Owen settled back into his wife’s lap. He instinctively knew what was happening at that instant almost half a billion miles away, and that there was little he could do right now but get in the way.
On the other hand, if things went sideways out there they’d have his head on a platter once it came out that he wasn’t hovering over the FCR. Like that would make a difference even without a two hour response time.
Another look at the pile of people and animals around him, and he knew. Whatever happened next was beyond his control so he might as well enjoy this moment. With all that had to happen over the next couple of days, he was most anxious to hear from Templeton once they’d started unpacking Cygnus. Who didn’t like surprises at Christmas?
There was much the combined spacecraft could do on its own without the need for human intervention. Once docked, Cygnus’ power conduits and propellant transfer lines plugged themselves into Magellan’s with some help from the service bots along its spine. Jack had only to confirm they’d put the right couplers together and let Daisy watch the tanks fill.
Unpacking supplies, however, still meant grunt work.
“More grub coming your way,” Traci called from deep inside the supply module, brimming with packages wrapped in insulating foil and fireproof cloth. A narrow tunnel had been created down the middle as they moved food into the galley and spare parts into the equipment bay. The rest would stay inside Cygnus until they needed it. As its contents were emptied over the next year, it would be steadily filled back up with their garbage. Starting life as a vessel full of goodies, it would end life as an expensive trash can.
A meter-long package of freeze-dried meals came sailing up out of the makeshift tunnel which Jack caught and redirected to their freezer. “Is that the last of the food?”
“According to the manifest. Hang on.” Traci wormed her way into a crevice where a container had been stuffed in behind the racks of food. “Curious. This isn’t listed.”
Roy’s voice boomed from behind them. “I’ll take that.”
Traci shrugged. “Okay.” She unstrapped it and sent it floating up through the portal. “Your preference, boss.”
Roy caught it in midair. “That it is,” he said, studying them both. “Is the module still in trim?”
Jack checked the mass distribution on his tablet. “CG is in tolerance.”
“Good job. The dry goods can wait, then.”
Traci floated up out of the tunnel of packages and eyed the container. “So what’s the special delivery?”
“Not now.” He glanced at his watch. “You guys just freed up three hours in your schedule. Go hit the rack until it’s time for the burn.”
The promise of sleep was more than enough to squelch their curiosity.
12
Mission Day 36
Velocity 320,485 m/s (716,904 mph)
Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)
Roy had been almost completely silent ever since they’d started checking out Cygnus. All through their inventory of its goods, every time Noelle would call out a report to him up in the control deck, Roy would acknowledge them with a grunt. A short grunt meant “good,” a long growl meant “not good.” After a while he’d even abandoned that minimal vocalization in favor of a rapid double-click of his microphone. If he wasn’t happy, whoever called would receive a terse command to “explain.”
Jack had therefore found it amusing that as they drew closer to Jupiter’s roiling cloud tops, their normally taciturn commander had become a virtual chatterbox.
“Jack, need your read on coolant flux. Temps look kind of wobbly up here.”
“We’re good. It’s just signal noise,” Jack said, and smiled to himself. He’d long ago decided that Roy allowed himself a certain number of syllables to use each day, evidently hoarding them for this moment.
Roy was nervous . . . no, that wasn’t right. Anxious. He tapped an icon on one of his lesser-used monitors to pull up a mirror image of Roy’s primary flight display. It was much easier than getting up to look over his shoulder.
His eyes darted back and forth between it and the cascade of information across the rest of his workstation. “Yep, that’s it. Too much data competing for attention in one reading. Dump all of that crap onto one screen and it’s not gonna know what to do with it.”
“One more lesson learned for the sims,” Roy said, “eventually.”
“Eventually,” Jack agreed. He selected a few critical feeds and set alarm thresholds on them, then pushed them out to Roy’s display where three green bars appeared. “Here. I’ve isolated the parameters you need to see in real time. Any one of those turn amber, we’ve got problems.”
“And if they turn red?”
“Then we’re about to blow up.”
Roy’s grunt sounded like assent; Jack couldn’t tell. “Nothing you could do about it anyway, boss. Just keep us on pitch, I’ll keep the rest in one piece.”
As they followed the flight computer through its countdown to relight the engines, Jack realized how they’d become an onboard Mission Control team as much as an actual flight crew. He wasn’t directly controlling the power and thrusters so much as he was just monitoring them. Roy and Traci weren’t flying the ship through this maneuver, they were watching the computers do it. Either one of them could take over if something started going screwy, but neither wanted to face that choice. At these speeds, being off by a decimal point now could have disastrous consequences a few billion kilometers downrange. When every error represented exponentially greater energy to be spent correcting it, even an old hand like Roy Hoover was content to let the ship fly itself.
Noelle had perhaps the best deal by far: Her principal job was to look out the windows, at least in a figurative sense. As mission scientist, her task now was to control the probes they’d flung into Jupiter’s cloud tops. She was giddy watching the returns as their ballutes reached equilibrium with the roiling atmosphere to carry her precious drones along supersonic jet streams. As the probes stabilized, she began slewing their outboard cameras to capture the most up-close video yet of the solar system’s largest planet. It was thought that Jupiter could have become a star itself had it possessed enough mass for its hydrogen clouds to spontaneously ignite. Intellectually she knew that current thinking was trending otherwise, but the idea became more plausible as she watched the churning gas giant from her bird’s-eye view. The clearest images from the best satellites had never conveyed such ominous enormity, and a two-dimensional video could only hint at the depths of cloud formations that descended thousands of miles toward whatever comprised the planet’s core.
Now that they were well inside the worst of Jupiter’s radiation belts, graphite shutters had been lowered over every window. Doubling as their radiation “storm shelter,” the control deck was surrounded by layers of bladders between the inner and outer hulls that held their waste water and made for a natural radiation shield. To a person, the crew remained sanguine about the fact that the only thing standing between them and certain death was a few liters of stale piss. Jack, for his part, had long ago exhausted any jokes about it.
“One minute to maneuver node intercept,” Traci announced. “Gimbals look good, still on pitch.”
Roy grunted once. Agreed.
“Reactor output and coolant flow both nominal, nozzle coils configured for max thrust,” Jack said, and made one last check of what he’d come to call simply “the board,” a display he’d arranged to show a quick, simple status of every system that they could not live without. “The board is green. Configuring for hard burn on your mark.”
“Go,” Roy said.
Outside, everything that could be tucked in against the hull began retracting into their cradles, minimizing their exposure to the stray molecules that were certain to hit them as they drew closer to Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. To Noelle’s dismay, this included the antennas which connected them to her experiments. “Don’t worry,” Jack reassured her. “You’ll just have that much more to catch up on afte
r we’re clear on the other side.”
“Let’s just get this done.” Noelle looked grim, knowing he was right but hating the separation nonetheless. She’d have been happy to take their excursion module and stay behind, except for that whole “stranded in deep space” problem it presented.
“Thirty seconds,” Traci said. “Jack, we’ve got a pressure warning on the secondary propellant tank. Can you give it a stir?”
Jack swore at himself, just noticing the tank warning flashing at him. “Yep, primary blowdown fan just went offline.”
“And the secondary didn’t cut in automatically?” she asked sharply, more out of time pressure than frustration. The countdown timer had just passed T-minus twenty seconds, on its way to zero.
“Apparently not.” Jack cursed as he reached for the switch. Indicators turned green as the tank came back up to pressure. “Might be control logic, but I doubt it.” It looked like a simple relay failure or a complex software glitch; either one would have to wait.
“Ten seconds,” Roy interrupted. The event timer counted down silently as the plasma injectors opened up.
“Ignition.”
It felt like a sack of wet concrete had been dumped in his lap. Curtains of gray swirled around the periphery of Jack’s vision. The gimbals in his flight couch hissed as they tilted with Magellan’s thrust vector, shifting his array of monitors temporarily out of view. He clenched the muscles of his lower body, which helped keep his blood in his upper body where it mattered most and made a mighty effort to turn his head. Staying conscious wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t see his own instruments, and the repeater screens mounted on his arm rests just didn’t convey enough information. It might have been enough for the others, but the flight engineer needed to know exactly what was going on inside of his ship. For the slingshot to work, they needed a continuous maximum-thrust burn for three minutes on either side of periapsis. That didn’t sound like much, except that the engines normally pulsed a few seconds apart in a complex sequence. All three pounding away at the same time was going to make for a rough ride.
Jack turned his head forward, the mounting g’s forcing him to put his faith in “Plan B,” the AI, to let him know before something went bang. Roy may not have liked it, but he wasn’t the one trying to keep an open-cycle fusion reaction running at full tilt. He reached for a switch by his right index finger and pressed it three times. A three-dimensional blue widget spiraled in on itself at the bottom corner of the screen behind a reassuring message: neural network online.
Good girl, Jack thought. Just you and me. He tapped the message “acknowledged” and saw the little blue spiral shrink into the background. The AI was now watching everything Jack was. A momentary spike in the secondary electrical bus was the single clue that something big was running in the background, and Jack was the only one paying attention to that anyway.
Ahead, Roy and Traci had it easier as their couches were aligned in the proper direction by default: forward, as pilot’s seats ought to be. Jack and Noelle were behind them at angles that made perfect sense in fractional or zero-g. Now, not so much. Perhaps the human-factors design group had figured a few minutes of high-g burn hadn’t necessitated changing anything. He made a mental note to hunt down and horsewhip them when he got back to Houston.
“Different than flying drones, ain’t it?” Roy teased from his position of relative comfort.
“Good thing Noelle’s the doc and not you,” Jack grunted, “your bedside manner . . . ” The word “sucks” formed in his brain and tried to climb out of his larynx before it was choked off by gravity. What emerged sounded something like Grnnughh.
“Try not to talk so much,” Roy said. “Nearing max alpha.” Meaning they were almost at three g’s acceleration as they raced through periapsis, their lowest point above Jupiter. As nuclear plasma exploded from their engines, the exchange of mass for velocity was further multiplied by the giant planet’s gravity. The effect would have been even more dramatic if they were just using Jupiter for speed: In this case, they were also using it to change the plane of their orbit to match Pluto’s.
Yet even with a total velocity change of over half a million kilometers per hour, it would still take most of the next year for them to reach the Kuiper Belt and Pluto’s orbit. Much of that time would be spent burning in the opposite direction, canceling out the velocity they’d gained to make the trip in the first place. To a layman it might have seemed self-defeating or even wasteful—a question which had in fact been raised often by the popular press—until realizing the alternative was to spend ten years coasting there.
It wasn’t even a useful percentage of light speed, something the Russians had achieved with forty-year-old technology. The public’s irrational, crippling fear of nuclear power was running headlong into the reality of a need for cleaner sources of energy. What was the point of building electric cars if most of the power plants that charged them still burned fossil fuels? Maybe there was some value in Russia having had the autonomy to ignore the predictable screeching busybodies: Every now and then, it enabled them to do something amazing. Then again, they’d managed to turn large swaths of their “motherland” into uninhabitable toxic nightmares. So, there was that.
Jack shook his head, bringing his focus back to the here and now. The ship had become almost serene, the ubiquitous low whir of cooling fans and air recyclers joined by the distant hum of magnetic rocket nozzles jetting high-velocity plasma into space behind them.
While the modules which housed Magellan’s sensitive payload of humans and electronics may have protected them from the invisible radiation hazards of space, the ship itself was protected from equally dangerous micrometeorites by a dome of ballistic fabric stretched over a titanium frame almost fifty meters across its bow, shielding it from the more mundane threats of cosmic dust which became a good deal less mundane if hit fast enough. It was nothing so much as an overgrown combination of heat shielding and body armor. And as such, the dome began glowing red as molecule-thin wisps of Jovian atmosphere began impacting it at high speed.
The engines, however, were much more exposed. Being small nuclear furnaces themselves, there was little protection to be gained other than from the collision avoidance of the bow dome. That in itself was superfluous, considering how much hard structure stood between it and the three open-cycle fusion engines: If they did hit something, the forward end would get the worst of it. After that, the layers of radiator panels just forward of the reactor sections could absorb anything that might conceivably make it past the forward dome. The likelihood of a plasma injector or lithium tank getting holed by a stray dust mote had hardly been worth worrying over.
The interplay between the powerful magnetic exhaust nozzles and the deep-space radiation environment was a different matter. Being industrial-strength electromagnets, each nozzle was calibrated to always maintain the optimum expansion ratio between the nozzle’s throat and its exit as it channeled a stream of nuclear fire that rivaled the Sun’s own hydrogen furnace. They were as strong as anything yet built, but nothing man-made was indestructible.
“Jack?” Roy’s tone carried the weight of what they were all feeling: a subtle change in the ride, a dissonant throbbing that rolled up through the spiral truss of carbon fiber and cylinders of aluminum alloys into the backs of their acceleration couches.
“I see it,” Jack said, more calmly than he felt. He fought the pressing g-forces to shift one of his displays, calling up trend lines from the accelerometers and transducers that relayed engine health just as an amber caution light appeared. He could feel it too, but something didn’t make sense. “Got some out-of-phase vibrations building up in number three.”
“Cause?”
This still didn’t make sense. His eyes darted over to the compression coil’s readouts. “Injectors and compressors are out of synch. Not by much, but . . . ”
“Approaching resonance?” If they started resonating with each other, the cascading vibrations would tear them apart in th
e same way a tenor could shatter a crystal glass.
“Not yet,” Jack said. The engine wasn’t in danger of shaking itself apart just yet. He felt a change in the ride at the same time he heard a curse from Roy.
“Engine controls just did a command override. They’re rolling back number three to idle.” Roy’s unstated question: And what are you doing about it, Flight Engineer?
“Fail-safe,” Jack confirmed. “The phase vibrations are in tolerance under normal thrust, so it opted for normal.”
“That still doesn’t get us to Pluto.”
And what was the alternative? Jack thought. “But if we have to shut down . . . ”
“Not happening unless you think we’re about to blow up.”
“Kinda hoped Daisy would tip us off to that before I could,” Jack said testily, biting back his annoyance at the interruption. The problem inherent to fusion reactions was that catastrophic failures often presented very little warning.
“I prefer your take first,” Roy said, his voice clipped.
Jack reached for his keyboard and typed out a silent query to Magellan’s computer. Better to suffer the physical punishment of exerting such a tiny force instead of just speaking to it and letting Roy know he was doing the exact opposite of what he’d just been told to do.
QUERY: No. 2 engine anomaly.
The onboard diagnostics flashed an immediate reply: PROPELLANT INJECTOR AND COMPRESSION COIL OUT OF PHASE BY 0.28 CYCLES PER SECOND.
Tell me something I don’t know. Still, almost point three hertz was bad. How had it gotten that far out of sync without his seeing it first?
QUERY: Root cause of No.2 anomaly.
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