Red Horizon: The Truth of Discovery (Discovery Series Book 2)

by Salvador Mercer

  The other good news was that the Earth-Mars opposition was only two years past the prime window when the planets’ orbits brought them together for their closest approaches once in every fifteen years, give or take a year. This allowed all three countries to take the newly mapped Oster trajectory and reach Mars in only four months instead of the Hohmann, which took eight and a half. The tradeoff was that each ship required nearly twenty-five times the amount of fuel as what would be required for the Hohmann transfer orbit, which was the most economical way to travel to Mars.

  Eight and a half months, however, would put the country using this method in dead last place with regards to the space race to Mars. Vlad thought about the near constant launches last year of nothing but rocket fuel, both liquid hydrogen and oxygen, in order to make the trip in half the time. The benefit from this very expensive trajectory was not only in the reduced time to make it to Mars, as each country wanted to arrive first and investigate the alien signal and perhaps transmitter first, but also it allowed for a short thirty day maximum stay before the ship had to depart and return to Earth. Using a very long and intense burn, along with an assist from the sun’s gravity well, the ships would hurl themselves back, racing to catch up with Earth before it circled out of reach, as its orbital speed was twice that of Mars with respect to circling the Sun.

  The velocity needed to perform this maneuver was so intense that there wasn’t going to be enough fuel for the Red Star to slow down fast enough to enter Earth’s orbit. Instead, they would have to refuel the ship as it approached and even after it looped around the Earth slightly, before it could burn and bleed off speed enough to return to anything resembling an orbit around our planet.

  “Pretty damn big ship, eh, boss?” Alex said, walking up behind Vlad from where he sat at the rear of the secondary command and control center. Secondary in name only, it was literally used as the primary even after the rebuild of the new space control center in Kalinin near Moscow, though it was smaller.

  Vlad looked up at the man and then over to the main screen where all three ship types were displayed horizontally one after another. On top was the Red Star, followed by the Red Horizon, and on the bottom was one of the Chinese ships, probably the Divine Dragon. He was just glad it wasn’t called the Red Dragon. “Yes, it does appear to overwhelm our screen up there, especially sandwiched between us and the Chinese.”

  Alex must have had the same thoughts, especially regarding the naming of the ships. “Three reds would have been too much; that is for sure. But seeing them up there in schematic form is painful. I’m surprised you don’t order them to change it.”

  “Have a seat.” Vlad pointed to a chair nearby. It had wheels, so Alex rolled it over and plopped down in it. “We are monitoring all three, but the other two are passive, of course, but we are manually updating the schematics with various states of readiness in order to assess when they may boost.”

  Alex looked back up to the screen where each part of each ship was also color-coded to their readiness state, in the case of the Red Star, or to their presumed state of readiness based on intel and other data gleaned from their activity. Green meant good to go, while yellow was partial, and red was considered down, or a lengthy time to complete. “All three look near ready.”

  Vlad nodded, seeing that the only red was on the American fuel tank that represented their propellant load. All other systems were mostly green, with a scattering of yellow. “Yes, and despite any system showing red or yellow, they are estimates only. Those ships could depart without warning.”

  “Understood. I heard the Yanks may actually leave without a full fuel load. Is this true?” Alex asked.

  “No idea,” Vlad said, looking at the immense form of the Red Horizon that took up the bulk of their screen. “This depends on their flight profile and what they intend to do.”

  “How is the crew doing?”

  “They just got up there. We gave them some extra downtime before sending them back up. The High Council wanted to keep running drills, but at least I got our psychiatrist to explain to the bureaucrats how important a sound mind is for a crew member, especially considering the length of the mission.”

  “I’d assume that they would understand something like that,” Alex said, his bottom lip turning down slightly.

  “You’d assume wrong,” Vlad began. “They threw the Gordust, Soyuz, and Mir mission times at us for supporting their argument.”

  “You can’t be serious. That’s not the same thing. I mean, circling in low Earth orbit and flying millions of miles across interplanetary space are completely different. The mere absence of the Van Allen belts—”

  Vlad cut him off. “I explained all of that.”

  “Well, they should know being that far out isn’t the same as being within the relative safety of our magnetic field.”

  “They understand now, Alex,” Vlad said.

  “All right.” Alex seemed appeased . . . for the moment. “Have you heard anything from our plan?”

  “What plan?” Vlad asked.

  “You know, ferreting out the spy,” he whispered.

  Vlad almost laughed. “Ah, that one. No, nothing yet really, though Dmitry did tell me that the KGB thinks if nothing comes from any of the information given, then that means the spy is either you or me.”

  “What?” Alex leaned back, his eyes going wide. “Are they crazy?”

  “I wouldn’t say that too loudly,” Vlad joked. “Don’t worry, that’s just Dmitry being smart, but no, we haven’t heard anything yet, and it’s been well over a month.”

  “Let me know if they do. I don’t relish the idea of something bad going on with our program. We’ve had enough issues so far. So, have you heard the latest? The Chinese moved in another division.”

  “Da, that makes three in the last six weeks.” Vlad nodded.

  “Did we get another brigade in return?”

  “Nyet,” Vlad said. “We got a brigade for the first two, but not this time.”

  Alex shook his head. “They will run this place over if we go to war.”

  “I doubt it,” Vlad said, seeing the skepticism in the other man’s eyes. “The High Council simply lined up a ring of SSM’s behind us a few hundred kilometers. They’ll pull the trigger on these tactical nukes before they let them reach us here.”

  “That would mean retaliation of the same kind,” Alex said, his voice serious.

  “Yes, that’s why they have built themselves bigger and deeper bunkers.” The ironic note did not go unnoticed, but Alex changed the subject.

  “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “How so?” Vlad turned to where his chief engineer was looking at the large screen on the wall where the three ships were displayed.

  “Look at how much mass their ship has. I mean, mass should be bad on a trip like this. It will reduce performance with regards to speed, and necessitate a disproportionately larger amount of fuel, yet they built that monstrosity anyway.”

  Vlad returned his attention to the main screen where Alex’s words rang true. Their own ship was much more slender, with smaller tethers in place and a single habitable module on each one, rotating opposite one another. Most of the bulk of the main ship was tasked with storing fuel or provisions. There were scant resources allocated for comfort or anything resembling a human need.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum was the Chinese vessel. Initially, when Vlad heard that they had constructed three of them, he thought there was a typo or error in the report. That would require three times the mass of an ordinary ship and make things three times harder to build. Turns out, the initial report was accurate.

  The Chinese strategy, after the loss of their first ship, was to triple up on individual ships as their form of redundancy and to make each ship a third of the mass of one larger one. Vlad looked closely at the schematic and wasn’t even sure he’d call what he was looking at a ship. It looked more like a long piece of scaffolding that was laid horizontally with large engines at the rear a
nd small compartments or storage pods attached willy-nilly to the structure.

  The lone lander, or shuttle craft attached to each ship, reminded him of the old pre-World War Two biplanes that were launched from a pair of short rails on a battleship, or other large warship, where the plane could depart but not land or return. If he didn’t know better, he felt that all three ships, despite being designed identical to one another, were built for a one-way trip. He wasn’t sure how, if at all, they could return based on what he was seeing. Besides, their only antigravity device was a small spinning drum that looked the same as if placing a human in a large dryer.

  Vlad turned to Alex and smiled. “It could be worse.”

  “How so, boss?” Alex asked.

  “We could be the Chinese.”

  *****

  People’s Republic Space Command

  Beijing, China

  In the near future, Year 4, Day 60

  This sucks, Hun thought to himself, reading the report of the American launch from early that morning. Yet another Eagle ETS rocket launch from Cape Canaveral with a full load of a hundred US tons of fuel to their ship. Hun had to do the mental calculations to fully appreciate the payload. Ninety thousand kilograms of pure propellant taken all the way to geosynchronous orbit where their ship loitered for the time being.

  All of their launches to date had been as close to perfect as one could script. Their ship would hardly have to maneuver in order to rendezvous with its payload. It was as if they didn’t need to deal with atmospheric drag, center of mass, gyro orientation, or a half dozen other issues during launch. It didn’t seem fair, and Hun wondered if someone somewhere on the Russian side felt the same way.

  Then there was the size comparisons that boggled his mind. His military leaders wouldn’t allow him to look at any display of the Red Horizon in an actual scale comparison to one of his three ships. When they did see the ship, it was at half scale, and the news reports usually did the same, making their ships see a bit longer than, and almost as solid as, the half-scale American ship. Hun knew the front third of their ships were basically hollowed-out aluminum, serving not much of a purpose than to lengthen the ship, though he did make use of them to move supplies forward and secure more tanks for fuel to the rear.

  The facilities, equipment, and resources of the American ships were so immense and advanced that they bordered on the obscene. This would not normally be competitive if it hadn’t been for the sheer will that his team, and indeed his entire country, contributed to the mission. Commander Shu all but died using the centrifuge at maximum in an effort to achieve one g as part of their medical protocol for superior conditioning. The radius of the centrifuge was too short, and not everyone handled it well. Hun thought he’d have to pull the commander from active flight status when General Wang stepped in and ordered his dosage of anti-nausea medication to be doubled. While it worked, neither the commander nor the general wanted to hear about the side effects from taking such a dose over a long period of time.

  Hun ignored the military officer behind him who feigned work. He knew the man’s purpose, and Hun knew where all the cameras were, as well as their locations. The military intelligence seemed vexed for some reason at his ability to know this, but Hun simply thought they had needed to think this through a bit better than trying to surveil someone who had a doctorate degree in mathematics with an emphasis on geometry and trigonometry. Hun knew every field of arc for each camera and could easily make such calculations in his head. He didn’t need a pen or paper.

  Hun leaned back and let his papers fall back to his desk. He took in the dimly lit control center with his staff hunched over each console, checking, rechecking, and then checking again more than three dozen systems and components. The screens seemed to glow just enough to cast the room into some sort of semi-permanent twilight, always just bright enough to see but not bright enough to illuminate everything comfortably. Sure, they all had desk lights, and sometimes they had to be used, but it wasn’t ideal. Hun wanted windows to the outside, not this artificial box.

  This brought his thought process to what his flight crew would have to endure. His team had the smallest ships, the smallest facilities, and the least amount of resources. Not from a lack of effort; no, the massive, centrally controlled bureaucracy that ran his government thought of everything for everyone, but they lacked something intangible, something that would set them apart and make them part of the human race again. They lacked compassion.

  Just thinking of what their fellow citizens would need and endure would be a start. Hun and his team tried to do just that, but they were guided mercilessly by their superiors into paths that they did not want to go. Take the mere fact that for the first time in recorded history, the human species found something from another sentient species, and what was the only thing his taskmasters could decide to do with something they didn’t understand? They nuked it, for Buddha’s sake.

  Now, what did they have planned in case they came across a door that wouldn’t open? Explosives. The military commandoes had special packs of C4 explosives that they would use to breach any door, with obvious disregard for what could lie on the other side. Did they not care or not know that breaching a door with a pressure differential could result in bad consequences?

  Hun sighed. His time was running out. Soon they would all depart, and there was no telling what would happen, who would get there first, or who would die first. The lunar discovery turned out more to be a marker of what a near perfect human genome would look like, but even after four years, they were struggling to understand how best to make use of this knowledge. The closest they’d been able to do so far had been to use some of the markers and code to identify higher risks in people for certain diseases. While a fine addition to humanity as a species, it was hardly worth the risks they were now taking.

  He noticed Lin fidgeting with something and was surprised she hadn’t come over yet. Usually he could count on her to walk over at least once on their shift when they were doing floor duty as opposed to having meetings or working on schematics or mission plans at their offices upstairs. At least up there they could see some sunshine, perhaps a bit of green from the local park nearby, and Hun enjoyed watching the clouds go by slowly but determined.

  He was just about to stand up and take a walk around the floor of the center when Lin seemed to notice him, and she stood, walking over to his console.

  “You seem pensive today, Hun. Is everything all right?” Lin asked.

  “Yes, thank you for asking, Lin. How has the testing on the electrical gone today?”

  Hun was being polite, as the results were sitting in his inbox. Lin nodded. “They all checked out, one hundred percent . . . again.”

  Hun laughed. “Yes, we do these over and over again, I know. Thanks for taking the time. I’m sure our crew appreciates the efforts we do for them land-side. Speaking of which, are we still set for departure on the main countdown timers?”

  Now this was something that could change, and the countdown was kept a secret except for the fact that if, or when, an update occurred, it went to Lin’s console as the chief of signals. She looked at him and smiled. “We’re still set on the master that you’re aware off. We go in three days if the Americans don’t go first.”

  “Hmm,” Hun said, stroking his chin with his hand and then rubbing it over the stubble on his head. “What are they waiting for?”

  “Probably the same thing we are, the optimal launch window,” Lin said.

  “Our problem is that their optimal launch window may not be the same as our optimal launch window,” Hun said.

  Lin looked behind him to her left side, obviously at the military liaison, and Hun had moved his chair a bit more toward the front to avoid the only camera that could see his face. She lowered her voice. “If they have the ability to sustain a longer rocket burn, they can leave later and arrive earlier.”

  “Exactly,” Hun said. “They would actually benefit by the Earth’s speed relative to Mars and allo
w our planet to close the distance before affecting launch. This would require a large amount of fuel, as their trajectory would have to be inclined considerably considering the angle and speed once they left.”

  “Do you think they have that amount of fuel, especially after their burn to save their shuttle?”

  “You’ve seen the same reports I have. They have been boosting nothing but propellant into orbit for that ship of theirs. We can only speculate for now.”

  “Will you discuss this with General Wang?”

  “I already have,” Hun said, turning to look at her. “He has other contingency plans, ones that you don’t want to know about.”

  Lin nodded and then looked back behind Hun again before returning her attention to her boss. “Well, we’re ready. We are all thinking of spending the evening tomorrow over at the Gracious Goose. Want to join us?”

  The Goose was a rather nice restaurant across the street from the main entrance to their complex. Hun had eaten there before and thought it was a nice way to build a little comradery before the launch, though in all honesty, there would be little to do for four months after the burn other than to track, and perhaps make minor corrections, to the trajectories of their ships. “Sure, I think that will be a splendid idea.”

  “Fine, I’ll tell the others. You get some rest, all right?” Lin said.

  “Will do,” Hun said, giving her a smile as she returned to her seat. Hun had been arriving well before the others and staying late into the evening, monitoring the crew and systems and, more importantly, the Americans. He’d be damned if they were going to arrive last. The last-minute additions of the pair of rocket motors for each ship were a nice surprise for a change from the general. Hun wasn’t sure he could get a good night’s rest until they departed. He hated to wait, but planetary orbits were like that; they made you be patient.

  “Soon,” Hun said under his breath. “Very soon.”