by Mark Anson
‘The target is rotating too quickly for an assured placement of a deflection charge, so the first action will be to slow down the spin. Colonel Randall in the Arlington will detonate a standoff charge here –’ he indicated a point on the diagram ‘– and this detonation is intended to reduce the spin to acceptable levels. Captain Garcia in the Las Vegas will go in next and will place either a second de-rotation charge if the first one has been ineffective, or the main deflection charge if it has. Captain Foster in the Mesa will attempt a second deflection charge, or the primary deflection charge if the first two have been used to de-rotate.’
‘What’s the composition of the target, sir?’ one of the Arlington’s crew asked.
‘Good question. TG4 is a chondritic fragment of a former comet, so it’s porous and fragile. All your charges will be standoff, minimum fifty metres above the surface. We don’t want this object to be fractured; that will just make the situation worse. The main deflection charges will be exploded along the main rotation axis, aligned through the centre of mass. Okay?’ The crewman nodded.
‘Right – we have spread your arrival timings and intercept angles so that there is a five-minute gap between your scheduled detonation times. This is a short window.’ He held up his hand as another murmur swept the room. ‘Yes, I know. We will be relaxing the normal minimum spacing between detonations to accommodate this. You will have to adjust the precise spacing of your bombing runs when you’re closing on the asteroid, to bring yourselves in on your designated target sites.
‘At the conclusion of your mission, the squadron will split up – the Arlington and Mesa will continue on to other targets that we will select while you are in cruise. The Las Vegas will be carrying a VIP passenger in stasis, and will make a high-energy course change that will put it onto a direct transfer to Venus, arriving there in mid-November. Captain Garcia, you will need extra fuel for this flight, so you will take on additional fuel from the Arlington before leaving the squadron.’
‘Yes sir,’ Garcia nodded. The interceptor squadrons occasionally got requests of this nature; they were the fastest ships in the fleet, and could do urgent transfers that were beyond the capabilities of the regular space tugs. The passengers were in stasis for the entire flight, so that they had no knowledge of the ship’s target. Still, Clare thought, they must be someone important, to be carried on board today.
‘This mission is a challenge, be in no doubt about it,’ Jordan continued. ‘You’ve all handled much harder tests during training, but this is the real thing – you’ve got a rapidly-turning asteroid, a short time over the target, and the ships close together. Don’t underestimate the potential for misjudgement when you’ve got so much going on. XOs – keep advising your captains on options; we want two pairs of eyes on this at all times.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You have all been selected for this mission because of your proven record, and calmness in unexpected situations. I am completely confident of your ability to deliver a successful mission. Your briefing packs and detailed flight plans to the rendezvous are on the desk behind me and your crew assignments are on the screen now. Mission departure is at zero five twenty Zulu.
‘Okay – they’re the basics of the mission to deflect this rock. Mister Sorenson and I will take questions now.’
The briefing had finished, and Clare was making her way to the front of the room to collect her briefing pack.
‘Captain Foster.’ A tall black man had come up alongside her. ‘I’m your executive officer.’
She looked closely at him as she shook the offered hand. ‘Collins, isn’t it? Dave Collins?’
‘Dan. Close.’ He grinned a set of very white teeth at her. ‘I was XO on the Nashville on its last mission.’ He towered over her. Clare was tall for a woman, but Collins was taller – he must have been at least one hundred and ninety centimetres.
‘Good to have you on the crew. Who else is there?’ She looked over at the crew lists on the screen, but there were only two for the Mesa – Collins and herself. The older Las Vegas had six, and the newer and larger Arlington had five.
‘They must think we can handle things on our own,’ Collins said quietly. He spoke with a deep voice that resonated in his chest.
‘I guess so. Well, at least there’ll be more room on board.’ The small Philadelphia-class interceptors like the Mesa were notorious for their cramped living quarters. ‘You must have made a good impression on your last mission.’
‘Guess I didn’t screw anything up too badly. We nailed our target, anyway.’
‘What was it?’
‘Fifty-metre chondrite. We blew it to vapour.’
‘Nice.’ Clare grinned. She was warming to Collins already, and he wasn’t at all bad looking. It would be good to have something else to look at on the mission – ‘cabin decoration’ as Gray would have put it. ‘Better get the briefing packs,’ Clare said, and went up to the table at the front of the room. Randall was waiting for her with the list.
‘Glad to see you’re a bit more alert, Foster,’ he said as he handed her the pack. He pointed to the signoff sheet on the desk. ‘Signature there, to show you’ve received it. I’m going to be watching you,’ he added quietly, as she bent down to sign her name. ‘I expect you to be more professional the night before a mission – especially one that I’m leading. Our reputation is at stake here.’
Clare stood up again, looking him levelly in the eye. ‘You can count on me, sir.’
‘Glad to hear it. You’d better report to the doctor – he’s waiting to see if you’re fit to fly. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Foster – I checked with him.’
Clare knew when to shut up. Randall eyed her for a moment, and then nodded towards the door.
‘Well, get on with it – the shuttle leaves for orbit in two hours, and you’d better be on it, or the Mesa’s going to have a new captain.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Clare stood by the window in the pre-flight centre, watching the Martian sunset. She had just received the second tranquiliser shot, and she sipped the small cup of syrup that would begin to condition her digestive system for its lengthy shutdown.
She felt completely empty, and very hungry, but she knew she couldn’t eat. Under her bright orange escape suit, she wore several biomedical sensor patches to measure her vital functions, and two pacemaker pads on either side of her heart. A small monitoring unit clipped to her chest showed her heart rate, breathing, and other readings. Her left hand had an intravenous catheter taped onto it for administering the various drugs, and her right arm had been cleaned and covered with a wide strip of sterilised gauze, ready for the stasis chamber.
The doctor had signed her off after the briefing; thankfully it had been long enough for her blood alcohol levels to return to acceptable levels. He had reminded her again about the dangers of alcohol and stasis: ‘You don’t want to bring on stasis syndrome – it could end your career real fast.’
Clare had been too relieved to do anything else but nod in agreement, and she felt fine now – the pre-stasis drugs induced a sense of incredible well-being and tranquillity.
She looked round at the other captains and crew in the room. Nobody was talking; they were either looking out of the window with unseeing eyes, or staring numbly at the walls. Collins, her XO, blinked sleepily in a corner.
‘Here, let me take that,’ a voice said by her, and she watched incuriously as a hand took the tilted cup from her frozen fingers. ‘Come this way,’ the voice invited, and she was guided gently to the door, her legs moving seemingly of their own accord.
‘Are you Clare Judith Foster?’ the male nurse asked.
‘Yes,’ she managed.
‘Going up to the Mesa?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. You’re doing fine. Hold on to me now, we’re stepping aboard the shuttle.’ Clare seemed to be gliding along a long corridor that led to a door set in a curving wall, and a different nurse took her by the arm and led her to her seat and helped her sit down. There were othe
r people already aboard, sitting in their seats, but she couldn’t take in their faces. The nurse glanced at the readings on Clare’s arm console, uncapped a syringe and carefully injected it into the catheter on Clare’s left wrist.
‘You’ll be fine now. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.’
Clare looked up, but she couldn’t frame the words; everything seemed to be moving very quickly, and now the nurse had gone away.
The shuttle shook as the cabin door was closed. She could hear an announcement on the intercom, but the words were meaningless. A hand checked her seat harness, and then the world went soft and muffled as a helmet was placed over her head and latched closed. She heard the hiss of air as her suit supply took over.
Her head felt very heavy now, and she had trouble turning it. There was a window next to her, and she gradually got her head round so that she could look out of it, but all she could see were the dirty white walls of the launch silo. She was in one of the crew shuttlecraft; a compact arrangement of fuel tanks and spidery landing legs, surmounted by a drum-shaped crew module. It wouldn’t be long before this type of craft would be unable to operate in the thickening Martian atmosphere, and the spaceplanes would take over completely.
The cabin shuddered slightly, and the walls started to move past – the shuttle was being lifted up on its landing platform. Clare saw the pink light of a Martian sunset flood in as the silo walls sank away beneath her. Dust swirled over the concrete landing pad outside, and the beams of the landing pad lights became visible, stabbing skywards in the fading light.
She could see the squat buildings and tall control tower of the Elysium spaceport, dark against the sunset. Time passed, and then there was a rising roar of engines, a smooth shove from below, and the shuttlecraft lifted off the pad and rose vertically into the sky. Clare looked down on the shrinking sprawl of the spaceport, its myriad lines of lights bright against the darkening landscape. The scene fell away below her, and the colossal forms of the atmosphere processors came into view.
The shuttle tilted over as it lined up on its ascent trajectory, and the flight path took them directly over one of the processors. The shuttle bucked and swayed as it went through the turbulence caused by the enormous vapour plume. Clare looked down into the mouth of the huge machine, and the hidden fires of its nuclear furnaces. From different directions, long lines of conveyors brought crushed minerals from the open-pit mines and tipped them into the waiting hoppers of the processor, where the raw materials would be burned together deep inside its fiery heart. As the shuttle’s flight path traversed the complex, the mines themselves came into view – platoons of huge bucket-wheel excavators, working day and night to strip the seams of desiccated minerals from the country rock, and feed it into the processor.
The terraced, fan-shaped scars of the mines dwarfed the base complex, and stretched north out into the high terrain surrounding the Elysium Fossae. The setting Sun threw the landscape into sharp relief, showing the deep gorges in the slopes of Elysium Mons, which would one day be full of blue water. As if in anticipation of that day, a few wispy clouds caught the light of the departing Sun.
The shuttle rolled over slightly in its flight path, and the sights below turned away to reveal the darkening sky. On Mars, the pink sky faded rapidly to black at even modest altitudes, and the stars were already coming out. The roar of the shuttle’s engines changed, taking on a hollow sound as the fuel tanks emptied. The engines throttled back slightly to reduce the force on the shuttle’s occupants, and shortly afterwards, shut down altogether. The gravity was so low on Mars that it took barely two minutes to achieve orbit, compared to the eight minutes of crushing acceleration that was needed on Earth or Venus.
Clare felt her weight fade away, to be replaced by the sensation of falling forward as they entered orbit. She felt a feeling of security and calm wash over her as she realised she was in space again, ready to board her ship, and as the shuttle turned and tilted in space, she saw the brilliant speck of the Mesa come into view. It grew larger with every passing second, until she could see the fuel tanks and the crew module at the front.
The effects of the drugs were increasing now, and she found her mind wandering. When she looked outside again, she could read the name of her ship, and see another vessel floating alongside. They were transferring warheads onto the Mesa, refilling the bomb rack.
She didn’t notice when the nurse came back a few minutes later and gave her another injection, and she had slipped off into a deep sleep by the time they docked. The medical team moved her and Collins through the Mesa’s airlock and through the ladder stairway into the interceptor’s hibernaculum.
Clare felt nothing as they removed the escape suit from her floating form and manoeuvred her into the stasis chamber. Clare was wearing a close-fitting undergarment that left her arms bare. One of the nurses remained behind, and she carefully withdrew the catheter from Clare’s left arm and held a pad over it for a couple of minutes until she was sure there was no blood. The nurse sprayed the tiny wound with an antiseptic sealant to make sure it didn’t leak; the dose of heparin needed for the next step would inhibit normal healing.
She secured Clare’s inert form in place with wide elastic straps. These would hold her still and secure during the vehicle’s manoeuvres, but could be easily released on revival. The last stage, and the most critical, was the positioning of the right arm inside the open halves of the stasis sleeve. The nurse removed the protective gauze from Clare’s lower arm, and swabbed the exposed skin with a surgical wipe. She manoeuvred the arm carefully into one half of the stasis sleeve, and closed the other half around it. There was a gentle hiss as the stasis sleeve sealed around the arm, and the machine began the process of locating the veins and arteries in the arm.
All the steps in inserting the cannulas, the various injections, intravenous feeding, and monitoring for any infection, were performed within the aseptic environment of the stasis sleeve. This also allowed the cannulas to be withdrawn when they were not needed, which reduced the chance of infection.
Now the nurse carefully opened Clare’s jaw and inserted the plastic curve of the intubation guide, which would keep the tongue out of the way of the tubes that would be automatically inserted to assist with ventilation during deep stasis, when even the autonomous impulses of the body would falter. She sprayed a thin film of oil over Clare’s closed eyelids, to stop them from crusting shut. Finally, she connected the various electrical monitoring lines to the sensor patches, and watched the displays for a few moments to make sure that all was well.
The nurse closed the lid over Clare’s unconscious form, and pressed the switches that would start the induction sequence.
There was a hiss as the chamber sealed, and then a sudden blast of mist as the air inside was exchanged for an antiseptic atmosphere. The nurse watched the displays closely as the machine took over.
The equipment in the stasis sleeve over Clare’s right arm had already located the various blood vessels, and the machine carefully inserted two catheters, one into the median cubital vein on the inside of her elbow, and the other into her radial artery near her wrist. The next step was to inject heparin, to prevent clot formation. After a short pause, the circulation pumps started, and from the line in her wrist, the bright-red arterial blood flowed out, to be replaced with a cold, transparent liquid that ran up into her elbow and began to perfuse her body.
Her core temperature on the display fell rapidly, and the machine increased the concentration of the stasis-inducing drugs and started firing electrical impulses to regulate her heartbeat, which had begun to flutter as the cold liquid started to fill its chambers. The gentle inflation and deflation of her lungs slowed as her blood CO2 levels fell.
She felt nothing, and would remember nothing, as her blood was gradually removed and processed by the machinery in the chamber, so that it could be returned to the body in the next stage.
Satisfied with how things were going, the nurse glanced over at the ship’s executive
officer, lying in the next chamber. She had put him under before Clare, and he was stable now. His black skin had gone a deathly shade of pale grey. One eyelid fluttered briefly, and was still again.
She turned her attention back to the captain and monitored her vital signs as her body temperature continued to fall, watching for any sign of an adverse reaction. For anyone trained in first aid, the readings flowing across the display screen would have sent them screaming for help, but the nurse watched impassively; the rapid reduction in body temperature was necessary to prevent cell damage during this first, and most important, stage of stasis.
Inducing deep hypothermia without causing tissue or cell damage had to be done quickly, with the blood replaced by a chilled isotonic solution to speed up the cooling process. The processed, chilled and thinned blood would then be returned to the body, and the core temperature held at the minimum level to maintain essential biological processes. In this state, the human body could be maintained for months at a time. Urea and other waste products in the blood only needed to be extracted every week or so, by a dialysis process, and the cleaned blood restored to the body.
The machine would automatically reverse the induction process if anything untoward happened, but once the subject was at stasis temperature, things rarely went wrong.
After twenty minutes the nurse was satisfied with Clare’s progress. The cold liquid that now circulated slowly round her body and kept the cells alive gave her a death-white pallor, but she was not dead. Her heart was being kept going at barely ten beats a minute, and her breathing was barely perceptible, but the machine watched over her constantly as she fell into stasis, alert for the tiniest sign of any problem.
The nurse checked that the captain’s personal sidearm was stowed correctly in its holster inside her chamber, with the safety on, and started clearing up the stasis chamber for the voyage, closing and locking any doors that might come open, and tidying away the various disposable wrappers and bits of tape that always seemed to accumulate. Soon everything was in order and stowed away. She went back to both her patients in their chambers one last time to make sure everything was normal, and then pushed herself upwards towards the door.
