Collective Hindsight (Book 1) - Aaron Rosenberg [12]
Duffy nodded. “Exactly. We’ve got countless safety protocols for the warp core—why wouldn’t they have the same sort of thing for their engines?”
“They do,” one of the Bynars—Duffy thought it was 110—replied. “We have sorted through much of the—”
“—remaining computer data. This ship had—”
“—extensive safety protocols, including automatic cutoffs.”
“Such an explosion should—”
“—never have occurred.”
“Okay, so it couldn’t have happened by accident,” Stevens said. “What about on purpose?” The others all turned to look at him, and he held up his hands. “Hey, can I help it if I see the ugly possibilities?”
“You are suggesting sabotage,” Salek said. “That is possible—certainly the safety protocols could be disengaged, and that would allow for the energies to be vented internally. A ship of this nature might even have some protocol for such an internal release, to flush away intruders or dangerous particles, and thus all that would be required is removing safety overrides and activating such a protocol.”
“But if there was a saboteur,” Duffy pointed out, “they’d have been killed along with everyone else. As near as we can tell, the energy poured through this entire ship in an instant. Nobody could hide from that.”
“Could someone have set things up, then escaped beforehand?”
Duffy shook his head. “Not without being noticed. I’ve gone over the data from the outpost. They didn’t see any other ships near it, no escape pods or the like, and no life signs outside it. So unless it was rigged before it ever hit this system, that’s not what happened.”
“What if the purpose was not to kill the crew?” Pattie pondered out loud. “We’re assuming that it was either an accident or murder, but what if it was deliberate and the deaths were a necessary cost, not the end goal?”
Stevens paced about, hands gesturing. “So somebody on this ship decides to flush the energy from the ship’s systems and does it internally, killing himself and everyone else on board. Why? Why not just flush it externally, and not hurt anyone?” He paused. “What if somebody was going to get hurt either way? And the choice wasn’t to hurt or not, but who would get injured? If these people valued other lives over their own, they might have sacrificed themselves to save the others.”
“Which others?” Duffy asked him, and in response his friend stabbed a finger toward the front viewscreen, which showed the rocks floating beyond the ship.
“How about R5-3791?”
“They killed themselves to save the outpost?” Duffy was finding that one hard to believe, but the Bynars were both nodding, and speaking to the ship computers in that high-pitched series of whines and beeps. After a moment they switched back to more normal language.
“The computer logs indicate that—”
“—life-forms were detected somewhere nearby. The crew—”
“—knew that they were not alone in this system.”
“Their engines can only handle so much energy at once,” Salek surmised calmly. “From the brief glimpse Stevens and I had, the containment systems are limited, and are already close to capacity again. The ship must need to keep moving in order to bleed off what it has absorbed. It reached this system, and stopped for whatever reason, intending to vent excess energy. But then the crew detected life nearby, and knew that, if they followed normal protocols, they would endanger those others. Instead they chose to vent internally, killing themselves but protecting the outpost from harm. It is logical.”
“Yeah, except for one thing.” Duffy tapped a few equations into his padd, then showed the others the results. “The energy released in here wouldn’t have covered the distance to most of these asteroids. Some of it, sure, but not enough to put the people on R5-3791 at risk, especially if they’re holed up in one of the rocks along the system’s outer edge. And we can assume this crew