by Samuel Best
“Everything!” he said. “I helped design it at the Diamond Aerospace facility in Baikonur. I worked there for three years. The schematics in your current documentation have been falsified.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “There’s no D.A. facility anywhere near Russia.”
“Not anymore.”
A car zipped by on the street, and Michael crouched down with a frightened gasp, watching it until it disappeared around a bend.
“Please,” he said. “If we could go inside, I’ll explain everything.”
Kate slowly bent down, keeping her eyes on him the whole time, and picked up her keys and her phone.
“We can talk out here,” she said cautiously. “But I want to write this down. I’ll just go inside and grab a pen.” She was thinking about the baseball bat she kept just inside the door. Had she moved it last time she cleaned the place? Did she remember to put it back?
Kate paused when a black SUV with tinted windows rolled slowly into view on the far side of the street, past her front lawn, then stopped. Its headlights were off and it had no license plate. The vehicle just sat there, its driver and anyone else inside obscured from view. It seemed to be waiting.
Cochran turned around when he heard the engine noise. He stiffened, as if he recognized the SUV.
Kate watched him closely as she unlocked her front door and went inside. A moment later, she burst back onto the porch with her baseball bat raised in one hand and her phone in the other, ready to dial the police.
Cochran was gone, along with the SUV. She had been so wound up she didn’t hear it drive away.
Kate breathed out a sigh of relief. She slumped against the wall next to her front door, scanning the dark corners of her yard.
There had been other unwanted visitors on her porch in the past. They were almost always protestors of some kind, railing against the continuous march of technology and the evils it wrought upon the world. Many of them hated the fact that billionaire Noah Bell – along with his other rich, space-crazed peers – was so intent on dumping pointless money into missions to Mars and Titan instead of pouring it all back into what they called the broken society of Earth.
A twig snapped in the yard and Kate jumped in place. Her grip tightened on the bat.
An armadillo waddled out from under a bush, sniffing at the ground. Kate lowered the bat and forced her tense muscles to relax.
“Good luck sleeping now,” she muttered.
She called the police and told them about her unwanted visitor.
“Would you like an officer to come by and take a statement?” asked the operator.
“I don’t think so. I’ll be fast asleep by then.”
“We’ll at least send a patrol car down to watch your apartment, Ms. Bishop, just in case.”
She hung up and looked around the yard one last time. The armadillo had made a hole and stuck its snout in up to its beady little eyes, rooting for grubs. The damn things were always digging ragged holes in her St. Augustine grass.
Kate got the mace out of her car, locked herself inside her apartment, and pushed an oversized lounge chair in front of the door for peace of mind. Not long after, her bed welcomed her as if it was made from the cloudy fabric of heaven itself, and she forgot all about Michael Cochran as she drifted into a dreamless sleep.
Jeff awoke wrapped up in his sleeping bag, pinned to the curved wall of the crew module. There were four cramped bunks the crew would use during the journey, but mission regulations only specified they had to be used while the ship was in motion. He and the others wanted to delay being stuck inside the coffin-like bunks as long as possible. For their brief visit to the space station, they opted to sleep farther back in the crew module, where the floor plan was a little more open.
He had traded his orange Mark IV suit for a pair of gray sweatpants and a thin t-shirt before his late dinner last night, and he wasn’t overly enthusiastic about trading back. Yet he and the other crew members would soon be on the longest leg of their journey, during which he could stay in his boxer shorts all day if he wanted – except for the video chats with Mission Control, of course. Jeff thought that perhaps seeing an astronaut working in his underwear wasn’t much of a confidence-booster for the public.
Gabriel slept nearby, his bag pulled up to his armpits and his arms floating out in front of him. He wore a long-sleeve hoodie, which bore an official mission patch on the left breast. It depicted a cartoonish, thickly-outlined Explorer I approaching Titan over a starry background, with the simple, italicized text of the Diamond Aerospace logo beneath it. Jeff had one just like it tucked away in his clothes bag.
The crew module was kept at an even sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit, mostly because that was the balance that had been struck between the cold vacuum of space and the heat generated from the engines and machinery of Explorer I. The heat was filtered and recirculated through the walls of the crew module, but there was no dedicated heating unit. If the recirculating motors failed, the crew would have about two hours before the inside of the ship became a freezer.
It was, Jeff thought, one example among many of how thin the dividing line was between staying alive and utter catastrophe.
He unzipped his sleeping bag and floated out of it, then rolled it up and stowed it in the mesh pouch bolted to the wall nearby. Riley’s and Ming’s sleeping bags were already rolled up and tucked away.
Already Jeff could feel more blood in his head than usual, especially his face. There was no real up or down in zero gravity. No matter how he had tried to angle his body before sacking out a few hours ago, the even distribution of blood throughout his body resulted in a puffy feeling in his face and a slight but constant pressure behind his eyes.
Enjoying the weightlessness, he allowed himself to drift slowly away from the wall. The crew had experienced a few minutes of simulated zero gravity during their training. A Boeing 747 following a parabolic flight path over the Arizona desert was the closest they could get while still on Earth, but the experience paled in comparison to absolute weightlessness. It was like being underwater without having to worry about the nagging requirement for air.
The slightest touch against any surface altered his spin. Jeff spent a few happy minutes floating in the crew module, occasionally tapping a wall or monitor to change his spin direction while he inspected what was to be his home for the next year.
The interior of the crew module was a 30-meter-long centrifuge capable of creating just under three-quarters of Earth’s gravity for the voyage to Titan, minimizing bone loss and keeping the crew that much more sane. The centrifuge would begin to spin after the antimatter engine had fired and the ship had passed the moon. Until then, the crew would spend most of their operational time in the command module at the nose of the vessel, sending out status reports and double-checking each other’s calculations for errors.
A large central pillar ran through the centrifuge along the ship’s primary axis, four meters from the floor. The design team had originally favored a more open floor plan, without the pillar, to ease the inevitable feeling of claustrophobia. It was to be the longest manned space mission, and the company psychologists didn’t want it to be compromised because there wasn’t enough elbow room. The designers tried to work without it. They thought it would be neat if an astronaut could push off the floor with enough force to float to the opposite side of the centrifuge, spinning in midair to land on their feet. It turned out that someone floating from three-quarters Earth’s gravity immediately into a pocket of zero-g almost always lost their lunch, and they could never fully control their direction once they hit that central dead zone. Sometimes they got stuck in mid-air and had to be pulled back down to the floor.
So they went with the pillar design.
The floor plan had been kept mostly open as a result, with only low barriers constructed off the centrifuge wall to approximate sections. The sections of the crew module, moving from forward to aft, were divided into the crew quarters (including a shower and privat
e hygiene compartment), kitchen and dining area, communications systems access and vehicle monitoring stations, the science lab, and space suit storage.
Every interior surface was contoured for maximum efficiency. It had been designed for habitation in space, not on Earth, which meant chairs bolted to the floor and extra straps for securing anything and everything that could float away if the centrifuge stopped spinning.
Now that the command and crew modules were linked, Riley and Ming would be spending most of their time at the front of the craft during the voyage, while Jeff and Gabriel worked in the centrifuge.
“What do you think?” Gabriel asked sleepily. He unzipped his sleeping bag and yawned. “Getting cabin fever yet?”
“Are you kidding me?” Jeff said. “I doubt I could ever get tired of this.”
“I’ll ask you again on the way home.” He noticed that the other three sleeping bags were stowed. “Early risers, I see. Guess we better go check in. We’re lighting an awfully big candle today.”
“Right.”
They pushed off the floor and grabbed the ladder that ran along the central pillar. Jeff followed Gabriel toward the command module, barely needing to touch the rungs to keep his body moving forward.
The crew module tapered down like a cone to an open, meter-wide hatch. Just beyond, in the passageway to the command module, was a docking hatch at a T-junction that led to the interior of the space station through Explorer’s sphere-shaped airlock.
“They put us on Node 2,” Gabriel said as he drifted into the open airlock. “Bet that made the photographers angry.”
One of the last major components to be attached to the International Space Station was an observatory module named the Cupola. Its seven windows offered the crew unrivaled views of Earth – a perk that both resident and visiting astronauts declared, without exception, was the single greatest perk aboard.
Docking Explorer I at Node 2 effectively blocked half of that view.
Gabriel drifted into the next module, the eight-meter-long Destiny laboratory. The lab’s walls met at ninety-degree angles as opposed to the contiguous cylindrical wall of Explorer I’s crew module, forming an extruded square that ran from hatch to hatch.
Two female astronauts floated in the four-meter-diameter lab. One had a clipboard and scrolled through lines of code on a monitor screen, and the other spun lazily as she sipped from a sachet of apple juice. The ISS had no centrifuge to create a percentage of Earth’s gravity; here, the inhabitants spent the entirety of their mission in zero-g.
Both women wore t-shirts under lightweight one-piece jumpers.
“Good morning, ladies,” said Gabriel.
“Morning, fellas,” said May Harris, the woman with the clipboard. A blue baseball cap with the letters ISS stitched on the front kept her springy dark brown hair under control.
The other woman, Elizabeth McCall, waved and smiled while chewing on her straw. Her curly, fiery red hair floated around her head as if she were underwater.
“What’s new?” Gabriel asked.
“Not much,” Elizabeth replied with the thick twang of a Texas accent. “Earth’s still spinning.”
“Your boss called while you were asleep,” May said.
“Riley?” Jeff asked.
“No, someone from your Mission Control. Kate Somebody. She wanted to make sure everyone was doing okay. I passed it on to Riley.”
“Thanks.”
May smiled knowingly and glanced at Jeff. “She put a special emphasis on you, space cowboy.”
“Me? Huh. Interesting.”
“Yeah, right,” Gabriel said. “You’re good at playing dumb, but not that good.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Elizabeth squeezed her sachet and a stream of apple juice flowed out of the straw. It formed a wavering globe the size of a large marble. Gabriel pushed gently off the wall, soaring across the lab and swallowing up the floating liquid before Elizabeth could get to it.
“Hey!” she said, laughing.
Gabriel bonked into the far wall and coughed, choking on the liquid.
“That’s what you get.”
“Riley and Ming around here somewhere?” Jeff asked.
“They’re with Alexei in Nauka lab,” said May.
“Right. I’ll go see how we’re doing.”
Jeff pulled himself past the others and floated to the far hatch.
“I’m going to hang around here a bit,” Gabriel said. “See if I can be of any assistance.”
“Oh, my hero,” May said, rolling her eyes.
Jeff smiled as he drifted into the next module. “Just give a shout if he starts any trouble,” he called back.
He made a mental map as he went along. Like the others in his crew, Jeff had studied the layout of the station before leaving Earth. Staring at a schematic on paper didn’t give him the proper sense of scale that came with being inside the real thing.
Moving from the docked Explorer I toward the truss, which was the longest section of the space station, he had passed through two modules: Destiny lab and Unity. Continuing straight from Unity module would take him past the truss and into the Functional Cargo Block. Beyond that was Freedom module, and finally Nauka, the Russian lab.
He decided to take a quick detour on the way to Nauka. Instead of continuing straight ahead when he left Destiny lab and entered Unity module, he hung a right toward Node 3 – Tranquility.
Including the crew from Explorer I, there were only seven souls aboard the space station. Jeff had expected the station to be as crowded as the command module of Explorer I, even considering its larger size. He saw no one as he drifted slowly through the various compartments.
Alexei Orlov had just crossed the halfway point of his year-long habitation, and wouldn’t be joined by a fellow cosmonaut for another three months. Elizabeth and May were the only two U.S. astronauts on the station. The next NASA launch would bring a third, along with a replacement for Elizabeth.
Accompanying the two U.S. astronauts on the same launch would be two from Japan. The country was eager to make use of the Japanese lab, which had sat vacant for nearly a year after the quick collapse and slow restructuring of their space program.
Attached to one side of Tranquility module was the Cupola. Ming floated there, her head inside the multifaceted dome created by its seven large windows. Her neck-length black hair wavered around her head. She lifted a DSLR camera to her eye and snapped a picture of the luminous Earth below.
Jeff cleared his throat politely.
“Oh, hi Jeff,” she said with a smile. “Want to have a look?”
She pushed to the side as he floated over.
“Taking some pictures for your daughter?” he asked.
“She doesn’t believe me that the space station is so high up,” Ming said. “She imagines it as a big airplane no higher than the clouds. She’s too stubborn for a four-year-old. I thought this would be the best way to show her.”
Jeff stuck his head up into the dome of the Cupola. Sure enough, more than half of the panoramic view of Earth was blocked by the nose-end of Explorer I.
“Hmm,” said Jeff, looking through the windows. “Gabriel was right. That’s a horrible place to park a spaceship.”
“Still makes for a pretty good picture. Look,” she said, pointing. “We’re about to pass over Australia.”
The largest of the seven windows was the one in Cupola’s center, like a large eye observing everything beneath the station. Jeff watched the Earth spin below him, a glowing sphere etched with the patterns of oceans and continents. Australia appeared first as a beige line on the horizon, partially obscured by a great cloudy sheet of stratocumulus.
The tall peaks of the Flinders Ranges came into view to the south as the station flew over. The mountains gave way to the central continent – a vast landscape of reds and browns. A minute later, Australia was blocked behind Explorer I and Jeff was looking down on the dark blue of the Indian Ocean.
“Almost m
akes you sad to leave, right?” Ming asked.
“Well,” said Jeff, grinning. “Almost.”
They floated in silence, watching the Earth spin, until Ming said, “Something Gabriel mentioned on the way here got me thinking. According to him, he tried for years to get into space.”
“Some people try their entire adult lives,” Jeff said. “I have friends back home that apply to NASA’s astronaut program every chance they get. They’re rejected every time, and these are people whose experience puts mine to shame.”
“Ever wonder about that?” she asked casually. “All four of us went through training with so many other qualified applicants. You and I weren’t the only ones with engineering experience. Gabe wasn’t the only agronomist.”
“But we were the best. And I’m pretty sure you’re here because you’re an engineer and a pilot. Leaving you back home would have been like benching a star baseball player during the World Series.”
“To be honest, I would rather have your job.”
“Well, I’d like to be a pilot, so there you go.”
She smiled. “Too much pressure.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you stressed,” Jeff said. “Not even during training.”
“Training wasn’t real,” she said. “This is.”
Jeff glanced at his watch. “We should check in with Riley,” he said. “Departure window’s closing in an hour.”
“I’m going to take a few more pictures,” said Ming. “Pick me up on your way back?”
“Sure thing,” Jeff said as he pushed off toward the hatch. “Get some good ones.”
“Ha! That’s asking a lot.”
The camera shutter clicked rapidly as Jeff left Tranquility module and made his way to the Russian lab.
Jeff coasted through the hatch into Nauka module. Alexei and Riley floated in the middle of the dimly-lit cylindrical compartment, engaged in conversation.
The machinery here was a little older than in the U.S. compartments closer to where Explorer had docked. Jeff remembered hearing that the Russian labs felt more lived-in than the rest of the station, mostly because they were the only country to have a continuous on-board presence. It wasn’t unusual for a cosmonaut to be on the ISS for weeks at a time without company.
