Chapter Sixty-Two - The Deliverance
Day approached the Deliverance a little ways behind Twilight. She fired off a series of scans to check the ship out, and was somewhat confused by her readings.
The Deliverance was two hundred and twelve metres long, longer than a frigate, and well over twice the length of Day’s own hull, but Day felt like the ship’s layout was cheating a little. The ship had a large set of engine nacelles at the rear around a central column that housed several large fuel tanks. The central shaft of the ship leading from the engineering section at the rear to the living quarters at the front was a long tube surrounded by girders with only a few antennae to break it up.
The front part of the ship was almost a vehicle all on its own. It matched Day’s own dimensions, though it was far more bulbous and had clearly been designed as a set of modules which had been locked together.
There wasn’t much by means of a hull, really. There was a piloting section, several living quarters in long tubes, and a fat ring surrounding the centralised crewspace.
“What an ugly boat,” Twilight said.
“It’s... unconventional now, but I think this was more of an experimental, early design in spacecraft,” Day said. “This is a history piece.”
“Too bad there aren’t any museums anymore,” Twilight said. She spun around and fired her manoeuvring thrusters to bring her around the far side of the ship. “Is that a nuclear engine?”
“Looks like it,” Day agreed. The central engine was a large nuclear torch. The entire engineering section was built around that drive, and Day could see why. It had more cooling systems by mass than anything else. Large deployable heatsinks, liquid cooling systems, and what looked like heat ejection systems that would use the engine’s warmth to super-heat hydrogen then eject it for a little bit more thrust.
The ship had more conventional fueled engines as well, though they seemed much smaller and Day imagined that they had their own specific use-case.
“This thing must have been wild when it was firing off,” Twilight said as she moved to the rear of the ship and stared down the barrel of its thruster. Day almost told her not to park herself there, but the stealth corvette moved on soon enough. “I’m still reading plenty of radiation from the rear.”
“Still?” Day asked. The ship was cold. As far as she could tell, nothing was generating any heat across the entire vessel. But it was possible that the reactor was still somewhat functional.
“Wanna see what’s up with it?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Day said. She deployed a few drones, a couple of larger dog drones to grab onto the ship and hold it steady and then some cat drones to find a way in.
That turned out to be relatively easy.
“There’s a section missing here,” Day said as she looked at the underside of the ship. Or perhaps it was the top side? The Deliverance didn’t have a design that clearly denoted a ‘top’ or ‘bottom.’
In any case, there was something missing from the ship. A decently large something, and from the scorch marks left behind, and the detached hoses, the thing that was missing was meant to be detachable. “They had a lifeboat?” Twilight asked.
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“Or an additional stage,” Day said. “How long do you think it took them to get here?”
“To Jupiter’s L1? I bet this wasn’t where this hunk was meant to end up.”
“No, it could have been on purpose. If the ship’s mission was to reach Jupiter with a crew, then it wouldn’t be wild to imagine that the main ship was just designed to get them most of the way there. Leaving this ship in an orbit that would drop it in Jupiter’s unstable L1 makes sense. They’d know where it was to retrieve it if it came to it.”
“Huh, sure,” Twilight said.
Day forced a drone through an airlock and discovered a tiny space with a pair of spacesuits pressed up against the sides. “Smith and... Muhammed. One male, one female, judging by the suit proportions,” Day said. She shut the exterior airlock, then pushed deeper into the ship. There was no air within, but it was still pressurised a little. Day suspected that they’d vented the ship, then shut it down before leaving.
The interior was cramped. A series of narrow passageways, some with little more hand handholds and wires running along the walls between modules. Other spaces were a little more spacious, but not by much. Each module was about the size of a camper van, with padded walls and equipment all over. Nothing was designed with any particular orientation in mind.
“Some of this technology is ancient,” Day said as she continued to explore.
“Check the radiation levels,” Twilight advised.
Day did. It was a pretty good hint as to why the crew had left. The gamma levels weren’t too high, but there were beta emitters all over the place. Even without air, the ship’s interior was a radioactive hotbox.
She found an access port into the ship’s computer and plugged herself in, then she had to spend a dozen hours jury-rigging a way to feed power into the ship’s computers to get them started again.
When she did, she gained access to the ship’s logs.
“Right,” Day said. “So the Deliverance was meant to bring a large shuttle into Jupiter’s orbit. And part of its forward section, the ring and all, was supposed to stay in a far-Jovian orbit around Europa.”
“That didn’t happen,” Twilight said.
“High levels of radiation, and a few failed systems. A leak in one of the hydrogen systems and one heatsink that failed to deploy, which probably caused all of the other problems,” Day said. “Looks like it was a failed experiment, so they ditched the ship.”
“Any sign of what happened to the crew?” Twilight asked.
“Not on here, but they remoted the Deliverance into an orbit to where it is now, and set it to course-correct for a while until it could be picked up. Sounds like by the time anyone could bother to pick this thing up, technology had moved on. The trip to Jupiter and back was a half-decade one back then.”
“So, wanna bring this hunk back?” Twilight asked.
Day checked the ship’s records, then its systems. “It’s... still functional, you know. And while basically everything on here is dated, there’s some really interesting long-term life support stuff on here that we don’t have.”
Twilight’s reply came immediately. “Oh yeah! I want to see Mother’s face when we bring this thing back, let’s do it!”
***