The Dark Spring: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  “Somehow, Slava. Do you know how?”

  “No. I’m a sculptor, not a programmer.”

  “Exactly. But connecting a couple of cables. We can do that.”

  “What about the orbit?”

  “We should be able to figure that out, too. We just need to start the main thruster and accelerate the Gateway. Then it’ll alter its orbit. But first things first. Oh, yeah, we need duct tape.”

  Slava floated over to a box mounted on the wall and pulled out a drawer. He reached in and pulled out a roll. “Here’s the duct tape,” he said.

  “Then those four out there are as good as rescued. Let’s start exercising. We have to get ready for our work as electricians.”

  Slava was hanging upside-down from the cable to the smaller antenna. He was holding a large wire cutter in his hand, which must have been designed especially for use with spacesuit gloves. “Do you really think I should?”

  “Just do it,” said Yunus. “But be careful not to accidentally cut through your safety line.”

  “What if we’re wrong?”

  They hadn’t run their idea by anyone at Mission Control, who would probably have prohibited the operation because it broke some regulation. They’d inferred which was the high-gain and which was the low-gain antenna from their size. That was logical. The larger the antenna’s area, the more it could concentrate the signal.

  “We’re not wrong.”

  “And our contact with Earth?”

  “It’s not important. We don’t need Mission Control. They’ve got enough on their hands.”

  They’d already discussed all this while exercising in preparation for the EVA. Vyacheslav was a broad-shouldered, physically fit man, but he seemed to have a particular respect for authority.

  “All right. I’m putting my trust in you.”

  “Just do it. Don’t make me come over there.”

  The two antennas were about two meters apart. Yunus had attached himself to the larger of the two

  Slava finally moved his arm toward the cable, which ran close along the outer hull, positioned the jaws of the wire cutter, and pressed the handles together. “Man, this is hard,” he said.

  “Has zero gravity made you soft?”

  “It’s a bitch with the gloves. You’ll see soon enough.”

  “You can do it.”

  “Ha!” Slava’s hand swung out. He lost his grip on the wire cutter. The tool sailed away, but he managed to catch it with his other hand. “Got it!” he said.

  “I can see that. Now the other cable.”

  Slava repeated the action. He squeezed, groaned, and then he was through. He pulled himself closer to the hull and picked up the cable. “Done!” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”

  He shouldn’t have made fun of Slava—operating a wire cutter with the gloves on was almost impossible.

  Yunus tried with both hands. The cable to the larger antenna must be a lot thicker. There was no other explanation. Finally, it clicked, and he was through. His muscles reacted too slowly, and a sharp pain shot through his upper arm, causing him to bite down.

  “Now the other one,” said Slava. “You can do it, I believe in you.”

  Fair enough, he deserved to be mocked. This time it went quicker. Yunus stood up and side-stepped, without removing his other foot from its anchorage. Slava mirrored his movement and passed him the ends of the cables that had been connected to the smaller antenna. Yunus gave him his. At that moment they looked like a parody of the Michelangelo fresco of God and Adam stretching out their hands toward one another. Slava was God, and he was Adam.

  He pulled himself back to the large antenna. There was no point in threading the cables through the lugs on the hull, because they’d have to reroute them again eventually to contact Mission Control. He slipped the wire cutter into his tool belt and took out the wire-stripping tool. The last time he played at being an electrician was when he was a kid, once with an actual 110-volt power socket. It had been a close shave. He gripped the cable with the wire stripper and pulled until he could see bare copper. Then he looked for the other end. The cables were color-coded—blue on blue and black on black, or mixed?

  “Slava, what about the colors?”

  “Blue on blue, of course. They weren’t mixed on my side, either.”

  “Thanks.”

  That was logical. Over-thinking a problem just made it unnecessarily complicated. He joined the ends of the cables with duct tape.

  Slava stank, thought Yunus, knowing he himself probably smelled like a polecat, but he could never smell his own sweat. There was no point in showering. They’d have to go out and return the cables to their original positions at some point. Someone on Earth was probably having a heart attack about now because they hadn’t heard from them.

  “Everything okay with you?” came KK’s voice.

  “What? Sure,” said Yunus.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last five minutes.”

  “Everything’s fine here. We just had a brief power outage.”

  “What? Nothing serious, I hope?”

  “No, Slava sorted it out. He’s a born electrician.”

  “You should tell Mission Control.”

  “They have enough to think about right now.”

  “That’s true. Oh, well.”

  “What’s wrong, KK? You don’t sound good.”

  “We were thinking about coming up to join you after all.”

  “But we can’t use the coupling mechanism.”

  “We just have to be within view. Then we can do an EVA and come across. It’s starting to get tiresome down here in such a cramped space.”

  “Aren’t you getting along?”

  “Sophie and Emily are bickering. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “What? That’s not true!” cried Emily in the background. “You’re refusing to take part in our activities.”

  “Activities, haha.”

  “KK? I have to end the conversation now,” said Yunus.

  “What about our launch?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now. You should sort out your differences first. Otherwise it’ll end up in the media. No one can bother you down there.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Yes, KK, it’s really better that way. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

  “You cut him off,” Vyacheslav said.

  “I didn’t have a choice. Now you can redirect the antenna.”

  “How did he even get through? Surely the high-gain antenna was directed at the Earth?”

  “That shows how the larger surface area works. I guess lateral radiation reaches it over short distances.”

  “Then let’s try our luck.”

  Slava typed something into the computer. “I hope this works,” he said.

  “I should have stayed out there and kept an eye on things,” said Yunus.

  “It should be fine. Maybe we don’t even need to increase our orbit?”

  “Have the Orion or the spaceship contacted us?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, then.”

  Vyacheslav had managed to activate the thruster. It was strange to feel gravity again. They’d accelerated until around a third of the fuel was spent. They’d have to wait to find out the result of that. Only Mission Control could calculate their ideal distance from the moon.

  But they currently had no communication with Earth. Fortunately, KK hadn’t radioed them again. From the point of view of the lander, they’d soon disappear into a radio shadow behind the moon. The moon was also shielding them from the Earth and its interference, a fact that might also positively affect their chances of receiving transmissions from the lost crew members.

  Yunus had made himself comfortable beside the radio. They’d take it in turns. The optimal conditions would probably only last two or three hours.

  “SpaceShip SS1 here. Mission Control, please come in.”

  September 1, 2026 – SpaceShip SS1

  “
Thank God. Are you all right?”

  They’d finally got through! Had they somehow reached the edge of the shielded zone?

  “Daniel here. Our ship’s undamaged, but Orion has a thruster malfunction. Who’s this?”

  “Lunar Gateway here. Yunus.”

  Oh no, not this now. Instead of Mission Control, they were communicating with the hobby astronauts.

  “Yunus. Hi. What about Mission Control?”

  “They lost contact with you, so we switched around the high and low-gain antennas.”

  “That was good thinking on Mission Control’s part,” said Daniel.

  “Mission Control doesn’t know about it. We just tried it out on our own.”

  “Oh.” He revised his assessment. Those two weren’t as stupid as he thought.

  “Is there any way that we can help?”

  “No, but it’s good to have contact again. Please let Mission Control know we’re all right. We’ll reach the Orion capsule today, get Dave and Livia on board, and then set a course for the Earth.”

  It wouldn’t be that easy, because they couldn’t exactly hold the spaceship level with the comet and wait for them. But they’d think of something.

  “Good, we’ll pass that on.”

  “Thanks, Yunus. And good thinking, you two.”

  “We’ll be in the same position in about seven hours. I suggest we communicate again then. In the meantime, we’ll contact Mission Control. I just hope they don’t ban us from making the adjustments.”

  “Not if they work.”

  “Good. Talk to you again in seven hours.”

  “Understood. We should have just picked up the Orion crew by then.”

  “Take care!”

  Daniel played back a recording of the conversation with the Gateway to Dave and Livia. “Did you catch all that?”

  “We heard it. You’re very optimistic,” said Dave.

  “About picking you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll have to somehow compensate for the difference in speed.”

  “What about the dark matter?”

  “We don’t know enough about it.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  “What I don’t know doesn’t make me nervous. We can’t take all factors into account. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “You could be dragged away with the comet. It’s bad enough the two of us going down with it. Please reconsider. Think about the warnings.”

  “Then the four of us will die together on the SS1. It’s quite comfortable in here. There’s even a large Netflix library.”

  “That won’t last forever.”

  “It doesn’t need to, Dave. We’ll run out of air in a few months.”

  “You think we’d last that long?”

  “This ship was built for a Mars voyage.”

  September 1, 2026 – Lunar Gateway

  “Finally. We thought we’d lost the Gateway, too,” said MOM. “The administrator was on the verge of a heart attack.”

  Yunus floated in front of the radio unit, sweating. He and Vyacheslav had just returned the antenna cables to their original positions. “I’ll be honest with you. The communication was cut off because we swapped the connections on the high and low-gain antennas.”

  “You did what?” MOM yelled at the camera. Her face was pale.

  He could see veins pulsing in her temples. “We—”

  “You cut the connection yourselves? Have you completely lost your minds?”

  Yunus hadn’t known the NASA MOM long, but she sounded pretty pissed. He felt like a small boy who’d been playing with a cigarette lighter at a gas station. “We just wanted to—”

  “You just intentionally damaged NASA property and endangered yourselves. Not just yourselves but the crew on the moon, too.”

  “But we—”

  “God knows we’ve got enough problems trying to locate the Orion and the SS1 without you messing with the hardware.”

  “We made contact with the SS1.”

  “I forbid you from... Whaaaat? Say that again.”

  “We made contact with the SS1.”

  “Is this some kind of stupid joke?”

  “No. The high-gain antenna—”

  “You’re geniuses! Why did no one here think of that?”

  Because they all thought we were useless tourists. “I know—”

  “How are they? What happened?”

  Yunus reported.

  “Thank you, Yunus. I should apologize,” MOM said finally.

  “We should have asked,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “No. This time I’m officially requesting that you maintain contact with the spaceship for as long as it’s out of our range. I suggest we communicate every six hours.”

  Great. That meant they had to go outside every six hours to reposition the antennas. They’d be continuously sweating. And when were they supposed to sleep? At least they were safe here in the station.

  “Yes, MOM,” said Yunus.

  September 1, 2026 – Comet 67P

  “We have a slight problem,” said Daniel.

  Dave swallowed his last mouthful of processed food, then plugged the headphones into the radio. Livia was buckled in above him. She’d just fallen asleep and he didn’t want to wake her. “How slight?” he whispered.

  “I can’t hear you,” said Daniel.

  David turned up the microphone. “How slight?” he repeated.

  “That’s better. Must be the dark matter.”

  “No. Livia’s asleep. I’m whispering.”

  “That’s considerate of you.”

  “Neither of us has slept in almost 48 hours. Everything’s a little difficult right now. So, what’s the problem?”

  “We can’t find you. We can see the nucleus clearly now, but no sign of you two.”

  “Hmm. Maybe we’re too small? The capsule’s only a few meters across and the comet’s several kilometers.”

  “No, Dave, the camera resolution should be good enough to find you.”

  “Then maybe we’re hidden in a ditch or behind a wall.”

  “That’s possible. One rotation of the comet takes a good twelve hours. We’ve scanned most of the surface. But maybe the capsule is positioned outside our line of sight.”

  “Wait a minute. I’ll make you a 3D model of the surrounding area. Then you can compare it to your model of the nucleus.”

  Dave activated the laser scanner. They’d already analyzed their surroundings. They had to pass the time somehow. He sent the data to the central computer. “Okay. In a few seconds you’ll know what it looks like down here,” he whispered.

  “Dave?”

  That was quick. Dave looked up at Livia. She was still asleep, but her eyelids were twitching. Hopefully she was dreaming about something pleasant. He straightened the headphones. “Have you found us?” he asked quietly.

  “We still can’t see you, but we know where you are.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “In principle, yes. But there’s another problem. We did some calculations. When we’re at our closest point to the comet’s nucleus, your capsule will be on the opposite side.”

  “I assume you can’t just come around to our side?”

  “We could change course, but that would increase our relative speed so that you couldn’t board safely.”

  “All right. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed... Then we’ll have to go outside and walk to where you are.”

  “Looks that way. But you don’t have much time. It’s about eight kilometers on foot, based on our 3D model of 67P.”

  “Cool. I’ve always wanted to go for a stroll on a comet.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “And we’ll be the first to set foot on a celestial body that isn’t part of the Earth-moon system.”

  “You’ll go down in history.”

  “Livia?” Dave squeezed her shoulder gently.

  Livia opened her eyes and looked around.
“Oh, man,” she said. “I was just being chased by a monster. I’ve never been so happy to wake up in this capsule.”

  “Unfortunately, we can’t stay here much longer.”

  “Unfortunately. Haha.”

  “I mean it. We’ve got an eight-kilometer walk ahead of us across the surface of the comet, to meet our connecting flight to Earth.”

  “When are they picking us up?”

  “In four hours. In the meantime we need to prepare for our EVA and cover the distance on foot.”

  “Good. I’ll just freshen up and eat something. Then we can start.”

  September 1, 2026, TU Darmstadt

  “You’re still in your office? I thought you might be.”

  “Sylvia. Thanks for calling.” Hopefully he hadn’t just invited a whole lot of small talk.

  “Yes, we’ve mostly been communicating via email, which I thought was a shame.”

  Email had the considerable advantage that it didn’t interrupt his flow. Like now. He only had a few lines left to write in his new algorithm. “I was intending to call you on the weekend.” That was a lie, but it sounded good.

  “Okay. You’re well then, Karl?”

  “Very well.”

  “So are we.”

  Just say why you called. Do you need help?

  “I... Never mind,” said Sylvia. “I have the data you wanted.”

  “From the supercomputer? That’s faster than expected. Excellent!”

  “I knew you’d be happy. I know one of the admins, and he reserved twice as many cores for me.”

  “That’s great. Please send it through.”

  “I will. And call me on the weekend, like you promised.”

  “I will. Thanks again!”

  Karl ended the call and hurriedly opened his emails. The cursor began spinning—his computer had chosen that precise moment to perform a backup. He canceled the operation. Had he ever been this excited about a table full of data?