Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  Finally, on the datasheet-cum-flight-controls secured by magnets to a disabled (or so he hoped!) alien console, a countdown timer broke below five minutes. He tapped the intercom. “Deceleration to end in five, people. Navigator to the bridge. Captain to the bridge.”

  Marcus arrived first, while deceleration still provided the simulation of gravity. He dropped into the bridge’s remaining acceleration couch. “The last I heard, a ship has only one captain. That’s you.”

  “Every mission has but one commander. That, my friend, is you.” And, Yevgeny realized with a start, friend was sincere. Whether Marcus was indeed a CIA asset? That he and the American had once been adversaries? That was ancient history. “Because I am merely the taxi driver. And because we have arrived.”

  “That is for me to decide.” On cue, Liu Yun, planetary astrophysicist and their navigator, had appeared in the hatchway. After the succession of major explosions to free Rescue One from the lava tube, followed by the two test flights, there had been no keeping secrets from the Chinese. Even so, Yun sounded, at least while speaking English, more upper-crust Brit than Mandarin. One consequence of an Oxford education.

  Yun was thirty-seven, per his FSB dossier, while scarcely looking thirty. The pampered son of Central Committee member Liu Ping. Short. Pudgy. Or maybe not pudgy as much as soft? And why wouldn’t he be soft? Until a week ago, he had been ensconced in the comparative luxury of the Farside Observatory, with nothing more taxing to do than nose about where everyone had been directed to look the other way.

  Yun’s head was a broad, inverted wedge, sprouting a scruffy chin-strap beard at one end and at the other enough deep-black hair, moussed into spikes, for three men. His forehead was broad, intelligent-seeming, and his eyes were seldom without a mischievous twinkle. (And perhaps that impishness was the appeal for Katya. Life for her, for them all, had been grim.)

  Yevgeny’s datasheet chimed. He reached again for the intercom. “One minute to free fall.”

  Marcus buckled in. Yun clasped the back of Marcus’s couch.

  As the seconds count broke into single digits, Yevgeny positioned a hand above the datasheet, ready to intervene if software failed to act. Needlessly so, for at zero the deep bass rumble of the drive … vanished. His poised arm wanted to float. The frenetic pop-pop-pop of the reactors, and the faint tremor that accompanied it, slowed to a stately, twice-per-minute pulse. He scanned the virtual instruments on the datasheet before again activating the intercom. “Coming around, people.”

  With gentle nudges of their attitude thrusters, Yevgeny began reorienting the ship. Earth and Moon, for hours now merged into a single, brilliant dot, slid to the port edge of the canopy, disappeared. They kept turning … turning … turning. An edge of the canopy darkened and polarized as the Sun appeared, the protective area expanding as they spun. And still, slowly, they turned ….

  A dusky mass, potato-shaped, edged into their view. And, larger than Earth as seen from the Moon, it kept coming.

  Two brief pulses of attitude thrusters brought their rotation to a stop. A three-second pulse of the bow thrusters brought them to a halt relative to the asteroid. Meaning the Hammer and ship alike were hurtling toward Earth.

  If the fools in charge at home had permitted Rescue One to bring along a few thermonuclear weapons, their job would almost be done.

  As if reading Yevgeny’s mind, Yun’s reflection in the canopy broke into a scowl.

  “What’s wrong?” Yevgeny asked.

  “Nothing,” Yun said. “This is the rock I expected, and just where I expected it. Which means, Earth remains in its cross hairs.”

  For the benefit of Ilya and Ekatrina, Yevgeny announced over the intercom, “We have arrived.”

  “How close are we?” Marcus asked.

  Yevgeny sent out a lidar ping. “Eighty-one kilometers.” They had been aiming for eighty. He craned his neck to look up at Yun, who, having released his grip on Marcus’s acceleration couch, now floated near the bridge ceiling. “Well done. I see you are not only an MSS asset.”

  “The 007 bit was Father’s idea. He despaired that with my esoteric interests I would ever go anywhere.” Yun laughed heartily, gesturing toward the canopy and the Hammer. “Shows all he knows.” Slapping Yevgeny on the shoulder, he laughed again. “And I am happy to know you are a competent pilot, and not just an FSB spy.”

  Then it was Marcus’s turn to laugh.

  Yevgeny studied the Hammer, spinning around its long axis, by naked eye and through the hull-mounted telescope. Cameras streamed both views to datasheets for Ilya and Ekatrina. As the asteroid turned, glinting in the ferocious sunlight, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Their spectrometer, analyzing reflected sunlight, gave the same report as had observatories orbiting Earth: the Hammer was a primordial chunk of nickel-iron. A planetesimal left over from the earliest era of the Solar System.

  “I see no sign the Titans were ever here.” He held back a shiver: with no obvious alien traces, where would they even begin to look? Its many lumps and indentations aside, the Hammer was a fat ellipsoid twelve kilometers by eight by six. Its surface exceeded two hundred square kilometers.

  Ekatrina said, “Nothing the Titans left on the Moon’s surface lasted. Why would it here?”

  Yun agreed. “Since the aliens were on this rock—if they were here—it has endured millions of close encounters with the Sun. Imagine the temperature extremes it has endured, and the blasting by solar wind, far more intense even than on the unprotected surface of the Moon.”

  Paul Bunyan’s remains survived the eons, Yevgeny thought. And how unfortunate for humanity that was. With a bit of help from us ….

  An idea flashed into his head. “Suppose there is nothing on the Hammer we can use. This ship is much more massive than any gravity tractor that might have been lobbed this way on a missile. Can we use Rescue One as a gravity tractor?”

  “I doubt it.” Yun’s eyes closed in thought. His lips moved in silent calculation. “Sorry. Not even close.”

  “We should report our arrival to Dirtside,” Marcus said.

  Yevgeny handed him the mic. “Here you go, Captain.”

  Marcus narrated a brief report. The transmission would be almost three minutes on its way. An acknowledgment would be as long in returning; any meaningful response longer still. In expectant silence, they stared at the asteroid they had come so far somehow to deflect.

  And after an interminable six minutes … nothing. Not even a burst of static.

  Marcus drummed fingers on an armrest until Yevgeny frowned at him. “Sorry. Well, looking on the bright side, we’re here. And Earth will know as much when the Hammer starts veering from its course.”

  “Assuming we figure out how,” Yevgeny said.

  Marcus shrugged.

  “Maybe Earth did not hear us,” Yun ventured. “The Sun pumps out a lot of radio noise, and from Earth’s perspective, we are almost in front it.”

  “You do not sound convinced,” Yevgeny said.

  Yun’s shrug started him slowly spinning. “Because I’m not. Natural RF is broadband noise. We are using a known, narrow, frequency band.”

  “Perhaps we remain within a plasma cloud?” Ilya suggested from the engine room. “If that is the issue, the cloud will be dispersing. They will get through to us later.”

  The plasma exhaust from the ship’s main drive had kept them in a comm blackout for the entire flight. Since turnover, they had been braking through their own ion trail. Interference had to be the problem. To be thorough, Yevgeny ran comm diagnostics anyway. “Hmm. Odd.”

  “What?” Ekatrina asked. “Would you like me up there?”

  Marcus leaned to where he could see Yevgeny’s datasheet. “An antenna failure? You’ve got to be kidding me. We have to go outside and point the dish by hand?”

  Yevgeny slued an exterior camera for a look at the antenna. And cursed
. In their separate native languages, all three men on the bridge swore. Where the steerable antenna had been attached to the hull, nothing but the twisted stump remained. The big dish was perhaps the only item for which they had not brought a spare. Because what could go wrong with a big, dumb piece of metal?

  Jesus,” Marcus said. “Are we unlucky enough to get grazed by a meteoroid ? Or were we careless enough to have screwed up mounting the antenna?”

  “Neither, I think,” Yevgeny said. “Or both. It does not matter. It is simply our destiny to do this alone.”

  * * *

  Ship studied the nearby asteroid. As the rock rotated, Ship had no doubt. It recognized this rock. It had been to this rock.

  This was a weapon of the masters. A weapon of last resort.

  There was equally no uncertainty but that this asteroid, its orbit extrapolated forward, would strike—would obliterate!—the third planet. That Ship’s return to this asteroid could be no coincidence. That its alien intruders must have come here, must have needed it to come here, to deflect the asteroid.

  As there could be no doubt of Ship’s duty. Whatever the cost, Ship would not permit the masters’ will to be thwarted.

  * * *

  “Is short-range comm operational?” Marcus asked. Short range used a dedicated antenna, your basic omnidirectional dipole aerial.

  Yevgeny’s fingers glided over his datasheet and its virtual controls. He nodded approval at what he saw there, then re-aimed the external camera. The new view showed a short dipole antenna standing out from the hull, just as it had at their departure. “Short range appears fine.”

  “Then we’ll report with that. Every radio telescope on the planet”—the Sun-facing side, anyway—“will be listening.”

  Yun said, “If so, we’ll never hear their response.”

  But they’ll know we made it. Valerie will know we made it. Marcus retrieved the mic he had left floating. “Ground Control, this is Rescue One. We have reached a point—”

  “What the hell?” Ilya shouted over the intercom. “Yevgeny, quit fiddling with the reactors.”

  “I have not touched them.” Yevgeny said.

  “Then why are they ramping up?”

  Marcus dropped the mic, his eyes skimming over Yevgeny’s virtual flight controls. Both reactors reported there as in their idle states, and the main drive showed as off. That they were in free fall proved the main drive was off. The battery banks registered a full charge. Apart from cooling and life support, the current power drain should be trivial.

  But there was no denying the escalating pop-pop-pop of the reactors, and the rumble Marcus felt in his bones.

  “Ilya! Can you shut things down from your end?”

  “Do you imagine I am not trying?” the physicist snapped. “Katya! Get down here. Help me to understand what is happening.”

  “Where’s all the energy going?” Marcus asked.

  “I do not know!” Ilya said. “Nothing! I see nothing on my instruments.”

  Marcus’s mind raced. Where would this energy surge go? What damage could it do? Overload batteries already at capacity? Not fatal, as long as they kept the reactors themselves online. Disable their life support? That was grafted-on equipment; apart from power feeds, it did not connect in any way to alien hardware. Circuit breakers would protect it. What else? Between the pulsing of the reactors and the roar of ventilation fans, it was hard to think.

  The roar of the fans?

  “Ilya,” Marcus called. “What’s the temperature?”

  “Your comfort is not at this moment my priority.”

  “Ilya!” Marcus yelled back. “Listen to the fans! And not here on the bridge. I’m hearing them over the intercom, on your end.”

  A Russian curse. “Burnt my hand on a door. The reactor compartments themselves are hot. Without a load on the onion shells”—which converted the radiation from fusion directly into electrical power—“they are going to blow.”

  Explosively, Marcus thought. Like a short circuit without a fuse. And with the reactors running flat out—pumping out their maximum radiation, never mind the escalating heat—to enter either reactor compartment would be suicide. Scraping the walls, and hoping for the best, as he had tried in desperation on that near-disastrous test flight, was not an option.

  “Cut the helium feeds.” Because there were cutoffs for any time a cryo tank or a reactor required maintenance. Regrown alien circuitry could do nothing about big, dumb mechanical valves. Marcus hoped. “We’ll run off batteries while we figure this out.”

  “Do you know,” Ilya protested, “what an uncontrolled shutdown will do to the reactors? Because I do not!”

  “I know what a meltdown will do,” Marcus snapped. “Destroy the reactors. If not kill us outright, disable the ship. In any event, end the mission. Cut the helium feeds. That’s an order.”

  “But—”

  “Do it, Ilya,” Yevgeny said.

  And together, over the space of no more than a few seconds:

  —Lights flashed, flickered, settled into a dim, battery-mode level.

  —The intercom chirped twice, emitted an ear-splitting squeal of positive feedback, and went silent.

  —And with a choking, asthmatic sputter, the throbbing/popping of the reactors died out.

  * * *

  Ship had done what it could. It wondered: had that been enough?

  Chapter 51

  The engine room was sweltering, its air thick with a stench of scorched metal, when Marcus arrived. Ilya and Ekatrina had their heads together, exchanging rapid-fire Russian.

  Marcus reminded them, “Your English is a whole lot better than my Russian.”

  Ilya shrugged. “There is nothing yet to tell. We do not know what happened, or what damage was done.”

  “What happened?” Back on the Moon, when the ship had failed on its first test flight, the cause might have been … anything. But twice? The situation no longer permitted any ambiguity. “We were attacked. That’s what happened. We need to understand how. And by what. The ship, obviously, but what in the ship? Because I don’t know that we can survive another attack.”

  Ekatrina murmured something.

  “What’s that?” Marcus asked.

  “We may not have survived this attack. Given the cooling demands so near to the Sun, backup batteries will only last a day or so.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “We have the fission reactor”—intended as a portable power source, should they need one, on the Hammer—“but cabling it into the ship’s systems and starting it will take hours. And while it should keep most things running, at best it would power the main drive at a small fraction of its capacity.”

  Marcus nodded. “Good point. First thing, we let ambient temperature rise to, oh, thirty degrees.” Or as he considered it, about eighty-six. No one else aboard even thought in Fahrenheit. “That will buy us a little time.”

  Marcus looked around the engine room until he found an intercom control. It did nothing. Fried, he remembered. He rang Yevgeny on the bridge through his datasheet. “If Yun is with you, put me on speaker. Can you shoot us the final few klicks on thrusters?”

  “Yes, but it will be more of a drift than a shot. And it will be a big drain on fuel.”

  Marcus thought. “The thrusters burn liquid aitch-two and oh-two, right?”

  “Yes. A clever design. No need ever to run out of fuel: just electrolyze some water.” And bitterly: “Unless your reactors give out.”

  Marcus asked Ekatrina, “Can we run the Titan electrolyzer, compressors, and cryo gear off their backup batteries?”

  “Of course. But is draining our power reserves faster a good idea? We might need all the time we can eke out to regain the use of the fusion reactors.”

  “What matters is reaching the Hammer,” Marcus said. “Yevgeny, get us close as fast as you prudently can. Figure
out where we should land. We’ll make more fuel if needed.” They would run out of time long before they missed the water. Or they would have roasted to death for failure to get a reactor up and running.

  “May I suggest something?” Yun asked. “Put us into a tight orbit around the Hammer. With a close-in survey, I can make a better recommendation where to land.”

  “Sounds good,” Marcus said. “I leave that to you two. Call if there’s a problem, or when we’re in orbit.”

  “Roger that,” Yevgeny said.

  Even as Marcus turned to Ekatrina and Ilya, he felt the gentle nudge of thrusters. “Something aboard took control of the reactors from us. Why did our isolation measures stop working? Can we restore them, or do something else, without crippling any shipboard systems we need?”

  Again, Ilya shrugged. Russian fatalism?

  Ekatrina frowned in thought. Opened her mouth. Closed it again. Frowned some more.

  “What, Katya?” Marcus prompted. “If you have a theory, a speculation, a wild-ass guess, don’t hold back.” Because I’ve got nothing.

  “I will go dig the fission reactor out of cargo, just in case,” Ilya said. “The fusion reactors will not cool down enough to examine for awhile.”

  Marcus nodded. “Thanks. I’ll shout if I need anything.”

  Ekatrina watched Ilya leave. Exhaled sharply through her nose. Sighed. “You will believe I am crazy.”

  “There’s always that chance. But you can’t be crazier than the guy who suggested this jaunt.”

  She grinned. “So, okay. Maybe I am not that bad off. Marcus, I have long been puzzled by the Titans using two such different types of electronics. One is much as what we use: racks of equipment, big consoles, and the like. And then there is the nanotech wall covering, back at the base and also here on the ship.”