The hab modules were dwarfed by the complex of foil-wrapped cryogenic tanks mounted three abreast and centered along the saddle truss that ran the length of the ship. Even with fusion power, constantly accelerating to Jupiter demanded that over eighty percent of the ship’s mass was propellant which would still have to be replenished if they were to continue on to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The tanks’ dazzling golden skin had made Magellan the brightest object in the sky for months, outshone only when the Moon was full.
This freight-train-sized mass of fuel tanks fed the reactor plant and fusion drive, nestled behind a conical radiation shield at the end of the ship. If the forward dome protected the crew from the random hazards of outer space, the drive cone’s shield protected them from the predictable hazards created by their own ship. Magnetic exhaust nozzles at the end were like mechanized tulip bulbs with louvered petals set within a wreath of coolant loops and control vanes. When their nuclear fire was finally lit, the exhaust plume would make Magellan visible in broad daylight.
“She is one big beast,” Jack whistled. His face was pressed against one of the big oval windows like a kid checking out the Christmas display at a toy store.
“You’ve seen her before,” Traci said with the practiced calm of a pilot who couldn’t afford to be distracted from her mission, which in this case was to fly them nose-down along Magellan’s length without running into the hundred-thousand-ton complex now filling their windows. She couldn’t forget that their situation was relative: Weightlessness might feel gentle, but there was an awful lot of mass and velocity between the two spacecraft.
“Haven’t seen it with the new hab and drive modules. Last time I was up here they’d just brought back the Mars expedition,” Jack said. “That fusion engine’s a lot bigger than the old one.” The ship’s original VASIMR thrusters had been removed and repurposed as the core of the Cygnus interplanetary cargo tug, which for the past year had been racing ahead for their rendezvous at Jupiter.
It all seemed great until he remembered that the Russians had beaten them by several decades with an even bigger ship that had flirted with relativistic speeds. Jack had almost managed to convince himself that none of that mattered—they were still about to be the first to visit Jupiter on the way to recovering secrets from a derelict ship that had been waiting at the edge of the solar system since before he was born. If theirs was now a salvage mission, so be it.
“Topside visual checklist’s complete,” Roy said after several minutes of no noise but circulation fans and the occasional thump of a thruster. “You guys see anything we may have missed?”
“Nothing to report here, love,” Noelle said. “Let’s move in.” The scientist was ready to get going.
After a thumbs-up from Jack and Traci, Roy keyed his mic. “Houston, Dragon. Exterior inspection complete, no anomalies observed.”
“Copy that, Dragon. You are go for transposition and docking.”
“Acknowledge we are go for docking,” Roy said, then glanced over his shoulder at his crewmates. “And Houston, be advised we’ve elected to change our radio callsign. All comm with Dragon will now go by Puffy.”
The hiss of air that came with opening Magellan’s inner hatch carried with it a faint aroma of iron oxide, a leftover from the previous expedition.
“So that’s what Mars smells like—a rusty car?” Jack wondered.
“Just the airlock,” Roy assured him. “And the flight deck. And the equipment bays. But we’ll have a brand-new hab to live in.”
“Don’t forget the hydroponic garden,” Noelle said. “I plan to spend every free minute in there.”
“Good thing we’ll be on opposite shifts or you’d have to fight me for it,” Traci said as she dogged down the hatch behind them. The odor was stronger in there, where the previous crew would’ve kept their EVA suits in between surface sorties on Mars. She wrinkled her nose. “It smells like a Mojave Desert scrapyard.”
“Even fresh filters can’t get rid of everything,” Roy reminded them as he powered up the flight stations.
A chime sounded as the onboard computer announced its readiness, just loud enough to get their attention. A synthetic female voice, its timbre painstakingly calibrated by teams of psychiatrists and audio engineers, greeted them.
welcome aboard commander hoover. all systems are normal. there was a transient voltage surge in main bus a during reactor warmup which was absorbed by the secondary capacitor bank. a preliminary engineering analysis from mission control is available at your discretion.
“You know better, Daisy,” Roy said, not hiding his suspicion of talking computers that were always listening. The spacecraft was up and running on its own thanks to their “fifth crewman,” the Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Surveillance Environment. As the time lag for communications with home would eventually be measured in hours, DAISE would likewise take over the monitoring and rapid-fire troubleshooting of Mission Control.
For different reasons, the idea hadn’t sat any better with the controllers in Houston than it had with Roy. “Talk to Templeton.”
of course, the voice replied. how are you, flight engineer templeton?
“Jack works fine. Just like the sims, okay?”
a-ok.
“No need to be cute.”
i thought it would be useful to adopt the appropriate idiom. would you like to see the analysis of main bus a?
“Anything in there you disagree with?”
no. in fact it had over a thirty percent probability of occuring.
Jack looked back at Roy as he switched on the flight engineer’s station. “That won’t be necessary, then.” He lowered his voice. “And once we get settled, let’s you and I keep our comms private. No need to irritate the boss.”
He was answered by a light buzz on his wrist. A message appeared on his smartwatch: understood.
“Good girl.”
Traci leaned over his shoulder. “It’s not like she’s a dog. She’s not even a she.”
“Not now. This is already getting weird.” He looked at the bag floating over her shoulder. “More stuff? How’d you get all that approved?”
“It’s light. Still below mass limits.” She pulled the zipper open. “See?” Stuffed amongst the stash in her “Personal Preference Kit” were strings of multicolor LED lights and inflatable decorations.
“Christmas in July?”
“Key West,” she said. “It’ll be a long trip.”
“It will be.” Jack surveyed the cabin as he floated down to the crew deck. As promised, the hab module felt brand new. Divided into three levels, each had its own common area built around an access tunnel down the center of the module. The first held their galley and rec room, and so was mostly open living space. The middle level’s common area was much smaller, hemmed in by sleeping quarters and lavatories. Since half the crew was expected to be resting at any given time, this level was kept spartan to encourage their privacy. In other words, there were no TVs or treadmills right outside their bedrooms. The lower level was the most crowded, being set up for equipment storage and onboard laboratories.
“Flight stations, people,” Roy announced as he flew past, heading forward to the control deck. “Five minutes.”
Jack ducked into his room and strapped his duffle to the bunk. At over twenty kilos, it could cause a lot of damage once they were under thrust if just left floating around. He closed the privacy screen, which was much too flimsy to dignify calling a “door,” and pushed off for the center tunnel. It was a quick flight up through the hab and back to the control deck.
The Flight Control Room, “FCR” for short and more popularly known as “Mission Control,” had not held crowds of this size since the Mars expedition or the first Moon landing. The visitor’s gallery was brimming over with VIPs maneuvering for space against the glass that looked out over the busy control room.
Anatoly Rhyzov dreaded being hemmed in by the pressing crowd and so was all the more surprised when his young friend Owen sw
ept them past the security screens and straight into “manager’s row.” The old man seemed confused as Owen escorted him to an empty chair at his mission manager console behind the flight director. He’d been given a front-row seat.
Rhyzov risked a furtive glance toward the VIP gallery before leaning into Owen with a gravelly whisper. “Are you sure this will not upset somebody?”
“Don’t much care if it does,” his host replied.
“I saw your Vice President in there.”
“The VP’s kind of in charge of the space program, traditionally if not officially.”
“He is not bothered by my presence?”
Owen smiled. “Who do you think approved your visa?”
Rhyzov looked up at the gallery, stunned, as the Vice President of the United States gave him a conspiratorial wink.
Owen’s smile grew both wider and mischievous. “You represent the whole reason we’re here, Anatoly. The boss understands that. The rest of them don’t know enough to be upset about it.”
“You are happy about this.” The old man’s voice carried an air of mutual understanding.
“There’s a lot to be happy about today, assuming they don’t blow themselves up,” Owen said, just loud enough to earn an angry look from the flight director at the next console.
“You joke, no?” Rhyzov understood Magellan’s fusion engines well enough to know they were in essence just a more sophisticated version of Arkangel’s nuclear pulse drive. Both used controlled nuclear detonations to push their payloads around the solar system—the difference was that NASA’s version relied on plasma jets and magnetic nozzles instead of a fixed supply of repurposed tactical warheads.
“I joke, yes,” Owen said. “You checked our math, remember?”
“Bah.” Rhyzov gave a dismissive wave. “Lucky for you I can still remember.” While studying their test results, Rhyzov had devised a method to keep the drive running at close to its rated specific impulse even when its plasma injectors were out of sync. The downside was the heightened risk of an uncontained nozzle failure, a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in engineering vernacular. To the general public, this was known as a “thermonuclear explosion.”
Owen nodded. “Good backup procedure, though,” he said, earning another skeptical glance from Flight.
“That remains to be seen,” Flight grumbled as he turned back to his console, a signal for Owen and the other big shots along Manager’s Row to zip it while his controllers got to work. He leaned forward and thumbed his comm loop. “Gold Team: once around the horn for TJI go/no-go.”
Jack reached out for a handhold to stop his forward momentum and spun into his flight couch at the engineer’s station, a six-pack of flat screens on which he could track every system on the spacecraft, including the maintenance bots that moved along rails on its spine. If anything broke, Jack and his bots could fix most of it from here.
He pulled his shoulder harness and lap belt tight and plugged his headset in. Roy was already asking for status reports as he pushed in his earpiece. It was noticeably noisier than the simulator as the spacecraft came to life. Traci turned to give him a playful wink as if this were just another spin in the sim. Roy was silent as usual, except when giving orders or needing information. Jack’s own experience in the Air Force had left him indifferent to the service’s “fighter mafia” but it had been a valuable lesson in managing a personality type that NASA teemed with.
Before Roy could start peppering him with questions about the plasma injectors or lithium coils, he sent an automated status report over to Roy’s master display. “Hey, boss. Got any Beemans?”
“Not now, peckerwood,” Roy deadpanned, unable to hide his anticipation as the final poll of flight controllers in Houston buzzed in their headsets.
“Retro?”
“Go.”
“FIDO?”
“Go, Flight.”
“GNC?”
“We’re go.”
“EECOM?”
“Umm—stand by, Flight. Little glitch here.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“Talk to me, EECOM.”
The electrical and environmental controller leaned into his console, as if his body language might help reveal some clue hiding in the data. “Flight, I’ve lost one of their telemetry feeds. Looks like Bravo-one antenna is misaligned.”
“Any chance that’s an instrumentation problem?” the flight director asked. The chance of losing an antenna before even breaking orbit should have been almost nil. Working on a hunch, Flight didn’t wait for an answer. “Booster, what’s your status?”
“Engine two had some flux in the containment field when the nozzle magnets were spinning up, Flight. Danced with the yellow band for a couple seconds before settling down.”
Flight’s scowl telegraphed a concern that Owen was well aware of. This is what we get for relying on propulsion that was barely into operational testing, on a mission that promises to be one whopper of a test. “Understood, Booster. EECOM, you hear that gouge on number two?”
“Got it, Flight. I’ll get back to you.” He dropped off the loop and started talking to his backroom team. Flight gave Owen and his guest a quick side-eye and returned to polling the rest of his team. Owen looked down at his own screens, taking in the unfiltered glimpse at what DAISE was doing up there with his astronauts. He decided to enjoy the lack of a signal delay for the next few hours. Rhyzov, for his part, sat transfixed by the quiet intensity surrounding them.
“Secondary antennas are just inside engine two’s radiation shadow,” Jack said. “That magnetic flux must’ve spoofed the relays.” On a hunch, he typed a command into one of his screens and brought up a trace log of the engine and electrical systems. “Yeah. Time stamp’s consistent with that power spike Daisy told us about.” He’d been holding a finger down on his private comm link as he spoke, making sure the AI understood him. Daisy buzzed his watch once to let him know it was on the case.
Roy chuckled at the exchange on the ground. He covered his mic with one hand and turned to face Jack. “Should I just tell ’em to fix their little problem and light this candle?”
So the big guy was capable of playing along after all. “All we have left is to open the injectors,” Jack said. “Question is, are you guys sure we’re pointed in the right direction?”
“We are,” Traci said, sounding a little defensive. She’d been updating their departure vectors the whole time.
“I always know where I’m going,” Roy said. “I’m just not always sure how I got there.”
Jack tapped some commands into the keypad by his armrest and Daisy answered right away. “Just in case anyone’s keeping score, the onboard diagnostics agree. It’s antenna interference. Magnetic flux spoofed the transmitter. Recommend we reset STE to AUX.”
“You said STE off?”
“Aux,” Jack corrected. “Auxiliary.”
“That your call, or Daisy’s?”
Jack wasn’t ready to admit the AI had suggested it first. “Umm . . . both. And I think she’s right.”
“So it has a gender now?”
Noelle had made it a point to stay out of the debate until now. “I don’t know of any men named ‘Daisy,’” she said, “not even in France.”
“She’s got a point, boss,” Traci said. “It saved our butts plenty of times in the sims.”
Roy was unconvinced. “It’s a computer outguessing another computer. So what?”
The crackling radio interrupted their spat. “Magellan, we recommend you switch STE to AUX.”
Roy shook his head in surrender and glared at Jack, relaying the command. Flip the switch, already. Jack reached for the electrical panel and did as both human and computer had suggested.
Their headsets beeped as Houston came back on the frequency. “That did it. You’re go.” Capcom’s tone then changed; there was a new gravity in his voice: “Magellan, you are go for Trans-Jovian Injection at thirty-six hours plus five-one.”
Roy covered his mic with one h
and and turned to face Jack. “Any last words, smart guy?” As Jack shook his head no, Roy returned to his flight controls. “Houston, this is Magellan Expedition Two; understand we are go for TJI.” He stabbed a command on the master display and synched their countdown timer.
Ignition came within a fraction of a second. Jack winced as he felt the first controlled explosion of plasma push at his back. “Ignition, and the clock has started.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Far behind them, cryogenic hydrogen flashed into ionized gas which was pumped through a series of magnetic injectors before it could melt the surrounding machinery.
Every few seconds a fresh cloud of this hydrogen plasma was injected into the thrust chamber, where it was met by a magnetically driven shell of lithium which instantaneously compressed it down to almost nothing. As two atoms of anything can’t occupy the same space at the same time, hydrogen fused into helium in the same explosive reaction that had been powering stars since the beginning of time.
But even this wasn’t enough on its own to propel Magellan. Besides fusing the hydrogen plasma, the lithium foil added its mass for the simple Newtonian response necessary for a rocket engine to work. The resulting explosion was channeled through electromagnetic nozzles at just the right speed to move the spacecraft away before blowing itself up. While more elegant than just throwing nuclear bombs out its tail, the process wasn’t all that different than what the Russians had done with Arkangel.
In adjacent orbits, camera-sats broadcast the departure of NASA’s first mission to the outer solar system. One, a shoebox-sized remote piggybacked into orbit on an earlier CubeSat launch by an anonymous Eastern European videoblogger, had maneuvered in close for a look straight up Magellan’s main engines. Any threat this electronic interloper may have presented disappeared as it was vaporized by the miniature sun that ignited just a few hundred meters away. The live feed was spectacular for the fraction of a second it lasted.
Frozen Orbit Page 5