20
“What the hell?” Garver uncharacteristically blurted out. “How are they not there?”
Simon rubbed at his forehead. “You got me, Chief,” he muttered. “This is a first.”
Garver dug at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Sorry for the outburst, skipper.”
Simon waved it away and floated up into the cupola, staring at the abandoned spacecraft and wishing he had gravity just so he could indulge the feeling of collapsing into a chair. How did they just up and disappear? If they’d been holed by a meteoroid, where would they go? Why would they go anywhere?
They must have gone outside in hopes of repairing the damage and become separated from the spacecraft, he decided. That was the only thing that made sense. He keyed his mic. “Give me a bow-to-stern visual inside then inspect the exterior. I want to see that entry wound on their service module.”
Simon took his binoculars from their mount and began searching Prospector for more clues. It had to be a repair gone wrong. Had to be. They must have taken a hit and decided to try and do something about it. He’d have done the same, but he’d also been at this for years with a crew of trained specialists who could work miracles under just about every rotten condition space could throw at them. He studied the debris field and imagined two rookies trying to effect repairs in that mess.
“Skipper?”
He shuddered at the idea and tried not to think about how that must have gone down.
“Captain Poole?”
Had one of them gotten tangled up in debris or ruptured their suit, and the other gone after them? Had something struck them both at once? There was a lot of jagged crap floating around out there. He decided to tell Marshall and Rosie to stay on the clear side of the ship—no sense risking them, especially with a skeleton crew . . .
“Captain!”
How long had he been lost in thought that Garver had raised his voice to get his attention? He tucked his legs and flipped, sticking his head down through the cupola opening. “What’s up, Chief?”
“We may have something, sir. There’s some electromagnetic energy coming from near RQ39. Infrared, occasionally into the microwave bands—UHF and EHF.”
He turned back topside, instinctively swinging his binoculars over to the asteroid now several kilometers distant. That couldn’t be . . . “Any chance its them?”
“Not unless they’re carrying high-gain transmitters with them, sir.”
Another spacecraft? He keyed the mic again. “EVA Team, Actual.”
Marshall answered. “Go ahead, sir.”
“Refresh my memory—weren’t the Jiangs carrying some survey equipment or experiment packages to deploy here?”
“Affirmative, sir. They were going to place a remote-operated drill and an in situ resource unit, see what kind of raw materials they could harvest from it.”
“Is that equipment still onboard?”
“Those packages were mounted to an external sled on the far end of the hab. They’re both gone, sir.”
That conformed to what Poole had seen through his binoculars. “Specter, Actual. Are you listening?”
“Aye, sir.”
“What’s your fuel state?”
“Bonus, sir. Ninety-two percent.”
“How much delta-v do you need to go inspect RQ39?”
“Say again?”
“I need you to get eyes on that asteroid. We’ve detected some thermal and radio energy. Weak and intermittent, but it’s there. Could be activity on the far side.”
“You think our missing persons might be over there?”
“Only thing that makes sense,” Poole said.
There was a delay while Wylie calculated their fuel. “Looks like five meters per second each way, figure another half-meter for station keeping. We’ve got plenty in the tanks for that, sir.”
“Very well. Hunter, you hear that?”
“Aye, sir,” Marshall answered for his team, already motioning Rosie and Harper to begin heading for the exit. “We’re on our way back to Specter now.”
With a quick tap against the translation controller, Wylie began pulling them away from Prospector as soon as Marshall closed the airlock. The abandoned spacecraft fell away quickly, spinning out of view as Wylie pitched around to align them for a short OMS burn. The little ship kicked for few seconds, adding velocity along its new vector. He motioned for the three to come forward, and pointed Marshall to the open copilot seat.
“We’re not set up to scan the microwave or IR bands,” he explained. “Rosie, I need you to manually frequency-hop the VHF and UHF radios. Listen for anything weird.” He noticed the look she gave him. “Yeah, I know. Everything sounds weird out here. Listen up for anything that doesn’t sound like cosmic background noise.” He turned to Harper. “Nikki, maintain a listening watch on the emergency frequency. If they’re out here then I don’t want to miss them because we were chasing shadows.”
They each plugged in spare headsets. “Sounds like a good plan, sir,” Rosie said.
“Don’t know if it’s good, but it’s the only plan we have right now.”
The asteroid soon began to fill the windows.
“Nothing,” Marshall said. “If they’re out there, the mass is blocking their signal.”
“Makes sense,” Wylie said, frustrated with himself. “Should’ve held back, kept our distance while we flew around the back side.”
“Spiral search pattern?” Marshall wondered. “If it’s really them, we’re just picking up random EM energy. We’ve already got an idea of where it’s coming from. I think we’d have to get close no matter what.”
“Grid search,” Rosie said. “Pick apart this rock one square at a time until we home in on them. Now all we need’s a map.”
“Not like I have any clue what I’m doing,” Marshall said, “but Rosie’s right. We need a map, anything we can use to track our search pattern.”
Harper pulled up an image of the asteroid. “We can at least start with quadrants and subdivide from there.” She pointed out prominent shapes and features. “We identify some landmarks to set our boundaries and get after it.”
The radio tuned to Borman’s frequency crackled once before going quiet as they passed into the asteroid’s shadow.
“Radio blackout,” Garver reported. “They’re in shadow, sir.”
Simon put down his binoculars. “Yeah, I just lost sight of them.” He turned to Garver. “Then what’s that tell us?”
Garver pulled at his chin, thinking. “That whatever we’re looking for has to be on this side of the ’roid. Or it’s a lot more energetic than just a drill and ISRU complex.”
Simon pulled up his file on Prospector. “Any chance there’s some components not accounted for?” he asked. “Did we miss a drone or remote-sensing satellite?”
Garver shook his head. “No sir. They deployed a couple of CubeSats to image it, simple cameras and magnetometers. Both have low IR signatures and their operating freqs are accounted for. This is different. Lots of EM radiation from that direction, sir. Like something just turned itself—”
Before he could finish, the master alarm began blaring and the caution and warning panel suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. “Propellant alarm! Temperature and pressure warnings from tank two,” Garver shouted from the control station.
“Any warnings from the coolant loops?”
“Negative, sir. Throughput’s normal but the ducts alongside two are heating up.”
“Purge valves?”
“Opened automatically, but delta-p is in the black band.” The valves, meant to keep internal pressure from reaching dangerous levels, couldn’t vent fast enough.
Simon unsnapped a covered switch to jettison the tank. “Number two is—”
Their world swirled around them as the big hydrogen tank exploded.
* * *
“I got nothing, sir.” Rosie pulled off the headset and rubbed at her ear, her free hand cupped over the other. “Just background noise.”
“No better here, sir,” Harper said. “It’s all static all across the spectrum. Nothing visual either.”
“Wouldn’t expect much different this far out,” Wylie said, “not unless they have a signal beacon. Even if they did . . .” He trailed off, letting go of the thought.
Marshall had not been able to let go as easily. “It’s been almost two weeks. If they’ve been out here that whole time, they’re long dead. But if that radio noise wasn’t them, where’d it come from?”
“Everything’s in motion out here,” Wylie reminded him as the darkened asteroid drifted past outside. “It was worth a look. We’ll have line of sight back in a minute. I’m sure they had better luck.”
“Report!” Simon shouted as he flew back down from the cupola.
“Engineering present and accounted for,” a crewman called from his station. “We’re both here on the command deck, sir.”
Simon turned to look behind, finding two wide-eyed petty officers hanging on to their seats and struggling to make sense of the situation. “Can you give me powerplant status?”
One of the men held tightly to a pair of nearby handrails, fighting to read off figures and trends while the ship bucked like an angry bull beneath them. “Reactors went to safe mode, sir. Control rods fully engaged. Containment shells are intact.”
He flew back up into the dome for a better look outside. They were rapidly becoming enveloped in a cloud of escaping gas. The Sun and RQ39 spun around them as their ship, knocked askew by the explosion, stumbled its way through a drunken spiral. The side-mounted hydrogen tank was split by a jagged wound that had opened up along its length, still venting propellant. Maneuvering thrusters pulsed wildly, automatically trying to compensate and right the ship.
“Shut down the RCS!” he shouted down into the flight deck. “Before we run out of gas!”
“Aye, shutting down,” Garver called out as Simon flew back down into the command module. The bucking and heaving soon came to a stop, though the ship’s tumble continued unabated.
“Nav platform may not be able to keep up with this, sir,” Garver warned him. “Tank two is a goner. We need to lose it before we can get the ship under control.”
“Roger that.” Simon reached for the jettison switch.
Whatever they’d expected to see after they emerged from the asteroid’s shadow, it wasn’t this. The ship they had left behind was shrouded in a cloud of vapor, lazily tumbling through space. For a moment Marshall had thought they were looking at the similarly damaged Prospector.
“Holy shit,” Rosie breathed.
“Borman,” Wylie called, “Borman, this is Specter. How copy, over?”
He was answered by the pop and hiss of an empty channel. He repeated his call, and the radio crackled. “Spec—”
The four stared at each other as if one of them might have been able to discern an answer. The frequency sparked to life again. “. . . maintain . . . position.”
“You’re broken, Borman. Understand you want us to maintain position?”
The channel hissed, then came an emphatic reply: “Negative! Do not—”
“They lost antenna control,” Marshall said, and pointed at the stricken ship. “Their signal cuts out as it rolls away.”
“You’re right,” Wylie said, hearing the static rise and fall with Borman’s rotation. “Then we drop the UHF.” He switched over his active channel to the rarely used high-frequency radio. “Never thought I’d need this out here. Hope they remembered to keep it on.” He flicked the mic switch. “Borman, this is Specter on HF, button one.”
They recoiled as the channel howled to life. It blessedly disappeared when someone spoke, though his voice was reedy from attenuation. The words came in a rush.
“Specter, Borman. Explosion in H2 tank two.”
“That sounds like Garver,” Marshall said. “Is Sim—Captain Poole—okay?”
If anyone noticed his stumbling into use of the familiar, they ignored it. Wylie keyed the mic. “How’s the CO?”
“Pissed,” Garver said. “His orders are for you to stay clear. Danger close, repeat danger close.”
Before he could ask anything else, they saw the damaged hydrogen tank separate from Borman and begin spiraling away.
Simon flinched, barely keeping his head from bouncing off a heaving bulkhead as he came down from the cupola. “Could be worse,” he muttered.
“How’s that, sir?” Garver asked coolly, trying to mask his tension.
Simon floated back down to strap into the pilot’s seat. “If this was a movie, we’d have panels falling out of the overhead and all the avionics would be on fire. So we’ve got that going for us.”
Garver laughed out loud. “Good thing they thought to put in circuit breakers.”
“Yeah, awesome.” One of the petty officers bit down on his lower lip as he continued fighting against their rolling and yawing. “How the hell are you laughing at anything right now?”
“Stress response,” Garver said as he studied the fuel system’s diagnostics, shooting a glance at Poole. “We’ve been in worse situations.”
The petty officer glared back at him over his shoulder. “Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on that one, Master Chief.”
“He’s not kidding,” Poole said, pulsing thrusters against the roll. “Remind me to tell you about the Sea of Okhotsk some time.” The ship jerked hard as thrusters fought the escaping gas. “Let’s just say that riding your boat down to crush depth is even scarier than being in a depressurizing spacecraft.”
“I’ll take your word on that, sir.”
Poole tapped the controls again, more lightly and in the opposite direction. With another pulse to null that motion, the attitude indicator finally settled down. He blew out a long breath.
“Ship’s stable,” Garver reported. “Clear of the debris cloud.”
Poole wiped his forehead with his ball cap. “How much RCS did we blow doing that?”
Garver checked the propellant totals. “Twenty percent, sir. And we vented a whole propellant cell. That leaves three cells in tank one.”
Simon ground his jaw. “Tell me about our radio masts.” Their antenna complex was adjacent to the propellant tanks.
Garver pulled up an interactive diagram of the comm and sensor module, much of it now in red. “The explosion took out our directional antennas. We can pick up HF and VHF if we’re pointed at the source.”
“We can still talk to Specter, right?”
Garver nodded affirmative. “We can relay our comms through their directional antenna. Limits us to S-band but it’ll work. We’ll have direct control once they’re docked.”
“Good. Clear them to approach the forward node, and make sure they get us external visuals. Get our people back in the barn ASAP.”
“Copy that,” Wylie answered. “We’re heading to Waypoint One now. Tuning S-band radios to the common traffic freqs. Stand by.” He gestured for Marshall to begin relaying Borman’s radio traffic through their antenna.
As he switched over frequencies, there was a high-pitched squeal as if an electronic being was clearing its throat. A computer-generated voice began a recorded recitation:
ATTENTION ALL TRESPASSERS, INTERLOPERS,
AND ENVIRONMENTAL RAPISTS:
THIS PLANETOID AND ALL NATURAL RESOURCES WITHIN IT HAVE BEEN DESIGNATED AS PROTECTORATES OF THE PEOPLE’S SPACE LIBERATION FRONT. EARTH HAS SUFFERED ENOUGH UNDER CENTURIES OF NATIONALISTIC PROPERTY THEFT, AND WE WILL NOT PERMIT FURTHER RAPING OF THE ENVIRONMENT OF WORLDS THAT NO CORPORATION HAS A RIGHT TO. AS NO ONE HAS RIGHTFUL CLAIM TO PROPERTY PER THE OUTER SPACE TREATY OF 1969, WE THE PEOPLE OF EARTH ARE THEREFORE THE SOLE ARBITERS OF ANY SPACE PROPERTY DISPUTES. ANGLO-IMPERIALISM WILL NOT BE PERMITTED TO EXPAND BEYOND EARTH. THIS FREE SPACE MANIFESTO APPLIES TO ALL NATURAL WORLDS OF OUR SOLAR SYSTEM.
Marshall and Wylie stared at each other, dumbfounded, as the eerie computer-voiced “manifesto” began repeating itself. Wylie’s eyes widened. “What in the actual hell was that?”