Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction)

by Michael Brotherton

  Lìxúe and I were loading broken equipment and garbage into the cargo module of the Progress. It was not a pleasant task. We found ourselves entangled in a chaotic cloud of rubbish, trying to push the floating garbage bags and obsolete electronics into the Progress. I gagged from the smell of decomposing trash.

  There had never been much small talk between me and Lìxúe, both because of the language barrier and the fact that I really didn’t know her well. But the cold, damp and malodorous Progress was just too much. I needed a distraction.

  “What you know of Liuˇ Diānrén?” I said at last in my awkward Chinese.

  Lìxúe stopped, a garbage bag frozen in mid throw. I feared she might have thought my question impertinent or disrespectful. But then she spoke.

  “Liuˇ Diānrén lives in a cloud of success. But it’s not his success.” She tossed the bag into the Progress.

  There was an awkward silence. Her answer was curious, and now I really wanted to hear more. “Explain.”

  Lìxúe hesitated. A strange look crossed her face. Perhaps she thought she’d already said too much, but she continued. “Diānrén’s father, Liuˇ Fākuàng, had built up the Xīn Shìjiè Corporation from a dumpling stall in Xī’ān into the diversified global corporation it is today. Liuˇ Fākuàng was lucky enough to strike gold, but his son wasn’t there when he was swinging the pick. Diānrén merely inherited the throne of his father’s industrial empire when the elder Liuˇ became ill and retired early, a dynastic succession if you will.”

  I didn’t know any of this, and I was fascinated.

  “Do you know what is a shǎ odì?” Lìxúe asked.

  “Little emperor?” I repeated.

  “Liuˇ Diānrén is like me, an only child — an only son — born of the first generation under the old One-Child Policy. The difference is, my family wasn’t rich.” Lìxúe paused. “He has a full-time employee whose only job is too peel grapes for him, the way his grandmother used to when he was small.”

  And I thought my daughter was a princess.

  Lìxúe sighed. “We are a nation of badly brought-up children.”

  The Progress cargo module was nearly filled to the brim. After checking that the seal around the hatch was airtight, we loosened the bolts that secured the Progress to the docking ring of the Dōngxīng module.

  “Shěnyáng, we are go for Progress separation,” Lìxúe radioed down.

  “Chéng rèn,” Mission Control acknowledged.

  Ground controllers commanded latches to open, and springs pushed the Progress away from the station. Floating to one of the small scratched up windows in Dōngxīng, I watched the vehicle back away, plumes of thruster exhaust periodically puffing from the squat insect-like spacecraft. I continued to watch until it resembled nothing more than a distant star in the blackness of space, destined for a fiery reentry over the South Pacific.

  Good riddance to bad rubbish.

  ***

  It took weeks to restore sufficient functionality to the Space Station Remote Manipulator System, the seventeen meter long robotic arm that had been crucial to the original construction and maintenance of the ISS. Most of the Canadian engineers who had developed the SSRMS were either retired or dead, but Liuˇ Diānrén’s team managed to find a handful of the old timers and brought them to Shěnyáng. Despite their best efforts, only one of the arm’s redundant control strings would respond to commands, and the wrist roll joint had failed completely. We would also have to make do with the arm’s remaining 386-processor, an archaic chip that had been obsolete even when it was originally launched.

  “Confirm Dàshoˇ ubì is in the pre-capture position,” Shěnyáng called up, referring to the robotic arm by its new Chinese name.

  “Acknowledged.” I looked out the Cupola windows, pitted and pockmarked from years of dust and debris impacts. Above the hazy blue of the Earth’s limb, the arm hung in space like a giant articulated soda straw, its formerly white thermal blankets now a dull yellow from long exposure to ultraviolet radiation and atomic oxygen. About ten meters below was Huoˇ niǎ o — the Phoenix. Twenty meters long and five meters wide, Huoˇ niǎ o was a cargo vehicle made up of half the payload shroud of a Chángzhēng-5G heavy-lift rocket with the modified upper stage still attached as a propulsion module. Resembling a truncated version of the old Space Shuttle payload bay, it was packed with tons of hardware, equipment and tools we needed to complete the station’s reactivation.

  “Start capture.” My hands tightened over the hand controllers of the robotic workstation. I had operated the robotic arm on my first expedition to the ISS. They say that one never forgets how to ride a bicycle, except in this case the bike had one flat tire and a messed up gear shift. The arm was sluggish and I had to fly a non-optimal trajectory to compensate for the failed wrist roll joint, but eventually I managed to snare the Huoˇ niǎ o’s grapple fixture. I then drew the cargo vehicle closer to the station and maneuvered it to the berthing mechanism on the Héxíe (“Harmony”) node.

  “We have Huoˇ niǎ o,” I reported.

  “Gàn dé hao,” Shěnyáng radioed.

  “Hěn hǎ o!” Lìxúe exclaimed happily. “Well done indeed!”

  With the capture complete, I cycled through the robotic arm’s cameras trying to find a working unit. One of the boom cameras eventually responded to commands. Through a grimy lens obscured by years of brownish-yellow propellant residue, I surveyed the berthed cargo ship. Most of the payloads were familiar to me: the new control moment gyroscopes, the high-pressure gas tanks for the airlock, the ammonia coolant tanks, the batteries, and…

  I frowned. There was cargo I did not recognize from the manifest: folded-up structural members, and oddly shaped tanks of unknown content. I powered down the robotic arm and went in search of Lìxúe to inquire.

  The commander was in the Wángcháo laboratory module, hunched over an open avionics rack like a surgeon at work. She looked up from the exposed spaghetti-like mess of wire bundles and electronic components.

  “Kristen, good job with the Huoˇ niǎ o,” Lìxúe said.

  “Xiè xiè.” I paused to compose the sentence in my head. “Lìxúe, I see cargo in Huoˇ niǎ o not known from manifest.”

  Lìxúe looked at me with an odd expression. After a moment, she said, “I will brief the crew after dinner.”

  ***

  Meals are of great cultural significance to the Chinese, in which the social interaction is far more important than the eating. I was certainly fine with the latter, but my lack of linguistic fluency was still a real barrier to the former. This was the case during our training on the ground, and nothing had changed in space. So, once again I ate dinner in silence while Zīchéng, Wénxìn and Chéngfēi chatted amongst themselves.

  The guys looked terrible. Wénxìn and Zīchéng had been trying to fix a coolant leak in the Dōngxīng service module and must have gotten some fluid on their faces because their eyes appeared the size of golf balls. Chéngfēi had been trying to replace a fan and filter in the Kēxué multipurpose laboratory module and had scratched his arm on something while reaching behind a panel. It looked swollen and infected, a dull shade of blue from wrist to elbow like a botched ink job from a shady tattoo parlor.

  As I ate my can of lukewarm chicken sticky rice and tube of watery soya milk drink, I tried to follow their conversation as best I could. Wénxìn seemed to be mocking Yuán Lìxúe’s son, who was apparently a thirty-something slacker still living at home with his biological father, fantasizing about becoming a big-shot business person like Liuˇ Diānrén but never actually bothering to do anything that might realize such a dream. Chéngfēi suggested maybe the guy should join the PLA, to which Zīchéng replied the only army that would take such a loser was the Americans.

  They laughed. I pretended not to understand.

  Lìxúe floated into the module, and the guys quickly fell silent.

  “Niˇ chīfàn ma?” I said, asking Lìxúe if she had eaten.

  Lìxúe shook her head. “No, but th
anks for asking. I’ve been busy.” She turned to the three guys. “If you’re all finished eating, I need to brief you on a significant change to the mission plan.”

  Lìxúe unrolled her tablet and mounted it to the bulkhead. “Now that the final hardware elements have been delivered by the Huoˇ niǎ o vehicle, I can tell you the full scope of our mission.” She woke up the tablet. “Liuˇ Diānrén has a great dream. His ambition goes beyond this station endlessly circling our home planet. He wants to push humanity out to a new horizon again. Liuˇ Diānrén wants to send this space station to the Moon.”

  My jaw dropped. The faces my companions registered similar expressions of surprise.

  The tablet showed a simulation of the station’s orbit around the Earth. “In three weeks,” Lìxúe continued, “a cryogenic upper stage will dock with the station. Following our departure, this upper stage will perform a series of propulsive burns at perigee over the course of a month.” On the screen, the station’s circular orbit began to stretch out into an ellipse that eventually reached out to lunar orbit. “This will put the station into an Earth-Moon cycling orbit, one that will bring the station into nodal alignment to pass behind the Moon every other orbit, about twice a month. Once established in EMCO, an Advanced Shénzhōu vehicle will be launched to deliver the first lunar mission crew to the station.”

  We stared in stunned silence. Finally Wénxìn said, apparently for lack of a better question, “This new mission…does it have a name?”

  “Wàn Hù,” Lìxúe replied.

  The three guys looked puzzled, but I recognized the name. Wàn Hù was a Ming Dynasty official. According to legend, he was the world’s first tàikōnaut, building a chair with forty-seven rockets in an attempt to launch himself into space.

  “Any more questions?” Lìxúe asked.

  There was something about the rocket-chair story that bothered me, and at last I remembered. Wàn Hù had blown himself up.

  ***

  With a full crew of five and the tons of hardware brought up by Huoˇ niǎ o, the pace and scale of activities picked up significantly. Over the course of two weeks Wénxìn, Zīchéng and Chéngfēi paired up in turns to conduct a series of demanding long-duration spacewalks, or EVAs. The first excursions replaced the four failed control moment gyroscopes on the Z1 truss. Once activated, the new CMGs restored full attitude control and enabled the station to overcome the gravity gradient torque that had pulled its axis of modules downward, returning the station to its nominal local-vertical local-horizontal orientation with respect to the Earth’s surface. Subsequent EVAs installed structural reinforcements at various locations about the station’s exterior: the connection between the Héxíe node and the Shènglì (formerly Kibo) laboratory, as well as the connections between the Shuˇguāng functional cargo block, the pressurized mating adapter and the Níngjìng node.

  I was worried for the guys because even in the best of circumstances EVAs were not easy. Indeed, they could be positively dangerous. During the original construction of the ISS, astronauts and cosmonauts would have trained for months if not years to perform complex assembly tasks like these. We prepared instead by studying written procedures and watching videos of practice sessions conducted in the neutral buoyancy water pool in Shěnyáng. It was hardly ideal, to say the least.

  A few days later, it was my turn.

  The airlock in the former U.S. segment of the station had been called Quest but was now renamed Xīngmén, which agreeably translated into English as “Stargate.” The airlock compartment was worn and scruffy. On a wall was a faded mission patch sticker with some Russian words scrawled underneath.

  We put on our helmets and donned our gloves. Lìxúe started the depressurization pump, and the air bled away. I was nervous.

  “Lìxúe and Kristen, you are go for hatch opening,” said Mission Control.

  “Hǎ o ma?” Lìxúe asked.

  I took a deep breath, and nodded.

  Lìxúe vented the residual air before releasing the handle and opening the hatch.

  The Sun was rising. Our EVA was planned to start at orbital sunrise so that we would get the longest period of light. The entire planet was spread out beneath us like a giant blue, green and white tapestry.

  “Woˇ men zoˇ u ba,” Lìxúe said.

  We tethered ourselves to the outside of the airlock and performed a final inspection of our tool and equipment packages as well as our Jīnyì propulsion units. After executing the self-test, the intention light on my Jīnyì went green. Lìxúe’s, however, stayed red. She tapped it with a gloved hand until it turned the right color.

  I could see faint puffs from Lìxúe backpack as I followed her along the length of the Wángcháo laboratory module to the Huoˇ niǎ o cargo ship berthed at the Héxíe node. Our job was to transfer the conformal water tanks that had been brought up in the Huoˇ niǎ o and install them on the outside of the Níngjìng node. Arriving at the Huoˇ niǎ o, Lìxúe and I unholstered our EVA power tools and set to work. We applied our wrist tethers to eye hooks on the first water tank before releasing the tie-rod bolts with our power tools. Then, we grabbed the tank by handles at each end and pulled the vessel free of its flight support equipment.

  “Shěnyáng, Kristen and I have the first tank,” Lìxúe reported.

  “Chéng rèn,” Mission Control acknowledged.

  Holding the tank between us, Lìxúe and I flew back along the Wángcháo laboratory to the Níngjìng node, where the Xīngmén airlock was also located. During an earlier EVA, Wénxìn and Zīchéng had removed some of the micrometeoroid and orbital debris panels, exposing the structural attachment points underneath. Using our power tools, Lìxúe and I bolted down the first tank, which was shaped to fit the cylindrical exterior of the node.

  After another seven exhausting hours, Lìxúe and I had installed the remaining water tanks onto the Níngjìng node. We then connected the station’s fluid lines to the tanks and also installed an external radiation dosimeter. Our tasks completed, I started making my way back to the Xīngmén airlock.

  Lìxúe was not following me. Puzzled, I turned. “Everything good?”

  “Yes Kristen, everything’s fine,” Lìxúe said. “I just have a small task to perform.”

  Lìxúe pulled a small octagonal object out of a pouch. It was a bāguà mirror. According to Chinese superstition, a bāguà is supposed to deflect bad qì from malevolent outside forces. I thought to myself that, really, there is no qì in space — good or bad — because qì literally means “air.”

  Lìxúe screwed the bāguà into an unused tie-rod bolt hole on one of the water tanks. She jiggled the bāguà to make sure it was secure, then pulled out two more objects — a decal of a Chinese flag, and one of the Xīn Shìjiè Corporation’s crescent moon logo. She stuck both proudly to either side of the bāguà.

  “The most important task of the EVA has been completed,” said Mission Control, with no obvious intention to be ironic.

  There was the sound of a tiny explosion, like a kid’s cap gun going off. A spider-vein crack suddenly appeared on my faceplate.

  “Shit!” I screamed in English, instinctively putting my hands to my face.

  “Kristen!” Lìxúe was with me in seconds, her hands reaching over my suit. She quickly found the control for the secondary reserve oxygen tank and cranked up the flow.

  “What happened?” Shěnyáng demanded. “What’s going on?”

  “Emergency ingress!” Lìxúe declared. “Kristen’s helmet is breached.”

  “Get back inside immediately,” Mission Control ordered. “Her suit pressure is down to 30.6 kilopascals and falling.”

  “Kristen, listen to me,” Lìxúe said calmly. “I need you to take your hands off your faceplate. Please, just for a moment.”

  Reluctantly, I complied. Lìxúe slapped a strip of silvery-grey material to my faceplate. It took me a moment to recognize the stuff.

  Duct tape.

  “Put your hands back now,” Lìxúe said. As I did so, she gr
abbed my arm and activated the thrusters on her Jīnyì jetpack to push us the last couple of meters towards the Xīngmén airlock. She opened the hatch, and unceremoniously dumped me inside.

  “Are you all right?” Chéngfēi asked over the intercom.

  “Yes, we’re fine,” Lìxúe replied.

  When the airlock repressurized, I removed my helmet and took a deep breath. The station had a faintly unpleasant odor, something between gasoline and antifreeze. Lìxúe and I looked at each other. Our sense of smell must have been deadened by the weeks of exposure to the sketchy air.

  “Smells like Be˘ijīng,” Lìxúe said, and then smiled.

  I shook my head and chuckled.

  Yuán Lìxúe brought duct tape on a spacewalk. How cool is that?

  ***

  On Chinese New Year’s Day, we unberthed the Huoˇ niǎ o cargo ship from the Héxíe node and released it into space. Under command from Shěnyáng Mission Control, Huoˇ niǎ o fired its thrusters and pulled away, heading for a fiery plunge into the South Pacific.

  That afternoon, Liuˇ Diānrén announced through a press release that the reactivated station was now fully operational. Officially. I supposed it was mostly true. Liuˇ declared a holiday for the crew and ordered a celebratory meal, both for New Year’s and also as a send-off for the impending departure of Fàn Zīchéng, Cài Wénxìn and Zhāng Chéngfēi.

  We set up a dining table in the Níngjìng node, allegedly the perfect location for the New Year’s dinner because it was now supposedly shielded by the bāgùa against bad qì. Against a bulkhead the color of bad teeth, Chéngfēi and Zīchéng put up a red banner with the characters “mission accomplished.”

  Much like the rest of the complex, the node was a chilly, dimly lit place. The station was simply underpowered, its solar arrays now providing only a fraction of the power they had generated when new, their photovoltaic cells degraded after decades in orbit. Our installation of newer, more energy efficient electronics and lighting systems offset some of the losses, as did leaving unpowered the modules of the station that we were not be using, but it wasn’t really enough.