by J. P. Landau
* * *
38 There are are 79 known moons in Jupiter, however, the other 75 comprise barely 0.003% of the total moon mass.
79 | Solar Storm
August 2 2033. Return Day 1,039; 13 Days to Earth
Sophia watched Derya from a dozen feet away, wishing she could bear some of his burden. His head pointed to a small Earth past Bacchus’ Observation Window. She could see the reflection of his face, sad exhausted eyes lost in rumination.
Nobody could have known, she thought. The three were the guinea pigs from which medicine on Earth was learning from. Radiation and altitude sickness were similar in that it was so far impossible to determine who would be affected. Some people seem to be much more vulnerable than others. His one susceptibility was a weakened body and immune system after the Enceladus accident … She felt fatigued most of the time but that was a nonspecific symptom that could hardly be connected with mild radiation sickness. And then there’s Sergei. Derya said it best on an audio interview with Russia-1 television: “Here’s an Übermensch if ever there was one. A physique carved by Michelangelo and a psyche stolen from the pantheon of Greek intellectuals. Nietzsche, Wagner, and Hitler would have been in turn mystified and horrified after realizing he’s as Slavic as Mother Russia herself. A verbose way of saying he looks great.
“What a bully this destiny thing. I mean, why not, right? Let’s throw these Shack people another unsporting hurdle and see if they can survive it,” said Derya. “I get it. My dashing looks confound and I agree my disability license plate was not displayed prominently enough. But still, come on.”
“You have no cure,” said Sophia caringly.
“Shite, you’re probably right,” he said to his mortified friend with a tired smile. His hair was as long as when Sophia met him for the first time, but it now looked as if someone had evenly plucked four out of every five strands and the jet-black sheen had become a lank ash. His eyeballs had bled for months and his sight had deteriorated to the point where his neck rocking forward and backward and a perpetual squinting replaced the focusing of his corneas. He hid most of the sores under long sleeves and pants but his lips always carried one or two.
“Want the secret to a long life?” came Sergei’s voice from the flight deck where he spent most of his time training. “Worry only about the things over which you have control, be carefree about the rest.” He had been rehearsing to pilot Shackleton and then Caird through the hours-long deceleration, re-entry, and touchdown for weeks. TiTus was still functional but had proven unreliable. It was having regular buffer underruns requiring partial or full resets, and if any of those were required during re-entry, it was R.I.P. to all and sundry. Sergei was universally acknowledged as the best possible human candidate to pilot through the full maneuver leading to landing, yet for almost two decades SpaceX and, soon after, everyone else relegated humans to the passenger seat for a reason. Two really: fuel consumption and safety. Humans are simply not fast enough to adjust trajectory in real time, so instead of moving along the optimal deceleration, or later descent path, the vehicle is constantly overshooting, drifting around the elusive target. That’s propellant intensive. On the safety side, asking someone to maintain full concentration for hours and to be unerring and faultless during all that time is, well, inhuman and foolhardy. But as things stood, they either gave up now or played the hand they were dealt.
“You know the drill. Everything that can go—” Sophia was about to fill the awkward silence when Derya continued, “Everything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong.” He sometimes spoke blinking-fast to dodge the memory lapses.
His wondrous intelligence is untouched. But the memory lapses were becoming painful to witness. He knows he’s becoming impaired and he knows you know. He wasn’t the most affected mind, however. That went to the severely handicapped TiTus. Earth’s terra firma was virtually obstacle free. Not anymore.
“Wait, anything I should fret about? More solar storm omens?” asked Sophia.
“Perhaps,” said Sergei.
“Serezha, don’t play mystery man with your commander,” she said. “What’s the latest?”
Active Region 7790 was at that moment the largest group of sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The biggest of them, about eleven Earths wide by fourteen tall, was on a rampage. Two days ago, it had released the most powerful solar storm39 since 2017, an X13. The press nicknamed it the Firing Squad.
“The Sun’s rotation will point Active Region 7790 straight at Earth, that’s also us, in four days,” said Sergei. “This morning—third X-class storm in a week. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center released a statement, which some are interpreting as a hint that this could be the big one.”
“Great. Just great. And we get to be the innocent, compulsory-bystanders-that-get-killed-by-any-bullet-that-goes-astray-or-ricochets,” said Derya.
The previous night, Derya had explained to Sophia that compared to the naked body of Shackleton, planets are suited in body armor. And yet, when the Earth is once again in the way of one of the big ones, our civilization won’t ever forget it. Even though neither Earth nor the people on it will be directly in danger. Earth’s molten iron core creates a magnetic bubble many times larger than itself—the magnetosphere—that acts as a bow shield deflecting the vast majority of Sun particles. The few remaining are absorbed by the thick atmosphere. And still when it happens the devastation will be unimaginable.
On July 23 2012, a solar superstorm with the power of 1859’s Carrington Event, an X45—the mother of all superstorms—missed Earth by nine days.
Right before noon on September 1 1859, English amateur astronomer Richard Carrington detected a giant solar storm from his private observatory just outside London. Some eighteen hours later, people as far away as the Caribbean saw stunning northern lights above them while telegraph lines were knocked out amid fires and telegraph operators across Europe and North America were electrocuted.
In the technology-dependent society of today, the consequences won’t be as pastoral. Electricity blackouts around the world, with electricity grids shutting down for weeks in the best of cases, and years in the worst. The global communication network jumping decades backward as scores of satellites are permanently disabled. A GPS network wipeout. Untold numbers of dead people from cold during winter seasons. Trillions of dollars in losses. And humans won’t be the only animals to suffer. Sperm whales have been known to strand in large numbers when their navigation, which uses geomagnetic fields, is disrupted by solar storms hitting the planet.
The auroras will be unforgettable though.
* * *
39 Fortunately for life on Earth, our Sun is a yellow dwarf. This makes it a stable star. Considering it’s a giant fusion nuclear reactor 1.3 million Earths in volume, this is important. It also helps to be middle-aged: 4.6 billion years old is well past unpredictable adolescence yet still billions of years away from becoming erratic. But it still has a temper and sometimes it does get violent.
Besides the permanent, steady stream of light and solar particles bathing its planets, the Sun is always developing spots across its surface. These last from days to months. Occasionally in and around these, when the Sun’s magnetic fields get twisted and tangled, solar flares—enormous explosions of energy—burst out into space, sending light in nearly all wavelengths, from radio waves to X-rays and gamma rays. Solar flares are sometimes followed by coronal mass ejections, huge clouds of superheated plasma and high-energy particles slung out of the Sun, racing through space at millions of miles per hour.
The vast majority of these solar storms are not strong enough to pose major risks to the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. But for the rest, the Sun acts as a giant revolver rotating on its axis every twenty-five days. The inner planets are forced to play Russian roulette. It sounds worse than it is as planets are miniscule and very far between, plus this revolver has thousands of empty cylinders and an unknown but small number of bullets, sometimes in unnerving succession. Any solar storm
above X1 is a bullet, doubling in power with each digit increment.
80 | Gaia
August 15 2033. D-Day, Earth’s Re-entry
ATSIMO-ANDREFANA, MADAGASCAR
The only movement around the village was a cart pulled by a gray, bony zebu, raising a lingering ochre dust that tinged the late evening sky into a dirty carrot orange. On it rode two shirtless boys, coming down the dirt road toward the red adobe huts. One of them jumped out and came running to join the community of seventy or so people gathered around the millennial baobab with its hefty naked trunk and scrawny branches of sparse leaves high up. From it hung a couple of sheets tied to each other and anchored to the ground, which along with a borrowed image projector from a church in Morondava, a knee-tall speaker, and the village’s grumbling diesel generator, allowed them to join the rest of humanity, impatiently awaiting Sophia Jong, Derya Terzi, and Sergei Dmitrievich Lazarev.
Most had been watching the French news channel, which was filling the airwaves with second-hand accounts to kill time before the main event, since the early afternoon. But minutes earlier, the official worldwide broadcast had finally begun. For now, the sound feed was Shackleton’s Mission Control bustle and buzz punctuated by Nitha Sharma’s recognizable voice without Malagasy subtitles—it hardly seemed to matter. The image feed was coming from Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma in the Canaries, the best location to track the spaceship for another seven minutes. It showed a bright dot moving against a coal-black background with fixed twinkling lights. Even the 7-year-old sitting cross-legged in front of the improvised screen was intensely absorbed. Even the 7-year-old knew the dot was Shackleton, less than an hour from starting the deceleration and atmospheric re-entry marathon.
Perhaps we would need to go past early civilizations, tens of thousands of years back to hunter–gatherer times, to find an instant when most of humanity shared the same thought, maybe as they heard the howls of predators behind the trees just beyond the bonfire.
“We are still here, Mr. President,” the sudden audio replacement for the unmistakable Sophia ignited shouting and arm shaking from the crowd. The prior video was supplanted moments later by an onboard camera showing the three space travelers strapped to their seats.
“I know how useless I am right now but is there anything, anything I can do to help?” asked the President of the United States.
“Mr. President, you can pray for us if you are into that sort of thing,” answered the commander.
Some villagers seemed to have received the message before it was even uttered.
No one needed a reminder that the crew was on their own. With Sophia, Sergei, and Derya on a live camera and open mic—which due to their proximity to Earth had essentially no time lag—anyone, meaning everyone, was forced to make a conscientious decision: knowing of their demise was very different from seeing and hearing them burn alive.
LOW EARTH ORBIT
Captain Qiang, along with the rest of the crew on board the Tianhe-3 space station, peered in silence through the circular window at the planet beneath them enveloped in darkness. The only glow was the onion-thin blue line becoming an incandescent white as the Sun emerged from behind the horizon. He had been watching attentively in the approximate direction for minutes, hearing over the speakers the three inside Shackleton like the billions below.
“There!” said someone.
A fiery dot had appeared from above and passed in front of them at a ludicrous speed. To Qiang it looked like a bright cannonball curving downward, about to dive into the atmosphere. His mood wasn’t festive. The optimism from below didn’t translate well up here.
The crew did a military salute as the shining mote of Shackleton, hundreds of miles away, flashed past them. Much too fast, he thought. He wished Tianhe-3 went unnoticed. Speed in space is imperceptible until a point of reference is identified. The Chinese space station was orbiting at 4.8 miles per second; Shackleton thirteen miles per second. Unless they started decelerating against the atmosphere within the next few minutes, they would miss Earth and continue falling into the Sun.
Godspeed, Sergei Lazarev, Derya Terzi, Sophia Jong. Everything to do with space is calculated 1,000 times and prepared one hundred, so that the one execution is unfailingly flawless. The dot fading against the rising Sun did not abide by the same rules.
Their only chance of survival was to shave speed before a full re-entry via an unproven, untried ballistic lob: trade speed in exchange for heating up by entering the atmosphere, skim back into space to cool down, repeat. Everybody who has tried skipping flat stones across the surface of a lake knows how hard and precise the maneuver must be. The entry corridor angle was paramount. Lower than 4.7 degrees and the spaceship bounces off into space and misses Earth. Steeper than 7.2 degrees and the ship crosses into the thicker part of the atmosphere too fast, turning into a blazing fireball right before disintegrating. And instead of only once, they would need to nail the operation many times in a row. Not by an automated computer re-entry but by the manual piloting of Sergei Lazarev. Can’t bear the thought of it.
TOKYO, JAPAN
The thousands of anime, electronics, and video game billboards covering every building structure that made the Akihabara shopping district famous had been turned off for the first time since World War II. The rainbow of colors had migrated from the vertical to the horizontal, where a multitude carrying umbrellas and lit candles—blanketing every square foot of street and sidewalk—faced the wide, tall scaffolding on which a giant provisional screen hung in front of the Akihabara railway station.
The voices of the crew reverberated across the open space with the paradoxical intimacy of a pulsing heart.
“One small step for man … I’m sorry, Sergei must have intentionally shuffled my cue cards,” said Derya’s voice. “What I wanted to say is that no matter what happens during the next few hours, it has been my greatest honor to have met and lived with you two … I have never felt this close to anyone before.”
All the world saw and heard the protracted hugging, a moment sensed more than understood. History being written no matter what the outcome.
Unexpectedly, Sophia addressed not her crew but the entire world, “To each one of you down there—down here, I want to ask a favor … life is a fight. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I’ve had the chance to confront my mortality and that of the people I love … my fear of death does not overpower my conviction that, whatever happens today, we should never think this mission was in vain. It was not … and to Derya and Sergei, you are not my crew, you are my family, my blood. We have lived, eaten, slept, and fought together through unimaginable circumstances and impossible odds. The best and the worst moments of my life I spent with you. This adventure has made me more alive than anything I ever did before. If the price turns out to be death, I’m ready.”
LOW EARTH ORBIT
Strapped to the middle seat, Sophia couldn’t believe her eyes: after three hours and five atmospheric dips, Sergei had blacked out from exhaustion. It was a fitful slumber, as if his conscience was trying to stir him, face beaten and covered in sweat. I wish we had the luxury to let him sleep for twenty more minutes, she thought. She turned to Derya. On their first episode of extreme deceleration he screamed in pain as his crooked back compressed against the seat. Later he grunted. And during the last and worst he stopped breathing. His body is giving up. His eyes were closed and his face constricted. He’s resting or asleep.
The cockpit display showed their speed, over eight miles per second. Sophia searched among the digital rows for the remaining propellant. Enough for two more deceleration dives. But with Serezha’s fatigue the risk of decelerating further on board Shack may be even higher than the risk of pushing Caird into a re-entry at a speed beyond its specs. There was no clear-cut protocol for her life-or-death decision. She went for the latter.
Shackleton would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a quarter of an hour. Not a second to waste.
In the cargo area,
Sergei was inside Caird strapping Derya to one of the two seats on board.
“Hey, bear,” said Derya, forcing out a mumble. “You know during the Apollo program … the condoms?”
“Yes,” said Sergei, coming to his friend’s aid. “The spacesuit’s urine collection. Looked like a catheter with a condom-type sheath.”
“You know they had different sizes … Small, Medium, and Large?”
Where is he going with this? thought Sergei. “Yes, you told me. There were so many spilling accidents they relabeled them Large, Gigantic, and Humongous. Leaks vanished.”
“Right. No one should measure … how much of a man you are … by the content of your pants …”
“… but by the content of your character,” finished Sergei.
“Nowadays … diapers. Much better for self-esteem … mine’s very full right now.”
“What’s going on, brother?” Sergei said in a conspiratorial voice.
“From brother to brother … I’m terrified, Serezha. I don’t want to die.”
“And you won’t,” he managed to say in a casual voice.
Sergei saw Sophia slide inside Caird, protecting a small box containing six years of history-defining discoveries summarized in two Petri dishes and three hard disk drives.
There were two seats and three people inside Caird.
“I really think—”
“No, Commander,” Sergei cut her off. “This is not musical chairs.”