CHAPTER 1
Space exploration was months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme excitement and discovery, or at least that’s how it seemed to Chris Holt as he poured over the morning flight data reports for the five spacecraft he was responsible for keeping alive and functioning. From his windowless office at Space Resources Corporation, he couldn’t even have the thrill of seeing the rain squalls pummeling the Gulf Coast from yet another tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico. He was still wet after making a mad dash from his Personal Transportation Vehicle to his office nearly two hours ago.
Using his ’net goggles to review the reports, he intently read the ghostly status results as they slid into and out of view on his personal heads-up display, obscuring his “real” view of the wall in front of his desk. Chris hadn’t yet opted for the newly-released cornea implants that were quickly making goggles obsolete. He wanted them to be out for at least a few years before he let anyone implant them in his eyes.
The reports, which were created overnight by the lab’s artificial intelligence, affectionately known as SNARC by the engineers, were full of the flight data from each of the spacecraft’s primary subsystems.
Chris was mainly interested in how the solar sails that propelled the small spacecraft through space were performing and whether or not anything needed to be done to adjust their trajectories to assure each would arrive at the designated asteroid at the right time. The data collected would help provide Space Resources Corporation with the information it needed to determine which asteroids would be good candidates for follow-up exploration and mining. Lots of money was at stake, and Chris was the one responsible for making sure that the mining engineers got the data they needed to advise the company’s president and board of directors where to go next.
Using solar sails to propel the company’s fleet of reconnaissance spacecraft had been his idea, and, so far, it appeared to have been a good investment. Each robotic spacecraft was barely larger than a shoebox, carried a camera and spectrometer to gather the asteroid data needed for assay, and was propelled by reflecting sunlight from a one-thousand-square-foot sail made of a reflective film thinner than a human hair. Without the need for fuel, and the only visiting asteroids closer to the Sun than Mars, solar sail propelled spacecraft never ran out of fuel and could operate as long as the sun was shining. But they were slow to accelerate and would require between one and three years after launch to reach their targets.
Now one of them was getting close to its rendezvous. Chris knew that the first usable photos should be coming in as early as today. The photos taken by the ship’s onboard camera so far were as expected: they showed a bright dot, taking up no more than a few pixels, growing larger with each passing day. The image processing team already had enough data to give him an indication of the asteroid’s overall shape and rotation rate. Asteroid 2055VG, named for the year it was discovered, was shaping up to be interesting indeed. The initial data showed that it wasn’t rotating and that it appeared to be almost spherical—making it an oddity among asteroids, which were usually elliptical and irregular, not round. He was looking forward to honest-to-God photos taken up close and personal from about one hundred feet away, which would be in his hands by the end of the week or sooner.
Four of the five spacecraft were operating normally, constantly and ever-so-slightly varying their trajectories through space to allow them to rendezvous with their designated asteroids at the right time—after maneuvering tens, and in some cases, hundreds of millions of miles since departing Earth. One was not operating as planned. Chris saw that the problem with the spacecraft was first reported during the night shift just before his arrival. Also included in the data were spacecraft temperature measurements, solar array power output stats, and a plethora of data that would only make sense to the various subsystem engineers who were periodically reviewing the data and responding to anomaly reports like the one that Chris had just found for AB-22.
He saw that the overnight staffer overrode one of the automated command uplinks that would have adjusted the trajectory of spacecraft AB-22 to account for an unexpected drop in overall thrust.
“The idiot didn’t even follow up by checking the context camera,” he mumbled to himself as he accessed the data streaming down from AB-22 in search of the spacecraft’s most recent self-shot. After a few moments, he found the data set containing the picture library and was looking at the distorted fish-eye view of the spacecraft’s solar sail.
“Shit.”
Chris activated the communications link embedded in his right cheek, and called his chief engineer, Pam Stark.
“Pam, AB-22 has a small tear in quadrant four. Yesterday’s data showed a change in the sail’s thrust level and a shift in its center of pressure. The idiot on the night shift got the flag and didn’t even try to see what was causing the problem. He just uploaded a new trajectory model and went back to playing a video game or whatever else he could waste time with instead of working. We need to update the sail’s thrust model and probably increase the spin rate to compensate for the extra torque. If we keep adjusting the trajectory, it’ll cause a huge increase in flight time.”
“I’m on it. Mattias was on shift last night, wasn’t he?”
“I think so. Do you want to talk to him or do you want me to?”
“I’d better do it,” she replied.
“Good. I’m so angry I can’t see straight.”
“I’m on it,” she said, cutting the connection.
Chris was so engaged with reviewing the data coming through his ’net goggles that he didn’t hear Vasilisa open the door and halfway enter his office until she spoke, startling him. Sometimes it was difficult to separate what was real from what came through the ’net.
“Chris, are you still interested in lunch?”
Vasilisa was Space Resources Corporation’s Vice President for Mining Operations, overseeing nearly two billion dollars of the company’s interplanetary mining investments. She was originally from Russia, but had become totally Americanized by forty years of living in the United States. Chris had many times heard her horrific story of surviving the nuclear blast that had leveled most of the South Korean city of Daejeon while she was a graduate student there. She mentioned many times how her life would have been different had she decided to pursue her graduate studies in Moscow instead of Daejeon. For Chris, this was ancient history—having occurred five years before his birth. Like most people, real “history” began with their own awareness of the world. But Chris liked her, and thoroughly enjoyed the rare moments she was available to meet with him for lunch. She understood him like almost no one else and was always there when he needed someone to talk to. Today was one of those days.
“Absolutely! You just surprised me,” he replied, rising from behind his meticulously organized desk.
“I’m surprised the ’Net Assistant didn’t remind you. Do you have it turned off again?”
“Well, not completely off, but I’ve silenced all the usual stuff while I review this data. You know how it distracts me.”
“Personally, I don’t see how any of your generation can get work done with fully active ’net access. Having all the information in the world scrolling through your field of vision constantly would just drive me crazy.”
“That’s why I use my ’net goggles with it turned off. Too addictive. I have more important things to do than playing games and watching porn. Besides, it gives me a headache.”
“We’d better get moving to the cafeteria or what little time I have for lunch will get swallowed. I’ve got a VR meeting after lunch.”
Chris rose from his chair and joined Vasilisa as they walked down the hall toward the company’s cafeteria. The usual aromas of exotic spices wafted into the hallway ahead of their entry into the brightly lit room that fed the company’s fifteen hundred employees. Chris was thoroughly accustomed to the extreme diversity of ethnic backgrounds that worked for Space Resources Corporation. The company only recruited the best and brightest from around the world. Vasilisa had related stories of her youth, when extreme intercultural mixing was only just beginning—especially in Russia. Her stories were high on the list of what Chris liked about Vasilisa. That and her uncanny ability to see through the usual political bullshit that people in her class of friends and business associates must deal with on a daily basis. She was a rare “I am what I am” kind of person who wasn’t afraid of telling people how she saw things. And it had worked in her favor on many occasions. That was why they liked each other—neither was afraid of calling out mistakes made by others nor would they put up with less than stellar technical performance by any in the office. Their only difference was one of style: Vasilisa was way more tactful in how she communicated than Chris. He knew it and hated it—no matter how hard he tried, his words usually managed to offend someone.
They chose to eat plain, run-of-the-mill Chinese and found a secluded table in the far corner of the room next to one of the large windows that overlooked the company’s well-tended garden. The garden looked soggy from being pounded by relentless rain coming from a dark grey, menacing sky.
“Tell me what you’ve got. I understand one of your babies is close to rendezvous.”
“Close. The imaging team gave me some preliminary data already. We might get a good image back as early as this afternoon.” Chris was in his element now, and he knew it. He enjoyed his time chatting with Vasilisa; he suspected it was his energy and enthusiasm for his work that she relished.
“When will we have enough information for the Assay Assessment Team?”
“We should be alongside and taking extremely high-resolution photos within the week. If it looks promising, then your division can have at it. If not, then, well, we’ve done more science and can turn all the data over to the NSF.” Even though the company considered the latter case to be a failure, since it wouldn’t make them any money, Chris, who was trained as a physicist, was a scientist at heart and didn’t mind turning over all the data collected to the National Science Foundation. For Chris, scientific data was as valuable as platinum.
“I saw that gleam in your eye when you mentioned the NSF. We aren’t going to lose you to some university, are we?”
“Not a chance. They can’t come close to paying me what you do. Besides, they don’t have the money to send spacecraft exploring.” Chris smiled as he played on an old theme from conversations past: the need to pay scientists more money to encourage more to go into science and engineering fields. She didn’t appear to take the bait.
“Tamika told me you’ve been invited to speak at the International Astronautical Congress in Sweden. What’s your topic?”
“I’ve built a roadmap for what comes next. With the Moonbase built, Mars being explored and real commerce finally happening in near-Earth space, we’re on our way to becoming a solar system-wide civilization. Have you heard about the fusion drive research at Livermore labs? Europa here we come!”
“Chris, do you really want to unleash the Caliphate on the stars? They’re living like it’s the year 800 and want to drag the rest of us back there with them. What about all of our petty conflicts, not to mention our wars? Somehow I don’t believe we’ll suddenly stop fighting each other if we go to the stars.”
“I don’t want the Caliphate to go. But they probably will. They, the Indians, the Chinese and all the rest will go right along with us. Nothing depresses me more than to think of us being stuck forever in the solar system when there is a universe out there waiting to be explored. I think we must go to preserve and spread life. If we stay here, the Caliphate or some virus might wipe us out. We have to go. We just need to convince the idiots with all the money that it needs to happen.”
“But do you think it’s even possible? Where is everybody? I think we’re it and we’re stuck. Just like this shrimp.” Vasilisa followed her last point by biting a whole piece of fried shrimp in a particularly dramatic fashion.
“Vasilisa, you just don’t think big enough. We’re mining asteroids, bringing raw materials back to the Moon and Moonbase, keeping it functioning—at a profit. And you just announced last week that we’ll be dropping processed ore into Utah and Nevada and putting it up for sale in the terrestrial market. How can you be so negative?”
“Because I’ve seen the horrific videos coming out from the Caliphate. I’ve lived through a nuclear blast that killed over two million people. I’ve seen the US and China go at each other and almost blast the world back into the Stone Age over a silly little island in the Pacific. I’m negative because even the way I earn my living is based on consuming raw materials from other worlds to make more stuff for people to buy and then eventually put into a garbage dump.”
“We need to get out there before the assholes screw it all up to the point that we can never recover and go.”
“Well, I think …” Vasilisa began but was interrupted by Chris raising his hand and turning his head away.
“Hold on,” he said as he cocked his head, activated the audio implant in his earlobe and listened to the message demanding his attention.
“Chris—the first image from asteroid 2055VG17 is here and it’ll knock your socks off. Do you have your ’net goggles on?”
“No, I left the damned things at my desk.” Chris’s voice was firm but barely audible to anyone near him in the room.
“Okay. Listen up. Get over here as quick as you can. It doesn’t just look like a sphere, it is a sphere. Perfectly round. And it looks to be artificial.”
“Excuse me, what did you say?” Chris asked, his voice now loud enough for Vasilisa to hear and understand.
“I said, it doesn’t look like it’s natural. No, it isn’t natural. It’s clearly artificial.”
Chris was out of his chair and moving toward the door before Vasilisa realized he was even moving.