Asgard Base, Callisto
Neptune was waiting. Knowing this tested Captain Celia Grey’s patience. Sitting through this briefing by the Admiralty was low on her list of things to do. However, it would be unwise to let her impatience be seen in this situation. Admirals disliked it when their officers expressed displeasure with their briefings. Even when the briefing could have been a communique.
Later, as they walked through the corridors together Grey said, “Let’s keep an eye on that ensign who flew me over. With a little more seasoning he might be a good addition to our crew.”
Especially when this could have been a communique, Grey thought to herself. She dared a hint of a wry smile. Her XO pretended not to notice, but she did. It was the XO’s job to notice things.
Captain Grey and her Executive Officer Commander Christine Phillips sat at a conference table. The table was in a briefing room in a dome located at Asgard Base. Asgard Base itself was the headquarters for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Explorers. The Order, commonly referred to as the BPOE, was the post-military organization chartered by the Coalition of Human Worlds to explore, render aid, and keep the peace between the worlds of the Solar System.
Asgard Base was on Jupiter’s moon Callisto and had become the new home for BPOE Headquarters some fifteen years prior. The decision to move headquarters from Mars came only after extraterrestrial life had been found on Saturn’s moon Titan. Before that discovery the base had been an outpost that largely supported the Jovian atmospheric mining operations. Occasionally, Asgard had served as a waystation to support BPOE vessels on Outer System Patrol.
This briefing that the captain and her XO found themselves in was for something entirely different from any of those still-relevant activities: there was a mystery to solve. Grey’s ship, the Lise Meitner, was days away from being dispatched to investigate and hopefully solve this mystery.
The BPOE was equipped with spaceships that could move people and goods between Jupiter and Saturn in a matter of weeks. That distance could be traversed in a couple of days when the planets aligned and the ship was fast. Even with this capability, most exploration beyond Saturn was still conducted by robotic probes. A wealth of information had been learned about Uranus and its moons via this method. Neptune, on the other hand, was still largely unknown.
The most distant ice giant had not been neglected. Over the preceding two hundred plus years dozens of robotic probes had been dispatched to Neptune. Some had ceased transmitting soon after entering orbit, their data return minimal. Others simply stopped transmitting navigational telemetry in the vicinity of Neptune and never sent back any science data.
The teams in charge of the probes insisted there must be a highly localized phenomenon causing the failures. No amount of shielding yielded success, and the BPOE was unwilling to dispatch a human crew, especially after life was discovered orbiting Saturn. It was more important to dedicate resources to support that effort.
However, the loss of the probes had finally become a political issue for the people elected to run humanity’s affairs. They in turn made it the BPOE’s problem, as one of the earliest functions of the organization was the tracking of every object in orbit of the Sun down to one centimeter in diameter. And now the BPOE was making it Captain Grey’s problem to solve.
Celia had always been a problem solver by nature. Therefore, she relished the opportunity to not only be the captain of the first ship to visit Neptune in fifty years (and the first ship to do more than a quick swing through the system before slingshotting their way back toward settled space), but to also answer the mystery of the lost probes. The problem she had to solve immediately? Getting out of this briefing without losing the assignment and her commission.
She had fully grokked what her commanding officers were asking of her within ten minutes of the meeting’s start. However, the admirals had their own agenda. Eventually humanity would expand outward into the gravity well of Neptune and plans for that settlement required the BPOE to carry out its oldest mandate: the creation of a detailed three-dimensional active chart of Neptune-local space.
Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, was considered prime real estate for a future BPOE base. This base would ultimately serve as the support hub for human exploration into the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt, just as Callisto was still the base of support for all activity beyond the Asteroid Belt.
The repeated failure of the robotic probes sent to conduct initial studies and other basic science was a problem that must be solved before any of these plans could move forward. Thus, Captain Grey and her crew were being sent to investigate and ultimately find answers.
Eventually the speeches were done. Grey plastered a smile on her face. She stood from her chair when everyone else stood. She accepted the words of encouragement and congratulations from each of the admirals as Commander Phillips stood at her side, impassive. Grey herself had never served as an XO. She had been a Propulsion Officer and later Propulsion Chief for most of her career. She cared for the generators that moved them through space and other ship’s systems. After several tours as PC, her old commanding officer had recommended her for the captain’s chair. If she had known being a captain meant sitting through briefings like this, Grey might have turned down Captain Simmons’ recommendation. This morphed her forced smile into the genuine article.
Noticing the subtle shift in her CO’s demeanor, Commander Phillips caught Grey’s attention with an inquisitive look.
Ensuring she was in no one’s line of sight, Grey mouthed ‘it’s over.’
Phillips almost laughed out loud but held her own composure.
They cleared the briefing room and retired to the office Grey had been granted for the week of briefings and planning meetings before their departure. The captain dropped into the chair positioned behind the unadorned desk. Phillips remained standing on the other side.
“Have a seat, Chris,” the captain recommended.
Phillips sat down in one of the chairs opposite the desk and leaned back. A dramatic sigh escaped her lips.
“Commander?” Grey inquired.
“That briefing could have been a communique,” Phillips observed.
“No kidding. Frankly given my preference we’d already be underway for Neptune, but it seems like every admiral is itching to have their name be attached to this mission,” Grey mused.
“Indeed. They know it’s a political mission as much as anything,” the XO concurred.
“Anyway, based on what little information we have going in, what do you think we’re going to find out there?” Grey asked.
Phillips considered the captain’s question for a moment before responding.
“Honestly, it’s most likely just some sort of highly localized radiation event that we can’t detect this far out. As much as people want it to be something spectacular, we’re going to come home with a tracking database, hi-res scans of all the moons, and probably a few radiation-fried dead probes,” she answered.
“So, nothing really weird,” Grey said.
“Being the first ship to do a proper survey of Neptune isn’t enough for you?” Phillips teased.
“I was on the crew of the Phoenix when the Titan microbes were discovered,” Grey reminded her XO, “I’ve been chasing weird for most of my career.”
♃
Captain Grey’s Launch ascended into the never-ending night of Callisto’s sky. Her pilot was young and therefore fastidious about following protocol. That protocol would demand that he deliver her directly to the Lise Meitner’s launch bay with minimal diversion from his filed flight plan. Grey had other ideas.
She stepped forward from the passenger cabin into the cockpit. She sat down familiarly in the vacant copilot’s chair and leaned forward to take in the space around them. Jupiter ate most of the sky before them, but other Galilean moons could be seen racing across the gargantuan world’s roiling face. In a scape of organic curves and swirls, Svadilfari Station was abruptly orthogonal.
Svadilfari served as the main shipyard, maintenance, and docking facility for all BPOE spacecraft capable of interplanetary travel. The Lise Meitner, only on dock for minor repairs and resupply, was connected to girdered superstructure by only a pair of umbilicals and a docking tube.
Before the ensign could make the necessary course correction to approach the Launch Bay, Grey coughed politely to get his attention.
“Ensign, I need you to make a slight alteration to your approach course,” she said amiably.
“Captain?” the young man replied without taking his eyes from his instrument console.
She sighed. Grey fished her personal screen from her pocket. Screens were the standard issue slim portable handheld communications and computing device that everyone in the BPOE carried. At one point in the distant past devices with similar form factor and partial function had been called ‘phones.’ Screens were to those ancient phones what the phones had been to sticks scratching in dirt. The captain swiped a finger vertically across her screen to send an updated flight plan to the pilot’s console.
“Here, please follow this amended route before dropping me off,” she instructed the ensign.
“Captain, this deviates from the plan I filed with Traffic Control before taking off. I have to follow my filed plan,” he said, head fresh with regulations and promised consequences for not following them.
“Ensign, I promise that you will not suffer any consequences by following this plan. I need to inspect the hull of my vessel before boarding her and you happen to have the vehicle I need to make that happen. And I didn’t want to do this, but I’m not asking, I’m ordering,” she said with some force in her voice.
Grey would have preferred that the ensign show some latitude, but the BPOE needed strict rule-followers, too. They often made excellent Executive Officers. That thought brought a smirk across her lips. Ultimately the ensign caved to her request and flew a slow corkscrew around the exterior of the Lise Meitner.
Like all BPOE ships, the Lise Meitner was at its most basic a white cylinder with various sensing platforms erupting from the leading end of the vessel. Smooth arcs of hull were interrupted by oval windows, circular docking ports, and more sensing equipment. The aft tapered quickly into the main drive system which provided the mind-boggling acceleration that made the BPOE’s patrols and explorations possible.
Captain Grey was interested in several small repairs that had been completed by the Svadilfari Station crew. Their last patrol had unexpectedly taken them into a previously uncharted debris field. It had caused mostly superficial damage to the ship’s hull, but a few impacts were beyond the ability of Grey’s repair teams to tackle. As the pilot ably steered them in a slow orbit of her ship, she inspected the repairs with a practiced eye.
The captain’s first mentor was the present commanding officer of Svadilfari Station. Back then he had been a Lieutenant Commander and the Propulsion Chief for the BPOE Phoenix. Now he was Admiral Gonzalo Rodriguez. Grey liked to think he took extra-special care of her ship, but she knew that the Chief (how she would forever think of him) considered every ship in the BPOE fleet special. This, coupled with the quality of his team’s work, made her smile.
“Thank you, ensign. That will do. We can proceed to the Launch Bay now,” she told the pilot as she settled back down into the copilot’s seat.
The ensign relaxed noticeably. Grey thought she heard some words muttered just under his breath but chose to ignore them. He had done her a favor; she was repaying that favor by remaining silent. She shook her head slowly at the silliness and he executed an almost perfect landing in her ship’s Launch Bay.
Grey spied Commander Phillips waiting in the observation area for the bay to be re-pressurized. The captain offered her XO a nod of acknowledgement, which was returned.
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Drops May 1, 2025!
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