But his sponsors had been fanatic about sticking to the plan. They always were. It was a trait he’d observed all across East Asia. They would want to know why he deviated from it, and how it had come to place him in an American military hospital.
He’d been wondering that himself. I ain’t no rocket scientist, he told himself. I didn’t know it would cook our spacecraft, though he vaguely remembered some dense blather from their trainers about cosmic radiation and something called the Van Halen belts.
Maybe he’d stumbled into the limits of his abilities, in which case he counted himself lucky to have realized it. No more space adventures for me, he decided. From now on, he would stick to machines on the ground.
He settled back into his bed, resigned to another repetitive cycle of news. Yet this time, their lead story piqued his interest:
“In what has become a rash of similar incidents, another communications satellite has ‘disappeared’ from sight. INDOSAT-21 is believed to still be functional, but its control center in Jakarta has been unable to send any commands or receive any information from the satellite. More worrisome for the region is this constitutes the bulk of their space-based information network. SinoComp Holdings of Macau has offered the use of its own satellites in order to plug what has become a considerable hole in the region’s information network.”
Carefully positioned for the camera in front of what Lesko assumed to be an Indonesian satellite antenna farm, the reporter droned on as colorful but mostly meaningless graphics followed.
So that’s what their game was. There must have been a hell of a lot of money in cornering the developing world’s communications networks. The bosses always withheld the full story and he’d have to figure out the big picture later, but that’s how it went. If everybody knew the plan, somebody would eventually get pinched and bring down the whole shebang.
Lesko smiled to himself and reclined in his bed, patiently waiting for the sports report.
Roberta’s first thought at using an Advanced Cryogenic Exploration (ACES) stage to put a new drone in geosynch was “overkill.” It was a big stage for a relatively small payload, certainly smaller than the payloads the workhorse upper stage customarily moved back and forth from lunar orbit. The X-37’s role was a “multimission space maneuvering vehicle” used in low to medium orbits. GEO was considerably higher at over thirty thousand kilometers, and the drone needed an extra boost to get there, but this was a mighty large kick. It was the highest they’d ever taken one of the spaceplanes, and the four-engine ACES would deliver it with nearly half of its propellant load left over. It had all seemed very wasteful until they got the first mission brief: close with and inspect the abandoned Stardust and the nearby SAMCOM-3 communications satellite.
That would require another small kick up to the graveyard orbit, another three hundred klicks higher. It would also require a little bit of orbit phasing, as the distance was enough to put them out of synch. They could use the Hall ion thruster package for station keeping around vulnerable satellites, but they’d still be hauling that hefty upper stage around.
It turned out they would need it for the next series of taskings. Once finished, they would be taking the new drone a third of the way around the world to the next assignment: another reportedly dead satellite at a different location in GEO. Given the amount of propellant that would be left over, she anticipated yet another burn and movement to a different longitude after that.
“What’s bugging you?” Ivey asked from the flight station beside her.
“Reading the tea leaves in the propellant budget,” she said, distracting herself with her work at the payload station. “Trying to figure out where they’re sending us next. Why don’t they just put it in the STO?” she wondered as she exercised the manipulator arms, cycling them through their full range of motion now that the drone’s cargo doors were open. “Why keep us guessing? We can do a better job if we could plan ahead.”
“Compartmentalization,” Ivey said, mildly lecturing her as he flipped through the maneuver plan. “The probability of a secret being blown is directly proportional to how many people are in on it. They tell us what we need to know to accomplish the mission and that’s it.” He wore a sly grin. “But they forget we’re all rocket scientists here. What information they do give helps me figure out what we’re doing next. Look.” He spread the printout of their maneuvering plan between them. “Here’s the delta-v budget for this mission, with the margins we need to leave for the next mission.”
Roberta stared at the numbers, struggling to discern their significance. “How does that tell you the next tasking?”
“Because I know how much we have to keep in reserve to deorbit at the end of all this. After this op, we’ll have just enough in the tanks for two more before we lose ACES.” He showed her a crude graph he’d drawn over a pocket map of Earth, with rough ellipses over two areas equally spaced around the equator. “These are the other two zones where satellites have started going dark. Phasing burns to reach each of them leaves just enough to deorbit afterward. The way we’re configured, it makes sense that’s where they send us next.”
“Could be,” she said. “But it could be a lot of things. Wouldn’t this be a pretty short mission duration? These things usually stay up for months at a time.”
“Depends on the mission.” Another mischievous look flashed in his eyes. “And if I’m right, it’ll be fun tweaking the planning cell. Those guys think they’re smarter than everybody else here.” He pointed at Roberta’s console. “But don’t let me distract you. How’s your package?”
She fought the temptation to enjoin a double entendre and turned back to her console. “Manipulator arms checked out and stowed for maneuvering. Cameras are up and tracking.” She clicked over to fill one of their shared screens with the visuals.
Ivey looked puzzled. “Blank screen. You sure it checked out?”
Roberta twirled a small joystick that controlled the cameras. “Yeah . . . yeah. Focus and color balance looked good inside the spacecraft.”
“Sun didn’t cross its field of view, did it? That’ll throw the exposure off, send it into safe mode.”
“No, I made sure to rotate it antisolar.”
“Check your focal length,” he said.
“It’s set at infinity, right where it’s supposed to be.” She ran the camera through its full range of focus. “Yeah, it’s correct. And it’s pointed in the right direction.” She swallowed nervously. “Infrared’s blank, too.”
Ivey checked his own instruments against hers. The X-37 was at the planned orbit and oriented correctly. Jacob’s cameras should have been able to see their target by now. Instead, they were staring at a blank screen. The region of space where the abandoned Stardust and the SAMCOM-3 satellite should have been was empty.
24
The small cabin of the Specter shuttle was becoming as familiar to Marshall as his own quarters back aboard ship. He’d become as fastidious with it as his spacers had been with their suits, a fact he’d realized when he’d become annoyed with himself after finding switches misconfigured from their last excursion. It had taken an extra ten minutes to find and correct the problem after it had prevented him from powering up the little spacecraft.
And he was still mad at himself, checking and rechecking instruments and settings as they approached RQ39, determined not to waste any more time. Wylie might still be occupying the command seat, but he was leaving much of this sortie for Marshall to fly. The need to perform was not lost on him.
Rosie floated by the secondary control panel next to him, working the directional antenna to pinpoint the source of the mystery biomonitor signals. “A watched pot never boils, sir.”
“How’s that?”
She pointed at the cuff of his pressure suit. “You keep checking your watch. That means you’re in a hurry, and pilots who get in a hurry tend to make mistakes. And since I’m not a pilot, that means I’m counting on you to not make mistakes. You’re making me nervous, sir.�
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He looked away sheepishly. “Sorry. Just pissed off with myself.”
She laughed. “Over a dead battery? That’s why they keep spares on the charger, sir. You think you’re the first pilot who forgot to isolate the backup bus?”
Marshall shot a glance toward Wylie up at the forward controls. He hadn’t mentioned it, which should tell him something. “I guess it is easy to miss.”
“Wouldn’t know, I’m not a pilot,” she said, following his gaze. “But yeah, it happens a lot. Even to the salty ones.”
Marshall nodded, silently wondering how long it would take him to get “salty.”
“You’re getting there, sir,” Rosie said, reading his mind. “This run’s been a steep learning curve. It’s felt like a full six-month float and we’ve only been out for a couple of weeks.”
The asteroid loomed large in their windows. Almost ten kilometers across, it was enough to have a perceptible, if weak, gravity field. Marshall pulsed their nose thrusters, parking them far enough away to keep from being drawn any closer. They hovered along its eastern limb while she listened on the biomonitor’s frequency.
“Got it,” she said. “Loud and clear, bearing two-nine-four, z minus three-zero degrees. Can you translate us port?”
“Stand by.” First marking the bearing on a digital map of the asteroid, Marshall pushed against the control stick, goosing the starboard thrusters to move them in the opposite direction. The gray, pebbled surface passed slowly in front of them.
“Lost them,” Rosie said as she tried turning the antenna to follow. “Can’t keep up with the lateral motion.”
After a few minutes, Marshall brought them to stop along RQ39’s western limb. Rosie’s eyes were shut in concentration as she gently tweaked the antenna controls, one hand keeping her headset pressed into her ear.
“Got it . . . got it! Zero-four-four, minus three-one degrees. I think we’ve got them, sir.”
Marshall marked this new bearing on his kneeboard tablet, almost directly on top of the first. “It sure looks like it. Good work.” He flicked his mic switch. “Borman, Specter. We’ve pinpointed their location. Request permission to proceed.”
Poole answered quickly, no doubt following them from his perch in the cupola with his ever-present binoculars. “You’re go for approach, Specter. Hold at fifty meters.”
“You sure this is the spot?” They orbited alongside RQ39, holding at fifty meters directly above where they’d expected to find the Jiang’s remains. “I don’t see anything.”
Rosie tuned the antenna while Nikki Harper looked out through the topside windows. “Signal’s really strong here, sir. This has to be it. There’s a heat source in the same vicinity too.”
“That’d be their surface experiment package,” he said, craning his neck and leaning farther into the window. “It was solar powered, those panels ought to make it easy to spot.”
He backed the shuttle away, moving them farther out to expand their field of view. As he did, a glint of light coming from a depression in the regolith caught their attention.
“There!” Rosie exclaimed. “At your two o’clock, sir. Can you bring us overhead?”
Marshall nodded and gave the controls a gentle tap back. Thrusters kicked beneath them and they drifted up and right. A final kick left them floating above a boxy metallic framework beneath two black semicircular fans: the In Situ Resource Unit and its unfolded solar panels. A tangle of cables and hoses glimmered in the harsh sunlight, running from the unit and disappearing into the shadow of an overhang.
“That’s their ISRU,” Marshall said. “No sign of either of them, though. Maybe dust clinging to their suits blended them in against the surface. If it’s anything like moondust—that stuff’s supposed to get into everything.”
“I don’t know, sir,” she said, leaning into the window herself. “I get the feeling this place isn’t like the Moon, or anything else for that matter.”
He turned to face her. “Ready to go investigate, then?”
“Walk on an asteroid?” she asked, for a moment forgetting why they were there. She exchanged looks with Harper. “Sorry, sir. I shouldn’t be, well . . .”
He laid a gloved hand on an arm of her suit. “It’s okay to be eager so long as we don’t lose sight of why we’re here. That’s not something I worry about with you.”
Marshall let her go first, keeping them parked above the Jiang’s presumed EVA site. She pushed away from the shuttle’s aft hatch and slowly floated across the gulf between them and the asteroid, feet first and trailing an extra tether behind her. When she made contact—“touching down” might be too strong a term in such feeble gravity—a cloud of gravel spread from beneath her feet and slowly settled back onto the surface. She bounced back herself slightly, having to give her maneuvering unit thrusters a tap to remain standing on the surface.
She’d been unusually silent for a while. “How’s it going down there?” Marshall prompted.
“I guess that’s one giant leap for me,” she said. “It’s weird, sir. Be careful when you come down.” She dragged one foot across the surface. “You can’t really walk on this, gravity’s not nearly strong enough. Feels weird. It’s not noticeable until it is, you know? It pulls at you just enough to be a nuisance. Standing’s kind of on purpose if that makes sense. It’s like you’re in your own orbit, your feet are just touching the ’roid.”
Which was exactly the truth, he thought. “What can you see?”
“Rocks.” There was a crackle of static as she moved forward, suggesting some mild electrical discharge as she stirred up the regolith. “Lots of rocks. It’s like the surface is covered with a blanket of loose gravel. Solid underneath, though.”
“You aren’t too far from their surface equipment. What can you see from there?”
“Heading there now,” she said, and he watched her launch across the surface in one clean, continuous hop. “Using my MMU instead of trying to walk on this.”
Rosie and Harper landed near the equipment setup, stirring up another cloud of gravel that stubbornly clung to her boots with static electricity. This was going to get real annoying real fast if they didn’t figure out a way to compensate for it. She shook each foot, sending pebbles flying in all directions. “How do you read me, sir?” The crackling radio channel suggested the answer.
“Loud but broken. How me?”
“About the same. I’m going to limit movement to the MMU as much as possible.”
“Makes sense. What’s it look like down there?”
The resource extraction package was a short hop away: a square, open cage of aluminum alloys atop four legs set into the rock. Beneath it, a drill shaft was embedded in the surface. The cage held foil-wrapped storage tanks and mineral processors encased in their own composite shells. Its control box was sturdy and simple, built to function in harsh and unpredictable environments. It looked to be framed in high-strength plastic, cheap and more importantly nonconductive.
“ISRU’s clean and pristine, sir.” She lifted a protective cover beneath a row of status lights, all of them green. “It’s drilled into the surface, looks like it’s been running for a while.” She whistled as she read off quantities. “Must have found a vein of subsurface ice, because it’s been cracking a ton of oxygen and hydrogen.”
“At least they’ll have proved their hypothesis,” Marshall said. “So this wasn’t for nothing.”
“Not sure where it’s all going, though,” she answered. There were umbilical lines leading away from the extractor into the nearby overhang she’d seen from overhead. “Weird.”
She jumped up and flew over to the outcropping, using the MMU’s jets to bring her back down in front of the opening. The lines led inside, behind a Mylar blanket draped over the opening. She pushed it aside to see the silhouettes of two pairs of boots lying atop a thin bed of gravel. She flicked on her helmet lamp, illuminating the inside of the little cavern they’d laid themselves to rest in. There they lay, two lifeless forms in dus
t-covered EVA suits, side by side beneath a rock overhang far from home.
Her heart sank. She’d come looking for them but hadn’t really known what to expect when she found them. She waved for Nikki Harper to follow.
“Report.” She must have been standing there for a while because he sounded anxious. For a boot officer, he’d been unusually patient so far.
“I’ve found them, sir. Stand by, please.”
What must that have been like? she wondered. They’d come here fully expecting to die. What goes through a person’s mind then?
Her mind went back to space survival and rescue school: “SEAL training with math.” And it had been the toughest experience she’d ever faced. Between the physical and academic expectations, the washout rate had been on the order of ninety percent. The single worst exercise, or “training evolution” in typically anodyne mil-speak, had been the suit isolation drill: a full day, encased in an EVA suit, lying in a darkened vacuum chamber with steadily draining life support and no outside communication. It would be entirely up to the trainee to be in touch with their own body enough to stretch their consumables well beyond suit design limits, the goal being to survive until the lights and air came back on without having the safety crew come pull you out early.
The idea was to test the prospective rescue spacer’s psychological limits in simulated deep-space isolation, on the theory that this could—in fact would—happen someday. “Somebody out there is going to be experiencing what may be the last day of their lives and it’s up to you to pull them out of it. You will have to stay with them and keep them alive until you can both be rescued. The farther out people go, the higher probability of them getting into bad trouble.”
It hadn’t been the physically hardest part of training, but the combination of total isolation and dwindling resources had pushed her to her limits. She was in fact ready to push the big red “I quit” button just as the chamber’s lights came back on.
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