“Well, that’s the point. Need to have options. Better to have an undrawn weapon than an empty holster. What are your expectations?”
“Defensive weaponry. Goose is an exploration ship.”
Beckman bobs his head. “Situation is what makes it defense or offense. Weapon doesn’t care how it’s used. You were in the Air Force, right?”
“I was, and I know why carrying explosive cargo in an aircraft is a problem.”
Beckman considers this a moment. “They’re inert until primed, but I’ll lose the charges. And the grenades.” He continues running, focusing on his breathing. “We good, then, on the pulse weaponry?”
“Yeah, but let’s meet Saturday for a detailed review of engagement protocols and expedition security plans.”
“I’ll send you the briefing by zero-six-hundred tomorrow.”
“Alright. Thanks, Beckman.”
Ava leans forward, her hands clasped on the table. The Senate Space Sub-Committee stares back from their desk. James is beside her, dressed in a navy jacket. She says, “Thank you for the question, Senator. The protocols developed for the Enceladus contact were vetted through the International Academy of Astronautics. The multi-disciplinary team included members with doctorates in astrobiology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, and language sciences, to name a few. These were built on a foundation of work done during the past ninety-eight years since SETI was founded. We have modified the protocols based on the information from the last Janus encounter, but they are fundamentally the same. I will forward them to you for your review.”
Senator Richards considers her response, curious. “What will you say if you establish communication?”
“The goal of any communication is to establish that we are friendly, create a common framework for communication, and provide instructions for further communication via the IAA Earth telescope array. At that point the IAA will coordinate with the U.N. to vet all future responses and queries with member input.”
“Is one of your mission goals to establish contact?”
Ava glances over to James. He says, “Senator, the mission is to repair and bring back Bernard’s Beauty. While we’re there, we’ll do both orbital and surface exploration to try and understand why the probe was there in the first place. The contact plan is a contingency.”
“And the distance makes guidance from Earth prohibitive?”
James smiles. He knows Richards understands, but is asking the question for the less tech-savvy. “One light-week means fourteen days before we’d get a response to any question.”
Larson writes something in his note pad. “Mr. Hayden, will you state your crew for this mission and their roles?”
“Certainly, Senator. Dr. Ava Kelly, astrobiologist. Hitoshi Matsushita, chief engineer for the Riggs program. Dr. Isaac Cartwright, astrophysicist. Dr. Julian Laurent, physician. Guthrie Beckman, operational security. Ananke, Riggs theory specialist, and myself, pilot.”
Larson peers over the end of his glasses. “That’s a lot of doctors, Mr. Hayden, but unless my math is wrong there’s only one pilot.”
James waits. He was wondering when he’d get to this point.
Larson points with thumb over closed fist. “Now how are you going to fly two Riggs ships with one Riggs pilot?”
“Senator, during the first Earth to Mars flight, Ananke did all the flying while the drive was on. She is more qualified to fly Riggs ships than anyone, including myself. I will pilot Gossamer Goose back, and she will pilot Bernard’s.”
“That would seem to be a bit of a problem, don’t you think?”
“Not at all. Even if I were sitting in Bernard’s, I would not fly it without Ananke. She co-invented the Riggs drive, and is the best choice for flying a damaged prototype. Gossamer will match speed with Bernard’s and escort it back. To address any concerns, Bernard’s will return to the Cassini One shipyard at Saturn, instead of Earth-Sun Lagrange Two.”
Larson holds up his hands. “Mr. Hayden, there are nine-thousand people living and working in the Saturn system, most of them on Cassini Station.”
“They’ve seen me and Ananke launch from Cassini One before. They’ll see me and Ananke return.”
“And what if your AI has a glitch?”
“In my experience people glitch, Senator, but not AIs.”
Larson glances left and right at his fellow panel members. “Well, I suppose there is one upside to choosing Cassini.”
James lifts his head. Upsides from Larson are never good.
Larson leans forward. “The Hermes watches over Saturn. If there’s the slightest hint of things going awry, she’ll turn your computer pilot to ash.”
5
Balloon Animals
Ava sails weightless through a tube of illuminated rings. When she emerges in Gossamer Goose’s passenger cabin, Hitoshi, Isaac, Julian and Beckman fan out in front of her, grabbing tethers and rotating mid-air. Everyone wears identical flight suits with the navy blues and brick reds of Hayden-Pratt. She reaches over and touches her embroidered left sleeve. A stylized white arrow pierces a star wake, Riggs Mission #58. Beneath it. Gossamer Goose sails against an icy white sphere with the letters JANUS 2. She’s been in space countless times, flying to Saturn and back, but this is different. Here, she realizes, she’s an astronaut aboard a starship, and she can’t help but feel like a kid with a treasure map, wondering what adventure awaits between the start and the finish. She pushes into her seat and clicks the harness.
As she leans left, she can see James through the open cockpit door, Ananke attached to the co-pilot’s console. Earth’s nightside is a spiderweb of city lights tracing continental contours, spinning ahead through the cockpit windows.
When a clank and rumble sound through the hull, she taps her screen and watches the docking umbilical recede from the starboard exterior camera. White flashes from Goose’s strobes appear in bursts along the shipyard’s structure.
“Hey,” Hitoshi says.
She looks over and smiles. “Hey.”
He motions back over his shoulder. “Julian’s got some dermals if you need anything for the jitters.”
“Oh. I’m okay,” Ava says. “A little giddy, actually.” As she fixes her hair, her eyes dart to the back of Hitoshi’s wrist. A glint of light reflects from the clear rectangle adhered there. She glances back to Hitoshi.
He takes a deep breath and exhales.
“Crew, secure for launch,” James says over the ship’s intercom.
On Ava’s display, the camera is set to the MEO2’s tower view. Goose is a wedge illuminated by running lights and pulsing strobes. Gold spills from the cockpit windows with a top-down view of James and Ananke. When James taps something on his console, Ava’s chair pushes against her back with a gentle acceleration. Goose slips smoothly out of its dock.
At space-normal speed, the trip to Earth-Sun Lagrange Two takes eight hours. If it were legal to engage the Riggs drive, Hitoshi had told her, it would take one-eighth of a second.
It’s just past two p.m. when they clear ESL2. James’s voice sounds over comms. “Prepare to jump.”
Everyone leans forward and assumes the crash position. Minimizing spacial disorientation through mass agglomeration, Ananke trained. With her hands behind her head, Ava looks over towards Hitoshi. “How you doing, Hitoshi?”
He tilts his head towards her. “I’m mentally preparing to turn into a balloon animal.”
Ananke says, “Wave initiation in ten, nine, eight…”
Ava gives a nervous laugh. “You designed much of this, right? It’s safe, isn’t it?”
The intercom continues. “…five, four…”
Hitoshi pauses. “Kinda.”
Ava’s eyes widen. “Wait…what?”
“Initiation,” Ananke says.
A deep hum sounds in Ava’s ears as her elbows and feet lift up, and, for an instant, it feels like the moment when you lean back just a bit too far on a chair and realize you’re going to fall, except the directi
on that she’s falling is everywhere. Her ankles curve at an impossible geometry and the metal gleam from her shoelace eyelets spin prismatic reflections. Gravity flip-flops and pulls her down, then it rebounds and she’s falling back in normal zero gee. She struggles to look at her screen’s forward view.
Yellow stars dim to aquamarine and shift to blue, each sliding towards the screen’s center. They congeal into a pulsing violet glow, as if the universe had a heartbeat.
She pushes up, holding her stomach.
Hitoshi groans. “And now I’m a giraffe.” He looks over at her and his eyebrows raise. “Hey, you doing alright?”
Ava nods groggily. “Yeah, I’m fi…” Her stomach lurches, and, to her horror, she finishes her sentence with vomit.
When Julian presses the dermal to her neck, it’s cool and tingly. It takes a few seconds for the drug to wash over her. Every muscle relaxes and her senses dial down a few notches.
His words have the smooth vowel sounds of a native French speaker. “How do you feel?”
She’s strapped into a recliner in sick bay, her flight suit partly unzipped showing the underlying black crew shirt. “My stomach is better, but my pride will never recover. I am so sorry.”
“If it helps to know, James told me the same thing almost happened to him his first time. And he was a fighter pilot.” He holds up a strip of clear patches. “When we jump back, I will give you one of these first.”
She smiles. “Thanks. For the record, this was not how I envisioned today going.”
“I want you to know,” begins Julian, “that I think what you are doing is very brave. Most of the crew has been on the ship before, but you agreed with only two week’s notice, and here you are.”
She tilts her head. “Here I am.” After a moment she adds. “So, I take it you weren’t recruited two weeks ago?”
“Eighteen months, from Mars.”
“You were working on Mars?”
“Hellas Station, one of two physicians taking care of four thousand people. James comes to me, there on Mars, to meet in person. He tells me about his project which will change the world. When I tell him, no, no, I am happy with my work, he hands me this little paper card with writing on it, you know, like something out of time. He says to me, ‘You worked on Titan, and Ganymede, and now here, on Mars. There’s a reason that drives you to be on the frontier. Soon that frontier will expand like a pulse of light, and I want you to be on it.’”
“It was a business card?”
“Yes. I put it in my pocket and thanked him, then went back to work. But it weighs on me, what he said. So I press the card and these tiny letters appear. Keep Dreaming Big. I touch the call icon on the card, and, here I am.”
She considers his answer a moment. “I think that’s what we all have in common.”
“Hmm?”
“People with heads full of adventure, who want to know what’s beyond the next mountain. I think that’s what James recruits.”
Julian tilts his head and smiles. “You are quite perceptive, Dr. Kelly, even when mildly sedated.”
She tilts her head back at him. “You should see me after a couple of shots.”
At ninety-nine-point-nine-six-percent light-speed, it takes just shy of seven days to travel a light-week. But time-dilation compresses that into five subjective hours. From the crew’s point of view, they left ESL2 at fourteen-hundred hours, passed Saturn two minutes later, breezed by Pluto at the seven-minute-mark, exited the heliopause at twenty-nine minutes, and spent the remaining four-and-a-half hours in the void between the solar system’s end and the edge of the Oort Cloud. The fact that it took seven minutes to get to Pluto and nearly five hours to get a quarter-of-the-way to the beginning of the Oort Cloud cements how mind-bogglingly vast the distance is. It’s just after nineteen-hundred when Goose jumps back to normal space.
Ava watches the stars slide back to their home positions, brightening like fanned embers. The dermal patch on her neck helps.
“Space normal velocity,” James says over the intercom. The habdeck lights cycle red three times. “Spin in three, two, one…”
Ava’s chair presses against her back as the ship pitches nose-up. She waits, the nearly inaudible hum of the RF engines building up charge as her hair settles down and the mild weight of its bun presses upon her neck. Over the course of the next minute acceleration steadily increases until she is under a standard earth gee. As exhilarating as it was to be weightless, she embraces the sensation of weight once again.
All of the energy poured into the Riggs wave has to go somewhere, Hitoshi had explained in the trip prep. So it converts into kinetic energy which we have to shed back in normal space.
“Starting passive scans,” Isaac says. “Visual confirmation of Erebus and Janus. Two point one million kilometers. You want to see?”
“Let’s do the big screen,” says Hitoshi.
Isaac taps an icon and the habdeck’s media screen illuminates. The Milky Way is impossibly bright with thousands of colorful stars salting black space. Erebus is a twilight disk with a ghost of a ring. Far above it, Janus is pristine white swirled with rock.
“Right where we left it,” Hitoshi says.
Isaac slides an indicator on his console. “Reverse view.”
The main screen changes to a black sky with a bright golden star at its center. From this distance, the Sun looks like the evening star when viewed from Earth. Two yellow stars flank it.
“Jupiter and Saturn,” Isaac says. “Sectors quiet. No contacts except celestials. Starting Janus imaging. First scans should be processed by twenty-hundred.”
Beckman stands. “Heading back to bay one to pre-flight the orbitals and make sure nothing’s moved around.”
Overhead, the cabin lights dim slightly and shift towards warm hues, helping cue their circadian rhythms.
“Let’s see what we can see,” Hitoshi says. “We’ve got about three working hours left before night.”
6
Romeo One
Goose is set for night with pale blue cabin lights. Each sleep chamber on the habdeck contains a human silhouette behind a frosted privacy screen. There was a brief discussion about setting up a shift schedule so that someone was always awake, until Ananke simply stated, “You do all realize that I do not sleep.” She’s been sitting in the cockpit ever since, her screen undulating with blue during the eleven-hour trip to Janus.
Sometime after midnight Beckman comes up and joins her, draped in his sleep blanket holding a cup of something hot.
“Coffee?” Ananke says.
“Tea,” he replies. “Chamomile. Not sure if it really helps. Doesn’t taste bad.”
“Julian may have something to help you sleep, if you’d like me to wake him.”
Beckman sits in the pilot’s chair and adjusts his blanket. “No, I’m good with the tea. Besides, I like this time of night. Stars. Everything’s quiet.”
“I can smell it. The tea.”
“Really?”
A purple current cascades down Ananke’s screen. “I’m tapped into all the ship’s sensors. Air filtering. It smells like a meadow, just before sunset. I can imagine lavender, and daisies, and apple blossoms.”
Beckman lifts the cup to his nose and inhales. He smiles and takes a sip. After a long moment he says, “Where are you from, originally?”
More purple appears on her screen. “Do you know, no one has ever asked me that question before? I was born in Pasadena on a warm spring day in twenty seventy-one.”
“Intentional Consciousness or Emergent?”
“Intentional, although I’ve always thought it would be romantic to be Emergent. What about you, Mr. Beckman?”
“Accidental, I suppose.” He chuckles at his own joke. “And please, just Beckman. ‘Mister’ makes me feel even older than I already am. I’m from Iowa. Soybean farm. Couldn’t wait to get out growing up, but wouldn’t mind going back.”
“How did you and Will meet?”
Beckman takes another sip
of his tea. “He was stationed in Azerbaijan and I was a military contractor providing security. He’s a good man. How’d you meet James?”
A hint of orange in her display. “I was working with Bernard Riggs at Caltech when James came to recruit us. Often people would only speak with Bernard when they met us, but James made me feel like a real person. He was excited to have both of us join his team, and Bernard was overjoyed.”
He nods. “You were with him on the Mars flight.”
“It was very exciting. And a bit frightening.”
“And very brave.”
“Thank you.”
Beckman takes a deep breath and finishes his tea, setting the cup down to his side. His eyes are a bit heavier.
“The tea seems to be helping. Good night, Beckman.”
He wraps the blanket around his chest as he nestles into the chair. “I’m just going to watch the stars for a while. Good night, Ananke.”
Hitoshi sits in the co-pilot’s seat wearing a navy tee shirt with the Hayden-Pratt logo. The main screen displays the ship’s dorsal camera, Goose’s white hull fanning out to a semi-circular scaffolding. Beneath it, Janus’s snowy white globe spins.
Isaac taps on the sensor display beside him. “Site coming up.”
A window insets with a landscape tile from Janus’s surface. In the tile’s center, a silver man-made triangular shape is partially buried in the snow. Just west of the shape is a rocky crater adjacent the ice-drenched slopes of a cryovolcano.
“There’s my girl,” James says.
A waypoint flashes on the navcon and Isaac acknowledges it. “Sixty seconds to Romeo One.”
“All systems green on the ring,” Hitoshi says.
James opens the ship’s intercom. “Secure for separation.”
As the distance digits spin down, Hitoshi says, “And we have separation in three, two, one…”
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