On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Mikhail is right. We must rest,” Hui said, accepting a meal bar herself.

  “Agreed. Let’s take eight hours break and see where we are then.” Paul tapped at his pad and set an alarm clock. “Till, uh, morning then.”

  “Are we sure we are safe in here?” Hui asked. “I mean, the ship has taken a beating.”

  “The aft section is basically no worse for wear, Paul. We came through the aft docking port. The damage is up here,” Rykov said.

  “Well the pressure alarms seem to be working. We have power and plenty of it. The reactor is working with no signs of damage.” Paul read the status of the ship’s systems on his pad. “The radiators are actually in the green and that’s probably because they are in contact with some of the asteroid now and have a big heat sink touching them.”

  “That settles it, then?” Hui asked as she started to unfasten her spacesuit.

  “I think we are fine in here. Keep your suits close and know that we can always make a run for the CTV if things go bad. If we have a leak, then it will likely be up front in the command capsule, or what’s left of it. So, we can always just shut this hatch,” Paul said as he turned his helmet until it clicked and then he pulled it free. He looked at the crack on the faceplate.

  “Why don’t we do that just to be safe?” Hui said.

  “Agreed.” Paul nodded at her. “Go ahead.”

  “Might I also suggest you swap out your suit with the spare, Paul?” Rykov suggested. “Uh, yours has seen better days, comrade.”

  “Right. Good plan.”

  * * *

  Hui and Rykov got quiet very quickly. They were so tired that it didn’t take long before they were out. Paul had made his way to the aft airlock and docking port where the spare suits were stored. There were several suits, but only one of them still had air. They’d used the oxygen bottles for explosives to tie down the Tamaroa. Paul shook his head at the thought. He knew now that the tiedowns hadn’t helped at all and they had just wasted both the oxygen and the time. He didn’t see any reason to tell Hui and Mikhail that, if they hadn’t figured it out by now.

  Paul grabbed the good suit and started the process of dragging it back toward his sleep cubicle. By the time he got back he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Somehow he managed to tie his suit down, crawl into his sleeping bag, and then zip himself in. That was the last thing he could remember doing until the alarm went off.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Russian missile was guided by optical sensors. A telescope in the nose of the “science package” kept the bright spot that was Sutter’s Mill in the center of the image and if the onboard computer detected the bright spot in the center moving off-center, then a correction signal was sent to the appropriate attitude control thruster which would then fire and push the missile back on target.

  What the Russians hadn’t accounted for was that several weeks prior the missile had passed through a very large debris cloud. The very same cloud that was now threatening the Earth had taken its toll on the modified Russian missile.

  The rocket had been peppered by several micrometeorites at very high relative velocities. One micrometeorite in particular had impacted with the clear bubble over the optical sensors. Very little damage had been done to the missile and its “science package” and as far as telemetry data being sent back to Earth was concerned, the missile was perfectly healthy. The mission control team back in Russia had no reason to think that the missile would not perform as planned. Diagnostic systems and telemetry data sometimes just weren’t enough to tell the entire tale. The people on Earth hadn’t panicked yet because they were assured that the Russian missile was going to save the day.

  But in reality that wasn’t the case at all. The micrometeorite impact against the protective optical bubble had left a divot in the aerospace hardened glass. The divot just happened to be in the right spot as to diffract the incoming light from the asteroid by three pixels on the image plane of the camera. While three pixels were only about one hundred millionths of a meter (one hundred microns) in distance on the image plane sensor that translated into thousands of miles in actual space. By the time the astrodynamics experts back at the Cosmodrome realized that their missile was thousands of kilometers off track, it was already so far away from the asteroid that there was not enough fuel on board to bring it back on target. The missile would miss the asteroid by a distance larger than the diameter of the Earth and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

  The mission’s chief engineer had a call to make to the Kremlin. In return, the defense minister would have a call to make. In either case the news was politically devastating, as the Russians had announced the missile as the mission that would save the Earth from desolation by the near-Earth object. But now the Russians were going to have to eat crow and announce failure. Russian politicians didn’t like to eat crow. In fact, they usually only ever ate crow once and then were never heard from again. But, in the end, there was no way around it. Millions of lives were in the balance. Perhaps there were still actions that could be put in place that would help minimize the loss of life. But it was very late notice for major preparations. The asteroid was only a few weeks out.

  The Russian president had some phone calls to make.

  CHAPTER 39

  Mike had been working at Arecibo for more than three years. He had hoped to finish up his doctoral research soon and get a real job, but at the same time he liked living in Puerto Rico. The pace of life was much less hectic than that which he had been raised in back home in the Bronx. And it was always nice and warm somewhere in Puerto Rico. He didn’t miss New York City at all.

  When he’d first gotten to the observatory he had no idea how any of the systems of the largest radio telescope in the world worked. In fact, he’d accidentally fried a very expensive amplifier for the S-band radar transceiver on his first day on the job. He continued to believe that it hadn’t been his fault and that they should have trained him on it before letting him touch it.

  Since that time he’d more than made up for his mistake. Mike became the guy that kept the systems running even when some new software upgrade brought all the computers crashing down. Once the graduate student who was there before Mike had passed along the torch on to him, he became the senior engineer for the planetary radar equipment. He had operated and maintained most of the planetary radar amplifiers and transceiver systems for more than two years now. When the planetary astronomers and scientists showed up to do an experiment they quickly realized that Mike was the man they needed to talk to first.

  Mike had other interests in astronomy as well. While his expertise was the equipment used for making astronomical measurements with radio waves he was very interested in the detection of extremely weak signals and the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence or SETI. Not that he believed they’d ever pick up signals from aliens, but the technology needed to detect extremely weak signals pushed the state of the art in amplifier signal to noise capabilities and he was fascinated by it. He had been building low-noise amplifiers since he was a teen and he always felt like he could tweak the technology just one more bit and get a little more gain out of them. Many times that led to him blowing them up, but sometimes he made incremental improvements. Those improvements and some of the failures would make for a great doctoral dissertation—if he could ever get time to finish writing it.

  So, in his spare time, of which he shouldn’t have any because he should be writing, he hung out with the SETI astronomers and learned how their equipment worked. Most of it was funded through private grants, since NASA and the NSF no longer funded that type of research. And in some cases the owners of the equipment were very “hands-offish” until they realized that Mike was an asset, who, for the most part, would help them for free.

  As far as the meteor cloud was concerned, there was little left for him to be doing. The big dish was on the wrong side of the planet now and wouldn’t be able to help ascertain details of the debris cloud until it was too late.
NASA, the Strategic Space Command, and whoever else were using other dishes scattered about the globe to pin down those details. And all of that effort was apparently above his pay grade. Mike was officially out of the loop on the whole debris cloud tracking effort.

  The computers were running analyses as Dr. Ledford had requested, but most of those efforts needed much more computing power and were therefore being done elsewhere on supercomputers. For all intents and purposes, Mike was sitting idle for what might prove to be a good while. Dr. Ledford had gone home for the evening and wouldn’t be back until morning. Like most graduate students he was a night owl by necessity and he had other work he could do. But he was more in the mood to just hang out and do fun stuff.

  So he decided to look at the data that had been stored away over the past few days by the SETI transceivers. After all, the dish was focused on part of the sky the asteroid was in, which also happened to have several nearby star systems in the very distant background. Who knew? Maybe there would be something there. In reality, there would be almost no way he could find such a needle in the haystack, but he liked watching the data flow across the screen. Sometimes he even played an audio representation of one of the channels.

  Mike started a digital strip chart across the S-band spectrum and watched as the “waterfall” of multiple colors representing signal strength and multiple millions of frequencies filtered down the screen. There was mostly the general noise of space. There would be an occasional blip that the filters missed but for the most part there was nothing but white noise. And the blips that got through always turned out to be some manmade satellite or a burping star or some such thing. There was never an alien signal, at least not to his knowledge. Then the autocorrelator filter grabbed onto a part of the waterfall. An alert box popped up on the screen.

  “Signal detected,” he read to himself. “What the…”

  He zoomed in on the channel and looked closer at it. The signal had structure. It was digital. It was very, very weak but it was a signal. He quickly started the strip chart markers and sped up the flow speed of the waterfall until he found the end of the signal. It had lasted for almost an hour. That seemed impossible.

  “Okay, I don’t know enough about this to understand what I’m looking at.” He looked at the screen for another second and decided to find help. He toggled open his video chat software and clicked on the username for the signals engineer from the SETI team. A sleepy-looking young lady answered the message.

  “Mike? It’s late,” she said.

  “I know, Lynne, and I’m sorry. But I think you found a signal,” he replied. “Look at your email.” He tapped at the keyboard and sent her a copy of about ten seconds of the waterfall chart.

  “Okay, hold on,” Lynne told him as she fiddled with her computer on her end. Mike could see her staring intently back at her computer and then she looked up wide-eyed. “It can’t be an alien signal.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I’ll have to come in and look, but the Doppler shift is all wrong. It looks like signals we see from space probes inside our own solar system.”

  “What does that mean?” Mike was confused.

  “Just hold on. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  “Alright then, I’ll see you in a bit.” Mike toggled the video chat software off and went back to looking at the signal. “Inside our solar system?”

  CHAPTER 40

  Gary Childers entered the room with a box of chocolates and a very large pink fuzzy teddy bear. It would be the first time he had seen Carolyn since she had regained consciousness. Bill and Rebecca Stetson were in the room already and were talking about the light show they were all expecting in a couple hours. Carolyn still had tubes coming out of her chest, presumably to drain her lungs as needed, and had oxygen flowing in her nose from smaller tubes, but otherwise she looked good.

  “Gary!” she said with a scratchy voice as he entered. “Come here!”

  “Carolyn, you look great,” Gary told her as he handed her the teddy bear and sat the chocolates aside. “Don’t know if you can eat these yet but I had them imported from France just for you when you can.”

  “The nurse says she can eat whatever she wants,” Rebecca Stetson said. Gary noticed the halo cast on her hand but did his best to act like he didn’t. He was sure she was getting tired of being asked about it.

  “I’m glad you are all here. I’ve got news,” Gary said somewhat excitedly. “I just got a call from the FBI. They have apprehended Zhi Feng. He is now being questioned and will soon to be transferred to a federal holding cell.”

  “That is great news!” Bill replied.

  “And I’m also glad you’re in one place. That’ll make our move easier,” Gary looked at his “family” as he thought of them. And he thought about how banged up they all were and how they had lost some of their best people. He did his best not to think of Paul. Gary had done everything he could to make certain that Paul had gone on the mission to the asteroid where he would end up losing his life. The amount of guilt he felt was almost beyond his capability to handle. But Gary was a survivor and right now he had to make sure that his “family,” at least what was left of it, were going to survive the rest of the asteroid ordeal.

  “Move? Where are we going?” Bill Stetson leaned back on the private hospital room’s sofa.

  “Well, in about thirty minutes we are all moving to my bunker in western Kentucky about three hundred kilometers from here. My jet is waiting right now take us to my hanger at the Paducah Regional Airport. From there we’ll go to my estate on the banks of the Ohio River. We’re transferring Carolyn and Rebecca there until after this is over.” Gary cringed for a second realizing that Bill might not have told his wife yet about flying the Dreamscape into space for him when the asteroid approached. He could tell by the dirty look Bill gave him that he was right.

  “Well, damn, sorry Bill.”

  “Now is a good a time as any, I guess Gary,” Bill replied.

  “What is a good a time as any?” Rebecca asked. The tone in her voice was flat.

  “Bill, let me.” Gary held up a hand. “Rebecca, I need your husband to fly the Dreamscape into orbit for me. I have several paying customers that are paying handsomely to be in orbit when the asteroid hits the Earth. And, well, Bill is the only pilot I’ve got.”

  “You mean the only pilot you’ve got left,” Carolyn said gruffly. Gary noticed the tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

  “I would never say that, Carolyn.” Gary squeezed her hand and continued. “I’m hurting too. Paul was the closest thing I’ve had in years to a true friend.”

  “I just hate that he gave his life not knowing I was still alive,” Carolyn started sobbing. As she sniffed it choked her and made breathing difficult.

  “Carolyn, you need to stay calm, honey,” Rebecca rushed to her side and stroked her arm. “Just breathe as easy as you can.”

  “I’m sorry.” Gary didn’t know what to say. He was saved by his phone ringing. Bill Stetson’s phone started ringing at the same time.

  “What the?” Bill looked at Gary and then his phone. Both men answered.

  “Hello?” The two of them echoed.

  “When?” Gary asked. He couldn’t tell what Bill was saying. “Now? Alright then.” He hung up his phone and then looked at Bill.

  “Right now?” Bill asked. “Okay. Will call in five minutes then.”

  “You first,” Gary told Bill.

  “The NASA administrator is having a teleconference in five minutes with the rescue mission team,” Bill said.

  “Same here. And there was no hint as to why.” Gary turned to the women and frowned. “We will go ahead and start getting the two of you moved to my plane. Bill and I will teleconference in while you two get packed and on the plane. We will be right behind you.”

  Rebecca only nodded at the two men. Gary wasn’t sure if she was angry or not. Rebecca had been an astronaut’s wife most of her life. She understood the territory.


  * * *

  “Stand by for the NASA administrator,” a voice announced on the speaker. Gary and Bill had commandeered one of the offices in the hospital for the call while the women were being moved to the airport. Gary had staff taking care of that. Bill and he would catch up with them as soon as this thing was over. Besides, he figured it would take a little longer for them to move Carolyn anyway. They needed to hurry, though, as the asteroid debris cloud was expected to start hitting the east coast of the United States within the next two hours. Within three or four it would be in range of Kentucky.

  “Hello, this is Tara Walker. I realize that most of you are making preparations for the pending impacts, so I will not bother with going around the room, so to speak, and getting a conference call list of names. If you have something to say, chime in and tell us who you are. That being said the information I’m about to announce cannot wait any longer. There are two bits of news. I’ll start with the bad. About one hour ago the president received a phone call from the Russian president wherein he was given the word that the rocket carrying the nuclear bomb to the asteroid has for whatever reason flown way off course and will miss the asteroid by more than twelve thousand kilometers.”

  “Holy cow,” Bill whistled. “What do we do now?”

  “Shit, Bill, I’m not sure there is anything left to do,” Gary told him, double checking to make sure the speakerphone was on mute. The administrator continued.

  “We are assessing the situation and hoping for a third solution alternative, but as of right now we are starting the beginning stages of developing an evacuation of the central latitude regions of the planet to minimize loss of life. The president is expected to make a statement within the hour.”