PRELUDE TO EXTINCTION
Andreas Karpf
Part 1: Approach
Chapter 1 – May 10, 2124
Jack Harrison walked briskly down the bare, gray hallway. The rhythmic rattle of the metal-grate floor under his shoes echoed lightly off the hard-plastic walls, making him conscious of his pace. Though there was no rush, he didn’t see the sense in slowing down and wasting time. The corridor grew dark as he passed beneath a row of burnt out lights; reflexively, he made a quick mental note of its state of disrepair. The shuttle bay door lay a few meters ahead. On reaching the steel bulkhead, a momentary feeling of irritation crossed his mind as he was forced to brush aside a layer of dust from its control panel. There was no reason to be surprised – no one had been down this way in at least a year. Their journey between the stars had offered them little use for shuttles and jump-pods. The heavy door slid aside, releasing a gust of stale air. One by one, the bay’s lights flickered to life, revealing a room that was both expansive yet barely large enough to hold its two shuttles and three jump-pods.
Though dormant for years, the shuttle bay felt chaotic, like he’d walked into a scene of frantic preparation frozen in time. Metal tool cases with open draws lined the wall. Service hoses snaked along the floor to their respective shuttles, and short step-ladders were parked next to each craft. He’d have to have a few words with the crewmen who last used the bay.
Two four-man shuttles stood over him and dominated the chamber, leaving little space to squeeze by. Their thick, white, delta-shaped bodies and stubby wings cast long shadows across the smooth, gray deck. The one-man jump-pods in which he was interested were tucked off to the right, almost as an afterthought. The small, spherical craft were barely as tall as he, and comprised of little more than a seat and support equipment. He peered through the curved, glass window that was the front half of the vehicle, and thought that it really wasn’t much more than a rigid pressure suit. There was no propulsion system – just a complex set of small wheels and guides on its back and underbelly that allowed it to crawl along the outer skin of the main ship.
“Computer,” Jack called out.
“Yes, Captain,” the machine answered in a smooth, passive voice.
“Ready jump-pod one for launch. I’m going to try to manually free that probe bay door.”
“I will prep seven hundred meters of cable.”
“That’s about what I was thinking too,” Jack said. A compartment door along the base of the wall slid open, and a small, four-wheeled, silver cart carrying a spool of high-tension filament sped to the row of pods. Unfolding its thin, metal arms, the machine adeptly connected the spool to the back of the nearest pod. Then, just as quickly, it retreated to its alcove.
Jack walked to a terminal and brought up a schematic of the ship’s exterior. The Magellan’s design harkened back to the dawn of space travel. Like the Saturn V that took the first men to the Moon, it was over ninety-five percent fuel tanks and engines; with the remaining few percent reserved for the crew and their support systems. The similarity ended there. The Magellan’s antimatter ram-drive was a complex array of superconducting magnets, RF field generators and lasers. Half of the equipment was needed to generate a five-hundred-kilometer-wide magnetic funnel that captured and fed Hydrogen from the interstellar medium into the drive: harvesting atoms adrift in open space removed the need to carry thousands of tons of fuel. The rest of the equipment had the job of accelerating streams of captured matter and stored antimatter into the engine. Moving at nearly the speed of light, the streams were compressed and fed into a small, ultra-dense target zone barely a centimeter across. The extreme energy of the resulting proton-antiproton annihilation generated an intense blaze of gamma rays, and yielded the immense power needed to propel the ship across the void between the stars. All of this was hidden from direct view of the crew by a blast shield and mammoth fuel tanks. Calling them ‘tanks’, though, was a misnomer as each was an array of specialized magnetic bottles holding the antimatter, and covered with a thick layer of protective shielding. At well over a half-kilometer in diameter, each of the six spherical fuel tanks was more than twice the size of the entire habitable portion of the ship. Arranged in two separate rings of three, they flanked the smaller globe-shaped habitat, keeping it nestled safely between them. The blast shield, a broad, squat cone several hundred meters across, dominated the aft, and protected them from the intense radiation streaming from the drive system.
Jack ran his finger along a line depicting the equator of the habitat until he reached a pair of small red circles. He tapped lightly on the image, and the computer obediently enlarged the region until two identical circular ports were centered on the screen. Each had a pair of white, semi-circular doors. The port on the right was highlighted in a computer-generated crimson glow, as was the upper door in the adjacent port.
“Computer,” he said, “Any change in their status?”
“No sir. Port-two is still completely fused. The lower door on port-one appears operational; however, I am unable to retract the upper door.”
“I assume Kurt tried shaking it again.”
“Yes. Lieutenant Commander Hoffman attempted a variety of approaches, as did Dr. Martinez, but none have succeeded.”
Jack drew a deep breath. “OK, let’s get this done.”
The computer answered, “Understood.” It then quickly added, “Regulations require that I remind you to spend no more than 30 minutes outside.”
Jack grunted in acknowledgement as he climbed into the cramped pod. He knew well that even though they had been decelerating for years, their current speed of ten percent of the speed of light was still fast enough to make every atom adrift in interstellar space the equivalent of a high-energy cosmic ray. Nature didn’t care whether you were in Earth orbit being bombarded by high-energy particles accelerated by some distant cataclysm, or if you were rushing toward atoms that were just drifting in space. In either case, the result was the same: too many high-speed collisions with these tiny particles would be fatal. The only thing that was surprising was how short the safe-exposure time was. The habitat itself had adequate shielding to protect the crew from those particles that did penetrate the blast shield and fuel tanks. The thin skin of the tiny jump-pod, however, didn’t. All of this added up to the fact that he would have to work quickly.
Jack strapped himself into the pod’s seat, and called out, “Display on.” A holographic image of the pod’s amber gauges and controls appeared, flanking the main window in front of him. He pointed to the status indicator and it responded by changing from ‘Stand-by’ to ‘Ready.’
“Open the bay door,” he said softly. A second later, there was the muted rush of the room’s air being pumped into holding tanks to await his return. As soon as there was silence, a pair of three meter, semi-circular doors slid aside, revealing the pitch blackness of space. Even though he’d spent years piloting vessels throughout the solar system long before the current mission, he still felt a little rush of adrenaline as the pod automatically inched toward the opening. It had been nearly three years since he last ventured outside. So long, in fact that he actually felt relieved two days earlier when the computer first informed them of the problem.
The only unnerving aspect of jump-pod excursions was the mode of travel. He would be effectively repelling in interstellar space down the side of a four-hundred-meter wide globe. The perception of down was provided courtesy of the interstellar drive. The Magellan had accelerated at a little over one-third of a “g” for five years’ ship-time, before turning around at the midway point in the trip. It then decelerated by running its engines at the same thrust in the opposite direction. The constant thrust from the antimatter drive meant that down was alw
ays in its direction. It was this constant acceleration that provided the crew with an apparent one-third Earth gravity in which to live. Jack’s current destination, the probe doors, lay a hundred meters to his left and one hundred fifty meters straight down.
His path required inching along the skin of the habitat until he was directly over the target, before sliding down on a line to the doors. It was the dangling by a cable part that he didn’t like. Even though it didn’t make any sense, he wished that he could just drift alongside the Magellan in a space suit and perform the repairs – the normal method when coasting between the planets back home.
A tone sounded when the jump-pod reached the threshold of the door. The metallic click of the safety cable connecting with an outer receptacle prompted him to touch the word ‘Proceed’ floating in front of him. The pod moved to the left, creeping along its guide track in the habitat’s skin. As soon as he was clear of the bay doors, they closed, terminating his only exterior source of light. Jack stared into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. The black, ghostly forms of the ship’s fuel tanks surrounding him were barely perceptible. Ironically, when his eyes became accustomed to his surroundings, there still wouldn’t be much to see. Star light itself would be too feeble to illuminate the Magellan. And, even if their target star system Epsilon Eri wasn’t hidden by the blast shield, its distance of nearly thirty billion kilometers would render it too dim to add any meaningful light.
Jack mulled the number over in his head: thirty billion kilometers – two hundred A.U. – two hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Despite knowing it meant they were only three months from the end of their trip, his mind focused on how much further they still had to go. Even lonely Pluto back home was six times closer to the Sun than they were to Epsilon Eri. That, and the surrounding darkness, drove home the ever present reality of their isolation.
Jack’s thoughts were brought back to the task at hand as the pod came to an abrupt stop. He activated the grapple and heard the solid sound of it latch onto one of the myriad of support sites that dotted the outside of the ship. “Exterior lights on,” he said.
The jump-pod’s floodlights illuminated the drab, metallic skin of the habitat. The square plates covering the outer hull showed their wear. Years of exposure to the interstellar medium had left them pitted and marred with thin, black streaks; the result of innumerable collisions with space-borne debris. His eyes followed the grid-like pattern of plates as they stretched away, disappearing in the distance around the curve of the spherical structure. As he gazed downward toward his target, Jack was reminded of being atop a ski slope, looking to the bottom of a steep run. The difference here was that his feeble floodlights were unable to illuminate the bottom. The slope simply curved away toward a black abyss. The only indication that there was any more to the ship was the collection of mammoth, round silhouettes of the fuel tanks climbing out of the darkness below to surround him. The immense disks blotted out all but the stars directly in front of him. Despite his intimate knowledge of the ship’s structure, the view was disorienting. Without any light, there was no frame of reference, no perspective to gauge how large or far away these shadowy figures were.
Jack looked over the status indicators and held his finger just above the word “Descend” before touching it. The pod rotated slowly until he was on his back, his feet pointing toward the surface of the sphere. The stars above hovered peacefully over his head for a second; then his stomach dropped as the spool of cable began to unwind, starting his descent. He accelerated quickly and the passing hull plates became a blur. Plunging into the depths below, the jet-black fuel tanks rose around him, engulfing the stars above. His body felt light against the padded back of the seat in the near free-fall plunge. As quickly as it started, the braking mechanism engaged, whining against the spinning cable, and pressing him firmly into the seat’s padding. The pressure of deceleration ebbed, and Jack found himself lying motionless again, staring at the curved, paneled wall as it ascended back toward his starting point.
The pod’s automated guidance system continued through its program, rotating until he was upright, and then slowly lowering itself on a cable until he was hanging only a meter from the probe launch door. The habitat then curved away toward its base hidden in the darkness a couple hundred meters below. The external lights revealed two brushed metal, semicircular doors that met directly in from of him. Painted across them in bold maroon letters was the label, “Probe Port 1 – Keep Clear.” Looking to his right toward port two, he immediately saw the source of the problem: A ten centimeter hole was punched into the plate separating the two ports – an impact crater from some high-speed piece of debris. Thin, jagged cracks radiated outward from the blackened cavity in all directions. It was closer to port two, deforming its frame, and thus providing the reason why those doors wouldn’t budge. Port one, however, didn’t look that bad. The fissures from the impact site just barely reached it, and its frame seemed undamaged. Jack moved in closer, carefully inspecting the upper portion of the door; however, it showed no defects. His eyes shifted back to its frame and he uttered a quick “Gotcha!” A razor thin fracture ran the width of the frame.
Without breaking his gaze, he called, “Computer, get me Kurt on the comm.”
Looking back to the crater, he noted some of the charring reached the outer edge of each port. He focused more closely on edges themselves, looking for embedded debris...
“Hey Jack, what’s going on?” the much too lively voice of Kurt Hoffman announced over the comm-link. Though originally from southern Germany, Kurt’s years of working in North America and off-world had left him with a barely detectable accent. Two of those off-world years were spent serving with Jack on the Lunar Polar Outpost.
“I’ve found the source of our problem,” Jack replied seriously.
“I’ve known what the problem has been for a while,” his friend quipped. “You keep hogging the EVA missions to yourself, leaving the rest of us boxed up here like cargo.” Kurt paused for barely a second, but continued before Jack could get a word in edgewise, “You know, I wouldn’t put it past you to have created this little mishap yourself, just so you could get outside for a while.”
Jack allowed himself a smile and a shake of his head as he answered, “I’d probably have broken down within the next week and done exactly that, if this didn’t happen first.”
“So, what’s so complicated that you need the help of your Chief Engineer?”
“There’s a pretty nice impact between the two probe launch ports.”
“Impact? How...I mean that area’s pretty well shielded from direct exposure. What’s the angle of incidence?”
Jack studied the site again and answered, “It looks pretty close to head-on.”
“I don’t see how. Unless...”
As Kurt’s voice trailed off, Jack completed the thought, “Unless it happened during turnaround at mid-point.” Turnaround was one of the most dangerous parts of the mission. For about ten minutes, the habitat was exposed to open space at high-speed. It was a remarkably short period of time considering it required turning a two-kilometer long ship 180 degrees. But it also represented a window during which any debris floating in interstellar space could impact the habitat at over 90% of the speed of light.
“How large is the site?” Kurt asked.
“Maybe ten centimeters across, and about half that deep.”
“It didn’t penetrate the hull?”
“No, doesn’t look like it. Auto-sealants weren’t deployed, and the logs show no record of any pressure loss. It looks like whatever it was completely vaporized on impact,” Jack answered.
“Too bad...” Kurt started.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jack shot back.
“It’s not what you think Jack. But just imagine if there were some debris we could recover. What Don wouldn’t give to get his hands on that?”
The scientist in Jack quickly saw where Kurt was coming from. Turnaround oc
curred at 5.2 light years from Earth. The nearest star was 4 light years away, and Epsilon Eri itself was still another 5.2 light years off. Though his original training as a planetary scientist was over twenty years removed, he knew that whatever struck them was true interstellar matter; something humanity had not yet had a chance to sample and directly study. For all they knew, it could easily have predated all of the local star systems, making its scientific value unimaginable. A sample of that material would have been nothing short of a dream-come-true for Don Martinez, their chief science officer. “It would have been nice, but there’s nothing left of it,” he finally said to Kurt.
“Actually, I’m not that surprised now that I’ve thought about it,” Kurt said. “With that impact speed, there couldn’t have been more than a couple milligrams of material in the first place. Anything larger would have done a lot more damage. Basically, we got lucky.”
“Captain,” the computer cut in, “you have only fifteen minutes of safe exposure time left.”
“Thank you,” Jack answered. “Kurt, let me get this done quickly. Just stay on-line in case I need your help.”
“OK. I’ll let you tell Don what he missed,” Kurt added.
“Thanks,” Jack retorted, emphasizing the sarcasm in his voice. He looked again at the thin fracture. It was a safe bet that a piece of the frame had separated underneath and was wedged into the door mechanism.
“Activate arms,” he called out. Two polished, metal appendages unfolded from the sides of the pod. They resembled an artist’s stylish interpretation of the bones in the human arm and hand, and precisely followed Jack’s every move. He reached into an outer tool case with them and retrieved a large, but simple crow bar. “Sometimes low-tech’s the way to go,” he muttered to himself. Sliding the flat end into a small gap between the upper door and the cracked frame, he began pushing down. “Increase force slowly up to four thousand Newtons.”
Nothing happened.
Prelude to Extinction Page 1