Riley paused at a computer workstation in the lower bay, beneath the crew seats. “Check this out, sir. It’s like my son’s gaming setup.”
Marshall pushed away to meet him on the other side of the cabin. It held two racks of monitors over some kind of control box with a keyboard and a pair of joysticks. He whistled. “Your son must be a serious gamer, Chief.”
Riley shook his head. “Okay, so maybe it’s his dream setup. You could just about fly your own spaceship with this rig.”
“This was supposed to be a maintenance hop.” All of the screens and switch backlights were dark. Marshall found the workstation’s master switch was on, just no power. “Must’ve gotten cooked in the flare. This is first-rate gear but it’s still off the shelf. None of it looks space rated.”
“Mighty unusual for up here,” Riley said. “If this was for controlling repair drones . . .”
“They would’ve needed a higher-power transmitter. A whole antenna farm. But yeah, they could’ve done that from the ground with this same gear.” It in fact looked a lot like the control consoles he’d become familiar with as a cadet.
“Apparently not.” Riley looked about and shook his head sadly. “Who knows what they were doing, sir. New businesses are popping up in orbit like weeds in my backyard, and every one of them is looking for an edge over the other. They must have figured out something to turn to their advantage.” He began reaching out for more loose gear, bulky items that hadn’t been pulled into the vents by escaping air. “We’d better get a move on if we’re going to recover this thing, sir. Skipper’s going to want it squared away before he lets us plug it into his ship.”
Marshall looked around the cabin once more, not wanting to imagine what their final hours must have been like. “Can’t blame him. It’s like the aftermath of a frat party in here. I’m getting a hangover just looking at it.”
“Thought the academy didn’t have fraternities, sir.”
“Doesn’t mean the other schools didn’t,” he grinned. “Not that I’d know anything about that.”
10
Nick Lesko seemed anxious. He wasn’t a professional spacer; he was just a project manager for some conglomerate they’d never heard of, hired to oversee a crew of odd characters sent to geosynch to try out some new satellite recovery techniques. Something about making it cost effective to repair expensive comm and remote-sensing birds using quick-response launch services.
“There isn’t much ‘quick’ about this,” Marshall said. “Not if you spent nearly six months preparing for it.” Even the two experienced spacers on their team had endured weeks of training just to satisfy the insurance underwriters.
“First time for everything,” Lesko explained. “If we could prove the concept, then we’d only have to train up a few teams and keep them on standby for when the call comes.”
“Space plumbers, then?”
A slow nod from Lesko. “Plumbers, yeah. That works.”
Marshall wondered at the possibilities, and if any of them made sense. Somebody had to have run the numbers and decided that yes, it did make sense. It wasn’t hard to imagine—these birds cost a small fortune. In fact they cost almost as much to insure as to build them in the first place. He didn’t pretend to understand the marketplace beyond the major players, and whoever this was didn’t sound like a major player. They were trying to break out with a hot new idea, trying to achieve the impossible on a shoestring budget and hoping for lightning to strike.
Maybe that’s why their patient seemed so impatient. Like he dearly wanted to be anywhere else. Marshall had to remind himself that Mr. Lesko was just some guy on a job, out of his element and eager to get back to something familiar after a brush with death.
“We can’t just fly back to Earth?” Lesko asked insistently. “Isn’t that what the wings are for?”
Chief Riley looked over to Marshall before answering. “They are, but it’s not that simple. We don’t have the delta-v to deorbit from up here.”
“Delta . . . oh yeah. Fuel.” Lesko’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute. You mean we don’t have enough fuel to go home?”
“It took most of what we had to get to you,” Riley explained. “We have enough left for station-keeping and rendezvous with the Borman tomorrow.”
Lesko’s eyes widened. “That’s where you came from? Isn’t that some kind of orbiting battleship?”
Riley exchanged muted smirks with Marshall, and gestured for him to join in.
“It’s not a battleship,” Marshall said. “It’s a patrol vessel. We’re up here to protect assets in orbit, ensure free navigation of space lanes, and provide search and rescue.” He realized he was repeating the service’s standard PR mantra. “Kind of like the Coast Guard,” he offered.
“So that’s where we’re going?”
“More like they’re coming to us,” Marshall said. “We looked up your flight plan. Remember how it took you about three days of burns to raise your orbit to GEO?”
“Not that I was flying it, but yeah. Whit kept having to make small boosts to get us up here, a little at a time.”
“Borman’s nuclear powered,” Marshall explained. “It can do more with less, but it’s not unlimited. The choice was to take another day to reach you, or fling us off in the shuttle on a tangent to intersect your orbit. We used their velocity to get here, but it took most of what we had to slow down to match orbits with you.” He checked his watch. “They’ll be on station here in about fourteen hours. All we can do is sit tight until then.”
“So you guys voluntarily stranded yourselves out here with me?”
“I guess you could see it like that.” Marshall had tried not to think of it that way. If something happened to Borman, the shuttle only offered a few days’ worth of life support with a full cabin.
“It’s what we do,” Rosie interjected. She glanced over at Marshall. “Sorry, sir. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He waved it away, looking up and down the length of the cramped cabin. “It’s okay. Not exactly a private conversation anyway. How’s your team?”
“All of us were out too long, sir. We’re going to need anti-rad treatments as soon as we get settled back onboard. Might even need to rotate a couple people back home.”
Marshall raised an eyebrow. That would be a big deal. He turned back to Lesko. “You might have a ride home sooner than you thought if that happens. They’ll have to bring up another shuttle.”
“We had enough fuel left to—what is it—deorbit?” Nick said. “Any chance you can use that?”
Marshall looked over his shoulder, forward, to Wylie up at the pilot’s station. He knew the answer but waited for the senior officer to turn that one down. “Negative.”
“Why can’t you dock with our capsule, use our engines like a booster or something?”
“Couple of things working against that.” Marshall hated to keep shooting the guy down, if out of nothing more than sympathy. “We have common berthing ports but that’s it. We can’t just plug in to your spacecraft and take over. If we can’t aim precisely or time the burns, we’d all end up much worse off.”
“Don’t forget why we’re here,” Riley said. “Looks like your guidance platform—hell, most of your avionics—might be cooked.”
Nick Lesko’s eyes darted back and forth. “So . . . do we just leave it up here?”
Riley shook his head. “Can’t do that either. It’s a navigation hazard. Pushing it up to the graveyard orbit might’ve been an option if there weren’t people involved.” He deferred to Marshall, not wanting to speak up too much for a new officer. “Am I correct, sir?”
Marshall had a lot more confidence in the chief’s expertise than his own, but part of learning to lead was knowing when to take up the baton. “Chief Riley’s right. Injuries or fatalities means the National Transportation Safety Board will claim jurisdiction. By law they have to investigate, which means we have to recover the vehicle if able.”
“I see.” Lesko’s lips drew tight as he
thought through the implications. “But what is there to investigate? We got cooked by a solar flare. Done, right?”
Riley shot a look at Marshall. “It must’ve hit you guys hard and fast,” he said, turning back to Lesko. “Were you in the ’lock the whole time?”
“Yeah. Giselle brought me along because we couldn’t do a solo EVA. I was just there to hand her tools.” He scratched angrily at his mane of black hair. “I was tired. I’d stayed up on comms all night.”
“A worldwide alert went out for that storm. That’s something your ground control should’ve advised you of,” Marshall said. “You don’t remember any kind of warning?”
Lesko shrugged. “Whitman was our pilot. He and Giselle took care of all of that stuff. They were the real pros, not me or Billy. We were just up here to fix stuff. We were supposed to go home tomorrow . . .” He paused, as if to collect himself. “The satellite we’d been working on started throwing out error codes. Servos. Stuff we couldn’t fix with a software patch, you know?”
“So Billy was your computer engineer. And you are—?”
“Project manager. You could call me a handyman,” Lesko said. “I fix stuff.”
Marshall exchanged looks with Chief Riley. “Kind of specialized work for an earthbound handyman. Are you an engineer?”
Lesko waved the idea away. “Who has time for that crap? All that math? Like I said, I fix stuff.” He eyed them both. “Look, our sponsors trust me to get stuff done. I’m the guy they came to with this project. Biggest job they’ve ever handed me, plus I got to go into space.” His laugh was dark and hollow. “Some deal, eh?”
“So not like any other job then?”
Lesko stared at him blankly. Really?
Marshall decided they’d asked enough questions. He changed the subject. “It’ll take time for the NTSB to send a go-team up here. We’re probably going to bring your spacecraft down to LEO in the meantime.” He looked to the pilot’s station. “Is that about right, Lieutenant Wylie?”
“Right-o,” the senior officer said. “If this were on Earth, even the Moon, we’d preserve the site in place. In this case, we need to bring the vehicle down for them to examine in low orbit. Keep everything else as is but make it as easy to get to as possible.”
“Then why not send it back to Earth?”
“Reentry’s a big deal,” the pilot explained. “That’s a lot of stress on a vehicle that’s already been put through the wringer. And if your guidance platform’s fried, it might not even make it back in one piece.”
Lesko didn’t seem bothered by that idea. Chief Riley nudged Marshall and pointed to a row of sleep restraints mounted along the bulkhead. “This young man’s been through a lot, sir. Maybe we should let him get some rest.”
Roberta waded through a growing roster of crippled satellites, filtering between those which were disabled, unresponsive, or simply waiting to come out of safe mode. Most were of the latter category—as they’d been designed to withstand exactly this kind of event—but a surprising number weren’t.
She compared this newest tally to a separate list she’d already been compiling on her own. Seeing so many go dark in such a short time had gotten her attention, and having a CME spike the sample size by nearly a whole order of magnitude wasn’t helping her make sense of it. If someone had been making mischief in GEO, that storm was an unbelievable stroke of luck for them.
Still . . . it hadn’t made sense before the flare, and it didn’t make any more sense now. What had been a most unusual series of events threatened to be lost in the background noise of a region that had become cluttered with disabled and expensive hardware. While operators all over the world were scrambling to put their networks back together, some were figuring out they were beyond recovery and so had begun asking for help clearing the deadwood. She was going to have to sort through a lot of garbage to pick out the few points of useful data.
The apparent lack of interest from anyone else was striking—or was it understandable with so many individual crises erupting overnight? Surely someone had to be trying to connect the same dots?
Ivey would be the one to ask. He was their official conduit to the intel weenies, and seemed trustworthy enough to tell her if she was just a rookie with a too-active imagination.
She looked over at the empty ROV control station. The Vandenberg alert crew was prepping the standby X-37 for launch; it was already stacked and going through vehicle integration. Tomorrow they’d have two of them to manage in orbit; meanwhile Borman had just finished its last phasing burn to intercept that civvie with the mayday call. That had been a weird one, too: What the hell were a bunch of civilian wrench monkeys doing all the way up in GEO anyway?
Roberta shook her head. Too much data to process, plus a new drone on the way. She’d just have to wait for the good birds to come out of safe mode and the dead ones to be cleared out of the way. The graveyard was about to get a lot more residents.
11
Max Jiang had spent most of the last day incessantly humming to himself. No matter his task—whether pulling rations out of the storm shelter and repacking the log module, checking in with Palmdale, or servicing the waste recycler—the constant almost-melodies emanating from him would have ordinarily driven his wife to distraction.
For her part, Jasmine Jiang was so preoccupied as to barely notice and was just as giddy. Whatever she put her hands to, she did with newfound enthusiasm. They had long ago learned to arrange their daily activities so that neither of them would become bogged down in mundane housekeeping or become overwhelmed with the mental gymnastics of managing a spacecraft, but after emerging from the safety of their storm shelter the timeline had become compressed to the point where load sharing was pointless.
A day and a half cocooned inside the tunnel had left them both swamped with work, as their destination was relentlessly drawing close. Physics didn’t care if fragile humans needed protection, as time and motion carried on regardless.
If anything, the compressed timeline excited them even more. After a short braking burn to match orbits, asteroid RQ39 emerged into full view. As their spacecraft turned about its long axis to distribute solar heat, the oblong body moved from one row of windows to the next, its color palette shifting subtly between shades of brown and gray as it slowly rotated in the sunlight.
Besides having something to look at other than empty space, tomorrow they would finally be able to get outside after weeks of confinement. “It’s been like driving an RV around the world,” Max had said during their storm quarantine, “except you can’t stop to get out and the only other place you can go is the passenger seat.”
It was too soon yet for direct exploration of RQ39’s—Malati’s—surface. That would come after another few days, when Prospector would draw close enough for them to safely jet across. For now they would have to be satisfied with tomorrow’s short jaunt outside to prep their survey equipment, currently mounted to a pallet on the hab’s utility port.
It would be enough for now. Perhaps on Earth the journey itself was half the fun, but space was different. There was remarkably little to see along the way; for as many weeks as they’d spent in transit, on a cosmic scale they’d not traveled far at all, though it was enough for Earth to appear painfully small and distant. From their vantage point it did look like the proverbial blue marble, and the lack of any atmospheric haze eliminated all sense of perspective. Suspended in depthless black, their home planet could very well have been a pebble at arm’s length—or a world the size of Jupiter, millions of kilometers distant.
That every single person they had ever known was on that tiny blue marble filled Jasmine with both longing and dread: longing to be back among the familiar, with trees and water and blue skies, dread for the inescapable realization of just how fragile it all was.
Was this how God saw the world—like an anthill? Enormously complex, indescribably beautiful, but in cosmic terms still just an anthill. Is this what omniscience felt like?
She decided it c
ouldn’t be. For even as humans might regard the entirety of an anthill, they could never perceive the individual perspective of every creature in the colony. That was the difference between the Creator and the created: We might be temporarily privileged to be given a taste of the Creator’s perspective, but it was only the smallest sliver of its totality. Barely a peek through a keyhole.
As Prospector continued rotating, RQ39 once again passed out of view. It would reappear soon enough in the opposite window, but its absence was enough to make her acutely aware of Max’s atonal droning.
“What is that tune?”
His humming abruptly stopped, as did his work. He left a tablet floating in midair, plugged into a data port on his spacesuit. “What was that?”
“My question exactly. Was that a song, or simply whatever random notes come to mind?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets with a sheepish grin. “The latter. You know I was never much of a musician.”
She pushed away from the sidewall with her fingertips to float closer. “That I do know,” she said. She stopped just in front of him with another gentle push from her fingers. “At least not in the West. You never quite shook off our homeland’s musical styles.”
“Some things were too ingrained in me, I suppose.” He kissed her forehead. “I will endeavor to be more melodic, my dear.”
She tapped her watch, and soon symphonic movements were emanating from speakers embedded in the overhead. “Or we can just put on actual music and hum along to it.”
“Even better.” His eyes widened as he looked beyond her. He pointed to the porthole over her shoulder. “There it is again.”
Malati drifted back into view, brilliant in full sunlight. From this angle its pebbled surface shone white.
“What do you think it is?” she wondered. “Do you think we’ll be able to stand on it?”
“It appears dense enough.” They both considered the asteroid’s surface. “Japanese and European probes at similar asteroids were able to maintain direct contact. I don’t think we’ll find ourselves sinking into an aggregate if that’s what you mean. There won’t be enough gravity to sink into anything.”
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