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 070S 2800W 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 pres-ently 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 long-standing 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 a 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 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 interplanetary 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 AU 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.
Four days after the Gold Dust Woman received the mayday from the Ritchie Explorer, the freighter came within visual range of the asteroid. Thirteen miles long and eight miles wide, Eros looks vaguely like an Idaho potato from which someone has taken a bite; at its midsection is a deep, scalloped depression, less like a crater than a gorge, from when it had apparently broken away from a larger asteroid countless years ago. Called Himeros, this was where the Explorer had anchored itself.
Asteroid mining rigs such as the Ritchie Explorer are called ships only because they have engines that enable them to move from one place to another. Other than that, they're more like spacefaring versions of the offshore oil platforms that used to line the coasts of Earth's oceans. About 70,000 tons in dry Earth-weight, the Explorer was an ugly, dust-covered hulk half-hidden by conduits, pipes, storage tanks, antennas, and cranes, with three fusion engines at one end and a hemispherical command module at its midsection. Eros was in its winter season, with the asteroid's slow, end-over-end tumble on its spin axis causing Him-eros to face away from the Sun, so the rig could only be seen by its red and green formation lights.
As the Gold Dust Woman approached Eros, Henry Zimmerman repeated his radio calls, continually hailing the Explorer while Lesley fired maneuvering thrusters to bring the freighter alongside the asteroid and match spins with it. As before, there was no response . . . and when the Woman finally achieved a parallel position about 2,000 feet above Himeros, its crew saw why.
"It looked like a bomb had gone off down there,” Henry says. “The command module dome was almost completely blown away. It was like . . .” He pauses, thinking of a way to describe it. “If you made a bowl out of aluminum foil, turned it upside-down, then lit a firecracker underneath it . . . that's what you'd get."
"The moment I saw that,” Ko says, “I knew this wasn't a rescue mission anymore. We were just going in there to find the bodies. There was no way anyone could have lived through whatever happened down there."
Nevertheless, Captain Zimmerman proceeded as if lives were at stake and the clock was ticking. According to the database, the rig's six-person crew was an extended family, three married couples who'd joined together to form a clan under a common surname. This practice is not unusual aboard Pax deep-space vessels; quite often, the clans are also the consortiums that own and operate their ships. In this instance, the Owlsley clan was listed as being the owner-operators of the Ritchie Explorer: David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley, the captain and first mate respectively; Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley, the chief engineer and operations manager; and Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley, both surface-operations technicians. According to their profiles, all were experienced spacers; it was possible that a few might have survived in some airtight compartment out of reach from the long-range com.
Because the Woman's reactor boom jutted out at right-angles from the rest of the ship, there was no way the
freighter could hard-dock with the rig. To make matters more difficult, the Explorer's primary docking hatch was occupied by its skiff, thereby preventing the Woman from sending over her own skiff; compounding the mystery was the fact that the Explorer's two three-person lifeboats were still in their berths as well. So reaching the rig wouldn't be simple.
After a brief discussion, Henry Zimmerman consented to let Quon Ko make an untethered spacewalk over to the rig. It was a dangerous task; Ko would be using an EVA maneuvering pack, and the slightest misfire of its control thrusters could mean that he'd mismatch his spin relative to those of both the Woman and the Explorer and either tumble away into space or, worse, smash headlong into Eros at hundreds of feet per second. Ko had logged hundreds of hours in spacewalks, though, and had practiced this particular ship-to-ship jump before.
Lesley would later confess to biting her nails to the quick, but Ko made the jump without incident. “The trick is, you don't look where you're going,” he says. “If you did, you'd get dizzy and screw up. So you keep your eye on the heads-up the whole time and just do it."
He came down near a small service airlock located on the Explorer's starboard side, just above one of the four massive anchor pods on the rig's underside that held the rig to the asteroid. Not far away was the hollow shaft of the primary drill; within the dim illumination of the formation lights, Ko could see that the drum-like shaft was sunk within the asteroid, a certain indication that the chemical laser bore had been deployed.
Ko found the airlock hatch, and it was then, within the halogen beams of his helmet lamps, that he noticed a safety line tethered to a rung next to the hatch. The slender rope lay limp from the hatch, falling down the adjacent ladder until it reached the ground, where it trailed away into the darkness. Ko used a flashlight from his belt to give the safety line a quick glance; there was nothing at the end of the line except another tether hook, but he also noted footprints scattered along the dark gray regolith beneath it. Little more than two dozen impressions, they went away from the rig and didn't come back. There appeared to be more than one set of footprints, but it was hard to tell for sure whether more than one person was responsible for them.
"I had a hunch all this was significant,” Ko would later tell the board of inquiry, “so before I went in through the airlock, I took plenty of pictures. Particularly of the footprints, before they got messed up by anyone else."
To avoid disturbing what might be a major clue, Quon Ko clung to the ladder as much as possible while he opened the airlock, setting his own feet on the ground only once. That was made possible by Eros's very slight surface gravity. At less than .002-g, one would have to remain still for a long time in order to stand erect; even a dropped object took a minute or more to slowly drift to a rest.
Once he entered the airlock, the first thing Ko did was to check the interior pressure gauge. He was startled to find nothing but hard vacuum on the other side. It appeared that the Explorer had suffered a catastrophic blowout that had voided even the lower decks. “Automatic pressure doors should've come down,” he says, “unless the explosion was such that the comps were instantly knocked offline. In that case . . .” He stops, shakes his head. “When something like that happens, there's no hope. You're dead before you even hear the alarms."
There seemed to be emergency power, though, so with Henry's permission, Ko disengaged the airlock fail-safes, then pried open the inside hatch. An emergency ceiling lamp had been lit in the adjacent ready-room, and beneath its amber glow Ko found another clue. Two skinsuits were missing from the lockers; the other four were still in place, and when Ko checked their name patches, he saw that they belonged to David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley and Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley. Which meant it was Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley who'd left through the airlock and not come back.
"When Ko found this,” Lesley says, “I figured, Okay, that's it. We're going to find everyone else's bodies somewhere in the rig.’ In fact, I started bracing myself for just that . . . even grabbing the med kit so that I'd have a sedative patch handy."
For Ko, the situation was different. Professional spacers speak of moments of surrealism that sometimes occur during stressful EVAs; they become hyperconscious of the fact that they're seeing the world through a helmet faceplate, and it suddenly seems as if they've become living cameras. “Distancing” is the expression most often used; you're there, but it's as if you're not quite there.
This is what happened to Quon Ko as he made his way through the Ritchie Explorer. Climbing up the ladder from the airlock, he found the passageway that led him to the crew quarters. As he'd suspected, the emergency pressure doors hadn't dropped; one by one, he entered compartments completely absent of atmospheric pressure. In the sanguine red tint of the ceiling lamps, he saw the damage caused by the blowout: food cans torn from galley shelves and strewn across the deck, clothes ripped from closet hangers, shredded paper thrown everywhere like confetti . . . and across it all, a thin layer of frost, where water vapor had instantly frozen out and become a patina of ice.
One small detail he'd come to remember: On the floor of one of the staterooms lay a paperback book, its cover torn and frosted-over but its title still readable—Basics of Rock Climbing. Perhaps because the book was so out of place, it stuck in his mind.
Yet there were no bodies. Like Lesley, Ko expected to find corpses. Even if two of the missing crewmen had been on EVA when the disaster occurred, it still meant that the remaining four should have been inside the rig; the lifeboats were in place, as was the skiff, so it was clear that no one had abandoned ship. Yet just as it was apparent that the rig had lost internal pressure before the emergency hatches could be sealed, so it also became obvious that no one would be found belowdecks.
Leaving the crew quarters, Ko crossed the short passageway that took him into the rig's industrial section. When he came to the place where the ladder to the command module should have been located, though, he found himself at the edge of a gaping hole. A blast crater yawned in the center of the rig: nearly a dozen feet in diameter, it was practically bottomless, or at least as far he could tell from the beams of his helmet lamps. This was the site of the onboard explosion, the effects of which the Woman's crew had seen from above. Judging from the way the torn metal edges of the crater were bent upwards, it appeared that the blast had happened somewhere below.
As Ko peered into the abyss, Henry and Lesley hastily pulled up the Explorer's schematics from the Woman's database. It was then that they discovered that the rig's primary drill was positioned directly below the command module. It looked as if the drill had hit something deep underground that had caused the explosion, the force of which had blown straight upward into the rig itself.
There was nowhere else to search for survivors except the bridge. Rather than spend time searching for another ladder, Ko took the most direct approach: firing his EVA backpack, he carefully used its jets to glide up the crater to the top deck. “I could've left the rig entirely,” Ko says. “The ceiling was almost totally gone. When I got up there, I saw almost nothing but stars above me."
The compartment was a wreck, only a handful of lights glimmering on the sole control panel that remained operational. Indeed, the final report issued by the Pax review board would conclude that it was only by a miracle that the Ritchie Explorer had been able to transmit the mayday received by the Gold Dust Woman; with most of the comps instantly knocked off-line by the explosion, only the emergency transmitter, which was located elsewhere on the platform and powered by its own battery, was left intact.
Still, nothing prepared Quon Ko for what he found. When the ovals cast by his helmet lamp found a black stikshoe wedged beneath the base of an upended chair, his first thought was that it was empty. But then he moved a little closer, and saw that the shoe was crusted with red ice. A foot, roughly severed just above the ankle, was caught within the shoe.
This was the only human remnant found aboard the Ritchie Explorer.
* * * *
Captain Zimmerman immediately sent word to Ceres Station, which in turn sent urgent requests to the Martian Pride and the Ulysses that they come to the Gold Dust Woman's assistance. By then, both vessels were nearly two weeks away from Eros, time enough for news of the disaster to reach Earth.
Journalists often say that the public pays little attention to what goes on in space until something goes wrong, and this is true more often than not. When space exploration became less about discovery and more about commerce, the only people on Earth who continued to closely watch what was happening out there were investors, lien holders, and insurance companies, along with the handful of amateur enthusiasts who still cared about such things. This tends to change, though, whenever something unusual occurs . . . and in space, an unusual occurrence is almost always something that takes its toll in lives.
So Quon Ko hadn't even returned to the Woman before the first reports of what he'd found aboard the Explorer appeared in the news media back on Earth. Within twenty-four hours, about half of the world's inhabitants, along with nearly 100 percent of the lunar and Martian colonists, were aware of the mysterious loss of six lives aboard an asteroid mining rig. To be sure, most of those same four and a half billion people would forget all about the Explorer and its crew within ten days, for nothing is as fickle as the attention of the media mass-mind. But for the moment, the Ritchie Explorer was the top-of-the-hour lead story.
It wasn't just that six people had been killed. It was also that those six people were missing, with nothing more than a severed foot to show for them. Among the countless experts, real and self-proclaimed, who took turns espousing opinions both educated and ignorant, the more well-informed pointed out that, even if most of the crew had been blown out into space by the explosion—the cause of which was, itself, a major mystery—then Eros's gravity would assert its pull upon their corpses, and the bodies would therefore eventually be found and recovered. And they were right: over the course of the next few weeks, searchers from the Pride and the Ulysses located the torn and frozen bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys, each floating in space not far from Eros. However, the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley remained both unsolved and unexplained.
Analog SFF, October 2010 Page 17