Mission One

by Samuel Best

  North Star, thought Noah. How vain.

  “We can’t raise anyone on comms. I’m going to play a hunch and say you haven’t heard from them in a while.”

  Whitaker hesitated, then said, “We lost all audio and video contact with the crew as soon as they arrived at Titan. But there could be any number of reasons for radio silence, not the least of which is that they saw you coming.” He looked away, searching for answers. Noah thought he noticed a hint of vulnerability and decided to act on it.

  “North Star’s hatch is open,” he said.

  Whitaker looked sharply into the camera. “You’re lying.”

  “Why would I?”

  Whitaker smiled without humor. “Why do any of us do what we do, Noah?”

  “On behalf of Diamond Aerospace, I’m willing to offer any and all assistance to North Star and her crew.”

  “I bet you are. I got there first, Bell. The spoils are mine.”

  Noah smiled tightly, fighting to keep his jealous anger from boiling to the surface. “Unless you have an orbital station in the hold of your ship, along with the crew to build it, I beg to differ.”

  “Bah,” said Whitaker, waving a dismissive hand toward the camera and turning away from the screen. He looked out his window at the glimmering Chicago skyline. Noah thought he would have to press the matter further, but Whitaker said, almost too quietly to hear, “My nephew is on North Star.”

  Noah scooted forward, gripping the edge of his desk, sensing victory just around the corner. Pull the line too soon, he imagined his deceased father instructing, and the hook won’t pierce deep enough to catch the fish.

  “If I don’t agree to your generous assistance, then what?” asked Whitaker. “You leave my crew to rot?”

  Noah spread his hands in a casual shrug, expecting at any moment for the other man to call his bluff. Riley and Silva were already heading over to the other ship, and would do what they could for the other crew, regardless of how the conversation with Whitaker concluded. “We’re stretched for time as it is, Jim. You understand.”

  The older man stewed in his own thoughts, trying in vain to uncover a different path. Finally, he growled, “What do you want?”

  And the hook is sunk, Noah thought. Apparently, Whitaker thought him vicious enough to follow through on his threat not to investigate.

  “Don’t interfere with our operation,” Noah said.

  “And?”

  “Tell me how you got the plans to build North Star.”

  Whitaker tugged at his collar, as if it had suddenly tightened around his neck. “I’ll send over the designs right now, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “It would.”

  Whitaker typed hastily at his embedded desktop keyboard, then pointedly tapped the transmit key.

  “You should have it.”

  Noah opened his cloud server and saw the file waiting for him. He opened it and began skimming through the pages. At first glance, the documentation was identical to Explorer’s.

  “But how did you get these in the first place?” he asked.

  “Michael Cochran sold them to us.”

  Maybe that’s what ultimately landed him in a dumpster, Noah thought.

  He continued scanning the documentation, then stopped abruptly when he came across a schematic for the antimatter drive. “You changed the engine configuration. Why?”

  Whitaker sighed. “Cochran’s plans came with a special warning regarding the antimatter drive. My engineers convinced me to listen.”

  “Our engine works perfectly.”

  “Not if it was built from the plans I bought off Cochran.”

  Noah thought about the five failed probes Diamond Aerospace launched toward Titan, and the improvements to them that were made after each failure. The sixth probe snapped the picture of the artifact. “We fixed any design flaws before Explorer left the ground.”

  Whitaker laughed. “No, you didn’t. I saw your engine firsthand. It’s a blind miracle the ship made it to Titan in one piece.”

  “The only way you could have seen the engine was if you went to the ISS yourself.”

  “Or had someone who was already on the station take a few simple photos. The same someone who helped slap the antimatter drive together while waiting for your crew to arrive.”

  Alexei, thought Noah. Then another loose cog in his brain clicked into place.

  “You partnered with Russia.”

  Whitaker nodded. “When the Russian Space Administration lost your company’s contract to the Chinese, they went looking elsewhere.”

  “And found MarsCorp. That’s why you didn’t tell anyone about the artifact. Russia isn’t supposed to launch anything other than low orbit satellites and capsules to the ISS.”

  “Yes, their new head of state is a real pain in the ass.”

  “Imagine what would happen to your company if someone found out you were violating a national mandate.”

  “I know, I know!” Whitaker said, agitated. Then he sighed. “Everyone’s been happy with the status quo, until now.”

  “You stole my designs, Jim. You didn’t innovate. You never would have made it so far on your own. Doesn’t that bother you in the slightest?”

  Whitaker smiled knowingly. “It doesn’t matter how you get there, Noah, only that you get there first. I thought you would have learned that by now.”

  Kate joined the other department heads in the conference room at Noah’s request. A nervous energy permeated the room as she sat in one of the high-backed chairs that ringed the circular table. Four department heads occupied chairs around the table, including Kate. The aging flight surgeon, Walt, looked to be the most nervous of all. His wispy white hair stuck out as if he’d jammed his finger into a light socket. One of his legs bounced vigorously, causing his whole chair to shake.

  Juan from Flight Operations nodded in her direction. He wiped sweat from his brow and blinked hard, as if a bright light were shining into his eyes.

  Allison Jones sat next to him, her short gray hair tucked neatly behind her ears, looking just as bewildered. Like Walt, she was an industry holdover from the '20s, back when NASA was still gearing up for the first manned mission to Mars. She ran System Logistics and worked closely with Juan’s team to certify that when a crew member flipped a switch, the ship returned the desired response. If Explorer I were a living organism, then Allison and her team were the doctors tasked with ensuring the disparate parts of the spacecraft functioned in tandem with each other.

  Noah himself was not there yet, but Frank stood at the back of the room, leaning against the dark wood-paneled wall, staring out through the glass at the display wall. The video feed currently showed Riley and Silva in the spherical airlock, donning their bright orange Constellation Suits for the trip over to the MarsCorp vessel.

  Kate was about to excuse herself when Noah pushed open the conference room door and strolled in waving a stack of papers.

  “The North Star,” he said bitterly. He dropped the stack of papers on the table with a dull thud. “The central point in the sky around which all other objects rotate. That’s what they named their ship.”

  “Who, MarsCorp?” Kate asked, leaning forward to look at the top sheet of the stack. It was an official press release from the other company, outlining the details of the North Star’s mission to Titan. According to a stamped redaction over the primary content, the press release had never been made public.

  “There are ship schematics in there, too,” Noah said. “It confirms that their ship is nearly identical to Explorer in every way.”

  “Where did you get those?” Kate asked.

  Noah shrugged off her question and turned to look out at the display wall, waiting for his assembled brain trust to provide some answers.

  Lucius Howell from Propulsion pulled the stack over and began thumbing through the pages with precise movements. His dark, sharp eyes darted over the words, scanning them like a machine reader. Lucius had designed engines for Northrop Grumman stra
ight out of college before moving over to the private sector in his early thirties. His calculated pedantry made him somewhat of a social pariah, but Kate would rather have a brilliant outcast on her team than a popular doofus. In addition, she would vote him least likely to lose his cool in an emergency.

  He adjusted his wireframe glasses and frowned deeply after pausing halfway through the stack.

  “It’s our engine,” he said, “right down to the curvature of the wash shield.”

  Noah nodded, as if he already knew. Kate saw him cast a quick, icy glance at Frank. Something passed silently between the two of them, and Frank looked away.

  Lucius held up a cautionary finger. “Except,” he added, “They added extra shielding around the fuel ignition chamber and–” He paused and raised an eyebrow as he read farther down the page. “And this is interesting. The antimatter doesn’t interact with liquid fuel until it’s almost flushed out the back of the ship.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Juan.

  “To put it simply,” Lucius said, “in Explorer, antimatter reacts with liquid fuel in the ignition chamber and swirls it around as the magnetic coils speed it up even faster. MarsCorp removed the magnetic coils. The engine might burn more fuel, but it takes less time for a reaction to occur.”

  “How does that help them?” Walt asked. He looked between Lucius and Noah, struggling to follow the conversation.

  “The fuel ignition chamber is built to contain an explosion,” Lucius replied. “The less time energy from an explosion resides in your ship, the greater chance you have of not blowing up.”

  “We tried removing the magnetic coils,” Frank said, finally joining in. “In the simulations, we never had enough fuel to get home. And I would guess that MarsCorp was more concerned with getting there before us. They didn’t care much about getting back in a hurry.”

  “So they copied our ship design,” Kate said. “I don’t see how that has any impact on our mission.”

  “Their presence might push back the timeline,” Frank said. “If Explorer lingers too long, the crew will miss their return window. Months of delay could turn into years.”

  “We no longer have a departure window,” Kate countered. “It doesn’t matter that we got there early if we don’t have an antimatter drive to get us back. The problem now is their supplies. With an extended return journey, they’re going to run out of food before they get home. Look, you want to send Riley and Silva over to the other ship. Fine. All they have to do is give it a cursory glance and offer medical assistance if anyone needs it. Jeff will repair the fuel line sensor and the broken pump. Great. After that, they stick to the mission parameters, which state they begin construction of the orbital station.”

  “What if the other crew is stranded out there?” asked Allison. “Maybe they ran out of fuel, too.”

  “We didn’t run out of fuel,” Juan corrected. “There’s enough for one more major burn, plus a little extra.”

  “Let’s take things one step at a time,” Frank said.

  “We can’t ignore the artifact,” Noah said quietly. Kate thought he was almost pleading for someone to convince him he was right. “It’s a monumental discovery, not just for the company, but for the entire world.”

  “That depends on its function,” Lucius said, pushing up his glasses. He glanced around the table. He had everyone’s strict attention as he continued. “Either it’s decorative, which I doubt, or it serves a very specific purpose.”

  Kate hesitated, not sure she wanted to hear the answer to her next question. “How do we learn its purpose?”

  “The crew of North Star probably figured it out,” said Lucius, “but they’re not exactly answering our calls, are they?”

  After seeing Riley and Gabriel safely to the airlock, Jeff coasted down the central pillar of the centrifuge, tapping ladder rungs to stay on track, until he reached the aft-most section. He descended the wall ladder at the back and began the process of unbuckling his bright orange Mark IV suit from its shallow compartment in the floor. Ming’s suit was in the cutout next to his, a few centimeters shorter and slightly thinner. Several meters away in the same section of the centrifuge, a rat’s nest of open straps and buckles represented the spots usually occupied by the other two suits.

  In moments like those, when Jeff had to wrestle with a hundred-pound spacesuit, he was especially thankful for the slightly reduced gravity in the centrifuge.

  After he released the last buckle, he opened a small floor panel and pressed a button inside. A telescoping arm in the floor extended upward, hoisting the suit by a quadruple-stitched nylon loop on the back of its neck. The suit rose slowly, as if an invisible occupant were rising to his feet.

  While it rose slowly, Jeff opened a nearby wall cabinet, grabbing a blue pair of long thermal underwear and a black unitard. He peeled off his clothes and pulled on the underwear, making sure he didn’t have them inside-out. If he did, the small silver strip over his left hip wouldn’t be able to interface with his suit through the unitard, and he wouldn’t reap the benefits of its auto-cooling system. Things got hot when one layered up for a spacewalk. He remembered scoffing at auto-cooling underwear during mission training, then quickly changed his tune after spending only an hour in one of Diamond Aerospace’s deep training pools without them, at his instructor’s insistence. He hadn’t quite passed out from heat exhaustion after they opened his suit following the dive, but he promised himself never to turn down any piece of clothing the company told him to wear, no matter how exotic.

  He wiggled into his unitard, taking care that the wicking fabric didn’t bunch up in any of his crevices, and pulled the hood up over his head, leaving only his face uncovered.

  The telescoping arm stopped when the open ankles of the Constellation Suit pants barely brushed the floor.

  Ming’s voice came over the intercom: “You doing okay, Jeff?”

  “Fine,” he said, speaking to the room. One of the embedded microphone arrays in the central pillar would pick up the sound. He plucked the fabric of the unitard. “Just getting ready for the ballet.”

  “Ah yes, a performance of ‘The Ugly Duckling’. It’s a classic.”

  Jeff grinned as he began the complex unzipping procedure to open the outer layer of his suit. “Maybe you want to do this instead.”

  “What do I know about fuel line sensors?” she replied.

  “Apparently not as much as old ballets.”

  “You need some help?”

  He unzipped the last zipper and peeled open the outer layer of the suit. “I can manage until you meet me at the airlock. Thanks, though. How’s it looking with the other two?”

  “Looking good. They’re about halfway to the other ship.”

  “Taking their sweet time, I guess,” Jeff said.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  The telescoping arm acted as a stabilizer while Jeff stepped first into one pant leg of the Mark IV, then the other, tugging up until his unitard-covered feet poked out. He leaned back to slip his arms into the sleeves and the suit enveloped his body, trying to deflate to its storage configuration. Jeff worked the various zippers, clasps, and seals blindly, having memorized the procedure during countless training exercises. The gloved fingertips of the unitard contained small tactile sensors which transferred dull electrical current to the skin of the wearer, simulating tactile pressure. It wasn’t entirely necessary while only wearing the unitard, but it helped to feel what he was doing after putting on the bulkier Constellation Suit gloves.

  After he was as fully dressed as he could get on his own, Jeff toed the button in the floor. The telescoping arm lowered a few centimeters and stopped just long enough so he could shrug the nylon loop at the back of his neck off the hook.

  There would be no jumping up to the central pillar for easy coasting through the crew module. With the extra seventy-five pounds of weight on his shoulders, the best Jeff could manage was a lumbering stroll toward the front of the ship.

  He began to swe
at as he climbed the ladder at the front of the module. The internal cooling system wouldn’t kick in until the suit was a closed loop. For that, he needed gloves, boots, helmet, and pack. With each successive rung, gravity lessened. Finally, blessedly, he passed into zero gravity and felt the weight of the suit slip away like an iron-filled blanket being lifted.

  Ming waited for him by the airlock door as he drifted into the T-junction, sitting motionless in midair with her legs folded meditation-style, her dark hair wavering slowly around her head.

  “Oh, sure,” Jeff said. “Show up for the easy part.”

  “Careful,” she warned. “I don’t have to tighten your boots all the way if I don’t want to.”

  Ming keyed a set of numbers into a wall panel. After a loud solenoid clunk, the inner airlock door slowly opened.

  Jeff followed her into the spherical airlock, being careful not to bump the sides of the hatch with his suit. The room was washed out with bright white light coming from a single hole in the ceiling. To Jeff, it looked more like a sterile clean room one would find in a medical research facility than a ship’s pressurization chamber.

  The remaining suit components were kept in a cabinet within the airlock. Ming opened it and put on Jeff’s boots and gloves, sliding the locking rings into place until they sealed with loud, satisfying clicks. The maneuvering and support system pack weighed as much as the suit in full gravity. In zero-g, Ming was able to help Jeff shrug into its straps without a grunt of effort. She hooked the pack up to the interface panel on the back of his suit.

  “Give it a whirl,” she said.

  Jeff checked the data pad on his forearm, pressed a button to start the initial test. Moments later, he got a green light.

  “Looks good,” he said.

  She handed him his Snoopy cap. “Ready for your helmet?”

  “You trying to get rid of me?” he asked, strapping on the Communications Carrier Assembly.

  “Any way I can.”

  “I’m ready.”

  She lowered the protective pressure helmet over his head until the lock at the bottom slipped into the grooved ring around the neck of his suit. With a slight twist, the gold-visored helmet locked into place. Ming slid another lock over the neck seal, closing the system. Jeff felt a cool hiss of air as the pack activated. A red Heads-Up-Display bordering the edges of his face shield told him he was now breathing the suit’s air, and had four hours remaining. His tongue tingled for a moment, just as it always did during training after the first few breaths of metallic atmosphere.