Astronomicon 1: Inception Point (Finished)

1 - Impact

Hundreds of sensors screamed.

An instantaneous torrent of error messages hit the primary input buffers, overloading them and causing yet more errors. Automated reports of critical pressure leaks, power losses and system failures were more than enough to lift Foxy into an alert state.

As Elysian's Automatic Flight Operations Computer System (A.F.O.C.S., known as "Foxy" to the crew), it was responsible for safety, navigating the ship, managing its many electrical and mechanical systems and, ultimately, ensuring the frozen crew of eighty humans reached Proxima C intact and healthy.

Within a microsecond, Foxy initiated another twenty processor cores. Barely more than a second later, with the extra cores up and running, Foxy's artificial consciousness was more "awake" and much better able to deal with assessing the event which had caused the flood of anomalous information.

The first job was to prioritise the incoming error reports. Vibration sensors, navigation alignment sensors and similar were all disregarded. Feedback such as pressure losses in the propulsion system, the loss of all power from fusion reactor B, a power output reduction from reactor A and explosive decompression in the hatch room were far more urgent.

Foxy's initial reaction to the issue took milliseconds. It cross-referenced tens of thousands of error code permutations with the error database, activated all available cameras on the base of the vessel, checked the internal pressure doors, and it tried to make sense of the vast array of information that was still bombarding its artificial intelligence.

It was quickly apparent that two of the three navigational cameras and the Stellar Observatory Telescope, mounted on a gantry beside the ion drive nozzles, were dead. The remaining one seemed to show vibrating fog. Foxy's image recognition algorithms could not make any sense of it.

Views from external monitoring cameras were of mixed help. Foxy simultaneously analysed all the feeds, mostly close-ups of the major components of Elysian's propulsion system. Some displayed nothing out of the ordinary, but others showed smashed components or even entire sections missing. One ion drive was still functional and providing the expected thrust. The other was still functioning in a reduced capacity, but xenon propellent was being lost at an alarming rate.

As the Elysian was within hours of completing its thirteen-year interstellar voyage, the four huge xenon gas tanks were nearing empty anyway, but that meant that the xenon gas was an even more valuable resource. Foxy started the pumps to move xenon from tanks three and four to tanks one and two. Only the pump on tank four reported normal operation. The pump on tank three appeared to be dead. In seconds, that would no longer matter as tank three would be empty anyway.

The issue ticked far more boxes than would count as urgent enough for human intervention, so Foxy issued the order to defrost the command crew; a decision not taken lightly. Meanwhile, it used the attitude thrusters, all still working, for now, to realign the vessel with Proxima C. Without the navigational cameras, it had to rely more on maths than actual feedback.

The engineers who had designed Foxy back on Earth had produced a combination of hardware and software with an unrivalled ability to learn and adapt skills viewed as critical in situations where human intervention was at least an hour away for the onboard crew and years away for mission controllers back at home.

Foxy correlated as much useful information from the monitoring cameras as there was and built a virtual star map. Rotating that to match recognised star locations fudged an impressively precise astro-compass, allowing it to align Elysian's ion drive precisely with its desired destination. As soon as it locked on target, Foxy cranked up the working ion drive to maximum thrust and tried to do the same with the damaged one.

The remaining fuel level was perilously close to inadequate and tank four was still leaking. The working pump was struggling to pump more than a trickle of the precious xenon into the secure tanks.

Because Elysian was only hours from Proxima C, the vast majority of the deceleration was complete. What was left was mostly fine-tuning, to ensure that Elysian, a closed-packed collection of nine 4-metre diameter aluminium tubes containing the colonists and their equipment, made a stable orbit around the planet ready to scan for the best landing site.

It was becoming clear that Foxy could not compensate for the loss of thrust from the damaged ion drive. On top of that, the increased rate of consumption from the two good tanks meant that Elysian would be running on fumes at about the same time as it entered orbit.

The remaining fusion reactor reported a minor overheating problem. Standard procedures required dropping to forty percent power until it had cooled a little. Judging by the unexplained drop in levels, coolant for both fusion reactors was also leaking into space. For the first time in its lifetime, Foxy overrode the safety protocol and kept the power output at one hundred percent. Forty percent would not be enough to run both ion drives.

Velocity calculations showed that the thrust from the damaged ion drive was barely twenty percent. Foxy looked at other ways to slow the vessel. Options were few, but the most obvious one was the attitude thrusters. Their propellant levels were nearly full, so Foxy fired all the thrusters that faced the direction of travel. Balancing them to avoid turning the vessel was a complicated job.

There was some heat resistance capability in the outer skin of the Elysian. They had designed each of the nine, 24-metre long, cylindrical modules that formed the ship to resist the heat caused by the pressure wave of entry into the atmosphere of the planet. The lightweight external frame which held it all together could withstand considerably more. Each module had a stainless-steel outer skin with a carbon heatshield protecting the bottom surface, together capable of resisting substantially higher temperatures than Foxy expected during the descent. Foxy decided to use some of that leeway earlier in the sequence.

By turning the Elysian a fraction of a degree away from Proxima C, the retarding thrust would push the ship's trajectory a little deeper into the atmosphere. The resulting extra resistance would slow the vessel more, and the heatshield should safely deal with the extra heat generated.

With all the adjustments completed, two propellant tanks empty and the command crew defrosting, Foxy's remaining job was monitoring progress until the commander was conscious.

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