Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  Moving forward, they finally arrived at the crew section. This was more familiar, having been constructed from existing “FGB” control modules and docking nodes that had eventually been adapted for the ISS. All were covered with olive drab micrometeoroid blankets that had faded over time, turning gray like lawn furniture left outdoors too long. And they were noticeably pockmarked.

  Jack whistled. “This thing took a real beating.” Looking back down the length of the ship, that was when he noticed random perforations in its radiator panels. “Micrometeoroids,” he said. “Think they got lucky?”

  “Several times over.” Traci turned the joystick to yaw the MSEV about for a closer look. One of the big cooling wings had a good meter-wide gash in it. “At their velocity, a grain of sand could do an awful lot of damage. Lucky they didn’t get holed.”

  “Maybe they did?” Jack wondered. “Obviously not here, otherwise we wouldn’t have half the information they gave us.”

  “Something important got smashed and didn’t become evident until later,” she said. “Hard to think what it could’ve been. All the vitals are internal.”

  “They coasted after Saturn,” Jack reminded her. “Flipped the ship so the thrust plate was pointed forward.”

  “Smart. Use what they had as a shield when they needed it most.” By that point, Arkangel was blisteringly fast. Being so close to Saturn’s ring system, they had expected damage. She pulsed thrusters to place them abeam the ship’s open docking port and thumbed the radio switch by her waist. “Node Two is clear. No signs of damage. We’re going to try the claw on it first.”

  “You’re go,” Roy answered. She nodded to Jack, signaling him to unlock the manipulator arms.

  Of the two mechanical arms, one was set up for heavy grappling while the other was built for finer manipulation—like opening a forty-year-old hatch. He flexed his right hand and inserted it into a mechanical glove. Outside, a camera on the arm’s robotic wrist came to life, filling the small screen atop his control panel. As Jack extended his forearm and curled his fist, the mechanical appendage followed. “Little closer, please,” he said after he was satisfied the arm was responsive.

  She gently pulsed thrusters once more, stopping them within a meter of the ship. “That’s as close as I dare.”

  “Should be enough.” He reached out and grabbed the outer door’s handle. Mechanical feedback through his controls hinted at little resistance, and the spin lever gave way with a gentle pull. After that, he was easily able to unwind the latch and expose the docking node to vacuum. Just outside their windows, a silent puff of ice vapor escaped as the little compartment’s remaining air crystallized. The door bumped open hard, as if something pushed against it from inside.

  That was when the body fell out.

  25

  Mission Day 301

  Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)

  Pluto Orbit

  “Gaah!”

  Absorbed with keeping the MSEV properly oriented alongside Arkangel, Traci had been oblivious to this macabre development until Jack cried out.

  “What?” She turned with alarm. “Oh . . . oh crap.”

  “No kidding!” Jack had reflexively let go of the hatch and was now, through the manipulator arm, holding on to a dead cosmonaut by the leg of his EVA suit.

  Roy’s voice crackled over the radio. “What’s your situation?” he demanded.

  Traci answered and described what they’d found. “Judging by his insignia I think it’s the commander.”

  “You still got him, Jack?”

  He shuddered. “Yeah. Not happy about it either.”

  “Any obvious injuries?”

  Traci leaned in for a closer look at the spacesuited corpse on the other side of the window. A tremor rose in her voice. “Um . . . negative, Roy. Suit looks to be intact. I can only see his face, and it’s . . . I don’t know . . . well preserved? A little bit of air escaped when we cracked the seals, but nothing like a whole compartment’s worth. I think he’s been in near vacuum for a long time.”

  After a few second’s pause, Roy came back on the radio. “No docking,” he said, “and secure that casualty in the outboard service bay until we decide what to do with it. We’re going with Plan B.”

  Traci sighed, though she knew it was coming. She’d have made the same call. “Let’s get suited up. We’re doing this the hard way.”

  Two hours is a long time to spend sitting idle. Spending that time encased in EVA suits might have counted as torture in some countries, had they not been floating in zero-g. At the very least, the pre-breathing process allowed Jack to catch up on some much-needed sleep. He awoke with a start, clawing his way out of a dream filled with zombies in space.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah . . . yeah.” He fought the urge to yank his visor open, instead opting to adjust the airflow in his suit. “Never did like this part. It gets claustrophobic.”

  “Seriously? For me it’s the other way around. Once we get outside, this glass is the only thing between me and certain death,” she said, tapping the faceplate.

  “Guess I never thought of it that way. Thanks a lot.”

  “Anytime.” That was all she was willing to let on, as she found spacewalks to be uniquely terrifying. She bit her lip and checked the watch strapped to the cuff on her left wrist. “We’ve been in here long enough. Time to go for a walk.”

  “The Big Empty,” Jack muttered to himself as they emerged into open space. If anything, it seemed even emptier floating next to a decades-old derelict above an icy globe that wasn’t even counted as a planet anymore. The light was ghostly, like a dim winter sunset. Sol was still obviously the nearest star but was at such a distance that it was obscured by the haze of the inner solar system. Jack realized his helmet’s sun visor was still down, standard practice for an EVA back in Earth orbit.

  When he raised the visor, there was an explosion of light and color and texture. Jack flinched as if he’d just had the wind knocked out of him. The solar system, he thought. We’re looking at the entire solar system from out here. Like I could spread my arms and wrap the whole thing up.

  Traci’s voice interrupted. “You okay?”

  “No,” he answered. Are you serious? “Guess I wasn’t expecting this.” For months they had been watching their home system steadily recede from behind layers of polycarbonate glass within their protective cocoon. Even their expansive cupola with all its lights out didn’t compare to this. When he turned to see her, he noticed she’d already had her sunscreen up and suddenly realized why it had taken her such an inordinately long time to clear the outer door.

  “Should’ve warned you,” she said. “Sorry.” She drifted toward Arkangel’s open airlock with Jack following suit, then took care to clip their safety tethers to the door. The little chamber was familiar inside, the same standard-issue Russian tech used for the ISS core except all of the warning labels and instruction placards were in Cyrillic without an English translation in sight. The hatch and airlock were familiar enough though; one more carryover from the old ISS. He reached for the pressurization controls mounted by the inner door, depressed a standby switch, and was quickly rewarded with amber status lights. “Vacuum inside,” Jack warned. They’d be keeping their helmets on.

  “It’s still under power,” Traci said, unsurprising given that Arkangel was powered by radioisotope generators. Unconsciously they’d halfway expected the entire ship to have been intentionally shut off. “Okay, let’s do this.” She pressed a selector switch on her wrist controls and pointed at Jack to do the same. “Roy, we’re switching to vox from here on. We’ll give you a running commentary.”

  Jack spun the latch. “Opening inner door.”

  The inside of Arkangel’s control module was, unsurprisingly, a mess. Long-duration spacecraft tended to get cluttered more than most, sometimes due to hasty repairs but more often than not from improvised workarounds of whatever harebrained arrangements the engineers had settled for back on the ground. Russian craft
were especially susceptible to this phenomenon.

  After fumbling about in the dark with nothing but his suit’s headlamp to light the way, Jack eventually located the ship’s controls. He brushed his gloved hands lightly over an adjacent electrical panel, hoping they didn’t find a bunch of popped breakers. Resetting them in an unfamiliar ship after so many years would be a quick way to start an electrical fire.

  There were a handful of open breakers; fortunately none of them went to the interior lights. Jack returned to the controls and quickly found the light switches, right next to the environmental controls. “Lights,” he said and depressed the switch. Fluorescent bulbs flickered to life along the length of the module.

  Arkangel was dominated by alternating panels of dirty white and sage green that curved around its interior. Along its sidewalls crept knots of pipes and cables and conduits, man-made vines choking the ship.

  “Very Russian,” Traci said. “I’d have picked a different color scheme, though.” She admired their devotion to brute functionality, but it had to get depressing after being confined to this space for so long.

  “They never were much for human factors,” Jack agreed. His single flight aboard a Soyuz several years before had been a uniquely uncomfortable experience.

  Traci’s brow knitted as she considered the layout. “I’m not so sure this time—check out their control stations. They’re all longitudinal.”

  Jack looked up and down the control module. Sure enough, they were looking down a cylinder with different levels of instrument panels and seats arranged in circular tiers and connected by ladders along the compartment’s length. “Of course—they were under near-constant acceleration. They had to stack the inside vertically, along the axis of thrust.”

  “Like a building,” Traci said. Staring down the length—depth—of the control module, she was reminded of an old missile silo. “They got it right, long before we did.” They’d had an unexpected struggle to arrange Magellan’s layout in a similar fashion. The tendency to stack a spacecraft’s innards like an oceangoing vessel was hard to overcome, though they’d finally prevailed with the compelling argument that constant acceleration, even at one-tenth g, still counted as gravity and demanded they plan accordingly.

  Jack paused at what appeared to be the flight engineer’s station and traced a hand along a schematic etched into the aluminum panel. “Lots of handwritten instructions,” he said warily. Nearby, an exposed coolant pump showed disturbing traces of fire damage. After they’d cleaned up the mess, they’d evidently bypassed its power supply in favor of something more reliable. “We’re going to have to be real careful about which systems we turn back on, Roy. This ship’s been kludged together beyond recognition.”

  “Figures as much,” he answered, “when your shakedown flight and first mission are the same thing.” They were lucky to have made it as far as they had.

  Traci pulled open a small but heavy door. “Found their film storage.” She gingerly lifted out half a dozen cartridges of 70mm film and placed them in a cloth bag on her hip. “Pushing on to the next module,” she said, heading for the living quarters. Based on the Soviet TKS spacecraft, it was another building block of the old Mir space station similar to the control module.

  The living spaces had been kept meticulously clean in comparison. A tightly packed bundle of power conduits and coolant pipes flowed in from the control module through the living spaces to continue aft into the supply section. Otherwise, very few vital systems were routed through here.

  More importantly, for being cooped up so long they would’ve needed a tidy living area for their own sanity. Despite its fastidious appearance, Jack felt a chill as he entered. It was one thing to rummage through a stranger’s office, it was another matter entirely to be inside their home. There were no individual rooms like they had on Magellan, just three bunks stacked one atop the other down the centerline, it being the only section wide enough to accommodate them. The same ladder traversed the length of the module, opposite from the bunks. They had at least thought to add some curtains across each one for some measure of privacy.

  Jack reached out for the nearest curtain and pulled it aside. The small bed looked like it could have been at home aboard a naval vessel: A mattress rested atop a set of small drawers, no doubt full of clothing. The space between the bed and the module’s curved sidewall offered shelving for more personal items—this one had a small collection of books, in addition to a few faded pictures. He reached out for one of the books when its spine caught his eye. “Russian poetry,” he said admiringly. “At least one of them had taste.”

  “Pretty sure that’s the commander’s bunk,” Traci said. It was nearest to the control module, which is how he would’ve wanted it.

  Jack nodded to himself and kept searching, this time more cautiously, as if it would’ve bothered the dead man outside. It was easier to be more aloof about the other two cosmonauts as they’d yet to be found. Jack and the others assumed they were aboard the missing Soyuz, or perhaps even down on the surface as there was the lander to account for as well.

  He moved aside a few more volumes, all soft-bound leather, probably the lightest the crew could’ve gotten away with, and wondered if they’d worked out who would bring what ahead of time. Aboard Magellan, they’d had the luxury of individual tablets and e-readers that could be loaded up with thousands of books, songs, and movies. But even for this old Soviet craft’s enormous capability to move around the solar system, they’d still had to launch the thing piece by piece. Mass and gravity were always the great equalizers.

  Their skipper had evidently been quite a bookworm, and his collection represented a “greatest hits” of Russian classics: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were all accounted for.

  Of the dead commander’s impressive collection, the most surprising was a single-volume copy of The Lord of the Rings. In English. How’d he get that up here? Jack opened it to find an inscription on the title page, smudged in pencil:

  To the good Lieutenant “V”—

  Not all who wander are lost.

  Regards,

  “Captain Cowboy”

  Also in English, and by the looks of it American English. There had to be one whopper of a story behind that one.

  Jack placed it back in its cradle and reached for the logbooks. He started to flip through one as best he could through the stiff gloves of a pressure suit, when he came upon a section which didn’t quite square with the rest. As he clumsily pushed the pages back and forth, it was apparent that it hadn’t been part of the original text.

  “Not much time for browsing,” Traci warned him. “You can bring those back if you’d like.”

  “I will,” he said, and shoved the book into a cargo pouch.

  “We need to keep moving, Jack.”

  “Then keep going,” he said, more irritably than she deserved. She was right. “I don’t want to leave without his personal logs. Can’t solve the puzzle if I don’t have all the pieces.”

  “True,” she agreed. “Promise you won’t leave without me?”

  “Not on your life,” he said, noticing a hinge embedded in the shelf. “I won’t be far behind. This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Just because a body flew out when we opened the front door? Don’t be such a pansy,” she said, moving through the next hatch.

  “I never figured you for one of those coffee-shop white girls that make horror movies possible,” he said. “So you hear a scary noise from an abandoned house in the woods and think it’d be a fabulous idea to go find out what caused it?”

  “You forget where I came from. We hardly ever went into the woods without a shotgun.”

  “Nobody goes anywhere alone,” Roy cut in sternly. “Whatever you’re doing, Jack, either button it up now or get it on your way back.”

  “Understood.” Jack opened the panel embedded in a little shelf beside the empty bunk. Inside it he found another soft-cover book, filled with handwritten notes: the commander’s personal log.
Until recently, he thought that would be the hidden treasure they all needed to find. Then he lifted the logbook out. Behind it floated a small plastic disc, just a few inches across and inscribed with numbers and scales: a whiz wheel, the circular slide rule pilots and astronauts used to rely on in the days before pocket calculators. Under his headlamp, he could see pencil marks where it had been indexed most frequently.

  “Done. Found Vaschenko’s personal log and his cipher key,” he said triumphantly, and stuffed both items into his pouch with the others. “Moving aft.”

  They found the rest of the spacecraft to be in similar condition—bypassed wiring, open access panels, and jury-rigged systems spoke to a machine that had been in a constant state of repair. The surprising thing had been how many of them had been tried and proven over years aboard various Russian space stations.

  “I don’t get it,” Traci said. “Other than the drive system and computers, these are systems with a long history. They weren’t stupid, sticking with known hardware.”

  “Except they weren’t,” Jack pointed out. “Working for two years straight aboard Mir in free fall? That’s a lot different than being under constant g.”

  “Good point,” Traci admitted.

  “Well, it’s not like this is anything we’ve ever encountered,” he said. “Not to mention the whole stack was getting pounded when that accumulator started wearing out. They had a rough ride.”

  This section consisted of a narrow access tunnel ringed with circular hatchways, each leading to separate supply modules arranged radially outside. As each module had been emptied of its contents, the storage space had been converted into waste compartments much like Jack’s crewmates had done with the Cygnus module.