Note: this story is my contribution to the Lunar Awards season 11, round 3, and contains a swear. Proceed accordingly.
Aaron Melnick woke up to the usual sound of his room computer’s friendly chirping. “Good morning! It is Thursday, January 27, 24-”
He waved it to silence. “Are we there yet?” Aaron had asked the same question every day for as long as he could remember. Every day he’d received the same answer.
“We have not reached the destination. Please remain calm. A final arrival date cannot be definitively calculated due to-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Aaron muttered, rising from his bed and pulling on his slate-gray engineer’s uniform. Another day of plodding about good old Drive Three, then. Oh, joy.
In his first day of training, way back after he’d finished the basic schooling course everyone on the generation ship got, they’d told him how many drives in all the ship had, but he’d long since forgotten that. His mind had burrowed in on Drive Three, its inner works, its fuel processes, its access stairs and circuit bypass panels. He knew every bit of it, and he didn’t have time for anything else.
So he thought, at any rate, as he fell into line in the busy cafeteria to get the standard morning ration, a protein bar and energy drink. Good enough for an engineer, anyway, and he didn’t mind. They usually threw in something nice for dinnertime. He was sitting at a table working on the bar and thinking over the day’s probable work to himself when he heard a sound he didn’t think he had ever heard before.
The ship drives, which had been thrumming along peaceably in the background, suddenly ground down and, in a shuddering instant, stopped.
The dead silence that followed spread lightning-fast through the cafeteria. It held for a few seconds as everyone waited. This was some sort of a mistake, Aaron thought. A test, a drill, the chief was doing something with the coils again, he’d said something about that in the monthly departmental, any minute now the engines would start up-
Except they didn’t. The silence stretched along until it was broken by the squeal of the ship’s com. “All hands, this is the captain. By now you’ve undoubtedly noticed that our stardrive engines aren’t running; this is just to assure you there is no need to worry; we are looking at the problem and we’ll have them up and going again in just a few minutes. Please resume whatever you were doing, and good morning, thank you.”
The silence in the cafeteria exploded into a tumult of objections, questions, demands, and complaints, punctuated by more than the usual bit of swears. Aaron didn’t waste time with any of that; without a moment’s hesitation, he left his tray on the table and headed straight for Drive Three.
He wasn’t the first one there; the night shift crew, who normally would’ve been shifting things over to their daytime counterparts, still remained in Drive Three’s cramped primary maintenance shaft. By long tradition it had become an informal gathering point at the start and end of each shift; the main entryway was plastered with scrawled notices, rewritten crew rosters, and other bits of all sorts. The place had a lingering odor of coffee about it; that and the familiarity of the shift routine usually lent a sort of comforting air to it in Aaron’s eyes, at least. Not now, though, not with the night crew hanging on and the day crew, looks of alarms in their eyes, hurrying in, so that the shaft was even more crowded than usual.
It was also quiet, which unsettled everyone. Normally you had to raise your voice just to have a casual conversation over the immense THWURM THWURM THWURM of the stardrive engine into which the maintenance shaft left. Now that was gone, and in its absence, all Aaron could hear were the intense, worried mutters from his fellow engineers. “What d’you suppose it is?” “Gotta be a drill, right? Yeah. It’s a drill. It’s a drill.” “Well I don’t like it, I don’t care what anyone says, it ain’t natural-”
A hatchway down the far end of the primary maintenance shaft opened and Drive Three’s Chief Engineer emerged. Burton Ryles had been the chief engineer for Drive Three as long as anyone could remember; so had his father, and his father, and presumably his father; officer positions like that were hereditary on board ships like theirs. Aaron had heard that theoretically there were procedures way back in the voluminous Ship’s Rules and Regulations that allowed a crewman like himself to move up into an officer’s position, but he’d never bothered to check. He’d been fine where he was; so had everyone. Burton Ryles was a good man to work for: solid, fair, competent. Now… now he looked shaken. Thoroughly shaken, as if he’d just received a terminal diagnosis from sickbay.
Everyone had quieted down when they saw him, but he took the intercom control anyway. Aaron had the unsettling sense that it gave the man comfort, the familiarity of it. “Well,” the Chief Engineer began. “We’ve got a problem.”
“No shit,” someone wisecracked from the rear of the crowd. Normally this would’ve gotten an uproarious laugh from the rest of them. Now the joke fell like slag in the dead silence. The Chief Engineer closed his eyes and waited for another long second or two.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s that bad. You all know the stardrives run on citrisium zynite which we focus through regulated chloronide coils and convert into usable power. The citisium zynite isn’t an issue; we have enough of that to last us the next millennium. The chloronide coils are. Specifically, Coil 147-9 on Drive Four, which cracked this morning; if the crew over there hadn’t been on the ball and deployed a rapid-scram procedure, well, let’s just say we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now.”
Aaron shuddered. A runaway drive reaction was everyone’s worst nightmare: the only consolation being that at least it would be quick. An instant’s almighty flash, and then-
“You’re probably wondering,” Burton Ryles went on, “Why we’ve shut down all the engines. That’s the bad part. After the rapid-scram the crew over on Drive Four started a full-scale examination of coil to find out what was wrong. I would’ve done the same.” He took a breath. Unconsciously, Aaron did too.
“They found… they found that the chloronide in the coils was decaying. Fast. And it’s accelerating. Seems the initial decay began at a quantum level where it wouldn’t register, and then it just built up. So, okay, they thought, they’ll just replace that coil. But then someone thought to check the others. Same thing. So they began a broader check. Every single chloronide coil in every single stardrive on this ship is in full irreparable decay. That’s why we had to shut down the engines.”
The silence this time was one of horror. Almost everyone grasped the implications. Aaron, some part of him refusing to accept it, raised a hand. “Surely we can replace them? Or manufacture something else to swap in? Like I did just last week with the retrixulator rods in-”
“I’m sorry, son,” the Chief Engineer said. “The boys in Science tell us that they’ve got nothing. There’s no replacement. Unless someone comes along with a brand new chloronide coil out of nowhere, we’re stuck where we are.”
“Oh,” Aaron said quietly.
The silence broke up then into shouted questions, cries, even some prayers. Aaron quietly edged his way out. He couldn’t see the point of questions or anything else. What he did think, as much as he could think anything, was that he had better get in line for the dinnertime ration now. After all, he thought with a stifled panicky jerk, it wasn’t like there was anything else to do.
Decades later, when the first outrider of the expanding K’donian Star Empire happened upon the drifting wreck of the human generation ship, their probe bot found most of the remains clustered in their quarters, or the engines, or in various hallways and corridors. Only one, curiously, was found in what appeared to be a dining area, its skeletal hand reaching out forlornly towards an empty tray. Sad, the K’donian pilot thought, then ticked off a point on a chart and ordered the scout ship to move on. There was clearly nothing left to see.