by Samuel Best
“How long was I unconscious?” he asked.
“Almost thirty hours.”
He froze with his toes half in the shoe. “Are you serious?”
She nodded.
Jeff listened to the faint hum of the ship’s electronics systems. The TAP System wasn’t in operation.
“What happened after the explosion?”
“Gabriel shut off the last fuel pump,” said Ming.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. There was no fire,” she added quickly, answering the question any astronaut fears having to ask. “It was a pressure blast. Some minor damage to the interior insulation of that section of the centrifuge, but it was mostly superficial. The TAPS burned for another thirty seconds at full output before shutting down. I did my best to keep the ship on target. Mission Control is tracking a new course for us to meet up with Titan, but so far it looks good. The full burn lasted three minutes longer than it was supposed to.”
“And occurred way too early. What does that mean?”
“It means we’ll be at Titan in twenty days instead of eighty.”
Jeff laughed, then quickly sobered. “Wait a second. That doesn’t add up. Even with a longer burn it would take us at least sixty days to arrive.”
Ming hesitated a moment, then said, “Canaveral authorized another full burn before we get there.”
Jeff shook his head and chuckled humorlessly as he finished slipping on his shoe. “Sure. I mean, why the hell not?”
“They say we still have enough fuel to get home, even with the extra burn.”
“But the return trip will take a lot longer if we use more fuel now.”
Another hesitation. “Ten months instead of five, if we’re careful,” said Ming.
“That’s too damn long,” Jeff said. He winced as he put on his second shoe, then he stood. “I need to talk to Riley. There’s no reason to keep us out here longer on the tail-end if we only have to wait an extra few weeks to get to Titan.”
“The burn is already complete,” Ming said as Jeff walked past. “We’ve begun our deceleration process.”
He stopped with his back to her and slowly crossed his arms.
“You were in the doctor pod,” she continued. “Canaveral said there was no reason to wake you because you’d just have to go back in after the burn.”
“How thoughtful.”
“For what it’s worth, both Gabriel and I both were against the additional burn.”
“And Riley?”
She shrugged. “He said he’s following orders.”
“Well, hey,” Jeff said sarcastically, “what’s an extra few months out here, right? Not like Earth is going anywhere while we’re gone. Oh wait, it’s going to be on the far side of the sun. So not only do we have a longer return trip, we have to wait months for Earth to swing back around to our side of the solar system.”
“Mission Control is working on a solution.”
“I won’t hold my breath,” said Jeff.
His cheeks flushed with heat as he clenched his jaw, then his vision got blurry and his knees buckled.
Ming hurried to his side as he crumpled, easing him to the floor.
“You still have a lot of painkillers in your system,” she explained. “Best to take it easy for a while.”
“I need to go lie down,” he said.
“Let’s walk together.”
He nodded as she helped him to stand. He leaned more heavily against her than he intended, but he didn’t have the strength to ease up. His legs were like rubber and his head spun as if he were doing barrel rolls in a jet.
She guided him into his bunk and covered him with a blanket. He shivered and his teeth chattered. Ming turned out the light and closed the privacy screen, leaving Jeff curled up in darkness.
Kate sipped tepid coffee and watched the little green blip representing Jeff’s delayed heartbeat on her workstation monitor. He was awake, but he hadn’t checked in. Riley sent a progress report a few hours ago, letting her and the others in Mission Control know that the remaining fuel pumps were fully operational and that the final big burn of the outward journey went smoothly.
Communication with the ship would be sporadic now that the signal delay was steadily increasing. They had scheduled check-in reports along the way, but the remainder of the journey to Titan, short as it was, would be mostly radio silent unless there was another emergency – and even then, Kate wouldn’t find out what was going wrong until it was maybe too late.
She set her coffee cup on a stack of papers, creating yet another moisture ring. She had been rifling through that particular stack of data printouts for several days, trying to figure out the malfunction that caused Explorer I to perform a primary fuel burn instead of the minor one that was scheduled. Neither she nor the engineering techs could come up with an answer. All of Explorer’s systems checked out. Besides the ruined fuel pump, every piece of equipment on the vessel was operating beautifully.
This wasn’t how she expected things to go when she accepted a job with Diamond Aerospace. Her last work environment at Boeing had seemed much more corporate, for lack of a better word. As a local operations manager working out of the Boeing building at Kennedy, Kate had only to keep up with detailed schedules and actionable plans that were outlined years in advance.
There was no real mystery to the job, because she knew what was around the corner every step of the way. It was comforting, for the most part. She had been fortunate to take part in several spacecraft design initiatives that more than made up for the monotony of her administration job – namely the Starliner capsule and Space Launch System rocket programs.
When Noah Bell personally offered her a job at Diamond Aerospace, her immediate internal reaction was to decline. Accepting the offer would have felt like leaving solid ground to step out on a chasm-spanning narrow footbridge with no railing.
Leaving solid ground was exactly his intention.
She had been safe at Boeing, and she saw a clear and uncomplicated career trajectory in the years to come. Boeing had stood the test of time as a company, and would be around long after she retired. Diamond Aerospace, a relative infant in the space industry by comparison, was not the sure bet.
Yet they were going to Titan.
And now she was in Diamond Aerospace’s Mission Control at Kennedy, wondering what else could go wrong that she hadn’t seen coming. There had been a formal plan, but it was rapidly crumbling as Explorer I got farther and farther from Earth. Apparently, there was a room full of geniuses in Houston in direct contact with Noah trying to figure out the best way to get the astronauts home after their stay in Titan’s orbit. Kate had been assured that safety wasn’t the issue – it was time. Each day, the ship’s target return date was pushed back. What was supposed to be a roughly eleven-month voyage had now ballooned to fifteen. If it extended much farther, the crew would run out of food before they got back.
“Pssst,” someone hissed from the side of the room.
Kate swiveled in her chair, looking for the source. Rick stuck his head out of the break room door and impatiently waved her over.
Kate wasn’t in the mood. She shook her head, no.
Rick huffed impatiently and hurried over to her workstation. He leaned down and whispered, “You’ll definitely want to see this.”
“Is it a new espresso machine?”
“We wish.”
He attempted to stroll back to the break room inconspicuously and failed. She glanced around the room. No one was watching him anyway. Why would they? Rick took more coffee breaks than anyone else who worked in the building. Seeing him mosey across the operations floor, mug in hand, was a common sight.
Kate reluctantly stood up and followed him, taking her time. Rick scanned his thumb, swiped his security badge over the electronic lock, and pulled open the door when the lock clicked open and the light over the handle turned green.
“I still haven’t figured out why there’s a lock on this door,” Kate said.
“Want to know what I think?” Rick asked.
She held up her hands. “No. No I do not.”
“Did you know,” he said, his voice lowering as they entered the break room, “that my unique badge code was just stored in a central database on-site because I unlocked the door? If something were to happen inside the break room after I swiped my badge, the security team would know it was me.”
“Uh huh…” said Kate. She smelled another conspiracy rant coming on.
They were alone in the room. Black tiles covered the floor, touching black walls that led up to a ceiling that was a solid rectangle of soft light from edge to edge. There were vending machines and a microwave on one side, a table with magazines and newspapers on another, and entrances to the bathrooms across from the entrance. Several build-it-yourself black tables were in the middle, each one surrounded by plastic chairs, the backs of which bent back too far if you weren’t careful.
Rick led Kate to a closed laptop on one of the tables. He sat down and opened the lid, then pulled an empty chair next to him and patted the seat.
Kate sighed. “Come on, Rick. Is all this cloak and daggers nonsense really necessary? I need to be out there watching the feeds.”
“Jeff is fine,” he said gently. “He is surrounded by the most competent people we could send into space. You can’t do anything for him down here that they can’t do for him up there, except worry a lot harder. And like I said, you’ll want to see this.”
She softened a little.
“They keep records of everything that happens inside this building,” Rick said, finally continuing his earlier monologue. His clunky laptop booted up slowly. Lines of text scrolled up the screen. He was running some kind of Linux system on an older machine. “They log badge swipes, keystrokes, fingerprint and retinal scans, and outbound signals…including access requests to the remote system on Explorer One.”
The welcome screen on his laptop popped up. Big letters in a faux spray paint font were printed over a brick wall background image: NOT YOURS, ASSHOLE.
“Just to deter any snoops,” Rick explained.
“Ah.” Kate sat next to him and folded her arms.
He typed at the keyboard, and several console windows appeared, each one rapidly scrolling through hundreds of lines of small text.
“It’s a smart system,” Rick said as more text scrolled up the screen. “If something goes wrong, they wouldn’t have to waste time checking every line of code. Instead, they could just go directly to the source and solve the problem.”
Kate leaned back in her seat slightly, her eyes narrowing. “Except…you don’t have access to those systems,” she said.
He hit the Enter key and gestured to the screen.
“I do now.”
“Rick–”
“I know,” he interrupted. “I had a hunch and it turned out to be right. No one would prosecute me for finding this out.”
“Finding what out?”
He nodded toward the screen. “See for yourself.”
Kate shook her head as she tried to make sense of the myriad streams of data in the console windows.
“This one here,” Rick said, pointing to a window at the top.
She recognized what looked like a long string of computer IP addresses and security badge codes, each one followed by a time stamp starting three days earlier and ending five minutes ago. Below that information was a block of text listing various systems, everything from the alarms to network access for a security upgrade.
“You can match the time stamps with the system that was being accessed,” said Rick. “For example, this one here registered five minutes ago and shows my unique badge code.” Kate followed his finger to the list of accessed systems and saw that the time stamp corresponded with something called INT_SEC 017. “It’s saying I accessed the internal security locking system, door number seventeen. That’s the door to the break room.”
She leaned back suddenly, finally understanding where he was heading.
“But it was a malfunction,” she said, referring to the primary engine burn that should never have happened. “It had to be. No one here would have triggered a primary burn remotely. It could have ruined the entire mission.”
“Yet that’s exactly what happened,” Rick said, pointing at a line of text. “Here’s the remote access system code for Explorer One.”
The code was REM_SYS EXP-1, and the time stamp next to it logged an access request two minutes before the primary burn. Below that line of text were the names of the two users in the system when the burn was initiated.
JOHNSON_F and BELL_N.
“Oh my God,” Kate whispered. “They could have killed everyone on the ship.”
“We don’t know if it was both of them or not,” Rick said. “Keep in mind that you followed me into the break room after I used my badge. If I left and you bashed in the microwave, I’d be the first one questioned by security.” He shifted nervously in his seat. “I went back through the logs, and Frank is logged in to the remote system a hell of a lot. Now, that could just be a precautionary measure so he doesn’t have to waste time logging in if something terrible happened and he needed to take control. But Bell…he hardly ever logs in. The last time he was in the system was for the first big burn, shortly after the ship left the ISS.”
“Okay,” she said. Her heart beat faster and her breathing was noticeably quicker. “We might be working for one or two psychopaths. What should we do?”
“We certainly don’t confront either of them until we know more,” Rick said.
“Isn’t this enough?” Kate demanded, pointing at the screen.
“Diamond Aerospace owns this information. It lives on their servers. I am not a welcome guest in their digital fortress. We would only get ourselves fired if we told anyone. Or worse. Remember Michael Cochran?”
“We can’t just sit back and wait for them to jeopardize the mission and the lives of the crew again.”
Rick slowly closed the lid of his laptop.
“We could leave,” he said.
Kate looked at him. He was serious.
“Honestly, it would be easy,” he continued. “We yank the money out of our 401k accounts before the company can stop us and head for South America until Noah and Frank commit career suicide because of their own mistakes.”
“It’s not that easy,” she said. “I…I can’t leave Jeff. Or the others. I don’t know what’s going to happen once they reach Titan, but I do know they’re going to need all the help they can get. Especially if someone here is working against the mission.”
Rick crossed his arms in thought and stared up at the ceiling. He rocked quickly against the flimsy back of the chair, then stopped suddenly.
“Okay, then,” he said. “We’ll stay. But I’m going to do some more digging.”
Kate looked at him skeptically. “What does that mean?”
“The less you know, the better. Let’s just say I have another hunch.”
“And if it turns out to be right, like the one you just told me about…?”
“Then we have more to worry about than who initiated a primary burn.”
Kate swallowed. Her throat was dry and scratchy. “Like what?”
“Like not ending up in a dumpster.”
Jeff floated in the maintenance tube at the rear of the crew module, staring into an open wall panel. He had an electric screwdriver in one hand and a length of stripped wire in the other, yet he could not for the life of him remember what he had been about to do.
He was dizzy from his morning painkiller. For some reason, the reaction to taking one had lasted longer than usual, causing a cold sickness in his stomach and dryness in his throat. After breakfast, he had caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His pale cheeks were shaded green.
Must not be getting enough sleep, he thought. Or maybe the beef cubes are finally doing me in.
Jeff shut his eyes tight and worked backward, remembering that he ended every visit to the maintenan
ce tube with a ship-wide check of the electrical systems.
Batteries, he thought, a dim light of revelation gleaming deep in his mind. He unscrewed a short wire from an electronics panel and replaced it with the one he was holding, then he pushed the old wire into his pocket to dispose of later. It was the last stage of his bi-weekly process to make sure the electrical systems were properly balanced. Any lopsidedness in the charge would reveal itself in one of the little wires on the main panel. They acted as early-warning fuses, and would melt before a serious piece of equipment became compromised.
He replaced the cover of the wall panel but didn’t exit the maintenance tube. Instead, he floated in silence, his eyes closed, and listened to the hum of the ship.
Getting his bearings had been tough after the accident. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the other crew members weren’t trained to do his job, he would have liked to stay in his bunk until Explorer I made it back to Earth. Ming had enough knowledge to keep the oxygen systems running and to perform maintenance on the computer mainframe, but she had only been superficially trained in propulsion and electrical.
The urge to stay in his bunk and ride out the rest of the mission was only temporary. He quickly found that the best way to keep his mind occupied was to embrace his daily routine. And so he pretended that the ship hadn’t suffered a serious malfunction. He felt a little queasier in the mornings after taking his painkiller, and he seemed to tire out a couple hours earlier than usual. Those symptoms would only last another couple of days, Walt assured him.
“Dolan.”
Jeff jumped at the sound of Riley’s voice. He looked down the maintenance tube. The commander floated near the central pillar of the crew module, holding on to the ladder with one hand.
“Join us for a meeting in the lab,” he said, nodding down to the floor of the centrifuge below him. “Got a mission update, and it’s a doozy.”
His face was red and sweaty. Jeff figured he had just wrapped up one of his longer UV sessions in the doctor pod.
“Be right there.”
Riley coasted toward the wall just outside the maintenance tube, whistling to himself, then he climbed down a ladder just under the tube opening and disappeared from sight.