Flight Of The Anasazi - Chapter 19

 Flight Of The Anasazi

By David Billiot

Copyright 2026: All rights reserved

Chapter 19: Maintenance

For the first time in the longest time the power on the Anasazi went out. Mark was surprised because the relentless good luck of not having a power outage had made him come to expect it. Al had been pushing the engines to go faster and faster each jump. Al had also been taking longer jumps all the way up to seven hours. Again and again there had been no problems but this time the lights had gone out. Mark still had the switch to get emergency power back on but he was out of practice with reaching it and the conn was back. 

“Don’t panic. Don’t panic.” Mark yelled as he reached for the switch and felt in the dark for the right one. 

The lights popped on and Lalia was holding onto her seatbelt for dear life. She spoke but Mark could not understand her. 

Mark floated over to her and reassured her. He got her out of her harness and then the two of them floated through the ship to their spacesuits. Until full power was restored they’d need the spacesuits just in case the issue was serious.  Lalia had been in her spacesuit a number of times but never yet in a serious emergency like this.  

Mark and Lalia found Bluman floating in the tool locker next to the 3D printer.  It had lost power as well but getting him turned back on was just a matter of a tactile button. 

“We’ve lost power. I need your help.” Mark said. 

“Of course.” Bluman said. 

“I need you to tell Lalia that everything is going to be fine but we need to work together.” 

Bluman relayed the message to Lalia and then the three of them went together to the generator room. Mark got the battery reserves on to power the ship and get life support going again. The RTG was still supplying power so they could have that as a minimum while they worked. 

“Captain.” Lalia said to get Mark’s attention. She pointed out something she found.  

“Oh.” Mark said when he saw it. “Well, that has to be replaced.” Mark examined the frame that held down the damaged unit to the rest of the ship. “We have to unscrew these. One two three.”

Mark set Lalia to that job while he followed the power line to get that disconnected. Bluman was holding replacement lines and offered Mark one. However, it was not a replacement line he needed. He needed a replacement part. 

Mark took a moment to close his eyes and visualize the ships systems in his head. He needed a replacement for that part. To get that he needed the 3D printer. To get the 3D printer to work they needed this part to work. “We’re going to have to bypass it.”  He said that and knew it was true but also knew it was double work.  That meant creating the bypass, running the printer, making the part, taking down the bypass, and then reinstalling the part.  “Or, I can try to run the printer from the H3 tank.”  That was a possible plan but it meant going outside the ship at least twice. “Gotta be the bypass. Lalia, Bluman. We got a nice eight hour job in front of us.”

… 

The lights were all red in the Roanoke. The men were working in shifts with limited down time but up to double rations if the men could eat that much. Stormer was exhausted and was resting. Roma was in the conn and again Karen had come back with a nonsense answer about their situation. The Roanoke had sent out an autonomous distress drone to report back that the Roanoke was in trouble but there was no way to know if that drone would be able to successfully stop. 

There were several burning questions in Roma’s mind. 

How had they gotten to HC03 so fast?

Where was the Anasazi?

How was the Roanoke going to get home?

The Roanoke had been able to FTL closer to the star and get into an orbit that matched the Anasazi’s flight plan but there was no sign of the Anasazi. The star was point zero eight solarmass. The light of the star was a deep red but it was dim. 

The render of the ship was up on display so Roma could cycle through systems to see progress on repairs. 

Over at communications Lozentz was relieved by Dardar. 

Roma looked at another display to get the raw numbers that were collected. She plotted the numbers onto a graph.  Something wasn’t adding up, that much was obvious to everyone. The question was why. The problem was that while in FTL electromagnetic signals from outside couldn’t get in.  The ship had to navigate from gravitational data and it only really showed that their target destination was in front of them, not how far.  Back home this wasn’t really a problem because the motions of the planets and other objects in the system were well known.  Anything larger than a golf ball was tracked or cleared.  The known motions of the planets was used to assist with navigation and laid over gravitational data.  But in the span between the stars when going FTL, with everything so far away the gravitational data only showed in which direction a gravitational point was, not how far away. 

Roma pulled up Mark Adakai’s file. What would Mark Adakai do? What was he thinking? If he was alive out here then what had he been doing? 

She played a recording of Adakai and Freedman discussing his first FTL. 

“They hit ignition and the ships just vanished. Poof. Gone like a magic trick.”

“To where? What was the flight plan?”

“The ships start from the plasma extractor and were set to fly to Memory Station. They never made it. Systems start up and then the ship is gone. It’s just gone. Not there anymore.”

“Twice?”

“Twice. They said they needed a real pilot, a human who could out think the machine, but I said no way. But Daniel heard about it and volunteered. Now we have to send someone. It’s an order.”

“And you choose me.”

“I’m not ordering you. You can refuse.”

Roma stopped playback. One phrase struck her. Out think the machine, she needed to out think the machine. How do you even start to do that? How had Mark done it? 

It dawned on her that she was not Mark Adakai. Captain Mark Adakai was not here. Amanda Roma was here.  How could Amanda Roma out think the machine? She could feel her heart beating as she thought.  She had wanted this. She had fought for this. Now she was here in a life and death situation. Now it was up to her to not only keep herself alive but keep these men alive. It was all on her. 

She pulled up a spreadsheet program and started putting numbers in. On a separate display she had the numbers plotted and graphed. On top of that graph she put the expected speed and distance. See, they don’t line up. So, that’s wrong. It just is wrong. The hydrogen wasn’t slowing the ship down, it was somehow speeding the ship up. Or … the reason the hydrogen was building up wasn’t because there was more hydrogen but actually because the ship was already going faster than it was supposed to. 

Roma went back to the spreadsheet and typed in an equation. The solution was then graphed and compared to the actual data points. It didn’t match. She tried another equation. Again, it could not connect the dots and didn’t match observations for flights under an hour. She adjusted the equation. The graph shifted but still didn’t match up. 

“The ship was going faster. That is the mystery. The ship was going faster.” she said to herself. 

She tried another equation. There it was. That was the solution right there. It matched observed flight data for short flights and also matched the Roanoke.  

“Karen, I want you to analyze and tell me about this.” Roma ordered. 

“Of course, Captain.” Karen’s voice answered. “Your equations would imply that the speed of the ship was increasing exponentially.”

“There are two components to the distance covered.” Roma explained. “One is speed and the other is contraction. Which one makes more sense?”

“In order to increase speed, more power would need to be fed to the FTL.  This did not happen.”

“So that means it was spacial contraction and that was independent of our speed. And it was not linear. It was exponential.”

“I am analyzing your theory now, Captain. It seems that the data does support your conclusion but it is weak.”

“I ordered a stop because we had hydrogen build up on the hull. Mark would not have stopped for that. He would have kept going. He wouldn’t have known he was in trouble. He wouldn’t have known until … he passed the star.”

Roma adjusted her graph to show the possible speed of the Anasazi when passing HC03. 

“If you are correct, Captain, there would be no way to safely stop at those speeds. If the Anasazi attempted to come to a full stop, it would have been destroyed.”

“And if he didn’t come to a stop?”

“He wouldn’t be in our galaxy anymore.”

“Well, one thing is for sure, he’s not here. Karen, it’s time to start making a plan on how to get home. We have to report this.”

“Captain!” Dardar yelled. “I’ve got a signal.”

“What!”

… 

Al came back online and the various displays with information came to life. 

Mark had his feet secured to the floor of the ship by the foot holds and Lalia was actually floating upside down with her head next to his as if she were standing of the ceiling. It was Lalia who spoke first to ask Al if he was ok. 

“I see we have suffered a power outage.” Al said. 

“One of the transformers had a burnout.” Mark said. “We did what we could back there but we need you to tell us if anything else is broken.”

“I will get the local gravity turned back on.” Al said. 

“Hold it.” Lalia said. “Gravity is expensive. First is safety.”

“She’s right.” Mark said. 

“I understand.” Al said. “Instruments show that we are in orbit around a star traveling at eighteen thousand kilometers per hour. I see the Anasazi was able to come out of FTL well below relativistic speed.”

“I think you had too many things going all at the same time.” Mark said. 

“It would be noteworthy to have found the actual limits of our FTL engines.” Al said. 

“We need to do full safety checks. And get another AI to help you go over the data from the jump.  Let’s find a number we can stay under. If it was speed or the time of the jump, I need to know what was too much.”