On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  Hui and Rykov watched the dust occasionally sparkle against their onboard ship lights and lighting from the engine and secondary reflections from the sun. It wasn’t so much a dense cloud as it was the dust particles she had watched as a kid floating and dancing as sunbeams warmed the air through a window of her home.

  So far, the makeshift tie-down anchors along the length of the ship below the asteroid’s surface appeared to be holding. The engine bells were glowing from the intense heat of the reactor-heated propellant but the ship wasn’t moving further down into the hole. This meant that Paul was very likely okay and not squashed against the rock outcropping that already dented the compartment in which we he was working.

  For twelve minutes, the engines burned without event. The dust cloud continued to rise and trail about the ship. Static electricity attracted a considerable amount of the dust debris onto the surface of the Tamaroa. But other than the ship getting dirty, there was no discernable side effect of the engine firing and pushing the ship against the asteroid.

  Both Hui and Mikhail were now breathing sighs of relief that the anchors had held. Or at least they were holding.

  “It appears to be working,” Rykov noted.

  “Yes. So far so good. Reach out to Paul,” Hui ordered from the pilot seat of the CTV.

  “Right.” Rykov tapped the microphone activation icon on the touchscreen in front of him. “Paul, please give a status report.”

  “It’s a little tight in here right now. I’m not sure the command capsule can compress any further. I’ve got fires everywhere! But I can’t deal with that right now.” Paul sounded overwhelmed and under extreme stress.

  “Hang in there,” Hui almost whispered.

  Then, they noticed the change. The ship lurched to the left and moved and then to the right.

  “Paul! The ship is moving. Is everything okay?” Rykov asked. There was no response for several seconds. Several long seconds.

  The ship listed a bit once again but this time one of the attitude control thrusters fired pushing it back in the right direction.

  “Did you see that, comrade?”

  “Yes, he is flying the ship.” Hui felt her heart jump into her throat. “Why is he not responding?”

  “Perhaps the radio in his suit is down?”

  “Maybe,” Hui didn’t like not knowing his situation. “Keep trying him.”

  “Right,” Rykov agreed. “Paul, are you okay? Come in Paul.”

  Thirteen minutes.

  CHAPTER 32

  The clock showed thirteen minutes and eleven seconds into the burn. The capsule was so compressed against the rock outcropping that there was barely enough room left for Paul to stay safely inside. Monitors and equipment were popping loose from their mooring points and were being flung about the capsule like shrapnel from a land mine.

  “I’m adjusting the vector angle with the attitude control thrusters,” Paul said. “Mikhail, can you tell me if it appears to be working or if it is stressing anything?”

  Paul continued to adjust the attitude of the ship as best he could without overdoing it. Too much lateral thrust and he might pop loose the cables and tie downs.

  “Mikhail?” He looked at the radio package on his wrist display and noticed a red icon on the screen. He then looked down at his chest and realized there was a metal bolt protruding from his suit that wasn’t supposed to be there. Then something popped and rang like a bell in the cabin and a monitor came loose from the wall just in front and to the right of him and flew past his head at several tens of kilometers per hour. Paul flinched as best he could in his suit, which wasn’t very much. He quickly checked the integrity of his suit. At least he wasn’t leaking air. Then something hit the back of his helmet from behind, but it was moving fairly slow. He didn’t have time to figure out what it was, as the capsule rang like a bell again and popped. Sparks and orange white flames began to form on the panel to the left of him. In the microgravity the flame appeared like the glow about the mantle of a camping lantern and only flickered as sparks popped or the capsule walls shook.

  Paul reached over with his left hand and one-handedly fired a couple of bursts from a fire extinguisher at it. The off-white colored material appeared to stick to the flame like a blanket and then it smothered it out.

  A beam that went from floor to ceiling that was used as an equipment rack bent and flew free of its attachment points. The capsule squashed in closer around him. Paul could just imagine the view from the outside of the capsule. It must look like a pancake by now.

  “Shit! I don’t like this.”

  * * *

  “I don’t like this, comrade Hui,” Rykov said. “Who knows what is going on down there? We have no way of knowing he is alright.”

  “His radio is just down. He is fine.”

  Then one of the attitude thrusters fired again.

  “Look!”

  “See, comrade Hui, like I said, nothing to worry about. He is still controlling the ship,” Rykov said with nervous humor.

  “Keep calling him,” Hui said.

  “Affirmative.” Rykov tapped the microphone icon again. “Paul, do you read me? Come in, Paul.”

  Nothing else happened a moment. Whatever had given way earlier apparently wasn’t enough to knock the ship loose from the hastily placed anchors. Or the combination of the anchors and Paul’s continued attitude corrections were enough to keep the Tamaroa in place. The dust cloud continued to dance off the surface and about the ship. The exhaust poured from the nuclear rocket engine and the asteroid was being pushed. The big question was if Paul was going to survive the effort.

  “Fourteen minutes, Hui,” Rykov noted. “Nothing other than a few attitude thruster burns so far. It looks like the structure is still intact.”

  “Come on, Paul,” Hui muttered to herself.

  “Fifteen minutes.” The correction burns had continued. Paul was still alive.

  At just after sixteen minutes, the ship lurched again. This time it moved to the left and then it did what they’d feared. It moved forward into the hole. It moved significantly forward into the hole.

  “The anchors came loose,” said Hui.

  “Or the truss broke,” Mikhail said.

  “Either way, it’s going to affect the thrust direction and it’s got to be bad for Paul.”

  “Let’s hope he can keep the engines operating for the full twenty minutes. We need to give this rock whatever push we can,” Mikhail said. “Comrade, this is nuts. The capsule cannot withstand this strain. It must be flattened completely by now. Or at a minimum ruptured.”

  The ship moved forward several meters and then stopped again, the engines still running, making the back portion of the craft sway back and forth, looking all the more like a giant match stuck in the sand, and burning.

  Finally, after just over twenty minutes after the engines ignited, they stopped. The ship still swayed, ever more slowly, until it came to rest.

  Mikhail didn’t wait long before he activated the radio. “Paul! Are you okay? What happened?”

  Still no response. The silence was unnerving.

  “Paul. This is Mikhail. The engines appeared to work flawlessly from out here, but we saw the ship lunge. Are you safe? Come in Paul.”

  Silence.

  “He’s not able to answer for whatever reason.”

  “We need to go in. He may need our help.”

  “Before we do that, let’s check the radiation level to make sure that when the ship lunged, it didn’t damage or crack open the reactor.” Hui turned back to the flight controls and made a few adjustments before she pointed toward the graph now displayed on one of the forward display screens.

  “The radiation levels haven’t changed. At least over here. I’ll ease us back toward the Tamaroa while you watch the radiation levels. I’m not too worried about a small change here or there on the way over, but a big spike would be bad news.”

  Mikhail watched the evolving graph of radiation levels while Hui concentrated on
piloting the ship back in the direction from which she’d come less than an hour before. She was tired and could tell that her lack of sleep was affecting her ability to simultaneously monitor the various ship’s systems as she normally would. Only her limited hours of training on the specifics of the CEV systems and her years of experience with similar Chinese systems kept her from making a mistake from her near-exhaustion.

  Slowly, she brought the small capsule and its attached deep-space service module back toward the fissure and the Tamaroa. So far, there was no indication from Mikhail of a radiation problem.

  That is good, she thought.

  They were finally hovering just over the fissure from which they’d emerged and into which they must now return if they were going to be reunited with Gesling. No word from him could mean a million different things. In several of those options Paul would still be alive and well. In most of the others however, well, she didn’t want to think about those.

  “The radiation levels are stable,” Mikhail said. “We must go to him quickly.”

  “Unfortunately, the ship moved and the path we took to fly out is now blocked by the ship. We don’t have the radar that the Tamaroa has so if we go in, we’ll be doing it by sight only. And the forward lights on us aren’t that great.”

  “Hui, he’s at least five hundred feet below ground and we don’t know yet what happened to him and the habitat after the anchors broke. We’re going in, right?”

  “We’re going in. I just need to figure out where to start and hope that the path I pick will let us get all the way down to where we started. We might have to go part way in the ship and then EVA for the rest.”

  “Then so be it. Let’s go.”

  Hui looked at the barren landscape surrounding the tail end of the Tamaroa, pitched her tiny ship forward, turned on the forward lights and flew straight down into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 33

  “AR, a subpoena from Congress is one you can’t ignore. The committee chairman is adamant that you testify and they’re looking to crucify you for the panic and, God forbid, the damage Sutter’s Mill may cause when and if it actually hits. They’re not going to go away,” Jonathan Price told his client.

  Anacleto knew that Asteroid Ores would soon be bankrupt from the costs associated with the Sutter’s Mill debacle. What he hadn’t counted on was being held personally liable—fiscally, and potentially criminally. He’d been hearing the news pundits talking about him being tried for “crimes against humanity” should the asteroid actually impact and kill people. And now this, being subpoenaed to testify before Congress. Anacleto saw his world crumbling around him and there didn’t appear to be any way out.

  “This is a witch hunt. They should be going after Trivek, not me. They’re the ones who made the damned thrusters that failed, not us.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they will go after Trivek. After they get through trying and convicting you in front of Congress. AR, there is simply nothing I can do to prevent this from happening.”

  Anacleto wasn’t one to accept defeat easily, but in this case he could see no easy way out. He’d tried something audacious and risky—and lost. He knew the company and fortune he’d amassed were in jeopardy but this was the first time he’d really come to grips with the fact that he might actually also go to jail.

  He walked away from Price and toward the window of his office and looked out upon the grand vista that was New York City. It was midday and the sun was shining. On the streets below, thousands of bright yellow e-taxis moved about, looking like a child’s toys from his thirty-fourth-floor view of Manhattan. It could at least be raining, he thought. If I’m going to be miserable, then so should everyone else.

  “Jonathan, pull together something for me to say. I’ll need a draft by noon tomorrow.”

  “You could take the fifth and not say anything,” offered Price.

  “I could, but that’s the coward’s way out. We didn’t do anything wrong, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to admit guilt over anything and go down without a fight. We’re trying to help the planet, for Christ’s sake. Mining this asteroid would save thousands of square miles of wilderness that would no longer have to be mined. I can’t let these pricks ruin that dream while they ruin me and my company.”

  “AR, we screwed up. We should have had a backup plan. I know that, you know that, and just about everybody in the space business knows that. But you didn’t and here we are. They are going to make you out to be a villain and this will set back your vision for decades. No one will do this again anytime soon.”

  “Jonathan, we’ve been friends for years. You’ve worked for me longer than that. But sometimes I just want to punch you in the face, and this is one of those times. And it’s only because your pessimism is more than I can sometimes bear.”

  “You pay me to be pessimistic. That’s how I’ve saved you millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. I look at the worst case and then help you steer clear of it.”

  “I know. But in this case, it looks like your worst case might be the reality and I don’t like that.”

  Anacleto continued staring down at the traffic as he spoke. He was saying the words that people, especially Price, expected him to say. “Be optimistic; be bullish; look to change the system” were the management-style buzzwords that everyone expected him to embody. What they didn’t know was that all he was really thinking about was how to end the ordeal. And jumping off the roof of his office building was sounding more and more appealing. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, he thought.

  CHAPTER 34

  Sutter’s Mill was only a little more than three weeks out and try as they might, humanity had yet to do anything about it that appeared to have worked. As far as anyone on Earth knew, doom was still on its way. Millions were going to die. Millions more would be displaced from their homes. The world economy was going to be devastated. Life as most people knew it was going to change. But there was still one last hope. The last hope would be that the Russian nuclear missile would engage the asteroid within the next two days. The hope was that the missile would do all it needed to do to save humanity.

  But none of that really mattered to Zhi Feng. His mind was singularly focused on one thing. It had been so focused since his fateful trip to the Moon. Rather than focus on the fact that he had gone to the Moon, he focused on his misplaced hatred. He was one of the first of the Chinese people to go to the Moon, and return home safely, but he chose to be bitter. His personal psyche would not allow the Americans to outperform his beloved China.

  As a child, Zhi’s mother and father had made several deals and arrangements to have him placed in an advanced school in Beijing. His family was from a region thousands of miles away from the capital city and for all intents and purposes and in every definition of the word, his family were peasants. They were literally dirt poor. Zhi Feng recalled the dirt floor of their home and how he and his brother and father had often gathered discarded cardboard boxes and scraps of plywood from garbage heaps and abandoned or burned-out buildings. They used the cardboard as flooring in the room that he and his brother shared. It helped keep dirt out of the bed they had built. While he was only a toddler at the time, Zhi Feng recalled those days vividly. He recalled hating the cold and wet seasons. It was always cold and wet, or at least that was how he remembered it.

  But Zhi was exceptionally bright for a child and one thing China had been good at for centuries was finding its talent and giving it a chance to grow. One could argue the ethics and humanity of the way China did it, but the facts were that young children with talent were often identified and given the opportunity to grow that talent for China’s greater purpose.

  Once Zhi had turned six years old he had scored very high on mathematics and logic exams given to all the kids. He had scored so high in fact that his parents were made an offer they couldn’t refuse. China offered them a chance for their son to be taken to the best schools in the world and to be cared for by the state. It would be one less mouth for his f
amily to feed and it would bring honor to the Feng household.

  Before he had turned seven, Zhi Feng was taken to the new school where he would eventually learn his deep rooted national loyalties. Unbeknownst to the young Zhi, it would be the last time he would ever see his parents. At the time he recalled not wanting to leave. Zhi had cried bitterly and he recalled his mother crying and his father standing thin-lipped, choking back tears, but proud and looking down at him.

  “Make China proud of you, son.”

  Zhi had lived to that last thought his entire life. As he excelled in math and science he pushed himself to be the smartest in every class. By the time he was thirteen he had been accepted at the university. Zhi was becoming one of the most brilliant engineers in the country and if he could maintain his performance he had a shot at getting into the space program.

  His life had been on track to make China proud. He had been chosen to go to the Moon on the first Chinese mission there. He was going to fulfill his father’s wishes and all was at it should have been. The sacrifice of a normal life, of not knowing his family, of not having a mother to hug when he fell and skinned his knee, of not having his brother and father there to teach him how to be a man, all of the sacrifice he had made for China was going to pay off in the end. He was going to the Moon and he would “make China proud.” He would make his father proud. Zhi could barely even recall what his father looked like, but he would make him proud nonetheless.

  But then the mission had gone from good to bad. Then there was still the chance that Zhi would have the chance to make an even greater sacrifice for China and give his life, until the damned Americans stole that from him. Bill Stetson, Gary Childers, and the now dead Paul Gesling. He smiled inwardly thinking about Gesling’s death. They had taken away the chance for him to add the ultimate sacrifice to his long line of sacrifices. They would pay for that. They would pay. Gesling was dead, though not by his hands. But he was dead.