On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  CHAPTER 56

  Bill stood in the door of the Dreamscape and looked about the cabin at his passengers. Gary was already seated in the copilot’s seat with specific orders not to touch a damned thing. In the first row on the pilot’s side in seat 2A was a fortyish-year-old woman named Maya Press—a multibillionaire from Texas. Her family had been in the oil business for several generations. Apparently, there was a story between her and Gary, but neither of them were talking.

  The older man in Seat 2B was Elliot Harbor, a software designer in the previous decade and had long since moved into global philanthropy. Bill knew of the man before he was a customer and as far as he was concerned, the phrase “global philanthropy” just was a fancy way of saying he was a busybody trying to stick his nose in everybody else’s business.

  For weight and balance seats 1A, 1B, 3A, and 3B were empty. Customer number three was seated in 4A. Katsuo Satou was a Japanese entrepreneur. Bill knew little about him other than he was a paying customer and had dealt with Gary before. Seats 4B and 5A were also empty. There was no 5B because that’s where the spacesuit locker was.

  Bill looked around and made eye contact with all the passengers and then keyed his headset microphone so his voice would sound over the intercom and in the suit helmet radios.

  “Alright. If everyone will be seated we’ll soon be getting underway. You don’t need to lower your face shields unless I tell you to over the headsets. Please buckle up and we’ll start through the countdown procedure in about five minutes. You’ve all had the preflight training so there shouldn’t be anything unexpected for you. So get ready for an exciting ride.” Bill pulled the doorway closed and dogged it down. Then he crawled into the cockpit and into the pilot’s seat.

  “Alright copilot, let’s do some preflight checks and then bring mission control online,” Bill said and then tapped an icon labeled “Preflight Checklist.”

  “Passenger Briefing. Check.” Bill tapped the first box on the touchscreen.

  “Seat sensors. Check.”

  “Seat-belt sensors. All fastened. Check.”

  “Vehicle hatch closure?” Bill tapped the next box. “Check. Pressure status is in the green.”

  “Brakes. Check.” He pressed the pedals with his feet. They indicated proper performance.

  “Master circuit breakers armed. Electrical equipment indicators are green. Check.”

  “Avionics Power Switch on and indicator is green. Check. Secondary circuit breakers are on and all panels are hot and green. Check.” Bill compared a picture of the secondary breaker indicator lights and colors that popped up on his touchscreen with the actual lights touching each one on the picture as he looked at the panel.

  “Stall Warning indicators in the green. Check.”

  “Landing and taxi lights on. Check.”

  “Comm panel master switch on. Radios on. Check.” Bill clicked a switch on the stick and looked at Gary. “Pilot to copilot, do you copy?”

  “Uh, I copy.” Bill could hear Gary’s voice but not over the radio.

  “Gary, we’ve been through this. Click the voice activation switch on your right hand panel marked pilot channel there.” Bill pointed to the appropriate switch.

  “Uh, sorry. Got it. Copilot copy,” Gary said after frantically flipping the switch into the on position. “But remember, you told me not to touch anything.”

  “Ha ha, yes I did. That right there is the only switch you can touch. Copy?”

  “I copy, Bill.”

  “Good. Gary. Try to relax. This is supposed to be fun.” Bill toggled the icon on the checklist. “Pilot to copilot channel, check.”

  “Alright, next.” Bill toggled a different channel on the radio. “Ground Control, Ground Control, this is the Dreamscape performing radio check, do you copy?”

  “Roger that, Dreamscape, we copy.”

  “Ship to ground radio test. Check.” Bill swiped the scrolled the screen a bit. “Alright. That is the minor stuff. Now we actually start in on the spacecraft stuff. You paying attention, Gary? You might have to fly this thing one day.” Bill laughed, but Gary didn’t see the humor.

  “Let’s see, what’s next? Got it. Weight and balance?” Bill tapped the second box. “Chec— Uh, wait a minute; that’s not right.”

  He tapped the icon again and opened the advanced menu. He pulled down the list until he found recalculate. A task bar started across the icon turning green from left to right showing a one hundred percent completion after a couple of seconds. The results were the same as before.

  “What the hell?” Bill hit the recalculate button again. Same result. “Am I going crazy? I just checked this thirty minutes ago and with the presets for the passengers it was fine.”

  “What’s the problem, Bill?” Gary asked. Bill could tell that Gary was already nervous enough. He didn’t want to start with problems that might make him freak out. But, this was starting to freak Bill out just a bit.

  “Our weight and balance are wrong.” Bill was perplexed. It didn’t make any sense. He’d gone through a pre-preflight checkout already and the ship was in the right condition for flight. Now, for whatever reason it wasn’t. “We’ve got an extra seventy-four kilograms in the back somewhere that wasn’t there thirty minutes ago.”

  “How is that possible?” Gary asked with a shaky voice.

  “I don’t know. Nobody is in the bathroom. All the passengers are in their seats. I just did the seat sensor checks. And they’re all buckled in. Hold on a moment.” Bill switched screens to the main menu and scrolled to the internal cameras. He brought all of them up on the screen in a multi-image split view. There was a camera for each seat, one in the galley, one in the toilet and shower area, and one in the airlock.

  “What have we got here?” He nearly jumped out of his seat at first. There was a person in the air lock. Bill tapped the airlock camera and expanded it to fill the screen. “Holy shit!”

  “Zhi Feng!” Gary almost shouted. “Look, Bill, he has a gun in his hand.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Zhi Feng shook his head as he realized he had nodded off to sleep briefly. He had been sitting in the airlock as patiently as he could, but his foot was starting to hurt him, and exhaustion from the previous three days was catching up with him. His body was going to force him to go to sleep soon no matter how hard he fought it. He was beginning to realize that his anger had forced him into a situation where he was quickly losing the upper hand. He was afraid that he would not be able to stay awake long enough to complete his plan. He had to complete his plan. Bill Stetson and Gary Childers would pay for what they had done to him. They would pay for the shame that he felt and for the shame that they had brought upon China.

  His plan was to cause a catastrophe on launch that would kill everyone on board. His life no longer mattered to him as long as he took out Space Excursions with him. He knew it was time to act. It was right then or never. He had heard the door to the spacecraft close and heard Stetson’s voice over the intercom. They were about to take off. They were all closed up inside. He could wait until they took off, but he might pass out before then. No, they were all captive inside and likely buckled in. He could go in and kill them all with the gun and then open the throttle on the spacecraft’s engine. From what he had read about the ship, it flew like an airplane at takeoff. Feng was pretty sure he could manage to get it off the ground by himself.

  Zhi Feng forced himself up and then checked to make certain there was a round of ammo in the chamber of the pistol. For a second he saw stars before his eyes and it was difficult to catch his breath.

  “I’m very tired. I must move now,” he said to himself. Then he cycled the airlock. The red light on the door flashed yellow and then back to red. He cycled the airlock again—same effect.

  “That’s not right,” he said sluggishly. “Again. I’ll try it again.”

  He started working through the process for opening the universal airlock controls in his mind. He’d done it many times before, but years ago when
he was a taikonaut for the Chinese space program. He’d been to the International Space Station once and he’d been to the Moon. He was pretty sure he was doing it right. His head felt so foggy and he was so tired he could barely hold it up. For a brief instant his vision tunneled in and he had to shake himself awake. His hands felt like they had lead weights attached to them and his broken foot throbbed as if it would burst from the cast. Then he realized from his astronaut training that he was going through the stages of hypoxia. He also quickly realized why the airlock wouldn’t cycle open. There was a pressure difference on either side of the door. The safety feature built into the system prevented the door from being open while there was a pressure differential in order to avoid an explosive compression or decompression depending on which side you were on. Somebody had slowly let the air out of the airlock and Feng was succumbing to the low pressure and low oxygen level.

  “Damn you, Bill Stetson!” He could barely mutter the words as he raised his pistol, intending to fire it at the airlock window, but couldn’t manage to raise his arms all the way as he fell backwards to the airlock floor. His head hit the docking ring exit door with a thud and the world tunneled in on him and faded to black.

  CHAPTER 58

  “We need to fire this thing off in less than eight hours. I don’t think we have time for a break, guys. Sorry,” Paul replied. “Would an extra set of hands be of any use? Or could I swap out with one of you?”

  “Sorry, comrade. This job requires certain skills. Don’t ask to do the engineering EVA and I will not ask to fly the ship.” Rykov grunted. Paul wasn’t certain if his grunting tone was humor or annoyance or pure exhaustion. He didn’t care as long as they could keep working. They were tired, very tired. The sleep and eating cycle he had to cut to from eight hours to six. It was taking them longer than they had expected. There was a scheduled one-hour break presently, but there just wasn’t time for it. “Roger that, Mikhail. Seven hours, fifty-seven minutes, folks. I’m here to help if you need me.”

  Paul had plenty of time to do his part. All he had to do was to reconfigure the magnetic field controls so that he could ramp the magnetic field strength up rapidly without blowing out the coils or tearing them away from their moorings. That was a simple graphical user interface job. Toggles and dials on his touchscreen were all he had to manipulate. Then he would run simulations to double check and optimize his settings. He also kept the radio open and listened to Hui and Mikhail’s progress and banter just in case they needed him.

  After about three hours he had the field coils reprogrammed and the simulations showed that they should be able to get the push between the asteroid pieces that they needed. On his last pass over Sutter’s Mill A over thirty-six hours ago he had measured the field strength to be on the order of a tenth of a tesla. The large rock was highly magnetized. With the superconducting field coils on the Tamaroa and the iron ore deposits throughout Sutter’s Mill B, there should be more than ten or fifteen tesla field strength permeating the smaller chunk’s surface once the equipment was ready and turned on. The combination of the two magnets pushing against each other should be just enough to push the asteroid parts free of the Earth—each part passing the planet on opposite sides. He hoped.

  All the simulations still showed that the Sutter’s Mill B piece would approach very closely to Earth or hit it. The latest models he ran suggested that if he could keep the field coils on and at significant strength for more than fifty seconds, then they should at least clear the Earth by two hundred kilometers. That was scary close and they would be slowed down some as they ripped through Earth’s atmosphere.

  Paul had originally gotten excited at that result, hoping he could slow the asteroid down by aerobraking in the atmosphere enough so that it would be caught in an Earth orbit. But the rock was just too big and it was moving way too fast. It had only been a fleeting moment of hope that physics and orbital mechanics had shown was a false one. But, Paul still couldn’t let himself accept that they were all going to die on this stupid rock. Somehow he was going to find a way off. Somehow he was going to go home. He just could not accept death that easily.

  He wasn’t sure how Hui and Rykov felt about it as they had all been too busy to discuss it much. But if the magnetic push worked, they would have a long eight days with nothing to do but talk. He figured there’d be a lot of soul searching then. And he also planned to spend as much of that time as he could sending and receiving messages from Carolyn. He so wanted to see her, to touch her, and to feel her embrace just one more time.

  Paul wanted to go home. Somehow. Someway. Paul told himself that he was going to survive this. Somehow he and his crew were going to get home safely. Somehow.

  “Paul, Paul, you copy?” Hui said over the radio.

  “Roger that, Hui. I’m here. What’s up?”

  “What is our clock status?” Hui asked. Paul glanced up at the screens they had reattached or repaired about the command capsule. All of them were tied into the countdown clock.

  “Four hours thirty-nine minutes,” he said. “What our status?”

  “Mikhail is moving like a whirlwind out here. In less than an hour we will be finished,” Hui replied. She sounded confident in her answer. Paul looked at the external camera feeds and could see several tethers staked into the asteroid’s surface holding the ship down. Paul hoped the magnetic field would hold the ship in place, but just in case they needed the tethers.

  “That’s great news. Wrap up then and get in as soon as possible,” Paul said. “We’re not going to have time to call NASA before we fire the magnets. The clock is burning down on us and I don’t want to take any more time than we have to.”

  “Understood.”

  CHAPTER 59

  “Wake up, you son of a bitch!” Bill slapped Zhi Feng across the face and then poured water from a bottle on him. “I want you to be awake when I punch you in the freakin’ mouth.”

  “He’s coming around, Bill,” Gary said as he pocketed his cell phone. “The authorities are on their way to pick him up. You don’t think he can get loose, do you?”

  “Not a chance in hell.” Bill almost laughed while at the same time he glowered through his gritted teeth and snarl. “That is two hundred mile an hour duct tape. And I used three rolls.”

  Bill watched as Zhi Feng’s eyes opened and he gasped for breath and then cursed something in Chinese once the man realized he couldn’t move. Finally he became coherent enough to realize that he was duct taped to the security light pole outside the hangar bay doors of Space Excursions. One of the technicians sat on a folding chair holding the gun Feng had been using. Feng was going nowhere, and Bill Stetson was glad of that.

  “You think we wouldn’t find you back there in the airlock, Feng?” Bill taunted him.

  “To hell with you, Stetson!” Feng spat at him. The man squirmed but Bill had him taped so tightly to the pole that he couldn’t move a millimeter. “You too, Childers. The two of you should die.”

  “We might someday. But not today and not by your dumbass hands.” Bill punched the man in the nose. “Ever heard of weight and balance, Feng?”

  “Bill,” Gary said as Bill punched him in the face again. “Take it easy. Don’t break your hand. We still need you to fly.”

  “Break something on him? Why, it looks like he already broke something.” Bill kicked Feng’s cast pretty hard with his flight boots. “Did you hurt yourself, Feng?”

  “Ahhh! Stop,” Feng shouted in pain. Bill kicked the man’s foot again, twice.

  “That’s for Carolyn, you piece of shit.” Bill kicked him again as the man screamed in agony. “That is for my wife.”

  “Stop, please,” he screamed.

  “You are such a big strong man when you’re facing pain, aren’t you, Feng?” Bill spat on the man’s face. “Coward.”

  Bill elbowed him on the side of the jaw with a crack. He hoped he broke the bastard’s face.

  “That’s for Gary here. I’ve got a good mind to let you go just so I ca
n shoot you as you run away.”

  “Bill.” Gary put a hand on his shoulder. “He’s about had enough.”

  “Has he?” Bill looked at the man as dark red blood trickled from his swollen nose and mixed with sweat glistening on his upper lip. His jaw was swelling and there was no telling what had happened to his foot. But Bill didn’t care. All of the delays caused by Feng could have been part of what was keeping Paul from coming back. Feng’s actions had likely given Gary a permanent limp. Who knew how well Carolyn would recover? Her wounds would bother her for years, probably. And his wife Becca had her hand blown off. Only through miracles of modern science might she regain use of the rebuilt pieces. Bill kicked him again. The man screamed again. This time the pain in his scream was even too sickening for Bill.

  “But I’m not going to kill you, Feng. Oh no. That would be too good for you. I want you to rot in prison for the rest of your life as we here at Space Excursions go on to do great and wonderful things and there is nothing you can do to stop us.” Bill turned to Gary. “We better move. This jerk altered our timeline. We’ll just make our launch window today if we get going and cut a few corners.”

  “He’s not going anywhere, Mr. Stetson,” said the tech holding the gun on him.

  “Great. Thanks.” Bill nodded to the tech. “Have fun in prison, Feng. Better hope you go to an American jail. I suspect the Chinese will execute you if they extradite you.”

  “Well, Gary…” Bill turned and put his arm on Gary’s shoulder. “Let’s go rescue some astronauts on the International Space Station.”