The rattles and roars of ignition hadn’t bothered him at all; it was the roll and pitchover after clearing the tower at Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex 6 which had sent his inner ear spinning. There’d been a brief respite as the Vulcan booster’s first stage burned out, but the rumbling and shaking had returned immediately when the second stage ignited. The ride smoothed out once they’d climbed above the atmosphere, when he eyed the chronograph strapped to the cuff of his orange pressure suit: one minute until second-stage cutoff. They’d jettison the protective shroud soon after.
The vibrations finally ended. “SECO,” Wylie announced over the intercom. Though he’d never been in orbit, Marshall had flown enough suborbital hops that he anticipated that sudden sense of speeding over the crest of a hill into infinite freefall. He felt freedom even as his body floated against the five-point harness.
“Shroud jett,” Wylie announced, and the upper stage’s clamshell doors sprang open to fall away behind them. The darkness that had surrounded them disappeared in a blaze of sunlight, dazzling and disorienting him even further. His ears had gotten used to their new normal and now Earth was all of a sudden not where he’d expected it to be. Up was down, left was right, and now the rising bile in his gut wasn’t just from being in freefall. He tore an airsick bag from the leg pocket of his suit and snapped open his visor just in time to avoid fouling his helmet.
The passenger beside him silently offered a package of wet wipes which were clearly not government issue. Marshall took them, embarrassed and hoping Wylie hadn’t noticed from his perch up front. The smell in such a confined space would’ve been unmistakable if their visors were up. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it, Ensign. This ride’s a bit like climbing into a paint mixer and getting thrown off a building.”
He watched his fellow passenger slip the package back into one of his cargo pockets. “That part of your personal gear, Master Chief?”
“Never leave home without them,” the older petty officer said. “After the first couple of times, I figured this was just how it was going to be.”
Marshall finished cleaning himself up and stuffed the wipes into a waste bag by his seat. “You seem okay with it.”
The chief held up a hand and spread his fingers apart. “Five. This is the first time I haven’t blown chunks. Guess that means I’m acclimated.”
Wylie gave them the all clear to unbuckle, and that was the first time Marshall had gotten a good look at the chief’s ID patch on his chest. Besides his name and rank—GARVER, MCPO—it showed both the wings of an enlisted space crewman and the dolphins of a former submariner. The Force’s Orbit Guard hadn’t been around long enough yet for anyone to reach senior rank who hadn’t first spent time in one of the other branches.
He nodded at the chief. “It takes that long to get your space legs?”
The older man floated up from his seat and braced himself against a handhold in the ceiling. “Wouldn’t know,” he said. “Everybody’s different. I always do fine once I’m aboard. It’s getting up here’s the bitch of it.”
Satisfied he was clean, Marshall hit the quick release on his waist and floated free. He grabbed hold of a cargo container behind them. “I figured it’d hit me after we were in orbit.”
“I’d heard the same thing when I cut over from the Navy.” Garver pointed at the cockpit. “Maybe if you got up here on a different ride, one with windows. Those damn clamshell doors guarantee it’ll be disorienting.”
He followed the chief’s gesture. Earth rolled by above them as they climbed toward apogee. There, another engine burn would begin phasing their orbit to eventually match their target, the USS Borman.
Marshall blinked and fought the urge to shake his head—that would just make the zero-g disorientation worse. “I knew we were inverted, but my body thought otherwise. It felt like we were right-side up.”
The chief laughed. “Always does. First cruises are for learning; about yourself as much as how things work in the fleet. You’ll find the skipper will never let you forget that you don’t know squat.”
“You worked with Captain Poole before, then?”
The chief nodded. “During the shakedown cruise, and a long time ago before that.”
Marshall took another look at the submariner’s dolphins on his chest and realized they must have gone very way back, indeed. “You cruised with him in the Navy?”
“You figured that out yourself? Good. Skipper doesn’t like having to spoon-feed his officers.” He smiled. “But yeah, I was a reactor tech with him on the West Virginia, right before he first got into the astronaut program.”
He was impressed. “Any advice for a nugget like me, then?”
Chief Garver put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Learn from them. If it feels like you’re having the worst day of your life, just remember it’s only the worst day of your life so far.”
They spent the next day catching up, Wylie and his copilot precisely timing burns until their orbits were co-elliptical. They approached from below and slightly behind, affording Marshall the opportunity to check out his home for the next six months as the Borman’s crew inspected their new shuttlecraft. With a puff of control jets the shuttle pitched up perpendicular, momentarily taking the bigger ship out of view. Soon enough, it began to slowly fill their windows.
The first thing he noticed were a pair of rocket nozzles, each mounted to a bottle-shaped fission engine. Just ahead of them, coolant panels formed a cluster of right triangles that fanned out around the base, angled to shield the forward section of the spacecraft from radiation. Two crewmen in saffron-yellow EVA suits were working on the next module, just ahead of the engines and radiator panels. One waved as they passed by while the other remained turned away, apparently focused on an exposed access panel. The module was covered by domes and square hatches, which he recognized as protective covers for long-range interceptor missiles.
“That’s the primary weapons and sensor module,” Chief Garver explained, anticipating Marshall’s question. “Some of that equipment’s pretty sensitive, so this mod gets a lot of TLC. It needs outside work almost every week. The yellow suits are for working in high-radiation environments. Like, you know, nuclear reactors.”
Marshall remembered some mention of them back at the academy, developed specifically for the Borman as it was being outfitted. “Those suits are externally mounted, right?”
“Very good, Ensign. Yep, we can’t have them bringing contaminated gear into the airlocks. Wouldn’t do to give the whole crew cancer.”
As the shuttle continued its drift along Borman’s long axis, more of it came into view: long, cylindrical tanks wrapped with insulating fabric and reflective panels; those were the hydrogen and oxygen that fed the engines and pressurized the crew modules. The tanks were mounted along a truss that served as the vessel’s spine, its length covered in handrails and tracks for mobile service platforms. On its forward end was mounted a squat, hexagonal module. Two long booms extended from it in opposite directions, each topped with parabolic antennas. Four bulbous, fork-mounted turrets were placed between them on adjacent sides.
“That’s the comm suite,” the Chief explained, “and those are the Phalanx pods.”
“Point-defense guns,” Marshall said, letting the chief know he’d done his homework. “Ten-millimeter, caseless depleted-uranium slugs, useful against hostile satellites or wayward space junk.”
“Correct, sir. We keep those things on an especially short leash. The first time we have to use them, the debris field and stray slugs will make that whole orbital plane unnavigable for years.”
“The Kessler cascade. Yeah, they did mention that in school once or twice.” It made one wonder what the whole purpose of a spaceborne patrol vessel could be, but the sad fact was that the more people had access to orbit, the more bad actors would arrive to screw it up for everybody else.
He heard one of the pilots call over the radio. “Borman, Specter on
e-one; coming up on Waypoint One.”
They arrived at the forward end of the ship, a cluster of six cylinders mounted along opposite sides of a central core with an observation dome in its center, which Marshall knew would be the control deck. The others were crew quarters and logistics. In the center module, a floodlight came to life above the open docking port in the nose.
A controller on Borman answered. “Specter one-one, we have you in sight. Call the ball.”
More completely unnecessary Navy lingo, but the pilots played along so seamlessly that he realized it had become custom—something they didn’t get in training.
“Roger ball. Specter one-one holding at Waypoint One with four souls onboard, three point three thousand kilos cargo, five point two thousand kilos propellant.”
“‘Call the ball’? That’s carrier slang.”
“That it is,” the chief said. “Up here, it means we confirm they’ve got lidar lock.”
Marshall was feeling comfortable enough to get some digs in. “They let a few squids into the program and you just took over, didn’t you?”
“Somebody had to. Think we’d leave all this up to the Air Force? They can’t build anything without first figuring out where to put the golf course. That didn’t work out so well up here.”
With another ripple of control jets the shuttle pitched over once more, turning its tail to face Borman. After several minutes, a final kick from its nose thrusters slowed them down enough for the big ship to drift into the shuttle’s tail-mounted docking port. The little spaceplane shuddered as they made contact. Amber lights flashed above the portal and on the pilot’s control panel.
“That’s a good capture,” one of the pilots said.
A second passed before the Borman’s controller answered. “Confirm hard dock. Stand by while we equalize pressure in the tunnel.”
The hatch creaked unnervingly as air moved behind it. He heard shuffling from the other side, which he knew were crewmembers connecting umbilicals between the two ships. Within minutes, the amber lights turned green and they had the all clear to open. With a nod from the pilot, the chief pulled on a lever and heaved the lock open. The hatch opened with a faint hiss. Marshall watched as he floated into the tunnel and saluted an officer in dark gray coveralls on the other side of the vestibule.
“Master Chief Petty Officer Garver, Anton A., request permission to come aboard.”
The officer rang a ship’s bell mounted above the entry. “Welcome back, Chief.”
The introductory tour was remarkably short; being a new officer, Marshall had been expected to memorize the ship’s layout. It shouldn’t have been complicated, as the interior volume was equivalent to a 737 airliner. The problem was that it was all broken up among compartments in modules arranged along the core tunnel, so turning into any one of them was like entering a different spacecraft. Two-dimensional diagrams, even a 3-D virtual tour, could not prepare him for the confusing experience of floating through Borman’s innards for the first time in zero g. Even with every deck and overhead in every compartment having clear labels to keep him oriented, it was a dizzying maze of hatchways and corridors all set against a monochrome background of white and gray.
After getting himself hopelessly turned around for the third time, he found Chief Garver floating patiently nearby.
“Something I can help you with, Ensign?”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “I seem to have gotten myself disoriented.”
“Layout’s a little screwy,” Garver said, “what with all those different modules plugged in like my kid’s Legos.” He looked around. “They were originally going to build it with a couple of big inflatables to save mass. The skipper wouldn’t have it. He doesn’t trust the things.”
Marshall was pretty sure he knew why. “The Navy wouldn’t have built subs out of ballistic fabrics, either.”
“Exactly. Though you may have noticed the outer skin’s the same material, just not pressurized. Inner hulls are titanium-aluminum alloy.”
“Standard construction materials. Seems risky for a warship.”
The chief nodded. “Hard to think of her that way sometimes. We’re a patrol vessel; our job is to protect US assets, keep the cislunar supply lanes clear, and provide on-orbit rescue. All of which would be cheaper and easier to do with satellites except for that last part.”
“Rescue,” Marshall said. “That takes up a lot of our bandwidth, doesn’t it?”
“We have twelve crew, fully half of whom are EVA specialists. The other half are dual qualified.”
“And how many rescues?”
Garver held up a finger. “One. Last year. Tourist vessel in LEO got holed by a micrometeoroid. Fortunately the pax were still in their pressure suits, otherwise it would’ve all been over before we got there.”
“I read about it. That was the only one?”
“World’s full of people with more money than sense, sir. The more civilians have access to space, the more knuckleheads are going to get themselves into trouble up here. It won’t be the last.”
“What about the rest—protecting the space lanes, showing the flag?”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make the papers.” The chief eyed him. “You got your threat briefing with your assignment here, right? About all of the foreign military birds up here?”
Marshall nodded. “LEO and GEO are chock full of comm and spy sats.”
“They’re not all spies,” the chief said ominously. “More than a few are what we like to call ‘dual-purpose’ birds.”
“Hunter-killers? Isn’t that a treaty violation?”
Garver laughed. “You have to understand that our Eastern friends regard treaties to be valid only as long as the ink’s still wet. After that, everything’s up for grabs.”
“Good thing we’re up here then. Nobody else has a deterrent like us.”
The chief nodded toward a porthole that looked out into space in the direction of the Moon. “Some of us have our suspicions about that Chinese station at L1, Peng Fei. They’re being awfully damned cagey about it.”
“They’re secretive about everything. Isn’t it supposed to be a propellant depot for their lunar ops?”
“That’s the official story, but they’ll have to really pick up the pace for that explanation to make sense.”
“They do like to appear inscrutable.”
“Screwing the inscrutable, effing the ineffable,” the chief drawled. “Whatever they say they’re doing, you can be sure they’re actually doing something else.” He waved Marshall ahead. “Come on, I’ll give you the nickel tour.”
“The modules are all oriented longitudinally,” Garver explained as he pushed off for the tail end of the connecting tunnel. Marshall only knew this because of the arrows labeled “Forward” and “Aft” along the sidewalls, otherwise there was nothing to distinguish one direction from another. A ladder was embedded in the ceiling along its length.
“Each deck is along the aft side of the module, then? How much time do we spend under thrust?”
“Enough for it to be a nuisance if we hadn’t paid attention to that. Those NERVA engines can burn for a couple hours before we have to cool them down. Not good for your deck to become your sidewall for that amount of time.”
Marshall did the math in his head. Though he’d seen the numbers before, being on the ship made them real. Each engine produced eight hundred seconds of specific impulse, thrust-to-weight ratio of almost point five . . . take it down by another half for the ship’s mass, and they were capable of a quarter-g burn. For two hours. He looked up and down the compartment’s length and whistled.
Garver read his expression. “Puts it in a different perspective being up here, doesn’t it?”
“It does. I’m just trying to think of what we’d need to burn that long for.”
“Only if the skipper was taking us to Jupiter for a couple of years, but I’m not signing up for that cruise. Mars, sure. Plug in a couple extra supply modules, get rid of some noness
entials, upload new nav software . . . we could do it. Out and back in about six months. Nine, tops.”
Which told him they’d been thinking about it. “Are they thinking about a ‘show the flag’ mission?” Please please please . . .
“Above my paygrade, Ensign. Yours too, I’m afraid. But it is fun to think about.”
“That was my senior thesis in astrodynamics,” Marshall volunteered, a bit too eagerly. “Adapting a Borman-class vessel for interplanetary flight. The delta-v budget’s not too far off from what we already use getting around cislunar space. Biggest hurdle would be consumables and life support.”
Garver nodded. “We know. Skipper and the XO have read it. They were amused.”
“Oh.”
“I read it too. You made a powerful case for a national Exploration Corps. But there’s a lot that can go sideways up here. Biggest problem with long-duration spaceflight is the ‘duration’ part.”
Marshall felt himself blush. “Maybe I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. Now that I’m here, it’s hard to look around a ship like this and not want to take it somewhere.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Ensign. Your job as a cadet was to learn how to think about outside-the-box concepts like that. Now you just have a different set of boxes. Come on.” He led them into the farthest aft module, the engineering compartment. The space was uniformly gray, one side filled with circuit breakers and access panels festooned with warning labels. The other side held racks of air and water filtration beds fed by clusters of ductwork and plumbing fed into the module’s entrance from all directions.
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