by Brian Smith
Ashburn put his helmet and gloves on, pressure-sealing his exosuit out of sheer force of habit. That was the way he’d originally been trained, and the law of primacy was a big influence on people in his line of work. Takagi watched him uncertainly for a moment, then wordlessly followed suit. He was already into the checklists, running the startup sequence and bringing the Zit’s fusion plant online.
The ship was large enough to boast a small torch of her own—it was her centerline engine, by necessity, and considered her secondary. Her primary engines were a pair of air-breathing rocket hybrids, tucked in against the sides of her aerodynamic fuselage. In Earth’s atmosphere the engines could create and tank their own liquid-oxygen rocket fuel during flight, but they’d be limited to using the rocket mode only on Titan, as there was no oxygen in its atmosphere. They had a thrust-vector capability that, coupled with powerful RCS thrusters and gyrostabilization, gave the craft a VTOL capability at lower weights or in low-gravity environments. That capability would be crucial here since there was no landing field where they were going. Fortunately, fuel economy wouldn’t be an issue, due to Titan’s low gravity.
When they were ready up front, Ashburn checked with the crew chief/loadmaster in the back, who reported passengers and cargo secure and all hatches and ramps sealed. A half dozen Tafuna Yaro were making the drop, and they’d be staying at the landing coordinates to do whatever it was they were there to do. They were packing some specialized Titan camping gear in addition to their sealed cargo; it was clear they were planning to stay a few days.
“Tell you what,” Ashburn said to Takagi as he completed his checklists. “You monitor this run, start to finish, and you can fly the next one with me riding herd. I know I’m supposed to do all the flights to the unprepared site, but it won’t hurt to know you can do it in a pinch if something happens to me. Especially since we’re dropping your teammates there.”
“Sounds good, Mike,” she replied.
He keyed the comm. “Dejah Thoris, Zitidar One. Ready for release.”
As expected, it was Captain Xiang who replied. She had relieved both watchstanders and taken sole control of the bridge. “Copy, Zitidar. Final nav-sync complete, based on our keps* and cross-referenced with the beacons at Chusuk and Janus Fields. I just sent you the numbers.” (*“Keps” was a shortened form of “keplers”; a late-twenty-first-century colloquialism for orbital parameters.)
“Received and entered,” Ashburn confirmed.
He slapped the acceleration alarm, giving the passengers a short burst of the klaxon in the main cabin. “All hands, this is the pilot. Stand by for maneuvering,” he called over the intercom.
Xiang’s voice sounded in his ear, counting down, and Ashburn switched over to virtual with his oculars, going “clear cockpit” to get the impression of sitting alone in open space without the confines of the ship around him. He could see the hull of Dejah Thoris right next to him in virtual, almost close enough to reach out and touch. A lot of pilots didn’t like to fly this way; Ashburn found it exhilarating.
Xiang finished her countdown. There was a muted metallic thump and a slight lurch, and Zitidar One cast off from her mother ship. Mike let the distance open enough to prevent damage to the mother ship’s hull, then gave her a quick shot of RCS thrusters to open the distance a little faster.
His hands were on the gyrogrips, and he spun them to orient the spaceplane for her deorbit burn, using a little squirt of RCS to speed up the process. Gyros were fuel efficient—as in they didn’t use any, other than tapping the ship’s electrical buses. They operated on the principle of conservation of momentum—if you spun a gyro in free fall, your overall mass would precess against it. You could use gyros to reorient a ship or stabilize it, and they were a staple system in modern spacecraft. Even torchships as large as Dejah Thoris had gyros; they were correspondingly larger and faster spinning, of course, to accommodate the torchship’s much larger mass and moment-arm.
In Ashburn’s field of view, Titan’s hazy orange horizon rotated around him until it was directly overhead. He double-checked his numbers and gave the computer the go-ahead to burn on schedule.
“We aren’t going to use the torch to deorbit?” Takagi’s voice suddenly asked in his ear.
“No,” he replied. “We don’t want to put out a fusion plume this close to Dejah Thoris, and we aren’t carrying a whole lot of torch-propellant mass. We may use it to give us a little boost back into orbit, but right now we’re saving it as our emergency-waveoff delta-v if we need it.”
“I see,” she replied, then went quiet again.
Ashburn gave the crew compartment another shot of the acceleration alarm before deorbit, and the rockets kicked and mashed him into his seat. He couldn’t help but grin, relishing the sensations of flight as Zitidar One began a ballistic fall toward an alien world. Like a true Crandall Academy alum, Mike had planned the trajectory to the nearest gram of fuel—once they bit air they’d hardly be using the engines at all, except for last-second corrections, braking, and touchdown.
Modern spaceplanes were designed to morph in flight depending on the aerodynamic requirements of the moment. Using complex flexible materials, fly-by-wire computers, and nanotechnology, Zitidar One’s wingbody would change shape multiple times throughout the course of flight. At launch in a vacuum, she was a long, sleek, delta-shaped vehicle with very little wing area and no vertical tail at all. As she transitioned from spaceflight to reentry, hypersonic to supersonic, and then finally subsonic flight regimes, her spaceframe morphed as needed, increasing wing area, decreasing sweep, and “growing” a sleek vertical stabilizer that itself would alter shape to minimize sonic-boom effects. This characteristic was more important during flight over populated areas but not normally a concern over Titan. Just prior to landing, the Zit would mimic a bird coming in to land: her wings would morph into a high, arcing curve, making good use of the same natural aerodynamics that evolution had gifted to the winged creatures of Earth.
As they made planetfall on Titan, Ashburn couldn’t help but dream of a day when he might fly a similar profile to the surface of some yet undiscovered planet or moon around Alpha Centauri.
After he completed the burn and flipped Zitidar One end for end for the reentry phase, his grin got wider as the ship came down and skimmed the high-altitude methane- and hydrocarbon-based clouds of the upper atmosphere, giving him an indescribable rush of speed. Flying in virtual “clear cockpit,” he always had the dumb impulse to sit cross-legged and fold his arms like an imaginary genie riding an invisible magic carpet. He heard Takagi’s gasp of pleasure and knew she was following along in virtual as well.
They passed nightside, and Ashburn adjusted his VR display to give him a visible overlay so that he could still “see” outside. Zitidar One’s wings began to spread as she bit into deeper air, slowing gradually to a lazy, extended glide in low gravity.
At 5,000 meters and directly over their proposed landing coordinates, Ashburn released a pair of robotic drones that fell away from the ship and spiraled rapidly down to the landing site, conducting a close survey of the terrain and picking out the best patch for him to set down on. When he made his choice, he plugged the adjusted coordinates into the computer and let the autopilot fly the approach profile, lining her up into the light but steady surface wind. Thick air and low gravity made the approach easier than he anticipated; it felt like the Zit really wanted to fly.
He began the landing cycle, dropping the tread-skids rather than the wheeled mains they’d use on a prepared runway surface. He waited until the last possible moment to take manual control—it was more fuel efficient that way. In truth, the computer could have landed them as well, but with Takagi sitting next to him he succumbed to a primal masculine desire to show off. As it happened, “Dakota” Ashburn was smooth enough “on the stick” that nobody in the back could even tell the difference. He kicked in a combined braking and hovering burn at the last possible moment, minimizing both the fuel expended and the dust cl
oud he was kicking up. The ship’s nose picked up slightly, and then he set them down with a gentle bump, throttling down as he came in, timing it perfectly—zero thrust at touchdown.
He was pretty pleased with himself, all things considered. He switched from VR back to AR, and the “real world” of the cockpit magically reappeared around him.
“And that’s how we do that!” Takagi enthused from beside him, tickling his vanity. “A little Jim Lovell quote from yesteryear,” she added, in case he’d never heard the reference.
They were now sitting in a gravity field only slightly weaker than Luna’s, quite comfortable. They popped their helmet seals and removed them, placing them on the seat mounts right behind their headrests.
Ashburn keyed in the circuit to the loadmaster. “Hey, Yosh. Do you need us to lend a hand unloading back there?”
“Negatory, Dakota—you’d just be underfoot. Give us about thirty minutes and we’ll be ready to button and burn.”
“Suit yourself. Holler if you need us,” he replied, glancing over at Takagi. “Are you expected back there?” he asked.
“Nope,” she replied with an impish grin.
Although Campbell had warned him against it, he took careful note of their landing coordinates and copied them to a secure file in his private data partition. He’d erase the file later when he could close his eyes and formulate a mnemonic to really memorize them, but until that time he felt better doing it this way.
Takagi was already accessing the astrogation computer from her snoopers. “Mind if I run the keplers for the return trip? It’s good practice for me—you do this stuff for a living.”
“Be my guest,” he replied, signaling the cockpit hatch closed and sealed. They were going to have to evacuate the hold and then pump in outside air to equalize the pressure before opening up the ship to unload; it was going to get lethally cold and hypoxic back there in short order. They’d be comfortable enough where they were, sealed in the cockpit.
Ashburn glanced over at Takagi, trying to decide whether he could pick her brain or not. She seemed friendly enough now that they were flying as a crew like this, and he wondered if she might be willing to leak a little information on their cargo and purpose. It didn’t hurt that hetero women found him attractive: Ashburn was solidly Terran-built, six feet tall, with crew-cut sandy hair, gray eyes, and a square recruiting-poster jaw. His mixed-Sioux heritage lent a little tint to an otherwise Anglo complexion, giving him a healthy color: he didn’t turn all pasty white after years of living aboard ship or in habitats.
“So,” he said casually, “what are they setting up out there, anyway? Research project?”
“Can’t say,” she replied, not even looking up from her calculations. Her tone and inflection left two possibilities: either she wouldn’t say or she didn’t know. What he did catch was the sense that the inquiry was unwelcome.
So much for that, he told himself. He let it go and changed the subject.
Janus Station, Titan
Dr. Shu Tian and Bill Campbell flanked the new synth on either side, looking it up and down. The most expensive synths on the market could be made to look and act incredibly lifelike, simulating human beings of all shapes, sizes, genders, and ethnicities. They ran the gamut from childrens’ toys to butlers and maids, factory hands to sex models, with variations in quality as a direct function of cost. This synth looked uncannily like a human, to the point of being virtually indistinguishable from one. It was better than the finest, most expensive models on the market, yet it came from a robotic assembly line, at about half the production cost of an “obviously a robot” midgrade synth.
“Is this the first one of these you’ve seen?” Shu asked him. “The quality is incredible!”
Campbell nodded. “You know, I wanted to get over to the plant and check these out when production began, but I couldn’t find a way to make it happen—at least not in my Kevin MacDonald persona. So, this is my first time as well—we had them boxed up tight on the trip out to keep them from prying eyes. We don’t want a known link between Janus Industries and the Omni Systems factory on Mars right now. I had a gander at their internal schematics, though, and it all looked Greek to me. Of course, synth engineering isn’t remotely my specialty.”
“Mine either,” Shu replied, reminded of the improved computer cores OURANIA had designed that nobody—including Shu—could understand. “I wonder . . . If a synth engineer compared the guts of this one with a standard model, would he or she even be able to comprehend it? I noticed that both OURANIA’s new core designs and these synths use large amounts of that Q-gel she’s come up with. What is it this new goop is supposed to do, exactly?”
“I’m not sure,” Campbell said. “Why not ask OURANIA?”
“Good idea—I’ll add that to the list,” Shu sighed.
“What is your name or designation?” Shu asked the newly activated synth.
“I have none as yet, ma’am,” the synth replied.
This one was a female model, with dark hair and vaguely generic Asian skin tone and features. It had a young voice and was dressed in thin, factory-supplied black coveralls and flat-soled kung fu–style slippers.
“Let’s call you Xia for now. Come with us, Xia.” As the synth followed Shu and Campbell into the main control room, they noticed that it adapted its movements for Titan’s low gravity quite naturally, moving with an efficiency and economy of motion that took humans quite a while to develop.
Shu asked OURANIA to give them an illustrated explanation of how the new Q-gel factored into the synth’s design. OURANIA complied, showing them how the gel, when combined with some silicate elements and nanocircuitry, formed the basis of a revolutionary AI CPU that was an order of magnitude more advanced than any system currently employed in synth design and production. The Q-gel was also incorporated into the synths’ dermal layers, giving them a slight morphing and insulating capability that allowed them to adapt automatically to extreme ranges of pressure and temperature. In hostile environments this allowed them to work far beyond the endurance of contemporary models. With very little in the way of additional protective gear, the new “Omnisynths” would be able to work in space construction and on repair docks with near-human problem-solving skills, social-interaction skills, and the ability to use both standard equipment as well as new equipment OURANIA had specifically engineered for Project Daedalus.
Finally, the Q-gel gave the synths an enhanced ability to autonomously self-repair any physical damage that wasn’t completely catastrophic. Most synths already had that ability to a certain degree, but, again, the improvements in this model were of a quality impossible to mass produce by contemporary standards. The manufacturing process designed by OURANIA obviously could meet such standards—the evidence was standing in front of them. Even now, as Shu and Campbell examined this model on Titan, the Omni Systems factory on Mars was stamping out production-line models on a nonstop schedule. The advantage these OURANIA-designed synths offered over a human or contemporary-synth workforce was immediately clear.
Shu asked what the Q in “Q-gel” stood for; OURANIA told her “quantum.” Beyond that, the computer didn’t elaborate.
“Dr. Shu, may I conduct a direct diagnostic examination of this model?” OURANIA asked. “I can use the data for quality control, to refine and improve the product. It will require me to access its CPU via hard line, unless you are willing to ease my networking restrictions.”
“Xia,” Shu said. “Disable all your external networking and data-streaming capabilities. Lock them under Kevin MacDonald’s authority, using DNA security confirmation.”
Xia turned toward Campbell. “May I touch your hand, Mr. MacDonald?” it asked pleasantly. Campbell nodded and held out his hand. Xia reached out and took it for just a moment. He didn’t feel a thing, but he knew his DNA was being scanned for the security lock. Xia’s hand felt warm and human. “Thank you, sir,” the synth added with a friendly smile, and turned back to Shu. “I have complied with your instruct
ions.”
“Very well. Sit down here, Xia,” Shu ordered. The synth obeyed, and Shu ordered it to open a hardline access port. Xia reached up, flipped open the tip of its left middle finger, and plugged it into the console where Shu directed. “OURANIA, you have access,” Shu said.
“Running diagnostic,” OURANIA replied.
Xia’s eyelids fluttered unnaturally for a few seconds, the only indication that anything was happening. “Diagnostic complete. Uploading corrective data for physical file transfer. It is available at your convenience.”
“Thank you. Xia, you may disengage,” Shu ordered. After Xia disengaged from the console, Shu ordered the synth to return to its maintenance bay without reactivating its data streams or network access. Like OURANIA, Xia remained cut off from the outside electronic world as a precaution.
“That unit is to be destroyed by end of shift,” Campbell ordered, once Xia was gone. He gave the order in the control room deliberately, curious whether OURANIA would question either the order or why he felt it was necessary. There was no reaction from OURANIA at all—he wasn’t sure whether that made him feel better or not. He turned to Shu. “I’ve been wanting to have a little heart-to-heart with OURANIA since you contacted me on Mars. May I?”
