Chapter No.10. Uncertainty.

The next day we climbed into the G-chairs to begin our journey to a new habitable planet, one that the surviving crew from the second mission might have gone.

"Okay," I said. "Hopefully, COMA has the right procedure to get us to the planet."

That didn't make them feel confident.

COMA adjusted the ship's direction and fired the engines, slapping us back into our seats. We were able to see the outside on a main screen at the command station. The burn lasted twenty minutes before we were up to a reasonable velocity, judging by how the stars were whizzing by.

Then the antimatter anomaly kicked in and the screen went blank. At that point the engines were no longer operating, which allowed us to get out of our G-seats.

We gathered at the command station.

"What sort of a star are we headed to?" I asked.

"It's a G5-V class main sequence star with a M8 class red dwarf companion," Janet said. "I'm not sure how a stable inner rocky planet formed around that combination, but evidently it did."

"We have to assume that the surviving crew knew that it was stable enough to be habitable," I said.

"What's our ETA?"

"According to COMA, we'll need to drop out of hyperspace at 0900 tomorrow and then it should be a few days to slow down and arrive at the planet."

I stood up. "I think I'll go check out the beer brewing operation."

They collectively smiled at me.

I went down to the agricultural deck and headed for the tool module. The robots had set up a brewing operation behind it. What I saw made me happy. They had already added a barrel shaped container to a feed tube that went to the food delivery system.

I checked to see if there were any malfunctioning robots, but they were all operational.

I headed back up to the crew wheel deck and headed to the food station. Using a holo-keyboard, I ordered a beer, which appeared after a few minutes.

I sat down and took a sip. It tasted delightful. Man, I could handle anything as long as I had beer.

I didn't see the women until supper time. I made sure that they each had a glass of beer to go with soy simulated chicken and real asparagus.

"Not bad," Janet said after taking a sip of beer.

"I'm surprised that they would include beer on a spaceship," Sharon said.

"I am too, but I'm sure as hell not complaining."

"Do you think we'll actually find the surviving crew members?" Janet asked me.

"I don't know. We're not too certain when they left the other planet."

After a good supper and some beer, we all felt better, but the anxiety never fully went away.

At 0900 the next day we strapped into the G-seats to suffer through the deceleration out of hyperspace and the slowing to a velocity that would allow us to orbit the planet. When we dropped into normal space, we were a billion kilometers away from orbital insertion.

It didn't take Janet that long to notice that something was not quite right. "I'm detecting what appears to be a sizable debris field around the planet."

"A debris field? Is that from a moon that got too close to the planet?"

"I don't think so. The debris is composed of different sized parts. If it were a moon that succumbed to the planet's gravity, it would be in much smaller fragments."

I ran a hand through my hair. "That's weird. When we get closer, we may be able to determine what the debris is composed of."

I spent the rest of the day going over the new instructions to get into and out of hyperspace. This first attempt came out pretty close to what I wanted. I just hoped that it would work for most situations.

The next day, I joined Janet and Sharon at the command station.

"I believe that the debris field is from the breakup of a vessel," Janet said.

"Oh shit! That's not good. I wonder what happened."

"I don't think we'll know that until we get there. We're not detecting any vessels in the vicinity of this solar system, so I doubt it's from some alien intervention."

"Could it have been from a planetary defense system?" Sharon asked.

"God, I hope not. I have us on course to enter a high orbit around the planet. That should protect us from some weapon on the planet, assuming there is one."

"The planet isn't all that habitable," Sharon said. "It's mostly frozen and the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen with only a small amount of oxygen."

I thought about it for a moment but decided not to react to her report. I stood up. "I'm going to go down to engineering."

They didn't reply. After the usual travel at zero gravity through the axel tubes, I arrived on the engineering deck and went to the control station. I was interested in the antimatter production process because that's what was responsible for causing hyperspace travel.

What I found made me cringe.

It turns out that the engineers realized that this would be a problem but erred on the side of optimism. One of the discussions indicated the possibility of an explosion from antimatter-matter interaction. Could this be what happened to the other ship? That's something I would have to determine before we ever went back into hyperspace.

The next day, we were only a hundred thousand kilometers from the planet when it became painfully obvious that the debris was once the vessel that time-shift preceded us on this mission.

"Damn it!" I exhaled. "This is not what I wanted to find."

"Why did their ship explode?" Sharon asked, biting her lip.

"I think it's from the antimatter production process. I found a reference that hinted that the engineers realized that it could happen, but evidently assumed that it wouldn't."

"Dose that means we could explode like that?" Janet asked.

"I think we're not as vulnerable because we're not pushing the system nearly as much as they were."

Sharon sighed. "Shit, that means that we're all alone out here."

I shook my head. "Yeah, I'm afraid so."

Janet's eyes grew larger. "Hey, you guys, I've detected something that may have come from the vessel."

We perked up and looked at her screen. What we saw gave us hope.