Hayden's World Shorts, Stories 1-3: 43 Seconds, Signal Loss, Aero One

by S. D. Falchetti

  “I don’t know. Feeling a bit numb.”

  “You might have a concussion. Drink more.”

  She’s having trouble summoning enough spit to speak. Sweat soaks her helmet’s forehead padding. She takes a sip from her water tube. “How are you feeling?”

  He shrugs. “Big headache, shaky. Feel drugged. You give me something?”

  “Everything the ER station had for inhalation, plus a stimulant.”

  Ping looks up to the left, tries to remember. “Battery fire. Tried to suit up.”

  She musters a smile. “You got on all but the helmet.” She raps her knuckles on his faceplate.

  Ping laughs a bit, coughs. His eyes look above hers, at her forehead. “Suit’s having trouble shedding heat. Chutes will deploy soon and things should cool down quickly.” A pause. “Did you know that Uranus is the coldest of all the planets?”

  Jia places her palm to the side of his helmet. “I’m glad you’re okay, Ping. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. Don’t worry about it.”

  She slides her hand off his faceplate. “It is, though.”

  He looks at her a moment, saying nothing, then glances down at her slate. Diagrams of Aero One’s descent overlay the external video. They are a meteor blazing through the pristine hydrogen sky of the stratosphere. They need to fall four thousand kilometers to reach the aero’s programmed deployment zone. More importantly, they need time for the aero’s scooper to collect, separate, and warm the hydrogen required to turn them into an airship. Otherwise they plunge into the crushing depths of the troposphere, implode, and splash down in a diamond ocean.

  “What will we do when we get there?” Jia asks.

  “I, uh, haven’t worked out that part yet.”

  Her eyes widen. “I was thinking you had a plan when you said climb in the aero.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I did. Get off the exploding ship. Done. You want to go back?”

  She holds both of her palms up.

  He shoos her with the back of his fingers. “You’re the pilot. Figure out a way to fly us back to orbit.”

  She places a glove against the side of her head. “It’s a balloon. There’s barely enough buoyancy for it at the bottom of the stratosphere. Everything above us is hydrogen.” Her breathing’s up and she pushes her back against the wall. The pressure outside is still only in millibar but she can feel the endless blanket of atmosphere smothering down upon her.

  Ping shrugs. “Fly to Cloud Nine, then, dock on the repair platform. Hang out in the emergency area until the rescue ship comes.”

  Jia shakes her head, taps the slate. Latitude and longitude lines superimpose over an atmospheric map of Uranus. The circuit of aerostats is an ellipse with Cloud Nine at its left. Clear across the map a blue icon marks their location. “We’re thirty-eight thousand kilometers out of the loop.”

  Ping frowns. “Yeah, we were all lined up to drop this one. Right latitude, just overshot the drop point. A lot. We must’ve both been out for a quarter of an orbit.”

  “An aero’s top speed is what, twenty-four hundred kilometers per day? It’ll take sixteen days to fly to Cloud Nine. Suit’s only good for two weeks.”

  “Well, so, we sit it out in here. Rescue ship from Central is twelve days, maybe sooner if someone in the outer system picks up the distress signal.”

  Jia shuffles and looks down.

  Ping hesitates. “What?”

  She makes eye contact with him, her head still lowered. “I tried…oh, Ping, there’s no distress signal. The comm room was gone.” She’s winded, tries to catch her breath. “You probably don’t remember, but you could see right outside to atmosphere from the core junction.”

  Ping doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. The white noise of buffeting atmosphere fills the space. Finally, he says, “Well, that is unfortunate.”

  Jia’s gulping air fast, shallow breaths, their pace escalating. She shakes her helmet, pushes at the core shaft with her feet. A CO2 caution blinks yellow on her suit display.

  “Easy, easy,” Ping says. “You’re hyperventilating.” He reaches for her suit controls, tries to dial up the O2, but she flails at his hands and pushes away. Ping grabs her by both of her shoulders, pulls her forward. He is surprisingly strong. “Hey, look at me.”

  They are faceplate-to-faceplate and she raises her eyes to his. He slides his palms off her shoulders, down her forearms, into her hands, and even though they are separated by their gloves she feels a warmth filter into her fingers. She looks at him and he smiles slightly, opens his mouth to take a slow breath, holds it a second, and lets it out. “In and out, just like that.”

  She curls her fingers around his, squeezes his hands. Her breathing slows, calms. The capsule rocks in the wind and she notices the plasma roar beneath her feet has subsided. They’ve shed enough velocity that they’re no longer a fireball. Now they’re a supersonic skydiving paperweight. Gees have eased closer to normal.

  “Better,” Ping says, coughing. “Hey, we’re thinkers. We’ll think our way out. We don’t need the whole plan, just the next step, right?”

  Jia breathes, air in through her nose, out through her mouth. She sits there, silent, regaining composure. “Okay,” another breath and a nod, “okay. You’re right. Focus on the now. Get the balloon deployed. Check bios.”

  “Put the suits in survival mode.”

  The thought of drinking reprocessed waste water infused with salts and sugars isn’t very palatable, but it will keep them alive. Oxygen will be stripped out of the carbon dioxide they exhale, resupplied as air, and the remaining carbon will be combined with hydrogen and oxygen to make sucrose. Empty calories, but still calories.

  Jia nods. “Could be worse. I guess.”

  Ping releases her hands and points to the slate. “I’ll check the aero’s system, make sure everything’s ready for deployment.” He slides up into a sitting position and she mirrors him.

  “I’ll do the bios.”

  “Good, good. First steps.” He takes the slate.

  She watches him work a second, then pairs her HUD with his suit’s telemetry. Some of the diagnostics are automatic, but others require her to pulse her helmet lights for pupil response. Everyone learns this in EV training.

  “Ping,” Jia begins, struggling to find the right words. “We would’ve died up there, outside that airlock, if you didn’t think of this.”

  “Eh, I wouldn’t have thought of it if you hadn’t fished me out of the bay.”

  She extends a fist and he responds with a knuckle-bump. It seems silly but feels right.

  Overhead a clank and whirl sounds, servos grind, and the wind noise escalates.

  Ping latches onto the crossbar and Jia mirrors him. “Getting close.”

  Six firecrackers crackle overhead and the capsule jolts. A cyclic whine whirls like a great spool unraveling. “Hold on,” Ping says.

  She grips the bars. The spool slows and the floor bounces up against her in a burst of deceleration. New forces catch her laterally.

  Ping holds the slate with his free hand. “Drogue chutes stable.”

  Jia braces her feet against the core shaft and bends her knees. The wind noise picks up and vibrations hum against her back as her weight settles against the floor. It’s a long thirty seconds before a loud pop jolts her. Tinges of pain shoot along her spine.

  “Pilot chutes out,” Ping says. “Mains deployed. Looks good.”

  Jia leans the back of her head against the wall and closes her eyes. They drift there for five minutes, silent, a slight sway in the capsule lulling her. Machinery beneath the floor comes alive and something like a turbine spins up to speed.

  “Here we go, moment of truth,” Ping says.

  The spool zips again as air hisses through the pipes and for a moment she feels like she’s in a steampunk boiler room. Overhead a flag flaps in a storm. The capsule rebounds and sways as all deceleration fades away.

  Ping releases his hold and slides over beside Jia. “Balloon deployed.
Chutes jettisoned.” He offers the slate to her. “Want to see?”

  Jia glances down at the external video. A bright aquamarine sky is obscured by carbon black cables radiating upwards, fanning out, silver umbilical attached to the great mirrored belly of the balloon. On its curved surface she can see the aerostat’s reflection, warped. Aero One is no longer a capsule but has blossomed at the nose into a twelve-petaled flower with hints of the unlocked lower structure visible at the periphery. Impossibly far beneath it, mammoth cloud columns smeared glossy cyan stretch across the entire reflected underside of the blimp. They remind her of cumulonimbus clouds seen from Earth orbit, except these are methane and ammonia existing at -168 C. She zooms back to wide-field and sees all fifty-eight meters of the silver balloon shaped like a twentieth-century blimp with four fins along its tail. Towering red hanzi characters contrast with the beryl sky.

  There’s something a bit retro-future about the whole setup and Jia gives a nervous laugh. Adrenalin after-effects kick in. “You know this is crazy, right?”

  Ping lifts his eyebrows. “We passed crazy about a thousand kilometers ago.”

  3

  Freeze

  Jia curls her knees up to her chest and tucks her fingers beneath her armpits. Her breath condenses into a thin fog on her faceplate’s base. She’s moved away from the external wall. Direct contact with it felt like ice on bare skin.

  Ping’s teeth chatter. “You think it’s cold in here, you should see outside.”

  “We’re in the wrong suits, I know. I thought we were going into space, not doing a planetary excursion. I’d kill for a PLEX suit right now.” She reaches over and rubs both of her hands over the outside of his shoulders, motions for him to do the same. “Gotta move, generate heat. Think of it like an athletic jacket. Mylar layers are reflective.”

  “It’s funny that everyone thinks space is cold, EV suits keep you warm. Did you know twentieth-century suits had to dump heat by ice sublimation to keep astronauts from overheating?”

  She did know that. Space is cold, but it’s amazingly bad at transferring heat. Vacuum is the perfect insulator. There’s no conduction, no convection, only thermal radiation. People’s bodies produce heat faster than they can radiate it, so wearing a spacesuit in space is like wearing a parka in the desert. You need a cooling system. It wasn’t until people started going to places with cold atmospheres that convection comes into play and suits need heaters.

  Ping stops rubbing her shoulders and holds them, looks her in the eyes. “I know you don’t want to turn on the heaters—“

  “I don’t.”

  “But we’ll be dead before nightfall if we don’t.”

  She takes a deep breath. “Four days. We go from two weeks to four days with the heaters on. Even if we could send a distress signal, there’s nothing within four days of here.”

  Ping presses his lips together, nods. “Yeah, but the choices are no time, or time. Let’s go with time. Figure something out along the way.”

  She glances around at the walls. “You think you could, uh, engineer us a way to recharge the suit batteries from the aero’s reactor?”

  Ping bobs his head. “Hydrogen all around us and no way to get it into our fuel cells. It’s a bit like dying of thirst because you can’t drink the ocean water.” He looks down. “I don’t know. No tools. Let me think about it, see if there’s a way to jury rig a connection to the charging port without frying us or breaking the aero.”

  Jia slides her hand down his shoulder to his forearm keypad. She looks him in the eye, presses the heater icon, then reaches over to her left forearm and does the same. At first there is no sensation, but after twenty seconds a warm diamond grid radiates along her torso and limbs. Warmth spreads in a pool along each fingertip and toe. She’s still shivering. It will take some time for the deep cold to dissolve, but it feels wonderful, like taking a swig of brandy. Her hands are tingly and slightly painful, but in a good way.

  “Better,” Ping says. He slides towards the core shaft, puts his back against it.

  Jia slides beside him. Where their shoulders touch, heat builds up. “This was not how I saw today unfolding.”

  “Yup. Well, tomorrow’s another day, and it’s only seventeen hours long, so, there’s less that can go wrong.”

  She grins and punches him in the arm.

  “Yeah,” he says, “can’t really feel that through all the kevlar.”

  Jia leans against him, and for a minute it’s nice just to have the contact. She feels like leaning her head on his shoulder, but she doesn’t. Instead, she clasps her hands around her knees and looks at her feet.

  “What are you thinking about?” asks Ping.

  Jia glances up. “When we first met.”

  “Confined space egress training. Hah! Hope you paid attention.”

  “You kept making jokes after everything the instructor said. You weren’t like any engineer I’d ever met.”

  “Ah, Zhao. Way too uptight. Needed a little fun.” He smiles. “But you, you were so serious, so focused. Not like Zhao, though. You were someone who wanted to achieve something.” He waves his fingers. “Eh, a little prickly at first, but I liked your spirit.”

  She breaks eye contact, looks down. “I have a bit of a confession to make. At first I wasn’t sure about you. You know, you were always interrupting the instructor. But the more I listened to the questions you asked, the more I realized you were very clever.”

  Ping raises his eyebrows. “You think I’m clever?”

  She smiles. “You’re the smartest guy on the planet. I’m glad it’s you I’m stuck here with.”

  The slate chimes an alert and Ping acknowledges it. “Aero Twelve just crashed. Telemetry’s gone.”

  Jia nods, then something catches her memory and she quirks her head. “Can I see the slate for a moment?” Ping hands it over and she brings up atmospheric data. A Mercator projection of Uranus appears with animated arrows showing wind directions and velocity. They are at the sweet spot on Uranus, the twenty-degree latitude line where winds are nearly zero. As you move north, winds are prograde, blowing west. As you move south, winds are retrograde, blowing east. The aerostats use this pattern to form a natural counterclockwise loop, docking with Cloud Nine on the west end every ten days to empty their day tanks.

  “Maybe we should do that too,” she says.

  “Crash?”

  “Well, hopefully not. Fly south, to, say about here,” she points on the screen, “drop into the troposphere a bit. Winds will be over three hundred kph. Add in our flight speed and we could make Cloud Nine in four days. Kind of like riding the jet stream back on Earth. What’s design spec?”

  Ping mulls it over. “One seventy-five.”

  “What about the fudge factor?”

  “Okay, engineers call that factor of safety, not ‘fudge factor’.”

  She waves her hand, motions him along.

  “Uh, two point four. So, technically we should be able to handle three hundred kph.”

  “Should I ask what happens if we can’t?”

  Pings bobs his head. “Cable rupture, possible balloon breach, followed by a very, very long fall. On the plus side, we’ll be buried in liquid diamond. Kind of cool.”

  “Okay, then. So, want to do it?”

  “It’s not the worst idea we’ve had today.”

  “I’m going to get some sensor readings, put the flight path together.”

  Ping nods. “When you’re done with the slate, I’ll pull up the aero schematics and see what I can come up with for charging the suits.” He coughs a few times. “In the meantime, I’m just going to close my eyes for a few minutes.”

  Jia places her left hand on his shoulder. “Get some rest.”

  Ping curls onto his side and drifts off to sleep. She watches him a moment before going back to work on the slate. Her mind drifts as she waits for the aero’s sensor scans.

  She remembers sitting on the Prosperity’s bridge and asking Ping, “How’s One coming
along?”

  Ping was down in the hangar to prep the aero. His face fills the bridge screen and from the perspective Jia can tell he’s transmitting from his slate. He pans the camera across the hangar bay. Aero One sits on its launch tracks, rotated ninety degrees.

  “One’s my favorite,” Ping says. “She’s a beauty. Fully fueled, quality inspected, ready to go. Hate to launch her, but I guess all parents have to let their kids loose.”

  “Okay, I’m calling Cloud Nine to get launch authorization.”

  Cloud Nine floats deep in the stratosphere at the same altitude as the aerostats. Prosperity flies at an altitude of four thousand kilometers above the eastern border of the aerostat loop, and Cloud Nine is stationed at the western edge of the loop. Jia’s navcon tags it with a green icon. She sends the signal, a few seconds transpire, and a stoic buzz returns over comms. “Uh, Ping?”

  “Yes?”

  “Cloud Nine says all orbital insertion services are suspended during ascent procedures.”

  Ping’s still on video and his face scrunches. “Wait, what?”

  “Querying tank status now. I’m reading three hundred and fifty kiloliters He3 in main storage.”

  “That sounds right. Half a month’s worth, minus Aero Twelve’s production.”

  “And it’s getting ready to shunt to the ascent vehicle’s tanks.”

  “Oh, that’s not good.” Ping is walking now, the camera bobbing. He’s at aerocon tapping away. “I’m showing the launch request originated from the orbital transfer platform. Bringing up the platform now. And…I’m locked out.”

  Jia taps open the Prosperity’s forward cameras and locates the orbital transfer platform. It’s a glistening metal speck ahead in a higher orbit. Prosperity’s orbital period is faster and it will pass beneath the platform in a few minutes. The platform is there, running lights and strobes marking it, but there’s something else. At first it’s hard to see, a black shadow occulting a few stars, but blue reflections from Uranus glint along its edges. “Ping! There’s a ship docked at the platform.”