The Next Continent

by Issui Ogawa

  “To work on the seafloor?”

  “It’s not so different from the lunar surface, an extreme environment where manned operation is difficult. It wouldn’t be hard to retrofit them for undersea work. The boss is looking for ways to recoup some of our development costs.”

  “Who’ll do the retrofitting? Everyone has their hands full.”

  “Gotoba will find a way. And he’ll turn a profit. The boss is almost a god when it comes to construction engineering.”

  “A god, huh? Hey…” Sohya froze. A white-haired old gentleman and a young woman were standing in the control center doorway, looking out of place.

  “Who’s that?” asked the supervisor.

  “Another god. Our sponsor, the chairman of ELE. That’s his granddaughter. Go tell the guys to quiet down.”

  The supervisor hurried off to alert the rest of the team. Sohya walked over to the visitors and spread his hands in welcome.

  “It’s been a long time, Mr. Toenji. Nice to see you too, Tae—Miss Toenji.”

  “How’ve you been, Sohya?” Tae Toenji was seventeen. She smiled in a grown-up way and extended her hand.

  Sohya shook it, a bit nervously. “Last time was in Paris, right?”

  “Yes, when we showed our wedding dresses for the Paris collection and kicked off the Sixth Continent PR campaign. But we see each other all the time on the VPN, don’t we? It hasn’t exactly been a long time.” Tae stage-whispered this last statement and smiled.

  “But I only see your face on the web. You…you’re taller.”

  “A hundred and fifty-nine centimeters. Maybe I won’t be able to ride in the capsule if I get too much taller.”

  “Apple is designed to carry five NBA players. We even got an inquiry from Johnson Jr. Of course, he’s already hitched…I mean, married.”

  “Mr. Aomine.” Sennosuke Toenji leaned closer to Sohya. “You don’t have to put on a show for me. Don’t be so formal.”

  “So then, you know?” said Sohya, slightly embarrassed.

  “I like to think of myself as close to my granddaughter. I know you’re close to Tae as well. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. She’s told you that she’s the real force behind this plan, I believe. She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t trust you.”

  “Mr. Toenji…” Sohya was at a loss for words.

  “Don’t worry about me. Officially, I’m in charge of this project. I do have a lot of interest in it. I was one of the ones who came up with the idea. But making Tae happy is just as important to me.” Sennosuke gave Sohya a jaunty wink. “Now then, Sir Aomine, please give our princess her briefing.”

  Twenty-nine-year-old Sohya was not thrilled to be treated like a hero in an adventure comic, but he did relax a bit. Over the past four years he had seen very little of Tae in person. She had been busy working with Eden’s PR team on the global campaign for Sixth Continent. In the process, she had become something of a media figure herself. But they spoke over Sixth Continent’s virtual private network several times a month. Naturally, much of their communication was personal, and Tae would have felt guilty keeping this from her grandfather, who was nearly her only family.

  Now that Sohya had official approval, there was no need for pretense. He relaxed and said, “You’re a little late. If you’d come an hour earlier, I could’ve shown you the final multidozer test.”

  “We watched it from out there. The robots are amazing.”

  “You saw the explosion?” Sohya was caught off guard. “That wasn’t a system failure, you know. We wanted to see if the bots’ networked AI could calculate the trade-off between the loss of one member and potential damage to the whole team.”

  “Don’t worry. The driver told us all about it.”

  Sohya heaved a sigh of relief. When he had first met her, Tae had been just thirteen, yet she could already speak fluent English and easily grasped the principles of spaceflight. But four years of globe-trotting had definitely seasoned her. Still, she hadn’t lost her innocent outlook.

  “I feel sorry for the robots though.”

  “Sorry? Why?”

  “As soon as they’re a burden, they’re left behind. I guess it’s efficient, but it’s merciless.”

  “Well, there’s no other way.” Sohya remembered how upset she had been about the trash scattered across the surface around Kunlun Base. “We can’t take a single excess kilo to the moon, so we have to recycle everything usable till there’s nothing left to recycle. But sometimes recycling uses more energy and resources than just discarding things. When humans are present on the surface, we’ll have the flexibility to recycle a lot of waste, but when it’s just robots…sometimes we’ll have to discard a unit.”

  “I know. That’s why we have to send humans. But I liked the way it was handled.”

  Sohya shook his head, confused. “You did?”

  “Yes. I liked the lack of mercy. The coldness to leave others behind if necessary and go for the goal.” Tae’s expression had turned unnervingly hard. Sohya had seen this side of her before. It reflected her isolation, a girl who had abandoned the pleasures other women her age pursued to embark on a strange quest to build a base on the moon.

  Then the carefree smile returned. “Listen, Sohya. Wouldn’t you like to come to Tsukuba?” Here was something else that hadn’t changed: her tendency to spring surprises.

  “Tsukuba? You mean mission control?”

  “Yes. Serpent lands today.”

  “Oh, right. That was today.” Sohya scratched his head. The development supervisor joined them.

  “Did you forget?” said the supervisor. “We were going to celebrate today’s shakedown test with a live feed from Serpent as the main event.”

  “Oh…yeah. Guess my mind was on the dozers,” said Sohya.

  “So you were planning to go?” pressed Tae.

  The supervisor slapped Sohya on the back. “In that case, we’d better turn him over to you. I’m sure he’d rather be with you at flight control than sitting in some pub watching it on TV with the guys.”

  Sohya blushed and looked down. Tae extended her pendant wearcom toward the supervisor.

  “Where is your party being held? At Gotenba? Okay, I have it. And how many? Forty-five? Right, got it.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Sohya.

  “I hope you won’t mind if I cover the costs.”

  “Wow, are you sure?” said the supervisor.

  “It’s because those white dozers are hardworking and very courageous. Have a good time.”

  The manager called out to the rest of the people in the control center. “Did you hear that, everybody?”

  The team gave a cheer. Sohya was impressed with Tae’s practiced way of handling people. It was hard to believe she was only seventeen. She took his arm. “Shall we?”

  “Sure, but can we make it in time? The maglev doesn’t stop at Tsukuba.”

  “Mr. Aomine, that’s what aircraft are for,” said Sennosuke.

  Once again Sohya felt as if he were in the presence of people from another universe entirely. Filled with anticipation and hesitation, he followed them out of the control center.

  [2]

  SEVEN HUGE FLAT-SCREEN monitors arranged in two rows dominated the flight operations control room of Tenryu Galaxy Transport’s Tsukuba Space Center. The upper-right screen displayed a constantly changing array of red numerals.

  JST 2029 05 01 17:30:45

  MET 59:30:45

  The main screen, in the center of the lower row, tracked the course of a white sphere. Its path through space was designated by a bright blue line.

  May 1, 2029, 5:30:45 pm. Following insertion into lunar orbit after a flight of sixty hours, Serpent—Sixth Continent’s two-ton probe—was approaching the lunar south pole. The control room was responsible for spacecraft tracking and control as well as data acquisition. Twenty-eight control positions faced the bank of monitors, arranged in four rows, including Flight Dynamics; Guidance, Navigation and Control; Propulsion; Instrument
ation and Communications, or INCO; Collection and Recovery; and Data Processing. The controllers stared tensely at their monitors. In the last row, TGT flight director Hideto Hibiki stared at the backs of their heads with a dour expression.

  The tension was even greater than usual, and for good reason. Many aspects of this mission were extremely difficult or involved some unprecedented element. The launch of TGT’s new rocket, Eve I. Sending a probe to the moon. Placing the probe into polar, rather than equatorial, orbit. A soft landing at the pole. Collection of ice samples. Return of the samples to Earth. All carried out by private enterprise. A test mission would not have been unusual for any of these elements, but none had been conducted. It was hardly surprising that TGT’s staff was under tremendous pressure.

  Still, nearly half of the previously untested hurdles were behind them. Eve I, the first launch vehicle equipped with a transforming scram rocket engine, carried the probe into Earth orbit. The second stage, equipped with a conventional LE-9S engine, executed a perfect translunar injection burn. The insertion into polar orbit was also successful. Now Serpent was a hundred kilometers above the surface, waiting for the command to initiate descent.

  Sohya and the others entered the observation booth at the rear of the control room. The glassed-in booth looking out over the controllers was crowded with journalists. Among them was a figure that seemed out of place: a tall man in a worn lab coat.

  The man waved to Sohya. “Hey, Aomine. I hear the multidozers passed the final test. Congratulations.”

  “We wrapped the shakedown sequence less than an hour ago. How’d you know?”

  “Everyone knows. Sixth Continent’s portal went live in April.” Shinji waved his wearcom.

  Sohya smiled. “The news is up already. Gotenba is really on the ball.”

  “No point in having a site if you don’t update it constantly, and not just for the public. The project partners are on the VPN all the time, swapping information.”

  Shinji smiled at Tae, who was standing behind Sohya. She was the website designer and ELE’s head of PR. It was her idea to have each participant in the Sixth Continent project input updates directly to the site rather than running everything through her. Shinji was right: to keep the attention of the public over the project’s decade-long timeline, regular updates were essential. Tae’s decentralized approach spared ELE’s PR team a lot of work. The project participants liked it as well. It gave them a chance to describe their hard-won success in their own words and made for effective communication. In addition to Gotoba, ELE, and TGT, there were over two hundred Sixth Continent partner companies—aerospace, airlines, engineering, construction, electronics, machinery, physical and life sciences, tourism, and advertising firms. The VPN was indispensable for efficiently sharing information across so many entities.

  Sohya brought chairs for Tae and Sennosuke and sat down next to them with Shinji.

  “If you’re up to speed I don’t need to explain,” said Sohya. “My group’s work is finished for the moment. I can spend the rest of the day here. When’s touchdown?”

  “Another half hour or so.”

  “In thirty minutes our fingertips will touch the moon.”

  “Yep. We’ve been reaching for four years. We’re just brushing the surface this time.”

  “Has it seemed like a long time to you?” asked Sohya.

  “No. I’m having so much fun I don’t notice the time passing. Don’t tell me it’s any different for you.”

  The two men looked at each other and burst out laughing. Perhaps because they were so close in age—the childlike materials scientist would be thirty soon—Shinji and Sohya had become fast friends.

  “Another half hour.” Sohya folded his arms and watched the displays through the booth’s bay window. The blue line representing Serpent’s orbit slowly extended itself across the map of the lunar surface. In a corner of the display was a six-figure number indicating the Earth–moon distance in kilometers: 389,121.

  Now everything was up to the probe, a machine about the size of a compact car, thirty Earth diameters away from Flight Control. Not much to inspire confidence, thought Sohya.

  Suddenly the control room began to buzz. GNC began calling out updates.

  “Losing telemetry. Readout interrupted.”

  “Unable to access attitude control.”

  INCO called, “Switching high gain to omni…No response. Unable to reestablish link with orbiter.”

  Flight’s response followed instantly. “Switch to CORE 3.”

  “Roger, handing over from CORE 1 to CORE 3…We have contact!”

  “Telemetry recovered.”

  “Reacquired attitude control. Orbiter is responding to commands.” The controllers sounded relieved. Hibiki didn’t relax.

  “Confirm telemetry and go back to high gain. Support Room Two, troubleshoot CORE 1.”

  The commotion died down, and tense silence reigned again. Sohya and the others exchanged glances—they had watched the short burst of activity with bated breath but did not fully understand what had just taken place.

  “What’s CORE 1?” asked Tae.

  “It sounded like the communication link was broken. Shinji?”

  “CORE 1 is a geostationary satellite that links the probe and Flight Control. There are three communications satellites giving full coverage of the moon. I guess there was a problem with one of them. Say, why don’t we go in and ask?”

  “Are you sure?” said Sohya. “That room’s pretty crowded.”

  “Why not? We’re with the VIPs.”

  Shinji looked over at Tae and Sennosuke, who blinked uncomprehendingly, then glanced at each other shyly.

  “Grandfather, we should have ringside seats.”

  “All right, as long as we’re not in the way.”

  With Shinji in the lead, the group headed toward the door leading to the control room. They showed their IDs to security and passed through. The journalists watching them go fumed with envy.

  Shinji approached Hibiki, who was sitting in the last row of control positions. “Can we ask you a question?”

  “Hold it.” Hibiki held up a hand as he spoke into his headset. “Go ahead, Support…What do you mean, someone blanked our frequency? Cut the crap. Who’d be jamming us? Rerun the diagnostics!” he shouted into his headset, then glared at Shinji. “If I had the budget, I’d hire a public affairs officer,” he muttered. “What is it?”

  “Is there a problem with CORE?”

  “We don’t know whether it’s a malfunction yet. But the probe is fine. Don’t worry.” Nicknamed “the Japanese Gene Kranz,” Hibiki had worked on the H-IIC rocket and was one of TGT’s most seasoned flight directors.

  “Serpent’s telemetry was interrupted, so we switched to a different frequency. That didn’t help, so we tried a different comm sat and recovered the link. There are always two CORE satellites available at any time. Even if we lost all three, we have a ground link. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Okay, thanks.” As Shinji spoke, one of the controllers put a hand on Hibiki’s shoulder and pointed at the console.

  “Um-hm…what? Goddard Space Flight Center? The Americans?” Hibiki stiffened. The console phone was buzzing. Baffled, he picked up the receiver. Apparently it was an outside call. The conversation was short, with no visual. The call ended, and Hibiki slammed the receiver into its cradle. “Those bastards! Who do they think they are?”

  “What happened?” asked Shinji in surprise. The other controllers swiveled in their chairs and looked questioningly at Hibiki. He ignored them and roared into his headset.

  “Support Two! Cancel CORE 1 troubleshoot. Resume normal operation…What? I don’t know. Maybe aliens are messing with the probe!” Hibiki lowered his voice. “Keep this quiet for now,” he said to Shinji. “We’ve just been treated to a NASA prank. That was Goddard Space Flight Center.”

  Shinji stared at him, mouth agape. Hibiki seemed ready to bite the mic off his headset. “They used a satellite in
CORE 1’s line of sight to jam our signal.”

  “Can they do that?” asked Shinji.

  “It’s not hard if they pump out enough power on a frequency close to ours. Ever listen to the radio next to a freeway? You get a lot of interference from CB traffic. It’s the same thing. All they have to do is point a high-gain antenna on one of their ATDRS comm sats at CORE. To change the satellite’s attitude, they just use their gyros. No need to waste propellant.”

  “Yes, but…can they do that?” Normally mild-mannered Shinji’s expression was uncharacteristically severe. “Serpent is entering its most critical phase. Messing with our communications now could blow the mission!”

  “No. The interference only lasted a few seconds. And they just hinted at the solution. Of course, they knew we’d have it fixed by now. But just in case we couldn’t recover the signal, they wanted to make sure we knew how—without admitting anything, of course.”

  “But why?”

  “I told you. It was a prank.” Hibiki frowned and muttered, “Probably a test of our emergency-response capability. They’ve been guiding spacecraft a couple of generations longer than we have, so they gave us a poke just to see how we took it. That’s bad enough, but what really burns me is how soft the poke was. They must think we’re amateurs!”

  Shinji and Sohya exchanged glances. Tae was confused. “Does this kind of thing happen often? Interfering with another nation’s space missions? If they pushed it too far, a huge amount of work could be wasted. It seems like a terrible thing to do.”

  “Don’t forget—America’s space program started out as a missile program.” Hibiki looked weary. “All the major space powers’ rocketry started with the military. The Soviets even put a heavy machine gun on one of their manned spacecraft. If they wanted to, these guys could attack us.”

  “Isn’t that something that went out with the Cold War?” said Shinji.

  “We’re in a cold war right now with our competitors. The prize is the moon’s water.” Hibiki’s words pointed to another problematic aspect of the mission. Building a moon base was not something that everyone everywhere would necessarily welcome. Certain parties with vested interests were already uncomfortable, if not in open opposition. There was even some opposition to TGT’s engine technology, since many nations were eagerly working to develop new, cheaper launch vehicles using TROPHY.