The Dark Unending – Part 1

Lets get to the writing.  Horse is done for now.  I’m not in much of a creative mood for where I was going with that one.  We’ll see if I come back to it.  Coin flip.

Joanna (not Johanna or Joannah, there are no ‘h’s present) Lind knew she was in trouble the moment her instrumentation indicated an enormous spike in the graphene capacitors.  That wasn’t supposed to happen, and until now had never happened.  Not in testing, not in any of the mock flights, not in any of the trial runs.

The capacitors had been the rock upon which this expedition had been built.  They were the reason humanity had exploded into the heavens.  The reason that in-atmosphere ionic propulsion was a real thing, instead of the subject of countless fantasies.  

It couldn’t fail.

Yet failing is exactly what it was doing, in defiance of all logic and reason.  And even as she tried to shut down her systems, the ship was rocked by an enormous explosion.  Which meant that the failure wasn’t mechanical: It was human error or sabotage. 

Joanna killed the engines, shut down the main circuits, and flipped over to the backup generators before whatever had caused the explosion could consumer her ship entirely.  

The Elizabeth Warren was officially adrift, and Joanna had exactly two days to figure out what went wrong with the main batteries and how to fix it.  Otherwise?  Well, dying of exposure didn’t exactly sound like fun, but that would at least beat dying by asphyxiation. 

Joanna set the ship into autonomous piloting, which would send her an alert the moment anything at all entered range of the ships radar range, and undid the straps locking her into the pilots chair.

Her vessel, a single person freighter hauling the first of many supply runs to Saturn, was kept at full gravity via the constant rotation of the battery mountings around the central axis of the ship.  This had the dual purpose of keeping her physical health in check during the six month round-trip, but also allowed her unfettered access to the precious power which ran her entire ship.  

The battery mountings, a series of blocky columns affixed to the ship, were billions of layers of carbene sheeting suspended in an electrically super-conductive electrolyte fluid, which made the ruinous power requirements of space travel possible.  

With the backup power, located in a sealed and separate internal area of the ship, engaged, the rotation of the central axis had been halted.  Without the catalytic converters and solar panels in full swing, powering the gravity generators would be ill-advised.  

Joanna had been extensively trained for this however, and the first thing she had to do was find out what she was dealing with.  As she pulled herself along the ceiling and walls towards the main living quarters, she paused at the rounded carbon-glass which showed the rear of the ship as the bulbous cockpit contracted into simple corridor.  She had a great view of the slowly rotating battery stacks, as the gravity wound down.  

There were six of the stacks, each almost thirty meters tall.  They were marvels of engineering, each on their own capable of propelling a ship into orbit. As they rotated, her heart sank.

Where there had once been six, only two remained.  The four others were twisted and warped, looking like a layered cake with a bite taken out of the middle.  Globules of fluid and shrapnel from the batteries floating alongside the ship.  

She had to think of something, and fast.  She was 2 AU’s (300,000,000 km) from help, and even if she called out to them, it would take over a month to get to her.  

She didn’t have a month, however.  She had two days.