14 Jan 1991
We have finally traveled far enough from Earth that it is safe to engage the pulse drive. The trajectory planners calculated our departure window to place the Moon between us and Earth, ensuring that no one will be able to observe our drive plume when it ignites.
With the Americans and NATO so preoccupied with their imperialistic adventure in the Persian Gulf, it seems doubtful as to whether any early-warning satellites could possibly be looking anywhere in our direction. I suppose their Hubble telescope poses a potential threat, although we had a good laugh at the Americans’ expense when it was discovered the primary mirror was misconfigured! GRU insists this is no cover story, either: The vaunted NASA buggered it up that badly. That is the sort of thing one should check before the launch, comrades!
I must admit some sympathy for them, being in such proximity to the Moon they abandoned two decades ago. We were all quite thrilled to watch it pass by close enough to fill our windows; I can only imagine what other wonders await us at the outer planets.
15 Jan 1991
Ignition!
With the very first detonation, we could feel the plasma jet firmly kick our backsides. The second followed in quick succession and continued that feeling seamlessly. With each detonation we could sense our velocity building as gravity returned with it. We gaped at each other as our instruments confirmed the magnitude of the force we felt.
It is too grand to put into words. After being used to spaceflight only in freefall while coasting between destinations, to be accelerating for so long is exhilarating. Even flying a MiG-31 in full afterburner doesn’t compare. We thought watching Earth fall away under the thrust of chemical rockets was profound. To see it recede so quickly now? Indescribable. We are living a science fiction tale.
On another note, Alexi learned a hard lesson about securing loose equipment before igniting a massive rocket. We assured him the bruise on his forehead will eventually heal.
Somebody forgot to stow his gear before they lit the candle? Cute. Reminded him of a story from one of the Moon missions, when Al Bean took a head shot from his camera. Maybe that’s what made the guy decide to become a painter?
19 Jan 1991
We are so very isolated out here as our ship continues to propel us along a nuclear vapor trail, now well beyond Earth’s sphere of influence. Though still distinct in color and shape compared to the stars beyond, home is just another point of light in the window. A sapphire grain in a sea of diamond dust.
Our velocity increases daily by astounding increments, even with the mandatory shutdown periods. We have found these quite useful for both checking up on the ship’s health and for recalibrating our navigation instruments. Despite our shock dampeners, there is no way to entirely null the vibrations from our pulse drive.
Under full thrust, Arkangel rumbles like a speeding train. Once settled into its natural resonance it can be just as soothing, but we did not fully appreciate how much this rhythm might affect our inertial guidance platform. The magnitude of accumulated error threatens to overcome the regular calibration which is part of the daily activity plan. The inertial units have been quite reliable in the past—that is, in a customary free-fall environment. It is one thing to function in Earth orbit, it is another matter entirely to use such sensitive instruments under constant acceleration.
I have added periodic sextant sightings to our automated star tracker’s input to reduce our gross navigation errors. We have had to perform a complete realignment of the inertial platform, but I believe as time goes on we will find ways to compensate for errors without such drastic steps. These deviations must be contained before we begin transiting the gravity fields of the planets on our itinerary.
So things got shaky almost from the start? That was interesting.
In his previous career of listening in on encrypted Russian military channels, Jack had brought a mathematician’s discipline to his reading. This made him loathe to jump ahead to the ending, fearing he’d miss some important context along the way. Whether from fatigue, impatience or curiosity he nonetheless flipped ahead a few pages at random.
22 Jan 1991
Only two weeks into our journey and we are crossing the orbit of Mars! It is ironic that the planet which for so long was assumed to be the next goal for men to explore is on the opposite side of the Sun now. Instead of its warm ruddy glow to encourage us along our way, our isolation becomes more evident as we continue ever faster. We will have to wait for it to welcome us home on our return leg.
One imagines it would still be possible to simply turn around and go back. Alas, that is not how the great discoveries were made, not how the western lands were conquered. The great Pyotr Alekseyevich did not turn back against the Ottomans or the Swedes . . .
Peter the Great? Now Vladimir was showing some balls. Back in the bad old days, your average Ivan had to be mighty careful about referencing Tsarist history, even when it came to the man who’d dragged Russia out of the Dark Ages. In reality, renaming St. Petersburg to “Leningrad” had been a warning for the proles to not get too uppity.
Vaschenko’s poetic side was starting to peek through as well. Jack imagined him hunched over a table with an ice-cold bottle of Vodka and a half-eaten loaf of black bread by his side. Who knows, maybe he’d actually had some? The Russians had always been a little more liberal about keeping a ration of the good stuff aboard their spacecraft. A long duration mission just about guaranteed there’d been a stash of hooch aboard. Maybe they’d get lucky and find some still there.
. . . nor did our brothers and sisters give up at Stalingrad. The Motherland did not press on to crush the Nazis through timidity. It is raw courage which propels us.
There we go. Good boy, back to licking the master’s hand. The old survival instincts always seemed to find their way up through the haze. Vlad was setting up the apparatchiks for some less-than-happy news.
As we become more adept at deep-space navigation, our ability to keep the inertial guidance units in tune has likewise improved. Gregoriy, bless him, has taken particular pride in his “spacemanship.” If my phrasing is clumsy, it is because I have yet to find a better term. He has become so adept at navigation that he manipulates the sextant as a violinist would a Stradivarius. He outsmarts the automated systems on a regular basis, and I have come to trust his solutions over the computers.
Yet we must treat our vessel with utmost care. The pulse drive exacts a punishing demand upon this great ship; it is the price for such marvelous speed.
Yeah, this looked promising. Here we go . . .
Our flight engineer is examining the ablative coatings on each propellant casing for any anomalies, however we are limited by the onboard test equipment. We can detect impurities in the coatings with spectral analysis, but an X-ray machine is needed for a more complete picture.
Good luck finding one of those out here. So the string of low-yield nukes they were setting off behind them was making for a rough ride? Not surprising, given twentieth-century Soviet technology. There wouldn’t have been any way to make it a smooth ride even with the best equipment: The drive used shaped nuclear charges with ablative material on both the bomb casing and the ship’s pusher plate. Each bomb’s detonation was directed at a tungsten plate atop its casing—they’d taken to calling them “slugs”—which was vaporized by the blast into a fast-moving jet of plasma against the pusher plate. They could maintain constant acceleration for as long as the crew could stand it until they ran out of slugs.
By Jack’s reckoning, their betters in Moscow presumed that would be quite a long time. The poor bastards would’ve gotten pummeled.
We have adjusted the timing between detonations to limit our acceleration to one-quarter g until the propellant casings have been inspected. There is only time for random sampling if we are to remain within reach of the outer planets and not exceed the constraints of our life support and consumables. The pressurized access tunnel may eliminate the need for repeated spacewalks, but the inspec
tion ports’ limited visibility makes a thorough check time consuming.
Otherwise, crew activities remain as planned. With signal delay times increasing each day, we have taken notice of the increasing level of detail included in the daily activity plans from Mission Control.
I’ll bet you did, Vlad. That was a laugh. Russian flight controllers were notorious micromanagers. As Arkangel sped farther and faster from the Motherland’s reach, he imagined their directors in the Mission Control Center, or “TsUP” as translated from Russian, becoming a little more freaked out as response times increased with each passing day. They’d have had no time to react to events, which would’ve driven the flight controllers crazy.
The cosmonauts, on the other hand, no doubt savored being so far out of reach. Such were the lengths some men had to travel to finally gain their freedom.
It left him with one thought that he couldn’t shake, something the old man Rhyzov had said: They found something out there. Something that drove their most trusted crew mad.
6
Mission Day 3
Velocity 53,658 m/s (120,030 mph)
Acceleration 0.981 m/s2 (0.10g)
Sleep, when it finally came, had been fitful: dreams of long-lost cosmonauts and nuclear bombs and unknowable secrets. The images dissolved as soon as he forced himself awake.
Jack yawned and stretched against the weak gravity. Years of astronaut training was still not enough to overcome the inertia of deep sleep and a lifetime in Earth gravity. As he planted his feet on the deck to stand he pushed off like he would on any normal day. But “normal” on Earth was too much here by a factor of ten, and he ended up rocketing into the ceiling head first. At least the fall back down was gentler.
Rubbing the fresh knot on his head, Jack hopped lightly across the crew berthing deck and climbed a ladder up to the galley into the adjacent recreation area. It was nice enough, with an exercise bike, treadmill, and a weight machine loaded with resistance bands. He’d have to think of a way to partition the gym from their dining room and made a mental note to pay extra attention to the air exchangers on this level. It all looked hospital-clean now, but it was going to get ripe in here over the next couple of years. At least this deck had plenty of windows for natural light, not that they’d ever be able to open one to air the place out.
The indirect lighting on the crew decks adjusted their color palette depending on the relative time of day. “Mornings” and “evenings” bathed them in warm light that shifted spectrums between blue, yellow and red with occasional hints of orange and purple for effect. The electrically tinted windows completed the illusion of twilight, dimming the relentless sun while they were still close enough for it to matter. A nice touch, but it couldn’t overcome the astringent smell of artificial air.
Jack turned the lights out to let the sun do its thing. For the first time in days, he had some unoccupied minutes to catch his breath. He had the luxury of being able to pay attention to things other than whatever life-or-death task wasn’t right in front of him. Sunlight streamed in from one side, the ring of portholes lighting up the room. Jack closed his eyes and leaned against the padded wall, basking in the sunlight. The acoustic insulation in here wasn’t as dense as down in the berthing deck, and so he was able to feel the comforting hum of the spacecraft at work.
Downstairs, the only sound all night besides Roy’s snoring had been the quiet hiss of air circulators. Here in the galley, the change was dramatic. It was still quieter than ISS had been but the abrupt return of all that mechanical background noise made it seem louder. Another level up, the control deck was much the same. Turning back aft, past the crew quarters and far down an access tunnel, the logistics and equipment spaces were calamitous as the pumps and valves and solenoids supplying a dozen utility modules made for an orchestra of mechanical racket.
Jack shoved a spill-proof mug into their hot drink dispenser and pressed the “coffee” button. As the machine hissed, he stared through a nearby porthole. It took a minute to find Earth, now shockingly small. What had been basketball-sized last night was now the size of a marble. The dim gray pebble of the Moon was separated from it by a couple of hand widths. In one day they’d sped beyond cislunar space and Earth’s shine had dimmed enough for the brighter stars to become visible.
Jack tapped his watch, summoning Daisy. “How far out are we?”
The computer’s feminine voice generator answered from a nearby intercom panel, artificially eager to please and a tad too loud for his comfort: what is your desired reference frame?
He frantically waved his hands at the panel. “Shh! Inside voice, please!”
please explain “inside voice.”
“It means be quiet. People are sleeping.” Had no one thought to put a simple volume knob on the intercom?
understood, it said, matching his volume and logging a new subroutine to do the same in the future. do you still wish to know our distance from earth?
“Now that’s interesting,” Jack said. “I never answered your first question about frame of reference.”
it seemed like a reasonable guess, despite our orbit being sun-centered.
“You guessed right. And whole numbers are fine.” He’d have to ponder over what process led it to a “reasonable guess” later. This could be an interesting side project if they ended up going the full distance to Pluto.
as of twelve hours mission elapsed time, magellan is eight hundred sixty-nine thousand, four hundred seventy-four kilometers from earth’s barycenter.
“Thanks. Back to sleep now.” A status light by the speaker blinked from green to amber.
Overnight they’d sped out to over three times the distance to the Moon. In just a few weeks they’d cross Mars’ orbit, though the planet itself would be a million kilometers distant during their passage. A few weeks after that, they’d have a first-person look at Jupiter while using its gravity to add more velocity. Even after all that, it would be another six months to Pluto. It had taken New Horizons nine years to make the same journey. Swift as they would be, the distance was still intimidating. Space was just too big.
“Save any for me?”
Traci’s voice startled him. Jack looked up to find her hopping off the ladder and into the galley. “What?”
She laughed. “Coffee. Java. Breakfast of champions.” She pointed to his mug, still sitting in the machine. “Is that for me, or do I hope for too much?”
“It’s mine,” he said, and removed it from the dispenser. “But you’re welcome to it. I haven’t contaminated it with sugar yet.” A quivering glob of black liquid spilled out in the low gravity, which he managed to sweep the cup underneath to catch before it had a chance to splatter in slow motion onto the deck.
“Keep it,” she said with amusement, and reached for her own mug. “So what’s up? We spent too much time together in the sims for you to be getting weird on me this soon.”
“Am I?” Jack shook his head and slid into a seat at their small table. The gravity from their constant acceleration was just strong enough to make him clumsier than usual. “Guess I didn’t sleep much,” he said.
“I knew it.” Learning from his mistake, she carefully lifted her mug out of the machine and sat down opposite him. “You got all wrapped up in those briefing docs, didn’t you?”
“You didn’t?” He pulled his tablet from the cargo pocket of his utilities and slid it across the table.
Her eyes widened as she opened up the bookmarked folder. “What the—?”
“Someone didn’t do her homework,” he teased. “These are the official transcripts of Arkangel’s commander’s log, straight from Star City’s archives in the original Russian.”
She set down her coffee and looked through his reading assignment. “You got a different file, then. Mine are just the English translations.” Even for the little Russian she understood, the added mystery was fascinating. “You’re in for some long nights. Might need to break out the sedatives.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. �
�Great. Am I that obvious?”
“Just keep pounding this bean juice,” she said. “If you need a break today, I’ll cover for you. But you have to do one thing for me.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask.”
She smacked the table, maybe a bit too hard as the low-g reaction pushed her up in her seat. “Tell me about it! What’s in there?”
“Nothing much. The usual vast conspiracy to infiltrate the West and enslave humanity under the iron fist of communism. Otherwise it’s pretty typical stuff. Predictable.”
Traci leaned in, her body language suggesting she wasn’t buying it. “Come on. It’s got to be better than Cold War propaganda.”
“Okay, not quite typical,” he said. “Owen keeping it from us until now might’ve given Roy a case of the red ass, but it’s giving me the creeps.”
She stared at him over the lip of her mug, silently urging him to go on.
Jack hesitated. “Congress fought tooth and nail over funding the Jupiter expedition, until all of a sudden they didn’t,” he said. “Next thing you know they’re letting NASA throw the Hail Mary pass, adding a high-speed run to the Kuiper Belt without a question why. Two different presidents made sure they kept the money flowing and stood on Owen’s throat to keep us on schedule. They had to know what was out here.”
“No chance they just finally saw the light and realized if we were going to have a space program, that it needed a purpose?”
Jack wasn’t used to her usurping his usual role as devil’s advocate. “Fat chance. The agency hasn’t been able to put a new vehicle into service since Apollo without someone else dragging it across the finish line. We wouldn’t have had the space shuttle without Pentagon money, and now here we sit in a for-real interplanetary spaceship for the same reason. Because once again, the Russians beat us.” He lifted his mug in salute.
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