On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  Bill also told him about how his wife Rebecca was going through an experimental trial procedure that Childers had managed to arrange. Apparently, they were hoping to use some magic stem cell matrix mixture, bone grafts, titanium, and 3D-printed muscle and tendon tissue to rebuild the hand she had lost in the explosion. Paul was mostly fascinated by the procedure details and was typing up a response to Bill about how amazing that was.

  “How are you?” Hui asked as she entered the five person sized capsule.

  Paul startled. He didn’t notice that Hui was in the room until she spoke. It was easy to get around unheard in the spacecraft since there were no floors to walk on and the loud air circulation system created a not-so-subtle white noise background sort of like a washing machine running in the distance. And being preoccupied with Rebecca’s amazing medical procedure had his mind elsewhere. He settled himself and thought for a brief second that he was glad he hadn’t screamed like a little girl. He hit the command chair unlock and spun around to face her.

  “Not too bad, once I recover from being scared out of my wits. I might need to change my shorts though. It might not hurt to wear a cowbell from now on, either.”

  “Cowbell?” Hui paused not quite sure she understood the reference for a moment but then Paul could see a slight nod of her head and a smile as she finally got it. “Very funny. Sorry about that.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll have to get used to everyone out here being on silent. On second thought, the cowbells might not be a bad idea.” He paused with a half-hearted chuckle, then continued, “I was just catching up on things back home. Nothing to speak of.”

  “I see,” Hui replied and made her way to a chair and then strapped herself into it. “I’m not bothering you, am I? If you’d prefer to be alone I can—”

  “No, no. Come in. Have a seat.” Paul had been sitting in the capsule alone for the past hour, he felt he could use a real person to talk to for a bit. “How about you? Any great news from home?”

  “Not really. My youngest sister’s daughter just had a baby girl. I am now a great aunt, as you Americans would say.”

  “And you will be a great one I’m sure! Congratulations,” Paul said. “Do you have a picture?”

  “Not yet.” Hui looked around at the capsule and then out into space. Paul could tell she noticed the small red star almost abeam of what would be the ship’s three-nine line if it had wings or were a clock.

  “Mars,” Paul noted. “I can’t look over there and not think about Melanie not being out here with us. I feel very bad about that.”

  “Yes, both Doctors Ledford and Hahn should be here with us or should be going there instead of us doing this,” Hui Tian agreed. “It would be fun to go there some day.”

  “I was thinking that earlier when I first saw it this morning. Heck, I’ve pretty much thought about it every day as it seems to be right there taunting us. How different it would be if we were on our way to Mars instead.”

  “Very different and less, what is the right word…”

  “Somber? Morbid? Scary?” Paul wasn’t sure what the right word was either.

  “No, not those. But, something along those lines perhaps. Serious maybe?” Hui shrugged.

  “Serious? Nah, going to Mars would be serious, but in a different way. I’m not sure what the word is. But I can’t help but think about how this ship was supposed to be carrying the first human mission to Mars and now we’re out here, running on a skeleton crew, trying to deflect an asteroid that should never have been moved in the first place.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that. I thought you were in favor of mining asteroids. Didn’t you tell me that we would have to be mining asteroids in order to help save the planet?”

  “Well, yes, I did say that. And I believe that. I just don’t think we were ready to start altering the orbits of flying mountains unless we have a backup system in hand to stop things like this from happening. All things considered, I’d rather be going to Mars.” Paul pointed at the red dot in the sky to their right.

  “You know I agree with you. But whether we like it or not, we have a pretty important job to do out here. And, don’t forget, neither of us would have been going to Mars. I was still training for the next Chinese mission back to the Moon and you were planning on taking tourists to that lunar hotel of yours. So, neither of us would be going this deep into space doing something this important.”

  “Important. You used it twice. Maybe that is the word?” Paul wasn’t sure there was a perfect word to describe their mission. One thing he did agree with was that they were supposed to be doing other things at the moment and not on such a deep space mission. “Well, you know what? I feel guilty about our important mission.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Guilty. I feel guilty because I like being out here. I like the fact that we were the ones chosen. I like the fact that we have a job to do that is taking us into deep space to someplace no human being has ever been before. I often find myself asking, ‘why me?’ Why am I the one lucky enough to go to space? To the Moon? And now to an asteroid? Why not someone else? Certainly Dr. Ledford or Reudiger would have been better suited or more qualified to be here than me. I was lucky, or had the right connections, I don’t know what, but I do feel guilty about it.”

  “I’ve asked myself the same question, but I don’t feel guilty about it. I worked hard to get here. In China, there are more qualified candidates for the astronaut corps than there are engineers in the United States. With a population over one billion, the competition is tough, but I did it. I know I am qualified to be here and I don’t feel one bit of guilt over it.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have to feel the guilt of not being there for Carolyn, uh, some family member who needs you there. She’s lying in a hospital bed, unconscious, and I should be there.” Paul choked back the emotions welling up and threating to overcome him as best he could. He turned as a yellow appointment icon popped up on his screen. He tapped the snooze button closing it.

  “Doing what? I mean, you are not a medical doctor. You are an engineer and a spacecraft pilot.”

  “I don’t know, I mean, well, I should be at the hospital, maybe? Holding her hand. Talking to her. Maybe that would help her come out of the coma faster.”

  “Do you really believe she would rather you sit by her bedside and mope than fly into deep space on a mission to save millions of lives, perhaps even hers? Really?” Hui’s expression was one of incredulity.

  “Yes? I mean, I don’t know. She’s much more pragmatic than me, so probably no, not really. She would probably be mad at me were she to wake up with me by her side and then learn I turned down this mission.” Paul seemed to hear those words for the first time and truly understand them. Carolyn would be mad at him if he had not done everything in his power to save the world, or at least the lives that were in danger.

  “So stop feeling guilty. Take pride in what we’re here to accomplish. Know that your loved one will understand. I wish I could have been there to see my grandniece, but I’m also very glad to be here. You should be guilt free. I know I am. I will see my niece when I get home and will give her a hug as you will your wife.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “What? It’s loud, I can barely hear you.” Paul’s mind was still wrapped deep into the dream he was having. He and his wife were holding hands watching others in their group play in the waterfall. The Jamaican Dunn River rushed off the large rocks all around them creating a beautiful spectacle and a very loud rushing sound. He could feel the spray on his body and enjoyed the warm heat of the Jamaican sun as it filtered through the greenery all around the river.

  After only a couple days following their wedding, the Dunn River Falls Excursion was an ideal honeymoon activity. Paul knew he’d been there a couple years ago with his wife, but it seemed like he was there all over again. The dream was quite lucid. He turned so that his back was to the falls. His wife’s hair eclipsed the sun behind her leaving faint rays of gold sunlight filtering
through. Paul smiled, thinking how much like a halo it looked and how angelic his wife appeared to him. In his eyes she was perfect.

  “Paul, dear?” Carolyn looked into his eyes. The rushing of the falls was very noticeable and the noise of one of the tourists screaming behind him was distracting. The movement of her hair with the slight moist breeze killed the halo effect behind her head.

  “What is it?” he asked. She seemed more distraught than he recalled. He reached out to take her hand in his.

  “Paul. Get up,” she told him. The sound of the waterfall was more than just rushing water noise. It almost sounded like the squeal of a balloon deflating when its neck is being pinched tight. And the scream was periodic, not like a person screaming at all. “Paul!”

  “What!” Paul startled so abruptly that his floating right arm jerked and he backhanded himself in the face. He quickly gained his composure while rubbing at the red spot on his forehead with his left hand. He then realized that an air pressure alarm was sounding, along with several other secondary alerts. He shook his head and began unzipping and unfastening himself from his bag.

  Paul turned to the panel in his sleep cube and tapped at the screen of his handheld tablet that was Velcroed to the wall. There was a drop in cabin pressure. The leak was so large that it was causing a fluting action making the noise that rang through the crew area in the central cylinder. The noise was damned near earsplitting.

  “Paul! Are you awake?” Rykov’s voice shouted through the zippered door of his rigidized cube. “We have an emergency situation.”

  “Yes, I’m on my way. Do you know what is going on?”

  “Only that there is a severe loss of pressure in the cabin nearest the command capsule,” Rykov explained.

  “Is everybody okay?” Paul unzipped his door and forced himself through it. Rykov and Hui Tian were both exiting there cubes respectively. He pulled up the ship schematic on his pad. There were several red dots blinking on the command capsule’s port side. “The command capsule integrity is lost. Hui, close the hatch to it and start up the secondary command center in engineering. I’ll shut down the air handling system to that section of the ship. Mikhail, suit up and grab the patch kit. I’m right behind you.”

  “I’m on it, comrade.” Mikhail turned and kicked off the wall pushing himself aftward toward the airlock.

  “I’ve got the hatch,” Hui noted.

  Paul filtered through the icons on his pad until he found the air handling system. He shut down the vents, both intakes and outtakes, in the command capsule. The he backed out of that menu up a couple levels to the alert systems menu. He shut off the klaxon noise. He realized he felt fairly lightheaded so he then checked the cabin pressure.

  “Jesus, we’re already at six pounds per square inch!” he said. “Less than half an atmosphere.”

  The hatch closed with a kathunk as Hui pulled it to. She dogged the door down, which attenuated the screeching fluting sound of the leaking air. Then Paul watched Hui as she kicked from the wall and then zipped past him toward the aft of the ship. He could feel vibrations from the motors in the intake and outtake vents just forward of them in the command cylinder cycled closed. The pressure in the crew cabin began to rise slowly.

  “Well, that’s good. Means there are no leaks in here, but if we’re going EVA we need to pull the pressure down to five psi anyway. We just weren’t supposed to do it so quickly,” he said to himself as he adjusted the cabin pressure settings. He put in the final EVA pressure goal and the computer calculated the safe rate of drop that could be implemented. It would be an hour or more before they should go outside. Paul checked his heart rate and hoped that they weren’t all going to get a bad case of the bends based on their rapid decompression. The computer would cycle the pressure back up and then down at the most appropriate rate with hopes of avoiding that.

  “Hui, as soon as the secondary system is up we need to send a communication to Earth,” Paul ordered. “And let’s get our vitals sensors taped on. We decompressed too quickly.”

  * * *

  “We may be in deep space but we were hit by debris,” Hui Tian told them as she brought up a radar image on the main screen in Engineering, which was for the moment acting as the bridge. The three astronauts were each in spacesuits with their helmets off but nearby. Until the leak was fixed and they knew what was going on, Paul had ordered it just to be safe.

  “Holy shit!” Paul didn’t like what he saw. The radar image showed a debris cloud as big as Texas that they had passed through. They were already more than ten thousand kilometers from it, and they had been lucky. It looked like there were several chunks in the cloud that were as big as automobiles. There was no way to know if they were solid or gravel piles but the relative velocity between the Tamaroa and the cloud was on the order of ten kilometers per second. It could have been devastating. Fortunately for them, the density of the cloud was very low, making the odds of a hit much lower than was intuitive from looking at the radar image. The devil was in the detailed resolution and the radar wasn’t that accurate at the distance between the ship and where the debris cloud currently was.

  “Is the radar at max power?” Rykov asked.

  “Uh, not sure,” Hui Tian tapped the screen and adjusted a slidebar control. “It is now. I assume power is not a problem?”

  “Not at all, comrade. The reactor supplies us all the power we need and then some.” Rykov sort of smiled.

  “Sweep the beam across our path up front and leave it on that sweep. I don’t care about what we have behind us.” Paul pulled himself closer to the screen and then realized he’d passed the “too far” point. He extended his arms until the screen came back into focus. “Damn, gonna have to get reading glasses before long,” he said under his breath.

  “For now it is clear between us and Sutter’s Mill,” Hui replied. She pointed at the blue and red trajectory lines of the Tamaroa and the asteroid respectively.

  “Can you back up the trajectory of the debris field based on the measurements we have?” Paul asked. He had a hunch that he hoped wasn’t correct.

  “Yes, hold on a minute.” Hui continued tapping away at the touchscreen for another moment. It was a good time to turn to Rykov and work out their repair plan.

  “Cabin pressure is just under five point seven psi,” Paul started. “Mikhail, once we know we are clear from further debris for sure we’ll go ahead and start chasing down the damage outside.”

  “Ready when you are, Paul,” he replied.

  “Trajectory extrapolation complete,” Hui interrupted. “Not sure how but it looks like the cloud came from Sutter’s Mill.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, does it?” Rykov asked. He rubbed at the beard starting in on his chin. “Why would some of the asteroid be moving faster than the rest?”

  “It was spinning.” Paul pulled himself up close enough to tap at the screen. “When they despun the thing I’ll bet you a dime to a donut that this debris field broke off and was slingshot forward converting the angular momentum of the spinning asteroid into acceleration. I’d love to have the despin data from the mining company.”

  “Makes sense,” Rykov nodded. “Where is it headed now?”

  “To Earth,” Hui zoomed out on the screen showing the red line intercepting with Earth in a couple of months. “Eighty-eight point three seven percent likelihood of impacts.”

  “We need to warn them and we need to fix the command capsule.” Paul pulled his helmet from its tethered location on the wall by him and pulled it over his head. The visor still up, he turned to his Russian engineer. “You ready?”

  “Ready when you are, comrade!” Rykov said playing up his accent as he so often did with them.

  “Hui, hold down the fort. See if you can get a warning message back to Earth as well.”

  “Roger that, Paul. We were lucky. It looks like the long range antenna is still lined up,” she said.

  “Yes, I’d say we were lucky we didn’t hit one of those larger chunks. Goo
d thing for us that space is big,” Paul added. The other two just nodded in agreement.

  CHAPTER 21

  A month later, the team was in the command capsule looking out the windows and at the many touchscreens that covered its interior surfaces. Paul Gesling was strapped into his command chair. He preferred it to floating around. It made him feel more in control of himself and like he was actually flying. He had noted over the months of flight time that Hui preferred to be tethered in as well, but Rykov almost never strapped in. The Russian had spent several months on the International Space Station and Paul just assumed that he’d gotten used to not being strapped in on the station. That triggered him to make a mental note if Gary ever decided to do an orbiting hotel. Some people might prefer to be strapped in and others might not.

  Sutter’s Mill didn’t look the way Gesling had expected. Rather than the odd-shaped potato or roughly spherical ball that so many asteroids seemed to resemble, it looked more like a skipping rock, the kind he used to select for skimming across the water when he was a boy. Were he a giant and had a big pond at which to throw the thing, he was sure he could get five or even six skips out of it. But then he thought that it reminded him more of a cookie than a skipping rock.

  The large two kilometer in diameter and half kilometer thick cookie-shaped asteroid wasn’t randomly tumbling either, as he’d expected. The initial maneuvers performed by the Asteroid Ores’ tether system had taken any residual rotation out of the rock. It almost looked flat enough to be used as a space-based aircraft carrier. He, Mikhail and Hui were crowded around the viewport looking at the asteroid as they progressively got closer, slowing their relative motion with respect to the rock, so that they would soon be stationary. Stationary in respect to the asteroid, which was careening madly towards Earth at about seventeen kilometers per second.