His heart rate peaked and began to subside as he considered the station’s words. “That’s all this is?” Adam asked his counselor.
“I’m afraid so.”
The assurance of Draco did little to assuage the anguish in Adam’s mind. On some level, it made sense. According to the monitoring computer, he had grown an inch and aged two years since falling out of the tube and nearly suffocating five months earlier. Adam continued to grip his scalp, forcing the deck to stop spinning around him.
His heart began to stabilize and the surge started to fade. Adam remained in place until the layer of nervous sweat down his bare arms gave him a chill. He forced his breathing slower, feeling his eyes grow heavy. Whatever madness that had taken root within his soul had evidently released its hold for the time being. Getting to his feet, the wanderer shuffled back to his rack, praying to the unseen force behind the universe to allow him to perform his function with satisfaction, if not the occasional pang of joy.
Sleep eventually overtook the astronaut’s weary body, and Adam rose in better spirits the following morning. After piping a ration of green puree through his system, he meandered to the command center and reviewed their status, intent on forcing the demons of regret out of his consciousness. A tiny victory awaited: the test probe had nearly reached Atlas and would complete its slingshot around the tiny moon by the end of the day, arcing back above the rings with a full cargo of new data.
The dream and associated experience stuck to his psyche like burning pitch, and he switched on the camera across the workspace. He considered his words before opening his mouth. “Sergey,” he began, “I get the feeling I’m losing my mind. I had a seal rupture on me in the docking bay yesterday and nearly take my head off.” He held up the bandage on his upper arm. “I had to race to stop the bleeding and get things cleaned up, but my nerves were shot the rest of the day. I couldn’t sleep and kept thinking of home.”
He swallowed hard. “It was this crushing feeling of nostalgia. I wanted to force time backward and escape all of this; I just wanted it over.”
Pausing for a moment, he regathered his thoughts, every syllable forcing its way from his mouth. “I couldn’t take it. I thought I had a plan, but the station caught me trying to reactivate the coma and locked me out of the medical bay. Is this normal for people?” Adam looked longingly at the dark glass circle on the wall, wishing to see the world that was forever on the other side, pleading that the technician would understand what he was saying. “Please, just tell me this gets easier.”
***
Sergey had played the message from his astronaut through a few times and had started a few recordings in response, only to stumble over his words and erase the progress. He had initially wanted the message to be well-reasoned and reassuring to Adam but had struggled to find the words that would be both enlightening and stabilizing. It was futile, Sergey came to understand, that he would be able to leverage technical statements when faced with strained emotions.
He pulled off his glasses and started another recording, dumping his previous ideas in favor of a measured response. “Adam, I’m right there with you,” Sergey started. “Everyone can commiserate, especially as you’re growing up. You asked, so trust me when I say that it will pass with time, but there’s no magic wand to make it go away. It’s a dual sensation of fear and rebellion, both cautiously pushing you into the unknown world of being an adult.
“There’s no way to restart the genesis process, so I’d say embrace the challenge. You’ll accelerate through these mild issues and come out stronger on the far side. Besides,” he added, “you’re the sole guardian of an entire planet. Give yourself some credit!”
***
Adam took the words in slowly, methodically working through what he was seeing and hearing. Sergey’s face told a story far richer than what his statements conveyed, and Adam took solace not only in his reassurances but in the simultaneous understanding that he was not alone.
“Are you feeling better yet?” Draco asked.
“I think so,” Adam said. “I couldn’t have said it better.”
He kept a closer eye on his mental state from that point forward and continued with his tasks, which were now branching out from the basics to the more specialized fields required by the Draco Station operators. He also came to be assigned the occasional liberal arts task, mostly in reading classical literature or texts to broaden his experience and stabilize his tormented mind. The exposure also served to draw a bridge between his earlier memories and the present day. Even though he could now only imagine the settings of great historical events in the abstract, Adam didn’t feel much different than he had in class while reading about far-away lands and times he simply hadn’t seen firsthand.
There were more deliveries expected at the station before long, but more than anything else, Adam waited on the arrival of his probe from Atlas. The timer on his display ticked down from days to hours to minutes, leaving him to wait in the observatory to catch its approach.
Similar to the captures performed on the pods sent from earth, Adam caught sight of his probe far in the distance as a glint of silver light against the night sky, leaving Draco to guide it in and perform the catch like an outfielder diving for a fly ball. Its approach was flawless as the arm lined up and snagged the careening projectile, deflecting backward at the point of impact and quickly decelerating. Although the probe had a fraction of the momentum of the full-size pods, there was no question that a quicker stop would have damaged the payload.
Feeling the movement of the arm rumble through the structure, Adam left his post in the observatory and bounded to the docking bay to wait for its arrival. He watched as Draco deposited the probe back into the same chamber it had left from, back what felt like a lifetime ago. The airlock hissed shut behind the delivery, sealing the vessel from the outside and equalizing the pressure.
Adam could instantly tell as the hatch swung aside that his experiment had at least survived, if not succeeded. The painted aluminum surfaces showed slight pitting, as if the assembly had been run through a sandblaster along the way, although the camera lenses appeared intact and protected by the random waves of dust, ice, and other particulate matter. He transferred the probe to its cradle and set about to catalog the data it had collected. He attached the probe to the closest terminal in the docking bay and began sifting through the files.
The output from the radar scans were little more than numerical tables, which would require additional processing to achieve anything meaningful, so his focus shifted to the study of the moon. The cameras had started their instructions before they reached its orbit, and the opening handful showed a glimmering field of the icy particles comprising the edge of the nearest ring. It turned to black and then to gray as the study progressed across the moon’s surface. Flipping through the pictures, Adam remained silent, scanning each one for anything of interest.
Atlas was as bruised as any other celestial body, owing its current form from a billion years of collisions with rocky bits which slowly contributed to its current mass. The images were clear enough to show craters numbering in the tens of thousands across an utterly blasted landscape. There was no atmosphere to speak of and no sign of geysers or volcanic activity to obscure the view; the body was as dead as the quintillions of bits that surrounded it.
Adam beamed. It might have been dead, but it was all by his doing. “Draco, can you stitch these together?” he asked.
“Of course.”
The flipbook of images went dark, to be replaced on the screen by a three-dimensional globe, with most of its surface covered by the imprinted pictures the probe had collected. Adam panned and zoomed in on the image, tracing a path around the endless fields of impact sites along the way. Clearing the path between the rings had taken its toll on the tiny moon, pulverizing its surface while at the same time likely contributing to most of its size.
He studied the representation for several minutes, letting the globe slowly rotate on the screen. He pa
used and gave additional attention to the terminator. Its angular shadows produced by the sun’s glancing light provided excellent contrast and altitude differentials to the otherwise washed-out surface.
Draco’s voice broke his concentration. “Adam, I have processed the data from the radar pass. It is available in the command center.”
“That was fast,” he remarked, getting to his feet. “The way you had warned me before, I figured it’d take hours or longer.”
“Usually, yes,” Draco stated. “However, the additional power provided by the thermal arrays has enabled me to engage additional processing nodes at an increased clock speed to cut the time required.”
“Well played,” Adam said. “Let’s see what we were able to recover.”
He returned to the command center where the largest monitor displayed a single image of the ring structure between the planet’s surface and the moon, Atlas. It presented as a shimmering field of solid color, with a darkened section outlined which crossed the bulk of the expanse, as if a pencil eraser had been scraped from the inside of a record to the edge and back again. “That band’s all the data we have, isn’t it?” Adam asked.
“Precisely.”
He shook his head. “That’s disappointing. If we’re ever ordered to complete the survey, we’d need years in a stable orbit just to take care of the C-ring.”
“That is not a likely scenario. There is limited utility to tracking the movements of quintillions of rocks in stable orbits, and nothing like that is currently projected by NASA.”
The diagram zoomed in on the path blazed by Adam’s probe. The picture gave way to a plot of the ring’s structure, one icy bit at a time. Each chunk of debris was marked with a vector and a rotational speed as they inched their way around the planet in unison. Their diagram continued to pan along the probe’s flight path, picking up an ever-expanding array of the rocky fragments.
A few flickered movements became apparent, and Adam stared closer at the interactions. From what he could tell, the larger bits of ring material would occasionally stray too close, spin in a quick orbit, and throw off one or the other. “Now, that I didn’t expect to see. I thought the particles were too far apart to interact like this.”
“Those types of collisions are rare. Judging by the data you’ve gathered, they barely measure in the parts-per-million.”
“But with the number of objects we see here, that’s a lot of possible movement,” Adam said, tapping the screen. “Could this be what hit the station last time? Is this what woke me up?”
“Yes,” Draco advised. “It was a chance occurrence that wasn’t anticipated. We trail a small moonlet by half of an orbit to keep the space clear.”
“I should say it wasn’t anticipated,” Adam said, getting incensed at the thought of another ongoing risk to the station that he previously hadn’t considered or been told about. “Can’t we move the station? Add countermeasures?”
“This altitude was chosen as the prime location for studying the entire planetary system. Any movement would jeopardize our ultimate success. I will leave it to you to design countermeasures against object collisions.”
Adam rubbed his scalp at the station’s challenge. It was a stroke of genius programming that made the artificial intelligence act on the border to being smug. It was entirely possible that Draco had already developed a solution but continued to play dumb in order to build his ability to critically think.
The radar modules were flexible enough to detect the moving particles, and he had communication nodes to provide an early-warning capability, but neither of those would be enough to stop a projectile if one decided to shred another pod. Adam shelved the idea. If he came up with a solution, great; if not, they had closer rocks to deal with in the form of additional deliveries from Earth.
There was no need to fish for compliments. His conduct thus far was effective, if not necessary; at least he had proven that much to himself.
Defiance
Lessons continued and two more pods arrived, these carrying heavy material transports. Draco had kept their contents a secret from the astronaut, content to let him stew as he attempted to guess their possible use.
Adam paced the storage area of the thermal array’s pod, waiting for the station’s decontamination process to complete and unlock the new arrivals. The airlock finally released, and he passed over the threshold to find himself standing on the edge of a catwalk overlooking an industrial-looking maintenance facility with a large booster rocket mounted to the center of the space. Feeling his mouth slacken, Adam followed the walkway, which was a full story above the floor, attempting to define what he was seeing.
The assembly hanging in the center provided vectored thrust to some sort of payload, as it resembled the smaller versions mounted to the probes, but at a much greater scale. His mind ran through the possibilities. “These are rockets…” he muttered, “for moving the probes? The full-size pods? Landers? Draco Station as a whole?” Adam stared at the complex mounting plate on its leading surface. “Am I getting close?”
“Yes, all of the above. This is one of two heavy-lift stages that will be delivered to the station,” Draco said, confirming his suspicions. “In the near term, they will facilitate lander deployments to the outlying moons beyond the ring system and maneuver larger nearby ice crystals for mining.”
“Outstanding,” Adam whispered to himself. “I could go for the occasional one-quart shower with pure asteroid water.”
“Thank goodness you approve.” Draco continued, “Later, they will serve as the boosters to reach the rest of the outer planets. As I mentioned earlier in your stay, these components will be launched from the doors below, then be fully fueled by the hydrogen draw from outside the station.”
“What, I don’t get to haul more canisters through the station when there’s a mission on the line? Where’s the fun in that?” Adam said with a laugh, still staring at the payload. “How long do we have until we strike out for the other planets?”
“A long time. Components are still being manufactured on Earth for the trip, so don’t expect it within the decade,” Draco said, mimicking a sense of human disappointment. “Don’t feel bad. The plan is that you’ll be alive to see it launch and take part in the expedition. In the near term, the second crew from Earth will bring with them enough support equipment on board the Hydra orbiter to survey the local moons and make a transit to Uranus.”
“You can tell them to hurry up. I can’t wait to see how one of these things flies,” Adam replied before turning back to the main level of the station.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. I’ve already added the simulation to your training routine.”
***
Draco Station did not have the space nor the capacity to run a full-scale orbital simulator, but at the same time, it didn’t need to. There was nothing to be gained by introducing a centrifuge to practice a launch or the subsequent microgravity when the station operators had lived in the environment their entire lives. Additionally, with enough software defined controls on the real landers, all the station needed to do was render a visual output for the operator in order to provide an operationally-viable test.
Adam unpacked the first planetary lander in the docking bay at the behest of his instructor, who began dictating the parameters for its operation. The craft reached nearly to the ceiling of the pod, well above Adam’s head, although much of the mass was taken up by a substantial lower stage built from a cluster of maneuvering jets.
“The standard landing module can be outfitted to bring a crew of three to any point in the planetary system and return them to the station. The booster that was just delivered in the extended pod below allows it to leave local orbit or take on longer duration missions, as I’m sure you understand. It will eventually be used by you along with the full crew of the Hydra to undertake the first manned mission to Titan.”
“So, teach me how to fly it,” Adam stated, opening the hatch and peering through the dark interior for the
first time. The space appeared cramped, with the operator stations facing upward much like the first-generation Apollo capsules. He took a deep breath and crawled inside, refusing to develop a sense of claustrophobia. At the pilot’s seat he stopped, and Draco powered on the system. The cockpit was completely glass, with no physical controls and surrounding screens that provided a clear, cohesively stitched image of space for improved situational awareness.
Draco ran his subject through all manner of operations in the lander, both with and without computer-guided assistance. While the AI could manage the preparatory work and docking procedures by itself, once in deep space, they both knew that Adam would be on his own to make the necessary course corrections to complete their missions. After learning the operational basics, they continued into more advanced movements that would be performed within the planet’s gravitational field, which could be leveraged for their advantage.
There had been many such training sessions over the weeks. Weary from another extended period of having his inner senses scrambled, the hatch finally opened and Adam tumbled from the lander’s access port, dizzy against the change in gravity. He staggered about, catching himself on the workbench on the wall.
“I’ve… I’ve got an idea,” Adam stated as his words caught up with the spinning walls. He gripped the table and stared at the wall.
“Which is?”
“Now that I’ve gotten to see some more of the gravitational fluctuations, I want to go for another probe launch.”
“I suggest you perform the proper calibrations and allow me to check the equipment before you go through with another questionable experiment.”
Adam felt his shoulder throb at the idea. The scar would remain a good long while, although the staples had done a spectacular job in keeping the lacerated tissue from tearing further. “Yes, agreed,” he said with a sigh. “I want to begin to study the planetary atmosphere in a little more fidelity. I’ll use a variable PRI on the radar to get images at multiple depths, and I want to add in the communication module as well. That way I can have it transmit data back as it’s gathered and I’ll have some assurance as to how to work it.”
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