“Not like I do,” Tsu said. “If you did, then you’d understand one simple principle.”
“What would that be?” Sun asked.
Tsu looked at the man and lowered his voice, a useless gesture in the confines of the airtight and soundproofed cockpit. “Everything and everyone is dispensable in achieving the mission.”
“I think we know that,” Sun said.
“Not like I do,” Tsu explained. “Your death will mean nothing if it achieves our goal.”
Sun looked into the other man’s eyes intently, gauging the statement. Finally, he answered in the same serious tone. “Understood, Colonel, and I understand the same applies to your life as well.”
“Then we understand one another.”
“Yes, we do.”
“Now we only need to convince the Americans,” Tsu said, a grin crossing his face.
Sun nodded. “Agreed, though I think you’ll find their resistance to be more effective than you’re estimating.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Tsu said.
“No, you’ll find out soon enough, Colonel,” Sun said.
Tsu nodded and then hit the button on the door lock to open it, and he floated out, leaving Commander Sun to ponder the inevitable . . . at what cost?
*****
Red Horizon
Interplanetary Space
In the near future, Year 4, Day 155
“You get an update on their position?” Jules asked from the cockpit of the Red Horizon.
They had the ability to run their radar from the front of the ship, but Neil Sullivan wanted to see if he could obtain a visual against the star field as well. That would confirm what the radar was telling them, along with ground-based telemetry data.
“I got them electronically again, but they’re either still running dark or simply not visible with our scope,” Neil said from the observatory pod on top of the ship, halfway between the engines and the cockpit. “I still can’t figure out how in the hell they closed the gap on us.”
The second-in-command wasn’t speaking literally. The ships were almost on the same vector and the same speed. The American ship was slightly faster, but by the smallest of margins, despite the huge increase in delta-v that they achieved on their outbound boost.
“It won’t matter. We’ll have two full days before they arrive, and I don’t intend to waste them,” Jules said over the intercom.
“What if the aliens won’t let you in?” Doctor Hill asked.
Unlike the other nation’s communication system, the Americans primarily used an open air radio channel where all transmissions were audible by all crewmembers. It gave a sense of social properness to the mission, as well as served the function of keeping everyone informed no matter where on the ship they were at any given time.
“That’s where Lieutenant Harris gets to play with his toys,” Jules said, referring to the officer’s explosive equipment that was on board for exactly that purpose.
“So first we nuke their transmitter on the moon, and then we travel all the way to a neighboring planet to blow up their base? That sounds real benign. I’m sure they’ll understand when they get here,” Hill said.
“Nobody said base,” Carter chimed in. “We’re only going to open a door or two, if necessary.”
“Well, let’s see if you can remember that when you’re back on Earth and someone blows the front door to your house down,” Hill said.
“Let’s not get into one of those discussions again, Doctor Hill,” Jules said, referring to the fact that the doctor was something of a pacifist, and definitely against having the SEAL team onboard. Jules thought it was fortunate for him that he didn’t have the experience of one of Major Carter’s lessons in what the Chinese might do.
“This coming from the ambassador of good will, our own esteemed commander?” Hill asked.
“I used to like you, you know,” Jules said.
“Well, I still like you, even if the Russians don’t,” Hill said.
“That was pure business,” Jules said in her defense.
“Yeah, I saw that when Houston commandeered our transceiver. I’m just glad they turned control over it back to us. You can insult them again when they arrive,” Hill said.
Jules smiled, though no one could see it. It was rather impromptu what she had done, and definitely not per protocol, but she couldn’t help herself. She clicked her push-to-talk, or PTT button. “No, I’m done. I said what I had to say, though I’d feel pretty good about leaving just as they’re arriving.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Neil cut in. “We have to think long term here as well. From what Houston is telling us, both the Chinese and the Russians will be stuck on the planet for nearly a year and a half. Assuming their resupply ships have accounted for that, then this means that despite our arriving first, we may find that thirty days isn’t enough time to explore whatever we find.”
“I have to agree with Neil,” Maria, their science officer, said. “We don’t know what we’ll find up there, and we end up having to leave before we can finish our research. So in a way, you could say that by rushing to get here and doing so in such a way that leaves us unprepared to stay, we may have hurt our own longer-term objectives.”
“I thought the reason for the resupply ship was to have a longer-term presence here if necessary?” Carter asked.
Jules jumped in to explain to the major. “Actually the primary purpose of the Ark is to ensure our survival should something go wrong with the Horizon. It’s more of an insurance policy than anything, and remember, while it was augmented to carry food supplies for twelve of us, the planet-side habitation modules, including the air scrubber, water purification system, and other life support critical functions were only designed for six people.”
“A definite issue when the military hitches a ride on a civilian mission,” Hill added.
“That’s unnecessary, Doctor,” Jules said, not wanting to hear another tirade from the younger idealistic man. She was surprised that the major hadn’t offered to give the man a lesson in the need of military protection, but perhaps he no longer had that kind of leeway after the stunt he pulled, along with the admiral, back in Houston. Still, she felt it better if everyone’s mood was kept even-keeled, including her own.
“I won’t say another word,” Hill said.
“I’ll bet twenty that won’t last past dinnertime,” Neil joked.
“I’ll take you up on that twenty,” Jules said.
True to his word, the doctor didn’t speak again. “Well, that was easy,” Maria said. “Did you hear that, Dave?”
“I heard,” Dave said. Dave was their mechanical engineer and was one of the crewmembers onboard Polo One when it was decommissioned. “So what’s your take on the aliens, Maria? I mean, as our science officer, aren’t you trained in the art of thinking like the ETs?”
“We’ve had this discussion before as well,” Jules said, wondering how things got so off track.
“No, it’s all right,” Maria said. “You know, it could very well be that the sentient beings who created the lunar transmitter have long ago went extinct. There may very well be nothing left of them other than these artifacts and relics to indicate that they even existed.”
“Then a lot of this is for nothing,” Carter said.
“Not for nothing,” Maria explained. “Like any anthropological study on earth, what we find about the aliens may very well enlighten us into new ways of thinking, new ways of exploring the universe around us. It’s only been in the last century or so that we started to understand the cosmos in any real significance or meaningful way.”
“I understand that,” Carter said. “I meant more toward the conflict that the discovery has unleashed upon us.”
“The cost was significant as well,” Jules said, remembering the thousands who perished in a myriad of doomsday scenarios and some small acts of lawlessness and disorder around the world, especially in the less prosperous countries.
“Do you think we’ll
find anything substantial down there?” Carter asked.
“I hope so,” Jules said. “Otherwise, it was a very long trip for . . .”
“Aha,” Carter said. “It’s all right, Commander Monroe. You’re the only living human to have seen anything meaningful of their technology. Let’s hope we find something more that can help enlighten us in a more peaceful way.”
“An odd statement coming from a military officer,” Hill said.
“That’ll be twenty, Jules,” Neil said.
“Doctor, you cost me,” Jules said.
“Sorry, Commander, I would’ve thought you’d have learned not to bet on me by now,” Doctor Hill said.
“I stand corrected and won’t repeat the same mistake twice,” Julie said. “For the record, we do have one clear data chip from the alien device. Let’s hope we can pull a full more before the Chinese arrive and nuke it.”
“Speaking of which, what is your plan in case they show up?” Hill asked.
“You asking me?” Jules said.
“Yes, Commander, you’re running the mission up here. What will you do?” Hill asked again.
Jules paused for a moment before answering. “I intend to turn things over to Major Carter and let him deal with it, but if they hurl another nuke at me this time, there will be payback.”
Chapter 21
History
NASA Space Command
Houston, Texas
In the near future, Year 4, Day 174
“T-minus two minutes,” Lisa said, taking over from the flight controller on duty as everyone in the room watched the countdown timer, which was synched with the one on the Red Horizon.
“So how long will it take to receive confirmation of their orbit?” Smith asked from his seat at the back of the room. Rock was standing next to him, about ready to return to his console for the next few hours.
“The signal delay is just under six minutes,” Rock said, knowing that they discussed this more than once in more than one briefing.
“All right, keep us posted,” Smith said.
Rock nodded and walked back over to his console, taking a seat and nodding at Marge, who looked up at him. He put his headset on and listened to the radio chatter, as all systems were reporting in.
“Cutting it a little close, Richard?” Marge’s voice came over the headset, and Rock noticed the private com button light up when she talked. This was on the two-way channel.
Rock pushed his own button to respond. “Yeah, he had some information for us on the Chinese nuclear capacity and wanted to know if our orbit would be higher or lower than theirs.”
“Not that it matters if their rocket has the capability that he said it did last month. It will be able to reach us no matter where in Mars’ gravity well we are with relationship to their own ship.”
“I told him as much,” Rock said.
“All right, let’s hope Jules and her crew gets the Horizon slowed down properly. We had to expend nearly two percent on course corrections the last week to bring us in on the proper vector.”
“They’ll be fine,” Rock said, trying to sound assuring.
“I hope so,” Marge said. “Back to secondary.”
Rock listened as the channel cut out and the main radio traffic on the secondary, local, Houston-based radio resumed as the default setting for his receiver. The clock ticked down, and then Lisa called out the last ten seconds. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . ignition.”
The clock hit zero, and Rock watched as the timer started to reverse itself and go up. The burn would be nearly as long as the boost when they left, sixteen-minutes’ worth, and the fuel savings would come from using aero braking within Mars’ thin atmosphere. The resulting maneuver would save fuel and pull the Horizon into an elliptical orbit around the red planet, allowing it to repeat the maneuver several more times and shorten its oval-shaped path into a tighter circle around Mars.
After a minute, Rock flipped over to the primary channel where everyone else had tuned to in order to monitor the crew of the Horizon in real time, if you could call a nearly six-minute delay real time.
Rock heard Jules’s voice. “T-minus four minutes, thirty seconds. All systems go. Max computing burn adjustments per gravitational fluxes.”
“Entry angle is optimal at minus point zero one two degrees,” Sullivan said. “I got Max showing us within three percent of zero line. This looks to be a good entry.”
The new sixteen K, maximum definition monitors showed various parts of the American crew and cabins. The intense data bandwidth needed to transmit such a clear signal was coming from the main array on top of the Horizon, just fore of the huge engine mounts that were now pointing at the Red Planet. While they showed that they were on standby, the atomic clock they used indicated that they had already started the deceleration burn. It simply took awhile to get the information back via the speed of light.
“How’s Max doing?” Rock asked, and Jack came back with an answer.
“He’s kicking butt over our two silicon-based systems.”
“How’s the data feed into secondary?” Rock asked, referring to the fact that besides calculating all of their rocket propellant flow, burn and orbital entry parameters, their quantum computer was also dumping its analysis directly into the data drives of the silicon backup computer known as secondary. Tertiary was on its own, computing the burn rates and navigational data from the same sensors, but doing so at a much slower rate than the other two computers.
“It’s keeping up with Max’s info dumps, which is helping it outpace our tertiary system,” Jack said, “but both systems are lagging . . . a secondary by only eight seconds while tertiary is down twenty now.”
“And that’s with Max running the secondary ship systems as well, correct?” Rock asked, making sure he was comparing apples to apples here.
“Correct, boss,” Jack said.
Marge jumped in. “Max’s heat levels are well below norms, and the quantum state remains stable.”
Rock understood that quantum computing was still in its infancy, though great strides had been made over the last two decades in moving this new computing platform forward. Unfortunately for them, their earliest models were prone to overheating and fluctuation states when reading data from the atoms.
For that reason, NASA had set up two silicon backup systems, one that took data directly from Max, their super quantum computer. In case it went down, it could pick up where their primary computer left off, and the second backup system was reading data on its own from the same sensors that the other two were tied into. It wasn’t that Max had any sort of artificial intelligence, but the name stuck from the initial program, Maximum Computer Program-Quantum Based. It simply turned into Max for short.
“So now we wait,” Rock said, watching as the feed showed them what had already happened several minutes ago.
The room fell quieter and quieter, as there was less information to share and more observation from what was happening tens of millions of miles away. NASA had never directed a manned space mission from such a distance. There were limits to what could be ordered, calculated, assessed, and acted on with the time differential. Not only would it take five minutes and fifty seconds to receive any signal, radio transmission, or video feed, but it would take the same amount of time to return an answer, instruction, or analysis. Well over eleven minutes for a response, and this was when the Earth-Mars alignment was almost at its closest.
The video finally showed the rockets igniting and the burn of the massive engines as they struggled to slow the large ship as it approached the Red Planet. A small cheer went up when the engines had ignited successfully. That was always one of the most stressful moments of any mission.
The burn went on for a long time, and Rock watched the time count away. There wasn’t much they could do other than annotate for history any failure or success. The crew of the Red Horizon was on their own.
Finally the burn completed as Mars grew large in the main vie
w screen. The lander would not detach until after the ship had completed at least two orbital rotations, and associated aero braking maneuvers to go along with it. Also, the entire timing of the trip was done so that the lowest point of the elliptical orbit, or perigee, was at a certain position relative to the ship and its plane of orbit to allow the lander to have an energy efficient vector to its designated landing point.
As the ship entered the higher atmosphere of the planet, Lisa began to register the heat differential. “External temps at plus twenty-five. Moving to plus thirty.”
“Signal data nominal,” Jack said. “All secondary support systems still green.”
Despite the delay, the NASA space command team was still receiving and reporting on the data from the ship.
“Ready for data hand off in three minutes,” Marge added, noting that once the ship went behind Mars, it could no longer radio back to Earth directly, instead needing to bounce its signal off a nearby communications satellite put into orbit twenty months earlier for this exact purpose.
Lisa continued her readout intermittently for the next forty minutes, interspersed with information on several other sub systems. “External temps now decreasing at plus three hundred ten. Drag coefficient nominal and holding steady at one point three meters per second.”
Rock nodded in approval, though no one was watching him. The atmosphere on Mars was so thin that the drag, or force pressed against the ship, was very light compared to Earth’s air density, and the temperature was well within the capabilities of the ship. If anything, they could have plunged deeper into the atmosphere, but something of this size had never experienced these same forces, and the risk wasn’t necessary.
“Hand off in ten seconds,” Jack said, referring to the fact that the Horizon would be back in line of sight range and no longer needing the assist from the communications satellite.
The ship pulled around the planet, and the speed had come all the way down to sub twenty thousand in miles per hour relative to the planet, as it bled off over half its speed during the approach, and now Mars’ gravity was acting on it in an appreciable way. It would bleed off more speed as it fought against the Red Planet’s gravity well.
Red Horizon: The Truth of Discovery (Discovery Series Book 2) Page 20