On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  It was time for Stetson and Childers to pay.

  Zhi Feng looked at the immigration agent behind the window at the desk. Los Angeles International Airport was no more exciting than the typical flurry of activity as far as he could tell. Feng did his best to act like an impatient tourist as the customs agent scanned inattentively at his documents.

  “What is the purpose of your visit?” The man looked up from the passport at him.

  “Business,” Zhi Feng said. The agent looked at the picture on the ID and then back at Feng. The agent stamped the form and handed it out through the hole in the window.

  “Very well. Welcome to America.”

  “Thank you.” Zhi Feng took his customs paperwork and then made his way to the turnstiles into the United States.

  He passed through the corral and into the gate area. As he scanned around there were people sitting scattered about the gate and there was a woman struggling with her luggage, a baby in her arms, and a toddler tugging at her and crying. It was a very typical airport scene. Very typical except for the three men in suits and the two security agents looking right at him.

  One of the men approached him and showed him a badge.

  “Hello, sir,” the man said. “I’m Agent Reed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would you mind coming with us for a moment?”

  “Uh, what is this about? I’m actually in kind of a hurry,” Zhi said. He looked to his left and then his right. He wasn’t sure he could outrun these men in the airport. He decided to play it calmly for now.

  “I must insist, Mr. Feng,” the agent said.

  CHAPTER 35

  Paul couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He was having a damned hard time believing what had just happened. The command capsule had been so flattened that he had his legs already outside the entry hatch preparing to make his escape when the rock outcropping that was holding the ship in place must have given way. He had realized at that moment that the anchors that Rykov and Hui had put in place were doing little to hold the Tamaroa. It was all the rock outcropping pushing against the command capsule. Once the rock gave way the ship lurched forward. The rocks shot free like missiles crashing through a wall of rock just ahead of the ship at what he had assumed was the bottom of the fissure.

  At the same instant the pressure was relieved from the highly compressed command capsule which popped back into shape almost instantly. Violently. The immediate elastic retraction of the capsule snapping back to its minimum energy position, well, it released a hell of a lot of energy. Paul was knocked backwards by something, he wasn’t sure what. But whatever it had been hit him hard enough that his helmet slapped into the wall behind him making him see stars, and not the ones out in space. His body recoiled and was flung forward and inward toward the nose of the capsule.

  The walls continued to oscillate and ring out the energy that had been released like a tuning fork that had been struck by a hammer. They lurched inward and outward and back and forth and tossed equipment about ripping it free from its mooring points with ease. Paul was slung arms and legs akimbo into the foremost section of the ship only to be flung immediately backwards into the bulkhead by the exit hatch where he’d just been. As debris peppered him, he grasped for a handhold—anything would have done, but he was having no luck. Several pieces of the debris cut into his suit and something hit his faceplate, leaving a spiderweb crack across the left side of it.

  Paul managed to pull himself together and finally grab a handhold on one of the seats that was still in place. He waited for the debris to float to a reasonable velocity and for the walls to stabilize. Once everything reached a minimum energy position he let out a short sigh of relief.

  “The engine seems to still be working,” he tapped at the one control panel still functioning. “There is no way to tell what direction we’re pointed though.”

  About a minute later he could feel the vibration of the engines stop. He floated himself to the window at the front of the capsule and looked out. There was daylight in front of him about a half a kilometer out. As far as he could tell the fissure in the asteroid went all the way through it and he had poked through a weak spot.

  “I wonder if the exterior lights still work,” he said to himself. He fumbled around the capsule looking for the controls and then finally switched them on. The exterior of the ship in front of him lit up with an almost too harsh white light. Brilliant sparkly gold reflected back at him from almost every direction.

  “Holy shit!”

  * * *

  “Holy shit. Will you look at that?” Rykov pointed out the window of the Crew Transfer Vehicle at the main body of the Tamaroa and the rocks that had wedged between it and the hole that it had created.

  “It looks like an arrow sticking through a target,” Hui noted. “It is almost like it poked a hole all the way through the rock wall. Shouldn’t our short-range suit radios pick up at this range?”

  “Possibly, though that is a lot of rock,” Rykov said.

  “Paul,” Hui keyed her suit mic. “Paul, do you copy, over? I repeat, Paul, do you copy? Over.”

  There was a long silent pause that gave Hui a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, but then the radio crackled and there was a digital connection made. The voice came through loud and clear.

  “Roger that,” Paul replied. “My long-range radio and suit are fried, so I’m using the wireless on my tablet. You two need to get in here. You’re not going to believe what we’ve found.”

  “I’m glad to hear your voice. It looked like a rough ride from out here,” Hui said.

  “Believe me when I say that it was a helluva rough ride that I never want to ever have to repeat.” Paul’s voice sounded tired, but excited.

  “Is it safe to come aboard, Paul?” Rykov asked. “We show no radiation levels increases. How is the air integrity?”

  “As far as I can tell we have no leaks. You were right about the capsule material. Believe me, it is flexible as all hell. I actually could use some help figuring out where things stand in here. I need to check the habitat module and engineering.”

  “We’re on our way. The hab entrance is blocked by rocks,” Hui said thrusting the CTV in for a closer look. “I think we’ll have to dock as normal in the aft section and then make our way forward from there.”

  “Affirmative. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Dr. Melanie Ledford had gone through multiple emotional states over the past year. She had been on top of her game as the newly appointed commander of the first ever mission to Mars. It was going to be historical. It was going to be nothing short of difficult, amazingly hard, and unexplainably exciting. A truly once in a lifetime event was coming her way because of all the hard work she had put in for her entire life. As far as the American space program was concerned, she was the top astronaut.

  Her doctorate in aerospace engineering and her two master’s degrees in geophysics and astronomy meant that she was more than qualified academically. She had over five thousand hours in complex aircraft as a pilot, mainly from test flights at the Boeing Phantom Works, some from flights back and forth between Houston and other NASA centers, and some from flying various Crew Transfer Vehicles to and from the International Space Station. She also had about a thousand hours on board the International Space Station. Her space resume was pretty good to boot.

  But then some idiots attempted to capture an asteroid and bring it closer to Earth. Well, they had succeeded in the worst way. In doing so, they cost Melanie her trip to Mars, at least for now.

  She had gotten angry when a civilian space tourist pilot was made commander of the mission to save Earth over her, but at that point she was at least still going on the mission. Then that idiot Zhi Feng blew up their ride, her ride, into space and she was stuck back on Earth doing support work. She, America’s top astronaut wasn’t going on the most important mission in space in her lifetime. Had she gone they might still be alive. But the mission had gone silent and remained that way
for weeks now. They must be dead. The mission had failed. She should have been there.

  It had taken her almost a month to get a grip on her situation and let herself reach the understanding that things “were what they were” and there was nothing she could do to change that now. What she had decided to do instead was to be the irreplaceable asset that she was. Being petty and moody wouldn’t help anybody. And if it wasn’t her turn in the flight rotation, then she knew she had to simply accept that and move on. Her turn would come. Or, at least she hoped it would before she aged out of the rotation completely.

  Melanie looked out the window at the mountain and the huge radio telescope dish beneath her. The Arecibo, Puerto Rico dish was the absolute largest single dish radio telescope that mankind had ever put together. And ever since the Tamaroa had sent a message back to Earth that there were chunks of rock a month or so ahead of the Sutter’s Mill asteroid she had been putting her astronomy degree and her knowledge of astrodynamics to work.

  The large radio telescope could also be used as a transmitter, and therefore as a radar with which to map space. In fact, it had been used as such for many decades since the system had been constructed. Planetary scientists had used it to make radar maps of Mars, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, and several asteroids and comets.

  Melanie was currently searching the orbital trajectories ahead of the asteroid and along the track of the rescue mission to hopefully get a handle on just how big the “chunks” of the asteroid were that might be headed their way. She had been searching for months, but the debris was so far away that much detail had eluded her. And even with such a large dish, three hundred five meters in diameter, there was still barely enough return signal to map subasteroid-sized chunks much farther out than halfway to Mars. It took patience to collect the very weak radar return signals over long integration times and then waiting for the computers to crunch and analyze the data seem to take forever. She couldn’t imagine how the astronomers back in the 1970s and 80s, with their slow computers, could stand the waiting. The dish had been there a very long time.

  “Dr. Ledford,” the young graduate student running the equipment looked out from behind his console. “The data analysis is coming in now. Would you like me to bring it up for you?”

  “Sure thing, Mike. Let me see what we’ve got.” Melanie picked her coffee cup up from her desk and sipped it. It nearly turned her stomach as she spat it back into the cup. “That’s cold. And just plain nasty. Can’t we get better coffee up here?”

  “Yes ma’am. Here we go.” Mike tapped at his console and brought up the first algorithm enhanced images from the radar return data. “Holy shit.”

  “Holy shit is right.”

  * * *

  “Yes ma’am, that’s right. It’s a debris field spread out about the size of Texas in its planar cross section orthogonal to Earth’s orbital plane and it is spread out over several hundred thousand kilometers. It is roughly four hundred times longer than it is wide. We estimate the volumetric envelope of the cloud to be about two hundred eighty billion cubic kilometers total. And of course, the astrodynamics of the situation will allow it to continue to spread out even more, which is actually a good thing, sort of. There are some chunks that are as big as a hundred meters across. The Tamaroa is lucky they didn’t hit one of the larger chunks. They must have just passed through the tail of the cloud. They were damned lucky, uh, ma’am,” Melanie Ledford explained to the NASA Administrator, Dr. Tara Reese-Walker.

  “Let me get this straight, there is a debris field the size of Texas on a collision course with Earth and we are just now figuring this out? When will it hit and where?” Reese-Walker didn’t like what she was hearing.

  “Well, ma’am, it is just now close enough that we are getting much radar return from it. One hundred meters is about the smallest size we can resolve at the current distance, but the general return from the debris cloud is quite large. Also, we need to keep in mind that it is fairly sparsely populated. I don’t have to tell you that space is big. The data shows about four micrograms per cubic kilometer. So, less than can be seen with the human eye every cubic kilometer. That’s the up side. The down side is the cloud totals a mass of well over a million kilograms of material and some of it is in big chunks. Doppler data shows it will hit Earth’s atmosphere with a relative velocity of about fifteen kilometers per second. As of now we still don’t know if it will be a direct hit, a glancing blow, or a near miss. But it is so expansive, I can’t believe we’ll miss it completely.”

  “What do you know?”

  “What we do know is that it is about one million kilometers from Earth right now and will begin hitting in the next twenty-two hours or so. If the cloud impacts Earth head on and we drive through the complete cloud, tip to tail, the impacts could last for as much as eight hours. If we just pass through it crossways they will last about two hours or so. Then, depending on other variables, the timescale is somewhere between the two. As our trajectory data gets better we’ll have a better answer for that, but we’ll know about the time it hits us, so the analysis is almost a moot point.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Reese-Walker cupped the microphone of the desk phone and leaned her head over to look out her office door. “Samantha! Get me the President’s Science Advisor on the phone right now!”

  “Uh, yes, Dr. Walker.”

  “Melanie, keep crunching the numbers. I need as much info as possible. Can you narrow down where we might get hit first?”

  “Well, in twenty-two hours the Atlantic Ocean will be pointed toward the cloud and the East Coast will start rolling by. We’re likely to see the United States pounded from coast to coast. Hopefully, the debris is loose and it will just be a really big light show. But there are several large blobs in the data that scare the hell out of me.”

  “Ma’am, I’ve got the White House on the line!”

  “Keep on top of this Melanie! I’ll call you back.”

  * * *

  The hot topic at the Arecibo Observatory of the moment was the impending meteor impacts. Priority was to determine: what was going to hit the Earth, how big it would be, how many of them there were, and when and exactly where it would happen. But the observatory had multiple systems running around the clock for multiple scientific experiments. There were multichannel radio telescope systems listening to space all the time. Some were looking for signals from black holes, supernovae, hydrogen gas clouds, and even aliens. Whatever their mission, they were running, nonstop, across the frequency spectrum. Computers would record the data and at some point somebody would do an analysis of it. Some of the data was automatically analyzed but most of it was not.

  So, while the entirety of the staff at the observatory were looking at the coming meteors, nobody happened to notice that a radio signal from space was detected and stored away in the digital database to be found, hopefully, later, by somebody. The signal was weak, but detectable by the large dish. It was manmade and was continuously repeating itself.

  “This is the spaceship Tamaroa. Our high and low gain antennas are inoperable at this time. We are broadcasting from a makeshift omnidirectional patch with hopes that you will get this message. The electric propulsion system repair has failed. We are still alive and well on the asteroid Sutter’s Mill and are attempting to push its trajectory using the nuclear engines of the Tamaroa. Please acknowledge and advise.”

  CHAPTER 37

  “Your spacesuit has looked better, my friend,” Rykov patted Paul Gesling on the back with his gloved hand. He and Hui floated through the hatch into the command capsule. The spaceship had been in much better shape as well.

  “What a mess!” Hui looked at the debris floating about and the extensive damage to the ship’s bridge. “We’ll never get it working again.”

  “Not so sure we need to. We’re out of fuel anyway,” Paul replied. He tapped at his handheld tablet. “Most of the systems that are still functioning are controllable through this pad or the consoles in engineering. Looks li
ke we have atmospheric integrity. Who knows, a coat of paint and a plant or two might be all it needs. Definitely a fixer-upper though.”

  Paul popped his facemask on his helmet. It was getting hard to see through anyway with the spiderweb cracks in it covering most of the left half. Paul took a deep breath of the cabin air and then motioned out the front windows of the capsule.

  “Look what I found,” he said, pointing out at the very large vein of sparkly gold in the rock wall surrounding them. There was an equally impressive dark red vein nearby. “And, if you look carefully, you can see all the way through this beast. See that bright spot out there. I think it is Earth!”

  “Holy…” Rykov whistled. “That has to be gold. Probably billions of euros worth! Sure looks like it.”

  “I’m more concerned with the view through our soda straw here. Is that truly Earth?” Hui asked. “If it is, we’d better hope it starts drifting out of view over the next few days.”

  “We need to figure out if all this worked,” Paul started. “And, we need to assess our life-support systems and supplies.”

  “Where do we start?” Hui shrugged her shoulders as best she could in her spacesuit. “We need trajectory data, but I suspect the systems on the Tamaroa are of no use stuck down here.”

  “Well,” Paul removed his gauntlets and then rubbed his nose. “Man that feels good. We need to get in the CTV and get topside so our star trackers can start getting some position data. Sure would be nice if we could talk to someone from mission control.”

  “Yes, the CTV could collect the data easily,” Hui agreed. “However, it will take several days most likely to have enough data points before a Kalman filter can map a new trajectory for us.”

  “Right.” Paul blinked his eyes and rolled his head left and right and couldn’t stop himself from yawning.

  “Comrades, I know there is much to do, but I am literally about to pass out from hunger and exhaustion. We must stop and rest and refuel.” Rykov rummaged through a compartment on one of the twisted and flattened equipment racks and pulled out some meal bars. He offered them to his colleagues. Paul took two. “It will do us no good if we are so tired that we make some fatal mistake in the process of saving ourselves.”