11
Max Jiang had spent most of the last day incessantly humming to himself. No matter his task—whether pulling rations out of the storm shelter and repacking the log module, checking in with Palmdale, or servicing the waste recycler—the constant almost-melodies emanating from him would have ordinarily driven his wife to distraction.
For her part, Jasmine Jiang was so preoccupied as to barely notice and was just as giddy. Whatever she put her hands to, she did with newfound enthusiasm. They had long ago learned to arrange their daily activities so that neither of them would become bogged down in mundane housekeeping or become overwhelmed with the mental gymnastics of managing a spacecraft, but after emerging from the safety of their storm shelter the timeline had become compressed to the point where load sharing was pointless.
A day and a half cocooned inside the tunnel had left them both swamped with work, as their destination was relentlessly drawing close. Physics didn’t care if fragile humans needed protection, as time and motion carried on regardless.
If anything, the compressed timeline excited them even more. After a short braking burn to match orbits, asteroid RQ39 emerged into full view. As their spacecraft turned about its long axis to distribute solar heat, the oblong body moved from one row of windows to the next, its color palette shifting subtly between shades of brown and gray as it slowly rotated in the sunlight.
Besides having something to look at other than empty space, tomorrow they would finally be able to get outside after weeks of confinement. “It’s been like driving an RV around the world,” Max had said during their storm quarantine, “except you can’t stop to get out and the only other place you can go is the passenger seat.”
It was too soon yet for direct exploration of RQ39’s—Malati’s—surface. That would come after another few days, when Prospector would draw close enough for them to safely jet across. For now they would have to be satisfied with tomorrow’s short jaunt outside to prep their survey equipment, currently mounted to a pallet on the hab’s utility port.
It would be enough for now. Perhaps on Earth the journey itself was half the fun, but space was different. There was remarkably little to see along the way; for as many weeks as they’d spent in transit, on a cosmic scale they’d not traveled far at all, though it was enough for Earth to appear painfully small and distant. From their vantage point it did look like the proverbial blue marble, and the lack of any atmospheric haze eliminated all sense of perspective. Suspended in depthless black, their home planet could very well have been a pebble at arm’s length—or a world the size of Jupiter, millions of kilometers distant.
That every single person they had ever known was on that tiny blue marble filled Jasmine with both longing and dread: longing to be back among the familiar, with trees and water and blue skies, dread for the inescapable realization of just how fragile it all was.
Was this how God saw the world—like an anthill? Enormously complex, indescribably beautiful, but in cosmic terms still just an anthill. Is this what omniscience felt like?
She decided it couldn’t be. For even as humans might regard the entirety of an anthill, they could never perceive the individual perspective of every creature in the colony. That was the difference between the Creator and the created: We might be temporarily privileged to be given a taste of the Creator’s perspective, but it was only the smallest sliver of its totality. Barely a peek through a keyhole.
As Prospector continued rotating, RQ39 once again passed out of view. It would reappear soon enough in the opposite window, but its absence was enough to make her acutely aware of Max’s atonal droning.
“What is that tune?”
His humming abruptly stopped, as did his work. He left a tablet floating in midair, plugged into a data port on his spacesuit. “What was that?”
“My question exactly. Was that a song, or simply whatever random notes come to mind?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets with a sheepish grin. “The latter. You know I was never much of a musician.”
She pushed away from the sidewall with her fingertips to float closer. “That I do know,” she said. She stopped just in front of him with another gentle push from her fingers. “At least not in the West. You never quite shook off our homeland’s musical styles.”
“Some things were too ingrained in me, I suppose.” He kissed her forehead. “I will endeavor to be more melodic, my dear.”
She tapped her watch, and soon symphonic movements were emanating from speakers embedded in the overhead. “Or we can just put on actual music and hum along to it.”
“Even better.” His eyes widened as he looked beyond her. He pointed to the porthole over her shoulder. “There it is again.”
Malati drifted back into view, brilliant in full sunlight. From this angle its pebbled surface shone white.
“What do you think it is?” she wondered. “Do you think we’ll be able to stand on it?”
“It appears dense enough.” They both considered the asteroid’s surface. “Japanese and European probes at similar asteroids were able to maintain direct contact. I don’t think we’ll find ourselves sinking into an aggregate if that’s what you mean. There won’t be enough gravity to sink into anything.”
“I suppose you’re right. Forgive me, but now that we’re here I’m having second thoughts. This is rather dangerous, you know.”
Concern darkened his eyes. “Are you nervous about leaving the spacecraft?”
“I’m nervous about everything,” she said. “Assuming all goes well tomorrow, we’ll each have done exactly one spacewalk in our entire lives before we attempt to stand on an asteroid.”
Max tried to humor her. “As they say, there’s a first time for everything.”
“I was hoping for a wildly inappropriate pun.”
“I’ve not had enough time to read other people’s jokes lately. You should know by now I’m not that original,” Max said. He gestured at the tablet running diagnostics on his EVA suit. “I’ve checked our maneuvering units three times. Their gyro stabilizers are working perfectly, we have the asteroid for spatial reference, and our little home here will be less than half a kilometer away. You could practically jump to it from there.”
“Please don’t mistake my reticence for anxiety.”
“I would never do that, my dear. I suppose fear of the unknown is to be expected, though I’ve been too excited to think about it. Excited and busy,” he finished with a beaming smile.
“Fear of the unknown,” she repeated, chewing a fingernail as she watched the asteroid drift across the window. “That’s it, of course. I had hoped we would have been able to collect more spectral data by now but there’s some odd electromagnetic background interference. The closer we get, the stronger it becomes.”
“Faulty spectroscope, perhaps?”
“I thought there might be a coolant problem but the ground team agrees with the onboard diagnostics. It’s transient, as if it’s external interference. Very odd.”
“That is odd,” he agreed, “but not entirely bad news. If it has a magnetic field strong enough to affect passive instruments then it must have a dense iron core. That suggests even more valuable metals could be present. Literal ‘rare earth’ minerals, just as we hoped. If that’s the case, then we were right to come here.” He smiled and caressed her cheek. “And I’m now absolutely confident we’ll be able to stand on it.”
“Still,” she sighed, “it would be nice to know what we’re about to set foot on.”
Lesko was surprisingly adept at manipulating playing cards in zero g. Shuffling was always a challenge for rookies, as the cards tended to shoot off in all directions, but he’d handled them masterfully. His control over the deck seemed effortless as he pitched them with a flick of his thumb, each flying across face down and arrow-straight.
“Smooth,” Hector said as he caught his in midair. “Probably a good thing we’re not playing for real money.” After five hands, he’d amassed an impressive pile of digital chips on the tablet Velcroed to the small table between them.
Lesko shrugged. “It’s a pastime.” He turned and deftly began flicking a fresh hand in Rosie’s direction. “So where are you from?” he asked, admiring her dark features.
“New Mexico,” she said. “Santa Fe.”
“So when was the last time you were in Jersey?”
She fanned out her cards and studied her hand, not lifting her eyes from them. “Never been there.”
“But you said—”
“Yeah, about that,” she said. “I had to keep you talking so I knew you weren’t gonna freak out or die on me. No offense.”
Lesko pursed his lips, now admiring her in a different way. “None taken.” Though he would pay extra attention to how she played her next hand.
Despite being more commonplace with each passing year, spaceflight still carried the aura of grand adventure into the unknown. That it could sometimes be deadly dull was really only known to those who had spent more than a day in orbit.
Marshall had been warned, and he’d had no reason to doubt those who’d gone before him. Sometimes the workload was steady, but often as not it ended up compressed into times of near-overwhelming demands in an environment that had multiple ways of killing a man.
The intervals between were a battle to keep from dying of boredom, the struggle his team now found themselves in aboard the cramped and adrift shuttle. As he watched Rosie, Hector, and Mikey engage Lesko in another round of poker, he noticed their rescued civilian had already played enough rounds to look almost comfortable again. He had to admire the spacers’ resourcefulness. They’d expected a lot of down time and had come prepared.
He pulled his tablet from a cargo pocket, swiped through its menu, and made a mental note to populate it with some music and e-books just in case. He’d spent enough time paging through system diagrams and fleet directives; it was all starting to run together and he needed a distraction.
Moving forward, Earth’s blue glow in the window drew him like a moth to a flame. He’d forced himself to stay away from the cockpit, if only to avoid giving his team the impression that he’d rather be up there than working in the mid-deck with them. The word had to have gone out that the skipper was a family friend, and he couldn’t afford to let that taint him.
The shuttle was set up as a two-pilot vehicle for launch and landing, but could easily be operated by one in orbit. Chief Riley sat in the second pilot’s seat, Lieutenant Wylie in the left-side command seat—which he’d been in since departing Borman yesterday.
Riley cocked his head back as Marshall approached, and pushed himself up out of the seat.
“No need to get up, Chief. I’m good here.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but don’t blow sunshine up my ass. Being polite will get you nowhere.”
“My mother’s a southern aristocrat, Chief. Politeness was bred into me. You might as well try to untrain a dog.”
“Point taken.” Riley floated up and away from the open seat. “But I’m getting up anyway, sir. You haven’t been up here since we arrived.”
“Didn’t see the necessity.” Marshall looked to Wylie—it was his ship, after all—who gestured for him to take the copilot’s seat. He used a handgrip in the overhead to twist himself into the narrow opening and settled in, keeping his hands clear of the controls.
Wylie appreciatively noted his caution. “Nothing you could mess up right now,” he said. “I’ve closed the RCS valves and the OMS tanks are almost dry. I’m using the gyros for station keeping.” He had the craft pointed nose down, so that Earth filled the windows.
“Saving propellant for rendezvous later?” Borman was climbing their way, due on station in another ten hours.
“Bingo. Just in case they overshoot. Which they won’t, but we’ve got to be ready to cover some distance on the off chance they do.”
Marshall eyed the propellant and power gauges. “More draw on the fuel cells, isn’t it?” Not keeping the craft in a thermal-control roll to even out solar heating put more load on the radiator panels as well.
“It is,” Wylie agreed, “but we weren’t pulling that many amps anyway. I wouldn’t want to do this all on battery power. It’d start getting uncomfortable in here.”
Riley pulled himself between them and lowered his voice. “Speaking of uncomfortable, gentlemen . . . now that both of you are up here, I have some thoughts.”
Wylie flashed a knowing smile. “Thoughts, Chief? I’ve learned those frequently end up with something that looks like actual work.”
“As it should, sir.” He glanced behind them. “I’m sure I don’t have to explain how unusual of a situation we find ourselves in here.”
Marshall was silent. Besides deferring to the senior officer, he wasn’t entirely sure where Riley was going and wanted to gauge Wylie’s reaction.
“We haven’t had a live rescue in almost a year,” Wylie said. “And never one in GEO.”
Riley nodded. “Because nobody ever comes up here, and with good reason. It’s an expensive trip with almost no benefit and considerably more risk.”
“You mean exposure to the Van Allen belts?” Marshall asked.
“That’s part of it. Not to mention it’s just harder to get to, which our predicament illustrates. Even if we had full OMS tanks, deorbiting from here isn’t cheap.”
Wylie glanced over his shoulder at the card game in back of the mid-deck. Marshall followed his gaze and realized that Rosie had arranged things so that her team was between Lesko and the officers, keeping their charge distracted and unable to overhear. She either had her own suspicions or had been reading the chief’s mind. Either one was just as likely. “So what’s your thinking, Chief?”
“Lots of hacker gear in that little ship, sir. I think Mister Hunter would agree it looked like they were ready to compete in a gamer tournament.”
Marshall agreed. “That was one serious rig. Looked like they could’ve piloted the thing from there.”
“Piloted something for sure,” Riley said. “It’s some kind of remote TT&C setup, for what I don’t know.”
“Tracking’s one thing. But telemetry and control?” Wylie pulled up specs for the Stardust on a monitor. “How familiar are you with that model? Because I only see one high-gain antenna. If they’re staying in touch with the ground, they wouldn’t have bandwidth for much else.”
“Might not need anything that powerful if they’re close in,” Riley said.
Marshall’s eyebrows rose. He’d noticed some cables snaking across the space between the consoles and an open access panel. “What were they plugged into? I didn’t get a good look.”
“Neither did I, sir.” Riley frowned. “The cabin was a wreck and our suits weren’t meant to absorb that much dosing for long.”
“No need to explain,” Wylie said. “I would’ve sent Rosie to pull you guys out of there if you hadn’t come on your own.” He paged through a diagram of the spacecraft’s command module. “All the Ka- and S-band stuff’s on the service module. Command module has VHF for launch-and-entry comms. Low power, but they’d be able to jack directly into it from the crew cabin.”
Marshall followed his reasoning. “So they were controlling that satellite? That’s why they were so close to it?”
Riley agreed. “Makes sense. I still can’t figure out why. It was dead.”
“Only because no one was willing to spend the money to come up here and work on it,” Wylie said. “Look, I’m no lawyer. They very well might have been exercising salvage rights. Or young Mr. Lesko back there might have been up to no good. The evidence could go either way. We advise the skipper, and he’ll pitch it to the brass back on the ground. I’m guessing they won’t see four people in a chartered spacecraft as much of a threat, especially since most of them died in the CME.”
Marshall took one last look aft. “And a lone survivor who learned some hard lessons about spaceflight.”