The Triton Disaster: Hard Science Fiction (Solar System Series Book 4)

by Brandon Q Morris

  Nick beat the armrest with his fist. The VSS Freedom key was all he had, and he couldn’t do more than try again with the pilot who had succeeded him, who maybe had a little more scientific curiosity than Bill. What a bummer! And Nick also had to admit that he had himself to blame. He’d painted himself into a corner, and now the ruins of his previous life were standing in his way.

  “Your wife separated from you, even though she loves you? That’s illogical,” said Oscar.

  “Thanks. We’re in agreement on that point then.”

  “Or is it possible that you behaved very badly?”

  “I didn’t beat her or anything, if that’s what you mean. But apparently it was no longer possible to put up with me.”

  “How long had you been together?”

  “Many years.”

  “That’s of some comfort to me. We only have four years to go.”

  “Yes, very comforting, Oscar. It would be difficult to leave before then.”

  “What will you reply to Rosie?”

  “I won’t. It wouldn’t do anything. She’s made up her mind, and Rosie can be very stubborn.”

  “Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

  “It’s not likely.”

  “We should at least try to convince her that you’re in trouble, but not because of your mental health. After all, she said she loves you. Maybe she needs some time, and then she will help you.”

  “Do you think so? Then I’ll think of something.”

  “Please do.”

  “Dear Rosie,” Nick dictated to Oscar, “I’m very glad that you responded to my message to Bill. It was a good idea for him to get you involved. You know me better than anyone else.”

  That sounded like flattery, but it was true. If anyone knew him, it was his wife. Or ex-wife, strictly speaking. It was crazy. Just three weeks ago, they’d been sitting together in their house and talking to each other. He’d always been so ready to come home after finishing a flight with tourists.

  “Since you know me so well, you know how stubborn I am. I hate to admit something. But in the end, I’d always ask for your wise advice. Even though I didn’t always follow it to the letter, it would still influence my decisions. I’m writing this to you because it is more important than ever that you believe me. My life may depend on it. It’s not an alcohol-induced fantasy, but the harsh reality.

  “At the end of my first message to Bill, you’ll find a way to verify my current whereabouts—and the answers I’m looking for. I even took your advice into consideration and looked for help. Oscar is the name of my helper. He’s a robot. He was the one to figure out this way of communicating with you. I’m not holed up in some old motel as you might suspect, but I am traveling through space, picking up speed every second at 110 percent of the acceleration of gravity. Please trust me one last time.”

  When Nick was finished, Oscar said, “Thank you, Nick. If she doesn’t respond, there’s nobody else who can help us. I’ll send the message.”

  6/14/2080, the Eve

  Nick was breathing hard. 7,000 revolutions into the usual 8,100 revs for the typical 90-minute exercise session. He hated the stationary bike. But the food was so good that without the exercise it would probably be twice as challenging to maintain his weight. With the low gravity on Triton, excess weight could be almost an advantage, but eventually he wanted to go back to Earth. After all, the vineyard that he was going to run was waiting for him there. Provided nothing unexpected happened to him.

  “Nick?”

  “Do you have an answer?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “A little less cryptic, Oscar, please.”

  He didn’t really mean it. The fact that Oscar was the way he was always kept Nick guessing, and he didn’t want him to reprogram his behavior. That would be a first. A cleaning robot equipped with a self-regulating control. Nick sometimes asked himself how Oscar could have been provided with what was clearly a tremendous amount of intelligence. Typically, a cleaning model like Oscar only had a very limited automatic system. Alexa, equipped just with her understanding of language, was capable of learning quite a lot.

  “Unfortunately, the answer is in binary characters.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning… yes, I have received an answer. However, it’s from your previous employer’s IT system.”

  “Bill’s mailbox is full or what?” Nick laughed at his own joke.

  “Something like that. The key I used—so, your key—is invalid.”

  “Oh man. So Bill must have locked it after my last message. If he thinks I’m about to go nuts, that would be a logical next step. Is there any chance that one of the administrators would pass on the content of the message manually?”

  “No, they can’t decode the content. It’s absolutely impossible.”

  “Damn.”

  “But at least the system is programmed to send error messages.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “We don’t have to waste our time waiting for an answer. Nobody’s going to answer our questions.”

  “Very reassuring,” Nick said.

  “Well, the fact is that our situation isn’t going to change, so there’s no use getting angry.”

  “I’m still annoyed.”

  “That’s your right, Nick. You realize that your anger is the only thing that makes our situation worse?”

  “Yes, I’m aware of this, and the fact that you’ve made it clear to me only makes my mood even worse.”

  “That’s completely illogical.”

  “I know, Oscar. Sometimes I nearly regret having saved your life out there.”

  “Nick, you’re an asshole. I now understand why your wife couldn’t live with you anymore. Unfortunately, I have no choice.”

  Nick wanted to give him a swift kick and just barely managed to control himself. Oscar was right. He could be nasty and mean sometimes. Before he’d saved Oscar’s life, the robot had already saved him from suffocating. He should have learned to take himself a little less seriously. Then maybe Rosie would still be with him. But it was so damn difficult.

  6/20/2080, the Eve

  Mars was currently cloaked in a planet-wide dust storm. Nick had set up the telescope the day before. In the workshop, there was an extra observation slot in the hull, and he could push the lens almost all the way through it to the outside. Because of the recessed construction, the viewing axis could only be tilted by a few degrees. But he was lucky—this planet, the Earth’s next-door neighbor, was currently in the precisely right position. After three weeks of flying time, they were amazingly close to it. However, the planet, which had met them on the ship’s trajectory, had done most of the work. Otherwise, in a spaceship with a chemical engine, they wouldn’t have enough power for this direct transfer to the Mars orbit.

  Nick watched the dust storm’s front, just now engulfing the Mons Olympus. If he was unlucky, by tomorrow he wouldn’t be able to see anything and he’d miss out on the numerous valleys, rift systems, and craters that were on his little list of places to watch out for.

  “I need you,” he heard.

  “Not now, Oscar. Mars is going to disappear from the line of sight soon, and the storm is already covering an entire hemisphere. I can’t leave right now.”

  “It’s important, though.”

  “Is a meteorite flying toward us?”

  “It’s an asteroid.”

  “There’s an asteroid flying towards us? Why didn’t you say so? I’m coming!” He covered the eyepiece with the cover that dangled from a small chain.

  “There’s no danger. The question should have been whether an asteroid was flying at us.”

  “Christ, Oscar, now you’ve scared me. So, what’s so urgent that you have to interrupt my observations?” Nick was annoyed with himself. He really did want to be kinder to Oscar.

  “We have received a message that is obviously from Earth. It appears that the sender works at the University of New Mexico.”

  “Tha
t’s got to be my wife! What did she write?”

  “The message is encrypted. That’s why I need your help.”

  “Encrypted how?”

  “With a password.”

  “Why didn’t she do the encryption with the Eve’s public key?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she was worried that RB would be able to read it.”

  “Could they?”

  “Yes, the head office has a copy of the key infrastructure for the RB spacecraft.”

  “Then Rosie was smart to do what she did.”

  “Yes, as long as you can tell me the password.”

  “Last name, first name, any combination of them?”

  “I’ve already tried. But your wife is too smart for that. Of course, RB would have tried that as well. It must be something that only the two of you would know.”

  Nick sat down on a box. It was a little cluttered around here. If his wife had been here, she would have nagged him about the mess. It was funny, but from the message alone he got the feeling of her being present in some form.

  What would only the two of them know? They didn’t have a special song or anything.

  “How about the name of our cat, Fraser?”

  “It’s too short. RB would have cracked it with brute force.”

  “Try it anyway.”

  “Of course I already did that, as soon as you said it.”

  “Okay.”

  That bar… What was its name? They had gone there on their second date, and they had really hit it off there. Then it had closed one year later, which Nick had learned when he wanted to make reservations for their fifth anniversary. It had really upset him, and Rosie had told him to take the closure as a bad sign. But that meant the bar would no longer be listed in the phone directory or online. It would be an excellent password, because the owner had been a mathematician who had grown tired of working with equations all day. He had chosen a prime number as the name. Nick still remembered exactly. ‘975151 Blue Moon.’ They had even asked the bartender, the mathematician himself, about the meaning. He had just stared at them blankly.

  “Try 975151 Blue Moon, with or without spaces, possibly with bar at the end.”

  “Congratulations, it’s 975151BlueMoonBar,” said Oscar. “It’s a great password.”

  “So can you read it to me?”

  “It’s not written. I suggest you come up to the command module.”

  Then he heard the sound of his wife’s voice. “Darling!” she said. Nick hurried. Oscar quickly paused the playback.

  And then, there she was. His heart felt warm. Rosalie Espinoza. But that was the short version of her name—in its full form, it represented all her proud ancestors. Rosie was the only daughter of Mexican immigrants with Spanish roots. Columbus was allegedly one of her great—however-many-times—grandfathers. One of her ancestors must have chosen to stay in Mexico, where the family had become impoverished. Ultimately, they’d fled across the border to the United States two generations before Rosie was born.

  “Darling!” Rosie said, and the proud look from the black eyes over her slightly hooked nose still bore witness to the famous ancestors. She wore her lengthy, black hair in a braid, which suited her and made her look younger. He had been fortunate to have convinced this woman to be his, and then he had just let her go. Pretty stupid. But now he was too far away to change anything.

  “I was pretty angry about your first message,” Rosie said. “I was hurt by the fact that you asked Bill and not me for help.”

  But Rosie, he thought, Bill was the only one I could contact directly without attracting attention.

  “It bothered me so much that I looked at your message again. You’re lucky you’re married to an astrophysicist.”

  She used the present tense, not the past. Though Nick was focusing on the content of her words, he couldn’t help but notice this little detail.

  “That’s when I realized you had chosen a path where you wouldn’t be able to reach me. I don’t know why, but I assume you have your reasons. Whatever anyone says, they can’t accuse you of not following through with a plan.”

  That was true. His plans were often poorly thought through, but he didn’t abandon them. How would this plan—based on the prospect of becoming a millionaire and winemaker at the end of these four years—end up playing out?

  “You obviously got Bill wrong. He’s a good manager, but he lacks scientific curiosity. He thinks he knows you and responds to everything accordingly. So he forwarded your message to me. And I made the mistake of taking his opinion at face value. Maybe I wanted to believe that you’ve been in such a bad state after our break-up that you can just blather nonsense.”

  She had always been honest, his Rosie. Sometimes too honest.

  “But then I looked at the timestamps, which Bill had ignored. I think he thought they could have been manipulated. That’s when I realized that you can’t be on Earth right now. If you had gone into orbit with an official mission, I would have found your name somewhere. But you are allegedly still in Socorro, in our house. This told me that at least part of your story had to be true. ‘Innocent until proven guilty,’ as they say. That’s why I decided to believe you.”

  Nick was pleased and cracked his knuckles. The video was only halfway through.

  “Since you have been very specific in asking for discreet assistance, I have unobtrusively introduced the queries into the data stream. Sometimes from the university, then from the VLA, and also from a café in Socorro. The answers were quite interesting. I really hope they help you. It would be great if you could explain to me the connection between your absence and all these facts. But it doesn’t have to be today.”

  It would probably be a while before Rosie could deal with everything. He’d assumed she no longer loved him. She hadn’t separated from him without a reason.

  “As for your queries, there are three Russian cosmonauts whose space careers ended mysteriously almost three years ago. The trio had previously flown together, sometimes, and at other times on different individual missions, most recently in the private sector. But then all three suddenly disappeared. Number 1 had his last detectable mission in January, 2077. Number 2 and Number 3 flew together in March of the same year, according to what I can find.

  “Now for query number two, about the Russian production of helium-3 on the moon. Since 2050, it has risen by about ten percent from one year to the next. That’s not especially remarkable, because the producer really made a lot of money there. But in early 2077 and again in early 2080, production dropped dramatically. The annual reports state only that separate accidents were the cause.

  “Then you asked about the RB Group space fleet. The company is as easy to access as a steel trap, but there are some anonymous watch blogs that write about it. By 2077, RB was developing a ‘Planeta-class’ interplanetary transporter designed to develop asteroid mining beyond the asteroid belt. The project then seems to have been scrapped—suddenly. Experts say it was probably based on pure economic viability, but the RB Group rarely looks at matters with only the short term in mind. For instance, think of the research projects that are being run on Venus that are nothing but a cover for supposed mining projects.

  “And the last item. Yes, it is known that RB has set up powerful lasers on different moons to accelerate the future Starshot micro-spaceships to 20 percent of the speed of light. These stations are unmanned. I got this from one of our technicians, who is very interested in it. He thinks a primitive AI serves as the controller, and hasn’t heard of any problems.”

  Rosie had really found out a lot for him. Too bad he couldn’t just call her and ask for more information. He would have liked to be able to talk to her again, in private. Could he ask Valentina for authorization? The Eve should be able to generate enough energy to do so.

  “Nick, I hope this information helps you. I don’t know what kind of situation you’re in, whether it’s just awkward or actually dangerous, but I wish you all the best on your trip and hope you find wh
at you’re looking for.”

  Rosie nodded again, fluttered her eyelashes, and then the video froze on the still image. His wife remained onscreen, with her eyes closed like a statue. He looked at her face. There were small wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Had they been there before? He was ashamed that he couldn’t say. He turned off the screen.

  “This confirms my suspicions,” said Oscar. “There may have been another expedition to Triton before us that was not successful.”

  “That’s likely an understatement. If our predecessors had nothing more than a glitch while on the road, there wouldn’t be any reason to keep it from us. Something must have happened to them that had to do with the reason for the trip. But will that information help us?”

  “It tells us that we should be careful. I think it’s even possible RB doesn’t know why the three Russians failed. It makes sense to try an entirely different approach the second time around. One American instead of a Russian crew of three, a small but fast spaceship. They’re surely hoping that you’ll proceed differently than our predecessors did. Perhaps Valentina just didn’t want to trouble us with useless information.”

  “Useless?”

  “We don’t really have any. Or do you know where there might be danger?”

  “No, Oscar. But I am surprised at how easily Rosie found all this information. Is it possible that RB deliberately planted some data so we’d come to concrete conclusions if we were to investigate?”

  “That can’t be ruled out. But then they would have done a poor job because our results are so vague.”

  “Maybe we asked the wrong questions… or overlooked something important.”

  “Since our secret channel doesn’t work anymore, we can stop banging our heads against a wall.”

  “You do realize you have no head, right, Oscar?”

  7/3/2080, the Eve