“I suppose you’re right. Forgive me, but now that we’re here I’m having second thoughts. This is rather dangerous, you know.”
Concern darkened his eyes. “Are you nervous about leaving the spacecraft?”
“I’m nervous about everything,” she said. “Assuming all goes well tomorrow, we’ll each have done exactly one spacewalk in our entire lives before we attempt to stand on an asteroid.”
Max tried to humor her. “As they say, there’s a first time for everything.”
“I was hoping for a wildly inappropriate pun.”
“I’ve not had enough time to read other people’s jokes lately. You should know by now I’m not that original,” Max said. He gestured at the tablet running diagnostics on his EVA suit. “I’ve checked our maneuvering units three times. Their gyro stabilizers are working perfectly, we have the asteroid for spatial reference, and our little home here will be less than half a kilometer away. You could practically jump to it from there.”
“Please don’t mistake my reticence for anxiety.”
“I would never do that, my dear. I suppose fear of the unknown is to be expected, though I’ve been too excited to think about it. Excited and busy,” he finished with a beaming smile.
“Fear of the unknown,” she repeated, chewing a fingernail as she watched the asteroid drift across the window. “That’s it, of course. I had hoped we would have been able to collect more spectral data by now but there’s some odd electromagnetic background interference. The closer we get, the stronger it becomes.”
“Faulty spectroscope, perhaps?”
“I thought there might be a coolant problem but the ground team agrees with the onboard diagnostics. It’s transient, as if it’s external interference. Very odd.”
“That is odd,” he agreed, “but not entirely bad news. If it has a magnetic field strong enough to affect passive instruments then it must have a dense iron core. That suggests even more valuable metals could be present. Literal ‘rare earth’ minerals, just as we hoped. If that’s the case, then we were right to come here.” He smiled and caressed her cheek. “And I’m now absolutely confident we’ll be able to stand on it.”
“Still,” she sighed, “it would be nice to know what we’re about to set foot on.”
Lesko was surprisingly adept at manipulating playing cards in zero g. Shuffling was always a challenge for rookies, as the cards tended to shoot off in all directions, but he’d handled them masterfully. His control over the deck seemed effortless as he pitched them with a flick of his thumb, each flying across face down and arrow-straight.
“Smooth,” Hector said as he caught his in midair. “Probably a good thing we’re not playing for real money.” After five hands, he’d amassed an impressive pile of digital chips on the tablet Velcroed to the small table between them.
Lesko shrugged. “It’s a pastime.” He turned and deftly began flicking a fresh hand in Rosie’s direction. “So where are you from?” he asked, admiring her dark features.
“New Mexico,” she said. “Santa Fe.”
“So when was the last time you were in Jersey?”
She fanned out her cards and studied her hand, not lifting her eyes from them. “Never been there.”
“But you said—”
“Yeah, about that,” she said. “I had to keep you talking so I knew you weren’t gonna freak out or die on me. No offense.”
Lesko pursed his lips, now admiring her in a different way. “None taken.” Though he would pay extra attention to how she played her next hand.
Despite being more commonplace with each passing year, spaceflight still carried the aura of grand adventure into the unknown. That it could sometimes be deadly dull was really only known to those who had spent more than a day in orbit.
Marshall had been warned, and he’d had no reason to doubt those who’d gone before him. Sometimes the workload was steady, but often as not it ended up compressed into times of near-overwhelming demands in an environment that had multiple ways of killing a man.
The intervals between were a battle to keep from dying of boredom, the struggle his team now found themselves in aboard the cramped and adrift shuttle. As he watched Rosie, Hector, and Mikey engage Lesko in another round of poker, he noticed their rescued civilian had already played enough rounds to look almost comfortable again. He had to admire the spacers’ resourcefulness. They’d expected a lot of down time and had come prepared.
He pulled his tablet from a cargo pocket, swiped through its menu, and made a mental note to populate it with some music and e-books just in case. He’d spent enough time paging through system diagrams and fleet directives; it was all starting to run together and he needed a distraction.
Moving forward, Earth’s blue glow in the window drew him like a moth to a flame. He’d forced himself to stay away from the cockpit, if only to avoid giving his team the impression that he’d rather be up there than working in the mid-deck with them. The word had to have gone out that the skipper was a family friend, and he couldn’t afford to let that taint him.
The shuttle was set up as a two-pilot vehicle for launch and landing, but could easily be operated by one in orbit. Chief Riley sat in the second pilot’s seat, Lieutenant Wylie in the left-side command seat—which he’d been in since departing Borman yesterday.
Riley cocked his head back as Marshall approached, and pushed himself up out of the seat.
“No need to get up, Chief. I’m good here.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but don’t blow sunshine up my ass. Being polite will get you nowhere.”
“My mother’s a southern aristocrat, Chief. Politeness was bred into me. You might as well try to untrain a dog.”
“Point taken.” Riley floated up and away from the open seat. “But I’m getting up anyway, sir. You haven’t been up here since we arrived.”
“Didn’t see the necessity.” Marshall looked to Wylie—it was his ship, after all—who gestured for him to take the copilot’s seat. He used a handgrip in the overhead to twist himself into the narrow opening and settled in, keeping his hands clear of the controls.
Wylie appreciatively noted his caution. “Nothing you could mess up right now,” he said. “I’ve closed the RCS valves and the OMS tanks are almost dry. I’m using the gyros for station keeping.” He had the craft pointed nose down, so that Earth filled the windows.
“Saving propellant for rendezvous later?” Borman was climbing their way, due on station in another ten hours.
“Bingo. Just in case they overshoot. Which they won’t, but we’ve got to be ready to cover some distance on the off chance they do.”
Marshall eyed the propellant and power gauges. “More draw on the fuel cells, isn’t it?” Not keeping the craft in a thermal-control roll to even out solar heating put more load on the radiator panels as well.
“It is,” Wylie agreed, “but we weren’t pulling that many amps anyway. I wouldn’t want to do this all on battery power. It’d start getting uncomfortable in here.”
Riley pulled himself between them and lowered his voice. “Speaking of uncomfortable, gentlemen . . . now that both of you are up here, I have some thoughts.”
Wylie flashed a knowing smile. “Thoughts, Chief? I’ve learned those frequently end up with something that looks like actual work.”
“As it should, sir.” He glanced behind them. “I’m sure I don’t have to explain how unusual of a situation we find ourselves in here.”
Marshall was silent. Besides deferring to the senior officer, he wasn’t entirely sure where Riley was going and wanted to gauge Wylie’s reaction.
“We haven’t had a live rescue in almost a year,” Wylie said. “And never one in GEO.”
Riley nodded. “Because nobody ever comes up here, and with good reason. It’s an expensive trip with almost no benefit and considerably more risk.”
“You mean exposure to the Van Allen belts?” Marshall asked.
“That’s part of it. Not to mention it’s just har
der to get to, which our predicament illustrates. Even if we had full OMS tanks, deorbiting from here isn’t cheap.”
Wylie glanced over his shoulder at the card game in back of the mid-deck. Marshall followed his gaze and realized that Rosie had arranged things so that her team was between Lesko and the officers, keeping their charge distracted and unable to overhear. She either had her own suspicions or had been reading the chief’s mind. Either one was just as likely. “So what’s your thinking, Chief?”
“Lots of hacker gear in that little ship, sir. I think Mister Hunter would agree it looked like they were ready to compete in a gamer tournament.”
Marshall agreed. “That was one serious rig. Looked like they could’ve piloted the thing from there.”
“Piloted something for sure,” Riley said. “It’s some kind of remote TT&C setup, for what I don’t know.”
“Tracking’s one thing. But telemetry and control?” Wylie pulled up specs for the Stardust on a monitor. “How familiar are you with that model? Because I only see one high-gain antenna. If they’re staying in touch with the ground, they wouldn’t have bandwidth for much else.”
“Might not need anything that powerful if they’re close in,” Riley said.
Marshall’s eyebrows rose. He’d noticed some cables snaking across the space between the consoles and an open access panel. “What were they plugged into? I didn’t get a good look.”
“Neither did I, sir.” Riley frowned. “The cabin was a wreck and our suits weren’t meant to absorb that much dosing for long.”
“No need to explain,” Wylie said. “I would’ve sent Rosie to pull you guys out of there if you hadn’t come on your own.” He paged through a diagram of the spacecraft’s command module. “All the Ka- and S-band stuff’s on the service module. Command module has VHF for launch-and-entry comms. Low power, but they’d be able to jack directly into it from the crew cabin.”
Marshall followed his reasoning. “So they were controlling that satellite? That’s why they were so close to it?”
Riley agreed. “Makes sense. I still can’t figure out why. It was dead.”
“Only because no one was willing to spend the money to come up here and work on it,” Wylie said. “Look, I’m no lawyer. They very well might have been exercising salvage rights. Or young Mr. Lesko back there might have been up to no good. The evidence could go either way. We advise the skipper, and he’ll pitch it to the brass back on the ground. I’m guessing they won’t see four people in a chartered spacecraft as much of a threat, especially since most of them died in the CME.”
Marshall took one last look aft. “And a lone survivor who learned some hard lessons about spaceflight.”
12
Only half a kilometer distant now, the gray edifice of asteroid RQ39 loomed above the Jiangs like a mountain. Still confined to their spacecraft, the Jiangs could only see what their portholes’ limited fields of view allowed. Two pairs of “panoramic” windows on opposite sides of their inflatable hab module—each sixteen inches square, practically picture windows for their purposes—offered better viewing angles. With their craft parked at one end of the oblong object, Max and Jasmine each hovered by one of the big windows but not so far apart that they couldn’t still hold hands. Each squeezed the other’s excitedly. When Max turned to his wife, her face was beaming.
“Do you see that cliff face?” she asked, an apt if not a strictly accurate description for such a feature. Along one side of the asteroid, nearly a third of its surface was scalloped with deep grooves.
Max pressed his face against the window, looking up to where his wife was pointing. “Spectacular! It’s like Half Dome in Yosemite.”
“It looks more recent than the other features,” she said, remembering that they were recording their observations for posterity. “Less impact erosion.”
“You’re right. For whatever meaning ‘recent’ might have here,” he agreed. “This body could easily be five billion years old. Part of it must have broken off.”
“My body feels almost that old sometimes,” she joked, “but I haven’t broken off any parts yet.”
“Very funny, my dear. It could be promising. If this was once a larger body that somehow sheared in two, then it could give us a better sense of what’s inside than any of our other instruments.”
“That would be fortunate,” she said. “Other than our magnetometer, I still can’t get anything useful beyond visible spectrum. Even the CubeSats we deployed are sending back nothing but static.”
“Still nothing from Palmdale?”
“They can’t find anything wrong with our onboard sensing equipment or the CubeSats. Frustrating.” She pointed at the window. “It’s something environmental out there. There’s no ionizing radiation, no decay that would account for it. Perhaps it is a very dense iron core as you suspected, a giant magnet.”
“With a large piece of the asteroid cleaved away, exposing more of the core? That might explain it.” He continued to stare outside. “It is indeed a strange universe God has made for us. Ready to go see a piece of it?”
“It feels like I’m staring at the heights of Everest from base camp,” Max said, standing atop the sled that housed their in situ resource experiment. Free of their spacecraft and able to take in its totality up close, he felt remarkably small.
“Perhaps you will be able to do that one day as well.” His love of geology and mineral exploration, besides making them wealthy, had created opportunities they’d never anticipated. Whether climbing rock faces or descending into caves, he had learned to embrace risks others wouldn’t. And she was steadfastly at his side for all of it. But this was a particularly sore subject with them—Everest’s summit straddled Nepal’s border with China, exposing them to an entirely different kind of peril.
“One day, perhaps,” he sighed. “Coming here was easier, I think.”
The asteroid looked like a mountain, untethered from Earth and floating free in the void. Eroded outlines of impact craters beneath a loosely pebbled crust hinted at eons of bombardment from other, smaller bodies it had encountered through its endless voyage around the Sun.
After they each clipped their maneuvering units to opposite sides of the sled, Max reached down for its release lever. He glanced across at his wife. “Ready?”
Jasmine nodded nervously from behind her visor.
“We will be fine, my dear. Let the computer do the work, just like we practiced.”
He tapped a command into a wrist-mounted computer. After a five-second count, compressed-gas jets in their backpacks fired in unison to pull them free of Prospector. Concentric circles appeared in each of their visors, projecting the path Max’s guidance computer had calculated to take them to their desired landing spot on RQ39, a bright region where subsurface water ice was suspected. He tapped in another command to execute, and their backpacks fired once more. The computer guided their way across the half-kilometer divide, adjusting their path with coordinated bursts of control jets.
The floating mountain grew as they approached, showing more surface detail with each passing minute. It had a grainy texture, like a layer of gravel. Some areas had been scoured away by long-ago impacts, revealing smooth rock beneath.
Closer they drew, until rock was all they could see. As their shadows seemed to converge, the computer fired a final, forward burst to slow them just a meter shy of the surface. They descended slowly, the barest hint of gravity pulling them the rest of the way. He could feel the thud of the heavy ISRU sled through his boots as they touched down as one, a thin cloud of gravel scattering in all directions.
They absorbed the gentle impact through their knees before reaction could send them back into space. Grapplers from the sled automatically deployed when they sensed the sudden change in inertia, securing it to the surface.
As the dust settled, Max looked across at his wife, beaming just as she had when they first saw Malati up close yesterday. Neither spoke, and by the look on her face he could tell she was just as am
azed that they’d made it. Her hand reached for his, clumsily gripping it through pressurized gloves.
Max drew in a breath to calm himself before speaking to the world. “Palmdale,” he said, “we have arrived on Malati.”
Transcript from the Global News Network
“Today’s spacewalk on asteroid 2023 RQ39, now informally named Malati, will be the first and shortest of three planned extravehicular activities, or EVAs, over the next week while the Prospector spacecraft remains in close proximity. After that time, they will perform a short correction burn and their orbits will begin to diverge as Prospector continues on to its flyby of Mars.
“GNN is privileged to be the first to interview civilian astronauts Max and Jasmine Jiang on the surface of Malati from the Prospector Foundation’s mission control in Palmdale, California. Light delays have been edited for time.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jiang, how are you? Could you describe your experience so far?”
Max: “We’re doing quite well, thank you, Kevin. I suppose the best way to describe our experience is ‘alien,’ not to put too fine a point on it. It’s surreal. If I turn one way I’m staring into deep space at so many stars it makes me dizzy. Eventually I’m able to pick out the blue Earth, even though we are several million kilometers from home. But then if I turn the opposite way, facing Malati’s surface, it all seems familiar. If you’ve ever been climbing, it’s not unlike the scree you might find on the slope of a mountain. The ground beneath us is bedrock with a fairly thick coating of loose gravel, though it doesn’t behave like gravel would on Earth.”
Jasmine: “If you follow my helmet camera, you’ll see static electricity causes the smaller bits to cling to our boots. That’s because this asteroid’s gravity is perhaps a hundredth of Earth’s. It’s really not enough to stand on.”
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