Really Really Really Big (part 6)
The Sumnar's skin-tiles darkened in surprise. Maggie sipped at her port.
"Why, Gale-human, would the Admiral attend to a negation of the standard protocols in the evacuation sequence planned for such a contingency?"
Walder snorted, interrupting.
"Gale, if you were on a ship in Corrado Runaway, in the danger you describe, you wouldn't be here to tell the tale."
The Sumnar paused to parse Walder's statement, before its body flinched, a blossom of reddish-orange spreading along its tentacles. There was a bleating interspersed with a blast of static-like rapid clicking, the Sumnar slipping momentarily into its native language.
"Confusion, and interrogative imperative," it stuttered, once it had found its way back to Standard, the common language of the Coterie.
"Are you then no more than a spectral emanation representing the former Captain Gale? Tales of posthumous presentation are common in the annals of your species."
Maggie smiled, taking another sip of the dark liquid in her glass.
"I can assure you," she said, sniffing at the bouquet from the wine, "that it was as bad as Walder suggests, if not worse. I can also assure you that I survived the experience."
"Elucidate, Gale-human, on this Runaway situation, and how then this bears on the wagers previously accepted."
"Corrado Runaway is one of the worst things that can happen to a ship in hyperspace. Do you recall my description of the mass limits of a ship in flight?"
The Sumnar twirled its voice organs, a sinusoidal wave that approximated a human nod.
"As I explained, a hyperspatial field can only be so big, and can only take so much mass. If you are in hyperspace and exceed that mass limit, there is no way to shut the field down and return to normal space. Since matter gets sucked into the field from the outside, you have to be very careful. That's why large ships vent their excess energy to radiative flanges on the hull; the flanges heat up, boiling off any of the hydrogen and helium that might collect."
The Sumnar's tentacles spun about dizzyingly.
"Is it an acceptable postulate," the being said quickly, "that failure allows an unbounded mass accumulation, increasingly beyond the acceptable probabilities of theoretical escape?"
"That is correct, Sumnar-kin. It's positive feedback. The more mass you have, the more that gets sucked in to the Corrado hyperspatial field, and the more impossible it becomes to break free. With a comet stuck to the front of the Really Really Really Big, we were so far over the mass limit that we weren't ever going to escape. The ship was destined to continue on to its eventual doom, lost in hyperspace - a Corrado Runaway."
"Then I find confusion at the imperative to end the exodus through the purposefully-designed pods of dangerous escape."
Maggie reached over to Walder's glass, and swirled it around. The ice clinked in the dregs of the clear alcohol.
"It was the hydrogen and helium ices freezing over the surface of the ship, collecting faster than the radiative flanges could melt. They'd frozen over the escape pod ports, making it impossible for the pods to get free. Some broke through the layers, but many did not."
She reached over and picked up the straw that Walder had used to suck down his alcohol.
"Each escape pod port is used by many pods, one after the other. Imagine a rack of pods lined up in a channel, like inside this cylinder. If a port is frozen over, or damaged, or blocked by a broken pod, then all the other pods behind it cannot get out. With each minute, the cold equations of hyperfield mechanics meant it less and less likely that the passengers could evacuate safely."
"There was a historical precedent of an oversized ship ramming into an iceberg far away from any rescue, without enough available rescue vessels. In both situations, the engineers thought their systems were adequate, only to be proved otherwise. The Armas ignored history, and history repeated itself, despite centuries of technological advancement."
There was a ripple of activity at the bar, as Ro#chon began to oversee the transfer of data crystals, deuterium shares, and diamonds involved in the wager. A tentacle of the bartender drifted over Walder's head, cradling a dusty bottle of the vintage '63 from Freedman's Planet. The bottle was swathed in the green and gray fabrics that identified the bartender's fourteenth limb. A second tentacle, the shimmering gold wrapped tip of the ninth, held an empty crystal decanter. The colored cloths were the only way most could tell one arm from another, and were often the subject of side bets.
"OK, OK, I give," Walder grunted, signaling the bartender to open the port. "It's a good yarn, and I can see how the usual failsafes would only make matters worse. I wouldn't trust an evacuation pod to get through that ice. But it's still just a yarn. No one escapes that inevitable a death."
The Sumnar's voice organs twisted towards Walder, shifting in color to a deep crimson, shuddering and twitching in midair.
"As the Walder-human succumbs to the concession of the wager, I follow in affable acceptance. Comprehension fails in how this results in a spheroid of weaving cloth or an undying afterlife."
Maggie laughed.
"This isn't a fabulous fiction - the 'yarn' Walder would have you believe it is. While the situation was dire, my survival, and that of everyone still aboard was simply a matter of learning from history."
"So that this one might understand the interpretations of chronologic inferences, what was the lesson that extended your lifespan beyond the expected probabilities?"
The bartender's ninth tentacle poured a small, thick stream of the vintage port into a fresh crystal glass in front of Maggie. She winked at the bartender; clearly the outcome of the wager had been evident enough for the port to be opened earlier, to give it enough time to breathe before being consumed. When the glass was filled, Maggie held it up, to drink in the color of the wine.
"C'mon Gale," Walder growled, moving his glass toward the bartender's tentacle. Just because he'd lost the bet didn't mean he wasn't going to get a share of the rewards. "Tell us the rest of the story. You can glory in your victory when you're done."
"The answer was right in front of us; it just required a little ingenuity and reengineering. Take your pick of historical examples - the novel solutions needed to get one of the early human lunar missions back after their primary ship lost most of its power, or the Thorn Expedition's use of the Europan ice to build pressure-tight igloos after the native bacteria damaged their habitat seals. That, and desperation, the 'mother of invention'."
"If our lifeboats weren't going to work, then we had to create one that would. Fortunately for us, there was a large enough chunk of ice ready to reshape to our needs. We melted our way into the center of the comet and quickly hollowed out a space where we could all survive. While that was going on, others cannibalized the life support systems, Corrado Field Inverters, and power reactors from the pods we couldn't use. Those were moved into the comet and reassembled. When we were ready, we sealed ourselves in and melted ourselves free from Big. The comet was large, but not too large - we had enough power to snap back into normal space. A week later, we were found by a Davlichti asteroid miner, who towed us back to civilization."
Maggie lifted her glass to inhale the complex fragrance of the wine.
"The Armas quickly and quietly reworked Big's sister ship, shrinking it enough to meet Irwin's strict guidelines. Then they named the new ship Big, and the Armas Public Relations department went to work. Before long, no one remembered that the new ship hadn't been the original. That too, is a lesson from history."
Maggie raised her glass again.
"To learning from history," she toasted, "and not ever having to go through that again!"