KR_IME

by Andrew Broderick

  “I am afraid it’s bad news, Miss Jones. There isn’t just one originating IP address. The network packets comprising the post have been sent in from a dozen places, on all seven continents. Whoever it is, they are using an anonymizer. There is no way to trace it.”

  “Hmph.” She slammed the phone down.

  54

  T-plus 93 days

  It was late afternoon. The crew were gathered in the hub. The excitement in the air was palpable.

  “Today is the day we’ve waited and worked so long for,” said Aleksandr.

  “Yes, oh yes, it is,” said Martin, nodding and grinning.

  “Once again, the main event will be outside of normal business hours,” Emile said, with mock annoyance. “I’m going to have to take this up with the IDSA. We French like our workdays short.” The others chuckled.

  “Let’s go over our checklist,” Aleksandr said. “First off: engineering. ECLSS?”

  “Nominal,” Christopher said.

  “Consumables?”

  “Good on food and oxygen. However, we are using two percent more water than we should be on side B,” Tung-chi replied.

  “Are you taking long showers again, Alessia?” Christopher joked.

  “I wish,” she said. “It’s just not natural for a woman, taking nothing but sponge baths with wet wipes. I’ll have gone for two years without a shower when we get back. That’s the first thing I’m going to do once on Earth. Have the longest, hottest shower you can imagine.”

  “Reactor?” Aleksandr continued.

  “Nominal, except for number-four cooling panel,” Christopher said. “That’s starting to get dangerously hot now – nearly 100 degrees hotter than the rest. Mission Control never did come back with any kind of suggestions. I’m starting to worry about it.”

  “Good thing we’re going to be dialing the power output back to from 100% to ten percent power in mere hours, then,” Aleksandr replied. “We’re going to have to get something better than ‘we don’t know what’s going on with it’ for the trip back though, when it’s got to be back at 100%. Plus, we will be using the engines a few more times before then for orbit changes. Maybe those periods will work to try diagnostics, since it won’t be critical if we have to power down the engines.”

  “Agreed,” Christopher replied.

  “Speaking of the engines, how are they?” Aleksandr inquired.

  “All good. Magnetic fields have held great throughout the entire voyage. I couldn’t be happier with them. Hats off to the Russians on that one.”

  “I built them personally,” Aleksandr joked.

  “Of course you did,” Christopher replied. “I heard it was nearly 800 man-years of work at Energiya-Roscosmos to put these things together and test them. And that was with a high degree of automated fabrication, and doesn’t even include the time spent installing them.”

  “Installation was an IKEA hex key job,” Martin said.

  “And I thought they just sold funny-sounding end tables!” Emile joked.

  “Who the heck do you think put this interior together?” Martin asked. “I’ve never seen so much cheap laminate board in my life as what’s in the living modules!”

  “The IDSA had to save money somewhere,” Aleksandr replied. “Better crappy dividing walls than skimping on the life support. How are our vegetables, Mr. Gardener?”

  “Doing well,” Emile replied. “Although growing more slowly than I would have liked.”

  “Too right,” Martin replied. “We were promised pumpkins and squash ages ago.”

  “Not on the menu, I’m afraid.”

  “Darn.”

  “Okay, onto navigation. MPS?” Aleksandr asked.

  “Locked,” Nikita replied.

  “A-STAR?”

  “Still good. The two are in sync to within one meter.”

  “Okay, cool. Now for the question everyone’s been waiting for: how long?”

  “Seven hours, four minutes and forty-five seconds,” Nikita replied.

  “Oh yeah!” Martin said. “Computer, display glass wall. Overlay navigation data.”

  The walls darkened. The stunning sphere of Mars appeared, against its backdrop of stars. They paused to take it in. The planet was huge in their field of view now – roughly the size of a large beach ball held at arm’s length.

  “Beautiful,” Kinuko said. They were passing over the sunlit side of the planet. Its reddish surface and dark brown channels and plains were crystal-clear, and they were the first humans ever to see this sight close up with the unaided eye.

  “What’s our orbital altitude?” Aleksandr asked.

  “6,183 kilometers,” Nikita replied. “We’ve got to lose another 144 kilometers in altitude to meet with Phobos’ Lagrange point. We also have 218 horizontal kilometers to go. We’re approaching Phobos from behind and above. And there is our destination.”

  He pointed. Phobos was easily visible, its potato-like shape moving slowly across the Martian surface as they chased it.

  “Boy, howdy,” Martin said, marveling at the sight. They remained silent for several minutes, just taking it all in.

  “I don’t care what time it is when we get there. I’m not missing it for the world,” Christopher said. “No pun intended.”

  “Incoming message from Mission Control.”

  “Accept.”

  “We’re along with you for the ride,” said Alan Krantz. He was the great-grandson of Gene Krantz, the CAPCOM for the Apollo 11 mission. Thus, he had been chosen for the honor of being CAPCOM when they arrived at their destination.

  “Everyone here at Mission Control is so excited. They’ve got this beamed live to every corner of the world.”

  The camera panned across the huge room. Specialists and technicians sat at rows of displays. The scene, in some ways, wasn’t so different from the control room of the Apollo missions. The technology had changed a lot, but the need for lots of people hadn’t. It would have been familiar to the astronauts from then.

  All the crew could do was watch the whole message from Earth in one go, of course, before recording their reply. That much was different from Apollo, due to the distance. Visible in the gallery above the technicians were many loved ones, smiling and waving.

  “By the way, we have you on video,” Krantz continued. “Here is the view from one of the five orbiting Mars probes, with its long range camera. It’s in low Mars orbit, and you guys are 6,000 kilometers up, so it didn’t get much of a picture but, still, there you are.”

  The picture switched to a view of a star field. One of the stars near the center was moving slowly from right to left. It was the IME. It was a strange feeling to all on board to be looking back at themselves.

  Over the next two hours, they watched spellbound as Phobos slowly rose up towards them. It seemed intimidating; this rock, this artificial, alien world. It had a certain sense of foreboding to it. Long before they got there, however, they passed around to the night side of Mars.

  “Phobos has the lowest orbit of any natural satellite in the solar system,” Martin explained. “The orbital period is eight hours, as opposed to our moon's twenty-eight days. It's going to complicate exploration a lot, since there's only going to be four hours of daylight at a time. We're still working with Mission Control to find the best ways to work things, so that we use the daylight optimally.”

  As they passed through the shadow of Mars, Phobos was only visible as a radar image overlaid on the view of outside. Mars itself was just a giant circular hole in the stars. They drew closer to their destination, little by little.

  Nearly four hours later, they entered the Martian sunrise – one of many they would see. A red glow around Mars' horizon went from being barely visible to being a crescent of fire, within two minutes. The crescent then gave birth to the blinding rays of the Sun, as it presented itself again.

  They did a sharp intake of breath, almost as one. Phobos was not just a far-off rock now; it was a world that was as big as Mars in their view, and getting l
arger all the time. Its rocky, pitted, irregular surface stood out in stark relief in the sunlight that had baked it for billions of years. Nikita watched their planned and actual trajectories very closely. The ship was piloting itself, but he was leaving nothing to chance.

  The Explorer drew in ever closer, as they prepared to pass in between Phobos and Mars. The vast Stickney Crater, viewed from the side, made it look like a large part of the moon had been simply chopped off, which indeed it had at some point in prehistory. Phobos now took up a large part of the sky above them.

  “Thrust, trajectory all nominal,” Nikita called out.

  “Phobos may not be the largest satellite in the solar system, but it sure looks big from here,” Christopher said, looking up.

  “It makes me feel very small, indeed,” Aleksandr said.

  “We're coming in at less than fifteen meters a second now,” Nikita said. They continued to decelerate, ever so slowly, like a cruise ship finally docking at its berth after a marathon voyage. The tortured, rock-blasted, surface moved by slowly above them, less than three kilometers away now.

  The next few minutes seemed suspended in time.

  “Five meters per second.”

  “Computer, open a channel to Mission Control,” Aleksandr said. (The previous connection had been severed when Mars was between Earth and the IME.)

  A few more minutes went by. The ship changed its pitch by twenty degrees or so, to fine-tune its final approach to the invisible point in space that was their destination.

  “We could get outside and float there now, we're so close,” Christopher said.

  “One minute to go,” Nikita said.

  “Thirty seconds… twenty seconds… ten seconds… shutdown!”

  Right on cue, the main engines powered down. They cheered wildly, and bounced around the hub like giddy third-graders suddenly let loose in a trampoline park. They were at the spot, two-and-a-half kilometers from Phobos, where its gravity exactly counterbalanced that of Mars. This would be their parking spot for the next eight months.

  “We made it!” Christopher shouted.

  “Woohoo!”

  “A toast is in order,” Aleksandr said.

  “You and your toasts!” Christopher teased. “We're at Phobos! Yeah!”

  Kinuko tried to blink away tears. Alessia looked in awe at the alien worlds above and below them.

  “Wait... there's no gravity!” Martin said.

  “Yes, total weightlessness now, until we restart the engines,” Aleksandr said. “Better get used to it!”

  * * *

  @KR_IME: GENTLEMEN, THE LUNCHBOX HAS LANDED.

  55

  T-plus 94 days

  It was four o'clock in the morning. Everybody was too excited to sleep, after arriving at their destination.

  “Why don't we orbit Phobos?” Alessia asked. “It seems like it would make more sense than just sitting in one spot relative to it. We could scan the entire surface with the ship's instruments that way, which are more powerful than the portable ones, and possibly find better targets to land at for exploring the surface.”

  “The problem is,” Nikita replied, “its gravity is too weak. We couldn't get into a stable orbit. Mars' gravity would pull us off course if we even tried. The weak gravity also makes the Lagrange point ideal, because we're so close – just three kilometers. If we parked at the Lagrange point for Earth's moon, for example, we'd be 60,000 kilometers away. Hardly close enough for a day trip! But then again, its strong gravity makes it easy to orbit at a low altitude, so that compensates. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

  Martin spoke next: “From an exploration standpoint, I can't get over being able to just park so close to the body we're exploring, without having to land the Explorer on it. If you were outside, you could actually jump off the ship and land on Phobos at a survivable speed! Can you imagine it? From spaceship to moon just by jumping! Plus, it helps that Phobos' orbit is phase-locked, so it always has the same side facing Mars, like our moon does with Earth.”

  “Going back the other way is more difficult of course: it does still have a gravitational field, after all. The escape velocity is only 11.3 meters a second. So, if a fit person, unencumbered by a spacesuit and life support gear, jumped hard, they could jump right off Phobos and drift off into space!”

  “I'm starting to think we don't need the surface exploration vehicles at all!” said Christopher. “First we just jump from the ship to Phobos. Then we just throw the rock samples back to the ship. Someone else outside with a net catches them. Finally, we just jump hard to get back again!” Laughter all around.

  “We might need a boost from a pogo stick or something to get back, but yes,” Martin replied. “Or, just lower a rope down.”

  “If we were just going to explore the surface immediately below here, the rope idea would have worked great,” Tung-chi replied.

  “Yeah,” Martin replied. “Although, I'm sure as heck not missing out on going to the bottom of Limtoc! That's got to be one of the greatest destinations in the Solar System. It's kind of like an inverted Olympus Mons; it's so deep.”

  Later that day, after everyone had slept in, their first work day at Phobos began. After a congratulatory exchange with Mission Control, the first science objectives were established. Martin deployed the remote sensing suite, and programmed a sequence of observations that would cover the entire face of Phobos that was visible to them.

  “It's huge,” Alessia said, looking up through the glass wall at Phobos as Martin set up the instruments.

  “It sure is,” he replied, as he worked away at a console displayed on the right hand side of the hub. “I have to turn my head almost as far as it will go both ways to see from one horizon to the other. Amazing. It's nearly as big in our view as our moon is from low lunar orbit.”

  He turned to Aleksandr. “True weightlessness is great fun and all, but it's making working at a touch interface a pain in the ass. No matter how gently I touch the screen, I'm pushing myself away from it!”

  “I see that,” he replied. “We will have to come up with some solution, like sticking ourselves to the wall, or just using our tablets for most things.”

  “On it,” Christopher said from the other side of the hub. In an hour or so, he came back with two handholds made in the parts fabricator. They were the approximate size and shape of an old-fashioned telephone receiver, and would attach to the inside of the hub at both ends so the user could hold themselves steady. Aleksandr looked surprised.

  “Don't worry boss, I'm not going to put screws in the walls of the hub. Here we have the famous Velcro pads, which attach right here,” Christopher said as he peeled off one side of a square pad and stuck it to the end of the handle. He then stuck the other one to the other end of the handhold, peeled off the backing, and stuck it to the hub's inner surface next to where Martin was working. “There you go, buddy!” He slapped Martin on the back.

  “Thanks,” Martin grunted, as he concentrated on the display. He did, however, reach out and make use of the handhold. Christopher attached the other one. “Need any more, just let me know.”

  56

  T-plus 95 days

  Breakfast was over. The crew was gathered in the hub, expectant and excited.

  “Martin, how are observations going?”

  “Very well,” he replied. “We’ve got extremely detailed LIDAR and radar data. There’s hardly a pebble on this side of Phobos that we don’t know about. The guys on Earth are already dissecting the data. The surface chemistry at first glance seems to suggest it’s a carbonaceous chondrite-type body. This is very much like the asteroid Ceres. But, it’s very much unlike Mars itself. So, as was previously suspected, it’s very unlikely to be Martian in origin. Its density is too low to be rock, so this raises the question: how did it get here? Hopefully we’ll be able to answer that before we leave.

  “The observations are still ongoing. We’re interpolating the laser spectroscopy points we laid down yesterday, and we’ll ke
ep on doing that to get finer and finer resolution data.”

  “Very good. So, we all know what else today is?” Aleksandr asked.

  “Sure do,” Christopher answered, grinning. “Today’s the day we go EVA, and give the surface exploration vehicles the once-over.”

  “Yes,” Aleksandr replied. “As Engineer, you will get the honors. Emile will go out with you. I trust you two brushed up on the rehearsal for the EVA using the VR simulator?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good. Of course, the SEV bay won’t be facing Phobos, as we’re still using the remote instrument package. Go ahead and open the SEV bay door.”

  Christopher commanded the computer to do this. A window appeared, showing a camera view of that side of the front of the ship. It was dark outside, as they were in the shadow of Phobos, so the only light outside came from the bright external floodlights. Slowly, the long, rectangular door began to open, to the side, revealing the four surface exploration vehicles. Wide smiles broke out on the crew’s faces.

  “Ain’t they beautiful?” Christopher asked.

  “Sure are,” Tung-chi replied. The four vehicles were white and resembled jet skis, but were roughly twice as long. They bore the IDSA logo on the sides. Each would seat two. They were completely open to the elements, so the only protection the passengers would have would be their spacesuits.

  “We’re timing it so that you’ll be suiting up and in the airlock while we’re still in the dark,” Aleksandr explained. Tung-chi will be the EVA director and communicator. Any questions?”

  “Can we get some more of those handholds installed on the floor? I’m floating all over the place here,” Alessia asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll get the fab working on making them while I’m outside,” Christopher replied.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “No problemo.” He turned to Emile. “Are we ready for what we are about to receive?”

  “Ha. Ready since the day I was born.”