On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  “And the harpoon!” exclaimed Hui, now looking energized for the first time since the conversation began.

  “Damn, I forgot about that. We have another harpoon and cable. Between that, whatever-the-hell else you come up with and the outcropping we might be able to stay in one place long enough to make this work,” Gesling almost cheered.

  “I’ll check out the harpoon and make sure it’s still usable while you get started making your calculations,” Hui turned toward the harpoon controls.

  “I’ll look at the schematics of the Tamaroa and see where the best places to tie off to might be,” Rykov said.

  * * *

  Bill Stetson and his wife were looking at their Houston home and wondering if it would be there after the impact. Stetson was all too familiar with Houston’s geography and though it was technically several miles from the Gulf of Mexico, it wasn’t far from the bay that connected the city to it. Any major rise in seawater would quickly move up the bay and flood the city. They should know, several homes on their street were flooded when Hurricane Ike hit back in 2008 and homes one street over flooded from some near-miss storms since then. They found that out when they were forced to buy flood insurance for their current home.

  “Rebecca, the likelihood of the Gulf of Mexico being hit isn’t big, but it isn’t zero. The fact is, they don’t know exactly where Sutter’s Mill will strike, if it strikes at all. I’m more worried about what will come if there is a hit—anywhere. I’ve been with Gary in some of the meetings with the disaster preparedness panels in Washington and it doesn’t look good. Even if the asteroid misses the USA entirely, there will be a worldwide depression. We’re all so interconnected now that any major disruption to global trade will cause extreme shortages of the stuff we need to function as a society. We would be able to keep the essentials working—water, power, and probably food, though the selection at the grocery store will become extremely limited until international commerce gets going again. But things will be fragile. With our phones, medicines, car parts and replacement parts for the infrastructure made of parts from all over the globe, there will be shortages.”

  “At least we’ll be able to eat,” she said.

  “Yes, but that might become a problem as well. Depending upon where the rock hits, it might put so much ash and debris into the atmosphere that it will block sunlight and cause the planet to cool.”

  “Like the Maunder Minimum?”

  “The what?”

  “When I was studying agronomy at Sam Houston, one of the professors went on and on about ‘the years without a summer’ back in the late seventeenth century. If I recall correctly, there were a few years without very many sunspots, which reduced the amount of heat and light reaching the Earth. This caused the climate to cool and produced a few decades of very short summers—short seasons for growing crops—and led to famine in much of Europe and elsewhere.”

  “I think that would be a good parallel. You’ve heard about people wanting to artificially pump sulfates and other particulates into the upper atmosphere to combat global warming? Well, our meteorite friend here might just do it for us. I’ll have to look up this Maunder Minimum thing tonight. It sounds interesting. Heck, the only thing interesting from that period I recall is from my music appreciation elective I had to take as senior. That era was called the Baroque music era and all the music was weird and out of rhythm if you ask me. Maybe they were all depressed because the dang winters were so long.”

  “Well, if that happens, there will be a lot of hungry people. The world is a lot farther away from its food sources now than in the seventeenth century. And there are a lot more of us. Combine that with a depression and the likely end of global trade, at least on any sort of large scale, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster even if the country isn’t touched by the asteroid.”

  “Is that why Gary is taking all his employees in to the Kentucky and Nevada facilities? Is he stockpiling food?”

  “Yeah, that and a lot of other things. I’ll say this for Gary, he cares about his employees and their families. He’s filthy rich and he’s sparing no expense to get prepared for the worst. He’s got a huge horse farm just outside of Lexington that he’s turning into a massive shelter and another is being built in Nevada. At both he’s stockpiling food, medical supplies and…guns.”

  “I’m glad to hear that he’s doing something. If what you describe happens, then it could get pretty rough around here.”

  “That’s why I don’t want to be near any big cities, including Houston, when the rock gets close. Hopefully the Russian nuke will do the job. But, if not, then I will feel a lot better being near people I know and trust. And Gary’s doctor just in case we need one.” Bill didn’t say anything but Becca’s new hand was still healing in a bizarre-looking halo cast that stretched from her wrist to the tips of her fingers. It would take a real doctor to remove the pins and screws when the time came.

  “Do you know yet where we’ll be?” Becca looked at her hand but didn’t comment on it.

  “Kentucky. It’s Gary’s home and, well, if the worst does happen, Kentucky land is better for growing food than the sand in Nevada. Plus that’s where Carolyn is. I promised Paul that I’d be there for her and I plan to live up to my word.” Childers knew he should tell his wife about Childers’s plan to be in space aboard the Dreamscape when Sutter’s Mill arrived at Earth—especially since Gary asked him to be the ship’s pilot. But he decided to wait.

  “That’s one of the reasons I love you,” Rebecca said, taking her husband’s hand and gripping it with her good hand.

  “I know,” he said, feeling guiltier.

  CHAPTER 29

  I can’t believe I’m doing this, thought Paul.

  Using the remaining functional attitude control thrusters, Gesling was slowly maneuvering the massive Tamaroa along the surface of the asteroid, approaching the fissure which nearly bisected the massive rock into two pieces. He had done the math over and over and over again. He then had both Hui and Mikhail walk through it with him. The calculations showed that if he placed the ship nose down into the fissure and settled her on the “left” side of the fissure, then the thrust from the ship’s engines would be oriented close to the optimal direction for diverting the asteroid. They’d lose about twenty percent of the directional thrust they needed, but it should be enough to have Sutter’s Mill give the Earth a close shave instead of impacting. They’d get a bird’s eye view of Earth as the rock flew past—but they’d be too far down in the hole to see it. If we live, he added.

  The Tamaroa was now hovering just above the fissure. Using nothing but gentle puffs of gas, he reoriented the ship nose downward toward the fissure.

  Hui and Mikhail were now positioned beside him at the control panel. Neither spoke as they hovered in the air to his left and right, watching intently out the main cabin window and peering into the darkness that awaited them.

  Paul turned on the ship’s running lights and directed those on the front to illuminate the hole before them. Allowing them to see only a few more feet into the darkness, the lights were just not bright enough to penetrate further.

  “Here we go,” Paul said as he commanded a series of thrusters along the outer hull of the ship to begin moving the ship downward toward the rock. The movement was so slight that none of the crew could feel the acceleration.

  “Warning, warning, proximity alert!” An audible klaxon warned. Pilots often referred to the warning as the “Bitching Betty.” “Warning, warning, impact imminent.”

  “Shit, Hui, do me a favor and turn Betty off, will ya?” Paul concentrated on what he was doing—flying the very large spacecraft into a very tight place.

  Hui switched off the audible alert, but the altimeter and laser ranging data displayed across the panel in front of them. They could see their progress, however, as the darkness and the fissure moved closer, and closer shadows made visual ranging tricky. Paul made certain to keep at least one eye on the laser ranging data, one eye on the radar
, and one eye on the viewscreen. He had at least four more eyes looking out windows. He was running out of eyes but not things that needed eyes on them.

  A few moments later, the nose of the Tamaroa inched into the fissure. The fissure was wide enough at its opening to allow five ships the size of the Tamaroa to enter. Paul noticed that the radar returns from opposing sides of the ship showed that he was right on the mark; the ship was flying into the middle of the fissure and as far away from the edges as possible—for now.

  Visibility ahead of them was now completely limited by how far the ship’s forward facing lights could illuminate, which was not far. Gesling estimated he could see perhaps twenty-five to thirty meters into the gloom.

  “With us moving at about a half-meter per second, if we see an obstacle ahead of us, there won’t be much time to react. The best I’ll be able to do is move us sideways. It’ll take us a good minute to bring this beast to a standstill.” Gesling spoke to no one in particular, his thoughts vocalized more for himself than his compatriots. He knew what he had to do, but giving himself the reassurance of saying what had to be done was tantamount to the checklists he was used to operating with. Pilots like checklists. At least the good ones do.

  As he spoke, a rock outcropping to his left became visible in their headlights.

  Gesling tapped the touchscreen on the virtual control panel before him and the ship slowly responded by moving its nose slightly rightward. Given the length of the ship and short reaction time available, Gesling had to fire more than the attitude control thrusters in the ship’s nose. He had to fire all the left side thrusters simultaneously so that the ship moved uniformly to the right as it continued to plunge forward and downward. But he couldn’t overcorrect, so only a few seconds after activating the left-side thrusters to move the ship laterally rightward, he had to then fire the right-side thrusters to stop the ship from moving too far to the right and into the far wall. Newton didn’t make his job any easier. He noticed that the width of the gash was now about half what it had been when the ship first entered the fissure. As far as he could tell, when all was said and done, about two-thirds of the ship would remain above the surface of the asteroid.

  “We found a cave on the Moon that reminds me of this,” said Mikhail. “The opening is about fifty kilometers from Korolev Base. We marked it for future exploration. I wonder if anyone has gone down into it yet.”

  “Since all three of us have been on the Moon, we should compare notes sometime,” said Hui. “But I don’t think now is the time.”

  “It’s odd we haven’t done that before now,” said Mikhail.

  “Not now, please. I may make it look like flying this giant toothpick is easy, but it isn’t and your chatter is distracting me.” Paul forced his mind and body to focus on nothing but putting the thread in the needle—the really big thread with a nuclear reactor in it.

  “I am sorry, my friend,” replied Mikhail, looking somewhat embarrassed.

  Gesling hadn’t wanted to silence his friends, knowing that they were talking out of nervousness, but it was beginning to affect his concentration. He noted that the ship was now fifty percent inside the fissure and the gap ahead of the ship had narrowed considerably. It was now less than twice the width of the ship that was entering it.

  “We may not be able to get past that,” he said as his head motioned forward toward the illuminated cavern hole before them. Just becoming visible in the darkness was a large rock covering what looked like at least half the opening that was now thirty meters ahead of them. Gesling hurriedly reoriented the side-mounted thrusts on both the left and right side of the ship so that their exhaust would go forward when they fired. It was his solution to maneuvering the ship without the thruster that had failed and nearly caused them to crash into the asteroid shortly after they first arrived. The forward thruster, which would have been ideal to use for slowing their forward motion, was the one that no longer worked. Once they were turned, Gesling wasted no time in telling the revectored side thrusters to fire and stop their forward motion.

  Slowly, the massive ship decelerated.

  The boulder inched closer as the thrusters fired full throttle to slow the ship.

  Finally, Paul realized he was holding his breath and likely had captured his underwear a foot up his rectal sphincter. He forced himself to relax and then he exhaled, triggering a similar reaction in both his shipmates. He now looked away from the forward window and viewscreen and instead focused on the numbers ahead of his eyes showing the ship’s forward velocity and acceleration. The velocity was falling as the radar counted down the distance to the outcropping. The goal was for the forward velocity of the ship to reach zero before the radar reached the same number. Paul wasn’t quite sure what would happen if the reverse occurred.

  He found out.

  “Brace for impact!” Gesling heard himself shout.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mikhail shouted back as he grabbed one of the handholds on the empty experiment rack up and to the right from where he was floating. Gesling saw that Hui attached herself to one of the straps holding equipment in storage just over her head.

  With the sound like that of a wet rubber ball being rubbed by an annoying two-year-old, the fore end of the habitat began to deform as it was pushed into the rock outcropping that Paul had been trying to avoid hitting. Equipment on the wall rattled, popped free in some cases, and flickered on and off. With tons of mass moving slowly forward behind it, and the thrusters still firing to slow the ship’s overall forward momentum, the inflatable habitat bulged inward.

  The bulging continued to worsen, snapping support struts, splitting plasma displays that until moments ago were showing the exterior of the ship at various points along its long axis, and bowed menacingly toward the crew that was now only a few feet from its closest point.

  Gesling heard Hui scream something in Chinese as she lost her grip on the strap to which she had been clinging and plunged in slow motion toward the bulge. The virtual control panel in front of Gesling that he was using to control the ship began to waver in the air, fading in and out of existence like a ghost. Sparks now flew from the bulging wall of the habitat, commanding his attention just as urgently as Hui’s fall—fire was a danger in any spacecraft and now his was in imminent threat of being engulfed by it.

  From out of the corner of his eye, Gesling saw Mikhail launch himself from the wall, pushing off like an Olympic diver trying to win a gold medal, and hurtling across the open space in the ever-shrinking cabin toward Hui. He reached her just before she would have impacted the bulge and they both “bounced” from the opposite side of the cabin and back away from the front where their home away from home was quickly collapsing.

  Gesling launched himself toward the rightmost experiment rack, the one nearest his location to which a fire extinguisher was mounted. As objects in the habitat began to be knocked loose from their moorings and the screeching sound of the inflatable habitat’s skin rose in pitch to nearly unbearable levels, he one-handedly grabbed the fire extinguisher, spun around to point it at the sparks which were now dangerously close to becoming a continuous stream bound to ignite something inside the now-smaller ship, and anchored his feet against the base of the experiment rack that Mikhail had moments ago been holding onto. With his feet firmly anchored, he squeezed the handle on the fire extinguisher and sprayed the electrical fire with flame retardant.

  The sparks faded as the retardant chemical coated the entire area until finally there were no more. The air in the cabin had a faint burned plastic smell about it.

  It took Gesling a few seconds to realize that the ship was quiet. The ear-piercing sound of the habitat being crushed against the rock outcropping had stopped—as had the forward movement of the ship.

  The habitat was a mess. The forward third was now grossly deformed by the rock around which it was neatly plastered and none of the display screens were still functioning.

  “Is everyone okay?” asked Gesling as he positioned the fire
extinguisher back into its mount.

  “Yes,” said Hui, “Thanks to Mikhail. I don’t know how I lost my grip…”

  “Shh. Everyone be quiet. Do you hear any air leaking?” asked Gesling.

  The crew of the Tamaroa floated motionlessly as they listened for the telltale hiss that would indicate their habitat had been punctured as it collided with the massive rock that was now part of their interior decoration.

  “All I can hear are the fans,” said Mikhail.

  “Thank God for that,” said Gesling. He knew that if the fans had stopped working, then they would have a whole set of other problems, including the possibility of suffocating on their own used and stale air.

  “I can’t believe the skin didn’t burst when we hit the rock,” Hui said. “You were right, Mikhail!”

  “I’ll thank God for that one also—and the materials experts back home who designed it. If we get the chance.”

  Paul turned his attention back to the virtual display that was reforming in the air in front of him. Several indicators were glowing red but he was able to quickly discern that none were immediately life threatening. He did frown, however, when he saw the position of the ship relative to the opening of the crevasse into which they’d flown the ship.

  “The back of the ship is about thirty feet more exposed than we’d planned. Fortunately, our tilt angle is fairly close to what I’d calculated, which means when we fire the engines, they’ll be pointing in the right direction to give this hunk of rock the kick it needs.”

  Mikhail was inspecting the front of the ship which, at least from the inside, now looked like someone had tried to kick the front in on itself and got their foot stuck in the process. Gesling noted that he was frowning.

  “What’s on your mind, Mikhail?”

  “When you fire those engines, it’s going to push the ship further into the hole, and this rock. With a hundred thousand pounds of thrust meeting the fabric of this habitat wrapped around this rock, it isn’t going to be pleasant. We will not survive it.”