Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  “That’s because all that snot’s been pushed back into your lungs,” Jack said, straining against the g’s. “I don’t know how long we can keep this up.”

  Roy gave the control stick another sideways tap, pulsing thrusters to keep up. “Won’t be much longer. Just keep our comm link up.”

  “Not sure if I can,” he said. “We keep breaking lock. Angular rate’s too high, even this close.” As Roy traced an ever-tightening circle around their target, their antenna struggled to stay in contact long enough to spark recognition from Cygnus.

  Roy mumbled a vague curse about some anonymous technician’s mother. “What’s our fuel state?”

  “RCS fifty-two percent. OMS at eighty-three,” Jack said, suspicious of Roy’s next move.

  Roy’s eyes were locked on the cargo ship, his HUD projecting only the most critical information onto the glass in his window. Numbers and symbols glowed green, superimposed over the tumbling craft outside. They were now staring almost straight down its centerline. As the background stars wheeled beyond, the ship rolled about its axis along its docking ring. He gave the roll thrusters another squirt and turned to face Jack. He blinked hard, his eyes bobbling for a second from the sudden movement. “What do you think?”

  Jack grimaced, this time not only against the sideways g’s. They were about to get a lot worse. He was mentally calculating the amount of fuel they’d have to make up, and if Magellan had the margin to steal from. “I think we’re both nuts.”

  “You might be right. By now I should know better than to argue with you. Call bingo fuel at thirty percent RCS, fifty for OMS. If we’re not in a position to capture by then, we wave off and go home. Agreed?”

  Jack screwed his eyes shut. “Let’s do it,” he said. “I’ll give you propellant callouts every ten percent until we’re within five of bingo, then it’s every one percent. Good?”

  “Good.” He smiled. “I’ll let you break the news.”

  Noelle was slightly less angered by her headset bouncing back to smack her in the face than when she’d first flung it at her console. “Men!”

  “Want me to clean out the spare crew berth for him?” Traci asked. “Or would the waste hold be preferable?”

  A tight, frustrated smirk spread across Noelle’s face. “Whatever’s most uncomfortable,” she said. “If we had a doghouse, he’d be sleeping in it.”

  “He’s doing this for all of us, you know. Or at least that’s how he’ll rationalize it.”

  Noelle fumed as she returned to monitoring her husband’s excursion. It wasn’t necessarily a rationalization, she knew. They’d talked through similar scenarios many times in private, long before Roy presented his idea to the others. Before the revelations of the Russian discoveries at Pluto, Noelle’s personal mission highlight would have been testing her theories of underwater life at Europa. She was a biologist first, therefore Pluto had always been secondary in her mind. She didn’t expect to find anything nearly as interesting there, yet it was a place they were going to an awful lot of trouble to reach.

  Now that they knew why, their current predicament felt all the more dire. Deep down, she wanted them to succeed, perhaps even more so than her vexatious and infuriatingly confident husband.

  It ain’t bragging if you can do it, her husband liked to joke. Noelle willed him on, hoping it wasn’t to his end.

  The sideways force became stronger with each turn as they drew closer and tightened the circle. Roy’s focus narrowed with similar intensity. It had become a dizzying ride as each pulse of maneuvering jets pushed them both inward and sideways along an ever-tightening circle. They were less than two meters apart now and spinning about each other at the same rate. This gave their target the illusion of being stationary but for the slow roll along its long axis, which Roy was now able to match with a quick burst from their own thrusters. Were it not for the tumbling stars in the background and the punishing lateral g’s, it would have seemed perfectly still.

  Jack bit back the taste of bile rising from his gut, keeping his eyes locked on his displays while Roy kept his focus outside. In this case, Jack had it easier: One of the first skills new pilots must master to fly in poor visibility is to ignore their inner ears and stomachs and to put complete trust in their instruments. When there are no visual cues outside, the senses you’ve grown up relying on will kill you fast. It made formation flying in bad weather a torturous chore, but at least fighter jets didn’t try to spin in formation.

  “One meter,” Jack said. “You got this.” There was a scraping tremble as their docking probe contacted Cygnus’ ring. Roy relaxed his grip on the translation control and let their inertia do the rest of the work. They shook with a gentle thud as retaining clamps slammed down along the rings. Soon after, comforting green lights appeared on their panels.

  “Capture,” Roy said, but adding their mass to Cygnus’ moment of rotation now made them the rock at the end of a sling. He began furiously pulsing thrusters to overcome the yawing motion. “That’s Gate Two. Can you hand me a sick-sack there, bubba?”

  Jack knew an old pilot like Roy wouldn’t ask unless he really was about to blow chunks. He reached down into a little-used pocket behind the seat and handed the plastic bag to him. Roy nodded gratefully and plastered it over his mouth. “Take over.”

  “My spacecraft,” Jack said, switching over control and taking his eyes away from his own control panel to their new acquisition outside. The perspective and sideways twisting acceleration made his head spin. He fought off an urge to shake his head to clear it, a dangerous reflex. “This is hard. Why didn’t you ask sooner?”

  Roy held up a finger before answering with an angry retch.

  “Never mind. I’m going to keep fighting this spin until you feel better. One of us needs to talk the other in.”

  Roy’s finger turned to a thumbs-up. “Wait one.” He reached up for the cabin lighting and turned them from low-light red to full bright. The wheeling background of stars was washed out by the glare, leaving only the docked cargo ship in view.

  “Sorry. I should’ve thought of that.”

  Roy took a deep breath. “It’s okay,” he said, after cleaning his face with a wet wipe. His stomach was still catching up to their actual motion. “Are we stable?”

  “We are. Good data lock.”

  “Please let the ladies know they can start nulling that roll any time now.” He reached for another bag. “And this stays between us, Templeton.”

  Jack mimed zipping his lip, then keyed his mic. “Home plate, Puffy. We’re ready to get off this ride now.”

  With Roy and Jack following close by, the revived cargo ship maneuvered itself toward Magellan’s spiral truss and into easy range of the manipulator arms under Noelle’s control. The stack of cylinders and tanks filled their windows, its polished skin reflecting a kaleidoscope of colors from Jupiter.

  Her hotshot husband had nailed it. They could have just about coasted into Cygnus at this rate; all she had to do was reach out and catch it like a slow pitch over home plate. “I’ve got it,” Noelle said. “Relative velocity zero. Moving it to Node 2 now.” There was a grating sound of metal on metal as the carrier’s docking probe slid into their open port, followed by the thud of pneumatic latches along its length. A ring of amber status lights flashed green.

  “Capture.” She turned to Traci, tired but content. “Tell Roy he can come home now.”

  The women sank into their flight couches and shared a silent fist bump. It would be another hour before the cheers erupted in Houston.

  11

  Mission Day 35

  Velocity 320,485 m/s (716,904 mph)

  Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)

  Just as Traci had wanted, Magellan’s control deck was awash in soft hues of yellow, orange, and purple as Jupiter’s gauzy bulk filled every window with light even brighter than they’d come to expect from the sims. Control screens were the only distraction from the planet’s natural glow. After a long night of hard-earned rest, it felt l
ike a normal morning. Roy had decided on his own that it would be rather nice to bask in some planetshine while they had the chance. The luster from Jupiter’s cloud tops gave the ship a feel of sunset after a summer rainstorm—all it lacked was the scent of air pregnant with humidity and the breeze through an open window.

  The sudden thought of opening a window to the killing vacuum outside yanked the chain of Jack’s runaway imagination back inside, caught up in another daydream when something important was supposed to be happening. “Why does my mind always wander when there’s too much to do?” he asked of no one in particular.

  “I’m certain your mother would tell us it’s because you’re ADD,” Noelle said in her best dispassionate medical professional’s tone. “Or you’re just avoiding responsibility, which is also a sign of ADD.”

  “Don’t hold back, Dr. No,” he said. “With that accent, you can say pretty much anything to me and I’ll take it as a compliment. Go ahead, let ’er rip.”

  “I’d not dream of such a thing,” she clucked, “unless you miss my payload’s injection burn. If it overshoots Europa, I’ll be quite, well . . . ”

  “Upset?”

  “Pissed. It is the entire premise of my doctoral thesis we are hoping to prove here.”

  “Yet you say ‘pissed’ in such a lovely way. What you’re saying is that the fruits of your research, your entire reputation, rests on my ability to not screw this up?”

  That was when Roy piped up. “Quit flirting with my wife, Jack. Though I do like the ‘Dr. No’ thing. Suits her.”

  Noelle’s protests were drowned out by the howls and whistles from her crewmates.

  “Let’s stay on task, people,” Roy said. “This isn’t the time to be getting slap-happy.”

  “Aye, skipper,” Jack said with a wink in Noelle’s direction. “Don’t worry,” he said just loud enough for her to hear. He activated a joystick controller by his console and uncovered a bank of protected switches. “Your bombardier is up and over the target.”

  The probe Jack was about to release, Astrolabe, had in fact been inspired by an Air Force cluster bomb. Instead of munitions, it would scatter a handful of self-propelled impact darts as it traced a low orbit around Europa. Each probe was tipped with a tungsten penetrator and boosted by a small solid rocket motor. They would be strung along a path thousands of miles long to maximize their chances of blasting through the ice into what was believed to be liquid water beneath. Wherever there was water, there was life. At least it was so on Earth; whether that held true for the rest of the solar system remained to be seen. Noelle’s doctoral thesis had argued for it.

  Jack’s excitement mounted as he ran through the release checklist: For real, no simulation this time. They had practiced this event and drilled every possible bad outcome so many times that the mechanics of it had become second nature. Which was of course the point, though at times he’d felt like a trained rat in a maze.

  “Internal diagnostics complete. Astrolabe is on internal power,” Jack said. “Disconnecting from our auxiliary bus.” He snapped open a red switch cover and looked over his shoulder at Roy. “Pyros armed. Standing by for your go.”

  Roy tapped at a screen on his instrument panel, checking their position and velocity relative to Europa one last time against the computer-generated cues projected onto his forward window. Piloting had become so simple that it was almost like a video game. The probe was in Jack’s hands now; Roy just had to make sure they stayed pointed in the right direction before it fired its braking rockets. “We’re on speed and on target. You’re cleared hot, bubba.”

  Jack had also come to realize that whenever Roy became dead serious he reverted to his old fighter pilot lingo, which meant everyone suddenly became bubba. He snapped open a covered switch and thumbed the release. A status light changing color was the only indication anything had happened. “Bombs away. T-minus fifteen seconds to retro burn. Ready to change your life, Doc?”

  Noelle fidgeted with her monitors. “Change can be for better or worse. We tend to assume the former.”

  “That’s kind of pessimistic for someone who’s about to validate her life’s work.”

  “It’s disillusionment with human nature,” she said. “If this gives us actual evidence of life beyond Earth, it will only be after we carpet bombed it first.”

  The probe itself was mounted inside the saddle truss of Magellan’s superstructure. Nestled alongside gleaming cylinders full of water and fuel, the various probes to be released during their sprint past Jupiter appeared mundane in comparison.

  Astrolabe was one of the more intricate contraptions despite its outward simplicity. A composite shell protected the half-dozen impact darts, propelled into its own orbit by a liquid rocket motor that dwarfed the probe itself. When Jack released it, springs punted the probe out of its cradle and set it drifting away. As soon as it reached minimum safe distance from the spacecraft, a hard burn from the booster began slowing it into Europa’s orbit. Magellan would be on the other side of Jupiter before it arrived at its final destination.

  The final two probes to be released at Jupiter were Aether and Boreas, named for the Greek gods of the winds. They were simple but tough weather balloons encased in ablative entry shells which would separate as the ship shot past Jupiter on its closest approach. The balloons would then behave like parachutes as they fell into the thickening atmosphere, slowing each probe’s descent as they filled. JPL’s mission managers hoped the balloons would survive the howling upper-level winds long enough to keep their instruments recording in Jupiter’s violent stratosphere. It wouldn’t matter if the balloons could stay aloft for days; they would only be useful for as long as Magellan was able to receive their transmissions and relay them back to Earth.

  “Good burn, and Astrolabe is still on target,” Jack announced. “That’s one tough bird. Twenty g’s deceleration would’ve had my eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.”

  “Is that your way of telling me to be happy that it started life as a cluster munition?”

  “Gets the job done.”

  Roy unbuckled and pushed away from his flight station. “Speaking of which, we still have a lot to do.”

  “Back to the grinder,” Traci said as she did the same. “Sooner we finish checking out Cygnus, the better. I need some sleep.”

  Jack looked at the day’s activity plan clipped to his console. In a fit of naive optimism, Houston’s mission planners had found a way to cram some rest time into the middle of their Jupiter encounter. “No problem. According to this, we were in rest two hours ago.”

  “Thanks. I feel so much better knowing that,” Traci said as she gave him a side-eye. They’d learned long ago that no plan survives contact with reality.

  Roy ignored them and checked his watch. “Twelve hours until periapsis. All we have to do is unpack the log mod, transfer propellant, eject the empty tanks, and get aligned for the burn.”

  Jack crumpled up the plan and stuffed it in the trash.

  As Owen started up his car, the electric hum highlighted its lack of engine noise—a reminder of how much work he still needed to put into restoring the old Mustang sitting idle in his garage. When this was all over, maybe he’d have time to finish that project. He’d been with the space agency for more than enough time to take early retirement and move on to something less taxing.

  After yesterday’s too-dramatic rendezvous, he’d decided to take Rhyzov’s advice and disconnect from the mission for at least one night. “You can do nothing here except aggravate people on your teams. They will do their jobs. You go home and do yours.”

  The old guy had been right, as usual. It being almost Christmas made it that much easier.

  The chatter from the all-news channel wrenched him back to the present reality. Early retirement? Not with the way the market had been lately. Too much churn for his comfort and most of it on the downside. If he was serious about pulling the eject handle soon then he needed to get wise and start moving money around now. Protect
his cash value or whatever it was the financial gurus were preaching this month.

  No more news. It left him too aggravated if he was paying attention at all. Otherwise it was all just background noise. It could be bleating at him the entire ride home and he’d not feel any smarter for it. He thumbed the controls on his steering wheel. Every other channel was holiday music. He kept alternating between genres until settling on some old country blues. Maybe he’d pick up the guitar again after he was freed from NASA. It had been, what, over a decade since he’d been even halfway serious with it? It was frightening to see how easily time could slip away.

  He rolled down his windows to take in the night air. Winter in Houston meant he could wear long sleeves with only feeling a vague need to roll them up. He didn’t even have to loosen his tie.

  As he turned off a densely forested road, the street seemed to explode with multicolored lights. Half the neighborhood must have worked at Johnson, but it was a small fraction on duty in the control room. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to count on having holidays free.

  His wife felt the same. After getting used to his rare presence at home, she’d expected him to be living in his office until Magellan was safely on the other side of Jupiter after Christmas. “You’re home,” she said, half-questioning.

  “Remember our Russian guest?” Owen looked down at his shoes. “He kind of shamed me into it.”

  His wife nodded. “You kind of deserve it,” she said, then gave him a lingering kiss. “But we’ll take you anyway. Tell Dr. Rhyzov he’s welcome here anytime.”

  Owen tossed his overcoat over the sofa and collapsed onto it. He would wake up in the same spot the next morning with his wife lolled over alongside him, along with their daughter who had wandered in sometime during the night. And the cat, whom he’d found draped over his feet.

  He turned his head, searching for the clock on their mantel and then deciding it wasn’t worth waking everyone else splayed around him. If it walked, toddled, or crawled, it had ended up in the same space he now occupied.