Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The elevator fell rapidly. Fahy, clutching her softscreen and scribbled notes, almost stumbled, disoriented; it was like being back in the T-38 again, pulling Gs.

  The MP was only a kid, she thought, surely younger than thirty. His blue eyes were black-rimmed, and she wondered if he’d had any sleep recently. He was probably as afraid as she was. More so, because he couldn’t understand as much of what was happening as she did.

  On impulse, she asked: “What’s your name, son?”

  He looked at her, puzzled. “Ma’am?” His vowels had the broad richness of a Texan. His hand, she noted, had gone automatically to the butt of his pistol.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  When she emerged from the elevator, she found herself facing a gigantic, intimidating logo: a shield, studded with stars; a stylized planet ringed by solid-looking orbital hoops, a simple delta-wing spacecraft overlaid before it. It was, Fahy knew, the shield of the Air Force Space Command.

  The MP hurried her through steel-walled corridors. His heels clattered on the metallic floor, his gun always visible. Fahy had to half-run to keep up.

  After a couple of turns she’d lost her orientation. The lighting came from dazzling, grey-white floods embedded in the ceilings, so that the illumination was colorless, flattening. Everyone she encountered looked deathly pale, as if drained of blood. There were no colors here, no smells. It was like being inside a huge machine. The rooms were crammed with information technology: huge wall-mounted softscreens, printers, telecommunications gear; earnest young Air Force officers, many of them bespectacled, labored at terminals.

  Machine or not, she sensed panic.

  They arrived at a small, compact briefing room. A single table stretched the length of the room; it was oak, its surface polished smooth, a bizarre touch of luxury in this dehumanized cavern.

  She had arrived in the middle of a briefing. It was a chaotic hubbub.

  Al Hartle sat at the far end of the table. Gareth Deeke sat alongside him, his eyes hidden by his mirrored glasses. There were several others here, mostly men, mostly heavy-set and middle-aged. Some wore service uniforms, mostly from the U.S. armed forces, but there were also representatives from the military establishments of Canada, Quebec, New Columbia, Idaho. There were even a couple of Russian officers: evidently the embodiment of some post-Cold War strategic tie-up between the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia, a new cooperative understanding as the former adversaries banded together in the face of a newly hostile and baffling world.

  Anyhow it was quite an assembly, a representation of the military establishments of two continents.

  Around the walls of the room, framing the group at the table, a series of young officers sat at compact workstations, the glow of their softscreens illuminating their earnest, smooth faces. She could see information flowing in continually over the surface of the soft-screens, and occasionally scribbled notes were passed to the heavyweights at the main table. Network cables lay across the floor, roughly anchored here and there with duct tape. Jackets had been draped over the backs of chairs, ties were roughly loosened, and a pall of blue-grey smoke hung over the center of the room.

  There was a stench of stale sweat, of too much aftershave. Of fear.

  Oddly, she found she welcomed the body stink. At least, she thought, you could tell there were living human beings in this place of metal and plastic.

  Fahy was waved to a seat.

  Hartle clapped his hands, and the hubbub died a little. “Let’s try and get some kind of overview here,” he said. “Gareth. What’s the most significant item we have, in your view, right now?”

  Deeke didn’t hesitate. “As far as the President is concerned, it must be the Wall Street bomb. The physical damage wasn’t important, Al. In fact it was just a suitcase bomb. The point of it was the electromagnetic pulse it delivered. Al, it knocked out everything: bank transfer networks, stock and bond markets, commodity trading systems, credit card networks, telephone and data transmission lines, Quotron machines… We’re looking at financial chaos, a meltdown of the global finance system. All from one suitcase bomb.

  “General, we have two hundred million computers tying us together through an array of land and satellite-based communication systems. We thought we were protected. We weren’t. The nodes of our government and commercial computer systems are so poorly shielded that it’s been a chicken run for the enemy, or their agents. And in our systems themselves, even the most secure, we have evidence of the work of crackers — malevolent hackers — and cruise viruses, targeted at our vulnerable points. Al, at this moment I don’t think we can trust any of the information we do have coming in here, or even our weapons targeting and arming systems.”

  “All right,” Hartle snapped. “What else?”

  “We’ve lost our satellites,” another officer said bluntly.

  “How? Anti-satellite strikes?”

  “ASATs aren’t necessary,” Deeke said. “It’s easier and cheaper to soft-kill a satellite: damage, distort, even reprogram the information it processes and transmits. You can jam, intercept, spoof, hit the ground stations, break into the comms networks… Al, this is knowledge warfare. We have to assume that there are troop movements, going on right now. Launches of their CSS-2 IRBMs. Stuff we can’t see any more—”

  “Knowledge warfare, horseshit. I’ll tell you what this is,” Hartle said. This is an electronic Pearl Harbor. The Red Chinese have blinded us. They’re doing to us what we did to them over Taiwan, back in ’12. We just didn’t think big enough, is all; we never thought they would attempt this—”

  “And of course we have a rather larger problem,” Deeke said mildly.

  Hartle turned to Fahy.

  “Miss Fahy,” he said, glowering at her. “Welcome to hell. Now, tell us about 2002OA.”

  Fahy, nervous, rumbling, stood up and walked to the head of the table, opposite Hartle. “2002OA is a NEO. A near-Earth object, an asteroid. We have four dedicated NEO search programs. Three in the northern hemisphere, one in the south. The U.S. has been running planet-crossing asteroid surveys for four decades now out of Mount Palomar, Kitt Peak and the Lowell Observatory. The surveys use photographic methods, with some upgrade to electronic methods. Palomar alone is responsible for the discovery of one-third of the NEO population known today. All these observatories are situated in the south-west of north America, and so cannot reach southern declinations. In response, a program called the Anglo-Australian Near-Earth Asteroid Survey was initiated in the 19908…”

  “So,” Hartle snapped, “where the fuck is 2002OA?”

  She fumbled with her softscreen, working through the presentation she had prepared, at last bringing up the image she wanted: a pencil of possible orbits, fanning out from 2002OA’s present position. The orbits enveloped the Earth.

  “The orbital elements of 2002OA are not precisely determined, yet. For one thing it is only visible from one NEO tracking station, the one in Australia, though we’re trying to bring more resources to bear. It’s possible, but not certain, that 2002OA will collide with Earth. We certainly can’t be specific about where, precisely, in geographic terms. The orbital data is too fragmentary at present to be able to—”

  Hartle closed his eyes. “Which hemisphere?”

  “I can’t tell you that, sir.”

  Deeke said, “NORAD and NASA are refining their projections all the time, Al.”

  Hartle said, “But if we can’t even figure out where it is heading, how was it possible for the fucking Chinese to aim it?”

  Deeke shrugged. “By placing a spacecraft on the spot. By doing navigation from there, they could achieve much greater precision. Maybe they even sent up a man to do it, General. After all, they aren’t scrupulous about spending human lives.”

  “And what damage is this fucker going to do to us?”

  “General, we think the Chinese miscalculated,” Fahy said, flicking through the projections her staff had prepared. “2002OA is a big rock. Bigger than they need, if they ju
st wanted to strike at the U.S. We think they intended some kind of glancing blow, or maybe to calve off a piece of the rock. Then we’d face localized destruction, maybe something like a nuclear winter. A Tunguska rock on New York. A Meteor Crater where Washington is. We think that was the plan. But 2002OA is too large. Instead, we may be looking at some kind of Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary impact—”

  Hartle turned to Deeke. “What the fuck?”

  “A dinosaur killer, General,” Deeke said softly.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Hartle said to Fahy, “So tell me how we shoot down this motherfucker.”

  She rumbled through her notes. “In general, the strategy for dealing with incoming objects requires spacecraft capable of rendezvousing with a threatening NEO and deflecting it by incrementing its velocity with a delta-vee — that is, an impulse — sufficient to cause them to miss the Earth. There are two generic strategies: remote interdiction, when the collision is predicted several orbital periods away, and terminal interception — when the collision is imminent, with the projectile less than one astronomical unit away — that is, days away from impact — and closing. Remote interdiction requires relatively small delta-vees, terminal interception much larger. In both cases, a deflection velocity is applied sufficient to cause it to drift from its original trajectory by at least one Earth radius. In cases of terminal interception it is best to apply the impulse perpendicularly to the projectile’s motion, which imparts an eccentricity to its orbit. The deflection delta-vee required is inversely proportional to the distance from Earth. And because of this—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hartle said. His body was unmoving as he watched her, as if carved from granite, his contempt etched on his face.

  Deeke said, “Tell us about Clementine, Ms Fahy.”

  “Right…” Fahy scanned ahead through the slides on her soft-screen, and began stumbling through a hasty presentation on a space mission called Clementine II.

  Clementine had been an experimental 1990s deep-space mission cooked up by NASA and the Air Force Space Command. Clementine’s primary purpose had been to serve as a test-bed for the performance of advanced defence technologies in deep space, up to ten million miles from Earth. But it was also a test of techniques for asteroid interception. It had been sent to close rendezvous with three asteroids and had been equipped to fire probes — yard-long cylindrical missiles — into the asteroids’ surface. In the event, Clementine had failed after the first rendezvous, but that first mock-interception had gone well.

  “Clementine was essentially target practice,” Fahy said. “It was criticized by the science community for that reason—”

  “Fuck the science,” Hartle said. “Why the hell didn’t we follow this up?”

  Fahy felt even more nervous. “Sir, the scientists won the day, in the end. They argued that the money would be better spent on ground-based instruments that could detect an Earth-bound incoming. Better to survey the problem, rather than try flying spaceborne weaponry at this stage. Then there was opposition from the liberal lobby, who argued that the build-up of a deflection capability might be a simple cover for the continuation of weapons programs, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, by vested interests: the military labs, the defence suppliers. Carl Sagan at Cornell was vocal in—”

  “Carl Sagan,” Hartle growled. “Miss Fahy, for once in your goddamn life, get to the point. Listen up. Right now money is no object, for NASA. I’ll give you what you want: Delta IVs to launch up as many nukes as you could wish for, all the ground-based resources you ask for. Now. Tell me about 2002OA. What options do we have for deflecting this goddamn incoming?”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. I thought you knew. We don’t have any options.”

  Hartle seemed baffled rather than angry. “There is always an option, damn it.”

  “Not in this case. We detected it too late. We’re already in the terminal interception phase. Right now, 2002OA is only four times as far away as the Moon. The delta-vee we would have to apply is more than three hundred feet per second. It is impossible for us to achieve such a deflection, no matter what we threw at it. The best we could achieve would be to break the rock up. But then you’d have a multiple impact instead of one, along with an immense cloud of dust and debris hitting the upper atmosphere…”

  Gareth Deeke said, “Like it or not, we no longer have the Delta IVs in the inventory anyhow, Al. We’ve run down too far. We just don’t have the launch capability any more.”

  Hartle’s nicotine-stained fingers drummed at the table. “You’re telling me we can’t shoot this thing down?”

  “No, sir. Of course we don’t know for sure if it’s going to hit Earth anyhow.”

  “Let’s start talking about what we do if it does. Gareth, are we prepared to strike at the Chinese? Should we launch before the impact? And what—”

  An aide walked in, a girl. She walked towards Hartle. He watched her approach, impassive, his face like a piece of Mount Rushmore. Her gait was awkward, Fahy thought, her steps uneven, as if she were close to fainting.

  “Sir,” she said. “We heard from NORAD. They have a fix on the incoming’s ground zero…” The girl officer started to cry, big salty drops rolling down her cheeks.

  Everyone was standing now; orders were shouted back and forth.

  The Atlantic,she heard. The Atlantic.

  Two young officers had clustered around Al Hartle. “Come on, sir; we have to get you out of here, over to NORAD. There’s a chopper waiting…”

  Holy shit,Fahy thought. They got confirmation. This isn’t just some military wet-dream fantasy of Al Hartle’s. It’s real; it’s going to happen.

  I’m going to die.

  Holy shit.

  Jake Hadamard parked at the foot of the Vehicle Assembly Building. His car was the only one in the lot.

  When he looked up at the face of the VAB, it was like peering up at a cliff. In the flat morning sunlight he could see that the wall was heavily weathered, streaked with seagull guano, and there was even some lichen, he saw, busily burrowing into the face of the VAB, as if it was some immense tombstone. It was a little difficult to believe that modern humans, in some epochal moment of madness, had built such a monument.

  He had a sudden, jarring sense that history was going to end, here, today.

  He walked away from the VAB, towards the press stand.

  The uncompromising old wooden bleacher was evidently abandoned now, its roof broken open to the daylight, dune grass colonizing the lower levels. He climbed a few steps and found a seat; he brushed it clear of dirt and sand and sat down, looking east.

  He was looking towards the ocean, across the Banana River, and, beyond a treeline, towards Launch Complex 39. The sun, still early-morning low, was bright in his eyes. The press portakabins that had once stood here had long since been hauled away, and the other relics of human launches — the gigantic countdown clock, the flagpole — were gone too. Nothing remained but obscure concrete podiums and platforms, already crumbling under the assault of sea and vegetation.

  Beyond the treeline, on the other side of the river, he could see the two LC-39 launch complexes, side by side, blocky mechanical towers blue-misted by distance. Now 39-B was all but demolished; little had been left after the scrap teams had moved in but a shell of rusting iron set on a concrete platform.

  An effort had been made to preserve 39-A, however; for the benefit of the tourist trade, Disney-Coke had erected a gigantic carbon fiber mockup of a Saturn V to stand alongside the launch gantry. It was easily visible now, a slim white tower, more than three hundred and sixty feet tall, tapering up from the flaring fins of the S-IC first stage, all the way to the pencil-thin escape rocket at the tip of the dummy Apollo spacecraft at the apex. But it was unpainted, many of the details missing, so that it looked like a child’s unfinished model.

  The sun was to his right and in his eyes, already hot. Hadamard was dressed in a suit, his tie loosely knotted. He adjusted his sunglasses for
greater opacity.

  He wondered if he ought to put on some sunblock.

  He checked his watch. Well, if what he’d heard from his contacts inside NASA and NORAD was correct, he wouldn’t have long to wait. He could risk doing without the sunblock.

  Rosenberg and Benacerraf huddled together at the galley end of the hab module. The door to Bill Angel’s quarters was closed; there was no sound from within.

  Even so, Rosenberg and Benacerraf were talking in whispers.

  “Sixty miles,” Rosenberg said. “It’s not so far. If we could manage ten miles a day, we could be there and back in a couple of weeks…”

  Rosenberg was in a mood Benacerraf had learned to recognize, and mistrust: a mood of excitement, in which he would be carried away by some new idea.

  The trouble was, around here it was only Rosenberg who came up with any ideas at all.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “You’re sure this is a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite crater?”

  “As sure as I can be.” Rosenberg had spotted the crater, punched into the border of the big Cronos plateau, in Cassini orbital radar imaging. “The size is the thing. Look, Paula, the nature of the impacting bolide determines the cratering profile. The most common type out here, far from the inner System, will be weak, icy, cometary bodies. If an object is small and weak, it’s going to break up in Titan’s thick atmosphere. For a bolide of a given yield strength you have a minimum radius below which you shouldn’t find any craters. For the ice bolides, that comes at around thirty miles. The stronger the material, the smaller the crater it can create.”

  “I get it. And the crater you’ve found on Cronos—”

  “ — is about twenty miles wide. Below the turndown limit for the icy bodies. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites would have four or five times the density, and a hundred times the internal strength.”