Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  But we don’t get many passengers on the EL. A ten-day-long elevator ride is not hugely interesting for anyone. Most space tourists opt for a Kármán-line rubber-stamp flight, or a private rocket to one of many low-Earth-orbit sightseeing platforms. GEO is not a vacation spot; it’s where the commerce of the Solar System begins.

  Most of the bays on an EL train carry cargo, which is why the bay walls don’t protect against hazardous radiation. Clients shipping fragile or perishable goods must provide their own, shielded, cargo storage pods.

  “Seriously? Your name is Roger?”

  “Hey, you asked,” the controller said. “My parents didn’t know I would pick this career.”

  Confession: I’m terrible at small talk. Especially if you’re a flight controller and your first name happens to be a voice procedure keyword.

  “Okay, Roger—no, dammit, I can’t do it,” I said, already giggling. “Sorry. I’m just going to call you ‘Gladstone.’ Or would you prefer ‘Control’?”

  “I’m indifferent,” Roger said flatly.

  “I guess your parents weren’t British, either.”

  “Polynesian.”

  I finally managed to stop laughing. “Okay. Any word on that manifest, Gladstone?”

  “Still waiting to clear Legal.”

  “I’m a little short on time here.” SOHO showed less than nine minutes before the first solar flare.

  “We’re doing our best.” I heard a muffled voice—someone off-mic in the control room. “Wait one.”

  He clicked off the line. I stared at the sealed cargo pod in bay two: a long, white, rectangular shape, nearly as big as the cabin which Nick and I inhabited during transit. The only markings on the pod’s surface were encrypted bar codes, but this was the cooling rig that had malfunctioned. If the cargo inside was sensitive enough to require precise temperature regulation, it probably needed radiation shielding, too.

  Roger’s voice came back. “Sorry, Kenna, we’re still trying to contact the shipper.”

  “Look, Gladstone, I don’t recognize this make, but if I pop the clamps, there should be a serial number on the bottom panel. Will that be enough for you to find an override procedure?”

  “That’s not the problem,” Roger said. “Legal says we need the shipper’s express permission to access their cargo in transit. It’s a . . . contractual issue.”

  I counted to ten before responding. “Are you still recording this conversation? For training purposes?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Gladstone Control,” I said, enunciating clearly, “this is Outer Space Technician Kenna Belecky, work code Sierra Zero Niner, requesting clarification: are you telling me that McCormick-Dewey International considers the contents of a single cargo pod to be more valuable than the life of one of their employees?”

  Static hissed at me. “Sierra, Gladstone, please stand by.”

  I didn’t wait. Whatever the company wanted to do to me after this—dismissal, lawsuit, blacklisting—I’d worry about that later. I wasn’t going to die up here. I wasn’t going to succumb to radiation poisoning before my son graduated high school. That wasn’t going to happen.

  I fired up my plasma cutter and carved into the pod’s lockout panel.

  The cargo turned out to be medical blister trays of little green pills, sealed in thin cardboard boxes and packed inside translucent polymer crates. All the text was in Hindi, which I’d never learned to read, but pharmaceuticals were definitely perishable and radiation-sensitive. Each shelf of crates had its own cooling apparatus. The walls of the pod were as thick as the width of my palm. Maybe not the best shielding ever, but still better than my spacesuit.

  The clock in my helmet pinged. Seven minutes until the flares hit.

  No time for finesse. Everything I threw out of the pod would burn up on reentry anyway. I ripped crates off the shelves nearest the door to make room for my spacesuited body, then turned down the power on my cutter and softened each metal shelf until I could bend it out of the way.

  That was the most nerve-wracking part: I had to work quickly, but avoid burning through the cooling tubes lining the shelves. A leak would mean balls of thick eutectic gel floating everywhere and obscuring my vision. I finished with less than a minute to spare, unreeled my suit’s auxiliary antenna, and stuck the far end to the outside of the pod, hoping the door seal wouldn’t crush it completely.

  My clock pinged again. I pulled the door shut, sealing myself in total darkness except for my HUDs. The SOHO feed showed radiation surging around Earth’s magnetosphere. My medical monitors all glowed green. I was safe. Now I just had to wait out the solar activity—an hour, maybe two—and hope Ground Control had things sorted out by then.

  I was actually dozing off when the entire pod lurched, banged against something, and started tumbling.

  ***

  “What the hell do you mean, separated?”

  I was yelling. I couldn’t help it. I was on the verge of completely losing it, and Roger was not helping.

  “You broke the seal on the cargo pod,” he said. “It was programmed to release docking clamps upon reaching its destination, and opening the door is a signal indicating end of transport.”

  “I didn’t unlock the door,” I said. “I cut through the damned lock, because you people wouldn’t tell me—”

  “I didn’t say ‘unlock,’” Roger snapped. “I said ‘open.’ You interrupted the circuit. If you had waited for us to clear Legal—”

  “If I had waited, I’d be dead,” I said.

  The line was silent for a moment. “You know what? Let’s just move on.”

  “Fine.” I took a deep breath. “Now what?”

  “We’re tracking the pod.” I heard keystrokes. “You’re in freefall right now, with an orbital period of one hundred and thirteen minutes. The flares will subside before you complete half an orbit. I’ll tell you when it’s safe, and you can exit the pod. Then we need to maneuver you back to a safe docking trajectory.”

  “Sorry, Gladstone, I understood all the individual words there, but I’m not sure I got your meaning.”

  “You’re going to crash into the EL ribbon and grab onto it,” he said. “But first you need to burn off some velocity.”

  Maybe it didn’t look like such a crazy plan on paper, or in Roger’s computer simulations. But he could see the big picture. I was hurtling around the planet at seven kilometers per second. I wouldn’t see the ribbon until I collided with it.

  The tether connecting Anchor and GEO is called “the ribbon” because it’s flat, so the ascender vehicle’s wheels can press against it on either side, holding a train on the track by friction alone. The shape was dictated by efficiency. It takes no power for an EL train to stay clamped on, and the rolling action causes minimal wear and tear.

  The carbon nanotube in the ribbon is stronger than diamond, but it’s flexible—it has to bend, in order to survive the normal swaying that occurs as trains move up and down its length. Any change in altitude causes a change in angular momentum: a rising EL train pulls the ribbon westward; a descending train yanks the ribbon eastward. Coriolis effect. We compensate by scheduling only one transit at a time, limiting our vertical speed, and using thrusters on the train and at both endpoints—Anchor and GEO—to null out excessive motion.

  Anchor had survived several tropical storms in the past, so I knew the EL could handle pretty severe vibrations. I just didn’t know how the ribbon would react to a one-hundred-kilogram mass hitting it dead on. Or whether the one-hundred-kilogram mass would still be alive after impact.

  “Coming up on final course correction,” Roger said.

  I had been clinging to the outside of the cargo pod for nineteen minutes. This was my ninth course correction.

  The pod had started tumbling end over end when it fell off the train. I needed to stop that rotation before attempting any other maneuvers. After the solar flares passed, I had crawled outside, flattened myself against one end of the pod, and used the reaction
control system in my spacesuit to counteract our spinning.

  After stabilizing the pod, I lined up its long axis with our direction of travel, so the door was facing “forward.” I had to work the RCS manually, with Roger directing me, and any mistake—too much or too little thrust, too long or too short a burst, not quite the right angle—was magnified as my orbit brought me closer and closer to the EL.

  Roger was kind enough to not tell me when I had over- or undercorrected. He just gave me a new vector each time, in a calm and steady voice.

  “I feel like I’m wasting a lot of reaction mass,” I said. “RCS fuel’s down by half.”

  “You’re still good,” Roger said. “You needed the pod’s extra mass to dampen your acceleration. Hohmann transfers at this scale are finicky, and your suit thrusters aren’t precision instruments.”

  “I am going to pretend I understood all that,” I said, “and then just push whatever buttons you tell me.”

  Roger read off a thrust vector, and I programmed it into my suit jets. I had no idea how far off course I still was. My suit didn’t include a radar unit. Even if I could find visual references, like known satellites or orbital stations, I couldn’t accurately judge distances by eye. I was depending entirely on Roger’s math to get me home.

  “Good to go,” I said.

  “Thrust on my mark,” he said, and counted me down from five.

  When he said “zero,” I started the program. I felt and heard the jets firing, a gentle pressure against my back and a soft hissing noise that came in pulses—a safety feature, to prevent an operator from building up too much velocity while spacewalking. I’d have to un-safe the RCS later.

  One thing at a time, Kenna.

  A few seconds later, the suit jets cut out, leaving me in silence again.

  “Talk to me, Gladstone,” I said.

  “Stand by, Sierra.”

  I waited for Roger’s ground computer to plot my new trajectory. I turned my head and saw the Earth below. Heavy cloud cover obscured land masses and oceans, so I couldn’t tell which continent I was looking at. I turned my head the other way and saw an endless black void.

  “You know why I was working this shift in the first place?” I heard myself saying. “Because I wanted the hours. I wanted to qualify for unaided spaceflight. I wanted to get promoted off the EL and into free transport.

  “Which is stupid, right? Because I’d be working just as much, away from my family for just as long, and I wouldn’t even have this view. I’d be stuck in a tin can for weeks on end, with nothing but black out the window. Why the hell do I want that? Why am I going to die for something so stupid?”

  I stopped to keep myself from crying. I couldn’t have a nervous breakdown now.

  “You’re not going to die,” Roger said, the slightest tinge of anger coloring his voice. “And it’s not stupid to want more—to want to fly.”

  A laugh choked its way out of my throat. “I guess I’m flying now.”

  “You’re doing fine, Kenna,” Roger said, in a softer voice. “We’re going to get you home. Just don’t wig out, okay?”

  “Thanks for the sage advice.”

  “Okay, I’ve got the numbers back. You are on course, repeat, on course.” Roger’s voice brightened. “Intercept in twelve minutes, that’s seven-two-zero seconds. Go for braking maneuver.”

  “Copy that,” I said. “Setting up retro burn now.”

  The course corrections had been the easy part. I was definitely going to collide with the EL now. This next bit would determine whether I survived the impact.

  An hour ago, when I had tested the flammability of the coolant gel inside the pitch-black cargo pod, the flaring brightness and positive sensor readouts in my HUD had been a flash of hope. Now, as I prepared to detonate my improvised explosive, I wondered if that fire would burn me to death before the crash into the EL could. I wasn’t sure which one would be more unpleasant.

  It was ironic, really: the same shoddy safety standards that had caused this cargo pod to fail, putting me outside the train at just the wrong time, were also going to be responsible for my rescue. Shipping companies aren’t required to use non-flammable coolants unless they’re for life support or installed within a certain distance of manned crew compartments. The blue gel flowing through cargo pod two’s cooling tubes had burned clean and hot when I ignited it with my cutter. It had a ridiculously high combustion temperature, it needed an oxidizer to burn, and it wouldn’t be half as efficient as my suit thrusters—but there was a lot more coolant gel in the pod than fuel left in my RCS.

  Siphoning the coolant out of the tubes had been easy. Hacking together a complete retro rocket from parts never intended for propulsion service had been much trickier. First I cut a hole in the pod door, then removed one of my RCS thruster nozzles and welded it onto that opening, measuring and remeasuring to make sure everything was lined up precisely. Next I packed all the coolant into one plastic crate, cannibalized one of my spacesuit’s oxygen tanks plus its valve assembly, rigged all that to the inside of the door nozzle, and attached my plasma cutter as an ignition charge.

  If this didn’t work, I wouldn’t have enough air to make another orbit. My hands trembled while I rewired my backup hand radio into a remote detonator. I willed myself not to hyperventilate as I crawled to the far end of the pod.

  Don’t wig out. Don’t wig out. Don’t wig out . . .

  “Gladstone, I am in position,” I said at last. “How’s my trajectory looking?”

  “Looking good,” Roger said. “Any time you’re ready.”

  I placed my spacesuited self as flat as I could against the pod, clanking the back of my helmet against the hard surface. “I’d feel better about this if I had some padding.”

  “You’ve only got one rescue kit. You’re going to need that for the ribbon.” The retro burn would slow my approach speed from several thousand meters per second to only a few hundred meters per second, which was still suicidal, but we were hoping that my rescue gear would absorb most of that remaining velocity.

  “If this explosion doesn’t kill me first.”

  “It’s a controlled blast,” Roger said. “It’s going to work. Trust me, I did the math.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Retro burn in three, two, one, zero.”

  Before getting this job on the EL, I had spent six months in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, running exploratory demolitions for mining concerns. I’d blown up a lot of big rocks, but I was never on the ground during a blast. Even in training, we used remotes. The closest I ever got to an explosion was when Travis wanted to see what would happen if he microwaved one of his air scooter’s spent battery packs.

  I didn’t expect the burn to be so loud. Outer space is hard vacuum, dead quiet. When my cutter ignited the mixture of coolant gel and pure oxygen, it was a firebomb going off inside a sealed metal box with one tiny opening. The blast only had one place to go—out through the nozzle in the door—and the kinetic energy of that plume of flame kicked back against the pod’s orbital velocity. The coolant burned unevenly, sputtering in an irregular ska-jazz rhythm and rattling the pod’s exterior hull against the back of my helmet. I hoped my welds would hold.

  “This is really how we used to get into space?” I asked nobody in particular. “Strap yourself to a tube full of explosives, and then set it on fire?”

  “Hey, rockets got us to the Moon,” Roger said. The radio sounded fuzzy over the noise.

  “The Moon’s a dump,” I said. “Total junkyard. Even the museum’s crap.”

  “I’d just like to see it with my own eyes, you know? Stand in Armstrong’s footprints, cover the Earth with my thumb.”

  “Oh God, you’re a tourist,” I groaned. “Trust me. Luna’s not worth it. You want to see a real moon, go to Titan.”

  “Someday,” Roger said. “You’re at twenty-five hundred mips and—”

  Something inside the pod exploded with a muffled boom, smacking the hull backward into my helmet. I spat ou
t a long string of curses, then waited, expecting Roger to comment on my unladylike language. Nothing came.

  “Gladstone, what’s my delta-vee? Gladstone, do you read?” I shouted into the radio. The noise behind my skull seemed louder, as if combustion inside the pod had suddenly accelerated.

  Another stream of expletives escaped my lips as the Earth crept up into my field of view.

  I knew what the explosion had been. It was my cutter, bursting open when the surrounding heat passed the melting point of its exterior casing. We had expected that, and it was a good thing. A hotter burn meant I would slow down even more. The bad news: the second blast must have deformed the exhaust nozzle, and now the pod was no longer thrusting true.

  It was pushing me down toward Earth.

  “Gladstone, I am tilting forward! I need a reverse vector!” The hazy curve of the planet continued moving upward. “Gladstone, please respond!”

  An alert popped up in my helmet display: EXTERIOR TEMPERATURE WARNING. The pod wasn’t insulated against this much direct heat. The fuel inside my plasma cutter must have acted as an accelerant—

  “Plasma!” I said out loud, followed by more cursing.

  The fuel in my cutter was designed to combust in a very specific way. My jerry-rigged rocket was no longer just burning; it was now expelling a superheated, high-velocity stream of ionized particles. The entire metal exterior of the cargo pod had become a giant electromagnet, interfering with radio communications.

  I wouldn’t be talking to Roger again until my rotgut rocket fuel ran out. If I wanted to stop this new rotation from pushing me off course, I had to do it myself.

  Think, dammit, think! The Earth grew bigger, a giant ball coming up to meet me. That image triggered a thought. Ball. Sphere. Rotating!