She had used a microscope to observe the effects of spaceflight on urchin embryo development. The study was designed to provide insight into the causes and cures of osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy. And she followed the calcium formation of a mussel’s shell, to shed light on the bone depletion suffered by humans in space. The creatures’ unusual swimming and feeding patterns, carefully recorded on video, were studied to provide pointers on how the oceans’ fish populations might better be managed. Jiang also spent much time studying the embryos of starfish. The purpose was to learn how to predict and control early birth defects in humans. The embryo of a starfish, in early stages of development, was remarkably similar to that of a human…
The bioscience program was genuine work. But it was essentially a blind: a misdirection, intended to confuse anyone following her mission suspiciously.
In some senses she was lying, and she felt obscure shame about that: to come all the way out here, fifteen times as far as the Moon was from Earth—an astounding technical feat, especially for a country which a century ago had been an agricultural backwater—and lie!
And yet, she felt, on another level she was telling a greater truth, a truth that transcended the exigencies of her mission.
Earth was not alone. Earth and Moon swam together through a sea of objects, of varying Sizes, called NEOs: near-Earth objects, also called Earth-crossing asteroids.
The object of Jiang’s mission was known as NEO 2002OA, discovered in 2002. It was a mountain-sized rock, covered with impact craters and a regolith—a pulverized surface layer—like the Moon’s. It was on a course which would bring it within a million miles of Earth: just four times the distance from Earth to Moon, only some one hundredth of the distance from Earth to sun.
There were three hundred thousand NEOs a hundred yards across or bigger, and some two thousand half a mile across or bigger. Some were rocky, some metallic, others rich in organics.
Earth sat at the bottom of the deepest gravity well between sun and Jupiter. Over billions of years, twenty percent of all the NEOs would impact the planet.
It was undoubtedly true, she had learned, that if humanity was to have a long-term future, leaving the planet and dispersing was the only option. Space travel was no leisure luxury for a rich world, but essential for the survival of the species.
Perhaps, she comforted herself, her mission—successful or otherwise—might spur a greater awareness of the hazardous environment within which humanity had, perforce, made its home; perhaps, in some ultimate long term, she might actually prove the savior of humanity.
Perhaps she might be remembered as mankind’s greatest hero.
Rather than as its supreme villain.
Three days from her closest approach, with the asteroid grown massive in her window, she saw the flashes of the drone warheads which had preceded her.
The weapons had emplaced themselves close to the asteroid, though away from its surface. The flashes looked like miniature dawns. They were immediately surrounded by surges of debris from the asteroid’s pulverized surface, which rocketed out in well-defined jets, some fragments glowing white-hot.
There was, of course, no heat, no sound, no concussion wave transmitted from the massive explosions—though her heart quailed as she looked into the fusion light.
She carefully observed the explosions, and prepared to compute their consequences.
The mission philosophy was simple. The smallest impulse required to deflect that rocky body was more than could feasibly be delivered by a single weapon. Too large an explosion, besides, could shatter the object, removing its usefulness.
Therefore a string of automated weapons had been launched by Long March boosters over the days preceding Jiang’s own launch. The necessary impulse would be applied, not by one large detonation, but by a series of smaller ones. Tianming was distinguished only in carrying the last—albeit the largest—of the weapon set, to deliver the final tweak to the asteroid’s new trajectory.
The mission design offered a chance for more accuracy, besides. The asteroid still had to travel many millions of miles along its new path. The successive explosions could be used to herd the asteroid closer towards the required final trajectory. The last detonation was, of course, the final opportunity for adjustment.
It was explained to Jiang, carefully, that China lacked the facility for sufficiently precise deep space tracking of either the asteroid or an unmanned spacecraft, and the robotic expertise to enable such a craft to navigate itself, sufficiently precisely. Only a human navigator—such as herself—using optical techniques on the spot could make the precise measurements of the deflection achieved of the asteroid by the unmanned probes, and then emplace the final weapon sufficiently precisely to achieve the last elements of the required deflection.
Such was her purpose.
It was also explained, equally carefully, that time, resource deficiencies and mission constraints were such that it had not been possible to provide a separable delivery system for the weapon itself. Nor any return or reentry provisions for the crew. That is, it was necessary for Tianming to remain in place during the explosion.
This was a factor which she took into account, in the course of her decision to accept the mission.
To fly in space: to venture once again beyond the atmosphere, to become the first Chinese to venture beyond low Earth orbit, the first Chinese to spend a hundred days in space—for that, she had, to her own surprise, been willing to exchange everything. Her life.
Even her place in history.
Jiang Ling was a spaceflight junkie.
It was even possible, she mused, that had this flight been offered even to some of the one hundred frustrated American astronauts, dispersing slowly from Houston, some of them may have accepted, so great was the lure of returning to the secret place, to space.
And having made her bargain, she would, of course, complete her mission.
It was conceivable that the detonations would he observed from the United States itself, and elsewhere. If they were, the Party had a further plausible cover story, she knew: that the explosions were being used in a scientific analysis of the asteroid’s structure.
The light faded rapidly The debris cloud dispersed quickly—or rather, the asteroid’s new orbit took it away from the fragments blown out of it by the weapons.
The dosimeter aboard Tianming indicated that the radiation dose she had already taken exceeded nominal safety limits.
Jiang Ling smiled.
She picked up her optical navigation gear—a sextant with a simple telescope—and began to study the new position of the asteroid.
On the last day before closest approach, she found it more difficult than before to comply with the order to complete her three hours’ cycling.
For her final broadcast she chose to feature the aquarium. She positioned the camera so that it focused on the apparatus, and then moved so that her own face was in the shot, close to the aquarium. For the benefit of the video camera, she made a show of peering into the microscope; her vision filled with blue water light. She spoke in her broadcast about th ese little creatures being her fellow passengers aboard Tianming.
It was a little corny, but it contained the essential truth. Somewhere in the milky-blue images of squirming sea urchins and eerily human starfish embryos, somewhere in this drop of the primeval sea which she had carried with her, so far from Earth, there was a sense of unity with all life, a hope of salvation.
She was not alone, even here, so far from the planet which had spawned her; she was still as one with all the creatures of the world.
Her greatest regret, in fact—which grew as 2002OA loomed—was that the thousands of creatures in this aquarium could not hope to survive the events to come.
Jiang Ling could no longer see Earth, Moon or sun.
On this, the hundredth day, the dark hide of 2002OA slid past the small window of Tianming.
It was as if she was flying over some miniature Moon, she thought. The surface
was so pierced and broken by craters of all sizes that it was impossible to tell, by eye, how far away it was; she might have been in an Apollo spacecraft sailing over the surface of the Moon, sixty miles below, or peering through some camera at a plaster mockup, just out of arm’s reach.
The spacecraft was in the shadow of the asteroid now, and only the spotlights of Tianmimg illuminated the surface, less than a mile from the craft: she fired her camera through the window, and the digitized photographs of churned regolith were sent immediately to the ground stations.
She heard the clatter of solenoids, felt the judder of the craft as it was pushed by squirts of the automatic reaction control system.
She was beyond the useful reach of her optical navigation; now, the automatic systems of the spacecraft had come into their own—particularly the radar, which would determine Tianming’s distance from the asteroid surface, and match it to the ground-based calculations using her astronomical observations of the asteroid’s new path.
For optimal yield, the warhead required a standoff detonation, with the warhead placed forty percent of the object’s radius above the surface. There, the weapon could irradiate an ideal thirty percent of the surface of 2002OA.
The weapon had been engineered to maximize its production of neutrons, which would be absorbed by the top few inches of the crust. The irradiated shell would heat, expand and spill away, thus imparting a rocketlike stress wave impulse to the asteroid.
From now on, until the mission reached its conclusion, Jiang Ling was a passenger.
She found the thought oddly restful.
She went to her sleeping cupboard, and retrieved the small brass bell. She rattled it, and the small clapper rang against the wall of the bell, and she stared into the corpulent, smiling face of ta laorenjia.
She ate a final breakfast. She found the ground crew had packed a special, final meal: duck, pork with rice, and even a small bulb of chemshu, a rice liqueur.
She ate with relish. Then she carefully tidied away the plate and cutlery and enclosed microgravity cups.
It was hard to imagine that in a few minutes none of this familiar cabin and environment would exist; it was right to behave as if that were not so.
According to her mission clock, the final moment was mere seconds away. She had requested that the cabin camera be disabled, and that the radio link be kept silent.
She didn’t want a countdown. And she had said her goodbyes.
The last person she had embraced, on Earth, was her mother.
A little before detonation, Jiang Ling pressed her fists into the sockets of her eyes.
She saw the complete bone structure of her hands, like an X-ray, drenched in pink light.
There was a moment of heat—
It was Benacerraf who found the methane vent.
She continued to ban any EVA beyond the walk-back limit, despite her mountain-top adventure. Rosenberg had set up a systematic program to take atmospheric and surface samples from the area around Tartarus they could reach in a couple of hours. So he sent Benacerraf in her snowshoes striking across the featureless, dull ground to the northwest. After a couple of miles, as he had instructed, she filled up her little sample bottles and started to return.
As she returned—taking a sighting on the white crest of Mount Othrys, visible as a hulking silhouette through the haze—she came upon a place where the gumbo appeared to have a different consistency, a lighter color.
She stopped, right in the middle of the discoloration patch.
She dug at the gumbo with her snowshoe, and bent down to take a closer look. The light was even worse than usual; they were coming to the end of one of the eight-day-long Titan “days,” and the methane overcast was heavy. But even in the dim, dried-blood light, she could see there was something unusual about the gumbo here. It was peppered by big, flattened bubbles. And as she watched, a fresh bubble emerged from under the tholin, spreading and flattening, streaks of color swimming in its surface.
She must have walked right over this patch on the way out. Whatever this was, it was out of the ordinary, surely the kind of thing Rosenberg had them out here looking for.
She bent, awkwardly, and took fresh sample bottles from her EMU pockets. She took a scraping of the gumbo itself, the air above the gumbo, and—with reasonable skill, she thought—managed to insert the plastic needle of a syringe into a bubble without breaking the sticky meniscus, and was able to draw out the uncontaminated gases within.
She straightened up, labeled the bottles, noted her location and walked on.
Back at Tartarus, inside the scuffed, patched-up, shacklike interior of the hab module, Rosenberg was distracted. He was busy trying to rebuild a balky nutrient pump from the CELSS farm, and he told her to store her sample bottles and he’d check them when he had time.
Meanwhile, Angel was having one of his bad days. He raged around the hab module, frustrated at his inability to perform the simplest task unaided. He railed at the equipment, at the assholes at NASA who wouldn’t speak to them any more, at his crewmates.
For all the difficulties his presence posed on even the simplest EVA, it was outside the cramped, battered, stale confines of the hab module that Angel seemed most stable. The opportunity to get him outside hadn’t come up for a couple of days, though, and now they were likely to he shut in through the eight-day Titan night. And already, Benacerraf thought, they were paying the price.
She made a meal for Angel, and sat him down in the Apollo couches. He rambled about his life, his space missions, his career, his father, even his sexual experiences. She sat and endured.
Listening to him was an easy safety valve.
Rosenberg padded around them in house shoes improvised from Beta-cloth scraps, and got on with his work on the pump. He didn’t actually do anything to help her with Angel; it was clear that as far as Rosenberg was concerned, Angel was Benacerraf’s problem, a waste of resources who ought to be pushed out the airlock.
It took Rosenberg two hours to get around to those anomalous samples.
Then he came bustling in from the Spacelab, shouting about an immediate EVA.
Benacerraf glanced uneasily at Angel. But he seemed to be heading into one of his inward-looking, passive phases. He was rocking to and fro in his couch, his right leg tapping rapidly, his head turning to and fro. She had learned to read Angel’s moods; if he stayed in this state, he was so shut-in it was beyond the power even of Rosenberg’s noisy, unstructured ranting to irritate him.
Rosenberg was still talking about going out.
“Slow down, Rosenberg,” she said. “You know we’ve avoided EVAs at night.”
“I know,” he said. “I know. But this is exceptional. We have an opportunity, right now, and we don’t know when it will recur. We’ll miss out on it if we wait seven or eight days for the fucking sun to come up.”
“What opportunity?”
“Paula, I analyzed those samples you brought back. The anomalous tholin, the bubbling—”
“I remember.”
“You know what I found, in the sample you took from within the bubble?” He grinned. “Guess.”
“Don’t play games, Rosenberg.”
“Methane,” he said. “Almost pure methane gas. You see?”
She thought it over. “No. No, I don’t get it. The air is full of methane. We even produce it ourselves. Why should we care enough about methane to risk our necks out there in the dark?”
“Because of where the methane comes from,” he said rapidly. “It has to be from an underground reservoir. There are probably pockets of methane scattered all through the bedrock ice, though not all so close to the surface… It has to be an intrusion of the magma, the deep ammonia-water, which is forcing that methane to the surface now. And if that’s so, the site you found is one of the best possibilities for finding traces of ammono-analogue biology. Short of dropping into the caldera on Othrys, we—”
“Woah.” She held up her hands again. “Tell me slowly.”
“I’m talking about life, Paula,” he said softly. “Titan life: life beyond Earth. That methane vent represents one of our best chances of detecting it. If we sit in here on our butts, we may miss it.” He was struggling to be patient, she saw. “Do you get it? I’m not interested in the methane for itself. I’m interested in the ammonia-water magma.”
“Because—”
“Because if we’re going to find life anywhere, ammonia-analogue life, it’s in the fluid of the ancient oceans. Where liquid ammonia is still available, as a solvent. And that’s bubbling up out of the ground, a couple of miles away.”
Angel turned his ruined face to Rosenberg. “Titan life, huh. So, what use is that? Can we eat the shit?” He shook his head, mumbling irritably, and retreated inward to his crooning.
“Actually,” Benacerraf said drily, “he has a point, Rosenberg. This is science, not survival. I don’t think we should put ourselves in a life-threatening situation for—”
Rosenberg seemed to snap.
She’d never seen him so angry. He came up and loomed over her, screaming at her. “This is precisely the reason we came to Titan in the first place. We have to be able to do more than sit around in here recycling Bill’s piss and waiting to die. Paula, either you come out with me now, or I go out there myself. Right now.” There were flecks of spittle on his lip, and behind his glasses his red-rimmed eyes were staring.
She closed her eyes, and wished she was in her wardroom.
She was sick of juggling them, these two assholes, both as difficult as each other in their ways, both demanding that she soak it all up, run their lives for them.
… The news from Earth, sent up to them in digital packets by the last DSN dish at Goldstone, was dire. More ecological decay, more flashpoint wars over crop failures and water shortages, more floods of refugees washing across the southern continents, more saber-rattling between the Chinese and Maclachlan’s government. In a way, the Chinese issue scared her most. It was like the Cold War all over again. Except that she sensed those old bastards in Beijing meant it, in a way the Kremlin never had.
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