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“The last pod has been collected,” the call came through the speakers.
Cheers came from the halls, but Ham Sulp was not among them, puffing as he ran.
The last pod his ass. It was the last pod in their area, but there was still one more they needed to recover, one more soul still out there.
He’d grown up on a fleet of vagabond ships. They lived their whole lives, generation after generation, in the deep void, only occasionally even piercing the heliopause of a star system.
To leave someone stranded out there to die was the worst thing in his view.
The doors to the launch room opened before him, and he heard the voices call out something else;
“Lift!”
The mechanical arm hefted the modified drone like it weighed as much as a feather instead of 800 kilograms.
Sulp had run down here as fast as he could, sweat pouring off his brow. For the last sixteen minutes he and his team had been working; even before he’d gotten into the room, his boys and girls had started pulling apart one of the long-range Response drones, the plans for what was unimportant and what was vital laid out in their HUDs.
The longest wait had been for their high-speed fabricators to finish producing the modified parts they’d need.
A drill to penetrate the pod’s hull. A vacuum-rated sealing coupling. The special air scrubbers that would remove the deadly engine coolant.
Last minute Y sent up modified plans that required only a little creative rearranging to fit in six more of their best medical drones, that he had modified personally to be able to treat the chemical poisoning and burns that Lily Brogan and Davyyd Pedraza had already suffered.
Then they’d packaged it all up, and moved it into the internal transport system.
Entirely unmanned, lacking gravity for easy movement, the tunnels and drones within the system brought their modified drone as fast as possible to the launch bays near the heart of the Craton, not far from the bridge.
He’d managed to make it in time to see the drone lifted, then placed in the launch cradle.
As the aperture slid shut – itself a solid block of the strongest alloys known to the Union, he looked to the launch screen.
“Power building – five seconds until launch!”
“Dark and stars, let it fly true,” Sulp muttered, bunching his fist over his chest.
“Rotating ship,” Jaya said. “Preparing to launch.”
“Charge complete!” the call came.
“Seven seconds until rotation complete.”
“Three seconds until rotation complete.”
“Rotation complete – all hands, brace for firing.”
Sulp gripped a rail, then felt the shudder that went through the decking, the very air, as Isaac Newton’s famous opposite reaction of recoil was released.
His eyes were still following the screen, watching their missile travel.
It was moving at a good rate, but not as fast as it could be moving – barely 0.01% of lightspeed.
With all they’d had to modify, the probe could not handle anything near what a military shell could. They could make things to last much harder blasts, but they hadn’t the time to produce all that.
Still – it would take only an hour to reach Escape Pod #57.
If it could make it through the debris field.
It was another reason for the slower launch; with the drone’s armor, at this speed an impact might do some damage, but it shouldn’t annihilate it. A far higher speed would mean that hitting even the tiniest piece would be like exploding a bomb on its surface.
It was all consolation, he knew. The drone would not take any impacts well, but they’d done their best to chart a course that gave it a chance.
Still struggling for breath, noting to himself how he was not a sprinter and should not even try sprinting like that again, he got on a lift to the bridge.
“How’s it going?” he asked as soon as he appeared onto the command deck.
“It’s 22% through the debris field,” Brooks informed him. “So far, so good.”
Not even a quarter. If it had taken the hit in the first minute or two then they might have had time to fabricate another attempt.
Already his team was working on another drone, this one to take a longer route around the debris. It would have to carry its own fuel and not just cruise on the coilgun’s boost, which meant less payload, but they’d accounted for that with a larger drone.
That would take another twenty minutes, though. And then take over two hours to get there.
The next several minutes passed. Sulp watched with trepidation as the drone ate up the distance, breathing a heavy sigh as it passed the halfway mark of the dangerous part of its voyage. Once it got through the debris, it was home free . . .
“We have an impact!” Rachel Zhu called. “Nose cone panel 17, small particle, low albedo! Skewing off course . . .”
“Can we re-orient?” Brooks demanded.
“Yes, guidance says so. Damage is unknown, but seems minor. Settling back into course . . .”
“We must know the extent of the damage,” Cenz spoke. “Share all internal sensor data.”
“We don’t have any,” Sulp said. “We had to take those sensors out to fit in the framework for the new equipment.”
Cenz was silent a moment. “I understand,” he finally said.
“Drone is back on course,” Zhu said. “This will not affect arrival time by more than a few seconds.”
Brooks looked to him. “How soon until we can launch the second probe? Do you think we should do a straight launch for it as well?”
“Twenty minutes, my team tells me. The initial work I put in before we finalized the plan all went into this one, so we need more time to get the second one running. I’ve got all the people I have on it and every fabricator. We can’t squeeze it out any faster.”
“As for course change,” Cenz added. “If I might jump in – I recommend against a second launch through. The high-speed particles from this one’s passing will likely stir up more micro-debris. While it may clear the path in some ways, it may also easily cause more to end up in the course. It is simply too chaotic to be certain, but I calculate the odds are likely to be worse for a second drone.”
Brooks nodded. “Very well. Let’s go ahead and reorient the ship for the second firing, and hope to hell that first drone makes it through.”
Sulp looked back up to the screen. It was 74% of the way through the debris.
Just a little further, then the rest of it voyage would be a clean cruise.
Other Terrestrial 
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