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Chapter Fourteen

“So,” Kamara said three days later as they had lunch in Outpost before their flight, “we’re not going to do any more landings on Outpost.”

“We’re not?” Although the statement should have made Bowden happy—he hated Outpost’s capture sequence as it was more dangerous than trapping aboard the carrier, where any landing could be your last—he found that he was truly enjoying the challenge of it. Just like coming aboard the carrier, you got better the more you did it, to the point where—even if you were never truly comfortable with it—you accepted the fact that you could do it and lost the sense of fear that assailed you the first twenty or thirty times you willingly threw yourself at a moving deck.

“No, we are done,” Kamara said. “You can rendezvous with objects in orbit and you can land on Outpost. Are you ready now for something truly challenging?”

“There’s something more challenging than those things? What is it, landing on a comet or something?”

Kamara’s face fell. “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“That we were going to go to a comet today. Did someone tell you?”

Bowden felt his jaw fall open, and he had to consciously close it. “Seriously? I was just kidding around. Why would we want to go land on a comet?”

Kamara shrugged. “Sometimes they have minerals or ice that is needed at an outpost somewhere. Not at Outpost, but on a station out in the asteroids or beyond that.”

“You spend time out beyond the asteroids?”

“Yes,” Kamara said with a nod. “If you want to find hidden treasures, you have to look off the traveled path. If you go where no one else has gone, the opportunities there haven’t already been picked through.”

“That makes sense, I guess.” Bowden cocked his head. “So we’re really going to land on a comet?”

“Yes we are.”

“Why is that harder than landing on Outpost?”

“What do you know about comets?”

“That they’re big rocky snowballs left over from the formation of the system. They have tails that point away from the star.”

“Why do they have those tails?”

“I’m not an astronomer, but, at a guess, it’s because the ice starts heating as the comet approaches the star and the frozen stuff starts melting.”

“Yes, but what you are missing from your description is the matter of scale. On its approach, the asteroid may be fifteen to twenty-five kilometers wide, but as its orbit brings it near the Sun, it heats up, spewing dust and gases, until it fills an area that is larger than most planets—sometimes up to fifteen times the size of R’Bak.

“The process of spewing all that material away is called outgassing and may also result in the comet having a tail one hundred million kilometers long, or longer, due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind.”

“Do we have to fly through the tail?”

Kamara shook his head. “No, we don’t have to fly through either of the tails, although we could if we needed to.”

Two tails?”

“Yes. Most comets—the ones that aren’t dead because they’ve outgassed everything they have—actually have two tails: a longer ion tail that interacts with the solar wind and a shorter dust tail made up of smoke-sized dust particles caused by outgassing.

“As I said, we don’t have to fly through the tails. We will, however, have to fly through the coma, which is the cloud of water, carbon dioxide, and other gases ejected from the nucleus as it nears the star. Once we are through the coma, we will have to land on the nucleus, and that is where things will get really challenging.

“This is because comet formation is not uniform, nor are the stresses they have been exposed to since their formation. Fracture lines accumulate over time, and heat-induced instability can cause them to give way at unpredictable times and in unpredictable directions. Trying to rendezvous with them is one of the most challenging and dangerous tasks in spaceflight. Imagine rendezvousing with Outpost, but having it rotate in all three directions and not having a docking collar to attach to. Meanwhile, at any moment, it might outgas and spew rocks and debris at your ship, potentially damaging it.”

Kamara smiled. “That is what landing on an asteroid is like.”

“And you do that on purpose?” Bowden asked, horrified. “That sounds like an accident just waiting to happen.”

“Well, it’s not outgassing all the time,” Kamara said. “The keys to landing on a comet are to get in and out quickly, and to disturb the surface as little as possible. Oh, and to watch out for any outgassing currently active. You especially don’t want to use heavy thrusters near the comet, as you increase your chances of creating a plume exponentially.” He shrugged. “Besides that, there’s very little chance of anything bad happening. Usually.”

“You’re not filling me with confidence.”

“Really, it’s not that dangerous. I only know three people who’ve been hit by outgassing, and two of them survived.”

“This doesn’t sound like something we ought to be doing.”

“Well, it is a little more dangerous here than out past the asteroid belt,” Kamara said, “as the chances of an outgassing event are a lot higher here due to the proximity of the star.” He shrugged again. “Also, Jrar is now close enough that it may cause its own outgassing. There could potentially be three tails—or more—or they could all be twisted into each other. We’ll minimize the risk by trying to disturb the comet’s nucleus as little as possible. Also, your Colonel Murphy told me you need to be as good a space pilot as possible. If you can land on a comet, you can land anywhere; however, the comet is in the best position today for us to launch and intercept it, so we need to get going.”

He turned and started walking, then looked over his shoulder. “Are you coming, then?”

“Yeah,” Bowden said as his feet started moving of their own accord. Why do I feel like I’m about to set a new standard for the dumbest thing I’ve ever done?


“Your controls,” Kamara said three days later as they approached the comet’s coma. It wasn’t as big as it could have been—a lot of the volatiles had blown off the nucleus over the millennia—but there were still almost one thousand kilometers of ionized gasses and detritus to navigate through.

Still, it wasn’t as bad as he’d been expecting. Having seen comets from Earth—and worse, the way they were portrayed by Hollywood—he’d expected the tail of the comet to be densely packed. It was anything but. From up close, it was unimpressive; low-density material flying in generally the same direction. Kind of like a US Air Force flyby, he thought with a chuckle.

Although they didn’t, they could have flown through the tail. Yes, they would probably have been hit by a number of fast-moving particles, but it wouldn’t have been that many, and the ship could have matched velocities with most of them, limiting their damage.

The coma was different.

“You want me to drive through that?” Bowden asked, looking out the canopy at the ball of gas. Although it wasn’t that dense, it was still far more abundant than the material in the tails had been, blocking any view of the nucleus. “Aren’t you going to do it the first time to show me how it’s done?”

Kamara shook his head. “No, it is too dangerous to go through the coma more times than we have to, and you need the experience.”

“Are you going to give me some sort of safety brief or anything? Do this? Don’t do that?”

Kamara smiled. “Of course; I was just going to do that.” He pointed to the coma out Bowden’s canopy. “Approach the nucleus. If something gets in our way, avoid it. When we get to the nucleus, avoid any plumes being ejected from it. Fly to within five feet from the nucleus, and I will harpoon it and draw us in.” He smiled. “As you say, easy peasy.”

“How am I going to see something in our way?”

“Use your radar, of course.”

“You make it sound like we’ve used the radar lots, and it’s something I’m comfortable with.” Bowden looked down his nose at Kamara. “We haven’t, and I’m not.”

“Well, now is a great time to get used to it,” Kamara said with a smile. “This is what I mostly use it for.”

“I just hope it fucking works,” Bowden muttered as he flipped the radar on. Systems on Navy aircraft had a habit of breaking when they weren’t used. The more you flew and used a system, the better it worked. Don’t use it for a few flights in a row? It was unlikely to work when you turned it on.

But—wonder of wonders—the radar began powering up. There’s probably something to be said for not slamming the packet into the deck of a ship over and over that helps with system longevity. Aside from the module Bowden had crashed the craft into early on, he hadn’t really hit anything else “hard.”

The radar had two screens: one that showed azimuth distance left or right, and another that showed elevation. In theory, he could do really basic radar nav through the coma when the gases got too dense. Assuming the radar didn’t register all the debris as one giant target.

“Ready?” Kamara asked. “The longer we fly alongside the comet, the longer it will take for us to get back to Outpost.”

“Yeah. Here we go.” Bowden turned the packet toward the nucleus and boosted toward it, allowing the craft to continue tracking along with its forward velocity.

“You’re going to have to go faster than that,” Kamara said. For the first time since they’d been flying, he tapped one of the gauges to get Bowden’s attention on it. “We’re only overtaking it at a rate of about one hundred kilometers an hour,” he noted. “It’s going to take us ten hours to get there at this rate.” He yawned theatrically. “I may have to go to the back and get—or is it take?—a nap.”

“How fast is too fast?” Bowden asked. “I realize we didn’t plan for this to be a two-week-long excursion”—and maybe we should have—“but I also don’t want to get hit by a big rock fragment that damages the craft.”

“The radar has a range of about one hundred kilometers in the average coma. If you go five hundred kilometers an hour, you still have twelve minutes to see and avoid particularly large rocks.”

“What about smaller ones that won’t be seen until we’re in close—or ever? I doubt this radar sees anything fist-sized, but that would leave a large hole through the ship.”

“There probably aren’t many rocks—”

Clang!

Kamara winced as something hit the packet. “Okay, new plan. Continue inbound at one hundred kilometers per hour, and I’ll get a nap. I’ll spell you in a couple of hours.”


Kamara peered out the canopy thirteen hours later. They’d had to slow several times as the rocks got larger and denser. “Got anything?”

“No,” Bowden replied. “It should be just starboard of the nose, though.” He was moving forward at ten kilometers an hour relative velocity, with the nucleus of the comet just over ten kilometers away. He glanced out but didn’t see the nucleus, either. Kamara had said it was the densest coma he’d ever flown through.

Bowden shook his head. He didn’t like flying through the mess; it reminded him too closely of flying near Mount St. Helens after it blew. The ash had stripped all the paint from the nose and leading edges of his aircraft, earning him a visit with the squadron’s commanding officer and his opportunity to brief the squadron officers at the next All Officers Meeting about the dangers inherent to flying around erupting volcanoes.

He’d long ago lost the ability to see the stars, and his field of view was nothing more than a diffuse light, like what you’d see walking through a deep fog in the middle of the day. Six kilometers, and he still couldn’t see the nucleus visually, although it was obvious on the radar, including a large return on it as if there was a concentration of metal.

Five and a half kilometers, and, if anything, the blasting the packet was getting was even worse. The coma wasn’t thinning; the material was getting more dense.

“I don’t like this,” Bowden said. “I’m going down.”

He nudged the thrusters and went “down” and “left” with respect to the comet’s nucleus. Within a few seconds, the visibility cleared. It still wasn’t great—it was like looking through a thick Los Angeles haze—but he could see the nucleus and the two bright jets spewing material from opposite sides of the vaguely dumbbell-shaped body. They’d been approaching into the ejecta coming from one of them. The nucleus was slowly rotating, so they would have been clear of it eventually; they’d just been unlucky to approach from the wrong direction at the wrong time.

“Good call,” Kamara said. “I should have thought of that sooner.”

“I wish you had.” Bowden’s brows knit as he realized the nose kept walking off to the left of the nucleus. Trust your eyes, Kamara had said. What do you do when your eyes are wrong?

You have other issues, he realized suddenly and looked out at the port wing. The packet was never meant to fly in atmosphere so it wasn’t a real “wing”; it was more of a place to attach things and store propellant. Which was currently leaking out the front of the wing through two small holes. He reached up and turned off the pressurization for the left-wing tank, and the leaks slowed.

“What did you do that for?” Kamara asked.

“I’ve got two leaks in the left-wing tank,” Bowden replied. “Shit,” he added as the nose started walking off to the right. “Looks like there may be one on the right, too.”

Kamara looked out his window, then reached forward and turned off the pressurization to the right-wing tank. “Now I really wish I’d thought of that sooner.”

“Still want to do this?”

“No. We need to get out of the coma and repair the tanks. I don’t know how much propellant we’ve lost, but we didn’t have a lot to spare.”

“—tance, please help,” a female voice said over the radio. “Any station—” A burst of static interrupted the voice. “…stuck on the comet’s nucleus. My ship’s damaged—” Another burst of static. “…assistance; please help if possible.”

Bowden tapped the bright object on the radar. “That’s a ship right there. Sounds like she’s in trouble.”

“You know radar mapping now?”

“Yeah, my plane had it where I came from, and that’s something I do know. My plane’s radar was a lot better than this one, but I trained on a radar something like this as a student.” He shrugged. “What’s the protocol here? Do we leave to fix our craft or try to render assistance?”

“If we leave, we won’t have the fuel to return, and I doubt there’s anyone who can get here and back. If we don’t help her—whoever she is—she’s going to die.”

“So we help her.”

“We do.”

“All right,” Bowden said. “Maybe we can make repairs to the tanks while we’re down.” He shook his head as a third plume of ejecta erupted from the nucleus and its rotation rate sped up. “Assuming we can make it down.”

“You can do it,” Kamara said. “I have faith in you.”

Me? Are you kidding? The ship is damaged, and we have a dangerous landing. Don’t you want to land it? It’s your ship, after all.”

“Have you ever used the harpoon system? Ever tried to attach to a comet before?”

“Well, no.”

“I have. You get us close, and I’ll tie us in. Try to get us close to the other ship.”

Bowden pointed out the canopy. “I can see it now. It’s pretty close to one of the jets.”

“Get us as close as you can.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes. Stay out of the jet. We’ve already seen what happens when you fly through that shit. But land close to the other ship. Preferably on a patch of rock.”

“Can I ask why?”

“The gravity is going to be minimal on a body that small. If you jump hard, you’ll likely jump off it. It will take about two minutes for something to fall from here”—he held his hand at his chest—“to the ground. The less we have to walk around there—much less have a jet open underneath us if you park us on ice—the better.”

Bowden felt his eyes open wide as everything hit him all at once. This approach was levels of magnitude harder than landing on Outpost, and yet infinitely more important. Three lives were counting on him flying a “rails” pass, the first time, to a body he’d never approached before.

He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. No pressure there.

“Got it,” he said slowly. “I’ll get us close. You bring us in.”

“I will.”

Kamara nodded and made a radio call while Bowden sized up the approach. The closer he got, the more he decided the asteroid looked like a peanut, with a narrow, elongated middle, than it did a dumbbell. The surface was pitted with huge indentations, although it was impossible to tell whether they were impact craters or cavities formed from the sublimation of material.

He slowed slightly as he got the rhythm of the nucleus’s spin.

You can do this. It’s a slower rotation than Outpost, and you don’t have to hit an exact spot, just a close one. You can do this.

I hope.


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