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14




Tucked away in a remote corner of Denver Centennial Airport, Hammond Aero’s research lab would have been indistinguishable from the office parks beyond the airport fence but for a cavernous adjoining hangar that could have swallowed the big Gulfstream whole. Its pilots pulled the jet alongside and waited until the engines had spun down before opening the main cabin door. Hammond was in a hurry, heading down the steps as soon as his crew gave the all-clear with Owen and Penny close behind.

Waiting for them at the foot of the stairs was an auburn-haired, green-eyed woman cradling a large tablet computer and a bundle of folders. “Audrey Quinn,” she said, extending a hand to Traci and Roy as they made their way down.

“Aud’s the brains of this operation,” Hammond explained. “Whatever half-baked ideas I come up with, she makes conform to reality.”

Audrey blushed, though this was not the first time she’d heard his spiel. “Pleasure to meet you both, finally.” She looked at Roy. “I worked in Houston before Arthur brought me here. I was there during your ASCAN class.”

“You were,” he said. “I had all the big shots’ names memorized. As a candidate you do everything you can to find an edge.”

“I was no big shot,” she demurred. “At most, a medium shot.”

“She’s better off here,” Hammond said. “I keep her brain engaged.”

“Still, I have to admit I was a little jealous of Owen running your mission,” she said with a nod to Harriman. “Every flight director’s dream.”

“Until it’s not,” Owen said.

“Sometimes life gives you second chances,” Hammond said cryptically. He leaned on his cane and inclined his head toward the hangar. “C’mon, we’ve got work to do and I’m not getting any younger.”


Audrey started her presentation off simple—or as simple as such a plan could be—with a slide titled CONOPS. The Concept of Operations showed at a very high level how they intended the mission to unfold. Like Traci’s earlier work, it began with a high-energy departure from Earth orbit and used Neptune’s deep gravity well to decelerate Columbus for its rendezvous with Magellan at the edge of the solar system.

While fusion rockets had opened up possibilities that had previously been the purview of fiction, the engines powering Magellan had so far been the only ones used in practice. The uprated four-core variant installed on Columbus promised to be even more powerful, but for the immediate problem that they had sat dormant for years. Other than some cold-flow tests of its plasma generators, their single ignition had been to push the vehicle into its current orbit.

“We don’t anticipate that outfitting the ship for a minimal crew is going to be a showstopper,” Audrey began. “You may not have the meal choices you were accustomed to on your last mission, but there won’t be any lack of consumables. SpaceX is willing to delay its next Mars sortie to give us the food and water you’ll need.”

“That’s a big commitment,” Roy said, “since they’re still tied to synodic launch windows.” Using chemical rockets, they were forced to wait until Earth and Mars were near conjunction.

“It is,” Audrey agreed. “This will set them back a couple of years but they think it’s worth it. It’s the only way to outfit Columbus in the time frame we need.” She pulled up a diagram of the ship. “Propellant is our first potential failure point. After studying the data, hydrogen boiloff is perhaps going to be a bigger concern than we initially thought.”

“How so?” Traci asked, wondering what she could have missed. “The improved cryogenic tanks are supposed to keep most of it from escaping.”

Audrey pulled up data from Columbus’s tanks. “The question is insulation. With the ship at minimum power and the cryo system off, we could measure exactly how efficient the passive insulation was. Hydrogen is just too light; it escapes through everything. From what we observed, the boiloff rate is almost four percent higher than expected.”

She didn’t have to explain the implications. Over time that would amount to a lot of propellant escaping into space. Though its orbit was high enough to keep Earth’s weak atmospheric drag from eventually reclaiming the ship, any hydrogen propellant left in Columbus’s tanks had long since boiled off. This had led Hammond’s team to embrace what Audrey colloquially termed “creative solutions.” Her deadpan delivery only made the next slide all the more shocking.

The vehicle diagrams projected on the monitors before them looked familiar enough, though there were distinct differences, as if they’d started a recipe using similar ingredients but with wildly divergent results. Traci could tell the ship came from the same lineage as Magellan but had picked up some unusual appendages along the way. It still resembled a flying umbrella stand, with the big Kevlar micrometeor dome shielding the forward hab modules ahead of a cluster of eight massive propellant tanks and radiator fins. Behind them, the improved pulse drive with its four tulip-petal engine bells were mounted to the stern. Other than the stripped-down crew modules, she noticed one curious change to its configuration. “What are those grids underneath the forward tanks?”

“That’s where this gets interesting.” Audrey exchanged a cagey look with Owen. “Those are electromagnetic ram scoops.”

“They’re what?” Roy was incredulous. “You’re not serious.”

“It was the best way to address the propellant constraints,” Owen explained. “Those uprated engines are the most efficient we have, but you’ll still need more reaction mass and it’s too late to pre-position a tanker like we did for your last mission.”

Roy replied with a skeptical grunt. Even if NASA had been willing to pay for it, a resupply ship would have to be launched a year ahead of them to be in position. He pointed at another monitor that displayed their path across the solar system. “Zoom in on the Neptune flyby.”

Owen did so, which confirmed Roy’s suspicions. “We’re not just picking up a gravity assist then, are we?”

“You’ll be using the scoop,” Owen said. “This will be your terminal go/no-go point. If you can’t extract enough hydrogen to top off the tanks, you’ll abort and return to Earth.”

“How close?” Roy needed to know. “Because the drag losses are going to be substantial. I assume you accounted for that?”

“Yes, but we can’t be certain how much. We’ve updated the atmospheric models from Webb telescope observations, but the only close flyby was Voyager.”

That had been over sixty years ago. Roy crossed his hands in a time-out gesture. “Let’s back up a minute. I have questions. First of all, how does this work? Who’s building it? And how much time will having to wait for it cost us?”

Audrey pointed at the window behind them. “It’s out there in assembly bay two right now.”

Roy and Traci each turned and lifted the blinds. In the cavernous bay below, a pair of towering 3D printers were slowly laying a net of carbon lace atop an intricate grid pattern laid out along the shop floor.

Roy whistled. “You’ve already started it. This isn’t some notional plan we’re discussing anymore. It’s set in stone.”

“Carbon, if you want to be pedantic about it,” Owen said.

Traci peered through the blinds, mesmerized by the mechanized spiders spinning their complex web. “How big?”

“Fully unfolded, the scoop’s structure will be almost a thousand square meters. The electromagnetic field it generates will be considerably larger, maybe a thousand kilometers effective area.”

“Maybe?” Roy challenged them. “An awful lot’s going to ride on maybe.”

Hammond spoke in their defense. “This isn’t as nutty as it sounds. We didn’t just cook this up by ourselves, it’s been studied for decades. We just dusted off the research and put our own spin on it.”

“He’s not wrong,” Traci said cautiously, and received a sharp look from Roy. “You put me in Future Apps, remember? When I’m not turning away crackpot theories on warp drive or hyperspace, I’m looking at more practical stuff. This concept is solid. It’s only at TRL 3 because nobody’s tried it yet.”

Roy remained unconvinced. Technology Readiness Levels were the industry standard for rating a device’s suitability to be employed in space; TRL 3 meant it had been proven in concept and tested at a small scale. “Why not, if it’s such a great idea?”

“Because prototyping can be expensive when you’re not able to do a full-up trial run,” Hammond explained. “Especially when the only way to do it right is on an interplanetary flight.”

“Earth’s atmosphere is too dense, isn’t it?” Roy asked. “Drag and heat would overwhelm your test article before you could extract enough hydrogen to prove anything.”

“Precisely,” Audrey said, taking back the conversation. “Molecular hydrogen is the first element to escape into space, but it’s still only a fraction of a percent of our atmosphere.” She pulled up a table of values on screen. “Neptune’s, however, is eighty percent hydrogen. It’s not quite like tapping oil fields in Texas, but it’ll do.”

“The other twenty percent is helium and methane,” Traci noted. “How do you separate it?”

Audrey zoomed in on a diagram of the ram scoop, ending at an array of funnels at the head of each tank. “Catalyst beds are integrated with the intake manifolds. They’ll filter out the stuff we don’t want.”

“We tested a subscale prototype in our vacuum chamber,” Hammond explained. “We introduced hydrogen, helium and methane into the chamber after it was purged. Then we switched on the current.” He made a whistling sound.

“So it worked—without igniting all that stuff along the way?” Even in low concentrations, hydrogen and methane could misbehave in spectacular fashion.

“We’re satisfied enough to move it to TRL 6,” Hammond said, which meant their prototype had been demonstrated in a relevant environment. “We’ve kept that part to ourselves until now.”

“Back to my oil field analogy,” Audrey said. “The hydrogen molecules were immediately attracted to the electromagnetic scoop. They followed the field lines like ants to sugar, right into the collection grid. The remaining hurdle is plumbing, funneling all that gas into the propellant manifolds.” She pointed to a collection of new machinery behind the intakes. “That’s what these turbopumps are for.”

Traci raised her hand. “I’m glad it worked so well, but that was in an environment free of aerodynamic effects. Our relative velocity is going to be a couple hundred kilometers per second by then. What about drag loss and heating?”

“It will be alleviated somewhat by the electromagnetic field doing most of the work, but there’s no getting around it,” Audrey admitted. “We can mitigate the worst of it by partially retracting the bow shield.” She then switched to the trajectory plot and zoomed in on the encounter with Neptune’s upper atmosphere. “The nice thing about hydrogen is because it’s so light, it’s constantly escaping into space,” Audrey said. “You won’t have to dip down into the cloud tops to collect it.”

“Well I know I’m reassured,” Roy wisecracked. “We’re going to want to see all of your test results, and your assumptions on drag and heating effects.”

Traci wasn’t entirely convinced yet either. “We studied this eight ways from Sunday, and skimming off some of Neptune’s hydrogen never entered into our thinking. Why add the risk?”

Hammond leaned back and pointed his cane at the plot of orbits. “Options. Speed is of the essence for a number of reasons. Call it instinct, but I suspect ours might not be the only vehicle heading that way.”


Traci tossed and turned in a vain struggle to achieve some level of comfort and an elusive full night’s sleep. When the clock on her nightstand finally passed 4:30, she knew it would be a lost cause.

She’d easily fallen asleep hours before out of sheer exhaustion. Between the prep work, the hearings, the surprise offer from Hammond and their trip to Colorado, mind and body each had about all they could take. Sleep had quickly overcome her after collapsing into the hotel bed, until her mind had apparently decided it’d had enough. She awoke for a groggy midnight trip to the bathroom, and with each passing second more questions intruded her thoughts. She was trying very hard not to think at all—I’m barely awake enough to propel myself to the can, she thought. Why can’t I just relax?

She pulled a bottle of water from the mini fridge and spent several minutes perched on the edge of her bed in the darkened room, staring into a mirror.

Anxiety was a new and most unwelcome condition. She’d always been a habitual questioner, in fact had considered it a strength. The people who were most convinced of their own infallibility were almost always not up for the job, being just skilled enough to not know any better. This could be an especially dangerous trait for a pilot, one which she’d assiduously avoided.

This was different. The anxiety had stalked her in an almost physical way, in fact had quashed her appetite for the past several days. Checking herself in the mirror, she’d thought that wasn’t all bad. Not being on the flight roster had allowed her to slack off on her PT routine and the effects were becoming apparent. Any excess weight seemed to go straight to her face and chest. While men might appreciate the latter, both annoyed her to no end. She adjusted her nightshirt in frustration, shuffled over to the room’s small study and flopped into a chair that looked more inviting than it was.

She picked up her e-reader and opened up her copy of the King James Bible. She frequently sought it for solace and guidance, but confusion reigned in her mind and stubbornly kept her from focusing. Her thoughts were in a tangle and nothing she looked for seemed to hit the right note. She took a series of deep breaths to clear her mind. When her thoughts became untethered, she fell back on the basics: Our Father, who art in Heaven . . . 

It calmed her, but the questions remained. Perhaps she could at least take them on more methodically now. Priorities, she reminded herself. When everything turned to crap in an airplane, she’d been taught to fall back on a simple refrain: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. Control the machine, know where you are and where you’re going, and let the folks on the ground know what’s happening. So what were her priorities now?

Jack was orbiting a deep gravity well that might be an actual wormhole leading to who knows where, without enough reaction mass to get home in any timeframe that would allow him to live. That meant someone had to go get him.

Why me? Why did it have to be up to her to take this on? The agency had at least a dozen eager astronauts who’d be clamoring for this mission if they knew about it.

The question answered itself, of course. This was not going to be a NASA-run mission and she and Roy were the ones who’d been extended the offer. They knew both Magellan and the operational concept better than anyone left on the roster. This type of extended-duration mission could hold surprises that couldn’t be duplicated in Earth orbit. A flight to Mars was decent preparation, but the farther one got from Earthbound assistance the more the crew was forced to rely on themselves. “Themselves” included the onboard AI, which demanded some unique skills as well.

It all made perfect sense, and a private venture wouldn’t be hindered by the same politics that drove Houston’s crew decisions. If they were going to pull this off, Hammond’s people couldn’t afford the niceties of assembling a fully qualified crew that adroitly checked off all the right boxes. She and Roy had been through enough together that she was confident they could make it work with the AI filling the gaps. That wasn’t in question.

She pulled her knees up under her chin, rocking back and forth on the stiff hotel chair. It was a simple problem which she was loath to admit: she didn’t want to go back out there.

Roy liked to tell astronaut candidates that they needed to think of space like the Australian outback: Literally everything is waiting to kill you. She’d experienced enough of that firsthand, and it had nearly done her in.

Earth orbit was easy in comparison. So many working crews and adventure tourists had been up in recent decades that it was now deceptively routine, perhaps dangerously so, since home was always a quick retro burn away. Just keep everything together for an hour or so, and you’d soon be back on solid ground or bobbing in the ocean beneath a soothing blanket of breathable air. It had led too many into complacency, forgetting that things often happened faster than an untrained person could react. Sometimes faster than a trained person could react.

In deep space, there was no emergency return home that didn’t involve months in transit. She’d seen enough of the solar system’s wonders to last a lifetime—though what Jack had found sounded awfully enticing.

Do I really want to do this? she wondered. Because deep space is scary.

And there it was, she realized. She was afraid, more so than she wanted to admit. Astronauts were supposed to be fearless, or at least in control of their emotions enough to saddle up and head out when the universe was screaming back “Don’t even think about it!

There was an endless series of practical considerations, cumulative radiation exposure being near the top of the list. Assuming some horrific cosmic accident didn’t suddenly end them, what were the chances of turning her body into a tumor farm later in life?

It was a huge risk: an unfinished and untried spacecraft, on a mission profile that was still being pieced together, all under a severely compressed timeline. It was a veritable glitch magnet, an invitation for something important to be overlooked. They’d have to spend weeks testing Columbus from bow to stern before they could think about taking it out of Earth orbit. She’d have rejected the idea out of hand had it not been Jack waiting for them.

He was out there alone, more distantly separated from the human race than anyone had ever been, and apparently more patient with the whole miserable situation than he had any right to be. How could he be so implacably calm? Did he truly not appreciate exactly how far removed he was?

Of course he did, and that grated on her enormously. Her mother’s earlier advice came to mind: That’s how she knew Daddy was the one for her, because nobody gets under your skin more than the one you care about most.

Was that it? After all this time and distance she finally had to confront her feelings about him, whatever they were. She wasn’t the least bit sure, and the occasional attraction she’d felt for certain women hadn’t helped at all. It collided headlong into religious convictions she’d never abandoned despite the cajoling of her more “pragmatic” colleagues—Jack foremost among them.

The admonition from certain quarters that life was the result of chance and pure unguided evolution didn’t square with the things she’d seen and experienced firsthand. There was a design and purpose to the universe, and being out there in the midst of it had convinced her beyond argument. She might not be able to prove it analytically, but in her heart she knew.

For those reasons, she’d chosen to remain celibate until she could resolve her inner conflicts. Though she wasn’t Catholic, it had given her an appreciation for the nuns and monks who’d similarly devoted their lives to a cause that required extreme self-discipline and sacrifice. Maybe it was a cheat, a careful hedging of bets, but it was the option she was least uncomfortable with. I might’ve been able to hide it from the shrinks, she realized, but not from Jack.

Finally, that brought her to a more difficult question: Was she too emotionally compromised for this mission? Was her desire to resolve this inner conflict driving her to take on something better left to others?

Maybe, she admitted. She desperately wanted to see him in person, if only to tell him off for doing something so foolhardy. Once again, her mother’s advice came to mind: He did it for you, dummy. If she’d been some swooning teenager, she’d have been swept away by such a heroic gesture. It’s so romantic!

Gag. Were there still women out there who acted that way in their late thirties?

You’re the one who’s celibate. Maybe that was an emotional reaction in itself. So this was what cognitive dissonance felt like. Grateful to be alive, yet nearly crushed by survivor’s guilt and angry at the one person who’d made it happen, all at his moment of most desperate need. Yet here she was, still afraid to confront her feelings about him, about life and relationships, about God Himself and the design (or not) of the universe. As much as she craved it, stoicism was apparently not in the cards for her.

She got up and snatched her phone from the nightstand, looking for a diversion. When she opened it the omnipresent social credit status banner appeared, clamoring for her attention. She knew right away it was going to be trouble, as just yesterday it had turned from yellow to amber. Now it was flashing an attention-grabbing crimson: WARNING! SOCIAL CREDIT STATUS IS D+. HIGHER INTEREST PENALTIES WILL APPLY TO ALL FUTURE TRANSACTIONS.

And what exactly am I hanging around here for? Deep space might be dangerous, lonely, and boring when it wasn’t exciting for all the wrong reasons. The one thing it wasn’t was soul-crushing.

She impatiently tapped her foot. “Oh, what the hell,” she muttered to herself and opened a group chat with Owen, Roy, and Hammond:


OK, I’M IN.


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