Chapter No.11. New hope.

We were looking at the main screen displaying a drifting object that Janet had located at ten thousand kilometers away from the planet.

"That looks like a shuttle," Sharon said. "Maybe some of them escaped the ship before it exploded."

"That's a very good possibility," I said. "We'll have to hustle to intercept it before it gets out of range." I turned to Sharon. "You can come with me." I pointed at Janet. "You stay here just in case."

"Just in case of what?" she said with wide eyes.

"You can always maneuver this ship to rescue us."

She wasn't happy to hear that.

Sharon and I made our way up to the hanger and got into a shuttle. After powering it up and having COMA depressurize the hanger deck in order to open the hanger door, I unlocked the landing struts and began a careful maneuver to get the shuttle out of the hanger. Once out, I used the engine controls to begin an intercept burn to the drifting shuttle.

It required a half hour of coaxing the shuttle to get close to our prey. The next trick would be really difficult. I had to come up alongside the shuttle and extend a telescoping bridge portal that would connect to receptors in the drifting shuttle. Once it was secured, we could enter the other shuttle, assuming they were able to open their door.

I began attempts to make radio contact. "SX355, this is mission control, do you copy?"

I had to repeat it several times before I received a weak static filled response. "Who are you?"

"We're members of the first mission to Proxima-b."

There was a long pause. All I got was static.

"We can't open our door," a squeaky voice replied. "Our controls are not working."

"Give me your operations passcode," I replied.

Another long pause before I received a response. "I think it's 343679."

I typed that number into our computer and linked it to COMA back on our vessel. I requested COMA to override their control computer to open the outer door.

After several minutes, the outer door opened. I opened our door and floated in zero gravity through the temporary portal to the drifting shuttle.

After gaining entry I encountered two females in space suits sitting in the forward seats.

I motioned for them to get up, but it was obvious that they were not able to move well. I grabbed one of them and pulled her out of her chair. Then I slowly maneuvered her over through the portal to our shuttle. Then I went back to recover the other female. Sharon took over to get the first female into a seat.

After I rescued the other female, I went back over to their shuttle to see if there was anything worth retrieving. I checked the shuttle's command module and noted that it was not operating, an indication that the battery had given up the ghost. I thanked the engineering gods that I was able to have COMA open their outer door before that happened. However, I did spot a computer unit, a metal box about a quarter the size of a laser weapon's battery pack. I deposited it in a pouch attached to my belt.

After getting back to my shuttle, I released the portal attachment and made it retract into a storage space in the outer wall of our shuttle.

I noted that Sharon had gotten the two females' helmets off. Badges on their suits identified them as Natale Wells and Bridget Fisher, both astronauts second class.

"I'm Ryan Taylor, and this is Sharon Bundt."

"How did you locate our vessel?" Natale asked in a squeaky voice.

"It's a long story, but we arrived at the planet that you people tried to establish a base on and found a location reference that brought us here."

"What made your vessel explode?" Sharon asked.

"We have no idea," Bridget said. "We were still in hibernation, and they revived us and ordered us to get in a shuttle and get away as far as we could before it did."

"We were never on the planet that you're referring to," Natale said.

I exchanged glances with Sharon before I turned back to them. "Okay, we can discuss this after you two get cleaned up and squared away."

They didn't object. Sharon and I had to help them out of their space suits and guide them back down through the axel tube that led to the crew wheel. While Janet and Sharon helped them get cleaned up and fed, I went back down to the engineering deck to attach their shuttle's computer unit to our main computer. After installing it, I used the engineering system computer system to go through the data contained in it.

I was able to see their original crew manifest, which consisted of four men and six women. The men were gone, leaving me stuck with four women now. Basically, all of us survivors were meant to be backup to the primary crews. Whoever came up with these mission plans missed the boat. The only way to describe what had happened is to label it as a cluster fuck.

I met the two new crew members formally the next day. They had gathered with us for a breakfast of soy sausage, doughnuts, and coffee. Both women had been assigned the two bunk beds down from Janet and Sharon's, leaving only one unused bunk, which was supposed to be mine if our original crew had survived. As it turned out, I took over the first bunk, which would have been assigned to the captain.

Natale was a blond with a sharply sculptured face. Her dossier listed her as being an exo-geologist.  Bridget was a brunette with more rounded features, and she was listed as an exo-biologist.

"How did they expect you two to survive in a shuttle?" I asked the two newbies.

Natale shrugged. "I don't know. I guess they realized that the ship was going to explode and reacted by trying to save us."

"What are you going to do now?" Bridget asked.

"I don't know. We're on our own out here now. We could try to go back to Earth, but we lost half our crew in hibernation. None of us want to go back into hibernation for the length of time it would take to get back there."

"I know how you feel about hibernation," Natale said. "I hate being in those things."

"I suppose we should try to locate another habitable planet," I said. "But, even if we find one, I'm not sure if it's safe to live on it. Supposedly, an alien disease killed some of your crew."

"Fortunately, you were not infected because you were never on the planet," Janet said.

"Maybe we would have been better not to have been revived from hibernation," Bridget said.

"You would have been killed," I said. "You're alive now, and we still have a mission to find a habitable planet. If we do find one, I'm not sure what we could do about it. If we send a message back to Earth, the Earth will be uninhabitable long before the message arrives."

"Any way you look at it, we're probably better off than anyone Earth right now," Janet said.

"I agree. I think the best thing to do is to continue searching for habitable planets. Maybe by doing so, we might find a way to get back to Earth without going into hibernation."

That seemed to boost their spirits a bit. It would be the next day before we would venture out again, leaving what remained of the second mission here in a useless solar system.