Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “Smart boy,” Cheryl said, nodding.

  I compared time stamps in the log with the current wall clock time. “If we want to do our shutdown while they aren’t looking . . . the earliest we can do it is two o’clock this afternoon.” I pulled up an orbital track and blew out a breath. “Which gives us less than an hour to get in, change the passwords, and fire engines to divert the package back to the original target area. Any later than that and we won’t have the delta-V to change course before atmosphere entry.” I tapped my front teeth with my stylus. “Tight. Very tight. But if we try it any earlier than that, they’ll certainly spot the shutdown and know what it means. Then it’ll be a race to see who changes the password first.”

  “And if we lose . . .”

  “Then they’ll have hours to figure out what happened and patch the hole we used. We won’t get another chance.”

  We looked at each other. “So we wait,” she said.

  The hours until two o’clock were not idle—I spent them preparing procedures, scripts, and fallback contingencies. I kept Amanda and the rest of Space Resources in the loop, though at Cheryl’s request I kept her name out of it. “As far as the public is concerned, I’m just your house cleaner. Don’t want to have my name in the papers.”

  “Even as the one who saved San Francisco?”

  “Never liked that town anyway.” But there was a twinkle in her eye as she said it.

  Finally the hour came, and another fifteen minutes to make double-sure, as I hadn’t been able to nail down the hacker dish’s exact longitude. A full hour would have made me more comfortable, but I didn’t have an hour to spare. “Okay,” I said, “here goes.” I tapped Transmit on a prepared command sequence.

  Thirty seconds later the package dropped carrier. The reactor had gone offline, as planned, putting the whole package on emergency battery power. I blew out the breath I’d been holding. “So far, so good. Now we wait.” The safe mode boot sequence would take anything from ninety to three hundred seconds, depending on exactly what the system had been doing when it shut down.

  We waited. Somewhere out in space a computer was rebooting.

  I could only hope that nothing went wrong.

  And then the carrier indicator switched from red to green. “Now!” I said, even as I tapped Transmit.

  A series of bytes flew from my computer to the Deep Space Network control center in Colorado Springs, from which it was immediately routed to Barstow, California, and transmitted to the package by one of an array of dishes, from which it spent about three seconds crossing empty space. The result of that command would take a further three seconds to return.

  I bit my lips. I held my breath.

  The words Password changed appeared on my screen, followed by a single hash mark.

  “We’re in!” I screamed, and grabbed Cheryl and kissed her.

  “Ow,” she replied.

  “Sorry, sorry.” I backed off. “I don’t even like girls.”

  “Neither did my second husband, alas. Come on, there’s work to do.”

  The first order of business was to change all the passwords and certificates. I had a command file prepared, so that didn’t take long. Next I upgraded the reactor firmware to version 12 to close the barn door I’d entered by. That took a little longer, and by the time it was done, I had the first proper telemetry from the package in days. “I’ve got my baby back,” I crooned.

  The package’s attitude and trajectory were perfect for atmospheric entry over Kamchatka. “They might be evil hackers,” I said, “but they know their stuff.” All I needed to do now was to redirect the package to Baja California, where a Space Resources pickup boat awaited. I double-checked the thrust sequence I’d previously prepared, tweaked it to account for the latest telemetry, and tapped Transmit.

  Six seconds later the acknowledgement arrived as expected, and I sighed with relief.

  Then came an alarm tone, and the message Equipment failure. “What?!” I cried.

  “Don’t panic,” Cheryl chided me.

  Cursing the Space Exploitation Licensing Board who had kept my baby confined to a warehouse for three damaging years—not for the first time—I checked system status, ran diagnostics, worked through troubleshooting checklists. “It’s the goddamn main hydrazine valve again,” I spat at last. “Damn thing sticks half the time even when it’s at proper operating temperature, but with the reactor shut down . . .” I stopped dead.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The valve’s frozen. I usually boost reactor power to unfreeze it . . .”

  Appalled comprehension dawned on Cheryl’s face. “But the reactor’s shut down.”

  “And it takes six hours to bring it back up.”

  We didn’t have six hours. We had at most two.

  I put my head in my hands. “We were so close . . .”

  “No time for regrets. Look at the orbital track.”

  The main engine had fired for several seconds before the valve had seized, diverting the package from the mid-Pacific toward Baja California.

  Most of the way . . . but not far enough.

  The new projected impact site was an ellipse that included most of Los Angeles. Even a near-miss would raise a tsunami that would wipe out half the city. And there wasn’t time to evacuate.

  The package would burn off most of its kinetic energy, along with the silicate crust, in the atmosphere, but the molybdenum core’s impact energy at the surface would still be in the vicinity of a hundred kilotons.

  About six Hiroshimas.

  And there was no way to stop it—no asteroid defense system. Just like climate change and the oil crisis and the ocean die-off, everyone had seen the problem coming for years but no one had ever been willing to do anything about it. And that wasn’t going to change in the next two hours.

  “There has to be something you can do.”

  “There isn’t. The package has only one main engine, and the valve is a single point of failure.”

  “Then use the other engines!”

  I shook my head. I had never felt so tired in my life. “Not enough delta-V.”

  “Don’t give up!” Cheryl’s red, tired eyes were as intense as I’d ever seen them—and in the last however-many hours we’d spent together, I’d seen them pretty intense. “It’s never too late! There’s always another solution!”

  “I’m sorry, Cheryl. This valve problem is pretty intractable. We’ve worked out a lot of tweaks to get past it, over the years, but they all take time.”

  “Time we don’t have.”

  “Yeah.” I looked at the dot moving along the orbital track. “Yeah.”

  The dot represented my package. My baby. My retirement fund. My San Francisco condo. My lack of bankruptcy.

  Six Hiroshimas.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I picked up my stylus and programmed a thrust sequence. It was so simple and basic I didn’t bother simulating it. I just tapped Transmit.

  Three seconds later, somewhere out in space, a vernier thruster fired, and the nose of the lifting body angled up by about twenty degrees.

  “That’s it,” I said, and slumped in my chair. My stylus clattered to the floor. I didn’t bother picking it up.

  “What have you done?”

  “I’ve changed the package’s attitude. When it hits the atmosphere, instead of entering it’ll tumble and burn up over the Pacific.”

  Cheryl just looked at me, comprehension darkening her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, and held out her arms.

  I rested my head against her shoulder and let her pat my back while I cried.

  After a while she handed me a tissue and I wiped my eyes. “Still,” she said, “you did save Los Angeles. I imagine they’ll be rather grateful for that.”

  “I imagine they will.”

  Together we watched the dot creep toward its rendezvous with the atmosphere.

  It was going to be quite a show.

&
nbsp; * * *

  David D. Levine is the author of over fifty published science fiction and fantasy stories. His work has appeared in markets including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy and has won or been nominated for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Campbell. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kate Yule, with whom he coedits the fanzine Bento.

  Another potential for corporate involvement are space elevators and other stations above the Earth such as the setting for our next tale. When her partner passes out, a female astronaut must work to save both of their lives in . . .

  TEN DAYS UP

  by Curtis C. Chen

  The alert sounded right after lunchtime: high temperature warning, cargo pod two.

  “Your shift, lady,” Nick said. He pointed to the board showing our assigned extra-vehicular activity rotations.

  I suited up with minimal complaining—that Nick could hear, anyway—and went EVA to inspect the cargo pod while he ran remote diagnostics. We left the cargo bay doors open to radiate heat while hunting down the malfunction.

  I had just finished tracing a coolant intake pipe down the side of the nonstandard cargo pod, and started cursing whatever third-rate South Pacific factory was responsible for its manufacture, when I felt dust impacts ringing against the thin walls of the cargo bay and vibrating through my boots.

  The micrometeoroids were nothing unusual—just the disintegrated remains of some orbiting space junk. They might have circled Earth for decades before hitting anything, and wouldn’t have been an issue except for the work delay. You can’t expose delicate components while tiny rocks are battering your equipment.

  I didn’t want to go back inside and then spend another hour cleaning and reprepping my spacesuit. Most dust storms passed in just a few minutes, and damage wasn’t an issue—both my suit and the cargo pod were well-armored.

  “I’m going to wait this out here,” I told Nick.

  “Do I offend?” he replied with a sniffle.

  “The hell does that mean?”

  The tiny video Nick in my heads-up display shook his head. “It’s a euphemism for body odor.” Then another sniffle.

  “I just don’t want to catch your stupid virus,” I said.

  “I am not sick.”

  I scoffed. Nick had nearly coughed up a lung at Clarke’s Pub the night before we left Earth, and I’d watched him buy some loose pills from a young entrepreneur in the back of the bar. “Masking the symptoms doesn’t mean you’re not contagious. I swear to God, if I didn’t need the hours, I would have ratted you out before they loaded the train.”

  “I’m not sick,” Nick repeated. “And what’s all this about hours, anyway? Doesn’t your lawyer husband make enough scratch to support you and the rugrat?”

  “It’s not about money.” I turned to look down, past the edge of the receiver hex under the pod, at the Earth below. “It’s about qualification. Now shut up, I’m enjoying the view.”

  “Whatever.”

  The radio squawked. “Sierra Zero Nine, this is Gladstone Control. Got a weather update for you.”

  Nick coughed, then replied, “Gladstone, Sierra, roger that. We almost done with this rock concert?”

  “No idea,” the Control voice said. “I’m uplinking a solar activity alert. SOHO is predicting M-class flares within the hour.”

  I thumbed the transmit switch on my wrist controls. “Nick, let me see that alert.”

  He frowned. “What, you don’t trust me to read a damn screen?”

  “I just want to see for myself,” I said. “I’m the one who gets fried out here, right?”

  “Fine.” He jabbed at his controls, missed, and looked confused. “That’s weird.”

  “You okay, partner?”

  “I’m fine!” His forehead glistened with sweat. When had that happened? “Sending uplink now.”

  My helmet display lit up with the space weather advisory. I checked the hazard ratings. There was major gamma radiation coming our way—more than my suit was rated for.

  “Okay, I’m calling it.” I snapped my tether back on the work line leading to the airlock. “Prep for ingress.”

  The micrometeoroids were still serenading us with white noise, so it took me a few seconds to realize that Nick hadn’t acknowledged my last. I looked at his video and saw a limp arm floating above the console.

  “Nick?” No response. “Dammit, Nick!”

  I toggled my radio from our local frequency to the control band. “Gladstone, Sierra. My partner just passed out.”

  “Sierra, Gladstone. What do you mean, passed out?”

  “I mean he’s unconscious!” I demagnetized my boots and pulled myself out of the cargo bay. “I’m going to need an override procedure for the airlock.”

  “Stand by,” the controller said.

  I moved in silence until he returned a minute later.

  “Sierra, Gladstone,” the controller said, “we have an update on those solar flares. The one-hour estimate was inaccurate.”

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “You’ve only got twenty minutes.”

  I’ve always wanted to fly. Into the black, slip the surly bonds, all that buzz. And when Haley Wu became the first human being to set foot on the Red Planet—that was it. I’ve still got my “Comet Hits Mars” T-shirt from fifth grade, threadbare and nearly unreadable now, but I’ll never throw it out.

  The day of the Mars landing changed my life. I was ten years old and watching a woman make history fifteen light-minutes away. At that moment, I knew I could do anything I wanted. It didn’t matter if I was a girl; there was no such thing as “just a girl” anymore. And I wanted to be an astronaut.

  The punchline is, gender aside, I wasn’t elite enough to break into the big leagues. That’s the real deal: working for a national space agency, doing hard science, unraveling the mysteries of the universe. But there’s no profit in pure research, and a very limited number of governments still put humans into space. These days it’s all robots and telepresence, and not everybody likes math that much.

  Of course, private firms are always looking for outer space technicians. Satellites and stations don’t fix themselves—not yet, anyway—and there’s plenty of room in Earth orbit for workers who can handle the high-wire act. They can’t legally call us “astronauts,” but who cares what’s on the dox when you get to see the curve of the planet and the stars beyond?

  I ended up on the space elevator—sorry, the “McCormick-Dewey ground-to-orbit lifting conduit.” That’s the official name. Everyone on the job just calls it “the EL.” I work an on-call service rotation, riding up and down one train every month. It’s not exactly rocket science, but ostechs get paid well, and like HR says, we have a fantastic view.

  “I’ve tried three times, Gladstone,” I said, doing my best to stay calm. “Airlock is jammed. Outer door is not, repeat, not opening. Please advise.”

  “Copy that, Sierra, stand by. Is your Ops still not responding?”

  I leaned over the top edge of the crew compartment and banged my multitool against one of the raised observation bubbles. Nick’s unconscious body had drifted out of view on the video feed, but there was no way he wouldn’t hear that noise.

  “Negative, Gladstone.” I started to put away the multitool, then had a thought. “Hey, how about this? I can smash through the airlock window. I’ll seal the breach with my helmet after I get inside.”

  “Negative, Sierra,” the controller said. “You can’t hold your breath that long.”

  “You don’t know that. I need to minimize my radiation exposure.” I raised the multitool with both hands.

  “Sierra, be advised your airlock is not adequately shielded for M-flares.”

  I lowered the multitool. “Are we on speaker, Gladstone?” I didn’t want the entire control room to hear what I wanted to say next.

  After a pause, the controller said, “You’re on headset, Sierra. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got less than twelve fu
cking minutes until a wave of lethal radiation destroys my immune system.” I was starting to reconsider putting that countdown timer in my HUD. “You get me some fucking options or I’m smashing my way into the cabin. I can get a helmet onto Nick before he suffocates—”

  “Okay, two things, Sierra,” the controller said. “One, please watch your language. This conversation is being recorded for training purposes. Two, this is not your decision. Unless you completed a medical degree in the last week, you don’t know that your Ops will survive the exposure.”

  I looked around the hexagonal ascender vehicle. “Then you tell me what the hell I can cannibalize from this train to make a radiation shield—” My eyes stopped on the open cargo bay doors. I had an idea.

  “Did not copy your last. Say again, Sierra?”

  “Stop calling me ‘Sierra.’ I had an aunt named Sierra. I hated her.” I began moving toward the cargo bay. “My name’s Kenna. And I need you to look up the cargo manifest for our pod number two.”

  Sometimes, when I tell people a round trip on the space elevator takes twenty days, they’re shocked that the travel time is so long. But ten days up is a bargain.

  An EL train moves at a hundred and sixty kilometers per hour. You launch from “Anchor,” the company’s equatorial deep-sea platform, right after breakfast. By lunchtime, you’ve passed low Earth orbit, where the old International Space Station used to fly. Your destination is the McCormick-Dewey Geostationary Orbital Transfer Station—”GEO”—orbiting more than thirty-six thousand kilometers above the planet.

  That’s a tenth of the way to the Moon. Yes, it takes a week and a half to get there, but the EL doesn’t require hundred-meter-tall rockets, millions of kilograms of specialized fuel, or multiple integral calculus to operate. For the cost of two hundred hours of microwave-beamed electricity, you can buy your very own ascent to an altitude where Earth is the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.