"Captain? It's time to wake up."
Jacob Letts awoke to the sensation of somebody blowing gently on his face and a pleasant female voice calling his name. "Captain Letts? Authenticate please!"
"Ugh. I'm awake, just give me a moment Tan." Jake batted his hand above his head until it found the switch to open his chamber, and the glass cover over his bed hissed up out of the way. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, tried to get rid of the furry feeling in his mouth. He felt like he had been asleep for a couple of years, which was more or less accurate. He pulled his mind upwards through the fog of hibernation and gathered his thoughts. He was Jake Letts, Captain of the Tannhauser, hauling a cargo of parts and modules up the Pegasus Wing to Omega Station. When this mission was completed, Omega would finally be operational as a jumping off point to even more remote reaches of the galaxy.
Jake swung his feet to the floor and stood up with only the barest suggestion of unsteadiness. The two crewmen continued to slumber in chambers identical to his; Jake glanced at them long enough to register that all the relevant lights were green, then made his way through the pressure bulkhead, past the galley and common area, then through another bulkhead and onto the bridge.
"This is Captain Jacob Letts. I have the conn. Thank you Tan- how are we looking?"
The captain's chair rotated towards him to reveal a pretty young woman in a blue jumpsuit. Jake smiled: "You're certainly looking good. Did you have some work done on the journey?"
Tan stuck her tongue out at him. "Just the usual routine maintenance and upgrades, Captain. The Tannhauser is tip-top. All systems are green."
Jake frowned, still trying to wake up his mind. "All systems? Shouldn't fuel be nominal by now?" Fuel typically hit nominal status - where the number of possible docking facilities in range dropped to one - two thirds of the way through the Omega Run; there was nothing else remotely close to the station.
Tan adopted a more serious expression and stood aside. "You had better sit down, Captain. The situation at Omega Station has changed while you've been away."
Jake sat down and scanned over his console, looking for something that might bely the AI's assurances that all was well. It didn't take long. "What are these other stations?"
"Captain, how long does the Omega Run take?"
"Depends on your point of view. For us, a couple of years. For someone watching from Earth? Well, Omega's almost sixty light years away, so ..."
"So sixty years, give or take. Well, it seems that sixty years was more than enough time to make some dramatic improvements to the Hermes engine. We had just hit fuel nominal when we received a signal. I know - how did anyone signal us while we were travelling at the speed of light? Don't worry about getting your head around that right now. Suffice to say I verified that it was legitimate, and that it announced the completion of Omega station."
Jake took a moment to think. This new engine meant that a ship had completed Omega Station and presumably returned to Moon Station in less time than it took Tannhauser to make a quarter of the outbound journey. "And you didn't wake me up at that point because Omega was already the only place we could go?"
"Correct. Since then, they've obviously been busy. There are two new outposts in the region and a fledgling colony on HN Pegasi-4 just showed up on the charts a couple of days ago. We are still two weeks out from Omega; I wouldn't be surprised if a few more stations appear before we arrive."
Jake updated his mental note; that ship had been to Omega and back in significantly less time than it took Tannhauser to make a quarter of the outbound journey. Faster by at least a factor of ten! Incredible! "So what do we do now?"
"The signal was not specifically addressed to the Tannhauser; it was more of a general announcement to everyone in earshot. Hopefully somebody will remember that we're still on the way, but it doesn't look like it so far. My recommendation, Captain, is to continue our flight plan and see how things look when we get to Omega."
"It looks to me like we're going to be the butt of the late-night comedy circuit's jokes. Tanny-come-lately, missed out on our own party. I was supposed to get to swing the bottle of champagne and declare Omega open for business! Guess I'll have to drink it instead."
"Perhaps one of these new stations will be able to use our cargo instead," said Tan.
"Perhaps," Jake admitted. "Tan, maybe you'd better plan to wake up the crew a couple days early- give them some extra time to get used to the situation."
"Aye-aye, sir."
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Two ship-days after dehibernating Jake felt that he had just about gotten used to the brave new world that had greeted him. He was rediscovering his muscles in the gym when Tan called him to the bridge. He successfully arrived on the bridge without collapsing in a heap, and the AI's holographic avatar joined Jake a moment later. "Tan? What's going on?"
"Captain, the Pegasi colony just disappeared."
"What do you mean, disappeared?"
"Its marker light just vanished, as if it was never there. I don't have any more details; I never had any further details about the colony to begin with. All I know is that it is no longer broadcasting a docking signal."
Jake sat in contemplative silence until his reverie was disturbed a few minutes later when the outpost in Equuleus disappeared, followed shortly by the other station in Pegasus. The green fuel status light abruptly changed to nominal orange. "What's going on?" he repeated.
Tan shook her head. "I'm sorry Captain, but there's no additional information available. All we can do is wait for a signal to reach us."
As if on cue, the comm station chimed with the arrival of a micro-pulse message. "Captain, it's a distress signal from Omega Station: 'Alert all commands. Surprise attack Omega Station, aggressor unknown. Structural failure, venting atmosphere, many casualties. Request immediate evacuation effort.'"
"We're still ten days out," said Jake. "Must be nearly a couple months if you're watching us from Omega. That's an awful long wait for whoever's left. And we can't even let them know we're on the way!" If Jake had harbored any bitterness at his unexpected obsolescence, that feeling had vanished now.
"Two months is also plenty of time for whoever launched the attack to come back and finish them off."
"Comforting thought. Can we shave any time off the approach? Start our deceleration mid-system instead of at the Kuiper belt?"
"That's risky, Captain. All it would take is one uncharted gas giant..."
Jake shrugged. "If a planet got in our way, we'd be dead before we could cry about our bad luck. Here's my command decision, Tan. Don't hit the brakes until we're inside the orbit of Pegasi-6. That puts us closer to seven days away, or just over a month on Omega. Break into the fuel reserve in our cargo if you need to- if they've built three stations and a colony all the way out here since we launched, I'm sure there are other new places that we can get to that are closer than Moon."
"If anyone's watching, they'll think the glare from our deceleration is another attack! I doubt anyone's been crazy enough to enter a planetary system at lightspeed before!"
"Well, if we do nothing else we'll be sure to put on a good show. I'm going to go wake up my crew. I wouldn't want them to miss the excitement."
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Somehow the Tannhauser and its crew had survived the unorthodox approach intact, but Jake had already moved on from the exhilerating ride and was back to business. Omega Station was dead ahead, only a couple hundred thousand kilometers distant. They were hours away from the end of their journey, but Jake was worried they were too late. The station was spinning crazily, like a child's top that had almost lost its gyroscopic inertia. Tan was still calculating the maneuvers that would be necessary for them to match its motion and dock, and Jake had never known the AI to take longer than a blink to calculate the solution to a mathematical problem.
Few people would have described Omega Station's design as elegant. A squat cylinder formed the core of the station and spherical modules around its circumference provided living space and service facilities. Nuclear batteries and solar arrays hung from vast struts at each end of the core. Even if you gave her credit for her utilitiarian looks, Omega was in bad shape. Most of a strut had been blown off one end, leaving just a few twisted scraps of solar cell behind. Several of the spheres were clearly open to vacuum and most of the remaining modules were scorched and dented. Most ominously of all, nothing intelligent - natural or artificial - had responded to the continuous signal that Tan had been broadcasting since they dropped below lightspeed. First and second glances both indicated that Omega was dead.
Jake and his two crewmen had spent the journey into the Pegasi system figuring out a way to rig up the life-support modules in their cargo to accomodate the extra passengers they were hoping to pick up. Now it was looking increasingly likely that their hopes were in vain. The hours went by and Omega's wild spin gradually evened, slowed and stopped as Tan copied the station's movement and made their final approach to the dock.
The Tannhauser gently kissed the stricken station and locked into the docking collar with a quiet clunk. Jake smiled at the sound- at least the old girl still had some power!
"Talk to me Tan, how are things looking?"
"Nothing yet Captain. The docking control is just a dumb automaton and can barely tell me the time of day. The station AI hasn't responded on any of the standard channels yet. Of course, the standards have probably changed since our day. The dock is still working on locking in the hard wire connection, so we'll hopefully know more when that's done."
Jake stared at his monitor, willing the visual feed to come in so he could see what was on the other side of his hatch. Was there anyone left for him to rescue?
A brief eternity later, Tan came as close to squealing as her programming permitted. "Captain, I have a hard connection with Omega. The station is still alive and there are several people waiting for you on the dock! You have an open hail channel."
Jake smiled at the sound of his crew cheering behind him in the common area and took a deep breath.
"This is Captain Jacob Letts and the Tannhauser. Who's ready to go home?"