Tatiana
Copyright© 2025 by Charlie Foxtrot
Chapter 1: Zero-day
Glitch
“I’m telling you, the computer is lying,” Tatiana said as she poked her finger at the screen. “Beta One just lifted from Singapore. There is no fighting in the streets there. Why are the news feeds filled with these images?”
“Maybe something is messing with the feed,” I said. That thought was scary. We were nearly a thousand klicks above the planet, and all our data and ground control information was coming up on the same transmission this news was coming from.
Tatiana, my on-again, off-again lover, was as sharp as ever, even though we were going through an off-again stage. It was stressful working together and trying to live together. She had moved out of my cramped quarters a week ago and maintained frosty professionalism when we were on watch together.
“If it’s the feed, we are truly fucked,” she said. “Check for local station control and verify our position manually,” she ordered.
She was the senior crew on watch, so I hurried to comply. I double-checked my work before muttering a soft “Shit!”
Her head snapped toward me across the small control module. “What?”
“We’re below our designated orbit and moving faster. There’s nothing in the log or the files recording the change in station.”
She moved without hesitation, knowing I was more than capable of checking our orbit parameters. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she floated in front of her workstation. “Station keeping is cut off from the feed. Get us back where we’re supposed to be. Onboard systems only,” she commanded.
I nodded and began working on calculating our burn to boost us back where we belonged. “You said Beta One lifted from Singapore,” I said as I worked. “Do they have our current position or are they going where they thought we’d be?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Tatiana muttered. She pulled on her comms cap, dialed up a frequency and keyed her mic. “Beta One, this is Copernicus, switch guidance to manual control, over.”
There was a long pause.
“Copernicus, this is Beta One, say again, over.”
“Beta One, this is Copernicus, switch guidance to manual control, over,” she said calmly, but I saw her glancing at me. Her eyes were not calm.
“Roger, Beta One is on manual control, over.”
Tatiana read off the vector they needed to rendezvous with us. Once she had confirmed they were on the right vector, she gave them further instructions.
“Beta One, terminate remote telemetry. There is a glitch in the feed, over.”
This pause was longer yet.
“Copernicus, remote telemetry has been terminated. What the hell is going on?”
For three years, our telemetry, and data feeds had been our lifeline to earth. We had watched as political turmoil flared into wars and wars had subsided to regional and commercial conflicts. As a private enterprise, the Copernicus Foundation liked to say it was above the politics and conflicts of our birth world, but the truth was that we all had friends and families down the gravity well.
“Beta One, we were getting erroneous data from the feed, unless you want to tell us most Singapore was engulfed in riots when you lifted, over.”
I could image in the crew looking at one another in the cockpit of the shuttle.
“Copernicus, Beta One is on vector under manual control with twenty-seven souls on board. Ground feed has been cut, over.”
“Roger, Beta One. We’ll have the docking crew ready for your arrival. Copernicus out.”
“Tatiana,” I finally managed to say. “What in the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, George, and I don’t like it. If ground control wanted us in a lower orbit, there would have been logs issuing the commands. Add in the bogus news feed, and something is off. It may be a glitch, but the political rhetoric has been heating up again. Someone may be messing with us on purpose, and I don’t like that one bit. Until we know what the fuck is happening, we need to stay in manual control.”
“How are we going to figure out what is happening? If we call ground control, the first thing they will tell us to do is get telemetry back up,” I said.
She nodded. “Strange that they haven’t raised us on voice comms yet, isn’t it.”
It was strange.
“Where’s the director today?” she asked. The Foundation Director was responsible for the mission. Director Belkin was nominally in command of Copernicus. We were a deep orbit shuttle designed to transport goods and people out to the Man’s Hope, the first interstellar spaceship chartered to colonize the first habitable system found in man’s journey to the stars.
“You know he’s dirt-side today. Geneva, I think.”
She nodded again. “And our orbit was changed without his knowing it while he was off the ship. At the same time, no one has communicated to us to see what’s going on. Can you figure out where we would have been when we started getting enough friction to make us aware?”
We were supposed to be orbiting at one thousand kilometers above earth, putting us well above the one-hundred-and-fifty-kilometer altitude where an orbit could be sustained without propulsion. We had caught the issue after dropping only eighty-five kilometers. I calculated the rate we had been decelerating at.
“We would have noticed well before we got that low,” I said.
“What if we didn’t? What if we were dealing with other issues? What if our life-support cut-out? Think about all our training scenarios. Except in the most basic training, we never had just one problem to deal with.”
She was right. She had five years of training to my four, but they never let you deal with one problem at a time after your first year, unless you were paired with a newb. Space was dangerous. They wanted us always thinking and planning ahead.
“Do we call the director?” I asked.
Tatiana thought for a moment. “Let’s get Beta One docked first. Our duty is to this ship, that shuttle, and then Man’s Hope. You keep checking everything manually. I’ll send a message out to the ship.”
It was a tense thirty minutes of waiting, double-checking, and waiting some more. Tatiana and I both slipped into our all-business demeanor. I could not help but admire her calm confidence. She caught me looking at her a couple of times and smiled.
“I’m glad you were here with me, George.”
I nodded. She was the senior crewman aboard. The Director was dirt-side, as well as the two other more senior flight crew members. The pilots of Beta One and Beta Two, our shuttles used for moving cargo and people up to us, were not senior to Tatiana. They were not in the Copernicus’ chain of command either, so while they could advise, they could not command. That burden fell on my girlfriend.
“You know,” she said. “If we can’t get the director back onboard, we’re going to have to split this watch.”
I nodded. There was no one else fully trained on the Copernicus’ systems. Nominally, we only needed one person in the control module, but that was when you could rely on the computers. If we had to maneuver without computer aid, we would need help.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“I’m not sure what we can do. I’ll have to figure it out. It was a shitty time for our crew to take leave. I wonder if that’s why it happened now. We’re seriously under-staffed.”
I could only nod. I had refused the offered ride down on Beta One, simply to give me some time to talk to Tatiana. She had moved out and I missed her. Our fight seemed trivial now, but it felt important then.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She seemed to know what I was talking about. “I appreciate you saying that, George, but now’s not the time. I’m sorry, too.”
It was all the time she had for emotions, which was part of our problem. The job was everything to her. I had felt insecure, as if I was not significant. I knew that was overly dramatic on my part, but it was how I felt then, when I invited her dirt-side to meet my parents.
“Beta One, Copernicus. We have you on local,” she said as the low-power phased array radar picked up the shuttle and its transponder.
“Copernicus, we have you as well, over.”
“George, head down to the docking collar and standby. You’ll have to run the arm manually.”
I waved a friendly salute and pulled myself toward the hatch. We had articulated mechanical arms stowed along the hull by each of our docking collars, capable of retrieving and deploying the shuttles. In theory, the computers could bring the shuttle docking collars within centimeters of the ship, but Tatiana did not want us to use computer control right now. I did not see how a glitch in the feed could affect the computer-controlled flight systems on the shuttle, or in the arms, but knew better than to argue with her. We both had history in Earth’s wet navies before being signed with Copernicus. Command in space was very similar to command at sea.
I paid no attention to the green “computer assist” button on the control console, and simply focused on the job at hand. Twelve minutes later, the satisfying clump of the docking clamps engaging could be felt in the ship, and I verified them visually as air began to fill the docking collar connecting the shuttle to us.
The co-pilot, Bill Decker, was the first through the hatch. “What the hell is going on, George?”
Bill was a pilot, full of swagger from his time in the U.S. Air Force, but a good guy once you got past his brashness.
“Tatiana is worried about the glitch and its timing. We were the only two souls on board when you took off. Our orbit got changed without an order in the logs or transmissions, and neither of us initiated it. The Director and other senior crew are dirt-side in Beta Two. Then she saw that news feed after you guys lifted. Someone or something is lying to us and trying to do some nasty shit to the mission. We have to be careful.”
He shook his head. “Ok. We’ve got the colony leader and his wife aboard. Do you want him in the command module with you guys to help sort this out?”
I knew the colony leader was not in the chain of command for the Copernicus, or New Horizon. He was to be in charge once they started landing folks on the new world, called Dawn. “You can send him up, so long has he has his bearings, but remind him he isn’t in command.”
Bill nodded. “He knows, based on how he acted during loading, but he is familiar with the board. He insisted we call him by his first name, Kgosi. You might want him there when you get anybody on the horn.”
“Sounds good. You’ll have to herd your folks to the transit quarters, since the rest of the crew is still down.”
“Will do, George. Go figure out what the hell is going on, and I’ll send Kgosi to you.”
I pushed myself up and away, heading back to the command module.
The Copernicus could easily be mistaken for a space station. It had a narrow central shaft with large solar panels sticking out like wings. The transit quarters were on a slowly rotating ring that spun for a sense of gravity, even if it was only a tenth of a gee. Huge cylindrical storage bays were just aft of the rotation collars and ahead of our ion-plasma engine. We did not move fast off the dime but could accelerate almost forever. Even a hundredth of a gee build up your velocity over time. The shuttle docking points were on two of those bays. The command module was at the front end of the central shaft. The design was nearly archaic in many regards. It had been written about over a century before, when man first went to the moon on huge chemical rockets. We all joked that the foundation was too cheap to mess with new designs. Of course, we were all taught to not fix things that weren’t broken.
Given how many trillion dollars had been spent by the foundation to build New Horizon, I could understand them not wanting to mess with a proven design for Copernicus. Similarly designed spaceships had taken mankind from earth orbit to the asteroids and moons of Jupiter and Saturn to mine the materials needed to explore beyond our own solar system. Since the jump drives could not function within Sol’s gravity well, the proven design had been adopted to ferry people out to the building site.
I saw Tatiana working on her terminal as I returned to the command module. “Captain Calvari wants us to begin our departure before we contact the director,” she said.
“Why?” I asked as I floated to my own seat and terminal.
“He’s been watching the broadcast feed. The foundation has been charged in the world court and the director is being summoned to Stockholm.”
“That makes no sense. What charges? Who brought them? Why haven’t we heard anything?”
“I’m not sure if it matters,” she said. “Let’s make sure Beta Two can reach us along a departure track, and then figure out the timing of our call.”
Kgosi Theron came into the module as I was finishing my calculations. “Bill Decker suggested I join you,” he said in a deep, rich voice. “I don’t know what I can do, but will help however I can.”
Tatiana brought him up to speed with a concise summary of the glitch we had spotted, as well as what Captain Calvari had shared.
“There was no news about that in Singapore,” he insisted.
“Can you use that?” Tatiana asked as she pointed at the comms console.
He nodded and slipped into the seat. “Are you sure this won’t turn telemetry or remote control back on?” he asked as his fingers hovered over the keyboard.
“I tripped the breakers on the module to cut out the remote capability. I guess the founder’s insistence on us being able to control our destiny is paying off.”
The legend of the foundation was that the founding board, a bunch of billionaires around the world, insisted that crew be able to operate without strong ties to earth control. Supposedly, they feared world governments taking over their orbital assets, even if they did not have space faring capability. It was the sort of thing that morphed into legend as crew were trained on the myriad systems and controls in our ships. The rest of the world and space became more automated, but not Foundation systems.