17
Kennedy Space Center
Cape Canaveral, Florida
The Gulfstream’s main gear kissed the pavement of KSC’s Launch and Landing Facility, originally built decades earlier for recovering space shuttle orbiters. Its pilots barely had to apply brakes to roll to a stop on the three-mile-long runway before turning onto the parking apron for Polaris Spacelines’ orbital hub. Alligators lined the edges of the pavement, sunning themselves on the warm concrete.
From behind the jet’s oval windows, Traci watched as security guards drove alongside in a golf cart, shooing the toothy reptiles back into the nearby marsh. As another reminder of the hostile environment surrounding this concentration of space-age technology, signs warning of venomous snakes dotted the perimeter at regular intervals. She turned to Penny in the seat beside her and gestured toward one of the attention-grabbing placards, featuring a crimson graphic of a fanged serpent. “Your passengers ever get their undies in a bunch about those things?”
“We remind them ahead of time that the Cape’s still a wildlife refuge, but that leads most of them to imagine it’s full of waterfowl and cute little otters. The concierge staff keeps them corralled in the passenger lounge until it’s time to escort them onboard. Wouldn’t be good for business to have a customer get dragged off by a gator.”
“You don’t get a lot of high rollers on these orbital hops, do you?” Roy asked. “Isn’t it mostly for servicing crews?” The trip they’d be taking the next day was just that. The rest of Hammond’s jet was filled with technicians and EVA specialists to finish outfitting Columbus.
“More than you’d think,” Penny said as they came to a stop outside the cavernous hangar. Inside sat two orbital Clippers, one being swarmed by technicians prepping it for the next morning’s launch. “If they’re used to traveling on the suborbital routes then they tend to prefer this if they want to experience orbit. It’s a gentler ride and they don’t have to wear pressure suits.”
Roy grunted, still not convinced it was entirely safe to fly into orbit without wearing launch-and-entry gear. “What do you think?” he asked skeptically.
“FAA had already put us through the wringer demonstrating pressure hull integrity for the suborbital birds. By the time NASA’s safety board approved our launch contracts, they’d found every imaginable way to poke holes in these machines.” She stared out at the spaceplanes in the hangar, recalling her days piloting them. “Having said that, this is going to be my first ride as a passenger. I’ll let you know how I feel after we get there.”
“We do make godawful passengers, don’t we?”
“We do,” Penny agreed, gathering her carry-on bag as she headed for the open door.
She led them out of the jet’s climate-controlled cabin and into a steamy Florida morning. Once inside the hub, they bypassed the glass-walled lounge and headed upstairs to the company’s control room. A smaller version of their larger operations center in Denver, it featured familiar rows of computer workstations and a floor-to-ceiling quartet of monitors displaying the status of every spaceplane in the orbital fleet. Penny directed them into one of the crew briefing rooms that surrounded the small auditorium.
She lifted a tablet computer from her shoulder bag and swiped at it, sending trip briefings to each of them. “Show time is 0600 tomorrow, downstairs in the passenger lounge. First launch opportunity is 0833. We have a ten-minute window, so don’t be late.” An infographic appeared on each of the checkout team’s tablets. “If you haven’t flown on a Clipper, you’re in for a treat,” Penny said with an ear-to-ear grin. “You’ll be flying first class on the fastest airliner anybody ever dreamed of, though the drink service is going to be limited so don’t get your hopes up.”
“Takeoff roll will be brisk; at wheels-up we’ll be pulling 1.5 g’s and holding that through the first climb segment.” She pointed to a list of critical phases of flight. “Max Q is at the first minute, give or take a few seconds. After that we’re supersonic and they crank the engines wide open. External tanks burn out after two minutes and drop into the ocean, after that we’ll accelerate to three g’s for the rest of the climb to space. Eight minutes later, we’re in orbit.”
Roy and Traci exchanged a look. It would be quite a ride, and both of them wished they could be up in the pointy end. At the controls.
After a few more minutes of explaining the long list of what not to bring and what not to do while the Clipper was blasting its way into space, Penny led them back out through the control center and down another flight of stairs. “You’ve all been checked into the crew dorms. Room assignments are pushed to your phones, and there’s a full service restaurant next door. Get some rest and I’ll see you all in the morning.”
Hastily cobbled together from existing components, the unimaginatively named UNSEC-1 probe would cross the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in a matter of weeks in its race to the edge of the solar system. Had it not been limited by the amount of deuterium-tritium fuel pellets available for lift into orbit, it would have been able to reach the distant Anomaly well before Columbus and its human crew. This advantage lay in the fact that the robotic probe was not constrained by those same human inhabitant’s low tolerance for sustained high-g acceleration. As the vessel grew lighter with each gram burned in its Chinese-built fusion drive, it continuously gained velocity. Whereas a crewed ship would be forced to reduce thrust over time to maintain a tolerable acceleration, the AI-directed probe suffered no such limitation.
Having gained velocity at a rate close to four times the force of Earth’s gravity, the probe’s brain registered that it was approaching the first critical point in its journey. Needing to conserve enough fuel to both decelerate for its rendezvous with Magellan and eventually return to Earth, the probe had determined the time was coming to shut down its drive for its long cruise to the Anomaly. When confirmation finally arrived from its increasingly distant (and increasingly irrelevant) ground control team in Beijing, the AI dutifully recorded their command and compared their calculations to its own. Had it been able to register emotion, it might have taken great satisfaction in the knowledge that their predictions matched to four decimal places. At the appointed time it shut off the flow of deuterium pellets, causing the fusion drive to go dormant. The vessel would spend months coasting toward its final encounter, no longer leaving a miles-long trail of incandescent plasma in its wake.
While unable to feel the sudden loss of apparent gravity, the AI did register the change through the vessel’s embedded accelerometers and the shift in fluid pressures through its coolant loops.
Like the American craft, the bulk of UNSEC-1 consisted of a cluster of cylindrical fuel tanks that accounted for most of the vehicle’s mass. Guided by the latest generation Russian Zarya control module, its universal docking node hosted a pallet of Indian sensing and survey equipment. Mounted to its forward end was a European-supplied micrometeor shield, an arrowhead of ballistic fabric similar to that which adorned the bows of the American vessels.
Behind this shield, nestled between the Indian components around the docking node, sat one more Chinese module unlike any of the others. Securely placed in its carrying cradle was a slender black cone of carbon fiber, its nose cap covering an optical turret of finely figured glass. A squat cylinder was mounted at the cone’s base which housed its propellant tanks, guidance platform, and a pair of ion engines.
This module’s independent AI brain lay dormant, drawing power from its Russian host until they arrived at the Anomaly. Once there, a compact fission reactor in its service module would be ignited and a pair of radiator panels would unfold, like wings of an origami raptor. It would then detach itself from its cradle to enter a separate orbit around the Anomaly.
As with the rest of UNSEC-1, this too had been an existing, though unpublicized, component. While China had deployed a squadron of these “sentry” satellites at potentially lucrative locations across the asteroid belt, this would be the first to venture so deep into the solar system. Where its brethren had been controlled by ground and space-based operators, anticipation of such extreme isolation had led its builders to augment it with a separate artificial intelligence. Not prone to giving their creations the convoluted acronymic names that the Americans favored, this AI knew itself only by its programmed mission: Sentinel.