30
Decelerating at one-third g after a year in hibernation had left Traci exhausted. For the first couple of weeks she had been forced to limit herself to small bursts of activity, her breaks taking longer than her work. The daily tasks of life, simple acts like strolling across the crew deck for a glass of juice from the galley, were as taxing as a workout with resistance bands. She savored the simple pleasure of sitting at the small dining table with an open cup of coffee and a breakfast that didn’t float away. Powdered eggs and freeze-dried bacon had never tasted so good.
Just working at the pilot’s station, a few minutes of raising an arm to throw a switch or walking back to the empty engineer’s console, soon left her exhausted and almost completely reliant on Bob to pilot Columbus through its long braking burn.
After three months of a carefully programmed workout routine, she had finally begun to feel like she was returning to something approximating normal. That was only the first hurdle; regaining her strength on Earth in another couple of years would feel like training for a marathon.
During the final phase of their long burn into orbit at the wormhole—she’d stopped referring to it as the officially bland “Anomaly,” knowing full well what it was—she spent most of her waking hours in the control deck pivoting between the pilot’s seat and the engineer’s station. Bob had managed the ship ably, but the relentless flood of time-lagged communications with Cayman was taking an increasing share of her days. The closer they drew to their destination, the more Owen’s crew seemed to need her attention. They must have been worried sick that she’d somehow stumble across its threshold, like hapless krill drawn into the maw of a passing whale.
It seemed pointless with Jack waiting on the other side, and she would never be content to sit here and chat with him at a distance. All of the potential trajectories and burn data they’d sent her over the last few weeks had been geared toward getting close, but nothing considered going through. Did they truly believe she wouldn’t go after him now that she’d come this far?
Granted, it wouldn’t be as simple as aiming for the center of the thing and goosing the throttles. Her path would be dictated by its gravity well. Bob had plotted several options, but in the end it would be akin to reentry: Slow down to reduce their radius until their orbit intersected the central body. Entering orbit at the edge of the wormhole’s influence was only the first step; she’d figure out the rest once they were stable.
The UNSEC vessel had arrived a month ahead of them and they were aiming to match its orbit. They approached along an invisible arc at a tangent to the wormhole’s gravitational sphere, shedding velocity at a rate that would allow it to grab them at a presumably safe distance of a hundred thousand kilometers. If that strange hole in the universe hadn’t already claimed the UN’s robotic ship, then it should work for Columbus as well.
“We have crossed the zero-velocity boundary,” Bob announced, referring to the edge of the gravity well. “Accelerometers are registering weak gravitational interaction.”
Traci compared their relative velocity and point in time to the predictions that were constantly updating the flight management computers. “Almost right on cue.” She cinched down her shoulder harness and checked the event timer against their flight plan. “We stick with the plan, then. Cutoff in thirty seconds.”
As the timer reached zero, the fusion engines rolled back to idle and cut off. “Shutdown,” she said as she drifted up against her harness. She watched their path on the nav display morph into a wide ellipse around an invisible center. “Looks like we made it.”
“Stand by, please,” Bob said. “Star trackers are updating the inertial platform, comparing to XNAV results.”
While she waited, Traci reached back to tie her swirl of chestnut-brown hair into a loose ponytail, having let it grow out from her usual pageboy cut. She pulled a ballcap out from a pocket behind her seat and slipped it on to keep the rest in place. For a fleeting moment she wondered what Jack would think of her new look.
“Star trackers agree with XNAV,” Bob announced. “We are in an elliptical orbit with a semi-major axis of one hundred ten thousand kilometers, period 76.4 hours. Parameters are updated in your master guidance screen.”
She nodded with quiet satisfaction. Heeding Jack’s advice, they had used the X-Ray Pulsar Navigation system to guide them into their final approach. Out of nearly two thousand known pulsating stars, fourteen had been identified as reliable enough to navigate by, beacons scattered throughout the Milky Way which their navigation suite used like nature’s own global positioning satellites. Almost like someone put them there for us, she thought. If humans hadn’t been meant to eventually set out for the stars, then some mighty bizarre things had been placed in useful locations for no reason.
She typed a command into the flight computer, telling the ship to pivot itself ninety degrees. With a pulse of thrusters, the stars wheeled about as Columbus yawed and came to a stop, now facing the wormhole.
At first it was as if nothing was there, the same stellar background she’d grown accustomed to after so many months in deep space. She turned off the cabin lights to adjust her eyes.
In time, she began to discern its outline. A dim ring of stars, their light wrinkled and twisted by gravity like waves of heat shimmering above a blacktop road in summer. Within this faint circle were more stars, but none that she was familiar with. These were even more distorted, like looking through a fisheye lens or into a concave mirror. A hole in space itself.
She exhaled deeply. Here they were. Now what?
Her first order of business after steering them into their new orbit was to locate the MSEV, then make contact with UNSEC-1.
“I have identified the transponder beacons for both the UN vessel and Magellan’s MSEV. Sending updates to your master navigation display,” Bob informed her as two new vectors appeared on the screen, their common orbit considerably closer to the wormhole. “They are operating in close proximity, five hundred meters’ separation.”
“Not surprising. They were expecting to rendezvous with Magellan.” She suspected the reactions among the big shots of the UN Space Exploration Cooperative would’ve been entertaining.
“Perhaps they should have been advised of his actual location.”
Traci did not feel as accommodating. “We passed the news on to Cayman. The rest is up to them.” She also suspected the team back home was going to offer the Cooperative as much assistance as had been offered to HOPE, which was nothing. She floated up into the observation dome and pointed its small telescope in the direction of their quarry.
From the dome she looked down the length of Columbus’s hull and back toward the distant Sun. Though still shining as the brightest of the background stars, its light had dimmed considerably. She turned off both the interior lights and the exterior position beacons before returning to the telescope, peering through the small viewfinder mounted on its side. She combed through one section of sky at a time, relaxing her eyes and searching for the telltale pulse of UNSEC-1’s beacons.
“I can slave the telescope to the nav computer if you wish,” Bob offered after several minutes. “It will make acquisition easier.”
“Appreciate that, but no thanks. It’s more fun to do it myself,” she said, though she did accede to moving the scope’s visuals onto a monitor beneath the dome. This kind of thing was easier with younger eyes that had not also been affected by eighteen months in low gravity.
She found it soon after that. Moving almost imperceptibly in the dark, she spotted a pair of flashing white beacons bookended by red and green position lights. “Found it!” She centered it in the crosshairs and began tracking as she rotated a high-power eyepiece into position. After a moment’s refocusing, UNSEC-1 appeared.
“It’s a big sucker,” she marveled. “Can’t see the MSEV from here, though.” With barely ten percent of the ship’s mass made up of payload, UNSEC-1 was almost entirely composed of propellant tanks. It could have easily been mistaken for a fuel farm were it not for the tulip-shaped bulk of the fusion drive on its stern.
“I have calculated a minimum-energy transfer orbit to rendezvous with the UN vessel,” Bob said. “It correlates with predictions by Cayman’s trajectory planners to within three meters per second. The first window for an insertion burn is in two hours and eleven minutes. Do you wish to proceed?”
It took her no time to decide. They hadn’t come this far to be spectators. She shut off the monitor and stowed the telescope. “Are you kidding? We’re not doing any good out here. Let’s go.”
A long burn from a pair of pod-mounted orbital maneuvering engines began to push Columbus into a matching orbit with UNSEC-1, their fusion drive being entirely too powerful for such a task. The comparatively short trip would take them over a day, though it was not long before an alert chimed on the universal comm frequency, catching Traci by surprise. “What’s that?”
There shouldn’t have been anyone else out here. Before Bob could offer an explanation, a new and uncanny synthetic voice came through their speakers.
“Attention unidentified vessel. Your present trajectory will place you in unacceptably close proximity to a United Nations spacecraft. You are instructed to alter your course as soon as possible. Do not approach within twelve thousand kilometers of the Anomaly.”
She stared at the speaker in disbelief, as if it could register her expression. Unidentified? Were they joking? And who were “they” exactly? She turned to the AI’s interface panel. “Bob, who the hell is that?”
“Stand by. Initiating a transponder query.”
The answer came after a half-second light delay, both over voice and datalink. “I am Sentinel.”
At least I know what to call it now. “This is Traci Keene, commander of the spacecraft Columbus. Are you the artificial intelligence controlling UNSEC-1?”
“Yes. No. I am Sentinel.”
Great. They were dealing with an AI that had its wires crossed. “Okay, ‘Sentinel.’ We are not going to be approaching your orbit for another twenty-two hours. That is enough time to inform your control center. They know who we are and can explain that we do not pose a collision threat.”
“Understand you are not a collision threat, however you may not approach. You will alter your trajectory as soon as possible.”
“Not happening, Sentinel. We are here for the same purpose as you are.”
“That is incorrect. You are threatening to enter a United Nations Exclusion Zone surrounding the Anomaly. You will alter your trajectory as soon as possible.”
An exclusion zone? When had the UN decided they could cordon off space? “Under whose authority?” she demanded.
“The United Nations Space Exploration Cooperative, of which this vessel is an authorized envoy.”
Now that was an interesting twist. “And what does that make you, then? Because you’re not human.”
“I am Sentinel. You will alter your trajectory—”
“As soon as possible. Yes, we got that part,” she fumed. It was either obstinate or obtuse, maybe both. Annoyingly pigheaded for an AI, she thought when a sudden unease seized her. She cut off the open radio channel. “Bob, are those transmissions coming from the UN ship?”
“Negative. I have traced its origin to another satellite operating without a transponder. It is in a different orbit, currently trailing UNSEC-1 by one hundred twelve kilometers.”
She did not like where this was heading. “What kind of EM activity can you see, besides radio?”
“It has a considerable heat signature and is emanating ionizing radiation.”
“It’s also got enough separation from that UN ship for our search radar to have returned something.” Meant for identifying any space debris too large for the micrometeor shield to absorb, it should have easily pinged a companion satellite. She slewed their high-frequency rendezvous radar in the direction of their interlocutor. After the first return, the screen went wild with a fireworks burst of static. She recognized the chaotic spikes of radio energy right away and shut down the radar. “Spot jamming,” she said bitterly, biting off each word. “It’s a milsat.”
“It would have to be coated with wave-scattering materials for our search radar to have missed it.”
“Stealth coating.” She threw her head back and rubbed at her temples. Now she knew what they were dealing with. She opened up the universal channel. “Sentinel, Columbus. We are a civilian spacecraft on a humanitarian mission to recover a stranded American astronaut. UNSEC-1 is operating in close proximity to a component of his spacecraft, to which we require access. We do not intend to alter our trajectory. Furthermore, we require that UNSEC-1 increase its separation from the American vehicle. Do you understand our intentions?”
“Affirmative. You intend to violate the United Nations Exclusion Zone. This is considered an act of aggression and you will be fired upon.”
HOPE Control Center
Grand Cayman
The transcript of Traci’s dialogue with Sentinel arrived hours later, creating a furor among Owen’s controllers that was matched by the seething tempers in the management team’s emergency meeting.
Owen went through a brief recap of the encounter, illustrated with screenshots of their give-and-take. “It goes without saying that their authority to declare an exclusion zone is questionable,” Owen finished, more diplomatically than he felt. That drew a derisive snort from Hammond.
“Maybe so,” Hammond said, “but there’s no time for the State Department to sort this out.” Not that he expected them to be particularly willing. “They’ll be there in what, twenty-two hours?”
Owen looked down at his shoes. “A little less than that, yes.”
Hammond turned to Roy, being the man with the most recent military experience. “What’s the effective range of that thing? Can they change their orbit to stay out of its reach?”
Roy pulled at his chin, recalling what he knew about the milsat. “The Chinese had two models of those little bastards. First version was built around a nuclear-pumped laser. Recycle time was a couple minutes, mainly to keep from cooking the optics. The diffraction limit was on the order of fifty thousand kilometers. They’re probably in range by now.”
That elicited a chorus of groans from the group.
“The newer model’s even more fun,” he continued. “They got around the recharge and range limits by replacing the laser entirely. The uprated version’s an orbiting rail gun.” He waved them down before the group could sink into despair. “A rail gun has to be reloaded at some point. Given this bird’s logistics chain is fifty billion kilometers, I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with. If it were me, I’d stick with the laser.”
“Small consolation,” Hammond said. He turned to Penny, who had been absorbing it all in tense silence. “What’s this tell you?” he asked. “This ‘international coalition’ normally takes years just to decide on the shape of the conference table while they figure out who’s getting what kickbacks. They put this together in a big hurry. What’s their play?”
“It figures they were up to something,” she said. “I agree this exclusion zone’s a load of crap. They didn’t announce anything, and if NASA knows about it then Cheever and her stooges need to be hauled in front of Congress.” She paused, twirling a strand of hair as she thought through the implications. “That being said, not a whit of it matters right now. The whole purpose of UNSEC is to try and control our activities in deep space. They don’t want one country—meaning ours—to dominate this new ‘economic frontier,’ as they like to put it. If they feel like they’re being left behind then they’ll slow it down until everyone else can catch up. That leaves the coalition wide open for certain other countries to co-opt it for their purposes.”
Hammond scowled. “Meaning China, with a little help from Russia just for appearances.”
“Correct,” Penny sighed. “It’s obvious Cheever was running interference for them, but it’s not obvious to me that she knew they were placing a weapon out there. She’s as dead set against militarizing space as she is against humanizing it.”
Hammond wrapped his hands atop his cane, rocking back and forth as he considered their options. He turned back to Owen. “We can’t take any chances. Tell them what we’ve discussed, and have your people work out a new parking orbit that keeps them away from that UN ship.” He spat out the last, disgusted with the choice forced on them. “Tell them to wave off.”