it is most likely a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. a slide rule could be used as a random number generator. it would also be possible to decode the key progression once a pattern was identified.
“So it’s like a Vigenère cipher?” Jack asked. “By chance did the Soviets keep an E6B aboard their spacecraft?”
i do not understand your reference.
“It’s a circular slide rule. Real common in aircraft for figuring out wind and airspeed conversions. I know there were versions adapted for spaceflight in the old days.”
stand by . . . yes. does the term “whiz wheel” sound correct?
He laughed. “It absolutely does. I think we found our cipher.”
i will look for likely numerical solutions between one and thirty-three.
“Good idea,” Jack said. No point exceeding the number of characters in their alphabet. “I think he gave away the first one just to tip them off. It looks like he started with a variation of the old ‘Rotate 13’ cipher.”
agreed, except the divisor would most likely be eleven due to the number of cyrillic characters.
The concept was simple, but as usual the trick came in applying it. If it was a substitution cipher, all he needed to know was how far ahead to count. In English, a thirteen-character transposition meant A became N, B became O, and so on. With twenty-six letters, thirteen characters divided the alphabet easily in two. That made eleven a natural choice for Cyrillic.
So Vlad hadn’t wanted to make it easy for Moscow. Who knew how long it had taken the Kremlin to figure out their hero cosmonaut was toying with them? How long after complaining about garbled transmissions had they realized he was trying to tell them something?
Maybe they never had. When something that obvious is staring you in the face, the tendency was to overlook it.
Jack turned to his new task with relish. Once a spook, always a spook. And where he had expected to uncover talk of a crew mutiny, what he did find was perhaps more bewildering:
ОБРАЗЦЫ ПОВЕРХНОСТИ
It was gibberish even in Russian, roughly translated to English as even more gibberish:
UNIR FHESNPR FNZCYRF
But transposed using every eleventh character in Russian:
HAVE SURFACE SAMPLES.
There was more:
СПЕКТРОСКОПИЯ ПОДТВЕРЖДАЕТ ОРГАНИЧЕСКИЕ МОЛЕКУЛЫ. Аминокислот.
SPECTROSCOPY CONFIRMS ORGANIC MOLECULES. AMINO ACIDS.
And then this:
СТРУКТУРЫ В ЗАВИСИМОСТИ ОТ ОСНОВНЫХ ТИПОВ РНК
STRUCTURES ACCORDING TO RNA BASE TYPES.
And in case they still didn’t believe him:
ОСТАВЛЯЯ НАСТОЯЩЕЕ МЕСТО. ВАХТА ДЛЯ ПОСЫЛЬНОГО.
REMAINING PRESENT LOCATION. WATCH FOR MESSENGER.
It ended with a random collection of numbers:
–5.6635..1.3994..2.3463..229.5449..287.928..2453772.5480
Jack looked up from the pad he’d been scribbling on. “Daisy? You see anything significant with these numbers? Maybe a key to more ciphers?”
they are orbital elements. semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination . . .
“Got it.” That should have been obvious to an astronaut. Jack smacked himself in the head. “It’s the return orbit for that Soyuz they shot down, isn’t it?”
that is correct.
Jack stared out into the darkness, vainly searching for a glimpse of their destination. The rest of the story waited aboard Arkangel. Vaschenko must have kept some kind of diary; his writing style suggested there was more he was holding back. Finding it would be Priority One when Jack finally got aboard that ship.
In the meantime, he would have to settle for the thought of Owen’s team crapping bricks when this missive came sailing over the transom in four hours:
//APPENDIX TO MISSION STATUS REPORT / 081205UTC//
SUBMITTED BY ENG J. TEMPLETON:
ANALYSIS OF ARKANGEL LOGBOOK REVEALED CODED INFORMATION WITHIN TEXT. CIPHER KEY EXTRACTED FROM MAIN TEXT AND DESCRIBED IN APP. II. WILL CONFIRM ONCE EQUIPMENT RECOVERED FROM SPACECRAFT.
SUMMARY OF DECIPHERED TEXT FOLLOWS:
1. COMPLEX ORGANICS DISCOVERED.
2. CREW COLLECTED SAMPLES OF RNA BASE PROTEINS AND AMINO ACIDS.
3. CODED TEXT CONFIRMS CREW REFUSAL TO RETURN AFTER 1991 COUP. INCLUDED TLE FOR SOYUZ SAMPLE RETURN MISSION.
4. MORE TO FOLLOW.
//MSG ENDS//
Short, sweet, and to the point. That’s all he knew, so perhaps they could shed some light on it. He rather doubted that, but it would get their attention.
Jack had hit the “send” button at about six in the morning Houston time, which meant it came across Capcom’s message feed a little after ten: just in time for the mission management team’s daily status briefing. It was the last of a three-hour routine of information gathering Owen Harriman engaged in each morning, filling his brain with the latest and most complete reports possible for a ship that was now over three billion miles from home. He, in turn, dutifully relayed this same information in condensed form to the NASA administrator, who then repackaged it into an even more tightly selected condensate for the White House. Like the old party game of telephone, Owen could only hope whatever he passed on upstairs still resembled the same information once the President had digested it. Sometimes it was a struggle to convince the politicians that they weren’t hiding evidence of little green men up there, which made it a wonderful time for Jack Templeton to inform them that the Russians had apparently been hiding evidence of little green men up there.
“He said what?” Owen tried to maintain his composure while dabbing the fresh coffee stains from his shirt and checking to see if he’d sprayed anyone nearby.
The lead flight director pushed the printout of Magellan’s latest message traffic across the table. “Looks like they found life out there,” he said laconically, which appeared to be his only setting. “Or at least all the necessary ingredients.”
Owen rubbed his temples as he read and reread Jack’s message. “Has anyone else seen this?”
“Negative.”
“Not clear if Roy signed off on it,” he said. “We’re not dealing with a stir-crazy astronaut, are we?”
“That would probably be easier,” the flight surgeon interjected. “Pump him full of Valium and keep him in his cabin for the rest of the trip.”
Owen frowned. The room was silent for several minutes as they waited for his response. “I don’t recall getting into this business because it sounded easy,” he said. “This is what we do, people. We finally started sending astronauts somewhere again and went for the Hail Mary pass all the way out to the ass-end of the solar system because in one hellacious cosmic irony, the Russians beat us to it.”
“Last time they did that we ended up on the Moon,” the flight director pointed out. “This one was a little more unexpected.”
“Unexpected would’ve been Neil and Buzz finding Marvin the Martian waiting to stamp their passports,” Owen said. “Or, you know, finding a derelict spacecraft in orbit at Pluto. The proverbial Overton window’s been shifted enough to where nothing should surprise us.”
“It’s not like we haven’t been looking for life out there ever since people could first see that far,” Flight agreed.
Owen sighed. “I need to pay our friend a visit.”
Now almost ninety years old, Rhyzov had grown noticeably frail over the intervening years since Owen had first tracked him down in Moscow. Round-the-clock nursing staff attended to him and kept him company, assisted by the plainclothes guard who was always close by. Rhyzov was of course free to go wherever he wished were his mobility not so limited; the guard was there to keep interested parties out.
Rhyzov’s bed was an articulated and heavy hospital-grade contraption that looked as if it could do everything but make his breakfast. Around him were moving boxes, the last of which were being tend
ed to by a relocation team that looked suspiciously military. For movers, they were unusually fit and clean cut. They discreetly excused themselves as Owen sat by the bed.
Rhyzov greeted him with a tired smile, which Owen returned. “Anatoly,” he said, looking around. “I am so sorry.”
“Bah,” Rhyzov dismissed his apology. “Nothing is forever. Did not bring much anyway.” He eyed Owen’s briefcase, knowing he wouldn’t be carrying it if he didn’t need to. “You have something for me?”
Owen unlocked his briefcase to remove a printout of Jack’s message, which he handed over. “Templeton was able to decipher some coded text within the mission logs.” He pointed at the paper. “Is this why the crew mutinied?”
Rhyzov’s eyes widened. “Explains much. Coup is too obvious, no? Military was eager to call it mutiny and be done.” So he hadn’t known there was more to the story.
“That’s it? They didn’t want to deliver a potential weapons platform back to an unstable dictatorship. We could’ve told you that.”
“Good. So you don’t believe either. I think your man Templeton is right, Owen. Rest of the story, as you say.”
“I don’t understand. How would Party authority be undermined by cosmonauts finding a few complex organics?” An understatement considering some of them were RNA strands. That alone threatened to turn a whole lot of origin theories inside out.
Rhyzov’s aged eyes glimmered. “You are too young to remember, and I am too old to forget. Party was everything, and everything was Party. Generations were raised to believe history began with them, that no power on Earth or in Heaven could supplant the supreme Soviet People.” He scowled as if the words had turned sour as they passed his lips.
“Their propaganda went that far? All the way down to the origins of life?”
“To go against party doctrine was considered fundamentally insane. Official position was Arkangel’s crew mutinied during coup and abandoned spacecraft. This proves truth was worse.” The old man laughed to himself, ending with a rough cough. His gray eyes beamed at Owen. “Don’t you see? What drove cosmonauts to revolt was the most terrible affront possible to Kremlin: They found God.”
24
Mission Day 300
Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)
Pluto Orbit
Despite its diminutive size, Pluto up close was no less imposing than Jupiter even though the gas giant had moons which dwarfed this ice-covered world. Perhaps it was the tiny world’s utterly desolate, alien nature. It was just as likely an effect of the extreme distance they’d traveled to get here, where the Sun had become just another star. Still brighter than the rest, but nothing like the life-giving warmth of Earth’s safe harbor in the “Goldilocks Zone.”
The high albedo of Pluto’s frozen surface reflected most of what little sunlight remained out here, which made Arkangel surprisingly easy to spot. Its olive green thermal blanketing had faded to the point that the entire spacecraft resembled a dun-colored insect against Pluto’s icy glow, like a fly flitting across a bright TV screen. And while they were anxious to finally see this derelict with their own eyes, the heat signature had given it up from thousands of miles away. Unlike the limited batteries of the Soyuz and LK-M vehicles it had carried, Arkangel still drew electrical power from an array of radioisotope thermal generators at the base of its service block. The decaying plutonium inside each RTG would continue powering the ship for hundreds of years while standing out like beacons in the cold dark.
With each successive revolution they burned retrograde at high thrust, shifting their orbit to match the derelict spacecraft. This drew them closer with each pass, until they had matched altitudes and could begin chasing Arkangel with earnest.
The ship was easily visible from the forward windows, now just a kilometer away. Jack was studying it through Noelle’s optical telescope. “It’s an old Almaz core, all right. No solar panels, but a whole lot of radiators. It looks like someone stacked a bunch of Dutch windmills on top—hang on.” He reached for a fine-focus knob. “The LK-M ascent stage is missing.”
“Any signs of it nearby?”
Noelle tuned one of the search antennas and watched its situation display. “No radar returns,” she said, “nothing in close proximity.”
“So they took it out into a different orbit?” Roy wondered, not liking the thought of unaccounted debris in the same orbit.
“Still want to hold at one klick?” Traci asked. Arkangel sat squarely in the video crosshairs at the center of her instrument panel as she held steady, station-keeping with the occasional pulse of control jets.
“Affirmative,” Roy said. He chewed his bottom lip, eyes locked on the big ship outside. It looked to be a lot closer than one kilometer. Though larger than Magellan due to its massive thrust structure, the old Soviet vessel looked decidedly cramped inside. The station core was mounted to a jumble of supply modules stacked behind it like so many building blocks. They were embedded within a network of girders constituting a dome that supported the massive concave pusher plate. For all its bulk, the actual pressurized area inside Arkangel was comparatively small given its intended mission.
“We stick with the mission plan,” Roy finally decided. “Jack, you and Traci prep the MSEV.”
In size and shape, the unimaginatively named Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle resembled a sleek if overengineered delivery van. Its front end tapered into a hexagonal arrangement of windows set above a bank of floodlights, beneath which were two manipulator arms similar to what might be found on a deep-sea submersible.
Inside it was much less roomy than a delivery van. After entering through the docking port in its tail, they had to swim through a tunnel of equipment and storage racks to land in the comparatively spacious cockpit. As Traci settled into the left seat to begin setting up the pilot’s station, Jack started powering up the spacecraft from the engineer’s seat. As the little ship came to life, he opened a plastic tube inside his flight bag and removed a roll of aged vellum paper. He carefully unrolled and mounted the contents to a magnetic board behind his seat, releasing with it a potpourri of decades-old odors. The scent of pipe tobacco filled the otherwise antiseptic environment of the MSEV.
Traci looked back at the old schematic. “Nice touch,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Reminds me of my grandpa’s house.”
“Same reason Owen sent me the original transcripts. A lot can get lost in translation,” Jack said. “These were Rhyzov’s personal documents. He took them out of his study himself, insisted we bring them along. Owen would’ve had to throw some weight around to get these on the manifest.”
Traci ignored the pun, being caught up in her own work. She flipped her intercom over to the control deck’s channel. “Preflight checklists complete, docking node is secured. We’re go on your mark.”
“You’re go,” Roy said. “Houston just approved your EVA.” Their signal would’ve been sent nearly four hours ago, just as they were preparing to launch the ship.
“Not like they haven’t had a few years to think about it,” Jack mumbled.
Traci gently whacked him on the arm. “You’re the reason I don’t keep us on VOX,” she said before thumbing her mic switch. “Understand go for undock. Stand by.” She gave Jack a nod and he reached up for the release lever. There was a muffled thunk, accompanied by the disconcerting sensation of floating free of their mothership.
“This felt a lot different during shakedown flights,” Jack said.
“We were still within sight of home then.” Which they definitely weren’t anymore. Roy’s voice suddenly sounded more distant, or maybe it was just her mind playing tricks. “We show you clear of Node One,” he said. “Ready for visual inspection.”
“On our way,” Traci said, and twisted the attitude control stick in her right hand. The little ship’s nose yawed left, bringing Magellan back into view as she thrusted them along its length. She brought them to a stop alongside its observation cupola just above the main control cabin. Roy and Noelle wa
ited behind the trapezoidal windows, she waving at them giddily while Roy inspected their ship through a pair of small binoculars. Traci slowly spun the MSEV around its vertical axis for his benefit as Noelle took pictures.
“You look beautiful,” Noelle said. “Be sure to get some shots of us, too.” Roy was silent, his eyes still hidden behind the binoculars. Satisfied with what he saw, he finally set them free and reached for the microphone. “Visual inspection complete, no anomalies. You’re go to proceed.”
Arkangel would have been remarkable even if it hadn’t been waiting out at the edge of the solar system for decades. It was more aesthetically streamlined than other Soviet-era vehicles, as all of the major components were stacked along the ship’s axis of thrust instead of hanging off at odd angles.
Beginning at the ten-meter-wide thrust plate, Traci cautiously piloted them along the vessel’s length, up one side and down the other. The concave plate was scorched from the heat of thousands of small thermonuclear explosions, but otherwise appeared to have held up remarkably well. Its base was mounted to a stack of four massive shock absorbers, which showed more evidence of wear: Access panels were clearly marked by scuffed and dented metal with ventilation ports that had become downright filthy. It looked like cleaning the outflow vents had turned into a full-time job. No wonder the ride had gotten rougher as time went on.
Reaching the end of Arkangel’s suspension, they passed over a massive assembly of foil-wrapped tanks surrounding a support truss that separated the ship’s drive section from its crew modules. Between the tanks were mounted a half-dozen radiator panels which gave the craft its dragonfly appearance. Inside the truss were supply modules that had held over a year’s worth of food and repair kits. The surrounding tanks mostly held water, which made sense despite the tremendous weight penalty: They would’ve been an excellent radiation shield.
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