Almost no one, Owen thought to himself.
“But I’m just a planetary geologist,” the scientist continued. “Took just enough physics to screw my GPA good and hard. Funny how they can never find any actual English speakers to teach it.”
“Should’ve gone to UC,” the engineer teased. “We didn’t have that problem. Not much.”
The other scientist laughed. “But then you’d have been in, you know, Ohio.” His wrinkled-up nose unambiguously telegraphed how he felt about the benighted Midwest.
The engineer rolled his eyes. “At least people can afford to live there. Baltimore rent is more than my parents are paying for a mortgage on an actual house with a yard, not just some renovated motel that slapped a ‘condo’ sign up front.”
Owen started thinking about finding those techs again. More work, less drama. “So, you said you were a planetary geologist . . . ” he prodded.
“Yes. But since I was a geologist, the senator was compelled to ask the physicist seated next to me,” he said, and jerked a thumb at his partner, “who in turn had to produce a meteorologist to verify our assumptions.”
“An actual, working meteorologist,” the physicist interjected. “No PhD, just a grad student interning at NOAA while he worked on his masters. The kid protested that he didn’t know squat about extraterrestrial climatology, which is what the senators were really asking about. We explained to the kid that they’re too bloody stupid to know the difference. He finally agreed that, yes, Pluto’s thin excuse for an atmosphere would indeed freeze and fall to the surface as the planet moved farther away from the Sun. And no, we couldn’t know when for certain because we didn’t know the complete makeup of the atmosphere.”
“It won’t matter once you’re within a few degrees of absolute zero,” the engineer joked.
“And no, it would not become warm enough to reappear for another two centuries,” the geologist concluded. “Only after the kid dazzled them with sophomore-level physical science did we finally get the funding.”
And so, New Horizons had been slapped together largely from off-the-shelf components and dispatched to the edge of the solar system. It had resembled nothing so much as an ambitious gradeschooler’s vision of what a deep-space probe should look like: about the size and shape of a grand piano wrapped in gold foil and topped with a massive dish antenna.
Launched from Earth in 2006, after a quick pass by Jupiter to steal some energy from the gas giant’s gravity well—which it wasn’t going to miss all that much—the little probe went into hibernation until being awakened by its masters back on Earth. That this golden piano, the first to encounter the solar system’s most distant planet as it zipped past at forty thousand miles per hour, would be in a position to see what it did, and that what it saw was in a position to be seen in the first place, was difficult to describe as anything other than miraculous.
Owen flipped through the reams of observation notes. “And these gamma transients didn’t get your attention back then? I mean, to have something that hot . . . ”
“Like you said: transients.” The physicist pointed at the thick printouts in Owen’s lap. “We were drinking from a firehose. We’re still correlating images against observational data. What are we looking for, anyway?”
Owen was afraid to voice his suspicions, lest they laugh him out of the room. “Not sure.”
“Whatever. Can I see the coordinates again?” the engineer asked. “Need to make sure I’m in the right grid here.”
Owen slid the top binder over to him. “Are you sure there’s imagery?”
“LORRI was slaved to RALPH during approach. If there was something worth seeing, it would’ve snagged it.”
“English please,” Owen said. “I can only keep one center’s acronyms in my head at a time.”
“Sounds kinky if you don’t know the lingo, right?” the engineer smiled. “LORRI’s the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager,” the engineer said deadpan. “RALPH’s the infrared spectrometer. No idea where the name came from.”
“Because the UV spectrometer was named ALICE,” the physicist said.
The engineer entered one final command. “Got it. We have imagery correlated to that radiation transient.”
He pointed at a mass of gray and white pixels suspended in the center of a black frame. “Looks like you found a new moon, Mr. Harriman.”
Owen perked up. “How’s the resolution?”
“At that distance? This thing’s maybe the size of a boulder. I can’t believe you even had a clue where to look.” If likened to a game of cosmic billiards, they’d just hit a blindfolded double-reverse bank shot.
“Irregular shape,” the geologist noted, “consistent with it not being big enough for gravity to make it spheroid.”
The physicist leaned in for a closer look. “If it were a shard from a larger body then I might expect that much residual heat, but it would’ve had to be recent to be that energetic.”
“Maybe energetic for a sheared-off planetoid,” Owen muttered, just loud enough to be heard. “So it would have to be something else.”
The scientist’s latent skepticism flared, which the engineer ignored as he kept working to refine the image. “What ‘something else’ explains a localized source this warm?”
“Could be volcanism. Like Io,” the geologist said, “but without Jupiter-sized tidal forces? I don’t see how. It’s too small.”
“I agree,” Owen said, not meaning what they were thinking. “Remember how everyone was convinced that Mars was devoid of water? The atmosphere was too thin. Then we discovered a naturally occurring antifreeze below the surface. Just because a phenomenon doesn’t agree with what we’ve come to expect doesn’t make it impossible.”
The now wide-eyed engineer raised his hand warily, as if it might get snapped off. “Umm, yeah. About that.” The image had taken on a more definitive shape: symmetrical, if somewhat irregular.
The geologist leaned forward. “It’s almost like a . . . dragonfly.”
The physicist was unconvinced. “You’re delusional. Seeing what you want to see.”
“Speak for yourself,” the engineer shot back, silencing them by shifting the image into the visual spectrum. The object resolved to a washed-out olive green with dull highlights of bare metal and a cluster of bulky gray protuberances ending at a battered disk.
“Is that writing?” Barely discernible in faded Cyrillic letters was the acronym CCCP: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
To a chorus of groans, the engineer glibly summed up their discovery: “That’s no moon. That’s a space station.”
2
Even in late springtime Moscow remained brutally cold. Low clouds scudding across the sky cast a monochrome pallor on the equally gray, equally dismal apartment blocks that seemed to march forever across the cityscape. The architectural style, such as it was, had been called “brutalism.” Leftovers from the country’s long, abusive relationship with collective economics, they were nonetheless left standing only because all those people still needed to live somewhere. The fall of communism and the fascist kleptocracy in its wake had not created much incentive to build anything else. Large populations were easier to manage if they were all clustered in one place.
If architecture revealed a culture’s character, then the deeper Owen Harriman wandered into this canyon of dingy concrete the more he longed to flee from it. He wasn’t sure what spooked him more: the vaguely threatening air of an unfamiliar neighborhood in a country they were barely civil with, or the realization that the same authoritarian urges could just as easily be found in his own country. Random scraps of loose garbage tossed about by the wind heightened his anxiety. All that was missing was the sound of a dog howling in the distance.
And at that, a distant canine did indeed begin howling. Owen told himself it was just the wind.
He shook off the chill as a welcome splash of sunlight opened up along the face of the next building. As luck would have it, the block number matched the one
on the note tucked in his coat pocket. Owen decided to take that as a sign of encouragement. That, and the place looked a little more tended to than the warren of dull cement he’d just navigated to get here. Maybe that was a way of protecting certain people.
The man’s apartment was just one floor up—he guessed a ground-floor entry was too inviting for burglars—and not that far of a walk. Owen’s facility with Russian was perfunctory, just enough to manage what little reliance NASA still maintained on Roscosmos’s launch systems. He hoped it would be good enough to at least start a conversation on friendly terms.
He knocked on the door, trying to make it sound as non-threatening as possible and realizing how ridiculous the effort was.
There was no answer. He tried again. After a moment, there was a faint shuffling noise as a shadow moved behind the threshold. Owen sucked in his breath with nervous anticipation and mentally ran through his rehearsed greeting as the door creaked open.
A wizened old man, stooped by time, regarded him with skepticism.
“Doctor Rhyzov?”
The little man just stared, dark eyes darting beneath brows unruly as overgrown hedgerows.
“Anatoly Rhyzov?”
Without a word he began to shuffle away and pull the door shut behind him. Owen leaned in and tried one last time, perhaps a little too loudly:
“Arkangel.”
The door stopped moving, then inched back open. The old man still wouldn’t speak.
“Doctor?”
“I am Rhyzov,” he sighed in a voice turned gravelly by the years. “What is it you want, Americanski?”
That was interesting. “How would you know I’m an American?”
“You are rude. Noisy, too. Heard you coming upstairs and down hall. No hoodlum makes such racket. That is why they are dangerous, whereas you are simply annoying.”
Owen smiled, he hoped disarmingly enough to keep the conversation moving. “Please accept my apologies if I come across as impolite, Doctor. But if this neighborhood is as dangerous as you say, then may I come in before somebody sneaks out of a dark corner to mug me?”
Rhyzov grunted. “Only because he would then move straight past you through my open door,” he said. “Very well, then. Inside.”
“Thank you,” Owen said as he slipped past. Round one was over, a tie if not an outright win. After months of background research and diplomatic palm-greasing, he was standing in Anatoly Rhyzov’s living room. It was small and tidy, painstakingly cared for and decorated with what had to be several generations’ worth of family heirlooms. In one corner was an open study which was much more cluttered: An old computer sat atop an older desk, surrounded floor to ceiling with shelves stuffed full of engineering texts and loose notebooks. Scattered among the academic detritus were the hallmarks of a life spent in the Russian space program: plaques, paintings, models, even bits of equipment that must have been pulled from old Soyuz capsules. Owen thought they appeared quite heavy to have ever been used on a spacecraft. The rocket equation didn’t discriminate between competing ideologies: Weight was the enemy which stalked every mission, no matter whose flag it flew.
“So,” Rhyzov grunted as he studied Owen. “You come a long way, Mister . . . ”
“Harriman. Sorry,” he said, and extended his hand. “Owen Harriman. I’m with NASA.”
If the old man was surprised, he didn’t show it but for the slight lifting of those bushy eyebrows. “What do you do for your space agency, Mr. Harriman?”
“I’m a mission manager in the operations directorate,” he replied, attempting an appeal to the presumed Russian respect for authority. “I’m in charge of something called Project HOPE.”
Rhyzov studied him quizzically.
“Human Outer Planet Exploration,” Owen explained.
“Ah. This I have heard of. Deep-space exploration vehicle, correct?”
“Correct. We’re on track to have the spacecraft Magellan depart for Jupiter in three years.”
Rhyzov nodded. “I hope for your sake it does not become rabbit hole.”
“Excuse me?”
“I may be old, but I am not foolish. Neither am I naive. You appear to be earnest young man, Mr. Harriman. Your agency has wasted a great many men like you on grandiose projects that never left drawing board.” The old man leaned in closer. “Tell me, does that frighten you? The prospect of devoting your life to a goal that may disappear from your grasp?”
He was a cantankerous old fart, blunt in a classic Russian way. Owen realized he wasn’t out of the rhetorical woods just yet. “That is a risk in any scientific pursuit, Dr. Rhyzov.”
A grin cracked his weathered face. “That is the difference in our philosophies, Mr. Harriman. Spaceflight is engineering, not ‘rocket science,’” he said, wagging a finger. “You know this. I know this. Yet your superiors pretend it is somehow about science when research is secondary. What does scientific discovery matter if you cannot get to where you’re going in the first place?”
Owen was taken aback. Rhyzov was right, and there was the gulf between their cultures laid bare. It was too easy to fall into the stylistic traps laid by decades of Public Affairs attempts to sell NASA to the taxpayers.
“You are very quiet for one who has traveled so far,” Rhyzov prodded. “Yet you come asking of this Arkangel business.” The grit in his voice made it clear this was a subject he didn’t enjoy.
“I’m not sure it was a question, to be honest. But here we are. So may we speak?”
“We are speaking now.”
Good Lord but this guy liked the wordplay. It was time to cut the crap. “Doctor,” Owen began, catching his breath while ceremoniously pulling a manila envelope from his overcoat. “We’ve found it.”
The surprise in Rhyzov’s eyes said it all. His hands shook as he took the proffered envelope. “This is certain?” he stammered. “How did you know where to look?” Left unsaid: How did you know it even existed?
“We didn’t,” Owen said. “Chance encounter, which we didn’t even see until reprocessing some imagery a few weeks ago. We’d never have found it without the radiation signature. Even after this long, that pusher plate’s pretty hot.”
Rhyzov glared up at him from beneath those unruly eyebrows. “You deduced our drive system?”
Owen laughed. “Are you joking? What else could it be? And I must say, that’s an awful lot of nukes to absorb without having it glow like a neon sign.”
“It was long ago, as you said yourself. As was your probe to Pluto. Yet you wait until now to have brought evidence.”
“We didn’t know there was something worth looking for until your air force blew up that inbound Soyuz a few months ago.”
Rhyzov’s dark eyes shifted. “What Soyuz?”
Owen maintained his best poker face. So the old guy didn’t know? “The transponder squawk we intercepted was consistent with Spacecraft TMK-1, callsign Dnepr, a long-duration variant that conveniently disappeared from your tracking databases after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Appeared out of nowhere, headed for your landing zone in Kazakhstan. It was coming in fast, too.”
“You say it was intercepted? Why?”
“That we don’t know,” Owen said in a little white lie fed to him by the intel briefers. “But between us, it sure looks like they were expecting it. Those ASAT batteries were spun up pretty fast.”
Dread descended on Rhyzov like a cloud. “What was its orbital period?”
“Forty-four years and five months, give or take a few days,” Owen said. “Consistent with a low-energy insertion from Pluto. Wasn’t TMK outfitted with a Block D service module?” It was a long shot, but if the old guy bit . . .
“Da,” Rhyzov said. He still remembered the details. “Needed for deep-space missions. More delta-v and extended life support.”
So it had been manned; one more data point he’d needed. “Our information suggests it could support three cosmonauts for thirty days,” Owen said, though the idea of three people being stuffed in
to those tiny capsules for more than thirty hours sounded crazy.
“Da,” he said again, wheels turning behind his eyes.
“They’d have needed at least one correction burn after breaking orbit, once they’d been headed sunward a while.” Thirty days might have been too soon. But if it held enough consumables to keep three men alive for thirty days, then it could keep two for sixty. Or one for ninety.
There’d been at least one live cosmonaut on that old Soyuz, if only to make sure it had remained pointed in the right direction. It might have been his—or their—last action as a living human being. “So our question for you is simple: Why?”
Old eyes flared with long-simmering anger. “You ask me why, when I just now learn at least one of them tried to come back? It would have been suicide, when they could have just come back with my ship.”
And there it was, the source of the old man’s recalcitrance. He’d poured his life into a machine that had been concealed from history along with his professional reputation, all no doubt due to politics. It was old Soviet Russia, after all: Everything was political, a miserable lesson the United States had recently begun to learn.
Owen watched as Rhyzov leafed through the grainy photographs and read the rudimentary information they’d been able to deduce: dimensions, mass, duration . . . the most shocking feature, despite being something they all knew a nuclear pulse ship could achieve, had been the assumed velocity. The Soviets had managed to build a massive spacecraft capable of achieving a measurable fraction of light speed, enough to fly a grand tour of the solar system in under a year. And nobody had known about it.
“Impressive work,” Rhyzov finally said, “though your crew complement is too generous by half. The rest of your information is largely correct.”
They’d flown this beast with just three cosmonauts? “You know this business, Doctor. Once you have enough data points, reverse engineering isn’t that hard. We just couldn’t quite believe its origin.”
Frozen Orbit Page 2