Free Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) by Robert M. Campbell Page A

head in. “Sorry Victor. Excuse me. Would Pohl, Wheeler and Franklin come with me, please?”
    Greg, Tamra and Emma looked at one another, got up and walked out. Greg nodded at Professor Simenko on his way out.
 

020
    Calypso.
    “Killing power in five…” Captain Edson Franklin pulled the throttle back dropping the ship out of acceleration, the engine instantly shutting down. The interior of the ship rang like a bell as the gravity disappeared. Carl Lambert groaned and stretched in the co-pilot’s seat beside him, suddenly weightless.
    The carrier signal indicator lit up and Edson opened a comm channel. “Mars Control, this is MSS18 Calypso. We have terminated burn. Requesting any and all data on the Pandora event. Send me all you’ve got. Over.”
    Ben Jordan floated up into the cockpit, squeezed past the Captain into his jump seat and buckled in.
    Edson released the locks on his chair and swivelled around, light in the zero gravity. “Any suggestions while we wait?”
    Ben shrugged. “Keep burning. Whatever happened to Pandora was probably a fluke. Maybe they had an engine problem?” They still hadn’t seen the footage from the station.
    Carl nodded. “Agreed, but we might as well see what Control has for us in the meantime.”
    Something about this worried Edson and he pulled on his goatee. Their ships were getting old, but they’d never had an event like this happen before. “What could make one of our ships explode like that? Any ideas?”
    Carl and Ben looked at each other. Ben shrugged. “It’d be hard, right? These engines don’t just turn into fusion bombs because they’re running on hydrogen.” Slight hesitation. “Ship fuel needs a big pile of energy to go nova. Needs power to sustain a reaction.”
    Carl thought for a second, frowned. “If it wasn’t the engine, but a chemical reaction you’d need a container of some sort. And some way to start it. And the right temperatures and pressures to keep them where you needed them as either gas or liquid.” Edson could tell he was still thinking. “Could an explosion in the hab section do that? Or one of their fuel pods?”
    Ben took a different tack. “What about the feeder? Small reactor. Plasma…”
    “Same as the engine, you’d have to power it.” Carl chewed a finger nail. “They’re secured in the cargo module. No way to turn one on and you still need some sort of reaction mass to ignite the thing. I don’t even know if you’d be able to turn one of them into a bomb.” He trailed off. He had a new problem to figure out. “It’s not like one of them would just suddenly turn itself on either. You think one of the crew did something?”
    Edson. “We can’t know what happened inside. Hopefully there was some kind of broadcast before they went up, but we haven’t heard anything yet.” Mutiny? That’d never happen aboard Mike Bruno’s ship. He ran a tight crew. Good people. In the eighty years these ships had been running there’d never been a case of mutiny on board. He looked back and forth at his crewmen and nodded. “Keep working on it, but right now, I’m not hearing anything that sounds likely. I think the most realistic accident scenario I can come up with is some fissile metal residue gunking-up the engine core. Could’ve been a dirty build-up of something unstable. If that went critical it could power a runaway fusion reaction if the H2 kept getting pumped in. But that’s crazy. We haven’t had a failure like that in forty years. Probably more.” How long had it been since they installed the shields on these ships?
    Edson took a sip of water from his bottle and waited for the return signal from Mars. “Why don’t you guys run some engine diagnostics while we’re sitting here. Check for any residual build-ups. Who knows? Maybe the engineering crews have gotten lazy on our refits.” Carl and Trigger unbuckled from their seats and floated up.
    Ben squeezed through the hatch and headed down towards the equipment