Starfire

by Unknown

  Her face, a mask of trembling lights, was projected on the rightmost of the three giant screens in Houston’s mission control room. Mission controllers at their banked consoles were transfixed by that iconic mask like worshipers before an idol.

  The Capcom spoke into his microphone: “Starfire, Houston. You are go for throttle up.”

  Robin’s voice, loud on the speakers, carried the ship’s vibration into mission control: “Roggger, go attt throtttle up…”

  A remote-imaging data relay satellite caught the gleaming steel ship, its incandescent wings swiftly brightening to pearly pink, falling toward the camera like a hot coal tossed from a cliff; the flaming apparition flashed past in an eye-blink.

  The screen in the center of the wall at mission control diagrammed the ship’s extreme path, bending toward the sun. “Launched at its own high noon—also noon here in the center of North America, by deliberate arrangement—Starfire is moving clockwise in the plane of the ecliptic, getting a minor boost from its orbital velocity around Earth to oppose Earth’s orbital velocity around the sun…”

  “…and Houston, we have a solid burn at eighty percent.”

  A wave of high-spirited emotion swept the room, shouts mixed with scattered applause that twice started and died away—

  —for not enough of the controllers felt like cheering; long, tense minutes stretched ahead before anyone could say that all was well.

  “Starfire’s engine is now operating at eighty percent maximum rated power, which is its optimal efficiency,” said the PAO. “Acceleration is now six gees, six times that of Earth’s gravity”—a brutal acceleration, although the PAO did not say so, which would continue for almost twelve minutes before the ship had shed Earth’s orbital speed and vectored toward the path of 2021 XA. When at last the bright fire of its engine died, Starfire would have flown one-tenth the distance to the moon.

  Seconds crawled. At mission control, controllers’ heads bent to their consoles, but their eyes continually glanced upward: none could resist the pull of the giant image of Robin Braide on screen, the vibration less violent now, the reflections in her clear mask stabilized, making her features clearly visible—revealing her flesh, its weight multiplied, flowing down over her skull like melting wax.

  In the row of consoles nearest the wall screens, farthest to the right, sat Prop, the controller in charge of monitoring propulsion systems. The woman on duty there suddenly twisted her head to look back toward the top of the room, whispering urgently into her microphone: “Flight, we’re showing a serious loss of—”

  “Attention. Attention,” said the robot voice of Starfire’s master computer.

  Robin’s tight-beamed voice overrode it. “Seeing a high N-two H-four rate, much higher than…damn that…”

  Meanwhile, the Capcom was conveying the message: “Starfire, Prop says we are showing an unrestricted crossover in…”

  Again Robin’s time-delayed and weight-deepened voice broke in: “Must have jiggled a valve open in MS-two.”

  “Copy excess MS-two rate. Hit that crossover on panel R-two for MS-one…”

  “…to MS-one. Oh, roger, Houston, we caught that already.”

  The silence in the room was complete.

  “Attention,” said the ship. “Attention.”

  Robin spoke again. “Think we got a little fire here.”

  Unseen by anyone, in the maze of spherical tanks and pipes that nestled below the crew module, in the guts of Starfire’s maneuvering system, an open vent was expelling a stream of self-oxidizing fuel all over the plumbing and wiring—

  —where a random spark had burst it into lurid purple flames. A huge fiery bloom writhed in the airless sextuple gravity, taking the shape of a diseased orchid, consuming fuel at a rate of thousands of kilograms a minute, threatening to melt heat-sensitive control circuits.

  On consoles in Houston and aboard Starfire, on the flight deck, in propulsion control, crimson emergency lights were winking.

  “There is an anomalous consumption of hydrazine in the reaction control system fuel storage area,” the PAO said calmly.

  The flight deck was a wave of colored lights in front of Robin’s heavy eyes. She strained against her vast weight to hit a row of switches under the ruby lights on her panel. Beside her, Spin slugged at complementary switches.

  In the service module the leaking vent snapped shut. White aerosol filled the compartment, snuffing the last lick of flame.

  On the flight deck red lights flickered to green and amber. “Fire’s out,” said Robin. “Bled hydrazine all over—nominal now. Green board, mostly.”

  In Houston the controllers murmured as they exchanged glances. The flight director bent in solemn conversation with the Consumables controller, then leaned across the central aisle to whisper in the Capcom’s ear.

  Capcom said, “Starfire, you are advised of a unit decrement in MS consumables. Emphasizing this is a discretionary.”

  Capcom’s words went out over the broadcast feed, but the public affairs officer, a white-haired gentleman whose desk overlooked the Capcom’s from the rear of the control room, swiftly translated them for media consumption: “Flight director getting a go/no go from the control team and getting a go from them at the discretion of Starfire’s commander.” What the PAO did not say was that “unit decrement” was a code phrase, indicating a change in the underlying assumptions upon which the mission profile was based, a change not sufficient for a mandatory abort at a critical moment, but sufficient to allow the commander to scrub the mission with cause. Full translation: Starfire is in good shape but heading into a long mission with a significant loss of maneuvering system fuel.

  “Roger, Houston. Discretionary declined.”

  “Copy,” said Capcom. “Concur there’s no immediate problem on that.”

  “Mission control and mission commander Robin Braide have confirmed that there is no danger to the mission from the hydrazine decrement,” said the PAO. “The spacecraft is carrying forward with its mission, now at five minutes into its flight, two thousand six hundred kilometers from Earth. All console positions in the control room are very quiet. No anomaly calls by any of their positions at this time.”

  Capcom said, “Want to give us some pictures, Robin?”

  “Coming at you…”

  Robin’s face on the right-hand wall screen sagged and disappeared in a snowy blitz, to be replaced by successive low-resolution images of the other crew members. “We appear to be nominal on the biomeds,” said Robin, her voice low and slow. “And here’s living proof. Spin’s taking a nap. Isn’t he cute?…Whooops, guess I woke him up.” Click. “Melinda actually looks mildly interested in the proceedings.” Click. “Linwood too; he must be amused by something. Who knows, probably rewriting his software.” Click. “But looky here. Professor Hill’s showing a pulse.”

  “Copy,” said the Capcom. All on board Starfire were “showing a pulse,” its commander included. Capcom hoped Hill knew she was being funny. “Biomeds nominal, confirmed, and everybody looks as good as could be expected. You guys’ll be happy to turn off that torch.”

  “That’s a roger.”

  “To the excellent reports the flight surgeon has received from the biomedical sensors, mission commander Robin Braide has added her own observations of the crew’s attitude,” said the PAO, putting a smile into his voice.

  “MECO minus one minute twenty seconds.”

  “Capcom has advised the crew that main engine cutoff will occur on schedule. Now at ten minutes twenty seconds into the flight Starfire’s velocity has exceeded thirty-five kilometers per second, greater than the velocity of the Earth in its orbit around the sun.”

  Aboard Starfire, Spin was querying the system; below him, Linwood was doing the same and sweating, six-times-heavy beads of sweat landing on his cheeks like BBs.

  “Thirty to the mark,” said the Capcom.

  Robin extended her massive hand to preset a row of switches registering concurrence with what the computers w
ere about to do. “Copy,” she said.

  One of the two clocks on Capcom’s console was busily compensating for the increasing time to communicate with the ship as Starfire fled his radio signal. “Ten seconds,” said Capcom.

  Robin waited for her own clock to hit its preset red line. “Heat transaction enabled, over.”

  As the roar of the pumps was sucked into thin vacuum—

  “MECO, mark,” said Capcom.

  —a silent puff of glowing plasma left the suddenly darkened blast nozzle, and Starfire’s wings immediately began to cool to gray. Aboard Starfire, five astronauts who a second ago had weighed almost half a tonne found themselves weighing nothing.

  Robin said, “Houston, we read MECO at T plus ten…make that eleven…forty-four point seven, over.”

  “Copy eleven forty-four point seven. Good work, Robin.”

  The PAO’s voice was rich with satisfaction. “An optimal MECO timed at optimal power with crew in good shape, ship in good shape, trajectory vector optimal. MOCR team concurs we have a damn fine spaceship here. Inbound for the sun.”

  Travis was showing a pulse, all right. While he lay in the dark crevice of his mission specialist’s den, a surge of exultation had washed over him as the core of him realized that the sun had risen on the ultimate burning desert, and he was riding into it. The way he felt just then, he didn’t care if he never came back.

  Beyond the moon, fifty times farther away, a jagged object as big as a mountain and as black as a lump of coal was also falling freely toward the sun. Over the course of the next two days, if all went as planned, the gently curving trajectories of the two falling bodies would ineluctably converge.

  A profusion of blueprint-style diagrams flickered past on a large pixel array screen. “You’re looking at the most complex propulsion and maneuvering system that ever flew, Colonel. Controlled by one of the most complicated control programs ever written.”

  “Save the commercials.”

  A damn fine spaceship, the PAO had called it, in a vigorous affirmation for public consumption. And true. Unfortunately there was a bug in the damn fine ship. Within half an hour of launch Taylor Stith had assembled a tiger team of engineers and astronauts, assigning them in pairs to each critical branch in the logic tree of maneuvering-system hardware and software.

  The image on the engineer’s screen froze on a detail, parallel lines of pipe crossing and bending in tight formation around steel spheres, like shiny meatballs embedded in some weird spaghetti. “We know where it’s happening,” said the engineer.

  “So do we,” said the astronaut.

  “Hardware, we’re pretty sure. These valve triggers are accumulating an unfortunate history of randomized misbehavior under certain sets of microconditions. On the other hand, the software that attends to those sets—”

  “You don’t have a clue,” said the astronaut.

  “Sometimes it’s difficult, initially, to narrow down the—”

  “It could happen again.”

  “Look, Colonel…” These astronauts tended to be damnably straightforward, the engineer reminded himself, but this one acts like he’s got a chip on his shoulder. On this little exercise the traditional rival professions were paired not so much to help each other solve problems as to keep each other honest, but random insults weren’t going to aid that. “Let’s just try to get along, okay? We’ll go faster that way.”

  “I’ll want one of these desks here with a terminal that can access this stuff”—the astronaut waved at the screen—“plus the entire code for the propulsion and control system, documented. However many hundreds of lines.”

  “Thousands,” the engineer said.

  “Good, you know what I want.”

  “Our own department team is on this specific problem already. Frankly, it’s going to take time to get you up to speed.”

  “Worry about your own work. I’ll ask if I need help.”

  “Fine. We’ll get to it right away.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  The engineer blinked. “You mean now?”

  “I mean now.”

  He had his desk and his documents in thirty-five minutes; the fellow who was ousted from it was thus publicly labeled as lowest on the local totem pole, and an entire roomful of engineers at their CADD terminals became nervous and resentful. Well, Jimmy Giles had been there before them, to that place called humiliation; he ignored their stares. He took off his jacket, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and sat down to open the first volume of code. Let the engineering side leap to their diagnostics and tapeworms; he preferred to read first. He flipped the loose-leaf pages back and forth for a couple of minutes before emitting the first low, unhappy grunt…

  Programs could be written in appropriate machine or assembly language or in a dozen or so useful higher languages, even in circuitry, but writing one wasn’t the end of coding, only the beginning. Individual styles within those languages were immensely varied, and to the person fluent in a programming language, the style of that language could be read off the printed page without ever running the program—grasped better, if the program was at all coherent.

  There were programs that were written with such grace and spare power that they evoked in the native speaker a thrill of comprehension and emotion akin to the reading of a poem of John Donne’s, one of Jimmy’s favorite poets. But there were tried and operative programs, widely used, that were the stylistic equivalent of a Pentagon press release read aloud by Donald Duck—impacted quacking, with operative phrases so recondite that loops within loops of definition and inference were required for the program itself to figure out how to do what it was supposed to, and running it was the only way for a user to figure out what it was actually doing.

  The program Jimmy now perused was a ripe example. In three minutes he recognized that glitches in this software would be hidden in the programmatic equivalent of misconstruable phrases, grammatical inversions, deliberate obfuscations. His intuition told him the FUBAR was somewhere in these volumes of software, and it was up to him to find it. On the other hand, he hoped his colleagues who were leaning on the valve manufacturers could prove bad hardware design, because that proof, if it existed, was likely to come much more quickly.

  Either way, the important thing was to prove the existence of a problem, one likely to recur, one with a cause to match its effects. Against the blind probability of accident there was no defense but prayer.

  Jimmy was no stranger to prayer as defense. Jimmy had prayed often and passionately in the past year, pleading for understanding of his own unpredictable angers, too well suppressed, and his predictable lusts, too well indulged. He had added conventional prayers for the safety of his colleagues, of course, but beyond that he did not ask God to do anything for him but forgive him.

  Jimmy refused to believe that his hopes for Starfire had been denied as a punishment; God was personal, but not petty. God didn’t intervene in wars or football games, and in Jimmy’s thin book those who asked God to do so were blasphemers. But the thought crept into his mind that he had been denied Starfire not as a punishment but for his life’s sake. He tried to push the idea away but couldn’t. He bent to his work, determined to prevent emergent reality from proving him right.

  “This is mission control in Houston, mission elapsed time nine hours and fifty minutes. All nominal in the control room and on the ship and it’s pretty dark outside in Houston, so our night control team is about to take over here in MOCR. Commander Braide and the crew will be getting into their sleep restraints on schedule, at ten hours after launch. Starfire’s day slides a little out of sync as the spacecraft gets farther away from Earth. Nothing fancy like relativity, just that the round-trip signal time increases and will increase to just about five minutes at farthest separation, so where mission control here is specifying time-critical aspects, we have to take into account that uplink has to go early. Flight team tonight is going to be very busy with a big data dump from launch, otherwise it is going to be a
quiet night.”

  11

  Jimmy Giles was still at his desk when the sun rose over Houston. He tuned his earphone radio to the public relations feed from mission control: “…read on the monitors down here that the crew was already out of the sack, they had begun their day, so we called up a little early and asked if they would go to work early for us on the RCS repatch. Thereafter the attitude, the position of the ship with respect to Earth for communication purposes, will be a little easier for them to handle…”

  Linwood Deveraux switched channels on his comm monitor to find the picture that was feeding to Houston: it appeared to be the negative image of a spiral galaxy. Over it the Capcom’s voice emerged from the tiny comm speaker, denatured of its lower frequencies. “In re those RCS repatches, here’s the best we can come up with right now, Starfire. When you’re ready.”

  On closer inspection of the monitor, the spiral galaxy revealed itself as whorls of stiff black hair against a pale scalp; the monitoring camera at the pilot’s position was looking down at the crown of Spin Calder’s head as Spin studied his checkpad.

  “Okay, Houston,” Spin said on the comm. “Could you just verbally tell us what you’d like to do, what kind of interconnect you want?”

  The delay in Houston’s answer stretched to almost twelve seconds. “Yes, the interconnect will be the one-twenty MS to RCS per the new procedure on message twenty-three.”

  “It may be five minutes before I find the procedure in this thing.” The spiral galaxy was bobbing with Spin’s effort.

  After the delay, the Capcom said, “I’ll tell you what instead—if you want to go to the attitude control file, page twenty-eight-dash-three, I’ll just tell you what’s changed there and Linwood can write in the rest later.”