by Allen Steele
“Looks like they sent out the stretch limo,” George remarked, and now Phil saw that the vehicle was a long-range rover: an eight-wheeler segmented into two sections, the kind used for major expeditions. Yet Descartes City was less than a hundred miles away, and this wasn’t the sort of vehicle sent out for a brief sortie.
“I think they’re short of equipment just now,” Marquand said, then he turned to Phil. “There’s nothing I can do to change your mind? Nothing I can say that will make you reconsider reporting what you’ve seen?”
“We talked about this last night. We do what we have to do…that simple.”
“Even if it means putting the children at risk?” Marquand raised an eyebrow. “Or is the public’s right to know more important?”
“I think the public…” Phil hesitated. “I believe people are smarter than you think they are. If you just tell them the truth and let them make up their own minds, then they generally do the right thing.”
“I wish I could believe you, but…” Marquand touched a button on the wall, and the ramp hatch irised open. “As you say, you do what you have to do.”
“We’ll be in touch.” Phil ducked his head and entered the hatch.
“What was that all about?” George said quietly as they marched down the ramp.
“Later,” Phil murmured. “Let’s just get out of here.”
They had been traveling for nearly an hour when Phil felt the rover suddenly hit tough terrain. Until now, the vehicle had been moving along a graded road leading from the edge of Mare Tranquillitatis into the Descartes highlands. George had crossed his arms across his chest and closed his eyes to take a nap, yet Phil had remained awake, and with the first hard bump he looked up from the H.G. Wells novel he’d been reading on his pad.
Glancing out the window, he saw that the landscape had changed. Small hills, bleached by raw sunlight, rose around them. Another sharp lunge, and he realized that the rover had just gone across a small boulder. Its oversize wire-mesh tires and independent suspension were usually enough to take on rocks and micrometeorite craters, which meant…
“Huh? Wuz’ happenin’?’” George woke up, grabbed for a safety strap. “What’s going on?”
“I think we’ve left the road.” They were in the rear passenger compartment, surrounded by ten empty seats. They’d met the driver only briefly—a dour young man, wearing a scalplock of the kind favored by loonies—before he’d shut the inner hatch leading to the forward tractor. Phil reached up to the com panel above him. “Hello? What’s happening up there?”
Another bump, then the rover came to an abrupt stop, hard enough to throw them out of their seats. “Oh, for chrissakes…” George stabbed at the button above his seat. “Hey, what’s the deal? Run out of gas or something?”
No response. Phil got up, walked forward to the hatch. He was about to grab the locklever when he felt a sudden jolt. A second later, the lights went out.
“Hey! What the…?” George angrily hit the intercom once more. “Yo! Moondog! You got a problem or what?”
There was a silence that he’d never heard before…or at least not in space. The sort of stillness one takes for granted on Earth, but not out here. Feeling a chill, Phil raised a hand to a ceiling vent. No air was coming out.
“Oh, God!” George was peering out the window next to his seat. “Oh, man, look…he’s cut us off.”
“I know.” Phil didn’t need to look outside to know that the tractor had just detached itself from the trailer. When it had done so, it had also severed all service lines leading to the rear half of the rover.
No power. No air.
Phil slumped into the nearest seat. In a few moments, the temperature would start to rise. Or maybe it would fall? No…the sun was up, so that meant they were going to sweat awhile. Or at least until the air ran out.
“Mayday! Mayday!” Lurching on his stick, George had gone to the back of the trailer to open the panel leading to the emergency radio transmitter. “Rover down! Repeat, to all stations, rover down, at…” He looked at Phil. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Doesn’t matter.” There were suit lockers across the aisle from him. In frustration, he raised a foot and kicked one of them open, and wasn’t at all surprised to discover that it was empty. “Give up. The short-range is disconnected. Probably pulled the plug on the sat dish, too.”
Marquand was a smart man; he wouldn’t have left anything to chance. Phil gazed out the window again; the tractor had disappeared, but it probably lingered somewhere nearby, perhaps just beyond that range of hills. It would remain there for a few hours, then the driver would return. All he needed to do then was fit their bodies into a couple of hardsuits, then take a trip out to the crash site. Two corpses found near the wreckage of a crashed lander, one with a broken leg. Waiting for rescue until their air ran out.
Just two more reporters to die in a combat zone…
Phil chuckled, shook his head. “What’s so goddamn funny?” George demanded.
“Y’know that kid? Vlad, the one I was playing with?” Phil wiped his eyes with his fingers. “I taught him a game. Simon says…”
“I don’t give a…”
“No, really. It’s a great game. Especially if he’s got a MINN implant and voice-activated computer access. All you have to do is get him to go eyes-up and repeat everything you say. Simon says, ‘Search for file Carson-slash-urgent.’ Simon says, ‘Open Luna-dot-net.’ Simon says, ‘Open email to editor-at-UMI-dot-com.’ Simon says, attach file Carson-slash-urgent. Simon says, ‘Send…’”
“You didn’t tell me.” George stared at him from across the compartment, his voice becoming harsh in the thinning air “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have attached my…”
“Simon says, ‘Stop being such an…’” Phil stopped himself. “Naw, forget it.” The compartment was becoming warm, his head getting thick; all he wanted to do was close his eyes, take a nap. “Shut up and sit down. It’ll be over soon.”
He laid his head against the seat cushion, gazed up at the distant sliver that represented home. A lousy assignment, but at least he’d filed one last time.
One day, his children might thank him for this.
The Great Galactic Ghoul
In the late 20th century, the first unmanned probes were sent to Mars. Most of them failed; of the thirty-nine missions launched by America and Russia between 1960 and 1999, nine exploded during lift-off, seven lost contact with home, seven more either went into useless orbits or missed the planet entirely, and four crashed while attempting to land. No other program had the same failure rate, nor as many mishaps that couldn’t be easily explained.
This led someone at NASA to playfully suggest that a creature lurked between Earth and Mars, a gremlin ready to sabotage or destroy any spacecraft that dared to enter its realm. The Great Galactic Ghoul became a standing joke among engineers and ground controllers, but as the missions continued to fail, the laughter stopped. It soon came to be considered bad luck to mention the Ghoul. Even if these otherwise rational men didn’t necessarily believe in space monsters, neither were they willing to say anything that might jinx the mission.
Despite the setbacks, Mars was explored and people eventually went there, and not long after that they began to travel further out into the solar system. By then, they’d learned how to build spacecraft that were reasonably safe and reliable; they had to, because the consequences of catastrophic failure were unthinkably high. There were accidents, of course, and occasionally a life was lost, but those instances were rare; when they occurred, more often than not human error was the primary cause. In any case, investigations would be announced, studies would be made, data collected, reports written, findings announced. Changes would then be instituted, and if the process worked the way it was supposed to, that particular accident would never happen again. Or at least not quite the same way.
In time, the Great Galactic Ghoul was forgotten. But he didn’t disappear. He simply went into hiding for awhile, waiting
for the day to come when he could return from the shadows and wreak havoc upon any vessel he happened to encounter in the darkness between worlds.
Until August 16, 2062, there had never been a deep-space rescue mission. There were countless instances, of course, between Earth and the Moon in which one spacecraft made an emergency rendezvous with another. The distance involved there was less than a quarter of a million miles, though, and since there were over a dozen stations in cislunar space, help was seldom more than a few hours away. Beyond the Moon, the situation was different; spacecraft crews were expected to deal with onboard accidents themselves, without relying on outside assistance. And for good reason; Earth and Mars were separated by an average of 49 million miles, and even in the most densely populated zone of the asteroid belt, tens of thousands of miles could lay between one inhabited rock and another.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before spacers realized that they needed to plan for coming to one another’s aid. No one could anticipate every sort of emergency, but there were times when it would have been helpful to know, no matter how bad things might be, that help was on the way. Indeed, one of the first things the Pax Astra did after it was formed in 2049 was to ratify the space rescue clause of the old 1967 U.N. Space Treaty even though the Pax rejected most of the treaty’s other provisions. As much as the newly independent space colonies wanted to break away from Earth, this part of the treaty, which mandated that all space vessels had to respond to distress signals, was worth keeping.
It’s a good thing that the Pax settled this particular issue, for only six years later the belt colonies broke away to form their own alliance, the Transient Body Shipping Association. Since the TBSA was willing to do business directly with Earth-based companies and governments, economic rivalry with the Pax Astra was assured. So it was just as well that Pax and TBSA ships formally agreed to come to each other’s aid in times of emergency; by 2065, each side would be committing piracy against the other, with worse yet to come.
But hostilities hadn’t yet broken out when the Ritchie Explorer disaster occurred. Considering that the Ritchie was a Pax Astra vessel, perhaps it was only appropriate that the nearest ship to receive its mayday signal was a TBSA freighter.
The TBSA Gold Dust Woman was seven weeks out of Ceres, passing Mars orbit on its way to the Moon, when the signal was received by its Ku-band wireless. Because the ship was no longer in the belt, Captain Henry Zimmerman had relaxed the 24-hour watch mandated by flight regulations. Chief Engineer Quon Ko remembers being in his berth, nursing a squeezebulb of Irish coffee while reading a fantasy potboiler on the data screen, when Zimmerman’s voice came over the intercom, asking him to report to the bridge.
“I didn’t ask what it was about,” Quon says. “I just said okay, be there in a minute, then I climbed out of my bunk, zipped up my jumpsuit and tossed the rest of my drink into the recycler, then headed upstairs.”
Gold Dust Woman was an Ares-class freighter, 272 feet in length and 110 abeam at its outrigger telemetry and reactor booms, the sort of workhorse known by spacers as a “rock hauler” even though it never carried asteroids themselves. It had a nuclear fusion main engine and an open payload bay capable of carrying up to eight cargo containers—on this mission it had six, mainly oxygen, water, copper, and titanium mined from inner-belt asteroids—and it had a crew of three: Captain Zimmerman; Lesley Zimmerman, his first officer, navigator, and wife; and Quon Ko, who doubled as engineering chief and cargomaster. The Zimmermans were the Woman’s permanent crew, while Quon was aboard only until the union rotated him out and gave his job to someone else.
As it turned out, Henry and Lesley hadn’t been in the bridge either when the signal was received. Captain Zimmerman was in the observation blister, using the optical telescope to make a manual navigational fix as required by regulations, while Lesley had been napping in their cabin. So the transmission was first heard by the ship’s AI, which in turn alerted the captain. It took Henry Zimmerman less than a minute to ride his chair down from the blister to the bridge, and only a minute after that to confirm that the signal was an emergency transmission sent by another spacecraft. A stickler for following TBSA regs to the letter, the captain had immediately summoned other the senior officers to the bridge; as it so happened, his wife and Ko were also the only other two people aboard.
By the time Lesley and Ko left the living quarters in the ship’s carousel and climbed up the access shaft to the bridge, Henry had learned other pertinent facts. The signal was coming from the PASS Ritchie Explorer, a mobile mining rig registered to the Pax Astra. The Explorer was presently anchored to Eros, an S-type asteroid whose annual period presently put it just within Mars orbit. According to the TBSA database, it had a crew of six.
Beyond that, little else was known. The signal, apparently sent by an automatic transponder, consisted of a brief print message that repeated again and again:
MESS. 1397 1503 GMT 8/16/62 CODE A1/0679
TRANSMISSION FROM PASS RITCHIE EXPLORER/433 EROS TO ALL SPACECRAFT PRIORITY REPEATER
MESSAGE BEGINS
**MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY*
PASS RITCHIE EXPLORER EXPERIENCING LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCY BREAK EXPLOSION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN BREAK POSSIBLE CASUALTIES AND/OR FATALITIES BREAK REQUEST URGENT ASSISTANCE FROM NEAREST AVAILABLE VESSEL BREAK LOCATION ASTEROID 433 EROS CRATER HIMEROS 07°S 280°W BREAK PLEASE RESPOND ASAP
MESSAGE ENDS
TRANSMISSION REPEATS
1504 GMT 8/16/62 CODE A1 0679
“As soon as I saw this,” Lesley Zimmerman says, “I knew we were going in. There’s a lot of ships between Earth and Mars, but chances were that we’d be the nearest one.” A quick check of the chart board confirmed this; although there were two other spacecraft presently operating within that sector, Gold Dust Woman was the closest ship to Eros.
There was never any question of whether the Woman would undertake the rescue effort. Regardless of the fact that the Woman was a TBSA freighter and the Explorer was a Pax Astra mining rig, it had always been understood among spacers that one ship always came to the assistance of another in times of emergency; international space law only codified what was already a longstanding practice that had been carried over from Earth’s maritime traditions. A few years earlier, officials from the Pax and TBSA had met to discuss forming a dedicated search and rescue team that would be on permanent standby for just such emergencies, yet both sides soon realized that the inherent difficulties were too much to overcome. Even in the inner system, the distances are just too vast for an SAR ship to be able to respond to a mayday in time for it to do any good. That, and the expense of maintaining crews and vessels which would do nothing but a wait for emergencies, meant that the proposal was impractical. Ultimately, both sides agreed to simply continue what they’d been doing before: overlook their rivalry in crisis situations, and come to each other’s aid no matter what.
So while Lesley began plotting a trajectory that would take the Woman to 433 Eros, Henry and Ko began prepping the ship for a course-correction burn. Once the captain was sure that his crew wasn’t having any problems of their own, he got on the radio and attempted to make contact with the Ritchie Explorer. His sense of foreboding grew when he received no response to either voice or text messages.
“That was when I knew that things were really bad,” Captain Zimmerman later told the TBSA board of inquiry. “According to the registry, there were six people aboard. When none of them can apparently make it to the wireless, you know there’s serious trouble. And when their comp does nothing more than repeat the same preset message over and over again, then it’s clear that they’re in deep.”
There was one piece of luck: Eros was only about one and a quarter million miles from the Woman’s present position. Once Henry and Ko worked out the logistics, they estimated that, if they used most of the fuel reserves and ran the engine at maximum capacity, the Woman should be able to reach the asteroid in a little more than four days. This might seem like a long time, but by inter
planetary standards it was a quick jaunt. The other two ships in the vicinity—the TBSA Martian Pride, another freighter, and the PASS Ulysses, an exploration ship outbound for the Jovian system—were seven and nine days away respectively, and although the Pride’s captain offered to assist the Woman, the other freighter was nearly out of range. Henry thanked the Pride, but told its captain that he and his crew could handle the problem themselves.
“I was wrong,” Henry would say later. “The situation was beyond us. I just didn’t know it then.”
Eros is somewhat unusual. Not part of the main belt, its highly elliptical orbit brings it as close as .15 AUs to Earth during its 1.76-year solar period; during this time, it crosses the orbit of Mars twice, therefore occasionally making it both a near-Earth and a near-Mars asteroid. In 1999, the NASA probe NEAR Shoemaker orbited the rock several times, sending back the first close-up photos of a major asteroid, before crash-landing on its surface. Because of this, more was known about 433 Eros than any other transient body until the beginning of asteroid mining operations.
Despite its proximity to both Earth and Mars, though, it wasn’t until fairly recently that anyone claimed a stake on Eros. And for good reason; since type-S stony asteroids are chiefly comprised of rock, they’re considered less valuable than either type-C carbonaceous chondrites or type-M metallics, which offer resources of volatiles and precious metals. Eros may have been easier to reach, but it didn’t seem to offer enough to attract the attention of a profit-minded mining consortium.
This changed once the more valuable main-belt asteroids were gradually claimed by one TBSA consortium or another, thereby locking out competitors from the Pax Astra. When that happened, Pax prospectors began shifting through old astrogeological data, seeing if perhaps there may be anything that had been overlooked…and that was when it was found that NEAR Shoemaker had detected large surface deposits of olivine and pyroxene, along with the possible presence of iron sulfide and iron-nickel. Eros wasn’t a bonanza, but neither was it worthless; the fact that it was close to Earth made a stake by Pax consortium a feasibly profitable venture, if they were willing to invest in a mining rig and crew.