by Bob Blanton
“Okay,” Blake said. “What do you need?”
“We’re going to need to start printing mini-fusion reactors and gravity drives,” Marc said, “plus, the computer circuits for the satellites.”
“Those have to be printed in microgravity with the molecular printers,” Catie said.
“Right, so we’ll need to get those in orbit and running as soon as we can,” Marc said.
“And you don’t want to put the Sakira up there, right?” Blake asked.
“Right, so we’ll need Oryxes to use as manufacturing platforms.”
“Once we build enough,” Catie said, “we can keep four in orbit with a printer on each of them. Then we just have to bring supplies up and rotate the crews.”
“That will work,” Blake said.
“Okay, I’d like to keep exactly what we’re manufacturing on them between us,” Marc said. “Blake, I’ll have ADI forward you the work we’ve done on the satellites so you can create a manufacturing plan.”
“Got it,” Blake said. “You’re really feeling the pressure, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I thought we’d spend three years getting the city finished and the space station built, but every time I turn around, there seems to be something making it more urgent to finish sooner,” Marc said as he gave a big sigh and rubbed his face.
◆ ◆ ◆
“Captain,” Catie said as she entered Marc’s office.
“What happened to Daddy?” Marc asked.
“We’re working. I want to talk about the mission.”
“Okay, Cer Catie. Where are you?”
“We’re ready to go.”
“When do you want to leave?”
“Saturday night after dark. I’m assuming you want to minimize any chance we will be seen.”
“You are correct.”
“That gives you tonight to say goodbye to Sam,” Catie grinned at her father.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Marc chuckled.
“You know she could move in with us. It wouldn’t bother me.”
“Thanks for letting me know, but I think she likes having her own place.”
“Just saying.”
“I know. Now about your mission,” Marc said. “A few things I want to add to the mission parameters.”
“Yes sir.”
“I want you to bring the asteroids into Earth’s orbit from the other side of the sun. That means, you’ll have to keep them next to the asteroid belt until the sun is hiding them from view. We don’t want them to be seen by anyone here and start up a scare about a killer asteroid. Once they’re in the same orbit, we can slow them until they’re at the proper leading position we want.”
The tip of Catie’s tongue poked out the corner of her mouth while she did some work in her HUD. “I can bring them into an outside orbit, having their velocity a little too slow, so they start decaying in toward the sun. Once they reach the right orbit, the Earth should have caught up quite a bit. We can goose them back to the right speed with the drives and adjust until they’re where you want them. We can put the three of them in a tight orbital line if you want, so you can only see one from Earth.”
“That should work.”
“Okay, I’m staying with Liz and Natalia tonight, have fun.”
Marc rolled his eyes and just waved Catie out of his office.
Chapter 9
Spaceflight
Day 1
“You guys ready?” Catie asked her crew. They were standing in the hangar looking at the Lynx that would be their home for the next three to four weeks. Each of them wore one of the shipsuits that they’d designed and had made onboard the Sakira.
“Girl, I was born ready,” Natalia said.
Samantha and Liz nodded in agreement while the twins were figuring out that they could both stand behind Natalia and hide from Catie.
“Wait, group picture,” Marc shouted. “Stand right there in front of the Lynx, and I’ll get a shot for the archives. Natalia, stand in back, Liz and Sam, one of you on each side of her. Catie, you stand in front of Natalia with one of the twins on each side. Okay, say space.”
“Space!”
“Take lots of pictures; someday we’ll publish this, and you will all be famous.”
“Sure, Daddy,” Catie waved at her father as she shooed the twins into the Lynx.
Once everyone was aboard, Catie gave her father and Uncle Blake one more wave before she closed the hatch. “Everybody put on your helmet. And you’ll have to put on the chest piece of your exosuit since that’s where the air supply is.”
“Are you telling us this flight isn’t safe?” Samantha said, clutching her hands to her chest in mock horror.
“No, but better safe than sorry. This is the first time we’ve ever taken a Lynx into orbit, much less beyond that.”
Samantha shuddered, “I didn’t think of that. Is it too late to back out? … Just kidding.”
“Once you’re suited up, strap yourself to your couches. Liz and I will be in the cockpit, but I’ll put the forward view up here on the display, with Liz and me in the corner here. We’ll be on open comm the whole time so everybody can enjoy the experience.”
“We’re ready,” the twins said as they finished strapping themselves in.
“ADI is preflight done?” Catie asked.
“Yes, Cer Catie. All systems are green.”
Catie and Liz cycled into the cockpit and strapped in. Catie reviewed all the preflight data, then signaled Blake to open the hangar door. She started the engines up, letting them idle while she engaged the landing gear. The Lynx had motor-driven wheels that allowed it to move in any direction without relying on the engines.
“Okay, we’re going to start taxiing now,” Catie announced as she started the Lynx toward the hangar opening. She drove down to the end of the runway and turned the Lynx around. “Control, Lynx One requesting clearance for takeoff.”
“Lynx One, you have clear skies,” Blake responded, “you’re cleared for takeoff. Have a safe journey.”
“Bye sweetie, bye hon, bye girls,” Marc said. “Safe journey; stay in touch while you’re out there.”
“And we’re off!” Catie pushed the throttle forward, opening up the engines. The Lynx rocketed down the fourteen-hundred-meter runway, lifting off well before the end and blasting into the night sky.
“Turning south and climbing to ten thousand meters,” Catie announced to everyone. “Next stop, the South Pole.”
“How long until we get there?” Samantha asked.
“A bit under an hour,” Liz explained.
“Will we be able to see Antarctica?” Natalia asked.
“It’s going to be dark,” Liz answered.
“Oh, pooh,” Samantha said.
“Can we get up?” the twins asked.
“No, you’ll need to stay in your seats for about an hour. We’re going to go vertical in a bit, and you’re going to feel a lot heavier.”
“Can you explain?” Samantha asked. “Inquiring minds want to know.”
Catie laughed. “Sure. When we get close to the South Pole, I’m going to go ballistic, like a missile. We’ll need to accelerate at one-point-five Gs, one G to overcome gravity and zero-point-five Gs, so we actually go somewhere. You will feel like you weigh over twice what you normally do. We’ll do that for about forty minutes. After that, the force of gravity will be about one-quarter-G, so I will back off on the acceleration to conserve fuel, and everyone can move about. Of course, it will be just like in training, with the back of the jet being down, so you’ll need to use the ladder.”
Everyone soon noticed their weight moving to the back of their couch and slowly increase as Catie arced the Lynx into a vertical climb.
“Speaking of inquiring minds, how do we have the fuel to do this kind of burn?” Liz asked.
“Isn’t it kind of late to ask if we have enough fuel to get there and back?” Catie asked with a laugh.
“Well, I was trusting you, girl, but now I’d like to unders
tand,” Liz said.
“So, would we,” added Samantha.
“Okay,” Catie said. “Although the Lynx mostly looks like a regular jet, its engines are really different. We have a small fusion reactor onboard that provides most of our power. We have these humongous capacitors that everything actually runs off of. All the energy absorbed by the hull is dumped into them, and whenever they drop below sixty percent, the fusion reactor kicks in and recharges them to ninety percent.”
“Why capacitors instead of batteries?” Samantha asked. “And what are capacitors, anyway?”
“Capacitors are kind of like a battery. They store energy, but they can absorb and release it way faster than a battery can. That way we can change the power to the engines really fast. The reactor is kind of a big, slow engine. Lots of power, but it doesn’t like to change how much power it generates very fast.”
“Oh, okay,” Samantha said.
“Anyway, when we’re in atmosphere, instead of burning fuel, we use energy from the capacitors to superheat the air that passes through the engines and runs the turbines. So, it acts pretty much like a regular jet engine, hot air goes blasting out the back end, the change in the velocity of the air gives us the thrust. We can dump a little bit of hydrogen into the mix if we need some more boost, but we usually don’t.”
“Oh, that explains why you never have to refuel,” Liz said.
“Yep. But once we get so high that the air is too thin to give us enough thrust, we have to either add a lot more hydrogen or switch to the space engines. The space engines run off of spent fuel from the reactors and the extra water we carry for ejection mass. Now our reactor takes in four deuterium atoms and fuses them into two helium-4 atoms, then it takes four helium-4 atoms and fuses them to make oxygen-sixteen; that’s about the best we can do with fusion, so we store the oxygen-sixteen atoms in a tank in the hold when we’re not using the space engines. But when we use the space engines, they take the oxygen-sixteen, accelerate it really, really fast, and eject it out the back of the engine. That’s what gives us our thrust. But when we’re spitting those oxygen atoms out the back, it’s like a rail gun. They collide with the air in the atmosphere, and that slows them down, kind of like the cue ball colliding with another ball. They both go off in different directions, but the energy from the cue ball is split between itself and the ball it hits. I adjust our vector so that we don’t keep hitting the same area, that way we don’t create a zone of high-speed molecules. In space, the molecules we eject eventually collide with dark matter or something else and get slowed down, but you wouldn’t want one hitting you on the head.”
“How fast are we ejecting them?” Liz asked.
“Right now, I’ve set it for one-tenth the speed of light. That’s so the particles don’t have too much energy when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere,” Catie said.
“Aren’t they going cause a problem anyway?” Liz asked.
“Not too bad. Like I said, their speed gets split between every molecule they collide with, but even with that, I’m sure we’re leaving a bit of a light show behind us.”
“Will they notice?” Samantha asked.
“You mean NASA?”
“Well, anybody.”
“Maybe. We’re on the light side of the Earth now so the show’s happening in daylight, which should reduce the effect. They’ll probably notice something but won’t know what it is. Once we’re a bit further away, I’ll boost the exhaust speed to one-quarter-c, so we can conserve fuel, but I’ll angle us, so the exhaust stream misses Earth.”
“How much fuel does it take?”
“We’re spitting out about twelve kilos an hour right now. Once I change the exhaust speed to one-quarter-c, we’ll drop that to about three kilos an hour. The faster we spin them up, the less it takes to give us the push we want.”
“So, we have plenty of fuel?”
“At three kilos per hour, we have almost a year’s worth of fuel.”
“Good to know.”
“Any more questions?” Catie asked.
“Can you change the screen so we can see Earth?” Samantha asked.
“Yeah!” the twins echoed the request.
“Here you go.”
It was an hour of quiet solitude as everyone watched the Earth recede in the view screen. Even the twins were mostly quiet, with just an occasional giggle between them.
“Okay everybody, grab a barf bag,” Catie announced. “I’m going to ease up on the acceleration nice and slow and bring us to zero-point-two G. Then we can reconfigure the cabin for the rest of our flight.”
“Barf, eww!” the twins squealed.
“I’m hoping by easing the acceleration slowly instead of cutting it off all at once, the transition won’t make anyone sick, but we won’t know until we do it,” Catie said.
“And I don’t want to be cleaning up any barf,” Samantha said.
“Ready. Here we go.” Catie eased the acceleration from one G down to zero-point-one G over ten minutes. “Everybody okay back there?”
“We’re all good,” Samantha said, obviously surprised how easy the transition went.
“Okay, Liz and I are coming back,” Catie said. “We’ll reconfigure the cabin, then I’ll have ADI ease us back up to one G.”
Catie and Liz made their way from the cockpit through the airlock. When they entered the main cabin, Natalia had already extended the partition bulkheads on the right side to act as a floor between the seats. Liz started down the left side extending those bulkheads, while Catie helped Samantha rotate the galley. Everyone was happy that the twins just stayed out of the way and watched. After she and Samantha finished rotating the galley, Catie went to the back and got Natalia to help her rotate the head and the shower.
“Okay, everyone, we’re set. The head is working if anyone needs to use it. While we’re underway, please be careful as you climb the ladder. We don’t want anyone falling. We have an emergency medical kit, but I really don’t want to have to use it.”
The twins had already strapped back in and were watching a video on their HUDs. Catie and Liz took their seats in the front row, close to the cockpit, but they were going to let ADI fly the Lynx for now.
“Okay, ADI, we’re ready, ease her back up to one G.”
“Yes, Captain,” ADI said.
“Ohh, it’s Captain now,” Liz said as she gave Catie a la-di-da wave of her hand.
Catie just grinned.
“How is ADI able to fly us when she’s back on the Sakira?” Samantha asked.
“Oh, I guess you wouldn’t know about that,” Catie said. “Do you know what quantum entanglement is?”
“Not really.”
“Well, if you take two atoms and get them to couple, they call it quantum entanglement, then when you separate them, one atom instantly reacts to whatever happens to the other. They maintain that entanglement no matter how far apart they are. We have a whole bunch of quantum sets in the Sakira. There’s one half of one here on the Lynx, so ADI communicates with that. The Sakira acts like a switchboard, and ADI routes between one quantum pair and the others, or whatever form of communication that is available on the Sakira. So, you can talk between any of them with only the delay from the switching circuit. So, you’ll be able to talk to Daddy anytime you want, and there won’t be any lag.”
“He said I could call him; I didn’t realize it was going to be so easy.”
“Yep, that’s also one of the reasons ADI does so well in the stock market. We took some Internet switches and added a quantum relay to them; then generated some bogus work orders to have them installed next to all the key exchanges. She gets the market data sooner than anyone else.”
“How does that help?”
“Milliseconds count in that game.”
◆ ◆ ◆
On the trip out, Catie had ADI ease the Lynx’s acceleration to zero each day for three hours. This allowed them to practice working in a microgravity environment before they hit the asteroid belt. They organized gam
es of catch; some acrobatic contests; moving around the Lynx; using the head. Samantha also made a point to cook one meal each day in microgravity. They would be in very low gravity or microgravity for up to a week as they searched for the right asteroids, mounted a fusion reactor and three gravity motors on each, and then sent each of them on their path to Earth. Liz also took the opportunity to work on self-defense in the microgravity environment. It quickly became apparent that Natalia’s extra bulk, while not particularly helpful in gravity, really gave her an advantage in microgravity. She could just hunker down and focus on blocking blows. Her inertia was so high that it was almost impossible to get her moving without gravity to help. Liz worked hard to come up with techniques where she could use a bulkhead to gain enough leverage to get Natalia moving. But getting Natalia moving didn’t actually help all that much, because the same problem presented itself when Liz tried to change her direction. Natalia could just curl up a bit, and her momentum would break Liz’s grip. Liz actually had to get her moving then switch to the side she was moving toward to be able to do anything remotely like a throw.
Day 2
“Right!” Natalia barked.
Catie turned to Natalia’s right, bumped into another crate, and dropped her end of the crate, spilling its contents all over the cargo bay. They were shifting the stores in the back of the cabin so they could get to some spices that Samantha wanted.
“Your right,” Natalia said.
“How was I to know whose right you meant,” Catie complained.
“My bad,” Natalia said. “We need to work on terminology before we’re standing on an asteroid getting our suits torn up because we don’t understand each other.”
“I agree,” Liz said. She’d been watching as the disaster slowly unfolded. “Who knows the right vocabulary to use, or do we need to make it up?”
“I think we can just use the terms I learned in the Marines,” Natalia explained as she bent down to gather some of the scattered supplies.