by Mark Anson
‘So nothing’s going to happen suddenly,’ her mother said, and Clare saw the signs of her bringing the call to an end. ‘We’ve been to see the realtors, and they’re coming to value the place next week, but we’re in no hurry. We’ll let you know what happens. I hope everything’s going okay for your mission and that it will be successful. Give our love to Lorna and tell her we’re delighted to hear she’s been accepted. Take care, dearie.’
‘You look after yourself,’ Blake Foster frowned, ‘and no worrying about us, that’s an order. Take care. Love you.’
‘Goodbye!’ They both waved to the camera, and her mother leaned over to switch off the recording. Her father started to cough, and just before the picture faded, Clare saw her turn towards him, a look of concern in her eyes.
CHAPTER THREE
The doctor, a captain in the Medical Corps, placed a drop of Clare’s blood on the test pad, and slipped it into the blood analyser. He raised his eyebrows at the result.
It was the following morning, and they were in the USAC medical facility on the base. Clare sat on a chair facing him, ashen-faced.
‘When was your last drink?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Uh …’ Clare began, trying to think through the pain in her head.
‘Never mind. Have you any idea how high your blood alcohol is?’
Clare shook her head, her eyes closed.
‘You know the risks involved in stasis and the effect of the drugs we have to give you. This reading –’ he eyed the blood analyser display ‘– is borderline at best. I should report you.’
Clare opened her eyes and gave him what she hoped was her most winning smile. ‘We finished drinking at midnight. I must have underestimated how much I’d had.’
‘Midnight.’ He nodded once, clearly not believing her. There was a long pause, and then he appeared to reach a decision.
‘Turn up for examination in this state again and I won’t clear you for stasis, is that clear? Your body can’t take it. Every year that goes by, the risks of getting stasis syndrome increases, and this isn’t helping. Well, I can’t give you the drugs now; they’d send you high as a kite.’ He scribbled on a pad. ‘I’m signing you off on condition you report back to me after the mission briefing. If your blood levels have stabilised by then, I’ll administer the first dose. If they haven’t, I’m not clearing you, and you’ll be in quarantine for the duration of the mission, do you understand?’
Clare stared back at the doctor, the impact of his words sinking in. Once the briefing had been given on the interception target, that was it – no contact with the outside world until the mission objectives were completed. That was the rule, learned through experience.
Whenever the press had got hold of information on their targets, no matter how low-risk the objects were, there was hysteria, mass panic, even political turbulence. So if Clare failed the medical after the briefing, she would be virtually imprisoned, cut off from the world until the target had been deflected or destroyed.
‘Yes, I understand. I’ll take the risk.’ But what other answer was there? If she backed out now, there would be questions, and probably an investigation. If she passed the medical in a few hours, then nobody would know. She simply didn’t consider what would happen if she failed the medical – the flyer’s total and utter belief in her own abilities made that possibility unthinkable.
‘Okay. Report back to me after the briefing. I’ll need a fresh blood and urine sample then.’ He indicated the door, and Clare got out hurriedly before he had a chance to change his mind. The mission briefing was in fifteen minutes.
The evening’s events were slowly coming back to her as she pulled the sealed briefing pack from her pigeonhole and walked to a seat in the briefing room.
She had met Gray in the bar as arranged, and first, they had to celebrate Gray’s new assignment. Then there was Clare’s new command to celebrate as well, and the toasts had continued, and then Gray started up a conversation with some other officers at the bar, and they had had a few drinks with them, and then things had got somewhat out of hand.
Clare closed her eyes. Just how many drinks had she had? She had lost count somewhere along the way. Then for some reason Gray had become belligerent, and Clare had to pull her off, to stop her hitting one of the officers over some imagined slight. She had last seen Gray in an embrace with one of them – probably the one she was arguing with – and she had disappeared after that, leaving Clare to pick up the bar tab, which had been considerable.
Clare sighed. It had been a memorable evening, but she wished her head didn’t hurt quite so much. She had drunk copious amounts of black coffee and water, but nothing could conceal the amount she’d had to drink, and the dark shadows under her eyes from the lack of sleep.
She lay back in the seat and closed her eyes for a moment, to shut out the world outside.
‘Are you fit for flight?’ A voice broke into her thoughts, and she woke suddenly. Randall, the squadron commander, stood looking down at her.
She smiled. ‘Sure am, sir.’
‘How much sleep have you had?’
‘Plenty, sir. Just resting my eyes.’
‘Don’t bullshit me, Captain, you were asleep,’ he said abruptly. ‘Has the doctor signed you off?’
‘Yes sir.’ She hoped this would be proven correct later.
‘Amazing.’ He looked sharply at her, as if he could see through her deception. ‘Well I wouldn’t have, but what do I know, I only command the squadron.’ He turned his back on her and walked to the front of the room, flinging a pile of briefing packs on to the table. More people came into the room, and Clare looked round curiously as the room began to fill. Normally for a briefing there was just one crew, or for a difficult interception sometimes two, but there were three ships represented here today – she recognised Captain Garcia of the Las Vegas, as well as the crew of the Arlington, under Randall’s command.
The mission planning team was bigger too – it looked like the whole department had turned up for the briefing. Clearly it was something big, and she sat up in interest.
Randall, known for his no-nonsense style and total absence of any sense of humour, glanced at the time and motioned for the latecomers to sit down.
‘Gentlemen,’ he began, without any deference to Clare or the other female crewmembers in the room. They didn’t bat an eyelid – in a throwback to the days of the Marines, the Interceptor squadrons traditionally referred to all officers on a mission as ‘gentlemen’ no matter what their gender. ‘This briefing is classified as Security Level Five. Once this briefing starts, all of you will be in quarantine security isolation. This is your last opportunity to sign out of the mission.’ The room went deathly quiet, but it wasn’t from the isolation warning – it was the security level. None of them had ever encountered a Level Five before; it was the highest level, something usually reserved for time of war.
Randall’s eyes swept the room, but nobody stood up.
‘Very well.’ He signalled to one of the security guards at the back. ‘Lock the doors, please.’
The guard stepped out, and swung the doors to the outside world shut, and locked them from the outside. From now on, they would only know the self-contained confines of the briefing centre until they joined their ships.
‘No details of this briefing must leave this room, and you are now under official quarantine until your missions are completed. The briefing packs in front of me here are the basics, the essential details that you need to know. Your detailed targeting instructions and key codes will only be released once you are out of stasis and closing in on the target.’
There was dead silence in the room, and Clare sat forwards. They were taking no chances with security. Her mind raced – some object was clearly posing a serious threat.
‘Your mission today is –’ he nodded at one of the mission planners, and the lights in the room went down ‘– asteroid 2010 TG4.’ Behind him, the display screen, which had been showing the Corps seal, changed
to show a picture of an unremarkable-looking asteroid, its surface features blurred and indistinct. ‘An exceptional situation has occurred, and this object is the reason. Mister n, you may begin your briefing.’
Randall sat down in one of the seats at the front of the room, and a young-looking man in civilian clothes stepped forward. Sorensen was one of the specialists that the Corps retained for their expertise in key technical areas.
‘Good morning everyone.’ He turned to indicate the picture behind him.
‘This is a telescopic picture of 2010 TG4, taken on its most recent closest approach to Earth in November 2141. It passed by at just over point two astronomical units’ distance, or about thirty million kilometres. As you all know, this is a massive distance and not one that gives us the remotest cause for concern.
‘TG4 is a C-type asteroid whose orbit takes it round the Sun every three point three years. We have known for some time that it is an extinct comet, a fragment of the much larger Comet Encke first recorded in 1786. It is locked in a three-to-one orbital resonance with Earth, so close approaches happen approximately every ten years, with the next due in November 2151.’ The display switched to show a speeded-up animation of the asteroid following its elliptical orbit, climbing away from the Inner Solar System, then falling back in again to fly past Earth.
‘All our long-term projections of TG4’s orbit showed this to be very stable, and to pose no threat at all. Nevertheless, we monitor this asteroid, along with all other potentially hazardous objects, on a routine basis.’ He stopped, and seemed to be choosing his words carefully.
‘TG4 was last observed using the automatic Mars-based telescopes in January 2145 as it came back in towards the Sun. When they pointed towards where it was expected to be, it wasn’t there. This sometimes happens due to calibration drift, so they looked the next day, and it still wasn’t there. That’s when the alarms were raised.
‘We eventually found it a few arc-seconds away from where we expected. When we looked closer, this is what we saw.’ The display changed to show a jerky movie of a nondescript, potato-shaped asteroid, rotating on its axis. It had evidently been taken from a tremendous distance; the asteroid was blurred and heavily pixelated. Sorenson stopped the animation, and brought up the previous picture, taken in 2141, next to it.
‘Notice anything?’ A murmur swept round the room. ‘There’s a chunk missing, right here –’ he pointed at a sharp-edged bite that had been taken out of one end. ‘It’s been hit by something, and pretty hard, to have broken off a piece like this. It’s also been set spinning – it wasn’t rotating like this before. It’s clearly had a collision with another object, somewhere out in the main asteroid belt. We conducted a detailed long-range radar survey of the nearby area, and found some smaller fragments trailing behind TG4, which pretty much nails it. There’s no trace of the object that hit it, on any computed trajectory, which suggests that it disintegrated on impact.’
The display changed to show a diagram of the Inner Solar System, and a series of coloured ellipses that looped past Earth.
‘We made an updated orbit projection from the Martian observations, and they’ve been refined by our space-based telescopes. We now know that the November 2151 encounter in three years’ time will take TG4 past Earth at a miss distance of two million kilometres. As you know, this distance isn’t any cause for concern. What is a concern is that this is much closer than the expected miss distance based on its previous orbit. At the next encounter in November 2161, which was already going to be a close approach, the miss distance will be just over half a million kilometres, which is well inside the radius of Earth’s Hill sphere. TG4’s orbit will be significantly perturbed during this encounter, and it will then be locked into an irrecoverable cycle of reducing miss distance, where each close encounter causes the next one to be closer still. We estimate that, two encounters later in November 2181, the miss distance will have reduced to the point where TG4’s orbit will have a ninety-five percent chance of intersecting Earth’s surface. Even if it misses then, it will definitely hit in 2191.’
There was dead silence in the room.
‘Gentlemen, this object is eight hundred metres in diameter, and will be travelling at eighteen kilometres a second relative to Earth. It will definitely hit, in less than fifty years, with an estimated explosive force of twenty thousand megatons. This is a Torino-nine event.’
For a moment, Clare’s mind refused to take it in. In the entire existence of the Astronautics Corps, no object had ever ranked above a Torino-five, and the ranking was usually subject to revision downwards as better orbit observations were made. This was different – it was definitely going to hit. The Torino scale classified the risk posed by potentially hazardous objects – level zero and one were commonplace and posed no risk, five through seven were a threat, and the highest ratings of eight and nine were reserved for definite events, causing local or regional devastation.
Ten, the maximum, was an event on the scale of the Chicxulub impact, which had ended the reign of the giant dinosaurs.
Twenty thousand megatons – Clare did some mental calculations. If that landed on a city—
‘You’re probably wondering what the effect would be on a centre of population,’ Sorenson broke into their thoughts. ‘Well, a twenty-megaton impact would flatten the biggest cities on the planet. Two hundred megatons is the equivalent of the Krakatoa explosion in 1883. This impact would be a hundred times more powerful – it would obliterate the state of Texas. If this object hits in the ocean close to a landmass, there’ll be giant tsunamis. The planet will suffer unprecedented regional devastation. The debris plume from the event will cause several degrees of global cooling, and we can expect disrupted weather patterns for ten years, affecting harvests globally.
‘Our new President and his advisors have been briefed on our assessment. The deflection of this object has been designated the highest priority of the Corps, to the exclusion of all lesser targets. Fortunately, we have two good opportunities to deflect TG4; one in five months’ time, shortly after it crosses the orbit of Mars, which will be your mission, and another in three years’ time at its next closest approach to the Sun, which will be handled by the Home Fleet. We are not taking any chances, and your mission objective is to reduce this object to a Torino-four or below, by altering its orbit to the point where it will not come within Earth’s Hill sphere. The deflection opportunity in 2151 will then reduce the threat to the point where it poses no significant threat to homeland security.’
‘Doesn’t a Torino-four asteroid still pose a significant risk?’ one of the crewmembers of the Arlington asked.
‘Yes – and civilian observers will eventually notice that TG4’s orbit has changed and will reach the same conclusions we have, which could trigger a global panic. We need to make sure that the threat has been reduced well before then and that the public is reassured that the situation is under control. In fact, if your mission is one hundred percent successful and you achieve the best theoretical deflection, we estimate that the rating will drop down to a Torino-two, but with a threat of this size, we have to be conservative and assume that it will take two attempts.’
‘What happens if we’re not successful – what contingency plans are in place?’ asked a voice from the audience.
Randall stood up immediately, and raised his hand to forestall Sorenson’s response.
‘You can stop that kind of talk right now,’ he said icily to the room at large. ‘I don’t care how difficult this is, or what the risk assessments are. We are the contingency plan, this is what we’re here for and it’s our problem to solve. We have trained for this, we are going to do this thing professionally and our mission will succeed, is that clear?’ He glanced around, and the room fell quiet. ‘Mister Sorenson, please continue.’
‘Thank you. Er – although there is intense interest in all our activities, we have succeeded in keeping this threat and your mission secret from the public, and I can now tell you that all of yo
u have been taking part in carefully-planned cover stories to explain your ships’ presence here now, should anyone ask or comment. It is essential –’ his gaze swept the room ‘– that this level of security is maintained, for the reasons I have explained.
‘It is also vital that your mission succeeds in achieving some level of deflection, which is why we’re sending three interceptors. You will be using the biggest charges we have in the inventory, set to maximum practical yield, which is roughly five megatons.’ A ripple of surprise went around the room. ‘We are not taking any chances here. That rock must be moved.’
Sorenson let that sink in for a moment. ‘I know you’ll have questions, which we’ll take at the end once we’ve completed the tactical briefing.’ He stepped back, and a grey-haired USAC colonel stood up to take his place.
‘Thank you Mister Sorenson. I am Colonel Jordan, from the Advanced Tactical Training School. Some of you will remember doing your weapons training under me.’ Several heads nodded round the room. Jordan was well liked in the interceptor squadrons. Behind him, the display changed to show an animation of 2010 TG4, tumbling through space, following the thin white line of its calculated orbit in towards the Sun. Jordan let the animation run for few moments.
‘We’ve calculated the best interception opportunity is just here, on June seventeenth, shortly after the asteroid passes through the descending node of its orbit.’ He stopped the animation. ‘This is between the orbits of Mars and Earth, nineteen weeks from now. Due to flight timings, the relative angle between your ships’ trajectories and TG4’s path will be nearly thirty degrees, so the target will go past quickly, and you will only have a few minutes of manoeuvring margin, when your ships have sufficient delta-vee to fly close to the target and make your bombing runs.’ The animation on the screen showed the three ships approaching the asteroid.
