The Far Shore

by Glenn Damato

  “Everyone’s here,” says Paige, “We should do introductions. Life stories. I don’t—”

  “You know what?” interrupts David. He pours himself a coffee refill. “I think you’re going to have forty-two days in space plus the rest of your lives to tell each other about your phobias and favorite foods. Right now you belong to me.”

  “Flight time forty-two days!” exclaims Ryder. “That means nuclear propulsion.”

  “We ruled out a nine or ten-month Hohmann trajectory early in the planning stage. Too much time exposed to cosmic rays.” David gestures toward Ryder’s crotch. “Gotta protect those vital organs.”

  Mikki says, “Please, not while I’m eating.”

  Ryder licks his lips. “When do we launch?”

  I nibble on a piece of toast. “Where’s everyone else? Jürgen? Eric? They’re not on this ship?”

  David sips coffee. “We’re sending thirty-six to Mars. The others are on different ships traveling close in a convoy formation.” He points to a spot on the horizon. Another ship! A red and mustard-colored vessel tears through the water parallel to our course. There are six white domes front to back—tanks?

  “That’s the Enterprise crew five kilometers off our starboard beam. There’s a ship off our port beam and three more behind us, if you look hard.”

  I ask, “Dr. Mike?”

  “Everyone you saw in Pasadena is on a ship.”

  Mikki probes. “You’re telling me Harmony doesn’t know we’re out here?”

  David drains his cup. “We’re okay for a while. Their systems show us in detention. Hundreds of ships cross the Pacific every year. As long as we don’t blow anything up, the monitoring systems can’t tell there’s anything unusual going on. All these tanker ships have been automated down to zero crew years ago. We’re on a regular schedule to depart Terminal Island Liquefaction Facility at midnight for a twenty-day run to the regasification plant at Ta Phut, Thailand.”

  Ryder blurts, “This thing is loaded with liquified natural gas, right? How about liquid oxygen?”

  LNG. Liquified natural gas.

  “A cryo tank is a cryo tank.”

  “So we’re hauling oxygen, too!” Ryder cries. He smacks his palm against the rail. “We’re taking fuel and oxidizer to the launch site. It can’t be a Harmony launch facility. We’d never get away with it.”

  David grins and puts down his coffee cup. “Your education commences now. Follow me.”

  ◆◆◆

  It lays horizontal, sparkling white and impossibly huge. I can’t speak. This can’t be real. It’s wider than a city street, it’s two Skylons end-to-end, and a Skylon is longer than a fútbol field. It’s too big to fly.

  My stomach is ready to climb up my throat. This is happening, we’re leaving, and soon.

  Ryder jumps up and down like a maníaco. He falls to his knees. Shuko’s head is bent back, his mouth open, trying to take in the tail-end of the rocket. Intricate silver machinery overhead, plus dark cones about two meters wide—too many to count, fifty at least. Engine nozzles.

  Paige places both her hands on top of her head.

  Mikki sputters, “This flies? This flies?”

  “Total length one hundred seventy meters. Booster stage, fifteen meters in diameter. Six times the weight of the former record-holder, the Apollo Saturn Five.” David smiles and points toward the massive nozzles. “In thrust we trust.”

  Ryder is back on his feet and vigorously shaking David’s hand. “How did you do this? How did you do this right under their noses?”

  “Fast as hell, that’s how. Everything you see, printed and assembled over the last nine days right here inside the hull.”

  “Here?” Alison asks. “You built this right here inside the ship?”

  “Best place to hide it.” replies David. “We hacked the whole setup right down to the raw materials. These ships were scheduled for a refit, so we already had the industrial printers plus the feed materials and power supplies. Aluminum. Titanium. Steel. Plastics and composites. The heavy printing and assembly work was done by the same bots that do ship refits.”

  Ryder snickers. “You stole Harmony’s materials and used Harmony’s printers to create this. Right under their fuckin’ noses. Sweetest thing I ever heard. Now show us the people section, the lander.”

  We head forward in this vast, misty place of pipes, cables, and machinery. Pairs of technicians in blue coveralls bend over their work. They don’t notice us over the background noise coming from racks of fans, pumps, and other equipment surrounding us.

  The rocket is supported by a long cradle of blue girders and braces. It grows narrower as we near the upper parts and it ends with a blunt nose. There are little oval windows bordered in black and an open hatch crowded with hoses. Written near the hatch: Liberty. Deep red letters over the glossy white surface—brash and gallant.

  “Liberty!” shouts Ryder. He punches the air. “Liberty!” He knocks fists with David and thumps Mikki on the shoulder. I’m lucky; I get a tap on the back of my head.

  There nearest window is directly above us. I ask David, “A look inside? Just for a minute?”

  “Not yet. They’re doing system checks and lineups.”

  Ryder shakes his head like he still can’t believe any of this. “Launch date?”

  “November eleventh, one week from tomorrow.”

  Fly in space, in one week. My heart races.

  “A week?” sneers Mikki. “We can’t be ready in a week!”

  “That’s my job,” David declares. “You’ll be ready, and you’ll have time in flight to learn and adapt enough to keep yourselves alive and build what you need. You’ll have considerably more information and resources than the first settlers who arrived at the Americas or Polynesia.”

  “Eight days,” mumbles Shuko. “That hardly seems adequate.”

  “Doctor Saito, I won’t question your medical judgment. Extend me the same professional courtesy.”

  I inform Shuko, “If they can build this in nine days, they can train us and get us to the launch site in eight.”

  David grins. “Launch site? You’re standing on it.”

  ◆◆◆

  The kitchen off the sleeping quarters has been set up as a classroom. David stands before a two-meter panel displaying a map of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Today’s agenda has three parts. First, your flight plan. Second, cabin familiarization. Third, emergency actions.” He points a bony finger to a red dot a few centimeters to the left of Alta California. “We’re here, about three hundred kilometers from the coast.” His finger cuts across the screen to a point halfway between the America states and China. “This is your launch position, sixteen hundred kilometers northwest of the Hawaiian Islands.”

  Ryder stomps both feet on the floor. “You mean we launch straight from this ship? That big beautiful gigantic thing lifts off straight from this ship?”

  “The cradle rotates ninety degrees to vertical.”

  Mikki exhales sharply. “If you’re launching the biggest rockets ever made, you might as well go all the way and do it from ships.”

  I ask, “How did you pick the launch position?”

  “It’s distant from military assets. Harmony’s defense tracking systems watch for ballistic threats near the coasts. They’re not configured against a target rising straight up from the middle of nowhere. We can launch you at any point, and the guidance system will fly you to Mars.”

  David changes the display to a cross-section of the entire ship. There are six enormous spheres in a single row—yes, tanks after all—each marked 65 meters in diameter. The rocket and it’s cradle are beneath the third, fourth, and fifth tanks, which are hollow and have only upper domes.

  “These middle tanks are dummies. The forward two tanks hold your liquid methane fuel, the sixth is full of liquid oxygen. Eighteen thousand tons of propellant. A few hours before launch, we’ll transfer the oxygen and the fuel into the rocket tanks. The three dummy domes slide off into th
e ocean, and the tower rotates to vertical via transmission cables spooled by two diesel engines.”

  Paige shakes her head. “Won’t the whole ship topple over?”

  “No, because we’ll be counter-flooding the hull to keep the center of gravity low. The rocket cradle also slides forward as it rises in order to keep the ship balanced along the transverse axis. Once you’re vertical, the cradle is your launch tower.”

  Mikki says, “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  “The part where I get a bottle of wine. Because I’m not doing this before I drink a whole bottle of wine.”

  David closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, but not fast enough to hide a tiny smile.

  The panel displays a drawing of the entire rocket. It’s divided into five sections and labeled R-56 Mars Colonial Transport.

  “We call this stack the BFR. Big Fucking Rocket. A straight-out trajectory in four stages.” David taps the bottom section of the rocket. “First stage, the biggie, fifty-six Raptor engines. Burns two and a half minutes, takes you up sixty kilometers.”

  I blurt, “Over halfway to space!”

  He nods. “But you’re still slow, a mere seven hundred meters per second. The second stage is lower thrust, but uses more efficient J-2X engines.”

  I can’t help blurting it out. “Apollo!”

  “That’s right, a J-2 derivative, heavily modified for methane instead of hydrogen. The design was digitized forty years ago, so we leveraged the engineering done at Rocketdyne. When that second stage drops after six minutes, you’re two thousand kilometers high, moving over seven kilometers per second. You’re gone, Harmony knows it, but it’s too late to do anything about it. The third stage accelerates to escape velocity plus ten percent over, faster than any humans ever moved.”

  Alison lets out a slow breath. I reach out and squeeze her shoulder.

  David displays two planetary orbital arcs over a black background: Earth and Mars. A green curve appears connecting the two planets. “Trans-Mars Injection. The TMI stage more than doubles your velocity to thirty kilometers per second. This is the newest tech in the stack, plasma thrusters running off an eight megawatt reactor. The thrusters will push you at one twentieth of a gravity for about ten hours.”

  Ryder says, “Direct trajectory, and with the reactor we don’t need solar panels.”

  “After thruster shutdown, the reactor idles and provides electrical power for the rest of the flight. Earth and Mars are in conjunction this month. Thanks to the plasma thrusters, total flight time is forty-two days.”

  I ask, “Does the TMI slow us down when we get there?”

  “Can’t lift enough propellant. But you’re on a hyperbolic trajectory climbing away from the sun. The sun’s gravity will take off half your velocity by arrival.”

  The display switches to a close-up view of Mars. A green curve loops around the planet twice and ends at a tan-colored smudge on the surface. “You’re going to aerobrake. The atmosphere will take off the rest of your velocity. We designed a landing sequence that will set one hundred tons gently down amid the rolling hills and glaciers of Protonilus Mensae.”

  Ryder leans forward. “Proton-nil . . . that’s our landing spot? Why there?”

  “Availability of ice, minerals, other useful resources. Everything you need is likely to be within driving range of your trucks. Closer to the equator would give you more sunlight, but there may not be available ice nearby. We didn’t want to take that chance, especially since our images and data are decades old.”

  Paige asks, “You said six ships. Are they going to this Protonilus place too? Or are we scattered across different locations?”

  David zooms the view of Mars. Mountains, ridges, craters. He points to a circular area. “All six spacecraft land within a few hundred meters of each other. Everyone is a backup to everyone else. With luck, you’ll be joined by Independence, Resolute, Endurance, Enterprise, and Constitution.”

  Mikki crosses her arms. “With luck, eh? I don’t see why there can’t be at least one expert coming with us. If something goes wrong, what are we supposed to do?”

  “Autosystems,” Alison says, almost a whisper. “The autosystems will assist with emergencies.”

  But David shakes his head. “No autosystems.”

  “Right, because how would you train them?” Ryder says. “Bayesian models to train helper systems need a huge set of examples to work with, and we’re headed into a completely new environment.”

  “That’s basically it. We decided it would do more harm than good to try to train helpers. Too many unknowns and unpredictable variables. You’re going to learn and adapt without artificial intelligence as a crutch.” David taps his forehead. “Use your organic intelligence.”

  Mikki snorts. “I get it. Hope nothing goes really wrong, because if it does, we die.”

  We all sit in silence for a couple of heartbeats.

  “If something goes wrong,” David says softly, “You deal with it. You’re going to learn how to do that this week.”

  The next few hours are a thick jumble of terminology, equipment, and configurations. According to David, we must memorize the physical arrangement of the major spacecraft components before we learn emergency actions and override procedures.

  Liberty is the uppermost section of the rocket, the part that lands on Mars. The shape is a truncated cone eight and a half meters wide at the base and twelve meters tall, not counting the nose fairing and parachute canister, which will be jettisoned before landing. The outer hull is high-temperature composite polymer, and within that is a pressure cabin of aluminum-lithium alloy with a honeycomb matrix core.

  The pressure cabin is bulkhead-divided into two main compartments: a control center in the upper section, and an equipment bay in the lower section. The control center has six acceleration seats that can fold away, storage lockers, plus three double-occupancy sleep compartments—sleepers for short. The control center is also where we eat.

  Everything else is crammed into the equipment bay: life-support machinery, medical gear, food stock, tools, batteries, materials stowage, two printers, two creepy little cryogenic flasks that hold hundreds of frozen embryos and sperm samples, an airlock and operating station, and a cramped hygiene compartment for washing and pooping.

  Outside the pressure cabin but within the outer hull are tanks for oxygen, nitrogen, helium, and the monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used by the landing engines. The compartments outside the pressure hull contain a compact portable nuclear generator and a disassembled methanol-powered truck with a built-in crane.

  “Power is your top priority after landing,” David tells us. “Once you assemble the truck, use it to dig a hole three meters deep. Lower the generator into that hole, bury it for radiation shielding, and start generating electricity. Without charging, your batteries will last ten days at most.”

  The display shows the interior of Liberty: a tangled maze of multicolored cables, hoses, lockers, and displays.

  “Routine procedures are automated, but you need to know four operating panels so you can monitor and override if you experience a serious failure.”

  Mikki snorts. “I feel so much better.”

  The System Power Panel is in the equipment bay next to the airlock operating station. It controls and monitors electrical generation, battery charge, and bus isolation.

  The Caution and Warning Panel is in the control center between two acceleration seats. It displays spacecraft state-of-health plus thirty-seven hundred warning messages and ten separate alarms.

  David tells us, “The Guidance and Navigation Panel is within view of the flight director, and the Master Control Panel is near the right seat.” He points to Shuko. “You’re going to be in that seat monitoring cabin atmosphere for the first several hours, until you’re confident the automatic systems are functioning normally.”

  “I understand,” says Shuko.

  “The flight director is responsible fo
r safety and coordination. Everyone’s going to memorize their emergency actions, but during any emergency or urgent situation, the flight director is in charge. Cristina, you are flight director.”

  I gulp in air and jerk upright.

  “You’ll be in the left seat watching both the nav panel and the warning panel. It’s gonna look overwhelming at first, but don’t—”

  Ryder shakes his head. “What?”

  David peers at him.

  “You must be . . . I mean, why her?” Ryder glances around the table. “She has to be the least qualified here.”

  David says, “Cristina—”

  “Don’t misunderstand!” Ryder interjects. “I like her, I really do. She’s bright and she has a knowledge of historic rockets. But face it, she’s not an engineer. So, I don’t comprehend this. Can we talk it out?”

  The silence goes on for several seconds. Mikki chuckles softly.

  “Are you finished?” asks David.

  “Me? Yeah.”

  “Cristina is flight director. I chose her. Is that understood?”

  “I’m just curious why you chose her, that’s all.” Ryder turns to me. “Aren’t you curious? Because I sure as hell would be. Curious and totally, totally confused.”

  Mikki sighs. “You made your point.”

  But he’s not done. “We’re pledging our lives. We need to vote on this.”

  “I’m fine with that,” I tell him.

  David exhales. “The instant you’re in flight you can do whatever you want. Until then, you’ll do as instructed.”

  Mikki leans across the table toward me. “What are your qualifications, by the way? You admitted you never went to university. I hold an engineering degree.” She turns to David. “Why should I listen to her?”

  The room sways sideways. Heavy waves? Ryder and Alison grab the edge of the table to keep from sliding off their chairs.

  I level my eyes at Mikki. Sometimes nothing’s going to work except for a bit of no-bullshit resolve. “Once we’re up there, we’ll work this out any way you want to work it out. Today, we’re going to listen and learn.”