Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology

by Honor Raconteur

  “I was, ah, trapped in the ship’s head for a while,” the woman reluctantly admitted, wetting her lips nervously. “Just lucky I wasn’t…well, you know.”

  Vladimir gave her an encouraging but grim smile. “It’s all right, Doctor. I’m afraid that the rest of your team…”

  She nodded briskly. “Yes, I already know about them. Especially Yelena.”

  “I’m sorry for them, Doctor, but I’m glad you aren’t hurt. We do need your help right now,” Vladimir conceded with a quick smile.

  “Yes, I’ve already done a fast inspection around the bay, Colonel. From what I can see, the gravitic drive looks okay, except for some superficial damage to gen-jector #2, the housings on a coolant pump, and maybe some trivial damage to one of the main coils. No damage that we can’t fix.” She turned to face Opinchuk, her face gray, her hands moving in rapid jerks.

  “You can’t abandon the ship!” she insisted bitterly, her nostrils flaring. She turned to face Vladimir with hard flinty eyes. “This ship means too much to the future of the Russian Federation and to the exploration and colonization of space!”

  Vladimir held up his good hand to stop her. “Calm down, Doctor.”

  Opinchuk stared uneasily at Vladimir while rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Sir, no main power and no chance to get it back anytime soon. In the meantime, the Kruzenshtern’s flight path is curving toward Earth and accelerating due to Earth’s gravity. In a little over two hours, the Vanya will enter the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and burn up like a meteorite. Long before that happens, we need to have everyone off this ship.”

  Vladimir gritted his teeth. He had forgotten that their general course had been back toward Earth. Without the gravitic drive, the Vanya could not be slowed down properly to re-enter orbit, nor could it prevent Earth’s gravity from pulling the ship into the atmosphere.

  In his mind, the ship’s drive had already proven itself, operating almost flawlessly for three hours. Indeed, its operation had practically verged on the magical. The silicone oil-cooled field coils had seamlessly interacted with the gravitic wave distortions created by the six generator projectors. The result was a “tilting” effect in the topology of Minkowski space time centering on the ship, causing it to fall (accelerate) in the direction of the tilt. And during those three hours, there hadn’t been a single hiccup, not one reading out of tolerance or a single abnormality noted.

  To be so close to total success and yet to fail so utterly in his mission frustrated him greatly. Oh, true, no one would officially blame him for the loss of the Kruzenshtern. But the outcome for him personally would still be the same. His name would be forever linked to this disaster. His next posting would be to some distant isolated outpost in the Russian Federation, there to finish out his military career in obscurity until retirement, a lonely forgotten figure.

  But much worse than his own personal fate was what would happen to the whole gravitic drive program. Dr. Dubov was correct. The Kruzenshtern represented a huge expensive investment both in terms of resources and of time. It had taken the active cooperation of no less than sixteen different departments within the Russian Federation’s government! There were many that had privately but confidently predicted that the program would never be completed, that the turf-battles between the various bureaucracies in combination with the volatile nature of the funding from the Federal Assembly would be enough to ensure its demise. The existence of the Kruzenshtern owed much to the talents, temperament and charisma of Dr. Timofey Polachev, who had pushed the program through, past all the political and bureaucratic hurdles. But he was dead now. And there was no doubt in Vladimir’s mind that if the Kruzenshtern were allowed to burn up in re-entry in Earth’s atmosphere, the whole program would be deemed as an expensive failure. It might take years, even decades, before another attempt might be mounted to build another ship with a gravitic drive. And without the Kruzenshtern for examination, the explosion in the ship’s fusion plant would remain an unsolved mystery and a huge hurdle to further experimentation.

  But then another thought occurred to him, one of more immediate concern to their current situation. The Vanya was much too big to burn up totally in the Earth’s atmosphere. It was going to hit the Earth’s surface somewhere and leave a very big hole.

  “Col. Opinchuk. One moment please,” Vladimir said, holding up a hand. “You’ve plotted the Kruzenshtern’s trajectory? And what is the predicted point of impact on Earth?”

  Opinchuk frowned before producing a shrug of his shoulders. “It’s a big planet, sir. Chances are it will come down over an ocean somewhere. Or some isolated wasteland.”

  But Vladimir shook his head. “Humor me. Have it checked, please. Immediately.”

  Opinchuk’s face turned a shade whiter as he opened contact with his executive officer, a Major Radion Sarnychev, in the control center of the Savitskaya. Vladimir activated his own PHUD to join in the conversation as well.

  “Sarnychev!” Opinchuk hotly snapped through the link. “Calculate the point of impact for the Kruzenshtern, if you please!”

  The figure in the PHUD, a thick chested man with blue eyes, short blonde hair and a chiseled jaw, nodded back in reply. “We just finished running that calculation, sir. Predicted impact is the east Chinese coast, in the vicinity of Hong Kong and Guangzhou.”

  Vladimir sucked in a quick breath. Relations between the Russian Federation and the Chinese government had not gone all that well in the last few years. The two governments had leveled economic sanctions against each other after a “misunderstanding” between their respective armed forces three years earlier. There had been a small but fierce naval action fought near Vladivostok in the Sea of Japan. Two Chinese ships had been sunk in that engagement and world tempers had flared rather badly. The crashing of a large spacecraft near major metropolitan areas of China would be enough to trigger a huge international crisis, perhaps even start that war between the two nations, the one that had barely been averted before. He glanced over at Opinchuk.

  “Colonel, we can’t let that happen,” Vladimir growled. “We both have nanotube cabling on board. We can rig tow lines from the Sveta.”

  Opinchuk was frowning and shaking his head. “The plasma plume from the Sveta’s main engines will melt the cables…”

  “We will have to rig booms, to hold the cables clear of the engines,” Vladimir argued insistently, a bead of sweat developing on his forehead.

  In the PHUD, Maj. Sarnychev responded quickly. “We can’t decelerate the Kruzenshtern, sir! Your ship has too much inertia! The Sveta doesn’t have the fuel mass to decel your ship to a halt in time!”

  Vladimir shook his head impatiently. “How about accelerating him instead! Accelerate the Vanya and alter the point of impact further to the east; somewhere in the western Pacific Ocean would do nicely!”

  Sarnychev nodded in understanding and began furiously typing away on the keyboard at his console. “Give me a minute to run the calculations, sir. It might be possible….”

  Time dropped to a crawl, the seconds passing by with agonizing slowness as they waited for the major to make the necessary computations.

  Finally, Sarnychev looked up from his displays, this time with a tight grim smile.

  “Commanders,” he said. “If we can tether the two ships together in the next thirty minutes, the Savitskaya can change the delta-vee enough to take the Kruzenshtern in a slingshot around the Earth.” He glanced down and back up again. “It will be very close. Both ships will dip into the atmosphere and some braking will occur. The outer hulls will heat up a lot and we will lose some speed but both ships should survive! We can save the Vanya after all!”

  Before Opinchuk could add some additional objection, Vladimir turned to him with a clenched jaw.

  “Make it happen, Colonel! Many lives are at stake!” he snapped before turning back to the quiet Istomin and Dr. Dubov. “Organize the engineering staff and any crew you need. I want those tethers rigged ten minutes ago!”
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  “No, absolutely not!” Major General Bogdon Kandinsky repeated himself emphatically, the sour look on his face vaguely reminding Vladimir of a distant great-aunt back in Siberia so many years ago, the one who had died of a perforated ulcer.

  “Sir…” began Opinchuk.

  “It’s totally against regs, Colonel. You know that!” the image of the general in Vladimir’s PHUD said in response to their proposed plan.

  Vladimir did his best to restrain a sigh. Instead, he spent a few moments listening to the comm audio traffic of his crew in the background. Both he and Opinchuk were EVA in spacesuits, along with two work teams from the Sveta and a makeshift team of crewmen, stewards and even a few officers from the Vanya (virtually every able-bodied crewperson left aboard the ship that even knew which end was the business end of a wrench). Under the direction of Vanya’s Chief Mate Fokin, the three teams were working to rig the carbon nanotube tether cables and secure them to two of the ship’s anchor windlass mounts. Vladimir was near airlock #5, not far from the Kruzenshtern’s anchor windlass #2 mount. Against the black of space, the Earth shone brilliantly in front of them. The east African coast was the most prominent feature in view, along with a cyclone brewing in the western half of the Indian Ocean.

  The two ships had been successfully aligned and were temporarily docked at their main airlocks. While the efforts to tether the two ships together had been underway, other crew had been working furiously to evacuate first the wounded and then the non-essential crew of the Vanya to the Sveta. Both the EVA crews and the transfer of patients and other personnel inside the ships were creating a lot of comm traffic. Vladimir’s reasons for listening in on the traffic were varied, but mostly he wanted to keep tabs on morale and the progress of the work. Multi-tasking, he and Opinchuk were also engaged in a PHUD teleconference, attempting to defend their plan to the director of Flight Control.

  “Just a moment, please, Bogdon,” Defense Minister Sokolov interrupted. “I’d like to hear their justification for this idea.”

  “Sir!” Kandinsky objected, one eyelid twitching sporadically. “Regulations are very specific. No ship without drive power shall have personnel on board during towing operations. The safety risk involved is too great. And in an operation like this one, when the ship will be towed through the atmosphere, the risk is far greater than normal! I simply can’t sanction it!”

  Sokolov nodded. “Still, I think that both Colonel Ushakov and Opinchuk know the risks and the regulations. I’d like to know why they think it’s necessary. Colonel Ushakov, if you would explain, please?”

  Vladimir took a quick breath to steel himself. “Sirs, because of the geometries of the two ships, we have to rig two tethers, one on the port side and the other starboard. As soon as the Kruzenshtern hits the outer edges of the Earth’s atmosphere, there will be a tendency for the ship to tumble, due to its nearly spherical shape. If the prow of the ship is off-center more than fifteen degrees, the strain on the windlass mounts will go beyond design limits. The tethers will break. And the ship will impact the Earth’s surface anyway. Our best simulations estimate the tether will break early enough that the ship will end up crashing near Xiaogang, Taiwan.”

  “That won’t happen, sir!” protested Kandinsky. “The ship won’t twist because the thruster system will automatically keep the ship aligned!”

  “The automatics are non-operational, sir,” Vladimir informed him in a dispassionate voice. “Un-repairable in the time we have left. And we can’t operate the thrusters remotely either. The ship’s comm gear is out. If we had more time, we might be able to jury-rig something, perhaps via a PHUD or other transceiver gear. But the only real option we have is to leave a team on board to operate the thrusters manually.”

  The general looked as if he had swallowed something incredibly vile. “All right! Due to the possibility of casualties on the ground, I might agree to a small team of engineering techs on board during the tow. Three or four crewmen, tops. But not you, Col. Ushakov!”

  But Vladimir was shaking his head. “There’s more, sirs.”

  “Go on,” Sokolov instructed him with a thoughtful, calm voice, his fingers steepled in front of him.

  “The computer simulations we’ve run predict three possible outcomes, sirs. The most likely is that one of the tethers will break during the tow through Earth’s atmosphere, due to heat stress. We think it will happen late, that the Savitskaya will be able to impart enough delta-vee to the Kruzenshtern to allow both ships to skip across the upper atmosphere. But there is a catch. The two ships won’t be quite on the same orbit after the tether breaks. The Sveta is much more streamlined and will maintain a greater speed and therefore a higher orbit. After the two ships clear the atmosphere, it will take time for the Savitskaya to maneuver back to the Kruzenshtern. Sirs, that will be time lost, time when an engineering team on the Vanya could be working on ship repairs, the most critical of which is to get the backup power system online. Sirs, that timing could be critical.”

  “Why so, Colonel?” Sokolov asked. “If the ship survives this passage, why the hurry? We will have other ships in position by then to rendezvous in a couple of days.”

  Vladimir cleared his throat quietly. “If a tether breaks too early, sir, then the Kruzenshtern won’t have that much time. Its orbit will be shortened. It will follow an elliptical path, swinging out toward geostationary orbit and then curving back toward the Earth again. We might need every minute we can get to work on repairs.” Vladimir smiled grimly but inwardly felt uncertain. How would Sokolov react to his next words? “Sir, the best chance we might have to save the ship and Russia’s investment in it is to leave a repair crew onboard. In my opinion, based on the simulations we’ve run, I think the risk to human life is minimal during the tow operation. Oh, and no disrespect intended, but I would hope that the defense minister would not try to order me to leave the ship, not when I still have crew onboard. Sir.”

  Kandinsky appeared ready to blow a cork, but gulping madly, managed to restrain himself.

  On the other hand, Sokolov chuckled lightly. “The captain going down with his ship, heh? I’ve always wondered. And just how far back does that tradition go, may I ask?”

  Vladimir inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. General Kandinsky would never have agreed, but it now appeared that Minister Sokolov would let them implement the total plan.

  “At least the middle of the nineteenth century, sir. Perhaps even before that,” Vladimir replied with a small smile.

  “Your plan is approved,” Sokolov apprized him. “Save my ship, Colonel.”

  No one had ever seriously considered towing a ship under conditions even remotely similar to those they were facing now. The geometries of the ships were wrong, the amount of energy to be imparted too high, the swing through the Earth’s atmosphere—all of these factors were well outside the design considerations of the tether cables and of the windlass mounts. If either one of the tethers or the mounts failed, then either the Sveta or the Vanya would have to cut loose the other tether as well, and as expeditiously as possible. Otherwise, the unbalanced load on the Sveta would send it into an uncontrolled spin. And if that happened while they were in the Earth’s atmosphere, the Sveta would quickly overheat from the sudden increase in atmospheric friction and it would be fatal to everyone on board.

  If the tethers failed early enough in the tow effort, before the Vanya’s orbit could be changed sufficiently, then the Vanya would burn up in the atmosphere and everyone aboard that ship would die a fiery death as well. However, according to Maj. Sarnychev’s calculations, if enough energy could be transferred to the Vanya’s orbit before a tether snapped, then the ship would skip along the surface of the Earth’s atmosphere and slingshot into a very eccentric and highly elliptical orbit, far enough away from Earth that other Russian ships might be able to rendezvous with it and tow it safely back to the orbital repair yard.

  The key, therefore, was the tethers. The open question was how long they would last when expose
d to the edge of the heat plume from the Sveta’s plasma engines and from the friction with the Earth’s atmosphere. According to the computer simulations, there was a good chance that the nanocarbon tethers would do the job adequately. The reality was that no one really knew. It was a huge gamble on Vladimir’s part.

  This made his decision to stay aboard the Vanya even more of a risk. And in truth, it had not been an easy decision for Vladimir to make, to keep part of the crew on board the Vanya. Lives were truly at stake here. He hadn’t quite lied to the defense minister or to General Kandinsky. According to the simulator models, it should work. Still, the demon Murphy stood a good chance of sticking his nose into the whole affair. It was still possible for people to die. It was, after all, a key factor in his insistence to stay onboard. He really couldn’t ask others to risk their lives while he watched safely from the sidelines. It just wasn’t in his nature.

  The tethers were rigged and all EVA participants had been brought back through the airlocks to safety inside the two hulls.

  Opinchuk and his two teams had returned to the Sveta for the maneuver, leaving the remaining portion of the crew of the Vanya, roughly sixty volunteers total, to fend for themselves in the semi-darkness of their powerless craft. Of all the teams from the Sveta, only Istomin and Borisov had remained aboard the Vanya.

  The Sveta undocked, and using its thrusters, moved slowly out to the limit of the tethers, removing all of the slack.

  In the red glow of the emergency lights, the control center was a spooky place to sit out the maneuver. From his command chair, Vladimir felt slightly nauseous from anticipation as he anxiously watched the PHUD feed from the Sveta as that ship began applying the maximum permissible thrust. Would the tethers, the booms, or the ship’s windlass mounts hold?

  “Thrust increasing, sir,” chimed in a voice from the Sveta. Vladimir did not recognize the speaker. “Tether strains are at 10% of rating and increasing.”