The Next Continent

by Issui Ogawa

  Tae blinked several times, her optimistic expression frozen in place. It was a mask that betrayed no hint of what was going on behind it. Sohya knew he’d struck home.

  He grinned. “I’m against it.”

  “What about the rest of you?” said Tae after a pause. “Wouldn’t anyone like to be the first to EVA for Sixth Continent?”

  The other passengers glanced at each other. The two engineers tentatively raised their hands.

  “I say let’s do it. I don’t see it being any more risky than walking on the surface.”

  “I’d have to agree. I’m willing to go.”

  Yamagiwa was waiting for GGS to make a decision. He silently shook his head. Shinji raised his hand. “I’d like to go if you don’t mind.”

  Sohya gaped in astonishment. “Shinji! Why?”

  “It’s what I came for. You do know why I’m here, don’t you?” He smiled without a trace of irony. “Three for Xiwangmu on the surface. We know who they are. Tae is here for publicity, of course. The mission can’t fly without its pilot. But me? I’m not doing anything special.”

  “Come on, Shinji—”

  “No, I mean it. Okay, I’m supposed to be gathering TROPHY performance data. But the computer’s doing it for me. I’m just warming the sixth seat. Hey, don’t worry.” He waved a restraining hand at Sohya. “I’m not complaining. I’m so happy I can barely sit still. This is my bonus from the boss for my work on TROPHY. Pretty soon I’ll see what I came to see with my own eyes: Eve XIX, climbing to meet me.” He winked at the other crew members. “Maybe I’ll luck out, and she’ll be coming up just about the time I’m out there. How’s that for a ringside seat?”

  The two engineers and Yamagiwa chuckled. There was something about Shinji one never quite got used to, something that made others want to help him.

  Tae cocked her head slightly in thought. She nodded and touched Sohya’s arm. “I think he’s right. Don’t you?”

  Still, Sohya hesitated. “What does Ground Support say?”

  “They’re deliberating,” said Yamagiwa. “No, wait a minute.” Yamagiwa listened to his headphones. “They took it all the way to the top. Gotoba is neutral. Yaenami wants to go for it. Flight thinks it might be a viable option.”

  “That settles it,” said Tae with a look of satisfaction.

  “But—we’d have to go to TLI as soon as we make the rendezvous. They’re calculating a new orbit that will let us rendezvous with Xiwangmu ahead of schedule. We’re cleared for EVA, but only if we can rendezvous in time.”

  “Then let’s get started,” said Tae. “Shinji, you’d better get into your suit.”

  Shinji grinned and pushed off toward his locker. As he passed Sohya, he slapped him lightly on the back. “Don’t worry. Tae’s right.”

  “Look, Shinji…” For a split second, a look passed between the two men and Sohya understood. If Shinji hadn’t volunteered, Tae probably would have gone, given the publicity potential. His self-effacing speech had prevented that without generating resistance. And if Tae was the first choice from a publicity angle, Sohya himself was number two. He and Tae were the media’s chosen stars. Shinji had been concerned about his friend’s safety as well.

  “Pretty smooth,” muttered Sohya.

  “Wouldn’t want you two to be separated,” whispered Shinji.

  He pulled his suit pack from the locker and gave Sohya and Tae a knowing wink. Sohya’s jaw dropped in indignation. He started to speak, but Shinji waved him into silence. Then he disappeared through the narrow hatch into the core module.

  FOR ANY HOBBY you can name, there are people who go to extremes.

  The spotter was middle-aged, and the bug had bitten him especially hard. Using the near-ubiquitous wireless Internet, he worked as a website designer from a dilapidated shepherd’s hut in the Peruvian Andes. A telescope taller than he was stood in the center of the room. On clear nights he threw back the corrugated sheet metal that covered one side of the roof, eagerly scanning the heavens. He was a satellite spotter, dedicated enough to leave a home in the city to live year-round on this isolated mountaintop.

  Night had already come to the Andes. As he worked at his computer, the spotter kept an eye on a live satellite feed from Gotenba Ground Support. The subcarrier channel at the bottom of the screen was datacasting mission-related information. He was anxious to get a glimpse of Apple 7; four times in the past week, he’d successfully identified Xiwangmu 6. Finding the Chinese module hadn’t been particularly challenging given its size. But Apple 7 would be much harder to identify, and the spotter had never tracked an object in this particular orbit, which would position the spacecraft for translunar injection. It was the kind of challenge he lived for.

  The spotter glanced at the subchannel and froze. How many people were watching this obscure satellite feed at this precise moment—fewer than a hundred worldwide? He stared at the monitor, and he knew he hadn’t imagined it: Apple 7’s orbital components were changing. The ship was altering course.

  Work forgotten, he feverishly began collating the data. If his orientation was skewed, Apple 7 might easily sail clean through his net.

  The reason for the course change was quickly apparent: the rendezvous with Xiwangmu 6 had been moved up. But that meant he needed more data, because now there was something else to deal with: verification of the new orbit against that of other known objects. Over forty thousand objects large enough to spot, mostly space debris, were known to be orbiting Earth at various altitudes. If a large object turned up in an orbit similar to Apple’s, the spotter might end up tracking debris instead of the real thing.

  The spotter loaded his translation software and patched the subchannel into his workstation for a closer look at the Japanese text streaming in from GGS. Sure enough, the Japanese were verifying the new orbit too. They had an even more urgent motivation. It would not do to have Japan’s first moon mission collide with an errant piece of space junk.

  The spotter said a silent thanks for the raw data coming in from GGS via the broadcaster’s mobile earth station. It simplified his task considerably; all he had to do was consider the objects GGS was looking at. He was not surprised to see that several were expected to cross Apple 7’s path. The object that concerned him most was the size of a compact car, but GGS had already calculated the odds of a collision. The debris had a 0.002 percent chance of hitting Apple 7.

  This made the spotter slightly uneasy. Apple 7 had already shifted to its new orbit, so the dice had been rolled. Evidently the Japanese had decided the risk was acceptable. At odds of fifty thousand to one, a collision was not a realistic possibility.

  What bothered the spotter were not the odds of collision. It was the possibility of a near miss. Fifty thousand to one was another way of saying the object would pass within a few kilometers of the six astronauts. At a distance of three hundred kilometers, with a short observation window, the spotter could easily become confused and miss his quarry.

  Anxiously he began pulling information on the object’s shape; that would give him an idea of its probable brightness. Brightness was the key to satellite spotting. His telescope was good, but even with the best amateur optics he could not make a visual identification based on shape alone. The objects were just too far away.

  A moment later he was looking at the United States Space Command public website. The site included information on a variety of objects in earth orbit, from functioning satellites to satellites in mothballs or defunct, entire spent rocket stages, fuel tanks, and explosion and collision fragments. GGS would have the same data.

  He punched up the object’s profile. It was a Russian Cosmos satellite that had “broken up”—exploded—a year and a half earlier. The cause could have been anything from leftover fuel expanding into a gas and rupturing the tanks to a breached fuel cell. Whatever the reason, the satellite was now junk.

  The spotter paused, something tugging at his memory. He knew this object. Before it had exploded, it had been well-known in the spotting c
ommunity for its unusual brightness. Tracking it after it broke up with his thirty-five-centimeter reflector, he’d noticed that the central point of brightness was surrounded by a gaseous-looking halo of some sort, about the size of a full moon. This would be a cloud of smaller debris fragments, but it seemed strange that the fragments would stay close to the main body over several months instead of dispersing into different orbits.

  Now he remembered. One night, with a group of friends—some of them dedicated comet watchers, others consumed by an interest in the planets—he’d spotted the object, and they’d all taken turns examining it, debating what the “cloud” might be. The most plausible theory pointed to a debris cloud embedded in splintered strands of some sort of plastic material, like the smashed remains of a wire-reinforced window. The satellite was almost certainly military, but the Russian Space Forces had issued no comment regarding its fate, so it continued to be a mystery.

  This was not good news. If this object passed close to Apple 7, it would seriously complicate his observation.

  Wait a minute… The spotter froze. One-inch devils!

  Space debris are tracked by radar, which can’t reliably detect objects less than ten centimeters across. Objects smaller than one centimeter would likely vaporize against a spacecraft’s Whipple shield. Objects invisible to radar yet larger than one centimeter represented the biggest threat to spacecraft in low earth orbit. The only way to deal with them was to trust in luck and a prayer. If that debris cloud was thick with objects larger than one centimeter and less than ten…

  A moment later the spotter was on his feet, lunging toward the ancient rotary-dial satellite phone on the wall of the hut.

  “FLIGHT, YOU HAVE an outside call.” The public affairs officer was responsible for liaison with the media concerning control room operations. Hibiki kept his eyes on his monitor.

  “Busy.”

  “Apparently it’s very important. ‘Critical, urgent, life and death.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. He had a thick accent, Spanish or maybe Portuguese. One of the satellite trucks put him through to us.”

  “You talk to him.”

  “Yes, sir.” The officer took the call through his headset, struggling to get the voice recognition package in his wearcom calibrated to the man’s excited stream of speech so it could be translated. As PAO, he was used to dealing with all types, and he made a polite effort to make appropriately sympathetic noises from time to time.

  Suddenly he went pale. He tore off his headset and shouted, “Flight, he’s saying Object 35665 is a collision risk!”

  “We ran all the SOC numbers,” said Hibiki, with barely a change of expression. “The crew is aware.”

  “He says the Standard Object Catalog is incomplete! Object 35665 is being followed by a cloud of debris with minimal radar signature!”

  “What?” Hibiki turned to stare at the PAO, who was already rushing toward the Flight Dynamics station.

  “That was a South American satellite spotter, an amateur. He says the object has a debris cloud that was never reported. The mission was classified. He swears it’s trailing thousands of particles smaller than ten centimeters, held together by some kind of weblike structure. We’ve got to evade—immediately!”

  “Get Roskosmos. I want to know everything about Object 35665. Capcom, tell the crew to suit up without delay. Hurry—closest approach in eighteen minutes.”

  A wave of quiet alarm spread through the control room. A minute later the GNC officer called out, “Flight! Object 35665 was a Russian Space Forces tethered satellite.”

  “A tethered pair?”

  “A base and a subunit, originally linked with forty kilometers of carbon fiber cable. Eighteen months ago a fuel cell exploded, and one of the pair broke up. The explosion created a matrix of tangled fiber that trapped a certain amount of small debris. The Russians estimate the matrix contains around a thousand fragments, maximum five centimeters. This fits what the spotter says he observed.”

  “What’s the diameter of this so-called matrix?”

  The officer hesitated. “Apparently it’s roughly spherical. Diameter is eight kilometers. Roskosmos estimates there are around a thousand debris pieces at least a centimeter across, but they can’t say how many are bigger than that.”

  When Hibiki’s next command came, his voice had a glacial calm, as if the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped.

  “Tell Roskosmos we need an immediate orbital correction for 35665. If it’s been in the same orbit for eighteen months, the subunit must’ve exploded. The base unit should still be responding to guidance commands.”

  “In that case, they would’ve deorbited it by now. Moscow says it isn’t responding, but the attitude control system is still powered up and functioning. All they can do is wait for it to run out of fuel.”

  “Capcom, tell Apple 7 to separate the core module from the stack and go to descent burn immediately.”

  “They can’t, Flight. Dr. Tai’s already opened the side hatch. He’d have to close it, repressurize, and get everyone into the core. That’d take half an hour.”

  “Tell him to fire the second stage manually. We can worry about the new orbit later. Anything’s better than a collision.”

  “The ignition lock is engaged. The main engine can’t be fired, even manually, for at least ten minutes after the hatch is closed. It’s a safety feature to give the crew time to get into their flight couches and prepare for a burn.”

  “Override the safety system.”

  “That can only be done from the core control panel. Dr. Tai doesn’t have the training—”

  “DPS, explain the override procedure to him!”

  The Data Processing systems engineer leapt over his console and sprinted over to Capcom. He began giving Shinji the override instructions, trying hard to keep the panic out of his voice.

  The network officer called out, “Flight, TSC just confirmed backup request for Eve XIX.”

  Everyone froze. For the last few minutes, the fact that Eve XIX was on the pad and about to lift off had been driven from everyone’s mind. GGS was responsible for all phases of flight except the launch itself, which was Tanegashima’s primary responsibility.

  “Shall we terminate the countdown?” asked the network officer. “This is no time to worry about putting the return module into orbit.”

  “Don’t terminate,” said Hibiki without hesitation. “Go to backup mode. Who knows, they might need an extra engine.”

  The controllers’ faces tightened with anxiety. The flight director had just issued a prediction. Apple 7 might find itself adrift. But if his assessment of the situation had just gotten worse, Hibiki showed no outward sign of it.

  “Whoever’s not on top of something right now should start making calls.”

  “To whom?” asked the PAO.

  “Their next of kin.” Hibiki swiveled in his chair and looked up at the bay window of the observation booth behind him. Sennosuke Toenji was standing with both palms pressed against the glass, staring wide-eyed at the mission screens.

  YAMAGIWA AND SOHYA were both in their space suits, perspiring as they worked at the habitat module’s control panel.

  “Now we have to power off the attitude gyros,” said Yamagiwa. “Can you do it?”

  “Gyro off…no, the power’s still on. The core won’t hand off.” Sohya was riffling through the operations manual with quiet desperation. Yamagiwa continued working the control panel, trying to use the module’s small attitude thrusters to change the orbit, if only by a fraction. But Shinji was still struggling to manually override the main engine ignition lock. As long as he was preoccupied with that, the core would not relinquish control to the habitat module. Both men were at the limits of their patience.

  “More unintended consequences. If this was Apollo 13 we’d be able to improvise something,” muttered Sohya.

  “Apollo was a toggle switch jungle. If Apple hadn’t con
solidated everything in one panel, I probably wouldn’t have qualified as pilot.”

  “All they had to do was give us a second control post. Now we’re screwed!”

  “Calm down,” said Yamagiwa, putting a hand on Sohya’s shoulder. “There’s nothing we can do. Better do something about her though.” He pointed to Tae, who was motionless next to one of the windows. She wasn’t in her suit.

  Sohya grabbed her floating suit pack and crossed over to her. “Come on, let’s get this on you.”

  “…I don’t want to.”

  “Feeling guilty?”

  She stiffened. Sohya put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward him.

  “Get suited up—now!”

  “But…”

  “You can’t help Shinji by exposing yourself to danger. What are you playing at?”

  She glared at him, resentment smoldering deep in her eyes. Sohya said nothing but began assembling the suit around her—first the two halves of the torso shell, then the arm and leg tubes. He plugged in the power unit for the joints. For ease of movement, the joints were normally electroconformed to their wearer in a process that took a few minutes. There probably was no time for that, but the suit would still be pressurized. Tae angrily snatched the helmet from Sohya’s hand and turned back to the window, as if searching for the invisible enemy stalking them.

  “Put your helmet on,” Sohya was about to say, but decided it would be pointless. He looked at Yamagiwa. “How much longer?”

  “Six minutes, maybe a bit more. Dr. Tai, what’s your status?”

  Shinji was as nonchalant as ever. “Well, gentlemen, I’m afraid a manual system override and main engine burn at short notice is a bit beyond me. I don’t want to make a mistake and send us straight into the Pacific.”

  “Shinji, don’t give up! At least come back here!”

  “I would if I wasn’t in this suit. Can’t fit through the top hatch, and there’s not enough time to repressurize. I’m not giving up though. GGS just gave me another option, and it’s a lot simpler.”