided to use all four. Redundancy had been a hallmark of mission success for NASA for nearly three centuries now. Why stop now? Valentina went to work, not taking any chances, she set about stripping the probes of any electronics. There was a chance she was being too paranoid. Even if the ship had somehow been infected, there was no real reason to suspect the probes in deep storage would have been affected too. But if part of the automated launch sequence for these was for the ship to connect to them in some way, that would potentially be enough to spread the virus.

Inside the probe’s cone, she found a trio of solar sails, folded gently and spring-loaded. She was surprised by them at first, wondering if they were a holdover from some other use case. NASA often recycled old hardware SKUs for new purposes.

Valentina worked all day and well into the night. She was able to lock into a deep focus even through the exhaustion settling into her bones. But knowing there was only another thirty hours before the captain would be woken kept her working. It wasn’t exactly a deadline, but she had begun thinking of it as one.

Exhaustion would catch up with her eventually though. It was one thing to work on the hardware of these probes, but she knew if she was going to solve the problem of how the trailing ships would recognize her probes as more than just debris, she needed to get some sleep.

With the probes stripped of all electronics and their flight plans completed, Val forced herself from the cargo hold back to the crew quarters. She curled up into her sleeping bag, feeling the tension from her limbs and joints start to relax after the physical exertion of the day. Sleep, however, proved elusive. She kept thinking of little things, pulling up data or checking calculations on her wristpad, and making notes on her findings so she wouldn’t forget in the morning. But each of these queries or quick notes turned into several minutes of squinting at her wristpad in the darkness.

Despite that, she slept for a few hours. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to give her a second wind. She now had twenty-four hours before the captain would wake up. Before she went back to work, she forced herself to eat a protein bar. While she chewed, she found herself thinking about road signs. She was pretty sure she dreamed about them again. It didn’t take much light to make a road sign light up.

Maybe that’s how she could get the ship’s attention? Make the probes shine, light reflecting off their surface.

Val wondered if she could use the same idea to catch the attention of the trailing ships. She was pretty sure she’d seen retroreflector tape in the cargo hold manifest. Hell, if she etched notches into the retroreflector tape, she could spell out a simple binary message that would not just broadcast a message, but scream it with light. Like a blinding lighthouse out in space, yelling “pick me up!” to the ship that encountered it. That would also help keep JMTEP in the dark. If she kept the probe’s trajectory between JMTEP’s planet and the ships, using the light from the TRAPPIST star so only those in the flight path would see the reflected light cone.

If she went this route, Val realized she wouldn’t have to put a message inside the probe at all. She could put the entire message in reflected light. That simplified things a lot—no more getting the trailing ships to intercept the probes to get to the message, if the entire thing could be seen on the outside.

That did add one complication though, she would need the probes to have the exact right spin on their axis for the message to come across. The probes originally had onboard computers that could do just that—but without electronics, the thrusters had been rendered useless.

Still, the retroreflected message on the probe was too good of an idea to dismiss.

She did need to get back to work if she wanted to finish in the next twenty-four hours though, which meant she would need to figure out the spin problem as she worked.

The retroreflective tape was the same width as duct tape, but was subtly thicker. She kept shining light in her eyes while inspecting the tape, even in the cargo hold's dim lighting.

She applied the tape in a spiral pattern along the rocket. It was tedious work, but she had to be precise. Any folds or creases in the tape could not only impact the legibility of the message she would etch into the tape later, but could conceivably impact the probe’s trajectory.

While she applied the tape, she tried to brainstorm how to solve the rotation problem. But every idea she came up with was too delicate with too many potential points of failure.

It took over an hour to apply the tape to the first probe, but thankfully, each probe after took a bit less time than the one before. When she finished applying the tape, she began translating a simple message into binary, which turned out to be a difficult task. It wasn't long before she abandoned binary for Morse code. She started out simple, deciding to begin each probe’s message with the name of the first trailing ship, “Asclepius V.” She figured having this as the first etched sequence would be enough for their FORBIN's pattern recognition to notice the message.

Next was to test her methodology. Using a utility blade, she cut the long and short notches to spell out Asclepius V. Afterward, she turned on a bright shop lamp, then picked up the probe and slowly spun it on its axis in the light. She grinned when she saw distinctive gaps appear in the pattern of light dancing across the cargo hold wall. This was going to work.

It was while spinning the probe that the solution to the rotation problem finally came to her. The solution was with the solar sails in the probe’s nose cone. They were spring-loaded and had a petal shape, so all she had to do was make sure the sails came out at the right angle to “catch” the solar wind. After a few hours, the probe would spin at the exact rate she needed them to.

It was another solution that excited her, as it was one that could easily be solved with math. No complicated mechanical solution, just using orbital dynamics and the light of the TRAPPIST star in her favor.

Time went by quickly while Valentina worked. But unfortunately, pushing herself to finish before she’d gotten more sleep caused her to get a little punchy. In the process, she accidentally busted one of the solar sails on the probe she’d been working on. Her original plan had been to send two probes to each of the trailing ships, but with only three left, she had to decide which ship she risked not having any redundancy with.

The answer was easy. She'd send all three probes to Asclepius V and add to her message, asking them to warn Asclepius VI, which would be easier for them since they wouldn't have to do so without electronics.

With that in mind, she pushed herself to go to bed for a few hours. After she awoke, Val finished the probes with only an hour to spare before the captain would wake. She was exhausted, sore from working, and starting to wish she could go back into hibernation herself. As the last hour slipped away and she prepared for launch, she grew nervous about being able to get the probes launched in time, but her excitement at the prospect of speaking to another human kept her nerves mostly at bay.

Valentina put on an EVA suit and entered the cargo hold airlock, where the probe launcher mechanism was housed. Once in the airlock, she depressurized it and opened the outer doors. The outer doors opened to reveal a large wheel crank. She would need to manually turn the wheel to fold out the rail launcher. It was hard work with how tired she already was, but once it was fully extended, she inserted the first of the three probes, wishing again that she hadn’t broken the fourth in her exhaustion.

With the first probe inserted into the rail launcher, Valentina took a moment to admire her handiwork, double-checking everything before turning on a small console screen nearby and pulled up the launching software. She took a deep breath and inputted the calculations from the flight paths she created. Once the data was entered, the launching software would calculate where the ship needed to be pointed.

The haptics of her wristpad gently squeezed her arm, notifying her that the captain's hibernation cycle had ended—she’d be awake in the next few minutes. Val had hoped to be there to greet her when she woke, especially since waking from hibernation could be disorienting, but that wasn’t happening now. She felt the ship’s thrusters engage, spinning the ship to be ready for the probe’s launch.

The thrusters disengaged. A small green button lit up on the launch console.

It was time.

Val wanted to triple-check all her calculations, but she knew the launch software already had. Everything was ready. Time to go. She took a few quick breaths then pressed the green button.

The taut spring drove the launching ram forward and the probe shot away. It moved fast enough that Val couldn’t see it when it launched. She expected to hear something from the launch, but of course, being in the vacuum of the airlock she heard nothing. But a few seconds later she saw a flash out in space—which meant the first solar sail petals had blossomed, right on cue.

She checked the console, watching the readings of the probe as it streaked away into the darkness. The calculations for the probe’s trajectory slowly trickled in. Valentina smiled to see it had worked, though just barely. The probe would be just passing into LIDAR range of the trailing ship, but wouldn’t stay long before it zipped past. It wasn’t a huge margin of error, which made her grateful she’d built three.

It took a few minutes to reset the mechanisms of the launcher. The new calculations from her sim came in, and she adjusted the ship's thrusters to move them in the right direction. She didn’t hesitate this time before launching. Just like last time, she couldn't help but grin as the trajectory confirmed another successful launch. This one was a much better shot and would spend quite a bit of time in the trailing ship’s flight path. And she still had one more to launch for insurance.

She once again reset the mechanism, got the updated calculations from the launch console, and made the proper adjustments to the ship. Right before she was about to launch, the comms in her helmet turned on with a burst of static.

“Lieutenant Nelson, what the hell are you doing in the cargo bay?”

Valentina gasped. It was the voice of the captain.

A real human voice, speaking to her.

“Captain?” Val answered. She could feel relief coursing through her at the sound of the captain’s voice. Unfortunately, that voice was also clearly angry with her.

“Val, answer me,” The captain said again.

Feeling stupid, Val realized she hadn’t turned comms on in her suit, so the captain hadn’t heard her acknowledgement. She opened the vox channel. “Sorry, Captain, it’s a long story. Do you mind if I just finish up here? Then I’ll come and explain?”

“I think you know that I’d prefer you explain right now,” the captain responded. “And your explanation should include why our FORBIN isn’t working, by the way.”

Val checked the calculations, realizing she’d missed her launch window. Prompting the computer to recalculate, she sighed, “I promise you, Captain, what I’m doing could save lives—I’ll give you a full report as soon as I’m finished. But it’s because FORBIN isn’t working that I’m doing this.”

“I’m assuming this explanation will also satisfy me as to why you are launching our orbital probes the opposite direction from our planet?” the captain asked.

Val didn’t answer, nor did she wait for permission to launch the final probe. She quickly input the new calculations, waited for the ship to adjust its position, and then launched the probe. She heard the captain sigh in her comms after launch.

The calculations for the final probe slowly came in. It was also a success, just like the last one. Actually, it was a bullseye. This one would be even harder to miss than the last. Part message in a bottle, part lighthouse, that would hopefully be all the trailing ship needed to be protected from JMTEP’s attack. She let out a sigh of relief, right as she heard a knock on the cargo bay door above her head.

Valentina looked up through the visor in her helmet and the small window to see Captain Amy Campbell looking at her.

“Why are you grinning like an idiot?” the captain asked. Yeah, she was definitely not happy.

“Sorry,” Val said. “It’s just really good to see another human being.”

The captain gestured for her to get out of the cargo bay. “Sorry, captain,” Val said. “I won’t be able to open the cargo bay door until I fold the launcher back down.”

“Hurry up,” the captain ordered.

As Valentina cranked the launcher back inside, she started to wonder how she was even going to explain the past few days. Thankfully, it took her nearly thirty minutes to get the rail launcher stowed and pressurize the airlock again, which gave her plenty of time to collect her thoughts about what needed to be discussed. She wished that Finn could give this report for her, but she’d have to do it herself.

When the airlock opened, the captain extended a hand to help pull Val back into the ship. The captain didn’t know her strength though—her brain was still getting used to operating its own body again after hibernation. Between that and the zero-g, when she pulled Val, the force pulled them both into each other. They crashed and spun into the corridor, holding onto each other to prevent flailing limbs from hitting anything as they spun.

Valentina didn’t mind though as their spin slowly died as they bounced off the corridor walls a few times. She looked up at the captain and they made eye contact. Val realized with a bit of embarrassment how tightly she had been holding onto the poor woman. With the magnetic grips in the suit Val was wearing, she was able to grab a rail and pull them both to a stop. But not before their momentum slammed them into the wall one last time. Val’s EVA suit took the brunt of the hit, but they were both clearly shaken up.

“You okay, Val?” the captain asked.

Valentina opened her mouth to speak, but found herself speechless. A strange mixture of relief, excitement, and a profound and sudden social anxiety she wasn’t expecting prevented her from answering for a moment. She read the concern in the captain's body language and noticed how she rubbed her arm gingerly—she must have hurt it when they crashed into each other.

“Val?” the captain asked again.

“Sorry,” Valentina finally said. “We just, well, we have a lot to talk about.”

Yes, it was good to see someone again.