Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  Vibrations coursed through the spacecraft as its nuclear thrust built upon itself. The plasma injector’s electric hum was replaced by a brisk shudder until the dampeners adjusted themselves. After that first kick, acceleration was smooth as Roy brought the engines up through their full range of power.

  “Thirty percent,” Jack reported. “Acceleration one-quarter g.”

  A dull thrumming had worked its way up through the truss and into the crew modules. As their thrust increased, the pulsing engine’s frequency rose in kind. “Fifty percent now, point six g.”

  “Velocity change?”

  “Passing nine thousand meters per sec,” Jack said with some surprise. He’d lost count of how many times they’d practiced this, but the rapid acceleration still caught him short. He searched for a suitably witty comment and failed. “Wow. We’re really moving.”

  Roy acknowledged him with a nod and unlocked the throttles, taking over from the computer’s programmed burn sequence. “Houston, CDR override.”

  They could hear the question in Capcom’s reply. “Umm . . . roger that, Magellan.”

  It was one more thing for Flight to be irked with. “GNC, can you confirm Roy just went manual?”

  “That’s affirm. He’s manual, Flight.”

  Flight cursed under his breath, feeling the gaze from the rows of VIPs in the observer’s gallery. “Capcom, get Cowboy Roy under control.”

  “Not sure how I’m gonna do that, Flight.” An astronaut himself, the capsule communicator was thinking he’d have wanted to do the exact same thing.

  “You’d better figure it out before we—” the tirade bubbling just below the surface was interrupted by another call.

  “Flight, FIDO.”

  “Go.” He bit the word off.

  “For what it’s worth, Roy’s flying this right down the middle. He’s not wasting an ounce of propellant.”

  “Then what’s he thinking?” Flight said, glaring at Capcom.

  “Magellan, you’ve got a lot of guys getting nervous down here.”

  “Not like we haven’t done this in the sims, Houston,” Roy answered brusquely.

  “No complaints from my side,” Traci said. The pilot in her wished she were the one flying. “It’s like we’re on rails.”

  “You doubted me?”

  Jack pulled up the nav director cues that Roy was following on his station, electronically looking over his shoulder. The digital eight ball followed Roy’s miniscule control inputs as he kept them centered on a floating target vector. That was Daisy, continually updating the aim point they needed to follow to leave Earth’s influence on their way to Jupiter.

  He gave Noelle a quick shot from his elbow to point out what he was seeing: Roy wasn’t feeling out the spacecraft, he was testing the computer’s ability to react to unpredictable inputs and compensate for them.

  “I know,” she said. “He’s been practicing that at home on his desktop sim.”

  “Thrust coming up through one hundred percent now,” Jack said as the mounting acceleration pushed ever harder into their chests. “One g, velocity eleven thousand point one . . . point two . . . wow. And there’s escape velocity.”

  Roy thumbed his mic. “Houston, Magellan. We have breakaway at five minutes, fifty-eight seconds.”

  Capcom replied right away: “Magellan, Houston; we agree. Show your present velocity eleven thousand, four twenty. Acceleration steady at one point one gees. Confirm your gimbals, over.”

  “Angles are stable at X plus four-one, Y plus two-zero, Z is at zero. Drift is null,” Roy said with no small amount of satisfaction. “What’s your read on our residuals?” he asked, which was the real test. They were thrusting away from Earth on a constantly moving heading that would eventually bring them to Jupiter. Any mistakes in velocity or direction would start compounding fast.

  “Copy those gimbal angles. Stand by.”

  Roy made a show of twiddling his thumbs while he waited for their answer. Jack felt like he could already hear the time lag building and the signal getting weaker.

  “And Magellan, we confirm zero residuals.” Capcom let the remark hang for a beat, knowing Roy deserved a moment to bask in his triumph over technology. “Flight says you are go for throttle down, and recommends you switch nav mode back to auto.”

  “Copy. In that case I think we’ll switch back to auto,” Roy said, and motioned for Traci to return control to the flight computers as he let go of the manual throttles. Now that they were going fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity, they could keep accelerating at lower thrust while burning less propellant. This made the task of navigating between worlds even more complicated than usual as the balance between velocity, mass, and gravity would change with each passing minute.

  Jack immediately felt the change as the press of gravity subsided and the vibrations settled into their own subtle rhythm. He felt instantly lighter as their acceleration ebbed into a comfortable one-tenth g. Though a mere fraction of Earth’s, the sensation of up and down would remain a welcome companion offering a resemblance to normal life they’d never enjoyed in spaceflight. “And that’s all, folks. We’re in cruise. Anybody remember to bring a magazine or something?”

  Roy twisted in his couch to face his wife. Their biologist and resident medic had naturally gravitated to managing the ship’s life support. “Environmental systems?”

  “Water reclamation and air exchangers are still nominal. Backup fuel cells and ECLSS test bed are on standby.”

  He gave his wife a wink and turned to Jack. “Reactor systems?” That would be the one that threatened to keep him awake at whatever passed for night out here.

  Jack hadn’t really stopped looking, but still made one last scan of the outputs and mass flow. “Ready for handoff,” he said. “I ran one more check of the control rods and scram system just in case. Output levels and heat gradients are steady in the green.”

  “All right, then.” Roy keyed his microphone. “Houston, Magellan; we are ready to hand off control for the first rest cycle.”

  “We’ve got you, Magellan. Flight says get some shut-eye and to not touch anything that looks complicated.”

  “See?” Roy beamed with a victorious grin. “It ain’t bragging if you can do it,” he said as they stifled their laughs.

  5

  Mission Day 2

  Velocity 14,810 m/s (33,129 mph)

  Acceleration 0.981 m/s2 (0.10g)

  Sleep was even more elusive than Jack expected. His body ached for it after being up for almost a full day but his mind was so keyed up that rest would come only when there was no more stopping it.

  The porthole by his bunk wasn’t helping. Jack’s room just happened to be on the side facing back toward Earth thanks to one more odd fact of spaceflight: Flying along an orbit toward a planet that was also moving along its own circle around the Sun meant they wouldn’t be pointed at their destination almost until they arrived. For the next several weeks, his personal window on the universe would always be looking back toward home. After having no time to waste looking out the window, now he’d have a solid twelve hours with it right in front of him when he was supposed to be sleeping.

  Even now, Earth had receded enough for most of the globe to fit in the window. By the time he woke up they’d have crossed the Moon’s orbit. How weird would it be to see both bodies in that little window? And yet it would still take most of the next month just to get past Mars’ orbit.

  Later, Jack told himself. He snapped down the window shade, making for one less distraction.

  He puttered around his sleep compartment—an appropriately impersonal, functional name for a space about the size of a walk-in closet—and began unpacking. This was going to be home for the next couple of years and he might as well make it feel that way now. His experience on the ISS had taught him that the pressure to just keep everything working in the unforgiving environment of space would relentlessly eat into his personal time as their mission drew on.

  He didn’t have m
uch to unpack: a few pictures with his mother and sister, all of them in the mountains up and down the Pacific. Now that he was living in a flying soup can, he couldn’t help but be reminded of his family home. His mother had been a true believer in the old “tiny house” fad and had never abandoned it after others moved on, mostly due to Seattle’s stratospheric real estate prices as he’d figured out later.

  Growing up like that made living in a cramped space like this familiar if not comforting. There might not be open spaces and fresh air, but he’d learned a lot about getting the most out of close quarters.

  The clothing likewise reminded him of outdoor technical gear: all multifunction, antimicrobial, breathable synthetics designed to be worn several times over before going in the trash. Out here, there would be no laundry service. Water was at a premium, and a washing machine would’ve just been one more contraption to keep spare parts for. Filling a storage module with fresh clothing was easier and carried a lower mass penalty. Jack arranged this month’s clothing allowance in a set of collapsible drawers underneath his bunk.

  He unzipped a padded sleeve and removed a tablet and keyboard. Two years’ worth of entertainment was contained in that little slate and Jack had made it a point to avoid any new books, movies or television series ever since he’d been assigned to this mission. Not that their training had allowed much free time, but now he’d have plenty to catch up on if the ship behaved itself.

  Beneath that were a couple of surprises. It had become tradition for the mission managers to let family members slip a few items in their loved one’s PPKs. With a wide grin, he lifted out a hand-knit afghan and a personalized, two-year calendar made of old vacation photos.

  Finally he got to a small collection of books including Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, a pocket New Testament, and a text on Zen Buddhism. The first two he’d cherished as a kid while the others he’d barely opened, and then only when asked. A bizarre combination from his mother, who held a unique Northwest Hippie amalgam of beliefs.

  Mom.

  Jack bunched up the blanket at the head of his bunk and curled up on the mattress with a slow-motion hop. He set the tablet into a mount on the adjacent wall and plugged it into the ship’s radiation-hardened network. The tablet flickered on and he typed in his password. He’d planned to keep his personal machine off the network for now but the information that had been sent up with them was too juicy to wait. The soft electric hums he heard coursing through the thin walls told him his crewmates were thinking the same thing.

  “You guys should be getting some sleep,” he said, loud enough for them to hear.

  Traci’s muffled voice came through the partition: “So should you. We’ve got first watch.”

  Jack lay against the back of a small closet that also served as his headboard and rapped his knuckles against the wall, something that had driven Traci nuts during their weeks in isolation sims. She answered him with an annoyed mule kick from the opposite side.

  “Stow it, kiddies,” Roy’s voice resonated from the opposite side of the crew deck.

  “Yes, Dad,” he heard Traci whine. If the mission commander and his wife were going to be the parents on this road trip, Jack and Traci were already falling into the brother/sister role with incessant taunts and tormenting schemes.

  Jack slipped on a pair of headphones and tuned out the background noise. First up was a file with Arkangel’s layout and technical specs. Another file held a separate set of dossiers on the crew. Otherwise, there were no menu selections. They were going to get this in whatever order HQ thought best.

  TOP SECRET-SCA // EYES ONLY //

  FROM NATL SECURITY COUNCIL

  TO MAGELLAN EXPEDITION II CREW

  VIA NASA ADMINISTRATOR

  SUBJ PROJECT ARKANGEL

  1. DEEP-SPACE EXPLORATION PROJECT UNDERTAKEN BY FORMER USSR SPACE AGENCY CIRCA 1985 BASED ON “ORION” TYPE NUCLEAR PULSE-DETONATION DRIVE.

  2. CONSTRUCTION AND ON-ORBIT CHECKOUTS COMPLETED LATE 1990. SPACECRAFT DEPARTED EARTH ORBIT JAN 1991 BY DISPOSABLE CHEMICAL UPPER STAGE TO AVOID DETECTION BY USAF EARLY WARNING SATELLITES. [NSC NOTES: WISE MOVE. PROBABLY AVOIDED WWIII.]

  3. PROPELLANT MAGAZINE CONTAINED +5,000 REPURPOSED TACTICAL WARHEAD CORES W/ MINIMUM 0.3 KT [MSL] YIELD. SPACECRAFT MAINTAINED AVERAGE 0.7 G ACCELERATION FOR FINAL VELOCITY 0.10 C.

  Whoa. That was a lot of nukes, no doubt most of their tactical arsenal. But ten percent of light speed?

  Here he sat in the most advanced spacecraft ever built and it had been beaten by a clapped-together heap of fifty-year-old Russian tech propelled across the solar system by a load of repurposed nuclear bombs. It was as high tech as low tech could get, a real Wile E. Coyote Super Genius solution.

  “Steampunk starship,” Jack muttered.

  The British Interplanetary Society had tried to whip up enthusiasm for such a project back in the ’70s, and why not? Assuming you didn’t blow yourself up first, an Orion drive could boost a ship to an impressive fraction of light speed given enough fuel. And by “fuel” they of course meant bombs, and lots of them. But their Daedalus starship concept had been ridiculously large, and the rest of the spaceflight community had stopped taking it seriously.

  While the western countries may have laughed off the idea, the Russians had quietly embraced it. Should anyone have been surprised that they’d been the only ones crazy enough to try it? They had the heavy lift rockets and expertise in long-duration spaceflight, keeping cosmonauts on the old Mir station for over a year at a stretch. Plus they were sitting on enough nukes to slag the whole planet three times over. According to the briefing notes, some in the Politburo had seen it as a clever way to get rid of a bunch of miniaturized tactical warheads they weren’t supposed to have anyway. He continued reading:

  4. SATURN FLYBY ADDED 26 KM/S DELTA-V FOR OUTBOUND COAST TO PLUTO. RETURN PLAN ASSUMED FLYBYS OF NEPTUNE AND MARS.

  5. SIX WEEK 0.7 G BRAKING BURN PLACED SPACECRAFT IN ORBIT AT PLUTO.

  So they’d blasted Arkangel clear out to the edge of the solar system and just left it there? Jack flipped through the electronic files: no hint of the kind of catastrophic failure that would’ve stranded them out there. And the orbit they’d followed: hyperbolic, well above solar escape velocity with a flyby of Saturn. No one had bothered to even send pictures?

  The level of secrecy was stunning. How had no one ever heard of this before? Just getting the film back would’ve been the PR coup of the century. The USSR had trumpeted every dubious achievement from inside the Workers’ Paradise; something this stupendous ought to have made the front pages of Pravda and been dutifully picked up by sympathetic western news outlets. Sitting on this had to have driven the Kremlin nuts.

  The Soviet Union had collapsed in the middle of the mission. Might that explain it? If anything, the old guard Commies would have broadcast any good news they could find if it might help them hold on to power. Even better if it happened to be true, unless it somehow undermined that power . . .

  He tapped the screen, opening the next folder. Vehicle specs, which he’d already seen. He wasn’t ready to digest that yet, so he swiped over to the next folder: more mission data, event timelines and crew activity plans. On to the next folder.

  That was when he stopped. Now it was getting interesting.

  Arkangel Commander’s Log

  08 January 1991

  A glorious day for the Motherland! We embark on the greatest adventure yet undertaken by humanity, spreading our reach far into the solar system. It is a destiny that could only be fulfilled by the Soviet Man. When our feats become known, the world will both delight and tremble in righteous fear of this achievement for all the Soviet peoples!

  Good Lord. Had he actually written this garbage or was it scripted by some political officer? It was easy to forget how heavy-handed their propaganda had been. Scrolling ahead, Jack saw the early log entries were filled with more of the same eye-rolling bombast that was guaranteed to please their political masters. Millions of miles f
rom Earth and they still behaved as if they were on a very short leash.

  Insufferable as it was, it showed how even the most agile minds could be manipulated given enough time. If he were being honest, it was easy enough to spot in his own country: Political partisans and religious fanatics held beliefs all bent in different directions by their rules and expectations. That anyone so obsessed could think clearly at all was amazing. How hard must it have been to visualize and build a machine like Arkangel while pretending loyalty to such a system?

  The answer was that of course they hadn’t all been pretending. There were always just enough true believers to maintain the illusion and keep the agnostics off balance. And if the true believers held the power, then the unconvinced soon learned to play along for their own well-being.

  Jack flipped over to the crew dossiers and found the author: mission commander Vladimir Ilyeivich Vaschenko, colonel of the Soviet Air Force, who’d spent most of his uniformed service as a cosmonaut in Star City outside Moscow.

  Had Vlad been a true believer? Jack scrolled ahead, hoping to find some stray comment that might reveal a telling detail or let him tease out some hidden meaning.

  11 Jan 1991

  Spacecraft checkouts are complete. We only await word from Star City to begin our journey. Our vessel is massive enough that this will require burning two Block D kick stages in sequence to first raise our orbit and then achieve escape velocity. We could easily do this with the pulse drive, but chemical rockets will not attract unnecessary attention from our adversaries. It is a pity we cannot yet demonstrate the power of this vessel for the whole world to see. That time will come.

  Jack sighed. If there were any hidden treasures, they would have to come later. Much later, as in when—if—they boarded Arkangel and he could see Vaschenko’s original diaries firsthand.