Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  Was that on purpose? And if it was, what does it feel like to literally play God?

  I’m not sure I want to find out. I just want to find answers. Thus, “Plan(et) Nine from Outer Space” was born.

  See what I did there?

  The outbound leg is going to be a real stretch, and I’ve spent enough EVAs spot-welding new structural joints and reinforcing old ones that I don’t want to do another spacewalk again. Ever. It’s too lonely out here. Always was, now even more so.

  They’ll be bringing Traci out of hibernation about the time we cross Earth’s orbit en route to slinging around Venus for the return home. Their trip will be almost over, but mine will just be getting started. They’ll go around Venus on the back side to bleed energy and start decelerating for Earth, whereas I’ll be taking Magellan around the front for a gravity assist and heading back to the vicinity of Jupiter for yet another gravity assist. Bummer, because I’d still like to see Saturn. It’s just never in the right place.

  That trajectory will also take me closer to the Sun than any human has ever been. No one’s ever slingshot a spacecraft around the Sun, for a couple of reasons: It’s insanely hot, and it wouldn’t do any good inside the solar system. That’s because it’s not the size of the object that matters as much as its velocity relative to whatever you’re trying to get to, so the Sun doesn’t offer anything. But Jupiter? Now we’re talking. Anyone care to guess how much kinetic energy it has relative to our puny little spacecraft? In purely scientific terms, it’s a buttload. It ain’t warp drive, but it’ll do.

  Sorry, people of Earth, but I’m terrible at metaphors. Ironic that I might just be our first Interplanetary Emissary.

  With the boost we’ll get from King Juno, in another year we’ll start decelerating into Planet Nine’s neighborhood assuming we have the right address. Here’s the catch: if Nine isn’t where we think it is, or if it isn’t as big as we think, there won’t be enough delta-v left in the tanks to slow down. No one’s ever navigated that far before, and it’s not quite “point and shoot.” Our beginning and ending state vectors have to be known and right now we’re just kind of guessing at the end state. As I learned from my chess lessons, you have to be able to see the end before you can figure out how to get there.

  Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. We have a pretty good bead on the whole system, thanks to a few decades’ worth of sky surveys and planet-hunting satellites that Daisy’s made quick work of. We know the relative position, orbital elements, and a reasonable estimate of mass. She’ll be watching for the slight perturbations it’ll make in our orbit and will figure out the corrections before we start decelerating. We don’t expect to make it without some tinkering along the way. It’s like hitting a golf ball or shooting a rifle: Tiny fluctuations at the beginning can make for big errors at the end. Fortunately, we have a lot more control over our trajectory than a bullet or a golf ball, and if you’d ever seen me golf then you’d know that’s a very good thing (hint: I suck at it).

  We’re keeping enough reaction mass in reserve to execute several course corrections, the most significant of which will have to happen within that first couple of hours after we put Jupiter behind us. After that’s done, I’m going to sleep for a very long time.

  You may have noticed I keep referring to “we.” That’s because I’m not alone, though my friends will be safely back on Earth by this time. Daisy will be looking after me and Magellan. No one’s ever done that before, not for that amount of time, and I’m facing a solid year in hibernation. To answer the obvious question: No, I have no idea if I’ll survive the trip and who knows what will happen after I get there.

  I’ve spent almost a year poring over documents nearly a half-century old, trying to tease out the hidden meanings everyone presumed Vaschenko had woven into his reports. We all figured that his personal log aboard Arkangel would be the key to deciphering the hot mess of his official mission transcripts.

  Turns out the subtext wasn’t all that subtle. Maybe that’s a good thing, as sometimes I need Deep Meaning to just come out and hit me right between the eyes. In this case, it helped us decide what to do.

  Arkangel’s crew wasn’t coming back. They were never coming back. Given the circumstances, we might have made the same choice: Get those samples back to Earth somehow and complete the mission, even if it takes half a century to do it. Two cosmonauts had to sacrifice themselves just to keep the injection burn on target, but that’s Steampunk Spaceflight for you. It’s like that old wives’ tale about how we spent a quarter-million dollars to create a failure-proof space pen when Ivan just used a pencil, but man those guys had guts. They knew it was a one-way trip and they did it anyway. Maybe the alternative sucked, but this would’ve been so much worse. Maybe.

  Would I have made the same choice? I can’t speak for Traci, though I can make a pretty good guess. But we do have alternatives—and between my best friend and three dead Russians, I know which choice to make. We’ve been given a tremendous gift, and we dare not waste it. If humans are the first and only intelligent life in the universe, then we have a responsibility to spread that life. This solar system will eventually die, but by the time it does there’s a decent chance that our sacrifice will have ensured a whole new civilization has blossomed somewhere else, and maybe we’ll be able to enjoy watching the first sprouts. We will have to find a way to let them know who planted the seeds, because not knowing our own story is killing me.

  Traci, of course, knows the answer. Just ask her. Guess I’ll have plenty of time to think on it when I wake up next year. Maybe Daisy will have it figured out for us, or maybe she’ll end up agreeing with Traci. All I know is that we have a responsibility to something greater than the frightened politicians on Earth.

  Life is bigger than anything we can imagine, and we are its caretakers.

  Acknowledgments

  They say it takes ten years to become an overnight success. Time will tell if this book qualifies, but I can say with certainty that ten years has been just about right to get this far. By the time this is published, it will have been eight years since I independently released my first novel, Perigee. It was another three years before Farside was ready for publication (pro tip: don’t put your first book out there until you’re certain the follow-up is almost in the can). Not long after that, Galveston Daily News reviewer Mark Lardas recommended that book to Toni Weisskopf at Baen, and here we are. They are the first people I want to thank.

  From what little I knew of the publishing world, Baen was the only house I wanted to work with and Toni is one of the main reasons for that. Besides a commitment to helping authors find their voice in a politics-free environment—which is very much not the case in too many corners of this industry—her input was instrumental in making this story the best it could be.

  After more than a year of back-and-forth with a couple of substantial rewrites, what you see here may not be fundamentally different from the story I first envisioned but it sure does work better.

  Returning to that whole “ten year” canard: The seeds of Frozen Orbit had in fact been germinating for almost that long. Being a space nerd I was quite curious to learn what New Horizons would reveal when it finally encountered Pluto, the one planet in the solar system which we’d never seen up close (and I don’t care what the eggheads at the International Astronomical Union say, Pluto got robbed. It’s still a planet).

  Also having an imagination that’s way too active for my own good, I wondered how cool it would be if it saw something nobody expected to find. Something unnatural, maybe?

  Mind you I wasn’t at all sure what that something might be; that part took a while. Aliens would’ve been way too easy and if you’ve read this far then you’ve most likely figured out that’s not my brand of science fiction. My personal philosophy is much closer to Traci’s than Jack’s: that is, there’s plenty of room for life beyond Earth. Intelligent life is another matter entirely and one which I’m admittedly reluctant to concede purely for theolog
ical reasons.

  So the idea floated in the back of my mind for years, finally coming together while I was perusing some wildly advanced concepts at the Atomic Rockets website (which, if you are not an engineer and want to write hard science fiction, should be at the top of your bookmarks) and lamenting our failure to pursue them. The only spacecraft that could reach Pluto fast enough to keep the crew alive and sane had to be fusion-driven, and I realized that the only country bat-guano-nuts enough to build an interplanetary spacecraft propelled by old nuclear bombs would’ve been the former Soviet Union.

  Now I had the hook, but that still wasn’t enough. Some writers just get the story moving and fly entirely by the seat of their pants, not knowing how it will end. I’m not one of those yet. I need to know what the end state looks like; kind of like Jack’s search for Planet Nine. His final sacrifice, the last scene in this book, arrived in my head fully formed on my way home from work one day. It felt powerful, to the point where I had to pull off the highway to write it all down before it all disappeared. The time in between has been spent figuring out everything else, including a lot of technical research. I’m one who can’t bring himself to write the story until I’m satisfied the technicalities are feasible enough that any readers who know what they’re talking about won’t howl in laughter. Much.

  Having said that, a lot of life happens during the “in between” and my family has been incredibly patient with me through this. As impossible as it was to devote the time needed to bring this to completion sooner, it has still taken an enormous amount of time away from them. Melissa, Nathan and Matthew: You are my inspiration and my reason for being. It is not too trite to say that you give my life meaning and have made me the kind of man I can face in the mirror each day.

  Thank you all for reading. There’s more to come and sooner than you might think, because now I’m on a roll.