Orphans of Apollo - S3 E5
Uncommanded
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Previously: Joanna almost tells Lana her theory about being genetically modified. Things are going well on the expedition and back at the hab, until an alarm is triggered.
September 2056
Owen jumped when he heard the door open. He forced himself not to turn around. Keep looking at the screen, keep looking at the screen. Maybe he could close the windows he had open without Kevin realising.
“Hey Kev,” he said without looking up, trying to sound casual.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Kevin was already at his shoulder. Too late to close the windows he had open without it looking suspicious. There were a lot of different ones open. Maybe Kevin wouldn’t realise what he had been doing. Maybe.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Too late. He turned to look at Kevin with the eyes of a puppy dog caught red-handed, destroying their owner’s favourite pair of shoes.
“What. The fuck. Are you doing?” Kevin screamed again, banging his fist on the table.
Owen stared back blankly.
“You couldn’t help yourself, could you? You fuckwit!” Kevin put his hands on his head. “I knew I couldn’t trust you. I should have stayed here.”
“I just wanted to make sure it was going to work like I thought,” offered Owen.
“Yes, but the whole fucking idea is that we do it when they are too far away for help to get to them.”
“Do you want me to turn it off?”
“Will they have got a warning yet?”
“Hard to tell. I would say if it is on for another few minutes, they will. I was only going to turn it on for a bit to make sure we could control the heater.”
“Oh,” said Aiden. For a heartbeat, his features froze. “Oh, shit!”
“What is it?” asked Lana.
“The battery heater is on.” Aiden furiously tried different commands. “I can’t seem to turn it off. We’ll have to ask them to do it from the rover’s controls.”
Lana picked up her tablet and opened the expedition comm loop.
“Expedition crew, this is base. We have just detected an anomaly with the rover. How do you copy?”
“Is that what set off the alarm just now?” came back the response from Pieter.
“Yes. The heater for the main battery in the rover has come on. It’s not responding to commands from Aiden to turn it off. You will need to turn it off manually from the rover’s control panel.”
“I’m on it.” This time, it was Brant’s voice on the loop. “How much has the temperature risen?”
“Only about five degrees, but it is rising steadily,” said Aiden, leaning over to the microphone on the side of Lana’s tablet.
“Turn it off. For fuck’s sake, turn it off!”
“Ok Kev.”
Owen navigated through the pages of the rover’s systems he already had open, eventually reaching the electrical system. He selected the main battery and deactivated the heater. Kevin watched him like a hawk.
“It’s off.”
Kevin sat down next to Owen and exhaled deeply. Then, in one smooth, swift movement, he picked up the empty glass from the workstation next to Owen and threw it against the wall. It exploded with a satisfying crash, followed by the much softer tinkle of the hundreds of pieces of glass falling to the floor.
“Now get the fuck out of here!” said Kevin, in barely more than a whisper.
Owen rose in silence, crunching glass underfoot as he backed toward the door, leaving Kevin hunched over the scattered shards, chest heaving.
“Good job Brant. You got to that quick,” said Aiden.
“What do you mean?” said Brant, breathing heavily.
“The battery heater is now showing as deactivated.”
“I’m still in the airlock. It’s just finished its cycle. I’m about to open the inner door now.”
“So you didn’t turn it off?” queried Aiden.
“Dude, I might be good, but I’m not that good. You must have turned it off somehow.”
“Nope, it wasn’t responding to any of my commands.”
“Ok then, that’s weird,” said Brant as he opened the inner door to the rover. He clumped straight to the cockpit, still wearing his full EVA suit and helmet. Tapping on the centre console screen, he brought up the controls for the electrical systems.
“Confirming battery heater is currently set to auto and showing as not running.”
“Ok, that is weird,” agreed Aiden.
Lana’s voice came on the loop. “Is there any way the battery heater could have been turned on by accident?”
“Lana, it’s been on auto the whole time,” said Brant. “We haven’t touched it.”
Lana looked across at Aiden. “The heater came on this morning at the preset time to warm the battery before they departed. After that, it went to auto. So it would only come on if the battery temperature got too low, like overnight when the power consumption drops right off. They have been driving until a little while ago. Plus, I have just looked back at the temperature log for the battery and it hasn’t dropped enough to trigger the heater.”
“So it’s not a faulty temperature sensor?” asked Brant.
“I thought that, but the temperature has always been within range on all the sensors. There should be no reason to trigger the heater.”
“Ok, that is really weird,” said Brant.
Lana muted the microphone on her tablet. “I don’t like this. It’s really strange. What happens if it comes on again and they can’t turn it off?” Aiden looked across at Joanna and then back to Lana.
“Well, I think we all realise if the heater comes on and can’t be turned off, the battery is just going to get hotter and hotter until it goes into thermal runaway.” He paused. “Then the whole rover will go up.”
Pieter’s voice came over the loop. “Are we all good to continue now then?”
Lana looked at Joanna, then Aiden. She unmuted the microphone and placed the tablet on the table. Joanna pulled her chair in closer.
“Ok, can all three of you hear us? We have you on speaker, so Joanna and Aiden are listening in.”
Pieter, Brant and Zawadi all responded, and Lana continued.
“I think it would be prudent to terminate the expedition and bring you back to the hab. We all know the consequences of the rover main battery going into thermal runaway.”
“It’s off now though, isn’t it?” said Pieter.
“Yes, but we don’t know why it came on and we did nothing to switch it off. What’s to say it won’t come on again?” replied Lana.
“Lana’s right Pieter,” said Aiden, “we have no idea why or how it came on.”
“What about if we leave it switched off rather than auto? We can always manually monitor the temperature and turn it on if needed.”
“It’s too much of a risk,” said Lana.
“There must be a manual breaker for it somewhere,” replied Pieter.
“You know I’m not sure there is,” said Brant. “I don’t remember that ever coming up when we learned the systems, do you Aiden?”
“I can’t remember either.”
The conversation became garbled as several people tried to talk at once.
“Ok, this is what we are going to do,” said Lana sternly, silencing them. “We’ll take one hour to try and figure out why the heater came on and what we can do about it. I want Aiden, Brant and Pieter to work on this. Zawadi and Joanna, I want you to search the documentation for the rover and see if there is any physical way that can be easily accessed to disconnect the heater, without relying on software. I want a breaker or wire that’s easily disconnected. I will talk to mission control and see if they have any suggestions. If we can’t resolve it, the expedition will return and set out again in the second rover tomorrow. Understood?”
“How dumb is it that there is no breaker to isolate the battery heater?” said Brant, staring off into the vast white expanse ahead of them, his hands lightly gripping the wheel of the rover. They had decided to swap for the drive back. Pieter was also convinced there must be a way of manually disabling the battery heater. He sat studying the schematics for the rover despite the decision to return home.
“I’m still convinced there has to be a way,” said Pieter, without looking up.
“Well, we couldn’t find it and neither could anyone back home.” There was no response from Pieter. “Anyway, we’ll head out in the other rover tomorrow, so we’ll only be a couple of days behind schedule.”
“If we pull up the floor and remove the rear access panel, I reckon we could almost reach the battery heater’s connection to the main battery control circuitry.”
“Yeah, maybe if you were Mister Fantastic,” said Brant, looking across at Pieter who still kept his head buried in his tablet. “Plus, we needed to find an easy way to disconnect it. Remember the easy part?”
Pieter finally looked up from his tablet. “Well, I would just like to know if there is a way of doing it. No matter what is involved. You never know when those little nuggets of information might be useful.”
The rover continued its steady plod across the white expanse back to the hab. “Lana’s right, there is a risk,” said Pieter, more to himself than anyone in particular. “At least until we figure out what happened.” He wasn’t sure if Brant or Zawadi, who was sitting behind, had heard him. He didn’t make any effort to see if they had.
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Elseware
Thanks for reading the latest episode of Orphans of Apollo.
You should have seen in your inbox the post I put out during the week about Andor. As I mentioned last week, I started to write about it for my weekly update, but it ended up being too long, so I decided to make it a standalone post.
I would like to be able to put out more of these posts on other subjects between the serialisation of Orphans of Apollo, but it’s just something I can’t fit in right now. My list of ideas keeps filling up fast though!
This one also came down to the wire to get out on time with putting out a mid-week post as well. Next week we have a public holiday here in New Zealand and then it’s school holidays, so I can see the next few weeks being the same. I’ll endeavour to keep the posts coming out each week. I’ll also try to keep posting about interesting stuff I’ve been reading, watching or listening to. I always find it interesting when people talk about what has caught their eye. Just one quick link this week, but I’ll try to expand this in the future.
Have a great week.
Thanks for reading - the future belongs to the optimists.
Alex
